One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  24

  IT IS a five-year diary, five years to the page, a few lines for each year. The year 1923, running along the tops of the pages, shows Jerry’s handwriting large, fervent, jubilant, despairing, erratic. The entries at the bottoms of the pages, the entries for 1927, come to us in a small neat hand.

  The tops of the pages seem to waver with tension and hope. A man on a cliff in a high wind. The bottoms are grounded and safe. The man with his sleeves rolled, raking a lawn.

  At the end of each month, space for a short summary.

  May 1923: Made no money. Town property going stale on acct. of the Fight. Started getting ready to put in ice cream parlor.

  Drop to the bottom. May 1927: Wettest month in 50 years. Lindbergh flies NY to Paris. Started dieting and took off 6 lb. since 10th. Francis got a pony at Cut Bank but hasn’t brought it down yet. Cancelling machine installed in P.O. Agreed to take on Boy Scouts.

  Flick the pages. There at the top: July 1923: The Big Fight pulled off a fizzle and lost a lot of money. No business whatsoever. Just about out of money. Daisy Lou staying on.

  But drop only to the bottom. July 1927: Splendid month. Put on Boy Scout concession the Fourth of July. Got $500 from Big Six syndicate on lease. Took small trip via Butte to Kalispell. Weather good.

  Dieting and a steady job. A job as postmaster. Postmaster and scoutmaster and taker of vacations in the summertime. The oil field just an oil field, a steady and unspectacular producer. A little lease money here, a little there. No more gushers, no huge surprises.

  The vacation is lovely and calm. A high green Montana summer, and the car works all the way. Maudie and Tip stay at a friend’s farm north of town. Francis is off to a Boy Scout camp on Flathead Lake across the mountains.

  Jerry and Vivian drive and picnic and talk. They camp at tourist camps. The glow of campfires and the silhouettes of the heavy purple mountains. Do they feel themselves to be entering on the long, calm, ordinary time of their lives? If so, it feels, at this point, like relief.

  They make the long loop, stopping to fish at any stream that strikes their fancy, roasting hot dogs, dedicating themselves to recreation in all its available forms.

  They pick up Francis at camp and he is sunburned and wears a beaded headband with an eagle feather in it. He has swum every day in the glacial lake, out to a splintery dock, his heart burrowing away from the shocking water like a frantic dog. He has learned five dirty jokes and watched a team leader kill a snake and stoutly smeared calamine over his bug-bitten skin. He has made the leather headband and, in wood carving, a beautiful replica of the Spirit of St. Louis.

  That is actually what Francis became consumed with at the camp. The rest went on around him and he went through the motions, like the terrible swim to the raft, when he had to. But he really lived the entire ten days for that airplane. He worked on it every available moment and kept it in the cook’s kitchen at night, safe on a high shelf in a box.

  At twelve, Francis is a tawny, gangly, fast-growing boy. He is earnest and pious and adventurous and idealistic. He has a shock of glossy chestnut hair that falls over his eyes, and a handsome, good-looking grin. He has a kind of cavalier, careless look—an ease and humor with other boys—that belies his intensity, his bursts of fervor.

  He has, in the past, been fervent about religion—for six months, through a long winter, he served daily mass in the frigid little church at 5:30 a.m. He was fervent about his aunt Daisy, waiting, waiting for her record to arrive. And how he wept when it arrived broken and had to be patched!

  He is fervent about horses and has bought one of his own with his newspaper money. (He also uses his paper money to buy his mother roses on her birthday.) And now he is fervent about Lindbergh. Impassioned by the man and his feat.

  He loves the man. Lone luck personified and triumphant. He thinks there could be nothing finer and more exciting that a human could do. Crawl into a machine shaped like a bird and propel yourself, alone inside the bird, across the Atlantic Ocean. The propellers gobbling the air.

  The thought is an absolute counteractant to the heaviness of his near adolescence.

  He wants to be a hero. He doesn’t see the point of life without heroics.

  He wants to be a flier. He feels the wish as destiny.

  Francis highest in his room on mentality test.

  The wettest month in fifty years and that wide country in May is beautiful in its fleeting green. The farmers smile. Even when their autos stick in the gumbo, they heave with good-humored vigor until the machines are extricated and chugging off again through the sweet drizzle, past the lime-colored wheat, the pretty prairie grass.

