To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  When Deena Schmidt read this letter, she shook her head in wonderment. “Well! I can think of three girls right now who would’ve gone into a dark room with Patrick Guest if he’d shown the slightest interest, which he never did. I’m impressed.”

  Judith wasn’t so sure. Though it was true that the Patrick Guest she remembered was calm and competent and perfectly okay-looking, except for the bangs, which could be cut off in a minute. She looked again at the letter. “Was he smart in school?” she asked.

  “I think so, but it was hard to tell. He missed half his tests because of farm work.”

  Judith folded the letter back into its envelope, and an odd correspondence soon developed between Rufus Sage and Woolcott. Judith’s notes played on their shared status as outsiders in new schools (Do you think it’s a moral failing for me to secretly root against our football team? And: This is the first school I’ve ever attended where I don’t have a crush-worthy male teacher. Do you like any of your teachers?) She found Patrick Guest’s responses endearing (I don’t just hope my supposed team will lose, I hope they’ll lose by 50 points. And: I don’t like any of my teachers here male or female, except for maybe my Spanish teacher who at least tries to act human.)

  What Judith may have liked best about her new home life was its lack of irritants. The rooms were tidy, the bills were paid, the freezer was full. She enjoyed her father’s company when she had it, but she enjoyed, too, the Tuesday and Thursday evenings when he was teaching and she could stay home reading by the fire or just staring into it. Her father often came home late from his night classes, and he was otherwise far busier than he’d been in the summer, but he seemed to enjoy the close proximity of their separate worlds. He’d purchased an old mahogany partners desk that he set in the front room, not far from the fireplace, so that on those evenings he was home he would put one of his favorite composers on the stereo at low volume and they would read and do their work while enjoying the music and each other’s silent company and the warmth of the fire.

  One night she found herself drawn to a song so evocative it seemed almost haunting. “What’s this?”

  Her father had been absorbed in his reading and had to catch up with the question. He looked at her, then tilted his head to the music. “Samuel Barber.”

  “No, I mean what is this particular song?”

  Judith heard him say, “ ‘To Be Sung Underwater.’ ”

  She liked the song, and she liked the title. She closed her eyes and imagined singing mermaids and humming whales. So it was a disappointment to her when, drawn closer to the strange music, she turned over the cassette case and found she had misheard. Its correct title was “To Be Sung on the Water,” a good title, better than the one she’d heard, which, now that she thought of it, was preposterous.

  Scotch was her father’s winter drink, either Dewars or J&B, whichever was cheaper at Lariat Liquor, and he generally liked a small tumbler while cooking dinner and another as he sat with his schoolwork. Conversations with him were pleasant and calming, filled with easy silences, and they afforded Judith beguiling glimpses of adulthood’s wider field of vision. Once, at a sudden shift and crackle from the fireplace, she looked up from a geometry problem and found him watching her.

  “What?” she said.

  He turned toward the fire. “I was just thinking how odd it is that I came here against my wishes to spend my teenage years, and how at roughly the same time in your life, you’ve come of your own accord.”

  Judith said, “I read in Seventeen that most teenagers want to be either someone else or somewhere else, or both.”

  Her father released one of his small puffing laughs and looked again at the fire. “I underappreciated what my grandparents provided me. I knew my grandmother was fond of me. She was always adjusting a collar or smoothing a hair so she’d have a chance to kiss me on the forehead”—Judith’s father smiled—“which was her particular specialty.” She was a homemaker, he said, and if that wasn’t enough for her, she didn’t show it. Once, when he asked her what she liked best in the whole world, she said baking in the winter and gardening in the spring. She belonged to PEO, Republican Women, and the Children’s Home Auxiliary, whose shoe drive she organized every autumn. A smile formed on his lips. “All day long she hummed to herself, a low tuneless drone, and when she stopped for a moment I took it as a sign she might be passing gas.”

