“Will there be firemen in long motor trucks?” Francis asks. “Will there be stores with toys clear up to the ceiling?”
Jerry is quiet during this conversation, these questions. He has visited Seattle, he has a picture of it, but it does not hold glamour or release for him. It strikes him as a realm that is, more than anything, familiar. Despite its surface differences, there is something of it that is the kind of place he left ten years ago, making the boldest, most exhilarating decision of his life.
East or west of these plains—he pictures the sweep of them from the Rockies to the Mississippi—east or west you ran into the city scramble; noise and old stone and the agendas of the established.
But they’ve made the decision. It’s time. And he tries once again to convince himself that it will be another adventure, another move west. But it isn’t. It is a move to a place with firemen in bright city trucks, and thus it is a circular motion. He doesn’t like the idea of circularity. It gives him that old hopeless trapped feeling. That foolish feeling of being someone who thinks himself to be advancing when he is really walking a treadmill like a donkey.
On the other hand, there is something about Cut Bank, this country now, that is like an abandoned battlefield. Beneath the weather, there is a great quiet. The place is ravaged. Young faces are exhausted, and if this winter turns out to be a long one, and not just cruel, then you will begin to hear gunshots in the air, there, then there, and animals toppling to the ground.
The presents were always opened Christmas Eve so the house would have a day’s warmth in it and the children would sleep through the night. Such meager gifts this year. Everyone so broke.
Maudie had yearned for a new doll with a nightgown and a traveling dress that she had seen in a neighbor’s Sears catalogue. She got a small, cheaper one, and Vivian made all the clothes for it from scraps. She didn’t like to sew, and it showed. There were signs of impatience on the little dresses, undone hems that made her ashamed when she saw them, though she had spent hours on the tiny scraps at night when she was half asleep.
Francis got a wooden replica of a World War airplane, made by Foster, a young guy who worked at the mercantile. Each child got an orange. And pencils from Daisy with their initials on them. And a one-dollar bill from their uncle Carlton, which made the biggest impression of all and caused their parents to feel, for a bleak few moments, like bystanders.
The children got their mother a 1920 calendar from the mercantile. They had loved its size and color and had insisted on it, though Jerry had suggested a muffler instead. The calendar showed slim young women in fur coats, fur muffs, ice skating on a pond surrounded by pines. Thatched English cottages with chimney smoke like treble clefs. Lawns. Croquet. Parade horses with red plumes. A girl in a swing under a huge spreading maple, her blonde hair brushing the ground.
Jerry got from the children and Vivian a small cardboard case to hold his pens and pencils and silver letter opener.
Vivian’s mother had sent handkerchiefs for everyone and a packet of well-wrapped fudge. Four pieces of it sat on a saucer like a prize.
They eat the fudge slowly. Francis remembers the quack. He does a small quiet one just for himself, eyes on the ceiling, and Maudie slaps him on the arm. Vivian leans back in her chair, her hands resting on her stomach. She is two months pregnant. She and Jerry are the only ones who know.
He puts a hand on her arm and does something then that startles them all because he’s never done it before. He clears his throat and, in a hearty tuneless voice, begins to sing. He may have been trying to dispel the quiet of his mother’s home and her quiet white form. He may have been listening to the billowing wind and how it covered all other sounds outside their windows and doors. Whatever the reason, he now sings “Sailing, sailing, over the ocean blue…” Quite loudly. The children join in raucously, still chewing their fudge. After a moment of disbelief, Vivian sings too. They belt it out—each rather surprised at the rest—and they feel, for a few seconds, like they are indeed in a tight ship on wild seas.
Vivian’s hands stay lightly on her belly and she catches Jerry’s eye, and they both see the strange night that caught this baby. How passion flared up like a dust devil, so unexpected and engulfing, after such a long time gone.
