News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  Georgette cried when he told her, begged him to wait until she graduated high school. “It’s only a year,” she said, but Ray knew what that meant. He’d seen it enough times: guys just ahead of him in school, stuck with a wife and kid before they were twenty. Only Steve Marstellar had escaped.

  “I’ll come and visit,” he promised, and for a while he rode the Greyhound bus to Bakerton every other weekend. (He was saving for a car.) When he returned to Cleveland, Marstellar filled him in on what he’d missed: the ball games (Marstellar, an Indians fan, rarely missed a homer), the girls. Finally Ray grew tired of the bus rides and tired of Georgette, who still dragged him to school dances; who wouldn’t drink or smoke; whose idea of a good time was hanging out at Keener’s Diner on a Saturday night. Months passed while he worked up the nerve to tell her, and by then it was too late. She was already pregnant.

  “Does her dad know?” Pop had asked when Ray told him. They were sitting on the back porch, smoking cigarettes. Pop didn’t mind Ray’s new habit but advised him to keep it from his mother.

  “Not yet. He’s going to have a fit.”

  Pop shrugged. “He’ll get over it. Red always liked you. He’ll be glad to have you in the family.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Talk to the priest before you go. No sense waiting until the last minute.”

  Ray’s face heated; his chest felt tight. “I don’t want to talk to the priest.”

  For a long time Pop said nothing. When he did, it was as if Ray hadn’t spoken. “She’s a good girl. Everything will work out. But first you have to make it right.”

  Ray stared at him. For a moment he forgot all about Georgette, the baby she was carrying. It seemed that everything in his life had led to this moment. “Is that what you did? Made it right?”

  Pop looked away. At the bottom of the hill, men were waiting for the company bus.

  “You were overseas when she got pregnant,” Ray said, his heart hammering. “It wasn’t even your mistake.”

  Pop was silent. “I should have told you myself,” he said finally. “I guess you figured it out.”

  Ray said nothing. Inside him, something was bursting. Until that moment he’d still hoped he was wrong.

  “Don’t say anything to your mother,” said Pop. “She’s sensitive about it. In those days they blamed it all on the girl. That isn’t right.”

  Ray nodded, his cheeks burning.

  “She was just a kid, alone in a big city. She didn’t know what she was doing. The fellow took advantage of her.”

  Who? Ray thought. Who took advantage of her?

  “He was nobody,” Pop said, as if he’d heard. “Sorry, buddy, but it’s the truth. He let her face it all by herself. That’s not a man. Not in my book.” He looked away, red-faced. “I knew her my whole life, since we were kids. I didn’t care what people said. I knew what kind of a person she was.” It was, for him, a tremendous speech. He sat back in his chair, as if exhausted by the effort.

  “You didn’t mind?” said Ray. “All those years, raising someone else’s kid?”

  “I didn’t see it that way. You were my boy, same as Kenny. It was no trouble.” Pop rose to go, gathering his things: snuff, dinner bucket, a clean set of miners slung over one arm. That spring he worked Hoot Owl, midnight to eight. “You were a good boy. I didn’t mind at all.”

  They were married at St. Casimir’s the first week in June, two days after Georgette’s high school graduation. That night they piled her things into the secondhand Ford he’d borrowed from Steve Marstellar, and Ray spent his twentieth birthday driving back to Cleveland.

  They rented a tiny apartment in a building downtown, half a mile from the river. That summer, the hottest on record, the Cuyahoga reeked of sewage. Their fourth-floor apartment held the heat like a greenhouse. At night they slept on the fire escape, waiting for a breeze. One Sunday afternoon they filled the bathtub with ice and spent the day there, wrapped around each other like pretzels. Most nights and some mornings, they made love in the narrow Murphy bed; he was crazy for her little belly, her heavy breasts. When he looked back, it amazed him, the constriction of that life; yet at the time he’d been able to breathe. Only later, after they bought the house in Parma, did he begin to suffocate. The split-levels in their subdivision were as alike as Bakerton company houses. His neighbors wanted nothing more from life than they already had: steady work, a new Chevy each year, weekends in front of the television drinking beer and watching ball. It wasn’t a bad life, if you considered the alternative. Kenny had been drafted, Steve Marstellar killed in the battle of Khe Sanh. Ray owed his life to Georgette and the baby, yet he was not grateful. He saw only that the life he’d feared had caught him, that he might as well have stayed in Bakerton after all.

