She was still on her knees when the mourners shuffled down the aisle. The mother with the grey hair wore a faded pink dress; as though tasting death, her tongue flicked her lips. Rose pretended she was praying, keeping her clasped fingers close to her face in case they were all looking at her.
She remained crouching there until she heard the blasting of a horn. It was typical of Harold to be disrespectful. When she climbed in beside him he apologised for making such a row. ‘I didn’t want that priest guy asking for a lift back to his car,’ he explained.
‘He’ll be too busy comforting the boy’s mother,’ she said. ‘And I expect there’ll be refreshments.’
‘By the look of her,’ he replied, indicating the fat woman in the black skirt propped against the nailed feet of Jesus, ‘she’s been refreshing herself all day.’
She didn’t see the point in telling him he’d got the wrong woman.
He was tardy in starting the engine, and the next moment Monsignor Secker was running towards them. Reluctantly, Harold waited. He needn’t have worried, the priest only wanted to thank him. The local priest had offered him a bed for the night and a breakdown truck was already on its way to fetch his car.
Rose said, ‘Do tell the mum how sorry I am for her loss.’
The Monsignor said such sentiments were much appreciated but the mother wasn’t present. She’d been taken to hospital earlier that morning. A stroke, he believed.
‘God Almighty,’ Harold murmured, and wound up the window.
Rain started to fall as they rejoined the highway they’d abandoned earlier. The sky now hung metallic grey and torrents of water buffeted the insect-smeared windscreen. Harold said the radio had given warning of a tornado. ‘How exciting,’ she trilled, at which he called her a fool. If they didn’t find a campsite quite soon they’d need to spend the night in a motel; he was worried about the stuff on the roof.
Under the ridge of a pass, he stopped to buy gasoline. Nearby, a row of cabins stood next to a café dominated by a sign printed with the words, No cheques cashed unless accompanied by fingerprints.
‘It’s a joke, isn’t it?’ she queried.
‘Not entirely,’ he said, and ordered her to follow him.
The café was deserted save for a young man in charge of the desk. He had a hairstyle like Elvis Presley’s. Rose felt he was wasted in his position, mostly because his eyes sparkled with hope. When he took down the keys from the board behind him and swaggered out to show them a room, she was dazzled by his two-tone shoes. Harold asked if there was somewhere under cover where he could park the camper, preferably a lock-up.
‘There’s a shed with a tin roof,’ Elvis told him. ‘But it don’t have no doors.’
The cabin was primitive, just one room with a bed, a row of hooks on the back of the door, a one-legged stool and a chamberpot in the corner. There was no washbasin and the counterpane had a large stain near the pillows. According to Harold the air smelt funny, a mixture of dampness and fried food. Suddenly he announced he’d best stay in the camper, to keep an eye on his belongings. She could have the room. What with the rain and no security he’d have to keep the door locked and she wouldn’t like that, would she?
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she agreed. ‘I’d get claustrophobia.’ It was a good excuse, one that would save her from his nightly nagging to wash her face and scrub her teeth. ‘But,’ she added, ‘I don’t want to cause you expense.’
‘It’s only two dollars. And by the look of the place that’s a dollar too much.’
She didn’t turn the light off and got into bed in her clothes. Presently she was aware of a dripping sound. Rain was coming through the ceiling, drop by drop, plopping into the chamberpot. She remembered Auntie Phyllis used to have such a receptacle, its china bowl decorated with red roses. The lav was in the back yard. Father had boasted, mouth grim, that he’d gained his education from a childhood spent reading old newspapers while waiting to evacuate.
She tried to think of the boy without a face and of his stricken mother, but all she could see in her head was Auntie Phyllis squatting on the potty, nightie hauled up above her backside, the street lamp glittering off the curlers in her hair.
NINE
At six o’clock the following morning, Harold knocked on Rose’s door and shouted that she should join him in the restaurant. He had endured a disturbed night spent clambering in and out of the camper, convinced he’d heard scraping noises and stealthy footsteps. Emerging from the black confines of the tin shack, he had done sentry duty beneath a canopy of stars.
