The Age of Cities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  “Evening, ladies,” Johnny tipped his hat at the nearest table. The woman with the white sweater waved exuberantly at Frankie. “Someone’s going to have a bun in the oven in no time,” Dickie whispered loudly to Ed.

  Downstairs, the clatter of the restaurant had died down; the main floor was deserted except for the table where the waiters were playing a game with cards and ivory and red disks. Johnny asked the emerald-clad hostess to call a cab. She walked toward the kitchen without speaking a word.

  “Is she always so quiet?” Winston asked the men.

  Dickie answered in a beat: “The Empress? Yes, rumour has it that she’s not said a single word since her husband took up with a white woman. Shame is a powerful force to these people.”

  “Shame has its place,” Ed said.

  “Say, we’re going to head to my place to fortify ourselves with some cocktails. Dare to come along?” Winston wondered why Dickie’s voice was so full of mischief.

  “I’d best be getting back to the hotel. Mother will wonder what happened if I don’t rise with her and the roosters at daybreak tomorrow. Thank you for the offer, though, Dickie.” He gestured toward his hotel. “I think I’ll just walk back the way I came.” His voice felt constricted.

  Winston felt he’d had enough conversation for the night. Groups—societies under glass with their own peculiar requirements and hidden rules—made him feel apprehensive, as much a fish out of water as Johnny in Tinseltown. And there were always judgments, too, swift and permanent. He recalled the boys who’d asked him to join their gang when he was in primary school. After telling Alberta about it, he’d reported back to the boys that his mother said they were trouble. It was a mistake—getting ahead meant tailoring the truth: hardly a fact a bookish child would intuit. The boys had retaliated by calling him a momma’s boy. That spontaneously generated reputation had chased him now and again throughout high school. He’d obviously made the wrong choice, but had never imagined its repercussion. Now, naturally, he had seen that life was stockpiled with similar lessons—once learned, never forgotten—and thought that his knowledge was cold comfort indeed.

  Winston pictured this new gang staying up late into the night—mixing drinks, squabbling, gossiping, and listening to music—and then leaving for work in wrinkled clothing without having slept a wink. He’d never done so himself. It seemed wrong to him even if he couldn’t say precisely why. After all, he pondered as they bantered amongst themselves, we’re not chickens that automatically fall to sleep as soon as the daylight fades. But standards and rules are here for a reason. His prim reaction to their supposed devil-may-care plans sounded like a lecture he might hear Miss Mittchel give one of her wisecracking back-of-the-classroom students. That naysayer’s sanctimoniousness was no characteristic in himself he’d care to fertilize any further.

  Outside, the men stood in the crackling neon bamboo grove and waited for their taxicab. The hard rain had mellowed to drizzle. Winston admired the play between the parti-coloured neon flashes and the rain slick cars and streets. It reminded him of the midways at home that delighted adults and children alike when they blazed into garish blossom.

  “Neon light is very cheap, that’s why all these businesses leave theirs running for so many hours,” Ed explained, filling the lull. “I don’t know why it buzzes like that, though.”

  “Don’t feel that you have to wait for us, Winston,” Johnny said. “You’re hoofing it, not us.”

  “Yes, I’ll be heading off, then, gentlemen. It was nice to see you all again. And a pleasure to meet you, Frankie.” The young man stood unsmiling, legs rigid, his arms crossing his chest. Winston reached out to shake his hand.

  “Sir.” It was the sole word Frankie had uttered since being chastised. His sulking softened his military stance.

  Passing by another neon-lit restaurant, Winston turned to wave. The last man on the street, Ed was now stepping into the black taxi. He shut the door and their vehicle shot into the night. As Winston walked in search of the spinning W to the west, his mother’s interest in Dickie sprang to mind. She’d adore that restaurant and its secretive Prohibition-era atmosphere; she’d be only too happy to smuggle in a flask or two in her purse. As for the gang, he felt protective. He’d lessen their outlandishness—lock it in a compartment for himself only—when they chatted over breakfast about his banquet of Chinese delicacies.

  No soul could doubt that the plump and tiny strawberry was the day’s honoured guest. Its delectable shape could be seen everywhere—teeming in baskets, rendered and then sealed with wax in jars, floating with ice chunks in punch, transformed into costumes, cut out from painted wood and affixed to streetlights.

