The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  “You'll be walking around like a native,” Eliza said, her hand on Rossie's thigh. “It's only a town. You'll get used to it.”

  Rossie kept his white hat in his lap as they plunged along. “I'll be hiding my head under a pillow.”

  “In the Drake,” she said, “you'll have feather-filled pillows.” The taxicab driver snorted.

  The Drake, with its array of public rooms adorned with marble and chains made of gold brocade, was a step beyond anything in Reno. Bernard passed folded greenbacks to bellmen taking the luggage away and made sure vases for the flowers, along with Scotch and house gin, would be sent directly up to their rooms. Ice and five dozen oysters on the half shell would follow.

  “Breads and sweet butter,” Lemma said. “Cheeses, brie and sharp cheddar, grapes, a selection of apples. Please.”

  Bernard and Lemma had a suite on the seventh floor, where the clusters of flowers were set up in tall crystal vases. Eliza and Rossie were in rooms of their own down the hall. When drinks had been poured—seltzer water for Eliza—Howard lifted his Scotch on ice and proposed a toast. “To these children,” he said. “All of us.”

  Bernard eased his money clip from his pocket. “Rossie,” he said, “this might as well be settled. What do you have for cash? You'll need to carry cash.”

  “One hundred and eleven dollars,” Rossie said. It was all his money. So far he'd spent six dollars. “Everything in the hotel should be charged to this room,” Bernard said. “From drinks to room service.”

  “And oysters,” Lemma said. “Where are they?”

  “What if my pocket gets picked?” Rossie asked.

  “Then we will get hold of more cash,” Bernard said. “I go onto the streets with greenbacks hidden in my stockings. That way you cannot be robbed without violence.”

  “You figure there's a chance of that?”

  “There are beggars, men capable of anything.”

  Just then the oysters arrived, five platters on a wheeled cart, a dozen for each of them, and the breads and cheeses, grapes and apples.

  “Have you been to the ocean?” Bernard asked Rossie. “If not, these oysters, due to the miracles of refrigerated transportation, will be your introduction.”

  “Smell them,” Lemma said. “Inhale. Squeeze the lemon, take one, dip it into vinegar, then the horseradish, and touch it into the red sauce.” She took up a tiny fork and demonstrated, chewing slowly. “Savor, chew faintly, allow yourself to taste before swallowing.”

  “All my life I been eating brains and calf nuts and such shit,” Rossie said. “Never found any I didn't like. But I never ate anything raw. Looks like eating eyeballs.” He went with the lemon, then the vinegar and horseradish, chewed and swallowed, and made a face. Lemma and Bernard were watching intently. “So that,” Rossie said, “is how the ocean tastes.”

  “What do you think?” Lemma said.

  “Way better than I guessed,” Rossie said, starting through the ritual another time. “I got a marble bathroom.” He grinned. “I can order up oysters from downstairs. What the hell?”

  Howard proposed another toast. “To romance.”

  “You,” Lemma said. “Have you settled down? New Zealand? At least you spoke the language. Howard,” she explained to Rossie, “is a wanderer.”

  Bernard rapped on Rossie's door the next morning. It was to be shopping at Marshall Field's for the women and baseball at Wrigley Field— the Chicago Cubs in a last series against Pittsburgh—for the men. “Today,” Bernard said, “leave your straw fedora at home. In this town, it's a hat for the night. We go bareheaded.”

  Downstairs in a barbershop hung with crystal mirrors taller than a man, the air was sweet with bay rum and lime and the murmur of barbers in immaculate white shirts and aprons and their soft-talking customers. Rossie was shaved by a man three times his age. His hair was trimmed, the back of his neck cool and tingling. He watched Bernard lay out silver dollars and examine his smooth face in one of the mirrors, then hold out his right hand before him to study as if looking for signs of trembling.

  “If you ever think about baseball,” Bernard told him as they made their way to Wrigley in a taxicab, “you will recall this as a stunning day. All forces are in conjunction.”

  “Can't say I'd know,” Rossie said. “I wasn't one of those baseball boys.”

