Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  The use of the word home to describe this strange, unfamiliar place that she and her husband visited so irregularly was not lost on her, but she didn’t comment on it.

  “You and Jackie are the cutest couple,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Absolutely the cutest couple since Bud and Geri themselves,” Viv agreed.

  “Of course, you’re not a thing like Geri,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Well, not in the way you look,” Jess agreed. “You’re a tall, stately gladiola and she was a peppy little pansy, but you’re both beautiful and hardy flowers. The beauty is a nice thing, but you’ll need that hardiness being married to that man of yours.”

  The last statement caught Claire by surprise. Her reaction was apparently evident in her face.

  Viv shushed her sister. “Jess doesn’t mean anything by that,” she said quickly. “It’s just those Crabtree men are thoughtful and too sensitive by half. Why, I’ve been widowed three times and if you added up the musing of a lifetime for all three of them, it wouldn’t make half a typical day for a Crabtree.”

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s true,” Sissy said. “I thought your Winslow was a very thoughtful fellow.”

  Viv shrugged. “Maybe so. He thought about sex a lot. He couldn’t do anything, but he did think about it.”

  The three old ladies cackled. Sissy shyly covered her face as if she didn’t want to be caught giggling about something so risqué. Claire was smiling, too.

  “Seriously,” Viv said. “We’re not criticizing no one, no how. The Crabtrees are peculiar men, but in a very good way. We love Jackie and Bud and we dearly loved J.D., God rest his precious soul.”

  All three were now nodding solemnly.

  Jesse spoke. “I sure to the world could never understand why, if the Good Lord had to take one of our boys, he didn’t take Julie instead.”

  “Sister!”

  Aunt Jesse was undeterred by the other women’s scolding. “I’m just speaking aloud what we’ve all wondered in our hearts.” She made eye contact with Claire and spoke more quietly. “Julie is our sister Cleata’s boy,” she said. “Cleata was violated as a young girl and Julie was the rendering of that. Our sister kept him and did right by him as best she could, but she was never close to him like her other children.”

  Sissy piped in. “Julie run off to the army at seventeen with just the purpose to get himself shot, we were thinking. He did a full tour of that Vietnam and didn’t get so much as a scratch. So he came home and became one of those hippies. Lord, that was a sight. And for all his good looks he could never keep a woman for more than a week at a time. Never had a child.”

  “And there’s J.D., who everybody loves,” Aunt Jesse said. “The light in his parents’ eyes. He had a new wife and a baby on the way. And he’s just lost to us. It’s beyond all understanding.”

  “Not that we’re not glad to have Julie back,” Viv interjected. “He’s a fine man, honest and upright and good to his mama till the day she died, no matter who his father might be. But sometimes a person just wonders what in the world God must be thinking as he’s picking and choosing.”

  “Well, I just wish He’d quit picking this family altogether,” Jesse said. “Opal’s first husband, Melville, is buried in the Hurtgen Forest. We just got Bud back from the Pacific by the skin of his teeth. J.D. came home in pieces. And now our little freckled-faced Corbin is over in that Middle East desert somewhere. I’m about ready to beat my sword into a plowshare, if you want to know the truth.”

  Viv was shaking her head. “But you can’t stop men from going,” she said. “No matter how hard you try. Bud and Geri would have done anything, said anything, to keep J.D. from risking his life.”

  Claire frowned. “But didn’t J.D. go into the service because he wanted to be just like Bud?”

  Each woman nodded and sighed. “More’s the pity,” Aunt Jesse said. “J.D. was always more of a Shertz than he was a Crabtree.”

  “What do you mean?” Claire asked.

  Viv gave her sister a look as if to suggest that she’d spoken unwisely. But before she had a chance to change the subject, Aunt Sissy piped in.

  “I guess it’s part of growing up as a big family crowded together,” she said. “We Shertzes don’t get a thought passing through our brains that we don’t share with anybody who will listen. The Crabtrees are secretive.”

  “Secretive?” Claire was surprised at the word.

