“—many times—”
“—a mother who’s always off delivering babies to make other people’s family lives more complete. Poor kid ought to be on his way to church. That’d put some stability in his life.”
“There’s room in our car. Let’s invite him.”
She gave him a look.
“I wouldn’t mind having his grampa’s income,” said Harold.
“Honestly, now. Any fool can write a book.”
“He gets eight or nine million apiece.”
“Disgraceful. People fill their minds with trash and he gets paid to produce it, empty-headed boobs escaping real problems by imagining they’re elves or knights or some similar idiocy. Drones. You should see the human garbage that wanders into City Hall asking if this is where T. E. Jameson lives. The man brings nothing but notoriety to this town. The day he packs up and leaves will be the day an albatross drops off our necks.”
“I don’t know.” Harold paused. “I picked up one of his books in the library once. It drew me right in.”
Another look. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response. Except to say that you’d better keep that tripe out of our home if you want to maintain harmony between us.”
There’s nothing I want more, thought Harold. Not a thing. A far cry from the days when mutual happiness, a tender give and take, had been their bywords.
“Look,” said Harold, “there’s Reverend Fleischer.”
He had seen the steeple rising, sunlit and tall, before they turned onto Spring Street. Now the sparkling facade of the First Methodist Church stunned him with its loveliness. A few parishioners, known to Harold through his wife, were decked out in their Sunday finery. A robed Bill Fleischer, silver-haired, tall, and large-handed, communed with a small circle of his flock on the church steps. His wife Marge beamed beside him.
Thea drove into the blacktopped parking lot. “Once again, Dawn is nowhere to be seen.”
“She’s a grown woman, Thea, not the pastor’s daughter you remember.”
“She knew her duty then, standing by her father and mother on Sundays. Then she went off to college and lost her faith.”
“Her parents respect her wishes.”
Thea turned off the ignition and pulled out the key. “A fine mood you’re in today. Are you trying to spoil the morning?”
“No, I—”
“Dawn Fleischer is a trial to her parents. They’re proud of her degrees in education and they’re happy to see her do well at the high school. But for all her pretended innocence, I’ve heard stories about her. About what she does at night and where she spends her weekends.”
“Shall we go in?”
Harold had chanced upon Dawn Fleischer in the stationery store a few weeks before. He had helped her find highlighters and engaged her in a few moments of warm conversation. In spite of his fifty-five years and her twenty-four, she had revived urges long dead. Hers was the kind of beauty that didn’t depend on skin or shape or the size of her eyes. For one mad instant, she made him want to leave Thea. But that was folly indeed. He knew it then; he knew it now. Still he wished Thea would stop tearing Dawn down. For once, he wanted her just to shut up, follow him obediently into church, and take her place beside him in the front pew.
“Seems a shame for such an innocent little girl to be corrupted by the big world,” said Thea, sotto voce beside him with her clutch purse swinging in her hand. “But they say the face of evil can be beguiling indeed, concealing the worst of sins behind a pleasing exterior. Oh, hello, Kathleen dear! Sandra, what a lovely dress! Good morning, Reverend Fleischer, Marge. Harold and I were just talking about your darling family.”
“Nothing untoward, I hope, Madame Mayor,” the pastor joked, and everyone laughed.
“Oh, Reverend, you’re such a kidder.”
Harold shut the rest of his wife’s jabber out. How good the sunlight felt, fresh air riding in on a breeze. It was a shame to have to move inside to worship God when He was so clearly present, and richly so, in nature. But, when came time, Harold allowed Thea to slip an arm through his and draw him proudly through the church doors.
*****
Her dad laughed. “Unfrown that brow, June, or your mother and I will think you’re not glad you’re home.”
June gave him a wry smile. “Sorry.”
“Always the serious one,” he joked.
Her mother, about to remove June’s breakfast plate, set it down instead and hugged her from behind. The peach-fuzz of her mother’s chin tickled her cheek. Then a kiss, a “Love you, hon,” and she was free, delighted at the warm confines of the embrace, but liking her freedom more. She still felt unsettled and a little thin-skinned about her last days at camp, crying like a schoolgirl even as she tried not to, Jeff blushing beside her, barely able to speak.
