“Genesee,” he said when Debbie brought them the opened cans of ale. Evidently Dory and her mother were busy in the kitchen and dining room, which John couldn’t see except for part of the silver-worn central floor register. His nervousness had subsided, although he wondered if Mr. Perkins had meant anything substantial by that quick glance through his fingers.
“I like a ale when I get off work,” Mr. Perkins said. Debbie sat down on the davenport and looked from one to the other as if to say that she was there to listen to conversation.
John put the cold can to his mouth and the perfumy liquid’s submerged bitterness reminded him of his first tries at beer and ale, when he was old enough to know someone old enough to buy it. It had been hard to get a whole can or bottle down then, but in the Army that sharp virginal fascination and revulsion had soon disappeared and for a while, on one post, he had come near to being a sot. He had a horror of soddenness, of potbelliedness; the animal he inhabited had to be, like Dory, quick and lithe. Right now if he had to he could dive neatly through the nearest window, taking with him at the most two lights of glass.
“I had a motorcycle once, when I was a young fella,” Mr. Perkins said with the fond, savoring look of a coming anecdote. “It was a Indian, one-lunger, and you never seen such a mess of V-belts, pulleys and belt tighteners. In them days what worried us most was blowouts, though them V-belts could eat you up if you wa’n’t careful. I recall…”
Debbie got up and left, her father ignoring her look of exasperated boredom.
“…heading for Woodsville one night, must of been the summer of twenty-eight. There was four of us on two bikes—the other was a Gilson Chain-drive, you never heard of that make, I bet. Young hellions, we was. Woodsville in them days had a rep. It was a railroad town. Where them loggers and railroaders met was some wild goings-on, let me tell you…”
As Mr. Perkins told his story of the night ride, the paved and graveled roads, the weak, magneto-driven headlights, the hip flasks of Canadian booze, John came to believe that the subject of the evening, as far as Mr. Perkins was concerned, was not his grown daughter’s relationship with John Hearne. Mr. Perkins was, after all, surrounded by emotional, authoritative and opinionated women and he was lonesome for a man to talk to. Machines, blowouts, the crazy exuberance of youth, a poker game in a whorehouse, everybody a character, a wonder. “Harvey Whipple, now—he owned the Gilson. What a heller he was in them days! Two cylinders and he never could get the goddam machine timed right, so it blew great fireballs each time he shifted, like a goddam Roman candle. Scare the living piss out of any car he passed, they believed they was being shot at!”
They were called to the dining-room table, Mr. Perkins still brimming with memory, to face the women and their food. There was Dory, in a neat print dress, his sweet and chilling reason for being at this table, and Mrs. Perkins, who was supposed to like him but whose smile was wary, as though she didn’t want to give her friendliness away too cheaply. She must wonder about her daughter, he thought, then looked at her again. Their eyes met for one appraising moment: she knew.
She passed him the platter of boiled potatoes. “Here you are, John,” she said. Not Johnny, as she’d always called him.
There was the clinking of knives and forks—individual preference in the preparation of potatoes for the gravy; the passing of the chicken platter, the baked meat separated from the bones; pickles sweet, mustard and dilled, bread and lima beans.
Lima beans. He took a few of them for politeness’s sake. They never had them at Amos’s house, and it was one matter of agreement between them. The fat, water-slimed gray-green of them, that taste of cement, bland but mealy and somehow wrong. Children hated lima beans; most people didn’t like them, but there they were in stores everywhere, canned, dried and frozen. Who in cold blood, with freedom of choice, bought them? There must be a perverse underground of lima bean eaters, their tastes akin to geophagy, and here he was among them.
Mr. Perkins helped himself to a mound of them, their plump bodies little greenish half-moons that slithered down the sides of their own pile. Dory and Mrs. Perkins each had a proper share.
