Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  Lars stayed in the TV room with me for an hour. He said that “We Will Sell No Car Before Its Time” was a better slogan than “Master Craftsmanship for Any Pocketbook,” because no one used a word like pocketbook anymore.

  “What is the question you asked about love last night?” Mrs. Truman asks. “Can love do what, Harry? What did you say about it?”

  As she comes closer to my bed, she pulls her feet up so they’re suspended in midair, like two socks hanging from a clothesline. “You asked if love could penetrate the generations,” she says. “Only you didn’t put it that way….”

  “Can love be defeated as easily by a difference in age as by distance,” I say, but softly, since Ruth is in the doorway now and she’s the one I said it to before, not Mrs. T.

  “Yes,” says Mrs. Truman. “That was it precisely.”

  Ruth has come to apologize for keeping her Lars Junior secret from me. She has come to tell me that fifty years is too much difference, that though she feels a kinship with me, it would never work, that yes, love can be defeated by age.

  I try to remember where Mrs. Truman was when I posed my question to Ruth, but I can only remember her looking high and low for Harry.

  “Shall I take you back to your room now, Mrs. T.?” asks Ruth. She uses her nursing home voice, the one she never uses with me.

  “No!” says Mrs. Truman, gripping her wheelchair, like she’s forgotten our deal.

  “She might as well hear the end of my story,” I tell Ruth. “After all, when you are gone, who will be left for me to talk to but Mrs. Truman?”

  “Oh, Mr. Kurt!” says Ruth.

  There is real pain in her voice, like all this means something to her. “Do you love Lars Junior?” I ask.

  “Of course she doesn’t love him,” says Mrs. Truman. “Love’s great enemy is ambition, and she’s ambitious, Harry. I know because I was ambitious, too.”

  Once Mrs. Truman brought a photo album to the TV room and sat showing me pictures from her youth. She hadn’t been pretty, but there’d been a likable quality about her, a look that ran across her nose and eyes. A boy had been in some of the photos with her, standing behind her and giving her looks of love. That boy’s name truly had been Harry.

  “Love grows like kudzu,” says Ruth. “Love can be learned.”

  Ruth lived in Mississippi before moving to Tacoma, and she often mentions kudzu as a metaphor for life’s difficulties.

  “Love does grow,” Mrs. Truman admits. “But only about an inch a year.”

  Ruth is wearing her uniform now, but she hasn’t removed her Eritrean sandals. Tobey Jones buys its employees’ uniforms, like Lars Larson Motors will presumably buy Lars Senior’s series of suits, if we allow him to do the ad campaign.

  “Accountancy is my love,” says Ruth, but I can see now that she’s only following moves as if upon a chessboard, and I wonder if she’s really better off than the models who followed their dreams in Nairobi. It’s a question I would have asked her if she’d given me the two weeks’ notice I deserved.

  “It broke my heart when Chung-ja didn’t show up for our date that day,” I tell both Ruth and Mrs. Truman. “Paul and Felix didn’t like it, either, but they soon wandered off to look for other women, while I just sat there brokenhearted.”

  Ruth finds the stepladder and places it about halfway between my bed and the door. I get the feeling that when she leaves, she’ll take it with her. “What happened next?” she asks. “Did you go back to her bar?”

  “Yes, but the owner wasn’t friendly. She said that Chung-ja had quit. And two months later, I got my second set of discharge papers.”

  “Harry was killed in 1944,” says Mrs. Truman. “His parents got a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, brought to their door by a couple of men in uniform.”

  I can see Harry clearly in her photo album, thin, with short hair, already balding slightly. I wonder what will happen to the album when Mrs. Truman dies. Will that be the end of Harry, or will someone in her family pick it up, telling his story to the next generation?

  “So that’s it?” asks Ruth, shifting her weight. “That’s the end of your story?”

  “Almost, but not quite. Four years later, in 1958, I went to Japan to try to form a partnership with Mitsubishi. Lars Larson Motors was just getting started and I thought the Japanese would one day make great cars.”

  It was true, I had thought that, but though I wait for Ruth or even Mrs. Truman to acknowledge such prescience, neither of them says anything. Ruth’s own prescience weighs on her, while Mrs. Truman is back in her photo album.