  Judith laughed, then waited, and after a second or two, he said his grandfather was more aloof, a gray kind of man. “He worked for Stockmen’s Bank and had seen enough droughts and hailstorms and failed farms that he’d armored himself with a somberness so complete that to a teenage boy he could seem not quite human. He was so stiff in his walk I used to think he had mechanical hinges at his knees and elbows.” A pause. “I thought my grandparents were indifferent to my progress—they never, for example, asked about my schoolwork or what I intended to do after high school, and they were as surprised that I was going to college as they were that I’d been offered a scholarship to do it—but I think now that what seemed like inattention was an intentional gift. They knew enough to leave me alone. Nobody said, ‘Go play football,’ or ‘So-and-so needs part-time help.’ They saw I loved to read, so they let me read. Even at church. Oh, at the appropriate times I’d stand and kneel and put my hands together, of course, but during the entire sermon I would read a book while my grandparents pretended not to notice. The other parishioners noticed, though, and one Sunday as we were leaving church one of the deacons approached my grandfather about it on the steps. Some consider it disrespectful, the man said, and my grandfather, who was such a recessive man, didn’t hesitate a fraction of a second. He said, ‘I suppose before talking to me, you discussed this with Reverend Steele?’ The man nodded, and my grandfather said, ‘Then please ask Reverend Steele which he prefers, my grandson and his book with us in our pew next Sunday, or my wife and me respectfully finding another house of worship.’ ” Judith’s father stared into the fire a few seconds. “It was at that point I realized my grandfather was fond of me, too.”

  It was quiet, then Judith said, “What did Reverend Steele do?”

  Her father shrugged. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. “He wrote a note of genteel capitulation. You, your grandson, and his books are all welcome, et cetera.”

  He fell silent and kept looking at the fire, and much later in her life Judith would come to believe that he’d provided this anecdote as a gloss for his own way of parenting, and it would help her understand his general pattern of nonintervention and make all the more perplexing the single significant occasion when he had acted otherwise. That night, though, it was quiet for a time, until the burning logs suddenly shifted. Her father rose from his side of the desk.

  “Ice cream?” he said.

  Their favorite was black walnut topped with a chocolate sauce he made with his own proportions of cocoa, sugar, butter, and heavy cream.

  One Saturday afternoon in early December Judith grew tired of waiting for her father—he’d gone to campus for unspecified reasons—so she took the book she was reading and walked down to the Dairy Queen, where Deena worked. She turned the corner onto King Street and was walking midblock when she became aware of a vehicle lagging just behind her. It was an orange newer-model pickup truck with yellow flames painted along the side of its hood and some kind of fancy chrome wheels. As the truck drew even with her, the driver leaned toward the open passenger-side window and looked at her. He wore a white cowboy hat, and his face was round and pink. When Judith set her chin and turned her head pointedly away, the truck crept alongside for another twenty yards or so, then shot ahead, wheels squealing, and at the corner turned out of view.

  At the Dairy Queen, the owner, Mr. Edmundson, was doing the cooking, which meant no obvious monkey business, so Judith stood before the ORDER HERE sign and said to Deena, “One hamburger, well done, no mustard, extra tomatoes please, a small order of fries, unsalted, and a lemon Coke with three ice cubes.”

  Un
der her breath Deena said, “Up yours with mustard, Judith.”

  Judith stared at the elasticized plastic stretched tight over Deena’s red hair and said in a sweet voice, “Love your headgear, Deena.”

  At the Coke machine, shielded from Mr. Edmundson’s view, Deena pretended to spit into Judith’s cup before filling it. “You did say a lemon Coke, didn’t you?”

  Judith laughed, which she’d always understood to be one of the critical things a friend should be able to make you do, but there was more to this friendship than that. Though she’d lived here all her life, Deena Schmidt, like Judith, preferred looking in from the fringes. Deena had taken the Dairy Queen job because it allowed her to earn pocket money while keeping tabs on the social ebb and flow—the unions and, more interesting, the partings. Most local girls wanted to be homemakers, stewardesses, or nurses, but Deena wanted to be a divorce attorney, because, she said, “there’ll never be a shortage of irreconcilable differences.” Deena had been pleased when Judith began referring to the Rufus Sage cheerleaders as the Sage Hens. (In honor of the fur trapper for whom the town was named, they worked out a pump, thrust, and kick routine for “Rufus, Rufus, he’s our man, if he can’t kill it, no one can!”) Though she wouldn’t have said so out loud, Judith believed Deena was the only girl in school smart enough to envy her.

