by Man Martin
I share my room with two other girls – there’s Lisa, who is from the south, and combs her hair CONSTANTLY. She is always in front of the mirror turning her face side to side and seeing if she’s really as pretty as she thinks she is. (The truth is she very pretty, and I can’t blame her much for being so vain about it. She has flaxen hair – I think it’s called flaxen – it’s very blond and wavy – and a little cupid-bow lips. If there were any boys around here, they wouldn’t pay attention to me or Margaret at all, I’m sure, but I’m not the least bit jealous. Really.) Margaret is very sweet and kind but – don’t tell anybody this, she’s just a little bit ess-tee-you-pee-eye-dee. In class the other day she kept calling Cordelia’s sister Gonorrhea instead of Goneril. The professor was too embarrassed to correct her, and I had to look at my book to keep from laughing out loud.
The food here is very good, and if I make it home on break I’ll fix you something we had the other night called Welsh Rabbit. Which doesn’t have any rabbit in it at all, just bacon. (???) Lisa says they have it all the time where she comes from, but you have to be careful because it gives you funny dreams. That might be true because even though I love it here, all I dream about is being back in Medville with you.
Anyway I’ll close here; I have to read my Latin and see if Caesar fixed the Helvetii’s wagon. (The smart money is on Caesar, but you never know.)
Love,
Mary
PS: You don’t mind if I sign off with love, do you? I don’t have anyone here to love – I certainly don’t love Margaret or Lisa, so I guess I’ll just have to love you.
Reading the letter the first time, I had begun hoping she harbored tender feelings when I came to the passage about her roommates. Clearly she was trying to warn me off her potential rivals in the form of flaxen-haired Lisa and the dimwitted but good-hearted Margaret. (As if I could ever care about any female but Mary!) But then when I reached the postscript -- ! No need to read between the lines, there. She came right out and admitted she’d fallen in love with me; of course, in her naïve imagination, she probably believed she’d been coy and indirect.
I imagined how once we were married, one evening I would put aside my well-thumbed copy of Mueller’s Life Expectancies of Modern Appliances and take out the letter – its creases browned and crackly with age, but carefully, lovingly preserved. I would run my finger under that telling PS, and she would blush to realize how disingenuously she had first revealed her truest feelings. I would laugh indulgently and kiss her dimpled cheek. Oh, darling, there was never need for subterfuge between us.
But meantime I needed a gift. Let her know by little tokens her love was reciprocated.
I unwisely informed the little gray-haired proprietress of a junk store I stopped in that I was looking for a gift, and she proudly insisted on showing me every meretricious gee-gaw in her inventory, all of it just as useless and superfluous as the additional “pe” she had appeneded to the word “shop” on her sign. A series of stuffed rabbit heads with deer antlers affixed to their skulls lined part of one wall.
“Would you like a Jackalope?” the woman smirked. “We have lots of Jackalopes.”
“I don’t want a Jackalope, I have another Jackalope,” I lied. Two animals had died for each one of these taxidermical whimsies. “What else have you got?”
“What else have I got?” she asked. “What else have I got?” She began pawing through an old cigar box of costume jewelry and meanwhile peering around the store, like an absent-minded bloodhound, remembering a felon it was supposed to be tracking. “Would you like some bric-a-brac?” A stuffed fantod gathered dust behind the dusty glass doors of a dark china cabinet gathering dust in a dusty corner.
“I do not care for bric-a-brac.”
“A work of art?” A gilt-framed painting – Stag at Bay – showed a deer that had unwisely fled to a marsh and now, enmired, contorted in terror to behold the hounds closing in behind. No doubt the rabbit that would go to complete the Jackalope was cowering in the reeds somewhere.
“It’s far too large.”
“I’ve a silver comb and hairbrush set, if you think that that would do.”
The price on the tarnished items in question would make a Rockefeller quail. Besides, a long dark hair was still tangled in the hairbrush. “I don’t think that that would do. I don’t think that that would do.”
“There’s a gilded wooden music box that plays ‘The Fleur de Lies.’”