Debbie didn’t like them; she took exactly four of them and he saw her hide one under a small peripheral gob of mashed potato, skillfully plastering it over and into oblivion. He decided not to try that; surely every guilty thing Debbie did was immediately discovered. He felt like a child, those no doubt nutritious leguminous presences accusing him from his very plate. What he did was to eat enormous quantities of everything else, trying to please. Weren’t they examining him? Did he want to imply a snobbish disapproval of their food and thus their very lives? But there was no way to mask distaste for a certain food. He knew that if he chewed them the lima beans would grow in his mouth, but managed to take one and then another down like a bolus.
“Fella don’t care for lima beans,” Mr. Perkins observed, chuckling and giving him the cunning Yankee glance that signaled a friendly, or not so friendly, gibe. “They say you ain’t a man till you like lima beans.”
Mr. Perkins was amused by his remark and cocked his head this way and that. There was an interested silence at the table to see how John would take it. Evidently he took it all right.
Mrs. Perkins said, “Of course, he don’t like oysters.”
“Puh!” Mr. Perkins said. “I’d rather take a swig out of a spittoon.”
“Pa, really!” Debbie said.
“Well, I would! Even if it was all one piece, as the story goes.”
“That’s disgusting!”
“So’s oysters.”
There were no ill feelings. Dory seemed to find her father amusing, as did her mother. They were also amused by Debbie’s sudden propriety because of John’s presence.
“Debbie, get me and John another ale,” Mr. Perkins said. Debbie did this immediately, without comment. He wondered if Mr. Perkins was ever a dangerous child-man. Maybe he was a little spoiled by his females, but he didn’t seem, at least in these circumstances, to threaten them, to be threatened by them or to be in competition with John for their attention.
“What you going to do, John, when you graduate college?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I don’t even have a major yet.”
“The war slowed you down some.” He added, philosophically,
“Ayuh. I guess we all have to do what we have to do.”
John could let them think that he had bravely sacrificed himself for his country, but he didn’t want to have to sustain that idea. In retrospect he had mostly enjoyed the Army and it seemed to him that he was being overpaid for whatever services he had rendered. “I’ve got plenty of time and the GI Bill, so I can’t complain,” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t mind the Army that much.”
“You didn’t mind the infantry?”
“No, not really. The training wasn’t bad, and I was only in combat for a few days.”
There had been an unpleasant combat-anticipation anxiety at times, maybe at all times, but against that was his escape from Leah, the general civilian admiration for servicemen and the great idea that he had become an adult at last, the uniform and the blue braid on his cap constituting absolute proof. He was good at everything they told him to do. Obstacle courses were legitimate ways of showing off; he shot “expert” with the M-1; he was never on shit lists. To try to impress Mr. Perkins with the hellishness of the Army, as he had perhaps done with others, would not be right. It was Dory, of course, before whom lies grew cheap. The opportunity to aggrandize himself was there, smelling of impermanence and dishonor, but she had changed him. She glanced at him across the platters, the pickles and condiments, too real to lie to.
But Mr. Perkins wanted information about that time. “I got questions about some of them weapons you had in the infantry, John. Maybe you can answer some of ’em, after.”
After dessert, a chocolate cake Dory had baked, maybe to prove her domestic skills, Mr. Perkins took him back into the living room. The women cleared the table and did
the dishes.
There was the filling and lighting of his pipe, Mr. Perkins’s dark channeled face flashing in the match flame between hard sucks, an expectantly wide eye gleaming across this small Vesuvius. “Yup, yup,” he said when his pipe was hot enough. “I ain’t totally ignorant—for instance, I got a thirty-aught-six, Enfield, so I know something about the ballistics and all, but…” He puffed, the blue velvet smoke finding its way to the convective push above the iron central register. “Tell me about the Garand, now. Did you like it?”