  Winston and Alberta were watching a group of young crooners from the Women’s Auxiliary perform a medley of songs sure to make a grandmother’s eyes glisten with nostalgia. Their demure white dresses were set off by green string bracelets that sprouted dangling cloth berries. The singers had strolled onstage close on the felt-clad heels of the Valley Players, whose contribution to the day had been the rousing final act of the little known Shakespearean tragedy, Strawmlet. Scampering about during the parade, the Players had promoted themselves—a miracle of self-improvement—as the world’s first strawberries performing in an Elizabethan drama. The audience had hooted and shouted good-natured insults when the red, man-sized Polonius came on stage; once the swordplay began, though, everyone in the crowd grew silent and watchful.

  As they feinted back and forth, Winston studied the Players’ backdrop. Painted who knows when and touched up over the years, the wooden wall depicted a berry farmer’s paradise: the fantastically verdant and fertile Valley overflowing with strawberry fields. Granite mountains had metamorphosed into giant strawberry mounds capped by creamy peaks; a grand rainbow arced from one side of the valley to the other, all the while fighting the laws of nature, composed as it was from scads of the celebrated red marvels.

  The mural was set up year after year and its fanciful vision never failed to elicit comment. Today, Alberta had wondered aloud about how badly the trots would course through the citizenry of that fairy tale kingdom. When they had bumped into Doc Carter, she’d asked for his professional opinion about a diet composed of nothing other than strawberries.

  “You wouldn’t get scurvy, that much is for sure,” he’d smiled, “but the lack of red meat would have you as weak as a lamb in no time.”

  Strawberries abounded, but it was the spectacular weather that was common currency. June was fickle: every man was aware that a furious downpour was as likely as not. Tents and tarpaulins were ready and available, and gave no one satisfaction. It would be better to head home than crowd together dripping wet and irritable in a dank tent. Yet at noon no hint of clouds near or far gave pause for an anxious thought. It was neither scorching nor wet, and proclamations about the fineness of the day stood ready on the tips of myriad tongues.

  Loud applause and a few shrill whistle bursts followed the lament of stoic Fortinbras over the dead berries now strewn on the stage floor. After the Players bowed, the master of ceremonies—wearing a flower-garlanded top hat and a tuxedo coat with tails—wandered out to announce that a band of fiddlers would be setting up soon. His words gave the audience impetus to mill about.

  “It’s a grand day for the Strawberry Citizen’s Derby, isn’t it?” Alberta was peering westward into the sky.

  Doc Carter nodded. “Couldn’t ask for anything better.”

  “I thought of the ‘Citizen’s Strawberry Festival Soap Box Derby Day’ while brewing my tea this morning. What do you think?”

  “It’s a bit of a mouthful. I’d vote for choosing just one. In a pinch, Citizen’s Day would be my pick.” Carter took off his sunglasses and shielded his eyes as he spoke.

  “I’d choose it as well, though I have heard Cameron McKay say that he believes it smells of communism.” Winston had already heard Alberta’s idea; they’d invented ludicrous names for the day as they walked toward their customary vantage point in fron
t of Klein’s Delicatessen on 1st Avenue.

  “Yes, well, he sees Russian infiltrators as often as I see sore throats.” He cleared his throat and rolled his eyes.

  Winston thought that the Bend’s social calendar was becoming positively Roman with its summer celebrations. The miscellany of holidays was unprecedented. In the staff room, Winston had overheard some claim the festivity was simply an outpouring of euphoria, patriotism that had naturally bloomed in response to the losses and upsets of the War. Others—Cameron McKay vociferous among them—hinted darkly that it was actually a tiny, desperate finger in a dyke holding back the flood of economic decline; everyone in town lamented that the flats and hills on the south side of the river had long surpassed the Bend’s berry output. Bend farms had never really recovered from the disastrous flood of ’48, and the Japanese, who ran so many of the successful berry patches, took their enviable farming secrets with them when the government relocated them to the hinterlands following Pearl Harbor.

  Lately, the Soap Box Derby had eclipsed the Strawberry Festival. It attracted zealous parent-chaperoned contestants from near and far; tourists loaded with cameras came all the way from Portland, Spokane, and Coeur d’Alene. The Record claimed it was a bonanza for business. Winston thought the true nature of the festival would sort itself out soon enough. More and more, though, strawberries did seem to belong in the past.

