by Larry Watson
The water was running, and that may have prevented her from hearing the siren earlier, but once she did, she knew it was coming toward Keogh Street. I didn’t disbelieve her account, but my sister sometimes tries to wring more drama from a moment than it actually holds. She is also prone to claiming powers of prescience that are nothing more than a storyteller’s hindsight.
But whether my sister’s premonition at the time was fictional or authentic, the siren was real and fast approaching. And just as it had years before, the ambulance pulled up to the Stoddard house. But this time, my sister noted, when it sped away, its siren was wailing as loudly as when it had arrived.
Lee Mauer had had a heart attack, and as so often happens, there had been clues that such an event could occur and they had been ignored. For weeks he had been experiencing bouts of nausea, excessive sweating, and pain in his chest, in his neck, and between his shoulder blades. Like many men, however, he rejected the seriousness of his symptoms and treated himself with Bromo-Seltzer. But that night his heart clenched for good, and Lee Mauer was dead by the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital.
Alma Stoddard Mauer would once again sleep alone, but she was not the only woman on Keogh Street who had her bed to herself. When the siren came for Lee Mauer, the sound did not disturb my father’s rest. He was sleeping 140 miles away in Wembley in the house that had once belonged to his parents and where he was then living with his brother.
My parents first separated, or so they both told it, when my father began traveling frequently to Wembley to assist his brother with a project that required a lawyer’s skills. Uncle Burt had decided that the land that was his parents’ homestead when they first came to North Dakota should be restored to the family. With my father’s assistance, my uncle determined where the original house and acreage had been, and he negotiated to buy the property from its present owners. Before long, the brothers were working to remodel the dilapidated farmhouse where their parents had briefly lived before they’d moved into town.
Gradually more and more of my father’s life was spent in the town he grew up in. Along with the small farm, he and his brother owned the house in Wembley, and after a time they were both living in the rooms that had been theirs as boys. Through that small real estate venture with the homestead, my father found other work in and around Wembley, and soon his services were more in demand there than in Bismarck. (I should add here that just as I was no longer living on Keogh Street when Lee Mauer died, neither did I make my home there when my father’s relocation became permanent. His business trips to Wembley started when I was in college, and we never again dwelt under the same roof.) But had the advantages of my father relocating to his hometown been only financial, my parents would have found a different solution. My mother and sister would have moved to Wembley, if not immediately, then upon my sister’s graduation from high school. Or my father would have said his Bismarck income was sufficient. No, something else kept him in Wembley and apart from his wife of twenty-plus years.
But neither of my parents ever talked much about the dissolution of their marriage, and when they did, it was only in the most general way. Their silence on the subject added more mystery to the way life was once lived on Keogh Street, that stretch of houses that had—pre–Raymond Stoddard—seemed emblematic of ordinary, predictable human existence.
And if I believe that Raymond Stoddard’s fate played a role in the breakup of my parents’ marriage, then I must also believe that their marriage began to crack very soon after that January day when the police cars skidded down Keogh Street. That meant I was there to observe the breakup in its first if not final stages.
Adolescents, however, are notoriously limited in their ability to see anything that lies outside their immediate concerns, and in that regard I was not merely a typical representative of my age group, I was probably worse. As an adult, I realize how frequently my self-involvement impaired my vision. For example, during part of the period when my parents’ marriage was no doubt diminishing, all my powers of observation were instead keen for signs of growth. Specifically, I was watching for evidence of Marie Ryan’s pregnancy, and I finally saw what I was looking for on a Friday night in late March.
Julie Benske’s parents were out of town, and in their absence Julie decided to hold a party. She tried to keep the numbers down, but to no avail. By the time my friends and I arrived, cars practically circled the block, and the house pulsed with the sounds of a hi-fi turned to full volume and with the shouts of teenagers who were either drunk already or intent on getting there. The neighbors must have been very tolerant, or else they believed Dr. and Mrs. Benske had sanctioned the party.
I hadn’t been there long when I saw Marie. And I heard her before I saw her. As soon as I entered the kitchen, I caught her laughter. She was with a group standing around a makeshift bar, and her gaiety traveled across the room as easily as her laugh. Why, I wondered, would she be as happy as she seemed to be, given her circumstances? Perhaps she and Gene had settled on what they’d do about their predicament, and what I saw as happiness was merely relief, even if for Marie Ryan a solution meant taking on the name more notorious than any other in the state. The crowd made it impossible to get closer to her, and I wasn’t sure that I dared to anyway. I hadn’t spoken to her since Gene had told me she was pregnant, and who knew how he had represented my boys’ room behavior to her? I couldn’t see Gene anywhere at the party, and I wasn’t eager to.
While the hard liquor was upstairs in the kitchen, the beer was in the basement, and that was where my friends were headed. Without taking off my coat, I followed them.
Gene wasn’t downstairs either, and then it was my turn to feel relieved. Which may be the reason I drank as much as I did. Or maybe it was because I was at the same party as Marie, though she might have dwelt in a different universe for all the good it did me.
So I huddled on the rec room floor and guzzled beer after beer, rising only when my bladder was full.