  Vivian has big boxes of geraniums on the front steps, out from under the eaves so they will be watered by the showers. The flowers are red and plump. The steps are newly painted, bright yellow. A silver bicycle rests against them.

  Inside, a new couch and chair. Crisp checked curtains.

  Shelby has become mad for clubs. Jerry joins the Lions, becomes executive vice-president. He plays basketball at the Men’s Club. There are card parties and dinner parties and, in the summer, big cookouts down by the river. Tennis when it’s not too windy. Dances. The Mr. and Mrs. Club.

  Vivian plays bridge once a week. Every woman she knows plays bridge, and they stay out, routinely, until midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m. It is their turn and they take it.

  The town is busy, busy, the way a child is who has badly scared himself by running away from home and comes back wanting nothing but routines: the blanket, the story, the food in the right places on the plate.

  There is some peace in all this. (Lovely day. Put up ten gallons of root beer.) The children have grown tall and present and active, and their parents’ eyes have swiveled slowly away from the world of their own concerns to those of their children, on the specifics of their children’s days.

  They require politeness and rigor inside the house, in the schoolroom, but give the kids the outdoors for their own. Francis and his friend Phil will ride their horses twenty miles, twenty-five miles in a day, anywhere they please, and if they aren’t home by dark, well, they have bunked with a rancher or farmer and will show up the next day.

  Maudie and five other third graders join the older kids on Sneak Day and walk seven miles to the Marias River in June for a swim. They’re home by dark, sunburned and giddy, and their parents welcome them calmly, give them the routine speech about not skipping school, put them to bed.

  They like their children to claim the country this way; make it familiar and theirs. It helps to wipe out those couple of years when Shelby seemed to contain an occupying army. It encourages them in the idea of adventure.

  Spoke at the Men’s Club on P.O. system.

  They will squint out the windows at Shelby, passengers on the Great Northern; squint out into the dawn or the late afternoon, through the sideways snow or the sun, because they remember: This is where the fight was. This is where they held the thing.

  It would never be an attractive little town. It would always have the look of a too-skinny kid with a few teeth knocked out. Rakish, unkempt, spare houses scattered like thrown dice across the flat, up the side of the ridge, north of the tracks where the shacks stood in their uncut weeds. It seemed to defy the idea of fame, this town.

  But yes, this was the place, and so you looked around for some sign as the train huffed impatient at the depot. And were there revelers straggling out of bars and dance halls? Were there celebrities, speculators, bootleggers, hawkers, reporters, fortune-tellers, grifters walking those streets? Not in your wildest dreams.

  Was there a wooden saucer bigger than Madison Square Garden? For a few years there was, out there on the edge of town, the evidence. Then it was torn down. After that, not in your wildest dreams.

  There was just a very small, very quiet little rail town with edges that frittered out onto a huge swelling prairie. The child’s-primer light of dawn. A young mongrel dog on a baggage car, ears cocked. A curl of smoke from a small
café across the way. A man in overalls stepping across the tracks, black lunch pail swinging. A man in a business suit swinging a mailbag onto a cart, wheeling it away toward a low brick building that flew a flag.

  Lovely day. Lions Club. Got Tunney-Dempsey returns and won $35 on same.

  V

  MIDNIGHT

  AS THE two old people talked in the blue light of the television, shadows came into the room and sat on the end of the couch next to Amelia’s feet, in the rocker, at the table in the next room. One stretched on the floor, feet crossed casually, arms behind the head. One lounged against the doorjamb.

  A July breeze that smelled of cut grass drifted through the open window and nudged the shadows and swirled among them. Everything remained—the shadows, the sweet breeze—when Jerry turned off the television and flicked on a warm table lamp.

  He tipped back his chair and thought with a small leap of happiness about homecomings and oil.

  Amelia said she felt better than she had in days, more relaxed. She could feel her ankle healing by the minute. She said she felt as though the hands of a very gifted and spiritual healer had been laid upon her ankle. When she said that, she thought about the letter she wrote to Penelope Wexner in the late summer of 1923 to say that she would be staying in Shelby; would not be traveling to Milan. She thought, rather, about the reply.