  “Cowboys wouldn't be. But you'll be sorry not to be a baseball boy now, I assure you. Lou Gehrig has just completed fifteen hundred consecutive games, a record, and this season he's got forty-eight home runs. Babe Ruth just played his final game for the Yankees three days ago, the same day Detroit clinched the pennant. Dizzy Dean is pitching this very afternoon on two days of rest and St. Louis might well win their pennant, too. And yesterday, in Yankee Stadium, before thirty thousand fans, the master unseen by white men, Satchel Paige, struck out twelve in a Negro exhibition. These are vast times. We have Wrigley, the shrine. My father brought me. I've been thinking about this for weeks.”

  The taxi driver let them off on Addison, two blocks from the ballpark. As they walked toward the stadium Rossie imagined Bernard sipping the wine he'd had shipped in to Montana and dreaming of days like this one, and what could be if he could go on being alive in the world.

  Bernard had box-seat tickets, behind home plate on the third base line. “I love the sliding in at third and home. Others insist on first base, the hitters, but I love dustups. Lemma says it's my version of romance. What do women know?”

  The reason for going bareheaded among so many men in fedoras was revealed. Bernard bought blue Cubs caps embroidered with a red C inside a white circle. They shaped the long brims, and Rossie realized that all morning he'd been watching Bernard for signs of how to conduct himself. “Does this make us fans?”

  “Fanatics,” Bernard said, gripping Rossie's shoulder.

  As they edged down crowded steps toward their seats, Rossie felt enclosed not so much by people as by pleasures. The marked field, the wheeling sweep of ivy-covered wall, fans thronged in the windows of the apartments beyond the outfield, ballplayers carelessly rifling balls back and forth, this could be a thing to love.

  “Wrigley Field, seasons end,” Bernard said. “St. Patrick's Day is the model. Bless the faithful and fuck a Depression.”

  They were surrounded by redheaded Irish and black Irish, and Italians and Jewish fathers with sleeves rolled up to their elbows, some in business suits, others already boisterous with drink, smoking cigars and talking softly in the way of bosses. Cups of Schlitz on the railing, salted-peanut shells on the floor, hot dogs oozing Polish mustard, sharply hit infield outs, the sliding in at third, the Cubs taking Pittsburgh by a score of four to two—in all this Rossie was content. “What it was,” he said as they filed slowly out in the midst of the crowd, “was dandy.”

  “It's catching,” Bernard said.

  At the Drake, Lemma and Eliza were drinking tea and eating sandwiches and lemon cakes off a table wheeled in by room service. Scatters of tissue paper and purple sacks from Marshall Field's surrounded them. They'd bought dark leather shoes with thin straps over the instep. There was a twenty-dollar bottle of Chanel No. 5 for Lemma, and Je Reviens for Eliza. “ ‘Je Reviens’ means ‘I'll return’ in French,” Eliza said. “To make your wait on my baby all the sweeter.”

  Lemma laid out a moss-green cashmere sweater for herself and a long, finely woven, off-white shawl of Scottish wool for Eliza. “We were practical,” Lemma explained. “Winter is coming and we bought for Montana. Not that these are things to wear in Montana. But things to think about wearing.” She went on, suddenly dismayed. “Women with those children, begging with filthy pillows and blankets at their feet? I'd forgotten.”

  Bernard shook his head.

  “We were as flagrant as courtesans,” Eliza said, “ignoring the poor, spending money given us by men.”

  “Given freely and happily,” Bernard said.

  “No money of mine,” Rossie asserted. “None to give.”

  Lemma shook her hea
d. “Yours is a temporary condition. For some it can become a state of being. But not you.”

  “In the meantime, there are gifts for you,” Eliza said, bringing forth three Brooks Brothers shirts—one white, one in dark blue, another striped red and white—a blue-and-red-striped necktie and a blue blazer with brass buttons. “On trial,” she said, “to see if it fits.”

  And it did. “This is too goddamned many clothes.”

  “But elegant,” Lemma said.

  The women posed in their shoes with the elaborate straps, Lemma in her sweater and Eliza in her shawl, then Rossie donned his new attire and posed with Bernard, both in Cubs caps, to laughter and applause.

  “We did one other thing,” Eliza said, studying her hands. “We looked at baby clothes, handwoven items.”

  “We'll see all that,” Bernard said. “But I'm exhausted.”

  “If we aspire to live late, like Spaniards, he'll need a nap,” Lemma said. “We'll gather at nine for cocktails. Howard is bringing a date. I can't wait to see this one.”

