by Morris, Ian;
MAJORS: We cut the words out of black construction paper and glued cellophane on the back.
DRU: Looks good.
Dru and I fought for hours, cross-legged on the floor in the living room, in the bathroom, while I took a shower, and in bed. She was angry at Harold and Roy. She took it out on me. We argued about expectations and responsibility. It all ended when I said, “If you feel that way about it why do you keep me around?” Walking through the stone gates of Rosewalter, I saw kids I knew. No one seemed surprised to see me or anxious to know where I’d been. The building felt even more unfamiliar to me than it had the first time I saw it. My mailbox door burst open, letting loose a solid rectangle of mail. Most of it was junk: flyers from the bookstore and offers for magazine subscriptions and credit card applications. Wedged among the litter was a small package.
It was wrapped in a brown paper bag. There was no return address on the package, which was postmarked Duluth. My address was scrawled on the brown paper in pencil and traced over several times. I recognized the choppy, almost hieroglyphic, scratchings as Pop’s handwriting. Beneath the brown paper was a layer of wax paper wrapped in rubber bands—unquestionably the work of my father who prized the innovation of the rubber band as a technological contribution more valuable than fire.
Rolling off the rubber bands I found a small pine box, about nine inches long, three or four inches wide, an inch deep, and burnished into the wood with a hot blade were my initials TZ. I hadn’t seen a pencil box in years, but it couldn’t have been anything else, as confirmed by the six Ticonderoga No. 2s inside.
The letter that came with it, written on the back of an invoice, smudged and filled with words started and then scratched out and written in again, said,
Tomas,
The box that I sent is something I made that Jack said you would like and Berthe thinks you will have use for. She says you are doing well at school.
Just to look at the thing made me sad. It was hard for me to conjure Pop’s vision of a university where we carried our pencils in homemade monogrammed pine pencil boxes. Still, he had taken the time to make it and that had to count for something.
I folded the note and put it inside the box and slid the cover closed.
I walked down to the observatory.
Elise looked up from her book and blinked.
“I’ve got to go away. How do I do that?”
“What do you mean?”
“How would I go away for a while without getting in trouble with anyone?”
“How long would you be gone?”
“I don’t know, yet. Couple of weeks.”
“I’m not sure, unless someone died—no one’s died, have they?”—I shook my head—“that there is any dispensation available. What you would have to do is make arrangements with each of your professors.”
“I don’t have time to do that.”
The look of worry she’d had on her face since I’d started talking softened a bit and she said, “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on.”
I must have been waiting for someone to ask me, because I let go with the whole story, which turned into the whole story of my life—not intentionally, but each time I started telling her about Grey and the Stovepipe crew and how that related to Pop, I got going so fast that I tripped over my words, and Elise would say, “Wait a minute. Back up,” and I kept backing up until I was back on the cot in Uncle Karl’s living room, hearing my parents threaten each other with murder in the dark. Then on the island and I told her about Callie, which led to Ray and Dolores, which led eventually to Professor Darling and the car wreck, to Jack, to the Mexican girl on the road, and back again to the afternoon in front of the telescope.
When I was finished, she took off her glasses, shook her head, and said, “Well.”
“You can see my problem.”
“Of course,” she said. “I mean it sounds like a lot of the people in your life have problems, and they would like to make their problems yours, or maybe you do that—wow, I’m not sure.”
“What would you do?”
“Wow,” she said again. “I don’t know. Nothing like this ever happened to me. That’s the nice thing about the observatory: all I do is look at things and everything I look at is very far away. But if you’re asking me, I’d go and do what you have to do. All this will be here when you get back. Look at the ivy on the buildings. It’s not going anywhere.”
23
A MAN CAN STAND UP
On the bus, I sat next to an ex-marine with the insignia of the corps tattooed on his forearm. He smelled like liquor and had some kind of white crust along the edges of a patchy goatee. Three times he asked if I’d ever been in the service. The first time I told him no. The second time I told him, No, like I told you already. The third time was fifty miles further down the road, when he asked, “So d’you say you’d been in the military?” I figured he was trying to start a fight and told him, “No, I haven’t, but that’s something I sure hope I get a chance to do.”
“You fucking with me?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“’Cause if you are I’ll kick your ass.”
“I said I’m not.”
“Proud to have served,” he said, tapping the tattoo.
I stared out the window looking for any landmarks to come into view that I might recognize, while knowing at the same time that places change in fourteen years.
Dru had said, “We kept you around to get to Dewey. It was Harold’s idea. He knew Dooley’s recommendation would carry a lot of weight with the committee. We couldn’t risk applying without it and after what he’d been through, with Roy and Harold and the elixir, we weren’t sure he’d say yes, and then well, there you were—”
“Well,” I said, “you got what you wanted and it still didn’t do any good, did it?”
“I guess not,” she said, and I’d crawled to where my backpack lay propped against the wall and stuffed in a change of underwear and socks and my second pair of jeans and the yellow shirt I got from Howie and I left.
