The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

“I guess so,” I said.

  “Because it’s awfully black.”

  “She must dye it, I suppose. I mean, I’ve never seen her dye it.”

  “She’d have to get hair dye, then. Wait a second, I’ve seen her carrying around bottles of something black. That’s it! She says it’s cough medicine, but you can bet on it, that’s the hair dye.”

  “Hair dye? Jocelyn has been drinking it.”

  “Jocelyn has been drinking hair dye?”

  “She says it’s cough medicine, too,” I said.

  “Well, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Are you sure?”

  “She says she has been drinking cough medicine that Dr. Houseman gave her.”

  “Oh well, then I suspect she has. What’s that got to do with Mrs. Mendelbaum’s black hair dye? Really, let’s try and stay on topic for two seconds. Oh, say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any roots either,” said Uncle Marten.

  “That’s a good point. If it were dyed, you’d expect to see some roots occasionally. When she’s flying around, you do see a lot of gray underneath.”

  “Yes. But then, if she doesn’t dye her hair, what is she doing walking around carrying bottles of black hair dye?”

  “White roots, if she’s really old, her hair would be white, wouldn’t it? Not just black with gray underneath,” I said.

  “Yes. I haven’t seen a single white root. But perhaps she keeps them covered in that hair dye and that’s why she walks around with it. Maybe she is always doing, what is it that women call it? Touch-ups! Or maybe she’s not so old.”

  “I think she is.”

  “She doesn’t look it.”

  “But I think she is. Anyhow she seems pretty old, doesn’t she?”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know. Set in her ways. Like she’s lived her whole life already. Like there’s no place to go. Like she’s just kind of resting now on her time left before, you know.”

  “Before she dies.”

  “And she talks about Nazis. If she was young in Nazi Germany, she’d be very old by now.”

  “I’m going to call Houseman to come in and get a look at her.” He picked up his radio phone.

  “Oh, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. I don’t think she’d like that.”

  “Why ever not? She’s sick, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, but I think she just wants this friend.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, we can’t possibly have anyone else living here. The house is bursting at the seams already. I really think I must take a stand.”

  “Yes, but think how you’ll feel if Mrs. Mendelbaum were to die alone.”

  “Die? Who is talking about dying? Besides, no one in this house could die alone if he wanted to. We’re crammed in here like sardines.”

  “I’m sure it’s only for a short visit, anyway.”

  “All right. But let us make that clear at the outset. People do so often seem to show up on your doorstep and then stay forever.” Then, when he realized what he’d said and to whom, Uncle Marten blushed a deep red and looked frantically confused, immediately launching into a new train of thought, hoping, no doubt, I hadn’t noticed, but I had and my stomach sank slightly. I had not known our presence bothered him so much. I hadn’t cared about being wanted. I had wanted to be left alone. But I hated to think of myself as an annoyance. An annoyance he could do nothing to rid himself of. I was glad for the change of subject as well.

  “How can you talk about people dying like that?” he asked. “It’s very bad for the digestive system to even think of such things. I’m sure she isn’t dying at all. I’m getting Houseman anyway because you can’t have people just dying unnecessarily all over the house. Of course, people are going to die and sometimes at your house, but not just cavalierly because you’ve left them. Because you’ve forgotten to have the doctor in to check. Even though I’m certain it is completely unnecessary. But there it is, you’ve put the thought in my mind yourself. You’ve only yourself to blame.” Uncle Marten pressed a button and got the hospital and left a message.

  “I’m surprised that you know her number. I’m surprised you remember her name,” I said. He never remembered things like this.

  “How can I forget her? She calls about fifteen times a day. Not to speak to me, oh no, it’s Humdinger she’s got her eye on. He won’t last long. No backbone. She’ll have him married and bundled over to Vancouver before the summer, you mark my words. There’ll be a summer wedding with everyone in long floaty white dresses and flowers and barefoot. Probably want to do it here on the island. Come to think of it, probably would want to raise their children in this very house if she could get a job here, which thank God she cannot. Everyone wants to come here. I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”

  “There’s another thing…”

  “Well, there always is these days, isn’t there?”

