Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  I learned more about her every day, but mostly from outside sources. She spoke little of her home life, her joys, her aspirations, her dreams. While I, being a male, babbled on endlessly, weaving about both of us a rich cocoon of myth and grandiose philosophical generalities.

  As winter silently faded into the soft sensuality of early spring, my resolve strengthened and took specific form, though I never saw Daphne outside of biology class. Officially, that is. Unofficially, I shadowed her like a maniacally devoted dacoit, one of the sinister footpad tribe of early India. Watching her from afar, I cataloged her every movement. I covertly made a note of every article of clothing she wore; her wardrobe was immense and infinitely varied. My maroon corduroy slacks, meanwhile, a holdover from the Christmas before, grew increasingly repugnant to me. My purple pullover sweater, with its faded, block-lettered “H,” somehow did not sing to me as it used to.

  Daphne never rode the school bus or the streetcar, or hitchhiked home like me and Schwartz and Flick. She just magically disappeared. One day I thought I saw a fleeting form enter a long, black, waiting Cadillac down the block from the school, but I could not be sure it was she.

  When we passed in the halls, I always wore my carefully rehearsed, debonair Fred Astaire smile, evincing private amusement at this unexpected coincidence. But she always smiled back even more enigmatically as she drifted past—always alone and aloof from the grubby, normal kid hoopla of high school life.

  The time for the spring dance was fast approaching. It was the custom for dates to exchange invitations well before the event. Posters appeared. Mickey Iseley a big-name local band, was engaged to officiate. I decided to lay the groundwork for a move so daring, so hazardous that if I had ever confided my scheme to Schwartz or Flick, they would have immediately wrestled me to the ground, hollering that I had finally completely gone off my nut. But I had not breathed to a soul, even to myself, that I had designs on the most magnificent woman in all of Hohman High, if not of the known universe. Few common gophers ever entertained designs on prize-winning, thoroughbred fillies. I did, and learned a lesson that I have never forgotten.

  One night, while safely huddled in the familiar lumpiness of the bed I had slept in ever since I had first crawled out of the playpen, staring up into the blackness—the faint sounds of distant, romantic whistles on trains bearing magic people off into the mysterious outside world drifting in through the cracked window shades and limp curtains of my bedroom—I decided to bestow my invitation to the big spring dance on Daphne Bigelow. My mind reeled with the mere thought of it! Craftily I began to piece my plan together. First I must have a date—a casual, everyday date—with her, and from there, inevitably, I would lead her to that dazzling ballroom where our love would finally be consummated in the throes of a dance I had zealously perfected in long hours of loose-limbed, sweaty practice, a dance that I knew neither Daphne nor any other woman alive could ever resist: the lindy. Among my peers, those who really appreciated subtle creativity, the beauty of the withheld statement, my lindy knew no rivals.

  The next day my sardonic, martini-dry wit during Biology II flickered like a flame as Daphne hunched next to me over a huge night crawler that together we were dissecting, the heady aroma of her exotic French perfume blending provocatively with the rich fumes of preserving alcohol and dead worm. My courage grew as my bons mots became more and more epigrammatic. Oscar Wilde would have stood tongue-tied in my presence. And then, casually, amid a brilliant analysis of Mr. Settlemeyer’s teaching deficiencies, I prepared to drop my bomb.

  “Oh, say, Daphne—heh, heh—pass me another roundhead pin.”

  Snakily I watched her from the corner of my eye as she turned her gaze away from the benighted night crawler and readied her delicate hand, with infinite grace, over to the pin box. For a moment, panic almost stilled me. Her beauty was such that it took the breath away. Rallying quickly, however, I plunged on:

  “Ah-heh, heh-”

  I took the pin from her hand, the light brush of her fingers over mine sending goose-pimples all the way down to my Argyle socks and out the ventilation ports of my Keds. Without thinking, I did it. It came out in a rush.

  “Howaboutyouanmehavinadate?!”

