The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  Theodora frowned, taken off guard by the rudeness of it, and gave a little laugh.

  “Why, Mr. Cavanaugh isn’t at home. You’ll just have to call back later.”

  “Dang, but I got to talk to him. I mean now.”

  “Like I just told you . . .”

  “Listen, lady—you don’t know me and neither does Cavanaugh, but I happen to know he’s got some folks runnin’ a show at his picture house and he don’t know what they’re all about. They’re bad news, do you get me? Real bad news.”

  Theodora lowered her eyelids, unaware until then how wide her eyes had gotten, and cocked her hips to one side. She knew where this was going. It was Reverend Shannon’s people, making their first salvo to shut down the picture Russ had going this week. She’d expected as much.

  “Look,” she said impatiently, “if it’s a moral problem you’ve got in mind, you can pray about until you’re blue in the face. And if you reckon Mr. Cavanaugh ain’t got the right to show the picture, well then we’ve got a perfectly competent sheriff here in town you can go tell all about it. But what I will not have, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, is harassing calls to my home when I’ve got supper on the stove and nothing at all to do with my husband’s business, which, by and by, is a highly respected one in the town of Litchfield. Do you get me?”

  “Lady, you’ve got me all wrong—I ain’t never been to Litchfield and don’t give two hoots about the moral or legal gobblety-gook you’re yammerin’ on about. I’m talkin’ about real trouble, here. This don’t got a thing to do with your husband’s business. This here is the Devil’s business.”

  Gritting her teeth, Theodora tried to will her heart to stop hammering against her ribs. Her hackles were up and she could feel the heat in her face getting hotter than summer could make it—it was a mad heat, and she could feel the fire building.

  “I don’t guess the Devil is in the picture business,” she said with as much restraint as she could muster. “And even if he was, I certainly don’t reckon he’d do it by way of educational shows like the one . . . never you mind. This is done, sir. Good-bye.”

  And with that, she slammed the receiver back on its hooks and let out an animalistic snarl at the temerity of the stranger on the line. Almost instantly, the bells atop the phone box jangled again. Theodora let out a startled yelp.

  “Goodness,” she said to herself. “My goodness.”

  She had no intention of answering it, not this time, so she returned to the stove and resumed her work, scooping up the potatoes and piercing them with the prongs of the fork to test how well cooked they were. They needed a few more minutes, and before they ticked by, the telephone went silent again. It stayed that way.

  But Theodora’s mind lingered over it the way the midday heat lingered in the air. Something the man said struck a chord with her, and not a pleasant one. The Devil’s business, he’d said—a favourite turn of phrase often spoken in hushed tones by her nanny, Anne, all those years ago.

  How come them men is killing each other in France?

  Hush, chile—that the Devil’s business.

  Of course, now men were killing each other in France once again, and near everywhere else besides, but that was not what the man on the telephone was talking about. Nothing so monumental as a worldwide war . . . no, only a picture show. A lousy picture show.

  What in the world could possibly be so devilish about that?

  She wiped her face with the hem of her apron and gazed out over the darkening horizon through the kitchen window. It was looking more and more as though Russ would not be home for supper, which was hardly a surprise, but remained a bitter disappointment. Her mama (God rest her soul) would have tsked and reminded her that her husband knows best, just as she always said her papa did even when the powder couldn’t hide the purple shiner grabbing her eye or the dark marks that hard, angry fingers made on the pale, flabby flesh of her arms. Your father knows best, Theodora, don’t you fuss. But that, too, was the Devil’s business in Anne’s estimation.

  Women ain’t treated right and neither is coloured folks, and maybe that a cross your mama and ol’ Anne got to bear, chile, but that don’t make nothin’ right. You find you a good man when the time is right, and not no man up to the Devil’s business.

  Like Papa, she meant, but did not say.

  Your father knows best.

  Russell knows best.

  The Devil’s business.

