by Packer, Vin
During the war, of course, it was best of all. There were medals, but it wasn’t just the medals — it was before the medals. It was jumping out of that foxhole with mud on your face and some kind of crazy wings on your big, dirt-clogged fatigue boots, pulling the thing on the hand grenade and shouting “Yah! Yah! Yah!”, as though you were just routing out some stupid crows from a corn patch, instead of Germans.
“Boy, you sure have got guts!” someone would say.
“Man, are you out of your G.I. mind! The chances you take!” Someone else.
And once an officer who didn’t even know a single thing about Stanley Secora took one long look at him, and said he would be good front-line material. A thing like that could make Stanley’s day.
• • •
Stanley never knew where he got his nerve, but he knew he had it.
Every time he did something to win himself another medal, he knew no fear. He even began to believe nothing could touch him, not a bullet, not a mine, not a bomb — nothing, if he, Stanley Secora, had the bull by the horns. That belief kept him returning to the front; and ultimately returned him to an astounded, but nonetheless wildly pleased Cayuta…. Stanley Secora, the third-most-decorated soldier of World War II. The American Legion Band met his train. Min Stewart’s husband, who was still alive then, offered him a permanent job at the drug store (which he would have accepted if it were not for the fact he would have to work alongside Louie Stewart) and the Knights of Columbus had a Stanley Secora Night, with a huge bigger-than-life photograph of him all blown up and wired around the basketball net in the basement of Saint Alphonsus Church.
Stanley sat on the green bench that morning in May, smiling to recall those days. What was that song playing over and over that summer he was a hero? Got no something, got no hum, dum de dum de? Then he remembered. Got no dia-monds, got no rings, but I’ve got plenty of ev-ry thing: I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. That was it. It always reminded Stanley of good old 1946.
Beside Stanley on the bench were two boxes, one containing two pieces of coconut ice (candy he had made himself) and the other the first three chapters of his novel. The candy, he realized, was a romantic inspiration, and he felt a trifle sheepish about going behind Mr. Wealdon’s back. He could not justify his intentions toward Gloria Wealdon; he no longer tried. He was sick, silly, down-to-his-toes in love with the author ofPopulation 12,360, and that was that. The only thing thatdid make him feel better about his date with her that noon, was the fact that Love was not his sole motivation. There was his novel, which he wanted her to read; he called itA Vet’s Memories.
Stanley Secora, six months ago, would never have dreamed of getting anyplace with Milo Wealdon’s wife. Women (when he thought about themthat way) had always been a source of painful embarrassment to Stanley. It was because he felt clumsy and ugly in their presence. The summer of 1946, when he was at his peak,wearing his uniform around Cayuta with his medals pinned to it, some of the Polish girls from the Falcon’s Ladies Lodge had crushes on him. This did nothing to inspire confidence in Stanley. They were all fat and pimply and left-over, and instead of being flattered by their giggling and blushing in his presence, he felt conspicuous, as though he had cast his lot with them. It made him feel as though he were a war hero for nothing, and there was the slight suspicion that if he had not been a war hero, even those homely wallflowers would not have him.
• • •
Population 12,360 changed all that. When he read Gloria Wealdon’s novel, he saw himself in a new light. He was Will, the husky, somewhat awkward character who did odd jobs around the town. He was Will, and the heroine used to watch him mow her lawn from her window, and wonder what would happen if she called him into the house and showed him her sheerest black negligee. Stanley could almost remember one part word for word:
The sprinkler was turned on the hot, August-parched summer lawn. Will wore no shirt. His back was browned from the sun, and as he pushed the mower along the part behind the sprinkler, tiny blades of grass were caught in the cuffs of his worn levis. Now and then he stopped and flicked them away, or mopped his brow with an old soiled handkerchief he kept in his back trousers pocket. He looked big and perspiring, all down his back perspiring, like some kind of huge work animal who would do almost anything you told him to do. She thought of calling him, of telling him to come inside. She thought of saying: “I want you to do something for me, Will. I want you to pick me up and carry me over to that couch, and then I want you to rip my clothes off me and make me naked.”
