Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  She laughed softly. “I don’t blame him. I didn’t have the background, the … what you call breeding, the know-how. But none of it mattered anyway. He got blown up on a ship named the Bunker Hill. May 11. This kamikaze pilot flew into his aircraft carrier just off Okinawa. The war was over, at least for him.”

  From the living room we could hear the record player. Ron had turned it on and settled down with a beer and cigarettes which he tended to smoke about like I ate Tootsie Rolls, one practically linked to the other. “He knows I take a long time,” B.J. said, looking behind her at her legs. “Are my seams straight?” She glanced at me, smiling.

  Her legs were so perfectly curved; the thighs and calves were like two Coca-Cola bottles standing upside down. She had every ingredient of the thoroughbred ankles that my grandmother wanted for me.

  But her story wasn’t over. And though she’d told me a lot, maybe easing her guilt while she did, she wasn’t through. She put her hands on my shoulders, looking at me again in the mirror.

  “I went back to that priest.” She grinned. Her eyes danced, her tongue found the edge of her chipped tooth that was like a slash between two words. “I told that priest his Hail Marys didn’t work.” She tried to laugh but her voice was flat. “I had sinned. I was like foul stuff you try not to step in. I hated myself, and at the same time I didn’t. I wanted a child; I didn’t see anything wrong with having a child. I didn’t see anything wrong with sex! How could what I had done been so terrible that I should wish I was dead or had never lived? With the feel of life inside me, I couldn’t turn my back on that or on myself, or even the Big Cheese, if he had lived! I would have married him no matter if he thought I was only a country bumpkin with a warm little center he especially liked. I didn’t care. I was going to live; and the life inside me was going to live! That’s all I knew. That’s all I cared about.

  “So that priest gave me the name of this doctor in New Mexico who ran a home—a hospital really. I called it the Dude Ranch for Women Carrying Unborn Life and for Alcoholics Who Wanted to Do Better.” She smiled. “I waitressed. Dr. Lissaro was a little man, sweet, an Italian like my grandfather. He’d once been a surgeon until his hands started to shake, and he couldn’t operate anymore. Then he bought this camp in the mountains near a desert and took in well-known people who didn’t want anybody to know where they were.

  “I wrote my parents that I’d gotten a new job in another war factory. They didn’t care, not really. I’d been gone since I was fifteen. They never knew I had a baby down there. She was born that next December. I gave her a name, even though I knew she wouldn’t get to keep it. I had her for a few minutes; they wouldn’t let me hold her. Dr. Lissaro said it’d make giving her up worse, so he held her up for me to see, and I called her Sam—,” she looked up from where she’d been staring at the top of my head, touching my hair slightly every once in a while, “—Samantha,” she said, finishing the name, but also letting us both realize that, by mistake, she’d said more than she’d meant to.

  “How Sam?” I said, sounding like an Indian in a Wild West movie—but making sense to us; and I couldn’t not ask.

  She went into the bathroom. She turned on the water in the sink and stayed there a long while, it seemed, leaving me sitting on the dressing table stool, looking at myself. By now I was so fond of her, I wouldn’t have tried anything that might have upset her. But I had to know; I wanted to know the rest. I followed her, stopping at the door and knocking, pretending to know more than I did.

  “Where do you think she ended up?” I said, knocking lightly on the bathroom door. “Would Sam know? He told me he’d gone to that place, that ranch, or hospital or whatever you call it.”

  She was standing in front of the medicine chest, staring at herself in the mirror where my father had shaved every day we’d lived in that house. She turned and looked at me. “He’s told you about being in that place?”

  The window was open and the night air was cool. I nodded. Lying silently wasn’t nearly like out loud.

  By now she’d wound her hair into a knot on top of her head and pinned it under a black bowler hat. She’d tied a ribbon around her thumb in the cast, and was holding a stick, with a silk bandanna tied on it, over her shoulder like a hobo. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Some other time.” Which is what anybody with half a brain knows means whoever said it won’t, not unless pestered half to death at least. After she rubbed her face against my hair, she stepped back and smiled and stuck up her broken thumb and put the other hand on her hip in a sexy hitchhiking pose. “How do I look?”

