All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  She’s so weary. If only she could talk with Bernadette. Bernadette is very smart. She knows about babies.

  “Bernadette has no trouble getting Kyle to sleep,” Mother Day told her. “You just have to be regular with Walter, Regina. Feed him at the same time every day and put him down at the same time. Get him on a schedule.”

  The baby is crying where she left him, in the middle of the living room floor.

  Regina looks around the room. Empty boxes are stacked against the wall and soiled diapers are piled in a heap, waiting for the washer. The Christmas tree still stands in the corner. It’s beginning to slump.

  Dear God. What time is it?

  “Now, don’t forget,” Mother Day said when she called on the phone. “The ladies from the church will be at your house at noon sharp. Be a dear and tidy up a bit, will you? Do you have enough tea bags?”

  Regina had been holding Walter then, jostling him in her right arm, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder. “How many will there be?” she asked her mother-in-law.

  “Oh, I don’t know, dear. Lillian Mayberry, Jeanette McCarthy, Jetta Coughlin, myself … Three, four, I suppose, no more than five.”

  “No more than five,” she repeated.

  “The ladies are so looking forward to seeing little Walter. Of course, they’ve all seen Kyle several times now, but never Walter. Bernadette has had them over for tea three times now. You’ll have him up and dressed?”

  The baby was getting fussy and Regina felt a headache coming on. “I’ve got to go, Mother Day.”

  “Of course, Regina dear. You won’t forget to tidy up, will you? I hate to be such an old nag, but you know Lillian Mayberry as well as I—and really, dear, it’s not good to leave trash lying about. Attracts flies.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Sully? Oh, he’s—no, he’s—he’s the brother of a lady I work with.”

  “Ah, yes.” The navy man smiled. “That’s where I’ve seen you. At the mayor’s office.”

  “Yes.” Regina smiled. “I work for Mayor Winslow.”

  “Good man. An old friend of my family.” The navy man smiled. “I’m sorry. How rude I am. My name is Robert Day. Lieutenant Commander Robert Day, United States Navy.”

  “Oh.” She couldn’t stop blushing. “I’m Regina Gunderson.”

  “What a beautiful name. Is it Danish?”

  “Swedish.”

  Lieutenant Day flashed that pearly grin at her. “I knew you were Scandinavian the moment I glanced across the room and saw you sitting there. You’re so fair, you hardly have any eyebrows.”

  Regina stumbled awkwardly, nearly tripping over the man’s feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a terrible dancer.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It was completely my fault.”

  What was the music they were dancing to? Sinatra? Tony Bennett? She could never remember, but then something fast by the Four Seasons came on, so Lieutenant Day had escorted her off the dance floor, his hand on the small of her back. They headed over to the bar and he bought her a glass of wine. She drank it quickly. He ordered her another.

  “So what do you do for Mayor Winslow?” Lieutenant Commander Day asked.

  “I’m just a secretary.”

  “I’m sure it’s exciting working for a politician.”

  She laughed. “Oh, not so … I just—”

  His eyes were twinkling at her. “I imagine you get to see all his secret political papers and the like.”

  Regina had to look away he was so handsome. “Oh, no, I just type letters.”

  “Come now. Working for a big politician like Mayor Winslow must be very glamorous.”

  She laughed again. “Oh, no. It’s just a job. I’ve been there almost eight years now.”

  They returned to the dance floor when something slow came back on. Regina was feeling heady from the wine. Lieutenant Day pulled her close to him and whirled her around.

  “What were you saying about not being a good dancer? You’re a regular Cyd Charisse.”

  “Oh!” Regina’s face burned. “No, really, I’m not—”

  He gave her a quick dip then pulled her back up to him and kissed her lightly on the nose. She was too stunned to say anything.

  “Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, Ginger Rogers—baby, you’ve got ’em all beat.”

  “Really?”

  “You could’ve been a Broadway dancer.”

