[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “Okay, Neva,” Clare said. “You’d better clear out. Wear the headband for me, okay? And tell me all the good parts when you get back.”

  “I have a surprise,” Neva said. “Wait’ll you hear about that!”

  Clare gave her his sternest look. “Don’t do any surprises,” he said. “Weddings aren’t a good time for surprises.”

  “Bye-da-lie!” she called, which he was supposed to answer with “Bye-da-loo,” but he was worried about the surprise and the strange way that Lavinia was now staring out the window at the baking-hot empty street.

  When everyone else was gone, the hotel was suddenly quiet, but Lavinia said nothing. Her straight black hair gleamed where it came to a point beside her chin. She had applied fresh lipstick and he was pretty sure he’d never seen the dress before. It was red with white dots, and the collar came down over her breasts in folds of silky cloth that revealed a snowy triangle between her breasts. Normally, she wore long sleeves and high collars and heavy black skirts. He looked to see if she wore silk stockings and was surprised to see that she did. He wondered how much of this his mother had noticed.

  “How do I look without the pulley?” he tried.

  “Jake,” she said, glancing without interest at his leg.

  “I’m not supposed to stand up yet, though. The doctor wants me to do exercises in bed first.” He intended this to be off-color because sometimes Lavinia was the kind of girl you could joke with, but she remained silent now, which depressed and annoyed him. He needed her to be encouraging. He had expected her to make a big fuss about it, to see the de-casting as a triumphant beginning to his triumphant recovery. She’d been saying all along that he’d walk across the stage on graduation day and give the valediction.

  “That the new game?” he asked.

  She had set the long rectangular box she was carrying on the chair. It said Sorry! in pink letters on the side. “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I see it?”

  She handed it to him without comment.

  “I see your motives now,” he said, trying for a flirtatious tone. “It’s a ‘fast-paced game of pursuit.’”

  She shrugged and he saw that she was holding back tears.

  “How about we play it then?” he said softly. “I feel pretty sorry already.”

  Lavinia didn’t answer.

  “Ah, come on, Vinnie,” he said in a coaxing voice. He felt different. The tugging feeling was much stronger now that she was pulling away from him.

  She sat down on the steamer trunk and looked out the window.

  “Is that a new dress?”

  She didn’t say. She went on looking out the window and then she said, “I think it’s time I stopped visiting.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you then.”

  In the new, revealing clothes, Lavinia looked older and more sophisticated.

  “You’re all dressed up,” Clare said truthfully. “You look pretty.”

  Lavinia glanced at him with what might have been gratitude, then looked back at the window, through which there was nothing to see, he thought, though in fact Bart Crandall was already limping toward the El Real with a night letter in his hand.

  “Stockings, even,” Clare said.

  “Gift from the English cousins,” Lavinia said. “The dress, too. They’re kind of rich.”

  Clare was quiet for a moment, thinking about the procession that was about to happen at the church, with Hurd instead of their father taking Charlotte’s arm. At the thought of his father he felt an icy panic, as if they were all moving forward in an ocean liner from which, in the darkness, their father had fallen, and if they didn’t go back now, it would be too late. But he wasn’t the person who could turn the ship around. He didn’t even know if it could be turned. He sang softly to Lavinia:

  “Bryan O’Linn had no stockings to wear,

  He bought him a rat’s skin to make him a pair,

  He then drew them on and they fitted his shin,

  ‘Whoo, they’re illegant wear,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”

  Lavinia looked down at her hands while he sang. Then she turned to him. Her eyes were black and large and her face was pale. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Just a song I learned a long time ago.”

  “Do you know the rest?”

  “Bits and pieces.”

  “Let’s hear it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Not if you’re going to stay way over there and be mad at me.” He felt such an insistent tugging now. He had to bring her back toward him, within reach.

  Lavinia smiled a little and remained sitting with her knees together and her feet pointing inward. Her fingers were laced together and clenched on her knees. He could tell that she wanted to come closer, but in all their afternoon visits she had never done more than sit in a chair that touched the side of the bed. He had only once held her hand.

