The second Thursday, she went to the Park Avenue Hotel, Tophet’s only good hotel, fully intending to sit in the dim cocktail lounge until something happened—but she had no more than stepped into the lobby when Barbara Pursley called out to her; and she ended by going to dinner with Barbara and her husband, who were visiting Tophet for a few days, and Barbara’s parents, whom she had always liked. Though she hadn’t seen Barbara for fifteen years, and in truth hadn’t thought of her once during those fifteen years (except to remember that a close friend of Barbara’s had been the one, in sixth grade, to think up the cruel but probably fairly accurate nickname The Ostrich for Rose), she did have an enjoyable time. Anyone who had observed their table in the vaulted oak-paneled dining room of the Park Avenue, taking note in particular of the tall, lean, nervously eager woman who laughed frequently, showing her gums, and who seemed unable to keep her hand from patting at her hair (which was baby-fine, a pale brown, in no style at all but not unbecoming), and adjusting her collar or earrings, would have been quite astonished to learn that that woman (of indeterminate age: her “gentle” expressive chocolate-brown eyes might have belonged to a gawky girl of sixteen or to a woman in her fifties) had intended to spend the evening prowling about for a man.
And then the third Thursday (for the Thursdays had become, now, a ritual: her aunt protested only feebly, her father gave her a library book to return) she went to the movies, to the very theater where, at thirteen or fourteen, with her friend Janet Brome, she had met…or almost met…what were thought to be, then, “older boys” of seventeen or eighteen. (Big boys, farm boys, spending the day in Tophet, prowling about for girls. But even in the darkened Rialto neither Rose nor Janet resembled the kind of girls these boys sought.) And nothing at all happened. Nothing. Rose walked out of the theater when the film—a cloying self-conscious comedy about adultery in Manhattan—was only half over, and took a bus back home, in time to join her father and her aunt for ice cream and Peek Freans biscuits. “You look as if you’re coming down with a cold,” Rose’s father said. “Your eyes are watery.” Rose denied it, but came down with a cold the very next day.
She skipped a Thursday, but on the following week ventured out again, eyeing herself cynically and without a trace of affection in her bedroom mirror (which looked wispy and washed-out—but do mirrors actually age, Rose wondered), judging that, yes, she might be called pretty, with her big ostrich eyes and her ostrich height and gawky dignity, by a man who squinted in her direction in just the right degree of dimness. By now she knew the project was doomed but it gave her a kind of angry satisfaction to return to the Park Avenue Hotel, just, as she said in a more recent letter (this to the girl, the woman, with whom she had roomed as a graduate student at Radcliffe, then as virginal as Rose, and possibly even more intimidated by men than Rose—and now Pauline was divorced, with two children, living with an Irish poet in a tower north of Sligo, a tower not unlike Yeats’s, with his several children) for the brute hell of it.
And the evening had been an initially promising one. Quite by accident Rose wandered into the Second Annual Conference of the Friends of Evolution, and sat at the rear of a crowded ballroom, to hear a paper read by a portly, distinguished gentleman with pince-nez and a red carnation in his buttonhole, and to join in the enthusiastic applause afterward. (The paper had been, Rose imperfectly gathered, about the need for extraterrestrial communication—or was such communication already a fact, and the FBI and “university professors” were united in suppressing it?) A second paper by a woman Rose’s age who walked with a cane seemed to be arguing that Christ was in space—“out there in space”—as a close reading of the Book of Saint John the Divine would demonstrate. The applause was even more enthusiastic after this paper, though Rose contributed only politely, for she’d had, over the years, many thoughts about Jesus of Nazareth—and thoughts about those thoughts—and in the end, one fine day, she had taken herself in secret to a psychiatrist at the Mount Yarrow Hospital, confessing in tears, in shame, that she knew very well the whole thing—the whole thing—was nonsense, and insipid nonsense at that, but—still—she sometimes caught herself wistfully “believing;” and was she clinically insane? Some inflection in her voice, some droll upward motion of her eyes, must have alerted the man to the fact that Rose Mallow Odom was someone like himself—she’d gone to school in the North, hadn’t she?