  She laughed. “Well, I was a singer once—”

  “Well,” said Robert Day, “that settles it. I’ve got to see you again.” He lowered his face very close to hers. “Because, baby, I want to hear you sing.”

  How was Regina to know then what she’d find out later? That the Days weren’t old friends of Mayor Winslow. That they were Republicans, and the mayor was a Democrat, and they weren’t friends at all, that they hated each other. How was Regina to know that the books she showed Robert would contain evidence of the mayor’s embezzlement schemes? How was she to know that taking those books home with her would ultimately lead to the mayor’s resignation?

  That’s why he asked me to dance. That’s why.

  “I’ve got to focus,” she says. “The church ladies. It’s almost noon.”

  They’re Catholics. Oh, how Mormor had hated Catholics. Papists, she’d called them. Roman idol worshippers. As a girl, Regina had always been a little afraid of Catholics, with their statues and incense and all that muttering in Latin. But now she was one of them—at least on paper, because Mother Day had said it was the only way Robert could marry her. And Robert had to marry her, Mother Day insisted. After all, Regina was having his baby.

  The same baby who keeps screaming now, who thrashes its little arms and legs in the middle of the living room floor. Regina picks at dried egg yolk on the kitchen table. It’s getting under her fingernails. She sits down on a metal folding chair and pulls her bare feet up to look at the soles. They’re black.

  “Really, my dear, you need to keep the floor clean. It’s unsanitary. When I was your age I already had two little babies and they could eat off my kitchen floor.”

  Regina closes her eyes.

  “It’s my duty, Regina. There’s a war on. I’ve got to go.”

  She had gripped the lapels on his blue navy jacket. “But what about when I have the baby, Robert? I’ll be all alone.”

  “I can’t do it for you, Regina,” he said. He was smiling. A joke. Of course he couldn’t do it for her. Her body was swelling up. She was sick every morning. Soon the baby inside her would be forcing its way down through her insides. It would spread her open, rip her apart, so it could make its way into the world. Robert was right. No one could do this for her. She had to do it all by herself.

  This is what happened when men touched you.

  She hears Rocky screaming in agony. She had sat outside the room at Aunt Selma’s house where her sister had had her baby. She remembers how Rocky screamed and screamed and screamed, until finally the doctor had to knock her out. Even still, after all that, Rocky’s baby had been born dead.

  But not Regina’s.

  Walter is very much alive. He lies there crying his heart out in the middle of the floor.

  “You’ve got to be brave now,” Robert said as he left her. “Can you do it? Can you be brave, Regina?”

  She puts her hands to her ears to block out the crying.

  What does he want from me?

  “Isn’t he precious?” Mother Day had said after he was born. “He looks just like my Robert. Don’t you think so, Regina dear?”

  Regina stands, moving into the archway between the kitchen and living room. She looks down at her crying baby. She wants to tell Mother Day that he isn’t so precious. He’s hateful. He cries to spite her. To spite all the agony she went through bringing him into this world. This goddamned world that sends fathers off to fight Communists and makes mothers take care of babies all by themselves.

  Why had she let him touch her?

  “
Would you come back to my room with me,” he had breathed in her ear, “before I head off to face certain death in the jungles of the Mekong?”

  And then they’d had to get married. Mother Day was adamant about it. Insisted that Regina quit her job, leave her little apartment in Dogtown, abandon the church Mama had loved so much.

  Little Walter continues to cry on the living room floor.

  “Stop it!” Regina screams, but the noise only worsens.

  He’s all red now, Mother Day. He’s shat his pants, too. Does he look like Robert now?

  Lillian Mayberry had had a grandson who drowned in the backyard well. Bernadette had told Regina the whole tragic story. “Oh, it made everyone cry when it happened,” Bernie said, bouncing her boy Kyle on her knee, Kyle who never cried, who smiled and hiccuped and went to sleep whenever she lay him down. “Don’t you remember it, Regina?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, maybe it happened while you were away in the hospital.”

  “It was a spa.”

