Oh, Humdinger did, did he? So the romantic feelings were not on Dr. Houseman’s side alone. “If you ask me, Jocelyn is just stoned. She keeps taking this cough medicine and who knows where she’s getting it. You’re not giving it to her, I bet, but Jocelyn says you are. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Mendelbaum is taking it, too, because at Christmas she was going around with this flask of black stuff that looks a lot like the stuff Jocelyn was taking. And I can guess who is giving it to them if you’re not.”
“I’m not giving them any medicine, no. So who do you think is giving them cough medicine?
“Humdinger!” I said. The cat was now certainly out of the bag. But if someone was poisoned it was as well that I made my suspicions known ahead of time. And she should know what she was romantically dallying with, if you asked me.
To my surprise Dr. Houseman, instead of seeming shocked or concerned, allowed a thin weary smile to cross her face. Then she just sat there for a second with it frozen as if having her own little joke.
“I’m sorry,” she said, finally coming back to. “Oh my, it’s been a long day. Why would Humdinger be giving Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum cough medicine?”
“He’s trying to poison them. I’m telling you, the man, well, he has suspicious behavior.”
“No doubt,” said Dr. Houseman and smiled again. “Listen,” she began, leaning forward and putting a hand on my forearm, but just then Humdinger came in and offered to get Dr. Houseman dinner and she followed him into the kitchen, winking at me as she left.
Well, of course she wouldn’t listen to you, you ninny, I said to myself. What did I expect, if Uncle was right and she was making a play for him? She wasn’t going to think he was a poisoner. Worst of all, now she was probably going to tell him that I was onto him, and it would be twice as hard to catch him. On the other hand, perhaps, so alerted, he would cease drugging Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum long enough for Jocelyn to recover sufficiently for me to take her to the plane. The aircraft was almost complete. I had only a bit of bolting left and it would be done. Maybe two days’ work. Would Jocelyn be well enough in two days? If I could get her as far as the dolly, I could wheel her there. I wasn’t sure that she would care about going anymore, but it seemed the right thing to do. As if I must think for her now that she could no longer think straight herself, and keep my promise to take her with me. I tried to imagine what Humdinger would do about this. Would he come racing across the meadow after us? I had never seen him race before. But how else could he thwart us? Would he somehow slip the medicine into me as well? Into my food? I was so close to being done with the plane that I vowed not to eat again. Then there would be no danger of becoming permanently stoned like Jocelyn. On the other hand, what did Jocelyn need the plane for if she had the cough medicine? She’d found her own way to fly above it all. She’d found her own way out. At that moment, I cut her loose. I don’t know why I ever thought she and I had to do this together anyway. I had done it all mostly alone and I could complete it alone.
The next day I finished bolting the machine. I turned the engine over and I should have been frantic with joy to hear the miracle of this sound, this engine I had brought to life after so many years idle and useless, but instead I sat in the pilot’s seat, worn out and feeling flat. I looked out the rain-streaked windshield to the blossoming trees and felt nothing. None of it really mattered. Without Jocelyn, there was no one who would even see me leave. It felt odd to have no witness, not even one you didn’t particularly care for, in your life. I tried to rouse some emotion in myself. Perhaps I just needed to eat something. Maybe I was at such a low energyless ebb because I needed food. I hoped it was something I could fix so easily because I could no longer reason myself out of this sense that none of it mattered or ever had. I dragged myself back through the rain to forage something uncontaminated in the kitchen, and on the way I almost tripped on a box that was lying sodden in a furrow. Another of Sam’s drops, one that had been sitting in the rain for a very long time so that the cardboard had soaked through and all but disintegrated, leaving the contents spilled in the mud. I pawed through it and carried it back to my room.
What I spread on my bedroom floor were the muddy remains of our photo album, pictures of my mother and father. I had taken none with me. This must have been sent some time ago by the executor of my parents’ estate. I had not seen my mother’s or my father’s face in months. I did not want to move or see or feel or think. I lay on my bed facedown all day and hadn’t the energy to raise my head or bring my face out of the pillow. I no longer wanted liftoff or even flying above it. I wanted nothing. I remembered those bodies in the doorways in East Vancouver. How little I had understood them then. How little I had known how much worse things could get.
