The duet, flush with possibilities, hung on the deserted street. Eddie grabbed Sarah around her willowy waist on the cadence. “God, that was great. I had no idea you could sing. You sound just like Donna Reed.” Sarah, lovely in the limpid darkness, looked puzzled. “Donna Reed. You know. From It’s a Wonderful Life.” Astonished at not yet ringing the bell, he added, “Tell me you don’t know it! Impossible. It’s on a hundred times every Christmas. What were you, born yesterday?” And answering her mumbled, tentative rejoinder, “No, that’s Judy Holliday, nit.”
Eddie shook her lightly by still unknown shoulders, scolding her in pantomime. “Know what my pop’ll say when he finds out his flesh and blood spent the evening with a woman who confused Donna Reed with Judy Holliday? ‘Out of this house! You’re no son of mine.’”
In fact, the only response Dad ever made regarding any of the girlfriends Eddie brought home was the sad, cryptic chant, “Girls, girls, girls.” Once he had said, confidentially, “Remember, son. Forty million Frenchmen can be wrong. Would you trust an appraisal of the fairer sex from the folks who gave you the Maginot Line?” That was the closest the two had ever come to discussing romantic love.
Sarah lifted her head to him and said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t seen very many of the classics.”
Eddie, hearing only her eyes, slipped his hand down into Sarah’s floppy jacket pockets and played there. “Who said anything about seeing them? I haven’t seen three quarters of the old films I talk about. You just have to know about them, is all.”
“So how is it that you know all about them?”
“Blame it on my folks. They raised me on old-movie references.”
“Just a slave to your upbringing, I suppose,” Sarah said archly. Eddie felt convinced of his suspicion that she was somewhat smarter than he, and infinitely more cultured. She played the cello, for God’s sake. He had to step lightly or he’d end up in deep mischief. The kind of over-his-head treading for dear life that he lived for.
“I was raised to blame myself on my being raised that way. How’s that?” Sarah gave a sophisticated “Ha!” but drooped her shoulder toward his at the same time. Eddie supposed that indicated the answer was just fine.
“Funny you should ask, though. About my upbringing. I was designed by committee. Sins of the fathers, and all. Nature versus nurture is one of my dad’s favorite debates. But my father, he never comes down on one side or the other. He asked us once whether a person raised in solitary confinement can know what it means to get lonely.”
“Your father asked you that?”
“Yeah. Over hot oatmeal, as I remember.”
“Really! He sounds remarkable.”
“Uh, that’s the polite name. Look, I had better warn you about my family right now. They aren’t the Cleavers.” Eddie looked at her sidelong and said, “That’s Ward and June, for those of you just back from the rococo.”
Sarah shoved him and pulled his hands out of her pockets. “Enjoy the man,” she ordered. “Mine just talks about what’s wrong with the car. What about the rest of your family? Are they nature or nurture?”
Eddie dropped into the tones of dramatic voice-over. “The close-to-the-chest older brother. The testy, ex-radical big sis. Sis number two, everybody’s favorite flake. The patient, long-suffering mom. All lost in orbit around the master of ceremonies. You tell me. Now that I think about it, we might make a halfway decent sitcom after all.”
She drew close again, and Eddie thought that nothing on this earth came close to the first feel of the waist of an unknown quantity. She had an easy grace, this stranger, a way of holding gingerly to his belt loop that made her seem unafraid of the consequences of knowing another person. He felt a rush of anticipation, doubled because he knew that she encouraged it.
For some months, seeing her in the halls, he had assumed that she was standoffish, that she liked cellos better than boys. And so he had fixed himself on her. Two weeks before, they had caught one another making a mutual appraisal. The three-second glance proved how bendable the social circles of late adolescence still were. Each strained to find some mutual overlap of friends, and at last hit on some contrived entree for breaking into the other’s crowd. And here was the same imaginary girl, made real in a few unbelievable days, teasing him on a late walk back home. Her pretending that he was half as interesting as she could only be early flirtation and a trick of the amber streetlight.
Eddie decided that before he dropped her off he would up the uncertain ante, answer her easy style. He started to steer them back to simple teases, but surprised himself by saying, “Pop’s off to the hospital in a couple weeks.”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.” She didn’t bristle at the mention of illness. Eddie felt a sudden hurry to admire her, before life knocked her out for being perfect. “What’s wrong?”
