“I know.”
“You do?” Cynthia was really surprised. She frowned at this secret Dory hadn’t told her.
“The Princess told me once.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“It never came up. I don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing anyway.”
“I guess you don’t.”
“It’s because I come from common peasant stock,” Dory said.
Cynthia had to smile, but she didn’t want to and the smile went away. “We’ve known each other so long, haven’t we? Childhood and all that.”
“Since fifth grade,” Dory said.
“Best friends,” Cynthia said. She seemed tired, worldly. “I remember how nice you were to me when I first came to Leah.”
“I was nobody,” Dory said. “I thought it was you being nice to me.”
Cynthia looked away, toward the flickering window. “There’s no reason we have to admit everything to each other, though, is there? You won’t tell me about John Hearne. I mean you won’t admit anything and it’s really none of my business.”
Dory could think of nothing proper to say, so she said nothing, but Cynthia’s mood was proof against her silence. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things she’s told me.” Cynthia stared gravely off into this knowledge. “Like at the age of nine…God, you’re so little when you’re nine! She was…She didn’t even know what was happening. One of her father’s pupils took her on his lap and she felt this thing and he pulled aside her underwear and just did it to her. Can you imagine? She never told anyone. They were alone for a few minutes and it hurt a lot but she didn’t dare cry or anything because she hadn’t lived with the Zwanzigs long and she was afraid to cause any trouble. Her mother had died and she didn’t have any other place to go. The pupil never came back but she was scared he would for a long time, until they moved to Zurich and then to New York. She used to have nightmares about him. One minute he was smiling and dandling her on his lap and the next he was hurting her like hell and snorting like a pig. Christ, what a monster! Can you imagine it? Nine years old! You’re so small when you’re nine. You’re small all over. And she didn’t tell anybody about it. Nobody ever knew. The Zwanzigs still don’t know about it. Can you imagine feeling you can’t even cry because you’re so scared you’ll get kicked out?”
Cynthia registered hatred, her fingers even curling into claws. “God!” she said, her jaws so constricted the word sounded German. “She says the most important thing about life is you never hurt people. It doesn’t matter what you do, there’s just the one forbidden thing—hurting another person. Instead you should love people and make them happy. She used to be a Catholic and she was going to be a nun but that didn’t work out, and then when she was nineteen she married a friend of the Zwanzigs’ who was twenty years older than she was. They were in Vienna when the war began, and he simply disappeared, totally. Later she saw a photograph in the New York Times and there he was in a German uniform standing with a bunch of other German officers under the Arch of Triumph in Paris. As far as she knows he was killed later in the war. She says she’s sorry for him but she never loved him, she just married him to please the Zwanzigs. She was pregnant and she had the child in New York. It was born with part of its spine uncovered and it died two days later of meningitis. It was a girl.” Cynthia’s voice had quavered at the last, and she sat quietly, her eyes moist. “And she’s such a beautiful person.”
Dory felt that she ought to say something. She was moved by Cynthia’s emotion more than by Yvonne’s story, which seemed so foreign and so far in the past. It was ancient history because it had happened before she became aware of history, a story of foreign perversities in which a child, or a million children, could be raped, and a husband could be a Nazi. Of course, all their histories would one day be ancient, and the old griefs would mean little. Like Betty Salmon’s. But now a real storm was coming and she didn’t know where Debbie was.
“Have you seen Debbie?” she asked, finally.
“No,” Cynthia said, startled out of her sad reverie into concern.
“What’s the matter?”
“She and Werner seem to have disappeared.”
“Oh-oh. She likes him.”
Someone walked down the hall past the closed door, and they looked at each other. Cynthia went lightly to the door, opened it without a click and peeked down the hall, then shut the door carefully. “It’s only Mrs. Patrick,” she said. “With the baby. Poor Mrs. Patrick—why does she have to wear those dresses that look like they came out of the dust bowl?”
“He doesn’t seem to mind,” Dory said.
“Oh, him. I mean she’s got the ‘new look’ and all that, but hers looks like 1936. And he looks like his battery’s run down. I mean they both practically drip libidinous fluids, don’t they? Maybe they don’t get enough sleep.”
Then Cynthia was looking at her with a kind of reckless intensity, about to say something she hesitated to say right out. “You and John Hearne,” she said quickly. “Did you?”
If Dory answered, “Did we what?” it could remain unadmitted, or nobody’s business, but Cynthia was her old friend and up till now they’d had no secrets. With a kind of relief she said, “Yes.”
“Wow. More than once?”
“Yes, a lot more than once.”
“Did you…like it?”
“I love him,” she said.
“But did you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Really? I mean a lot?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“So do you have any kind of understanding? About the future, I mean?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, it wasn’t his fault.”
“He seduced you!”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“You’re only seventeen! Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
“Well, thank heavens for that. But he did take advantage of you. You’ve always had a crush on him and now he’s had his fun and taken off for California.”
“Fun?”
“Yes, basically, I suppose. He had this lust so he just used your body.”
“Cynthia, do you know all that much about it?”
“It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? When you cut out all the palaver and the moonbeams he had this urge and you were handy.”
“He said he was going to come back and marry me.”
