by M. E. Kerr
“It was the Congressional Medal of Honor, Mr. Trumble. Purple Hearts weren’t that rare, you know. Artie Young got one, lot of boys did.”
I was always forgetting my father’s aversion to certain types of information. There was a famous philosopher, I don’t remember which one, who said the unexamined life was not worth living. My father seemed to feel the examined life wasn’t. The afternoon of Miss Wheatley’s funeral I was reminded again of how he felt. Three of Miss Wheatley’s faculty friends from Seaville High had sent three large orchids with a card attached which said, “Ruthie, we’ll be with you before long: Gladys, Gert and Frances.”
Charlie was riding in the flower car with Mr. Trumble, who was feeling tired from the trip to Hauppauge. I was riding in the hearse beside my father. My father’s a very thin, tall man who looks a little timid because he has a habit of backing away from people when he talks to them, and because he wears these rimless glasses that went out of style in my grandfather’s time. Both the backing away and the glasses are part of the undertaker’s syndrome: I mustn’t offend. The glasses, he believes, are the least offensive and conspicuous. I think he backs away out of fear his breath might smell. My father’s always asking me or my mother to “okay my breath.”
He was driving along with the lights of the hearse on, although it was a bright, sunny afternoon. I think funeral processions look weird going along with the lights on in the daytime, but then again if it didn’t look weird, it wouldn’t be much like a funeral procession, because anything to do with funerals is far out.
My father was talking business per usual, and per usual I was trying to tune him out. He was telling me that he was working on old Mr. Sigh to make “prearrangements” for his sister’s and his funerals, adding that the Witherspoon Funeral Home “heretofore” hadn’t paid sufficient attention to the very practical idea of recommending prearrangements.
“When grief’s in the way, it’s hard to impress on a customer the necessity of a truly memorable send-off,” my father was saying. “And half the time the type coffin they might choose is out of stock; they settle for less, regret it all the rest of their days. . . . Then too, some old folks like Mr. Sigh don’t even know if anyone who cares about them will be around when they pass. Those important details are left up to strangers.” That was about when I interrupted.
“I’ll bet Gladys, Gert and Frances would have second thoughts about sending orchids if they knew the word ‘orchid’ meant ‘testicle.’ ”
“What are you talking about, Wally?” said my father.
“The word ‘orchid,’ ” I said. “It means ‘testicle.’”
I saw a nerve jump at the side of his face.
I said, “Mirabilis est orchis herba, sive serapias, gemina radice testiculis simili.”
“Is that Italian?” said my father. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s Latin,” I said. “Pliny the Elder said that. He was this famous Roman naturalist, and what he was saying was that the orchid was remarkable because with its double roots, it resembles the testicles.”
My father drew a deep breath, blinked, let it out. He looked at me sharply, briefly, then back at the road.
“Wally, I’m going to give you a tip,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“That is that children say everything that comes to mind but adults do not. If I said everything that came to my mind, where do you think I’d be in this business?”
The idea of my father blurting out something gross fascinated me.
“Give me an example,” I said.
“An example of what?”
“Of something that could come to your mind that you’d be better off keeping to yourself.”
“There’s no necessity for an example,” said my father.
“I’m just curious about what comes to your mind,” I said.
“You’re too curious about most everything,” he said.
My father didn’t say anything for a while. The hearse turned down Cemetery Road, the cars behind us in the procession winding around in the same direction like a long black snake with headlights for eyes.
Then my father said, “I have my thoughts. You think I don’t, but I have them.”
I wished we weren’t so near the cemetery because I was warming to the subject.
“Are they ever bad thoughts?” I said.
“Why would I have bad thoughts?” he said. “Your thought about the orchid was not a bad thought. It was an inappropriate thought.”
“It’s appropriate for a naturalist, or a linguist or an etymologist,” I said.
“None of which you are or I am,” said my father.
“Mr. Sponzini said I’d be a good linguist or etymologist,” I said.