  “Mrs. Mendelbaum wants you to arrange a boat to take Sophie over here because she is afraid of planes. She won’t take the helicopter with Sam.”

  “But Sam doesn’t drive a boat,” said Uncle Marten, going back to work. “He never has. He doesn’t like the ocean. He likes the air. Can’t think why.”

  “But he can’t be the only person who could get a boat here.”

  “Hmmm? No, probably not. The laws of probability say otherwise. Anyhow, I’m busy. Have Humdinger attend to it. Isn’t that what he’s here for?”

  “I think you hired him to answer doors.”

  “In point of fact, Mrs. Mendelbaum hired him, and as I recall it was so he would worry—but worrying doesn’t seem to be his strong suit, so let’s see how he is with boat procuring. Now leave me alone. No more things. Go away.”

  It was always easier and harder than you thought it would be with Uncle Marten, but you could never predict which would be the easier things and which the harder. I sighed and went downstairs to give Jocelyn the news. She was pacing and scratching and didn’t seem interested particularly. So then I knocked on Mrs. Mendelbaum’s door and she was lying on her bed moaning.

  “Mrs. Mendelbaum…” I said.

  “Go away.”

  “I’ve got good news.”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” she said and put a pillow over her head.

  “Mrs. Mendelbaum, do you hear me?”

  “Oh.”

  I heard her muffled groans.

  “You can call your friend Sophie and ask her to come here. Uncle Marten says it’s okay. He says Humdinger can arrange a boat for her.”

  “Oy,” moaned Mrs. Mendelbaum. She seemed to like to vary her distressful exclamatory syllables. Then she started snoring just like that. For a second I was afraid it might be a death rattle, so I ripped the pillow off her face, but it was furrowed and she breathed heavily in the deepest, most miserable-looking sleep I had ever seen. It looked as if instead of giving her relief sleep was torturing her. “Mrs. Mendelbaum?” I said, but she continued to snore and I decided not to wake her. Jocelyn could do the rest. She’d probably rather have the news from Jocelyn anyway.

  Maybe Uncle was right and Dr. Houseman had better see Mrs. Mendelbaum. I left when it was clear that she was going to hear nothing I said, and went back to Jocelyn’s room. She hadn’t stopped scratching or pacing and I wondered if maybe she had measles on top of everything else. She was still far away. Almost as far as Mrs. Mendelbaum appeared to be. They were a pair, all right.

  “Listen, Jocelyn,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell Mrs. Mendelbaum about Sophie yourself because she won’t listen to me.”

  Jocelyn just nodded as if she had no time to speak to me. As if I was interrupting her pacing.

  No thank you from anyone. No acknowledgment. I left and went to my room. When I got there I realized that I hadn’t even told her about finding the plane cemetery. I started to go back and stopped. What was the point? It was clear that she no longer cared.

  * * *

  Day after day passed alike. I slept or sat alone. My nights
I spent working in the cemetery. Then one day I realized that to follow me out to the cemetery without being spotted was beyond even Humdinger’s sneakiness. It was easy to see me going into the barn from a window in the house and even easy to sneak up to the barn and spy on me. But the cemetery was a long way from the house. And, besides, I thought, who cared anyhow? What could Humdinger do about it—the plane was almost built. If he hadn’t done anything to stop me up until now, it was doubtful he would in the future.

  There was a deep quiet in the house now. Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum never left their rooms and Uncle never seemed to notice. He was preparing for a conference and ate silently, reading through dinner. The puppy remained with Humdinger and the cat with Uncle Marten. In such deadly silent aloneness, my thoughts began to stray too often to home. Some nights I didn’t even care about going out to the cemetery to work and would roll over to go back to sleep. This frightened me more than anything. I could not afford to lose momentum.

