The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “My wife and I looked after Jimmy like he was our own. Then after she died . . .” He shrugged.

  Tommy’s office phones kept ringing and one of the secretaries kept shouting messages at him from the top of the stairs and he kept shouting back.

  Someone came up to him on the street to complain about tomatoes. Six baskets. “Irving, I’ll tell someone to make it right, okay?”

  “You know better,” he said to someone. “Give Irving whatever he wants. Let him pick them out himself.”

  Someone came in to say that they’d unloaded more celery from a boxcar. Did he want it in the cooler or was it going out right away?

  “The whole thing goes out to Godfrey’s. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it all, but they want it. But check with Nick first.”

  “Nick,” he explained to me, “handles the celery account. I saw that certificate your daughter got. Truck-driving school. What put it in her head to go to truck-driving school? She’s such a little bitty thing.”

  “She’s five-six,” I said. “Almost as tall as you are.”

  He laughed. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. I grew up on a farm. My dad used to let her drive the tractor. But it’s hard for me to accept it as woman’s work.”

  “They’ve got their own organization, you know. It’s called Women in Trucking. Headquarters right here in Wisconsin, up by Stevens Point.”

  “Women truck drivers?”

  He nodded. “Stella grew up on a farm?”

  “Not really. My dad and my uncle kept my grandfather’s small farm. They raised some sweet corn and some corn for the pigs, and a big kitchen garden.”

  Tommy was an easy person to talk to, especially out on the street, with all the noise made by the flat trucks, dollies. I found myself telling him about Paul’s death. “How do you make things right again? After death: too late, too late.”

  “It’s sort of like reconsecrating a church,” he said, “after it’s been desecrated.”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Are you a religious person, Mrs. Godwin?”

  “No.”

  “Neanch io. So this is it,” he said, waving his arm at the market, at the double doors that opened into the warehouse, at the produce stacked on the broad sloping sidewalk. “It’s good, isn’t it? Avocados, cherries, plums, grapes, artichokes, potatoes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, celery . . . You name it. God’s plenty. Is it enough?”

  “It’s good,” I said. “It’s wonderful. But it’s probably not enough.”

  “No, I suppose not. But it’s what there is.”

  A sawhorse was blocking a spot for the truck, between a Leshinsky Potato Company truck and a semi that said James T. Wilkins, Tacoma, Washington, on the side. The back of the Leshinsky truck was open. It was stacked up with six tiers of hundred-pound sacks of potatoes. A big burly man took hold of two corners of one of the sacks on the bottom, jerked it out, and threw it over his shoulders. Bushels of green peppers from the James T. Wilkins truck were being loaded onto flat trucks and pushed into the warehouse. There wasn’t a lot of room between the two trucks.

  “Gonna be tight,” Tommy said, “but Stella’s a good driver. They really taught her some tricks in that driving school, or probably she’s just got a knack. Myself, I learned the hard way,” he said. “My dad gave me the key to a truck and told me to figure it out for myself. So I started making deliveries. Around the city, you know. Kohl’s, Safeway, Roundy’s, Godfrey—that used to be IGA. Used to be A and P and National Tea. Those were the big ones. I had some real problems. But those were straight trucks. The semis I could never manage, turning the wheel to the right when you want the back of the truck to go left. I never was too good at it.”

  But when the truck finally pulled around the corner, by Nachmann’s Market Bar, Jimmy was driving, not Stella. He was wearing a baseball cap and big sunglasses. Stella was sitting next to him. She’d rolled down the window, though it was cold. She’d let her hair grow. She was wearing sunglasses too.

  “Going to be tight,” Tommy said again.

  Broadway was a one-way street. South to North. If you looked north you could see the traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. If you looked south, you’d see more of the market. And beyond that, warehouses.

  I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Stella since Paul’s death. I always had plenty of forgiveness for Stella, but there was a limit. Now she wanted me to help finance a truck with a sleeper, so she and Jimmy could have some privacy.

