After dinner they would go to the lounge, where usually Mrs. Appleton was already playing the slot machines. The lounge was on the other side of the big ballroom, and the older Meyers almost always got there first. Mr. Meyer would roar, “Hello there, boy,” and extend his enormous hand, but Tommy knew that Mr. Meyer knew his name. Mrs. Meyer, who often looked a little wobbly and whose hair was so thin her scalp gleamed through the wisps, would nod. When Mr. Wolfe was there, he would sometimes ask Tommy to play cribbage. He was trying to teach him the game.
The lounge was paneled in old yellow pine. Behind the bar were rows of bottles, and some of the colors and some of the names were beautiful and strange: Triple Sec, Chartreuse, Forbidden Fruit. Tommy liked to look at them, and he wondered if they tasted as good as they looked. The Chartreuse was green, green as an emerald. Forbidden Fruit was purple, and its bottle was round and fat and bound with thin metal wires the color of gold. Tommy checked the bottle every time he came in. No one ever seemed to drink it; the level of the purple never changed. Bob Griswold, when he was noisy, liked to say that Forbidden Fruit was the tastiest fruit of all, but he never drank it either. The slot machines stood on a shelf built into one wall, behind a panel that could be raised and lowered. When it was closed, you couldn’t tell the machines were there. They had one nickel machine, two dimes and two quarters, and people liked to play them after dinner. The state inspector always dropped by the pro shop before he came into the clubhouse. Emil would lend him a new driver and give him a box of Acushnet Titleist balls, the best, to drive from the practice tee while he went into the clubhouse to make sure the panel was closed. If the state inspector saw them, he would have to take them because they were against the law, but they made up the club’s annual deficit and more, or Mrs. Appleton did, with her endless supply of quarters.
The club was run by a Negro steward. Her name was Ophelia. The word “Negro” was never used in her presence, because the condition it described was thought to be embarrassing at best and irreversible in any case, and polite people did not call attention to the ill fortune of others, particularly when the others couldn’t help it. Their feelings might be hurt. Similarly, it wasn’t nice to stare at cripples on the street, at the stump where the plumber’s thumb used to be, or at Mrs. Hutchins in the bar. His mother always said Mrs. Hutchins was a lovely person, but she couldn’t be talking about the way she looked, which, to an eight-year-old, was as alarming as it was riveting. Tommy couldn’t keep his eyes off her, or off her hands, bright with diamonds, which were usually clasped around a small glass of bourbon the color of strong tea. She had migraines, and the migraines gave her a facial tic that went off whenever she lifted the glass to her lips, causing hand and face to twitch violently and drops of bourbon to splatter on her bosom. Mrs. Hutchins knew he watched her, waiting for the glass to move, the spasm to begin. She would glance at him as she dabbed at the bourbon on her dress, laugh a little as if to say, “Oh, foolish me,” and smile. Mr. Hutchins made money from bread. He had a chain of bakeries spread over several hundred miles, so he had to travel a lot. Tommy liked Mrs. Hutchins, and he liked Mrs. Barlow, too. He wasn’t supposed to stare at her, either. Mrs. Barlow was the fattest person Tommy had ever seen. She was so fat that now, even on a calm summer day, she couldn’t make it to the Island, where she used to have a small cottage. As she was leaving the Island late one evening the summer before, the rowboat sank beneath her, fortunately immediately upon her settling into it from the dock where the water was shallow so the consequences were not serious. Still, it took five men to get her out. Of course, the boat was small and, as his father said, already loaded with departing guests. “Or was it departing with loaded guests?” he would ask when he told the story—“I can never remember.” His father liked to tell stories like that. They all needed a hot toddy afterwards, and then they spent the night. Mrs. Barlow crossed over the next morning alone, except for the Indian rower, and she never came back. There used to be a Mr. Barlow, but he was gone, either into the ground or off on the train, Tommy could never remember which, and he didn’t remember Mr. Barlow, either.
