‘Don’t start. It took me five years to get that tune out of my head.’
Anything took about five years, he thought – a bereavement, a serious illness, a broken marriage or love betrayed: anything bad took about five years to come to terms with. That didn’t mean you could forget it, but you could manage.
*
The next day Franklin showed Sherman around town and told him everybody’s life story.
In the afternoon Irene set up the ironing board near the kitchen table where the two men were sitting. When she brought the clothes in off the line, Franklin went to hold the door for her. As she passed him, she whispered, ‘How long is he staying, honey? I’ve been trying to talk to him but it’s tough going.’
‘Not long,’ he answered. ‘Take it easy.’
The baby was asleep and the other children were out in the yard, where they could be seen and heard.
She sprinkled water over a shirt and started the ironing.
Franklin and Sherman began to talk about men who went down into volcanoes to study them and how that was a job neither one of them would envy anybody.
‘If you had to, that’s different,’ Franklin said. ‘But out of choice – no.’
‘You could do it, sugar,’ Irene said. ‘He’s so brave, when I had a dream about being in the hospital –’
Franklin groaned. Sherman asked, ‘What?’
She said, ‘I had a dream that I was in the hospital, having the baby, and that they wouldn’t let Frank in to see me. He was on the other side of the door, calling to me and they wouldn’t … it was really horrible. In the dream I lost the baby and then I died because he couldn’t get to me. So, when the time came –’
‘She insisted. She was so sure everything was going to go wrong unless I was there that I thought if I didn’t agree, everything probably would happen the way she’d seen it. She was so nervous.’
‘I don’t like dreams,’ Sherman said.
Irene folded a T-shirt, took up another and asked, ‘Why on earth not?’
‘They make me feel bad.’
‘Well, sure. I guess nobody likes having nightmares. Portia’s starting to get them. We just have to keep telling her that they’re only dreams: they don’t mean anything.’
‘If they don’t mean anything, that dream you had about being in the hospital – it would have been the same: only a dream.’
‘No. That came at a special time. It was like a sign. An omen. If I’d disregarded it, that would have meant … well, I don’t like to think about that. Children’s nightmares are different. They dream about dying, but it’s mixed up with growing. They dream that something’s chasing them and they can’t get away – they can’t move fast enough. They’re running away from a fire or a big wave from the ocean, or maybe a truck is coming right at them and there’s no place to go because they’re backed up against a wall. They also have nice dreams about being able to do magical things: being able to fly, and that kind of thing. It’s the beginnings of, um, physical feelings. You know. A lot of dreaming is like that. If you need to get up and go to the bathroom, you have a fear dream about being late for something. Or, if you aren’t lying in a comfortable position, there’s some kind of frustration in the dream’s story. Dreams aren’t all what those psycho people tell you: all about some sick feeling you’ve got against your mother. I read this article at the doctor’s and it said the brain spends the night sort of putting information into its filing cabinets and getting some of the old stuff out to look at it.’
‘But some of those drawers,’ Franklin said, ‘are labeled s-e-x.’
‘Well, you know about sex. You had to watch it in the raw, didn’t you?’
‘I have to admit, it sobers you up. There are some things you don’t take for granted any more.’
‘Like what?’ Sherman asked.
‘Like what happens to women. Like what they can go through when some man has said goodbye and shut the door and he thinks that’s the end of it.’
‘Get in, go off, get out, roll over and go to sleep,’ Irene said.
Franklin turned his head.
‘That’s what one of my friends told me,’ she explained. ‘We were pretty surprised, too. We always thought her husband was such a nice guy. I guess she could have been describing somebody else, but that would have been even more surprising.’
‘Well, whichever way you cut it, that isn’t me.’
‘It’s plenty of others. So I’m told.’ She picked up a pair of striped shorts and put them on top of the pile.
‘In your dream …’ Sherman said, ‘You really died?’
‘I was dying and I knew that I was, and that if he couldn’t get to me, I would. Not exactly the same, but bad enough.’
‘They say when you dream you’re falling, if you hit the ground in your dream, you die: you die for real, not just in the dream.’
‘You don’t die,’ Franklin said. ‘That’s just an old wives’ tale.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How does anybody know? If you died, who would know what you’d been dreaming? I know because it happened to me. I was up on a skyscraper, walking over the construction girders. Somebody was chasing me.’
‘And you fell off and hit the ground?’
‘You bet.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Right before I was going to hit the ground, I had an orgasm that just about knocked me out of bed and I woke up.’
Irene said, ‘I think this conversation has gone far enough.’
‘So you didn’t hit the ground?’
‘I think that’s what they mean by dying.’
‘OK, boys,’ Irene said to Franklin. ‘Break it up.’
‘Yes, Sir, Officer O’Brian.’
‘Who’s O’Brian?’ Sherman asked.
‘The college cop, where I did my studying. We never used his name. We’d just call him “Break it up, boys”, because that’s what he was always saying. He was a nice old guy. In the springtime a lot of the kids used to get drunk and go around in a mob: picking up the back end of cars, and that kind of thing.’
‘Not very funny for the people in the cars,’ Irene said.
