by Jane Smiley
Just then the bartender said, “Can I get anything for you gentlemen?” He leaned close to peer, not at Frank, but at Lawrence. Lawrence said, “Old Fitzgerald and soda, I think.”
Frank had to admire the ease with which he said this, but, then, Lawrence made every transgression look as easy as you please. The bartender looked at Frank. “You?”
“I’ll take the same, but straight up with a beer chaser.” Then there was the long moment while the bartender made up his mind. Finally, the drinks appeared. Frank, who had never drunk whiskey before, tossed his shot back the way he saw Gary Cooper do it in the pictures, then held his head perfectly steady as his throat burned. After a moment, he took a swig of the beer. Grandpa Otto gave all the kids beer, so he was used to that. Even so, it was a good thing the place was dark, because his eyes were tearing. Lawrence took a sip of his whiskey and soda, an experienced sort of sip. He said, “You always seem older than you say you are.”
Frank said, “I was never young.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I was always up to something, according to my folks.”
“Must’ve been fun.”
“Sometimes.”
“Maybe,” said Lawrence.
Frank laughed. “How about you?”
“Wasn’t up to enough, according to my aunts and uncles. They are all well known to be very industrious. My mother is said to have spoiled me, and I am said to be spoiled. When I flunk out, all of their suspicions will be confirmed.”
“How can you flunk out?”
“You are truly asking. That’s one of the interesting things about you, Langdon. You have no talent for idleness.” He finished his drink, and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?”
“The women’s college.”
Each of the whores had a room of her own, but at least some of them were sitting in a large hall at the top of the stairs. As he climbed, he heard one of them say that she had been to Chicago to see a Cagney picture about dancing. When Lawrence got to the top, he walked over to an older woman who looked like the madam, and kissed her on the cheek. She said, “Barney, my boy! Are you well?”
Some of the other whores called out greetings, all of them smiled, and two put down their knitting. Frank wiggled his shoulders to loosen them, then stepped up onto the landing as if he knew what he was doing. Yes, he had lived in Chicago, but as far as he knew, communists did not go in for this sort of thing. Lawrence said, “Hi, Butterfly. I’ve been missing you.”
The madam said, “I’m sure you have, sweetie,” and looked Frank up and down. She said, “Who’s this?”
Frank said, “Rolf.”
“Rolf? Rolf what?”
“Rolf Silber.” He thought, There you go, Julius. This put him in a good mood.
He ended up with Pixie. Pixie could not have been called a girl, but she was tall and slender, even without the high-heeled shoes. She walked him down the hallway almost to the end, to what might have been her room, or what might have been just a room. She opened the door for him, and followed him in. The room had electric lights—a small chandelier made of glass flowers hanging from the middle of the ceiling. There was a yellow chair, a green-and-yellow spread on the bed, and a sink over in the corner. Frank had no idea what to do, but he tried to look relaxed. He put his hands in his pockets. She stepped toward him. The surprising thing about that was that, even though she was pretty in her way, he didn’t feel very good. It took him about five seconds to remember that girl at the state fair—he sometimes remembered that night, but he never remembered the girl in detail. Now he did—the light across her cheek making her look very sad. Her sigh of disgust. The shine of his stuff on the fabric of her skirt. He must have stepped backward.
Pixie said, “You’re a pretty boy to be looking so worried. What are you, twenty or something?”
Frank decided for once to be honest. He said, “I just turned eighteen at New Year’s.”
Pixie put her finger into his belt. She said, “Take your jacket off.” He did so. She set the shoulders together and laid it over the back of the chair.
“Now the tie.”
He pulled the end through the knot of the tie, and she took it out of his hands and smoothed it over the jacket. Then she slipped out of her shoes, went to the sink, and put her foot on the rim. After a moment, she started washing herself. She said, “No, look. You need to watch. You don’t have to do anything else.”
Frank watched. He was glad she went slowly. Maybe that was what had gone wrong before—too fast.