  This afternoon Judith took her hamburger and lemon Coke to a corner table, where she ate and read This Side of Paradise (the world of Princeton it portrayed was both incomprehensible and fascinating to Judith, and she liked Amory Blaine for the calculated way he tried to direct his trajectory upward). She was nibbling fries and Amory Blaine was screaming down the highway among a carload of boisterous schoolboys off for a wintry seaside weekend when Deena abruptly sat down at the table. She had a damp rag in her hand, but she’d taken off her plastic hat and was shaking out her long red hair.

  Judith looked around and said, “Where’d Mr. Ed go?”

  “He’s in the boys’ room taking advantage of himself.” Deena grinned, and the yellow in her eyes glinted. “Guess you didn’t see Melinda Payne come in.” Melinda Payne was a six-foot-tall bank clerk who always wore twin sets that showed to advantage breasts that Deena enjoyed describing as Tetonic. “Mr. Ed always heads for the john after a visit from the Tetons.”

  Judith made a private resolution never to eat food Mr. Edmundson had touched or even been in the close vicinity of. She mentioned the pink-faced man in the orange pickup with flames.

  “Sounds like Boss Krauss,” Deena said. “He’s a total troglodyte.” This being Deena’s new word. “What was he doing?”

  “Staring.”

  “That’s him. First he stares and drools, then after a few rounds of that, he tries to strike up a conversation.”

  Judith said that sounded like something to look forward to. They were quiet a second or two, during which time Deena’s expression turned sly.

  “So do you want to see Patrick Guest?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to see Patrick Guest? It’s not that tough a question.”

  Judith honestly didn’t know. She liked writing Patrick Guest short silly notes, and she liked getting his odd notes in return, but he hadn’t responded at all to her last two cards. “See him where? Is he in Rufus Sage?”

  He wasn’t, but Deena said that her two uncles were driving down to look at somebody’s ranching operation near Woolcott, and they could drop them at Patrick’s for a visit. This was the next day. There were more specifics, and though Judith nodded and said, “Okay,” she couldn’t bring herself to think it sounded like fun.

  “You’ll call him first, so he’ll know we’re coming?” she said.

  Deena’s eyes brightened. “What’s the matter with a pop-in? Afraid we’ll meet his new girlfriend?”

  “Promise, or I’m not going,” Judith said.

  Deena promised, and was talking about how weird her uncles were when she abruptly stopped, and Judith followed her gaze to Mr. Edmundson returning from the bathroom. Deena was pulling her plastic hair cap on as Mr. Edmundson came through the door, but he didn’t look at the girls. He just slipped behind the counter and went to work scraping the grill.

  Melvin and Mickey Eleson were Deena’s uncles on her mother’s side, but they seemed to Judith as unlike Deena’s mother as two humans could be. For one thing, Deena’s mother rarely spoke, whereas the uncles hardly stopped. They were also cheerful. They picked up Deena and Judith two hours before dawn, and though Judith could hardly function at that hour, the uncles, sitting up front in clean snap-button shirts and sweat-stained cowboy hats, seemed to think it was the top of the morning. They talked, laughed, and bickered without restraint. The passenger-side uncle offered the girls brownies he’d made himself and poured black coffee into Styrofoam cups that to Judith’s eye appeared to have been used before. The back seat of the Riviera was roomy, and Judith had almost dozed off when Deena made the mistake of asking her uncles just what kind of operation they were going downstate to see.

  “You tell her,” the driving uncle said, and the other uncle said, “Well, it’s a fool’s errand and that’s why we have the job.”