When twilight came I trudged for the last time across the meadow and through the woods to the plane. I started the engine and moved the throttle. The propeller was spinning and I moved forward down the rutted remnants of the runway, jolted now and then so hard that my head hit the ceiling. Then things began to go inexplicably wrong. The plane tilted when it shouldn’t have and a wing hit the ground. I lost control of the wheel and the engine made strange noises. I was thrown sideways and tried desperately to attain an upright position, through crashing noises. The plane began to spin in circles. I looked for the instrument panel and remembered there was none. I grabbed frantically at the wheel and tried to move the throttle back, but it was stuck, and I was growing dizzy watching the line of trees in the distance go around and around. Then something hit the back of my head and that was all I knew.
When I awoke the back of my head was bleeding. It was dark out and I was chilled to the bone and a little nauseous. For a minute I thought I had flown and crashed; then I looked out the window and saw the lights of the house in the distance and the stand of trees where the cemetery stood and knew that the plane had fallen apart before it had taken off. I put a hand to where my hair was plastered with blood, and groaned, and then pulled myself out of the plane wreckage. All along the ground were fallen plane parts as if the plane had simply fallen apart piece by piece as it taxied to liftoff. But how was that possible? I’d checked it all myself. Humdinger! The thought so filled me with fury that although I was feeling dizzy and nauseous, I felt a burst of angry adrenaline that flooded my legs with sudden strength, enough to see me back to the house. I stormed up to the bathroom, shed my filthy clothes on the floor and cleaned my cut, ran a bath and sat there in fury until some warmth returned to my limbs. Then I put on clean clothes and went to Uncle’s study, not sure what I was going to demand, that Humdinger be fired perhaps. How dare he? How dare he interfere? He had gone too far this time. I pushed Uncle’s door open slowly, but he was asleep at his desk. I was about to wake him up when I saw, heaped on a corner of his desk, holding down some paper, a pile of airplane bolts.
* * *
I was so startled by being completely wrong in my assumptions that I crept out without saying anything at all. Uncle, not Humdinger, Uncle had seen me working on the plane. Uncle had removed the bolts. Uncle had known what I might do. How? It was too many questions. I went to bed. I would build another plane! But when I awoke in the morning I knew I was done building planes. I saw Jocelyn heading for the bathroom, looking groggy as usual. She was going to crash her plane in a slower, surer way, but Uncle didn’t seem to see this. I went out and walked to the meadow to check the plane and confirm my suspicions. Sure enough, all the bolts I had spent so long putting in had been equally carefully removed. I followed the trail of plane parts back to the cemetery and there, in the space underneath where the plane had always stood, I saw for the first time the three gravestones lying flush with the ground: Second Lieutenant Vincent Knockers, Second Lieutenant Michael Knockers, Second Lieutenant Gary Knockers. I sat down on the grass and thought for a very long time.
Later, when I could bear it, I went up to Uncle Marten’s room. I didn’t know quite how to introduce the topic of his and my father’s deceit. And Jocelyn’s fa
ther’s, too, I guess. They had all lied to us. Or at least had not told the whole story. I opened his door all the way from the six-inch gap he always left for the cat. He was sitting at his desk with his back to me, scribbling away as usual. I cleared my throat twice and finally he turned around.
“Oh, Meline!” he said in surprise.
“I went out today to where the plane I built stood. Or what’s left of it. I was looking to see if it had fallen apart because the bolts were removed,” I said, looking down. He said nothing. When I looked up he was just nodding his head. Not denying or admitting it but not offering any kind of explanation or apology either.
“Well, where the plane used to be, there were three gravestones flush with the earth.”
“Second Lieutenant Vincent Knockers. Second Lieutenant Michael Knockers. Second Lieutenant Gary Knockers.”
I nodded.