“Huh! I’d get it in writing, kid.”
“You sound like my mother, only she’s not so…vociferous.”
“Your mother knows?”
“Yes, she knows.”
“Did you tell her?”
“No, she just knows. What’s so strange about that? She had to get married herself. In my family we know what happens when a boy and a girl spend a lot of time alone with each other. She didn’t have to be Einstein to figure it out.”
“Ah, yes. Folk wisdom. I keep forgetting your peasant origins.”
“Well, that’s why I’m worried about Debbie. All the Perkins women have round heels.”
“Are you offended? Dory!”
“I’m worried, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said, taking her hand. “I didn’t mean to be so…vociferous.”
The dry, tanned hands enclosed her hand and her first instinct, though she didn’t allow her hand the slightest pulse of motion, was to withdraw. This touching was new, something Cynthia had learned from Yvonne.
Cynthia said, “If they’re out there somewhere the storm will bring them in.”
Lightning was continuous in the west, and they heard the first faint tinnitus of thunder.
“I’ve got to go,” Cynthia said. “Oh, how things have changed, Dory.” She seemed again emotion-weary, a lady in romantic decline. She sighed. “I haven’t practiced for three days—I might as well have left my violin at home. Anyway, I’m no Fritz Kreisler, so what’s the use?”
“You’re good,” Dory said.
“What good is good? Oh, I’ll keep it up, I supp
ose. I’ll go and crank out my exercises. Every genteel young lady should have a minor talent.” With that she got up and went to the door. She was acting now, going, as Cynthia would, from emotion to its dramatic imitation.
“Don’t worry too much about Debbie,” she said. “She’ll come back.” With a sad, brave, encouraging smile she said good night and slipped out the door with something of a dancer’s controlled fluidity.
Dory turned to the window, toward the storm. A tiny pattern glittered at the bottom of her screen, a geometric arrangement of squares that seemed deliberate, and she went closer to look. In letters four squares high, each square touched with, probably, a dab of Duco Cement, were the words I LOVE YOU. The porch roof ran along a few feet below her window, but she’d never thought to pull the shade. Dibley. Dibley, she thought immediately. Dibley trying to write backwards, remembering to reverse the L but not the E, making the letters so small no one might ever see them. But that he’d had to make the message concrete when he could never say it aloud—that he’d had to turn the idea into action—seemed as premonitory as the coming storm. Had he hunched there in the dark while she undressed, not five feet away, black eyes in his white face?
Cynthia tapped her tap on the door and opened it. “You’ll be relieved to know she’s back,” she said. “She and Werner sailed out to Pine Island and had to paddle all the way back in the calm. Creepy as that Hun is, I don’t detect any major hanky-panky, if you get my drift. Okay, Dory?”
“Thanks, Cyn. Thank you.”
“Are you okay, kid?” Cynthia asked. “Listen, I didn’t mean to be so hard on John Hearne. What do I know about it? Do you miss him terribly?”
“I’m afraid he’ll get hurt, and I’m jealous, too. I’m nervous all around, Cyn.”
“Listen, Dory. We all love you. Your loyal crew. We may be a little screwy but we love you, okay?”
Before she undressed that night she pulled down the shade, then put it up again when her light was out. The storm passed with high bursts of wind and thunder, but little rain or damage. The electric clock in the hall lost only a half hour during the night, less of an outage than most storms caused, or would cause.
20
He woke not knowing where he was, examining carefully, as if his eyes were scouts on the point, a square of light upon which leaves or their shadows danced. The square, cut by a vertical line, was too even and straight to be organic. He was in the Army, on bivouac—the rough wool of his blanket bag insisted upon it—but the tall lighted square didn’t belong. He felt for his rifle and his hand dropped over the side of what was suddenly a bed. As the light became the sliding door of this room in Winota he was whirled over years and faces to land here smeared with guilt he would have to remember and classify. He’d monkeyed with other lives, is what he’d done, the irresponsible little shit. For someone who didn’t believe in God he had a bad case of looming judgment.
So he was twenty-one and his country was full of women to charm and hurt, to nuzzle and abandon. For Gracie he felt pity, awe at her candidness, shame at his unloving seduction. How could he have undressed her? Shame for his priorities, his self-indulgence. Everyone seemed more real than he could ever be, yet he could delude them into thinking him real. Life went on everywhere else, people having real feelings for each other, real unto danger, while he treated them as objects upon which to test some kind of cruel aestheticism. Even here in Winota, where he’d been a real child, and in Leah, where Dory, her clear gaze noting all of this, still claimed she loved him. Her resignation when he left had been part of that knowledge.
“I’m too nervous,” he said out loud, a kind of groan.
“What’s the matter?” Miles said from across the room. “Hey, John, you having nightmares or something?”
“I’m afraid I made an ass out of myself,” he said. He was anxious, breathless with unfocused fear and embarrassment. Everything frightened him, including his motorcycle.
“You? What did you do? You were nice as pie,” Miles said.
“Screwing around with Gracie.”
“What’s wrong with that? Anyway, you said you didn’t slip it to her, right?”
“Right.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. I just feel bad about it.”
