The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  Fletch grinned, his teeth white and even. “No sugar,” he said.

  He got some, all the same. Every noon, when he dropped by with mail, the coffee was hot, and Marion’s hair fluffed out. The piece of toast she began putting by his cup soon became a cookie, and ultimately, a serving of her pound-foolish strawberry shortcake. Then, one night at ten o’clock, I heard a creak on the stairs, and flicked on the hall light. It was Fletch, a little tight. “She here?” he asked sheepishly.

  “Still at the Quarry, Fletch.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well—it’s just that I had some letters for her.” Self-consciously, he backed down the stairs. “Tell her I’ll drop ’em off tomorrow.”

  She stayed home all the next day, and sure enough, at midnight the mail was delivered. For a week after, I could tell exactly where she was in the house by her singing. He was an ardent lover, but irregular—usually showed up only when he had quarreled with his wife, or had a few drinks in him. “It’s like he still stops by just to use the convenience, only now it’s me,” Marion laughed. None the less, she welcomed him, fed him, arose a half-hour before him at daybreak so he would never see her until she had helped her cause with astringent and cosmetic.

  The morning they both overslept added a complexity that this relationship did not need. Marion awoke to find that her mother had dropped by for a shampoo, and was standing at the foot of the bed, eyes wide and mouth narrow.

  “Now, Ma,” Marion cried. “Damn it, Ma, wait, it doesn’t mean a thing!” She rolled out of bed, and hurried down the stairs in pursuit. “Listen to me, Ma! What happened is—see, Fletch is Gary’s boyfriend. But they quarreled in the middle of the night, so Fletch bunked in with me. Why not? We’re like sisters, I couldn’t have been safer with a drowned man!”

  This explanation stunned Marion’s mother into silence, but it had no such effect on Fletch. His virility made suspect, he shouted down the stairs, advising everyone in the house exactly how many times the drowned man had resuscitated during the night, and swearing, by God, never to fucking come back here again. He never did either, unless he was drunk, a condition Marion found less and less acceptable. By the end of August, he was simply sticking her mail through the door-slot in silence, and where he went to the bathroom was anybody’s guess.

  I had planned to leave the Hamptons after Labor Day, yet I lingered on there. In some crazy way, Marion had provided the family life I was famished for, and I felt unable to leave her until she could regain her composure. It didn’t happen overnight. Too often, I would find her sitting in the dark, alone except for a bottle of blend. “It’s not that I’m eatin’ my heart out for Fletch,” she told me. “Maybe I didn’t even like him. But I liked—” She fumbled for the word. “—I liked loving. I loved having the excuse to care—know what I’m talkin’, hon?”

  Darkness began to fall earlier. To work off excess energy, I patched the roof, fitted in storm windows, and raked up leaves. When I’d come inside, Marion would have dinner going and a drink waiting. Afterwards, we would play Scrabble, or make hilarious plans for her debut at the Persian Room playing the musical saw. (She actually could.) Gradually, I edged her back into circulation, occasionally trotting her around to the parties she set such store by. It was a healing time for her, but I was increasingly restless.

  “Maybe you’re working at it too hard,” suggested a pleasant guy I met while jogging. “Maybe you need to bust out a bit—sow a few wildflowers, and such.”

  We did something of the sort. However, Marion, who had never made a fuss about me having overnight guests before, suddenly asked me to cool it—the neighbors were talking, she claimed. Subsequently, when the occasion arose, I simply spent the night out. The icy silences that met me when I returned to her house in the morning apparently didn’t warn me enough.

  “She’s jealous,” my new friend told me. “I dropped by to leave you a message today, and, pow! she acted like a cast-off wife. Practically tears!”

  I had to face her down with it: if she was thinking she and I were seriously playing house, she had better re-think. She tumbled out apologies. “I got my head on wrong, hon,” she cried. “It won’t happen again, I promise and swear.”

