It's Not the End

by Matt Moore

  Mary redid her buttons, forcing her thoughts away from James and onto what was left to do that evening. It would have been a mistake, anyway. It had been two weeks since her period, her most fertile time.

  What would she do if she got pregnant without a soul for their baby? In another letter, after Mary had told her parents about giving James’s translantern to his brother, they’d suggested she get pregnant “by accident” and force James to confront his beliefs. Would he side with his mother, who’d no doubt pressure Mary to end the pregnancy, or support her in finally starting a family?

  But the scheme never took into account what she believed. Which was what? she asked herself.

  Mary pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, forcing back the building tears. Thoughts like those didn’t help. She had to be strong and calm tonight. It had been her suggestion to host James’s parents for dinner. James had resisted, reminding her they’d moved out to the suburbs to put some distance between them, but she’d insisted.

  The truth, she admitted to herself but could not admit to James, was she was terrified to face pregnancy and childbirth without her mother. Yet her parents had settled permanently in that commune. Their letters were cordial enough, but Mary hadn’t seen them in years and didn’t honestly know if they would leave after the horrible things she’d said to them. So despite James’s feelings toward his mother, Mary had no other choice than to rely on Vivian when they finally had a flame and could start a family.

  The shower shut off. Knowing James would be in a mood and seeing her so upset would make it worse, Mary went downstairs to check on dinner.

  The doorbell rang.

  In the living room, James let out a groan Mary could hear over the boiling pots. With her hair done up and new dress fitting perfectly, she felt ready. She hoped James was. At least he had thawed a little as they had finished tidying, cracking jokes and his hand “accidentally” brushing her breast or bottom.

  But hearing James move to the door, a familiar fear twisted in Mary’s belly—that tonight would be the night James’s simmering anger would boil over at Vivian and he’d vent the four years of rage he’d been carrying. Just as she’d driven away her parents, James would drive away his, leaving them alone and without any hope of getting a flame except buying one.

  And, Mary feared, would James’s anger turn on her for putting them in that situation? Her breath caught. At twenty-seven, the time where they could start a family was slipping away. Another fear crept cool and tight up her neck that James might leave her for a younger woman with a flame who could give him a child.

  “Hello, sweetie!” Vivian boomed, breaking Mary’s thoughts. Wiping her hands on her apron, Mary moved into the hall and toward the door. “Hello Mary!” Vivian cried, shrugging out of her coat and pressing her bright reds lip to Mary’s cheek. Thomas, James’s father, followed silently behind, offering James a handshake and a barely audible “Nice to see you, son.” Mary pecked him on the cheek and, after a few words of greeting, returned to the kitchen.

  Vivian followed, lifting pot lids and looking in the oven. “Make sure to baste that,” she offered. “Need to turn this down,” she added, changing a jet’s dial. After “Make sure that doesn’t burn” and “use butter, don’t use oil,” Mary said, “Thank you, Vivian, but I think I can handle the rest. Why don’t you go sit and enjoy yourself?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind.” She looked over her shoulder at the doorway and took a step closer to Mary. Voice low, she asked, “I really wanted to ask: have you talked to your doctor? About ‘the pill’?”

  Mary’s breath caught. “He’s not sure it’s the best,” she lied. “For me. Who still wants children.”

  “Well, I hope you and James are careful,” Vivian replied. “You especially. It’d be a shame if . . . well. It would be shame.” Her bright red lips curled up into a smile. “If you need any help in here, just let me know.” She turned and left, saying, “Now what are you men talking about?”

  Mary shut her eyes, letting out the breath she’d been holding.

  Having time to let things simmer, she untied her apron and moved into the living room where she found a gin and tonic waiting. She sipped at it as Vivian went on about how much faster the new highway made the ride out from the city. She shifted to how she wanted Thomas to close down his practice so they could get out of the city and move to the suburbs themselves. With so many young families out here, a doctor would be in high demand. “And with that latest Negro riot,” she added, “who can say where it will happen next?”