  The derby finale—coming after countless heats and rounds that Alberta and Winston were not fervent enough to watch—was the cap of the day, announced with a gun shot at four p.m. after all the musicians and performers had completed their programs on the downtown stage. They grumbled about the derby and routinely vowed to take their leave after the entertainment on 1st Avenue. There was simply nothing to the sport (“It’s no better than watching a tire roll down a hill” was Alberta’s refrain) and once the final race ended—it took about one minute from hilltop to finish line—the imposing crowd jostled and pushed in its eagerness to return home. The Wilsons preferred the look of the day a few years back: the Strawberry Pageant and its crowning of the Festival Queen had been the day’s big draw, followed in the evening by the Strawberry Social. Auctions, contests, stage performances, and the Strawberry Dunk had come in between.

  Their taste was passing out of date, and they acknowledged it as being a whiff of nostalgia. The editor of the Record—a blowhard of a man fond of forecasting the rosy future of the Bend—had called for the Derby celebration to be spread out over an entire weekend. It was difficult to organize all the volunteers for a single day, he opined, and three days would also mean a greater volume of business. There was no shortage of outsiders, it would seem, who would travel for hours to the Bend to watch boys steer rocket-shaped vehicles down a moderately steep hill. Winston was of the opinion that the craze for boys in dinky racecars would fade as well. By contrast, Citizen’s Day would last as long as the Bend possessed citizenry.

  Now as always, the loud, spangled parade inaugurated the Day’s festivities. Subdued in comparison to last year’s centennial parade, it was again led by the mayor, who sat cross-legged on the hood of his Ford while his wife sat behind the steering wheel and waved. Close behind them marched the high school’s band, playing their usual handful of tunes that included the Viennese Waltz, Blue Moon Over Kentucky, and snatches of the national anthem. The lithe players on the River Bend City Sikhs volleyball team walked steadily—keeping one gleaming white ball aloft—and on the occasion of their coach blasting his whistle the men broke into patterned steps as complicated as quadrilles; six men on the Flood Prevention and Emergency Committee frolicked with inner tubes wrapped around their waists, bumping and rebounding with Fool silliness; harnessed by ropes like dray-horses, a platoon of fathers pulled Soap Box Derby contestants; wearing matching scarlet bathing suits and intermittently passed between the shoulders of six brawny men in masks, two platinum blondes held up signs advertising their professional wrestling bouts at the Clear Brook arena the following day; a dozen workers from the Eddy Match Company—the sign for their company made wholly from matchsticks glued onto plywood—tossed out tiny matchboxes from their truck; Rotary Club members clowned, while behind them unsmiling war veterans in uniform walked in formation and stopped every few feet to salute the clapping crowd; and, on the Buckerfield’s flatbed, dolled-up ladies sat on hay bales and threw fruit-flavoured candies wrapped in golden cellophane. The Women’s Auxiliary and its outpouring of feminine industry—Irish lace, German dirndls, Ukrainian embroidery, Indian saris, and Chinese robes—drew Alberta’s applause. “A veritable United Nations,” she exclaimed.

  The parade closed with another flatbed truck, for Anglo-Am Cedar Products. On it, a clutch of men stood in front of a cedar shake hut; holding chainsaws and shake-splitting axes, they stared down at the thick line of people along the curb with cold eyes and expressionless faces.

  Once the Anglo-Am men had passed, the freed spectators milled on 1st Avenue, amused to annex a territory ordinarily reserved for automobiles. Watching the miscellany of townsfolk, Winston was struck by the memory of Dickie asking him about his fetching get-up as though he’d recently arrived from a dustbowl Okie settlement with a piece of straw stuck between his teeth. The nerve of that man! What authority did he have? Winston had read enough literature to understand that city sophistication had long been pitted against country simplicity. Indeed, for eons, their faults and strengths had been simplified and exaggerated, so that they became flattened symbols, cartoons no different from those preposterous professional wrestlers, The Strangler and Mr. Marvelous, evil and good; as though any matter could be so cut and dried.

