White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  Father was asleep in the recliner in front of the television. The war was still going on.

  16.

  The next morning the rain came. One of those warm summer downpours that follows the opening up of the sky and a great movement of air.

  There was a note from Father in the kitchen. “Went riding with Otto.” K was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee. Even her skin looked pale and gray in this light. “He didn’t want to wake you,” she said. As I reached for the door of the refrigerator, I felt a presence occupy my body, as though I were outside myself watching the morning break over us. K, or the semblance of K, returned to thumbing one of the women’s magazines Mother had delivered to the house.

  It wasn’t unlike Father to set out at that hour. He was often at his best in the morning when the sun had released him from the confinement of his bed.

  I poured two tall glasses of juice. K and I stumbled into the living room and the drone of the television. K was lax to settle on any one program. The images on the screen barely registered. I just needed some buzzing between us.

  The phone was ringing after a while too.

  It was a woman. It was Mother. Or it sounded like Mother would sound if she was shouting across some long field.

  “Is that you, Jeanie?” she said. “Do you still have that same twang in your voice? Is that how you sound?”

  “It’s still me, Mom,” I said, unsure of the answer myself as I was saying it.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m always a little nervous in the afternoons.”

  “Oh,” I said, pausing for a moment to scan the mist in the field visible through the window over the sink. The world outside looked not unlike one of Father’s Bob Ross imitations, faint and hazy around the edges. The tree line barely etched in with his chisel. “It’s still morning here.”

  “Anyways,” Mother said. “Your grandmother just burnt her pie.”

  There was a pause then. I could hear the air rushing over the receiver. It sounded as if Mother were shouting in a vacuum, a long narrow tube laid next to a highway. Occasionally, a car whooshed by.

  “It’s still morning here too,” she said.

  She’d run to Granny Olga’s old gaping house. There was enough space there for getting lost. There, she fostered what the children of all first generation immigrants feared, an innate feeling that the day to day was long and hard and struggling but as the city teamed around you progress was being made. The struggle was the pride of it. It was only in the face of adversity that Mother was ever truly free. Under Mother’s feet, there was the kind of ice made for skating. It was thin. But she was light.

  “Where’s that?” I said. “Where you are.”

  “Here,” she said. “Outside of the Stewarts.”

  We’d used the pay phone there together once when we’d forgotten a carton of cream that Granny Olga had wanted. Or a certain spice. We’d rung her up with a dime Mother had found wedged between the seats of the Toyota. “White pepper,” Granny Olga had said. “Creamed corn.” “Remember that,” Mother had said as she went back into the store. “Or she’ll have our heads, the both of us.”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” Mother said.

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t. I just got up.”

  “Well fine,” she said. “Is your father around?”

  “He’s out,” I said. “He went riding with Otto.” I paused, trying to steady my breath.

  “Well that’s fine then too,” Mother said. “Some things are as they are.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “Look after your sister.”

  “I will, Mom,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Oh, and Jean. Look after yourself a little too.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Is there anyone there with you?” she said. “Or did he leave you two to your own devices? I hate thinking of you two left to your own devices.”

  “K’s here,” I said, looking into the living room at the doughfaced girl lolling on our couch.

  “Is that her name?” she said. “I thought it was Kat or Katherine. Yes, it was Katherine. I remember meeting her once and thinking she looked like Catherine Deneuve.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said, examining the girl’s face more closely as she tapped her cigarette out the window and yawned.

  “I’ve been mistaken for a Katherine you know,” Mother said.

  “People used to say I looked like an actress. I could’ve been in films.”

  “I know,” I said. “I remember.”

  “I know you know,” she said laughing a little. “Does it scare you that your old Mom was once mistaken for someone other than who she is?”

  I didn’t know who Catherine Deneuve was. I looked in at K, or Kat, or Katherine, the small pudgy-faced girl stomaching around on our couch with her legs stretched skyward. I imagined her as she would look as a Catherine. Her hair done up in a wave that gave several inches of rise to her face and highlighted her cheekbones making her look finer than she was.

  I could imagine someone mistaking Mother that way.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not scared.”

  “Good,” Mother said. “That was all some time ago anyways. Now I’m your mother. You know me as your mother. I still want you to think of me that way.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well,” she said.

  Her voice dropped out after that. I had the feeling that the line had died. There was the static. And the distance. And the Stewarts. Mother was saying something about K again.

  “Is she often over?” she said.

  “Not too often,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “I meant to talk to you about that before I left. I meant to talk to you about men and their ideas.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “I don’t know if you know what I mean yet,” she said. “But one day you will and we will talk about it.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Well good,” she said. “Then one day soon we’ll talk about it. In the meantime, keep an eye out for me.”

  “Sure, Mom,” I said.

  “I don’t know what’s going on over there, but you know what I mean about your father and that girl.”