  Rossie went alone to his room and ordered up a gin and tonic on the telephone from room service just to see if it would come. After sleeping and showering, he got into the striped shirt and the new Brooks Brothers jacket but failed at tying the necktie.

  “Look at you,” Lemma said when Rossie knocked at their door. “Let me deal with that.” She ducked her chin and looked up to him as if a question might be floating between them and touched the knot a final time. “Tending to you, young man, makes me feel weak and wicked.” Then she frowned as if at herself, shook her head, and turned away. “Bernard isn't feeling right, and has gone to bed. We're staying in, but you and Eliza, the two of you, have dinner reservations.”

  “Where is she?” Rossie asked.

  “Wasn't she with you?”

  “You mean in my room? There's times when we go to our own rooms.”

  “I suppose there must be.”

  Bernard came wandering out in rumpled white pajamas. “Sorry about the evening,” he said. “Howard has canceled on us, and there is only so much excitement I can stand. Tomorrow night we'll be ringside with Earl Hines.”

  The Steakhouse at Norton's Park was very much a Chicago affair: waiters in tuxedos, a flaming grill, and racks of beef on display in the cool room where Rossie went to pick his porterhouse. Eliza's steak tartare was prepared by the waiter alongside the table, its minced, raw sirloin mixed with capers and egg yolk.

  “That's a new one on me,” Rossie said.

  Eliza smiled. “I don't think so,” she said. “I'm thinking nothing is a new one to you, you've seen it all. Women are envying me, all around the room, wondering why you came after me.”

  He accepted a forkful of her tartare. “Not oysters, but it's close.”

  Back at the Drake, Rossie unbuttoned his striped shirt and Eliza hung his new coat in the closet, then turned her back to him so he could help with the snaps on her dress. She asked if he felt properly kept.

  “I'm a volunteer,” he said. “Don't worry about me.”

  She lay back to display herself, swollen with her pregnancy, waiting for him on his bed. “Fondle me. Kiss me and caress me. That's all we'll need.”

  But it wasn't.

  “This has got to stop,” she said.

  But not that night.

  They toured north to Evanston and showed Rossie a tree-lined street and a pillared, white house nestled beyond a deep lawn amid Colorado blue spruce. It was where Bernard and Lemma and Eliza had lived. “There it is,” Bernard said. “Lost years.”

  “Not so bad,” Lemma said. “But you were ruthless.”

  In the silence that followed Rossie wondered to what degree Lemma had ever come to a truce with Bernard.

  “Neither of you,” Eliza said, “ever says what you mean.”

  “Nonsense. We say anything we mean.”

  “You're a nice woman,” Rossie said, listening to his voice like it was someone else talking. “But Eliza is right. You don't either of you much say what you mean.”

  “Rossie,” Bernard said. “Perhaps that's where we should leave it.”

  “What don't I say, for instance? What about this?” Lemma went on, focused on Rossie. “Why was Eliza alone in San Francisco? Why did she go at all? Are those unanswered questions?”

  “Because I insisted,” Eliza said.

  “Ah,” Bernard mused, “the prodigious truth.”

  “I ask,” Lemma said. “No one answers.”

  Bernard turned to Rossie, signaling a new topic. “Tonight, the Panama hat.”

  They gathered in a dark hotel barroom, where Bernard toasted “this chance at life.”

  Lemma studied herself in a mirror. She was clad in a midlength, gray gown, with her hair in a high French bun. “Smiling through sadness,” she said, then went on to describe another quarrel she'd had with Howard on the telephone. “Those women he thinks he picks. They pick him. They bleed him.”

  By ten-thirty they were in a taxicab heading down to Thirty-ninth Street and Southern Parkway. “The jive joints are deeper to the south,” Bernard said. “It's another world. We want this to be glamorous.”

  The Earl Hines Band played a new music, called swing, in the Grand Terrace Ballroom. Locals boasted that it was the Cotton Club of Chicago. “They have an hour on NBC radio,” Bernard said. “Every night, going out to all of America. I've caught it in Montana, radio from over the mountains, from Spokane. They advertise him as ‘Fatha’ Hines—an adman's moniker so I never say it.” He explained that musicians like Earl Hines, who'd returned year after year to the same mob-run establishment since opening night in 1931, were said to be “owned.” It was dangerous for them to talk of quitting, while others, like Louis Armstrong, had the power to work where they pleased. “Things around Chicago are commonly known. We'll be in God's hands, safe as sweet potatoes. This is Mafia land, pleasure for profit. Part of the pleasure lies in understanding the corruptions.”

