Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  Annie made Hoover build her a house, a house that would really be a place, so Hoover would know where he was. He seemed to, when the house was up. There was actually no reason for Hoover to go insane, because, unlike his father, he loved the aspects of his job. He loved clear water running through a clot-free pipe. He loved the wonder of nastiness rinsed and heaved forever out of sight; he loved the dribbling water replacing it in the bowl, loved the fact that water ran hot and cold; he loved thermostats. He adored digging down to a pipe, breaking it and dragging the mineral crud and roots from it, and watching the water flush through, spangling. He got high and witty watching that one day at twilight, and the slogan came to him, like a smash to Hoover’s mind: “The Plumber’s Friend.” That was how he advertised his firm in the Clarion Ledger for twenty years.

  Hoover went jumping hard and erect to the gingerbread house with yellow towers, driving home with his first ad in his pocket. On Titpea, he saw the house lit up in all quarters; knew his gentle Annie waited in one room. He knew he must have the wings full of baby sons, soon. Annie opened the door for him. He took her body. He was almost gagged by the odor of flowers and her supper of spaghetti, which was very new then, but he blasted her; bucked her upstairs, and perished hunching her to the point he didn’t know when his orgasm was, but kept on hunching in a trance. He knew she was frail as a peaflower. He liked to snap her and squeeze her.

  Oh! Certainly, how much, how so, so much Hoover wanted to be both a plumber’s friend and a father, every evening. And Hoover Second came, finally, hurting more than any of those books told, because those books were written by men in some far-off tower, and they couldn’t know. The intern leaned on her stomach. Great Lord! The nuns held her. They giggled. “He’s looking for another baby, dear.”

  There could be no doubt that Hoover was. Again and again, and something was wrong. Not just that Mother Rooney couldn’t have any more babies, as she couldn’t, but Hoover’s desire to be both a plumber’s friend and a father was destroying her. The dearie loved plumbing, but he got to see less of it every year. The company was big and he had to employ many men in the expansion. He could do nothing but sit at his desk and inventory and buy and sell, in his business suit, and he didn’t have the old man’s love for pure money. How many times, she asked, how many times did I see him leaning over the toilet bowl smiling at the water? How many times did he deliberately break some rod or other in the tanks at home, or rip something out that wasn’t brand new, so he could drive down to the place in the night for a part? How many times did he look at me as if I was brand new too, and had worked once, then fagged off?

  Bless his heart, he had to remember the night of what we both thought was Hoover Second’s right vigorous making, the night he came home with his first ad in his pocket. Oh, I knew in my heart without doubt that was when, because the pains of the entrance and the exit almost matched up. Pity his name, poor Hoover had to remember that he had had a little dirt from the pipeline on his breeches that night, and that he stunk some from heaving away and watching the men work. Lovely, wronged, one-son Hoover Rooney, heaving away and mating me, he had smeared my legs with mending compound off his ankles. Charming Hoover, who began showing up late in twilight absolutely negrified with pitch spots and sweat beads and his business suit done in forever with gunk. I knew what the dear was doing, that he was leaving the office at noon to parade out on one of his jobs among his plumbers, who probably didn’t want him out there. He peered into the deepest and filthiest work going, careful to lift a pipe for some Negro, stumble against the roofing tar, for luck and because he desired so to be a plumber’s friend. He came in manly and proud of his day’s work’s grime, looking like he wanted to break my back. Through the years he tried different combinations of filth and ruined bundles of suits, for luck, but he had no more with me. I had shoved out the boy that I had, for mercy’s sake, and I tried to tell him so with my hurting eyes. It would not take—get in that silly position till Christ came!

  Then Hoover went insane, yes, long before Hoover Second was killed and the house began tilting. In the middle thirties, when he was losing money every day, he almost gave me up and turned on the house. He sat on the dainty loveseat in the lobby when he came in, and soiled that, then lay back in the studio upstairs on my Persian divan with cornets and red iris on it, rolling the suet off his breeches until the pretty pattern was blurred; slept silently away in both wings with his rusty cheeks hard on the linen, for I could see the half a face Hoover left behind in the mornings, the big fans of palm grease where his hands had known my guest towels, and the wallpaper of clover flowers, but especially on my lovely fat pillows, everywhere. Oh, Hoover, you were late for supper again, hung down so heavy with dirt. You were private and sulky and unhungry. You were so ugly and angry when I opened one of the doors on you, as if you’d been found out in your love’s rendezvous. Pretty soon you had the house back like the cottage on Road of Remembrance, where you could’ve grown agricultural products on the floor.

