I said, ‘You'll soon forget your humble roots.’
‘Don't worry, Peg,’ she said. ‘I get a free moment from all that bridge-playing and volunteering, I'll come down here and see you. You know how I do love to slum.’
None of us ever heard from Gayle. I wrote her every week, for a while, then there didn't seem much point. Only subjects I had were air force and kids, probably the last two things on earth she wanted reminding about.
The day of Okey's anniversary, me and Betty took flowers out to the cemetery. When we got back there was a card from Gayle. Just said, ‘Please remember Okey on the fifth. Still packing smokes. Missing you.’
Next promotion board, Vern and Ed both got passed over. They were reassigned to transports. Betty said Ed was of a mind to quit anyway, but that was just brave talk. Three growing girls to feed, they had to be struggling.
Vern took it real bad. I mean, I could see the board's point of view and I could see Vern's too. Anybody could get sinus trouble. There's no shame in it. But when a man's been a real aviator and he gets sidelined, he feels like a waste of space all of a sudden. He doesn't want to hang out with the jocks any more ‘cause they're going higher and faster, and he's going nowhere. So that was when the chip on his shoulder started growing. Ended up it was all chip and no Vern.
Crystal started hanging out with Sherry Gillis about this time.
I said ‘How come? You never liked her before.’
She said, ‘We both got grouchy dads. Plus, she hates Deana and Carla's just a kid, and I don't even have’’ a sister.’
Nineteen fifty-four was a bad year for me. I could see where me and Vern were headed, but I didn't have anybody, I could tell. Ida and Pearl were gone, back to Castle, and it wasn't like it used to be with the old gang. Kirk and Carla and Audrey's boys were all at that troublesome stage. Getting into everything, falling over every two steps they took. When you have a smart eight-year-old who can tell you how frogs get babies and where flies go in winter, you don't have patience with the diaper stage any more.
I did a few turns at the base thrift-shop, but my time for that had passed too. What I needed was a job. Heck, even Kath Pharaoh had a job.
‘The laundry offered me full-time,’ she wrote me. ‘But for one thing, I fancy a change. I'd like to get out and about. Meet different people. I went after something at R&D Modes. That's a dress shop. I didn't get it, though. I don't think I was smart enough dressed. Then the other thing is, John Pharaoh. He's going downhill, so I can't be gone all day.’
Every time I wrote and asked, she just wrote back, ‘It's a nervous thing.’
Couple of times in town I saw places were hiring and I made enquiries, but soon as they seen my address they tore up the forms.
‘No military,’ they'd say. ‘You just get a girl trained up, then she's gone.’
The only one halfway understood what was bugging me was Lois, and sometimes I didn't think even she did. Sometimes I thought she'd caved in, started shinning up that greasy pole at the OWC. Going to coffees. Painting her nails Peach Pastelle instead of Red for Danger.
Then the squadron got a Temporary Duty to McDill, Florida, and Lo was pissed as a nest of hornets ‘cause the wives didn't get to go.
‘I am so bored,’ she said. ‘Let's go someplace. Remember that time we all went to the beach?’
Wichita, Kansas, was a long way from any beach, but Labor Day weekend there was a Wild West show over in Butler County, so we fixed to all get together and take the kids. Even Audrey said she'd come along, for old times’ sake.
Lois said, ‘Long as I don't have to have that Gillis girl riding in my car.’ Deana always got car-sick. It seemed to me Betty brought it on. You have your mommy asking you every five minutes, ‘Y'all right, precious? You feeling ill yet?’ of course it'll happen. Crystal never was sick in her life. We never asked her if she wanted to be.
So I had Deana ride up front with me. I told her to read me out all the signs along the way, take her mind off her stomach. Audrey sat behind with her boys and Kirk.
I could have spent hours watching Kirk. He was like a little old man sitting there. Funny beaky little nose. He wasn't much of a talker yet. He just looked out the window and pointed at things. I noticed Audrey was studying him too. I caught her eye in my mirror.
I said, ‘Cute kid, isn't he?’
