by Mark Dunn
Ruth was about to observe that it certainly was a topsy-turvy world in which talking about bombs should be found more frightening than the actual sound of their nearby detonation, when a tweedy old man sitting within earshot said, “If you ask me, that boy and girl should have been sent away from London along with half the other children of the city. This is no place for a child, with them Nazi bombs raining down on us every bloody night.”
Now it was the children’s mother’s turn to speak. She did so as she embraced her little ones, one on either side: “From what I’ve heard, London is only slightly more dangerous than all them other places the little ones been shipped off to. So why don’t you just sod off?”
It was time, once again, for the shelter marshal to intercede: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a proper and respectful way to speak to one another in such close quarters as this, and I am not hearing it. Has anyone a mouth organ to play or a music hall song to sing—mind, one appropriate for young ears?”
“Oh good God,” muttered Carrie. She kept her eyes squeezed tight and feigned sleep, lest any of her four sisters commit the unpardonable atrocity of informing the other sardines in this tight little underground tin that there was one among them who had a voice to put even Deanna Durbin to shame. Carrie conjured up a picture of Will and the way he had held her during “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” taking care not to squeeze her too tightly. She liked that. It seemed such a contrast to the way the evening had ended for poor Maggie. Carrie peeped at her friend. In the dim lantern light she could almost swear Maggie was crying, but she wasn’t close enough to ask her outright, nor would Maggie much fancy it if she did.
Carrie thought of how similarly the two of them had been brought up—each enduring early years with a father who wasn’t fit to be a father at all. Although Carrie’s dad was still out there, perhaps even going about the business of redeeming his putrid character by offering his showman talents to the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA, to most), and Maggie’s father was gone entirely from this earth, both of the young women had been required by circumstance to reside in more recent years in homes in which the bond between mother and daughter was, by necessity, crucially important to the survival of what was left of their attritive families.
But Carrie could not help thinking there was something even more special about how much she and her mother loved one another. They got on very well together (everyone said so), and was this fact not best demonstrated by Sylvia’s willingness to gently nudge her daughter fully fledged from the nest? Carrie could not contain the frisson of bliss that ran through her in this paradoxically unhappy and revolting place. Will Holborne’s edges were deckled, his personality gruff, his intellect adequate but far from remarkable; yet there was something that commended him to her heart.
And yet.
First loves are anomalies, they always say. They cannot be completely trusted. Carrie knew this. Each of her sisters would be quick to tell her this. But the feeling of joy that came from knowing—or, in the very least, guessing—how Will felt about her was hard to ignore.
Carrie Hale couldn’t wait to get home to tell her mother all she was able about the night at the Hammersmith Palais and about the man who made her sing—both from her lips and from her heart. She asked the time and was told it was nearing midnight. There had been one raid already, and then an hour later the All Clear. Now another raid was underway. She could hear it and feel it. She could see the fear imprinted upon the faces of her fellow Londoners, who never got used to it, never stopped wondering if this particular night would be their last. Perhaps if they were lucky, Carrie and her sisters wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the night in this terrible place, like rats in a sewer. In the meantime, she would hum her way through this durance vile: “They know you have departed without me and we wonder why, the breeze and I.”
Was Will safe?
You see, she was already worrying about him. When, if there was worrying to be done (and most will tell you that worrying is never productive), it was her mother who should have occupied her deepest, most fretful thoughts.
For at that very moment, in Elmfield Road not far from Balham High Road, a bomb—not one that shatters and rends and pulverizes and deforms, but one that only burns—a diabolical incendiary bomb—fell with a seemingly innocent thud upon the roof of the Hale row house and tumbled down the steeply pitched roof, coming finally to rest upon a loosely tied stack of paper rubbish Mrs. Hale had been gathering for the next paper drive. Its sputtering sparks ignited the paper and then the grass beneath it and within moments the sideboards of the house whilst Carrie’s mother slept in the cupboard beneath the stairs, where she and Carrie would always go, having been told that staircases offered the best protection from falling bombs—at least the kind of bombs that destroy on detonative contact. And so the house began to burn as Sylvia slept (for she had just dozed off, having fought sleep for hours in hopes of being awake for Carrie’s return) and the family cat, awake and motivated by an instinct for survival, fled through the cat flap in the kitchen door.