  It was a telegram that did not try to save money. MY DEAR DEAR AMELIA, it said. YOUR POWERS OF IDEALITY HAVE CLEARLY SURGED TO THE FORE IN A MANNER DIFFICULT TO ANTICIPATE STOP I HAVE CONSULTED MADAME DE PLANTE THE FINEST SPIRITIST IT HAS BEEN MY PRIVILEGE TO MEET STOP SHE SAYS YOU HAVE CORRECTLY JUDGED YOUR ROLE IN THIS LIFE STOP YOU SHALL ENABLE OTHERS STOP THIS IS A PRIVILEGE STOP YOURS VERY TRULY MRS. PENELOPE WEXNER.

  The shadows nodded. A car thundered past, sped on, screeched, faded, and then the night was quiet again.

  “I used to watch my best student, Virginia, roar off after her lesson in a motorcar,” Amelia said. “It broke my heart, the frivolity of it. The waste. She chose a young man over her talent.” She thought for a moment. “Saint Paul. Not here. Virginia lived in Saint Paul. She may live in Saint Paul to this day.”

  She adjusted the ice bag and wrapped herself closer in the blanket. “More likely Virginia is dead,” she answered herself matter-of-factly. “They all are.”

  Sometimes at the pond where they swam after church, large birds appeared in the trees. Crimson and turquoise, they moved through the filmy leaves, or perched and watched. When they flew away, wings thumping the air, their wind lifted the hair of green-eyed gypsies who roamed the jungle and made campfires at dusk.

  Francis’s young son, Donnie, was somewhere in that jungle. And the boy Penelope Wexner lost in the Great War. All the lost ones. They were making their way, exuberant, back to the pond.

  “I was surprised that I was able to recall all the words to the song I sang this evening,” Amelia said. “I was very pleased with myself, if I do say so myself.”

  “You were in very fine voice the day of the prizefight, if I recall,” Jerry said. “That evening, when we all went out. And you sang with the dance band that looked like desert sheiks.”

  “Exactly like those men you see now on the television,” Amelia said. “Those Arabians.” She sat up on the couch. “What did I sing? Oh, I am trying to recall what I sang with those sheiks. Something about love, I’m sure of that. Or stardust perhaps. Or the moon. Probably the moon.”

  “Bright as a torch that night.”

  “I could see the shadows of the blades of grass that night.”

  “Vivian said she could see through her fingers. That the light went right through the skin.”

  For Maudie’s high school graduation, in the middle of the Depression, Vivian ripped apart her own wedding dress and sewed her daughter something that could have come from Lord & Taylor. She had never learned to like sewing, but she cut the material fearlessly with the long shears. The kids were all at a dance. Vivian’s face was flushed. Her hair was prematurely white but still full. She cut the pattern and pinned it to the pieces of material. They listened to the radio. He made popcorn and they ate it out of a single bowl. She washed the grease from her fingers and sewed two new long seams in the new dress, then put it aside, hidden from Maudie, because it was getting late. They tamped down the stove—a spring storm had changed from light snow to washing rain—and she sat on his lap and put her hand on his cheek and smoothed his eyebrow with the tip of her thumb and ran her thumb lightly across his mouth.

  Vivian showed him an oversized, elaborate Easter card from Carlton. He said he had “taken a position” in Dempsey’s restaurant on Times Square and talked every day to the champ. His handwriting was cramped and shaky. Carlton’s children, a lawyer and a fashion buyer, said they had heard he was in California. They hoped he was alive and on his feet.

  Carlton was one of the shadows. They let him stay, hoping he would just doze.

  The shapes of their parents were there too. Their mother wore a white nightgown. Their father was a boy in a preacher’s frock. Mrs. Wexner, imperious, stood by the window. Suzanne McClintock read tea leaves. Skiff Norgaard snooped around in the kitchen. Vivian, of course, sat in the other big chair, and the children were in from the cities. Their children too, including the missing Donnie—gaunt, medaled, triumphant. On the bed, stretched out as if returned from a long trip, the young Dr. Sheehan slept, hands across his chest.

  “I feel strangely happy,” Amelia announced. “The way I did, sometimes, as a child, when I didn’t want to sleep because I would go away from that happiness.”