Like it? An interesting question about an engine of war. The conventional attitudes of his college, for instance, would exclude such a question without a trace. Did he, John Hearne, like the M-1 rifle, which he’d had to disassemble, meticulously clean, never drop on pain of punishment, never lose or even misplace on pain of incarceration—that long, nine-and-a-half-pound weight he’d had to lug everywhere—did he like it? He didn’t miss it. He had forgotten most of its serial number already, except for the shorthand last four digits—8825. Where was it now, his old partner? He could feel its weight in his wrist and forearm, the smoothed walnut and black steel of its balance point in his fingers.
“It was all right,” he said. “Pretty heavy, though.” But there was more to it than that, to be honest. He’d spent all of his eighteenth and nineteenth years in the Army, among men similarly occupied with steel, copper, brass and lead. With his M-1 he could at five hundred yards send deadly force into a circle as small in diameter as a man’s chest. Not so much death as the elimination of imminent danger; the dead were anonymous, disarranged, dusty, inert. What could he have done with nothing but his hands? Though he hadn’t, as far as he knew, shot anyone, the power had been there.
His feelings about that weapon must be allowed their complications. Shooting people, that gruesome rupture of tissue, was, as a general idea, insane, but he had been in a war that was as encompassing to his youth as the universe itself, and his rifle was his protection, his long arm. It happened to be more accurate than most, though it had its idiosyncrasies. It would half-extract a fired casing and crumple it in its breech unless its gas port and cylinder were cleaned more often and more carefully than most. It broke more firing pins than it should have, though they were easily replaced. Small, individual, accepted flaws. He explained these things to Mr. Perkins, who found them so fascinating his gaze was a totally unselfconscious stare. “Well!” he said. “God damn!” They spoke mostly of velocities, cams, grains, pawls, stops and feeds, terms they didn’t have to define to each other.
When the dishes were done, Dory came from the kitchen and suggested to John that they walk around the block “to settle their supper.” Mr. Perkins followed them to the door and put his hand on John’s shoulder, a small gesture of friendliness, or of affection, or even of admiration, that he could not remember having received from an older man before. He thought how every man was supposed to want a son, someone presumably interested in motorcycles, tools, guns and the like—good hard things and finite processes. The light pressure of the older hand stayed with him.
In the dusk he and Dory walked down Water Street next to the weedy bank of the Cascom River. “I think your mother knows,” he said.
“She suspects, but she won’t ask me right out. She was pregnant with me when they were married and I guess she thinks I’m like her.”
“You are like her in some ways.”
“In some ways, I guess.”
He asked her how she would like to live her life.
“I don’t know. Is there any choice? As happy as possible.”
“But where, how?”
“It doesn’t matter where.”
“In the country? In Leah? In a city?”
“Don’t ask me that! What do you want me to say?”
She was angry, and as always her anger taught him that she was real and in her real danger couldn’t afford this sort of moony theorizing about the future. She wouldn’t be used that way. She was the only girl he’d known who wouldn’t fantasize on his terms, for the possible benefit of his self-importance.
He looked down on her as they walked, the light fabric of her dress easy on her because she was so firm and trim, modest and ordinary. He put his hand on the small of her back, her graceful tensions in motion flowing up his arm like voltage. He would be responsible for the center of her, easy or not. What the hell? Sooner or later you made a choice and stuck with it. He said, “When I come back we’ll get married, okay?”
“If you want to.”
It was done. In the sudden absence of one of his anxieties he felt light on his feet. “Let’s run,” he said, and they ran down Water Street to Maple Street and stopped under the streetlight just as it came on—an omen. The motionless hard maple leaves overhead were greener than in daylight, the mown grass of the Pulsifers’ yard the primary green of a child’s painting.
