by Larry Watson
I said hello that night, but received no greeting in return, which was exactly what usually happened when our paths crossed in the presence of others in the Dunbar home. Then, as I was on my way out of the room with the bottle of Elmer’s, Louisa Lindahl said, “Nice of the Dunbars to take in strays and give them the run of the place, eh?”
I’m not sure what kept me from arguing with her, in spite of the fact that that was my first impulse. Was it the fear that this was an argument I would lose? Or could it possibly be the notion that I might benefit in the future from her belief that she and I had something in common? Whatever the reason, I stammered, “I guess,” and hurried from the room.
Now, when Dr. Dunbar took the cloth that Louisa offered, a look passed between them. Even if my vision had not been restricted, I still wouldn’t have been able to interpret it. Then the doctor smiled his best Rex Dunbar smile and said, “Anticipating my every need. Thank you, Louisa.”
She returned his smile.
Dr. Dunbar folded the cloth into a rectangle the size of a paperback. “Press this over your eye, Matt.” Behind me I heard a puck hit the pipe.
With his hand on my elbow, the doctor steered me inside. Mrs. Dunbar was in the kitchen, taking a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven. When she saw me and the bloody cloth, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, Matty!” Her expression of concern was that of a mother’s.
“Take it easy, Alice. It looks worse than it is. A few stitches and Gordie Howe here will be right back out on the ice.”
The doctor continued to guide me through the house as if blood had blinded me in both eyes, and I could hear Louisa’s footsteps as she followed close behind. She’d been watching the game ... she’d seen what happened ... but did she know why?
At the door to the clinic, Louisa asked, “Should I come in with you? Do you need any help?”
“No need,” replied the doctor, much to my disappointment. “Matthew could probably sew himself up.”
We went into the same examination room where Dr. Dunbar had treated Louisa Lindahl. “Lie down on the table, Matthew.”
I did as I was told. I wasn’t about to ask for it, but I wished I had the blanket he’d used to cover Louisa. My feet were freezing after standing out on the porch in my socks.
“Now, ordinarily I’d put a drape over the patient’s face, leaving only the laceration exposed. Hell, you might like to watch. I have a hand mirror here in the drawer.
“All right.”
Once I had the mirror in hand, I slowly took the compress away. Blood was leaking more than flowing from the cut, and that soon stopped when Dr. Dunbar numbed the area with lidocaine and epinephrine. “This is what a cut man uses to stop a boxer’s bleeding.” Dr. Dunbar was close enough that I could smell his sweat and his aftershave.
He continued to talk his way through the procedure, exactly as he would have done if I were watching him work on someone else. He cleaned the wound with 300 cc of saline solution and then prepared to sew. He explained the type of thread (6-0 nylon) and sutures (simple interrupted) he’d be using. “And notice that I’m not shaving your eyebrow, Matthew. Some doctors might do that, but it’s not necessary. And I’d probably mar your good looks. Takes a hell of a long time for eyebrows to grow back. Different kind of hair.”
I felt nothing but a vague tugging as the needle went in and out, and I watched my reflection with one eye while the doctor administered to the other, adding to the sense that I was more observer than patient.
He treated me so gently that I wondered again if I could have been wrong about what happened during the hockey game. Touch that tender didn’t seem as if it could belong to the same man who had speared and then tripped me, sending me sprawling on the ice.
I handed the mirror back to him when he finished, but Dr. Dunbar wasn’t through looking. He circled the table slowly, examining his handiwork from different angles.
“Any other injuries that need attending to?” he asked.
“I bit my cheek, but I think the bleeding’s stopped.”
Nevertheless, he inspected the inside of my mouth with the aid of a light and a tongue depressor. After a moment of probing he declared, “Nothing serious.” He patted my shoulder. “You can sit up now.”
I did, slowly.
“Feeling woozy?”
“A little.”
“Take your time. Lie back down if you like.”