  “Callie?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Katherine. Or whatever girl he’s hired to replace me. Don’t let her get her claws into him. And call me if she does.”

  It was hard to imagine the plump teen lounging on the settee next to the window raising her claws to a man. All K dragged out of the world was a relief from momentary inertia. Even when her boyfriend stopped by, when she rose up into him in the doorway and kissed him on the mouth, the most she drew out of him was the faint stench of sweat. Afterwards, she released the smell out the window and was back to her smokes.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Your father thinks he could do no wrong,” Mother said. “The way you girls coddle him.”

  “He’s my father,” I said.

  “Well sure,” she said. “But he’s a man too. And sometimes he’s not half the man you’ve raised him up to be in reputation.”

  “Reputation?” I said.

  “It just means keep your eyes out for your mother. And don’t you go rising up into his arms too often either,” she said. “He’s lonely, you know. Yes. I imagine he’s quite lonely there.”

  I could hear the skittishness coming back into her voice. She would hang up soon. Soon she would be on her way back to us.

  “OK,” I said.

  I hung up the receiver. The refrigerator kicked in.

  When I returned to the living room, K was painting h
er nails. She was sitting on the edge of the L-shape, one knee drawn up to her stomach, her foot poised on the edge of the cushion revealing a long line of toes, which she covered with a red gloss. I recognized the bottle. Mother kept it in the back of the drawer where she stashed the compacts she used to paint her face those nights she was going out. On K the polish looked thick and cheap. Something about the color made me want to vomit. The way she went down the row, her eyes barely moving from the screen of the television to dab or wipe a smudge, I doubt she cared much.

  Birdie was curled up next to her. A box of cereal wedged between them. They were watching that program again about the circus pony who’d learned to dive.

  “Go, go, go,” Birdie said grabbing her feet and flinging them in the air.

  “Easy there, Little Wonder,” K said. “You’ll upset my color.”

  I felt outside myself. I had not entirely left the void I’d entered the night before. Standing in the doorway watching K and Birdie’s bodies across the room was like watching the exposed side of a mountain in a storm. The more the rain came on, the more their expressions washed into a sheen. Eventually their eyes eroded into shutters. The shutters flicked open from time to time revealing a faint light behind them. Probably just a reflection of the glare from the tube.

  “Have a seat, soldier,” K said to me, her eyes challenging mine for a moment. “You’re making your sister nervous hovering like that.”

  “It’s okay, Jean,” Birdie eventually said. “It’s just a movie.

  “I know,” I said.

  I looked out the window behind them. Through the fog I could make out the bodies of The Sheik and Father’s big Morgan. Their heads were down, grazing in the doctor’s field. The brown patches of their saddles rose and fell as they shuddered along looking for new spots of green. I’d seen horses graze so many times this way. The absence of any rider didn’t strike me until I heard someone laying hard and long on the doorbell.

  In the brightness of the morning light Otto’s body looked pale and shrunken. I shuddered at the sagging chicken skin of his neck where he stood on the other side of the door. He was half way through the archway before I had the chance to shut him out.

  “Get your mother on the phone,” Otto said. His eyes were expressionless. “Tell her we’re headed to the hospital. Tell her your father would like to see her there. Tell her I said so.”

  Father was sitting away from us at the far end of the narrow slab of concrete that served as our porch. After he saw me look at him, he put his head in his hands and walked off some distance toward the stream to hide the damage. His face had rearranged itself into a dark mass not so different from the field that had rearranged it that way.

  As Otto later recalled the accident, he’d never seen an animal go down with so much weight. They’d been galloping, sure. But they hadn’t been so crazy as to go open reigning in that weather. It was the fault of the rain and the slick of the mud, Otto said. That and Father’s big old Morgan had too much of the carriage in him. He was sturdy on his feet but undependable in the wet. His rear went out from under. Father went down with him. His foot had caught in the stirrup. There was nothing between Father’s face and the corn. “I’ll be damned about that rain,” Otto joked with Father some days later. “It’ll turn even the tiniest field into something famous.”

  “Next time,” Father said, “I’ll put some cleats on that fella.”

  “Sure,” Otto said. “Or don’t take a carriage horse out sledding in the rain.”

  A stalk had nearly pierced Father’s eye. It had threaded itself in the soft spot next to the socket. One eyelid was hanging. Everything else was swollen shut save for the opposite side of his mouth. When he went to speak, he tongued the gap where his tooth was missing. The blood let down from his gums. “Take your sister and get back in the house,” he said. “Everything’s all right here. It’s a close call is all.”

  I resisted making the call. Otto went inside to use the phone. When he came back he had a bag of ice in one hand and one of Father’s flannels in the other. He wrapped the shirt around Father’s head. The two men shouldered down the walk toward the Bronco where it was parked in the gravel next to the drive.

