“You don’t use nonviolence against anyone. You’re still not understanding. You use it with, not against.”
“It’s a doctrine for heroes,” said Irini’s father. “We’re not really a nation of heroes.” This was a provocative statement. A shocked silence followed it.
“We just won a war.” Mrs. Baldish’s voice was clipped and severe. “How did we do that without heroes?” She let her glance linger definitively on Mr. and Mrs. Tarken.
“Oh, the Tarkens are heroes,” Irini’s father agreed. “The Tarken family is full of heroes. Sissy Tarken was the bravest little girl I ever knew.”
“Mr. Doyle spoke without thinking,” Mr. Baldish suggested.
“As usual,” Irini’s father agreed. The awkward moment passed without Irini’s father actually retracting the statement.
“Although the. Mahatma did not speak to me, he did smile at me.” Ada had come to the end of her notes. She tapped the index cards together on her palm, until all the edges were aligned. She might have been blushing. All Magrit, and certainly Henry himself, could see that his wife was in love with another man.
Fair enough, you say, tit for tat. Hadn’t Henry had Maggie all those years? What’s good for the gander is good for the goose.
But if you really think that, check out 20 Ways to Cook a Goose and think again.
“Well, it’s all too deep-dish for me,” said Holcrow.
“Let’s have dessert now.” Henry gave a brave imitation of good humor. “I think Maggie has sent over a dessert that can’t be beat.”
22
Magrit had been a mining town before it became a mill town. Its roots were economic; it lacked, therefore, the religious homogeneity of many American towns. But every Sunday morning everyone in Magrit went to church except for Irini and Irini’s father. Some families made the long drive to the Lutheran church; some went south to the Catholic; some stayed home and attended Presbyterian. Magrit prided itself on being tolerant of all forms of Christianity.
Irini minded a lot when she was little. It was one more thing that made her different, along with having no mother and a father who drank. Sometimes it seemed as if the only way to ever belong in Magrit was to have been born there.
She knew that while no one blamed her, exactly, this business of not attending church was not considered nice. She’d had that brief but devout Catholic period. And for a while in the second grade she went as a guest to the Presbyterian church with the Mays. But one week during Sunday school she was assigned to play the part of the neglected Bible in a tableau and then the next week they read and studied a story from the Old Testament in which God sent a bear to tear apart a group of children for teasing a holy bald man. Irini was too empathetic to tease the bald herself, and she would have thought a good spanking entirely appropriate for anyone who did. But she was deeply shocked by God’s behavior. She tried to say so, but Mrs. May, who was teaching Sunday school on that particular occasion, told her sharply that she was not to have opinions about God’s behavior, much less express them. Irini had been raised to have opinions about everything. So she didn’t show up to perform her part as the neglected Bible, which her father assured her wouldn’t hurt the performance at all, but would instead be a very telling detail. Cindy May told her she was going to hell, but Cindy May was only in kindergarten at the time and Irini’s father said if it came to that he would take the fall for her.
“I’ll give you a religious experience,” her father told her and showed her a picture in a book of the face of Mary from Michelangelo’s Pietà. It was the most beautiful face Irini had ever seen. When she pictured her own mother, it was also, of course, an image from a photograph. Her mother wore a suit with a fur collar. Her cheeks had been hand-tinted pink. Her eyes were directed downward. She had a slight smile, as if she were being teased.
You could not really say that Irini missed her mother. You could say that Irini’s whole life was organized around the absence, but Irini was mostly unaware of this. In fact, for someone raised in a steady glare of pity, Irini managed to be entirely without self-pity. Magrit might have liked her better otherwise.
And you might think, what with her father’s drinking and her heathenism and her dinners of soda crackers and jam, that one of the other women in the town would have stepped forward as a sort of mother substitute. I have to assume that the problem of little Irini was discussed over many backyard fences. Probably more than one of the Magrit mothers would have liked to take her in hand, pack nutritious school lunches, hem her skirts at a proper length, so they touched the ground when she kneeled, teach her to pray. But Irini was not an easy, affectionate, or grateful sort of child. Instead she was good at fending people off.