‘Oh, nobody ever got hurt. Nobody even had any paint scratched except just that one time when the guy lost his nerve and gunned the thing, so when they let the wheels down again, he roared ahead at top speed.’
Sherman laughed.
Irene sniffed. ‘Childish,’ she said.
In the evening the two men went out together again and had a couple of drinks. This time Sherman did the talking.
He was full of bizarre anecdotes and unlikely pieces of information. His favorite reading, he said, had always been ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’. They couldn’t stand or sit or drink in silence for more than a few minutes without Sherman saying, ‘Did you know that …?’ or ‘I read someplace …’ or, more often, ‘A guy I met once told me …’ Naturally, any such meeting would have taken place in another bar.
As the flow of Sherman’s knowledge became a torrent, Franklin understood that he was supposed to admire and not interrupt too often. But it was no good letting his attention wander at any stage because occasionally Sherman would stop in the middle of a narrative and lose track of where he was. Then he’d ask to be prompted.
‘A lot of people,’ he said, ‘are just here for the ride. You know? Up and down, back and forth. They do a little shopping, they go out for meals, they put on brand new clothes once a week. What I got to say to those people is: just quit it. If you’re only here for the ride, get off the escalator. What you got to do is appreciate the nature of things. See, what’s in our minds is dead. In our minds we hold the past and the future: one gone and the other – maybe it’s never going to be anything. The present is where we live. It’s like a thin line between the dead and the unborn and it doesn’t belong to either of them till it happens or it’s passed away. Then it can join everything that’s dead. I used to think a lot about stuff like that when I was in the
veterans’ hospital.’
‘Well, I don’t know. I guess I think ideas and philosophy ought to make things clearer, not just get you feeling more mixed up.’
‘I’m not mixed up. I got it all figured out. Listen. This is what the world is like. Did I tell you about the Canadian fur-trappers and the Arctic fox? Some guy I met told me. These foxes are very, very valuable. They’re the white ones. But you need a lot of them to make a coat. They’ve got to be the right size and you have to get yourself several completely pure pelts, unmarked. So what do those trappers do? They don’t go out gunning for the things – that way they’d shoot the skins full of holes. No. What they do is: they put a little bit of fresh meat on the tip of a knife and then they bury the knife point-up in the snow. The fox smells it from a long ways off and he comes running. He gets to the meat, he licks it, he licks it some more and he cuts his tongue on the blade. But it’s winter and he’s half-starving, so he keeps going, in spite of the pain. He’s tasting all that wonderful, fresh blood and he don’t realize that it’s his own. That’s how they catch them. Not a mark on them; the fox just bleeds to death. It’s so simple. And cheap. No cash spent on bullets. You can use the knife again. And you don’t have to risk anything – you don’t even have to get cold till it’s time to go out and collect the corpses.’
‘Horrible.’
‘Oh, no. That’s what we’re like. That’s the ingenuity of man.’
‘They can’t still be allowed to do that.’
‘I guess it’s probably outlawed by now but it was a traditional method, specially for a poor man who couldn’t afford to waste ammunition. It’s so easy and so smart. So, I bet it still goes on. It’s a practical method of doing that voo-doo thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You think bad luck onto somebody. If you do anything with real belief, it works.’
‘Hunting foxes?’
‘Killing people without touching them. That kind of thing.’
‘That’s too much. That’s like what Irene says her aunt was always telling her: that a cake baked with love tastes better than an ordinary one.’
‘Well …’
‘Well, it won’t help you if you forget the flour, or the butter or the eggs or anything else that’s supposed to go into the mixture. Love isn’t one of the necessary ingredients for a cake.’
‘But I read someplace that all these magnetic and electrical impulses can come out of people depending on how they feel and what mood they’re in. They can give off something like a vapor or, ah, something chemical that sort of changes the atmosphere.’
‘Maybe. But I doubt it.’
‘Well, I never been to college, like you.’
‘Oh you’re smart enough, when you want to be.’
‘Animal cunning, that’s what I’ve got.’
Franklin laughed. Every once in a while he found himself enjoying Sherman’s company. He’d feel that it was a relief to get out and be in new surroundings, and to escape from the noise of the kids.
‘How about another?’ Sherman said.
They went on to talk about mountain-climbing in different parts of the world and then discussed climate in general and geographical oddities in particular. Sherman liked to describe the places he’d seen since military service and the people he’d met. He enjoyed imparting information on all sorts of subjects.
He’d recently heard some facts about the curative powers of sunlight. Putting a glass of bad water up on the roof of a house would kill the bacteria in it; if you kept the same water down in the cellar, those bacteria stayed alive. But he’d also heard about sunshine causing cancer. He thought it was interesting that the purifying agent was also the one that could kill.
Sooner or later, Franklin thought, they were going to get around to the war. He could feel an unexpressed urgency emanating from every part of Sherman. That was probably why the man had shown up: he wanted to talk.
When Sherman raised his glass and said, ‘The good old days,’ Franklin thought: Here we go. But it didn’t happen. Instead of reminiscing, Sherman said, ‘Only one thing I recall that was good about wartime: the women treat you better.’
