Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  Her brow furrowed with concern. “You had to kill people,” she said. “That could give any man bad dreams.”

  I might have left it there, but I needed to tell it out loud and her trust, her love, gave me that courage.

  “It wasn’t the killing,” I told her. “The killing was easy. It was the dying that was hard.”

  There was no change in her expression, not an iota of judgment, not the batting of an eye.

  “The man you loved, Geri,” I told her. “That man died out in the Solomon Sea in 1943. Everything that happened since then, all the kills I made, all the medals I won—those went to a dead man. That’s how I did what I did. I had no fear of getting killed, ’cause I was already dead.”

  Geri continued to look at me. I tried to look away, but she wouldn’t let me.

  “These last weeks I’ve not been making love with a dead man,” she told me at last.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You can’t tell me that you don’t feel alive when I touch you, Bud. This shadow may come back on you, but when you’re in my arms you’re alive.”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I admitted. “For those few moments it’s like the war never happened. You make me want to try to live.”

  Those words dangled in the air between us for long moments.

  “Do you know how I got you to love me?” she asked finally.

  I was surprised at the change of subject.

  “Wearing that tight red pencil skirt?” I suggested.

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “That was just the last straw,” she told me. “Every day of my life, every day since I was a kid, I pretended that you loved me. I walked like you loved me and I talked like you loved me. I even married you like you loved me. Each day it got easier and easier. And even when you said you didn’t love me, I’d gotten so used to pretending that you did, that I didn’t believe you.”

  She took my hand in her own and caressed it and kissed the knuckles.

  “Then one day, you did love me,” she said. “It was a miracle. But one I’d worked for, waited for, struggled for, for years. Sometimes miracles are like that. I wondered many times why it had to be so hard. Now I see exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s going to take a miracle to bring you back to life,” she said. “And I’ve already learned how to go about getting one.”

  I was skeptical.

  “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve already proved this works. Together we’ll pretend that everything is fine. We’ll pretend it every moment of every day. We’ll pretend that the war never touched us and that our life is normal. We’ll pretend we’re a regular couple. Nothing out of the ordinary about us. We’ll pretend it day after day and if we’re lucky, someday we’ll forget that we’re pretending.”

  I wasn’t sure her plan would work, but I cared enough about trying to make her happy that I had to try.

  The first thing we did was get married again. We meant it to be just a small, private ceremony in the Pentecostal church. The Shertz family showed up, which filled half the church. Old Dirty Shirts was widowed now and frail in both body and mind. His daughters and sons-in-law helped him to his pew, but he didn’t seem much aware of his location.

  “Daddy, this is Bud, you remember Bud don’t you, Daddy?”

  The old man looked up at me, his eyes rheumy.

  “No milk today, boy. Go on now, no milk today.”

  “At least he knows who you are,” Geri’s sister Viv said. “Even if he don’t know what decade he’s in.”

  On my side of the aisle I expected only Mama and Mr. Stark. But surprisingly Saffy and Jonas showed up. They were, Mama pointed out, my stepbrother and stepsister. And Berthrene came, as well. I was shocked to see her. I’d taken great pains to avoid her since I’d come home. Like facing the night terrors, I approached her and thanked her for coming.

  “I was there for the first wedding,” she said, laughing. “I could hardly miss the rerun.”

  Our first wedding had also been hers and Les’s. It couldn’t have been easy remembering that. I said as much to her.

  “The hurt of remembering those you’ve lost is not as painful as not remembering at all,” she said.

  She was undoubtedly right about that.

  The kids we saw nightly at the Jitterbug Lounge showed up, as well, which filled up the groom’s side of the aisle nicely. And all in all it seemed as nice and fancy and full of good will as any normal wedding for normal people. Geri and I pledged our vows of love, honor and fidelity once more. And this time I listened to her words and I meant my own.

  She wore a blue dress and pinned her hair up with a funny sort of beaded cap on her head. She looked young and pretty and happy. I had on my high school graduation suit, which was two inches short in both the sleeves and the trouser hem, and hung on me like a sack. I hadn’t realized I’d gotten so thin.

  People threw rice and everyone went to Mr. Stark’s house afterward. My mother had a fancy cake with a sweet candy wedding bell on top.

  It was official once more. We were Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree. And this time I wanted everyone to notice.

  Geri, always practical, always willing to make do with whatever she had, began our marriage not from the perspective of our problems, but rather from our opportunities.

  “You need to get a night job,” she told me.

  “Huh?”

  “If you can’t sleep at night, then you need a reason to be awake. You go up to town and see who needs a watchman or a booze runner or whatever kind of jobs people do at night.”

  “A booze runner?”

  “Well,” Geri said, with great seriousness, “it would be better to do something legal. But at this point any job would be better than pacing inside these four walls all night.”

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to pursue a vocation in crime. I began asking around. My willingness to work the night shift quickly became a positive. I got hired at the Catawah Daily Citizen, helping the typesetter and running the presses. Before the war there had always been a newspaper in town. And the bankers and merchants read it and the working men sometimes looked at the sports page. During the war, however, the news became something that everybody wanted to know, needed to know. Timbuktu wasn’t just a place you couldn’t pronounce, it was somewhere that someone you knew was hunkered down.