  The uncles, it turned out, had gotten wind of some kind of mysterious high-yield ranching operation from a man who’d stopped at Daylight Donuts on his way east a week before. When the uncles had told the man they were cattle ranchers, the man said he’d run cattle for years, too, until he got a little smarter. He pulled a card from his wallet that said, Fritz C. Hoffman, Stock Consultant, along with a telephone number with a 237 area code. At the bottom, in smaller letters, it said, Legitimate Inquiries Only. “Fritz is who you want to talk to,” the man said, “but do us both a favor and keep it to yourselves.” He smiled. “It’s just one pie. We don’t need smaller slices.” The uncles watched the man drive away from Daylight Donuts in a late-model Coupe de Ville. When they’d called the number on the card, the man who answered acknowledged that he was Fritz C. Hoffman, but in terms of his ranching operation he wasn’t forthcoming. Finally he said, “Look, fellas, if I was to tell you what we’re doing down here, you wouldn’t hardly believe it. The only way is to see it for yourself.”

  The uncles made a show of not expecting much from the trip, but Judith had the feeling the jokes about how they’d soon be driving Coupe de Villes and spending winters in Key West seemed to have something very much like real hope buried in the middle of them.

  Shortly after dawn the geography grew flat and the uncles fell quiet. Judith drifted to sleep and didn’t awaken until the driving uncle said, “Okay, gals, this is your stop,” and the other uncle said, “Last call for all sleeping beauties.”

  Judith peered out at a row of small, untended houses. A squat stucco building of faint blotchy blue had the address 242 hand-painted on the door. “Is this Adams?” Judith said, because honestly, she didn’t see how it could be.

  “Unless it changed names midblock,” the driving uncle said. The other uncle said there was a little restaurant a few blocks down where Adams hit the main drag, such as it was. “Country Kettle or Country Kitchen or Country something. We’ll meet you there at one o’clock.”

  The girls got out and stood in the sudden cold watching the car drive away. From the passenger window, one uncle extended his cowboy hat and gave it a sweeping wave, and then the old green Riviera turned the corner and was out of view.

  Judith and Deena looked at the dingy blue house, looked at each other, and began moving toward the door.

  “I feel like I need a little prep time,” Judith said. All of her parts felt frozen, including her hair, and she felt strangely irritated. She wanted to say, Whose idea was this, anyhow?

  There was a TV going in the house, some kind of sporting event, and Deena knocked twice before a boy who didn’t quite look like Patrick Guest opened the door.

  “Patrick?” Deena said.

  The boy nodded.

  After a full second passed, Deena said, “It’s me. Deena. Deena Schmidt.”
/>   The boy stared blankly.

  Judith thought she was having some kind of out-of-body experience.

  Deena was actually pointing at her. “And Judith Toomey. We were in the neighborhood.”

  “Hi,” Judith said. It was clear Deena had not called in advance, as promised.

  The boy who shifted his bewildered gaze to Judith seemed no closer than a distant cousin to Patrick Guest. He’d lost his forward-leaning look, and beneath some kind of flesh-colored dermatology paste his face was alive with a secreting acne that made him hard to look at. He knew this, too—she could see it in the way his eyes slid downward from hers.

  “I liked getting your letters,” Judith said, but he didn’t look up.

  A woman’s voice from within the house said, “Patrick?”

  He turned, and there was Delia Guest, looking like her own ghost. Her skin was waxy, and her hair hung in strings. She blinked in the sunlight, took the girls in, then stepped back.

  “These are girls from Rufus Sage,” Patrick said in a flat voice. “Deena Schmidt and Judith Toomey. They were just in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m Deena,” Deena said. “She’s Judith.”

  A horrible silence followed, and Judith heard herself say, “I’ve never been to Woolcott before.”

  Deena gave her a look, and there they all were, Patrick in the doorway, his mother behind him, and Deena and Judith outside in the bitter cold realizing that if anybody were going to invite them in, it would have happened by now.

  Finally Patrick’s mother said in a small voice, “How is your father?”

  Judith didn’t realize Delia Guest was talking to her until Deena turned toward her. “Oh. He’s fine,” Judith said. “I’ll tell him you asked.”

  Delia Guest took this in and said, “Did he know you were coming here?”

  Judith shook her head, which was the truth. When she’d told her father about the excursion with Deena and her uncles, she’d left out the part about visiting Patrick Guest.