  He wondered—his whole life, but in those years especially—about the man who’d fathered him. A city man, he imagined, bred for a different kind of life: fast, complex, constantly changing. He decided that restlessness was in his blood—not a character flaw, as Georgette saw it, but a biological fact like his height, his dark hair; a trait beyond his control. A trait some (not Georgette, but some) might call admirable. His restlessness got him off the assembly line and through six years of night school, difficult courses in geochemistry, mineralogy, petrology. By his thirtieth birthday he had a new job, the first college degree in his family, and something even more valuable: an understanding of time. Geologic time, large and long; the patient earth incubating its treasures—diamonds, petroleum, coal. By comparison, his life no longer seemed so static.

  Slowly, slowly, things were changing. With the boys in school, Georgette got a beauty operator’s license and opened a shop above their garage. In a few years she’d be able to take care of herself; the boys would leave for college, and Ray would go and find his life. He hadn’t planned on being laid off or on finding the right job, the Exxon job, just as his unemployment ran out. “I have to take it,” he told Georgette, and for once she couldn’t argue. They’d pretended at first that she’d join him once the school year ended; or maybe only Ray was pretending.

  Until then he’d be on his own in Houston.

  At first he’d behaved himself: flew back to Ohio every month to visit, spent evenings in front of the television in his studio apartment. Finally the possibilities overwhelmed him. Women were everywhere. He had money, time, and freedom—at least, the illusion of it. Never before in his life had he possessed all three things at once.

  Guilty, he called Georgette daily. Every two weeks he sent money, each paycheck more than he used to earn in a month. For his younger son’s birthday, he flew both boys down to Houston and took them to a game at the Astrodome, where Ray Junior had rooted for the visiting team and Bryan spent two hours reading a magazine. At twelve, Ray Junior could still be distracted; Bryan, four years older, could not. “How come you never answer the phone?” he’d asked as they ate breakfast in Ray’s apartment. It rang constantly that weekend. Ray had met Evie that spring when she fitted him for reading glasses. They’d been dating on and off for months.

  It was Georgette who asked for the divorce. She demanded the house, alimony, child support. Guilty of everything, Ray conceded. She kept the money they’d set aside for the boys’ education; what she did with it, he never knew. Neither of his sons was interested in college. Ray Junior studied automotive repair at Lincoln Tech. Bryan went to the same cosmetology school Georgette had attended. For years he’d worked above his parents’ garage in Parma, cutting hair alongside his mother.

  Neither of his sons had come to the wedding. “No way in hell,” Bryan said when Evie invited him. Ray Junior had been more casual: he’d used up his vacation days in hunting season. He and Ray rarely spoke, though Evie sent the boy a card each Christmas and received one in return: Happy Holidays from Raymond and Sherri. The neat handwriting belonged to Ray Junior’s girlfriend, a woman Ray had never met.

  He replaced the photo on the wall. Below it hung a more recent shot, his grown sons standing before a Christmas tree. Br
yan, he noticed with a kind of shock, was balding; a diamond stud twinkled in his right earlobe. Ray Junior wore sideburns and a goatee. The last time Ray had seen him, the kid was barely old enough to shave.

  His whole life, he’d believed there were two kinds of men: the kind who’d fathered him and the kind who’d raised him; men who took advantage of their freedom and men who threw it away; men who lived big lives and men who were content being small. For years, living in Parma with his family, he’d believed himself the latter kind, a small man who would never be free. Later—too late—he saw that he had it backward. He wasn’t, could never be, like Pop. He was his father’s son after all.

  His mother came home from the bake sale loaded down with packages: raisin bread, poppy-seed roll, strawberry-rhubarb pie. “You’re looking good,” said Ray, watching her bustle around the kitchen, wiping down clean countertops, reheating leftovers for lunch. His mother, sturdy and compact, her white hair freshly set. Except for a few wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, her skin looked tight as a girl’s.