“I’m okay.”
“Sit for a minute. You’re done playing for the day. This isn’t the Stanley Cup.”
I took a few deep breaths to steady myself, and the doctor reached into a drawer to pull out a pack of Chesterfields. He sat down on a rolling stool and lit up, using a kidneyshaped steel bowl for an ashtray. Then, after taking another look at me, he held the bowl out toward me. “You need this? You think you might throw up?”
I hadn’t cursed, cried, complained, or recoiled at any time during the procedure. I couldn’t think of any other way to convince him that I could handle this except to say again, “I’m okay.”
“You look pale.” The doctor’s tone puzzled me. It was oddly formal, almost grave, and not at all like the jocular, light-hearted Dr. Dunbar I knew. Was he angry with me? Did all this have to do with my having knocked Johnny off his skates?
“I feel fine.” I considered insisting on lacing my skates back up and returning to the game.
“If you say so.” He cocked his head as he looked at me. “You’ll have a black eye.”
“That’s okay.”
“Sure. It’ll make you look like a tough guy. You want people to think you’re a tough guy?”
So, it was about Johnny. “I never thought about it.”
“Some girls go for that.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Trust me.”
He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. He made an incongruous sight, wearing his hockey jersey yet holding his cigarette in that elegant way he had. “You know, Matthew, there’s more to hockey than just banging into people. You need skills to go along with your aggression. We used to have an expression that applied to guys like you. ‘Getting ahead of your skates.’ That’s you out on the ice, Matt. Ahead of your skates.”
I was right. Dr. Dunbar had wanted to teach me a lesson for hitting his son.
“I know I stink out there,” I said. “So I try to hustle and skate hard and hope that makes up for it.”
He ignored my comment. “I wonder if that’s you in life, Matthew. Out ahead of your skates.”
I understood that we were in the realm of metaphor, but I didn’t really understand what was being said about my character. Still, I no more would have inquired after his meaning than I would have asked for a blanket to cover my cold feet.
“Maybe so.” I got off the table.
Later that night, after my mother had gone to bed, I went into our little bathroom. I stood at the sink, in front of the faucet that always seemed to drip. Above it, the mirror’s silver backing made every image seem as if it were decomposing before your very eyes. Under the harsh light, I undressed and inspected the injuries that the masculine code had prevented me from paying attention to earlier. The rectangular bruise on my side could not have been a more perfect impression of the butt of Dr. Dunbar’s stick. The inside of my cheek was red, raw, and puckered. My eye was starting to blacken, the socket rimmed in deep purple. And the newly repaired cut throbbed as if my blood was trying to break free of the doctor’s stitches.
6.
JOHNNY AND I HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to Buzz Mallen’s New Year’s party for weeks. Buzz’s parents would be in Saint Paul for the night, and his older brother had agreed to buy beer and hard liquor for the occasion. Then, only two days before the party, its format changed. Now it was going to be a small affair, one you could only gain entry to with a date. I had recently broken up with Debbie McCarren, my girlfriend of five months, because she felt we were “getting too serious,” which was almost surely a euphemism for either “I want to date someone else,” or “I
’m tired of slapping away your roving hands.” And since neither Johnny nor I could possibly find dates on such short notice, we resigned ourselves to missing the party.
Rather than give up completely on the idea of celebration, however, we improvised our own feeble party plan. Johnny’s parents always went out on New Year’s Eve, first to dinner at Palmer’s (where I might have cleared their table had I not arranged to have the night off), and then to a dance at the Heritage House Hotel. The twins were sleeping over at the home of a friend. Johnny and I would have the Dunbar house more or less to ourselves. Along, I hoped, with Louisa Lindahl.