  The Starlings’ green truck crested the hill. Otto had put the call out to them too.

  As the two cars passed on the road, Ray saluted Father through the windshield and swung into our driveway. He parked in the gravel next to the house and turned down the engine. Ruth took over the kitchen and put on a spread while Ray smoked his cigar on the porch. He was drunker than usual from the heat. His smell was thick. He moved as though swimming.

  I sat in Father’s rocking chair in the corner. Dumb. Silent. A witness to something but I wasn’t sure what.

  “I imagine you can go now,” Ruth said peeking her head out from the oven and speaking to K. “There’s no need for more bodies in this house.”

  “If you think so,” K said.

  “Sure,” Ruth said. “Just let Ray know you mean to be going. He’ll drive you home.” Ruth was in her element. The pressure of an emergency was thrilling. Within the hour eggs and pancakes and the half-box of Entenmann’s, which she’d grabbed from her counter and stuffed in her purse, appeared on our table. Afterwards, she turned the light off and made a pot of coffee for her and Ray. The dishes she hand washed in the half-light and stacked on a yellow hand rag. The dishwasher brought too much heat into the house. When she was done, she sat with us and watched the night shows that ran in the weekend slot after the morning cartoons, fifties sitcoms, old black and whites with the laugh tracks. Ruth’s laugh was easy and inviting. Anyone would’ve chuckled along with her under different circumstance. That afternoon as the sound of her voice reverberated off the thin walls, I wondered if it wouldn’t finally blow out Mother’s windows altogether and let the world in to consume us.

  The day passed by way of the rain. First sheeting and then intermittent waves of mist that descended and ascended in a rolling pattern as dry patches of air moved into the swamplands absorbing some of the moisture until the drizzle came and the doctor’s fields were saturated again. Despite the heat and the film on her face, Ruth kept us in meals. Every few hours she went into the kitchen to prepare something, which occasionally one of us picked at until the temperature got the best of it and she plated whatever it was and put it in the fridge to keep. Ray returned from dropping K home. I showed him where Mother kept the jug of cooking rum. He went outside with the bottle and swept the porch for a while.

  It was dark by the time Father’s Bronco rolled into the drive. Otto was at the wheel, Father alongside him. Time resumed with the slam of a car door and the sound of the two men making their way up the gravel. A second pair of headlights soon fronted the street. I could make out Granny Olga’s hair as the car turned into the drive. Gramps’s white Panama hat still shone from where she kept it on the ledge in the rear of the Buick.

  “Lord, child,” Granny Olga said clutching the hem of my dress before her bags were through the door. “Get yourself upstairs and put on something decent.”

  The moment Mother entered the house every switch was tossed. The lights were on and the windows were open. She was sharing a cigarette with Otto who had her on one arm and her bags on the other. Father was in an unusually light mood. Despite the fact that his face had been beaten and bruised, he was quick on his feet. He was joking about the hard time the hospital had given them. “Nurses. Stiff upper lip from the start. Swore I’d been in a bar fight,” Father was recounting to Ray. “They were jealous of my wife’s right hook.”

  “That’s not all they were jealous of,” Otto egged him on. Otto’s flattery went a long way in reviving them. Even Granny Olga gave up a tight-wadded snicker.

  Ruth was in kitchen again with the eggs and the éclairs. What with the emergency, we’d worked up an appetite. Granny Olga was bothering Ruth about the tea. There was nothing like a good Catholic woman i
n her daughter’s kitchen to stir up Granny Olga’s hankering to bring out the samovar. Once, I’d asked Mother about attending catechism.

  “I want to go,” I’d said. I’d just finished sitting down to my method. Mother had come into the room to have a cigarette and a listen. It was the only time Mother had ever struck me in the face. The surprise of it was what stung.

  Despite her husband’s alcoholism and her penchant for Pall Malls, Ruth was a Catholic. Grandmother could smell it on her, lapsed or no.

  “I’ll clean up here, darlin’,” Granny Olga said as soon as Ruth had finished arranging her spread.

  The house had the feel of the holidays.

  “I heard Jean’s been tending to Helene,” Mother was saying to Otto. Everyone was sprawled out on the L-shape.

  “With all her grace,” Otto said. “Never thought I’d see anyone make that old piano sing again,” he said.

  “I keep telling her,” Father said. “She could really have something if she just practiced. Not everyone can have a little something like that. A real talent.”

  “I think she practices just fine,” Otto said.

  I was quiet then. My eyes fell into my lap. I examined the curve of my thigh where Grandmother had touched it. I thought maybe I’d have a fine shape one day if I just discovered it right.

  “Speak up, child,” Granny Olga said. “We don’t mind you so much talking.”

  Otto cleared his throat. He began telling stories about the bonfire.

  “All this celebrating in my absence,” Mother was saying. “You know how much I hate to miss a good party.”