To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  He was looking at her thoughtfully, which also irritated her.

  She said, “Tonight, in the Laurel Canyon Vons, I had three different employees ask if I had found everything I wanted. Three. And they were all grinning like idiots. I thought I was in the Magic Kingdom or something.” That Malcolm seemed amused by this only deepened her annoyance. “Three times. I was minding my own business, but three times. I should’ve said, Solitude. On what aisle will I find solitude?” Malcolm’s smile, calm, knowing—it was driving her crazy. “What?” she said.

  He kept his benevolent expression and gave his shoulders the subtlest shrug. “Do you think miffy is a word?”

  Almost luxuriantly, something dark and venomous unfolded within Judith. She said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Malcolm tried to keep the tone airy. “I suppose it would mean prone toward miffedness.”

  “A synonym of pissy, you might say.”

  “I guess so.” He looked away, inhaled, exhaled. He was tired. A fight was not what he was spoiling for.

  “Then why not just say pissy?”

  “You’ve got me there,” he said. “As a small nod to civility?”

  Judith felt a little of the sourness drain from her mood, but only a little.

  After a few silent seconds, Malcolm tried a change of subjects. “I’m taking Sonya and Milla to the Getty tomorrow morning,” he said. “Something about a world-cultures assignment for Milla, and Sonya has never seen it.” He gave Judith a hopeful look. “Care to join us? We could go to Modo Mio afterward for lunch.”

  An olive branch—she liked the restaurant’s cozy atmosphere and salmon penne—so two Judiths fought for a moment, the one who wouldn’t mind pretending all was well and by doing so perhaps in fact make it so, and the one who wanted to hold open her grudge-keeping options. She said, “Tempting, but no.”

  “No?”

  “We’re moving the bird’s-eye maple tomorrow. I rented a storage unit.”

  He took this in. “We could stay and help.”

  “You could, but you shouldn’t. It’s all lined up with a guy from work who has a truck and can use the extra money.”

  Malcolm had finished the ratatouille but was running a scrap of bread through the sauce. “Should I feel unwanted or merely unneeded?”

  “How about excused without prejudice or something like that?”

  “Okay,” Malcolm said, “but only on condition you and I have dinner next Saturday night at the new Italian place on Melrose with the chef from Valentino.” He smiled his thin urbane smile. “The kind of place you might wear the little black dress the girls and I will acquire for you after lunch tomorrow.”

  She said, “Are you feeling contrite about something?”

  He shook his head, and his expression—was it truly surprise or simply meant to suggest it?—dissolved into amusement. “I’m not,” he said. “But perhaps that’s just a failure of self-awareness.” Then he smiled at her, a warm, authentic, enfolding smile, and asked if she was still a flawless size six.

  8

  The first Christmas with her father in Nebraska was, in Judith’s opinion, almost perfect: they cooked and consumed a delicious meal, he told her a story she’d never heard, and then they went for a walk.

  It had snowed the night before, a dry, clean, piling snow, and when she’d come up from the basement in the morning, the streets hadn’t been plowed, so the whiteness was unbroken and all the roofs and trees and fences were plump with snow. Judith and her father shoveled the front walk while the beef roasted (the accompaniments were to be twice-baked potatoes, peas with pearl onions, and curried fruit). Judith set out her grandparents’ good china and silverware, and before her father brought out the serving dishes, she lighted candles and looked at the stemmed glass of red wine he poured for her, though she barely sipped from it. For dessert they had strawberry ice cream with slivered almonds, and he brewed them coffee. It was all serene and beautiful and orderly. They washed and dried the china and set the silverware into the slots of its velvet-lined box, then he laid a fire in the front room, where they unwrapped their presents. He’d bought her a Victorian punch-paper sampler in an old red frame. The sampler said:

  LOST,

  YESTERDAY,

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNSET,

  TWO GOLDEN HOURS,

  EACH SET WITH SIXTY DIAMOND MINUTES.

  NO REWARD IS OFFERED,

  FOR THEY ARE GONE FOREVER.