“I doubt if you remember this—you remember it, Anne, right?—how when June was three she loved to dance up a storm to West Side Story and I told her the plot—”
“Yes!” said her mother.
“Whenever I put the record on, she’d get that same wrinkle in her brow, and ask ‘Tony dead yet?’ after every song, and I’d have to assure her that Tony was just fine, that he wouldn’t bite the big one until the end of side two.”
“Well, Dad, I may have seemed too serious about things to you. But life really isn’t a cakewalk, when you come right down to it.” June sipped her apple juice.
“She’s got you there, George.”
“She does?” He grabbed at his chest, holding his coffee cup steady at chin level with his other hand. “By kibble, she’s got me! I ain’t long for this world, ma. My own flesh and blood, for so you have often protested she is, hath struck me to the quick. This life—”
“Dad!” June let her exasperation show, but it was as drawn out and ineptly histrionic as the death speech her father now delivered between pauses for coffee.
“This life, which until this very moment I had always thought the quintessential cakewalk, that most elegant of dances, beside which the finest minuet is as the tromping of loam-footed peasants . . . this life, I say, is now revealed to me (sip), not by indifferent Dame Fortune, no, but by she to whom I have bequeathed all I have in this world—if it should be that my beloved spouse fall by the same blow, as now I fear she must, that takes her worthy husband to his unworthy death (sip)—as not a cakewalk, not that most beloved of dances, but as some unnamed something else, a vile writhing of the body too terrible to name, or not a dance at all (sip) but some nullity too terrible to contemplate.”
“Okay, it’s a waltz!”
“Mine eyes grow dim, mine ears wax exceeding—”
June’s mother laughed by the sink.
“—but I hear her, my murderess most fair, speak of walls—the walls rise gray and smooth and tall as a tunnel tottering on its end, I at their bottom falling deeper as deeper they fall, their rims thrusting upward as upward they thrust (sip)—”
To her mother: “He’s losing it.”
“George dead yet?” her mother volunteered. That broke it up, her father almost losing his coffee through his nose.
“Good one, Anne,” he said, holding his throat from the sudden heat of the swallow, “yep, George is dead all right, but so is that frown. It’s good to have you home, June.”
“I’m glad to be home.” And she was, even though her first time away from her parents now cast them in an odd light. They’d been strangers coming toward the bus in the school parking lot yesterday, girlish memories brought to life, every gesture emanating from them in rhythms that spoke not to what she was, but to what they believed her to be.
Now the three of them were engaged in the process of matching soil to uprooted root. Her room, surprisingly small after their drive home, had improved slightly upon waking this morning. But there were things that needed boxing away, and June had a feeling the discolored patch of paint above her bed, the hippo face, would now always remind her that she was sleeping in a little girl’s room, a place she no longe
r belonged, not really, not like other girls her age, not even others who had gone all the way.
“So how would my two girls feel about a drive to Lake Tahoe?” her father asked. “Spend an afternoon at Emerald Bay, take in Vikingsholm Castle? It’s been over a year.”
“I have things to do around the house, George.”
“I was going to see if Ward was free.” June watched her father freeze up.
“June,” said her mother, “aren’t there other friends you’d rather see first?”
“Ward’s a nice boy and all,” said her father. “But he’s disturbed, not at all your type. He was fine for a childhood friend. But he’s grown into an odd duck. Your friends’ parents, those willing to confide, are afraid some of his weirdness has rubbed off on you.”
June put up a fight, a civilized, respectful one. But after a few exchanges, she agreed to wait a while to see him. She told them she’d be ready for the family trip in an hour.
