Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  Crickets

  HI SWEETHEART,

  WE WERE TALKING ABOUT YOU last night at a dinner party. Dad and I were invited to eat with one of the CEOs that he plays golf with. The man was bragging about his son who wants to write a book. Apparently the son is the vice president of ICC (Important Computer Company!) but he has always wanted to be a poet. I gave out your phone number because I thought you could give him some advice and help him get published. I know you got mad the last time I did that, but I did it anyway!

  As to your question what is the central grievance in my life — are you going to write about this? I’m not sure I like the things I say being passed around to strangers. I mean how would you like it if I wrote down somewhere that when you were little you used to walk in your sleep? We found you all around the house in the morning, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen in a closet or at the foot of the stairs. And once our neighbors, the Anstys, called us to say that you were standing in their vegetable garden staring at the cherry tomatoes as if hypnotized. Your dad went to get you: you were like a little zombie in your nightgown and bare feet. He said, Natasha, go back to bed and you walked home beside him, held his hand and walked upstairs and got under the covers without saying anything. The next day we changed the drop locks to key locks and hung a wind chime on your doorknob. You can write that down.

  I guess there are a lot of things I would change if I could edit my life. I would get more education. I would have been more ambitious and had an interesting job. But the central grievance in my life? I guess I miss my family. Not my sister. I don’t miss Wales. I do miss my mother. But I miss my father in a more painful way not only because he’s dead, but also because I can’t remember him very well.

  Dad’s full name was Peredur David Richard Stuart Campbell Jones Jones. He was a romantic figure in the family because he was always nearby, but so impossible to know. When he met Mum they both lived in Cardiff. He was known for racing motorcycles and she had come to watch the races with friends. She was engaged to another boy when they met, but Dad proposed to her that first night at a party. They were drinking beer and leaning into each other, but not touching. He was leaving to fight the Germans in a week. They spent the whole night talking together. Like two crickets singing in tune they understood each other perfectly. She stayed with him and the party rolled into the morning. In Cardiff in the days before the young men left to fight, parents became strangely permissive — acting against their own Victorian impulses as fascism rushed across the rest of Europe. Perhaps they were thinking of themselves and the nights they lay alone and frightened during the first war, vulnerable in untested flesh.

  I think Perry must have exhausted all the words he knew at once that night. No one ever heard him speak at length again. He told young Gwen that she had legs like a grand piano and hips like a mountain pony. I think it made her excited to hear a young man talk about her legs and hips even though what he said wasn’t nice. I’m engaged, she said, at last, afraid to see his face twist with anger.

  When are you getting married? he asked.

  In a month, she whispered. I’m getting married in a month to a boy I met in school. His name is Harvey, he’s sick tonight. I think he’ll make a lovely husband. I mean to say I love him.

  Well, said Perry, I’m leaving in a week. I’m going to fly fighters against the Germans. I don’t think I’m coming back. You can marry me first and marry him after I’m dead.

  I’ll have to think about it, whispered Gwen, feeling suddenly ordinary and unsure. I can’t decide. I’ll need a few days. You should meet my family. I’d have to buy a dress.

  Wear this dress, he said. I like this dress.

  She cried as she confessed to her fiancé. She shook her head and tears flew from her cheeks, a few drops landed on his hands. He listened numbly, his jaw fell lower, a deep furrow sliced his smooth forehead. She made the mistake of defending her case, describing her infidelity as a kind of romantic nationalism saying, Perry Jones Jones was about to leave everything behind, risk everything, to spit in face of the enemy. Show the world how powerful and wild were the hearts of the Welsh, and all for the sake of the English those ingrate bulldogs — but we must stop fascism! she exclaimed, pounding a fist on her knee.

  Her abandoned man could not listen. Gwendolyn, you idiot, he said. We’re all going. In a month you won’t see a man in Cardiff. He doesn’t know he’ll die, no one knows which of us will die. We’ll all be there but he’ll have your photograph, and he’ll have you.

  She was shocked into silence. Finally she responded to him. I’ve never seen you look so cruel, she said. I’ve done something terrible, haven’t I?