  The day Sophie arrived I was the first one to see her. I was on my way to the plane cemetery when the boat landed. It was a small fishing boat and I thought Humdinger was very resourceful and wondered how he had procured it. The captain or fisherwoman or whatever you called her helped Sophie out and into a dinghy, which she rowed to shore, and then the woman pulled the dinghy with Sophie in it up onto the pebbly beach so she could get out without getting her feet wet. I stood and watched and almost ran over to escort her to the house, but then I decided no, I was not a welcoming committee, my plane was coming along a treat, and I would be departing soon. I did not wish to raise her hopes that she had a friend in me, so I shrugged to myself as I watched them scan the island for the house, and walked on toward the cemetery, where I spent a long day reattaching one wing where it had separated from the fuselage.

  When I got in for dinner that night, Sophie was sitting at the table. Humdinger had set a place for her where Jocelyn used to sit, mid-table, but she had pulled her chair and place setting cozily next to Uncle Marten and was engaging him in conversation, which seemed to bemuse him, but politeness dictated he stop working and pay attention.

  “Ah,” he said as I sat down. “Here is Meline. Meline dear, this is Miss Babilinska. You must keep her entertained. You really must.” He emphasized this a bit too heartily. Humdinger brought in pumpkin soup, and this seemed to distress Sophie, who kept trying to jump up and take courses from him all through dinner. It was clear she had never been served by a butler before and she seemed to think it was beneath Humdinger’s dignity. But from what I had seen over the last few months, Humdinger’s dignity was unassailable and had nothing to do with menial labor. In fact, Humdinger’s dignity seemed to derive from being able to do menial labor, competently taking care of the things that needed to be done. Humdinger’s dignity seemed to derive from the fact that he didn’t worry about his dignity. Sophie, in apparent agony, watching Humdinger serve, had a small knot between her eyes even though Humdinger kept trying to reassure her and gesture for her to sit down and stop worrying. This was what he did, after all. I dug into my soup enthusiastically. I was chilled to the bone and my hands were red and raw from working with cold wet metal all day.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “I lost track of time.” I’d been working with a particularly difficult joint. There was a huge piece of metal missing where the elevator was and I was going to have to rig something. I was still not sure how to cut metal. I would have to go on the Internet and see if I could get some information.

  “Tut tut, not at all, my dear. I have been telling Miss Babilinska that in the future I will be unable to eat dinner with the two of you. I have so much to finish before I leave for this conference. Fortunately, with her arrival, the two of you can dine together.”

  “How is Mrs. Mendelbaum?” I asked Sophie politely because presumably she had spent the afternoon with her. Better her than me.

  “Miss Babilinska has informed me that Mrs. Mendelbaum is doing very well. But it is a great comfort for her to know that she has a friend here.”

  “A bosom companion,” said Miss Babilinska, stuffing her mouth with meat. Humdinger had brought in the plates, and after a short wrestle, Sophie had let him do so. I had heard Mrs. Mendelbaum call her Sophie originally and now I was finding it difficult to call her Miss Babilinska, which was a mouthful anyway. There was sliced brisket, and pierogies, which I assume he made especially for Sophie’s welcome, and tzimmes, which were candied carrots and mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. He didn’t bother putting brisket on my plate because by now he knew what I ate and didn’t and didn’t trouble me by offering me things he knew I wouldn’t want. He was as aware of things as Uncle was unaware. Because he was so aware I began to have nervous knots in my stomach; maybe I underestimated him, maybe he could do something to stop me from completing my flying machine. Maybe he was simply waiting until the last second to scuttle my plans. We were so close to flying.

  I could hear voices coming from the kitchen.

  “Who’s in the kitchen with Humdinger?” I asked.

  “Ah. That would be the doctor,” said Uncle Marten, looking at me meaningly, raising his eyebrows and touching the side of his nose. “She came over to examine Mrs. Mendelbaum, who wouldn’t let her in her room, by the way, causing quite a ruckus. Yes, you missed that while you were gone wherever it is you go all day. And then Dr. Houseman went to examine Jocelyn, who wasn’t getting well fast enough to satisfy her, so now she has had the brilliant idea that she should move into one of the quickly disappearing free bedrooms where she can keep an eye on both of them.”

  “I don’t understand, doesn’t she have to work?” I asked.

  “Sam is taking her back and forth now and she is staying here apparently. She has a suitcase with her. I saw her bring it in.”