And I was on my way back up to the first floor—the downstairs bathroom was occupied—when I again caught sight of Marie.
In Bismarck in 1962 the markers signifying the status of the community’s wealthier members were few and subtle. Even the city’s doctors, lawyers, and business owners lived in modest houses that didn’t stand apart much from the homes of their less prosperous neighbors. But there were differences, and I was standing on one of them.
The Benskes’ home was plushly carpeted, even the stairs, and just as I was ascending them, Marie Ryan was coming down, and I stopped a few steps below her. The softness underfoot was such an uncustomary sensation that I felt for a moment as though I might keep sinking until I dropped from view, something I might have hoped for, so flustered was I by our meeting.
She laughed and, spreading her arms and legs wide to block my passage, said, “You can’t get past unless you say the secret word.”
I’ve never been quick-witted, and, then as now, drink only increases my tongue’s sluggishness. No reply, clever or otherwise, came to mind.
But perhaps my being tongue-tied had another cause. With the three steps between us, Marie’s waist and abdomen were right at my eye level. I did some mental arithmetic, difficult in my condition and further complicated by my ignorance of some matters of reproduction and anatomy. Gene had asked me to be his best man in January, and Marie was what—two or three months pregnant then? It was March now, which meant she could be at least four months along. . . . But she was wearing a white blouse tucked into a snug skirt, and if a pregnancy had swelled her tummy in the least, wouldn’t it have been visible by now? Even clothed, however, wrapped tight in a girdle’s spandex, a skirt’s tight wool, a brassiere’s hooks and straps, and a blouse’s buttoned-up cotton, it was apparent that her body’s sensual configuration was exactly what it had been the previous summer in a bathing suit.
Suddenly I had a new theory for her high spirits. She wasn’t pregnant—she couldn’t be, not looking like that—and perhaps she had only
recently learned of her true condition. She wasn’t celebrating her upcoming marriage—she was jubilant because it wasn’t necessary.
Elated as I was to make this discovery, I kept my happiness tamped down. Not difficult, since in the essential way, her circumstances hadn’t changed. “If you’re looking for Gene,” I said, “he’s not down there.”
She relaxed her stance, leaning against the stair railing. The pose was seductive, although I’m sure that was not how she intended it. “I know where he is. And isn’t. He chose not to come tonight.”
“Not his kind of party?” The question was legitimate. None of Gene’s newer acquaintances was likely to be at a gathering at the Benskes’, no matter how much alcohol was present.
“He’s at home.”
“Is he sick?”
“He’s fine. But considering the occasion, he didn’t feel like going to a party.”
“The occasion?”
She tilted her head and gave me a sidelong flirtatious look, or so I perceived the gesture. She probably wasn’t sending that message, but she couldn’t help how I received it.
“Think about it,” Marie said. “It’s Gene’s dad’s birthday.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
The date had never had any purchase on my memory, even though on one awkward occasion I was a part of Raymond Stoddard’s birthday celebration.
Maybe there were Bismarckers of that era who dined out often, but that certainly wasn’t true of my parents—we could count on fewer than four or five such experiences each year, and those always occurred spontaneously, when my mother decided at the last minute that she didn’t care to prepare the family’s meal—and it was even less true of the Stoddards. But five years earlier, Gene had asked me if I’d like to come along with him and his family for a birthday supper at the Wagon Wheel, a restaurant on the city’s east side.
The Wagon Wheel was not a supper club or steak house. It was a small diner, more likely to be patronized by truck drivers than Bismarck families. I wasn’t sure why we went there, but it seemed to have something to do with Mr. Stoddard’s preferences, some belief he held that the Wagon Wheel’s chili or fried chicken was superior to any other restaurant’s.
Yet his unhappiness at being there became obvious almost as soon as we slid into our booth. A cold rain had begun to fall, and Mr. Stoddard worried that it might freeze on the streets, making even the short drive back to Keogh Street treacherous. The food was not to his liking—“grease, nothing but grease,” he complained—and the waitress failed to bring the full order.
Mrs. Stoddard tried to cheer him up. “Birthday boy,” she persisted in calling him. “Let’s see a smile from the birthday boy.” His mood only darkened, and before the meal was finished, he fell into a trancelike silence. Seated next to the window, he stared out at the puddles gathering in the parking lot’s gravel. At one point he pressed the heel of his fist to the glass and rubbed small hard circles, as if the window were frosted or fogged and needed to be cleared. It did not, but we soon looked away, certain that we couldn’t see what Raymond Stoddard saw, no matter how transparent the surface.
“But I just decided,” Marie said, “no matter what day it is—I’m going out. I’m going out and I’m going to have a good time. Just because March thirtieth is a bad day for him doesn’t mean everyone else has to suffer along with him.”
“That’s right. Your name isn’t Stoddard.” It was as close as I dared come. Now, if she wished, she could say, But soon it will be.
“Exactly.”
“Did you say all this to Gene?”
“More or less.”
“How did he take it?”
Something in her shrug told me they had probably quarreled over the matter.
“So,” I said, “you’re taking the day off.”
She smiled, apparently pleased with the notion. “Sort of.”
