Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  A very tall man, dressed in a dark suit and tie, was standing at the window, staring out at the rain-soaked backyard. He turned quickly when he heard our footsteps. It was Reverend Vaughn from the Congregational Church.

  “I hope you don’t mind me butting in like this,” he said. “I don’t usually go where I’m not invited, but Mrs. O’Brien said there was a bit of a crisis.”

  “Oh.” Why hadn’t she warned me he’d be coming today?

  “She thought you might like to talk.” I didn’t say anything, and he uttered a high, nervous laugh. “Of course, you don’t have to,” he added quickly. “It’s up to you. It’s such a personal thing—who you can talk to.” He had thinning blond hair and pale skin. A pink blush appeared on his neck, just above his carefully knotted tie, and spread up under his chin. For once, someone was tall enough to give me a view under the chin.

  “Would you like some tea? Or would you two rather be alone?” asked Mrs. Vernon, sounding as if she were trying to arrange a romance.

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” said Reverend Vaughn.

  I shook my head. Silence tortured the three of us for a few seconds. Then the minister said, “The rain’s let up for the moment. Would you like to take a walk?”

  “Okay.” I grabbed a jacket, and he ushered me out of the house. When he walked, his long body moved in sections, all elbows and knees and angles. I thought of Ichabod Crane.

  We started left toward the square, then turned up Prosperity Street, crossing to the other side to put a little distance between us and the commotion of the KTD. “It’s so sad,” he said, gesturing toward the factory. “What’ll Katydid do if it shuts down?”

  “Mrs. Vernon was wondering the same thing.”

  He stopped for a moment and stared at the side of the building, a plain brick wall, lifeless except for an occasional grime-encrusted window. The machine noises, so comforting at night from a few blocks away, were a bit too insistent this close. “When I first moved here,” he said, “I thought it was funny to find this factory, a huge factory, right in the middle of town. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t build it outside someplace, where it wouldn’t be so close to so many homes. But then I asked someone about it and he showed me how stupid I was being. When they built the factory, it was outside of town. The houses came later, when people moved here to be close to the place they worked.”

  “That must have been a long time ago.” It was hard to imagine the neighborhood as ever being new. It had nothing of the flat, cleared look of, say, Pine Tree Manor, the subdivision they put in west of town a few years ago.

  “Oh, the place was built half a century ago, long before you were around,” Reverend Vaughn said. “Your mother’s parents might remember.”

  “My mother’s not from around here. She’s from Wisconsin. She only moved here when she was seventeen.”

  “Really?” He started walking again. “Why’d she come?”

  “It had something to do with a man,” I said—and wished immediately that I hadn’t. Bunny deserved more privacy from me than that.

  “I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”

  We turned off Prosperity and walked down Sylvan Street. Though the sky had lifted somewhat, rain had been falling, off and on, for the last few hours, and we had to dodge puddles on the sidewalk. A few other people were starting to venture out—a woman dragging an empty, wire cart down to the Piggly Wiggly; Janie Wilson and a friend, probably on their way to Osgood’s Store to buy candy; Jack the mailman, a deflated mail pouch over his shoulder. He nodded respect-fully when he saw the minister.

  Reverend Vaughn started asking questions—nothing serious, questions about school and friends, about books I enjoyed and movies I liked. He was gentle and shy, as Mrs. O’Brien had said. When our eyes happened to meet, his gaze would dart away. He seemed boyish to me, and he listened to me with a kind of boyish enthusiasm, getting excited when I mentioned something he cared about. At least he seemed to be excited—I guess you can’t really know. At any rate, I liked him. Walking beside him on the sidewalk, I had a strange sense of my own presence. I couldn’t stay out of the way. We kept bumping together. I’m so clumsy sometimes, so big. He’s much taller than I, and yet I seemed to be occupying more space than ever. A breeze brushed by, lifting my hair, and for a moment, I was afraid the odor of chlorine, picked up in my morning swim, was floating off me, like bad perfume.