But it was Ophelia whom he loved. He was also afraid, afraid that he would say the word “Negro” in front of her, making her angry or sad. Yet the color of her skin was as indisputable, and as exotic, as the bottle of Forbidden Fruit on the shelf behind the bar, or as some of the pictures in his Lands and Peoples set. Tommy always wanted to ask her about it, but he didn’t want her to think that he’d noticed. After his golf lesson that summer, Ophelia would make him a toasted cheese sandwich, with a lot of sweet pickles on the plate, and a milkshake or a root beer or ginger ale float. For dinner she made biscuits and fruit conserves and Southern-fried chicken, which she knew how to make the right way because she was from Kentucky. More than once, when he had been sick, she had sent a chicken sandwich home for him, and she was careful to use only the white meat. Ophelia brought her relations up from the South every summer, when the club was busiest, and there were many of them: nephews, cousins, children, in-laws. His mother called them Ophelia’s shirttail relations because no one knew exactly how they were connected. That’s what his mother said, anyway, but Ophelia knew. Ophelia was beautiful and soft, and so was her daughter, Katherine, who had long, slim hands. In the winter Katherine and her husband taught at a college for Negroes in the South. In the summer they waited tables, and George helped tend the greens. Ophelia and Katherine were very refined people, the finest type of colored, everyone said. She was a good steward; the club was lucky to have her.
It was Ophelia’s nephew—his name was Buck and he was almost fourteen—who told Tommy one summer day when they were playing by the small creek that divided the seventh from the eighth fairway, exactly what things did happen between men and women, that they did these things all the time, that some people—Bebe, for instance, and her girls from the west end of town—got money for doing them, that sometimes but certainly not always these things resulted in babies, and that he himself had seen these very things happen several times already. “Junior and Bebe, they always at it,” Buck said. “They be doing it all the time. But Junior, he don’t have to pay. He gets it for free. He say Bebe should pay him, he’s so good at it.”
Buck used words Tommy had never heard before. He listened awestruck, incredulous, and he made Buck repeat the story. Amazing, Tommy thought, absolutely amazing, and he tried to store the information away in the back of his mind. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want it to disturb the surface, but he couldn’t forget it, either. He didn’t know if he believed it or not. Maybe only Negroes did it, surely not the people he knew, not the people who played golf and went to dinner dances and served tea to his father’s two Canadian cousins who looked like the Queen Mother Mary with their enormous hats and walking sticks and had even been presented to the King and Queen on their Canadian tour; not the people who gave cocktail parties and dinners and, on New Year’s Eve, wore tuxedos and long dresses and popped champagne corks into the big Indian canoes suspended from the ceiling in the club’s foyer. The canoes were called Montrealers and were very old. There were two of them, and a third in the dining room. A similar but smaller one had been made around the turn of the century by an Indian a long way up in Canada, beyond the end of the Algoma Central Railroad, and brought down by water and portage to the Island, where for many years now it had rested upside down on two wooden sawhorses at the Sedgwicks’. Tommy had never seen it in the water; he didn’t think it was ever used.
Tommy believed a lot of things, although belief was confused in his mind with hope. He believed, for instance, that the next time he coaxed his brother David into playing cards with him that David would not insist on playing Fifty-two Pickup, which meant that David spun the cards from the deck across the entire living-room floor and then Tommy had to scramble to pick them up; and when David did insist on it, as he almost always did, that Fifty-two Pickup would somehow become a real card game, like rummy, in which he might sometime get the deal.
It never did. And once, when Tommy was in kindergarten and just before he turned six, he still believed that his mother’s age was twenty-two, his father’s twenty-three. His mother had told him.
He learned otherwise quite by accident, and after he learned it, it seemed so obvious that he was ashamed he could have been such a fool. He was, after all, supposed to be a smart little boy and very observant—so his mother always said—and since John was then twenty and David going on nineteen, in college both of them, simple arithmetic might have revealed the truth. But as his father often told him, he wasn’t very good at simple arithmetic. His father could never make him understand why two and two had to make four. “It’s a given,” his father would say. “Why couldn’t we say it made nine?” Tommy would ask, making his father very angry. Arithmetic seemed to Tommy a convention, like many others. Nonetheless, he firmly believed his mother’s story, and so, when Mrs. Steer asked him how old his mother was one Saturday morning in her kitchen where he was playing with her daughter Amy, Tommy replied, “Twenty-two.”