They ran up Maple Street to Union Street past the shady yards and windowlights of houses, on the tilted slabs of sidewalk where he’d counted the cracks as a child, down Beech Street to Water Street and back to her house. He took her hand and led her behind some ancient lilacs, an enclosed place known from childhood games, and lifted her up against him. The sweat in her armpits and on her forehead was silky and endearing. When they kissed she had for him the shapeless power of water—not taste, but something deeper and more primitive, like the odor of that elemental fluid from which they’d both come. It was all consent, as if for once in the entire history of human intercourse an absolute mutuality, however temporary, had been accomplished. At those moments he felt his intelligence dissolve. Everything slipped, and afterwards he would have strange scuttling shadows in his memory, as if he’d been in the skin of one of his distant ancestors, some utterly unselfconscious, mud-colored skipper with external gills and just the one urgency.
A lilac leaf brushed his temple. Nothing caused such a delicate, creepy itch as the touch of lilac.
They went back into her house and played Monopoly with Debbie and her father. Her mother didn’t like games. By ten o’clock Debbie had gone rather unpleasantly bankrupt. “Christ, Deb, it’s only a goddam game,” her father said, but he had all the utilities, and hotels on Marvin Gardens and Indiana Avenue that attracted their counters like magnets, so it was obvious that, with great satisfaction, he had won.
“Don’t gloat over it!” Debbie said, and went stomping upstairs, which caused no general embarrassment. John thanked the Perkinses for his supper and he and Dory went out to the teeter-totter, officially sweethearts, to say good night. He would be leaving early in the morning and they had decided, or he had decided, that this would be their farewell.
“I’ll see you in September,” he said.
“All right.”
“It’s only nine or ten weeks. And listen, I’ll keep in touch, and if you miss your period I’ll come right back. I’ll call you at Cascom Manor, okay?”
“ ‘No wind serves the man who has no port of destination’—Montaigne,” she said.
“I know. I read your speech very carefully. But will you give me this summer?”
“It’s not mine to give.”
“You know what I mean. Don’t keep on like this.”
“All right. Goodbye, Johnny. Have a good trip.”
It came to him that it was impossible for a man and a woman, tainted by love, to talk plainly to each other.
11
Her desk was a small oak table, originally a bedside stand for pitcher, washbasin and chamber pot. It was eleven-thirty and she sat there, the cone of light from her lamp yellowing the paper of her valedictory address—which John Hearne had read so carefully. His window was dark; maybe he had gone out somewhere on his last night in Leah. She didn’t feel neglected because she felt that it was over, the whole freaky time with him in which she had been dreamy and unstable, as though great furls of satin were billowing inside her. They were so familiar with each other it was like being skinned and turned inside out, a domestic enormity, a rapture of guilt n
ot at what they were doing but at the loss of sanity. The constant, sickish need for his presence she identified as love. No one liked to lose independence, to become an addict—at least she didn’t, and that was why she got angry at times that surprised both of them.
Tonight he’d asked her how and where she wanted to live her life—theoretical, of course, just for the purpose of discussion or confession. But she wouldn’t be patronized, so she wouldn’t talk about it. She must look up “patronize” in her new dictionary, and did, and her face flushed warm when she read his note in the margin. She had too many words she wasn’t sure how to pronounce, words never to be said aloud. And so he had patronized her—he who knew how to pronounce the word.
How different was he from others, then? Suppose he went around telling that he had “made” her. Would he? Would she then get calls for dates from his friends? She had heard of such cases. She worried about Debbie in that respect; after the prom Debbie had been with a senior in his car, beer present, though Debbie had told her that nothing happened, “really.” What was next to “really“? She knew the senior, Harry Morrow, and he would have told, or he might even make something up.
At least John Hearne would never do that. But where was he tonight, for instance? Where was his presence and warmth? He could be out with one of his old girlfriends, some woman his age, and they could joke about her. That empty ache was apprehension, helplessness, jealousy, the sick underside of love. She couldn’t help having these spasms; they were part of the disease and out of her control. But she could put names to them, and what was named could at least be kept in context.
When John Hearne had read her speech he had been kind, noncommittal, patronizing. He’d said, “Maybe you think we’re all better than we really are in this country.”
“I just meant that most of us know how things should be,” she said.
“You and I do, babe, but how many of us are there?”
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