  “I failed; I couldn’t form the partnership. But one weekend I flew over to Korea to have a look around. The Japanese get more credit for it, but Koreans are hardworking, too, and were busy rebuilding their country after the horrible war they’d suffered through.”

  “Koreans are tough,” says Ruth. “I’ve had two of them here as supervisors.”

  She seems distant now, as if she already has one sandaled foot out the door, so I focus on Mrs. Truman, who, when she feels me looking at her, glances up, her glasses no longer reflective but simply showing her magnified eyes.

  “I stayed in Seoul for a couple of days, then took the train to the town I used to live in, and who should I meet as I was coming out of the station but my old friend Paul, who had remained in Korea for a couple more tours of duty.”

  “Oh, Paul, so good to see you!” Mrs. Truman says. “How have you been, Paul?”

  Maybe it’s the scorched terrain of her brain that gives her this unnatural empathy, or maybe she has had it her whole life long.

  Ruth brings the stepladder over so she can sit by Mrs. Truman. Even on her last night she’ll be diligent, following Tobey Jones protocol. By that, I mean if Mrs. Truman gets too excited, she’ll take her back to her room.

  “Yes, Mrs. Truman, it was Paul, all right, and he looked the same as he did the last time I saw him.”

  “Did you tell him that?” she asks. “One thing I’ve learned in life, if you think someone looks good, you ought to tell them. Life is just plain short of compliments.”

  “I did, and I took him up on it, too, when he offered to buy me a drink for old time’s sake. Paul was an afficionado when it came to Korea, loving both its high and low life, and that night he was drawn to a low-class bar not two minutes’ walk from where I met him.”

  “Some men are drawn to bruises, others to beauty marks,” Mrs. Truman says.

  Ruth puts a hand on the back of her wheelchair. I’m surprised to see that there are tears in her eyes.

  “As we walked along, it was like going back in time,” I say. “All the work the Koreans had done to rebuild their country was out along the main roads, but the back streets were still war-torn. We saw bombed-out buildings and orphans sitting on piles of rubble. Disease and poverty were everywhere, but Paul put his arm around me and, I swear, started singing ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ at the top of his voice.”

  At first, I think it’s Mrs. Truman who sings along with Paul, but it’s Ruth. Her voice is good, like an Eritrean Connie Francis.

  “Paul took me into this horrible place called Saxophone Heaven, where laborers and street kids sat listening to a band made up entirely of saxophone players standing in the middle of the floor below one of those twisting ballroom balls, with hundreds of little mirrors, so that light was cast around the room. The floor was wet and women danced in the light from the mirrored ball, turning in circles with their arms up, as if holding dance partners. They wore placards with numbers on them, so if you wanted one of them, all you had to do was call out her number and she’d be yours.”

  “That is not the world depicted inside either of your books,” says Ruth. She picks up Middlemarch, opens it, and reads from the beginning, “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”

  “I had the kind of beauty that couldn’t be thrown into relief by anything,” Mrs. Truman tells us.

  “Paul and I took a ta
ble at the side of the room. Paul had learned Korean well by then and ordered beer and told our waiter that we didn’t want any of the floating women, that we weren’t in the market for sex slaves.”

  “He said ‘sex slaves’?” asks Ruth. “Just like that?”

  “That’s what he told me he said. The waiter looked tough, like he’d just as soon kick our asses as take drink orders, but when he heard Paul’s Korean, he drew a line in front of our table with the toe of his shoe, making a bunch of hopeless women turn and dance away. Clearly, he was saying he would beat them if they came back.”

  “That was unkind,” says Ruth. “The models in my modeling agency—” but Mrs. Truman interrupts her.

  “What did the saxophone players like to play?” she asks. “I was always partial to ‘Deep Purple,’ by Earl Bostic. Did they happen to play that?”

  “Actually, they played only three tunes: ‘Too Young,’ by Nat King Cole, ‘You Send Me,’ by Sam Cooke, and, of all things, ‘Old Black Joe.’ And no matter which of the songs they played, the dancing women sang along. It was when the band was playing ‘Too Young,’ in fact, that one woman danced across the imaginary line on the floor and sat down next to Paul, staring across the table at me like I had just caused her great insult.”

