Ice-Cream Headache

by James Jones

  ’Cause…”

  Their voices faded and died as the motor started. Tom honked the horn once, derisively.

  Sandy Thomas stood in the door, watching the headlights move away, feeling the need inside, holding the bottle in her hand, moisture overflowing her eyes unnoticed, looking backward into a past the world had not seen fit to let alone.

  Tomorrow she would change the tablecloth, the red and white checkered tablecloth. And it was not her fault.

  Secondhand Man

  I spent the summer of 1945 in the Smokies, and it was there that I heard first of Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender. Originally it was about a cracked-up veteran trying to pull himself together by living by himself in the mountains (where he learns of the surrender), but somehow was always too sentimental and never worked. In 1948 I rewrote it as it is now, changing the character, adding the wife, and drawing on a couple I knew in Illinois. Reading it over I find I still like it but nobody ever wanted to publish it.

  I

  WHEN THE DOCTOR TOLD Larry and Mona Patterson he thought Larry should spend the summer in the mountains and suggested the Great Smokies, neither Larry nor Mona had even the vaguest idea of what it might be like there, and neither of them wanted to go. Also, they were both naturally pretty frightened too, by the pronouncement.

  “Now for God’s sake dont look so scared,” the doctor said irritably. He was a big heavy floridfaced man they had had for years. “Its nothing permanent. And its nothing serious especially. I know youre both city dwellers. So’m I. But Larry’s lungs are not in good shape.”

  “In other words, you mean Ive got spots on my lungs,” Larry said. “TB.”

  “No, I dont mean any such a damn thing,” the doctor said irascibly. “If you did, Id tell you.” He hitched his chair up to his desk on the expensive carpet and looked off out the window over the rooftops of downtown Baltimore for a moment. Then he turned back to them. Patiently, explainingly, with the same awkward and irascible gentleness he had displayed all through Larry’s illness and ever since they had known him, he spoke of the bad siege of double pneumonia Larry had been through, and of the run down condition in which it had left him. He did not say anything about the protracted bouts of hard drinking and exposure scattered over a period of some years which they all knew had occasioned the pneumonia. Slowly, and logically, he pointed out that the best thing Larry could do was to change his environment and normal practice for a while.

  “You newspapermen,” he said. “You dont lead any healthier lives than us doctors.”

  What Larry needed now was a complete change. He was past the convalescence, but he still wasnt built up enough to go right on back into working. “Just look how shaky you still are,” he said. He shook his head. “Those lungs of yours have had a bad beating.” A summer in the mountains should restore him. Larry—who had an invalid’s gratitude to his doctor now that amounted almost to worship—had the feeling that while he talked patiently on, by far the larger part of his mind had gone on somewhere else. To contemplate some other patient’s problem, probably.

  “Then you mean I dont have any spots on my lungs?” he couldnt help saying anyway.

  “Larry, spots on the lungs can come from just about any damned thing in the world; and they can mean just about any damned thing in the world,” the doctor said with irascible patience. “No, you dont have any. But I will say this, Larry. You are not going to be able to go on living at the pace and in the manner you have been for the past ten years so lets face it. Your body wont stand it any more. Now, I dont know what your trouble is, with all this extended drinking and all, and everything,” he said embarrassedly, with a look at Mona. “Im no psychiatrist. But I do know your body wont take it much longer.”

  Larry did not say anything to this. But Mona put out her hand on his and patted him and he turned to smile at her gratefully. “He wont, doctor,” she said embarrassedly.

  “And right now your lungs are your weakest part,” the doctor said. “It might be a good idea to start looking into the idea of whether your paper would transfer you somewhere out West. In the high country,” he said. “They own papers out there, dont they? And after all youve been with them a long time.”