  Mary looked to James, worried he’d take the bait and correct his mother that most “riots” began as peaceful marches for the equality Negroes had been promised by following the Cycle. They became riots when police turned fire hoses on the protestors or sicced attack dogs on them. Or perhaps he’d remind her of the Negroes he met every day who were as smart and reasonable as any fully ensouled follower of the Cycle. Working in settlement services for new immigrants, James’s job brought him into contact with Negroes, Orientals, and Hispanics from all over the world seeking a better life in this country. At least once a week he described a family, or sometimes a young man on his own, who only wanted to work hard and make their own way. Hardly the savages that Vivian believed anyone who didn’t follow the Cycle had to be.

  But James sat on the couch, swirling the ice in his glass. He resembled his father so much, silent and letting Vivian ramble about how well Leonard was doing with his new auto dealership. To say nothing of his three wonderful children who were growing up so fast. Thomas spoke about his practice when Mary asked him directly, but Vivian would interject, steering the conversation back to one topic or another.

  By the time coffee had been served and cleared, Vivian’s musing had veered from Vietnam (“Their resistance to accepting the Cycle only shows how badly they need it”) to President Johnson (“More trustworthy than that Orthodox Kennedy”) to elderly distant relatives (“Your second cousin Stanley still lives alone up in that shack”). Mary despised herself for how her attention had been piqued at the mention of James’s cousins and aunts and uncles, hoping that someone’s health had taken a bad turn, or worse, so that when they died James and Mary might receive a flame and finally start their family. She debated casually suggesting to Vivian that these distant relatives consider not waiting for a natural death and do the honourable thing by cycling on. If they were all as devout as Vivian claimed, they’d consider it an honour for their soul to live in the newest member of the family. But the news was of good health all around, leading Vivian to assure them that the Cycle does indeed turn, to have faith and be accepting of a flame in its due course.

  When Vivian and Thomas left around 9:30, James shut the door and leaned against it, head bowed and mouth set in a thin line.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary began. “I shouldn’t have—”

  James held up his hand. He didn’t look at her. “This buys us some time. She’s wanted to see the house. She’s seen it. I don’t need to see her again. Unless she has news on a flame.”

  Bringing plates into the kitchen and wanting to take her mind off Vivian, Mary said, “Tell me more about Alvin.”

  “More fun than my parents,” James replied, sorting clean silverware from used.

  “Oh?” She carried in more, placing everything on the counter.

  “He’s lived quite a life. A man constantly in motion.” As James sorted plates from bowls, cups from glasses, his movements softened, his anger draining. “Played baseball. Fought in the wars. Ran his own store for a while.”

  Mary said, “I’d like to meet him.”

  “Yeah,” James said, moving behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. “We need some friends around here.”

  Mary stripped off her rubber gloves and placed her hands over James’s, knowing what he’d left unsaid. That it would be good to have a friend without kids or translanterns reminding them of their home’s crushing emptiness.

  “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Rusk,” Mar
y said, balancing the plate of hors d’oeuvres on a hip and taking Alvin’s offered hand. The gentleness of the older man’s grip surprised her.

  “No need to be so formal,” he replied. “It’s Alvin. Here, let me grab that.” He reached out and took the tray from her, holding it in his left hand before sweeping his right into his home. “Come on in.”

  Mary stepped past Alvin into the living room where faded black and white photos covered the wall behind a simple, plaid couch. An old, wingback chair with worn fabric faced a tiny television. Through the archway into the dining room Mary saw a small circular table with two wooden chairs.

  “Simple, I know,” Alvin said, setting the tray on a coffee table. “But it’s all I need. What can I get you to drink?”

  James asked for a beer and Mary did as well while examining the photos. As Alvin milled about in the kitchen, she spotted younger versions of him in photos of muddy fields and dense jungles, or looking dashing in a baseball or postal uniform.

