One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  It is a shame when a person loses the capacity to care.

  She had perfected several new mannerisms. He didn’t remember them, at any rate, though they now seemed habitual, ingrained. She would tip her chin up a little, the point of her heart-shaped face, and drop her lofty eyelids very slightly as if she had refocused on a far horizon. Then she would say something that had a formal, rhetorical cast to it. I should like to take him to task, she said of Carlton. I should truly like to do that. She also had a habit of hitching her skirt a bit so that her crossed ankles showed, and they were pretty ankles in pretty polished shoes.

  She crossed her ankles, tilted her head, dropped her eyelids and talked. The words, the recitation of small troubles, came out calm, flat, delicately aggrieved. He thought of Cut Bank, of the clouds of grasshoppers and army worms, of the red sun, as he listened to this catalogue of an old house’s ailments, of his mother’s symptoms and medications, of her daughter’s contained fury. And it was, indeed, anger. He knew it, could hear it beneath the words like the tick of a pencil on a tabletop. I have been here, been here; and you have not. Have not. I have been in this house, these years. And that makes me a serious person and you must somehow find a way to say so.

  Light filtered through the lace curtain onto the tabletop. It dimmed periodically, briefly, like a slow signal.

  You’ve been a godsend for mother, Jerry said. Daisy inclined her head and smiled slightly. She thanked him. Not exactly a godsend, she said. I’ve been here all the time.

  In his old room, Jerry opened his valise, the one he had taken to Montana a decade earlier. He changed his shirt and sat on the edge of his old narrow child’s bed, breathing. On the dresser was a cross he had carved as a nine-year-old for a Bible class. It was crude and grudging. Great gouges out of the wood. Frayed twine to bind the two parts. It rested on a lace doily. He remembered how pleased his father had been to get it, and he buried his face in his dark hands.

  The teapot began to whistle two rooms away. He heard Daisy’s footsteps. The teapot continued and the whistle grew. Take the teapot off the fire, he said in a low voice. It climbed, the sound, and he heard a drawer open and close. Another drawer. He clenched his eyes. The sound had grown to a shriek. The clouds passed again and the room turned bright.

  He leaped to his feet. Threw his jacket onto the chair and walked rapidly into the kitchen. Daisy had squatted before a low cupboard and was reaching far back into it, her gaze concentrated on the ceiling, her arm moving in the recesses. The teapot was deafening.

  Jerry grabbed a towel, grabbed the handle, held the pot for a moment while the sound trailed down, tapered off into quiet.

  He slammed it onto an iron trivet. He was breathing fast and wheezing a little. I’m going up to see Mother, he spit out. I’m sure she’s awake by now, Daisy mildly agreed.

  What had she expected? She asked herself that as she followed him up the stairs. She had expected the clean glow of a pioneer, the look of someone who stepped out of a crude log cabin each morning onto a wide place of sun and crops and horses. Sunsets that lasted, maroon and gold, for hours.

  He had written about the grasshoppers and the heat. He had said there was a need for rain. But it had all seemed settler chitchat. Now she saw that it was not. This Jerry before her did not look radiant and calm. He seemed scrubbed, as if the top layer of his body and soul had been taken off with a wire brush. His dark-red hair had become thin, light, and dry. Like cured grass. His blue eyes had faded and become narrow and wrinkled at the corners. His skin was mottled and patchy, bleached here and there of its color, and there were black creases around his fingernails like a hobo’s.

  He wore suit pants, white shirt, and starched collar, of course, but his clothes looked thin. There was something faintly neglected about his entire person. That discolored front tooth, the lifeless hair and scraped-looking shoes.

  He had a snappy, impatient, nervous aspect to him too. Talked faster than Daisy remembered, and bit off his sentences and his laughter.

  Perhaps Mattie’s life had slipped away as soon as Daisy had covered her for her afternoon nap and descended the stairs. Perhaps then. Perhaps when Jerry still rode the train, or as he walked the edge of the wet street toward the house with the sagging porch. Or while they talked over tea, the sister and brother, about sagging porches and faithless students and money.