And she was intensely loyal to her father. Magrit liked her father well enough, except for those who didn’t. Since the war he had the additional stature of being one of only a handful of single men. Still Magrit did not approve of him. In order to have one of the Magrit ladies take charge of her, Irini had only to ask. Irini had only to say, by inference, by the act of asking, that her father could not do it. She had only to admit what everyone could see, that he was an undependable drunk. She had only to go to church on Sundays and leave him at home.
But Irini liked to take care of herself and preferred her father’s transparent affections to anything more artful and less heartfelt. And the approval of Magrit depended on Irini’s making certain alterations, while nothing was more clear than that her father, from his stool at Bumps, under the spreading arms of Norma’s antler collections, in the warped but cheerful daisy mirror, thought she was the best thing since fish sticks just the way she was.
By the time Irini was a teenager she had come to appreciate the lazy Sunday mornings. She would sleep until the sun had tracked across her room and all the way into her eyes. Bumps was closed for the whole day and her father would make her hot chocolate and pancakes or popovers. They read the Sunday paper all morning and went for a drive in the afternoon if Norma had the Oldsmobile running, which mostly it wasn’t since even before the war. If the weather was nice Irini might go for a walk with Tweed, into the woods between Brief Street and Collins House, or. up to the falls.
North of Magrit there was the beginning of a road. For a while, during the despair of 1942, the government thought an escape route into Canada might be required. The road was never finished and Irini liked to walk out to it and see how the grass and the weeds were taking it back. Sometimes she would think to herself how there were only two roads out of Magrit and one of them led to nowhere, was being slowly erased before her eyes. This was a melancholy thought, but so philosophical and adult that, of course, it had its pleasures.
Sometimes she would think instead how the road was like the war itself. I see this as a particularly American sensibility. No pain is permanent. No act is irrevocable. The day would come when all the damage and all the grief would vanish under new growth. There was a force in the world more powerful than men and she could see it more clearly in the woods than in church.
This was an advantage of Magrit that she didn’t learn to appreciate until later, after she left. Magrit was fields and farms and cleared land. But all around it, in a dark circle, were the woods. Hidden inside them were beaver and muskrat, deer and bear. Quiet little mice by the millions burrowed in the fields, breeding with the speed of thought. There was the constant Babel of flickers and waxwings and jays and phoebes and grouse and herons and hawks and toads and cicadas. Never again would she live in a place so busy.
In Magrit she could go out the front door of her little brick house, and within a matter of minutes she could get to somewhere wild. Not a city park—my mother always despised those. But a place where the trees had their own lives and were not clipped and domesticated pets.
“Well, look at this here,” Irini’s father said, spreading the Sunday Tribune over the breakfast table and into the jam. “Mr. Henry’s ad for the ape is running here, too. You wouldn’t think an ape would be so hard to find. Not for a m
an with Mr. Henry’s money.”
Irini was belly-down over the funnies. There was a woman in Terry and the Pirates with breasts as big as Helen’s, only pointy, like torpedoes. Deadly breasts. You could see the outline of them quite clearly under the woman’s satin top. Irini looked for a while. With breasts like those she would have never been able to read the funnies in this way. It would be as much as her life was worth to go up to bat. No matter how far out she stood, she would always be crowding the plate. Irini’s own breasts were a source of dissatisfaction to her. She was cross with Terry and the Pirates for bringing it up. A girl should not feel criticized while reading the Sunday funnies. She rolled onto her back. “Do you think anyone has ever been murdered in Magrit?”
Her father turned. “That,” he said, “is what I would call a non sequitur. Why are you asking me that?”
“Magrit can’t be as boring as it seems?”
“Nineteen-year-olds are easily bored. I remember being bored once. Those were the days.” Irini’s father folded up the paper and gave her his full attention. “And this very Thursday is dish day at the movies.”
“But that’s what I’m saying. There must be extramarital affairs we know nothing about. There must be seething passions. True love.”