“I doubt that Mr. Sponzini makes fifteen thousand dollars a year,” said my father.
“Isn’t that a little off the subject?” I said.
“He’s hardly someone to give advice,” said my father. “Wally, your remark about the orchid and its alleged meaning calls to mind the time you brought up the word ‘lust’ at the dinner table, when we had Reverend Monroe for rib roast. You were going for the shock effect.”
“I was not,” I lied. “I thought it might interest him that ‘lust’ meant pleasure once, until everyone decided that pleasure was sinful. He laughed, didn’t he?”
“It’s one of his duties to be politic,” said my father, “but he and I and your mother would have preferred not to have had the subject of sex brought up while we were eating. He barely finished grace before you leaped to introduce it.”
I remembered something I’d presented Lauralei Rabinowitz with right after I met her, before I’d talked her into examining the inside of a hearse back in our garage. It was a piece of white construction paper with a red heart pasted on it. Across the heart I’d written out a quotation I’d copied down from an old book I’d once found behind the other books in my father’s library. The name of the book was On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis. The quotation said:
The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
I’d put this in a large manila envelope decorated with other hearts and tied with a red ribbon. I’d passed it across to Lauralei in the cafeteria.
Late that same afternoon she walked by my locker and handed me an envelope with my name written across it in fancy script. The envelope was sealed with red wax and PERSONAL was printed across the back.
Inside was a carefully printed message:
WALLY, YOU ARE SO FULL OF B.S. IT HURTS!
“In our business,” my father continued as we glided toward the cemetery in our air-conditioned Cadillac hearse, “we pride ourselves on staying in the background, and I don’t necessarily mean physically. I mean that we’re discreet. We don’t feel compelled to step forward and spout off the things we know. We’re privy to many mysteries and secrets. Wally, you’re not in our business long before you know an awful lot about your neighbors.”
I became involved in an instant daydream of Sabra St. Amour running toward me on a hill, the wind blowing her hair behind her, her arms outstretched.
“Sometimes a bruise on the body tells you something,” said my father.
We were laughing and stumbling toward each other.
“The fingernails tell you something,” said my father.
We were slipping, falling on soft grass, holding each other.
“The hair, the soles of the feet,” said my father.
We were rolling down the hill together.
“The hands,” said my father.
We stopped, we lay there close together and she whispered something with her lips touching my ear lightly: Grab the reins.
“Believe me,” said my father, “our business is chuck full of privileged information, Wally.”
What I said next surprised even me. “Don’t call it our business anymore, Dad. I’ve made up my mind that I won’t go to BEAMS. I want to go to college.” I’d said it very fast, but very distinc
tly.
We could see the cemetery coming into view. That same nerve jumped at the side of his face. He gripped the steering wheel harder. I could see his knuckles turn white.
Then, almost like the passing of a seizure, he untensed, looked sideways at me with his quick, minimal smile and said, “I thought you might feel that way, Wally. I felt that coming.”
“I want to go to college,” I repeated.
We were turning into the cemetery. “You may,” he said.
“I can?”
“BEAMS can wait,” my father said.
I almost felt Miss Wheatley prod me from behind us, and I shouted then: “BEAMS IS OUT!”
We pulled to a stop a few feet away from her freshly dug grave.
14. Sabra St. Amour
“Here’s one from the Princeton freshman again,” said Mama. “He starts off ‘My Beloved Sabra.’ His folks are wasting their money sending him to college.” Mama was sitting out on the deck with me, in her bathing suit, with her reading glasses slipping down her nose, poring through a box of fan mail with me.
“Why do you think they’re wasting their money? He sounds intelligent,” I said. I was in my suit, too, helping Mama devour a box of Mallomars. Except for the one slip that Saturday night, I was still not smoking. I was eating instead. Mama was doing both, not bothering to sneak smokes anymore. She was chain-smoking.
“Somebody in college watching soaps?” Mama said. “He should be reading Socrates or something. Shakespeare, John Wadsworth Longfellow.”
