Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  The doorbell rang.

  “Go see who it is,” Mother said. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  It was Dr. Murphy. He and my mother made their apologies and she insisted that he stay for dinner. I went to the kitchen to fetch ice for their drinks, and when I returned they were talking about me. I sat on the sofa and listened. Dr. Murphy was telling her not to worry. “James is a good boy,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about my oldest, Terry. He’s not really dishonest, you know, but he’s not really honest either. I can’t seem to reach him. At least James isn’t furtive.”

  “No,” Mother said, “he’s never been furtive.”

  Dr. Murphy clasped his hands between his knees and stared at them. “Well, that’s Terry. Furtive.”

  Before we sat down to dinner Mother said grace. Dr. Murphy bowed his head and closed his eyes and crossed himself at the end, though he had lost his faith in college. When he told me that, during one of our meetings, in just those words, I had the picture of a raincoat hanging by itself outside a dining hall. He drank a good deal of wine and persistently turned the conversation to the subject of his relationship with Terry. He admitted that he had come to dislike the boy. He used the word “dislike” with relish, like someone on a diet permitting himself a single potato chip. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” he said abruptly, and with reference to nothing in particular. “Then again maybe I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what to think anymore. Nobody does.”

  “I know what to think,” my mother said.

  “So does the solipsist. How can you prove to a solipsist that he’s not creating the rest of us?”

  This was one of Dr. Murphy’s favorite riddles, and almost any pretext was sufficient for him to trot it out. He was a child with a card trick.

  “Send him to bed without dinner,” Mother said. “Let him create that.”

  Dr. Murphy turned to me. “Why do you do it?” he asked. It was a pure question, it had no object beyond the satisfaction of his curiosity. Mother looked at me and there was the same curiosity in her face.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and that was the truth.

  Dr. Murphy nodded, not because he’d anticipated my answer but because he accepted it. “Is it fun?”

  “No, it’s not fun. I can’t explain.”

  “Why is it all so sad?” Mother asked. “Why all the diseases?”

  “Maybe,” Dr. Murphy said, “sad things are more interesting.”

  “Not to me,” Mother said.

  “Not to me either,” I said. “It just comes out that way.”

  After dinner Dr. Murphy asked Mother to play the piano. He particularly wanted to sing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

  “That old thing,” Mother said. She stood and folded her napkin deliberately, and we followed her into the living room. Dr. Murphy stood behind her as she warmed up. Then they sang “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and I watched him stare down at my mother, as if he were trying to remember something. Her own eyes were closed. After that they sang “O Magnum Mysterium.” They sang it in parts and I regretted I had no voice, it sounded so good.

  “Come on, James,” Dr. Murphy said as Mother played the last chords. “These old tunes not good enough for you?”

  “He just can’t sing,” Mother said.

  When Dr. Murphy left, Mother lit the fire and made more coffee. She slouched down in the big chair, sticking her legs straight out and moving her feet back and forth. “That was fun,” she said.

  “Did you and Father ever do things like that?”

  “A few times, when we were first going out. I don’t think he really enjoyed it. He was like you.”

  I wondered if they’d had a good marriage. He admired her and liked to look at her; every night at dinner he had us move the candlesticks slightly to right or left of center so he could see her down the length of the table. And every evening when she set the table she put them in the center again. She didn’t seem to miss him very much. But I wouldn’t really have known if she did, and I didn’t miss him all that much myself anymore. Most of the time I thought about other things.

  “James?”

  I waited.

  “I’ve been thinking that you might like to go down and stay with Michael for a week or two.”

  “What about school?”

  “I’ll talk to Father McSorley. He won’t mind. Maybe this problem will take care of itself if you start thinking about other people—helping them, like Michael does. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay with me. I’d like to see Michael.”

  “I’m not trying to get rid of you.”

  “I know.”

  Mother stretched, then tucked her feet under her. She sipped at her coffee. “What did that word mean that Murphy used? You know the one?”

  “Paranoid? That’s where somebody thinks everyone is out to get him. Like that woman who always grabs you after Mass—Dorothea.”

  “Not paranoid. Everyone knows what that means. Solipsist.”

  “Oh. A solipsist is someone who thinks he creates everything around him.”

  Mother nodded and blew on her coffee, then put it down without drinking. “I’d rather be paranoid. Do you really think Dorothea is?”

  “Sure. No question about it.”

  “I mean really sick?”

  “That’s what paranoid is, is being sick. What do you think, Mother?”

  “What are you so angry about?”

  “I’m not angry.” I lowered my voice. “I’m not angry.”

  “I don’t think she knows what she’s saying, she just wants someone to listen. She probably lives all by herself in some little room. We should pray for her. Will you remember to do that?”

  I thought of Mother singing “O Magnum Mysterium,” saying grace, praying with easy confidence. She could imagine things as coming together, not falling apart. She looked at me and I shrank; I knew exactly what she was going to say.

  “Son,” she said, “do you know how much I love you?”