And so that New Year’s Eve, Johnny and I lugged his record player up to the attic, along with a bag of potato chips, a log of summer sausage, a few cigars, two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and a fifth of blackberry brandy I’d stolen from Palmer’s. The large dusty space smelled of mold and unfinished wood from the heavy dark timbers slanting overhead. And because that night was exceptionally cold, we plugged in a space heater; its glowing bars and an old floor lamp illuminated the corner where we would usher in 1963. The attic was a deliberate choice. We’d both been drunk a few times, but that night we planned to reach a new level of inebriation, one that would require sequestration. We even designated a tin wastebasket as the receptacle if either of us had to throw up and couldn’t make it down to the bathroom in time.
I loved the Dunbars’ attic in part because my mother was ruthless about throwing out or giving away anything that wasn’t essential to our lives. What other families saved for future generations or emergencies, or simply because they couldn’t bear to throw it away, my mother banished as “junk.” So when I entered the Dunbar attic, I felt as if I were in a place where time meant something more than the present moment, and items were saved for reasons other than mere utility. The Dunbar attic contained the usual assortment of old clothes and outgrown toys, broken furniture and holiday decorations, but all of it seemed to me part of an effort to perpetuate and preserve a family and its traditions. To me, it was as much museum as storage area.
We listened to our favorite album—the soundtrack to West Side Story—over and over that evening. We’d seen the movie the previous summer, on a trip to Minneapolis with Mrs. Dunbar. (While the doctor tried to provide us with a medical education, Mrs. Dunbar tried to encourage our appreciation of culture.) It was the musical’s sadder songs that best matched our mood that New Year’s Eve. For while we tried to convince ourselves that the big party didn’t interest us—after all, we were above the immature antics of our adolescent peers—we both knew we really wanted to be at Buzz Mallen’s place.
We finished off the sausage and chips and washed them down with the beer. And we had just cracked the seal on the brandy and lit our cigars when I made the suggestion I’d had in mind all along.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound as if the idea had just occurred to me, “why don’t you go find Louisa and see if she wants to join us?”
Johnny was sitting in an old armchair whose upholstery had torn and begun to leak stuffing, and I was in a rocker whose cane back had begun to unravel. “Louisa?” he said.
“You know—she lives in your house?”
“I thought this was going to be a stag night.”
“She has to hear us up here. And she’s sitting down there all alone on New Year’s Eve. It’s kind of rude, don’t you think? Go ahead. If she doesn’t want to, she’ll just say no.”
He puffed on his cigar and stared at me for a long moment. “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”
While Johnny was gone, I looked around for another chair. I finally found a small metal folding chair, once part of a play set the twins had only recently outgrown. I sat down to try it, and then, confident the chair would support one of us if necessary, brought it over and put it under the lamp. I was using it as a footrest when Johnny reentered the attic.
He came toward me with an expression so glum I was certain he had failed to persuade Louisa to join us.
Then Johnny said, “We’re over here,” and I looked past him to Louisa Lindahl, who was just ascending the final step.
She paused for a moment to adjust to the dim light. “Is this where the party is?”
“Over here,” Johnny said again.
As if she couldn’t be sure of the safety of the planks beneath her feet, Louisa walked slowly toward us. When she stepped into our little circle of light, she took a long moment to gaze down at the arrangement. The record player. The empty potato chip bag. The beer cans. The ashtray, with Johnny’s cigar still glowing.
“Well, this looks comfy,” she said. “But where are the party hats and the noisemakers?”
She was wearing an ill-fitting, too-tight cotton dress, and I remembered it from the days when she was scurrying back and forth behind the lunch counter at Burke’s. But now it looked as if her wardrobe had been supplemented from the closets of the Dunbars. The fraying blue cardigan she had on was so large it must have once belonged to Dr. Dunbar. It fell from her broad shoulders like drapery, hanging down to her thighs, and the sleeves were turned up multiple times. And she was wearing a pair of slippers that had been Mrs. Dunbar’s.
“This isn’t a party,” Johnny said. “This is an antiparty.”
“Sad,” she said, nodding in understanding.