  I laughed. To me, and to just about everybody I knew, she looked wonderful. But I didn’t want to change the subject, and I was getting ready to start my pestering, when Ron walked down the hall and tapped on the bedroom door, calling for her.

  “You’re going to grow up beautiful,” she said. “Just look at you.”

  We were standing with my head just beneath her chin, looking at ourselves in the medicine cabinet mirror where my mother had given me my first lesson in brushing my teeth, making me stand on a stool and lean over the sink. Now, thanks to B.J.’s handiwork, I did look pretty good.

  She stepped back. “I shouldn’t have told you all of this, but I got started and … sugar, I’ve got to go.”

  Ron came into the room as we walked out of the bathroom. “B.J., it’s nearly ten.” He looked at me. “You want me to watch you home?”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s not far.”

  B.J. slipped her feet into high-heeled tap shoes. “I’m going to be late again and Ella Jenkins and the band’ll kill me!”

  Just inside the back door, B.J. stopped and turned to me. “Maybe you want to stay here a while alone?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  They escorted me to the edge of the yard where my grandparents’ property began. Ron waved to me. “Take it easy, little lady.” His voice was soft and teasing. “Don’t do nothing the Queen of England wouldn’t.” He laughed, backing the truck up, and he and B.J. drove off.

  I sneaked back into my grandparents’ house. It had been dark and silent for hours. I lay down, thinking about the night, feeling love for Sam, and love for B.J., and a terrible hunger for knowing, and at the same time, a fear. I didn’t want to know anything that might change us. Staring up at the dark ceiling I listened to the night bugs and fell asleep after deciding not to wash off the face B.J. had given me until morning.

  14.

  A Visit in My Grandfather’s Office

  The back entrance to my grandfather’s office opened into a room he called his lab. Beyond this was the treatment room and then the waiting room. Even though a young doctor drove over from Searcy every other Tuesday to hold a clinic at the other end of Main Street, no one was willing to let my grandfather retire. No one who had started with him wanted to change, which was a compliment to my grandfather, since he didn’t believe in much treatment. Yet that also meant he’d never killed anyone. His own medicines were, in a sense, a form of treatment. But his specialty was histories.

  His files were the size of law books, each one with the patient’s name on it sitting in a bookcase behind a glass door, and the number and size of them never dwindled. Often I had heard him say to patients that he thought it was time to take a new history. Then they would start again at day one. My grandfather would take notes, writing in a large black-bound book, throwing in questions. Often he would repeat what the patient had just said, starting with: “Now let me get this right.” My grandfather was more than a just good listener; he was, in himself, an entire show, sort of like the one on TV called “This Is Your Life.”

  That’s probably part of what Joel had meant when he claimed that my grandfather was a great actor. Joel’s mother had once suffered from nasal blockage. My grandfather supposedly exploded it with a piece of cotton dipped in the Outside Medicine, which was taking a great risk, considering the Outside was poisonous to the inside. But Mrs. Weiss had been cured, even thoug
h she had the side effect of smelling Maulden’s Outside Medicine for several days afterward. In fact, a direct clue that someone had been at the Maulden Clinic was the distinctive odor of the Outside Medicine. It was the best remedy for acne and common zits that anyone could buy. Even Mr. Barber recommended it at the drug store, because he knew he didn’t have anything to match it. On many days a whiff of my grandfather’s Outside Medicine could be detected in the halls of the high school and in the aisles of stores all over town.

  I sat on a stool in the lab, because I could hear my grandfather talking with a patient. My grandmother had sent me to fetch him for supper. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the house, and I didn’t want to bust in on anybody naked.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Clayton was relating the activities of her gall bladder, and she was talking a lot. She had a list of foods that set it off. She was, she said, down to eating almost nothing. She had lost fifteen pounds, and there was no way the flesh was not going to stop falling off—which, considering how much she must weigh, was a blessing in disguise, I thought. I was fascinated with blessings in disguise. It seemed that so much of life was blessings in disguise.