  After a while, a sprinkle opened up again, and we ducked into the little park behind Sylvan Street Elementary School. The playground equipment was glistening with raindrops, but there was a small shelter there, just a roof supported by four thick wooden shafts. We sat at the picnic table underneath. Someone had carved “Elvis” in big, fresh letters in the tabletop.

  “Do you like him?” Reverend Vaughn asked, pointing to the name.

  “He’s all right. I kind of like his voice. It’s so deep.”

  “He’s not too loud?”

  “Maybe a little, but you get used to that.”

  “And the wiggling?”

  “I’ve never seen him. I just hear him on the radio.”

  “He’s supposed to be on Ed Sullivan this fall.”

  “I know. I’ll try to watch.”

  The minister’s legs didn’t fit easily under the picnic table, so he stretched them out to the side. Drops of rain dripped off the end of the roof and splattered on his polished black shoes. “I don’t know about Elvis,” he said. “He has an effect on people. He does something.”

  “He’s a fad,” I said.

  “Yes, but why? Why him?”

  “He’s different. He sounds different.”

  “It’s more than that. I’ll give you an example, but you mustn’t repeat this because it involves local people.”

  I nodded.

  “A few weeks ago, a father in the church came to me. He’s not a man who comes to church often, but I knew him, and I knew his family. I thought he was a nice enough guy, a well-meaning person. But he wanted me to do something for him. He asked me to talk to his daughter. She’s about your age, maybe a year or so older, and it seems they’d been fighting about her Elvis records. He said he’d put up with all the Johnny Rays and Bill Haleys and whoever else she brought home, but Elvis the Pelvis was it. She was too involved. Elvis had to go. Well, I told the man I’d be happy to talk to his daughter, but I couldn’t tell her to get rid of her Elvis collection—that was something they had to work out between themselves. So he told me to forget it. He was actually sort of irritated with me. He wanted me to be the enforcer.”

  The minister reached down and swept some drops of rain off the tops of his shoes. “So that was it,” he went on. “But then, last week, I happened to run into the man on the square, and I asked how things were going with the Elvis records. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I just went in there and broke them all. Smashed them over the bedpost.’ ”

  “Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine who the girl was, but no one I thought of fit.

  “Yes,” the minister said. “It’s sad. And, you know, he’s not an ogre. He’s ordinarily a normal guy, with a good job. I asked him if he didn’t think his solution was a bit extreme, but he was adamant. ‘No Elvis the Pelvis under my roof.’ ”

  “He’s just a dumb singer.”

  “I know, but the truth is, it’s not Elvis the man’s frightened about, it’s his daughter. He’s scared to death of her.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, not really—but, yes, really. He’d never admit it, of course, but I think he is. It’s the same with a lot of people. They’re scared to death of you kids, and I can’t figure out why. I mean, these things come and go—the fads, the music, the clothes. But today people act as if the world is so delicately balanced that as soon as one little piece of it changes, the whole thing will collapse. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure.

  “They get very defensive, very irrational.” He shook his head. “Smashing up a record collect
ion. Now the girl will probably want to marry Elvis, not just listen to him.”

  “Maybe she should buy the records and hide them.”

  “Maybe she should marry him. Teach her old man something about psychology.”

  I laughed. “That doesn’t sound like a minister’s advice.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Look at the New Testament some time. There’s a lot of vindictive stuff in it. Jesus was very sure He was right.”

  “Wasn’t He?”

  The minister spread his arms. “Depends on who’s counting.”

  Across the asphalt playground, a custodian was washing the inside of the windows in the elementary school. I’d spent six years there—seven, including kindergarten. Now, the corkboard walls had been stripped clean for summer, all the colored paper and crayon drawings and looping streams of alphabets were gone. The classrooms were barren and cold.

  “Do you and your mother ever argue like that—over things like record collections?” Reverend Vaughn asked.

  “No. We argue sometimes, but not over things like that.”

