Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “It’s a terrible, terrible thing, this war,” Frenchy said as if it were still going on. “But it gives a man his purpose.” His eyes would get misty with scenes of heart-wrenching sadness as he spoke. “Your friends die in your arms, and it is very, very sad. But all the time you know in your heart that their purpose still lives and that they were their purpose. A man is not a man, Bernard, unless he is also a purpose. Do you comprehend this, my young friend?”

  I nodded soberly, but he was over my head.

  “Without a purpose, a man can be dismayed by war. War can drown the spirit of a purposeless man.”

  I was grateful to him for telling me about the war. He had seen things that were just as terrible as the things my father had seen, but they hadn’t turned him into a silent brooder. Of course this was ten years after the war had ended and for all I knew my father was able by then to tell stories of the war with equal enthusiasm to some willing listener somewhere in the world.

  “Do you understand how important it is to preserve your dignity, Bernard?” Frenchy said to me once. He was visiting Mother and we had just polished off a set of steaks that had cost her a week’s worth of tips. He made a church of his hands as he spoke, and the rare stones on his thick fingers flared in the light from the candles Mother had put on the dining room table.

  “Sure,” I said, but as it always was with Frenchy, this was only his way of opening up a deeper subject.

  “It is a ludicrous thing, really. Dignity, why do we insist on it? In the end, none of us have it. In the end, we are a few ounces of humble dust.” His rings and diamond cuff links winked richly in the candlelight. “And yet, without dignity, life becomes a monstrous slaughterhouse pageant without meaning.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” Mother said.

  “No matter what the enemy does to you, Bernard,” he said, ignoring her, “you must refuse to submit. His techniques may be subtle, and you may be tempted to bend to his arguments, but you must hold yourself apart from him. Deep within you there is the unviolated place of refusal. You must preserve this, under torture, under bribery, under his vile promises.”

  “Oh, brother,” Mother said, rolling her eyes.

  “I tell you, my young friend,” Frenchy continued. “Many many went along with the boche. Women and men. They licked the boot.”

  I was very impressed with French Bigelow—from his knowledge of rare stones to his participation in the war. I told Mother this while we were doing the dishes later that evening. We still had on our good clothes and were both wearing aprons.

  After listening to me praise Frenchy, Mother said, “Oh, honey, Frenchy’s an old liar. He’s never been to France, and the jewelry he wears is mostly fake. He’s from Detroit. He worked on a GM assembly line during the war.”

  I found myself rising to his defense. “So what if he’s lying,” I said, “as long as what he’s saying is true.”

  She shut off the water tap and looked at me, drying her hands on her apron. “Listen to yourself, Bernard,” she said mournfully, as if I had just proved beyond doubt that my early promise had been the biggest miscalculation of her life. “Just listen to what you’re saying, Bernard.”

  But even though Frenchy was a liar, Mother married him a year later anyway. He was as close to rich as she’d seen, and money had always been a problem for us after my father left home. I don’t think she loved Frenchy in any kind of torch-song way, but she got along with him well enough. Frenchy was kind and generous to Woodrow and me and Baby Bart, and in return we were a faithful audience for his fabricated tales of life in the French resistance.

  I used some of the knowledge I’d picked up from Frenchy to impress a girl named Sidney Graves. We were both in eleventh-grade chemistry. I’d been watching her from a safe distance since the eighth grade. She was not especially pretty, but she had eyes that stopped my heart. They were amethyst lavender, deep set, and her gaze was steady and serious under her tall, brainy forehead. Her eyes gave you the impression that the mind behind them had never entertained a trivial thought. She had long thin legs and narrow hips, but her breasts were womanly. Her hair was mouse-brown, but closer to gray than to brown. Sometimes, from a distance, she was mistaken for a teacher because of her iron-gray hair, perfect posture, and slow, purposeful stride. And because of this and the slightly English intonation of her speech (an impediment, I found out later, rather than an affectation), she was not a popular girl. Kids called her Lady Graves behind her back. She was the best student in math, chemistry, and physics and had already been offered scholarships to Berkeley and Cal Tech.