  You had a place again, dearest, and I had none, but only Hoover Second that you almost forgot, wanting Third through Four Thousandth. I loved, loved. What could I do, though? Little Hoover. I see him most of all for his feet and little toes, hot and dimpling from the bath water, and his steamy curling hair, his tiny wet marks on my rug. It was always him just coming from the water that I . . . like a fish you pull up, wondering what? And there the marvelous slippery rascal is, breathing something else than you breathe. Christ, the horror as he grew up and I saw he did, he did breathe something else. Oh, in the earlier days when Big Hoover attacked me in gangs, every one of them more mindless and slaughtering, hurting, ahhhhh; when he draped on me afterward, nicking his dirty fingernails together, and he was heavy as the island of Ireland and had just tried to mash the whole country into me, and he would smoke then, roughhousing his cigarettes and letting them fall in pieces all over the bed. Well, I see too Hoover Second nestling by me after his bath, and think that my little baby, who didn’t even know he had his man’s business between his legs, was left to me when I was almost too tired to look at him and love. But I did, and I cupped his infant’s peabud in my hand and held the softest most harmless unhurting thing in the world, and fell asleep in beauty.

  I watched it stalk and grow too, and shiver—that funny time when he was open and proud with it and had just found it out. We called it Billy. Nuzzling against my side, he would want to know which neighbors had Billy. He asked if the air, clowns, toy soldiers and Cream of Wheat had Billy. I told him no, and we divided the world like that, with Billy and no Billy. He would kid me then, and ask about rocks, mud, the Jitney Jungle, underwear, as he hiccupped with the jollies. I guess he was telling his first racy jokes.

  Sure enough, the days came so very soon when he hid his boyhood sprout from me, and it brought on a sweet pinch in my heart to see him finger away and snap up his pants with a rude look when I burst in on him unawares in the bathroom. There were two hurting worlds for me to endure. Big Hoover, coming at me with his never-faulty club with the head of an apple as he stands red and greasy as an Indian of naked insanity; his world, so slow and grinding. Little Hoover, slipping away just out of hand-reach in all the rooms of my big house, so I seem to see only his heels in the cruel scuffed leather of his shoes. And he was gone, a teenager and suspicious.

  I was snagged, and only my unwanted hands to look at.

  Came that afternoon quiet as a bird’s breath when the world itself blew up, and all through the house there lay newspapers with inch-high letters on them about the war. Hoover dropped them on the floors and they filled up our Plymouth, so you made a dusty crackling sound climbing in upon the seats. We drove to St. Joseph’s School. There he stood under that oak near the storm fence and the basketball court, in a ring of friends, talking quietly. All of Jackson was so quiet and breezeless. We couldn’t hear the boys, but I know it was about the military situation. You thought they should be in the classrooms, that they were hatching something illegal and
were hoodlums. Hoover Second was tall and not so pretty now, and in his large wool pants he looked skinny and just a little stupid. He noticed us; his eyes were black and hard. He felt called on to spit, and he did. He waved to his friends. Then, now, he was up in the left wing packing, and didn’t want me near him, I knew, because the war idea made him even more a man. Oh, I thought he was through, though, and I was innocent and walked up to kiss him, crying already, and hung on his small bones for half a minute because I knew I had it coming to me.

  It was mine too, that three-second vision of Hoover Second partially blind without his steel glasses and naked on his feet, when I bumped the door to his room open. He held his underwear in one hand and his other hand rested in the groove below the belly where it joins to the legs; he was pink from his bath. And yes, he was tenderly awful with his coiling wet hair, his dim eyes that felt toward me at the door. Who are you, Mother? he seemed to say. He stepped quickly into his underwear and abided my weeping weight, rushing upon him. “What is it?” he says. I wanted to say, “This is it: that you, something like you, should have been the one, that I was made for somebody like you; that what I see of your muscles and hair and your crumpled stalk tells me somebody like you would have been kind and right, that I’m crying now for how safe the world is with your skinny tenderness in it, how delicate its girls must be to deserve you, how lucky they’ll be, how Europe seems like a rough metal planet to eat you on its cold soil or in its foggy air. Please, please, don’t you meet any of Hoover’s nieces in Ireland, who would eat you just as quick as the Nazis, and you watch out for, you step around Ireland and Irish like the plague. Oh, Hoover, baby, you hide in the tiny dark unfindable corners and ditches and clouds and cupboards of Europe, and do come back to your mama and she will find you a girl.”