  “No, not secretive,” Viv corrected. “Discreet is a better word for it. The Crabtrees keep to themselves. Oh, they talk and are sociable and all, but that’s all for show. Their real feelings they keep locked up inside. You can never be sure what’s really going on with them.”

  “J.D. hadn’t figured that out yet,” Jesse said. “The poor boy died without understanding a blessed thing about his father.”

  Bud

  I awakened cold, my body was cold, my face was burning up. The sky above me was bright blue. It wasn’t the blue of the sky above Catawah. It was South Pacific blue, a beauty so brilliant it was almost unbearable. I lazed in it, smiling. And it was quiet, so quiet, except for the persistent little hissing sound. Water sloshed around my waist.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” I screamed aloud.

  Wrestling with what was left of the raft, I managed to find the leak again and put my finger over it. Cupping the other hand I began bailing furiously. If I lost the raft, I was doomed. If I lost the raft, I was dead. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to go home to Geri, to go home to J.D., my baby boy.

  That thought caught me up short. In the raft, I hadn’t thought a thing about Geri, and my baby boy wasn’t even born. I had survived. I had come home.

  It was just my dreams again. More of my bad dreams. Wide-awake a man could go on, he could live his life. But in dreams the water was never far away.

  I’d survived the water and gone back to the war. I’d been a country boy in a gun turret before I was shot down. Afterward, I was a warrior in flight. I didn’t want to be anywhere but in back of my guns. They sent me to New Zealand for an R & R, but I was miserable. I wanted to be in the air. By the time I mustered out, I had a sleeve full of hash marks and a chest full of medals. I wasn’t some kind of hero. But I was comfortable in my turret and confident about my job. I would have been willing to continue doing it forever.

  When the Japanese surrendered, we all celebrated. But I was in no hurry to leave. I had nowhere I wanted to go. After the war ended, we ferried POWs back to the States. It wasn’t fighting, but I felt good about it. In late 1945 they disbanded our unit. I volunteered to stay in the Pacific. With communists coming out from behind every bush and trouble brewing in Korea and China, it seemed sure that things would heat up again. So I asked to stay. I’d found my place in the world and I wanted to hold on to it. I maneuvered. I stalled. I transferred. I pleaded with the brass that the air force was my home. But they relieved me of duty.

  It was the dreams that did that, too.

  All the missions I’d flown, all the kills I’d made, they didn’t mean much after the war. Everybody’d flown, everybody’d killed. But I was the one who woke up in the middle of the night screaming.

  “Shell shock, combat fatigue, whatever you call it, it’s incurable,” the flight surgeon told me. “Go home and learn to live with it.”

  I’d gotten used to following orders, so I took a train to Tulsa. I walked from the station to the bus depot and then got on a Greyhound to Catawah. Though I had little reason to do so. I knew there was nothing left there for me.

  In late ’44, Mama had written to say that Mrs. Stark, the grocer’s wife, had passed away and that she’d agreed to marry the grocer. I read her letter a half dozen times, finding it completely unbelievable.

  Geri’s letter arrived a few days later explaining my mother’s whirlwind romance.

  “Mother Crabtree has finally decided to get out of bed and get on with her life,” Geri wrote. “But it took a world war to do it.”

  The next day I sent Mama
and Stark a card expressing congratulations. And I wrote to Geri and told her I was getting an annulment.

  I’d talked to the CO and he’d made me talk to the chaplain, but they both agreed that since I hadn’t slept with her, I could be done with the marriage without much fuss. By the time I got back to base in the States, all the paperwork was in order. I was out of my marriage almost as quickly as I’d gotten into it.

  “It’s no big deal,” the company clerk assured me. “Since V-J day, I’m requisitioning more divorce forms than toilet paper.”

  Geri never wrote me again. Somehow I expected to hear from her. I expected her to argue that I was reneging on our agreement. She’d kept her part of the bargain, I should, too. In my spare time I practiced my arguments for why she had to let me go. But I hadn’t heard one word from her when I stepped off the bus in Catawah at three-twenty in the afternoon of Wednesday, October 10, 1946.

