by Tobias Wolff
I told Crosley that I liked his idea. “The time has come to lose our innocence,” I said.
“Exactamente,” he said.
And so we sat up and took counsel, leaning toward each other from the beds, holding our swollen bellies, whispering back and forth about how this thing might be done, and where, and when.
Lady’s Dream
Lady’s suffocating. Robert can’t stand to have the windows down because the air blowing into the car bothers his eyes. The fan is on but only at the lowest speed, as the sound annoys him. Lady’s head is getting heavy, and when she blinks she has to raise her eyelids by an effort of will. The heat and dampness of her skin give her the sensation of a fever. She’s beginning to see things in the lengthening moments when her eyes are closed, things more distinct and familiar than the dipping wires and blur of trees and the silent staring man she sees when they’re open.
“Lady?” Robert’s voice calls her back, but she keeps her eyes closed.
That’s him to the life. Can’t stand her sleeping when he’s not. He’d have some good reason to wake her, though. Never a mean motive. Never. When he’s going to ask somebody for a favor he always calls first and just passes the time, then calls back the next day and says how great it was talking to them, he enjoyed it so much he forgot to ask if they’d mind doing something for him. Has no idea he does this. She’s never heard him tell a lie, not even to make a story better. Tells the most boring stories. Just lethal. Considers every word. Considers everything. Early January he buys twelve vacuum cleaner bags and writes a different month on each one so she’ll remember to change them. Of course she goes as long as she can on every bag and throws away the extras at the end of the year, because otherwise he’d find them and know. Not say anything—just know. Once she threw away seven. Sneaked them outside through the snow and stuffed them in the garbage can.
Considerate. Everything a matter of principle. Justice for all, yellow brown black or white they are precious in his sight. Can’t say no to any charity but always forgets to send the money. Asks her questions about his own self. Who’s that actress I like so much? What’s my favorite fish? Is calm in every circumstance. Polishes his glasses all the time. They gleam so you can hardly see his eyes. Has to sleep on the right side of the bed. The sheets have to be white. Any other color gives him nightmares, forget about patterns. Patterns would kill him. Wears a hardhat when he works around the house. Says her name a hundred times a day. Always has. Any excuse.
He loves her name. Lady. Married her name. Shut her up in her name. Shut her up.
“Lady?”
Sorry, sir. Lady’s gone.
She knows where she is. She’s back home. Her father’s away but her mother’s home and her sister Jo. Lady hears their voices. She’s in the kitchen running water into a glass, letting it overflow and pour down her fingers until it’s good and cold. She lifts the glass and drinks her fill and sets the glass down, then walks slow as a cat across the kitchen and down the hall to the bright doorway that opens onto the porch where her mother and sister are sitting. Her mother straightens up and settles back again as Lady goes to the railing and leans on her elbows and looks down the street and then out to the fields beyond.
Lordalmighty it’s hot.
Isn’t it hot, though.
Jo is slouched in her chair, rolling a bottle of Coke on her forehead. I could just die.
Late again, Lady?
He’ll be here.
Must have missed his bus again.
I suppose.
I bet those stupid cornpones were messing with him like they do, Jo says. I wouldn’t be a soldier.
He’ll be here. Else he’d call.
I wouldn’t be a soldier.
Nobody asked you.
Now, girls.
I’d like to see you a soldier anyway, sleeping all day and laying in bed eating candy. Mooning around. Oh, General, don’t make me march, that just wears me out. Oh, do I have to wear that old green thing, green just makes me look sick, haven’t you got one of those in red? Why, I can’t eat lima beans, don’t you know about me and lima beans?
Now, Lady …
But her mother’s laughing and so is Jo, in spite of herself. Oh, the goodness of that sound. And of her own voice. Just like singing. General, honey, you know I can’t shoot that nasty thing, how about you ask one of those old boys to shoot it for me, they just love to shoot off their guns for Jo Kay.
Lady!