  I was a poor chemistry student, and that was my excuse to talk to her. I asked for help with precipitates and catalysts. We studied together, first at school during lunch hour. I took these opportunities to show off my knowledge of gemstones.

  “Did you know, Sidney,” I said, “that the Hindus believed that if you put the powder of ground-up diamonds into your mouth, you wouldn’t be struck by lightning? Or that lapis lazuli was prescribed as a laxative by Antonius Musa Brassarobus, the medieval medical scholar?” Her unblinking eyes studied me, assessing my credibility, and I’d feel my confidence start to crumble. “The color of a gem often changes its name,” I said quickly. “For example, a red sapphire is a ruby. But a yellow sapphire is called a yellow topaz. You probably didn’t know that topaz gets its name from an island in the Red Sea called Topazion.” I talked straight into those analytical eyes, hoping for the best. I wanted to bring up my knowledge of the French resistance, too, but couldn’t find a way to make the leap from gemstones to underground warfare.

  Our study sessions eventually moved to her house. Her house was always empty when we got there every afternoon at three o’clock. Her father was a detail man for a pharmaceutical company and spent most of his time on the road. Her mother worked in a real estate office, sometimes not coming home until after dark.

  “You’re the only boy who’s ever shown any interest in me,” she said after our first kiss.

  The kiss was an accident hoping to happen. Our heads were close together, bent over the kitchen table as she worked out a reaction formula. I said, “Wait, you’re going too fast for me, Sidney.” She looked up, we bumped cheeks, our lips brushed together. My heart began to stumble against my ribs and I heard her catch her breath. I said, “I’m sorry.” She said, in her unintentional English accent, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” and we kissed again, involving our tongues this time.

  These homework sessions gradually degenerated into kissing sessions. Then kissing wasn’t enough. We both went exploring. The first time I saw her naked breasts I almost passed out. The only breasts I’d ever seen were the low-slung overworked breasts of native women in National Geographic. Sidney’s breasts didn’t sag like theirs and her nipples hadn’t been elongated and chapped from swarms of little mouths. Her nipples were small and pink and alert with virginal anticipation. Staring at them, I started to shake all over. I was having a mild convulsion and knew that I’d stammer if I tried to initiate conversation.

  Sidney’s explorations were at first limited to her hands slipping under my shirt, but she eventually grew bolder and opened my belt. Her explorations, unlike mine, were conducted coolly, with scientific reserve. She regarded sex as another learning experience, I regarded it as a tightrope walk to joy. When she took my penis in her hand, I came instantly, showering her hand and forearm with hot pearls. She didn’t pull away in disgust as I expected but bent closer to see the phenomenon, as a chemist might regard an unexpected catalytic reaction. “Oh, G-Geez—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Don’t be,” she said. We took a shower together, and under the drumming water, on the slippery tiles, we gave each other our virginities.

  These blissful afternoons were the high point of my life, but they didn’t last. Her father died suddenly in Cincinnati of a heart attack. Sidney and her mother went back east to live with Sidney’s grandparents so that her mother could recuperate and start her life over. I was frantic with g
rief, but Sidney took the philosophical view. “Our time together was perfect, Bernard. Nothing can change that. We’ll think about this years from now and be glad that we didn’t let it become a boring thing, ruined by arguments or unfaithfulness. You see?”

  I didn’t see. “I love you, Sidney,” I said.

  “I love you, too, dear,” she said. “And nothing will change that. I’ll change, and you will change too, but these last few months we’ve had can’t be changed by anyone or anything. We’ll both keep this time safe in memory, and memory will only make it better.”