When Rose appeared she was dressed in her usual outfit of trousers and raincoat, even though the rain had ceased and the sun was climbing into a cloudless sky. In the middle of chewing on her one slice of toast, she offered him some English shillings in exchange for a dollar. He gave her what she needed, but refused the coins spilled onto the table.
‘What are you going to buy?’ he asked, at which she muttered something about it being women’s stuff, which was a lie because she went straight to the tobacco counter. When she’d paid for what she’d bought she called to him that she was going out for a spot of fresh air. He assumed she wanted a cigarette and wondered why she preferred to smoke on her own.
As they drove out of Pennsylvania into Ohio she chirruped that it must be like crossing from Lancashire into Yorkshire. When told they were halfway to Chicago, she sat up and even began to study the map, but after no more than a moment cast it aside and announced that she knew about Chicago from gangster pictures. ‘It’s where,’ she said, ‘Al Capone did all his killing.’
Approaching Cleveland, he was seized with a desire to visit his old university and made the detour to Akron. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but something compelled him. A queer sense of loneliness filled his being, an isolation of the spirit. He reasoned it had to do with lack of sleep, that and the turmoil of his thoughts.
When they reached the campus he ordered Rose to stay where she was. She pulled a face, but he took no notice. Her presence was unsettling. She was too confrontational, too apt to speak without thinking. For more than two hours she had talked about nothing but the Holy Spirit and the Day of Wrath. The funeral had brought out the worst in her. She reckoned even the dead soldier would face the flames of everlasting hell. He was beginning to believe that some power, God even, had joined them together in order to crush his resolution.
Shoulders bowed, he trudged towards the administration buildings. There was no one about save for an old man with a wart on his nose, sitting on a chair outside the closed doors. He asked Harold his business.
‘Class of 1945,’ he volunteered. ‘I remember you, but I don’t expect you remember me . . . too many faces.’ He didn’t explain it was the wart that he found memorable.
‘Nope, I don’t,’ the old man replied, ‘but that ain’t surprising. Most days I don’t recall me own name.’
The gymnasium lay behind the chemistry lab. He had a need to go there and stare through the windows. He had not been altogether happy during those long-gone years—no surprise there—but at least he had partially got away from the suffocating presence of his mother. Memories swirled through his head like a flock of birds: that first encounter in the locker room with a young Shaefer, watery-eyed at the news that Mahatma Gandhi had been shot; the fist fight with Meredith Manning, caught stoning Mrs Arlington’s cat; his first glorious lapse into drunkenness when the music of the dance band had drowned his shyness and Shaefer, a guiding arm about his shoulders, had walked him into the moonlight. Shaefer was his true friend, one who never had nor ever would betray him. Lastly, vivid, an image of his mother advancing towards the Rothschild Building, arm in a sling of black silk dotted with fake diamonds. His second stepfather had pushed her to the floor after receiving a hefty bill for two bronze horses she’d had installed on the gates of their house on Long Island, copies of those she’d seen on St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Her arm hadn’t suffered lasting damage, but she had never been shy of attracting at
tention. Only Shaefer had understood that Harold’s misery stemmed from embarrassment rather than pity.
The interior of the gym had altered. The vaulting box was no longer there, nor the row of lockers where once his name had been displayed; gone from the walls the photographs of the baseball teams, gone the yellow ropes that used to dangle from hooks in the ceiling. Time, he thought, was fast wiping out his life.
Rose was sitting outside on the grass when he returned, rubbing the dirt from between her toes. He asked if she was hungry, and as always she said she wasn’t. When she sat beside him in the camper, he was aware she was staring at him.
She said, ‘Your face looks funny.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ he quipped.
‘It never does any good,’ she said, ‘to dwell on things that can’t be changed . . . that way madness lies.’