  Mrs. Truman tries to sing ‘Too Young’ until Ruth puts an arm around her, tears making inroads down her face.

  “At first, I thought she wanted to hurt me and I was about to call that waiter, but Paul’s face crumbled when he saw her. Paul’s face crumbled, not mine! Until, that is, she leaned across the table, touched my arm, and said, ‘Let’s meet Saturday and have a picnic,’ in perfect English.”

  “Chung-ja!” Ruth cries. “It was Chung-ja trapped inside that woman!”

  “She had a placard around her neck with ‘fourteen,’ written on it,” I tell Ruth. “And, of course, I was fourteen years older than she was.”

  “Your grandson is fourteen years older than me, too, Mr. Kurt,” says Ruth. “Are you telling me this story to give me some sort of message?”

  Actually, I’d begun my story before I knew about Ruth and Lars Junior, but are they really only fourteen years apart? Harry and Mrs. Truman, I knew from her photo album, had been about the same age.

  “Poor Chung-ja,” says Ruth. “She fared worse than most of those Nairobi models. What did you do when you discovered who she was?”

  “That waiter came over to throw her out, but Paul said we were friends from the days when the ravages of life did not yet have us by the balls.”

  “Paul was a poet,” says Mrs. Truman. “A better man than you thought he was.”

  She forgets she can’t walk and puts her stocking feet on the floor and pushes against the wheelchair and stands and turns in little circles with her arms up. Ruth stands, too, but when she tries to get Mrs. Truman to sit back down, Mrs. Truman lashes out, scratching Ruth’s cheek along the tracks of her tears. That makes Ruth call Al, a Tobey Jones orderly who was just then passing by. Mrs. Truman likes Al, so she sits when he tells her to and lets him roll her back into the hallway. Ruth has to follow them, since Al isn’t allowed to be alone with Mrs. Truman at bedtime.

  I expect Ruth to come back soon, so while I am waiting I pick up Middlemarch and open it, to a spot held by one of our Lars Larson Motors bookmarks, Master Craftsmanship for Any Pocketbook. It’s a much better slogan than “We Will Sell No Car Before Its Time.”

  In Middlemarch, things have grown complicated and Miss Brooke is being asked in various ways to forget what the Brooke name stands for. She won’t do it, of course, she never does, no matter how many times I read Middlemarch.

  In a while, I put my book aside and fall into the lightest of slumbers and remember as if it were a dream what happened after we left Saxophone Heaven that night. It was 11:30 and raining and I didn’t have a place to stay and Paul was in high spirits, talking in Korean to Chung-ja. Eleven-thirty and raining, with the midnight curfew coming fast. I needed to find a room and Paul had to get a taxi back to the base and Chung-ja seemed to think we would have our picnic that very night, that, though four years had passed, our love had merely been unplugged, and we could plug it back in. When we came to a spot where taxis were waiting, Paul said something in Korean to Chung-ja, and then said to me, “If you run out of ways to communicate with her, Kurt, just sing one of those three songs and point.”

  “Too Young,” “You Send Me,” and “Old Black Joe.”

  Maybe Paul said the same thing to Chung-ja, for as soon as he left she took my hand and very clearly asked, “Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain? Why do I sigh that my friends come not again?”

  Those are the initial two lines of the second verse of “Old Black Joe,” the little-known heart of everyone’s story.

  As we looked for an inn, the rain increased. We didn’t have umbrellas, and the first four inns we came to didn’t have vacancies. Oddly, however, by the time we got to the fifth inn, the accelerated years of Chung-ja’s difficult life had begun to fall away. I knew then that our first instincts had been correct, that we could have been good for each other, we could have had a decent life, that she could have provided the help I needed at Lars Larson Motors, most particularly, even back then, in accountancy.

  When I awake in the morning, a storm is beating against my Tobey Jones window, and Mrs. Truman is in the hallway in her wheelchair. “Wake up, Maggie,” she says. That tells me she’s been alone in her room for hours, with no Ruth and no Al, with no Harry and no Mr. Truman, and with nothing to do but listen to the oldies station on her radio.