  Mrs. Clayton was sick to death over the fact that she could no longer purchase the Inside Medicine. Finally my grandfather said that the only course of treatment was for her to lose just as much weight as would make her happy, and then she should go to Little Rock and have her gall bladder taken out.

  Mrs. Clayton cried. I could hear her putting on her shoes and snapping her purse shut.

  While I waited for her to leave, I stared at the equipment. Here in my grandfather’s lab were giant porcelain tubs for mixing his medicines. There were boxes of empty pint bottles into which he poured it, and funnel devices with rubber hoses and clamps. On the walls opposite me were posters. One had a picture of Hadacol, a medicine that had gotten real famous when I’d been in about the first grade, and under it was: IF YOU THINK THIS IS GOOD, YOU’RE HALF RIGHT. Beside it were the Maulden Medicines with a picture of a heart-shaped shield, an armed knight holding it, emblazoned INVINCIBLE. I suppose that was a painful poster for my grandfather to look at, considering that all those medicines had now fallen into ill repute.

  There was another poster showing a bottle of Milltown Don’t Give A Damn Pills. They were tranquilizers that had once been very popular. Underneath, in red print, was EITHER/OR, IF YOU WANT TO GIVE A DAMN, YOU STILL CAN. IF YOU DON’T, YOU WON’T. DILUTE WHAT POLLUTES, MAULDEN’S HAS IT ALL.

  The last poster showed the two bottles of Maulden’s Medicines: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WHERE THE AIR GOES WHEN WE’VE SPRAYED IT, SMOKED IN IT, DROPPED BOMBS IN IT? IF YOU WANT TO LIVE WITH NO COMPLAINTS, REACH NINETY, FEEL FIT, YOUNG, VITAL, THEN …

  That was the one he had put in every newspaper and magazine that would let him. He sent four cases of his medicines to Eisenhower, six bottles to Nixon, and one of each to the speaker of the house. My grandfather said he preferred voting Republicans out of office to having them die there. He sent Nixon and Eisenhower just enough to tide them over. But to Harry Truman my grandfather regularly sent both kinds of the Maulden Medicines, and the older Truman got, the prouder my grandfather became.

  Mrs. Clayton closed the front door of the office and my grandfather opened the back room door and looked at me. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I was sent to tell you supper’s ready. But I didn’t want to barge in.”

  He stood, drooping his shoulders, but looking excited. I’d played chess with him and seen that look on his face when he took my queen. “I don’t feel like eating,” he said. “Do you?”

  I raised my shoulders and let them drop.

  He called over to the house and told my grandmother he was helping me with homework. No one but me minded.

  For the next hour, my grandfather taught me—or attempted to teach me—the beginning steps for making the Inside Medicine. He told me we were going to mix acetone and bromoacetate and zinc and let it bubble, turn brown, heat it, and then use its crystals as vitamin C.

  I nodded.

  Just short of seeming to be brain-damaged, I slowly measured vials of yellow stuff and splashed them into basins. But my approach was the only thing I had seen to speed up my grandfather. He was like a circus trainer getting a seal to blow the right horn for “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” He clapped, praising me to the skies for any slight movement in the right direction. At the end of an hour I caught him looking at me with a mixture of wonderment and what may have been hopelessness.

  “We’ll get to the next step some other time,” he said. “We need to let this one soak in.” He put my vitamin C crystals—stuck on the bottom of a basin like caramel gravel—in a Mason jar and locked up the office.

  As we walked home, if it hadn’t been for lights from the sun porch, we’d have been stumbling all over in the dark. A faint odor of decomposition floated from the direction of the outhouse across the alleyway.

  My grandmother had already gone to bed, but had left our supper on the stove under pot tops. It was Louella’s biscuits drowned in Brer Rabbit molasses, along with heated-up soup. After a piece of Louella’s chocolate cake, I went into the hall toward my room. Behind me, my grandfather flopped down in a chair and stared at the TV, which he did not turn on. Through the back window came the frantic sound of dried-out, dying bugs. Katydids did most of the rubbing, and my grandmother had told me the male cicadas were the only ones with “stridulating organs.” That sounded dirty to me. But when she said it, she didn’t seem to notice. I imagined the male cicadas squeezing out of their shells to run off naked. And in the morning I—as well as their mates—could find their husks stuck to a tree or weed, like calling cards.