“We were invited to a party,” I rushed to explain, “but we didn’t want to go.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You had to have a date,” said Johnny.
“Gotcha.” And then she flashed a smile that made her look as if she were preparing to take a bite out of something.
I had an impulse to say that we could have found dates if we wanted to, but I kept my mouth shut. That remark would only have made us seem more pathetic. Besides, upon her arrival the attic became the place I most wanted to spend New Year’s Eve.
Johnny sat down in the children’s chair, and Louisa sat where Johnny had been. She pointed to Johnny’s record player, where Larry Kert’s version of “Maria” emanated from the mesh-covered speaker. “You’re sure wearing that out. I could hear it down in my room. What are you listening to?”
“West Side Story,” said Johnny. “But this isn’t the movie soundtrack. It’s the original Broadway recording.”
The distinction meant nothing to her. “Don’t you ever play anything else?”
I reached down and picked up the stack of albums we’d brought to the party. “What do you want to hear? We’ve got Dave Brubeck. The Kingston Trio. The Brothers Four. Odetta.”
“You have any Ricky Nelson?”
“Nope,” Johnny answered. “Sorry.”
“Bobby Vee?”
“No Bobby Vee.”
She shrugged and pointed to the bottle at Johnny’s feet. “What are you ringing in the New Year with?” Midnight was hours away.
“Blackberry brandy. Want a drink?”
“You have any more beers?”
“Sorry.”
“Okay. What the hell.”
“You want me to get you a glass?” offered Johnny.
Louisa laughed. “Don’t bother.” She reached for the bottle, twisted the top off, and then did exactly what a teenage boy would do: she wiped the rim with the palm of her hand.
After two swallows she grimaced and handed the brandy back to Johnny. “You could put that on pancakes.” Nevertheless, after the bottle passed from Johnny to me, she accepted it when it came back to her.
For a long time no one said anything. We simply circulated the bottle and listened to Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence profess their doomed love. As Tony and Maria approached their fate, Johnny grew increasingly drunk. Louisa was visibly bored, and she didn’t even know how the story ended....
Louisa spoke up. “This must be a real fancy affair your folks went to tonight,” she said to Johnny. “I saw the red dress your mom was wearing. Jesus, was that something!”
Johnny nodded. “They go to that dance every year. It goes on all night, and then when it�
��s over the McDonoughs—they own the hotel—open up the restaurant and fix bacon and eggs for everybody.”
The music was over, but no one got up to put on another record.
“But she won’t wear that dress again next year, will she? It’s a new dress every year, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“She’ll probably wear it once, and then it’ll end up over there.” Louisa pointed to a standing wardrobe filled with garment bags.
“Could be.”
“Damn fancy dress for this town,” she observed. “Is your mom from Willow Falls?”
“Detroit. She and my dad met at the University of Michigan.”
“How the hell did they end up here? A doctor—he can go anywhere.”
Louisa may not have been from Willow Falls, but it hadn’t taken her long to understand why so many people in our town worshipped Rex Dunbar. He wasn’t like the mayor, whose family had become wealthy selling Chevrolets to the residents of Willow Falls for decades. Nor was he like L. D. Smalley, who had been drawing up deeds and writing wills in town for over thirty years, or Gordon Ruland, whose family had been selling groceries in Willow Falls almost as long as the town had been there. As admired as these and other men were, they were in Willow Falls because they were from there. But Rex Dunbar and his stylish, beautiful wife—as Louisa said, they could have gone anywhere.
“After my dad got out of the service,” Johnny said, “he and my mom got in the car and took off. They were planning to drive out to the West Coast and take their time getting there. They stopped in Willow Falls for gas, and they liked the town right away. They thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”
“To each his own,” said Louisa, shrugging as if to suggest that while that might have been a reason good enough for the Dunbars, it didn’t count for much with her. She pulled a crushed pack of Chesterfields from the pocket of her cardigan. “You sports have a light?”
