Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  He sat up, as feverish as last night, and was sure he was coming down with the flu. He dressed and went downstairs. Susan and Marie were at one side of the kitchen table with their backs to him, Laura and Ginny at the other, and Ginny looked up and smiled, showing the braces on her teeth, and then appeared stricken, as if she'd committed a blunder she couldn't make her way out of, and bowed her head. Marie got up, her features awry and disfigured, and he took her in his arms, and then Susan put her head on his other shoulder and he could feel the heat from their sobs through his shirt. "There, there," he said, and had no idea what else to say.

  Over their shoulders Laura sat with eyes downcast, turning and turning her coffee mug on the table, as if the complexities of their ties, when this many were home together, left no room for her, and now she must feel a captive, or worse. He got the girls to their chairs and made them sit; soon, though, Marie got up and ran to the other side of the house, and then Susan got up and followed. He poured himself some coffee with shaking hands, full of fear or hate, and sat at the table.

  "They're really very terribly upset," Laura said at last.

  "I'm sure you'll be able to find some way to help them," he said. "I don't think I can."

  Laura and Ginny looked up, and again, though more circumspectly now, Ginny smiled and beamed all of her daughterly youthfulness out at him.

  *

  His father came into the room upstairs, in a dark suit and tie, and Jerome closed his book and pushed it to the side of the desk as his father sat on the bed. "The arrangements are all made," he murmured. The strain of the last two days had stretched the skin over the bones of his face like a mask, and Jerome realized how much he'd aged; his hair, once a thatch of glossy curls, was straight and dry-looking, so thin you could see through it in places, and had receded above his broad forehead; his hooded lids were more fatty and drooped at their corners, altering the circular, ingenuous look of his eyes.

  He gave Jerome a quick questioning glance, then looked down again. "I have a chore. Fred and some of the others think I should write up something for the paper, a sort of memorial to Dad along with a general note of gratitude to the communities, for the sympathy they've shown, and maybe a few anecdotes to remember him by."

  "You're probably the only one who could do it."

  "I hardly know where to begin. He led such a full life. I could go back to when we lived on the farm, or even farther than that. Did you know, for instance, that he once attended a seminary?"

  "No."

  "An abbey around Bismarck. His dad wanted him to become a priest. Grandpa never talked about it, and I'm sure it's because he would have liked to be a priest, but . felt it was his duty to stay on the farm and help out his father."

  Jerome was doubly amazed. Davey, who was valedictorian of his high-school class when he was sixteen, very close to his parents and pampered, perhaps, since he was so much younger than the others, only three years older than Jerome, had studied to be a priest himself for seven years and then, a few months before his ordination, appeared at home without the rabat and white collar he'd worn since he entered the seminary, and said to Jerome, "I'm not sure why I quit. I guess I didn't have the moral makeup to be a priest." Jerome hadn't ever seen his grandfather so openly brokenhearted and morose.

  "I like the story about the Golden Guernsey," he said, and saw his father walking over the plain again to bring the cows in at twilight, in the spring, when he could see the windmills, and getting angry and throwing a rock into the herd and hitting the Guernsey, who fell as if shot —"It probably couldn't happen three times in this world" —and then sitting on a stone beside her and seeing his father come over the fields, expecting a beating to remember the rest of his life, and hearing instead, "Come home and eat now. You've suffered enough."

  "I don't think I could write it down," his father said.

  This sounded so final, Jerome felt it was what his father should try. "It shows how easily he forgave. And how he understood that children tend to torture themselves more than their parents would."

  "Yes." He seemed to test this in his own mind. "You know, I never once saw him in tears, although he was very sensitive, as you know, and certainly had much to grieve about. He lost two children, infants, and you know how much he loved kids—" The intake of breath was so sudden it was as if his father had drawn the last phrase back inside him. Was he trying to emulate his father? "He lost his mother when she wasn't so old, and when his dad died, he built the coffin for him and buried him with his own hands." Martin glanced out the sun-glazed dormer and blanched, as if that window had once been a doorway through to an end he'd endured. "The death of your mother affected him more than anybody realized then."

  Jerome was downstairs on the couch beside his grandmother, trying to learn to crochet, so he'd have a skill to show his mother when she returned from the hospital, and

  then the telephone rang, and his grandfather, who was in the kitchen, answered: "Yes, this is Mr. Neumiller. What? No, no, no, you've made a mistake. This is C. J. C. Neumiller. You don't want me, you want my son Mar— I tell you you don't want to talk to me!" And slammed the receiver down. It was the hospital, calling to say she'd died, and his grandfather wouldn't hear of it.

  "I sometimes think he held everything inside so much it might partly explain why he suffered from"—his father lifted his fingers and made quotes—" 'stomach trouble' so much of his life."

  Jerome lit a cigarette, backing his eyes from the match heat, and leaned his elbows on his knees, feeling they'd come close.

