Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  She’d closed off the whole upstairs, to save on heat and cut down on cleaning chores, but now it was open and a major piece of framework in the home she was building within the house; she put a sleeping cot, white organdy curtains, and glassed-in bookshelves she'd got at an auction for a couple of dollars and thought she'd never use, in the room the roll-top desk would never leave, and called it "Martin's office and that desk of his." In a battered box of junk, she unearthed the shell of a turtle Martin had found, empty, along the county right-of-way when he worked on the road gang with his father the summer Emil was injured and Jerome drowned. He'd had his father and other county employees sign it on the dome, leaving the colored whorls of its plastron clear as paint, and then filled it with cement and varnished its outside and used it as a paperweight. It was a misplaced, much-missed talisman, and she put it on the pile of papers on his desk. She sat in the chair. Could she write here? She was flooded by a fluttery grayness that made her get up and go to her own upstairs room, a sewing room with an easy chair and a lamp for reading, when she wanted to relax and be away from the boys, if they weren't up here. The closets of the room held all their winter clothes out of the way and there was so much space she was able to leave her curtain stretchers permanently set up. It was more than she'd expected to have, in Hyatt or anywhere.

  She painted the cupboards in the pantry and kitchen with white enamel, and Martin put down new linoleum in every room. He trimmed the hedge around the house, all of it, down to four feet, and got blisters and sores and then hands as hard as horn from the job, which took him two weeks to complete. And then there was still a huge mountain of branches at the back of the yard. He installed an oil heater in the living room, so they could keep the chill out of the downstairs on fall days without starting the furnace, and when school dismissed for the summer, he hired a neighbor, William Runyon, as a helper, and they scraped and wire-brushed and repainted the outside of the house. It was the color Alpha had always wanted her house to be—warm yellow, with white trim.

  She had a place for everything from the rocker she'd begged from her mother to her open-toed summer shoes, and every piece of their furniture was being put to use; and then Martin, bless him, went out and bought a bedroom set of solid maple she'd dreamed of owning for seven years ("$210," she dashed down on an address page of her diary, to always remember. "But who cares?"), which had a tall dresser for him, and a vanity with a mirror high and wide enough to satisfy even her. And still the house looked underfurnished. Which suited her fine, a sort of perfection she'd hoped to achieve, where nothing or nobody was ever underfoot.

  She helped Martin lay out a vegetable garden beyond the lilacs at the south of the house, and they kept the rows as straight as the planting strings, and well weeded. She canned and preserved from the middle of summer into the fall, and the shelves in the basement began to fill up. The potato bin was full. There were parsnips, kohlrabi, turnips, and rutabagas, all dipped in paraffin to preserve them, in other bins, and carrots buried under sand. She brought out the winter clothes and began to mend them.

  *

  One afternoon in October she was sitting in her rocker in the alcove made by the bay window, absorbing the last of the warm sunlight before winter, and knitting a heavy cardigan for Marie, when she thought she heard a knock at the front door. Nobody in town ever came to that door. She put her work in the seat of the chair and looked into the boy's room and found all three playing there, up to no mischief. She went through the living room, down the hall to the door, and opened it. A young priest she'd never seen before stood rocking his weight in a kind of feint on the porch.

  "Hello. I'm James Russell. Just call me Father Jim.”

  "Oh. Hello."

  "You must be Mrs. Neumiller."

  "Yes, I am."

  "I used to live here."

  "Well, come in. Please, sir."

  He stepped inside and his eyes traveled in rolling waves over every area of the entry and stairs as though following a familiar course, and stopped; the boys had trailed after her and were at the end of the hall. "Ah," he said, "I see you have three fine sons."

  He strode past her, his billowy cassock smelling of cologne and cigarettes, and went to them and tousled their hair. "Your father's a fine gentleman," he said. "He taught two of my brothers and two of my sisters, and they have nothing but praise for him. You should be proud. Have either of you older fellows made your First Communion yet?"

  "Me," Jerome said.

  "What do we mean when we say that God is all present?"

  "When we say that God is all-present we mean that He is everywhere."

