Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  Immy wasn’t on the deck when Ralph and Jip got there, but she joined them soon with appetizers. The floor of the deck had a thick glass window in it, put there years ago so Herb could watch the water sloshing around beneath him.

  “High tide was Dad’s favorite time of day,” Immy said.

  She gave Ralph a glass of wine, handed one to her mother when she came out to join them, and took one herself. Jip turned in circles, trying to find a place to lie down.

  “You know, Goethe’s Faust also traveled with a dog,” said Eva. “People believed his dog turned into a servant, so it’s really not so strange that we pour a glass for Herb when we’re out here drinking in the evening. You don’t find that strange, do you, Ralph?”

  Ralph said he didn’t find it strange, never mind her non sequitur. He had the impression that she would also say that it wasn’t strange to have her dead husband out on her deck in a wheelchair, but Immy spoke first, quite as if she’d lifted the word wheelchair from Ralph’s thoughts.

  “We use it to take him in at night, or when the weather’s bad,” she said. “Temperature control’s important when dealing with taxidermy.”

  “Please, Immy, how many times do I have to ask you not to use that word?” said her mother. She turned to Ralph. “It isn’t taxidermy, of course, but that student studied taxidermy with Herb, and now he’s head of human reproductions at Madame Tussauds in London.”

  “He caught Dad’s personality pretty well, don’t you think?” said Immy. “That is, if you believe that personality resides in one’s physicality. I bet you do. I bet you can name all kinds of examples of it in literature.”

  “Richard the Third, Ahab, Tiny Tim, the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” said Ralph. “Their personalities all lead back to physical deformities.”

  He blushed, fearful they’d think he was showing off, but Eva only picked up the wine bottle and refilled her glass. “Tiny Tim’s deformity didn’t defeat his cheerfulness, though,” she said. “Quasimodo’s bummed him out, it’s true, yet it also gave him his nobility…. But I don’t believe deformities in literature equate very well to those we find in real life. In life, I don’t think there’s much catharsis. We just keeping on keeping on.”

  Ralph took courage from that, took it to mean that no cathartic moment was likely to come today, but when Immy said, “Dad kept on keeping on for a decade after he started having his strokes,” her mother harrumphed.

  “How would you know? You were off getting married and divorced while I sat out here trying to talk your father out of killing himself,” she said. “He would have done it, too, if he could have managed on his own, but I wouldn’t be a party to it. Are there examples in literature where a person won’t help another person kill himself, Ralph?”

  Ralph couldn’t think of one and said so. He felt the poem in his pocket—its subject departed loved ones—but he didn’t feel that now would be a very good time to pull it out. “You certainly have a beautiful view,” he said. “Do you eat out here often?”

  “Are you trying to tell us you’re hungry?” asked Eva. “Is that your way of saying you’d like to get this over with?” But when Immy said, “Mom …” she once again grew cheerful.

  “Ralph, do you like meat?” she asked. “I failed to ask you on the phone.”

  “I don’t deny myself any sort of food,” said Ralph.

  He rocked back on his heels, like he would if their deck were a boat. Surely she wouldn’t say that he hadn’t denied himself with Herb.

  “That’s good, because we’re having Dad’s favorite,” said Immy. “Prime rib, Polish sausage salad, carrots and peas, and ice cream for dessert.”

  Those weren’t Herb’s favorites. His favorite had been salmon with wild rice.

  “In fact, I’ll run in and see how things are going,” Eva said.

  When she left them, Immy sat next to her father. Ralph sat down, too, crossed his legs, then quickly uncrossed them. “I first met your father at one of our brown-bag colloquiums,” he said. “He was presenting on bald eagles, the numbers of which had been steadily declining around Puget Sound.”

  He wanted to say that the meeting had changed his life, that it alone proved that life had cathartic moments, but instead he asked, “Do you ever see bald eagles around here anymore?”

  “Rarely,” Immy said, “though your question would have pleased Dad.”

  Ralph looked at Herb, in the hope of seeing a pleased expression.