  “Shoot!” she suddenly shouted.

  The potatoes were coming apart in the water.

  Theodora rushed to lift the pot off the flame before the damage could worsen, but in her hurry to minimize the catastrophe she forgot the oven mitts—the iron handles on opposite ends of the pot burned her hands, and she gasped, and she let go of the pain-inducing handles which dropped like a rock, pot and all, to the floor. The pot clanged loudly against the tiles—several of which cracked and broke—and hot water, just boiling, rose up and out like a wave. The overcooked potatoes swam out in pieces. Theodora leapt back to avoid getting splashed by the water and slammed up against the kitchen table, which slid back to the wall from the push of her weight. A wooden cross on the wall came loose from its nail and fell, crashing against the tabletop and splitting in two.

  Steam rose in white circlets from the floor in front of her, from the mush of the ruined potatoes and the broad puddle of hot water that now pooled at her feet. Theodora staggered to one side and collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs. She was shaking all over, her heart pounding a tattoo in her chest.

  When the tears came, she did not bother to wipe her eyes. And later, when the ham began to burn and the oven started smoking, she merely turned the knob to kill the flame and retired to the sitting room. She’d lost any semblance of an appetite anyway, and Russ wasn’t coming home.

  Before Theodora knew it, the room was dark.

  But she did not get up from where she sat. Not for a long while.

  Chapter Five

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen, if you please.”

  The auditorium—if such a small assortment of hard red chairs, bolted to the floor in twenty-five rows of fifteen, could be called that—softened its distinctly male roar to some degree, though not completely. A slight fellow stood on the dais beneath the screen, his hands raised up and out like a revival tent preacher, his face a mask of stone. He wore a long white coat, the familiar uniform of a medical professional. Beside him stood a plump young woman, also dressed in medicinal white, a stack of pamphlets cradled in her thick arms.

  “Gentlemen, direct your attention to me, please. It is now time to begin.”

  The nurse—for indeed every fellow in the audience had to agree that was what she was—smiled in a decidedly phony way and tried to look interested in what the man in the white coat had to say. The roar softened some more, devolving to a dull murmur, then a whisper and, finally, silence.

  The man grinned.

  “I am Dr. Elliot Freeman,” he announced. “I am a licenced sexologist.”

  Titters erupted from several clusters of young men in the audience. The doctor frowned.

  “Ours is a nation in crisis,” Freeman continued, a bit louder now. “Because of men like Hitler and Tojo, yes, but I mean here, in our blessed small towns, right in the heartland of America. In your homes, gentlemen!”

  The tittering ceased. A few cleared throats, but that was all. Freeman had them now.

  “I am talking about your sons and your daughters, about all the young people in your community. I am talking about the very future of—”

  Here Dr. Freeman paused momentarily, his mouth hanging open and drawing a slow breath before at last his memory kicked in a beat too late to hide the lapse.

  “—of Litchfield, my friends.”

  His eyes scanned the crowd, taking in the faces of the men, many of whom raised their eyebrows in anticipation for what was yet to co
me. Most of the seats were filled—only a dozen or so were vacant—and a second nurse wandered lazily up and down the aisles. She too had an armload of pamphlets. Unlike the one up on the dais with Dr. Freeman, this nurse seemed to have a perpetual scowl tugging at her face.

  “Folks,” the doctor resumed, “we live in an eminently modern era. Things have changed. Things are still changing. But some things, my friends, never change—even when they really ought to. Let me ask you—all ya’ll—a question. When the criminals in our society get smarter, don’t you want the lawmen to get smarter, too?”

  Murmurs of assent arose from the audience.

  “Of course you do—the question answers itself. So, when our young people get smarter about sex—come on, now, that’s why we’re here—when they get wise to the facts of life, don’t you reckon we, their guardians, their caretakers, need to get wise as well? And wiser!”

  Yeah, said a few voices; That’s right, said one in particular. Several others grunted and hummed. A third of the heads nodded at least once.