  “Please sit beside me,” Clare whispered. “We won’t be wicked. We’ll just be together.”

  Lavinia stood up uncertainly. She wasn’t mad anymore, he could tell. “Well, how many verses are there?” she asked, smiling enough so that he could see she was forgiving him a little.

  “Lots,” he whispered. “At least eight.”

  She looked over at the bedroom door, which was still open, though of course the whole building was empty now, empty as a dead tree, and then she came over to the bed and eased herself onto the side of it. She kept her shoes on at first, then let them drop. She put her two feet up on the bed beside his, though she was on the outside of the blankets and he was inside. She stuck a pillow behind her back and head. “Well?” she asked.

  “Should I start at the beginning?” he asked. He reached over for her hand and when he touched it, he felt her tremble. His own skin tingled at the contact, and he let each of his fingers find a place between each of hers. He wasn’t sure that he could sing now. He cleared his throat and sang,

  “Bryan O’Linn was a gentleman born

  He lived at a time when no clothes they were worn”

  He paused, hearing it differently now that Lavinia was so achingly close to him, now that what he wanted to do was stroke her naked arm. The tune still reminded him of Aldine but she felt far away, like an island that he could see but never reach.

  “What a wicked song,” Lavinia murmured.

  “Wait’ll you hear the part about the breeches,” Clare said. It would shame him, later, to think of what he was doing the whole time his father was dead and he didn’t know it. It would seem to Clare that he should have known, somehow, and in his memory, the courting of Lavinia took on a lurid cast that it shouldn’t have had: he took his left hand and brought it across his body to her arm.

  He ran his finger up the middle of her wrist to her elbow and she trembled. He was mostly upright in the bed, leaning on a mashed stack of pillows, and the silky folds of her dress touched his good leg. “Lavinia,” he whispered and he was surprised at the beauty of her name when whispered like that. “Lavinia.” When he turned his face toward her, she was close enough to kiss, and he stared into her eyes for what seemed a long time. She looked broken, in a way, as if his singing had done that to her. He kissed her once, then more and more, tenderly and hungrily by turns, gently tasting her jaw, cheeks, and ear, his hand in her sleek straight hair and on her neck. He couldn’t twist on his hips to place himself closer to her, so he brought her toward him, and she shifted on the bed so that she leaned into him. The tugging in his chest was unrelenting, and it was entwined with his terror that he would be a cripple forever, that the most he could hope for was to move from the bed into a chair like the wheeled ones in Dr. Quigley’s medical catalogues. Dr. Quigley was satisfied that the bones had grabbed on to one another again, that’s what he said, but he wasn’t sure if Clare should test the calcified joins with his weight, or risk snapping them in a fall. In a few weeks, maybe, Quigley had said. Clare shifted his weight
, felt no warning pain, and kissed Lavinia as if she were the source of a potion that would transform him.

  They didn’t hear Bart Crandall outside the café door. They didn’t see him reach out to open the glass door of the café, his face coated with sweat, his body tight with the importance of the cable he held, news that would spread from his hand like red wine on linen. With his hand on the knob he read the sign Ellie had written hastily before leaving:

  Closed for family wedding. Open again Monday, Dec. 11.

  Have a good day.

  He stood in the sunlight and thought about which was worse: to leave a night letter in a place where nobody was, or to show up at a wedding with this news.

  Regret to inform Ansel Price killed dust storm stop

  Send instruct re burial to Emporia PD stop

  Bart Crandall tucked the night letter in his pocket and stepped away from the glass door. He stared up Alvarado Street at the white wooden spire where the Price girl was getting married. The worst part was that his wife, Florrie, was looking forward to the reception. Maybe he’d just tell her to keep mum and he’d walk over at the end of the party and hand the letter to Mrs. Price. The date and time would be printed on there, but Ellie would understand, wouldn’t she? Maybe she would even appreciate his conscientious delay?

