Ice-Cream Headache

by James Jones

  What could have flawed them all so? the four of them. Within five years of the grandfather’s death in 1929 the three of them, the uncles, would be dead of some violent death or other, each connected with some woman in some way or other. The eldest, the gambler, would be found sitting in his car with a knife in his chest on a back street in Henderson, Kentucky, and without his customary large roll of bills in his pocket; although the claim was that it was the irate husband of some enamored wife. The second son, the carpenter-cabinet-maker, would be found dead, burned, in the remains of his concrete-block workshop, where a gasoline stove—apparently—had exploded and caught fire while he slept in a chair with a whiskey bottle between his knees—this, after having found out two days before that he had gotten pregnant a young countrygirl distant cousin from down in the bottom part of the county near where the old family farm used to be. And the fourth son, the “baby,” after settling in Iowa and remarrying, then moving on from there minus his second wife to California, where he became a somewhat shady scandal- and divorce-lawyer on the periphery of Hollywood, would die at the wheel of his own (unpaid-for) Cadillac convertible in a drunk-driving accident with the wife of another man dead beside him.

  That left the one. Tom’s father. The third son. Who might just as well be as dead as the rest of them, as far as his son was concerned. He had probably never argued with the grandfather once in his life. And he was a goddam veterinary today to prove it. A drunk veterinary. It was pretty obvious he hated his work. And what kind of life was that. For a man. Tom jetted spit at the white stone again, morosely, and hit it center. He knew a bit more than he was telling, too, about his father’s women. This was back when there were still any of them who would still have anything to do with him. He secretly suspected that in about five years his father would be dead too, a suicide maybe, dead of a pistol shot in the heart, or an overdose of pills, and without even having the prestige of the courage of having killed himself sober.

  Tom was tired of sitting. And he had solved nothing. What was there to solve? That house. That damned big old house. He stretched out his legs in their corduroy pants in the cinder dust. There was a pissy smell in here, due to the working men taking a quick leak against the boards of the truck ramp inside the lumber yard, but he didn’t really mind it. After a moment he looked at his five dollar Bulova watch. It was barely eight o’clock, and he did not want to go home this soon. He didn’t want to go home at all. Except that he had to. He had to because he had to confront his sister about their date with her friend this afternoon in the deserted old house. The thought made his heart jump again despite his depression. But he wanted to wait to do that, to see his sister, until his idiot mother was busy.

  But what could he do? He decided to ride out to the depot and watch the 8:53 go through. That would do it, that was it. Gingerly he crawled out of his sanctuary and after looking all around to make sure he hadn’t been seen, got his bike from against the yellow brick of the bank building. Sanctuary—that had been a good one. And he bet he was the only one in town who had read it, except maybe the librarian.

  On the bike, riding out Main Street toward the tracks, his thoughts came back to his father despite himself. It had been Tom’s father, the grandchildren’s father, who had more or less emerged as the new family leader there in the white hospital room of the grandfather’s death, largely by default. He had become the grandfather’s favorite when he had fathered two children. None of the other three had had any children. And the grandfather cared a great deal, after the fashion of his time, about his family continuity. So he bought his third son a large fine family house—his reward—directly in back of his own big place with its Corinthian columns and huge old lawns on West Main, so that their backyards adjoined and he could be near the kids. Then he remodeled it for him, put it in his name, and installed him in it with his family; although of course, naturally, he could not stand the wife—the mother—who could not stand him either. Probably it was this being the old man’s favorite that had caused his father to step into the role of leader, Tom mused. But more likely it was that none of the other three wanted the job. At any price. In any case there wasn’t much of anything that needed leading at that moment. They were all “well-provided-for.” In Insul stocks. Even the two children appreciated that. Ha.

  Tom remembered that outside the hospital under the stone and brick carriage porch of the Sanitarium, on the newly curving and richly planted driveway which the old self-taught doctor had just had redone commemorating that his one son had just graduated from Harvard Medical School, the men had shouldered into their topcoats in the chilly September night and got into their cars, switched on their lights and pulled away. His father had been the last to pull away, in his brand-new Studebaker. As he did, his wife, Tom’s mother, had begun to sob and cry again. She had hated the old man, the grandfather, ever since she had first met him, and he had equally disliked and detested her. Tom and his sister had whispered together in the backseat about this new state of things where they were no longer grandchildren. They knew all about the active dislike between their mother and the grandfather, since she had told them over and over how miserable and unhappy he made her life having to live so close to him, so they did not put too much stock in her weeping and grief. They were much more interested in where people went when they died.