  “Well, I suppose they would,” Larry said. “But if I dont have—”

  “You havent,” the doctor said. “Well, it doesnt matter. Thats just something for you to think about. Im not recommending it. But you ought to think about gettin’ out of here. And cities arent good for your type anyway. But right now, theres nothing wrong with you that a summer in the mountains wont fix. You need fresh air, and exercise, and sun, and rest. Chop wood. Breathe. Eat. Sleep.” The doctor suddenly leaned back in his chair and looked out the expensive twentieth floor window of his office. “I use to hunt up there, myself,” he said looking out. Then he turned back to them. “Still do. Whenever I get the time,” he grinned, wistfully and almost unbelievingly, and then shook his head at his own lie. “Great country, anyway. Be the best thing in the world for you, Larry. I wouldnt suggest it if I didnt know you could afford it,” he added.

  “I couldnt afford it for more than a summer,” Larry said. The doctor nodded.

  “Your paper ought to be willin’ to give you a leave of absence,” he said. “With pay. After all, they dont like to invest money in sending a man to an executives’ school and then lose him. No corporation does. You see about it. If you need any letter or reports or such like, call me up.”

  Larry looked dependently at his wife. His wife who for four months now had been nursing him back to health. Mona, who had looked as perturbed as he had at the idea of going to the mountains, smiled and nodded without hesitation. “Okay, doc,” he said, “I always wanted to be a pioneer anyway.”

  “And remember, lay off the liquor,” the doctor said as he shook hands with them.

  “You mean I cant drink anything?” Larry said. He always felt like a chastened schoolboy whenever he was around doctors; at least, when on business. They were so positive. They were only men, but they had all this responsibility for telling people what to do, and he was glad he wasnt one. Of course if they were standing together at a bar having a drink it was a different thing.

  “Larry, I dont intend to itemize how much you drink for you,” the doctor said, and then grinned, with his heavy florid face which looked like the face of a man who drank his own full share, and in fact was, as they had known for years. “We both know a beer and a couple of highballs wont hurt you any. But youre going to have to cut out these protracted benders that wind up givin’ you pneumonia. Thats for sure. Youre almost forty now.”

  Larry did not say anything to this either, and only nodded, dumbly, as if he superstitiously hoped perhaps in that way, by saying nothing, it would maybe not exist.

  “And you see that he does, Mona,” the doctor said cheerfully as he shook her hand. Mona smiled embarrassedly and nodded; “I will,” she said, and he leaned back against his big expensive desk and folded his arms in the white coat.

  “When you get to be our age, Larry—and Im older than you—” he grinned ruefully, “we become Second Hand Men. Thats what I like to call it. Second Hand to everything, we are. In this day and age. Second Hand to our jobs, to our country’s military strategy, to the money we make or hope to make and then cant spend, to taxes and the cause of world peace; Second Hand to our children, if we have any. Three hundred years ago at our age wed be about ready to die, if we werent dead already. But now we can go on living for a long time yet, if we want to, in a Second Hand sort of way. Well,” he said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Tell Miss Pender to send the next person in in about three minutes, will you?” he said.

  The sort of vague-eyed, reticent-faced embarrassment they had all been laboring under had apparently tired him out as much as it had them.

  II

  And so that was the way it ended, and a month later they were in the Smokies. The doctor had had friends up there and had written to help them get a secluded cabin. He had als
o handled all the papers and red tape necessary for Larry to get his three months’ leave of absence with pay. The paper obviously knew that Larry was walking along a very thin ragged edge and as the doctor who apparently had handled many such cases said, they had spent too much money grooming Larry into a potential future business manager not to want to protect their investment. Of course nobody said any such things to Larry down at the office, and there was a sort of great embarrassed constraint apparent whenever he was around and when he left everybody wished him luck. Heartily. As if they superstitiously hoped that in this way, by this sort of formal genuflection to human comradeship and hearty good feelings, they might make themselves immune to breakdowns. Needless to say Larry was glad to get away. He had kept on going down to work all during the month which was May although of course in reality he had done very little and had left early and was very shaky still.