“You’re staring at the wall. Look at me.”
He looked at her.
After she finished washing, she took off her top. Her breasts looked strange in the light. His eyes closed. He opened them. She was sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her fingers, unlit. She said, “Look, your friend paid, but he didn’t pay for any special thing. Anything you want is fine.”
What was that girl’s name? he thought. She was from Muscatine. Muscatine was right around here. This thought made him dizzy. He closed his eyes again.
But his cock was hard, and Pixie was touching it. She must have unbuttoned his fly. Then he felt a much stranger sensation than touching, and opened his eyes. The top of her head was at his stomach, and he realized she had his cock in her mouth. Moments later, he came, and she pulled away. She got up and went over to the sink, where she spit his stuff into the drain and washed it away. Frank sat down on the bed. It was late, and he wanted to fall asleep. Pixie said, “You like boys, then?”
Frank looked at her.
“It’s no big deal. Some guys like boys and girls. Maybe you don’t like anyone so far. That happens, too.” She shrugged and put on her top. They waited a few minutes in silence. Frank could hear occasional noises from below, steps out in the hall.
When they rejoined the group at the top of the stairs, Lawrence was still with his whore, but it was okay, Frank thought. It was nicer with more girls. Pixie sat down on the sofa, and patted the spot next to her. One of the knitting girls said, “So—where are you from?”
“Usherton.”
“Yeah? I’m from Mason City myself. Lizzie here is from Rochester, Minnesota. But most of the girls are from Chicago.”
Frank said, “What about you, Pixie?”
“Who, me?” She licked the tips of her fingers and smoothed her hair back. “I’m from down south of St. Louis. Cairo. It’s on the river there.”
Lizzie said, “Well, it’s nice to have a good-looking fellow like yourself come around. There’s not a lot of that.” She leaned forward and kissed him hard. He liked it.
Pixie said, “You should come back sometime midweek. It’s not so busy.”
Lawrence and his whore emerged from one of the rooms. He had his arm around her waist. On the way home, Frank said, “Why do they do this?”
“It’s a living,” said Lawrence. “There’s a Depression on. People live in tents and shoot rabbits. What else are they going to do? Lizzie’s dad died of diphtheria, and that was the end of their farm. Some are nymphos, though.”
Frank pondered the whores for most of the next week.
AT THE BEGINNING of the third quarter, Frank got a job that paid more, one that would keep him in Ames through the summer. Since he planned to move back into his tent, he expected to save quite a bit of money. His boss, who was an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department, wanted to burn cornstalks in a way that would make them usable for gunpowder. Frank foresaw that when the gunpowder was perfected, he and his boss, Professor Cullhane, would put it to use. But it was not perfected yet. It was an interesting idea, though—a field of corn as a weapon.
Frank saw himself as something of a ghost around the campus. He had given up all ideas of Sigma Chi or Sigma Nu. He didn’t mind the kids in his classes and liked walking across the campus with this one or that one—he had retained his habit of being nice to all the girls, and so he always had someone to walk with. He was g
ood at carrying books, or, since he had brought the cruiser back from the farm, riding a girl to the library. There was one girl, Annie Haines, in his history class, who liked to sit on his handlebars and be pedaled around town. She was pretty brave, and once in a while he kissed her, but that was all. She didn’t know where he lived, though if she’d looked out of her window in her freshman dorm rooms, she would have seen the rooming house across Lincoln Way where his room was. But it suited him that no one knew where he lived other than Lawrence, and Lawrence was sworn to secrecy. Lawrence kept the secret, too—not because he honored Frank’s wishes, but because he liked secrets. The reason Frank didn’t try to join a fraternity was that, apart from Lawrence and the girls, his fellow students interested him only for observation.
