“Think of all the kids we could have kicked the stuffing out of when they were mean to you,” she said. “Oh, well.”
Mr. Schaefer, the funeral director, explained to me that the metal marker wasn’t the placeholder for a slab that hadn’t been delivered yet because my uncle hadn’t ordered one. “Your parents had just about enough money left to cover either caskets, or a headstone,” he said, spreading his hands apologetically. “I couldn’t see my way clear to burying them in tow sacks.”
I told him that I understood and was prepared to settle whatever outstanding balance remained, and ready to buy a monument. Mr. Schaefer, who knew all about my parents’ misfortunes, said, “Will that be on the installment plan?”
I pulled Emily’s prodigious wad of cash from my pocket and said, “I can pay in cash.”
“Good lord, boy, did you rob a bank?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
After our business had been transacted, Mr. Schaefer escorted me out and locked up the funeral home after us. “Don’t let your uncle see that bankroll of yours,” he said as he pocketed the key, “or like as not he’ll figure a way to come between you and it.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “We aren’t in touch. If I never lay eyes on him again it will be just fine with me.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that. Judge not lest ye be judged,” he said, wagging a finger at me. “That poor soul. Always so worried somebody might be getting a bigger share than he has, so he figures he better grab a double handful of whatever he can, every chance he gets. His kind of empty is a sickness. He deserves our sympathy and forgiveness.”
“Not mine,” I said.
“Someday maybe you’ll come around to it,” he said. “He’s still your kin.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said. Not out loud. I didn’t want to insult Mr. Schaefer for being so good-hearted even as I wished he would keep his opinion of my duty as a nephew to himself.
Before we parted ways Mr. Schaefer asked me what my plans were. I told him I was looking for work. He said he had a friend looking for an assistant at his mortuary in Oxford, Mississippi. Maybe not the kind of work I might be interested in, but if I did happen to be interested he’d be glad to call and put in a word. Next thing you know I was on a train again, headed south. Oxford was just a handful of stops down the line from Memphis.
Mortuary work wasn’t such a bad job for someone still harboring the dream of going to medical school. It cured me of any squeamishness I might have had about being around dead bodies and was a crash course in all the timely and untimely ways a person could meet his end. It was also an object lesson in empathy. Occasionally I was called on to attend the funerals of unfortunates who had no one to mourn them. On such occasions I always thought about that Nevada mining ex-millionairess, Eilly Bowers, and wondered what sort of funeral she’d had after she’d died penniless and alone in San Francisco. Who, if anybody, stood by to lament her passing.
I confess I thought about my uncle, too, and wondered what had become of him. He’d written one letter to me in Oxford, having tracked me down via Mr. Schaefer, I supposed. I tore that missive up unread, but a month or so later Uncle Daniel telephoned the funeral home. By chance I was the one who answered. I recognized his voice immediately, so I disguised mine, or tried to, saying, “Ward Bennett doesn’t work here anymore,” and promptly hanging up. The phone rang again almost right away, and like an idiot I answered it. Uncle Daniel said, “Ward, I—”
He was still talking as I eased the receiver back into the cradle.
While I lived in Oxford I slept in the spare room over the funeral home, a perk the assistant before me had passed on but one I accepted enthusiastically. I liked living among the dead. They didn’t ask me a lot of questions about my past or try to set me up with their daughters. Matter of fact, if you ever want to see ladies scatter like cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light, say you spend your days draining blood and whatnot out of corpses. Another perk of the job, by my way of thinking in those days. I’ll tell you something else. There is nothing like cleaning under a body’s fingernails to make you appreciate that there is no coming back from death.
Every cent of the prodigious wad of cash I had left when I arrived in Oxford I parked in a bank there. I didn’t want to dirty myself up with touching Emily’s money, but I’ll admit it was a comfort knowing it was there in case I needed it. No, I didn’t use the wad to pay for my medical education. After the war the G.I. Bill took care of that. By then I’d lost all interest in going back to Yale. I finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Mississippi, then went on to medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. My residency I did at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.