  I do not believe all the terror Hoover Second was supposed to be in his airplane, because I know he couldn’t see to do it; that he unloaded a record amount of bombs on German cities and set them afire; that he flew unofficial missions to “grind them to powder.” He was so happy in the photograph with his crew. I believe that he was shot at unmercifully, and that he came back a hero with his legs full of brutal powdered lead, dug up in Europe’s cold earth. Big Hoover told me once, trying to twist the knife over my not being pregnant—we were out of church and behind Mrs. Pitcaithly with her brood of boys and saw them wait in the cold weather for a taxi—“A mother is the sum of her children.” Very cute and salty, Hoover, but you will wish to explain to me how this charming saying applies to me all the way through. You tell me Hoover Second has gone off as a soldier, and I would say, all right, that’s me, I would’ve gone off too. Then you tell me Hoover Second was a war hero, risking himself, going beyond orders in an airplane called the Ugly Fierce Sparrow, to put the bombs in Hitler’s lap, and I say again, all right, this might be an undiscovered hero fool part of his mama. But tell me, Hoover, if you were pushing on, what part of me was it that came back to Jackson wounded but out of the crisis, and tinkered together a wreck the Civil Air Patrol gave him for twenty dollars, that Piper thing which pooted and fluttered over Jackson and swooped over the towers of this very house, then proceeded to drop here and there—on the grounds of the capitol building, on the governor’s mansion, on St. Thomas’s, on Millsaps’ campus, on Main Street Jackson, on the football game in Clinton—white unspooling rolls of toilet paper that he had stolen out of the basement of St. Joseph’s High School; and enjoyed the scandal and the protest that the Clarion wrote up about it, until they found out who it was: a veteran with a rich sense of humor! Then the schoolchildren ran out on the playgrounds at lunch period, hoping hoping hoping that he would drop a roll of rump-wiperage down their throats; and the whole town, running out to caress the paper, to find the real spool dropped from Jackson’s man of the air. What part of me ran to the airport every morning, couldn’t even finish his cup of coffee, like he was still on some schedule? What act have I done at my wildest is there that would remind you of Hoover Second’s crash and irresponsible burn on the tennis courts of Mississippi College, when there were miles of flat unpopulated fields all over the county for him to choose from? Find me somewhere in the sum of the parts of that burned airplane, dearest, and think again on that charming saying “the sum of her children.” The little coeds, with their rackets, were telling the police how Hoover Second had come down on them repeatedly, how they had to scamper, and the preacher students were still pronouncing on the wreck when we arrived, two hours later. I sat down on the courts and I was never in a more foreign land than on the scorched tennis courts at the scene.

  We die, Mother Rooney thought. Even me, in this cold hall, by accident. But God—Goddamn it, yes! for you, Hoover, to hike off with a broken heart and die of self-inflicted plumber’s pneumonia when the house did tilt, it seems, a week after Hoover Second’s crash. But I know it wasn’t. I got three more mooning years from you, who never looked at the boy in his life except as the first number of numbers that didn’t come. For you to die, Goddamn it, for you to be the one, with everybody saying: “Sure. Completely understandable. He’s borne that grief.” All your dirt started piling up in the back of the house, didn’t it? Your heart was broken, it had been stretched so much when the men with the jacks couldn’t do anything about the tilt. Godarooney, Goddamn. Thanks for not omitting to fill the bathroom with colorful phlegm when you went. Thank God we didn’t live on together and dredge up memories of false romance from our past. Don’t think, dear, that I missed those scrubby melancholy kisses of old age.

  Mother Rooney had never taken even an aspirin, and now she was harsh and proud.