  Winston imagined that for certified city dwellers such as Dickie and company, ridiculing country ways might be as habitual a response as taunting was to Alberta upon seeing a jumpy travelling salesman at the door. That attitude must be merited, after all: the country bumpkin was a universal figure of fun. And he felt such disdain from time to time. Likewise, he supposed that Delilah Pierce would venture cynical, superficial, and cruel if she’d spent an hour or two with the gang at the Bamboo Terrace. She wouldn’t be wholly in error, either.

  Winston squinted his eyes, imagining he could see the essence of the woman walking before him. His vision blurred and he bumped into the man next to him.

  “Pardon me,” he said, “this is some crowd.” The man nodded. Winston thought the stranger had likely come to the Bend for the derby.

  He directed his attention to his mother and Doc Carter, whose youthful feet had moved them a few paces ahead. Winston squinted again for a moment. It was hopeless; there was no single property that defined those two as belonging here. And if he looked at himself with objective eyes, he was certain he’d encounter a bubbling stew of properties, each of which might be considered a country or city attribute. That would be the same for each and every man, woman, and child on 1st Avenue.

  “Winston, you’re dilly-dallying,” Alberta said, breaking him from his reverie. “Come join us so that we can find a good view at the bandstand.” She clapped her hands together. “Chop chop.”

  The band onstage was a quartet that featured a plain chestnut-haired woman dressed in a strawberry print calico who could belt out a tune. She sang a pair of mournful ballads about love—won then lost—before turning the stage over to the musicians. They broke out with a polka for the nimble-footed.

  Alberta stood between Doc Carter and Winston. She pointed across the still sparsely populated field of dancers—farmers and their wives in their Sunday best were always the first to cut a rug—so that her companions could not help but see her precise target.

  “There’s Delilah Pierce. Look how she’s swaying. I had no idea she was such a romantic.”

  “Yes, Mother, that’s Delilah.”

  “She’d appreciate your asking her to dance, I’ll bet.”

  “From one of the town’s eligible bachelors, no less, a true honour,” Doc Carter chimed in with a smirk.

  “The bachelor librarian and the widowed
Social Studies teacher. Now there’s a picture. That’ll get tongues wagging, you know.” Winston could feel himself being corralled by decorum.

  “Let them wag. What’s the harm? You two are a tad old for a shotgun wedding, anyway.” She smiled at her impertinence.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Mother. What’s one dance, after all?”

  Doc Carter joined in with their patter. “And one good turn deserves another, madame. Will you do me the honour?” He bowed slightly, the gesture’s sincerity flecked with mockery.

  “I will gladly partake when they play the next waltz. That polka is a tad quick for these old pegs, though.” She gave her thigh a slap.

  “Very well. I’m going to fetch us some punch. Would you like strawberry? Or perhaps strawberry?”

  “I’ll take strawberry, please.”

  “Winston?”

  “I’m fine, Doc, but thank you for asking.”

  Doc Carter turned toward the refreshment booth next to the stage and walked along the unmarked line that separated the dancers from the spectators.

  “Well, Mother, it’s my turn to brave the crowd.” Winston nodded at Alberta and started toward Delilah Pierce.

  O[ctober 19]59

  As he approached the house—its glass-flecked stucco dappled by fluttery cottonwood leaf shade—Winston reminded himself to drag the garden hose to the hydrangeas that stood like wilting regimental guards on each side of the Manor’s front steps. This Indian summer was taking its toll. He walked to the side gate to check in on Alberta. At this time of the year, he’d complained to her, she practically lived out of doors. It was no surprise now to find her hunched over like a seasoned strawberry picker in what she called her vegetable patch. Winston preferred to think of it as the acreage.

  In past seasons, she’d joked that she had no choice, that the garden demanded its Lebensraum and that she was powerless, the hapless instrument of its infernal design. Now, with the exception of a rectangular strip of lawn running alongside the house, vegetables, herbs, and flowers sprouted everywhere, coaxed into the peculiar shapes and alliances by Alberta’s singular logic—marigolds running in parallel rows with carrots; zinnias and tomatoes intermixed promiscuously, all bordered by purple-leafed sage; towering hollyhocks with cucumbers sprawled at their heels; weedy dill competing with fronds of overgrown asparagus dotted with red berries; beauty pageant contestant dahlias left by themselves to proclaim their poise and beauty.