  After the war, the reading habit lingered. The G.I.s who’d seen the world were still interested in it. And the folks from the home front who’d kept up with the world for years now just couldn’t let it be. Circulation at the paper was up, which meant that advertising was up. And that meant the number of pages had to be increased, meaning more time and more hands running the presses at night.

  I showed up at deadline, 10:00 p.m., and worked until the paper was on the street, usually four o’clock or four-thirty. Then I’d walk home, climb into bed with my warm and rested wife and we’d play love games until breakfast time. I found it to be a near-perfect situation.

  Of course, nobody can stay awake night and day. Geri saw how comforted I was about being in the garden, so she got a cot and set it out under a tarp right in the middle of everything. I told her she was crazy, but the truth was, I could rest better out in the open like that, until the day got too hot.

  “You need a fan to keep the heat off you,” Geri said.

  I laughed. “Why that’d be perfect, Geri. You just get one of those big palm fronds like the slaves of the pasha have in the movies and you can just fan me all day long.”

  She laughed. “What? Are you trying to ruin my reputation as the meanest wife in town, making her poor husband work all night long.”

  Ultimately, I ran an electric line out to my tarp pole and pulled in a brand-new oscillating fan that kept me as cool as cucumber.

  Geri teased me about that, too.

  “I’m going have to plant pole beans real thick around your camp or the neighbors will start thinking you’re living the life of Riley.”

  Her reference to
the popular radio show gave me an idea. I dragged the radio out into the garden and plugged it in, as well. I played it all day long and it kept me from sleeping really deep. And without sleeping really deep, the dreams were less horrible and less frequent.

  In the late afternoon and evenings I did my chores around the house, patching the roof or painting the walls. When the water and sewer mains got laid down Bee Street, I dug ditches for my own lateral pipes and stole the interior portions of both bedrooms to put in an indoor bathroom.

  Mama was appalled. Although the Stark home already had indoor plumbing, Mama insisted that the room only be used for bathing.

  “It’s disgusting to use the pot in the same building where you eat and sleep!”

  Geri and I only snickered at her behind her back. We were young and progressive and the world was new. We were trying to be alive and that meant embracing change.

  Once I’d constructed the new room, I realized how much work the house still needed and I began to try to make our home a nicer place. I was pulling in good money and Geri could make a nickel stretch nearly to Tulsa and back. Our life together was good. The dreams had not gone away, but I was learning to live with them. And Geri was, too.

  Just before Christmas in 1949 we got some news that should have been expected. For a couple who went at it like rabbits, the news shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But I was completely caught off guard.

  “Pregnant? Are you sure?”

  Geri nodded excitedly. She was obviously delighted.

  I felt as if somebody had punched me in the stomach.

  “Dr. Mayes said that everything looks perfectly normal and I should deliver near the end of July.”

  She was smiling so brightly, looking at me so eagerly, I didn’t have a clue as to what I should say.

  “Well…Geri, that’s…that will be real nice.”

  I excused myself and promptly headed for the garden.

  Geri caught me before I made it past the kitchen.

  “You’re not happy about the baby?”

  “Of course I am,” I began, before surrendering to the relentless honesty that she expected from me. “I’m just worried that a baby will upset things. I’m doing better, but what if that stops. What if I get…what if I get in a bad way again. A child needs a responsible parent, not a…a damaged one.”

  “A child only needs people to love it,” Geri answered. “We’re not going to borrow trouble on this. We’re going to take it one step at a time. You’re going to be glad about this.”

  She was right. On June 30, 1950, Jack Dempsey Crabtree, Jr. was born at Prattville Memorial Hospital near Catawah. He had all the requisite arms and legs, ten fingers, ten toes.

  “He’s perfect,” I told Geri.

  “He’s beautiful,” she corrected me. “Just like his dad.”

  She was sitting up giving the baby her breast in the eight-bed maternity ward, our privacy provided only by a thin white sheet that encircled the bed.

  I ran my finger along the chubby pink cheek that suckled so greedily at his mother.

  “I don’t want him to know about me,” I whispered.

  Geri looked up surprised.

  “I want him to know everything about you,” she said. “How you are kind and hardworking, how you took care of your mama through your whole childhood, risked your life for your country and chose to love me, even if I pushed you into it.”

  I chuckled lightly at her little joke, but leaned closer. “I mean about the other thing,” I said softly. “I don’t want him to ever know about that.”

  She gave me a smile of reassurance. “Your son will know everything about you that he needs to know. And nothing that you don’t want him to know. I think that’s fair.”

  “Can we keep it from him?” I asked. “What if he hears me…you know…having a dream?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll make sure Daddy always gets to sleep in private.”

  The music began playing. I was momentarily startled before recognizing the tinkling ivories of “Pompton Turnpike,” my favorite Charlie Barnet tune.