  "If God is everywhere, why do we not see Him?"

  "Although God is everywhere, we do not see Him because He is a spirit and cannot be seen with our eyes."

  "Is God all-wise, all-holy, all-merciful, and all-just?"

  "Yes, God is all-wise, all-holy, all-merciful, and all-just."

  "Good, good. You've learned your catechism well." He turned to Alpha. "Do you have others?"

  "A daughter, two and a half months."

  "Is she asleep?"

  "Yes."

  "Ah, that's too bad. I'd like to bless the little darling. Is your husband here?"

  "No."

  "Will he be back soon?"

  "Later today. He's gone to McCallister."

  "I'm afraid I won't even get a chance to see him, then, I'm so awfully rushed. That's disappointing. I haven't been in town since I was transferred to St. Paul, which is three years now. I'm with the Jesuits there. I believe they thought it best if I didn't visit the family for a while. We were all very close." He rubbed and wrung his hands as if washing them and looked toward the door. "But the family, God bless them, is gone now, so I don't feel guilty I stopped. There's a conference in Bismarck the Mon-signor couldn't attend—one that might be important to the laity, by the way; it deals with sacramentals—so he delegated me to go and loaned me his car (I left it running; I'm already late), and since I was so close, I couldn't resist. I had to stop and see the old place. Isn't it a lovely house?"

  He stepped into the living room and strode around, displacing the air as none of them did, his eyes moving with such speed and restlessness he kept changing direction, turning to look behind, looking up, turning again. "You've done very well by the old place. It's decorated with real taste and is as neat as I can remember. The outside looks stunning, too—I mean the new paint job and the hedge, which I think Father let go the last years. I can't understand why he felt compelled to go to South Dakota. The hardware store hasn't worked out as he expected, not in that place, and he just suffered a second stroke. Well, God works His will, and sometimes His ways seem strange to those of us who merely stand by and watch. Edward and Jackie have left home, of course, but Dennis is still there to help. Dennis is a good lad. Enid has decided to take her vows—a surprise to us all, she seemed so involved in the arts—and Margaret graduated valedictorian this year. That makes five in the family so far." He stopped at the bay window.

  What did he mean?

  "I always liked to stand here and admire this view. Mother loved it so. She'd look out and pray the Rosary here at night, when the children were off in bed, and before her fingers had gone a decade, you could hear a pin drop. I used to believe she put us to sleep that way. Ah, childhood I The lilacs, the garden beyond, that oak down the road next to the Runyons'—somehow the arrangement is so pleasing and serene. I hope nobody ever builds on the lots to the corner. It would ruin this view. You can see past the highway all the way to Hawk's Nest and beyond. There were supposed to have been some Indian battles there. For many years the Indians used it as a lookout point and fortress, or so I've heard, and then the Army surrounded it and starved them out. In all the years we lived here, I never once got out to see it. Isn't that a shame? It stands nearly in the next county, you know, yet from here you can see the creases and valleys in it, especially when it's clear like this, and those big trees at its base—see? They look like pines, and su
rely must have been planted. Those always intrigued me. Here's where I decided to become a priest."

  He removed a handkerchief from the sleeve of his cassock, blew his nose hard, and then refolded the handkerchief, still staring out the window, and restuffed it up his sleeve. Then he started to pace again, peeking into the kitchen, the boys' room, and through a gap in the sliding doors to the master bedroom.

  "I'm sorry I'm in such a terrible rush. I'd like to sit down and visit, or have dinner with you, and I wanted so much to see Martin." He stopped. "I'd love to run up and look at my old room. But I'm afraid that would really be imposing."

  Alpha started to answer, but he held up a hand. "Also, I don't know if I could face it now. Patrick and I used to share the room, and we lost him in the war." He crossed himself in a hurried way that looked involuntary. "Well, boys, remember to always honor your father and mother, don't forget your morning prayers, and keep yourself pure, for there's nothing more honorable in the eyes of God than purity. Now, come now, kneel down, and I'll give you my blessing."