  But it did. The last time, she made no more promises, and we did not meet each other’s eyes. I invented a reason to go to New York the next day, and found other excuses to keep me away. We exchanged postcards and phone calls, but when the next spring came and I returned to the Hamptons, I moved into a place of my own.

  My life began to fill out in other directions: new friends, different pursuits, even an unfamiliar sense of worth. Women’s Lib and the Black Revolution had swept into our lives, and now a new wave was racing up the beach—some outraged faggots had dared to resist a police raid in New York, and suddenly a vital young movement was pulling down the figurative stone walls that had for so long segregated us. This change could not last, we warned each other—there was sure to be a violent backlash; yet hope remained white-hot, and Marion was reputed to have raised fifty bucks for the cause by selling paper pansies right under the opposition’s nose at a policemen’s benefit.

  She and I ran into each other occasionally in those years, and always agreeably. We promised to get together soon, but we didn’t, and so I know what happened to her mostly by hearsay. It was one of the old ladies she used to curl, for instance, who told me Marion was engaged to be married. “—a responsible man,” she confided. “Sixty-ish. Owned a big construction company, but’s retired now. And—” She tapped my arm significantly. “—very well fixed!”

  “How do you know?”

  “How, indeed!” she cried. “You should see her engagement ring!”

  It was mid-summer before I met him formally—no lesser word could describe the occasion. It was the Historical Society’s annual lawn party, and even with the unexpected gusts of wind hitching up long skirts and flapping wide-brimmed hats, it was a more sober affair than those I remembered Marion attending. Yet there she was, strolling up to me, hand outstretched, smiling with new radiance. She was lighter by twenty pounds, and her hair, which had become quite brassy, was now as discreet as chemistry could make it. “I want you to meet Wallace Byrd,” she said. “I want you to like him almost as much as I do.”

  He was a stocky, garrulous man, with wiry gray hair, looking much younger than sixty. He and I chatted agreeably, and Marion backed up his every word with nods and beams. When it came time to part, she once more held out her hand to me, and I glimpsed the sparkle through her mesh glove. “Show me,” I said.

  “I was hoping you’d ask,” she said, and tugged off the glove. Her hands were always her greatest beauty, and one of the slender tapering fingers set off an exquisite pear-shaped diamond. Even as I exclaimed, the stone slipped around to the side of her finger, as if shy. “Band needs to be smaller,” Wallace remarked. “She’s dropped so much weight.” He winked at her, and I had the impression that, had they been anywhere else, he would have given her a jovial smack on the behind.

  She phoned a few days later with an invitation. “Not really a party,” she warned. “We’re just having a few friends over to see the miracles Wallace hath wrought on this house.”

  They were extensive. The sagging screen door had been replaced with a gleaming metal one, and it swung open onto a gracious sun-filled room. Upstairs and down smelled of fresh paint and new carpeting. “Everything’s in process,” Marion laughed. “Every time I get a chance to sit down, the chair’s just gone to be re-upholstered. My clothes are all at the seamstress being taken in, my ring’s being cut down to size—”

  “When’s the happy day?”

  “Soon as the house is ready.”

  I told her I knew they’d be happy here, but she shook her head. “We’re not planning to live here,” she said. “We’re only fixing it up so we can sell it. Wallace has a house in Virginia, where he’d like us to live five months a year. Rest of the time, we’ll travel.” Her eyes sparkled as she told me about it—France in the f
all, and during the winter, Switzerland, where they would join the Elliot Roosevelts for skiing. She shook her head, marveling. “Me, hon! I just can’t believe it.”

  I couldn’t either, although I had no reason not to. Yet I remembered her words a few weeks later, when someone in New York mentioned that Wallace had fled. A bad check had surfaced, and the police came knocking. Even as Marion was coming downstairs to answer the door, Wallace was out the back window and down the alley.

  Only then could everyone see how really busy he had been. The diamond ring that had been sent back for sizing was traced to Riverhead where he had pawned it. His home in Virginia, like his big construction company, was a fiction, but his police record in Arkansas was genuine enough. His name turned out not to be Byrd or even Wallace, he had no acquaintance with any known Roosevelt, and, far from being of retirement age, was five years younger than Marion. “He had you all set up,” the police chief told her. “Soon as you’d sold your house, he’d have skipped with the cash, and you’d been on the street, crying your eyes out.”