Just thinking about it made Stanley’s pulse race.
• • •
He flipped his wrist up so he could see his watch. It was eleven-thirty. He had fifteen minutes more to wait. Near his wrist there was a bandage; he had burned himself while he was making the candy. It was painful, but he thought about it the way he had thought about his battle wounds during the war. It was part of the reward attached to winning; the only difference was that in this case he bore the scars of the battle before the battle was fought. There probably wouldn’t even be a battle, Stanley Secora decided happily. With Gloria Wealdon as his objective, victory was certain. He felt euphoric, and, like any good soldier, not at all brave yet.
Six
Miles was not violent, not about anything. The word violence to him was like ham to an orthodox Jew. Sure, there was such a thing, but he had only heard about it; never had a taste of it, nor any appetite for it…
— FROM Population 12,360
IN THE DREAM Gloria was dressed like Cinderella.
“I’m leaving you,” she said, “unless you can prove you’re the real Prince, and my literary agent is not. If you are,” she continued, “you’ll be able to wear this shoe.”
She held a space shoe in her hand. It was as big as a bread box.
Then there were the shots, one after the other,bang, bang, bang! …
• • •
Milo jumped to his feet. He stood in the living room, momentarily dazed. The dream was done. The banging continued.
Then he realized that someone was pulling on the front screen door, which he had locked just after his migraine had started. He had lain on the couch, intending to rest for only a few minutes, but he must have slept for twenty.
The clock on the mantle read eleven-forty. As he started toward the screen door, he could not deny that there was a certain sense of gratification in him, accomplished through the dream. He could not help it; it had started at the dream’s point when he had pulled the trigger on the gun. Only it was not a gun in the dream; it was an arsenate of lead bomb, the kind he had used last April to rid the iris of borers. But it had worked like a gun would; it had shot Gloria. He had awakened as she fell forward, clutching at her stomach.
• • •
Over and over in the past weeks, he had dreamed of killing his wife. The stuff of his dreams was theatrical, as though his unconscious mind were putting forth its whole imaginative effort to stage Gloria’s murder with every bit of uncanny creativity possessed by Milo. Once, last week, he had dreamed that Gloria was Saint Febronia. He had seen the angry mobs pull seventeen teeth from her mouth, tear her breasts off, and ultimately burn her. Another time, Milo had dreamed he was bent over a proud bi-colored narcissus in some dream garden, when he noticed that the tissues of the plant seemed soft and rotted. At the moment in the dream when he said, “This plant will die. It has Bortrytis Bulb Rot!” the yellow and the white of the flower faded together and became skin and the skin became Gloria’s face.
• • •
At the same time that Milo felt the gratification he felt sick in his heart. It was the same sickness that overtook him whenever he was reminded, in his gardening, or in his study of the saints’ lives, that the whole living world constituted a colossal cannibalism, a holocaust in which life continues only at the cost of death. Man lives because of the sacrifice of plants and animals, and in his own turn is a sacrifice to the birds and the worms, or to the bacilli which effect h
is death. Gloria, in his dreams, was sacrificed to his inmost hostile fantasies, just as he had been to hers in her novel. He smiled forlornly at the thought, and then found himself in his front hall, facing an even more forlorn fellow.
Unlatching the screen door, Milo said: “Come on in, Stanley. She isn’t home yet. I suspect she’ll be along in a while.”
“I thought you’d be at the track meet,” said Stanley, as he waddled past Milo. He was perspiring, and his glasses were steamed. Under his arm he carried two boxes; one small, like a jewelers box, the other withSPHINX TYPEWRITER PAPER, ESQUIRE BOND printed across it. He followed Milo into the living room, bumping into a chair en route. His face turned a brilliant red as he mumbled an inane apology to the furniture.
“I’m going to the meet in a very short while,” Milo told him.
About the only way Milo could communicate with Stanley Secora was to demonstrate his own ineptness. Milo himself stumbled as he bent over to pick up his sport coat from the couch. He said something equally inane: “Whoops-a-crazy-daisy.”
