Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  In the excitement of his parents’ homecoming, and the relating of David’s news, Tommy forgot all about his parents’ surprise for him. And so did they. His mother discovered it the next day when she was unpacking, and gave it to him. It was a blue beret, and she liked it quite a lot.

  Earlier that year, Tommy’s father had brought him a present from New York. Tommy was very surprised, because his father never bought gifts, not even for his mother. He said she had everything she wanted, but he would always give her a check for Christmas anyway. He didn’t like to shop, his mother had explained, and he didn’t have the time, either. But he did bring Tommy a black fountain pen with a gold clip. It was a birthday present that arrived two days late because his father couldn’t get home in time for his birthday. Tommy had had it only a couple of months; he’d never even used it. He kept it with the Crayolas John had given him and with his other treasures in his safest place. Tommy thought it might become his most prized possession; it was hard to tell. The pen had a gold point, a gold band around the cap, and a gold clip and filling lever, and it came in a white case with a strip of gold around the edge. If you opened the lid to a certain point and let it go in the right way, it snapped shut with a solid thwack. Tommy liked to do that, though it irritated his mother if he did it over and over. The pen was held tightly in its box by two tiny elastics, and it looked very much like those pens Tommy saw advertised in the magazines, the pens with a white dot on the cap that were supposed to last a lifetime.

  “Really a lifetime?” Tommy asked his mother. A lifetime seemed like a very long time indeed.

  “Well, probably not really, Tommy,” she replied. “Hardly anything lasts a lifetime.”

  Tommy thought of the antique desk and chair in the downstairs hall that had belonged to his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather and had lasted longer than all of them; and of his grandfather’s gold watch, which was not a wristwatch but a pocket watch and was attached to a gold chain with a gold nugget hanging from it and another gold ornament that held a reddish stone with his grandfather’s monogram carved into it. The stone was called a carnelian, a word Tommy thought very elegant and strange. He liked to turn it over on his tongue. The watch was found on his grandfather’s body when it washed ashore one spring five months after he had drowned. His brother John told him that was how they’d identified him. They couldn’t tell to look at him; his face had been mostly washed away. But all that happened long before Tommy was born.

  Tommy never knew either of his grandfathers, or his mother’s mother either, who had died of pneumonia on New Year’s Day a year or two before Tommy was born. He had known only his father’s mother, who had lived with them for a while. The house had once been hers, and Tommy’s father and his brother and sister had grown up in it. Tommy’s grandmother smelled of talcum and dried flowers, like the old lusterware jar she kept in her bedroom. The jar was filled with dried rose petals saved from the roses on his grandfather’s coffin. They were older than Tommy. She almost always wore lavender or purple and a long string of pearls with a clasp blue as ink—“For the opera, Tommy,” she would say with a laugh, for of course she never went to the opera; there was no opera to go to. But she would hum a lot and sing “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you,” or her favorite hymn, “O God, our help in ages past,” as she walked through the house, alone in her thoughts. A warm and pleasant smell wafted around her, and tortoise and bone hairpins drifted from her as she passed, leaving a trail so that you always knew where she’d been. Long after she went to the hospital and died, those pins would turn up in odd corners of the house. She kept them in an ivory box on her dressing table. Her dressing table was cluttered with ivory and tortoise boxes, including a strange one with a hole in the middle of its lid. Tommy could never figure out what that was for; it was always empty. There were little containers of rouge—“pots,” she called them—which his father said she used too much of, and boxes of pinkish powder and great fluffy puffs and puffs that were not fluffy. It was curious to him that women were always powdering their faces; when he tried it himself once he didn’t like the way it felt at all, or the way it looked, either. There were also a hand mirror made of tortoiseshell and a buffer for her fingernails and little scissors with tortoise handles and a thing like a knife and orange sticks for her cuticles. His grandmother was proud of her fingernails and of their moons. She would examine Tommy’s hands and tell him that he’d have fine nails too, if only he’d stop biting them.