  I didn’t understand this or feel consoled by it, but I knew one thing: Sidney Graves was too smart for me and that, had we gone on together, she would have soon left me far behind. I was older than Sidney by three months, but the last time we made love I sensed that something in her was years older than I would ever be. This realization embarrassed me. I felt the displacement of someone who had always been over his head and was just becoming aware of it. I made some choking noises—disguised sobs. Sidney held me in her consoling arms; I buried my face in her iron-gray hair.

  We said good bye in a strangely formal way: we shook hands on her front porch while her unsuspecting mother, smiling sadly, looked on from behind the living-room curtains.

  4. BABY BART

  Mother decided that Baby Bart wasn’t normal enough. She took him to the doctor, and the doctor recommended a child psychologist. Baby Bart was nine years old and quirky with goofball behavior. He wouldn’t talk for days, and when that passed, you couldn’t shut him up for days. He alternated between brooding and babbling from about age six on. And his babbling was weird. He’d want to talk about death and what happens to people after they died or where they were before they were bom. Frenchy humored him, but the rest of us ran for cover when he’d start in.

  Mother asked Woodrow to show Baby Bart how to do normal things, like building model airplanes or using a compass to find your way out of the woods. Woodrow was an Eagle Scout and knew how to do a lot of practical things with limited resources. But Baby Bart was even too much for an Eagle Scout. Woodrow tried to teach him how to read semaphore flags, but Baby Bart’s constant questioning defeated his patience. Woodrow put a paper bag over Baby Bart’s head and made him keep it there.

  Mother believed Baby Bart’s switching back and forth from total silence to annoying babble was a form of epilepsy. All the medical tests, though, turned up nothing. Baby Bart was normal, as far as any of the experts could tell. But he wasn’t.

  “How can things just be?” he said to me once.

  I was still grieving over my loss of Sidney Graves, who, I believed, was the only woman I could ever love, and was in no mood to put up with Baby Bart’s oddball ramblings. I ignored him.

  “Stuff just is everywhere, but I can’t figure out how stuff can be stuff, the way it is, like dishes and hair and shoes and light poles and cities,” he said. “I mean, there should be no stuff at all, there should be nothing anywhere everywhere. And what is ‘where’ supposed to mean? Tell me what ‘where’ is supposed to be, Bernard. Or ‘there.’ Or even ‘here.’ What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve been inhaling your own farts under the blankets,” I said. “For Christ’s sakes, Baby Bart, you should be talking about baseball or playing with your decoder ring. You keep this up, Mom’s going to have you committed to a nut house.”

  The thing about Baby Bart was that he never took insults personally. He was big for his age, tall and wide, but he was also weak and flabby. He had no athletic ability. Not that I had any. I was a lounger, always on the lookout for cookies and other sweets. I’d already had two molars pulled, and fillings in ten other teeth. Woodrow, even though he was an Eagle Scout with merit badges, wouldn’t drink milk unless he could spike it with Hershey’s chocolate syrup. But Baby Bart was even worse. He sugared everything, even his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

  I once overheard him talking to Frenchy. They were in the kitchen late one night, having cookies and milk. In his nonstop talking phase, Baby Bart wouldn’t go to sleep. He’d roam the house, looking at things, reading a few pages from books randomly selected from the bookcase, or looking out the windows at the nighttime sky. I’d been reading in bed and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water when I heard them. I stopped to listen.

  “Do dogs think?” Baby Bart asked Frenchy.

  “They certainly do,” Frenchy said without hesitation.

  “That means they have words in their heads, doesn’t it, Frenchy?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe not words...”

  “You can’t think without words, can you?”

  “Hmmm... let’s see. No, I guess you can’t.”

  “A dog knows, ‘sit,’ and ‘come,’ and ‘fetch’ and ‘roll over,’ but that’s not enough words to think with, is it?”

  “Maybe they can think without words,” Frenchy said.

  “No, I don’t think so. I tried to do, it but it didn’t work. You’ve got to have words to think.”