It was curious, he thought, how sometimes she appeared educated. Glancing sideways at her, he recognised the expression on her face, a mixture of unease and fortitude. She was trying hard, he reckoned, to make the best of a disappointing situation. Taking stock of his behaviour, his lack of sympathy, the absence of interest in his voice whenever she waxed on about her childhood, he resolved to make amends. God knows, he knew better than most what it was like to feel undervalued.
‘Would you,’ he asked suddenly, ‘like to go to a movie?’
‘Yes,’ she said, eyes shining, ‘but only if you would.’ She was happy now.
He made for Cedar Point and a campsite on a hillside. It was well equipped, boasting a miniature golf course and a large swimming pool, its blue waters mirroring the sky. Beyond, below the campers and the tents, a jumble of fishing boats jostled the dazzling curve of Lake Erie.
Rose was impressed. She stared at the men in shorts and the plump women lounging on chairs, but turned away from the screaming children running and tumbling beneath the cedar trees. Nearby, a baby strapped into a high chair was banging its wooden tray with a spoon; he noticed that Rose winced at the sound and immediately put on her sunglasses. He had the notion that it wasn’t just the sun she was blotting out.
Although he was hungry, he thought it best to see to cleanliness first. Indicating the laundry room beside the store, he asked Rose if she had any clothes that needed washing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Too much cleaning makes us susceptible to germs.’ A superior smile on her face, she watched as he stripped the mattress of its covering and beat the pillows against the trunk of a tree. ‘Insects will wriggle in,’ she warned. Then she wandered off, which annoyed him because he could have done with some help.
When he came back from the laundry room she was squatting on the grass some distance from the camper, close to an elderly man in a straw hat. They weren’t talking to each other. He was slumped in an armchair and Rose was rocking backwards and forwards, eyes to the ground. Then a younger man appeared and said something to her, at which she got up and engaged him in conversation. She appeared animated and did most of the talking. Once, she held up her hand and wafted it in front of the man’s face, as if wiping out something she didn’t want to hear.
Later, Harold asked her about the old boy in the chair.
She said, ‘His name’s Theodore. He once lived in England.’
‘I guess,’ he said, thinking of the man’s age, ‘that he talked a lot of moonshine.’
‘No,’ she corrected, ‘as a matter of fact he talked perfect sense. He said he was rotting.’
‘Rotting . . .?’
‘Hearing, innards, feet, eyesight, bones . . . nothing as it used to be.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Obviously not a cheerful guy.’
‘He hadn’t expected to be cheerful,’ she said, ‘not once he got old. He’s just facing life as it’s meant to be. He always knew he would rot.’
‘Jesus,’ he said again, and told her to get into the camper.
The cinema screen was in a field alongside the golf course. Rose was amazed that films could be shown in the open air. The movie was called The Third Man and was about an American guy arriving in Vienna to stay with his best friend, only the friend turned out to be dead, though not for long. Orson Welles played the elusive character and ended up running through the sewers. Harold had seen it before and dozed intermittently. Rose thought the film wonderful, but couldn’t understand why the Yank wanted to kill Orson Welles. She said it didn’t make sense, a man endlessly looking for his friend, and then shooting him when he found him. It wasn’t normal. And she only remembered two men. Who was the third? Harold tried to explain that the Welles character was bad and that he deserved to die, but she argued that no real friendship could ever end in that sort of way, no matter what the circumstances. In the end he gave up and agreed with her, to keep her quiet.
Before she went to bed she asked to borrow a piece of paper and something to write with. Her father’s pen had gone missing. He could hear the rumblings of her stomach as she scribbled. He’d eaten half a chicken, she no more than a mouthful of bread. He was surprised she wasn’t turning into a skeleton, like someone else he knew. When she climbed into the camper she left the bit of paper by the fire. To his astonishment, she had written something in Latin, albeit badly spelt. Recordez Jesus pie, quod sum cause tua via, ne me perder illa die. With difficulty he deciphered the words: Remember gracious Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey, do not let me be lost on that day.
