by Rocky Wood
“Where?”
“To your right.”
He turned a little and looked. It was Arnie. He was with a stunning blonde girl who was wearing a low-cut blue minidress that had half the men in the room watching every twitch of her nyloned legs. And Arnie was looking at her with a kind of low-key lust that she could feel from where she sat. It was as if she had put her face perhaps two feet from an open fireplace.
“It’s him, all right,” John said. “I wasn’t sure at first. He’s aged five years since his people died. The girl’s a knockout, isn’t she? I’ve seen her around school, I think.”
“She’s Kitty Longtin,” Miss Rowsmith said. “Mr. Coolidge’s niece. She has a reputation.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” She was about to say more but just then the waiter appeared with the drinks and she decided not to. She remembered Janet Cross, sitting beside her on the green bench, and how they had talked and looked at the bronzed people on the littered beach.
“He looks strung out,” John said thoughtfully. “He wouldn’t be taking drugs, would he?”
“Arnie?” The question surprised her, and she was upset to realize that she didn’t know. “I don’t think so. It’s…everything, I think. Everything that’s happened to him. It’s too bad.”
They tried to pick up the threads of conversation, but something had gone out of it. She felt Arnie’s presence behind them like a dull pressure on her back, and could see it in John’s eyes, too--that baffled, frustrated look that comes when you had to face something indecipherable, off the tracks, wrong. Failure. Too bad. The words echoed in her mind, and she thought of the day Earl Neiman had called Arnie a hunky in class.
The food came, and they ate. The band played old standards, and not many people danced. The steak was excellent, but she only tasted it in an absent way. The dessert was slow in coming and nowhere near excellent.
After, John lit a cigarette and said, “Well, it was a bust, wasn’t it?”
“It was fine, John Edgars, and you know it.”
“It was a bust. I wanted us to have a good meal and a good time and Arnie Kalowski and his girl with a reputation spoiled it.”
“Not your fault, John.”
“It is,” he said softly. “It is. He came to me, Edie. For help. He wanted somebody to get him off dead center…somebody to make him move again. In any direction. And that was a bust, too. He walked out just like he walked in.”
“I doubt that,” she said softly.
He put his hand over hers and she shivered a little. “I’m going to miss you, Edie. Very much.”
She felt her eyes sting, and suddenly she was crying. She dabbled at her eyes with a napkin. “You shouldn’t go, John. You’re running away. Stay here and fight their lousy system. That’s what young men are for. Fighting lousy systems.”
He avoided her eyes. “I’m not all that young, Edie. Maybe that’s one thing that Arnie taught me. I want a clean slate and a fresh start. Harding has gone sour in my mouth.”
“That’s what we were going to have,” she said softly. “Don and I. A fresh start. A new place. We even talked about this place, although we talked about lots of others, too.”
“And he died.”
“He was murdered,” she said. The band was playing Stardust. “His mother killed him.”
“Lord God--you don’t mean literally--”
“Literally. Quite literally. There’s nothing more literal than a kindling hatchet, is there?”
And suddenly it came back to her, the thing that had been stirring, that awful Gothic thing that had been buried for years. And here it came at her, covered with the rot and slime of years, lurching through this amazingly blue restaurant like a horrifically absurd Frankenstein’s monster. It came back to her, home to roost. It came rushing back through all the vacuum barriers of the intervening years (the dry, closed years) with an ease that terrified her--as if it had been waiting, crouched directly under the trapdoor of her conscious mind, alive and well, thank you. The blood, the smell of burning apple pies, the icicles hanging from the eaves beyond the kitchen windows, and the woman, the horrible, drooling woman crouched in the corner with Don’s genitals wrapped in her apron.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said. “Get me out.”
They rose quickly and he guided her across the room (the orchestra was playing As Time Goes By--it made her want to cackle) and she was vaguely aware that they had passed Arnie’s table, but neither Arnie nor the girl had looked up, lost in their own thoughts.
She didn’t throw up. The air of the parking lot was warmer than inside, but it was fresh. Even the lingering odor of fish seemed to make her feel better. It was, after all, here and now.
“Do you feel better?”
“Yes.” She smiled a little shakily. “It happened a long time ago. Too long ago to throw up over.”
“Can you talk about it?”
She looked up at him. “I don’t know. I never have. I never did.”
“Come on.” He took her arm and led her back to the car. The car-park boy came over (he was black, Edie saw, and she was reminded of Luke) and John gave him another dollar. “The lady isn’t feeling well. We thought we’d just sit in the car for awhile.”
The boy nodded and went away. Even his shadow looked blue, a dark blue cutout against the arc-lamped cement.
John helped her in, got in himself, and lit a cigarette. He said nothing. He simply smoked and said nothing. Edie tried to think of how he had felt inside her, that strange feeling of pressure and parting. She could not recapture it. She opened her mouth twice and nothing came out. The third time she said, “Perhaps we’d better go.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and his voice was as crisp and blue as the car-park boy’s shadow. It brought her mixed feelings of reassurance and fear. “Edie, I’ve wanted to do something for you…apart from the other thing. We did that together, and that was good, but I want there to be more. For both of us. It’s necessary. For you and I both. It’s the last thing. A hard way to go, but a good way.”