  Jerry brought her another blanket and a glass of water for her teeth and propped the pillows. He led her into the bathroom and left her to go about dismantling herself. Her knee had developed an odd twinge. She wished she had a handsome cane with a gold knob on the top.

  Amelia removed her dress and girdle and jewelry and put on a robe Jerry had brought her. She decided to leave her wiglet on so she wouldn’t shock him too much.

  Jerry went into his office and turned on the goosenecked desk lamp. He chuckled to himself. “Norgaard.” he said. “I would like to see his face when that forty-dollar oil starts chugging out of the ground.” He bent eagerly over his papers, making notations, penciling x’s on his map, smiling shyly from time to time. “You wait, Norgaard!” he crowed, stabbing the air.

  Amelia, back on the couch, called out that she was very grateful for Jerry’s hospitality. Then she called out that she hoped T.T. knew which cupboard she meant for the kibbles. Then she had Jerry come in and pull back the curtain and turn off the light so she could watch the night outside. She had twenty-thirty vision in the undamaged eye and could see plenty when there weren’t distractions.

  Jerry went to bed, closed his eyes, and saw the film again, stark and grainy.

  He seemed to see it better in his mind’s eye than he had on the screen. He could see how young the fighters were and how hot the day was. How Dempsey, fighting, is beautiful and forward-tilting, like a ship’s figurehead. Always forward and dancing lightly during the pauses. Springy and cruel. His shoulders as muscled and sleek as a big cat’s. The long thighs dark against white cloth.

  Gibbons is planted and scrappy. Defending. His back is knotty. He jabs at Dempsey like a brave kid poking a coiled snake with a stick. He hitches his trunks nervously, making him, each time he does it, too human and alert.

  In the corners between rounds, black umbrellas flare, collapse. The flick, flick of white towels fanning. Clapping hands that flock upward each time Gibbons lands a blow. The quivering shadows of ropes and men when the two fighters move outside of what the camera is able to see.

  Sometimes Dempsey lunges at air like a dog, because that is simply what he lives to do. Provoke. Attack. He is like bad weather.

  Gibbons comes back. Again and again. He can’t be knocked over. The clapping hands ruffle upward like birds.

  He might be a rich man by the time young Donnie steps off that big plane. He’d pick up the
boy in a big town car and take him to the rest of them, and Francis would laugh the way he used to, because his flying son was finally home.

  The nurse would say something different. She would say Vivian was dressed and anxious to be going, and he would whisk her out of that white place, off to a little town out West that had the sound of trains and wind.

  Junegrass, slender wheatgrass, blue grama.

  If they couldn’t afford a tree, they would decorate a big tumbleweed. Francis would laugh helplessly at his own jokes and Daisy would clap the hands of her big china doll.

  There would be entertainment. Twins singing “Red Wing” and then Daisy-Amelia singing “Baby, Oh My Baby” with the sheiks. Suzanne McClintock, her hip healed, telling fortunes.

  His mother’s hand would sweep the hair from his forehead, and his breath would come a little easier.

  Outside, the wheat would climb high. Unblown. Well-watered.

  Oil would gush out of the kitchen sink and they would all roar their approval, thousands and thousands of them, while Dempsey staggered, grabbed, fell—knocked out cold. They’d take him to a room at the Arena Motel, and then they’d have a big party at the Green Lite or the King Tut. They’d laugh all night. No one would go home until dawn.

  Amelia sat up awake long after Jerry went to his bed and sank into his rich sleep. She watched the night like an owl, calm and alert. Stars were everywhere, and they made her remember the night she and Lelia went looking for the comet. How she had felt the low electric presence of the comet.

  She heard Lelia out there in the dark, warbling very quietly. And then the warbles dropped away and a clear, high soprano voice remained. It stayed for a while to sing portions of Amelia’s favorite songs—songs like “Life” and “Vale” and “A Spirit Flower”—each one conjuring a specific scene. She saw herself leaning across a long florist’s box to kiss the face of a young man named Furey. She saw summer light arrowing through gauzy curtains onto a horsehair couch and a girl’s white lap. She saw sweltering bagpipers escorting a blind tenor up a slope of white-pine steps.