The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Mrs. White’s eyes remained shut, making it easy to overlay the face of Bridey Valentine. Now, there was a woman who’d worked! Verily, she’d outworked every man in Hollywood. Come to think of it, how about the flappers I’d met in New York? They’d been teachers, stenographers, even librarians, and I’d basked in their intoxicating moxie. Further back now: Mother Mash, tireless moonshiner; Mary Leather, general of a squadron of servants. I saw where my brain was headed and could not stop it—my cherished Wilma Sue, a “working girl” in the most colloquial of senses, slaving away at the oldest profession of all.

  I had, to my surprise, a long history of loving hard-working women.

  Could such madness be true? Zebulon Finch—feminist?

  The nub of Mrs. White’s Chesterfield sizzled. Her eyes, when opened, were steelier than expected, her voice more guttural.

  “All right. We’ll give them their cookout. We’ll need decorations, good ones. And food, lots of food. And a grill—shit—pardon my French—but you’ll have to dig out Charles’s grill from the garage. Can you operate a grill? Well, you’ll have to learn. Because we’re going to put on a display. An entirely normal display. The whole block can rubberneck till they’re sore, see for themselves that I’m normal, that my children are normal—that you are normal. All right? Mr. Gray? Do you think you can manage? We only have three days.”

  X.

  AMERICAN IMPROVISERS REGULARLY birthed technological monsters, from Leather’s Voltaic Bed to the C-53 Skytrooper that had launched me over Germany, but none of them scared me as much as Charles White’s grill. It was the size of an upright piano, a hooded double-decker of iron and aluminum stippled with cockeyed knobs and illogical gauges, centered by a grate crusted with barbecues past and strewn with cobwebbed tongs, rusty pinchers, and dank bags of bygone charcoal.

  My terror at manning the grill was so great, in fact, that I’d had little time to voice my dismay over Charles’s barbecue garb. Mrs. White’s insistence that I wear it indicated that she thought it would standardize me, but what kind of sick “standard” was a towering chef’s hat labeled SUPER CHEF and a shin-length smock printed with a bumblebee cook and his idiot slogan WHAT’S COOKING, HONEY? I felt like a fool, but this whole affair was my own damned fault. I glared at the marbled sirloins and flaccid wieners awaiting my dilettante torching.

  Decoration had carried on nonstop since Tuesday. Forget common crepe (though we had pounds of it) and party hats (those, too). Dangling spangles on strings had transformed the yard into a humongous American flag. One entered into the blue sector, twirling with oversized stars, before progressing to the white sector, where one could find both grill and potluck spread, and finally the red sector, where we’d built a bar complete with the folksy accent of a wheelbarrow filled with ice, Budweiser, and Blatz.

  Our prep work recalled the Leathers’ dinner with the Cockshuts.

  I felt the train-track rumble of barreling doom.

  Liberty-colored pinwheels clacked. A billion sequins snagged the sun. The radio cooed a doubleheader, Saint Louis Cardinals at Milwaukee Braves. Junior and Franny stood at starched-clothing attention like trembling greyhounds awaiting the race. In the center of it all was Mrs. White in satin-piped taffeta, bosom pounding, fingertips fluttering about the radical new hairdo she’d had done that very morning, a startling departure from her conservative pin-curl. It was called, she said breathlessly, the Eska Protein Wave, the sort of Italian cut popularized by actress Elizabeth Taylor. The boyish crop piled upon her head a carefree mess of curls while leaving her swan neck unprotected, thereby emphasizing her earrings, pearls, and surprisingly shapely shoulders.

  Mrs. White was out to show them all.

  The Cunninghams arrived first, as Mrs. White had predicted; their ongoing penance for their septic sins required wild overenthusiasm for neighborhood events. They were a pudgy blond foursome who oohed over our stack of mosquito-encircled meat, and when Mr. Cunningham accepted Mrs. White’s introduction of me and hesitantly shook my cold hand, I could see brown shoeshine polish beneath his fingernails. The man was working overtime to buy back his reputation.

  The Schmitts charged the yard next. Myrtle Schmitt gasped at Mrs. White’s hair, and they cheek-kissed as if it had been a Klondike expedition, not a four-foot fence, that had separated them for so long. Chet, overcompensating as you might to someone given a terminal diagnosis, gave me a back-slap nearly hard enough to shoot Johnny’s golden aggie from my stomach.

  “He cooks too!” exclaimed Chet.