He even liked her wording, how she left off the with him. “We don’t know what’s wrong, really. Vertigo virus. The shimmies. Who knows? That’s part of the problem. That’s the subject of the Cleavers’ misadventure this week.”
“Don’t be a curmudgeon. It’s not becoming. Not if the man’s not feeling well.”
“Who you calling a curmudgeon?” She poked him in the sternum. “Oh, yeah? What’s it mean?” She gave him the dictionary definition. “Damn it, that was on the SAT. If you’d have told me that three months ago, I’d be going to the college of my choice next year. Well, a couple of decades of jaycee never hurt anybody, huh?”
“Three months ago, you didn’t know I existed. Maybe you should have gotten Laura to tell you what curmudgeon meant.”
“How do you know who I was going out with three months ago? Anyway, I swear to you that Laurie, as she is called by the general public, was just a passing physical insanity.”
“She’s a strumpet, that’s what.”
“What’s a strumpet, pray tell? Who was that strumpet I saw you with last night?” Eddie could not keep his voice from resembling the old man’s. “That was no strumpet, that was my curmudgeon.”
“Don’t push your luck. What about Barbara, then?”
“Barbara? Barbara Simms? You jest. I wasn’t going out with her. We were just childhood curmudgeons. All right, we talked about rubbing our bacons together. Once. In the interests of Science. But that’s as far as it went.”
Sarah tucked her lower lip under her top teeth and pushed him again. “You are unbelievably crude, Hobson. ‘Bacons.’ I’d walk home alone if Rabelais hadn’t used the same phrase.”
Eddie assumed Rabelais was a passing indiscretion of Sarah’s. Her Barbara Simms. “Who wants to know all these names from my sordid past, anyway?”
“I do,” she said obstinately. And the kid fell in love.
“Listen. I want you to know, you have a terrific alto. Beats Donna Reed, I swear. We have to get married and form an act. I know you have a vote in the matter, but listen. We could take it on the road. Take it to Europe. Do Italy. Hop over to the Vatican and see the famous Medulla Oblongata.”
Sarah laughed and corrected his anatomy. Then she lowered her eyes and hinted, “I’ve studied a little Italian, you know. On my own. It helps when reading scores.”
“That’s okay. I’ll marry you anyway. We don’t have to tell anyone that you know things.” He had heard her excruciating maybe; I wouldn’t mind Italy; I don’t mind you. There was nothing to do but maybe her back.
The banter exasperated her. She withdrew her fingers from his and cast his hand away. “There’s no way I’m going to marry you, Hobson. You are a proven unreliable quantity.”
They walked in silence the length of three houses. The night air was cold, but not cold enough for either of them to know it. Near the horizon, just outside of town, sat the hunger moon. “If you bail out the tide with a twopenny pail,” Eddie said quietly, to the motionless air.
“Then you and the moon can do a great deal.” Eddie looked at her in astonishment. He did not dare ask where she had heard the phrase. He had always considered it Dad’s
private stock, and the discovery that it was known to this beauty alarmed him with possibility. Sarah saw the quick look come across his face. Their hands fumbled back and knit together, static-charged hair to winter wool.
“Know what my mother says?” Eddie asked, not believing that he was going to make this detail public. “She says, ‘I would never dream of leaving your father. I signed the papers, didn’t I?’ How do you explain somebody like that?”
Sarah tucked her chin into her jacket collar. “That’s who she is, I suppose. But I bet her feelings are the real contract.”
He could not help himself from cupping both hands over her knit cap, behind her ears. “Well, if that’s how you really feel about the matter, could we just live in sin, then? I’ll move out to Harvard or Yale, or wherever you end up. Huh? Pretty please?”
She laughed out loud. “Oh, all right. If you insist.”
The cadence of their step changed. Eddie tried wordlessly to get her to avoid stepping on the sidewalk cracks, still visible through a first dusting of snow. After a silence that any other girl would have surely deflated, he asked, “What do you think of children?”