—and so he brushed aside her worries, and told her that of course it was nonsense, but one felt a nagging family loyalty, yes one did quarrel with one’s family, and say terrible things, but still the loyalty was there, he would give her a prescription for barbiturates if she was suffering from insomnia, and hadn’t she better have a physical examination?—because she was looking (he meant to be kindly, he didn’t know how he was breaking her heart) worn out. Rose did not tell him that she had just had her six months’ checkup and that, for her, she was in excellent health: no chest problems, the anemia under control. By the end of the conversation the psychiatrist remembered who Rose was—“Why, you’re famous around here, didn’t you publish a novel that shocked everyone?”—and Rose had recovered her composure enough to say stiffly that no one was famous in this part of Alabama; and the original topic had been completely forgotten. And now Jesus of Nazareth was floating about in space… or orbiting some moon… or was He actually in a spacecraft (the term “spacecraft” was used frequently by the conferees), awaiting His first visitors from planet Earth? Rose was befriended by a white-haired gentleman in his seventies who slid across two or three folding chairs to sit beside her, and there was even a somewhat younger man, in his fifties perhaps, with greasy quill-like hair and a mild stammer, whose badge proclaimed him as H. Speedwell of Sion, Florida, who offered to buy her a cup of coffee after the session was over. Rose felt a flicker of—of what?—amusement, interest, despair? She had to put her finger to her lips in a schoolmarmish gesture, since the elderly gentleman on her right and H. Speedwell on her left were both talking rather emphatically, as if trying to impress her, about their experiences sighting UFOs, and the third speaker was about to begin.
The topic was “The Next and Final Stage of Evolution,” given by the Reverend Jake Cromwell of the New Holland Institute of Religious Studies in Stoneseed, Kentucky. Rose sat very straight, her hands folded on her lap, her knees primly together (for, it must have been by accident, Mr. Speedwell’s right knee was pressing against her), and pretended to listen. Her mind was all a flurry, like a chicken coop invaded by a dog, and she couldn’t even know what she felt until the fluttering thoughts settled down. Somehow she was in the Regency Ballroom of the Park Avenue Hotel on a Thursday evening in September, listening to a paper given by a porkish-looking man in a tight-fitting gray-and-red plaid suit with a bright-red tie. She had been noticing that many of the conferees were disabled—on canes, on crutches, even in wheelchairs (one of the wheelchairs, operated by a hawk-faced youngish man who might have been Rose’s age but looked no more than twelve, was a wonderfully classy affair, with a panel of push-buttons that would evidently do nearly anything for him he wished; Rose had rented a wheelchair some years ago, for herself, when a pinched nerve in her back had crippled her, and hers had been a very ordinary model)—and most of them were elderly. There were men her own age but they were not promising. And Mr. Speedwell, who smelled of something blandly odd, like tapioca, was not promising. Rose sat for a few more minutes, conscious of being polite, being good, allowing herself to be lulled by the Reverend Gromwell’s monotonous voice and by the ballroom’s decorations (fluorescent-orange and green and violet snakes undulated in the carpet, voluptuous forty-foot velvet drapes stirred in the tepid air from invisible vents, there was even a garishly inappropriate but mesmerizing mirrored ceiling with “stardust” lighting which gave to the conferees a rakish, faintly lurid air despite their bald heads and trembling necks and crutches) before making her apologetic escape.