“There were six of us brothers. Or six and a half actually. I was the pilot that stowed away on the helicopter and turned our father in. It was your grandfather who had the idea of the Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane. It was a good idea, I always thought it was a good idea. It was sacrificing the men to it that was the problem. He took it too far.” Uncle Marten looked distant and tired. “Donald and your father were still living at home with our mother. Vince, Gary, Mike, and I were all officers in our father’s corps. Anyhow, I saw Vince’s plane go down, and after it crashed I thought, we all thought, my father would stop this nonsense. He wanted to make good pilots—why would he allow them to be killed? We thought he might pack up the whole operation. Especially since it had been Vince. Send us all home. But he just kept sending pilots up. We didn’t know what to do about it. We were young. We couldn’t believe it would continue. I didn’t see Gary crash. The other officers told me at dinner. Gary and another member of the corps had gone down together. Mike crashed while I was on the mainland, turning in my father. It wouldn’t have been a bad idea if it had worked. Learning to fly without instruments. But it didn’t. He should have stopped after the first plane crashed and he didn’t. He kept going. Well, when I told them what was happening, the bigger brass came over and put an end to it. Our mother lost a husband and three sons. They had to put her in a sanatorium, a kind of a nuthouse. And not a very nice one because we couldn’t afford better. I went to visit her there. She’d always been a very sane, practical woman. We’d had a good family life. Good Christmases. Those sorts of things. We thought she’d get out before long, you know, pull it together, but she cut her wrists. She left your father and uncle in foster homes. I went off to college.”
I stood on the carpet. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how he could sit there so calmly and tell the story. Or how Uncle Donald and my father could have become pilots after that. How they could teach me and Jocelyn to fly. “I don’t know how you went … Unbearable, so many of them. Unbearable. I don’t know how you went on when it happened,” I said.
“Well, it will happen. And if you go on, it will happen again. I don’t want you and Jocelyn to leave now. That may surprise you. It surprised me. But I don’t. But you will. And probably pretty soon. You’ll go on to college and then maybe get married, have families, move away. And then we won’t need Humdinger anymore and he’ll go. And that lovesick doctor, when he goes, will have no reason to stay around. Not that she was ever invited to move in in the first place, but let’s not get into that again. Mrs. Mendelbaum I’m not so sure we ever really had. Sometimes it is unbearable,” said Uncle Marten.
“I don’t want to build another plane. That passed…” I began.
“Good,” said Uncle, picking up his pen again.
“But how can you be so matter-of-fact?”
“Well, it was a long time ago.”
“I don’t ever want to feel like that, that it was so long ago that I don’t care about my mother anymore or my father. Like getting on a train and leaving my parents waving goodbye. That’s what I see every time I think of it. I see myself standing on the back porch of one of those cabooses. You know the kind I mean?”
Uncle Marten nodded.
“And I’m waving and they’re waving and getting smaller and smaller in the distance.” I stopped and Uncle Marten said nothing, just looked at me. “I, well, I don’t think I can do that. It would break my heart if they thought I could leave them there. I don’t think I can ever do that, leave them behind like that. So that means I can’t go anywhere either. I’m just whirring up above it all in one spot.”
“You should have built a helicopter, not an airplane,” said Uncle Marten.
I laughed even though I don’t think he was trying to be funny. It was the type of thing that would occur to him.
“Ah well, you see I view it a little differently,” said Uncle Marten, putting his pen down again and swiveling his chair slowly back and forth with an abstracted expression. He tented his fingers. “I see it like a lake. And when you have to be parted from someone, for whatever reason, you just leave that part of the lake.”
“But they’re still in the lake?”
“They are the lake. So are you.” Then Uncle Marten went back to scribbling.
“How do you know this is true?” I asked.
He swiveled his chair around and looked at me long and hard for a second. “I don’t know it’s true, Meline. I hope so. But sometimes I think we believe these things only because the other is so unthinkable.”
Uncle went back to scribbling at his desk and I went down to Jocelyn’s room.
I sat on the side of Jocelyn’s bed and waited for her slow, drugged awakening. I didn’t tell her yet Uncle’s story or mine. Instead I said, “Jocelyn, how do you know for sure that they’re dead?”
“Wha’?” she asked sleepily, then fell back on the pillow. “Why are you asking this now?”
“Because I am,” I said.
“You don’t want to know,” she said wearily, pulling herself up to a sitting position. “Not really.”