He wrote two essays for Lawrence. One was about the Russian Revolution and Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. This one was easy to write—all he had to do was reproduce Julius’s “line” on Trotsky, that while he was out in the field during the last year of Lenin’s life, when Lenin was so debilitated by strokes, Trotsky was doing the real work of running the army and taking care of administrative business, but Stalin was back in the Kremlin, extending his influence over everyone in the Politburo. Stalin’s betrayal of Trotsky only prefigured his betrayal of his erstwhile colleagues and the revolution itself. Lawrence received an A on the essay, and was told that his thinking was “Very astute. You’ve been paying better attention than I thought, Mr. Field.” In the second essay, “Lawrence” wrote about Richard III. He compared the feuds between the House of Lancaster and the House of York to the feuds in the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and likened Richard to Stalin, “even in terms of height and looks.” He ended the paper with a few remarks about how humans remain constant through the ages, in spite of ever-changing theories of human nature. This essay also received an A. The professor considered Lawrence’s argument “unorthodox but intriguing.” As a result of these two papers, Lawrence did not flunk out of school, but he did have to retake his physics class.
Frank would not have said that he asked for anything in return, but he appreciated Lawrence’s generosity—a meal here and there, another ride to Chicago (though not to Little Chicago), a pair of boots that his mother sent that happened to be too big for Lawrence (and why two sizes too big, Frank didn’t ask). The spring progressed from dogwood through lilacs, and Frank enjoyed himself. There were lots of ways to fit into a place like Iowa State College, and one of them was not to fit in at all.
WHEN HE PLANTED Rolf’s cornfield, Joe decided to breed a hybrid. Actually, it was a bit of an accident. Papa had saved seed from the fall crop (back up to forty bushels an acre, but what good did that do you when the price was twelve cents a bushel?). When Joe checked the seed, there wasn’t enough of it to begin with, and some of what they had was infected with a fungus. Grandpa Wilmer had some seed corn, too, but not much, and of a different variety. What got Joe going was that Grandpa Wilmer’s variety would grow taller than what Papa had, so he just filled the seeders—three rows of Papa’s, then a row of Grandpa Wilmer’s, from one end of Rolf’s field to the other. He didn’t say a thing about it to Papa, at least until the corn was about chest-high, when Papa noticed the difference between the rows. He brought it up one Sunday in July when all the grandparents were over for Sunday supper. Papa was smiling when he said it, but Joe knew he didn’t approve. He looked around the table and said, “Joey’s going into business.”
“What’s that?” said Granny Elizabeth. “Wasn’t Frankie good at earning money, too? Those fox skins he had were beauties. When was that?”
“Joey’s sort of business is the sort where you pour time and money down a deep hole.”
“Oh, Walter,” said Mama, “what could you possibly be talking about? Joey does what you tell him.”
“We didn’t tell him to grow seed corn when we said he could take over Rolf’s farm.”
“What does that mean?” said Mama, and Grandpa Wilmer said, “I’ll buy it.”
Joe thanked him.
Grandpa Otto said, “Opa tried that for a couple of years. He detasseled every other row and saved that seed for the next year. Lots of work, nothing gained.”
“That’s not what I’m going to do,” said Joe. “I’m going to detassel the rows I planted from Papa’s seed, and let Grandpa Wilmer’s seed pollinate those plants.”
“What are those rows, four to one?” said Grandpa Wilmer.
“Three to one,” said Joe.
“Lotta work. That’s a big field.”
Joe shrugged, then said, “I bet I can get it done before the oat harvest. I bet I can.”
Grandpa Wilmer said, “That was good seed. Pretty high yield.”
“What good is that?” said Walter.
“Prices are rising,” said Grandpa Wilmer.
Grandma Elizabeth and Oma each said something in German, then Grandpa Otto. Walter said, “Well, tell the rest of us.”
Grandpa Otto said, “She said, ‘War in Europe raises prices in Iowa.’ ”
Papa said, “There isn’t going to be a war in Europe. They learned their lesson the last time.”
Oma spoke in German again, and Mama said, “You can talk English, Grandma.”