  “When you’re young, they say you’re good-looking. At my age, they say you’re looking good.” She set the table with familiar dishes: dark bread, beet soup, cucumber slices in sour cream. “I can’t complain. My sugar’s good. Fran took me to get it checked. Some of those ladies up the church take a dozen pills a day. Me, nothing. I’ll live to be a hundred.” She set down a steaming platter mounded with pierogies.

  “This looks delicious, Florence,” Evie said.

  The name hung awkwardly in the air. Ray’s first wife had called his mother “Mom”; Kenny’s wife did the same.

  The dishes circulated. Evie talked about the Ovo Café, an elegant bistro in Houston. Recently pierogies had been added to the menu at the astounding price of twenty dollars a plate.

  “Twenty dollars?” Ray’s mother looked down at her plate. “They’re nothing but potatoes and flour. You can make a dozen for a quarter.” She watched as Evie finished her soup. “You’re eating good. Last time I remember you ate like a bird.”

  “I’ve gained a few pounds.” Evie’s eyes met Ray’s; for a moment he saw the question in them: Can I tell her?

  “Where’s Pop?” Ray asked his mother, avoiding Evie’s gaze. She’d be disappointed, angry with him for changing the subject, but he couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t ready for anyone to know.

  There was no sensing waiting for Pop, Ray’s mother explained. His appetite wasn’t what it used to be. “If I don’t feed him, he forgets to eat. He’s as bad as your brother was.”

  Ray thought of Kenny as he’d last seen him: gaunt and wizened, his face lined as an old man’s. In his final years he weighed less than he had in high school. In Vietnam he’d contracted a parasite from drinking untreated water. The army doctor gave him pills and pronounced him cured, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was eating him from the inside.

  He came home on furlough in ’69, a week of freedom before his second tour of duty. I re-upped, he’d written to Ray in a rare letter. Don’t tell Mom. Ray drove in from Ohio to see him and was surprised by how well he looked: strong, suntanned, somehow feral with his white teeth. By comparison, Ray felt middle-aged, weak, and indoorsy. He was prone to backaches. His hands looked girlishly soft.

  For three nights they sat on the back porch, smoking and drinking. Kenny had nothing to say about the war, his life as a soldier. Instead they talked about the past, the childhood that, with their age difference, they hadn’t quite shared. Still: there were nuns who’d taught them both in grade school, neighborhood boys they both remembered, pretty girls they’d watched from afar. They talked late into the night. Kenny never seemed to get tired. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked when Ray, bleary-eyed, rose to go to bed.

  A year later Kenny came back for good. “He’s changed,” Ray’s mother warned him over the phone. When Ray visited at Christmas, he was stunned at his brother’s appearance: hollow-eyed, skeletally thin. He was missing a front tooth—he had a fake one, he said, but couldn’t be bothered to wear it. There was no reminiscing during that visit, no late-night drinking. Ray and his family were staying with Georgette’s parents, and Kenny spent most of the time in his old bedroom with the door closed. He slept all the time now, Ray’s mother whispered. He slept as though he hadn’t slept in years.

  He was hired in the machine shop at Baker Eleven, a greaser. All night long he lubed the moving parts of shuttle cars. “It’s a start,” Pop said, though Ray knew he was disappointed. Shop positions were dead-end jobs; the real money was underground. For Kenny, that was precisely the problem. “I can’t do that,” he told Ray. “Crawling around in caves like a rat. I done enough of that over there.” He phoned late on his nights off, drunk usually, and reminisced about his crazy army buddies, the drugs they’d taken, the girls they’d balled, the hell they’d raised. These monologues could last an hour or more. “One more thing,” he said again and again, before launching into another tale. He talked so fast that Ray could barely understand him, as though he were running out of time.