Ah, you remembered how I said that New Orleans was the last place on earth I’d ever set foot because I did not want to run into my uncle there. Very good. Well, I’ll tell you. I began to soften toward Uncle Daniel after my stint at the funeral home, plus the carnage I encountered in the course of the war, followed by my work in the emergency room during medical school. I’d witnessed a lifetime’s worth of sad ends close up and had seen many a tear shed over opportunities lost for forgiveness and reconciliation. Like Max used to say about the beautifully tailored suits shot full of holes in gangster movies, it made a person think.
I hadn’t heard from Daniel in more than half a dozen years when I accepted that residency in New Orleans. I didn’t mean to look for my uncle, not exactly, but if we happened on each other quite by accident, well, so be it. When that didn’t happen I took to casually running my finger down page after page of the H’s in the telephone directory, looking for Horn, Daniel, then invested many dimes in calling every one I came across. I started digging through hospital records, too, on the off chance he’d come in to be treated for pneumonia, to have his appendix removed, or get sewn up after a knife fight. But nothing. Daniel Horn was a ghost.
Turns out I wasn’t much of a detective after all. Eventually I started lying awake nights, feeling eaten up with guilt as a nephew and a human being. If I meant to be as good and forgiving as my mentor, Sam, well, I was doing a rotten job of it so far. Steps must be taken, I decided, so I tapped the contents of my tip jar to hire a professional. Within a week the detective had found out what I had not been able to after many months of half-hearted looking. Daniel Horn had died in 1941. His body lay unclaimed in the city morgue before landing in a pauper’s grave, location unknown. Like his brother-in-law, my father, he’d taken his own life. Of course I felt bad about that. That poor soul. I’d done more to commemorate a dead horse’s passing than I had my own flesh and blood.
Chapter Twenty-six
On the way over today you stopped by my house to have a look? Well, I must say I’m flattered you’ve taken such an interest in all things Ward Bennett. Yes, it is rather large. The biggest house in Whistler proper, until people started building those sprawling behemoths they call McMansions out on the highway between here and Ripley. Although in fairness I suppose the house Big Howard built was considered a sprawling behemoth when it was new.
You know, when I bought the old place back I stood in the yard with the keys in my hand and let myself have a moment, just a moment, of imagining living there with Emily as man and wife. Filling that place up with children, the way my parents had imagined they would but didn’t manage to after having me. Pointless thinking of Emily and me there together, I know. Even if we’d married, I’m sure Emily would have insisted the threshold I carried her across would be hers, up in San Francisco. So you see there was an upside to getting ditched. I’m grateful for the life I’ve had here in Whistler. It makes me think of that old joke I tell the nurses when they help me get settled in my chair and then ask, “Are you comfortable?” Then I say, “I make a living.” Some of them even get the joke. You do? Exactly. Good.
Too bad I didn’t know you were stopping by the ancestral manse. I could have given you the keys so you could go inside and look ar
ound. Much the way I left it, I suppose. Furniture draped in the dust shrouds, as if a family of ghosts has settled in. Mine. My parents, plus all the unborn grandchildren Miss Pam wanted, babies she could play with to her heart’s content but wouldn’t have to housebreak. I guess Barrymore the undertaker will get his hands on the old place after all once I’m gone, as I’m the end of the line.
This wedding band I have on? It was Big Howard’s. I came across it, still tied up inside an old sock, when I moved my things into my parents’ house once I got it back. I never did get married, no. Bad luck, I suppose. Was never in the right place at the right time to meet the person I was meant for. I’d seen too much, was too busy with my career, too set in my ways, too selfish. Take your pick. Whenever Hannah heard one of my lame excuses she’d laugh and say the truth was that Miss Pam had raised me up to think nobody on this earth or in Whistler was good enough for me.
I hope that isn’t so, despite evidence to the contrary. Without giving Hannah any particulars about my past, I’d protest I’d been in love twice, maybe three times, and that every time I’d gotten my heart stomped on. “Oh, hush,” she’d say. “You’ve got all your own teeth and hair, you’re a doctor and a man. If you wanted to be married, you’d be married. Trouble is, cousin, all you ever wanted was the Romeo-and-Juliet stuff, not the slog of living with somebody day to day. You aren’t fooling anybody, claiming you wear your daddy’s ring out of fondness. Ha! You wear it the way folks wear garlic necklaces to scare off vampires.”