  Strangely enough, Tom thought, or perhaps not strangely at all, the grandfather although he had been quite hard on his own sons had gotten along remarkably well with his grandchildren. Maybe he was trying to undo with them what he felt he had done wrong with his sons? During summer vacations he would invite them over across the two backyards to drink heated milk in coffee mugs with him, while he himself had his morning coffee. He kept boxes of chocolates hidden around the house from which, if the children could find them, he would allow them to have one or two chocolate creams. He loved to feed them large doses of ice cream on summer afternoons, would laugh at them gently when they got the terrible sharp headaches from eating too much too fast, and then give them a gentle lecture on gluttony. He took them for walks around the big lawns and grounds and showed them trees, shrubs and flowers he had planted and nurtured. Did he ever look at them and wonder, Tom wondered now himself, study them and try to discover if the “Mark of Cain” he had somehow passed on to his sons had also passed on to them? “Mark of Cain” was certainly what he would have called it, Tom thought. By this time he must have been convinced he had failed them all. His guilt must have been an enormous felt mat, blanketing everything. “Mark of Cain” was almost what Tom would call it himself. Now. If he believed in things like “Marks of Cain,” But back then the children had known nothing of this. They knew only that their mother hated for them to spend so much time with grandpa, was jealous and complained that he gave them candy. All their spare time was spent whispering about ways to outwit and lie to her and get back to the grandfather.

  At the railroad station four old men had taken over and apportioned among themselves the two benches on the station platform. Their knotty hands clasped and leaning on their creaky knees, these relics of another age, two of them chewing tobacco and spitting quietly down between their feet off the platform onto the gravel roadbed, sat and chatted while they waited for that same 8:53 Tom had come to look at. He did not go near them but backed off slowly and simply stood in the shadow of the depot, leaning against the wall. He had no use for the old-timers in the town except to be contemptuous of them. They were almost always mean and teasing all the kids, as if being old gave them certain special rights, and at the same time as if they were in some way jealous of the young. He certainly did not want to wind up spending his whole life in one town like them, to end up at the railroad station watching trains go through.

  A sort of bleak despair of total hopelessness took him, making it unworth the effort it took to breathe, at the thought that that was probably just about what would happen to him. With no more money—and no more desire than his family had to educate and set up well their children
, it was almost certainly what would happen to him. And his sister Emma.

  The Crash, The Crash, always The Crash. The Crash and the Depression. Would his grandfather really have had the foresight, had he lived, to get out from under and save himself—and them? Other families had saved themselves, at least partially, and still lived in their big family houses. But Tom saw no reason to assume the old man would have. He had already made at least two serious mistakes in thinking. The future of the automobile was one, and the social status of the veterinarian was another. And what about the Insul stock itself? having so damned much of it? Total despair came over Tom Dylan again. They had done a hell of a lot for him and Emma, hadn’t they? He owed them a lot. He and Emma owed them an awful lot, didn’t they?

  He did not even wait for the train to come through, but got on his bike and left. The encapsulated old men horrified him and at the same time scared him. The livery stable of course had been the first thing to go. It was going downhill all through the 1920s, and only the grandfather’s money kept it going. The man who bought it for a little of nothing was a mechanic and immediately turned it into a garage, a money-making garage, and his father was immediately reduced to a grubby one-room office and the taking care of people’s pets. The grandfather’s house could not be sold. It was a white elephant; nobody had money to lay out for a mansion of an earlier, wealthier time; everyone was retrenching. Anyway the lawyer uncle—and then his widow—wound up owning that, and she didn’t even live in the town. And then they, Tom’s family, had lost their own house.

  It was about then, Tom remembered grimly, that all the party invitations and come-to-play requests had stopped coming in from the old family friends still in the old, once-familiar big houses along East and West Main Streets.

  It was true the house had been in their name, his father’s name. But he had had to mortgage it almost at once, for the money to set himself up in a new vet’s office after giving up the livery stable. Then, when they could no longer keep up the payments, the foreclosure came. Since then they had been living in a rented house, an old inelegant place, given them—allowed them—at a very low rent, like poor relatives, by a rich old crony of the grandfather. The only thing at all nice about it was that it had three huge hard-maple trees in its small front yard. That was where he was going now.