The three of them on the porch, waiting but not waiting. Sufficient unto themselves. Nobody has to come.
But Robert is on his way. He’s leaning his head against the window of the bus and trying to catch his breath. He missed the first bus and had to run to catch this one because his sergeant found fault with him during inspection and stuck him on a cleanup detail. The sergeant hates his guts. He’s an ignorant cracker and Robert is an educated man from Vermont, an engineer just out of college, quit Shell Oil in Louisiana to enlist the day North Korea crossed the parallel. The only Yankee in his company. Robert says when they get overseas there won’t be any more Yankees and Southerners, just Americans. Lady likes him for believing that, but she gives him the needle because she knows it isn’t true.
He changed uniforms in a hurry and didn’t check the mirror before he left the barracks. There’s a smudge on his right cheek. Shoe polish. His face is flushed and sweaty, his shirt soaked through. He’s watching out the window and reciting a poem to himself. He’s a great one for poems, this Robert. He has poems for running and poems for drill and poems for going to sleep, and poems for when the rednecks start getting him down.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever Gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
That’s the poem he uses to fortify himself. He thinks it over and over even when they’re yelling in his face. It keeps him strong. Lady laughs when he tells her things like this, and he always looks at her a little surprised and then he laughs too, to show he likes her sass, though he doesn’t. He thinks it’s just her being young and spoiled and that it’ll go away if he can get her out of that house and away from her family and among sensible people who don’t think everything’s a joke. In time it’ll wear off and leave her quiet and dignified and respectful of life’s seriousness—leave her pure Lady.
That’s what he thinks some days. Most days he sees no hope at all. He thinks of taking her home, into the house of his father, and when he imagines what she might say to his father he starts hearing his own excuses and apologies. Then he knows that it’s impossible. Robert has picked up some psychology here and there, and he believes he understands how he got himself into this mess. It’s rebellion. Subconscious, of course. A subconscious rebellion against his father, falling in love with a girl like Lady. Because you don’t fall in love. No. Life isn’t a song. You choose to fall in love. And there are reasons for that choice, just as there’s a reason for every choice, if you get to the bottom of it. Once you figure out your reasons, you master your choices. It’s as simple as that.
Robert is looking out the window without really seeing anything.
It’s impossible. Lady is just a kid, she doesn’t know anything about life. There’s a rawness to her that will take years to correct. She’s spoiled and willful and half-wild, except for her tongue, which is all wild. And she’s Southern, not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, but a particular kind of Southern. Not trash, as she would put it, but too proud of not being trash. Irrational. Superstitious. Clannish.
And what a clan it is, clan Cobb. Mr. Cobb a suspender-snapping paint salesman always on the road, full of drummer’s banter and jokes about nigras and watermelon. Mrs. Cobb a morning-to-night gossip, weepily religious, content to live on her daughters’ terms rather than raise them to woman’s estate with discipline and right example. And the sister. Jo Kay. You can write that sad story before it happens.
All in all, Robert can�
��t imagine a better family than the Cobbs to beat his father over the head with. That must be why he’s chosen them, and why he has to undo that choice. He’s made up his mind. He meant to tell her last time, but there was no chance. Today. No matter what. She won’t understand. She’ll cry. He will be gentle about it. He’ll say she’s a fine girl but too young. He’ll say that it isn’t fair to ask her to wait for him when who knows what might happen, and then to follow him to a place she’s never been, far from family and friends.
He’ll tell Lady anything but the truth, which is that he’s ashamed to have picked her to use against his father. That’s his own fight. He’s been running from it for as long as he can remember, and he knows he has to stop. He has to face the man.
He will, too. He will, after he gets home from Korea. His father will have to listen to him then. Robert will make him listen. He will tell him, he will face his father and tell him …
Robert’s throat tightens and he sits up straight. He hears himself breathing in quick shallow gasps and wonders if anyone else has noticed. His heart is kicking. His mouth is dry. He closes his eyes and forces himself to breathe more slowly and deeply, imitating calm until it becomes almost real.