  "After the Depression, and all those years of scrimping, when he finally got into the position of making money himself, his first thoughts were for the family and others. When he saw the plans for the gymnasium here in town, he said, 'Why, this is just a glorified quonset hut.' Which it is. He said it was an eyesore and shouldn't be built, and drew up a set of plans of his own— a, beautiful place—and submitted it to the school board. They said it was too expensive. He sat down and showed them with figures how he could build it for only a few thousand more than the tin shed they were considering, and then the community could have a place to be proud of. They wouldn't listen, of course. Grief all along, those people. They got an outfit from somewhere else to put up their quonset, and then there was some kind of strike—union labor, of course—and in the end it cost them more than the building he proposed."

  “I didn't know that."

  "I've kept my mouth shut about this sort of thing because he did, and I figured that's what he expected from the rest of us."

  So combative again and final. Somebody started up the stairs, paused a moment, and then went back down again. His father shifted his weight, and Jerome could see the bulge of his balls at the top of his trouser leg.

  "I don't believe anybody knows the complete story behind the swimming pool. For a while the Men's Club bused the local kids to Delavan once a week to go swimming."

  "I rode those buses a lot."

  "Well, he wanted a place his grandkids and the rest of the kids around could enjoy on their own. So he persuaded the Men's Club to fix up that pool at the edge of town that hadn't been used since the thirties, and was cracked up and going to general waste. He oversaw the construction of it, gratis, and when the club ran out of money, helped them set up a corporation and sell shares of stock. He bought quite a number of shares himself. They still didn't have enough. So he took out a lifetime membership in the club, which cost a few hundred dollars, and persuaded Fred and Jay to do the same. That summer the pool was finished."

  "You have to write that down."

  "Oh—" His father lifted his hand, saw it was trembling, and let it fall. "Oh, I guess there are better instances of his generosity than that. When we moved here, I had a terrible time finding a home for us. Your mother wasn't feeling well even then, and Dad knew how important it was for her to have a place of her own. This house came up for sale and he said it was structurally sound and could always be fixed up, and told me to take it. I said I di
dn't have enough to make the down payment. I was short over two thousand. He loaned it to me. It wasn't until last year that I got caught up enough to pay him back. He never once mentioned the money. When I took him the check, he said, 'What's all this for?' I said I'd added some interest for all those years, ten of them. 'Interest?' he said, and stared at the check, and then folded it up, then tore it up, and shoved it in his pocket, and I asked him what the—what the hell he thought he was doing, and he said, T owe you this, and much more, for all the hours you put in as a young man! working for me I on the farm!' "

  Martin shoved up his glasses and gripped the bridge of his nose, and tears ran over the backs of his fingers and dropped in spots over his shirt front. Jerome blinked at the bed, a spangled square with the blur of his. father's body against it, and then was out in the back yard, kicking at cinders and weeds as if for something he'd lost, in order to leave his father to himself.

  There were so many cars around his grandparents’ house, Jerome had to park a block down from it, on the side of the street where the railway embankment rose, behind a pickup of Jay's whose tailgate, employing the name of the vehicle's manufacturer, read:

  YOU CAN

  A’ Ford

  NEUMILLER QUALITY

  LATHING, PATCHING, PLASTERING,

  FINISH WORK

  He and Charles and Tim and their father got out (the girls had come down with Laura in her car), and went past Jay's, with the green wire fence around it where a hunting dog had once run, and then along the back of the shrubbery-bordered shrine to the Blessed Virgin, built by Davey out of fieldstones from the countryside one summer when he was a young seminarian and wore cutoffs and leather sandals, and seemed to brood too much. The front door of their grandparents' house opened and a tall woman in a pumpkin-colored coat came down the brick-walled walk that descended the three terraces of the lawn.

  "I'll be right in," Jerome said as the others headed toward the back of the house. "I think this is Martita. I want to say hello."

  He waited on the crushed-rock drive beside a red convertible with the top down. Martita was big-boned and bosomy, but her waist, cinched by her trench-coat belt, was the waist of a young woman, and she came over the lawn with a delicacy and grace he'd always admired, and stared at him with deep-set eyes, which made him recognize again how brown eyes were better for expressing emotional concern than gray or green or blue, and then her lower lip pushed out and gleamed behind its line of lipstick. "My thoughts been with you. Doc."

  "Thank you."

  "He was a man I sometimes want to hug, if I could. He helped us when other people thought. Do them two understand beans, how they talk. Old man Neumiller, they figure, he sees what's up." She began to wink and her black eyelashes caught.

  "Do you know what it was?”

  She hefted her heavy shoulders and stared at her feet, small for her size and shod in shoes that showed pastel-painted toes, and then shifted them over the crushed rock in a sudden dance that expressed the mystery of their affinity, and let it rest there. "Could be embolism, infarct, bad tight arteries, his age, and then we seen lots of fluids in his lungs that could put pressure on and inter-fierce with his, you know, the thumpa, thumpa of it. But me, I just figure his heart's broke. ‘Why meddle?' says Luis, so we sewn him back up. Does the school still agree on you?”

  "Pretty much."

  "All the A's still?"

  "A couple of B's."

  "No worse, now. Do you know your Auntie Rose Marie is P.G. again?"

  "Really?"

  "Just barely so yet. I tell her not to, but she did."

  "How does Grandma seem to you?"