  “I was quite the handsome young devil,” Alvin said. When Mary turned to take her drink, he winked. “Always the active sort. Thought France would be a big adventure, but . . . well.” He waved his hand, clearing away the subject and moving on. “But when the Japs bombed Pearl I re-enlisted. Forty-two and could still fit in my uniform.” He patted his barely there paunch. “I could out-run, out-fight and out-drink those young sprouts. And those overeager jackrabbits didn’t know how to treat a lady.” He chuckled and Mary noticed how the left side of his face curled up, while the right remained still. “But hell, listen to me, rambling on. Mary, my dear, I’ve met James. Let’s hear about you.”

  Mary told how she was born and grew up in the city’s west end. She mentioned her older brother, David, and how she’d been twelve when he’d been killed in Korea. Not wanting to ruin the mood, she didn’t tell Alvin that no one had been with David to light a flame and capture his soul when he’d died. She recalled vividly, but did not describe, their priest explaining how David’s soul would not be lost. Instead, it would have entered into a Korean newborn, saving the child from the wild, uncivilized life of a quarter- or eighth or even no-souled who were so common over there. Which was why, the priest went on, that part of the world was constantly beset by things like wars and famine, and susceptible to dictators and communists.

  She skipped over the change in her parents, who’d never been faithful in attending church, as they attended fewer holiday services and decorated less for equinox celebrations. And by the time she started high school, boys and clothes and music filled her life, not how long her father’s hair had grown or that they visited unnamed friends some evenings, leaving her home alone.

  So there was no need to tell Alvin about coming home from school on the Friday after the Vernal Equinox to find her father home from work. With her mother, they sat her down in the kitchen and told her that they had converted to Christianity. She couldn’t breathe, trying to process that her parents had joined this new religion, though they insisted it was two thousand years old, that rock musicians had brought it back from visits to the Middle East. It was people in their twenties who were growing out their hair, quitting respectable jobs, moving to remote camps and reproducing like Africans or Orientals because they believed their all-powerful god could create as many souls as it wanted. And because those souls returned to this god after death, the idea that one could trap a soul in a flame when someone died and release it into a newborn baby by extinguishing the flame was ridiculous.

  It was that realization that made her leap from the kitchen table and run to the living room to find the candle in each of the two translanterns on the mantle extinguished. Smoke still curled from the candle in the fourteen-inch high octagonal translantern, which her mother brought into the marriage and would have been Mary’s. She snatched it up, its brushed chrome sides still warm. The squat, cone-shaped translantern with circles stamped into its copper sides, which would have gone to David, was cool. Her legs nearly gave out with the realization that she’d had gone from the enviable position of bringing two souls into a marriage, the one thing that could get some boys’ attention over her friends’ pretty faces or curves under their sweaters, to none.

  She’s wheeled on them, unleashing hateful rants about blasphemy and heresy, spouting conservative politicians’ rhetoric on how breaking the Cycle would lead the country down a path of depravity, hedonism and idleness. She didn’t know if she believed it, just that she wanted it to hurt. And lastly, the one thing she did know, is who would marry her if she could not bring a flame to the marriage?

  They told her God loved her, would love her children and place souls within them, but by then she was halfway up the stairs. She slammed the door and flopped onto her bed, sobbing into her pillow with the knowledge that the life she had imagined had been wiped away by something as simple as two breaths. Men without a flame could still succeed in life, but women grew into crazy old spinsters or, sometimes, prostitutes. Now she’d be one of them. And she found that this realization fuelled her grief, not that her grandparents’ souls had been let loose to wander until they entered a newborn who might otherwise have been soulless. Because, in that moment, she realized she didn’t believe in the Cycle. There was comfort in the traditions and the notion of a population that wouldn’t explode out of control, but the idea of trapping a soul in a flame was as unbelievable as a single god who could create souls from nothing.

  But others did believe and would judge her for what her parents had done. Whispers behind cupped hands followed her through the halls at school. At home, her parents’ overtures to follow Christ ended in screaming fights with her storming out and spending hours alone at the library since she wasn’t welcome in her friends’ homes any longer.

  And when high school ended, she moved out and told them she never wanted to see them again.