Sarah’s face modulated to seriousness. Not oppressive seriousness, not brooding agitation or the end of enjoyment, but a richly textured, nuanced, sonata seriousness, the slow weighing of possibilities hidden in a minor key. “I don’t think . . .” she began. “I’m not sure this is the best world to bring children into.”
Eddie dropped a beat. He had heard the notion before. Pop had put it forward once to the older kids when they broke into their twenties: Suppose there was a final crisis in the world and the outcome of everything was uncertain? Would any decent parent risk an infant to a world turned upside down? On the other hand, what good do we do by not enlisting new children? Now, suppose the crisis is too many children. Suppose the world is already lost. . . .
Eddie, Jr. had ignored the what-if when Pop had brought it up. Dad had a way of manufacturing sounds that weren’t there. If the world were tearing at its seams, wouldn’t the air fill with riot horns and sirens? Only now, curling the ends of this girl’s hair, Eddie Jr. understood that they would never get such advance warning. Sirens come only with returning order. All they would ever hear would be a questionable hush. If someone as jaunty, full-spirited, and seventeen as this woman felt the touch of the child-forsaken world, maybe the place was upon them.
“We’ll discuss this later, my little chickadee,” he said, tapping imaginary cigar ash onto the snow. “Change of subject. Let me tell you a joke. There’s this famous Broadway impresario—that’s the right word, isn’t it?—who wants to stage the greatest Hamlet either side of the Atlantic. They put out the word for auditions. ‘Looking for greatest Hamlet ever.’ They listen to hundreds of guys. Famous, not so famous, good, great, unbelievable. But nobody rises to the heights of perfection this impresario has in mind. Then this little guy comes down from Washington Heights, paunch, receding hairline, shuffling, just off the boat. ‘I vant to audition Hemlick.’ The impresario groans, but lets the schlemiel do his thing, because nobody else has been quite good enough either.
“So the guy gets up on stage and after a short silence says, ‘Thrift’—pretty good, eh? ‘Thrift.’ Didn’t think I knew anything about Willie the S, dija? Thought I was a big dumb jock, dinja?”
“Just tell the story,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets, refusing to take them out until he got on with it.
“You curmudgeon, you. So anyway, he says, ‘Thrift, Horatio.’ His voice fills the theater, and the dust from his clothes falls off, his paunch recedes, and he is in another world. He transports everyone with that one word. He goes on: ‘Assume a virtue if you have it not.’ He holds up this skull, says how he kissed it once when it still had lips.”
“Hobson, you counterfeit. You really know that play, don’t you?”
“No way. But I’ve got this joke down pat. Now please. By the end of the speech, the impresario is weeping. The other auditioners are weeping. The guy sweeping the back of the theater is weeping. The little man on stage has them all in a place where the skull is somebody they knew.” Sarah took hold of his arm and slowed his walk.
“Then the man stops, turns back into a little shlep, and comes down off the stage. There’s this moment of silence, and the impresario says, ‘That was the most astonishing, moving Hamlet I have ever heard. How did you do that? What kind of man are you? Where in God’s name did you get that power?’ And the zhlub shrugs and says, ‘That’s ecting.’”
Sarah laughed melodically, but not at the punchline. “I don’t get it, Eddie.”
“Come on, woman. ‘Ecting,’ you see. E-c-t . . . Immigrant’s accent. You see, if he can talk like Hamlet, if he can fly away, change the place, then why does he . . . ?”
She covered her mouth and doubled up. “It’s not funny, Eddie. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean, not funny? You just don’t get it. You eggheads have no sense of humor. Come to think of it, I don’t really get it either. Thought you might be able to explain it to me. Blame it on my brother. He told it to me. Maybe you should marry my brother. He’s an egghead too.” She shook her head rapidly and gathered a handful of his shirt fabric into her face. She said something Eddie couldn’t catch. “Know something? You are a terrifically good-looking human bean. Don’t scrunch your nose up like that. It’ll leave little lines.”