It wasn’t until the house was nearly engulfed that a fireman fighting a blaze at the end of the lane spotted the curls of smoke coming from inside and rushed over to discover if there was anyone within. What happened to her mother Carrie would not learn for another four and one half hours: she was not dead, but she had been badly burnt in her attempt to escape the house upon waking to the acrid smell of smoke, and by only the most clinical definition could Carrie’s mother and best friend in the world be called alive.
The house and nearly everything inside—the musical instruments, the sheet music, the books—were lost.
There was even a biscuit sheet of slightly scorched muffins, freshly baked, waiting for Carrie on the top of the stove, now burnt to a point that even Sylvia Hale had never taken them.
Chapter Fifteen
Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997
It was two and a half days before Carrie was finally able to make it to the blackened shell which had been the house she shared with her mother. In the meantime Carrie’s next-door neighbors, the Prowses, had kept careful watch over what was left of the structure (in addition to giving a temporary home to the now homeless Frisky McWhiskers); Mira Prowse had even pulled a few things from the less-damaged rooms that she felt her friend Carrie might want to have—although everything she’d carried out was either singed or smoke- or water-damaged. Mira’s Samaritan salvage operation was not without incident. At one point she was confronted by Ms. Little-john, the neighborhood busybody, who demanded to know “what in God’s name” she was up to. Mira’s harried response: “What you should have been doing yourself, if you were any kind of thoughtful neighbor, you nasty old bitch!”
Since Sunday night when Carrie had been taken off the gaming floor and told by Ms. Colthurst that “oh honey, darlin’, something just awful’s happened and you need to go straight to the hospital,” Carrie had cried so much that she no longer even resembled herself. Molly insisted on keeping her friend’s eyes periodically Visined to get at least some of the redness and puffiness down. Molly had been right by Carrie’s side ever since it happened. Carrie’s other sisters had also remained in close orbit, but it was Molly who put everything in her life on hold to give around-the-clock attention to her devastated friend.
Neither of the girls had had more than a cat nap. They had spent all of the previous two nights in the I.C.U. waiting room as Carrie received continuous updates on her mother’s precarious condition. Sylvia Hale had suffered burns over fifty percent of her body, and the doctors had thought it best to induce medical coma to spare her from excruciating pain. What the doctors hadn’t been able to do was offer any kind of assurance that Carrie’s mother would recover. It is always impossible to know such a thing in those critical first few days. Every patient is different, the doctors had said, and every patient’s immune response to severe bodily trauma unique.
What was additionally difficult for Carrie
to bear was that she’d been denied the chance to see her. “Oh goodness mercy! Why would you even want to, child?” was what one of the I.C.U. nurses had said to her (somewhat callously, though the harshness of the statement was softened somewhat by the woman’s honey-sweet Delta drawl). “She won’t know you’re there and she’ll be a fright to look at. Spare yourself, sweetie.”
It was almost as if her mother were already dead.
Molly didn’t know what to say that would be of any comfort to her friend. She only knew that Carrie needed her. And she’d be there for Carrie for as long as was necessary. Mr. Osborne had also made it clear that Carrie could stay with Molly and him if she liked, an offer repeated by three of her sisters. Ruth would have asked her too, but Ruth hadn’t room in her tiny trailer to, as Jane had colorfully put it, “swing a dead cat.”
The two young women wandered in silent head-shaking bewilderment through the remains of the house, its destruction caused by a short in its aging electrical wiring. When Carrie finally found her voice, she mused aloud, “In times like these it does make you wonder why people collect so much stuff. Although I hate it that we’ve lost all the photo albums and the scrapbooks.” Then Carrie turned to Molly and said, “But I’d gladly give up everything I own to have Mama back the way she was.”