  Mona did not ask for leave of absence from her own job with Antoine’s, but just quit altogether. As she herself said, she could get it back anytime she wanted it, or a better one. They kept their apartment in the city and only took a few little things with them and clothes they felt they would need for roughing it. They left the city, driving down, and took Route 1 toward Richmond, heading for Asheville, Larry driving until he tired which was soon and Mona relieving him, and as they drove they talked. They talked it all, everything, all of it, the illness, what had preceded and caused it, what they would do now about it, and what they would do later. It was really the first time they really had talked about it openly together, without reservations, and it was not only nice but comforting. It was warm and close and intimate to them both in the car, alone together, as they drove south that evening, the headlights lighting up a short stretch of the perpetual highway that rolled slowly back toward them and then fled beneath them.

  “It isnt the liquor,” Larry said, “that isnt it. Or even the women, you know—” he added delicately and guiltily, but determined to be honest—“that I crave. I dont know what it is. I dont know what I crave. I dont know—” He floundered, caught up in his own ineptness. “I guess Im just weak,” he concluded.

  “We all are weak,” Mona said, sparing him one warm glance from the road. She drove in such a characteristic way, hands high on the wheel, leaning forward on her arms against it. He knew it so well. “All of us. Everybody. There arent any strong people any more in America.”

  “You know, thats true,” Larry said eagerly. “I can think back over every person I know, you know—and not a one of them is what you could call strong.”

  “Maybe its a good thing,” Mona said, “but maybe its not. Either way, there arent any strong people any more. I mean—you read books about the frontier and the pioneers, and the wild west, and there seemed to be strong people then. But to be strong you have to be—dogmatic. Dogmatic and opinionated, and righteous. Self-righteous. And were not that any more.”

  “Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal,” Larry said.

  “Thats what I mean. Did you ever read a more horrible thing than when he made that poor shaking Mexican draw while he counted three, and then drew his own gun and shot him? And he thought he was being fair. He believed he was right. Maybe its a good thing we arent like that any more. Today we have to depend on each other more, because we all are weak.”

  “I think youre strong,” Larry said.

  “Oh, but Im not. Im very weak. My weakness just comes out in a different way from yours.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I know so. But together well work it out,” Mona said. “Wont we?” She released one hand from the wheel and reached over and patted his knee. “Well work it all out—for both of us.”

  “Yes,” Larry said fervently, and took her hand and held it. “You know, I dont want all those things. I dont know what it is. You get started; somebody suggests something; one thing leads to another; you go ahead. You get wild. Must be some kind of frustration or other, I dont know.”

  “I understand,” Mona said, “I understand. For the first time really I think, I understand. And I must help you more.”

  Larry released her hand to the driving and lay back and lit a cigarette feeling very safe. The thing that amazed him most about Mona was how she had changed when he was sick. It was almost unbelievable. From a very nearly silent, monosyllabic, cold withdrawn intractable woman who went her own way and rarely spoke to him, and whom he violently disliked and expected to leave him soon, she had changed into the most tender and thoughtful nurse a man could have, always cheerful and warm, always at hand to look after him, never tired. She had taken an indefinite leave from her own job to take care of him, and had not even gone back after he was up and around and able to go down to the paper. It had been Mona who, after the doctor had mentioned that idea about him moving to the far west, had urged him to write to Harold Beckett, head of the Department of Journalism at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who two years before had offered him a job out there teaching which at the time he had declined. Beckett was a good friend of his and had once worked for the Sun-papers before he himself had removed to the west. Beckett had really had TB.

  “I think it would be the perfect thing for us,” Mona had said. “Both of us. Not only for your health but for everything. It would be a different type of life, teaching. A different environment. Calmer and quieter and less hectic, you know. Maybe we could sort of start everything over. Start from scratch. And youd be getting away from these influences which are bad for you.”