  But, of course, there had been no music in Prattville that long ago. The music was here now, in this hospital in Tulsa where I lay connected to these tubes and wires. Here the music played at odd times of the day and night. I was getting sicker, feeling weaker. Was I just treading water, waiting for the inevitable?

  Sunday, June 12, 5:00 a.m.

  Jack awakened when the headlights of a car flashed through the bedroom window, followed by a thump on the front porch. He rolled over and wrapped his arms around his wife. She was warm and soft and sweet-smelling. She was also sound asleep. He feathered some kisses on her neck, hoping to wake her. They’d had sex the morning before. And since the birth of the twins, their frequency had really slacked off. But this was a vacation, sort of, he reasoned, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy themselves.

  No reason except that Claire wouldn’t wake up. He stepped up from neck kisses to full body stroking and got little response beyond a whining groan of complaint.

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart, are you awake?”

  Clearly she was not. Finally, he was shaking her shoulder. “Hey, sweetheart, it’s morning.”

  “Morning,” she responded finally turning into his arms. Her voice was still gravelly with sleep. She rolled over into his waiting arms and promptly fell back into sleep.

  Jack held her there, considering whether to continue trying to awaken her. In the darkness he could only see the contours of her face, but her breathing was so relaxed, so peaceful, he didn’t have the heart to rouse her out of that.

  He pressed a kiss on her forehead and disengaged himself from her arms as he slipped out of bed.

  In the kitchen he measured coffee by spoonfuls into the filter basket and then filled the machine with water. He waited for a minute to make sure the rich morning brew was dripping into the pot, and then he went out to the front porch to get the newspaper.

  The sun had yet to show itself over the eastern horizon, but the silver shimmer of predawn was illuminating the edges of the landscape. There were no sounds of traffic or neighbors, no leaf blowers or boom boxes. But he noticed that it was far from quiet. The sounds of birds in the trees was not hesitant little tweeting, but strong, insistent calls. He didn’t remember noticing the sounds of birds before. He frowned slightly as he tried to imagine why not.

  Water features.

  He realized instantly that in most of the backyards he spent time in, all that he’d designed, he’d gone to excessive lengths to ensure the constant sound of water. Whether it was a waterfall of rocks, the circulation from smaller pools at different levels or just the drop-shelf return of the infinity design, he made certain that the sound of water was as prominent in his layouts as the sight of it. That’s what pools were about. And it was important for the occupants of the house to be drawn to the pool. It was a part of the total sensory package. Swimming alone was not sufficient to give pools their allure. He’d always understood that it was much more complicated. To be successfully integrated into a house, the pool must be an asset to the theme of the decor as well as part spa, part Zen garden. It was not enough that the occupants of the house would want to show off a pool to their friends at parties, it also had to be as much about everyday relaxation and peace as it was exercise.

  Those were all good things. Until this moment, Jack had never considered what those positive experiences might be masking. Uncensored nature also provided a welcome respite.

  He went back into the house to get his coffee. He left the Sunday paper unopened on the kitchen table and instead returned to the front porch with his drawing pad under his arm.

  He seated himself in the old wicker chair and propped his feet up on the railing that he’d repaired yesterday. It still needed painting, but it was now significantly more sturdy. In the low light, he could hardly make out what he was sketching, but somehow he didn’t want to intrude on wakening the world around him. He b
egan working.

  Designing pools was an accidental vocation for Jack. After he and Claire had married, their disapproving parents had cut them loose.

  “If you expect to make decisions on your own,” Ernst had said, “then you’ll need to support your wife yourself.”

  Jack hadn’t offered even the slightest complaint. In truth, he’d been almost cavalier about it. Claire had a scholarship and he didn’t care so much about college. He figured that he’d get a job and she could continue in school. He took a full-time spot on a construction crew. But it didn’t take them long to figure out how expensive an education could be and how hard it was to stretch a workman’s wages.

  He began doing pool care on the side for extra cash. Cleaning and maintaining was low-paying, but Jack was working for himself. He could put in extra hours on nights and weekends. He taught Claire how to do it and they expanded the business further. It was a nice addition to his regular paycheck. He might have continued doing that, but one fateful Sunday one of his client’s neighbors asked advice on building a pool. The man wanted something special and hadn’t seen what he wanted in any of the stock structures from the local pool builders.

  Almost without thinking, Jack had offered to design and build it. And once he’d done it, Jack never wanted to do anything else.

  His pencil moved purposefully across the paper. As the morning light heightened he could see more easily, but the sounds retreated. The birds were still there, still whistling and singing among themselves, but they were joined now with the barking of dogs and the whirr of car engines up on the highway. Fortunately, the memory of the early hour lingered in his mind and translated itself onto his paper.

  The sound of the screen door caught his attention.

  “Morning,” Claire said.

  She was still dressed in her sleepwear, a pair of baggy pajama bottoms and a mismatched T-shirt. She hadn’t brushed her hair yet, and it was tousled and a little wild, giving her a surprisingly youthful look.

  “You’re up,” he said.

  “I smelled the coffee,” she answered, indicating the cup in her hand.