“Shit. You ought to have Loretta to deal with. You want problems? All I think about is putting it to her. Jesus, I go crazy thinking about it. I’m supposed to be taking courses at UM and all I can think about is Loretta opening her knees. I get so goddam hot and bothered I practically explode. It took me six months to get her to give me a hand job and sometimes she won’t even do that. She says it’s too messy. I tell her, okay, I’ll put a sock on it, and she gets mad. I tell her let’s get married before I get an internal hard-on and fuck myself to death, but she can’t make up her mind. Other women don’t interest me, honest to God. I’d rather jack off thinking about her than screw anybody else. I have just plainly got to have her. So you got problems? Your girl in New Hampshire—you got problems like mine?”
“No, not like yours. She likes to fuck.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“It’s me, not her. She’s real enough.”
“Real enough? This got something to do with you looking for your dad?”
“I’m not really looking for him.”
“Okay. I’m no psychiatrist, but he abandoned you, so you think you don’t exist? Did you think you existed on Okinawa?”
“Yeah. I could tell by the piss in my boot.”
“Ha, ha! Oh, shit. Life’s complicated, ain’t it? I tell her, ‘Look, all the dumb things I do that piss you off I wouldn’t do if I wasn’t suffering from a terminal blue-steeler, so if you’d just he back and relax…’ She says she’s going to be a virgin on her wedding night, but she’s driving me ape and that’s why she can’t make up her mind to get married in the first place. So you got problems? You going to marry your girl in New Hampshire?”
“I think I might.”
“She want to marry you?”
“Last time we talked about it.”
“So she’s waiting for you, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“I still think you should have humped Gracie. What the hell! There’s got to be a first time for everything. Sooner or later somebody’ll get into her skivvies, so why not you? Stick around for a while and do it right.”
“She doesn’t appeal to me that much. I mean there wouldn’t be any future in it.”
“So break her in. Do some guy a favor. Hell, do her a favor. She might look a little butchy but I’ll bet she’s got the muscles to pump your bilge, man. Drain your brain. So teach her the drill. There’s enough goddam virgins as it is. Any virgin over fourteen is a crime against mankind.”
Though he didn’t agree with Miles’s theories they were widely held and he found their expression, at least, somewhat comforting. Because he’d been alone, out of that sort of company, its side of the equation had faded into the shadows where it no doubt belonged, but that world existed and expressed no guilt.
“Christ, it’s four A.M.,” Miles said, yawning as audibly as a dog. “I don’t know what she’s got that gets to me. I mean Gracie’s got a prettier head, for God sakes. It’s something else, like those long bones. Long neck, long legs, heart-shaped ass, a kind of horsy, snooty look. Even her goddam glasses.”
John woke again in the heat of the morning. Miles was already up. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” Miles said.
They went on the motorcycle to pick up Miles’s car, and then John followed him to where he didn’t expect Miles to go—the Loup Qui Parle Diner. He thought as he parked that maybe Loretta and Gracie didn’t work today, but there was Loretta’s Ford. Miles was already at the door and motioned for him to follow, so he didn’t have time to object. They sat in a booth and Gracie, smiling, healthy and friendly, came to wait on them. Loretta, behind the counter, gave them one cold look and turned away.
“I told Loretta nothing
happened last night,” Gracie said, “but that only made her mad at me.”
“We’re all in the doghouse, huh?” Miles said.
“She said if you came in this morning the cook’s got a gumboil and she was going to get him to spit in your eggs.”
“I’ve seen her madder than that,” Miles said. “I’ll have her eating out of my hand again in no time. Tell her I want to take her away from all this. Tell her I want to be the father of her children. Ask her how many she wants. Tell her I want to eat her…” But Gracie, having seen that he was maundering, had gone to get them their coffee.
When she came back with the coffee she said to John, “I saw my Aunt Estelle this morning and told her you wanted to ask if she knew your father.”
“I did?” John said.
“Didn’t you? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” This was like his mother. You mistakenly told a woman something and she immediately translated it into action.
“She’ll be coming in for coffee in a while. Anyway, she says she remembers you and she wants to see you again.”
Maybe he could escape right now. He could zip back to Miles’s place and get his gear.
Gracie looked at him, frowning—a frown worried for him. “She’s not going to eat you, John.”
This exchange had interested Miles. “The question, me boy, is, is you interested or is you ain’t?”
“I is nervous,” John said. He was moved by their concern but had a small reservation concerning curiosity, or the documentary urge. They might have expressed the same alert interest while watching a pinball game, and he was not much used to, or taken with, the idea of being the center of attention. In Leah he could fade into the trees.
Miles ate ham and eggs, spit or no spit, but John had only an English muffin, its blandness necessary. When Estelle Hilberg came in and Gracie brought her over to the booth, Miles had finished eating and tactfully went to sit at the counter.
Estelle was a handsome woman of about forty with wide, freckled jaws and long teeth. Her reddish-gold hair was done in reverse-curled glamour-girl style, a tube of it across her forehead, and her eyes seemed smashed into diamond and blue fragments that glittered with delight, as if lighted from inside. Her tan linen dress was so pressed and crisp it rustled as she moved.
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