  “Well, whatever. The story of the poor little Mayberry boy was all over town. The poor child had fallen down there one afternoon while he was playing. His mother was only a few yards away, hanging clothes on the line. The whole town came out for that funeral. All the ladies were crying.”

  Regina can see them, hear them.

  “Such a sweet little boy.”

  “A darling.”

  “An angel.”

  Regina’s not so sure.

  Maybe Teddy Mayberry was a monster. Maybe his mother pushed him.

  Regina’s looking at little Walter, but she’s thinking of Lillian Mayberry’s grandson down there in the well, his face all blue and puffy.

  “You should feed him at the same time every day, Regina, and get him on a regular schedule. Otherwise, the crying will never stop.”

  The crying will never stop.

  “Wait, don’t.”

  “What’s the matter, Regina? Don’t you like it?”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Robert just laughed.

  “I’m—I’m not what you think—”

  He laughed again. “So it’s not your first time? As if it’s mine. Just lie back, Regina. Just lie back.”

  “No, don’t—”

  “I said lie back!”

  Her baby’s little fists are clenching the air. Regina’s fists are pounding her temples. Her eyes are closed and she’s leaning against the refrigerator listening to him cry in the other room.

  I can’t do it for you, Regina.

  “I—I’m so tired,” she had said to Mother Day last week.

  Her mother-in-law was fretting over the crib. “We never had colic in our family. Were you like this as a child, Regina dear?”

  Little Walter begins shrieking, the loudest cries yet. How can so much noise come from so little a creature? Regina suddenly pounces on the radio and turns it up full blast. She sings along with Martha and the Vandellas. “There’ll be music swaying and records playing—”

  Her baby screams higher to compete with her. She sings as loudly as she can. “Dancin’ in the street! Oh—wohhhh!”

  “Oh, my dear, one other thing. The Christmas tree. You know it really should have come down by the Feast of the Epiphany. You know how the ladies from the church can be.”

  Regina’s trying to remember what time Mother Day and her church ladies are supposed to be here. She can’t see the clock. The crying is getting in the way.

  “Robert,” she’d begged, “let me go stay with Bernadette.”

  “My brother and his wife have their own baby, Regina. You can’t keep running to them.”

  “Or—then—someone—”

  Aunt Selma? No, Aunt Selma and Uncle Axel were angry at her for marrying a Catholic. Uncle Axel had called her a Papist whore. Betty? No, Betty had never forgiven her for what happened to Mayor Winslow.

  “Now, Regina, stay right here,” Robert had said to her. “My mother can help you out, but you’ve got to start learning how to take care of yourself. You have a child now, Regina. You’re just going to have to learn to be responsible for the first time in your life.”

  She’s back to standing in the doorway of the living room. The Christmas tree slouches in the corner. It’s brown and almost bare, its needles covering the floor. Boxes lie scattered underneath its branches, brightly colored paper crumpled in heaps. The baby screams as he writhes among the needles.

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can, Regina. Take care of my son. Tell him all about me. Tell him I’m making our country safe for him to grow up in, that I’m off making sure he can grow up proud and free.”

  Regina walks over to the baby in the middle of the living room. He screams at her feet. She looks down. For a moment the child opens his tiny blue eyes and stares up at her. She stares back, silent.

  “Regina, dear, you cannot allow that child to sit in a soiled diaper. That can cause severe irritation. Imagine what it would be like to sit in your own bowel movement for hours at a time.”

  Can you do it? Can you be brave, Regina?

  Otherwise the crying will never stop.

  She starts to inhale and exhale very fast, pushing herself over to the window, where she looks out and sees nothing: no day, no night. There is only whiteness, a cold whiteness, like snow gusted up against the window. There is nothing outside. And in here: there is only the crying.

  Why won’t he stop?

  She staggers back to the tree, brushing against a lifeless branch. Dry brown needles scatter to the floor.

  “Concentrate on the task at hand,” she tells herself, remembering what they had taught her at the spa. “First thing. Take down the tree …”

  The baby cries in uncompleted, tearless gasps. His face is purple.