Oma said, “Nicht zu diesem.” Then she added, “Alles, was Teufel will, ist Krieg. Die Engländer können es nicht sehen, aber die Deutschen können.”
Papa said, “What did she say?”
“She said Hitler is bent on having a war.”
There was an uncomfortable silence; then Papa said, “Prices will go up.”
Joe didn’t mind detasseling the corn. He did it at a trot, from one end of a long row to the other. He moved along, yanking the pollen-filled tassels out of the stalks and dropping them on the ground. It was not terribly hot—he did it in a loose shirt and light shoes. The field was full of all sorts of bugs and bees, and he had to watch out for snakes, but it also gave him a chance to pull up the rogue corn plants, and the bindweed, and the lamb’s-quarter, and the Canada thistle, all of which smelled rather good. Because of how sharp the edges of the corn leaves were, he had to wear gloves anyway, so he got all of the thistles out of the field. Mama said, “You are such an industrious boy, Joey. Do you remember the way you stacked those dominoes when you were about two? No, of course not. But every time Frankie knocked them over, you stacked them up again.” The dominoes were in Henry’s toy box. Joey didn’t remember playing with them, but he was sure that mindless activity had been his specialty.
His favorite day of detasseling was the last Saturday, when Minnie, who had been teaching at the schoolhouse for the last year (six students, including Lois), agreed to help him. That day, he slowed down.
He was now taller than Minnie, though he wasn’t quite sure when that had happened. He hadn’t gone to school at all this year, and so he hadn’t had her as a teacher, which meant that he could tell her what to do. He said, “Well, too bad you didn’t come at the beginning instead of at the end—the corn is a lot taller now. But there aren’t many tassels left. This is cleanup.”
She set down the basket she’d brought with the clean dish towel tied over the top, and Joey threw his jacket over that. The morning had started pretty cool, but it was warming up fast. The tassels were bright yellow at the tops of the green plants, but you had to reach into the leaves and grab them at the base, or they would break off. After he showed her, she went over a few rows and he could barely see her. She shouted, “Looks like a good crop!”
“Too soon to tell.”
She shouted, “That’s how I feel about my students!”
Joe laughed. At the end of the row, they sipped some water from the canteen he was carrying. Minnie said, “So what do you hear from Frank?”
“Not much. I guess they have a nice swimming pool there. He likes that. Did you know that he learned to swim when he was in Chicago?”
“He wrote me about that.”
“You probably hear more than we do.”
“He said he was
working on making gunpowder out of cornstalks.”
Joe said, “I think that’s a joke.” The joke was that if there was anything in the world Joe could imagine Frank trying, it was making gunpowder out of cornstalks. And bullets out of kernels.
They made their way down the next two rows, back to the basket. When they were having a sandwich (chicken salad and cucumber—the cukes were sweet), Joe said, “How were your students this year?”
“I had to be kind of strict with Lois and Henry. I think I hurt their feelings. But it’s not like when Frank and I were going there—lots of kids, and so lots of distractions for the teacher, and so lots of fun. Do you remember when Frank set the mousetrap for the bullies, where they kept their cigarettes in the outhouse?”
“Never heard about that one.”
“He might have been seven at that point. I thought he was so brave and smart. Even though they were bigger than he was, they left us alone after that, because he was as sly as could be. Another time, he put a half-rotted rat in one of the bullies’ boots. It was winter, and the kid had to jam his foot in to get it on. We all knew it was in there. Oh my, we laughed. But there’s none of that now. I have my eye on all of them all the time.”
“I guess, when Lillian and Jane go to the high school, you’ll be down to four.”
“They might close the school.”
She pulled out a small bowl of raspberries, which they ate one by one.
It was nearly noon when they made their way down the third set of rows. Joe wondered what Minnie would do if they closed the school. She had never shown any inclination to leave home, and he didn’t know what Mrs. Frederick would do without her.