  “But here’s the thing, here’s the crisis, men! They—your young ’uns, I mean—they only know half the facts. They know all the rewards but none of the risks! Do you? You sir, in front—do you know all the facts you need to know to protect your little Susie or Lula Mae? I’m talking about the most vitally important facts, men. Do you? Can you be sure she won’t end up like poor, unfortunate Barbara in the motion picture you’re about to see?”

  Jojo maintained a vice-like grip on the box of licorice in his hand, self-conscious about opening it up when no one else in the theatre appeared to have any concessions. Was it uncouth to bring candy into a picture like this? He felt like it was, despite the fact that they were selling the damn stuff right out in the lobby, though he did feel queer about being the only customer at the counter. Now he squeezed the sealed box like it contained state secrets, wishing he’d never bought it in the first place. If only he weren’t so hungry.

  He’d awakened with a start, certain that it was the result of his brain telling him he was late, he was going to miss the show and he couldn’t make the next one on account of work. He sat up, staring wide-eyed but unseeing at an only marginally familiar room strewn with feminine chaos, and the female in question looking down at him from the doorway. She cooed something about waking the prince with a kiss and he responded by barking a question about the time. He wasn’t late, as it turned out, and yet there wasn’t time enough for supper if he wanted to make the picture, which he did. So Jojo settled for black licorice, his favourite, and all but crushed it in his hand for his anxiety concerning the propriety of eating it just then.

  Instead, he gazed at the strange man on the dais and half-listened as he prattled on about the dawning of a grand new age when frank speech about human sexuality would be accepted as science, and reason became mankind’s saviour—though the doctor was careful to couch his language in faux religious terms, lest the multitude of holy-rollers in the crowd get rowdy about it. They didn’t, thanks in no small part to the lecturer’s well-selected words, and by the end of his speech he appeared to have the men in the palm of his hand. He had, Jojo realized, scared the holy Moses out of them with all that talk about the sanctity of their daughters’ virtue, after all. They would have been fools—or very terrible fathers and brothers—not to give the esteemed sexual hygiene commentator their full and undivided attention.

  Privately, he regarded the whole performance as a lot of ballyhoo, just a lot of the same preposterous fire and brimstone twaddlecock you could get for free at any church you liked.

  At length—finally—the doctor, who Jojo figured wasn’t really a doctor at all, wrapped it up and gave it over to the unseen projectionist, who dimmed the lights and rolled the first reel. Flourishing orchestral strings crackled and a type crawl made its way up the flickering grey screen.

  foreword (it read)

  Our story is uncomplicated, and much too common. Our story is yours! It unravels in every American town, in your own backyard! You will meet Barbara Blake, as demure and innocent a girl you shall ever know—unfortified against this new time in which we live!

  This vague, fear-mongering assertion was quickly followed by a proclamation in bold, capital letters that filled the screen as the music turned low and sinister: ignorance is a sin—knowledge is power.

  Jojo smirked in the darkness. Jim Shannon’s going to have a heart attack if he sees this garbage, he thought.

  But at least it’s air conditioned.

  The film itself was perfectly unremarkable in every respect. Poor Barbara Blake, played drowsily by some unknown actress whose name Jojo forgot almost as soon as it vanished from the title cards, lurched stupidly through the first act, falling in desperate love with the grocer’s son and, ultimately, ending up in the family way. Naturally she struggled through the shameful secrecy of the thing for most of the second act and found herself a pariah by the start of the third. Her screen time fluctuated between lethargic pouting and wild histrionics. She even had a fainting scene that elicited a few stifled chuckles from the audience.

  By the end of it, Barbara’s too-soon-motherhood came to a terrible, tragic end when her beau got tight and all but kidnapped her in the dead of night to secret her away to a new life in the Big City, only to slam his coupe into a massive oak tree. He died, she lived, but the baby was lost. And somewhere in the high-toned narration that concluded the whole sordid affair was the strong implication that fate decreed such awful calamity for those who did not properly learn the facts and abide by them.