  She drew a hand out of her coat and tossed up a syringe, caught it, and put it in her pocket again. "I just shoot her up some more Seconal now. She listened to me once, but no more. It's too deep in her yet. Two days or so, I'll knock again and see does she open inside. Do you still pray. Doc?"

  He shrugged and stared down.

  "Ah, Doc, you could for her. What you got to loose? And poor Grandpa, his soul, too, huh? I got an idea what purgatory and hell is like."

  He looked up and found her brown eyes even on him.

  "You’ll learn, too. Doc. I gotta go now."

  She slid into her convertible and spun away, her head lifted back as though peering over the windshield top, and went across the embankment of the tracks with a dipping leap, on her way to traveling everywhere, as she did even when it wasn't necessary, at speeds up to a hundred, and then telling him to pray. Only the pious could use piety as a tool or club with impunity, or not use it; his grandfather's choice. He went around the back and stopped after he'd passed the garage, sure that he'd seen, at the other end of it, at the front of the car, somebody duck into shadow. Was he going off his gourd now? He stepped into the garage and saw Tommy crouched in the corner below the car hood. Tommy straightened and said, "Oh, it's you. Hi."

  "How are you today?"

  "Pretty good." Tommy smiled, sending deep dimples into his full cheeks, blushed dark, and then held up a hand, five inches across its back, and revolved it so Jerome could see the cigarette cupped inside. He smiled again. "Had to have a fag."

  "Oh."

  "Mom'd kill me if she knew about it, jeez."

  He was as massive as his namesake, Tom, who was called "Big Tom" to distinguish the two, and had had these same muscle-bunched shoulders, the heavy beard and matted hair over his chest from the time he was sixteen, and yet Elaine, a wisp of a tiny woman, still punished him physically, and he submitted with a strained smile.

  "How's your mom?"

  "Not so good." Tommy's eye widened. "Me and Dad and Carl don't know what to do. Hoooo, boy!" Carl was Tommy's middle brother.

  "What about Laurie?" This was the youngest brother.

  "He's been as bad as Mom. Helk!" His cry was a whispered hurt.

  "Is your dad here?"

  "He and Kev and Tom decided to work. I think Fred is, too."

  Shoes crunched over the crushed rock at the front of the garage and they held themselves motionless as a woman's voice said, "It seems just weeks ago we were here last," and then the back door closed with the uneven and screechy settling of the worn plunger within its cylindrical sleeve. Tommy stared with wide eyes.

  The garage was attached to the house by a glassed-in breeze-way used as a greenhouse, and they'd heard from there a muted wail, some women's voices calling out together, and now a louder, stronger voice, still a woman's, saying, "No, no, no, no, no!" It was a version of their grandmother's voice that came belling through the house as though from underwater.

  "Boy," Tommy said, "they're sure whooping it up in there."

  Boy, is this some digs, Jerome heard again, and remembered this garage filled with their furniture when they moved, and that Tommy's father had been on a destroyer during the war and brought back souvenirs that filled a cabinet in their old country home, and then Jerome had a picture of that place, where the three boys had lived all their lives, large and intact, and then saw the charred remains of it, as it was a summer ago when it burned to the ground before the volunteer fire department got itself assembled, and remembered Tommy walking over the smoking remains that filled the basement, carrying a bucket that contained a mass of melted-together silver dollars—all he'd been able to salvage. A new house was built over the basement of the old one.

  "I have to go inside," Jerome said. He felt a victim of years of uncontrollable events.

  "You're going to want to leave the second you get in there."

  "Probably."

  The kitchen was empty. Coffee was going on the stove. Ahead, in the dining room, among a crowd that included Vince and Adele and their son Luke, who had Vince's ambery-brown eyes and straightforward amplification of inner strength, were Charles and Tim and others, and then Jerome saw Emil, and was surprised at how much he resembled Martin; Emil taller and thinner, with Jay's grace, but with Martin's hair of younger years, curly still; his fatty, hooded lids, and the same mole beside his nos
e. Then Emil saw Jerome, excused himself, and came over and guided him back into the kitchen.

  "How are you?" he asked, and his eyes, direct and appraising, went from Jerome's eyes to his mouth to his eyes again, considering and probing, as if to find the answer before Jerome spoke.

  "Oh." Jerome shrugged and looked down, unable to bear the intensity of the examination. "It was terribly sudden," Emil said. "Yes."

  "But I had a feeling it would come.”

  "Oh?" He looked up and Emil's eyes said to him, I'm troubled, too, but we seem to understand one another. Let’s be reasonable, all right?

  "When I drove away from here the last time, after I'd shaken Dad's hand, I thought, I'll never see him again.' I've never had such a thought without its coming true. So in a way I was prepared when the call came, or as much as one can be. We flew in this morning. Kath was just saying how it seemed only weeks that we'd been here."

  "Your family came?"

  "Just Kathy and Greg and me." Greg was his oldest We just got in now. Jay just drove us in."

  There was a protuberance above his heart where he carried his pistol.

  "How is Jer—er, Jay taking it?" Jerome said.

  "Terribly. He shouldn't drive. I thought my younger kids wouldn't understand all of this, so I left them home with Kath's mother."

  "I can see that."

  "It'll be hardest on your dad, of course."