She began to protest, but he held up a hand. “We love each other, Edie. We do. It has to be this way.”
Edie stared at him, all her feelings frozen.
“You loved Don and you love me. Maybe they’re both mixed up. But I only love you. I want to see you whole before I go away. Tell me. Tell me.”
She touched his hand and he gripped it. She uttered a very small, unhappy laugh. “My system finds the act of vomiting very distasteful, John. The last time I threw up was twelve years ago at my older sister’s wedding anniversary. There was a plate of bad shrimp. And even then - - ”
“Make yourself,” he said harshly. “Stick your finger down your throat, if you have to.”
“Hold me, then. Hold me, John.”
He put an arm around her and drew her against him. She pressed against his shoulder. She felt better. She put a hand to her forehead, nervously, and collected her thoughts.
Somewhere out on the lake a boat tooted, and that was a blue sound, too. John sat and smoked. He was very quiet.
“I was born in Scarborough,” she said suddenly. “I went to Gorham Normal School, which was not far from there, and I graduated fifth in my class. I was a good student. I was dedicated to the idea of teaching. I wanted to teach. It wasn’t a case of those who can’t do something end up teaching it. I was like a missionary.
“Most of my class--the men at least--went out of state. My mother wanted me to teach in Scarborough or Portland. I didn’t want to do that, and I didn’t want to go to New York where the money was good. I got a position out in the piney woods, a place called Gates Falls. I’d sent out a number of inquiries, and that was the second lowest-paying place. I picked it over the first lowest because the conditions sounded worse at Gates Falls. An idealist, do you see?
“I was hired--by mail and with hardly any questions asked. My mother wept and my father took me aside and said: Don’t you get caught alone with boys bigger than you
rself, Edie. Do you understand what I am talking about?
“I had two suitcases and a toilet box and a copy of The Ladies’ Magazine to read on the train. I got onboard at the old Union Station in Portland--there’s a shopping center there now, I understand--and the train pulled out at 11:15 am sharp. That was the last time I ever saw my father--he died of a stroke a month later. I can remember him so well…even better than the rest of them, my mother and sisters. He was standing on the station platform in his dungarees, wearing a flannel shirt and suspenders. He had a walrus mustache and he was going bald. He and my mother and two of my sisters saw me off. They were still waving when the train went around the first bend. And when they were out of sight I sat up very straight with my toilet box behind my feet and my magazine in my lap. I didn’t even cry. Do you see how idealistic I was?”
She drew a deep breath in the darkness and let it out, hoping he would say something, break the spell, somehow dam the memories that were boiling in on her, a river run over its banks.
“I was to board with a family named Knowles. Mister and Mrs. Knowles met me at the Gates Fall station and we drove back to the house in their buggy. It was a ten-mile drive, and you could smell the sea. Sometimes you could hear it, when the woods thinned.
“They were lobstering people. There was John and his wife Cass, and the children--Donald and Julia. Donald worked in Brunswick, at a bank. He was college educated, and John was very proud of him. Cass didn’t let on if she was proud or not. She was thin--scrawny, really--and there were pouches under her eyes. The little girl, Julia, was a change-of-life baby, seven years old. She was solemn as the Pope.
“Don didn’t come home that first night--he had business in Portland. But Cass fixed a huge roast and…and an apple pie for dessert. She made simply lovely apple pies. They won blue ribbons every Fourth at the town fair. We sat and ate and afterwards John had a cigar while Cass put the child to bed. And there I sat, watching the dark come in, listening to the sea, my toilet box safely stowed away in the bathroom, wanting my mother, wanting to be able to smell the special smell of the sachet she used, feeling lonesome and sad.
“Do you know the feeling?”
But John didn’t speak. He had lighted another cigarette.
“I started the Monday following. I wrote my name on the blackboard in fine round letters--Miss Rowsmith. I wore a dark blue skirt and a white shirtwaist. I had put a comb in my hair.
“The rustic country school. The red Currier & Ives building peeking serenely through the elms. Gingham girls and happy little boys rolling hoops. Yes, yes, oh yes. Only this one was a yellow-gray, pitted and flaked with salt from the ocean. And there was an outhouse tacked on to the back of the building and it smelled of shit. Yes, that is the correct word. Shit. Not excrement. Much too juicy for such an academic word. Shit. It hung on the air until you hardly knew it was there. I used to sprinkle lime by the pound, but there was no drainage to speak of and the smell was always there. And the gingham girls and the bright-eyed boys turned out to be great hulking brutes and vapid sows, most of them. There was Alvah Campbell, who ran bootleg down to New Hampshire on the weekends, and there was Tom Guinn, who was supporting his mother on short lobsters. There was a boy named Joey Hall who was retarded--if you gave him a penny he would catch hopping things from under the shed stoop and eat them. Six-five if he was an inch. He used to pee himself, too. And cry about it. He might’ve been fifteen or he might’ve been thirty. It was impossible to tell. There were six girls in the whole eight grades. One was Julia Knowles. She was in the first grade. Two of them were twin sisters from Gates Center, cute and almost dear. They always dressed alike and held hands. One of them was a slut named Karen Genack. Fast? She was a streak. I caught her in the shed one recess with Alvah. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She was leaning up against the birch stovelengths and she had his money in one of her hands. She had him in the other.
