Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  Anna sat primly between the two men. Enough vibration played through their triangle to keep things pleasantly edgy. She had a vague impression that Jerome and Willoughby knew each other; their mutual diffidence advised her not to pursue the connection. Against expectations they had a fine time, Anna especially. As the one in the center she was the center. Since the men never addressed one another directly, she was the conversation’s easiest topic and also its conduit for the tension between them that she assumed was on her account. She was aware of, and only a little chagrined by, the gratification this gave her. The scene’s sheer unlikelihood sensitized her to her awkwardness in it. She liked the feeling. It was sexy.

  More amazing were the calculations she found herself making. How did she feel that Jerome intellectually was flat as a hardwood floor? Well, she reasoned (while refilling their mugs and telling clean stories of life in a monastery), one shouldn’t underestimate street smarts — and despite his rough edges he was attractive, thanks no doubt to a pure and primitive spirit. As for Willoughby, he’d neatened his appearance and improved his manners since when they’d first met on the ferry three days ago. He too was attractive, though elusive and wry compared with Jerome’s oaken solidity.

  Willoughby was talking now, telling a story (the only church one he knew) of how his mother had run off with a Baptist minister and got excommunicated by his replacement.

  “Does that mean she’s going to hell?” he asked her. “You’re a pro, I figure you’d know.”

  She was annoyed that the men seemed so intimidated by her professed piety. “I’m not too familiar with Protestant doctrine,” she said, refixing her attention not entirely playfully on Willoughby as a sex object. She considered his long hair a minus, though its black curls were laced with an interesting auburn. She felt sweetly depraved, like a trader in harem slaves, when she let this improve her opinion.

  Jerome opined, “Hell’s hell in any religion,” determined to hold his own here. The pedestal on which he’d placed Anna was wobbling through no fault of hers. Though a lapsed Irish Catholic with ingrained fear of clergy, he was at pains when face to face with her not to imagine her sexually. I wanna watch you when you come, he was thinking. “Is my opinion,” he added quickly. “Sister.”

  “Please! I’m not a nun. It’s a possibility only.”

  Jerome hung his head, cursed himself for tempting Anna from the holy calling. “Didn’t mean to offend.”

  “I’ve brought it on myself, I realize, but you two make me feel silly.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Willoughby said. He didn’t know what he meant. He was all twisted on the fact that he was feeling pretty good, relaxed almost, not six feet away from Jerome. The reason seemed to be Anna. She diffused his bitterness and made him forget to recall just the bad events in his life. The woman has peace about her, he thought — and he didn’t rule out God’s. Fuck!

  Lois Cochran shattered the party’s delicate stasis with her boisterous entrance, always unnerving to those who feel like tenants in their own skin. Lois sensed she was interrupting but no way would she cater to it. She carried groceries and a plastic-wrapped dress from the cleaners. “Kinky, huh?”

  Anna blushed. “We’re just having tea.”

  “She means the dress,” Willoughby explained. It was a maid’s uniform — black dress, frilly white apron.

  “I understand that,” Anna snapped, drawing a hurt look from Willoughby. But Anna hadn’t understood. She’d thought

  Lois was commenting on two guys with one girl — being Lois, in other words. Her embarrassment tilted the ground under her. As Lois took a seat to join the conversation, Anna slowly immersed in herself like someone underwater.

  About a month earlier, Anna had let herself be roped into a blind dinner date with a friend of a friend. Toward the end of the meal, she’d asked the guy what sort of music he liked. “Streisand and Hendrix,” he quipped: “And you?” “Gregorian chants.” Which took him aback: “I bore you, is that it?” “We bore each other.” Anna had paid half the check and left. Driving home she sang to the radio. It was a Beatles weekend. “Here, There and Everywhere,” a sad or happy song depending on who is where and with whom, hit the mark and stung her; singing about it mingled the poison with the antidote. The deejay said he hoped listeners everywhere were singing with the Beatles, dreaming with them. Anna thought that was a corny thing to say on the air, though people probably were.