  Perhaps that shrieking kettle had been a pure alarm. It would always seem so, later, to Jerry. And he would never again hear the sound without a wash of the deepest self-doubt.

  They pushed open the door to her room, obedient smiles on their faces, and found her marbleized and for the ages. Her long hair—plump, pinned-up, and dark when Jerry last saw her—was pure white. It fanned across the white linens and the sleeves of her white gown.

  Shouts. The thud of heels down stairs. Daisy flying out the door to the neighbor who has the telephone.

  Jerry shaking his mother’s arms. Gently at first, then so hard her head begins to rock. Shaking to start her, as if she were a balky pocket watch. A sour smell rising up to him from his own skin and the vise now around his ribs.

  Daisy back in the room. Where is Dr. Sheehan? she cries. Where is my mother’s own doctor? She whirls upon the body. I can’t find the right doctor! she shrieks.

  The cold floor of his room, and himself like a dog on all fours, his ears and eyes dead to the world, only trying for trickles of air, watching the hot tears fall out of his eyes on the floor. He puts his mind someplace else. Does everything he can not to care, not to feel, so that he will simply be able to live and to breathe.

  The funeral is over and they all mill around in the social room of the church. A row of high windows and in the windows red leaves swirling. The last big gusty day—the wind sounds like water from inside the wall—and then the big trees will stand bare.

  There are the Malones—Daisy, Jerry, and Carlton. They stand in a half circle and shake hands, accept pats, incline their heads to hear murmured condolences. They don’t look like siblings, do they? Well, perhaps Jerry and Daisy share a certain contained, trim look. A certain solemnity of the eyes and mouth. Both look very pale—Jerry bleached somehow and Daisy just drained of blood. The black cloth makes her skin almost translucent. She wears a brooch of her mother’s, a cameo. She is speaking slowly today. She seems a little glassy with grief. She took a double dose of tonic, but it isn’t working as well as she’d hoped on her nerves and she wants badly to go home.

  Carlton is a large man, upholstered, florid, loud-voiced. He is already rather pear-shaped and has odd womanlike hands. He shakes hands vigorously. A gleam of tears comes easily to his eyes.

  When he arrived in his Hudson Town Car, about an hour after they found Mattie; when he came booming into the house, pulling his vest over his large girth, and then looked up, smiling, to really see their faces—well, then he had actually thrown his big body across the foot of the bed. Pounded his fist on the wall, every movement extreme and heavy. But he was soon done, and all that was left of that was the pinkness of his smooth face, the easy tears.

  What has returned to him, in this little gathering, is his manner with the public. He had a certain surface finesse, always. He mastered, early on, the gestures of authority—the crisp signals for cabbies and waiters, the guiding hand on a woman’s elbow or back, the satisfied flip of a white napkin as he embarked on an expensive meal.

  Carlton loves deals. In fact, he is talking at this moment—light hand on a shoulder—to a neighbor who might be interested in a new kind of fire insurance policy that Carlton sells. Not real business talk, but he wants the man to know he is available, and they will arrange a time to talk. His job is with Minneapolis Fire and Marine, but he has side deals going all the time. The stock market, a share in a mining venture, a large bet on a hot-air-balloon race. This all puts him daily at some risk. Most days, that is, hold the potential for dramatic loss or gain, and that gives Carlton an aura of peril and extravagance that draws certain women to him. Quite a few
, to tell the truth.

  He is also beginning to be in thrall to alcohol. It gives him an infusion of confidence and gusto. Confirms him in his energies. Those women who stand near the table with the tea and the cookies, that little clot of them speaking so furtively? They are talking about Dr. Sheehan. They are saying he let a baby die. They are saying he had been drinking liquor and did not notice that the baby could not breathe, and he let it die.

  They are saying a nurse defended him. A nurse vowed the baby had been born dead and said the mother’s grief had blinded her to the facts. The nurse was insistent. But Dr. Sheehan did not defend himself, and so it seemed she was making a fool of herself out of misguided loyalty or more. He did not say, himself, that the baby had been born dead. He did not deny that he had been drinking liquor, but he did not confirm it either. He did not say anything.