Jerry had just returned from Saint Paul and his mother’s house and her funeral. He was angry, agitated, low on sleep. Whenever he drifted off he saw his mother floating over him; floating over his head while he talked trivia with his sister. After three days hunched in a crowded, cold train, he wasn’t even given the chance to walk up the stairs and say good-bye. She drifted above him as he talked porches and money and Carlton with his sister. And the worst of it was that the whole missed chance felt like a manipulation—a heartbreaking manipulation because the perpetrator paid with her life and thus you could not accuse. She was beyond reproach, and there was only anger thrown at a corpse.
He came home with that to Vivian, who had spent a month with two small children at the end of the worst summer and fall in memory. No railroad pay for that time, and then he had come home from his mother’s funeral to talk about his brother Carlton and Carlton’s high-roller friends, his schemes, the way Carlton handed Daisy her money after all these years. He mimicked the very gesture, bowing like a prince. He scarcely mentioned his mother. He did not request the details of how she, Vivian, had been getting along.
But he had suffered his mother’s death and so she could not accuse. She could only be angry.
She told him about how the Iversons had lost their little boy Delbert to diphtheria. How the doctor was out of town and nobody knew the symptoms soon enough to send for another. She had given him the news in a letter, but now she told him the details and how bitter and scared it had made her feel. How fearful for their own children.
Jerry nodded thoughtfully, gave her shoulder a tight little pat. Then, after a pause, he told her about a bet Carlton had put on a balloon race. A winning bet, and then Carlton did the same thing on a prizefight they took in together, and lost exactly the amount of money he had just won on the balloon.
She knew he was simply giving words to the images that floated closest to the surface of his mind, though it wasn’t, of course, the surface images that he cared about. It was something else, which he couldn’t talk about. So he would speak in non sequiturs, the words having nothing to do with what he was feeling or what he was puzzling about.
She knew he was speaking around his thoughts, but she was still infuriated. Nothing about their talk was a conversation.
Just three days earlier, little Delbert was fine, she said.
Neither Daisy nor I thought Carlton would ever have the money, he said.
The Jones brothers left town, she said. One of them knew your mother and sister back in Saint Paul, did you know that? They had a coal business and delivered to your mother.
Daisy Lou plans to go to New York City, he said.
It went on like that for three days, and then it all broke or melted. The children were in bed. A new burst of polite dead phrases went back and forth, but this time Vivian felt her face change. It flushed, then seemed to drain, and she threw a hot pad at him and there was not the shred of a joke in it. It caught the corner of his eye and he winced, blinked hard a couple of times, then he grabbed the top of her arm. She clasped his wrist and their fingers trembled with a fury that seemed to take the covers off their eyes. And when they looked at each other then, they were absolutely avid and ungentle, hurt and without rules. They gave themselves up in a kind of terrifying relief.
The look between them now is mostly gentle, mostly familiar, but there is an edge of wariness in it, the memory of how much anger there was in a night they never wanted to end. How close their bodies seemed to run, in pantomime or not, to murdering and being murdered.
The kids are doing something. Francis has his airplane by his plate. Maudie is flipping up her doll’s dress to look under it, showing Francis. Their oranges, one for each, sit side by side on the cupb
oard with Jerry’s cardboard pencil case and Vivian’s calendar. January is a red velveteen parlor and a man with a handlebar mustache in a brocaded wingbacked chair smoking a pipe, a fluff of a dog at his feet, two starched and ruffled little girls peeking around the corner, fingers on their rosy lips.
When the dishes are done, they bundle the kids and themselves into vests, sweaters, coats, mufflers, and hats to have dessert and cards at the McClintocks’.
As the children let themselves be dressed, their faces as detached and patient as ponies being saddled, their parents look at them and love them. They love their particular kind of fortitude, their immediate investment in the new—how they took long wild sniffs of the oranges; how they examined the doll’s crazily sewn clothes. The way they seem to have emerged out of these acid, wormy, scathing years with clear eyes and beautiful skin and helpless laughter at the drop of a hat.
There was a carpenter’s kind of truth in children, they thought. They trued the corners.