They pass the power company and the Greyhound station. Red-faced soldiers in shiny shoes stand around out front smoking. The bus stops on a street lined with bars and the other men get off, hooting and pushing one another. There’s just Robert and four women left on board. They turn off Jackson and bump across the railroad tracks and head east past the lumberyard. Black men are throwing planks into a truck, their shirts off, skin gleaming in the hazy light. Then they’re gone behind a fence. Robert pulls the cord for his stop, waits behind a wide woman in a flowered dress. The flesh swings like hammocks under her arms. She takes forever going down the steps.
The sun dazzles his eyes. He pulls down the visor of his cap and walks to the corner and turns right. This is Arsenal Street. Lady lives two blocks down where the street runs into fields. There’s no plan to the way it ends—it just gives out. From here on there’s nothing but farms for miles. At night Lady and Jo Kay steal strawberries from the field behind their house, dish them up with thick fresh cream and grated chocolate. The strawberries have been stewing in the heat all day and burst open at the first pressure of the teeth. Robert disapproves of reaping another man’s harvest, though he eats his share and then some. The season’s about over. He’ll be lucky if he gets any tonight.
He’s thinking about strawberries when he sees Lady on the porch, and at that moment the sweetness of that taste fills his mouth. He stops as if he just remembered something, then comes toward her again. Her lips are moving but he can’t hear her, he’s aware of nothing but the taste in his mouth, and the closer he comes the stronger it gets. His pace quickens, his hand goes out for the railing. He takes the steps as if he means to devour her.
No, she’s saying, no. She’s talking to him and to the girl whose life he seeks. She knows what will befall her if she lets him have it. Stay here on this porch with your mother and your sister, they will soon have need of you. Gladden your father’s eye yet awhile. This man is not for you. He will patiently school you half to death. He will kindly take you among unbending strangers to watch him fail to be brave. To suffer his carefulness, and to see your children writhe under it and fight it off with every kind of self-hurting recklessness. To be changed. To hear yourself, and not know who is speaking. Wait, young Lady. Bide your time.
“Lady?”
It’s no good. The girl won’t hear. Even now she’s bending toward him as he comes up the steps. She reaches for his cheek, to brush away the smudge he doesn’t know is there. He thinks it’s something else that makes her do it, and his fine lean face confesses everything, asks everything.There’s no turning back from this touch. She can’t be stopped. She has a mind of her own, and she knows something Lady doesn’t. She knows how to love him.
Lady hears her name again.
Wait, sir.
She blesses the girl. Then she turns to the far-rolling fields she used to dream an ocean, this house the ship that ruled it. She takes a last good look, and opens her eyes.
The Night in Question
Frances had come to her brother’s apartment to hold his hand over a disappointment in love, but Frank ate his way through half the cherry pie she’d brought him and barely mentioned the woman. He was in an exalted state over a sermon he’d heard that afternoon. Dr. Violet had outdone himself, Frank said. This was his best; this was the gold standard. Frank wanted to repeat it to Frances, the way he used to act out movie scenes for her when they were young.
“Gotta run, Franky.”
“It’s not that long,” Frank said. “Five minutes. Ten—at the outside.”
Three years earlier he had driven Frances’ car into a highway abutment and almost died, then almost died again, in detox, of a grand mal seizure. Now he wanted to preach sermons at her. She supposed she was grateful. She said she’d give him ten minutes.
It was a muggy night, but as always Frank wore a long-sleeved shirt to hide the weird tattoos he woke up with one morning when he was stationed in Manila. The shirt was white, starched and crisply ironed. The tie he’d worn to church was still cinched up hard under his prominent Adam’s apple. A big man in a small room, he paced in front of the couch as he gathered himself to speak. He favored his left leg, whose knee had been shattered in the crash; every time his right foot came down, the dishes clinked in the cupboards.