  “I guess dogs don’t think, then.”

  “But they look like they are, don’t they? When a dog looks at you with his ears up and eyes all shiny, you could swear they are thinking.”

  “I’m getting sleepy, Baby Bart,” Frenchy said. “I think I’ll turn in.”

  Baby Bart banged the kitchen table with his head, startling both Frenchy and me.

  “What did you do that for?” Frenchy said.

  “Do what?”

  “Hit the table with your head!”

  “Oh, I was just wondering if I could shake up all the words in my head so that I would think different thoughts.”

  Frenchy laughed. “Good idea, Baby Bart! You need to think some different thoughts, all right, but you don’t have to give yourself a skull fracture to do it.”

  “I want to try to think like a dog someday,” Baby Bart said. “I want to think of something without thinking of it. Wouldn’t that be neat? That would be like figuring out a puzzle before you knew it was a puzzle. You’d be ahead of everybody. It’d be like having one of Superman’s special powers from the planet Krypton.”

  “You make me dizzy, Baby Bart,” Frenchy said, yawning.

  I walked into the kitchen then. “Hey, Bernard,” Baby Bart said. “Do you think dogs think?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They think about licking their balls, then they think about humping your leg. They’re real geniuses.”

  Frenchy and I made our escape, but from my bedroom, all through the night, I heard Baby Bart roaming the house, rummaging through drawers and cupboards, paging through magazines and books, absorbing the small details of a world that had the inexhaustible power to seduce his sense of wonder.

  We never stopped calling Baby Bart “Baby Bart” because he had a baby face that he was never going to lose. When he was stoop-shouldered and gray, that chubby pink face would still be open and naive and stubbornly impressed by the unsolvable puzzle of existence.

  5. MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

  In 1958 the draft caught up with Elvis Presley, but I was safely enrolled in college by then. I got my 2-S deferment by majoring in electrical engineering. In any future war, I would be stationed, on the grounds of my valuable education, well behind the front lines. It was clear, even then, that the gun fodder for future wars would come from the marginally educated legions of aimless young males a society such as ours produces with almost conscious intent.

  After I graduated, in 1962,1 married the third girl I’d slept with, Beatrice Carns. I got a good job at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation in the industrial town of Sunnyvale, just north of San Jose. A year later, Woodrow joined the marines and they sent him to officer candidate school.

  Lockheed was the prime contractor for a submarine-launched ballistic missile called the Polaris. I worked in a unit that investigated quality-control problems with parts and equipment that were shipped to us by suppliers around the country. I traveled a lot, sometimes even to Europe. It was
an interesting, even exciting job, but Beatrice became unhappy. She didn’t like it when I was gone, and she didn’t seem all that happy when I was home.

  Beatrice was a tall, impatient redhead who had been a star volleyball player at San Jose State. We met in a Sunnyvale bar called the Vertical Takeoff. The bar was named after an experimental interceptor Lockheed was developing. The plane, never put into production, sat on its tail and went straight up a few thousand feet before it leveled off. What it did after that was ineffective.

  It was happy hour and Beatrice, along with a few of her friends, was celebrating. She had majored in psychology and had just been hired by Lockheed’s personnel department. Mutual friends introduced us. We were both a bit drunk, but we looked good enough to each other to continue what chance had started.

  I’d been at Lockheed two years by then, and Beatrice saw me as an insider, someone who knew the ropes. She was ambitious and wanted to become part of Lockheed’s management structure. I had no such desires, but I didn’t tell her this. In spite of her ambitions, Beatrice quit her job a few months after we were married. She wanted babies and a domestic life. At least that’s what she thought she wanted.

  We rented a small house next to the railroad tracks on the east side of Palo Alto. The commuter trains roared by every half hour on the dot, shaking the house, making dishes rattle on their shelves. It may have been that simple, conversation-stopping intrusion, rather than any particular fault in either of us, that frayed our marriage bonds.