  “I’m afraid I’ll bump your leg,” Lavinia whispered, still letting Clare kiss her, still letting her hands do what his hands were doing, caressing his back, his neck, and face.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he whispered. His skin wanted only for the hunger to overtake him and lift him away from his legs and the painful clutch of the bed, the sheets, the pillows, and the unending sameness of the red wallpaper. The uneasiness was the question of whether he loved Lavinia, but later it felt like the foreknowledge of his father’s death and the moment when Neva walked up the aisle of the church wearing not the red velvet headband (which she slipped off while Ida was fussing with her own hat) but a hand-knit cream-colored beret, about which a sobbing Neva would only say afterward, when Charlotte asked furiously what possessed her, that she just thought it would be nice to wear it in case Miss McKenna showed up.

  He got it all much later: the story of the beret, the lingering of Bart Crandall at the door of the Practice House, so slow in leaving and so glum in the face that finally his mother walked over and asked if Florrie would like to take one of the centerpieces home, and that was when Bart took the cable out of his pocket and handed it over, “his eyes all teary,” said Ida, who was standing nearby.

  109

  Aldine couldn’t decide if she was glad or sorry about the deception everyone in Emporia, including Sonia Odekirk, agreed to practice: that the Price family would never be told about the baby or Aldine’s presence in the house when he died. They knew Ansel died on the tractor, in a field, of a natural disaster. He was alone. He had tuberculosis. Nothing about these circumstances required her to be mentioned. She couldn’t argue with it, really, as a means of causing less pain. But when Dr. Stober prepared a birth certificate for Vivien, he listed the father as Unknown. They buried Ansel in Kansas to bury the tuberculosis, and they wouldn’t let her and Vivien leave until they were tested. For two weeks, they waited. The doctor thought she would surely have it, but she didn’t.

  After the train ride with Will, to whom she said nothing for hours and hours, she was kindly received in the Sugar House 4th Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (which met in a church made of solid pink stone) as the widowed sister of Leenie Cooper, a view they held of her without asking. She took her baby to church, as Leenie did, and the young girls of the ward liked to hold Vivien during the meetings. She took her baby to the park, as Leenie did, and watched her crawl on dry swards of grass.

  It was the following August that Will drove them all to the Great Salt Lake, and she stood in the photo that was the last thing they sent to Aunt Sedgewick before she died, a photo in which you could not see the tin ring she wore on her index finger, inscribed with the name of Tom Mix, or smell the water ten times as dense with killing salt as the ocean. She stood by the water but she didn’t wade into it. She did something she now did habitually. She smelled Vivien’s soft, dry hair and neck. She wondered if someday her daughter would do as Leenie and Will did, like all the other Saints, and stand in the stone-white fountain in the stone-gray temple at the center of the wide, wide streets of Salt Lake City, and be baptized for the numberless dead, her head dipped back, her face full of hope. You could never tell who would be a believer, and who wouldn’t. When Dr. O’Malley’s will had finally been settled, bequeathing to Aldine a small amount of money, she’d sent it to Dr. Stober as compensation for his trouble, but he returned the bank check with a note saying he believed she’d paid quite enough already. He wished her Godspeed. He signed it Sincerely.

  EPILOGUE

  Fallbrook, California, 1957

  Clare Price, the druggist, likes to eat at the counter of his sister’s café. His legs, one of them lame, can slide into its shadows while his smooth-shaven face, trim haircut, and robust arms (at forty, he can still walk on his hands) absorb what little attention might come his way. He’s eating what his sister calls the divorced man’s dinner—French apple pie topped with Tillamook cheese—while he combs the back pages of the Los Angeles Times sports section in search of a score for the KU-Oklahoma basketball game. Things are looking up for the Jayhawks. They have a kid named Chamberlain.

  Torkelsen had been sitting at the counter when Clare came in, but this is late afternoon, when people come to the café more for retreat than society, so he’d kept three stools between him and Torkelsen, the better to spread out his paper.