  The next afternoon I took the bus to Los Angeles. I looked forward to the trip, to the monotony of the road and the empty fields by the roadside. Mother walked with me down the long concourse. The station was crowded and oppressive. “Are you sure this is the right bus?” she asked at the loading platform.

  “Yes.”

  “It looks so old.”

  “Mother—”

  “All right.” She pulled me against her and kissed me, then held me an extra second to show that her embrace was sincere, not just like everyone else’s, never having realized that everyone else does the same thing. I boarded the bus and we waved at each other until it became awkward. Then she began checking through her handbag for something. When she finished I stood and adjusted the luggage over my seat. I sat and we smiled at each other, waved when the driver gunned the engine, shrugged when he got up suddenly to count the passengers, waved again when he resumed his seat. As the bus pulled out my mother and I were looking at each other with plain relief.

  I had boarded the wrong bus. This one was bound for Los Angeles but not by the express route. We stopped in San Mateo, Palo Alto, San Jose, Castroville. When we left Castroville it began to rain, hard; my window wouldn’t close all the way, and a thin stream of water ran down the panel onto my seat. To keep dry I had to lean forward and away from the window. The rain fell harder. The engine of the bus sounded as though it were coming apart.

  In Salinas the man sleeping beside me jumped up but before I had a chance to change seats his place was taken by an enormous woman in a print dress, carrying a shopping bag. She took possession of her seat and spilled over onto half of mine. “That’s a storm,” she said loudly, then turned and looked at me. “Hungry?” Without waiting for an answer she dipped into her bag and pulled out a piece of chicken and thrust it at me. “Hey, by God,” she hooted, “look at him go to town on that drumstick!” A few people turned and smiled. I smiled back around the bo
ne and kept at it. I finished that piece and she handed me another. Then she started handing out chicken to the people in the seats near us.

  Outside of San Luis Obispo the noise from the engine grew louder and just as suddenly there was no noise at all. The driver pulled off to the side of the road and got out, then got on again dripping wet. A few moments later he announced that the bus had broken down and they were sending another one to pick us up. Someone asked how long that might take and the driver said he had no idea. “Keep your pants on!” shouted the woman next to me. “Anybody in a hurry to get to LA ought to have his head examined.”

  The wind was blowing hard, driving sheets of rain against the windows on both sides. The bus swayed gently. Outside the light was brown and thick. The woman next to me pumped all the people around us for their itineraries and said whether or not she’d ever been where they were from or where they were going. “How about you?” She slapped my knee. “Parents own a chicken ranch? I hope so!” She laughed. I told her I was from San Francisco. “San Francisco, that’s where my husband was stationed.” She asked me what I did there and I told her I worked with refugees from Tibet.

  “Is that right? What do you do with a bunch of Tibetans?”

  “Seems like there’s plenty of other places they could’ve gone,” said a man in front of us. “We don’t go there.”

  “What do you do with a bunch of Tibetans?” the woman repeated.

  “Try to find them jobs, locate housing, listen to their problems.”

  “You understand that kind of talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Speak it?”

  “Pretty well. I was born and raised in Tibet. My parents were missionaries over there.”

  “Missionaries!”

  “They were killed when the Communists took over.”

  The big woman patted my arm.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Why don’t you say some of that Tibetan?”

  “What would you like to hear?”

  “Say ‘The cow jumped over the moon.’” She watched me, smiling, and when I finished she looked at the others and shook her head. “That was pretty. Like music. Say some more.”

  “What?”

  “Anything.”

  They bent toward me. The windows went blind with rain. The driver had fallen asleep and was snoring gently to the swaying of the bus. Outside the muddy light flickered to pale yellow, and far off there was thunder. The woman next to me leaned back and closed her eyes and then so did all the others as I sang to them in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue.

  Soldier’s Joy

  On Friday Hooper was named driver of the guard for the third night that week. He’d recently been broken in rank again, this time from corporal to PFC, and the first sergeant had decided to keep Hooper’s evenings busy so he wouldn’t have leisure to brood. That was what the first sergeant told him when Hooper came to the orderly room to complain.

  “It’s for your own good,” the first sergeant said. “Not that I expect you to thank me.” He moved the book he’d been reading to one side of his desk and leaned back. “Hooper, I have a theory about you,” he said. “Want to hear it?”

  “I’m all ears, Top,” Hooper said.

  The first sergeant put his boots up on the desk and stared out the window to his left. It was getting on toward five o’clock. Work details had begun to return from the rifle range and the post laundry and the day-care center, where Hooper and several other men were excavating a wading pool without aid of machinery. As the trucks let them out they gathered on the barracks steps and under the dead elm beside the mess hall, their voices a steady murmur in the orderly room where Hooper stood waiting to hear himself analyzed.

  “You resent me,” the first sergeant said. “You think you should be sitting here. You don’t know that’s what you think because you’ve totally sublimated your resentment, but that’s what it is, all right, and that’s why you and me are developing a definite conflict profile. It’s like you have to keep fucking up to prove to yourself that you don’t really care. That’s my theory. You follow me?”

  “Top, I’m way ahead of you,” Hooper said. “That’s night school talking.”