The McClintocks were the young Methodist minister and his wife. They were rather modern and adventurous, childless, very handsome and clean-browed and only in town for the previous three years. They liked to have people over, like Vivian the Catholic, who didn’t belong to the congregation. They were liberal that way.
There was something about them that said money. Money somewhere. The evidence wasn’t in their clothes or their home, which was modest, though there was good china and a small painting or two in a silver frame. It wasn’t their possessions, though they were casual toward their nice things in a way that made you know such things had always been abundant in their landscapes.
No, the signal was their freshness. They had a kind of heartiness that made you know they had the freedom, emotional and financial, to leave. They were, in some psychic respect, tourists. They were buttressed. On safari.
They were great fun to be with. They always had an activity at their home when they had desserts—charades or cribbage or auction bridge. Very unlike a preacher and his wife. But it went with her prettiness, which didn’t fit either.
What did she look like? Very thin and modern-looking. Blonde hair that was not bobbed—her sister’s was, but she said she was afraid to take the leap. She wore it pulled back in a style that looped over the ears and somehow looked bobbed. Her hair was very shiny, clean, and light. And her eyes were dark—dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark-blue irises. The effect was startling—the coloring was natural but it looked artificial. And so there was a kind of innocent artificiality, an unplanned tartiness that was immensely attractive.
Her name was Suzanne. It had the sound of an adopted name, but she never offered another, a former. She was constantly in touch with her sister of the bobbed hair in Chicago and always knew the latest games, fads, and so on. Somehow, she could offer them in Cut Bank at the end of 1919, the worst year anyone had known, because she was fun and kind and she was a minister’s wife too. Her looks conferred raciness. Her husband conferred seriousness of purpose. And Suzanne—who knew? She didn’t choose. She was just friendly and lively and a little eccentric, as some put it, in the most harmless kinds of ways.
The Norgaards were there too, and the soldier who had jumped off the train a year earlier, half frozen. The tips of most of his fingers were missing. The McClintocks had befriended him—he lived alone in a lean-to by the depot—and had hired him to do some carpentry on the church.
Late into the evening, the adults played bridge. The Malone children and the three-year-old Norgaard boy, Thomas, played with an elaborate fort and soldier set that belonged to the minister and then they had cake and fell asleep on the big sofa.
George McClintock, the minister, didn’t play but preferred to stand behind the chair of his pretty wife. He had a long handsome face, curly hair, and a kind of innocent goodwill that might have been insufferable if he hadn’t backed it up with good hard deeds—which he did. He visited the sick and the dying and sat with them for hours. He gave money to those in the direst need. He was kind in his sermons, urging patience and tolerance. He invited people like the soldier to his house, his table.
He pointed himself toward what he knew to be good and tried to conduct himself so that he moved toward it. Suzanne, though, was what he adored. She was his delight, and that is why he hovered around her; because anything she did seemed more interesting than himself.
She was not going to commit a sacrilege, Suzanne announced with a dramatic folding-up of the cards, but her sister in Chicago had described to her in detail how to tell fortunes from tea leaves—it was hardly a matter of a swish and a guess, as they might think—and she planned to tell theirs then, on the spot. In Chicago, almost every party included a fortune-telling session. Suzanne believed she had a gift for it.
Her husband stoked up the stove, sat back down. They all peered in the bottom of their thin china cups at the remaining leaves of good black Ceylon.
A blast of wind shuddered the house, seeped cold at them, gave them quick visions of horses leaning into it, racks of bones, hay flying out of their mouths; grim small visions that hovered always inside the black wind and made them jump eagerly on the homeliest diversion.
Fortune-telling in a warm room. It seemed the kind of thing that people would be doing who didn’t live on the Sahara, the moon, the back of God’s head.
Suzanne swished the remains of Alice Norgaard’s tea, a little liquid, the lazy black leaves, and then she turned it all over on the saucer, swished it again, closed her eyes, and put her fingertips dramatically to her temples.