  Instantly, I bent over my friend, the deceased denizen of the underground, a distinct ringing in my ears as the classroom faded from my consciousness and I stood alone, unafraid, in the bull ring. From somewhere off in the hazy distance I heard a flutelike voice say softly:

  “What?”

  Did I detect a note of incredulity, or was it my imagination? I repeated my question, not daring to so much as glance at her. After a three-century pause came the answer.

  “When?”

  From a distant auditorium, the school band struck up The 1812 Overture. Cannons roared; bugles blew. I had scored beyond my wildest dreams I The rest of the conversation went by and is now mercifully lost from memory. But I remember mumbling something about a John Wayne movie, and that I would pick her up. She told me where she lived. The next night, a blessed Friday, was going to be it!

  Realizing that there was much to be done and no time to lose, like an arrow loosed from the bow, I shot homeward the instant the doors of our pen were grudgingly thrown open. Closeting myself immediately in the bedroom, the scene of so many sweaty erotic daydreams, I went over every item in my vast wardrobe, carefully calculating piece by piece how best to achieve the magnetic effect I knew was necessary. Overlooking nothing, including my American Legion Ball left fielders uniform, I considered, weighed, rejected, wavered; selected each tiny link in my crucial costuming for what was to prove a fateful night. Individual socks were pored over with infinite care, held up to the light, smoothed and laid reverently aside for a final screening.

  Through my locked door filtered the usual family sounds: pots banging, my kid brother’s occasional whimper, and finally, the roar of the old man’s Olds up the drive. The shadows darkened and lengthened. At last my ensemble was complete. If the outward man has any shield against the slings of outrageous fortune, I was more than ready.

  Now I was at the supper table, ready to let the family in on what could very well be a turning point in all our lives. My old man, seated to my left in, as usual, his long underwear, dug lustily into his meat loaf—which, as usual, he chopped up into small pieces, the better to mix with his mashed potatoes and peas, over which he splashed a heavy puddle of lush, piquant Heinz tomato ketchup.

  My kid brother, his snout buried deep in his plastic Mickey Mouse Drinkee Mug, slurped noisily at his Coco-malt, which he attacked with a venomous hatred, recognizing the stuff for what it was—a cheap trick to get him to drink milk. The nightly fight that preceded this ritual had come and gone before my arrival at the table. As he drank, he performed the daily rite that my mother referred to as “playing with your food.” For some obscure reason, he had found that mashed potatoes, meat loaf and red cabbage tasted better when molded into the shape of an inflated football. He occasionally varied this pattern by constructing other symbolic structures such as propellers, and once even a fairly good likeness of Tillie the Toiler. He then asked everybody:

  “What does this look like?

  Nobody ever told him. Our family did not use that kind of language at the table.

  My mother shuttled between the stove, the sink and her chair, wiping up debris from around my brother, refilling my old man’s coffee cup and in general keeping the action going. In the midst of all this, I asked casually, of no one in particular:

  “Do you remember one time I told you about Daphne Bigelow? In Biology II?”

  My mother, not accustomed to actual conversation from anybody, at first did not grasp the meaning of what I had said, thinking that I had asked for more gravy. The old man, who rarely listened to anything said in the kitchen, banged his cup down with a clank on the white-enamel table as a signal for more coffee, a beverage to which he was passionately dedicated. I began again:

  “She sure is a great girl.”

 
; Behind me, the refrigerator chugged and squeaked to itself, a sound that provided night and day a musical obbligato to our lives. My kid brother had extended his tongue to its fullest length, at least a foot and a half. He was using it to make great sworls in his red cabbage.

  “Stop playing with your food!”

  My mother slapped him smartly on the arm with a wet dishcloth and shoved a fork into his greasy mitt Silently he glowered straight down into his plate to announce that it was going to be another of those nights. There were times when he was fed through the use of a funnel and a ramrod, my father prying his teeth apart with a screwdriver while my mother poured the turnips into him. Absent-mindedly, my father, glancing up from the sports page, said:

  “Girl?”