I’m not so sure about that. You see, I’d look at the ring my mother gave my father and, just like Margaret said, think how impossible it would be for me to replicate the bond my parents shared. There’s a difference between being choosy, and being afraid to choose. Why risk matrimony if I wasn’t sure I was in love and moreover was never lonely? During the Hannah years, my cousin was what you could call my “office wife” and the rest of my staff was my substitute family. I had a steady stream of patients to charm with my famous bedside manner, grateful souls who in return provided me with an endless supply of homemade pies, cakes, jams, and crocheted toilet paper cozies. My housekeeper cooked and cleaned and didn’t complain about never seeing me because I was always at the hospital. I was a happy man. Fulfilled in my career. Hannah, meanwhile, no poster child for marital bliss, cycled through three husbands and three acrimonious divorces.
Of course, I’m lonely now.
I missed Hannah something fierce after she retired out to California to live with Judy, who finally resurfaced, not in the movies but teaching high school history at Immaculate Heart, a Catholic girls’ school in Los Angeles. Hannah and I talked on the phone for years after that, every Sunday night.
That’s right. Hannah had three husbands, no children. Just like Nina O’Malley. Do I know what became of our friend Nina? As a matter of fact, I do.
So. After I found out about my wastrel uncle Daniel’s death, I fell to thinking more and more about the good-hearted cowboy family I’d tossed aside so casually by setting my sights on Emily. It took longer than it should have for it to dawn on me that Max and Margaret probably had no idea that I’d betrayed their trust in me. Given that, I couldn’t see any downside in trying to get back in touch.
This was after the war and medical school, you understand, ten or fifteen years after I left Reno. First I called the ranch, but the number had been disconnected. I wrote a letter that came back to me marked “no such person at this address.” Then I had the bright idea of calling Parker’s Western Wear in Reno to ask if they knew what had become of Max and Margaret. Everybody in Reno went to Parker’s, so I figured if anybody knew, they would.
“The Flying Leap?” asked the young man who answered the telephone, a person who’d identified himself as “Luke.” Indeed I do still recall that fellow’s name. I’ll tell you why. I’d known every man jack of the staff there back in the day, and when I placed the call I remember thinking I might have a nice chin-wag with whoever picked up the phone. No such luck, alas. This Luke I didn’t know from Adam. Irrefutable evidence that life had gone on in Reno without me there to sign off on any changes. The little details connected to what hurts your heart are always so much easier to remember, wouldn’t you agree?
“Sure, I know The Flying Leap,” this Luke said. “Terry Finley raises cattle there.”
“You must be confusing it with another ranch,” I said. “The Flying Leap is a dude ranch. For divorcing ladies. Or at least it used to be.”
“Come to think of it, I knew that,” he said. “I was just a kid in those days. Terry bought the place to raise cattle for the war effort after the fellow who was running the dude ranch up and died.”
“Max?” I said, suddenly wishing I hadn’t called. “Maxwell Gregory died?” How old could Max have been? Fifty? Maybe sixty?
“Gregory, yeah. That sounds right. Had a heart attack. In court, testifying for one of his divorcées. Dead before he hit the floor. It was in the paper, right before the war started up. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”
“I haven’t been to Reno in a long time,” I said. “What about Margaret?”
“Margaret?” he asked. “Who’s Margaret?”
“His wife,” I said. “His widow.” As far as I knew they never married, but I didn’t know what else to call her.
Luke said, “Hold on.” The receiver clattered onto the counter. I heard footsteps receding, voices, and footsteps returning. “Boss thinks she moved back to Chicago.” Click. Seems Luke wasn’t one for settling in to shoot the breeze.
After stumbling out of that blind alley I got back in touch with the detective. Then realized I didn’t know Margaret’s last name. I told him to look for a Margaret Gregory, on the off chance she and Max had married at some point, or pretended to; but none of the Margaret Gregorys he found turned out to be mine.