  Everyone said his grandmother was a beautiful woman and a wonderful cook, like Mrs. Barlow who made angel-food cake like no one else and a punch from green tea that was served before the champagne at weddings and christenings. The punch took several days to make, and while it was curing it turned the color of butterscotch, though it didn’t taste like butterscotch. He had tasted some once, at the country club. It was in a cup somebody had left in the card room. Tommy’s grandmother did three things in the kitchen: she made red currant jelly late in the summer when the currants turned ripe, black currant biscuits for Christmas breakfast, and the stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, tearing bread into small pieces the day before and dropping them into the heavy glazed bowl with the dark brown bands while his mother prepared the pumpkin and the mincemeat pies and plucked the turkey and poured hot paraffin over it which congealed and was peeled off with the pinfeathers. Pinfeathers, Tommy thought, was another queer word.

  His grandmother was tall and stood straight, and on the street she walked with a cane. One day, when his grandmother had taken him shopping, a friend of hers told Tommy, “Young man, I’d know you anywhere. You look just like your mother.” Tommy did not want to look like his mother, who would sometimes put one of her hats on his head and say that he looked better in them than she did. A few minutes later, on the same street, another friend said, “Why, Barbara”—that was his grandmother’s name—“anyone would know he’s a MacAllister. He’s the image of his father.” Tommy sometimes examined his face closely in the mirror at home, his dark brown eyes peering back at his unruly hair, his cleft chin, ugly nose, and big ears, but he didn’t see his father in it or his mother. He didn’t think he looked like his brothers, either, but pretty much like himself. He certainly didn’t think he looked, as his mother once told him, so pretty that he should have been a girl. That made Tommy’s skin turn hot and prickly. “Look at his little legs,” she told his grandmother, “they’re pretty as a girl’s.”

  “No, Emma, they’re not,” his grandmother said. “They’re the legs of a fine, strong young man. He’s a handsome boy.” Tommy was grateful to his grandmother for that, and he allowed her—without complaining, though he hated it—to comb his hair with water, slicking it down flat, and send him off to school.

  His grandmother had died just a few days after their trip to Chicago in the fall. She’d been in the hospital for a long time, and then she just died. Everyone said it was a blessing, although Tommy didn’t understand why it was a blessing to be dead. She was very old, though, exactly seventy years older than Tommy, seven and seventy-seven, a lifetime apart. She and his father used to argue a lot about her pills; his father was always trying to make her take them and she was always refusing to swallow them.

  “No, John,” she used to say—John was not his father’s name but his grandfather’s—“I won’t take your damned pills.” His father didn’t like that. When he spoke, he expected people to mind.

  Tommy’s father didn’t like women to swear, to wear pants or shorts, to dye their hair, or to contradict him. He especially didn’t like to be contradicted, but people did once in a while. Mrs. Steer told him at a party on the Island, when his father was talking about John L. Lewis’s union trying to organize the plant, that he had the politics of Louis Quatorze, and his brother David shouted, “Off with their heads,” and Mrs. Steer whooped with laughter and clapped his father hard on the back, causing his drink to slop.

  Mrs. Steer was the only Democrat Tommy knew except for Mr. Steer, wh
o was a Democrat because Mrs. Steer was. She argued politics and told everyone that she’d voted for Roosevelt. His father said it wasn’t anyone’s damned business how a person voted and he would never tell, but everyone knew anyway. Mrs. Steer used to wear her son’s overalls when she worked in her garden, and his father said she might as well be a farmer, she looked more like a man than a woman and as much like a horse as a man. And it was true, there was something horselike about Mrs. Steer, and Tommy laughed when he said that. But when Tommy said that Mrs. Appleton had a pink snout and looked like a pig, which she really did, his father didn’t think it was funny. Tommy didn’t see the difference, especially when Mrs. Appleton looked a lot more like a pig than Mrs. Steer did like a horse or a man. Mrs. Steer was as tall as his father and had a long nose. She was lanky, people said, and she loped. Tommy liked the way she walked; it was fast but it looked easy. “Saw Varla Steer cantering down the River Road today,” his father said one evening. “If we put her in harness she’d be my odds-on choice.”