Deana was reading out road signs, like I'd told her. ‘Pure Oil. Ice. Pumkin Pie Diner. Nothing Refreshes … like Seven-Up.’ She was the dead spit of Betty. Big for ten too.
Audrey said, ‘Yes, he is cute.’
Deana said, ‘My mom says that baby is from the Devil. Thrifty Maid Tomatoes. 400 East. Snap Beans Serve Yourself.’ She hardly broke rhythm. ‘Pickrell Feed and Harness. Dogie Gulch Wild West Show first left!’
Audrey was still looking at me next time I checked the mirror. Raised her eyebrows.
I said, ‘Well, motherhood seems like it suits you, Aud. You think you'll have any more?’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I've done my duty by the Rudmans. Given them an heir and a spare. Once they're in school, then I'll have time to do some of the things I want to do.’
I said, ‘Would you ever get a job?’
She looked shocked. ‘I have a job, Peggy,’ she said. ‘I run Captain Lance Rudman, Inc. But I'd really adore to do something artistic. You know? Paint pictures or something?’
We'd all took blankets, excepting Audrey. She'd brung lawn chairs. I helped her get them outta the trunk.
I said, ‘You believe what that brat said about Kirk?’
She said, ‘She's only repeating what she's heard. Betty ever discuss it with you?’
I had never heard Betty say a word about Kirk, except her usual head-shaking over the slapdash way he was being raised.
Audrey said, ‘Maybe one of us should have a word to her? Deana goes round saying things like that, I don't care to think …’
I said, ‘Maybe. But not now. I don't want the day ruined.’
It was the first time the four of us had been out on a spree since England. We had a great time. There was steer-roping and bull-riding, and stick-horse races for the kids. There was burgers and hot dogs at the Chuck Wagon, all you could eat for a buck, and a bank robbery at three o'clock.
Lo was yee-hawin’ all over the place, flirting with some good-looking boy in fancy high-heeled boots and leather chaps, his hair grown just like a girl, meant to be Buffalo Bill or somesuch. He sounded East Coast to me. If he was a cowboy, I was the Yellow Rose of Texas.
‘Is it true, what I heard?’ Lois said. ‘Cowboy gets undressed, last thing he takes off is his hat?
‘Yes, ma'am,’ he said. ‘And in the morning it's the other way around. First thing I do is reach for my hat. Third thing I do is roll me a cigarette.’
39
When we got home, friend husband was prowling around, waiting for his dinner to jump outta the Frigidaire and fry itself.
‘Where you think you've been?’ he said, even though I'd told him a hundred times where we were going, and Crystal had her Sitting Bull totem-pole souvenir balloon an inch in front of his nose.
He had turned morose since he stopped flying bombers, and he was getting a little paunchy too. Time was, he was as religious about doing his squat thrusts and his sit-ups as he was about Beer Call. Then it got, it was just Beer Call. Final stage was he just stayed home, sat in front of the TV with a cold one.
I sat with him, watched him shovelling in the corned beef. Crystal was trying to rope the cat.
I said, ‘Betty's having a Tupperware You get a free gift, or something.’ I thought I'd keep the conversation light, till the storm-clouds passed.
‘I'm thinking of quitting,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Nobody stays in the military for ever.’
Times I'd longed for him to be out of it. Then when he said it, I felt like a big hole opened under me. We'd always been a threesome, me, Vern and the US Air Force.
‘Go back to Maine,’ he said.
‘Give Mom a hand.’
I said, ‘You got three sisters up there to give her a hand. She's got your pop. Besides, she don't want a hand. She wants a yarn store. That what you gonna do? Sell knitting patterns?’
It was a fool thing to say.
He was up on his feet, chair went over one way, table went the other, fried eggs, ketchup, beer bottle splintered into a thousand pieces. Crystal shot into her room and the cat went with her.
He never said a word. Just banged the door on his way out. Lois said she never heard a thing, but Nancy Windier, who was the other side in Gayle's old quarters, asked me next day if I'd heard a sonic boom. She said it had made her wedding group fall off the wall.