  Regina removes one, then two, ornaments from the tree. She wraps them carefully in newspaper and places them in a box. But then she drops the third ornament, a silver angel, the only one left from the ones Mama used to hang. She’d brought them over from Sweden. It smashes on the floor.

  “No,” Regina says.

  There’s a moment of stillness so deep, so terrible, even the crying cannot penetrate.

  And then she turns, swinging her arms, whipping off icicles and stars and hurling them across the room like a firestorm in the night sky. She stomps on top of old red balls, delighting in their fragility, the ease with which they crumble into dust under her bare feet. She ignores the pain, the sharp glass piercing into the soles of her feet. She lunges at the tree, pushing it over. It falls on top of her baby. He screams.

  “Let me cry, too!” she shouts at him. “Let me cry, too!”

  She stares down at her baby writhing between the bare brown branches of the tree, his purple face scratched and bleeding.

  “Oh, he’s so small,” she says softly, almost a whisper.

  So small.

  She looks over at the couch.

  And the pillows so big …

  Her hands are in her hair again. She’s screaming. Mother Day is pushing her, shoving her hard, screaming back at her. The church ladies are picking up the baby. Now they’re handing him to Mother Day.

  Go ahead! Take him! Raise him! Turn him into another Robert!

  Mother Day jostles the screaming baby in one arm and dials the phone frantically with the other. Regina flops down onto the couch and puts her hands over her face. She sits that way, not moving, not speaking, not thinking, until the crying has finally stopped.

  It’s left to Lillian Mayberry to sweep up the broken glass.

  21

  THE SECRET

  “You act as if you think she killed him.”

  Wally wants to punch the son of a bitch. Has for years. Wants to haul off and smack him, right here, right at his desk, right in his big, fat, foul-smelling face.

  “What I think doesn’t matter,” Sergeant Garafolo tells him, shrugging, and goddamn it if he isn’t eating again, this time a jelly donut, with powdered sugar all over his mustache. “The navy thinks
he skipped town to beat an assault charge. Can’t argue with Uncle Sam.”

  “But still you’d like to search my mother’s house.” Garafolo stares up at him from his desk. “Yeah. I would.” “Okay.” Wally’s seething, and it shows. “Let me get this straight. Despite the fact that my cousin nearly bludgeoned some guy to death, despite the fact that he has a long history of disciplinary problems in the navy, despite the fact that he could be facing a long stretch in jail, you still think his disappearance is totally unconnected to all that. You think, instead, that his senile old aunt who can barely lift a bag of groceries killed him and stuffed his body in a closet.”

  A small, tight smile dares to move across Garafolo’s face. “All I said, Walter, is that I’d like to do a search of her house. That’s all.”

  “Why haven’t you gone after the girlfriend? I tell you, she was—”

  “We did go after her. And indeed there was a report from her father that she was seen driving off with somebody who fit the description of Kyle. The father couldn’t swear it was Kyle in the car, but it might have been.” He shrugs. “Probably was.”

  “So there. You’ve got it.”

  “But when the girl was questioned in the city, she claimed it was her cousin she was with. Some cousin who’s helping her get a job as a model.” Garafolo sighs. A glob of jelly drops from his donut onto whatever official form he’d been reading at his desk. “Fuck,” he says, dabbing at the jelly with a napkin.

  “Look,” Wally says, “I’ve been in my mother’s house several times over the last few days. If he was there, dead or alive, I’d have seen something.” A terrible memory shoots through his head. “Smelled something, if he was dead.”

  “I’ve signed off on the case,” Garafolo tells him irritably, not looking up at him, still wiping jelly off the document on his desk. “I’ve turned it all over to Uncle Sam. If I had my way, sure, we’d be doing a search of your mother’s house. But the navy thinks they know the answer.”

  “Well,” Wally says, “in this case, they do.”

  There’s nothing more to say. He stands there watching Garafolo make the stain on the paper even worse.