  “I’ve never actually met your mother,” he said. “I’ve seen her, of course. She’s very beautiful.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s quite young, isn’t she?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Thirty-five,” he repeated in a soft murmur. “How does she feel about this, about the trouble you’ve got into? Has she talked to you much about it?”

  I hesitated, trying to guess where this was going. “She’s depressed,” I said.

  He smiled weakly. “I can understand why.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she get mad at you?”

  “Not really. She doesn’t really blame me. That wouldn’t be like her anyway. Bunny doesn’t really separate between trouble that happens accidentally and trouble that happens because somebody did something wrong. Either way, she figures, the thing is just trouble and something more to worry about.”

  “That’s very unusual.”

  “I guess so.” Even as I said it, though, I realized I was talking about the past, about Tom’s problems. This time, Bunny was full of blame—for Mrs. Benedict, Sergeant Tony, Judge Horner, for the whole town of Katydid. This time was different.

  Reverend Vaughn watched my face. “You’re very close to your mother, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of people your age have difficulty with their parents, they go through a kind of rebellion.”

  “I know. I could never understand that. A lot of girls hate their mothers. With me, it’s just the opposite. Bunny’s my best friend, she’s the one I think about all the time.” Something about the minister invited me to open up, and I started gushing about Bunny, about how funny she was, how pretty, how good to me. I went on for several minutes, until I noticed that his expression had changed, and he was looking at me in dumb, blank wonder. I stopped talking abruptly, but my words hung in the air, gonging like some stupid bell. Now he knew what a child I was. I felt crushed.

  After a few seconds, he reached out beyond the roof with his palm open to the sky. “The sprinkle’s stopped,” he said. “Maybe we better head back.”

  Walking beside him, I hurried to keep up with his long strides, but I didn’t talk. My stupid mouth, I kept thinking. My stupid, stupid mouth.

  In front of the Vernons’ house, he said to me suddenly, “I hope I wasn’t too nosy back there. Sometimes I get a little carried away.”

  “Oh, no, not at all.”

  “You got so quiet. I was afraid I’d scared you.”

  “No, no.”

  “Would you like me to come again?” He stood above me. I looked into his face.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, tomorrow—about three,” he said. “It’s a date.” He turned quickly and strode off, hurrying down Oak toward the square.

  TEN

  “How was the Champions Banquet?” I asked Bunny the next day. We were sitting on folding chairs in the Vernons’ backyard.

  “A lot of drunk men,” said Bunny. “It gets worse every year.”

  “Did they have movies again downstairs?”

  “No, thank God. Some of the wives nixed that.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the teacup she was using for an ashtray. “But there was a fight. Shorty might get fired.”

  “Why?” I was shocked. Shorty had been there as long as I could remember.

  “Well, you know John Dent? He and this other guy, Mel somebody or other who was John’s guest, decided to have a divot fight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “See who can make the longest divot.” Bunny lit another Lucky. She inhaled, made a face at the cigarette, and then stubbed it out in the teacup. “So, anyway, they went out to the practice green. They used irons. Each of them had three swings, and they went at it real hard. It’s amazing the amount of ground you can dig up with one club. Great big pieces of sod. They were kind of creepy looking, like furry green toupees or something.”

  “Didn’t anyone stop them?”

  “Are you kidding? Everyone went out there to bet on the winner. They made giant holes in the green. And then a couple of other guys decided to try it, too. The green was covered with scars.”

  “That’s awful.” A piece of loose tobacco was stuck on Bunny’s lower lip. I reached over to brush it off and startled her. Already, I could tell, we were losing that ease with each other that comes from living together.

  “Anyway,” Bunny went on, “in the middle of this, Shorty comes out. He takes one look at what’s happened to his practice green, all that beautiful, soft grass torn up, and he throws himself at this Mel guy, who’d lost the contest but was still taking divots. Shorty just flew at him and knocked him right over. Started hitting him, too, though he’s about half Mel’s size. Mel was so drunk I don’t think he knew what was happening. Then everybody else jumped in and broke it up, but they were really mad at Shorty—you know, getting on him about doing that to a guest and everything. Now they’re gonna take it up with the executive committee.”