  “I suppose you take him in at night not only because of the weather but also so he won’t get stolen,” said Ralph. “I know nothing of these things, but it seems his student did a pretty good job.”

  Oh, how he’d hated that student, had wanted to get a death grip on his throat.

  “He did a beautiful job,” said Immy, “right down to the blotches on the backs of Dad’s hands.”

  “Liver spots,” said Ralph. ‘I’ve got some of those.”

  He put his hands out in front of him, turning them over and back.

  “Dad had a scar on his abdomen, and it’s there, too,” Immy said. “I hate to think how the student knew that. His name was John Hancock, by the way, and he signed his work with great big letters, just like our famous forefather.”

  Ralph drank some of his wine, his hatred of John Hancock roaring back in, just as Eva came back outside. “Another few minutes,” she said. “Now you have to tell me if you want to eat inside or out. Can you manage a little chill, Ralph?”

  The only chill he felt came from thoughts of John Hancock. “I can manage out here,” he said, “and the deck will be better for Jip.”

  Jip looked up when he heard his name.

  “We could leave where we eat up to Dad,” said Immy. “Whatever else it might be, John Hancock’s version of him is a pretty good weather vane.”

  She reached over and took off her father’s right shoe. Ralph could see Herb’s toes through the creases in his argyle sock.

  “Immy,” said Eva. “How many times do I have to tell you not to say ‘it’ when talking about your father?”

  “He’s a good weather vane,” said Immy. “His right big toe is an actual thermometer, Ralph. It turns blue if it grows too cold for him, red if it grows too hot. I guess John Hancock knew about our deck.”

  She pulled off Herb’s sock to reveal five fleshy toes, none the least bit blue or red. She rubbed her father’s right big toe. “When I had a fever last month, I thought about sticking this in my mouth,” she said.

  “I used to tell my students that trashy talk would get them nowhere,” Eva said, “but I never thought I’d have to tell my daughter.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” said Immy. “Guess I got my sense of humor from Dad.”

  “Eva, I wanted to ask, when you taught English, what did your students read?” Ralph asked. “Anything remotely Shakespearean?”

  He hardly cared what her students read, but he could not take any more of Herb’s toes.

  “Romeo and Juliet,” said Eva. “I used to think if I heard another ‘Wherefore art thou?’ I’d scream, yet now I find myself screaming for no good reason.”

  “Hardly for no good reason,” said Immy. “Your husband died a decade ago, yet here he still sits. I keep saying you should go to Paris, take a cruise…. Ralph, will you please tell her seventy’s not too old to do something like that?”

  “It’s not,” Ralph said. “I’m nearly that age and I’ll be heading back to Oslo soon, where I once had a Fulbright scholarship.”

  When Eva went inside to check the food again, Immy put her hands to her face, but soon enough she asked Ralph to put her father’s shoe and sock back on while she helped her mom. He didn’t want to do it. By the time Herb needed help dressing himself, he’d left Ralph for John Hancock. Still, he picked up the shoe and sock. To his surprise, the sock was warm, and when he looked inside the shoe, he saw that it was from Thom Browne, a shoe store he had introduced Herb to. When he glanced back into the house, Eva was taking the food off the stove and Immy was stackin
g plates, so he put the sock down, took off his own right shoe, and slipped his foot into Herb’s Thom Browne. And when he stood to test how it felt, Jip took off down to the beach again with Herb’s sock in his mouth.

  THE PRIME RIB WAS PERFECTION, the Polish sausage salad phenomenal, especially if you mixed it with the peas and carrots. Ralph had never tasted anything like it, and said so.

  “Dad used to eat it all mixed up like that,” said Immy. “He felt that otherwise the sausage was too salty.”

  Herb sat there smiling his crooked smile. Jip was still down on the beach. Ralph had put Herb’s shoe back on him without the argyle sock, hiding the fact that the sock was missing by crossing Herb’s other leg. Herb’s joints had moved fluidly, his knee in Ralph’s hand, even after all these years, as familiar as Ralph’s own. If Eva or Immy noticed the missing sock, they didn’t show it, but tried to make the meal go well.