Only sleep had the power to shut the ex-marine up. Though I could still smell him. I turned toward the window and saw the skyline of Chicago, which sparked no memory in me.
When I left the station downtown, it was near noon and dark, which I blamed on the shadows of the building, until I saw the gathering clouds. I got directions from a cop—who looked at me strangely—and then made a chopping motion with his hand, “You want to go west and then north.”
The rain did hold off—for nearly two blocks. Then it fell in sheets, sweeping across the pavement and filling the gutters instantly. The jacket I was wearing, a cotton windbreaker I borrowed from Majors, was soaked through before I reached the next intersection. Figuring I couldn’t get any wetter I pressed on, walking for close to an hour before I reached California Avenue. I turned north and walked twenty-two blocks in the rain, through industrial neighborhoods and neighborhoods of black people and foreign-looking children who eyed me as I passed. Nothing looked familiar, until I spotted the Zimmermann Meats sign over Uncle Karl’s butcher shop. Even that wasn’t as large or as bright as I remembered it. Once through the door I knew from the smell that I’d come to the right place. There was a guy about my age behind the counter. He laughed when he saw me sopping wet the way I was and said, “What can I get you?”
“Karl here?” I asked.
He nodded at the small man sitting in the corner. Again memory had betrayed me. This wasn’t the round, chuckling man I remembered. His clothes were loose on him and he didn’t recognize me either. He pushed himself up from the chair with some effort and narrowed his eyes and tilted his head, giving me the once over. “Tomas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Is my brother dead?” he asked.
It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “No,” I said.
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yes.”
“You want to be dry. Go, go back to the house and Berthe wil
l throw your things into the dryer. We have a washing machine and a dryer now. Did she tell you that in her letters? One sits on top of the other. Make her show you when she puts the clothes in.”
He pointed me between the freezers through the back door and along the narrow sidewalk I remembered riding a tricycle down to the kitchen door of the house. Through the gauze curtain on the window Berthe looked the same as I remembered and seemed not to have aged, though as she swung the door open, I saw a tiredness in her eyes that hadn’t been there in the days she was tripping over me. Unlike Uncle Karl, she knew me at first sight.
The soup was pea—thick as oatmeal with fist-sized ham hocks. I ate two bowls at the kitchen table with the long tails of Uncle Karl’s robe tucked modestly between my legs. As I blew on spoonfuls of soup and slurped it hot into my mouth, Berthe sat at the other side of the small, round table with a mug of coffee between her reddened hands. She wore a light blue housecoat with white daisies on it. This was not the Berthe I remembered who was dressed and at the day’s work long before the rest of us were up. But I took the changes—like the wallpaper peeling at the corners and the chips in the green paint—as a sign of honest wear rather than decline.
“You left school?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Was this your choice?”
“Depends on how you look at it.”
She took a cautious sip of her coffee. “Why would you be smart with me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you quit your job as well?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can keep it. They give them to students.”
“See if I understand.” She pushed the mug away and crossed her arms. “You are out of work. You have quit from your college, and you have no plans of returning to your father. You are running in the opposite direction, like your mother.”
“I don’t know.”
“This is my fault. I ask too much of you. I will tell you that I was not eager about you going to university. This was never something that your father’s family had much use for. I was afraid that what has happened would happen. Now you have a school you cannot go back to and a father who you wouldn’t be much good for if you went home to him. You are free to do as you choose. I will have no more to say.”
“I’d like to stay a few days if I could.”
She poured a glass of buttermilk and set it in front of me. “On the couch.”
By the time my clothes were out of the dryer, Karl had come in from the shop and taken his place in his easy chair. “What did I say, eh,” he said, pinching the warm flannel of my shirt between his fingers. The pipe was long gone, he said. He’d had two heart attacks that Berthe didn’t think worth mentioning in her letters.
The girls came around for dinner. Hilde was twenty now and still round, with pink-dyed hair and black lipstick. She went to a Lutheran college in the suburbs but chose to live on campus for reasons that became obvious before dinner was even on the table. Silke was twenty-two and a beauty, with hair a darker blond than her mother’s and long legs. She said she was a data processor for a bank downtown, and she had an apartment and a convertible and a Puerto Rican boyfriend.
Aunt Berthe was paralyzed with disapproval whenever the girls spoke, in their city accents full of slang and swear words and bad grammar. They were wary of me, probably remembering how I had been favored when I lived with them. I talked to Hilde about the clubs she went to and the bands she liked, pretending to know the ones I had never heard of. Hilde warmed to this line of talk when she saw how it annoyed her mother.
Silke left right after dinner, squealing away from the curb in her electric blue Mustang before the dishes were dry in the rack. Karl shuffled with his newspaper down the hall to the half bath. Berthe made up the couch with sheets and a down comforter. Hilde sat cross-legged at my feet talking for more than two hours, even though I was bone tired and longing for sleep.