  Gwendolyn Morgan and Perry Jones Jones married after four days, and then after seven days he went away to fight overseas. He took risks. He flew with the confidence of someone who has decided to die. But he didn’t die. He became a war hero. He was part of the Desmond unit in France, which guided British planes by radar. When his airfield base was being bombed, he stayed behind alone after the evacuation and ran the radar to guide the other fighters through the night and through the shelling to safe landings. He was given the British Empire Medal for his bravery.

  So there you have it. He was a motorcar racer and a war hero. He was a man’s man and a ladies’ man, but he never thought he’d live to be a daddy. He didn’t understand children. He and his sisters had been brought up in separate boarding schools and as children left alone with children they always thought of themselves as adults. Whatever pale memories he retained of familial intimacy could not compete with the brightness of his late adolescence. As a father he was lost. He didn’t play with us or talk to us much at all when we were little. His face seemed miles away. He smiled a lot, but I can’t call back his laugh. I followed him around like a dog, but everything he liked to do he liked to do alone. He loved us. He loved taking pictures of us. He was always taking pictures of us, always behind a camera. We were on the beach, chasing crabs with our fingers in the water. We were sipping tea in a café at Hay-on-Wye. We were in the fields surrounded by sheep. We were in our beds asleep. And he was there, behind the camera, with us and not with us. Then he’d go into the darkroom and be in there all day, hidden by the smelly mysterious darkness, behind a light-proof door. I sat outside with my shoulder against the closed door, my head against the wood as I read my comics and listened to him walk around, lift invisible objects, shift things and shuffle papers.

  When at last he came out I fell backwards against his feet. I did it every time so he would pick me up with his hands under my arms and set me on my feet before he moved away again. The smell of the chemicals on his hands and in his clothes was so strong my eyes filled up with tears. In the room behind him a clothesline was hung over a table lined with cans and tubs of developing fluid. Along the clothesline, pictures of Mum and me and Jackie were held aloft with wooden pegs.

  He liked to work on his car in the garage. I remember one day Mum gave me sandwiches and tea to bring to him. I struggled to balance the heavy pewter tray and the teacup rattled on the saucer. He was leaning over the engine under the hood. His hands were black with grease. He lifted his head from under the hood and smiled and gestured at me to leave the tray on a chair. Then he ducked back under the hood again. Daddy, I said out loud at last. He stopped working and looked up at me. What is it, Jane? he asked, controlling his irritation. I thought for a minute for something to say. Daddy, there’s a sale on tools at Foster’s, I called out at last.

  Thank you, Jane. I’ll go over there later when I’m finished here.

  Do you want me to hold your sandwiches for you? I asked, sensing that I was about to be dismissed. Your hands are covered in grease.

  No thank you, Jane. That isn’t necessary. I can feed myself. And, with that, he re-entered his world and I was abruptly left in mine.

  He also liked to garden in his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. The greenhouse was filled with tomato plants a
nd lettuce, cucumbers and any vegetable you could grow on a vine. It was like a little jungle, all hot and steamy inside and smelling like fresh tilled earth. I watched him through the glass moving around and it was like he was in another country, a country where it didn’t rain except on the plants, where it never got drafty at night, and where your footsteps were silenced by the soft moss on the flagstones. I might have been watching him from a thousand miles away. He never looked up from what he was doing.

  If I had stayed in Wales after I married I would have learned how to talk to him. He did love me; I know that. I’m sure of it. It was apparent in the careful way he spoke and moved around when I was there. He wasn’t antisocial and he wasn’t cold, exactly. Jackie got to know him well once she became an adult woman. He and Mum shared a bed until he died at eighty-one. He was a man, not a trace of boy about him. But he was a nice man, a quiet man, an entirely private sort of person. I was angry that he never came to Canada to see you once you were born. We were always returning to him. But, if I were less self-involved in my twenties, or less involved with you girls in my thirties, I might have got to know him better. But then again, maybe we were always too different to be close. I loved him. He was my father, but maybe he could see from his adult point of view that we really had nothing in common and I was just too small to understand.