So I braced myself for hard times with Vern, but one upturned table was as bad as it got. He got his discharge leave the same week Pop Dewey electrocuted himself saving money on getting a repair man in, so he'd have had to go to Maine anyway for the burying. I cleared the post. Audrey didn't make it to my Farewell, she had some Luncheon Club committee, but Lois dropped by. Betty was crying, said she didn't know what she'd do without me.
Lois said, ‘Will you quit dabbing your eyes, Gillis? What kind of a send-off is this? Don't you realise Peg's escaping? We should be drinking some of that French champagne.’
I said, ‘You think I'll ever see any of your ugly faces again?’
‘You never know your luck,’ she said.
You get used to a whole lot of goodbyes when you're with the military. There are faces I remember, without names. Some are names without faces. Just the gang from Drampton who've stayed kinda true over the years. That's adversity for you.
So I took Crystal back to San Antonio and stayed at my mom's. Had a bedroom to ourselves ‘cause sister Connie had moved on. She was in Lubbock, living in sin.
I said to Mom, ‘We won't be under your feet long.’
‘Good,’ she said.
It took me a month to get a job stacking shelves at the Piggly Wiggly and two rooms to rent, and I guess by that time, I knew Vern wasn't coming back. We just kinda fizzled out. We never even bothered getting divorced till he met Martine and hell, that was years after.
40
Lance Rudman made major in ‘56. Herb Moon didn't, but according to Lo he had already decided to quit, had his fill of all that schmoozing you got to do, if you want to reach the heights. They went back to the East Coast and he got a job as foreman in a lumber yard, somewhere up the Hudson.
‘Herb's happy as a pig in a toilet bowl. I'm slowly going nuts,’ Lois wrote. ‘So no change there. Goad news is, we get twenty percent off rafters and planking.’
Me and Betty seemed fated to go through life together. Nineteen fifty-eight she came back to Converse after Ed flipped one night, busted her jaw and was declared unfit for duty. There were some people thought the neighbours had been over-hasty, calling out the MPs when they heard the kids screaming, getting Ed thrown in the glasshouse, and once her swollen face went down it wasn't long before Betty started agreeing with them.
‘I blame myself,’ she said.
I was working in layaway at Woolworth's and I told her they were hiring. She got a start as a part-time checker while Ed was coming to terms with civilian life.
I said, ‘Betty, I never heard such a load of hogwash. What did you do? Walk into his fist?’
‘I didn't handle him right,’ she said. ‘You can't make a trained killer of a man, then expect him to just turn it off when he comes home. I should have took the girls and gone for a drive. Leave him alone, he soon calms down.’
‘Trained killer my ass,’ Lois said when I wrote her about it. ‘Thank God Ed Gillis never took Bayoneting 101.’
But Betty was still hanging on in there, working her shift at Wool-worth's, then going home to the ironing and the cooking and the picking up. Ed got driving jobs, but he never lasted long. Didn't matter which outfit he went to work for, there was always some fool there he couldn't get along with.
‘Ed's a good man,’ she used to say. ‘He just has to learn to master that temper of his.’
I knew she was getting food stamps, but she didn't know I knew. Crystal and Sherry were both in eighth grade at Kirby Junior High, so sometimes I found things out without even trying.
One time she came home from school, she said, ‘We had to write about what we wished for and Sherry wrote she wished her dad'd drop dead and Miss Hopko saw her after school and asked if she wanted to talk about it or anything and now she's scared her mom'll find out. Do you think Miss Hopko would tell her mom?’
I said, ‘What did you wish for?’
‘Trainer bra,’ she said. ‘And a pet ferret. And to see my dad sometimes.’
41
It was a hard thing, raising a child on your Own back then. Course, everybody does it now. Vern'd send money. I can't fault him there. But he was shackled to that damned Dewey place up in Maine and Crystal did pine for him, I know.
I guess I wasn't much fun. Work, come home, fall asleep. That was my life. I got offers sometimes but most of them I wouldn't care to repeat.
I had the idea to learn typing and shorthand, try and improve my prospects, but all I seemed to do was watch the Lawrence Welk Show and then wake up with a crick in my neck. I wasn't feeling too proud of myself at that period of my life. Even Kath Pharaoh was taking classes.