“I’m sure we have as much of that sort of thing as anyone. But well-bred people never notice adultery and the Doyles have long been celebrated for their discretion. We don’t speculate; we don’t pry. Have you and Walter had some sort of tiff?”
“Get over me and Walter. There was never any chance.”
“Such a nice boy.” Irini’s father shook his head sadly. He picked up the paper again. “But I take your point. The whole world’s been sugar-coated. It’s this labored American blandness. This forced optimism. It happened during the war, somehow. Darndest thing. We’ve seen the concentration camps. The mass suicides of the Japanese. We’ve seen innocent hostages shot and hanged, whole cities obliterated in a blink. And we still think we live in a Disney cartoon.
“It’s just as if the worse the real world got, the more people believe in the candied one. We’ve been through the biggest war in history and all we learned was gloss and double-talk, double-talk and gloss.”
This was not Irini’s point at all. She went on to Brenda Starr. Brenda’s apartment had been searched and trashed.
“Not that I ever planned for you to end up in Magrit,” her father said. “Look at this. Hoover’s in Congress begging for the rights of Germans to fish in the Baltic. The factory workers are on strike in Frankfurt, claiming they’re too malnourished to work. Isn’t this damnable war ever going to end?”
Brenda’s enormous eyes were enormous. “Who would do such a thing?” Brenda was asking.
“We’re destroying the fertilization plants in Germany. Just when everyone is starving. Why are we doing that?” asked Irini’s father.
“We must have good reasons,” Irini said and it was 1947 and they lived in Magrit so maybe neither of them doubted it.
Irini folded the paper and wiped the colors of the funnies off her hands and onto her bathrobe. There was a pile of her father’s clean shirts, pressed and stacked on one of the living-room chairs. He’d ironed them himself, but if it was up to him, they’d never make it the last few steps into his closet. Irini gathered them up.
Her father’s bedroom was practically bare, as if he didn’t expect to be staying long enough to put up a picture in the room where he’d lived for fifteen years. Irini opened his closet door and pulled on the light chain. She stacked the shirts on the shelf, then turned the light off again and stepped inside. She closed the door. She had done this often as a small child. By ducking she could still slide in under the rod, squeeze between the coats and pants. She wrapped herself in the rough arms of her father’s suits, the smell of her father’s aftershave and his whiskey and his cigars.
23
The following Monday, Henry called the Sweethearts into the Kitchen to read Maggie’s newest column aloud.
Dear Maggie:
The more I see your column “Ways to Welcome Home Your Mate” the angrier I get, and my husband has it taped to our refrigerator, so I see it pretty often. Now when my husband walks in the door from work, he expects to find a peaceful house and me, attractively dressed, lipstick on and stockings straight, holding out an ice-cold martini. Instead our three normal, active boys have overturned the living-room furniture and are clamoring for dinner. “Prepare yourself,” you say. I don’t have time to comb my hair. “Prepare the children.” How? Should I slip them a mickey? Please try to be more help next time out. I begin to wonder if you’ve ever had children yourself.
Unkempt in Columbus
Dear Columbus:
Your letter touches on a topic that is a real concern of mine. For too long we have willingly blinded ourselves to the very real and prevalent dangers of alcoholism. We’ve enshrined the institution of the cocktail hour as the very essence of gracious living, with no thought to the consequences. But how many of us are stopping with a single martini? You ask if I can help you. I must tell you no. Only you can help yourself. Stop drinking and encourage your husband to do the same. You owe it to your three little boys.
Maggie
P.S. Perhaps if your husband didn’t drink so much he could manage to set the table once in a while. It’s not so hard. An ape could do it.
Henry rolled the magazine into a tube. “To use a baseball metaphor, someone has made a good swing, but the pitch wasn’t there.”
Irini could feel everyone not looking at her.
“Alcoholism is a serious problem and concerned my first wife deeply. Of course, Maggie is also concerned. But I stand by Maggie’s original column. It was a good column. Too often women don’t understand the pressures of the working world. A man comes home tired.” Henry had written the original column himself. “Maggie knows that. I’m forced to wonder if Maggie wrote this letter. It doesn’t sound like her.”
