Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  Below the guardrails of the bridge were crisscrossed one-by-eights painted white, which gave it a primary and self-suspended look from a distance, as though children with no sense of mechanics had built it. It was supported at its center by a pier of railroad ties. I always stopped at the pier and hoisted myself up on my stomach and leaned over the rail, seeing moss and long weeds sway away from the sunken ties beside my reflection, and watched for bullheads and carp, my face rippling with a greenish patina until I was the water, or so it seemed (and once I saw a goldfish as long as my arm), I'd resolve to bring.my rod and go fishing the next day, but never did. It would have taken away from the time I had with her.

  "Jerome. Help me, please."

  She took out the blanket she'd brought and I helped her hold it square and floating down to the grass, in the shade of a tree. Then I went into the men's bathhouse, where a latticework of light lay on the floor from the cracks in the walls and roof, and undressed in the cool air and unrolled my towel and pulled on my swim suit, and then went to the corner, where a crack had been widened with a knife, and stared toward the women's place. There was never anything to see, but if everybody who looked from here had an intent as powerful as mine, then I'm sure it's the reason the bathhouse leaned in that direction. And the women's bathhouse leaned toward the men's.

  I'd tie my shoelaces together, and fold my clothes and roll them up in the towel, and go outside, where sunlight on the water and the whitened pea gravel made my eye sockets and back teeth ache. The pea gravel was spread over the swimming area to keep back bloodsuckers (or leeches: some form of fresh-water Annelida; we called them bloodsuckers there) and I once saw a boy who waded beyond the gravel walk out of the water with bloodsuckers fringing his ankles like leaves.

  I'd go to the blanket, blinking against the loss of color, and lie beside my mother, who was sitting or kneeling and undressing my brothers in public, and watch her hands move over their bodies and imagine their bodies were mine. This observance of affection, without receiving any, seemed to me the burden of being an older brother, and still does. If I could somehow recapture the sound of her voice as she talked then, merely to talk to us and soothe in her musical way, I don't believe it'd be so necessary, now, for me to work so hard at every task, as though I could attain within myself some measure of perfection, or to comfort others and attempt to strengthen and repair their bodies and minds. I'm an M.D.

  A wooden catwalk projected twelve feet into the water, with its trembling reflection beginning ten feet below, and at the end of the catwalk was the high-dive board. Alan Pflager, the lifeguard, was usually stretched out on his back on the board in the broad sun. I don't think he ever had to assist a swimmer in trouble, and the one summer somebody nearly drowned—Brian Rimsky, falling from the high dive when he was four—he was pulled from the water by Pat Ianaccona; it was the summer Alan Pflager had shingles so badly he felt he was being blinded.

  "All right, Jerome," my mother said.

  I'd lead my brothers to the edge of the lake and leave them, and wade out alone, always frightened, and dog paddle to the floating dock and pull myself onto it panting. And after I'd rested, I'd have to dive off and paddle back to shore. Neither my mother nor my father could swim, and my mother's brother, my namesake, drowned when he was a boy. I'd leave my brothers splashing and throwing gravel, and go to the blanket and lie down beside her. I could have a sandwich now, or a piece of pie, or an orange or an apple, which she always brought along in a covered basket. She usually had a book or two with her, also, and after I'd eaten I'd try to read over her shoulder, but she'd close the book with a sigh and lay her head on her arms. I'd turn on my back, or turn on my side and pretend to be asleep, and she'd say, "Oh, this heat tires me," and then she'd glance in my direction, and I'd see her closed eyes part to study me. Then she'd become restless and roll on her back, one arm flung out on the grass, and murmur, "You'd better go get your brothers. We better get going. Your dad'll be home soon." In the summer my father worked in the fields as a farmer, and for some reason the idea of this, and her bare arm lying on the grass, filled me with fear and an unnamable sympathy.

  And now I'll have to tell it. One afternoon I got angry at her for the way she was being, however that was, and went downshore from the swimming area, where a set of rotting steps led down into a deep hole near the foot of the bridge, and sat on a step in water up to my throat and wondered how it would feel to slip under and start gulping and sending up the bubbles of the drowned. It would be the sort of family story, because of the names, that would be repeated for generations to come, I was sure. My mother kept calling and, when I didn't answer or appear, sent Alan Pflager, who led me up the steps and into the bathhouse. "Time to go," he said, and I told him to mind his own business and get out, and he did. I pulled down my swim suit and had to clear my eyes before I realized what I was seeing. A big bloodsucker was attached to the top of my thigh, close to my penis, and a tangle of babies were swirling in a clot of blood beside it. I screamed and started up and my swim suit around my ankles brought me down. My mother and Alan ran in, and she held me while he took a forbidden cigarette from his trousers on the wall, lit it, and touched it to the bloodsucker's back. He ground it into a stain in the boards when it fell free, and went bowing out.

  "Hush," my mother said. "People will think something awful has happened." She wiped my thigh with her handkerchief and tried to put an arm around me, but I pushed her away.

  "What are you doing in here?" I said. "You're not supposed to be in here."