  She heard Harry Monroe’s English Ford outside, with its drizzling ruptured halt at the curb. It was a ghost again, she thought. But she thought of how Harry Monroe had cured her of being afraid every October when the fair came and when she thought she heard something down the hill in back calling her—Mother! Mother! Mother! Harry took her out in the backyard and proved to her that what she was hearing was the men getting the cattle out of the trucks, and when they didn’t move right, the men would lay on with sticks and shout, “Motherfucker!”

  “It’s just the Four-H boys saying motherfucker,” Harry explained. Mr. Harry Monroe thought he was being such a clever learned adviser to her. But from Bobby Dove Fleece she knew Mr. Harriman Monroe wasn’t making it as a medical student.

  Harry Monroe was really there in the doorway.

  He called, “Mother Rooney?” He wore his sophomore lab coat as a cape on his shoulders; he had a fat little book in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. He was handsome in an old public way. His face was not smooth. He had wanted to play the horn more than know all he was forced to know at the med center of Ole Miss.

  He found her. He saw Mother Rooney regarding him. He hit the light switch, and he saw her cartoon yellow hair in its old bun, her bunions shining through her stockings, and the white, blue-rosed dress.

  Mother Rooney crooned, “I’m gone, Harriman. You pull off your clothes and let me get a look at you, baby. You were the one, but you always just hurt me. I deserve this. Don’t you be shy. I walked in on Jerry Silas completely naked one night. He was so muscular. He was a wonder. I have seen young men. You aren’t the first. Don’t you be ashamed, Mister Monroe.”

  Harry Monroe said, “I know you saw Silas. He’s on the porch. I’m going to take his ass tonight. Don’t you lose control now.”

  “You ran my boys away. You ruined this house.”

  Mother Looney, he thought. He shut the door and locked it to keep Silas and the other fellow out. “I’m the only one that did care a little,” he said to her. He knelt by her and saw the brooch buried in her and the blood dripping down the old ravine of her breasts. He didn’t want her to see him blanch. He thought she was in shock. “I brought you this bottle of wine. I saw Silas at the Dutch Bar and we thought we’d surprise you tonight. You must take up drinking.” He peered at the wound some more. “I brought this book, the Merck Manual. You can read in it and
tell your own disease by the symptoms. You can advise the doctors.”

  Aw hell, Monroe thought. The bottle of wine was a third drunk, and the Merck Manual was an old one he’d got out of the pharmacology trash basket.

  “You were always ugly to me. Is Jerry Silas out there? I want to see him. I have a crush on him,” she said.

  She’s with it. She’s not in shock, Monroe thought.

  “I’m not going to let them in,” he said.

  Two men were outside the door, falling on the porch and yelling to him.

  “You don’t like Silas, Mother. We all knew he was . . . he lifted weights. Didn’t just lift them. The weights possessed him. He sent off for special underwear and for red oil to rub on his body. He bought a camera that he could activate from across the room while he lay on his bed, flexing. He’ll kill himself when his stomach muscles start sagging.”

  Oh, but they didn’t sag, Mother Rooney thought, when I walked in on him and he was naked and stiff, but twinkling in his eyes so joyously that it was clear he couldn’t hurt a woman in all his health, either. He would have been tender, friendly, out-of-doors with you. Oh, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, but where was he and where was his pasture? And, yes, he restoreth my soul, but all I got was used up. And, yes, his rod and staff, they comfort me—and they would have, but where was he, and where was the comfort I was entitled to? My cup runneth over with hurt-juice.

  “Mr. Silas wanted me to be thirty again,” Mother Rooney said.

  Monroe leaned on the stairwell with his head in his hands. He yelled out to the porch for them to shut up. He opened the Merck Manual and began turning pages.

  “You cannot like him. You cannot like any of us. We were the ugliest people as a group. Didn’t you see how marked out for losing we all were? Hammack, Worley, Delph. I sometimes wondered how all we shits got ganged up in this—this beautiful house. But especially you can’t like Silas. Silas breathes out a smell of broiler shanties and rotten pine, and he is always sweating. He’s lost his job at the music store, but he flourishes on, trying in different ways to prove that he is not from Fig Newton, Mississippi, that a certain type of mass-produceable chicken wasn’t named after his father.”