“A trip,” she said. “A trip to the south. No, not Great Falls. Farther. A trip to Denver in the not too distant future. A happy event. A…” She squinted her eyes at the leaves. “A christening? A visit with a young woman, a dear friend?”
Alice nodded, a little bored. Someone had surely told Suzanne about Alice’s brother and his wife in Denver and that they were going to have a baby and there was worry because they’d already lost three at birth. This pregnancy was thought to be twins.
“A christening?” Alice asked innocently, as if for verification. Suzanne studied the leaves again, tilting the saucer slightly.
“Yes, I would say a christening or some other important event. An important birthday?” She looked up at Alice sharply. She threw her beautiful dark eyes around the table. Stared closer at the leaves. “A double christening?” she asked, incredulous.
They all laughed at her antics. She was such a ham. Two pink spots had appeared on her cheeks. Her husband gave her a look of the purest affection.
It was Vivian’s turn now. She had only a couple of leaves in the bottom of her cup. “Are there enough to tell anything?” she asked. “Maybe I swallowed all my secrets.”
She gave Jerry the slightest sideways look, a brush with her eyes. And there was the brief presence again of their dark people.
“Too few?” said Suzanne. “I think not.” Her diction was becoming more formal. She had taken on a slightly hollow, out-of-time-and-earth voice. “I think, for the purposes of the future, there are not too few.”
Suzanne rocked the china cup. It had a small garland of pink roses around its rim. English. Four or five leaves floated in the last of the tea. She turned the cup over on the saucer and the leaves rested in a perfect half circle. Suzanne studied them, looked back into the cup as if there had to be something else.
“Half,” she said. “A half that wants to be whole. Or”—she turned the plate so that the leaves arched—“a small mountain. A small mountain to be climbed.” She was flailing a little. She turned the saucer again and examined Vivian, who felt for a startled moment that Suzanne foresaw her billowing nine-month profile in the leaves.
But if she did, she did not say so. She made a pronouncement: “The year holds for Vivian a mound of treasures, the extent of which she has no reason, at present, to suspect.”
Vivian smiled at the bland little pronouncement, nodded her head in thanks. She allowed herself a brief vision of the curve of Seattle�
�s Puget Sound, the arch of its Queen Anne Hill.
During the silence between fortunes, they heard, through the hiss of the stove, one of the children—Francis it was—murmuring something in his sleep. “Put on my swimming costume,” he said. “I’m going to take a splash.”
That broke them up for a few minutes, even the soldier, who had seemed to be by himself and not given to hilarity.
Suzanne turned to him and suggested that he be next. He handed her his teacup with his blunted fingers. He was a man in his twenties, he’d have to be, though his cheeks had long furrows in them and the whites of his eyes had a yellowish tinge. The hair on his head looked dead. He didn’t seem to say much, and what he did say seemed slightly off the beat of the conversation though it was spoken in a pleasant, gravelly voice. When dessert was passed, for instance, he gazed at the cake and said, “Sugar.” And then his eyes blinked and he began to eat.
Suzanne studied his tea leaves with a very intent look on her face. She said, in a softened voice, “These suggest that the low point of your life is behind you. You have passed the test and the rest of life now stretches before you, productive and rich.” She paused and resumed. “The miseries of war will soon fade and it will come to seem a dream of hardship that tempered you but never again has to be lived.”
George McClintock’s eyes gleamed with compassion as he watched the soldier take in her words.
”It was cold out there, I can tell you,” the soldier said with more energy than he had shown all evening. There were sympathetic, somewhat uncomfortable looks all around. Here will come an intrusion of horror. Why do the McClintocks bring these people in? Small shameful thoughts like that. Someone had said the soldier had circulatory problems that could cost him a foot. Was that why he limped?
“It was cold, sure enough.” His voice was reckless. He had a faint Scotch burr. It occurred to Vivian that he might have come to the evening slightly drunk.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 9