Mrs. Steer whooped with laughter. She always whooped when she laughed, and it was often loud.
“Yes, she’s twenty-two,” Tommy insisted.
“What makes you think that, Tommy?”
“My mother told me,” he replied, but already he had stopped believing it. He could feel his face beginning to flush.
“Of course she’s not twenty-two, Tommy,” Mrs. Steer said, her voice softening. “Let me see, you’ll be six very soon,” and she put her hands on the counter, tilted her head toward the window, and began to calculate. “I’m just forty-two. Dick is forty-seven.” Dick was Mr. Steer. “David is the same age as Vint.” Vint was her son. And she counted various years and dates and remembered anniversaries and concluded, “Why, your mother must be forty-three or forty-four. I think she’ll be forty-four in July.”
The shame filled his face. His mother had lied to him. Mrs. Steer was right. He had even insisted on its absurd truth. But at least he would not cry, although he wanted to, not cry and compound his ridiculous shame. Instead, he asked if he might have a slice of her bread, which she made herself every week as an economy because the Steers had lost a lot on margin calls in the Crash. She talked about things like that, the Crash and the Depression. Tommy always imagined the Depression as a large, gaping black crater below a skyscraper, filled with clothes and furniture, dollar bills, gold jewelry, and a few dead bodies fallen from the building.
That evening, when his mother was sitting at her dressing table getting ready to go out, Tommy stood behind her and asked, with all the innocence and guile he could muster, which was quite a lot, “How old are you and Daddy, Mother?”
“Twenty-two, darling, and Daddy’s twenty-three,” she replied, glancing at his face in her mirror as she brushed her hair.
“When did you vote?” he asked.
“Your father’s right, you do ask a lot of questions.” She was slightly exasperated. “Let me see, when was the last election...?”
“I know you’re not twenty-two,” Tommy said, his voice level.
“Now how do you know that?” his mother asked gaily, teasing him, rummaging in the drawer for her lipstick, which she always sucked into a little point like a pencil.
“Because Mrs. Steer told me you’re forty-three or forty-four, and I know she’s right. You lied.” The tears he could not shed in front of Mrs. Steer, lest she think him a still greater fool and a sissy besides, welled up in his eyes and trickled slowly down his cheeks. His sense of betrayal was dismaying and acute. It was almost as if he had learned that his mother was not really his mother, or his father his father, but that he was a foundling, taken before his memory awakened from the Evelyn MacCracken Children’s Home, a graceless brick structure with a fire chute that sat by itself in the midst of a large and treeless lot on top of MacCracken Hill.
“Oh, my baby,” his mother said, when she looked up from her lipstick and saw his face in the mirror. “You mustn’t be so sensitive. Don’t cry. It was just a joke, a little white lie, not a real lie.” She turned toward him. “It didn’t mean anything—just a silly little teasing joke.
“Wipe your eyes,” she commanded, handing him a scrap of tissue, dismissing his tears, “and stop being silly about it. You mustn’t be a baby.” His mother was very matter-of-fact, but at the same time she hugged him, and gave him her amethyst to play with, and helped him pick the jewelry she would wear that night. When she was dressed they went downstairs and she sat at the piano while his father finished his shower. Tommy sat in his favorite brown silk chair while his mother began to play the music they both loved, Kinderszenen, “Scenes from Childhood.” She only got through the second song, which was called “A Curious Story” but in German, before his father was dressed and they had to leave. Tommy was comforted, but he didn’t forget who had lied, and how she had been caught.