  I lay in the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, staring at the ceiling, holding my breath and hoping to hear my grandfather turn on the TV, scrape around in the kitchen—do anything to seem normal and alive. I lay there thinking. Maybe I should change, join in, become the fascinating debutante my grandmother wanted me to be, and at the same time spend a lot of time in back rooms mixing medicines. I could peddle them at debutante balls. What could be a better way for rich contacts? And what, if I really thought about it, could be a greater compromise? Debutantes would live forever, and everybody but me would be happy—which, of course, would be all right, too.

  I rolled over and looked at my old house. My future wasn’t up for grabs. It wasn’t for anybody but me and Sam to worry about. I was his.

  15.

  I Learn About B.J. and Sam

  The nights were cool, and the leaves seemed dusted with red and yellow chalk. Cicadas and katydids gave up their songs. On homecoming night B.J. and I walked to the school to the faraway sound of the Coldwater Band’s bass drum, bought after a townwide raffle.

  “And so,” B.J. began, after I’d pestered her, pretending I knew what I didn’t know, and asking her please, please to go on and tell me about how it was during the last of the war in New Mexico where she and Sam were. B.J. would laugh, touch my hair and call me “Flea,” since I’d become such a pest—jumping her whenever I could. I even pretended to be crazy about history, about New Mexico, anything, just to get to talk about what had happened, and about Sam. I mentioned his name every chance I got.

  “And so, Flea,” B.J. said, “you want to know what it was like?” Cars were passing us, splashing beams of light onto the sidewalk. “It was the funniest thing you ever saw—Dr. Lissaro drove a Stanley Steamer. He picked me up at the train station in it, a car puffing like a dragon. Because, you see, no car company had made a new car in years. They were allowed to make only so many, the rest were army trucks and stuff; and there in New Mexico people were riding bicycles, using buggies, anything that’d move—and Dr. Lissaro had bought this old Stanley Steamer, made the last year the company sent them out. It was twenty years old, older than I was, and about as fast.”

  I would try to imagine how it was in New Mexico that year, 1945—the mountains, the desert, one so close to the other. It was late that May whe
n Sam and B.J. rode the train in different cars and got off at the same stop.

  Sam had met Gill in a bar in Texas, where Gill was celebrating getting home from the war with nothing worse than losing a lung. Since Sam had been a graduate of West Point and trained for war, he had spent most of the past three years in Italy, tromping with his troops in brown mud like porridge. The first thing Sam did when he was discharged from active duty was drink. He checked into a hotel in Galveston and began—spending days alone, drinking until he could sleep, sleeping until dreams woke him, drinking again to forget the dreams.

  He was supposed to marry Ellen Lipscomb that October. Before the war she had ridden the train to West Point from Little Rock for football weekends and dances, going with Sam’s parents at their invitation; and she would invite Sam to escort her during her debutante parties when he was home.

  “You know, Flea …,” B.J. walked on the sidewalk toward the lights of the football field, “the saddest thing about Sam is Ellen.”

  “Why?” I asked, not able to even imagine what she was talking about.

  “Well, from everything I’ve heard, and from what I’ve put together, she loves him. I mean really loves him.” B.J. turned and looked at me; we stopped on the sidewalk and stared at each other a minute. The Coldwater Band struck up the fight song and we could hear the cheerleaders yelling. If B.J. was trying to tell me that Ellen’s loving Sam was supposed to make us back off from him, she could do what she wanted. I figured Ellen had stepped out of the picture, even though she and Sam weren’t divorced yet—and if I was on the road to committing adultery with a still-married man when I got a little older, and was already definitely coveting my neighbor, it couldn’t be helped. Sam loved me, and that’s all the sign I needed. I wasn’t ever going to give him up.