  Jerome and Charles knelt in front of him with their hands clasped and eyes lowered, and Tim, copying them, did the same. He sketched crosses in the air above their heads and spoke the Latin three times without hurrying the familiar words, and then thanked Alpha for her hospitality, again apologized for his rush, reminded her to greet Martin, and went ahead of her to the front door.

  The boys watched her accept his blessing, and then he jumped from the porch and ran across the lawn, out of sight, and they heard the sound of his car engine echo off a building and grow faint.

  Alpha leaned her shoulder against the door, thinking of priests and nuns, converts, herself and Father Schimmelpfennig, the size of Catholic families, and the way the religion could be youthful and vigorous, as shown by Father Jim, and didn't involve rosaries, religious pictures, statues, crucifixes. Sacred Hearts, or any of the visual trappings she could feel on the walls and shelves behind her—shadows and undusted squares, as though the Russells had just moved—and had come to think were a part of every Catholic's need to believe with fidelity in the "true" faith. She wondered about his relationship with Patrick, and if it had had any of the qualities of hers with Jerome, and then saw, as if on shards of pink-tinged glass, Jerome, her son, crying as he had in the bathhouse, because he couldn't go swimming every day of the summer and felt he should, out of duty to her; Charles on a bed with pieces of the glass beside a leg, blood on the sheets; Tim's skin blistered and Indian-red while slugs the size of fists moved beneath it; Marie trying to kick her way out of a closet, her face blue; and whole seasons and aspects of all of her children, and other children, who'd rise and grow up without her touch or praise or her acknowledgment that their lives as a whole were lived within such short and brightly illuminated early years.

  She turned to the boys, six open eyes she couldn't deceive, and felt they'd had a glimpse of what she'd felt, and felt also, now, over and above that, that the Russells, as well as the Halvorsons, would always occupy a part of their house. And she was sure, too, that no matter how much she might resist it, it would only be a matter of time before they moved.

  9

  THE TWO AT HIS DESK

  "What is it?"

  Jerome, who was seven hardly a week before this particular afternoon, narrows his pale-blue eyes and evaluates the sheet of paper. "This is a house," he says, and places his finger at the bottom of the paper, where there's nothing. "These are the people Living in it." His squint, critical and fierce, makes wrinkles appear beneath his blond eyebrows, and Charles copies the look, hoping it will endow him with the superior vision his brother apparently has.

  "I can't see anything."

  "Naturally. It's invisible."

  Which reminds Jerome of a detail. He takes up the pen, dips it into the ink eradicator, and holds it poised above the sheet of paper, kneeling in the oak chair at the roll-top desk, in a shaft of afternoon sunlight that bleaches his blond hair white and makes his angular features look even more like an old man's, and before he lowers the pen he does a sort of waddle on the seat of the chair, settling his weight down to serious business.

  Charles locks his hands behind his head and rests his elbows on the writing area of the desk. He looks at Jerome's eyes, darkened now with concentration, at the shadow of his lashes below, at the downward curve of his thick, heavy lips, and then at a leaf of reflected sunlight resting in the hollow of his cheek. When Jerome's absorbed in this way, when he practices the piano, when they play duets, or when he has to rehearse for a reading, he turns pinch-faced and pale, as if a part of him were bleeding into each task. They've been initiated early into the theater by their parents (not that they wanted to be), and are called upon to perform at club meetings and card parties and other feminine functions in Hyatt, where they're looked upon, with smiling benevolence, as future fruits or freaks.

  Some of their readings, from poets such as Poe, Longfellow, Kipling, and Eugene Field, are easy to memorize, because of the hobbyhorse metrics and the cymbals of rhyme, but there are the long monologues in prose, by obscure or anonymous writers, that are harder to cope with: the lyrical piece about the child whose father, so his mother has told him, is away on a business trip with the angels; the one about the "real boy" whose freedom has recently been encroached upon ("Aw, shucks, I been keepin' my turtle in that ole crib." Nasal twang) by a baby sister; or, with the rattling added difficulty of dialect, the piece about the Swede who's just seen his first baseball game, nah, ja, shure.