  Eighty-nine years old we are, while Chung-ja would be seventy-five—still fourteen years younger than both of us.

  Anyone Can Master Grief but He Who Has It

  [1979]

  RALPH, THE ENGLISH TEACHER, lunched every Sunday at Knapp’s restaurant up on Proctor Street in Tacoma, Washington, and one particular Sunday, as he was sitting beside the ruins of his meal, a woman approached him. “Aren’t you Ralph, the English teacher,” she asked, “from the English department at the University of Puget Sound?”

  Since he was Ralph, the English teacher, or had been before his retirement, he could do little but admit it. He’d never actively disliked the word professor, but back in the sixties it had been fashionable for students to call their professors by their first names, and he had gotten used to it.

  The woman said she’d taken a class with him, and had also seen him out and about, occasionally, for a night on the town. She told him she was at the restaurant celebrating her mother’s seventieth birthday. Her mother stood nearby, and when the woman pointed at her and she came forward, Ralph stood out of his booth.

  “We’re the Kants,” said the woman. “I’m Immy and Mom is Eva. I’m sure you remember my late father, the ornithologist Herbert Kant? He taught at UPS, too.”

  “My gosh, Immy,” said Ralph. “I remember you well. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. You took world lit from me.”

  “Shakespeare,” said Immy.

  “I was an English teacher, too,” said her mother, “though my highest level was ninth grade. And we had you out to dinner once, before Herb’s illness.”

  “I’m about to have pie,” Ralph said. “Come, both of you, join me….”

  He remembered Herb Kant as if it were yesterday, for Herb had broken his heart.

  A waitress came by with pie menus. Blackberry for Ralph, apple for Immy and Eva. Two pieces of pie but three forks.

  WHEN EVA KANT CALLED A FEW DAYS LATER to invite him out to their house, Ralph grew troubled. Retirement was retirement, and he wanted to spend it with his thoughts and his poetry. But he hadn’t thought quickly enough to turn the invitation down, so half a week later he dressed in his good linen jacket, with a poem he’d written for the occasion folded in its inner pocket. And he also decided to take his dog, Jip, as a hedge against too much intimacy. Jip was good at that.

  The Kants lived on the beach at Brown’s Point. On his way out, Ralph stopped to buy a
bottle of wine. To arrive with nothing save the poem in his pocket seemed rude, even for a reluctant guest. But the stop made him late and he had to stop again to consult a map—how could he not remember where Herb had lived?—which made him even later and therefore somewhat flustered when he pulled up behind the house. When Jip understood that they were near water, he pressed his nose against the window, and when Eva Kant came outside, she said, “What a good idea, you’ve brought your dog,” though her face belied her enthusiasm. “Well, come in,” she said. “Herb is out on the deck.”

  “Herb?” said Ralph, while Jip danced up on his toes.

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s only his likeness, a gift from his best student ever, shipped to us a few years after Herb’s death.”

  Herb’s best student ever had been Ralph’s undoing, but he managed a simple nod. “Do you mind if I walk Jip first?” he asked. “He’ll go nuts if he doesn’t get to explore the beach.”

  “Take that side trail and come up to the deck when you’re done,” said Eva. “Immy’s out there, too.”

  When Ralph found Jip’s leash, Jip sat down nicely—it was the only bit of training Ralph had managed to impart—but once the leash was fastened, he tugged Ralph toward the trail, forcing him to lean back radically to give Eva Kant the bottle of wine. She took the handoff nicely, as if it were a relay race baton, then walked back into her house.

  FOUR GLASSES OF WINE—not from Ralph’s bottle—stood on a tray on the deck, not far from where a life-size and perfect likeness of Herbert Kant sat in a wheelchair with his legs crossed, when Ralph and Jip came up the outside stairs some ten minutes later. Herb’s face had the same preoccupied look and lopsided grin that Ralph remembered. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, beige chinos, argyle socks, and shiny brown penny loafers. His hair was slightly mussed, as if the wind had caught it, his elbows rested on the arms of the wheelchair, and his fingers were laced in his lap. He also leaned forward, as Herb had been wont to do when pretending to listen to someone make some point.