On the upside, the detective did find Sam Vittori. He’d ended up in Southern California again, not dancing in the movies but working in a plant that manufactured airplanes in El Segundo. I called the number the detective provided and listened to his phone ring probably ten times. Just before I gave up on it, Sam answered, sounding winded. He’d been out riding his bicycle, he said, and heard the phone ringing through his door when he got back. “I like to of busted a gut to get to it in time. I would of been pretty broke up to of missed you, son. How are you?” Good old Sam.
“Riding your bicycle?” I asked, then added, as if it were the next logical question, “Are you still in touch with Hugh?”
After a protracted, painful silence he said, “Hugh?”
“Nina O’Malley’s husband,” I said, awkwardly, wondering if I’d put my foot in it. “Hugh O’Malley?”
“Nina was the O’Malley,” Sam said. “She never once changed her name, not for no man. Always held with staying her own self, that one.”
“Good for her,” I said.
“Nina got me this job here,” he continued, tidily sidestepping any further mention of Hugh. “She pulled some strings during the war, told some muckety-muck how I could fix near anything that’s broke. Got me pulled out of the trenches and put in the Army Air Corps, rebuilding engines for her crew. God rest her soul.”
“God rest her soul?” I remember thinking then, oh no, not Nina too. How could she be dead? Nobody I’d ever met had been more alive than Nina.
“Oh,” Sam said. “You ain’t heard.”
It was as I suspected. Nina had gotten herself killed during the war, in the course of training enlisted men to fly. “That and delivering airplanes was about the only job they figured lady pilots was fit for,” he explained. “She was a good teacher, Nina. That know-it-all peckerwood from Boise she was trying to train up walked away from the crash what kilt her. Always figured him at fault, on account of Nina being too good at everything she put her hand to. Except for picking husbands.”
Some would call it a sad end but I believe Nina would be the first to disagree. Never had to be old and tottery, which I can tell you now fi
rsthand is no day at the beach.
Forgive me. I got choked up there for a minute. Flashed on the three of us at the beach at Pyramid Lake that afternoon. All this talk has stirred up memories I thought I’d put away for good. Emily and Nina and I—we were so young then. In my mind those two will be, always. That’s the upside of never seeing someone you knew in your youth again. They stay forever young.
Where was I? On the phone with Sam. That’s right. “Yes,” I said. I had to hustle Sam off the phone right quick after that. I choked up then, too, on hearing that Nina was gone. Even after so many years, Sam sounded like he might bust out crying to boot. Both of us loved Nina, yes. I can say that now. Even though we hardly knew her. Still.
Before I rang off I gave Sam my phone number and we exchanged addresses. After we got back in touch we talked now and again, sent each other Christmas cards, birthday greetings. I kept promising I’d go out to visit him in the land of milk and honey, where any old boy like Sam or I could reach out his kitchen window and pluck a lemon right off the tree. Once Hannah had moved out there to live with Judy, there was really no excuse for my not going. But I was always too busy to get away, and then it was too late. Sam went first, then Hannah, and soon afterward, her sister.
No, I never thought to ask Sam if Nina ever married again, or if she got around to sending him his clothes back. I never asked him, either, if he knew what had become of Margaret. That was on purpose. He never mentioned her in anything but the past tense, so I figured she might be dead. If that was so I didn’t want to know it.
And no, I didn’t ask the detective to track down Emily. I didn’t have to. I knew her name, first and last. I knew where she lived. I confess I’d already gone looking for her myself. Did I find her? More or less.
It was about six months after I got home from the war. I couldn’t believe I’d made it through in one piece. I might not have, if I hadn’t been working as a medic behind the front lines. I was still trying to get over my disappointment with French Emilie, just starting up school again at Ole Miss, and feeling like the world’s oldest college sophomore. I confess I’d had a drink or two. I started thinking about Emily Sommer and feeling sentimental. Fell to wondering if Portia, who’d outplayed both me and Nina all those years before, was grown and gone. Up and called the long-distance operator in San Francisco and asked if she had a listing for Archer Sommer. The operator found it for me. Got the exact address out of her while I was at it. What the hell, I figured. I asked the operator to put me through.
Better Luck Next Time Page 22