****
Now Rose Mallow Odom sits at one of the long tables in Joe Pye’s Bingo Hall, her stomac
h somewhat uneasy after the Tru-Orange she has just drunk, a promising—a highly promising—card before her. She is wondering if the mounting excitement she feels is legitimate, or whether it has anything to do with the orange soda: or whether it’s simple intelligent dread, for of course she doesn’t want to win. She can’t even imagine herself calling out Bingo! in a voice loud enough to be heard. It is after 10:30 p.m. and there have been a number of winners and runners-up, many shrieking, ecstatic Bingos and some bellowing Bingos and one or two incredulous gasps, and really she should have gone home by now, Joe Pye is the only halfway attractive man in the place (there are no more than a dozen men there) and it isn’t likely that Joe Pye in his dashing costume, with his glaring white turban held together by a gold pin, and his graceful shoulders, and his syrupy voice, would pay much attention to her. But inertia or curiosity has kept her here. What the hell, Rose thought, pushing kernels of corn about on much-used squares of thick cardboard, becoming acquainted with fellow Tophetians, surely there are worse ways to spend Thursday night…? She would dash off letters to Hamilton Frye and Carolyn Sears this weekend, though they owed her letters, describing in detail her newly made friends of the evening (the plump, perspiring, good-natured young woman seated across from her is named Lobelia, and it’s ironic that Rose is doing so well this game, because just before it started Lobelia asked to exchange cards, on an impulse—“You give me mine and I’ll give you yours, Rose!” she had said, with charming inaccuracy and a big smile, and of course Rose had immediately obliged) and the depressingly bright-lit hall with its disproportionately large American flag up front by Joe Pye’s platform, and all the odd, strange, sad, eager, intent players, some of them extremely old, their faces wizened, their hands palsied, a few crippled or undersized or in some dim incontestable way not altogether right, a number very young (in fact it is something of a scandal, the children up this late, playing bingo beside their mamas, frequently with two or three cards while their mamas greedily work at four cards, which is the limit), and the dreadful taped music that uncoils relentlessly behind Joe Pye’s tireless voice, and of course Joe Pye the Bingo Master himself, who has such a warm, toothed smile for everyone in the hall, and who had—unless Rose, her weak eyes unfocused by the lighting, imagined it—actually directed a special smile and a wink in her direction earlier in the evening, apparently sighting her as a new customer. She will make one of her droll charming anecdotes out of the experience. She will be quite characteristically harsh on herself, and will speculate on the phenomenon of suspense, its psychological meaning (isn’t there a sense in which all suspense, and not just bingo hall suspense, is asinine?), and life’s losers who, even if they win, remain losers (for what possible difference could a home hair dryer, or $100 cash, or an outdoor barbecue grill, or an electric train complete with track, or a huge copy of the Bible, illustrated, bound in simulated white leather, make to any of these people?). She will record the groans of disappointment and dismay when someone screams Bingo! and the mutterings when the winner’s numbers, read off by one of the bored-looking girl attendants, prove to be legitimate. The winners’ frequent tears, the hearty handshaking and cheek-kissing Joe Pye indulges in, as if each winner were specially dear to him, an old friend hurrying forth to be greeted; and the bright-yellow mustard splashed on the foot-longs and their doughy buns; and the several infants whose diapers were changed on a bench unfortunately close by; and Lobelia’s superstitious fingering of a tiny gold cross she wears on a chain around her neck; and the worn-out little girl sleeping on the floor, her head on a pink teddy bear someone in her family must have won hours ago; and—
“You won! Here. Hey! She won! Right here! This card, here! Here! Joe Pye, right here!”
The grandmotherly woman to Rose’s left, with whom she’d exchanged a few pleasant words earlier in the evening (it turns out her name is Cornelia Teasel; she once cleaned house for the Odoms’ neighbors the Filarees), is suddenly screaming, and has seized Rose’s hand, in her excitement jarring all the kernels off the cards; but no matter, no matter, Rose does have a winning card, she has scored bingo, and there will be no avoiding it.
There are the usual groans, half-sobs, mutterings of angry disappointment, but the game comes to an end, and a gum-chewing girl with a brass helmet of hair reads off Rose’s numbers to Joe Pye, who punctuates each number not only with a Yes, right but Keep going, honey and You’re getting there, and a dazzling wide smile as if he’d never witnessed anything more wonderful in his life. A $100 winner! A first-time customer (unless his eyes deceive him) and a $100 winner!