  He worked Hoot Owl, which suited him; all day he slept in his and Ray’s old room. Weekends he dated Fran Wenturine, a girl he’d known in high school. Fran lived with her widowed father, who tended bar at the Legion. The old man was fond of Kenny, would often slip him a free shot of whiskey when Kenny stopped in before work. When the mines slowed, Kenny was switched to day shift; he worked three days a week and closed the Legion the other four. Broke, he sold reefer on the side. Every couple months he drove Fran’s car down to Kentucky and came back with a bagful of dense, flavorful skunk, grown by an army buddy on his family’s tobacco farm.

  By then he’d stopped calling Ray. Married to Fran, he had someone else to listen on those drunken nights when his words ran together in his eagerness to get them out. Ray learned the details of his life thirdhand, from Georgette. Fran called her in a panic a few times a month, when Kenny drank more than usual and scared her with talk of suicide. For years he’d suffered from nightmares; often he walked in his sleep. One night she’d found him on the front porch dead asleep, her father’s hunting rifle across his knees. “I have to go,” he said when she called his name. “Time for me to go.”

  Each morning Fran made him breakfast, then left for her job at the A&P. If he was working, she’d drop him off at the mine; if not, she’d leave him sitting at the kitchen table with her father. They’d spend the day there, playing cards and drinking into the afternoon, until the old man left for work at the Legion. Life went on that way for years, until Fran’s father found a bag of marijuana stashed in the basement. When she came home from work that night, she found Kenny alone at the table, his left eye bruised where the old man had hit him.

  After the Eleven closed, he worked as a roofer, a trash collector, jobs that slipped mysteriously through his fingers. Finally he became a volunteer fireman. The work was good for him, according to Ray’s mother; at least it was better than sitting home all day. Fran got pregnant—intentionally or not, Ray never knew. Probably she’d talked to Georgette about it, but by then Ray and his wife were no longer speaking. She had already filed for divorce.

  The Bakerton Volunteer Fire Company sat at the corner of Baker and Susquehanna, what used to be the busiest streets in town. Years ago, Keener’s Diner had been located across the street, flanked by a bowling alley and a pool hall. Weekend evenings, after dances or football games, these places had been crowded with young people. On warm nights the firemen set up folding chairs on the sidewalk and called to the girls walking in pairs or threes down Baker Avenue. In August came the Firemen’s Festival, the town overrun by volunteer firemen from neighboring towns, drinking and gaming at the booths set up along Susquehanna. The festival closed with a parade and an open-air dance, musicians crowded onto a platform outside the fire hall: shrieking saxophones, the silvery hiss of a cymbal. Since then the bowling alley had been torn down, the pool hall converted into a Goodwill store. Keener’s Diner had become the public
library. All along Baker Street, the windows were dark.

  That night a light snow was falling. Wind tugged at Ray’s coat as he helped Evie out of the car. They went in through the side entrance. The first floor of the hall was for firemen only: garage, equipment room, and in one corner, a dark, smoky barroom known as the Firemen’s Club. Once, years ago, Ray had gotten drunk there with his brother. After the mines shut down, Kenny had spent all his time at the hall, smoking and throwing darts while he was on duty, drinking himself unconscious when he was off.

  They lingered in the lobby, brushing snow from their shoulders. Evie stood before the glass case in the corner, examining the trophies inside, won in games—tug-of-war, battle of the barrel—at firemen’s festivals across Saxon County. Hanging inside the case was a heavy wooden plaque carved with ornate letters: REMEMBER OUR FALLEN HEROES. The plaque was decorated with gold nameplates.

  “Did you see this?” Evie asked, pointing.

  Ray leaned close, his breath steaming the glass. His brother’s name was at the bottom: Ken Wojick. No other fireman had died since.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  They climbed the steps to the social floor. The room was decorated all in white: crepe-paper streamers, Kleenex flowers, cardboard cutouts in the shape of wedding bells. A polka band was setting up in a corner; the drummer was a cousin of Pop’s. On the back wall, a hand-lettered sign: CONGRATULATIONS FLORKA AND PAUL.

  “Go sit down,” Ray told Evie. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

  A card table had been set up near the door. Fran stood behind it, filling out name tags with a Magic Marker. Ray studied her a moment: stout, broad-bosomed, dark hair hanging in a braid down her back.