  Tears were not Marion’s usual response to bad luck, however. A week later, she had taken back her old job stirring up fun at the Quarry. Once more, parties became her cure-all, and she rushed from one to another, sometimes four in a night, invited or not, cheerleader at a losing game.

  In August, she fainted during a beach picnic. Her sons, serious young men constantly torn between loyalty and mortification, insisted she see a doctor. “I’m fine, I’m fine!” she assured everyone a few days later; but the doctor had laid down some hard-line restrictions. No more booze, for instance. No smoking either, and a rigorous diet. Rest was in, the beach definitely out—walking on sand, he told her, was too much for her heart.

  “And if I do all you say,” she bargained, “how long will I live? Ten years? Five?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” he replied. “If you don’t take it easy—and I mean easy—I can’t even promise you six months.”

  She put up with his opinion for a week, but her old enemy, Labor Day, was bringing summer to an end, and the parties marking it were nothing she wanted to hear about second-hand. In the time it took to answer a phone, she was back on the celebration circuit Nor was there any reasoning with her. “What do you want me to do?” she laughed. “Die of boredom?”

  She lasted until the new year. The final time I saw her was just after her annual Christmas bash for the boys. Without irony, I asked the old question, “Have any fun?”

  Her answer was the same as ever, but her appearance was not. She looked strangely puffy. Or perhaps it was just the way she wore her hair. She had back-brushed it up into a vast blonde pouf, and petrified it with a blast of lacquer which had coincidentally blinded her rhinestone earrings. Her own sparkle persisted, though, and she relayed all the news about people I didn’t know, topping it with a familiar challenge: “Want me to beat you at Scrabble?”

  I glanced at her daughter-in-law, who was sitting in as nurse. She nodded permission. “You can try,” I told Marion, “but don’t get your hopes up.”

  Even propped up in bed, she played as she always had, swiftly, and with a passionate conviction that coq figured in English usage, and so was permissible in the game. We were nearly through the first set-up, when, inexplicably, she became silent, and her attention contracted inward. The daughter-in-law edged closer. “You okay?” I asked Marion. She nodded, but did not continue playing. I waited uneasily.

  “She never had any friends!” she burst out suddenly. “At least I did. I never had anything in my life, but friends. And if they were all boys, so much the better.”

  “Mind telling me what you’re raving about?”

  “Vivian,” she said. “What she called me at the Estuary Inn that night.”

  I wondered what had sparked this memory, and then noticed I had spelled out the word hag on the Scrabble board. “Forget it,” I said. “That was ages ago.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. “Sure, I looked after ’em,” she defended. “Cooked for ’em, heard their troubles, loved ’em. And they loved me right back, the only relationships I ever had that were worth a hoot in hell! And if that’s what she calls being a fag-hag, I don’t give a damn!”

  I patted her hand, and told her that she had never been a fag-hag. What she was and always would be was an aide de camp.

  She wasn’t listening. Her eyes kept going back to that hateful word on the board, and abruptly she sat up. With sudden resolution, almost as if her next breath depended on it, she planked down her last three tiles, one in front of hag, and two after it, transforming it into shaggy, a harmless word that ended the game in her favor. She met my eyes with quiet pride. “Scrabble!” she said.

  14

  THE PEARL

  Most of the guys I talked to in Union Square had left their fingerprints with the police. But so had I. While my fear of being set up by the cops again had begun to fade, I still could not bring myself to admit to anyone that I had been pulled in on a vag-lewd charge. In some odd way, I found relief in listening to these men who had been through far worse than I, yet seemed able, even eager, to discuss every detail of their sideswipe with the law.

  During the hot weather, I usually brought my lunch to the Square. Before long, someone would sit down on the bench beside me and strike up a conversation—could I spare some needful, did I want to buy a Movado watch cheap, was I looking for some fine Columbian leaf? The goods they had for sale weren’t anything I was interested in, but the stories they inevitably got around to telling me were.