  His wife went to the chief of the hospital and pleaded for him. This was known through a sister of one of the staff doctors. Mrs. Sheehan said she would have to take the children and go back to her old parents in Boston if her husband’s overseers allowed him to be wrongly disgraced. She wept.

  Dr. Sheehan was called in again, and again he did not defend himself. He did not say anything. The baby was buried. His patients were transferred to another man, Dr. Colfax by name.

  The women’s voices drop another notch. They are saying now that some local men, the father of the dead baby and some of his friends, dragged Sheehan out of his house last night. They called him terrible names—Bolshevik, slacker, fiend, rummy, murderer—all in front of his wife. They bloodied his face and ripped his clothing and threw him on a freight that was headed west.

  They are nearly whispering now, and that is what they are saying. That all of that happened and Dr. Sheehan, through it all, didn’t say a word.

  They are saying someone should tell Daisy Malone, in as vague and kind a way as possible, of course, because she has to be wondering where her dear mother’s personal physician is. Why he has been so absent.

  None of the other doctors will say anything yet. It is an official secret. But it seems Daisy, at least, should be told. In the kindest way possible at this difficult time.

  Jerry has been at his childhood home for three weeks, a lifetime. He leaves tomorrow. He and Carlton went to a burlesque show last night. It was business, Carlton said. A chance for Jerry to meet some men who were interested in the uranium business and had a prospect in Montana they wanted him to check out. A small mine up by the mountains somewhere. One of the men had an interest in the mine and wanted Jerry to arrange for testing of some ore samples. For a cut of any proceeds, of course.

  The woman at the burlesque hall was at least six feet tall, with white-blonde braids wrapped around her head. Broad white shoulders and a dress with no top or bottom, just fancy red stuff with lace from breasts to thighs and a long train. Not enough cloth there to wad a shotgun, Carlton announced, and all the men laughed and bought expensive drinks and the woman’s husky voice floated over their heads and her large white hands, her long fingers, coaxed whatever was in the air to come into her lace-covered arms.

  Carlton’s life. Smoke and men and deals. Prospects. A long discussion about a uranium mine in Idaho and how rich someone had gotten overnight. The ore involved. Extraction methods. Markets.

  Carlton’s world. Cigars and premium brandy. A dollar bill in the shoe of a woman who floated in the footlights undressed. Easy laughter. Prospects.

  Jerry didn’t tell them he had been switching trains. He mentioned land. He said the key was to buy now, after a stretch of bad years, and wait for values to rise. For demand to increase. As it was sure to. The key to the land game, he told Carlton and his friends, was timing. He heard himself say those words. The key is timing. Knowing when to hang on. When to bail out. What to hang on to.

  He didn’t tell them he had promised his wife they were leaving that country, moving to the city of Seattle when they got together the money to move. The very instant they had the money.

  He didn’t tell them his shack on the prairie was in tatters and that all the topsoil had blown away. Or how slowly everything moved. How stunned the place seemed. How Vivian strained the orange water through cheesecloth to filter out the tiny red bugs.

  He thought about that, and his children.

  He thought, for a shade of a long moment, about the way his mother used to brush back the hair from his sweating forehead as he gasped for breath. Her cool hand and how it had helped.

  The air had grown very close.

  He didn’t tell Carlton’s friends how his impeccable sense of timing had caused him to miss his own mother’s death.

  The woman sashayed to the edge of the stage, her arms still beckoning, her red satin flickering. I need air, he told Carlton. I need a walk.

  Daisy had waited up because it was Jerry’s last night. Her eyes were red. She looked at them reproachfully and cut cold beef for sandwiches. The three of them sat at the table. It was after midnight. They had made the decision that morning, and now they all felt like transients. The house would be put up for sale.

  For a week after her mother’s death, Daisy had been volatile and inconsolable. She had fainted while talking to a group of women at the funeral. She had burst into tears and slammed herself in her room when Carlton handed over her inheritance with interest. (He had unloaded some stocks at a profit.)