Rose, her face burning and pulsing with embarrassment, must go to Joe Pye’s raised platform to receive her check, and Joe Pye’s heartiest warmest congratulations, and a noisy moist kiss that falls uncomfortably near her mouth (she must resist stepping violently back—the man is so physically vivid, so real, so there). “Now you’re smiling, honey, aren’t you?” he says happily. Up close he is just as handsome, but the whites of his eyes are perhaps too white. The gold pin in his turban is a crowing cock. His skin is very tanned, and the goatee even blacker than Rose had thought. “I been watching you all night, hon, and you’d be a whole lot prettier if you eased up and smiled more,” Joe Pye murmurs in her ear. He smells sweetish, like candied fruit or wine.
Rose steps back, offended, but before she can escape Joe Pye reaches out for her hand again, her cold thin hand, which he rubs briskly between his own. “You are new here, aren’t you? New tonight?” he asks.
“Yes,” Rose says, so softly he has to stoop to hear.
“And are you a Tophet girl? Folks live in town?”
“Yes.”
“But you never been to Joe Pye’s Bingo Hall before tonight?”
“No.”
“And here you’re walking away a hundred-dollar cash winner! How does that make you feel?”
“Oh, just fine—”
“What?”
“Just fine— I never expected—”
“Are you a bingo player? I mean, y’know, at these churches in town, or anywheres else.”
“No.”
“Not a player? Just here for the fun of it? A $100 winner, your first night, ain’t that excellent luck! —You know, hon, you are a real attractive gal, with the color all up in your face, I wonder if you’d like to hang around, oh say another half hour while I wind things up, there’s a cozy bar right next door, I noted you are here tonight alone, eh? —might-be we could have a nightcap, just the two of us?”
“Oh I don’t think so, Mr. Pye—”
“Joe Pye! Joe Pye’s the name,” he says, grinning, leaning toward her, “and what might your name be? Something to do with a flower, isn’t it?—some kind of a, a flower—”
Rose, very confused, wants only to escape. But he has her hand tightly in his own.
“Too shy to tell Joe Pye your name?” he says.
“It’s—it’s Olivia,” Rose stammers.
“Oh. Olivia. Olivia, is it,” Joe Pye says slowly, his smile arrested. “Olivia, is it… Well, sometimes I misread, you know; I get a wire crossed or something and I misread; I never claimed to be 100% accurate. Olivia, then. Okay, fine. Olivia. Why are you so skittish, Olivia? The microphone won’t pick up a bit of what we say. Are you free for a nightcap around eleven? Yes? Just next door at the Gayfeather where I’m staying, the lounge is a cozy homey place, nice and private, the two of us, no strings attached or nothing....”
“My father is waiting up for me, and—”
“Come on now, Olivia, you’re a Tophet gal, don’t you want to make an out-of-towner feel welcome?”
“It’s just that—”
“All right, then? Yes? It’s a date? Soon as we close up shop here? Right next door at the Gayfeather?”
Rose stares at the man, at his bright glittering eyes and the glittering heraldic rooster in his turban, and hears herself murmur a weak assent; and only then does Joe Pye release her hand.
And so it has come about, improbably, ludicrously, th
at Rose Mallow Odom finds herself in the sepulchral Gayfeather Lounge as midnight nears, in the company of Joe Pye the Bingo Master (whose white turban is dazzling even here, in the drifting smoke and the lurid flickering colors from a television set perched high above the bar), and two or three other shadowy figures, derelict and subdued, solitary drinkers who dearly want nothing to do with one another. (One of them, a fairly well-dressed old gentleman with a swollen pug nose, reminds Rose obliquely of her father—except for the alcoholic’s nose, of course.) She is sipping nervously at an “orange blossom”—a girlish sweet-acetous concoction she hasn’t had since 1962, and has ordered tonight, or has had her escort order for her, only because she could think of nothing else. Joe Pye is telling Rose about his travels to distant lands—Venezuela, Ethiopia, Tibet, Iceland—and Rose makes an effort to appear to believe him, to appear to be naïve enough to believe him, for she has decided to go through with it, to take this outlandish fraud as her lover, for a single night only, or part of a night, however long the transaction will take. “Another drink?” Joe Pye murmurs, laying his hand on her unresisting wrist.
Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 14