  Georgia Boy, for instance. A big, tawny hustler from Valdosta, he would tell his life story for a “Co-Cola.” For two, he’d tell the truth. Both were worth hearing. I was especially impressed by his account of conning five different women in Jacksonville, Florida, into legally adopting him. It impressed the other grifters in the Square too, because soon they were telling the story as if it had happened to them.

  Over the summer, I got so I could spot such borrowed prestige at fifty paces, and outright lies from half a mile. Not that all the stories I heard were made up. Most of them had at least a grain of truth, but a grain so uncomfortable that the teller had coated it over and over with soft soap so he could live with it—sort of like what an oyster does in the formation of a pearl. However, true or false, I wrote each of their stories down in my notebook when I got home.

  Eventually these began to fuse together in a wide pattern, and characters started moving around in it. The most special of these was a big child-like illiterate I called Babe. As his adventures gradually unfolded in my imagination, I started to shadow after him in fact—in the interest of accuracy, began doing on-the-spot research at his hangouts—the train yards, the hobo jungles, the small-town jails. What slowed down this investigation, however, were the big slammers. While I managed to land a job as a guard in a prison road camp outside Oviedo, Florida, I couldn’t get inside the major penitentiaries. It is ironic that after all my nightmare efforts to keep out of prison, I was now struggling to bust in, and being turned away.

  So the door’s locked, you crawl in a window, is old housebreaker logic. Since lack of education is such a conspicuous cause of crime, and I was more or less qualified to instruct, I figured a volunteer teacher in the rehabilitation program for convicts would always be welcome. However, I found out that in the fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, no such educational plan was being offered in prisons. “Unless you’d want to teach Sunday school,” said the Lieutenant at a big institution on Long Island. He was a heavy-set man with a face as flat as a thumb print. “There’s always an opening for someone who knows the Bible.”

  I had only the slightest background in the Gospel, but claimed to be an authority. “You’ll need to be,” the Lieutenant told me. “We got boys here who really know their Bible. You hear ’em quarreling sometimes, not shouting obscenities at each other, but curses from the Old Testament by chapter and verse. ‘Genesis four-eleven to you!’ one of ’em screams at some enemy down the corridor. �
��Yeah?’ the other yells back. ‘Well, Deuteronomy twenty eight-seventeen right back at you!’”

  My palms got wet, waiting for the Lieutenant to ask if I’d ever been arrested—if that secret were discovered, I’d be kicked out at once. No such question was ever asked, however, and the next Monday, I was allowed to pass behind the high penitentiary walls and join the other Sunday school teachers: two women and a Mr. Wilton. The little cement block chapel on the third floor was bleak, but clean, and one of the ladies put a few sprigs of honeysuckle in a pleated paper cup. Around six o’clock, our convict congregation began straggling in, mostly young, and predominantly black. A guard sat at the rear, armed and ready in case opinions differed. Our staff read aloud from the Bible, after which, we sat down with the boys in small groups, and for the rest of the hour discussed their personal problems in light of the Scripture. There was no collection, and no music, although once, the older of our two ladies sang Lead, Kindly Light in an inadvertently bluesy voice. “‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,’” Mr. Wilton quoted, with approval.

  Nearly every occurrence inspired Mr. Wilton with an appropriate quotation. This amused me at first, but then, one night after class, he turned it on me. As I shook his hand before parting, he peered into my face and lowered his voice. “‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’” he rebuked.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “You’re not here to spread the Word, are you?” he accused. “You’re here for some peculiar reason of your own.” His eyes searched me. “Some kind of newspaper reporter, perhaps? Looking for an inside scoop?”

  “Me? Don’t be funny!”

  “I’ve seen you taking notes,” he persisted.

  I gave the careless shrug I had learned from the inmates, but the threat of exposure alarmed me. “Are you going to tell the Lieutenant?” I asked.