  Varla was an odd name, Tommy thought, but interesting, like something out of a book. It was Danish, like Mrs. Steer, who’d been named for an aunt who moved from Copenhagen to Oslo and died and left her a heavy gold bracelet with her name engraved in flowing script on the clasp. Mrs. Steer had a lot of things that came from Denmark where she’d been born: furniture, silver and china, little ornaments, old jewelry that fit in leather cases, and photographs of her mother and her aunts in silver and wooden frames. There was a photograph of her father, too, in a small leather case lined with faded brown velvet that opened and shut like a book. He was a smiling, handsome man, Tommy thought, with curly hair that was dark and thick. He looked as if he laughed a lot, and he looked very young, much younger than Mrs. Steer, more the age of Phil Meyer. Mrs. Steer’s hair was white, and she didn’t smile much. When she did, though, it was nice. The photographs of her mother and her father and her aunts in their wooden and silver frames were kept on Mrs. Steer’s dressing table, along with a photograph of herself in an evening dress taken the Christmas before she was married. “To remind me,” she told Tommy, although Tommy didn’t know what it was supposed to remind her of. Except for her hair, which had turned white after Vint was born, when she was still in her twenties, she looked the same to Tommy as she looked in the photograph taken all those years before.

  Mrs. Steer had moved from Copenhagen to Detroit when she was thirteen, but she could already speak English, and French and German, too. In Denmark they started learning languages when they were Tommy’s age, and they went to school even on Saturday mornings. She had come with her mother. Tommy thought they were following her father, but he went back to Denmark or maybe to England where he had business, and Mrs. Steer’s mother moved to New York when Mrs. Steer went to the university. New York was more like Copenhagen, Mrs. Steer said. It had an opera, and her mother could smoke the little cigars she liked. Women in Denmark smoked cigars; no one thought anything about it. When her mother died they didn’t bury her but cremated her in a special furnace and Mrs. Steer kept the ashes somewhere in her house. He’d never heard of anything like that. It was spooky. Somewhere in the Steers’ house was a box of ashes from a dead person. Tommy wondered where the box was kept, what it looked like, and what the ashes looked like, too, but of course he couldn’t ask. Mrs. Steer hardly ever talked about her mother, and she never talked about her father. Tommy supposed he was something like his mother’s father, who had gone out West when his mother was a girl and eventually died there. He had built the library in Grande Rivière, and on the wall above the card catalogue there was a plaque with his name on it. When Tommy discovered that, he felt quite proud, and his mother said that yes, his grandfather had built the library and a number of other buildings as well, and that he had gone West to build more. But like Mrs. Steer, Tommy’s mother never talked about her father; Tommy always had to quiz her about him, and even then he didn’t learn much.

  Mrs. Steer kept a stack of books and magazines, some of them in French and German, on the table next to her chair. Tommy’s mother could read German too, at least a little, but Mrs. Steer said it wasn’t the same. Mrs. Steer was like that, and nobody did what Mrs. Steer did as well as she did it. She was very smart. His mother said she was a perfectionist. Tommy always thought that ought to be good but his mother said that was why Mrs. Steer had migraines. Mrs. Steer read a lot of the time and liked to solve problems in calculus. She had gone to college when she was only sixteen and gotten a Phi Beta Kappa key which she kept in a jewelry box. The only other person Tommy knew with a Phi Beta Kappa key was his Uncle Christian. He was his mother’s brother, and he was different, too. Mrs. Steer did a lot of things that other women didn’t do. She read a lot, of course, and sometimes talked to Tommy about what she was reading. No other grown-up talked to him about that. She argued with men and slapped them on the back. She had a deep voice that boomed at parties, though she didn’t like parties. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, which she kept on the table next to her chair along with a silver porringer full of matches. They were kitchen matches and she struck them on the underside of the table, which was not an ordinary table but a large oval lithograph of George Washington under glass, in a polished walnut frame set on a luggage rack. Sometimes she scratched the match tip with her fingernail and it would burst into flame. When she smoked, she would hold the cigarette between her second and third fingers or, when she was working, between her lips. The cigarettes stained her teeth as well as her fingers, and after she had had her teeth cleaned at the dentist’s she would stop smoking for a few days. She said she never inhaled but just held the smoke in her mouth until she released it, sometimes in a sudden great puff, sometimes in a slow blue stream that she would suck in through her nose. Tommy loved to watch Mrs. Steer smoke, to see if the ash that grew slowly longer and longer would drop on her lap, on the book she was reading, on the floor, or in the ashtray, which was a thin silver leaf of a kind of tree that grew in Denmark. It was perfect in every detail, even to the veins and stem and toothy edge, and it looked as if it had been molded from a real leaf. Mrs. Steer had six of them, and they fit so snugly together you had to use your fingernail to separate them.