‘I'm doing night school,’ she wrote.
Book-keeping. So far I've come top in all the tests. And you meet all sorts. I'd never realised how many different kinds of people there are. Some of them go for a pint afterwards, but I have to get back for John. Dennis Jex comes and sits with him. Or, if he can't, May does it, or the couple from next door. They're all good pals to me. I don't know how I'd manage without them. The doctor says I should think of putting him in a home, but I'm not having that. I've promised him I won't send him away. He understands. He's all seized up now, can't hardly move. But he understands.
I loved Kath's letters. There was always something new she was up to, in spite of her troubles with John. It was like she was waking up to life.
Audrey kept the letters coming too, always full of the brilliant achievements of the Rudman family. Lois preferred the phone. And all I ever got from Gayle was new addresses:. c/o The Coffee Can, Wallace; c/o Reba's Dinette, Haw's Run; c/o The Stay A While, Delco.
Nineteen fifty-nine Lance Rudman made lieutenant colonel and he got orders to Oxfordshire, England. Audrey was thrilled.
Lois said, ‘Well, that silver creamer of theirs never did look right in Wichita. They'll probably get a castle or something now.’
I wrote Audrey, asked her if Oxfordshire was near enough to visit Kath, find out just how bad things were with John. But we were too late. He died on January first, 1960.
All Kath wrote was:
I had him cremated. I do miss him. That's a lonely place to come back to when I finish work. I leave the telly on now, so the place sounds a bit cheerier when I come in. There was a bit of money left from the insurance so I've had the phone put in. First time it went off I jumped a mile high. I'm putting the rest in Premium Bonds.
She answered that telephone like she thought it might bite her. Then she screamed when she realised it was me.
‘What!’ she said. ‘All the way from America? What ever is that costing you?’
I said, ‘Never mind how much. Ain't this a miracle, that we can talk?’
‘That is,’ she said. ‘Miracle's about right.’ It was good to hear her funny old way of speaking.
I said, ‘I was so sorry to hear about John. You bearing up?’
‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘I forget sometimes. I'm busy at work, I don't have time to think. It's when I come home it hits me. But life goes on. I shall be all right.’
I said, ‘I guess it just takes time, Kath. How long were you two together?
‘How d'you mean?’ she said.
I said, ‘Married.’
It was a weird conversation. I could hear a kinda echo of my own voice, and then I had to wa
it while her answer came back. I pictured my words going down a long tube on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Her answer took even longer coming back that time.
I said, ‘You still there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I thought for a minute you asked me how long we'd been married. Must have been a crackle on the line.’
I called Betty after. I said, ‘Do you think maybe Kath and John Pharaoh weren't married?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I never saw her wedding album. Did you?’
I phoned Lois. Herb picked up. ‘Hey, Peggy!’ he said. ‘When are you gonna come up here and visit? You should come in the fall, see the leaves turn.’
He put Lois on.
I said, ‘John Pharaoh died. I don't suppose you heard?’
‘Who?’ she said. ‘Oh …yeah … I think I remember …’
I said, ‘Don't go through that charade for my benefit. I just thought you should know. You might drop Kath a line.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘What happened?’
I said, ‘Pneumonia. But he had all that other business. Nerves and everything. Still, he was only thirty-eight, Lo. Makes you think, don't it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Kath okay?’
I said, ‘She's a wonder.’
We talked about the kids and stuff. Sandie was in her school band, learning to play the cornet, and Kirk had been sent home — disruptive behaviour.
Lois said, ‘He's boisterous, that's all. It's natural in a boy. But his teacher is such a ‘fraidycat, so he gets sent home’.
I said, ‘Lo, you know John and Kath?’
‘Yeah?’ she said, kinda weary.
I said, ‘Did it ever cross your mind they weren't married?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘and who the hell cares?’
42
Christmas of 1960 I got two neat surprises: a card from Gayle, actually had more than a change of address in it; and a telephone call from Norfolk, England. Kath Pharaoh herself, gone international.
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