I sat silently for a while. I wasn’t sure she wasn’t right. Then I said, “It was really awful, wasn’t it? You saw them, didn’t you?”
“At two o’clock the next day it was my turn to go identify the bodies.” Jocelyn stopped and began to cry. I put my arms around her. And my plane came slowly down, down, down on ground I hadn’t even known was there.
* * *
Later I told Jocelyn about the cemetery and the extra uncles. That was when I remembered that Uncle Marten said there were six and a half of them, so I went back to find out who the half was, and it turned out it was Sam.
Sam’s mother had been a floozie who had an affair with Uncle Marten’s father for a short time while she was on vacation in Canada. While Sam was in Vietnam trying to stay alive to return to her, his mother, with nothing much in her life but her constant worry about Sam, found she got to sleep with a judicious blend of sleeping pills and vodka. One night she found she couldn’t sleep even with her usual dosage, so she dosed herself right out of the picture and slept not only till dawn but forever after. Her neighbors, maybe not the world’s most upstanding citizens, noticed that she didn’t seem to be about anymore, but they only shrugged. Her constant nervous chitchat about her son who was in Vietnam whenever she cornered them in the elevator or by the mailboxes had not made her popular. So they didn’t find her until she began to smell, and they became very, very irate as the odor lingered for weeks. They told Sam all this when he got home to California and was trying to piece together what had happened, and so he cut out for Canada to find his biological father and nicer neighbors. It turned out his father had died in prison when he was in Vietnam. It would seem that although Sam had gone off to war with great trepidation, North America was where all the casualties were. When the prison chaplain told Sam his father was dead and that he’d never mentioned having a son named Sam, it precipitated a round of drinking that he never really recovered from. So, having nowhere else to go, but being half-Canadian, he stayed on and got himself fired from six different private helicopter
companies before he read a small article in a local paper about Marten Knockers buying the island where the Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane had gone down. He put two and two together and called upon Uncle Marten, who was a little disconcerted to find himself with another brother, but was in need of a way to have things delivered on and off the island and gave Sam the job. Sam would never put down on the island, though. “A little fussy, that,” said Uncle Marten.
And then there was Humdinger! Dr. Houseman came to me to ask me more about the cough syrup and when I told her what Jocelyn had told me, that it was homemade stuff, she just shrugged, and said, oh well, these old home remedies, and dismissed it. When I said I bet she was glad that it wasn’t Humdinger poisoning everyone, you didn’t want to date a poisoner, which was bold but I wanted to see if Uncle was right, she laughed and said that she couldn’t date Humdinger even if she wanted to because he was a priest. Sophie’s priest, in fact. Impossible, I’d said. Sophie was Jewish. She went to shul with Mrs. Mendelbaum. She spoke Yiddish.
But I was beginning to see that I really hadn’t known anything about anyone. Dr. Houseman filled me in on Sophie’s story, which Humdinger had told her.
Sophie was a poor Catholic girl and had worked as a maid for a wealthy Jewish family in Poland before the war, and when the Nazis came they killed the family she worked for, but she managed to sneak the youngest son, Mickey, out of his house while his family was being rounded up, and she hid him in her own house and then claimed him as her own son. She kept him safe all during the war, pretending to be his mother, and when the war ended she took him on the first boat to Palestine, because she wanted to find his relatives there and raise him with their help as a Jew as his mother would have wished. But, although grateful that she had saved him, Mickey’s relatives were appalled at the idea of him being raised by a Catholic woman. And a maid, at that. They promised her money for passage to Canada and a job in Vancouver if she would leave Mickey alone. She did not want to do this, but they were adamant. He was already too attached. This was their condition. So she left him there and came to Vancouver. She wrote him letters, but either the family apprehended them or he never bothered to write back. Either way, it broke her heart. She kept hoping someday to find him again. She went to the Jewish community center, asking for help. They knew Sophie was one of the righteous gentiles, gentiles who had saved Jews during the war, and they found Mickey for her and raised money to bring him to Vancouver for a surprise reunion. Of course, to her he was still her son, but to him she was just a distant memory from a long time ago. An unhappy and frightening time. He was grateful and kind, but it was clear that he was relieved when it was time to leave again for Israel.
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Page 19