Then she went to her room to phone him, at least talk to him, see if he too had turned into a stranger. Or if (and this she hoped) the way things were matched the lie she had told Jeff Balunis when he led her to their tree by the lake and told her it was over, that all this time he’d had a girlfriend, at first he wasn’t going to tell her but she was so nice he had to, he really liked her, and he was sorry he hadn’t been honest with her. She started crying then but Jeff didn’t touch her, even though she wouldn’t have minded. She pulled some Kleenex out of her hip pack and let her tears, cool from the lake breeze, soak them. When she regained control, she told Jeff she too had a boyfriend. His name was Ward. He was wonderful. And she was sorry she had been “mutually deceptive” in not telling Jeff about him, but now everything would be okay because she could go back to Ward, and Jeff could go back to what’s-her-face, and they would cherish the memory of what they’d had and wish each other well from a distance and it would always be this special time. Then she broke down again, and she could tell that Jeff knew she was lying about Ward.
But for all of Jeff’s almost-fifteen wisdom, and as gentle as he’d been in taking her all the way, even then she knew that her lie was somehow no lie, that casting Ward in that light just long enough to invent a tale was not an idea her mind wanted to let go of. It felt too good, too right, to throw off. It felt, if she cared to admit it, like the truth.
This closest friend of hers, whose meeting was almost her first memory, whom she’d confided in, who had shared his invisible companion with her as she had with him and then as both of them had with the short-lived Shy Friends Club, who had lain with her for hours the summer they were seven beneath the treehouse oak, hearing his grandfather bellow from the treetops, tossing below the brilliant discards of what was to become Unicornucopia, a three-months’ blistering wordbrawl distilled into three hundred scintillating pages—this peculiar Ward could well be her intended.
Maybe it took absence to awaken fondness.
She flounced onto the bed and reached for the phone. Her heart pounded as the digits beeped. A ring, the interruption of the next ring, suspended time.
“Hello.”
Oh. A breath. “Joy, hi.”
“Is that . . . is it June? You’re back!”
“Yes, as of yesterday.”
“Great to hear your voice. Ward’s missed you a lot.”
Her forehead felt hot. She imagined that Joydrop could see her cheeks redden. “Is he there?”
“No, he went for a walk. I don’t know where.”
June tried to be casual about the news but it disappointed her. She asked after everyone else, said she’d had a great time at camp (which was true), and took Joy’s bemused promise that she’d let Ward know she had called.
Her sweaty ear peeled off the receiver. She imagined Joydrop Heartline, a pouch of magic rocks about her neck, giving a girlish giggle at the ways of children.
Let her laugh, thought June. Laughter, her kind anyway, had never hurt anyone.
*****
On Ward’s walk south on Bedford Avenue, half a mile to I-50 and City Hall, Timothy had flitted all over the street, goof upon his face, a brood-hen swell filling his chest, a drunken swagger to his walk.
Ward did his best to ignore him, neither smiling nor laughing. But they were both giddy over dropping in on June.
Just past Mother Lode Medical Center, June’s former house on Pleasant Street jaunted by, and Timothy started leaping rooftops, trampolining from shake to lawn, diving like a darning needle through the drivers of passing cars, balling himself up to bounce from hedgetop to roof, unwrapping his sphericality just in time to set foot upon shingle and start all over again.
When he thought there was no one about, Ward spoke a few words of encouragement. Once, these earned him the stare of an old man sitting on a porch with a lap blanket as gray as the siding of his house. But though it seemed to take forever to shake free of that stare, they did it at last and enjoyed a good laugh about it.
Things sobered up once they crossed the I-50 bridge and passed the town square. Mr. Haskell was there again. Ward mechanically returned his wave, but he skirted around the square to avoid being waylaid into incoherent conversation.
There was nothing he could do for the poor man and he didn’t want to jinx his visit by having to take in his rancid-cough-medicine breath or the porcupine stubble on his chin.
Ward avoided Timothy’s admonishing look until they were a few blocks down Main Street and had turned onto Benham at the post office.