  Mrs. Steer played golf better than his mother, better than Daisy Meyer even, better than any woman not only in town but in that part of the state, and she had silver trophies with her name on them to prove it. She played better than most of the men, in fact, and when she had beaten all the ladies at the country club she hardly ever played again. When she decided her house needed redecorating, she didn’t call Mr. St. John but did almost all of it by herself, not with wallpaper, like most of the houses Tommy knew, but with paint that she herself mixed. The living room was covered with canvas drop cloths one whole winter, but when she finished it looked beautiful, and she never did it again. When she took up rug-hooking, she ordered special dyes from Boston and Philadelphia and dyed her own wool and drew her own patterns on the burlap and put her initials and the year in the corner. She baked bread every week, but in November and December it seemed as if she baked day and night, filling up coffee cans with an endless variety of cookies and cakes that could not be touched until Christmas Eve, when she would put on a long dress and give a big dinner, like Christmas Eve in Denmark. His parents didn’t go; his mother had her own tree to decorate that night, which she did, sometimes with his brothers after Tommy had been put to bed, arranging the lights and hanging the balls and finally draping the tinsel from the branches. Tommy’s mother saved the tinsel from year to year, and each year it became more wrinkled. Tommy hated tinsel and couldn’t understand why his mother, who had forty pairs of shoes in her closet, refused to buy a new box of tinsel now and then. “It’s good enough,” she would say. “It’s perfectly good.” No one else thought so, though, and after the holidays had passed everyone helped with the lights and other ornaments, but she took the tinsel from the tree by herself.

  Tommy thought the Steers’ tree the most beautiful he’d ever seen. Many
of the ornaments had come from Denmark with Mrs. Steer’s furniture. There were brilliantly colored birds with tail feathers, little mushrooms with red caps and white dots, shells of nuts made into sailboats, and a tiny carousel that played music like the old burled box on a lamp table that he and Amy were never allowed to touch but that Mrs. Steer would sometimes play if asked. But what really thrilled him about Mrs. Steer’s tree were the candles that she would light especially for him late on Christmas afternoon, making the whole room glow against the descending dark and snowy outdoors. She would play the music box then, and make hot chocolate for him and Amy and pour a glass of sherry for herself while Mr. Steer sat with his drink and told stories about his childhood or the war. He’d been wounded in France and come home with a metal plate in his skull and a leg that didn’t work right, but he was a hero. He told how he and Mrs. Steer spent their honeymoon in his college fraternity house. Mrs. Steer said he had told her he was going into the foreign service, like his brother-in-law Mr. Aldrich, which was why she married him, but he didn’t; he took over his father’s insurance business instead. Once he had an office in the Shaw Building downtown but he gave it up because of the Depression and worked from a small room he made in a corner of the cellar. Mostly, though, he worked with wood. That was what he liked to do. He could whittle all sorts of things out of it. On the Island he made Tommy a heavy slingshot with thick elastic bands, a leather pad for the stone, and a handle you could really grip, almost like a tennis racquet’s. Tommy was very proud of it. It was a real weapon. He could have killed a squirrel with it, if his aim had been good enough. Mr. Steer also made him a whistle. He slipped the bark cleanly off a twig, handing Tommy the hollow tube. Then he poked the core out of the glistening white stick, cut a notch in it, sliced one end at an angle and plugged the other, and there was the whistle. Mr. Steer himself could whistle louder than anybody, just with his lips, and when he whistled for Amy—three quick notes followed by a swooping long one and another short—you could hear him from almost any place on the Island or on their street in town. Mr. Steer may not have walked very well, but he could do a lot of other things. Once he made Amy a playhouse that was big enough to stand in and had windows and a tiny but real stove. He had a lathe in his cellar, and Tommy liked it when Mr. Steer let him watch as he turned blocks of wood into the spools and spindles that piled up beneath his workbench. Tommy liked the smell and feel of fresh wood, and he liked to watch the chips flying from Mr. Steer’s lathe. Tommy wanted to try the lathe himself but Mr. Steer said he was too young, and he kept his workroom locked when he wasn’t there. Tommy liked Mr. Steer, but he was unpredictable and usually wanted to work alone.