Ants had invaded the Scientific Kitchen. The girls were trying to trap them with shallow dishes of beer. It was hoped that the pleasantness of this death would be a mitigating karmic factor, but no one was actually checking with Mrs. Ada. The plates were set in many locations so that the girls themselves kept stepping into them accidentally. Sticky beery footprints led from counter to counter. It was hot inside and out. The topic was alcohol and the Kitchen smelled like Bumps on a Saturday.
The project for the day was cheese breads. Irini’s hands smelled of aged parmesan. She had washed them twice with dish detergent and the scent wouldn’t come off. It was all slightly sickening.
“I didn’t write it,” Irini said. There was a long silence. Irini could hear the Kitchen clock ticking. It made a clucking, admonishing sound.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Henry. “I even agree with the gist of it, Irini. Haven’t I made that clear? I’m only objecting to the timing. Inappropriate response to the particular stimulus.” The skin around his eyes was sagging into shadowy pouches. The skin at his throat drooped. It was a pathetic look. Irini wished he would cut it out.
“But I didn’t write it.”
“No one has said that you did.” Henry managed to make Irini’s denials sound excessive. He put his finger deep into his ear, wiggled it viciously. “Everyone can see that the letter was well intentioned. No one is angry about it.”
Everyone else was quiet. Irini looked at Margo, who smiled at her, but with obvious embarrassment. She looked at Arlys, who was not looking back, though this could have meant anything. Well intentioned! Irini could not concede this. It was a letter plainly designed to implicate her. And after years and years of not cheating on tests and not reading the answers off Margo’s paper when she always sat by Margo and Margo always had the right answer, and not telling lies and keeping her promises and, being, in short, thrifty, helpful, and punctual, still she turned out to be an easy target. Irini, who wasn’t born in Magrit, and didn’t go to church, and whose father drank too much.
“
It was a fine letter,” said Henry. “But it came at the wrong time.” He had a defeated tone, which angered Irini since it seemed a bit theatrical and anyway, it wasn’t her fault. “I’m going to have to start reviewing Maggie’s letters before publication myself. I should have done so from the start. I blame no one for this but myself. I’m not going to ask if you read it before sending it on, Fanny. I don’t even wish to know who wrote it. It was a well-meaning letter.”
“Of course I didn’t read it and send it on. It made Maggie sound deranged. I wonder why New York editorial let it through,” said Fanny. “Everyone knows that Maggie appreciates a fine glass of wine. I don’t know how many times she’s said so. Mrs. Ada took the packet to the post for me. She said she was going anyway.” Fanny looked hot and disheveled. Her scarf was twisted to the side. The strap of her apron was falling from her shoulder.
“Did you read any of the letters?” asked Tracy.
“I read some of them,” said Fanny, meaning, of course, no.
“I had a letter in this week, dealing with teenage curfews. I said how, now that the war was over, kids could go back to being kids. I said they should appreciate having curfews. We should have had nothing to worry about but curfews. It was kind of a different way of looking at the problem. Why wasn’t my letter published?” asked Tracy. “My letters are never picked.”
Tracy had to put a quarter in the blue pig. She didn’t seem to mind. “Maggie’s letter about teenage curfews was better than this letter,” she finished airily.
“Irini didn’t write it,” Arlys said. “Come on, Irini. Let’s go get some bread baked.”
Irini washed her hands again and sifted flour. She separated eggs so that she could use the yolks to paint the tops of her loaves. She greased her pans and talked to everyone just as if they weren’t all thinking she wrote the letter and wouldn’t admit it. She listened to the new installment of Wheat Theater. Reception was particularly bad, but through the snap, crackle, and pop, she gathered that Anna Peal had had a fight with her mother and that some clown convinced her to run off with the circus. I can teach you to be an acrobat, he told her. But all was not right with the Elastic Man. And then someone cut Anna’s safety wires. Someone didn’t like her. And Irini had no idea who that was.
The Sweetheart Season Page 20