“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” I said.
“Henry, John—he should be getting an education.” Ever since Fedora invented the “Tell me more” gimmick, I’d been getting about two hundred fan letters a week. Some of the fans seemed to believe what was happening to me on the tube was happening to me in real life. I got advice, proposals of marriage, invitations to parties, criticism and questions on every subject from how I felt about abortions to how someone got a job on the soap. (I also got threatening letters and obscene ones, which Mama kept in a file in case anything ever happened to me.) I answered some of the mail myself; some Mama answered, and a lot of it went to a part-time secretary who sent back a standard “Thank you for your interest” letter, and my photograph which she signed my name to.
Mama wasn’t quite her old self. She jumped whenever the telephone rang. She had her prescription for Valium refilled at the Seaville Rexall.
Monday night when I got home for dinner, Mama had fixed a Rochambeau omelette like the ones we loved to have at a little restaurant in New York called Madame Romaine de Lyon. She said we’d work on the letter to Fedora over the weekend, that Lamont would probably give her the news, anyway, when he got back to New York.
“Poor Lamont,” I said. “He’ll have to con his way in somewhere else.”
“Lamont’s not desperate for work,” Mama said. “He’s up for a Guggenheim grant and he’s up for a grant from The Ford Foundation.”
“Being up for a grant isn’t getting a grant,” I said.
“Plus his agent says his new musical is another My Fair Lady.”
“Mama, I can’t believe you’re taking Lamont seriously, suddenly!”
“Who’s taking him seriously?” said Mama. “He’s another Leo, like Sam was, only worse because Gemini’s rising.”
“He’s another loser like Sam was, only worse because he’s a taker,” I said.
“So?” Mama said. “I’m a giver. Where would a giver be without a taker?”
“Mama, just a while ago you were bad-mouthing him to Fedora!”
“Just a while ago I was a young bride. Just a while ago I was a young widow. Just a while ago I was a bride again. Just a while ago I was a widow again. Don’t tell me about just a while ago,” Mama said.
“But Lamont is the pits, Mama!”
Mama just shrugged and we dropped the subject. Mama and I almost never fight. We bicker and snipe at each other, but we never have the fireworks she used to go through with Sam, Sam, Superman. I remember once when I was little, I got Mama to take me for an audition at K.K.B.&O. advertising agency, for a small part in a butter commercial. They wanted a pudgy little girl, which I was. We’d heard about it on one of our excursions to The Apple, while Mama was traipsing around showing me off to her casting-director friends. When Sam, Sam found out about it, he threw all Mama’s shoes out on the front lawn—it looked like it had rained shoes for a week. He just went ape before our eyes, yelling that no stepdaughter of his was going to turn into a butter saleswoman so Mama could make our house into a shoestore! I tried to get in between them to tell Sam, Sam it had been my idea, not Mama’s, but he picked me up bodily and dumped me on my bed in my room. He said if I came out he’d tie me up and gag me.
I could hear Mama screaming, “You’re no respecter of talent, Sam!”
“Talent doesn’t dress up like a bar of butter and dance around on top of a slice of bread!” Sam, Sam shouted back. “Talent doesn’t sing sick little ditties about ‘Sun yellow butter is better butter, ask my mutter!’ ”
I stood beside Mama crying as hard as she did at Sam, Sam’s funeral, but I wasn’t crying because he was dead. I was crying because Mama was crying, and it always scared me when Mama got out of control. I could almost always, all my life, make Mama laugh, or change her mind about something, or go places and do things with me, but for a while after his death, I couldn’t reach her. The day of the funeral she kept saying over and over, “No one in this whole crummy world ever loved me like Sam did!” and she’d just look through me like I wasn’t there when I’d protest that I did, I loved her more.
After we sorted through my fan mail, Mama read me a long memo from Fedora that had arrived that morning. It said that the whole cast of Hometown was in agreement about staying a half-hour show, if it meant keeping me.