  “We don’t stand on ceremony here,” said Eva. “If you want more of anything, Ralph, help yourself.”

  She nodded at a side table, where the meat sat on a platter, the Polish sausage salad filled a bowl, and the carrots and peas roamed around on a plate of their own. “I will,” Ralph said.

  “Herb had the most amazing metabolism. He could eat this way every day and still not gain weight, while my hips got bigger with a single bite,” Eva said.

  Ralph laughed dutifully, his eyes on Herb, who’d insisted that his wild rice and salmon be cooked without salt, and surrounded by lemon wedges.

  “You look fit, too, Ralph,” said Immy. “What keeps you so trim?”

  “I skip a lot of meals,” he said, “don’t get much chance to have a great one.” He pointed at his food with his fork.

  It hadn’t been chilly when they decided to eat outside, but at about the time Jip came back from the beach, with no sock in evidence, such a powerful wind came up that Eva and Immy both started to carry things inside without a word. So Ralph stood to push Herb in after them. He had to put Herb’s feet on the wheelchair’s footrests, but Herb did not complain. Jip did, though, when Ralph told him he had to stay outside.

  “He can go in the laundry room, if you want him to,” Immy said. “There’s a basket there that Charlie used to sleep in…. Charlie was Dad’s old pointer.”

  Ralph knew Charlie. Herb had taken him to Ralph’s house often.

  “Herb didn’t even like Charlie,” said Eva. “He’d go to any length to see some stupid bird, but Charlie could stare at him all day long and he would never notice.”

  In Ralph’s memory, Charlie had been Herb’s beloved partner in bird-watching. He’d often thought of Charlie when trying to train Jip.

  “It was the same with me,” Eva said. “I was as loyal to Herb as anyone’s dog, but all he wanted from me was a good meal every night, then help when he decided to kill himself. Sometimes marriage is a crock, Ralph. I hope you get that.”

  Immy went to open the door for Jip. Though Herb’s argyle sock hadn’t been in evidence when Jip came up from the beach, there it was again, hanging out of his mouth. Immy used it to pull Jip into the laundry room.

  “Bring clean socks when you come back!” Eva called. Then to Ralph, she said, “You’re probably wondering why I keep Herb around after all these years, especially given what I just said about my marriage.”

  “Not at all,” said Ralph. “Loneliness can make us do a lot of strange things.”

  He wanted more prime rib, so he took her at her earlier word and reached over to the side table to spear a slice of it with his fork.

  “When John Hancock sent him to us, he was in a box as big as a coffin,” said Eva. “And the postage, my God, it was nearly four hundred pounds, even back then. So though I was shocked when I saw him, at first I kept him so that John Hancock’s efforts wouldn’t go to waste. And also because I was afraid he might come visit.”

  Ralph stifled an impulse to say “Fuck John Hancock.”

  “Am I right in thinking that after while you got used to him,” he said, “that he became a kind of solace to you?”

  “And close the laundry room door!” shouted Eva.

  Her voice had a warble in it, and when she looked at Ralph, the warble was in her entire face. “Am I right in thinking that after a time you got used to the loneliness?” she asked. “That it became a solace to you?”

  Ralph looked at her evenly. He wanted to care for this woman but didn’t like her much.

  “You know, solace and solitude have the same root,” he said. “And what I came to understand was that ‘wanted’ solitude is a blessing, while ‘unwanted’ solitude is a curse. And yet they are the same thing.”

  When Immy returned and saw the pain in both their faces, she said, “Mom! You asked him already? The two of you were in here talking about this while I was dealing with a dog?”

  Her irritation was greater than her mom’s had been.

  “Ask me what?” said Ralph.

  “I’ve decided to start living my life again with a modicum of dignity,” said Eva. “That means disabusing myself of any residual belief in Herbert’s love, and that means sending him home with you, Ralph. I’ve done my duty; now it’s time for you to do yours.”

  When Immy, who’d brought fresh socks, knelt and nudged her father slightly, his chest fell forward, his arms slipped off his lap, and his hands fell down on either side of his feet, but Immy simply sat him up again. When she finished putting his shoes and socks back on, she nodded at her mother.