“But all this wasn’t the first day. The first day was just enough to start getting the smell of shit and to find the old books with rat-turds stuck to the covers and to sit and hear the woodchuck running under the floor. I had forty pupils and when I came home with Julia I nodded and smiled at Cass (she didn’t even ask how things had gone) and then I went up to my room and cried. I decided to go home. I was homesick and disheartened and all the ideals in the world couldn’t stand up higher than that smell. To the smell of shit and the vacant way Joey Hall stared at me.
“I was going to tell them at supper, but I never did. Don came back late that afternoon, fresh back from Portland and a day late, and I fell in love. I fell all at once, and there was never any question about it. He looked something like you--I said that once, didn’t I?--only not quite as tall. He had blue eyes and he was wearing a tweed suit with a vest. He came just while we were sitting down to the table. Cass had the Bible to read from and she was just opening it. Julia scrambled up and threw herself at him. He laughed--a big, roaring laugh--and grabbed her up and swung her until she squealed and her underpants showed.
“John grinned and told him to come on and get his supper, and when he came to the table his father introduced us. He looked right at me, directly at me. Later on he told me he fell in love just as quick, and I think perhaps he was telling the truth. We shook hands and he sat down. He grabbed a chop and was starting to tell about his trip when Cass said: I was going to read from the Book, Donald. Course, unless you mind. She looked sour and put out.
“Don just smiled and said she should read the prodigal son story. Cass said: Don’t you be flip, and she read from Job. By the time she was done, the chops had stopped steaming. We were all quiet for a minute. Cass closed the Bible and looked around at us, almost like a queen. But she looked like a chicken, too--an old hen whose laying days are done but who still rules the roost. It sounds funny, saying she looked like a queen and a chicken at the same time, but she did and it wasn’t--funny, I mean. I think I started being afraid of Cassandra Knowles right then.
“But John asked his son something about the chances of getting a railroad loan for town roads, and that broke it. Everybody ate and Don talked about loans and banking and what was new in the city. He was a wonderful talker, witty, but not a bit filled with his own importance. I don’t think he had any idea what a fine conversationalist he was. After supper we went into the sitting room and Cass knitted and Mr. Knowles read from a collection of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. There was a little fire, and Julia sat between Don and I. I forgot all about going back, and I never thought seriously about it again.
“There was Don to think about, and Julia who was bright and perky enough when Cass wasn’t around, and there was Peter van Nook. Peter was in the fifth grade. He was the son of factory people, and he came to school in the most horrible scarecrow pants and shirt. But his hair was always brushed and his fingernails were clean. He’d already read his way through most of H.G. Wells’ science-fiction novels and there was always one of those pulp magazines hidden in the back of his Spiral notebook--God knows where he got the money for them. Sometimes in the winter I’d catch him dreaming out the windows as if he could see way past the snow and the slush. He wrote beautiful papers about countries he made up in his mind. Sometimes he drew pictures to go with them.
“The rest was pretty bad. It was the smell of shit and the blank wall of stalled minds. The ideals couldn’t get past those things, but I held onto the ideals some way--Don had something to do with that. So I kept them. Their horizons had shrunk a good deal, but I kept them. And they seemed to center more and more around Don and that little boy with the pulp magazines. Peter. The other boys used to call him Nooky. I guess that word meant the same then that it does now. But he was strong enough, that was the fine thing. He wouldn’t back off from them. He played ball and once he got hit by a pitch and his nose bled. I wanted him to go inside but he just sniffed it back and went on batting. He looked so little, waving the one big old splintery bat we had, blood on his nose and the front of his shirt.
“The
n I got word that my father was gone.”
“I went home for the funeral and to mourn with my family, and it would have been easy to stay home, but I didn’t. I brought back a copy of The Thousand and One Nights for Peter. He was entranced. He asked me to write my name in it. A few weeks later, he came up to me after school. He wanted me to help him think of a way to earn the money for a library card in town. I offered to give him the money and he wouldn’t take it and I was glad. I sat him to chopping kindling for the school stove, half an hour after school every night, twenty cents a week. By the end of the first week I had kindling enough for the rest of the winter and Peter was starting on stove-lengths.
“And it seemed I was staying on because I’d found somebody worth staying on for, but there was more than one. There was two. There was Don.
“When I came back after the funeral he began courting me. I didn’t want to be courted; I wanted to grieve. There was a hole where my father had been. I kept seeing him on the Union Station platform, his arm around mother, in his overalls, in his walrus mustache. And I hadn’t cried when I left home. It almost seemed as if his death was God’s way of punishing me for not crying.