  “Jimmy had a lot of adventures, you know,” Tommy said. “I’m glad to see him settle down.”

  I didn’t ask what kind of adventures.

  I’ve watched a big furniture truck backing up the alley behind the lofts. Pretty amazing. All the way from Mulberry Street, around the corner into the alley that divides the parking lot, through the lot in front of the loft garages, and then angling into the furniture dock, always leaving me enough room so I could get my car out of the garage.

  Jimmy waved from the cab, even tipped his cap. I could see Stella, but I couldn’t see her face. I wanted to run to her, climb up on the running board. But I didn’t.

  Jimmy pulled across the space and then started to back up. But there wasn’t enough room on the opposite side of the street for him to get even a forty-five degree angle. I thought he was going to back into the Wilkins truck—the one with the load of peppers—but he stopped just in time, pulled up, and tried again. But he couldn’t get the cab—the tractor—to follow the trailer into the space. Tommy had his eyes closed. Jimmy tried three more times. People were starting to watch, and they weren’t gentle people.

  “Jack it in,” someone shouted. Someone else laughed. I could see Jimmy through the open window, his head jerking as he looked from one mirror to another. I thought he might be looking for help. Finally he got out of the cab.

  “Somebody’s got to move this goddamn truck,” he shouted, banging on the side of the Leshinsky Potato Company truck. “There’s not enough room to get in.”

  “You just got to jack it in,” somebody shouted again.

  I wasn’t sure what this meant.

  “Fuck it!” Jimmy shouted.

  The big burly man who was unloading potatoes laughed.

  “Move the fucking truck,” Jimmy says. “You can see I don’t have enough room.”

  “Let your girlfriend back it in.”

  “Go shit yourself.”

  “Who you talking to?”

  “To you, Polack asshole.”

  The burly man pulled a produce hammer out of his back pocket and started for the Jimmy. At least it wasn’t a knife.

  Jimmy whipped off his belt, which had a heavy buckle on the end, and whirled it around his head.

  What was it Keats said about a quarrel in the streets? More exciting than a poem?

  But Tommy intervened before things went any farther. “Basta basta basta. Take it easy. Put your hammer away, Leo,” he said to the Leshinsky driver. And to Jimmy: “Put your belt back on before your pants fall down. Stop acting like a punk and I’ll buy you a drink.” He put his arm around Jimmy. And led him off toward Nachmann’s Market Bar.

  I stayed to talk to Stella, who was out of the cab now, looking over the situation. The truck was blocking the entire street. “Later, Ma,” she said, glancing at me.

  She climbed into the cab and made herself comfortable, then pulled forward till the back of the trailer was near the opening between the two trucks and then adjusted the back wheels, the tandems, all the way forward so she could make a shorter turn. I could understand the principle, but I couldn’t imagine turning the wheel left to get the back of the truck to go to the right. And vice versa.

  She started to back up, and I thought she was going to back right into the Wilkins truck. I could see her talking to herself, bending the truck to her will, and suddenly the back of the trailer swung around into the opening.

  I could see her checking her mirrors and pulling on the wheel, a white light be
hind her, filling the cab. All of a sudden the angle changed again and it looked as if she were going to back right into the Leshinsky potato truck. And then the trailer magically straightened out and the cab followed it into the hole.

  Later, in the bar—we were sitting in a booth—she said, “Sometimes when I’m in a tight spot I tell myself that there’s a perfect line to follow. That’s what they taught us in truck-driving school. If I could find that line, a line that would put the truck straight into the hole the first time . . . That line’s the line you’d follow if you were pulling out of the hole, right? So you just follow the line that you take pulling out of a space and sink the trailer right into the hole. But you have to visualize that line.

  “Sometimes there’re going to be two lines . . . ” She went on to explain how the two lines worked, and I knew then that Jimmy was going to kill her if I didn’t do something to stop him. But what could I do? The waitress brought out coffee.

  “You keep the temperature at sixty degrees?” Tommy asked Stella.