Molly nodded, though she was having a little trouble understanding the logic behind such a hypothetical tradeoff. At that moment her eyes fell on the black carcass of Carrie’s violin. “Oh, your fiddle!” she announced sadly.
“Oh, I can always buy another one when I want to start playing again. It’s not like it came from Cremona.”
Molly didn’t get the Stradivarius reference, but she nodded and smiled nonetheless.
Carrie picked up a few things for Molly to take home and keep for her, and then the two left.
As Molly was driving them back to the hospital, Carrie said, seemingly out of the blue, “Do you know if Will’s been asking about me?”
Molly gave Carrie a curious look. “You know I haven’t been back to the casino, Carrie.”
“But you talk to Jane and Ruth and Mags. Did he say anything to them?”
“If he did, they didn’t tell me about it.”
“Oh,” said Carrie, staring contemplatively into space. Then she said, as if to herself, “I liked him.”
“Will Holborne should be the last thing on your mind right now, Car.”
Carrie shook her head. “He’s the only nice thing I have left to hold on to.”
Molly gripped the steering wheel tightly. “First, that isn’t true. You have your four sisters. We’re always gonna be there for you. Second, you need to stop thinkin’ about Will. He’s just like the others. We were just fun little pieces of ass to them.”
“You sound just like Ruth,” said Carrie, swiping a handkerchief across her swollen eyes. She half groaned/half sighed. “I could sleep for days.” She slumped down in her seat. “I wish the doctors would put me in a coma. And if I’m lucky I’ll never wake up again.”
“You stop talking like that.”
“Will is different,” said Carrie groggily, her eyes now closed.
“Uh-uh. They’re all the same,” responded Molly, giving no ground. She took a deep breath. Then softly—so softly, in fact, that she didn’t think Carrie in her present, half-somnolent state could even hear her, she said, “Except for Pat. He’s the only exception.”
Coincidentally, at that very moment Pat was very much the outlier—but only in the sense of physical proximity to his four Ole Miss frat buddies. Because while he was helping to hose out the casino’s parking garage (not in his job description, but who respects job descriptions in the non-unionized American South?), Pat Harrison’s four friends were all waiting together on the arrivals pick-up deck of Memphis International Airport, each man having driven one of Lucky Aces’ four courtesy vans. They were waiting for the appearance of a large party (four entire vans’ worth) of Atlanta Woman’s Club members, who were treating themselves to three days of gambling and one night of the Jordanaires at their favorite Mississippi River casino. The plane was late. The four men had gotten tired of automotive circling, and one of the airport cops had eventually given them permission to stand.
“I hate this fucking job,” said Jerry Castle through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“It was supposed to build character,” said Tom Katz, “although in your case, Castle, I always knew that was gonna be a nonstarter.” Tom turned to Will. “So, are you gonna call her or what?”
“What do you care?”
“You don’t care?”
“Course I care. But just how am I supposed to do this? Her phone’s probably a glob of molten plastic.”
“Then go see her at the hospital. Ms. Colthurst said they’ve got her mother in the Baptist in Southaven.”
Will, who was also sucking smoke, exhaled his own thick cloud and shook his head. “Eh—I don’t think so.”
Cain unfolded his arms. He’d been leaning against the Unloading Zone sign cemented into the sidewalk, counting the number of times the same woman in the same blue Dodge Colt was making the “loop” while waiting to pick up whoever it was that was supposed to be flying in around this time. Cain wanted to tell the woman it would be much better for the environment if she’d just park the damned thing, eat the two dollars it would cost to leave the car in the short-term lot, and go inside.
Seeing no need for preamble, Cain said, “I think it’s time to end the game, y’all. Now that Will’s decided to remove himself from competition—”
“Who said Will’s removing himself from competition?” hurled Will, straightening up. After flicking his butt to the ground and then mashing it with the tip of his shoe—it was a black cowboy boot, actually, the closest thing Will could find to go with the livery provided by Lucky Aces—he took a couple of steps in Cain’s direction. “Where’s the rule that says I gotta be stuck with ‘The Warbler’? Besides, I’ve already made big plans for my weekend with Tommy’s friend’s Maserati, and if any of you even tries to blow this for me, I’ll fuck you over real good.”