Both men laughed, and blushed, fidgeting nervously.
Milo remembered how he had quite inadvertently sculptured Saint Felix of Cantalice in a way which bore a very good likeness to Stanley. Even Gloria, who commented less and less on Milo’s sculptures, noticed the resemblance. She had said, “Migod, this one looks like Stanley Secora. Some saint he’d make, the blundering ox!”
“In a sense,” Milo had explained, “St. Felixwas an oaf, but I really hadn’t intended to draw a parallel.”
“You talk about them as if they were people you knew. How do you know St. Felix was like Secora?”
“I don’t. I never said they were alike. It was just an impression I wasn’t even aware of…. But it’s not too far wrong.”
“Well, you better get Saint Felix on the phone; the windows in the front need cleaning.”
“Saint Felix,” said Milo, “was always apologizing for himself — the way Stanley does. You know, as though he’s in the way. Felix wore a shirt studded with iron spikes, and he never wore shoes, and if anyone did something mean to him, he always said, ‘I pray God that you may become a saint.’ “
“Some kind of masochist, if you ask me,” said Gloria.
“Most of the saints were, when you think about it.”
“I’d rather think about the Marquis de Sade,” said Gloria. “That’s what makes horse races, ah, Milo?”
At those times, Milo Wealdon felt no streak of hatred in him toward her. He wasall hatred, with a streak of forgiveness in him toward Gloria, so tiny that it was like a sliver in the backside of a rhinoceros. Still, his hatred was impotent. He was left quaking with it, helpless. It was like a migraine. He just had to wait until it went away.
Stanley Secora’s voice cut into his reverie.
“Yes,” Stanley repeated, “I thought you’d be over at the high school, Mr. Wealdon.”
“Oh, I’m going there,” Milo said. “Mrs. Wealdon ought to be along any minute.”
Stanley sank into the folds of the couch. “Tempus fugit,” he smiled.
Milo was about to say something compulsive and idiotic like “It certainly does fugit,” but both of them were saved from the preposterous conversation by Gloria’s sudden appearance.
To Milo she said, “Well, I hear you’ve won the Fultons over to your side! Playing the part of the great all-suffering husband, ready to forgive me anything!” She punctuated her sentence with that littlePsssss noise she made whenever she wanted to ridicule something.
She said to Stanley, “It must be mental telepathy, Stanley. I was just noticing that our car could use a good bath.”
“Stanley is here to discuss writing with you,” Milo told her.
“Don’t get that supercilious tone in your voice, J.C.,” she answered sarcastically, standing legs spread and arms akimbo, with her head cocked to one side. “You’resuch a martyr, aren’t you,dear good Milo?”
Stanley was squirming in his seat, his fat hands twisting the manuscript box flap in an anguished manner.
Milo realized something had gone wrong at the Fultons.
Again, he felt the tentacles of pity reach out from him, felt his anger and embarrassment fade. He wanted to say: how sorry I am, Glo; at the same time he pictured the benign face of Freddy Fulton, and thought how quiet and subtle their friendship had always been. Only a few days ago, when Milo had felt an almost overwhelming urge to talk to someone about his plot for revenge, he had gone through the shortcut in the fields to visit with Freddy. He had stood beside him before the lycium halimifoliums, and theyhad talked, but not a word about his plot. Freddy’s unshakable dignity had sustained Milo in that moment of weakness, had saved Milo from the vulgar experience of unburdening himself to another person.
He had never stopped admiring Freddy for the way he had handled himself in his affair with Edwina Dare. Even Gloria had never gotten wind of that chapter in the Fultons’ life; so few in Cayuta had. There were rumors among some of the town’s businessmen at the time, but the girl’s name was not known. Sometimes Milo wondered whether it was a fluke, or an act of faith on Freddy’s part, that Freddy did something that told Milo who she was.