They turned at random onto Locust. Eddie no longer knew where they were heading. He considered asking Sarah about the Drunk and the Lamppost. They peered into low-lit living rooms, intimate domestic scenes that were fair game from street level, each holding the secret of how to get by but revealing nothing. They slowed again, as if only faint streetlamps, the hollow moon, chill air, sidewalk cracks, the smell of a cold front rushing down a street already folded and put away for the night, only this collected instant, could lead them to the specific weight and exactness of the world. They had fallen upon the legendary there, or as close as they could push to it, and all life after tonight would amount to trying to re-create this moment.
At last Eddie broke the spell. “One thing I have to ask you. If you ever do marry somebody, if you do decide that it’s okay to bring children into this world, don’t name them after their parents. You know: Junior. What can you do then, besides join Order of the Arrow, or some other Elk-induced, paramilitary, junior chamber of . . . ?”
Sarah listened to him trail off. She thought for a minute that they were going to stop under a shed maple, but they did not. When the chance was lost, she said, “Thanks for talking me into that movie. I’d read a lot about it, but none of my long-hair friends would ever deign to go near it.”
“No kidding. You mean you’ve never seen that film before? One of my favorites. Classic animation. 1940. Happens to be one of the few old-timers I have seen.”
“Admit it. You’ve seen them all.”
“Have not. But this one I love. My favorite part’s when that little rodent goes up and pulls on the old guy’s tuxedo tails. I always want the maestro to turn around and go, ‘Eeeek, plague.’”
She hit him again, and her grace brought them back to innocence. They compared favorite parts. She liked the Bach best, although she felt that the transcription was a little heavy-handed and inauthentic. Eddie liked the little colored horses with wings.
“And speakin’ of rats and plagues and all,” Eddie said, alluding to Mickey and Stokowski, “I learned something unbelievable this weekend. From Big Brother again. Did you know that ‘Ring around the Rosie’ was first played by little kids during the Black Death? It’s all about those lumpy sores and how they had to burn the bodies and all.”
“Yes, I remember reading that somewhere.”
“It’s not fair. You can’t be attractive and know everything, too. Make up your mind and specialize, like everyone else.” Sarah declared that her specialty tonight was Donna Reed. So they took it again, from the top, with feeling. “Buffalo gals won’t you come
out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight. Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight. And . . . dance . . . by . . . the light . . . of the moo-ooon.”
“God, you’re beautiful.”
“Let’s not be blasphemous, now.”
“What? I didn’t say nothing. I said, Gob, not God. ‘Gob, you’re beautiful.’ I’ve got a great idea. How about you and I . . . ?” He took her elbow and pointed to her mouth, then to his, waving his index finger back and forth between the two, inquiringly. She nodded almost imperceptibly, and they kissed a tentative exploration.
Eddie felt that it was almost impossible to be less than an inch from the face of another without wanting to shout love like a signed confession. But somehow he did not. He said instead, “Mmm. Oh! That was perfect. Now that’s ecting.”
Sarah looked off shyly. Facing away, she said, “You wouldn’t be kissing relative strangers while keeping a certain Barbara Simms sequestered off on the side, somewhere?”
“I don’t know. What does sequestered mean?”
“How about duplicity? Know that one?”
“Duplicity. Dee-you-pee-el-I-cee-I-tee-why. Uh, that’s when the half note gets the beat, right?”
She mugged a look of long-suffering. “Men.”
“You’ve got me all wrong. No kidding. I’m really a shy kind of fellow. ‘Thrift, thrift.’ I stand helpless in the express lines behind those people who try to sneak in with thirteen items. I want to tell them off, but I can’t get up the nerve. See . . .” He faced her, taking both her hands in front of him. “I’m really emotionally scarred, underneath. There was this traumatic incident when I was two, when I tried to cut an English muffin with a knife, and my mother came howling out of the next room, screaming, ‘Fork!’ I’ve been virtually spineless ever since.”
She took his arm, patted him gently on the back. “Maladjusted, are you? Poor boy. Tell me, what was the greatest embarrassment of your life?”
“Hmm. Tough one. Let’s see. There was the time in Sunday School, when we were saying the Lord’s Prayer just prior to heading off for the work week, and we got to the big finish—kingdom, power, glory for everandever—and I just kept going on with the Hobson evening version, ‘God bless Mommy and Dddy and Lily and . . .’ An unfortunate solo that my peers did not soon let me forget. How about yours?”
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 20