  The afternoon was not a bit cold, but the smell of autumn was in the air. It was so familiar and yet so surprisingly unexpected. There had been no autumn in the South Pacific. Not even in San Diego, where I’d mustered out, had there been any sense of fall. But it was here in Catawah. The leaves on the birch trees that lined Main Street were bright yellow and the various oaks and ashes and maples in the city park were just as vividly colored.

  I swallowed hard. There was a kind of catch in my heart that I hadn’t expected. All the guys talked of home, but except for Geri’s letters I thought it meant nothing to me. Now that I was in my hometown again, it did seem somehow to be my hometown.

  The bus stop was in front of lyler’s Drug Store. I stood there for a moment taking it all in. Then a voice called out to me.

  “Who ere ye, soldier?”

  I glanced up to the sidewalk bench where a trio of decrepit old men watched passersby. They were all squinting, trying to make me out. I recognized all of them. I’d once stolen a huge orange pumpkin from Clevon Ramsey’s patch. Ned Gunderson was Orb O’Neil’s grandfather. And George Collier had been sitting on that bench spitting tobacco on the day I’d left town.

  “Crabtree,” I answered simply.

  I’d begun to think of myself as a one-name guy. Bud was some young fellow that I’d been before I’d left here.

  I turned to walk up the street.

  “You’re headed the wrong direction,” Gunderson called out. “Your mama’s at Stark’s grocery.”

  I knew that, but I kept walking. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. I was still trying to get a handle on how little things had changed. I felt like I’d been away a lifetime. But it was as if in Catawah no time had passed at all. I walked down Main Street to the highway and headed toward the house. The walk did not in any way dispel the sense that I’d just stepped back in time. The streets were the same. The houses were the same. I recognized the cars at the gas station. The path beneath my feet was so familiar I almost felt I should be dragging my duffel bag behind me on a little milk wagon rather than hoisting it on my shoulder. Even the stray dogs looked to be the same mutts that had been around before I left. I was totally different. Catawah was just the same.

  Despite appearances, I knew that there were changes. For one thing, it occurred to me that our house might not be my home anymore. For all I knew Mama might have sold the place. Or Geri might still be living there.

  As I made my way along the path at the side of the highway, I considered my options. Mama and Mr. Stark would probably offer me a place to stay for a night or two. If they didn’t, I was not too proud to rent a room. But if I had no home in Catawah, I had the perfect excuse to go elsewhere.

  Elsewhere had always loomed large in my aspirations. But now elsewhere was a specific place with a familiarity that both drew and repulsed me. Elsewhere was the Pacific. If I couldn’t live there, then I must live here. Otherwise, I felt I would just simply be lost.

  I was not doomed to be lost, however. Not long after I turned off the highway on to Bee Street, I could see that the house seemed empty, perhaps even abandoned. As I drew closer, I realized it was the one place that seemed very different. When I’d left, it was a stark place, a bit shabby and badly in need of paint. Back then it looked, in fact, like what it was: a property kept up by a young boy, resentful of the work and ungrateful for the good fortune of a roof over his head. As I approached it now I saw that it had been well tended. The remains of summer flowers were evidenced in beds cut out of the sparse lawn. The rickety floorboards on the porch had been replaced and everything had a clean coat of whitewash. It looked like somebody’s home. I couldn’t remember the place looking so fine since before my father died.

  I was stunned. I was puzzled. Then I reasoned that this must have been how Stark courted my mother. He undoubtedly paid fellows to come down here and fixed up Mama’s house. In gratitude she’d felt obliged to marry him. It was a very plausible explanation. I could hardly resent it, but somehow I did.

  I stepped up to the front door to find it locked. Undeterred, I reached up and ran my hand along the top of the doorframe and sure enough, the key lay up there. I unlocked and walked in, dropping my duffel inside as a doorstop.