  I asked Gød, my long-held adversary, if he wouldn’t mind helping me out just this once, and with a prayer slapped a sirloin onto the grill. I’d devoured plenty in my day but had cooked none; I frowned, wondering what I was supposed to do next while it hissed at me in disgust. Chet, thankfully, was the sort unable to resist usurping masculine tasks. He grabbed three shakers of spices and began applying them with abandon.

  From there it was impossible to keep track. The DeWitts, the Brandts, the Dodds, and the Shaefers might as well have been a single fifteen-person tribe, so interchangeable were their bouffants and buzzcuts, bow-shouldered dresses and Bermuda shorts. While the wives clung to Mrs. White and their dungareed kids dove through streamers after Junior, Franny, and Clown, the husbands gathered around the grill like druids. Following Chet’s lead, they addressed me with a jocularity almost too pronounced to be believed.

  Joe, is it? Glad to make your acquaintance! That’s a dilly of a steak there! And gosh, this garden! Gigi’s going to give me the dickens if I can’t whip ours into shape! I think it’s real swell how you’re helping Mrs. White with the place! I wish my boy was more like you: quiet, respectful, no darn duck’s-ass haircut! You know, Joe, my little Susie had herself some skin problems, too—how about I fix you up with the family doc? Hey, you a baseball fan, Joe? Then you need yourself a high-fidelity unit! Mosey on down to Dodd Electronics; we’ll fix you up!

  Having done their civic duty, they loosened their collars and decided to become hungry. Like wild dogs they attacked Mrs. White’s plates of cracker-ready pimento spread, limeberry gelatin molds, prune whip, and canapés ranging from devilled ham to cheese puffs, and then pushed on to what had become a citadel of competitive cakes: Mystery Mocha Cake, Ambrosia Cake, and Black Midnight Devil’s Cake, just for starters.

  This last dessert came from none other than the notorious Mrs. Shoemaker, who timed her entrance with the Braves’ seventh inning stretch. “Everyone, it’s the Shoemakers!” cried Mrs. White, and the congregated, especially the bootlicking Cunninghams, hoorahed as if their future happiness depended on it. I didn’t need the introduction. Mrs. Shoemaker, a beanstalk woman approaching fifty, announced herself with an unfrivolous sheath dress, nurse’s heels, white gloves, and a look of imperial skepticism. Beside her, Mr. Shoemaker, Wichita’s Chevrolet King, barely registered.

  Mrs. Shoemaker allowed Mrs. White to pay first tribute, during which the elder raised her eyebrows at the showy hairstyle and naked shoulders. I flipped steaks and rolled wieners with jittery quickness, flip-roll, flip-roll, as the grand dame made a thirty-minute parade across the lawn of fawners. At last she reached the grill. I’d faced foes as cunning as the Barker, Dr. Leather, Detective Roseborough, and Heinrich Himmler, and yet a housewife pacing so confidently about her domain was a new kind of threat. I jostled the coals to create smoke cover, but her small black eyes pierced it like wasps.

  “You there. You must be Mr. Gray.”

  Mrs. White had behaved impeccably for two hours. Surely I could last two minutes?

  “Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Shoemaker.”

  “You’ve caused quite a stir around here, young man.”

  “Have I? I did not mean to.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I flubbed a wiener. It dropped onto the coals. Mrs. Shoemaker smirked. There was a coldness to her appraisal that recalled, in the worst of ways, the judgmental Abigail Finch.

  “I’m just trying to finish my book,” said I.<
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  Mrs. Shoemaker had no interest in obvious lies.

  “Mrs. White tells me that you are stricken with Blackhand’s Disease. How perfectly awful for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “In fact, I called Dr. Proctor on Sycamore Lane so that I might learn more about it. I thought I might bake a cake that fit with your dietary restrictions.”

  I darted my eyes rightward, hoping for Mrs. White, but she was off in the blue sector, too far away to help.

  “You shouldn’t have,” said I.

  Mrs. Shoemaker smiled, if that’s what you want to call it.

  “Posh. I was being neighborly, that’s all. But Dr. Proctor had never heard of Blackhand’s. Isn’t that curious?”

  Leftward I looked, hoping for Clown. I’d hiss “steal,” and she’d clamp her jaws over Mrs. Shoemaker’s purse, the perfect distraction, except the dumb dog was off snuffling up a yard’s worth of dropped nubbins.