  His sister Geneva, passing by with plates spread along each arm, says, “Another day in paradise.”

  She means this to be wry but he can’t help saying: “It is, in its own way, isn’t it?” Sometimes wanting to believe a sentiment like that was the best you could do, and was, besides, about the only thing standing between you and real gloom.

  “You just missed your old flame,” Torkelsen says.

  This was not news. Geneva had telephoned the drugstore to warn Clare that Lavinia and one of her girls were at the café, and had called again when they left. “Coast is clear,” she said, and hung up.

  “So I heard,” Clare says.

  “That oldest girl of hers is going to law school,” Torkelsen says.

  Clare thinks of saying he’d heard that, too, but instead just murmurs and keeps to the paper. He’s found the scoring line. KU by 20. Chamberlain with 41. 19 rebounds.

  But Lavinia. Her girl going to Boalt School of Law and here to throw the news around, as if to say, Look how well I’ve done without you. It isn’t the girl’s success that’s a disappointment to Clare. The truth is, he’s less unhappy living alone, going about his routines, filling prescriptions, exchanging everyday pleasantries with everyday faces, watching Jackie Gleason and Gunsmoke on Saturday night.

  He takes from the pocket of his shirt a ballpoint pen and a business card. On its back, he keeps Wilt’s running totals in minute figures. With 41 points yesterday, that’s—he does the math in his head—536 on the season. 339 rebounds. Clare is bent over the card entering these updated totals when the bell over the door jangles.

  A young woman carrying a satchel has stepped in. Somebody lost on her way to somewhere else, Clare supposes, which might explain her off-balance manner, that and the fact that he, Torkelsen, and the other few customers are all staring at her. But she isn’t lost. She says she’s looking for Geneva Price.

  “Come to the right place,” Clare says, smiling.

  The girl might be twenty or a little older—it’s hard to tell, because she has dark hair coiled up severely and she’s wearing a skirt and jacket like this is a business stop or she’s looking for a job she fears she won’t get. She’s leaning awkwardly on one high heel when she says, “I understand her parents came out from Oklahoma during the dirty thirties.”

  Geneva has emerged, w
iping her hands on a dish towel. “Kansas,” she says. “Our parents came from Kansas.” She glances at Clare. “That galoot is my big brother, Clare.”

  He gives a confirming nod. “Both our parents came out, but only our mother stayed.”

  The girl doesn’t move. She says she’s doing her dissertation on the economic effects of families migrating to California from the Plains states during the 1930s.

  Clare grins past the girl toward Torkelsen and says, “That’s a mouthful.”

  “I guess it is,” the girl says, her face turning pink, and Clare feels a little ashamed of himself for making sport. “Anyway,” she says, “that’s why I’m here. I’d like to interview you and your sister, if I could. Your mother, too, if she’s alive.”

  “Parents are both gone,” Clare says.

  The girl opens her satchel, and pulls out a narrow notebook with top spiral binding. Paper-clipped to the cover is a business card she hands to Clare. It says simply Vivien Simmons, Teaching Asst., University of California, Los Angeles. She must be older than twenty. She wears a wedding ring as small and modest as the one he gave Lavinia long ago.

  The card goes from Clare to Geneva then back to the girl, who slides it again under the clip. She’s a pretty girl, but that isn’t it. She seems familiar in a way he can’t put his finger on.

  “Sure,” Geneva says, “we can talk to you. Probably not right now, but maybe tonight—would that work?”

  This is her normal laconic voice but Clare sees eagerness in her expression, which is both a surprise and an amusement. His sister is flattered by the prospect of being interviewed.

  “Tonight around seven then?” the girl says, writing it down.

  A car Clare has never seen before is parked in the palm shade across the street, a green DeSoto, ’48 or ’49. A woman sits on the passenger side wearing dark glasses and a sun hat tied down with a scarf. “That’s a nice DeSoto,” he says nodding toward the car. “That what you’re driving?”