  Charles emphasizes ripe words, highlights phrases for effect, plans pauses for breathing, and subdues the piece until he has it sounding the way he wants it to sound, but Jerome gallops through both tragedy and farce with the same hurt look in his eyes, as if any attempt to enact what he felt could only destroy the purity of his feeling.

  Now he's drawing this. Charles sinks to the floor, detaching himself from the concentration, and smells a fragrance of old raw oak that the open desk breathes into the room, so dense and enwrapping it seems to him he's leaning against it. He closes his eyes and can distinguish other smells, more delicate and elusive, mingled with the heavily resinous smell, and they arrange themselves in layers that he attempts to see as he separates a sweetness of glue, a bitter yellow perfume he knows his mother never uses, a tang of ink, a hint of oily age similar to the smell that slips from the riffled pages of a big dictionary or old book. He opens his eyes and the sunlit room drops ceiling and walls around him. He looks at Jerome, whose lips are compressed in a tight line as he draws, and realizes that the purpose of the picture is somewhat beyond him. He studies the bottom drawer of the desk.

  From the swirling oak grain he isolates the shape of an archway, a swallow in flight, a rising flame, an old man's face, an eye; he thinks of these as dovetailing. Then a cloud crosses the sun and the grain moves to a greater depth, the silvery highlights shift, and colors alter; from coppery brown, rose, bronze, and gold, the grain changes to dark umber, dark brown, and black. He stands at Jerome's side, twisting his forefinger in the hair above his ear. "Why don't you use a color crayon?" he asks.

  "Nnnn?" Hardly a response, Jerome is so absorbed.

  “So I could see it."

  "It wouldn't be any good then."

  "How come?"

  "Because then you could see it."

  "Oh."

  Charles isn't sure whether to concede to this logic, and needs information that's more precise. He moves so close he can see curved shadows, like faint pencil marks, lying beneath each blond hair on the bulge of Jerome's free forearm, and watches Jerome move the pen in rapid pinches of his fingers while the hand and arm lie absolutely still, and finds himself, though detached from the act, participating in it in such a physical sense that a cloak of sensation covers his shoulders and then, as he moves to speak, shudders down his back.

  "How do you know it's good?"

  "I'm doing it."

  "But you can't see what you're doing."

  Jerome looks u
p, distracted from his task, a veil of creation clouding his eyes, and being as patient as he can be with somebody so young, not even six, says, "Nobody can see it. It's invisible."

  "That's what I mean!"

  "I know."

  A reply to stun most any literal mind into silence. Now he studies the drawing and sees that it's complete. He prints his name {is it his name?) at the bottom, puts the cap back on the bottle of ink eradicator, puts it in a pigeonhole of the desk, puts the pen away, and puts the blank sheet on the pile from which he took it.

  "What are you doing?" Charles cries.

  "I'm finished."

  "Don't put it there! Dad’ll use it in the book."

  "That's all right. I know what it is."

  "He'll write a letter and send it away!"

  "So? They won't see it."

  “Wen, make it so they can!"

  "Then he wouldn't send it away."

  "Make it so I can see it."

  "If you could, it wouldn't be invisible."

  “Why do you want it invisible?"

  "Because it's mine."

  They'll be necessary to each other the rest of their lives; the one with his passionate need to know and be told what everything means, the other already serene in his knowledge, and living among elements that are invisible and his own.

  10

  SOME OF HIS STORIES

  "When I was a young man and we were living on the farm near Courtenay, there were hard times. One summer it was a plague of jackrabbits, I remember. There were jackrabbits every direction you looked, hightailing it over the fields and pastures and eating up every green shoot the second it appeared. To us, they were eating up our providence, so we went after them with rifle and shotgun. I carried a twelve-gauge on the back of the tractor so much there was a groove worn in its stock where it rested on the toolbox. I learned to shoot the thing one-handed and drive the tractor with the other, although your grandpa warned me not to, and I made a little money that year; there was a bounty of twenty-five cents on jackrabbits and if you had ten dollars in those days you were rich. I remember at the co-op elevator in Courtenay, where they paid the bounty, the carcasses were piled up one winter in a mound as high as a haystack.