Of course we will stick to our plan to use Sabra off camera in as many scenes as possible, with voiceover letters from her, reveries with still shots and telephone calls. I am, in fact, right now developing an extremely exciting storyline concerning Sabra’s flight from the cruel incidents of the sorority turndown, etc., in Clear City, to her older sister’s home in Seattle, where she will become involved with a fanatic religious group like the Moon organization. Her ulcer will heal, but she will need to be rescued. This theme will begin to appear late this year and carry over into the fall of next year.
“See what you’re not missing?” Mama said.
“I’d be a dynamite Moonie, though,” I said.
“You’ll be a dynamite college graduate,” said Mama.
“I’ll major in John Wadsworth Longfellow,” I said.
“Oh har har har de har har,” Mama said. “So they never taught Longfellow before the eighth grade, which was when yours truly split.”
“You did okay,” I said.
“I did hah? Do you call doing okay not being able to think of a bigger word than ‘stupid’ during a Scrabble game? That’s why I hate Scrabble.”
The telephone rang then and Mama knocked the Mallomars box off the deck scrambling to answer it. But it was just Charlie Gilhooley telling me he’d like to come by that afternoon to talk about some kind of dance contest Seaville held every summer.
“I hope you’re not expecting to hear from Lamont again,” I said. “That’s really gross.”
“I see you’ve picked up a new word,” Mama said. “Who wrote it for you?”
Charlie was there about an hour before Mama suddenly got up from the redwood chaise where she’d been pretending to read Variety but really listening to us talk. She was still wearing her pink-and-white latex bathing suit, which was tight on her because she’d gained weight as I had; she had on rope-soled platform clogs, with her reading glasses hung around her neck on a gold chain.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, turning down the Jack Jones tape. “I happen to know a dance nobody will remember that’ll put that contest on its ear!”
Mama looked down at her feet and hummed to herself for
a minute, then she started doing steps. “This is a dance from the thirties,” Mama said, “when I was little enough to come to about your knees, Charlie. I was in London, just getting started in vaudeville, when vaudeville was just petering out. I don’t like to think I contributed to its demise.” Mama put her hands on her hips and laughed. Then she started doing more steps. “Da da da da dee dee dee,” she sang, moving in time with the rhythm, “deedle daddle daddle dee—me and my gal, doin’ the Lambeth Walk!” She put one thumb over her shoulder as though she was hitchhiking and called out, “Hey!”
She said, “You either yell ‘Hey’ or ‘Oi’ at the end, I can’t remember.”
I looked at my watch. I said, “We’re on in a few minutes, Mama.” Mama never missed Hometown, even if I wasn’t on it that day.
“This was in a fantastic show called Me and My Gal,” Mama said. “It was the hit of all England. Everyone was doing this Lambeth Walk. It’s like a walk, too, I mean you practically walk. Get up here, Charlie, and I’ll show you.”
“Mama,” I said, “it’s almost four thirty. The scene where I visit my mother in prison is coming up.”
“You want to watch it, watch it,” said Mama.
“Me?” I said. “I hate myself on tape.”
“Charlie?” Mama said.
“That show was in 1938,” Charlie said, getting up from his chair, joining Mama in the center of the deck.
“Let’s hear it for the boy genius,” Mama said. “Now follow me, Charlie: daddle daddle deedle dee, daddle daddle—no, your left foot points out.”
“Daddle daddle deedle dee,” Charlie said, doing steps.
“Deedle deedle daddle da,” Mama said.
“Me and my gal,” Charlie sang.
“Doin’ the Lambeth Walk!” they both finished. “Hey!”
The phone rang again.
The smile on Mama’s face wilted. She was balancing herself on one foot, watching me while I reached over to the windowsill to pick the arm off the cradle.
“I’m just about to become part of a funeral cortege,” Wally said.
Mama was making who is it with her lips.
I waved my hand at her and pointed to myself.