  “Daphne Bigelow.”

  My mother, now seated and trying to wrench the Mickey Mouse cup from my brother, who had placed it atop his head, asked:

  “Who?”

  “Daphne Bigelow.”

  “STOP FOOLING AROUND AND EAT!”

  My father raised his head again and asked:

  “What about her?”

  Bracing myself for the big plunge, I looked meaningfully around the table at our tiny brood wallowing happily at the trough.

  “Well, me and Daphne Bigelow are going on a date. I’m going to take her to the Orpheum to see John Wayne in Hearts Aflame at the Old Corral. She’s really a great girl.”

  It was out! Irretrievably!

  “I’m going to take the bus and go over—”

  The old man cut in:

  “The bus? Where does she live?”

  No kid in the neighborhood had ever dated anyone who lived more than 150 feet away from his own warren. The idea of taking a bus to a girl’s house was a truly revolutionary concept, and I knew it. Picking my words carefully, I laid the javelin home.

  “Oh, she lives over on Waverly Street On the North Side.” The North Side! In one breath I had evoked an image of a land, a world so remote from ours, so inaccessible as to be almost outside the realm of reality. I might as well have said the North Pole. The North Side was a legendary fairyland of vast lawns, great elm trees and sprawling fiefdoms reached only by winding private drives through landscaped wonderlands.

  My father, recognizing instantly the emergence of a new and possibly dangerous generation being nurtured in the bosom of his own home, was now alert and intensely interested. My mother lay back, suspecting a trick.

  He asked:

  “Did you say Daphne Bigelow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On Waverly Street?”

  I had struck pay dirt. I played him like a rainbow trout on opening day.

  “Yeah. She’s in my Biology II class.”

  My mother, not fully realizing the import of what she had heard, fuzzily threw in:

  “What happened to Esther Jane?”

  The faintest trace of an enigmatic smile curled the corners of my lips. My father carefully smoothed out his Chicago Herald-American. He folded and refolded it with exaggerated care, and then said:

  “Daphne Bigelow. I wonder if she’s the daughter of Mr. Bigelow over at the Second Calumet Region National Bank?”

  “Isn’t he that tall, thin man at the second cage?” asked my mother. My father, radiating disbelief from every pore and speaking with some wonder, said:

  “No. He’s the chairman of the board.”

  This was news to me! But at the time I did not fully grasp what kind of news it was. I was to find out all too soon.

  At the time, I thought a chairman was somebody who sat at a desk holding a gavel. I had no idea what a board was, other than the two-by-fours that Flick and I stole from time to time to use in various ways.

  “Maxwell Bigelow is the guy who gave that ice-skating rink to the park,” said my old man. He was looking at me now with a very funny expression on his face.

  “Oh, it can’t be the same one. Does anybody want any more mashed potatoes before I put them back on the stove?” When confronted with inexplicable developments, my mother often pretended that they didn’t exist.

  “You’ve got a date with his daughter?” My father slowly stirred his coffee, steaming and black.

  “Yep. We’re going to a show.”

  “How did you get a date with her?” my mother asked.

  “She’s in my biology class. I asked her.”

  With infinite care and deliberation, the old man placed his cup on the tabletop. He was not a veteran Edgar Kennedy fan for nothing.

  “You mean to sit there and tell me”—he paused dramatically—”that you just asked her?”

  “Yep.”

  “Maxwell Bigelow’s daughter? Maxwell Bigelow from the Second Calumet Region National Bank’s daughter? You just asked her for a date?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  Upward mobility had at last hit Hohman. It was the first recorded instance in Indiana of its occurring at the grassroots level.

  My mother, who had been gradually sucked into what she now saw was a situation that even more mashed potatoes would not change, decided to go along with it

  “Well, you be nice to her parents.”

  I never quite understood what she meant by this advice —which she always handed out over the years. On various occasions she had advised me to “be nice” to teachers, to people on my paper route, to steel-mill foremen, and later even to first sergeants; all people or institutions that she recognized to be in absolute authority.