  Of course, she told Alvin none of this. Not even James knew all these details. With his parents so devout, she didn’t dare risk telling him of her own lack of faith. A pang of guilt still soured her stomach over how she had lied to him when they had first met that her father had been killed in WWII and so she was eligible for the Potsdam Dispensation of having a child without a flame. By the time she’d confessed, they’d been so deeply in love he had forgiven her and told her if they only had one child they’d have to love it twice as much.

  Instead, she told Alvin that she and her parents had had a falling out after she’d finished high school, so she’d moved into an apartment with three other girls. She’d worked as a secretary at an insurance company, met James through some common friends, fallen in love, and then married. And once married, of course, quit her job to take care of the home in preparation for children.

  “Well. Quite a story,” Alvin said, finishing the last of his can. “So who’s ready for another?”

  Head buzzing but not quite spinning, they thanked Alvin and headed for home. Past midnight, the night air was still warm.

  “What’s so funny?” James asked, slipping his arm around her waist and slowly tracing a fingertip up her side.

  “Just that Alvin is not what I expected,” she said, giggling and then realizing she’d been giggling for some time. James’s finger tickled and teased and her giggles became squeals. She put her hand around his waist. “And not full of baby talk or how great it is not to be surrounded by Negroes.”

  They reached the front door, Mary having just enough self-control for James to open the door for her, follow her inside, and shut it before grabbing him, pressing against him, kissing him. “Upstairs,” she breathed and turned, awkwardly mounting the steps, flying into the bedroom and flopping on the bed on her back. A moment later, James’s was above her, lips on her neck, hands everywhere.

  She let James strip off her clothes, her hands too clumsy and drunk. Her fingers stroked the swell in his pants. “Hurry. . . .” she said.

  Voices from teachers in those all-girls classes in high school piped up in her mind as clothes fell away and cool air licked h
er skin. “. . . boys can’t help themselves, so girls must be in control.” “We have our own cycle to track and protect . . .” “. . . a woman’s hips and breasts are curves to remind her of the Cycle’s endless curve . . .”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Huh?” James asked, confusion in his voice and suddenly still.

  “Nothing,” she panted. She caressed his face, his neck, his chest. “Nothing.” When he remained unmoving, she slapped his shoulder. “It’s nothing, now come on.”

  “Okay,” he grunted, leaning to the side. She heard the bedside table open, his hands rummaging through contents.

  “Oh, just do it,” she begged.

  “Without—?”

  She reached out in the dark, following his body down and guiding him inside her. “Yes.”

  James obliged, thrusting forward.

  A noise woke James out of a restless sleep. After a second, he shut his eyes and tried to doze back off. A dull pain coated the front of his head.

  Stopping by Alvin’s after the Autumnal Equinox fireworks had seemed like a good idea. Alvin had had some beers in the fridge, tomorrow was Saturday, so why not? Besides, it was better than going to the Sutherlands’ or Atwoods’ and listening to the dads talk about little league, new school year schedules, or what a pain setting up a swing set could be. Sure, he kept a smile on his face, but sometimes he wanted to shake one of them. Didn’t they read the paper? Watch the news? Who cared what their kids were doing when kids were dying in Vietnam. And for what? Or the hypocrisy of the so-devout southern governors claiming Negroes could never be fully ensouled no matter how hard they worked, despite scripture saying the opposite. The country was changing. Hell, the whole world was.

  And they knew he and Mary wanted kids but didn’t have a flame. Talking about little Michael on the swing or Jennifer losing a tooth just twisted the dagger a little more.

  That’s why he and Mary had spent so much time with Alvin over the summer. They could talk baseball, movies, politics. Crack some jokes. And his opinions surprised James. The first time watching Walter Cronkite report on a Negroes’ equal rights march, James had braced for comments like his mother’s. A century after slavery, his mother would have started in, Negroes had more babies than they could support. Got mixed up in crime. No better behaved than their no-souled ancestors brought over from Africa. At least under slavery, his mother had once said, they had a chance to become fully ensouled through hard work and following their masters’ teachings.