  “Well, Mrs. Shoemaker.” My idiot mind whirled. “It’s, you know, a Korean disease. I contracted it in Korea. The word for it doesn’t translate here. It’s Korean.”

  “Of course, Korea. On behalf of the Heavenly Hills Welcome Wagon, I thank you so very much for your service, and in a country of such natural savagery. Tell me, which division were you in? I’ve studied them extensively in Reader’s Digest.”

  Dearest Reader, I do hope that the good times we’ve had together will motivate you to forgive what I did next, as I cannot quite forgive myself. The degrading parlor trick with which I’d paid my way into dozens of Hollywood shindigs popped into my mind as my only salvation. I plucked a kabob skewer from a tray of grilling implements, took false aim at a wiener, and instead drove the skewer into my right arm below the wrist.

  It stuck vertical like a flag pole, one more patriotic party favor.

  One of Junior’s pet phrases, just the thing to garner sympathy:

  “Gee whiz, I’ve pulled a real lulu this time!”

  Mrs. Shoemaker gawped while I unstuck the skewer, pressed my opposite hand against the bloodless wound, and babbled an excuse about fetching a bandage. I took off, weaving around minglers for the safe harbor of the garage. Once inside, I wiped a porthole through a dust-encrusted window and peeked out. Though far across the yard and thronged by kowtowers, Mrs. Shoemaker hadn’t dropped her eagle eyes—she was staring right at me.

  I might have harbored there till morn had not the tabernacle of Charles’s dynamism (drill press, circular saw, extension ladder, soldering iron) begun to shame me anew for my cowardice. Had I really said gee whiz? Had I really called my stabbing a lulu? I had no right to help Junior achieve manhood if I insisted upon acting like a little boy. I wrapped my new wound in a cloth and slipped back outside the garage, creeping beneath the overhanging eaves.

  From shadow I observed the party’s final arrivals—eight cane-wielding geriatrics who hobbled into the yard bunched like white grapes. They glowered while gathering potato salad, chafed while cutting cake, and muttered old-country curses each time someone tried breaking the ice.

  “Say hey, Mr. Falzone!”

  “What do you know, Mrs. Romano?”

  Despite alabaster cataracts and jungly eyebrow hair, the elderlies spotted me within five minutes and glared even harder than Mrs. Shoemaker. They’d lived too long and seen too much to be suckered by a coat of paint, whether it be the literal polyester lacquer that turned a sad home bright pink or the figurative veneer of normality draped over an unnatural incubus.

  I peeled off hat and apron, a Super Chef no longer. The more I stewed beneath their hot glowers, the more convinced I became that the crusty immigrants had it right. Just look at them, the denizens of Heavenly Hills, getting fat and tipsy while yakking about pension plans, making the country club’s par-five, and building that backyard pool. The proud empire these old folks had known had teetered, and I heard the ash-whisper of the Millennialist, urging me to look more closely.

  It was as if I’d donned Junior’s 3-D glasses. See Mr. Shoemaker showing off his Diners Club card? His docility was cover for a career of unrepentant backstabbing. See how Mr. Schaefer couldn’t keep his eyes off little Franny? He fought against the blackest of desires. See how Mrs. Brandt looked at Mr. DeWitt and how Mr. DeWitt looked at Mrs. Mitchell? Spouses would swap, and in the end it would matter not, for each of them rolled along rails into a furnace.

  These were the petty pinheads withholding approval of Mrs. White until she leapt through their series of flaming hoops? I’d tried playing it her way, landscaping her yard as I’d landscaped her family, but no longer could I stomach such shallowness. I pushed from the side of the garage and shouldered aside perspiring bodies. I was distinctly more alive, thought I, than any of them, their dull quips deserving nothing better than the Father Knows Best laugh track.

  “Timer-controlled cooking? Why, pretty soon we won’t need wives at all!”

  Wa-ha-ha-ha!

  “George says this power steering has got all us lady drivers power-mad.”

  Hur-hur-hur-hur!

  “I’m not sure, Shirley, that your home is right for a Tupperware party.”

  Awwwww!

  This last cold crack, delivered by Mrs. Shoemaker, was received by a smiling but inwardly crestfallen Mrs. White. How peddling flexible polyethylene containers equated to higher social status was beyond me, but that, Dearest Reader, was not the goddamned point.

  “And why not?” challenged I.

  “Oh, good,” purred Mrs. Shoemaker. “Our young gardener’s injuries are not mortal.”