  Anyway, love you,

  Mum

  MY MOTHER’S FATHER WAS SO distant he’s more like a fictional character to me than like a person I once knew. In every memory I have of him he is sitting alone in a room or leaving the room where I am. It’s strange to think of him as the eager would-be soldier seducing my grandmother into marriage overnight. Or as the hero who ran back between exploding shells to save his compatriots one awful night during the war. It’s strange and yet it makes sense. He so liked being alone that he may have felt the space around him expand in the stuttering darkness. The bombs exploded the tarmac; the pilots’ voices crackled over the radio waves. The planes appeared as discreet blips of light moving across a screen. And he was finally able to protect those precious bodies from a distance.

  I have one of the medals he won racing motorcycles. It’s made of white and red gold and shaped like a shield; I have it on a silver chain. On the front M.M.C. is engraved. Master of Motor Cars maybe? On the back it reads Goss Hall Grass Race / P. Jones Jones / 21/7/29. Six years before the day Gwen’s fiancé began to sneeze and wheeze and backed out of an afternoon with friends. And she went on without him, excited about her new bathing suit, which revealed a fraction of thigh white as refined sugar. She and her friends posed for each other, Brownie cameras like black magic boxes held in turn by one while the others clambered onto the rocks by the shore and threw arms around shoulders, kissed each other’s cheeks, and smiled. Their hair in the pictures in still neatly curled in spite of the waves. Hairspray in Wales is strong enough to hold up buildings after dynamite.

  Her eyeglasses are speckled with mist. She has her hands on her hips and one thigh is turned outward to show the daring swimming suit. Black because it’s slimming, cut with a round neck that shows her collarbones.

  Later someone suggested the grass races. The bikes were gray with dried mud. The smell of oil hung in the air. All the riders looked the same under their helmets and goggles. But one pulled ahead of the others, tilting as he rode as if he had no thought to right himself, he did not care if he crashed, he was not afraid of falling. Who’s in the lead? she asked her friend. Perry, her friend answered. Perry Jones Jones always wins.

  I wonder what it was like that first night they were married. Lying in bed together in silence, smear of icing from the wedding cake on his cheek. The windows open to the damp night. Crickets whispering. The other guests and residents of the Angel Inn moving in the hallway. His hands on her skin touching her arms and legs and back and breasts. How she might have held onto him.

  I’ve forgotten some of your names, she might have said, still unnerved. One day he doesn’t exist and she has never been totally naked in bed before and then within a week he is her husband, her strange husband with so many names, and he will be leaving her by the time the weekend is over. How is she to negotiate her tiny world now that it has been invaded by sex and maybe by love. Is it love?

  They were in love in their seventies. I watched her touch his shoulder, touch his arm whenever she passed him in the room. And he reached back to grip her fingers. At seventy she performed in the pantomime, playing the king, wearing a velvet crown and a felt cape over the shirt and pants she borrowed from her husband. I sat beside him in the theater. He never turned his head or spoke. He simply stared at her until the curtain fell. He thought he would die in France or over Berlin. He did not dream of domestic bliss or of fussing with his car or sorting out his children or attending to his familiar wife in bed. He did not dream of my mother and he did not dream of me. He may have been too honorable to come right out and say to her that what he wanted was to have sex before he died and so he proposed, thinking heroic thoughts of nuptial orgasms followed by a fiery plane crash.

  Maybe she shared his fantasy, to come and then to go. To lie in bed and really know someone naked in the dark, someone that you had spent only breathless days speaking to and barely a kiss before facing death. Her first engagement was to a man she thought would make a good husband, a good father, her partner for life. Her second engagement was to a man who made her legs shake when he told her she looked like a Welsh mountain pony — stocky and feisty. Picture her, a young woman at a party with a beer in her hand, breathing in the dusky scent of men and feeling like a mountain pony climbing a steep green range, skin letting off steam in the rain.

  Nora

  DEAR NATASHA,

  WHY ASK ABOUT NORA NOW? I don’t know why I never mentioned her, but if my mother told you anything about her then I’m sure you already know the entire story. Grandy was in Normandy during the war. We lived on Rumney Street in Cardiff. Your Uncle Brian and I slept in stacked cots in one bedroom and your Aunt Joyce slept in the cold box room with the sewing machine. Brian and Joyce spent most of the hours they were out of school throwing stones at the magpies winging, black and white, white and black over the huffing chimneys and slate roofs.