“How’s your vacation going so far?”
“Very well.”
Who knows what went into the mix that caused me to consider what I was about to say? Was it her good spirits? Our staircase rapport? Her disenchantment—even if only for the night—with Gene? The beers I’d drunk certainly contributed. But no matter what the reason, I decided I’d tell her about Gene’s crude remarks about her condition—at least what they thought her condition was at the time.
Before I could frame the words, however, Doug Bauer appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs. “Cops!” he said. “In the driveway!”
I froze, but Marie acted instantly. She hurried down the stairs, sweeping me along with her.
The Benskes had a walk-out basement, and we scurried toward that door. Somehow, even without an explicit warning, everyone downstairs knew that the party was being raided, and there was much scrambling to get out. Together Marie and I pushed our way through the door and out into the backyard. People scattered in every direction, and if they were like us, they had no real destination in mind. We just knew we had to get as far from the Benske home as we could and in so doing stay away from the streets and streetlights.
Marie had to be cold—she had left her coat behind—and her low heels kept slipping on and breaking through the crusted snow we had to run across, but I heard only laughter from her and not complaint.
Eventually we decided that it would be safe to return to the sidewalks, so we cut through a yard, traveled down an alley, and came out on a street blocks from the Benskes’. At a stop sign just ahead we saw Rick Withers’s car, jammed with fugitives from the party, and we ran to join them.
They made room for us, which meant that I was squeezed against the back door. As tight as the fit was, I didn’t mind because Marie was forced to sit on my lap. I felt her shivering subside as the car’s heater and all the bodies—there must have been nine or ten people in the car—generated their warmth. I smelled the sweet musk of her perfume and the slightly medicinal scent of vodka on her breath. When she turned her head, strands of her hair brushed across my face. I would have gladly remained in the back of that old Chevrolet forever!
But Rick Withers wasn’t interested in driving around. Like almost everyone else who had been at the party, he was still shaken over his close call. He wanted to know where he should drop off his passengers, and sadly, Marie’s house was nearby.
He pulled into her driveway, and she jumped out immediately. “Thanks for the ride,” she said to Rick. And to the rest of the car, she added softly, “I’ll bet we wouldn’t have been as tightly packed in jail!”
“Wait!” I said. “I’ll walk you.”
I was still a little drunk, but fear and cold had sobered me somewhat. Fear . . . I had been afraid. If I had been arrested that night, my parents would have been angry and disappointed, and they certainly would have decreed a penalty of some kind. But it would have been relatively mild. They were not nearly as strict or severe as, for example, Marie’s parents were. Yet throughout our getaway and flight, she had displayed no fear. In the car she hadn’t gone on, as some of the partygoers had, about how narrow their escape had been or about how awful their punishment would be if they were caught.
Was Marie Ryan brave because she had once stood loyally beside a Stoddard as that family went through their terrible ordeal, and in the process had she acquired a courage that would serve her forever after, no matter what the situation? Or had she always possessed the kind of bravery that allowed her to step forward and stay when almost anyone else would have hung back? But even if the source of Marie’s courage might have been unknowable, the fact of it was without dispute.
And perhaps I took a cue from her character and elevated my own courage that night, for I attempted something that was for me uncharacteristically bold.
Once again we were in her garage, darker now than it had been on the day I had walked her home from Raymond Stoddard’s funeral, and once again she stood on the step above me just where she’d be when she’d kiss Gene good night.
“Do you mind if I kiss you?” I asked.
At leas
t I asked, though I leaned forward with the hope I’d get the answer I wanted.
She didn’t say no. Neither did she laugh at me or slap me or turn away in disgust. She had too much grace for any of those actions. Instead, she gently said, “Do you think that’s a good idea? I’m still going with Gene.”
What could I say to that—let me make my betrayal complete? She was offering me the opportunity to be better than I was.
Without saying another word I hurried from the garage. The night’s cold couldn’t touch me, burning as I was with my own shame.
Monty Burnham considered making his confession on the day when the Sherman tank he commanded was mired in black volcanic ash, and Japanese artillery fire was shrieking all around. He believed then that it was only a matter of time before one of the armor-piercing 150-millimeter shells found its target and he and his crew of five were incinerated in their vehicle. For good reason the tanks had been nicknamed “Ronsons.” And with death imminent wouldn’t it have made sense to blurt out a soul-cleansing statement right at that time, especially since the man whose wife Burnham had fucked was right there in the tank with him? And if the confession weighed down one soldier at the same time that it unburdened another, so what? They were all doomed anyway.
He tapped his friend, Corporal Raymond Stoddard, the tank’s loader, on the shoulder with the full intention of owning up to what had happened between him and Raymond’s wife, Alma. Yet when Stoddard turned toward him, Burnham couldn’t speak. He and Stoddard had attended the same high school in Wembley, North Dakota, and they had played football together, and at that moment his former classmate, his features almost erased by grease and dirt, looked, in his leather tank helmet, just the way he had looked on the playing field. Monty Burnham shook his head and waved away Raymond’s inquiring glance. He could have confessed to a fellow soldier, a subordinate, but not a former teammate.