  She continued: “I don’t want anyone to think you weren’t well brought up.”

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” The old man, who had played such a large role in Bringing Me Up Well used this favorite expression to cover all occasions.

  “Yep, I’m taking her to the Orpheum. And the Red Rooster afterward.”

  “Well, don’t you keep her out too late so that her mother and father will worry.” With that, my mother concluded her entire catalog of counsel about life and its problems. She took it as it came, and felt that as long as you were nice along the way, things would work out fairly well, provided you got home early enough.

  All through dessert—her famous rhubarb rice pudding—technical matters of transportation, dress and behavior were discussed. Obviously I had scored heavily, and the awe that they felt about this unparalled achievement slowly gave way to righteous pride.

  My old man unbuttoned the top of his long underwear and began to talk of great dates he had had in his feckless youth. In sullen silence, my mother cleared the dishes off the table and resumed her old station, hanging over the sink, Brillo pad in hand, amid the lingering aroma of red cabbage, meat loaf and coffee grounds. The squeaking of the refrigerator blended with the sound of Bing Crosby singing about some Hawaiian babe from the radio in the next room. I began to feel my new status.

  By bedtime, as I checked over my outfit for the great adventure. I found myself—for the first time in my life—a full-fledged hero in my own home, not an experience one has often, I have later found. But being a kid, of course, I was under the impression that this was only the natural state of affairs.

  Later, in the dark, incredibly witty things to say to Daphne tumbled end over end through my churning mind. I sifted through my assortment of jazzy stories, which I had picked up from the ball field and the gym. In the dark I could see my lean-flanked figure escorting Daphne to a seat in the fabled lushness of the Orpheum. And then—whisked magically—we were in the number-one booth next to the jukebox at the Red Rooster. Casually I drop a coin in the slot, and amid admiring bursts of applause, I demonstrate my matchless lindy, waving casually for Bucky the counterman to knock together another of my specials. Daphne, her eyes shining in unabashed adoration, poured out her heart to me. Squeezing her hand, looking deep into those jade-green jungle pools, I knew at last the meaning of true soul communication. The night was full of laughter, song, dance and awakening love, all against the backdrop of soft spring skies—and, of course, the clean thrust of my chis
eled jaw.

  Waves of ecstasy coursed up and down my body as I tossed on my monastic pallet. Outside in the darkness, a few distant rumbles of early spring thunder mingled with the soughing of the eternal train whistles reaching into the dark, going away, coming closer, going away again. A few drops of rain pattered on the rusty screen outside my bedroom window. Gradually I fell asleep, but not without a struggle.

  At first, as I awoke in the gray-green light that trickled in through the battered window shade and the roar of sparrows holding their morning orgy filled the room with whooping and hollering, I did not remember what day this was. Then I noticed my Number-One, Heavy-Artillery, Important-Occasion Sports Coat hanging on the back of my bedroom door, and I knew. This was D day.

  I dressed absent-mindedly in my school clothes, my mind deep in scheming. At the breakfast table the aura of wonder was still rich and ripe. As I spooned in the oatmeal, my kid brother abortively tempted to wrest from me the glory that was rightfully mine by relating some trivial cock-and-bull story about a silly pumpkin he had drawn at school and that was being hung on the bulletin board. I smiled tolerantly and headed off for school.

  That morning, when I joined my hitchhiking companions, my fellow freeloaders who every day pocketed—and squandered—the dime that was given to them by their parents to ride the school bus, it was all I could do not to tell them that although I was briefly among them, I was no longer of them. Flick particularly, that morning, seemed to be not only disrespectful but somewhat insolent. He had gained some degree of fame on the hitchhiking corner by an alleged exploit which, at least according to his overblown account, he had shared with a certain Juanita Clobberman. I, naturally, did not pull him up short, knowing full well that when the word got out that I had had a date with Daphne Bigelow—in full public view—there would be no question as to who was who and what was what among the hitchhikers.