  Then, once the melodrama had finished, the last reel came to befuddle and astonish every walleyed, stony-faced man in his seat with a tacked-on bit of honest-to-Christ real live childbirth. Jojo directed as much of his attention to his fellow audience members as he did to the horrors on the screen, amused by their terror and intrigued to discover how much he could tell about each man’s personal experience based on the degree of discomfort his face registered. The youngest of them turned a greenish-white. Conversely, one old-timer with a scraggly grey beard just grinned and shook his head. The miracle of life held no surprises for him.

  Explicit though it was, Jojo remained largely unaffected and unimpressed. When the lights came back up, Dr. Freeman stood to the side of the dais and surveyed the audience, presumably measuring the mood of the room before launching into the next phase of his attack. Flanking him were the two nurses, their respective stacks of pamphlets at the ready.

  “For the price of twenty-five cents, I hardly see how you can afford not to peruse the powerful information contained in these little volumes,” said the doctor.

  There were two from which to choose, as it happened, one from each nurse: Motherhood Too Soon, of course, but also its companion volume, Fatherhood Too Soon. Freeman liberally recommended interested parties pay the half dollar for both.

  Jojo purchased neither, judging his own knowledge on the subject sufficient. When the more pleasant of the two women drew near to where he sat, he smiled and wagged a discouraging finger at her. She merely shrugged and tried her luck with the next schlub in line.

  The other nurse kept her distance. They made eye contact once and only once, she and Jojo, and the mutual recognition was evident. She looked better in the black stockings she’d worn in the hotel lobby the night before, Jojo opined, but the tight-fitting nurse outfit (no doubt acquired from some costume shop someplace) fit her just fine. He guessed nurses did not normally wear so much make-up on the clock, but she was no nurse anyway. Like the esteemed Dr. Elliot Freeman, who was also among the Litchfield Valley Hotel’s new guests, she was clearly nothing more than a latter-day Vaudevillian, earning her bread playing a corny part.

  The nurses made two rounds each, trying every man who declined their offer a second time. Jojo pursed his lips at the woman when she reappeared near him, and she gave a nervous giggle in reply. There was a time, he realized . . . but no, not an
ymore. She continued on, sold a few more books, and Jojo made his way back to the lobby and out into the street. A pale-faced little man with a shock of white-blond hair stood just out of the streetlamp’s range, furiously flipping through his copy of Motherhood Too Soon, his face pinched into a wild-eyed scowl as he searched the pages for whatever licentious material he hoped to find. As he reached the back cover, he uttered a frustrated growl and tossed the pamphlet into the street. The little man stalked off, and Jojo sauntered over to claim the disowned book.

  One man’s trash, he thought.

  He rolled the booklet into a tube and stuffed it in his pocket. He checked his wristwatch, realized he wasn’t wearing one, and then headed up to the hotel.

  There was nothing to see here, as he’d so often informed any number of looky-loos back in his cop days.

  And as he strolled along Main, Jojo finally opened up the box of licorice and had himself a walking supper.

  Jake’s eyes were a pair of silver dollars, shining bright at the ample bosom of the nurse bending at the waist to address him. She was a dish, all right, and mightily intimidating on top of it with her sleepily lidded eyes and the enigmatic line she made of her ruby red mouth. She presented a copy of Motherhood Too Soon like it was the offering plate at church and raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question.

  Only a quarter, the eyebrow reminded him.

  Jake grinned and tittered in much the same way he’d been doing all evening, part embarrassed but mostly a little tight. He’d put back a few beers with his brother-in-law and his boys—all of them about ready to move to Memphis and make their mark on Country and Western music—and as usual one became two, and two became four, and before he knew it he was staggering up to the Palace with the world doing cartwheels all around his head. Inside it, too.