‘If that’s the way you like it.’
‘Well, you liked it too, didn’t you?’
‘Sure. It was worth what we paid for it.’
‘And how much are you paying for all this?’
‘What I’ve got now is the real thing. It’s free. The best things in life, you know. Like the song.’
‘She made an honest man of you – is that what happened?’
‘What happened was: I woke up. I just suddenly saw how everything was. I realized that if I was willing to work for it, I could get anything I wanted. But if I didn’t get up and do something about it, nothing was going to happen, ever. I’d just live and die like a stone somebody threw into a field.’
‘Like a lonely flower by the wayside, as Roscoe used to say. Remember?’
‘Sure.’
*
Sherman had arrived just before the weekend. Beginning on Monday, the help started coming in: a cleaning woman called Addie, and friends who took the kids away to play and who – on another day – would drive up to load their own kids on to Irene. A Mrs Hescott did the serious cooking when there was a party. She’d be assisted by a couple of teenagers who served as waitresses and washed up. Otherwise Addie did most of the housework and fixed lunch on the days when she was there, three times a week. Irene managed the kids. Even with help, for as long as the children were in the house, the noise never seemed to let up; at night they’d cry out in their sleep, causing Irene to excuse herself from the conversation or even to break off what she was saying: she’d move into the hall and part way up the stairs, listening.
Sherman liked some things about the kids. He liked the way they looked, like large toys; and the goofy way they had of talking, which reminded him of the hospital patient named Beech, whose first name he’d never discovered and who hadn’t minded when Sherman took to calling him ‘Nutty’. But the constant noise got on his nerves so badly that once or twice he’d really wanted to pick them up and smash them to pieces, especially their heads: all the little screaming heads and faces.
As for Irene, sometimes he thought she was going to come right out and say that he might be moving on. But she never quite broke. She was nice and polite; she was the one in control. And there were times when he was just about ready to hit her across the face, or rip her clothes off, or yell names at her: to see her eyes change. To see her really look back at him, looking into his eyes. He was sure she knew – she had to know what he was thinking, and she was pretending not to. But it was hard to tell about wives. Sometimes when they got that dumb look, they were just thinking about how long to cook the pot roast.
He listened to her breathing at night, asleep. He heard her get up in the dark and go to the children. He heard her with Franklin, making love.
He got to know their routine: when she’d be surrounded by other young mothers and their children, or when she had time on her own because the kids were with a play group; when she was expecting the grocery delivery, the milk, the mail. In about a month things would be different because the oldest child, Portia, was going to be out of kindergarten and starting the first grade.
He took all of them out to a family restaurant. Everybody had fun and he didn’t have to make any effort. The waitresses were laughing and flirting and being nice to the whole group. Everyone was busy keeping the children from acting up. They were seated at a big, round table like a circle. And Sherman at one stage in the evening thought: The family circle.
The day after that, they were in the living room when the child named Hagen said, ‘Do your play, Mama.’ Irene struck a pose: one hand on heart, the other up in the air as she declaimed, ‘This by Calpurnia’s dream is signified.’
‘What play?’ Sherman asked.
Franklin told him: their daughter, Portia, had been named in honor of a production of Julius Caesar, given by Irene’s
school class when she was fourteen. Portia was the name of a woman character in the play but Irene herself, owing to the scarcity of boys who could remember the lines, had played a Roman senator called Decius.
They moved to the kitchen, where Irene sat the children down for their supper. The men leaned against the counters, shifting from place to place as she picked up pots and pans and dishes.
‘So you could have been a star?’ Sherman said.
‘Oh, not in the movies. It was the stage. We had such a good drama teacher: Miss Moody. It was really exciting. I think it was the best thing we ever did at school even though we didn’t put on the whole play, just part of it. That’s the way I remember it, anyway. God, my memory.’
‘Five cents,’ Hagen said.
‘Yes, honey, thank you. I meant to say, “Gosh”. No, we’ll get the cuss box later. No, Pixie. Now’s the time for eating.’
‘I’ll treat you,’ Franklin said. He reached behind a salt carton, lifted a glass jar, unscrewed the lid, threw a coin in, twisted the lid again and put the jar back.
Irene blew him a kiss. She wiped Pixie’s mouth and picked a piece of potato off the floor. ‘We had a good cast,’ she said. ‘Our Julius Caesar … who was it? Who played Caesar? My goodness, I must be losing my mind. Was it Heddy? I think it might have been. But she was in the Greek play we did when we were nine. Anne was the brother, or maybe the brother’s friend, and Heddy was the heroine. Or was she? This is awful – it wasn’t so long ago. And there isn’t anybody I can ask. So many people move away, that’s the trouble. I see their parents sometimes. It really is annoying: I used to be able to tell the years apart by thinking about our school grade. Then it was jobs and vacations. And now it’s how old the kids are. Honestly, I can’t even remember what I did yesterday.’
‘But you can remember what you ate can’t you?’ Franklin said. ‘She can always remember the menu.’
‘Gee, yes. That was great last night.’
Gee, Sherman thought.
Franklin said, ‘It sure was, but I meant in general. Just as a way of marking the time.’
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