She offered me one of Uncle Karl’s German beers she swiped from the garage after her parents went to bed. “She doesn’t want you to run a store. Trust me on that. As much as she might build your dad and our dad up, she looks down on them. Do whatever you think is right. She’ll respect that. Even if she doesn’t, what can anyone do?”
We heard the padding of rubber slipper soles down the hallway and Aunt Berthe called, “Hilde, go to bed.”
“Jawohl,” Hilde yelled back. She drained the beer and said, “You’re cuter than your pictures. It’s too bad we’re cousins.”
I pulled the covers up to my chin. “Get out of here. I’m beat.”
The light over the kitchen sink cast a dim light over the living room that had been my bedroom for five years. I noticed that the row of bookshelves that had once run the length of one wall had been replaced with a console television. They had held my books, the books that Berthe read to me.
I stayed a week and spent the days helping out in my uncle’s store. Karl, like the girls, always looked at me as Aunt Berthe’s pet. We’d never been close. But he was a patient, generous boss and introduced me to his regular customers. “My nephew down from college in Wisconsin. He’s a smart boy.” And the venerable burghers were polite enough not to ask what the smart boy was doing behind a butcher’s counter in the middle of a semester.
The work was dull. Karl viewed butchery as a profession and wasn’t about to let me near the sides of beef with a bone saw. He’d only taught Marco the rudiments of meat cutting after three years of loyal gopherism of the sort I was assigned. The best I got to do was to mop the floors and rinse the blood from the wooden cutting tables and fetch sausages from the walk-in freezers. All of which made Marco happy because those were the chores he hated. He was a decent guy and if he worried I might steal his job, he didn’t show it. He had nothing to worry about. As clean as they kept the place, the constant smell of dead flesh stuck in my nose.
The girls came over the first three or four nights, until the novelty of my presence wore off. We played Parcheesi at the dining room table, and it was easy to feel like part of the family, especially when Hilde brought her fist down on the table and sent the colored markers whirling around the room. Aunt Berthe offered me the use of Silke’s room, which I refused, feeling comfortable in the only room in the house I’d ever slept in.
On the seventh day, I called Dru. The Princess Executive rang a couple of dozen times before she picked up. “What time is it?” Her voice sleepy and lost.
“Six.”
“Jesus, Tom.”
“I wanted to be sure I caught you.”
“Well, you did. Where are you?”
“Chicago.”
Pause. “How’d that happen?”
“Just kind of did.”
“It wasn’t true what I said.”
“Forget about it.”
“Do you believe me?”
“I don’t. Doesn’t matter.”
“Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to be back for the show. We’re going to assassinate Roy in front of the Board of Regents.”
“Are you nuts?”
“It’s just pretend,” she said. “You have to see my dress.”
“How’s that going to work?”
“It’s complicated. Come back and I’ll tell you.”
Berthe came into the kitchen and cast a stern glance my way, guessing correctly I was on long distance. “Why don’t you come down here?”
“To Chicago.”
“You could come for Easter dinner. Uncle Karl carves a mean ham.” That for Berthe’s benefit, though she was filling the percolator and didn’t seem to hear.
“No way. We were never big on Easter in my house.”
“Atheists?”
“Jewish.”
“You’re Jewish? Oh my God, you’re kidding.” That got Berthe’s attention. She missed the filter with a full scoop of coffee and it scattered on the Formica.
“Come back for the show,” she said. “I want you to see my dress.
”
When I hung up, Berthe set a full cup in front of me and returned to her soiled counter. “I’ve got to go,” I said.
She swept the spilled coffee into the sink and, without turning to look at me said, “Good.”
24
BESIDES THAT, MRS. LINCOLN
April thirteenth was bright and cold. I got off the bus in front of the student union and walked west in the direction of Rosewalter, blending in with the flow of students that were heading up the hill to class. I had a hundred and twenty bucks in my pocket (six day’s pay from Uncle Karl that I hadn’t asked for and didn’t expect) and clean clothes.
The room stunk of cologne, explained by the half-empty bottle of Williams Lectric Shave on Ship’s dresser. My old mattress was bare and piled with books. His Faces of the Future calendar on the wall was still on February. The course schedule he’d taped above his desk said he was at something called “Business Lab.” I dropped my stuff, stripped, and yanked one of Ship’s towels off the closet door. In the empty shower room, I turned the hot knobs as high as they would go and sat underneath the rising steam until I started to doze off. Then I shuffled back to the room, shoved Ship’s books on the floor, and hit the mattress.
I was asleep when Ship came in but woke up when he turned on the light and howled, “Holy crap.”
I rolled over and saw him standing in the middle of the room arms down, palms out, like the human body chart on the wall of a biology lab. “You scared the shit out of me,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Kind of in a bind. I need a place to crash for the night.”
“Well,” he said, pacing to the window and then back again, “you can’t stay here. It isn’t even legal. Don’t think I don’t know you dropped out.”
“Who told you?”
He tapped his pocket notebook. “Nobody has to tell me anything.”
I felt around on the floor until I found my jeans and pulled a twenty from the pocket. “Here,” I said. “Think of it like a hotel.”