  "All right," she said. "Get dressed, then, and come out and help with your brothers." She disappeared through the rectangular blaze of sunlight and left me to me.

  If I'd been able to think then, or had any thoughts, or been more mature or had foresight, I probably would have thought, This is how it is. This is the way it will be.

  8

  THE OLD HALVORSON PLACE

  A family of fourteen had lived in the house for ten years. Their name was Russell. Mr. Lowell Russell was the sexton at St. Mary Margaret's Catholic Church and the janitor of the parochial school, a frail and ailing man, and of his seven sons and five daughters, ranging in age from eleven to thirty-three, one son had thus far been ordained a priest and three daughters had become nuns. Another daughter was said to be an accomplished musician, and yet another had literary leanings, and these two composed the words and music of the school song still sung in Hyatt to this day; it begins

  We'll raise a lofty, mighty cheer for you,

  Straight from the hearts of students fond and true …

  and concludes

  Deep as the ocean, our love and devotion

  For the Hy—! Hy—! Hyatt High School!

  Martin Neumiller was now principal of the high school and had been annoyed for years by the stilted and solemn phrasing of the old song (sung to the tune of "On, Wisconsin!"), and persuaded the Russell girls to write this new one. The parish owned the Russell house and everybody in the parish expected the Russells to live out their lives in it, a monument to the faith. But one day old Mr. Russell went to Father Schimmelpfennig and said he was giving up his job and moving out of town.

  What?

  He was grateful for all the parish had done, he said, but felt there were better opportunities in South Dakota for him and the children still at home.

  Father offered him the house rent-free.

  He couldn't accept charity, he said. No, Hyatt wasn't growing and wouldn't ever grow, he was afraid, and he wanted to get in on the boom down there around Rapid City, maybe go into business for himself, and he wanted his children to attend the better schools.

  Two months later the Russells were gone. They were a self-confident, cloistered, close-knit family, nearly monastic in their devotion to the faith, and, other than the song, they left little trace of themselves behind when they moved.

  Father let their house stand vacant for a year, as if unable to admit they were gone. He didn't accept defeat gracefully, and was know
n by his fellow seminarians as the donkey, or the jackass, whichever way you cared to take the German word, because of his resistance to the Third Reich, whose leaders he called thugs and idiots from the start, openly. Then he went to Rome to be ordained, in violation of one of Hitler's edicts, and came back an enemy of the Reich and a marked man. He often talked in a cheerful manner about a winter manhunt for him conducted by the SS boys in black leather with their big black dogs. "After all, dey were chust ordinary louts up against me. And dere were plenty of people in and out of da church willing to help a priest. I made it to Switzerland. I ended up at Fargo Diocese. Dey said dat all dey had was Hyatt, and I said, 'Gif it to me!' And den when da people dey were so agreeable, I knew dis was da place for me. I can't ask more from life."

  He had a painful-looking crease in his neck from his clerical collar, and came toward you with a light stride for the bulk of him, the gold in his front teeth gleaming, his jowls so heavy they made his forehead look small, and, close up, triangular folds of skin beside each eye disappearing into his hairline, his smile was such a wholehearted and consistent part of him; a wide mouth with purplish lips stained tan in one corner from his panatelas and cigars; water-blue eyes behind round gold rims. He loved children and knew every girl and boy in the parish by name, and never got names or siblings mixed up, and gave them all a quarter or a half or silver dollar on their birthdays, depending on how well they were doing in school, since he was the figurehead of the parochial school and acting superintendent of it—and thus had been further hurt by Russell—and also kept track of all their grades. Not even the most retreating child in the village was afraid of him.

  In the big rectory there were potted plants on steps and sills, two walls lined with books, large mirrors, a tree in a tub, a marble-topped desk and a grandfather clock in his study, a dining room with French windows, an open maple stairway to the second story, and cases of foreign beer and wine in the basement. He had a housekeeper from Germany. The rectory was next to the church and next to it was the three-story parochial school of buff-and-clay-colored brick with its white cupola and white cross on top—all his domain. He'd entered the seminary expecting to be a monk, and see how this tiny place had brought out the aristocrat and bohemian in him I Ahem! Once a week he had a card party that filled the rectory with tobacco smoke, while beer bottles went popping and cash passed hands. Was he leading the men in town, most of them prominent ones, down to the Devil? No, no, they all understood it was just a way of having fun between the boys and getting away from the wives for a night. The wives needed time off, too. What was there to do in a town this size? There were unlimited opportunities and freedom here! But he should probably try to be a bit more priestly and businesslike in some matters, if he could. Now about this Russell place. He'd heard the Neumillers were looking for a new house again. Well, let them have iti And at a reasonable price, too. Who needed money? The parish would have their new church within a few years, a brick one to replace the barnlike wood-frame one they had now (although he liked the old one; his voice echoed in it as in a cathedral), and that was all the parish asked of him, other than absolution, of course.

  Martin was a devotee of his family and ambitious for them, but without guile—Biblical, as Father thought of him, because his purity and strength of character came out of unclouded ingenuousness. Over the years, Martin had become his best friend and confidant, his confessor, practically, and Martin had three intelligent, promising young sons. You could never tell where priest material might spring from!