  Larry had agreed with her, and had written the letter. He had not always been in the business end of newspapering; he had started out as a cub and progressed to reporter and then on to article writing before they had put him into the business part and sent him to ‘executives’ school,’ and he could teach journalism from experience as well as Beckett. Of course it would not be near as good a job and it would not have near as good prospects for advancement. But as Mona had said, they would not need as much out there, either. What did they really need, actually? And anyway who the hell cared? What good was money if you were dead and couldnt spend it. Or half dead and laying it all out on doctor bills. Up to now they hadnt heard from Beckett yet.

  Larry stubbed out his cigarette and through half closed eyes watched the road’s moving treadmill and the canvas backdrops of scenery that rolled perpetually up along each side of them. They had passed Richmond now on the four lane and turned off toward Lynchburg and Roanoke and the Blue Ridge Parkway and were getting into the mountains. Lynchburg, he thought. Lynchburg, which was forty some odd miles from Lexington where old Lee had lived and labored in silence all his few years after the war. Larry had read all four volumes of R. E. Lee while he was laid up sick. Man, what a biographer that old Freeman was! Mona was right; there just didnt seem to be strong people like that in America any more. Every virtue seemed somehow to have turned back in on itself somehow—today—like an ingrown toenail, perverting its own purpose into an infected sore spot. Well, maybe she was also right about its being a good thing. In the way it made us all dependent on each other more, because we were weak. God is Love!

  Larry looked over at her driving and smiled. Mona sensed the movement and turned her head slightly to smile back. As if in direct answer, and without taking her eyes again from the road, she said: “Its all going to be all right. Both of us. You wait and see. Its like weve both been living in some kind of a bad dream.”

  “I think it will,” Larry said with strength. He still could not get over the change that had occurred in her and felt again his astonishment. And it had practically happened over night. He did not attempt to understand it.

  As a matter of fact, he thought, it was as unbelievable as the change that had apparently taken place in him simultaneously. When he looked back at the him of then from now, at the drinking and the sorry straggly women—anything; anything he would take! and didnt know why—when he looked back at that he wanted to shudder. He felt it wasnt even him. It had been down in the sorry skidrow section of Baltimore t
hat, in some vague liquor-numbed wandering about with one of them, that he had contracted the pneumonia. Why had he done it? It was absolutely unbelievable.

  What had it all been about? What for? What could he have possibly hoped to gain? Love? Ha. He looked again at Mona. She didnt know how much he depended on her. She said she wasnt strong but she was. Even if he wasnt.

  Through the half open car window, all at once, as if there were a definite dividing line in the air itself, a strong aromatic scent of pine began to pour in over him as, winding their way up slowly into the mountains, they passed through a big stand of them. Larry turned to look out at them. It was as if every breath he took of them was carrying health and strength back into him. They actually seemed to seep peace and drip it out into the air along with their fragrance. Larry slept.

  III

  That scent, those whiffs of pine, seemed to stay with Larry all the rest of the way, a promise. Through Roanoke, through Asheville where the doctor’s friends lived. He loved the smell of the clean country and felt it would heal him. To get to the hunting cabin of the doctor’s friends he had engaged for them, and which the friends themselves now guided them to, they had to drive on west on the highway west of Asheville, and then turned north on a blacktop road that wound straight up into the mountains along the edge of the National Park. The cabin itself was just off this road, and set at the foot of a whole mountainside of pines. Some of the other hills around them had been logged completely bare, but not this one. From the backdoor of the cabin it soared above them, incredibly, the arrowhead tips of the pines interspersed with hardwoods sharp against the sky. And that smell, that clean smell of pine and peace, permeated everything.

  Inside, the hunting cabin was just that. Made of logs chinked with concrete, it had two rooms. In one was a big iron wood range and a table. In the other there were just beds. Outside was a well with a hand pump. For milk and green vegetables there was a farmhouse half a mile down the blacktop. Or they could drive to town. The farmer would also sell them cut wood for the stove. They set about unpacking their stuff from the car, mostly books, and then went out the back door together to bend their heads back and stare up at the mountain.