  The first sergeant continued to look out the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re doing in my army. You’ve put your twenty years in. You could retire to Mexico and live like a dictator. So what are you doing in my army, Hooper?”

  Hooper looked down at the desk. He cleared his throat but said nothing.

  “Give it some thought,” the first sergeant said. He stood and walked Hooper to the door. “I’m not hostile,” he said. “I’m prepared to be supportive. Just think nice thoughts about Mexico, okay? Okay, Hooper?”

  Hooper called Mickey and told her he wouldn’t be coming by that night after all. She reminded him that this was the third time in one week, and said that she wasn’t getting any younger.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Hooper asked. “Go AWOL?”

  “I cried three times today,” Mickey said. “I just broke down and cried, and you know what? I don’t even know why.”

  “What did you do last night?” Hooper asked. When Mickey didn’t answer he said, “Did Briggs come over?”

  “I’ve been inside all day,” Mickey said. “Just sitting here. I’m going out of my tree.” Then, in the same weary voice, she said, “Touch it, Hoop.”

  “I have to get going,” Hooper said.

  “Not yet. Wait. I’m going into the bedroom. I’m going to pick up the phone in there. Hang on, Hoop. Think of the bedroom. Think of me lying on the bed. Wait, baby.”

  There were men passing by the phone booth. Hooper watched them and tried not to think of Mickey’s bedroom but now he could think of nothing else. Mickey’s husband was a supply sergeant. The walls of the bedroom were knotty pine he’d derailed en route to some colonel’s office. The brass lamps beside the bed were made from howitzer casings. The sheets were parachute silk. Sometimes, lying on those sheets, Hooper thought of the men who’d drifted to earth below them. He was no great lover, as the women he went with usually got around to telling him, but in Mickey’s bedroom Hooper had turned in his saddest performances and always when he was most aware that everything around him was stolen. He wasn’t exactly sure why he kept going back. It was just something he did, again and again.

  “Okay,” Mickey said. “I’m here.”

  “There’s a guy waiting to use the phone,” Hooper told her.

  “Hoop, I’m on the bed. I’m taking off my shoes.”

  Hooper could see her perfectly. He lit a cigarette and opened the door of the booth to let the smoke out.

  “Hoop?” she said.

  “I told you, there’s a guy waiting.”

  “Turn around, then.”

  “You don’t need me,” Hooper said. “All you need is the telephone. Why don’t you call Briggs? That’s what you’re going to do after I hang up.”

  “I probably will,” she said. “Listen, Hoop, I’m not really on the bed. I was just pulling your chain.”

  “I knew it,” Hooper said. “You’re watching the tube, right?”

  “Somebody just won a saw,” Mickey said.

  “A saw?”

  “Yeah, they drove up to this man’s house and dumped a truckload of logs in his yard and gave him a chain saw. This was his fantasy.”

  “Maybe I can swing by later tonight,” Hooper said. “Just for a minute.”

  “I don’t know,” Mickey said. “Better give me a ring first.”

  After Mickey hung up Hooper tried to call his wife but there was no answer. He stood there and listened to the phone ringing. At last he put the receiver down and stepped outside the booth, just as they began to sound retreat over the company loudspeaker. With the men around him Hooper came to attention and saluted. The record was scratchy, but the music, as always, caused Hooper’s mind to go abruptly and perfectly still. He held his salute until the last note died
away, then broke off smartly and walked down the street toward the mess hall.

  The Officer of the Day was Captain King from Headquarters Company. He had also been Officer of the Day on Monday and Tuesday nights, and Hooper was glad to see him again because Captain King was too lazy to do his own job or to make sure that the guards were doing theirs. He stayed in the guardhouse and left everything up to Hooper.

  Captain King had gray hair and a long, grayish face. He was a West Point graduate. His classmates were majors or even lieutenant colonels but he himself had been held back for good reasons, many of which he admitted to Hooper their first night together. It puzzled Hooper at first, this officer telling him about his failures to perform, his nervous breakdowns and Valium habit, but finally he understood: Captain King regarded him, a PFC with twenty-one years’ service, as a comrade in dereliction, a disaster like himself with no room left for judgment against anyone.

  The evening was hot and muggy. Captain King proceeded along the rank of men drawn up before the guardhouse steps. He objected to the alignment of someone’s belt buckle. He asked questions about the chain of command but gave no sign as to whether the answers he received were right or wrong. He inspected a couple of rifles and pretended to find something amiss with each of them, and when he reached the last man in line he began to deliver a speech. He said he’d never seen such sorry troops in his life. He asked how they expected to stand up to a determined enemy. On and on he went. Hooper lit another cigarette and sat down on the running board of the truck he’d been leaning against.

  The sky was turning a weird purple. It had a damp, heavy look and it felt heavy too, hanging close overhead, nervous with rumblings and small flashes in the distance. Just sitting there made Hooper sweat. Beyond the guardhouse a stream of cars rushed along the road to Tacoma. From the officers’ club farther up the road came the muffled beat of rock music, which was almost lost, like every other sound of the evening, in the purr of crickets that rose up everywhere and thickened the air like heat.