  She’d driven fast through the darkening countryside that night. The air hinted pine groves and cut hay. A light — a planet, not a star to steer by — hung brightly out ahead, and she followed it. The road curved away and her car plunged over the shoulder into a ditch. Energized by near injury, she ran the half-mile to the nearest phone booth, only then realizing she had no one to call. She called her date. His voice was eerie, as if tranquilized, but sounded sincere when he said he didn’t know her.

  “Hey Anna, what?”

  The words interrupted her reverie yet concluded it perfectly, the concern of the person speaking the words a fulfillment of her need that night when she’d wept alone in the phone booth for someone to care just a little. Anna savored the sound — “You okay there, Anna?” — and the delicate tap of a hand on her knee. She didn’t mean to seem coy or aloofly abstracted, she wanted merely to enjoy this small tenderness before opening her eyes to a roomful of strangers. Nor did she mean to fall in love with the voice or with the hand touching her — it was a game, a new sensation tried on like a sweater to learn, for later, what warmth was. Yet love seemed the right reflex when a second voice intruded jealously, “The sister is praying. Defend yourselves.” Anna whirled and opened her eyes on Willoughby’s smirk. For an instant she hated him, and it showed.

  Poor Willoughby. Attack or entrench was all he knew. Anna had snapped at him a moment before — he’d taken it to heart, then waited to even the score. He drained his cold tea like a man taking poison. “And now I depart.”

  Lois observed, “I guess you lost.”

  “Lost what?”

  She shook her head in amazement. Jerome and Anna she knew would be dense to it, but she’d thought this guy would get the picture here, his own one of three hearts beating arrhythmically like birds caged side by side. Lois had seen it right away. She’d been riffing on her latest annoyance — her conscription as a cocktail waitress for the Winstons’ dinner party tomorrow — when she’d realized no one was listening. Willoughby and Jerome had been watching Anna, lost in her usual fog, till Anna’s eyes had opened to choose her favorite and send the other one packing. Lois wasn’t even jealous. Jerome was a puppy — he liked anyone who was friendly or smart. As for Willoughby, Lois assumed he must have big problems to think her sister could solve any of them.

  Jerome asked Lois gruffly, “Yeah, lost what?”

  “The girl, dummy. As if you didn’t know.”

  Jerome didn’t know. He raised his hand off Anna’s knee and studied it, his hand, as if seeing it for the first time, unsure of its powers. Anna stood and trancelike walked out of the room. Jerome said to Lois, “Ain’t you a heartbreaker.”

  “She’s gonna be a nun.”

  “Oh, you’re protectin’ her?”

  “I’m protecting you!”

  Willoughby cut between them to the foyer, glancing back at Lois. “I had fun till you got here.”

  “Jesus Christ! Next time I’ll phone ahead.”

  “Hey, I owe you.”

  She looked to Jerome to explain. “Guess he don’t like fun.”

  “Another Matthew?”

  “Must be,” Jerome said, before he too rose to leave Lois alone. Outside the house, Willoughby glimpsed Anna by her window in the corner bedroom. He flashed her a V sign, victory or peace. But she was looking across the room at Jerome, who stood in its doorway with his hands open toward her in affable supplication. Willoughby walked away fast. He lit a cigarette after having ab
stained the whole time inside. At the boarding house he fetched Jerome’s pistol. He wanted to use it. He wanted to throw it into the sea. Confusion again. Willyboy was back.

  “Willoughby!” Thumps on the door roused him. “Willoughby!”

  “Yes, dear?”

  Matthew entered breathlessly. “Where have you been? I’ve been insane, looking everywhere.”

  “I am not your wife.”

  Matthew’s face was haggard. The cancer-worm had been at him all day. “I’ve angered you. I’ll leave.”

  “I’m not angry at you.”

  “Then who?”

  “Your buddy Jerome. And don’t look so pleased.”