  —HORACE MANN.

  He’d found it in an antiques store in Hemingford, a transaction he recalled wryly. “Before taking my money, the saleswoman said, ‘Isn’t it precious?’ ”

  “Horace did lay it on pretty thick,” Judith said, “but I still love it.”

  “Yeah. I did, too.”

  Her mother had sent an equally odd gift, an ancient handsome barometer whose brass arrow pointed to a section marked Change. Her father opened the present she’d bought for him—a bottle of Glenmorangie single-malt scotch—and seemed shocked into stillness. “How…?”

  “I knew you liked scotch, so I read up on it.”

  “No, but… logistically… how?”

  “Mom did the actual ordering,” Judith said, and felt a pang at the completeness of her own contentment. “I should call her,” she said, and her father nodded distractedly while heading to the kitchen for a glass.

  But when Judith went to the hall phone and dialed the number in Vermont, a man answered in an odd, not-quite British accent. “Greetings and goodwill to all,” he said.

  “Jonathan?” The tall man with the arm gestures and the Buffalo Bill jacket.

  “Hello, love,” he said, still using the half-baked accent. “I’ll get your mum. She’s been hoping you’d ring.”

  When he put the phone down, Judith could hear significant background commotion: loud voices, laughter, even some singing. She’d nearly given up on her mother’s answering when finally she did. “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  Judith said, “Why is Jonathan talking like that?”

  “Oh, sweetie, it’s so quiet here without you and I was dreading Christmas and Jonathan saved the day by having everyone here for a traditional English Christmas. We’re having duck and a roasted pear and Amaretto trifle and ever so many yummy things. Oh, and crackers! You know, those wrapped cardboard tubes that go pop? We have a gazillion of those!”

  After a second or two, Judith said, “And that’s why he’s talking with that absurd accent?”

  Her mother’s laugh was merry. “It is absurd, isn’t it, but it’s been terrific for cheering me up.” Silence lengthened, and finally her mother said, “So what do you think of the antique barometer?”

  By the time Judith went back to the living room, her father had poured a small amount of scotch into two cut-glass tumblers and was waiting in his red floral chair.

  “May we always have a clean shirt and a dollar in our pocket,” he said, and they gently clicked glasses.

  Judith sipped and nearly spit hers back in the glass. “Oh, my God!” she said. “How can anything that vile cost that much?”

  Her father wore an expression of utter contentment. “Silk made fluid,” he said.

  She handed hers over. “Then please finish mine.”

  He took her glass and said, “And how is your mother?”

  “She said she’d been depressed, so she invited some people over for dinner,” Judith said. “Also, it turns out the barometer she gave me always says Change. That’s why she liked it.”

  “Ah,” her father said. “The unappeasable barometer. No matter how much we change, it asks for more.”

  Judith, who already viewed the gift warily, now wondered how to get rid of it. Set it out in the alley on top of the trash, maybe, and let some rummager haul the curse away. (She didn’t. She stored it in the back of her closet, and years later, after her father’s funeral, she discovered it hanging in his office at the college.)

  Her father was regarding his tumbler of sc
otch, swirling the liquor gently, watching it coat the crystal. He said he had the feeling that going back to the cheap stuff was going to be a humbling experience. Then he said, “These are the same glasses my father drank bourbon from.”

  “Your father?”

  “Is that what I said? I meant my grandfather.” He thought about it. “He also had a cut-glass decanter he poured it from, but that’s gone now.”

  Judith looked again at the barometer. Then, without giving it much thought, she said, “Didn’t you ever wonder who your father was?”

  He stared at her. “I know who he was. Who said I didn’t?”

  “Mom. She said your mother never married and would never say who your father was. Plus you never mentioned him.”

  Her father sipped his scotch and gazed into the fire. She waited until she couldn’t wait any longer.

  “So who was your father, then?”