But that was all a long time ago: before Mrs. Appleton died and Mr. Appleton married Daisy’s mother, before Daisy and Phil were divorced, before Emily Sedgwick wore his grandmother’s diamond and both his brothers were married; long before Mr. Sedgwick resigned from the Edison, sold all his father’s bank stock and the big house, and the Sedgwicks moved to Arizona, before the war began and Tommy’s brothers went off to fight it, before Mrs. Steer gave up her garden and the Steers moved away—before many things had changed. The war disrupted the easy rhythms of life in Grande Rivière, turning the sleepy old fort with its red brick officers’ quarters laid out in a decorous oval around the grassy parade ground into a bustling army base with thousands of soldiers living in Quonset huts, even tents, that sprang up overnight, it seemed, and everywhere—on his very street, in the fields and the woods he played in, in the place where his favorite hamburger stand used to be. Whole areas of town were taken over and closed down to civilians, which he and his parents and his friends had suddenly become. Chain-link fences and barbed wire were thrown up around the park by the river at the same time that the graceful old wrought-iron fences were dismantled and shipped away to be melted down for the war effort. The fountains with their play of colored lights were removed for the duration. The Japanese stone lanterns and the temple gate that stood in the park disappeared, along with the statue of the two naked boys sucking at the teats of a wolf that stood in front of the Courthouse and that used to puzzle and embarrass Tommy every time he saw it. One day a barrage balloon appeared across the street, and soldiers to guard it. For a while the sky was thick with the silver balloons, protection against the air raids that might come at any moment but never did. Tommy’s father kept buckets of sand in the attic in case an incendiary bomb should hit. The maid’s room became an air-raid shelter with blackout curtains at the windows, a portable radio, a deck of cards, a cribbage board, and a supply of canned food and water. An officer lived for a time in the big guest room, and sometimes another officer in the little guest room, too. Then someone they knew was killed, and then another and another. Little flags went up in windows all over town, some of them with gold stars if a son or a brother or a father had been killed. Tommy’s father kept a map of the world on the wall in the upstairs hall, and they put pins in it to mark the progress of the war. Suddenly, with the war, everyone he knew seemed always to be moving, always traveling despite the difficulty: taking trains to Fort Lauderdale for the sun, or to Newport News or Long Beach or Boston or New York, the women to see their husbands, sons, naval officers, the men for the war effort; or to Washington, where Daisy ended up with another husband, and, occasionally, Bob Griswold appeared on business for the Edison, where he’d become a director and the company attorney as well. They would never meet, although they once were very close. Strange things happen in life—a ticket here, a ticket there, and twenty, thirty, forty years later the destination.
1
TOMMY loved his brother John. John was dark and handsome, though not so tall as his brother David, who was six feet and had played center on the basketball team when he was in high school, and the summer Tom
my was seven played tennis with Madge McGhee and Daisy Meyer, and sometimes golf with Daisy, too. John just played golf, sometimes with David or his parents but usually with Emily Sedgwick. Tommy’s mother said that John was “almost as handsome as your father. I have three handsome sons, but none of you is as good-looking as your father.” Tommy didn’t understand that. He thought that he himself looked weird, a skinny little frame topped with a cowlick and huge, flapping ears, but that John was much more handsome than his father and certainly easier to get along with.
When John and Emily were home from college, they talked all the time on the telephone, his brother lounging in the chair in the corner of his parents’ bedroom, talking in a low voice so no one could hear. When Tommy asked Emily what they talked about so long and so often, she told him, “Sweet nothings, just sweet nothings.” Once, just for fun, he even called her himself—“Four-oh-six,” he said to the operator, remembering her number because he had heard his brother give it so many times—and Emily answered, but when she said “Hello,” Tommy had nothing to say so he hung up, giggling. He would tease his brother by singing out “Four-oh-six” at unexpected moments. John might blush, but he didn’t get angry the way David did when Tommy teased him. John would even play rummy with him on occasions that became special for that reason, and for his eighth birthday he gave him forty-eight crayons, Binney & Smith Crayolas in the green-and-yellow box that opened to reveal the colors pointing up in rows, each row a little higher than the one before it. Tommy’s mother could never see the need for forty-eight crayons; eight or twelve seemed plenty. He had lots of gifts for his birthday that he knew were more expensive, but few that pleased and thrilled him so much as this. John could please everybody except, on occasion, usually at dinner, his father, although John could not know that; he was at college, and at the table his mother would read his letters home. Each new letter seemed indistinguishable from the last, and the reaction it provoked was as predictable as the carrots on his plate.
Testing the Current Page 2