  *

  The Neumillers' luck with houses in Hyatt hadn't been good; Mrs. Glick promised to make herself "so scarce you won't know I'm here" but never did; in another place the furnace never worked properly and a smell that originated inside a kitchen wall was amazing, and since they didn't feel right about breaking into the wall of a house that didn't belong to them, and were afraid to complain because they'd let it go so long, they kept wondering, What could it be? and were never informed. In the last, the basement flooded to the floor joists in the spring (bringing up buried salamanders that went floating out into the yard), and eroded the foundation so badly that walls began to part from the ceiling. And each place had its noisy population of mice and rats, driven indoors by the prolonged, windswept, blizzard-flayed winters, and not one of them was large enough. This was in 1945, and the Neumillers' three sons—Jerome, Charles, and Timothy— were still sharing the same room for sleep and play; and although Jerome, the oldest, was only five, Alpha was pregnant again.

  The Russell house had three bedrooms plus a big walk-in attic on the second story, and two more bedrooms downstairs. There was a living room with a bay window, a kitchen with a pantry as big as most kitchens, a basement with vegetable bins and shelves for canned food; an indoor bathroom (rare in Hyatt—there was no municipal water system) with all of the fixtures; a front porch, with turned posts and gingerbread trim; an enclosed porch on the south side; and, attached to the rear of the house, a lean-to which had once been used to stable a pony and was now a workshop and utility room and coal shed. The rent was twenty-five dollars a month.

  Alpha knew that a house wasn't any better than the lives that went on in it—some were wrecks after ten years, others stood fresh as morning after several hundred—and there was a feeling about this one that it would endure.

  She went pirouetting through the empty rooms, saying, "The space! The space! The space!" And less than a month later was leaning against a wall with her arms folded and a smile on her face, watching a dozen birthday guests (Charles was four) play Red Rover in her living room— her parlor, you might call it; she saw herself as the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel filled with the moors, glamour, and more glamour. The room was so large that her upright piano, which had always been in the way in their other places, seemed to have shrunk three sizes. Her piano! She sat down and started playing "Clair de Lune," and the children stopped their game and stared at her as she played.

  Martin could understand how she felt. There were articles close to her heart, family samplers and other heirlooms, and wedding presents that hadn't been unpacked since the day they were married, and some of their furniture—a dining-room set with inlays of bird's-eye maple, a handmade gate-leg table—had never been used. And around town and at the Friday-night pinochle games at Father's, Martin was heard to say, "She loves the place, sure, how could she help it? But it's always been like this. The happiest times of her life have been when we've moved."

  *

  Martin's father had started his own carpentry business in Illinois, but was visiting relatives and friends around Mahomet, so he drove up to Hyatt to help them move, and somehow got stuck with bringing in the basement junk, and toward the end of the day stopped in front of Alpha with a solemn face, and said, "I've carried nine hundred and ninety empty fruit jars down these stairs, I want you to know.” He made minor repairs around the house, and persuaded Martin to pour a concrete slab that began at the outside wall of the lean-to, went in a wide-swinging arc around the corner of the house, beyond the steps of the enclosed porch, and abutted against the bay window. It took five men a day to do it, and Martin's father finished troweling it by the light of a floor lamp

  Martin held above him, then leaned back on his haunches, his trowel turned up with gray bubbles streaking its face, and said. "There. Now the boys have a place to ride their tricycles, Martin."

  Martin took Jerome and Charles upstairs into a room overlooking the street corner, where an enormous roll-top desk stood against one wall. "Look," he said, and turned to them as though offering a gift that would soon appear in his hands. They glanced at one another, and Jerome shrugged.

  "Well, don't you see what's happened?" he asked.

  They didn't see.

  "First of all, you can tell by looking it never could have come up the stairs. They're too narrow. The door to this room is even narrower, and the windows are narrower yet."

  He squatted at the desk and rapped on it with a knuckle. "That's
solid oak, you hear? The corners have been dovetailed and then trimmed over. You can feel the dovetailing here in the back. Right here. Now, nobody could take this apart, once it was built, without damaging the wood somewhere, especially the dovetails, and they certainly would have left a mark on it. But the finish is practically perfect—the original, I'd guess. It's hand-rubbed. Isn't it lovely?"

  They nodded, eager to get their hands behind the desk and onto that dovelike, cooing, feathery or whatever surface he was talking about.

  "There's only one conclusion!" he said. "When this place was built, an old cabinetmaker came into the house here, carried his hand tools and materials up to this room, and built the desk on the spot where we're standing right now! But why would anybody want to build a desk like this way up here?"

  Mysteries, for Martin were a source of delight. There was nothing unnatural about them at all; they were an ingredient of life to be explored and marveled at, but never feared, and seldom explained. Where others saw no mystery, he could find it, and kept himself in a constant state of childlike wonder, exuberance, and joy.

  His father stepped into the room, and said, "Why would anybody want a desk up here? Why, Martin, to enjoy it!"