  “Well, she can’t do that, can she? I mean, it’s your island, Uncle Marten.”

  “Well, it was…” said Uncle Marten, absentmindedly going back to his book.

  Humdinger brought dessert in at that point and Sophie ate her ice cream doggedly as if she were afraid someone would take it away if she didn’t get it down promptly. So it wasn’t until after dinner that she even bothered to look at me, and when she did it was with large, empty eyes. There are some people who you know are simply not too swift by looking at them. I could see why Mrs. Mendelbaum had said she could get Sophie to do anything. She would not be hard to push around because it was clear that she could have no ideas of her own. She had the hanging jowls of a basset hound but also the large trusting sad eyes. But she had no interest in me any more than anyone else in that house, she was there for Mrs. Mendelbaum. And she seemed to be in awe of Humdinger for some strange, basset hound reason of her own.

  One evening after dinner when Sophie had left before dessert because Mrs. Mendelbaum had asked her to bring dessert up on a tray for the two of them, Uncle Marten turned to me and said, “How long does she plan to live here?” Sophie was spending more time eating with Mrs. Mendelbaum, so Uncle had apparently forgotten his threat not to come down to dinner and was sneaking down to meals again. We could sometimes hear the sound of their Yiddish drifting down the stairs. It gave the house a strange international flavor, Yiddish upstairs, English downstairs, as if we were the UN.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, has she moved in?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Well, let me put it this way, did she have a lot of stuff with her when she arrived that she unpacked and put folded neatly into drawers?”

  “I really don’t know, Uncle Marten,” I said, nonchalantly toying with my rice pudding. “I wasn’t in when she arrived. I didn’t see what she unpacked. She did seem to have a lot of cartons in the dinghy. But I can’t say for certain those were hers because I didn’t see them taken out. I left before they unloaded them, if they did. They might have belonged to the boat owner.”

  “The boat owner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would the boat owner have a lot of cartons i
n a dinghy?”

  “Well…”

  “That’s it. Trust me, that’s the tip-off. Cartons. She has moved in. I have lost another bedroom.”

  I shrugged again. I was becoming a great shrugger.

  Sophie was keeping Mrs. Mendelbaum occupied. I had hoped that with her arrival, Mrs. Mendelbaum would sever ties with Jocelyn and Jocelyn would rejoin the airplane building, but I was beginning to accept that Jocelyn didn’t ever want to get out of bed. It no longer felt like a joint project. I was working feverishly. I left the house early in the morning and worked in the rain until I was drenched, coming in at lunchtime to change clothes and eat and go out again until dark. It was staying light longer and longer and I was vaguely aware that trees were budding, but I didn’t care. Humdinger seemed to find my wet clothes no matter where I hid them and they ended up washed and dried and folded neatly on my bed. This seemed pushy to me. As if he were emphasizing that I could have no secrets from him, but even this didn’t bother me particularly. It didn’t seem to matter if he knew anymore as long as he didn’t stop me. Rainy day followed rainy day. It didn’t warm up gradually like spring did at home. Instead daffodils bloomed, blossoms came out on trees, but the rain remained a gray driving constant and every day was like the one before.

  I was sitting in a wing chair in front of the fire one evening, eyeing Humdinger carrying a basket of my laundry up to my room, when Dr. Houseman, who had just come dripping into the house, having arrived by helicopter, plopped beside me. She shivered and ran her hands over her rain-drenched face and then held her wet hands before the fire.

  “Whew,” she said. “Long day. Thank goodness Sam was on time. I think I would have slept at the hospital or at home tonight if he hadn’t been. I didn’t have the energy to wait around on that windy helicopter pad. It’s beastly out there.”

  “Why don’t you ever sleep at home?” I asked. “Why bother to sleep here? Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum aren’t that sick, are they?”

  “Well…” She looked as if she were about to tell me something and then stopped. She sat quietly for a moment in her chair. She was one of those people comfortable with her own silences. Then she said, “They’re something of a mystery to me, I must admit. They aren’t getting better as fast as I would like. I can’t tell if it’s some kind of secondary infection or depression. And, of course, Humdinger asked me to keep an eye on things. Medically.”