  “Poor Shorty. What’d he do?”

  Bunny shrugged. “You know Shorty. He just kind of growled and crawled back to his room. He was out there today trying to patch up the green. They had it all roped off.”

  “That’s so sad. All he ever wants to do is make the grass grow better.”

  “And then it usually dries out on him anyway,” said Bunny. “This is the greenest he’s had it in July in a long time.”

  The folding chair was tippy and uncomfortable, so I plopped down in the grass. Stretching out, I caught sight of Dwayne, around the corner of the Vernons’ house. He was riding his bike along the sidewalk, staring back at Bunny and me. I waved and Bunny turned. “Oh, yeah, Dwayne was hanging around in front when I got here,” she said.

  Bunny had changed clothes before coming over, and she was wearing a sleeveless yellow blouse with buttons down the front. Her arms were beautifully thin and white. She doesn’t care about tanning, and this summer she’d had even less sun than usual. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “We’re supposed to have a session with Mrs. O’Brien tomorrow,” she said wearily. “All of us together.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “What more can we talk about? I’ve already given her the family history three times. Plus she’s collected all your records from school. And Tom’s, too. She knows all about him. She knows more about us than we do.”

  I plucked at the grass. It had spurted up with the rain, and the lawn was looking a little shaggy. “Sometimes I think I bore Mrs. O’Brien,” I said.

  “Congratulations,” said Bunny, without opening her eyes.

  The social worker had visited that morning, but instead of staying to talk, she’d taken me out shopping. She was thinking about buying a new washing machine, so we looked at models around town. She was remarkably diligent about gathering information, asking question after question of the salesmen. At Fanzone’s, for examp
le, she kept one salesman so occupied that customers were lining up. The salesman was a bald, nervous little man, and he started sweating through his shirt. He was too polite to move her on, even after it was obvious that she wasn’t about to buy something. Later, Mrs. O’Brien told me she thought the man was “shifty.”

  Bunny was quiet for a long time. Somewhere behind us, across the maze of yards and fences, children were laughing and yelling.

  “I hear you’ve been talking to that minister from the Congo,” Bunny said. The “Congo” is what she calls the Congregational Church.

  “He came to see me. How did you know?” I hadn’t mentioned him to Bunny, and, now that I thought about it, I wasn’t quite sure why. Ordinarily, I’m eager to tell her about someone new I’ve met.

  “I’m your mother,” Bunny said. “I’m supposed to know those kinds of things.”

  “He’s a nice man. He’s real smart.”

  “I’m not sure I like all these people pushing religion on you. Like this one here.” Bunny nodded toward the Vernons’ house. “Who knows what goes on out at that awful church of hers. Probably a lot of chanting and hocus-pocus.”

  “Reverend Vaughn isn’t like that at all.”

  “Well, he’s got his own problems,” said Bunny.

  Dwayne rode past in front of the house again. This time, he stopped. With his thin legs straddling the bicycle, he squinted at us, making a face.

  Bunny stretched and moaned. “Ohhh, I’m so goddamned tired,” she said. “Goddamned tired all the time.” She slid down in the chair, folding her hands over her stomach, dropping her chin to her chest, stretching out her legs. There was something manly about sitting like that. She looked as if she were inviting someone to pick a fight.

  “Remember when I had scarlet fever?” I said. “Seeing you sitting there reminds me. It seemed like I couldn’t move, and you were always there.” I was six at the time. Bunny was scared to leave me alone through the night, so she had someone carry the easy chair up to my bedroom. She practically lived in that chair. I used to wake up and roll over at night to see if she was still there. She’d be asleep, but with her legs stretched out in that same masculine way, as if death would have to climb over her before it could get to me.