  “I’m not pleased. I’m concerned. I know there was great ugliness between you once. I’d like to see that corrected. If there’s anything I can do . . . ”

  Willoughby was silent. He blamed his unease with Matthew on himself. He felt Matthew was posing a superior friendship that Willoughby was too thick to appreciate, a three-day acquaintance with the timeworn, laconic, almost callous dependency of a fifty-year marriage. And whenever, as now, Willoughby pondered the question. Who is this guy, Matthew uncannily answered it:

  “I’m a pest, I know. I shouldn’t have just appeared here. I don’t know the rules. I enjoy your company, therefore I seek it.” Even in health Matthew needed other people’s attention, other people’s problems, to keep his own at bay. But in the days since receiving his ambiguous X ray, the others he’d always depended on — Jerome, Brendan, Lois — were otherwise occupied. It was out of rejection and even spite that he’d seized on Willoughby to divert him, to save him. Indeed, the perceived threat of his dying had made him irrational, proposing a crazy deal he was willing to accept — that death could have him if he could have Willoughby. As a friend, Matthew told himself, an ideal companion. “There’s an urgency that I feel,” he confessed at length. “My illness compels me to cut through the small talk. I haven’t time.”

  All those years on the farm with his mother and father hadn’t prepared Willoughby for the likes of Matthew. He’d persuaded himself that he simply was using Matthew to get to know, and eventually to get, Sergeant Cochran. A genius fools himself; a fool follows his own foolish counsel — Matthew favored the first category, Willoughby the second. “I’m sure you’re fine,” Willoughby said.

  “My doctor phoned me. My tests are set for next week on the mainland. Then I meet with the specialists.” Matthew hesitated. His smile turned impish and scared. “I’d like you come with me — to the city, to the hospital. See the sights, my treat.”

  “That’s kind of a private thing.”

  “I have no one else.”

  “There’s your friends here — ”

  “No one.”

  This candor shook Willoughby. “I have to check my calendar . . . ”

  He got rid of Matthew by claiming a need to nap. He fished the pistol out of his duffel and, as had become his habit, began idly to toy with it. His bewilderment over Matthew’s behavior and his own response to it found respite in the silver lining Matthew’s creepy proposal presented. To get out of traveling with Matthew off-island, Willoughby quickly must take his revenge on Jerome, or choose not to, in either case cutting his ties to this island, these people, this new life that threatened to snare him.

  Twenty

  It’s hard to say exactly what Johnwayne’s hopes for Araby were. The hormonal imperative was strong in him, its objective indistinct. How could he reconcile erections and glop with the ideal of John Wayne embracing some pioneer widow as the camera fades to sunset? The question put him in a vast company of men, except for him there seemed no remedy, no chance to concoct with another human a homebrew of esteem and lust. He much more than Araby knew the odds against them. She of course had no inkling there was any “them” at all. Her rapport with him was a celebrity’s with flashbulbs, her own reflected radiance the thing she smiled at.

  Johnwayne’s jaw would clench at the sight of Brendan exiting the after-school bus with Araby. Spying on them, he felt most every emotion at each indication of body language, from fury if Brendan appeared comfortable to glee if he sulked and stammered. His own manner with Araby had grown quite smooth. Bathing often and going heavy on Chaps cologne, pressing flowers and Dentyne into her hand, presenting her with all manner of curios, from an old wood tennis racket he found in his attic to a gleaming new marlinspike he stole from a marine supply store, Johnwayne was confident he was bowling her over. She’d thank him with a smile, ask how he was — and he wouldn’t have yearned for more from her, except that Brendan seemed to be getting it. Brendan’s evident progress with Araby stretched Johnwayne’s thoughts past their usual reach. He decided to confront Brendan, ask him as a gentleman to withdraw. He’d seen Araby first, after all. Surely that counted for something.

  Three visits in four days had established Brendan within the routine of the Winston estate. His rapport with the help (especially Lois the cleaning lady, whom nobody knew was his aunt) offended Johnwayne. Johnwayne’s mother, her black eye healed, was back at work in the Winstons’ kitchen; Mrs. Locke acted so eager to feed and pamper Brendan it set Johnwayne’s teeth on edge. Even the Winstons were charmed, Mrs. Winston calling him “Bonnie Bren,” Mr. Winston calling him “Sir.” Johnwayne didn’t realize they were grateful that Brendan was keeping Araby mollified, for the girl was a demanding guest.

  He finally got Brendan alone late Friday afternoon, while Araby was out on her pony. “A’bby my friend,” he declared.

  “I know she is.”

  “My friend long time.”