The Fleur de Lies is a flower, of course. She meant ‘The Marseilles,’ the sort of tune you get when the French are feeling self-righteous about something. “I’m afraid it isn’t quite the thing for me.”
“Would you like a Readers Digest from nineteen twenty-three?” Magazines – only slightly more recent than the ones at my dentist’s office – were spread on a glass-topped table.
“That ‘Silent Calvin’ Coolidge was quite a card, I see.”
“These figurines are a lovely conversation piece.” Someone had immortalized in porcelain a girl in crinoline stooping to lay hand on a kitten and a chubby-faced mongoloid in the act of relieving himself.
“I’d take a vow of silence before discussing these.”
I picked up a stack of magazines, feigning interest until I could decently leave without making a purchase. Then I caught my breath.
Under the glass was a crystal heart just like the one owned by my adored Aunt Betty Ann. A silly knick-knack, you will say, something to collect dust on a mantelpiece, but it was just the sort of thing to be a marvel in a little boy’s eyes.
I lifted the table’s glass top – it was hinged in back – heedless of periodicals falling like thawing snow from a roof peak, and lifted out the heart with an astonished hand. How often we come across such things, treasures that as children seemed the glory of the world but as adults make us shake our heads in tender sorrow for our own lost naiveté. But the crystal heart excited exactly the emotions I remembered. The shape was made of innumerable diamond-shaped facets curved into two lobes of a Valentine, the roundness emphasized even more by the flat surfaces that made it up.
The sight brought back memories of the glorious summer I spent with Aunt Betty Ann. She woke me up early, and it was out to the henhouse with me to reach beneath the warm feathery bossoms to get the eggs she’d poach for my breakfast. I was allowed to scatter cracked corn for the hens. Taking a cue from my environs, I once sang, “Jimmy cracked corn, and I don’t care,” in my childish off-key voice, and Aunt Betty Ann laughed at this sally.
Each night after bathing, as she dried my hair, rubbing it roughly with white terrycloth, I admired the crystal heart on her dresser, which Aunt Betty Ann’s darting towel allowed me to see in flashes, like a movie projector. After my hair was dry, she would take the heart from the dresser and turn it over in her hands, casting rainbows from the light of her Tiffany Lamp. She would place it in my shy hands, and I would cradle it as delicately as if it were a holy relic. Afterwards I would go to bed with a mug of warm milk – a teaspoon of vanilla and a lump of sugar stirred in to ensure sweet dreams – and sleep dreaming of that marvelous crystal heart.
My mother’s younger sister was lovely even when I knew her, but as a young woman she had, as well as one can judge from a faded daguerreotype that stood beside the heart, fine high cheekbones and large expressive eyes set off by waves of dark hair, as lustrous as Mary’s. Could you blame me if I told you I was half in love with her, and imagined in my childlike way that someday she would marry me?
One evening, Aunt Betty Ann, knowing how much I loved it, said that when she shook off this mortal coil, the heart would be mine. Many years later, when I had come into young manhood, attending my aunt’s funeral (Miniature golf. Meteorite.) I imagined Uncle Horace taking me aside and solemnly presenting me the heart with a manly handshake. He did no such thing, however, so following the service, I wandered the rooms searching for the heart intending to stake claim on it. But Uncle Horace was a fastidious man and had already packed my aunt’s belongings
in boxes. Rather than remove the straps that bound them and dig through my dead relative’s possessions, I returned to the dining room where my family was still digesting grief and cold chicken.
How could I tell them what was on my mind without sounding like a monster? I could never make them understand that the heart was only special to me because it had been Aunt Betty Ann’s; even I was old enough to realize the thing itself had no intrinsic value. I loved the heart because Betty Ann loved it and because I loved her, and she loved it because I did, and she loved me, and we loved each other for sharing our love of it.
Written down, it looks contemptible and fatuous; spoken – had I been articulate enough to come up with even that clumsy explanation – it would have sounded like the shallowest rationalization, so I composed myself to wait until my uncle disposed of the estate, expecting that in the fullness of time, the crystal heart would arrive by mail. It didn’t.