He had done it one evening back in 1953. He had taken Milo aside at one of the country club buffets, and had said that he wanted his advice about something. He had a friend, he said, who was a Catholic. He wanted to give this friend a medal of some kind, as a gift. A sort of going-away present.
“You know about the saints and all that, Milo,” said he. “What could you give someone who was around books all the time?”
“St. Catharine is the saint of learned men,” Milo had told him.
“Isn’t there a saint for someone who sells books?”
Edwina Dare, the girl who worked at The Book Mart … plain, quiet, nice Edwina Dare. Milo had often been waited on by her in the Mart, when he ordered the Peterson field guide series, or the texts for his classes in skin and scuba diving. Memory is an uncanny confederate. He could remember then an afternoon out near Hubbard’s nursery, on the outskirts of Cayuta, when he had come across Freddy’s Buick, parked and empty. Milo had pulled up and parked beside it, and as he was getting out to see if he could find Freddy, he found him, sitting on a log just at the entrance to the woods, with Edwina Dare. They had exchanged pleasantries. Freddy had made no attempt to explain what he was doing there in mid-afternoon with Edwina, and Milo somehow had not thought that peculiar. He had been only slightly surprised at seeing Edwina with Freddy, yet not surprised enough to dwell on it. Perhaps the most peculiar part about the whole incident was that later in the day, when Milo and Gloria had a drink in the backyard with Freddy and Fern, neither man referred to the meeting. It was as though their silence on the matter was simply understood. And yet, until Freddy asked Milo about the saint who sold books, it never occurred to Milo that Freddy was deeply in love with Edwina Dare.
Milo had simply answered, “St. John Port Latin is the saint you want.”
“Thanks,” Freddy had said. He had clapped Milo across the shoulder, and they had gone back to join the others.
That had been all there was to it.
Now, Milo supposed, Freddy was somehow making it obvious to Gloria that he did not approve of her, making it obvious, undoubtedly, through Fern. It was a vote of confidence in Milo, but like all of them he had received in the past, it made Milo want to protect Glo, protect her even from his own inevitable pity.
• • •
He said nothing more to her. He walked from the living room with his sport coat hung across his shoulder, leaving her with Secora, thinking for the first time that day that he did not want any revenge, that, God help him, he was all she had, wasn’t he? The word Pitts came to mind, but he thought only of seedy old peach and olive pits, and of all things left-over and unwanted, things no one loved, and his anxiety and bitterness knew a respite in sadness and sympathy, which in fact had always been an asylum for him.
Seven
; Will began to be an obsession with her. When would they be alone together? Wasn’t she actually afraid of him? And the thought that she could be really afraid of any man made her tingle all over.
— FROM Population 12,360
GLORIA reached into her frontier pants for her package of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke from her nostrils as she strode across to the picture window, feeling quite a lot like Bette Davis. Except for the stomach ache, another one of her damn nervous stomach aches. She could not forget Fern’s remark about Freddy being stuffy — the reason he was (how had she put it?) never “overly-fond ofyou, dear.” That’s rich, she thought, oh thatis rich. Freddy Fulton stuffy!
“And so,” she said as she stared out at the Japanese quince, “you want to be a writer, Stanley.” She sucked in smoke, turning then in a fast movement, facing him.
Stanley Secora looked as though he were going to faint. Instead, he nodded. He was perspiring and his face was the color of a lobster. Gloria thought of the hero of Victor Hugo’s novel about Notre Dame — Quasimodo, the deaf, deformed, grotesque bell-ringer of the cathedral, who was in love with the beautiful Esmeralda.
She said, “What have you written?”
“A book. My war memories, Mrs. Wealdon.” He held out the manuscript box. A timid smile crossed his countenance. “Don’t be nervous, m’am.”
“Nervous, Stanley?”
“I’m sorry. I mean, I can’t thank you enough for giving up this time to read it.”
“You mean read it right now?” She laughed. “I just can’t sit down and start to read it now.”
She took the manuscript box and placed it on the end table. “I have a date for lunch.”
Stanley fumbled in the pocket of his sweater jacket until he found the other box, the small one. “I brought you some candy.”