Sometimes he went with Grampa to mail a manuscript. Grampa had a favorite clerk, Ms. Rutherford, long red hair fanning out on either side of her face, late thirties with a harnessed chest, but really friendly in an empty sort of way. Ward had watched her lower and fold the flag at day’s end. He was surprised to discover today that her house was the pretty, well-kept one with the long bed of daffodils (she looked up from it and smiled, waving her trowel) just a few buildings along Benham from where she worked.
Kind.
“Too bad she’s not married,” said Ward. “I think her husband died when I was in third grade. She’s the first person I knew—well, kind of knew—who had anybody close to them die.”
Deaf mute.
Timothy wasn’t referring to Ms. Rutherford. The phrase “deaf mute” was useful shorthand for anyone who wouldn’t understand why Ward was talking to the air. He saw a tourist couple on the other side of the street, a well-dressed man and woman. A map was crumpled partway open in the man’s hand. They ignored him in favor of the tour they were taking, which was fine with him.
As they neared June’s street, sand began to seep out of Ward’s legs. Heartblood thudded in his ears and his underarms tickled with drops of sweat.
Ridiculous. He’d played here dozens of times.
Ulterior rose.
“Right, old buddy.”
He’d never had anything but play in mind before. He’d never had a box from Perrini’s in his pocket, pressing against his outer thigh with every step. Phillips Court felt as if it lay in wait. She lived in the sixth house along the left, across from the DeSario family, which always made Ward fear for her safety.
Even so, he walked down the right sidewalk now, a sheen of sweat saddled on his upper lip. He took tentative steps, stopped, what if she’d seen him, a few more steps, maybe they weren’t home, garage door shut so he couldn’t tell, no, there was a standing lamp lit by the couch beside the picture window, no one visible.
Cross over.
What if her parents yelled at him, threw him out? What if she didn’t like him any more?
“Maybe tomorrow,” Ward said, turning to go.
A heavy door opened like an axe chop behind him, noise of TV on too loud, people arguing, the DeSario house, Big Mike. An invisible hand scruffed hot at his neck, recalling his fear that day when he’d stood up to Big Mike in the cafeteria.
The memory revived as he turned: Ward’s assigned table of six, Joey Russo sitting opposite him for a week of punishment, away from his gang,
not all that bad when you got him alone. But now Calvin DeSario’s big brother hunched in Ward’s seat, a black t-shirt across his broad back, and Ward’s warped sense of justice pushed him to confront Big Mike with You’re in my seat, again once ignored You’re in my seat, Big Mike about to say or do something when Mr. Burke huffed over to order Ward’s nemesis back to his own table, Big Mike’s olive eyes fixed on Ward, then gone, Joey Russo wearing no mean look or anything, just repeating You shouldn’t uv done that to Big Mike.
A hand on his shoulder spun him around. It was Calvin.
“Hi, Ward. Hey you want to—?”
“Calvin, Jesus you scared me, I thought it was,” he glanced at the house, “your brother.”
“No, Mike’s not home.” Calvin had been close to Ward in elementary school, once belonged to the Shy Friends Club in fact, not because he himself had an invisible companion but because he tagged after Len Frome, like now he mostly tagged after the kids in his big brother’s inner circle at school. Scootling an acorn with his foot, he said, “Mike and Patti Singer are . . . they’re off somewheres. So you want to come in and play or something?”
Timothy tried to dissuade him, but Ward put Calvin’s nervousness down to embarrassment about his home life. He had heard that Calvin’s father, a guidance counselor at school, could, for all his dressing up in smart clothes, let slip some fairly crude remarks—more whispering at this stage than anything the kids let the teachers in on. With a son like Big Mike, who’d been held back twice and was maybe seventeen but in ninth grade, neither one of the parents was likely to be a prize.
Anyway, it would give Ward time to regather his courage. He’d play an hour or so with Calvin. Then without stopping to think about the consequences, he’d march across the street and ring June’s doorbell.
“Sure, Calvin. Let’s.”
*****
Look at him, you asshole, Calvin admonished. All this talking a blue streak, he’ll run away before I can get him upstairs. Mike’ll beat the crap out of me.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 2