I can only assume my confidence that Aunt Betty Ann would tell Uncle Horace of the bequest or leave written instructions for after her death had been mistaken. Certainly I never suspected my uncle of deliberately ignoring his late wife’s wishes and withholding a promised keepsake from his own nephew, but my disappointment was keenly felt, and as months and years rolled over my head, I vowed to keep an eagle eye out for that heart, and now here it was.
“How much for the heart?” I asked.
“The heart? How much for the heart?” She took it from me, to examine; there was no price tag. A shrewd gleam came into her senile eyes as tried to calculate based on my eagerness the maximum price I’d be willing to pay. She named a figure that must have seemed astronomical to her, and I accepted without a quibble. I handed over my money with trembling fingers and walked out with the heart wrapped up in a brown paper package tied up with string.
An Interlude
I never intended, of course, to keep the heart. It was meant to be bestowed: an elder person to a younger, a gesture of fondest esteem. I imagined explaining its long and tender associations to Mary. I would hold it to the light, and we would watch it make an aurora borealis on the wall. I would place it in her hand, telling her that I wished her to have it, and to care for it as the precious thing it was. Her breath would rush out in gratitude, and she would squeeze my hand. I would permit my own masculine hand to cover her small delicate one. It isn’t right, she would protest, you should be the one to keep it.
There is one way, I can give it to you and own it myself at the same time, I would murmur softly, and cross by that threshold into the topic of sacred matrimony.
With these happy thoughts and the crystal heart beside me on the seat of my Model T, I came to Morning Glory Downs, the spacious green park on Medville’s outskirts; rolling green hills flecked with yellow and purple wildflowers on either side of a winding lane. The clean scent of sunshine on grass floated in the air, and a swarm of butterflies, like brightly colored paper scraps in a whirlwind – you might not think butterflies can swarm, but they can; I have seen them – came fluttering over a hill beneath a slender crook-boughed and white-blossomed tree. In a few days, I knew, the rain would come, and knock all the flowers down and chase away the butterflies. The summer would be beautiful, of course, green and green-smelling, but the particular beauty of spring lies in its heart-breaking brevity.
Such moments are why Medville honors the season each year with its Spring Festival, and it occurred to me how superfluous Sam’s orchestra was, adding music to nature when all of nature provides its own music to anyone with an ear to listen. Musing on this pleasant notion, I found myself humming, and insensibly my lips soundlessly formed a lyric, there’s music for anyone who hears, there’s a hymn in the buzzing of the bees.
It was then that I realized once again Sam the conductor was at work. The melody I had thought was part of my private thoughts, was actually quite external, and by this time as un-ignorable as someone whanging through “The Anvil Chorus” at a golf tournament. I should have expected something like this the moment I entered Medville’s precincts, but so preoccupied was I with presenting the heart to Mary, that I had been caught off guard. A brightly dressed troop of little ones, the same gaggle that had impeded my path that morning, crested the hilltop, frolicking after the butterflies which they resembled in their multi-colored costumes. I slapped my steering wheel in disgust and consternation that even the innocent and blameless insect world had somehow been drafted in this monstrous conspiracy.
I do not know if you have ever frolicked yourself, but anyone who has can tell you it is not a pastime for the weak or invalid. After a few seconds of even the most moderate frolicking, the heart pumps so hard and the breath comes in such heaving gasps, that it is impossible to speak, let alone sing. And yet these children, frolicking with all their might and main, poured out such a flood of singing, it seemed to come from every direction at once:
“There is glory in the coming of the dawn,
“When God’s creation wakes up to greet the day,
“And all of nature hushes for the robins and the thrushes
“When they sing to us that spring is on its way.”
They stopped for a moment, to catch their breath, I imagined, but no. The little mismatched urchin who had stopped to tie his shoelace in the crosswalk that morning, came forward, and bleated a solo:
“There is music for anyone who hears.