  The embers shifted and glowed orange, and he rose to feed the fire two more logs. From his armchair, he watched the flame spread and said, “Today my mother would be called a single mom, but in those days she was an unwed mother.” He sipped his scotch and kept talking. He and his mother had lived in San Francisco from the time he was born until she died, when he was twelve. He believed his mother had gone to San Francisco because it was a more openhearted town than most when it came to misfits like herself. She’d found work with a legal publisher named Bancroft-Whitney. His mother adhered to routine, a practice (he smiled when he said this) she’d passed on to her son. After school, he spent afternoons at the home of Henry Salvatori, a schoolmate whose mother made cocoa and cinnamon toast and would let them lie under the dining room table reading comic books (his favorite was a supernatural crime fighter known as Doctor Occult). Sunday afternoons he and his mother walked to the Cliff House, where his mother would have a Remus fizz, her one weekly self-indulgence, and he would have a Coke float. On cold or wet days they’d step down from the Cliff House to the Musée Mécanique, where he would stand a little back from the machines and wait for someone to put a nickel in the slot and bring the mechanical characters to life (his favorite was Susie the Can-Can Dancer). On pleasant days they would walk to the park. His mother would sit on a bench and read the Examiner, or gaze over it at him, or sometimes close her eyes and tilt her head back to receive the mild warmth of the sun. He assumed his mother to be happy, but later, looking back, he thought she was only as happy as a person waiting for the next phase of her life might be.

  On the afternoon of his mother’s death, he was called into the school office, where Mrs. Tompkins, the principal, explained that his mother had become ill at work and been taken to the hospital. She’ll be all right, though? he asked, and Mrs. Tompkins said she truly hoped so. But Mrs. Tompkins didn’t look herself—her face wasn’t right—and she explained that he would spend the night with Henry Salvatori. Instead he stayed two. Henry didn’t look at him differently, but Mrs. Salvatori did. So did the teachers at school.

  On the third day he was called out of the classroom and found his grandparents waiting for him in the hallway. He had never seen his grandparents outside Nebraska, and their appearance in San Francisco frightened him. They were like Mrs. Tompkins and the other adults—they didn’t look like themselves. They walked him outside. They sat alone near the flagpole—whenever he later heard the lazy resonant clinking of a rope against a metal flagpole he would recall this scene—and his grandfather explained that his mother had died when a blood vessel in her brain burst. He would go with them to Nebraska. His grandmother said they’d packed most of his things, but they wanted him to be sure they hadn’t left anything important behind.

  When he walked into the flat with his grandparents, it was no longer the place in which he’d lived with his mother. The furniture and carpets were gone. His grandparents’ whispers sounded loud in the bare rooms. He went through a cardboard box filled with his discarded possessions and pulled out a few things to take along—a folded picture of Whirlaway from Life, three Doctor Occult comic books, and a Cub Scout buckle he’d found and kept even though he’d never been a Cub Scout. He went into his mother’s room. There was nothing there. He took a deep breath, but it didn’t smell like his mother’s room anymore. He opened the door to the small walk-in closet. It was empty, too, but her smell was still there. He closed the door behind him. He stayed there, breathing in his mother’s smell. He heard the tapping of his grandparents’ shoes on the bare floor and stood perfectly still. They called his name and he held his breath. Finally the door opened. His grandfather looked in at him. “We need to go now, Howard,” he said in a low voice, and Howard allowed himself to be led away.

  On the train his grandparents gave him the window seat, so he could watch the countryside and then, at night, the lights. From time to time he would see a light in a distant farmhouse window, and once he saw a small campfire and wondered if there were still cowboys or Indians or hobos who slept out on the open plains. His grandfather was the first to fall asleep in the reclining seats. His grandmother knitted in dim light. Finally Howard closed his eyes. Sometime during the night he dreamed he was in his room in San Francisco and his mother had come, as she came every night before she went to bed, and pulled his covers to his chin and said, Another good day, kiddo. He began to awaken then, and in those transient slippery moments between sleeping and waking, he felt the closeness to his mother he had for the past few days been craving. He opened his eyes. Evidently he’d been speaking or making sounds, because his grandparents were looking at him in the darkness.

  He said, “She’s here, isn’t she?”