  “All the way.”

  “They’re hauling black-market tomatoes,” Tommy said, turning to me.

  “Black market?”

  “Florida tomatoes. Not exactly black market, but I got a cousin in Pompano Beach figured out how to grow tomatoes that taste good in the winter. Like real tomatoes, not cardboard. But they don’t look too good. Like those tomatoes with all the bumps and cat faces on them you see in Italy. So the Florida Tomato Growers Association decides he can’t sell them out of state because they don’t meet minimum beauty standards. Because of the bumps. I can’t sell them to the chains without making a stink, but restaurants, they’re another story. Not just Milwaukee, Chicago too.”

  That night Tommy made sauce with some of the black market tomatoes. Paul would have loved it. He cooked some garlic in olive oil, then cut the tomatoes in half and squeezed the juice into the pan with the oil and garlic. He cooked the juice down to concentrate it and then added what was left of the tomato halves. So the juice was concentrated, but the meat of the tomatoes cooked for only a short time. He put the tomatoes through a food mill and served the sauce on spaghetti. No Parmesan cheese. “Parmesan cheese is the emperor of cheeses,” he explained, “but every dish is a little drama. Parmesan cheese is a strong actor. You don’t want Parmesan cheese to upstage the lead.”

  Jimmy disagreed. He wanted Parmesan cheese.

  “Grate it yourself,” Tommy said, but Jimmy couldn’t find it in the refrigerator and Tommy had to help him.

  Jimmy couldn’t let the truck-backing-up business rest. “Old man Leshinsky and his fucking potatoes,” he kept saying.

  “Don’t talk like a punk,” Tommy said, but Jimmy was determined to be disagreeable.

  “He could of moved the fucking truck.”

  I could see where things stood. But could Stella see? Had she waded in too deep to turn back?

  “I could of backed it in, but it just made more sense for that fat-ass Leshinsky driver to move his truck.”

  For a second course Tommy served thick pork chops, browned in olive oil and then baked with fennel seeds, followed by a salad. Later on Jimmy and Stella went out to a club.

  “Stella knows how to drive,” Tommy said. “That school must have been pretty good.”

  “What I want to know,” I said, “is if she’s going to be all right.”

  “You mean, is she going to turn things around for Jimmy. I’m glad to see him with a good woman. She stuck by him all that time he was in prison. Visiting every week.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Love,” he said. “What do they know that we don’t know?”

  “There’s more than bed to marriage.”

  He laughed. “You got that backward,” he said. “That’s what we know that they don’t know.” And for a while we explored the mystery of love. We didn’t disagree about anything, but we didn’t take the argument very far beyond the obvious.

  “He did good work on the house,” I said, not mentioning the chandelier.

  “He’s not afraid of work,” Tommy said.

  “What happened to his parents?” I asked.

  “My brother was killed on the back loading dock,” Tommy said. Crushed by a truck backing up. His wife couldn’t manage on her own, died a year later. “He’s my brother’s son. We took him in, treated him like he was our own. My wife . . .” He crossed himself. “I promised my brother I’d look after him. Blood is blood. You’ve got to understand that. You look after your own.”

  And I thought he’d just told me everything I needed to know.

  But it turned out there was more. Isn’t there always more? A lot more?

  “I’m going to put the dishes in the dishwasher,” he said, “but let me put something on to lift the spirits. He had a fancy stereo system that could handle LPs as well as cassettes and CDs. I recognized the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, which Paul and I had seen in the Arena in Verona. And I experienced a peaceful easy feeling, like the old Eagles song, as if we were not doing anything special, as if we just happened to be walking along side by side, heading in the same direction.

  We met twice, in Chicago, to see Turandot, at the end of February, and Norma, in the middle of March (at the end of the season). Both times I took the Illinois Zephyr from Galesburg, and Tommy, who took the North Shore down from Milwaukee, was waiting for me in Union Station. We took a cab to the Lyric Opera and sat on the mezzanine. Tommy was a subscriber.