  “I learned about you and Herb more than a year before Herb died,” said Eva. “When I was cleaning his boat, I discovered your letters in his tackle box. You think you know a man…. I never confronted Herb with the letters—he was too sick by then—but after he died I shared them with Immy.”

  “You did know him, Mom,” said Immy. “It was just that that kind of love, back then…. Dad didn’t know how to deal with it.”

  She looked at Ralph. “I wasn’t shocked by what you wrote, and after a while Mom wasn’t, either, when she thought back over their lives together. She knew him, she just hadn’t let herself know she knew him, if that makes any sense at all.”

  “But the letters were to Herb from me,” said Ralph. “He didn’t write them.”

  He could have said that Herb’s letters to him were as often expressions of hatred as love. He could have said that Herb had been awful to him, but Herb was sitting right there, staring with his lopsided grin.

  “There were letters from John Hancock, too,” said Immy. “Angry ones. They made me think that the letters Dad wrote him were ‘Dear John’ letters in more ways than one.”

  “He never wrote me a ‘Dear Eva’ letter, at least,” said Eva. “Perhaps that meant he loved me. But in any case, I’ve packed his bag with three shirts, three pairs of pants, and six pairs of socks.”

  “All of the clothes were really Dad’s,” Immy said.

  “You may think John Hancock took Herb from you, Ralph, but John dressed him in jeans and a paisley shirt for the trip over here, for crying out loud. Can you imagine Herb in paisley? He’d turn over in his grave.”

  Immy left the room, coming back quickly with Herb’s suitcase.

  “You don’t absolutely have to take him,” she said. “We’re not giving ultimatums here, but if you don’t, we’re sending him to Davy Jones. Mom’s met someone, and I won’t have my father sitting here ruining it for her.”

  She met someone? She wasn’t going to Paris, but she was taking up with someone else?

  “It was all so long ago,” said Ralph. “It killed me to get over him once, so I’m sorry, Immy, I don’t think I can take him. But Davy Jones? Why such a radical solution? Why not donate him to the university? He could sit in the room with all the stuffed birds, be a sort of gatekeeper. And I’d be glad to help make that happen. I still have a bit of pull.”

  That he didn’t have pull, that once he retired he’d hardly set foot back on campus, was an issue he would deal with when he got back from Oslo. Until then, Herb could wait i
n his place, scare the devil out of the dog sitter.

  “That would certainly put him in his element,” said Eva, “and he was an emeritus professor.”

  For the moment, everyone smiled. Immy mentioned the ice cream, but nobody wanted it.

  When it was time for Ralph to leave, they took Herb out to his car with very little fanfare, sitting him cross legged in the passenger seat. While Immy buckled his seat belt, Eva insisted that Ralph take the wheelchair, too, so they put it in the backseat with Jip.

  “Good-bye,” said Immy, “and thank you for doing this for us.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ralph said.

  Eva thanked him, too, and forced upon him the same bottle of wine that he had brought. “You’re going to need this,” she said.

  IN THOSE DAYS, YOU COULD STILL GET BACK to Tacoma proper on 11th street, with its many waterways and bridges. Along the way, there would be several opportunities for Herb to meet Davy Jones, if Ralph decided to introduce them. He did slow down when crossing the Hylebos bridge, and again when he got to the mouth of the Puyallup River. The Eleventh Street Bridge was his favorite, with it slabs of suspended concrete that acted like thick, slow guillotines when the bridge had to go up. He stopped for a moment, looked at Herb beside him, then put his car in gear again and drove on home, where he got out of his car, let Jip out, too, then went inside by himself to look out the window at Herb. He thought of driving him over to the university when the hour grew late enough, of dropping him off in front of the science building. But in the end, at just after midnight, he went outside again, got Herb’s wheelchair, lifted Herb into it, and rolled him inside. It galled him to think that in order to rid himself of the pain this man had caused him he would have to go to Oslo twice, but as he opened the bottle of wine Eva’d returned to him, and poured two glasses, that was what he did think.