  His grandmother seemed frozen by these words. She didn’t move and didn’t speak. His grandfather leaned forward. “Yes. That’s right. We’re taking her home, too. We’ve got a plot for her in the churchyard.”

  Judith’s father rose, punched the fire with a new log before laying it into the orange coals, then reseated himself and said, “I haven’t forgotten your question, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything,” Judith said.

  He finished his scotch and kept the glass in his hand. He said there were a surprising number of people at the funeral, most of them friends of his grandparents, but some of them had known his mother as a little girl. Two of them told him his mother had been sharp as a tack. If she’d been a man, one of them said, she would’ve been a doctor or a lawyer. The casket was open. He went up when no one was there. He touched her skin, but it had lost its softness. She felt like a doll of herself. He went out and sat under the porch of the funeral home, where he wouldn’t be seen. Men came out from time to time, and one of them said to another that he was surprised that Mert Feister had showed up, and the other man gave a small laugh and wondered aloud whether Mert’s wife had given him permission.

  A few days later, Howard took the funeral register into the kitchen, where his grandmother was ironing. He read a couple of names—Alvin Lemon, Bob Brubaker—and asked who they were. She told him. Then he read Mert Feister and asked who he was, and his grandmother just said, Oh, he runs the Western Wear in town. He said he’d heard a man at the funeral say that it was funny Mert Feister would come. His grandmother sprinkled water on the shirt she was ironing. She had a pop bottle fitted with a corked sprinkler cap. He asked why it would be funny that Mert Feister would come.

  His grandmother was being careful, he could tell, and finally she said, well, Mert Feister had been a sweetheart of his mother’s for a while. Then Mert Feister had fallen for Dory Atkins, who, his grandmother said, had had her cap set for him since grammar school. His grandmother didn’t think Howard’s mother minded the loss much, to be truthful, but Dory Atkins never let Mert Feister say a word to Howard’s mother ever after. She guessed that Dory was now thinking there was no point in fretting over a dead woman—a foolish idea, in his grandmother’s opinion.

  He asked if his mother had ever had any other sweethearts, and after a moment’s hesitation, his grandmother said in a decisive t
one that no, she had not.

  The following day, Howard walked up to Feister’s Western Wear. Mert and Dory Feister were both there. She quickly came down the aisle and said, “Let me know if you need help,” and otherwise they didn’t say another word to him. He went back several more afternoons, and even began saving for a long-sleeved green shirt he saw there. On his fifth or sixth visit, Dory Feister came up to him and asked what he was there for. Her tone wasn’t friendly. To see if the green shirt is still here, he said. She asked which green shirt, and when he showed her, she pulled it from the stack and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Take it, it’s yours, but for God’s sake leave us alone.”

  Judith’s father turned the tumbler in his hand. “I did leave them alone, of course.”

  “So he was your…” Her voice trailed away.

  “Putative father,” her father said. A dry smile. “Though even at that age I had some sense that a man wasn’t much of a father if all he was willing to give to the enterprise was a small donation of personal lust.”

  The fire needed another log, but her father didn’t add it. He turned to Judith and said, “Shall we go for a walk?” and they did walk, heading no place in particular, just moving from one wide white street to another, warm within their heavy coats, not talking, listening to the clean squeak of their boots in the snow. They walked and walked. A few children were out playing, but no one else was out walking, or driving either. Judith and her father began walking down the center of the deserted streets. Eventually their route took them down Main Street, past all the shops closed for the holiday—Myers Drugs, Marian’s Mademoiselle Shop, Love’s Jewelers. Midblock, her father drew up and pointed a finger at a thrift shop on the west side of the street. “There,” he said. “That’s where Mert and Dory Feister had their Western Wear before they moved to Arizona.”

  It was still and quiet. They were surrounded by snow, but it was not snowing. “It was only a couple of years ago that they sold. I looked into when they put it up for sale. It was exactly ten days after my hiring by the college was announced in the local paper.” He smiled. “Though for the record, Dory Feister cited their declining health as the reason for the move.”