  We had a recording of Joan Sutherland singing “Casta Diva”—Joan Sutherland’s Greatest Hits—but hearing June Anderson live was heartbreakingly beautiful. More than beautiful. It was like being seasick or coming down with the flu, but somehow wonderful, as if our limited physical responses had to do double duty, had to stand for the flu or for joy, the way the same notes on a piano score can sometimes represent the flute and sometimes the violin.

  We stayed at the Palmer House, in separate rooms after Turandot. That was the first step. The second step was easy. After Norma we shared a room, and a bed. No one wants to imagine the sexual desires of an older woman. But let me tell you something, they’re the same as yours: to be touched, stroked, embraced, to be held. That’s the long and short of it. To feel the earth rolling under your shoulder blades, to share a glass of wine, one glass for the two of you, to drink a cup of coffee together in the morning. That’s what we did. Coffee and eggs Benedict in the hotel.

  Inside I was as dizzy as a teenager who’s just lost her virginity, as unsteady as a drunk trying to walk a straight line, but outwardly I remained calm as we walked north on Wabash to the river, leaned against the railing, looked down at the tour boats. I felt flirtatious, in command, still able to surprise a man. Myself too.

  We talked about Norma from every possible angle—the difficulty of staging, the difficulty of coordinating the words and the music, the difficulty of finding a balance between carnality and spirituality.

  “I never thought it was a problem,” I said.

  He laughed.

  June Anderson’s performance—I started to hum the aria—was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Tommy explained bel canto singing, and opera singing in general.

  “It’s totally different,” he said. “You got to link your different registers, and you got to do it with no microphones, no amplification. You got to make yourself heard. It’s a kind of controlled screaming. It takes years to learn. You got to sing pianissimo over the orchestra and be heard in the back row of the top balcony. What you do is you make a column of air in your body and then ride it like a wave, like you’re on a surf board.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to form a column of air deep within my body and then jump on that one word at the top, which I recognized as pace and ride it down to the end. I wasn’t worried about anyone hearing me. Too much noise. Too much traffic on Michigan Avenue, too much traffic on the river.

  Tommy put his arm around me. “Careful,” he said. “You need to do some warm-ups first. You don�
�t want to ruin your voice.”

  We ate a late lunch in one of the new restaurants underneath the station, and I left on the California Zephyr. I could have stayed longer and taken the Illinois Zephyr, but I was still shaky and I thought I’d better get home. Tommy saw me off. The California Zephyr is a big train. When it leaves the station it’s more like an ocean liner leaving the port than an airplane taking off.

  I walked home. The apartment’s only a block from the Amtrak station. I’d had an unsettling glimpse of a new life. But what stayed with me was not so much the possibility of a new life, but the music, the aria. Casta diva. Chaste goddess. Like first love, it promised to vindicate life, or at least point toward what’s important in life.

  I went down to the garage, which was full of banker’s boxes full of books. Some labeled. Some mislabeled. Some not labeled at all. But I found what I was looking for: our old Scribner Music Library, ten volumes of folk songs, popular songs, piano classics, and two volumes of opera excerpts. I took them upstairs and looked up the piano score for Norma—excerpts from Norma. The music for “Casta Diva” wasn’t difficult. I sight-read my way through it without stopping. Then I played it again. Then I started to sing. The beauty was overwhelming. Not the beauty of my decent alto voice, but the way the melody holds its breath at the top and then pulses its way down to the tonic. I tried to sing the words, an octave low, but it was like trying to sing when you’re seasick: “Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ce . . .”

  I played it again, tried to form a column of air deep within my body, but I didn’t know what it would feel like if I succeeded. But I recognized the experience now. It wasn’t seasickness, it wasn’t the flu; it was homesickness.

  The doorbell rang. It was Lois, in her bathrobe. And Camilla. “I thought you might want your dog back,” she said.

  “Thanks, Lois,” I said. “Sorry. I got carried away.”

  “You can tell me about it tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going back to bed.”