  But then she became very quiet and calm. Brisk in movement. Matter-of-fact about the disposition of the furniture and so on.

  It is time, she announced to her brothers. It is meant. I have had a dream that confirms it beyond any doubt. I have the money. I shall go to Manhattan and pursue a musical career. This has all been, these years, an important test of my character. It has all been a preparation.

  She made them clasp hands in the dim light then, and they tipped their heads over the remains of a midnight supper. They said a prayer for their dear gone parents, and then they said another one for themselves.

  8

  THERE ARE four of them gathered around a table with a red cloth on it and a small roast duck at its center. It is Christmas 1919, the one they believe to be their last in Montana. It is the pause before the beginning of their highest venturing. Four Malones in a three-room house at the beginning of the worst winter of all, the one that will finish off all who still hang to this country by their fingertips.

  Part of the main room has been sheeted off to make a bedroom for Francis and Maudie. Another room is just large enough for Jerry and Vivian’s bed. The kitchen and wash area is the biggest room, and that is where they all are now, seated around the table with the red cloth. The stove is stoked. It is bitterly cold. Rags are stuffed at the bottom of the door; blankets are tacked across the windows.

  There is a small tree over on the hutch—the train brought a stack of them one day from the mountains—and it is draped with chains of paper rings and topped with a battered angel. The bare electric bulb that hangs from the ceiling is dark. There are candles on the table and in one corner the kerosene light. The light is fluttering and warm on their faces.

  Francis is now five. He is an alert child—hearty, high-colored, bright. His emotionality, his exuberance, are attributes Jerry never remembers having in himself as a child, and he welcomes them in his son. And Francis’s generosity too. He is the kind of child who will in a few years buy birthday flowers for his mother with money from his newspaper route; who will like beautiful places and things and wonder aloud, more than once, why the family doesn’t live across the mountains where there is water and, in the spring, acres and acres of cherry blossoms. But he doesn’t brood—not as a child. There is nothing furtive or shadowy about Francis.

  Already, at five, he is known for his fits of laughter. There will be times when something strikes him as funny and he will laugh in such a helpless extended way that everyone around him will have to start laughing too.

  The duck, slick and gaunt, was brought to them by a friend who shot two on a lucky day. He kept one
for his family and gave the other to the Malones. Vivian stuffed it with lots of seasoned bread and cooked it carefully, making a gravy with a tablespoon or two of some old brandy she saved for holiday cooking. They sit around the table in the warm light. They say their prayers. They listen for a few seconds to wind throwing new snow against the door, the snow so cold it is sand.

  There is a quacking sound. A very accurate quack. Francis is making a near-perfect duck sound he learned from an older boy, and he is doing it with barely a change in the shape of his mouth.

  Maudie’s head jerks up. She is four and has a small, avid face wreathed by flossy hair. A large bow bobs on the crown of her head. She glances sharply around the table, at her parents with their eyes cast down and small smiles on their faces, at her brother whose eyes are off on the far side of the room. She squints at the glossy hot duck; hears the sound again.

  Her eyes dart around the table once more. Then she stands up and reaches over to the duck and slowly lifts its wing, twisting her head with the big floppy bow to see under it—and everyone bursts out laughing, Francis loudest of all. He can’t stop. He stands up and doubles over and falls to the floor, laughing and kicking his heels until his laughing mother pulls him up.

  Maudie is clearly about to cry, so Jerry calls her over to his side of the table to help with the duck. He slices it—she still looks dubious—and puts the pieces on a plate for her to offer around. Her mother gives her a long hug.

  They eat peach preserves sent by George and his wife in Seattle; wild rice from Aunt Mina and Uncle Charles in the Twin Cities; cheese from Vivian’s mother; tinned crackers from Daisy Lou.

  “In Seattle, we’ll have a big pink salmon for Christmas,” Vivian announces happily. “Oysters. Oyster stew.”

  “We’ll take the trolley down the big hills of the city”—her hand swoops—“and see a Christmas tree as tall as the coal chute. With small electric lights all over it. Thousands and thousands of them.”