“Okay, here goes,” he said. “I’ll have to fill in here and there, but I’ve got most of it.” He continued to walk, slowly, deliberately, hands behind his back, head bent at an angle that suggested meditation. “My dear friends,” he said, “you may have read in the paper not long ago of a man of our state, a parent like many of yourselves here today … but a parent with a terrible choice to make. His name is Mike Bolling. He’s a railroad man, Mike, a switchman, been with the railroad ever since he finished high school, same as his father and grandfather before him. He and Janice’ve been married ten years now. They were hoping for a whole houseful of kids, but the Lord decided to give them one instead, a very special one. That was nine years ago. Benny, they named him—after Janice’s father. He died when she was just a youngster, but she remembered his big lopsided grin and the way he threw back his head when he laughed, and she was hoping some of her dad’s spirit would rub off on his name. Well, it turned out she got all the spirit she could handle, and then some.
“Benny. He came out in high gear and never shifted down. Mike liked to say you could run a train off him, the energy he had. Good student, natural athlete, but his big thing was mechanics. One of those boys, you put him in the same room with a clock and he’s got it in pieces before you can turn around. By the time he was in second grade he could put the clocks back together, not to mention the vacuum cleaner and the TV and the engine of Mike’s old lawn mower.”
This didn’t sound like Frank. Frank was plain in his speech, neither formal nor folksy, so spare and sometimes harsh that his jokes sounded like challenges, or insults. Frances was about the only one who got them. This tone was putting her on edge. Something terrible was going to happen in the story, something Frances would regret having heard. She knew that. But she didn’t stop him. Frank was her little brother, and she would deny him nothing.
When Frank was still a baby, not even walking yet, Frank Senior, their father, had set out to teach his son the meaning of the word no. At dinner he’d dangle his wristwatch before Frank’s eyes, then say no! and jerk it back just as Frank grabbed for it. When Frank persisted, Frank Senior would slap his hand until he was howling with fury and desire. This happened night after night. Frank would not take the lesson to heart; as soon as the watch was offered, he snatched at it. Frances followed her mother’s example and said nothing. She was eight years old, and while she feared her father’s attention she also missed it, and resented Frank’s obstinacy and the disturbance it caused. Why couldn’t he learn? Th
en her father slapped Frank’s face. This was on New Year’s Eve. Frances still remembered the stupid tasseled hats they were all wearing when her father slapped her baby brother. In the void of time after the slap there was no sound but the long rush of air into Frank’s lungs as, red-faced, twisting in his chair, he gathered himself to scream. Frank Senior lowered his head. Frances saw that he’d surprised himself and was afraid of what would follow. She looked at her mother, whose eyes were closed. In later years Frances tried to think of a moment when their lives might have turned by even a degree, turned and gone some other way, and she always came back to this instant when her father knew the wrong he had done, was shaken and open to rebuke. What might have happened if her mother had come flying out of her chair and stood over him and told him to stop, now and forever? Or if she had only looked at him, confirming his shame? But her eyes were closed, and stayed closed until Frank blasted them with his despair and Frank Senior left the room. As Frances knew even then, her mother could not allow herself to see what she had no strength to oppose. Her heart was bad. Three years later she reached for a bottle of ammonia, said “Oh,” sat down on the floor and died.
Frances did oppose her father. In defiance of his orders, she brought food to Frank’s room when he was banished, stood up for him and told him he was right to stand up for himself. Frank Senior had decided that his son needed to be broken, and Frank would not break. He went after everything his father said no to, with Frances egging him on and mothering him when he got caught. In time their father ceased to give reasons for his displeasure. As his silence grew heavier, so did his hand. One night Frances grabbed her father’s belt as he started after Frank, and when he flung her aside Frank head-rammed him in the stomach. Frances jumped on her father’s back and the three of them crashed around the room. When it was over Frances was flat on the floor with a split lip and a ringing sound in her ears, laughing like a madwoman. Frank was crying. That was the first time.