Jerry Castle hooted. “Being awfully cocky about your chances, ain’t ya, Willy-Boy? Seeing’s as how the girl you wound up with doesn’t have much time for anybody these days ’cept her medium-to-well-done mawmaw.” Castle cawed with laughter.
Cain looked him coldly in the eye and said, “Why do you talk shit like that? After what happened to that woman. And maybe you haven’t noticed, Castle, but until this did happen, you were the only one of us who didn’t have a date lined up for this week. In fact, you left such a favorable impression on Mags, you’d probably be lucky to get her inside the same county with you.”
The fingers that comprised Jerry’s right hand curled into a tight fist.
Noticing this, Cain said, “Wouldn’t you rather wait and beat the crap out of me somewhere more private?”
“It’s Tommy’s game,” Jerry shot back. “He’s the one who gets to decide whether we keep playing or not.”
Tom “the Kat” Cheshire-grinned. “Well, that’s an easy one. We keep playing. Because I could easily wrap this whole thing up by Friday. Jane’s as horny as a junkyard bitch in heat. She all but went down on me in the parking lot of the blues club last week.”
Will and Jerry burst out laughing. Will said, “You really think you can win the game based on a pity fuck?”
Jerry added: “Bless the bestiality and the chilrens!”
Cain retreated to his van. After climbing into the driver’s seat, he slammed the door with force sufficient to get across, unequivocally, his absolute disgust for the topic at hand.
Cain Pardlow wondered, as he often did, why he continued to associate with three men whose every word and deed turned his stomach into a roiling acid pit. But the answer always came quick and easy, and it was always the same: Cain hung out with Will and Tom and Jerry, as much as he had grown to despise them, as the price he had to pay for being with Pat.
Pat. The man he loved. T
he man to whom he was affectionately and dutifully devoted. Cain had tried to reroute these feelings—had tried to make himself think of Pat in that fraternal, protective way older brothers sometimes feel about younger brothers. But he never succeeded. The physical desire was too strong. There was nothing remotely fraternal or even platonic about Cain’s feelings for Pat Harrison—feelings he knew would never and could never be returned. Not that this mattered. Because at this point he’d pretty much reconciled himself to circumstances. And if just being around Pat was the best it was going to get, then he would exercise his private devotion by helping to shepherd the boyishly adorable Pat Harrison safely and happily through these early formative chapters of his life.
Cain Pardlow had become, in his own mind, the self-sacrificing heroine of a schmaltzy Douglas Sirk soaper.
“So,” said Will Holborne, lighting up another Marlboro, “all things being fair in love and shit, and there being no rules in the game against poaching, I shall find myself another victim. So good luck, suckahs.”
Tom Katz couldn’t help laughing. You had to admire Will’s chutzpah. Jerry might be your garden-variety, old-fashioned Mississippi anti-Semite, but Will Holborne, when he wanted to be, could top them all: the aggressive, the assertive, the brawny Quicker-Picker-Upper Nordic über-man Nazi right down to his hollow core.
The next day, conveniently a day off from the casino for both Cain and Ruth, the two found themselves sipping caffé mochas (called, with a soupçon of pretension, “mocaccinos” on the menu) at Harvey Joe’s, Bellevenue’s popular new combination bookstore/coffeehouse on the town square. Although it wasn’t, nor could it ever be thought of as a “date,” their afternoon meeting didn’t go to the other extreme either. Neither the gay man nor the lesbian felt like the kind of awkward stranger that circumstances required them to be in this early, exploratory stage in their friendship. In fact, the ease with which they settled into conversation was a first for both; Cain had never had a female friend with whom he felt comfortable enough to open up, and the same could be said for Ruth (with the required gender flip). Even though the Reverend Mobry had dropped many a hint that he would be receptive to anything Ruth wished to share with him, she’d never felt the desire to take him up on the offer. It would have been, for Ruth, a little like a daughter disrobing in front of her father.