  He could tell the moment he walked into the darkly shaded old house that his mother was down in the basement washing. He could hear the washing machine motor hum-chugging away down there, and the house had an unanxious, unpreoccupied feel; the late-summer air outside sucked gently at the curtains at the windows. His sister lay on the divan in the tree-darkened livingroom, her favorite place, reading a book. For a moment he stood in the doorway motionless, studying her. If the grandfather had ever wondered about that “Mark of Cain” of his in his family, Tom thought suddenly, that flaw in the blood passed on in his seed, then he ought to see the two of us now. And yet he knew nothing would deter him. An earthquake might. They had done a hell of a lot for him, hadn’t they, and Emma? And their damned town had too, for that matter. His heart was pounding in him again, so hard it seemed to cut off half his breathing in his throat. Not as if she had just seen him, but as if she had been aware of him all the time, Emma lowered her book and looked at him and smiled. “Hello. You’re late getting home.”

  Tom didn’t answer for a moment. He had been her hero all her life. Obviously for his benefit, but as if she were alone in the room, Emma stretched herself luxuriously, seductively in her shorts, raised her arms up over her head, yawned prettily. For her age she had nice breasts, fine long legs below a flat belly and a noticeable mound. Tom had been born in 1919, nine months almost to the day after his father’s return from The Great War, and Emma a year after that. That made her fifteen and a half. More. Fifteen and ten months. Practically sixteen. Tom continued to stare at her from the doorway. She continued to stretch out her body, teasing him.

  All his mother’s precious furniture, her precious proofs that she had not always lived like this, were crowded into this one small livingroom. Back in the other house they had had two livingrooms, a Main Parlor and then an Everyday Parlor they actually used, and now almost the entire furnishings of both rooms were crowded into this one room smaller than either. Beside him at the doorway stood a woven wicker floorlamp which had a huge umbrella-like shade of faded, discolored pink silk which had been red with three-inch, faded pink fringe dangling around its circumference, one of the few items she had managed to acquire from the grandfather’s mansion and she loved it. Tom hated it. Still looking at his sister, he reached out and combed his fingers through the hated fringe, and six or eight faded fringe strings came away in his hand or fell to the floor. This fringe had always fascinated him as a little boy with the fragile, half-rotting way it came off to the touch, and he had gotten more than one whipping when his mother had caught him standing by it in complete and fascinated absorption, touching it to watch the fringe fall. This time, however, he did it totally cynically, and grinned.

  His sister Emma tittered. “You’ll get caught.”

  “Nobody’s ever going to lick me again in this house,” Tom said. Just the same he bent and picked up the two or three telltale fringe strings which had fallen to the floor and pocketed them.

  “I said you’re late getting home,” Emma said from the couch.

  “I meant to get home late,” he said gruffly. “Is our date all fixed up for this afternoon?”

  “Yes. I think it is,” Emma said. She put her arms down at her sides and looked at him in a totally different way. “I talked to her about it yesterday.”

  “How did Joan feel about it? What did she say?”

  “She was—excited,” his sister said. “She wants to do it.” Her voice had gotten heated, and almost as choked-up sounding as his own, and her eyes had a deep almost red color in the dim light. But then she looked at him a long moment and then sat up nervously on the couch. “But Tom really I don’t think—”

  “Never mind,” Tom said sharply. “I told you I’d tell and I mean it. You’ll do it or I’ll tell. Anyway,” more softly, “you know you want to do it.”

  “Yes, I want to,” Emma said in a small breathy voice. A hush fell in the room. She stretched out on the couch again.

  “Okay. Hadn’t you better call her up on the phone and check and make sure?”

  “I’ll be having luncheon with her down there at her house anyway today,” Emma said.

  “What’s the point?” Luncheon, Tom thought. Haw!

  “Anyway, she wants to do it. She said so. And she said she’d be there. And I’ll be with her all afternoon. And we’ll be right next door.” Joan’s house was right across the street from their own old house which they had lost and whose backyard connected with the backyard of the grandfather’s mansion. She had been their childhood neighbor all their lives until they had had to move.

  “Okay. Then I’m going upstairs. I’ll meet you both there, in the house, at three o’clock.” He straightened in the doorway.

  “But why did you think to pick on grandfather’s old empty house?” Emma said.

  “Do you know any better place for it?” Tom said thinly. “I mean—there’s probably no place else in the whole town that’s as safe, is there?”

  “I guess not,” she said in a hushed breathy voice. Upstairs in his room he locked the door. A dull heated excitement in him made it nearly impossible for him to think. He went to the bookcase and got down the library copy of Sanctuary, intending to reread the part where that guy used the corncob on that girl Temple, but he found he could not concentrate enough to read. He put the book back and lay down on the bed and clasped his hands behind his head.