Yet again he slept badly, waking from a dream of walking with Wheeler through a field of maize. He’d been blinded by the sun blazing on Wheeler’s hair, that and the blue vein pulsing on his forehead. They’d had a conversation, an important one, but he couldn’t remember what it was about.
The next afternoon, approaching Chicago, he gave Rose a lecture on the city to shut her up; she was still meandering on about God. Originally, he told her, it had been known as Fort Dearborn, a settlement on the shores of Lake Michigan with no more than a hundred inhabitants. Sixty years later, renamed, it housed over a million and had become the largest grain market in the world.
She didn’t seem interested. He stopped himself from telling her that the downtown area had been burnt to the ground in 1871. It would only have started her off again on the fires of hell. Then she asked what grain was. He laughed and didn’t reply, convinced she was joking.
Without thinking, he came to a halt in a street in Wicker Park, a suburb of the city and once a neighbourhood of the rich. The great houses had long since multiplied into apartments, the lawns into storage spaces for trashcans and automobiles. Rose, remembering the address on the letter, asked him to show her the place where Wheeler had stayed some weeks ago.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ he argued. ‘He’s long gone.’
‘I just need to see it.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘You needn’t come,’ she snapped. ‘Just tell me where to go.’
Frowning, he indicated a house further down the street, its white tower stabbing the cobalt sky. She was opening the door when a wave of sound followed by a thunderous roar swept the air. The camper shook. Startled, she turned and clutched his arm. ‘It’s the El,’ he reassured her, ‘just a train,’ and pointed at the track running level with the chimney pots.
‘No wonder he chose to stay here,’ she said. ‘He and his wife used to live next door to a railway crossing . . . and his house had a tower as well.’
‘Wheeler didn’t have a wife.’
‘Yes he did . . . she rode a bike. She always pushed in front of me in the chip shop.’
‘What did she look like?’ he demanded, convinced she was lying.
‘Old, plump, lots of grey curls under a straw hat.’
‘He never mentioned he was married.’
‘Neither did you,’ she retorted, which rendered him silent.
He was getting short of money and needed to cash a cheque. She insisted on coming with him. ‘I could do with the exercise,’ she said. ‘My bottom’s gone numb.’
He’d wanted her to stand guard over the campe
r, but she was already leaping out of the door. Whatever store they passed she darted away to look in the windows. She couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself, letting loose little screams of astonishment as she swivelled round to scrutinise the people streaming along the sidewalk, making remarks in a loud voice as to the mixture of races. ‘That coloured man,’ she shouted, nudging him in the ribs, ‘had Chinese eyes.’ He wished her dead.
The bank was only half full and he didn’t have long to wait. There was a limping woman ahead of him, and a second female at the adjacent grille, wearing a pink bow atop a beehive of dyed hair. He was writing out a cheque when someone screamed. He turned to see a man with a mask over his face holding Rose by the throat, a gun to her temple. She twisted round in his arm and buried her face in his coat; taken aback, he patted her head as though comforting a puppy. A man by the entrance, a scarf covering his nose and mouth, ordered everyone to fall to the floor.
The next few seconds were confused, traumatic. Some part of Harold contemplated jumping to his feet and wrestling Rose from the gunman, but a larger part kept him on his stomach, face to the wooden floor, heart pounding. Minutes later, although it might have been hours, a stampede of armed police entered the building, followed by the gunman and his accomplice being overpowered. No shots were fired. The man holding Rose threw his weapon to the floor. When the mask was torn from his face his expression was puzzled. Trembling, Harold felt he had taken part in a movie. Aghast, he discovered he’d wet himself.
Rose and he were detained for questioning. He said he remembered nothing beyond the sound of his friend screaming.
‘I didn’t scream,’ Rose protested. ‘Why would I scream? I didn’t think it was a real gun.’
He could tell the cops found her odd, partly on account of her English accent—that and her lack of hysteria. She said it was the woman with the pearl earrings and the bow in her hair who had screamed.
He said, ‘I didn’t notice the earrings.’
The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress Page 8