  Brendan knew what was coming. He responded as if to somebody normal, with straightforward honesty. Some experts in dealing with the handicapped say this is the best way; others say it’s a big mistake. “She’s my friend too.”

  “A’bby my guhfriend. You ’tay way.”

  “Can’t do it. I like her. She likes me.”

  “You ’tay way muffuh! Me say — ”

  “Cease!” It was the Winstons’ groom. The boys faced him with matching expressions. “The fact is she’s none o’ you’s girlfriend,” the man said. “She’s bare an acquaintance to this conjuncture, so’s I suggest you shake hands and have at her, to one the spoils and to the other the last laugh, is how I sees this nonsense.”

  The speech dismayed the boys to silence. But a moment later the groom shot Brendan a collusive wink. Johnwayne saw it and felt the worst kind of rage, so deep and resigned as to be innate, what a Native American might feel for stolen land, or a woman for her miscarried fetus, things whose loss is of potential and whose tragedy is proportional to what your hopes had been. And Johnwayne’s hopes had been high.

  As much as Johnwayne needed to feel superior to someone, his brother Del was primed to be mocked. At home that evening, Del inadvertently left his door ajar as he reclined naked on his bed with his penis in his hand. He was due for night duty at the police station and was just out of a prework shower; and he was doing nothing remarkable, but comic embarrassment was blown to monumental shame in his mind because he’d been caught, though you couldn’t tell by looking, in a clinch with his dead boyfriend Paul. Johnwayne’s idiot face in the doorway captured exactly Del’s self-verdict of personal stuntedness. He screamed to make the face go away.

  It did, for a moment.

  Del covered himself and called Johnwayne back. “Two peas in a pod, you and me.”

  “Me have guhfriend A’bby,” Johnwayne said.

  “Oh yeah? Is she retarded too?”

  The boy’s head tilted quizzically.

  “Because retards have to stay with their own. Fags too.” Del’s throat felt thick. “Of course, fags don’t jerk off in their moms’ nightgowns, but almost. So take it back and forget your guhfriend. We can be pathetic together.”

  This wasn’t the usual Del. Del’s tone more than his words signaled some hurt or hurtful
ness that his brother knew enough to wait out. But recently schooled in fair play and turnabout, Johnwayne wouldn’t be the good dunce any more. He went to Del’s bureau for the blue satin nightgown he’d recently given him. Del already was laughing at their drama’s ridiculous object when his brother flung the gown into the trash can and stomped out of the room. “Come on now, it’s yours.” Del’s smile faltered. “I don’t want you to be lonesome.”

  Johnwayne returned and regarded his brother with malice. “Me have guhfriend! A’bby!”

  Del recognized the damage done. Johnwayne was crying, his jaw thrust forward. Softly Del said, “You know I didn’t mean what I said. I think it’s great you have a girlfriend, Abby.”

  Johnwayne’s face darkened. He left the room in a sneering fury that felt like triumph. His brother — the smart one, the normal one — couldn’t even pronounce Araby’s name.

  Later it would seem to Brendan the worst thing he’d ever done. Worse than the harsh things he might have said to Johnwayne, worse than any small hurts inflicted on less popular schoolmates. He’d told Araby about the time last year when his father had hit him, told her (this was shameful part) simply to raise her opinion of Brendan in the realm of heavy experience.

  What iced his guilt was that the ploy worked. She’d kissed his face and hugged him, first like a mother, then wetter and noisier like a love-starved wife in the movies. Sure it was stagy, but it felt hotter for it. He was beating her at her own game of artsy torment that she might find him suitably deep.

  Araby had been bragging about her “skitzee” mom, her neglectful dad and the ordeal of unearned wealth. Brendan had countered with his history of mother loss and father fury, converting unspeakably precious agonies into notches on a gun. Of his mother’s drowning, he aptly conveyed the strangeness of the absence of a body, her bones still under the sea somewhere, her spirit no less lost. He paused before Part Two of his saga to let Araby begin to be moved, be awed. When he resumed, his voice crackled with bitterness as he described his dad’s three-year tailspin that had followed his mom’s death. Finally (and most uncharacteristic of all) Brendan had put an absurdist spin on the story of the night Jerome hit him.