  Junior’s comic books were jammed with Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads, in which ninety-seven-pound “runts” were transformed, through Atlas’s Dynamic Tension exercises, into “he-men” raring to take revenge on beachside bullies. I felt similarly transformed; Mrs. White’s warning looks deflected off my rippling muscles.

  “Mrs. White shall host the next Tupperware party,” declared I. “It is only fair.”

  “I agree,” said Mrs. Shoemaker. “It’s only that, well, Mrs. White does not own a dishwasher and can’t demonstrate Tupperware’s washability, one of its best features.”

  “Your excuse is weak tea, madam. Weak tea!”

  Mrs. Shoemaker swirled her mai tai in a white-gloved hand.

  “You have so much oomph for one so infirm.”

  “ ’Tis only the tip of my oomph, I assure you.”

  “Mrs. Shoemaker is right.” Mrs. White forced the words through clenched jaws. “I should’ve thought about the dishwasher. That’s my mistake.”

  “There is one mistake here,” said I, “and it belongs to Mrs. Shoemaker.”

  “Mr. Gray,” hissed Mrs. White.

  “Do go on,” said Mrs. Shoemaker.

  Not that the villainess could have stopped me!

  “The belief that Mrs. White is worth anything less than you or your coven of witches because she slaves for her family, because she does the work of two, because she does not have the pocketbook to purchase the latest whatsit or thingamabob, that, Mrs. Shoemaker, that is the mistake, and if I have learned one thing from my time in Heavenly Hills, it is that children here are taught to apologize for mistakes.”

  Mrs. Shoemaker’s frown was a tarantula of wrinkles.

  “You want me to apologize?”

  “That is not what he means,” said Mrs. White. “Mr. Gray, stop this instant.”

  Stop? I had no intention, especially given the agog faces beginning to stare at us. Friends, Romans, countrymen, thought I, let me shout sense into your TV-deafened ears! But by then Mrs. Shoemaker had slipped my blade and drawn her own.

  “I am quite sure, Mr. Gray, that I don’t know what you are going on about. Of course Mrs. White is a capable homemaker. Any advice I offer her, I offer as a friend, and I am confident that she takes it in the intended fashion.”

  “Oh, I do,” insisted Mrs. White. “I appreciate it so much.”

  But Mrs. Shoemaker was not finished.

  �
��I believe that I speak for all of the ladies present when I say that we are simply not comfortable bringing our children into an environment that includes a large unleashed dog, an ill renter about whom we know little, and, quite frankly, an atmosphere of unconventional ideas—building a bomb shelter from a basement, for instance. I’m sure Mrs. White takes no offense.”

  On this point, Mrs. White herself seemed uncertain.

  “I—well,” said she. “It’s only that I—”

  What good fortune that I was there to rescue the stumped stammerer!

  “Unconventional, you say? Do you see, madam, the tint of my skin? How unconventional it is? The A-bomb at Hiroshima did it! Yes, that’s right! Now all of you know! I was there! I saw the detonation from a distance that few others did, and I can tell you—nay, promise you—that the household that prizes plastic food containers over bomb shelters is a harebrained household indeed!”

  Silence descended so completely that we could hear strike three called from Milwaukee. The laugh track had run out of tape, and the backyard party now seemed grossly overproduced, the air putrid with wieners and Jell-O into which maggot larvae had already been laid. Stupid, stupid Zebulon! I’d need to have been thirty years old to have been present at Hiroshima, and here I was, still lousy old seventeen.

  Mr. Cunningham, famished for respect, rolled the dice on clearing his throat, checking his watch, and declaring the lateness of the hour. The gambit paid off. Others echoed the sentiment to the stricken, speechless Mrs. White—they had to drive to the grandparents’, had to get the kids cleaned up for lakeside fireworks, had to relieve the babysitter. The elated Mr. Cunningham lifted streamers to facilitate the satisfied exit of Mrs. Shoemaker. There were kisses and handshakes but only for show; their eyes transmitted to one another the real conversation: We’ll talk about this later.

  And talk—and talk—and talk.

  Dear Gød, what had I done?

  Chet Schmitt, potential pal of mine for a whole three days, gave me a disappointed shake of the head before leaving. That left the old folks, who departed as they’d arrived, in a cluster, as if they were a clan of rats with their tails knotted together. They sneered at me as they disappeared around the pink clapboard, gratified that at least one of their senses worked well enough to have sniffed out my dishonesty long before I’d exposed it myself.