  Immediately I had the answer to the question of someone’s living there. The house had been closed up for some time. It was dark and dusty and so stuffy it was almost airless. I began pulling back the curtains and opening up the windows.

  The sunlight revealed the aging furniture I remembered very well. The overstuffed horsehair sofa was still in its place, though the rip in the arm had been sewed up. The spindly rocker where, on her good days, Mama sat, was still next to the fire, though the cushions for the seat and the back were changed to a dark blue fabric. The blue caught the colors in the newly braided rag rug that now covered a broad circle of front-room floor.

  I sat down on the arm of the sofa and just stared at the room. It wasn’t that I was lost in thought. I didn’t have any thoughts at all. I’d made it home. It was something I’d never intended. Beyond that, I knew of nothing else to do. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t summon the will to make my next move.

  Then I heard the creep of a car coming down the road. The pop of branches and rustle of trees let me know that it had pulled up into our driveway. Wearily I got to my feet.

  I glanced out the front door, but didn’t recognize the car. Still, I stepped out onto the porch, certain that whoever it was, they were here to see me. When the driver stepped out, I knew Mr. Stark immediately. He hurried to open the passenger door, but Mama didn’t wait for him. She thrust it open with her own strength and came hurrying toward me arms outstretched.

  “Buddy!”

  She embraced me, burying her head against my chest as sobs escaped her throat.

  “You’re home,” she declared. “You’re home and safe.”

  She was shaking with emotion. That was when I first realized how numb I had become. I could hardly summon a response.

  “Don’t cry, Mama,” I told her. “It’s all over. It’s all over.”

  She would hardly release me long enough to catch her breath. Stark handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes.

  He offered me his hand and I shook it. “Welcome home,” he said.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “Now, Dumplin’,” the man said to Mama, “turn off your waterworks. Your boy is here and he’s fine.”

  Mama nodded, but continued to cry, offering an explanation broken by sobs.

  “When I didn’t hear…and I didn’t hear…I just didn’t know what to think. Geri told me…she was sure you were back in the States…out of harm’s way, but as time went on—”

  My own callousness shamed me. Why hadn’t I put a penny postcard in the mail? I could have even called Stark’s grocery. I could have let her know where I was and what I was doing. I didn’t even think about it. I’d thought, if I’d thought at all, that she was busy with her new life. It never even occurred to me that she might worry.

  “You shouldn’t have been scared,” I told her. “You know the a
rmy would let you know if something happened.”

  “That’s what I told her,” Stark said.

  She waved away their explanations. “I just don’t think I could go on if something happened to you, Buddy,” she said.

  I didn’t doubt my mother’s sincerity. And not being able to go on was a condition with which she was quite familiar. I’d just not expected her to feel that way about me.

  “Let’s go inside,” I suggested.

  Stark, who had brought some groceries, went out to the car to get them while I settled Mama into her rocking chair in the front room.

  “I was afraid you might have sold this place,” I admitted to her. “With the housing shortage and all, I figure you could get a pretty penny for it.”

  She looked surprised. “It’s your house, Buddy. It’s the only inheritance you’ll ever get. I wouldn’t sell it for anything.”

  I nodded, but the idea of it being mine didn’t fit perfectly with my perspective on things. I’d convinced myself that there was nothing left in Catawah for me. And now I was confronted with the facts that I had a mother who loved me and missed me as well as a pretty good house on a nice piece of ground. More than a lot of G.I.s I knew could brag about.

  “Well, the place looks really nice, Mama, the way you and Mr. Stark got it all fixed up.”

  Her brow furrowed, momentarily puzzled. When the truth dawned on her, she shook her head and laughed.

  “Oh no, Bud, I didn’t fix up this place,” she said. “I’ve just got no knack for even seeing what should be done, let alone doing it. It was Geri that made the place so nice.” Mama smiled. “I thought you were out of your mind hooking up with her, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders and none of those Shertz girls are afraid of work, I’ll sure give them that.”

  “Geri fixed up the place?” I was completely dumbfounded.