  Storefronts along Southern Parkway were decorated by neon signs advertising run-down taverns and small groceries. The Grand Terrace itself was low and undistinguished. A little crowd, mostly black, had gathered on the sidewalk. Women cut dance steps as syncopated music came flooding out from the spangled doors, and stylish men snapped their fingers, admiring the women. “Hey, cowboy,” one said to Rossie. “Five dollars for the hat.”

  “Can't do it,” Rossie said. “It was a present.”

  The man smiled and gave him a thumbs up.

  The space inside was brilliant under a dazzling, mirror-covered ball spinning over the bandstand. Earl Hines, a slim master of quickness, gleaming with perspiration beneath the lights, was got up in formal white, as was his band, to match the ivory-colored piano. Bernard passed a fold of money to a black man in a tuxedo.

  During a break in the music the usher led them to a table at the edge of the dance floor that Bernard had reserved. Two young men were already there, one lean and pale-white with eyes quick as a bird, the other with skin a deep, almost bluish ebony.

  “What if we don't fucking move?” the white fellow said. A battered trombone case lay across the second man's lap.

  “Then, gentlemen, you'll embarrass the Grand Terrace Ballroom. I think you'll agree that's a very bad idea.”

  The men eyed one another.

  “My friend here is a musician. Who are these assholes? They're bozos. Somebody should kick their asses.”

  “Are you threatening customers? I hope not. Surely you're not challenging our authority.”

  The black man with trombone case was already standing as his friend slowly pushed back from the little table.

  “She sold me this fucking drink,” the white fellow said. “What am I supposed to do with this fucking drink?”

  “I'd carry it to the bar. I'd carry it carefully, I wouldn't spill, and I'd see if I was happy at the bar. If I weren't, I'd get out of here. Quickly.”

  The two men made their way slowly across the empty dance floor toward the dimly lit ba
r in the back of the room.

  “Thank you,” Bernard said. “Could we have a bottle of champagne?”

  Lemma opened the tiny blue purse, took out a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and waited as Bernard struck a match.

  Eliza watched, eyes gleaming, as her mother blew smoke from her nostrils.

  Rossie had started to take off his hat, and Lemma told him to leave it on.

  “Don't,” she said. “Never give up your style.”

  “Never saw you light up before,” Rossie said.

  “It's a filthy trick, but we love them.” She blew another stream of smoke.

  A woman in fishnet hosiery brought the champagne as Earl Hines and his men moved back to the bandstand. Hines was off into an intricate beginning on the piano.

  Eliza held out her hand to Rossie. “Slowly,” she said. “I want a man in a white summer hat. For you, once around the floor with a pregnant woman.”

  As the band swung into a flare of horns, Rossie led Eliza through an improvising waltz, jostling along as the dancers spun around him but happy because she was smiling and throwing her dark hair as she leaned back to study him. She moved forward and kissed him on the neck. Spinning slowly, with Eliza perspiring in his arms and Earl Hines touching that piano with careless intimacy, Rossie studied the mirrored ball above them and felt suddenly weightless, not so much dizzied as floating.

  “There,” Eliza said when they were seated with glasses of champagne before them. “You've done it once and you can do it again.”

  “I can.”

  Eliza shook her head, gazing at him in an archly mystified way. She placed her hand on his knee. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “Your cowboy,” Lemma said, over the music. “Mr. Buckaroo.” Leaning in to Rossie, she said, “Now I'm going to drag my own prince onto the floor.”

  Bernard tipped his glass back to empty it and joined her with a sliding grace Rossie had not suspected, spinning with Lemma until the midnight show commenced with a blare of horns and a swirl of beauties who didn't so much dance as pose on the stage. Small girls— women, really—pranced around the floor, occasionally pausing to strike a few notes in time with Earl Hines on four white grand pianos that had been rolled out among the dancers. “Those little girls,” Bernard said, returning to his seat. “They call them ponies.”