“There’s a hymn in the buzzing of the bees.
“In every little flower there waits God with all his power;
“You can hear all heaven’s chorus on the breeze.”
At the conclusion, the others rose in song again, and exited over another hilltop at full frolic. But I did not drive on. My body trembled as if the bones had been removed, the fugitive color fled my lips, my two eyes, like stars, started from their spheres, my knotted and combined locks parted and each particular hair stood on end, like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
The little boy: I have alluded, have I not, to the fact that he was adorably mismatched? I did not tell you yet, that while he sang, his peers knelt around him – the skirts of the girls spreading on the grass like lilies on the surface of a jade pool – gaping with looks of such melting adoration, he might have been Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount and promising homemade ice cream afterward – nor have I told you that … no, no, I cannot; it is too horrible.
But I must. You will know all. You will understand.
The red-haired boy with the slingshot and the un-tucked shirt, the one who sang in off-key rasp about power and flowers and bees singing hymns, he sang it – he sang – he… Oh, what am I afraid of? Write the words, coward, out with it; hold nothing back.
He sang with a lisp.
And it was an endearing one.
Home Again
Perhaps because I was still shaken after my experience on the way home, presenting the heart to Mary did not turn out as I had intended. I had imagined when I pulled the strings on the package, the bow would come loose instantly letting the brown paper fall away with a crisp rustle, and the heart would sit nestled like a glowing egg.
Instead, pulling only tightened the knot beyond hope of untying, and I had to fetch a knife from the kitchen. Sawing through the twine, I barked at Mary when she cautioned me not to cut myself, “I’m not going to – ” and of course at that instant I did cut myself, necessitating a fresh delay while Mary got iodine and gauze from the bathroom. By the time I finally hacked through the string and pulled off the blood-stained wrapping, the heart itself came as a dreary anticlimax.
My explanation that my beloved aunt had owned one just like it failed to lend it enchantment in Mary’s eyes, but she politely said, “Ah,” when I told her about the summer I had spent with Aunt Betty Ann. I did not mention feeding chickens, having my hair dried, or warm milk with vanilla and sugar because those details would seem purest non sequitur to Mary, and yet, as I now realize, they were essential to appreciating the heart’s value.
I wanted to show her how it refrac
ted light into a rainbow, but when even when I removed a lampshade and touched the heart to the glowing hot light bulb, we could coax only the palest dismal yellow glimmer on the wall. This later proved to be a smudge, which Mary wiped off with ammonia and a towel.
By the time we’d worked our way through these various fiascos and letdowns, I knew when I presented her with the heart, there would be not be the scene of adorable reluctance on her part I had fondly imagined and which was to provide the opportunity to discuss grafting the two distant branches of our family tree. Nevertheless, she accepted with a smile and gave me a k. on the forehead with a sweet, “Thank you, Wiggly,” – a genuine smile and a genuine thank you, not the smile-like rictus one wears and the “how nice” one forces from the lips when opening the unwanted and baffling gift someone has chosen – the monogrammed work gloves or the chrome-plated egg coddler.
After suggesting she keep it on her bureau where she would see it each morning and evening, I sat, feet on an ottoman, in my wide, comfortable wing-backed chair, under the glow of a goose-necked lamp and opened my well-thumbed copy of Mueller’s Life Expectancies of Modern Appliances; truthfully, I was not really heeding Mueller’s exquisitely-honed prose; even the passage on lint-baffle mortality in the spin dryer, which under normal circumstances makes me lean forward and hold my breath, passed under my eyes with scarce a grunt of acknowledgement. My disappointment over my gift to Mary weighed heavily upon me, and I was engaged in a brown study about what I would say to Jim Hansom on the morrow.
Mary returned and put a cup of tea with lemon on the table beside me. She gave the f. another kiss, and said, “I love the heart you gave me, Wiggly.” I smiled and sipped my tea. “I love the way your hair does this on top.” She sat on the arm of the chair beside me and lightly toyed with the fine hairs on my bald spot between her fingers.
