His father said, “I know I’m never going to make it in the ministry. Ozzie wants me to edit a new magazine for him, The Clarion of Love and Triumph. And they want me to stay on at the Co-op, Lord knows why after what happened. But I think I’d like to go into farming.”
“Raising lima beans?”
“Wouldn’t that be something? There’s a farm and some rental land up around Marysville I heard about.”
“What about the Church of the Science of the Way?”
“It’s fading, Johnny. It just can’t make it with only twenty families. They’d have to tithe just to keep up the mortgage and they couldn’t afford that.”
“Would Bonnie go with you?”
“If she wants to. Lord, I guess I was the only man who was kind to her at a time she needed it. But I’ve wished myself on enough women, Johnny. It’s always been bad luck for them. Anyway, Bonnie’s too young and pretty for the likes of me. I’m twenty years older than her, and a failure at that. I couldn’t even manage to keep my own name I was born with.” His father was silent for a while. Then he said, as if recklessly, “Johnny, you rode your motorcycle all the way to California to find out what your father was like, and I’m sorry you found out.”
“I’m not sure what I found out,” John said quickly, exasperated and saddened by the man’s humility, which seemed such an easy pose. What had he found out, anyway? That he, John Hearne, was the result of a union between a monster of ego and an addled saint? The sweet, feckless, awkward man who sat across from him had once in unsaintly heat impregnated a pretty, improbably egocentric blonde named Martha Gustavson, who, by the dark bypassing of ineptitudes, by the Grace of Fecundity, had produced a male infant. How that infant came to be John Hearne, whatever John Hearne was, was a vaguely unsavory mystery, an embarrassing sort of progression leading to here and now. He, John Hearne, was inside this person, the one that surrounded him and through which he perceived the world. All this, at this moment, seemed unbearable.
And now he sat nervously, culturally superior before his father, the failure who aren’t in heaven, his name not even his name.
“Look, Johnny!” his father said, all at once eager. “See that fellow, the big man there? That’s Mike Mazurki!”
John looked where his father looked and sure enough, there was a big man in an ice-cream suit whose craggy, hoodlum face was instantly familiar, though he wouldn’t have thought of the name. Through a hundred minor parts had moved that predictably ominous mug.
His father was marvelously excited and pleased. “At least we got you to see a movie star!”
The plane was ready. A squeal came from the loudspeaker and a high male voice read off a progression of landings generally northeastward: Phoenix, Albuquerque, Tulsa, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Albany, Boston—a progression somehow retrograde, toward a harsh twilight.
As they got up, he with his new suitcase, there came a business with lemons and oranges. A blond girl and four boys equally tanned and handsome, all in Bermuda shorts, came running across the concrete floor. At first he thought the girl was Streaky, or Dianne, because she wore a halter made of red bandannas. Her suitcase opened and at least thirty lemons and oranges came out rolling and bouncing, the lemons erratic little footballs among the rounder oranges. It wasn’t Streaky, but she screamed and they all stooped and scurried among the people and chairs after the lemons and oranges, their laughter a pitch below hysteria within this most wonderful and desperate event. As she reached beneath a chair occupied by an older woman, one of the boys skillfully tweaked the knot of her halter, which fell away. There was more laughter, including hers, her bone-white breasts hugely swinging, and then John saw that she wasn’t amused, that what he had thought was her laughter was above the allowable pitch and she was crying. She picked up the bandannas and spread them with both hands over herself as she ran alongside a wall, or partition, probably looking for a rest room. The way she had to run, bearing the awkward burden of her breasts, made him think of Thelma. The boys, contrite but still helplessly unstifled, as if under the spell of perverse hilarity at a funeral, went on picking up the lemons and oranges.
His father walked with him to the airplane, where it stood canted skyward, and embraced him, hard arms beneath slippery cloth; in that quick embrace he thought of nothing but how strange it was. They waited, saying nothing, for the passengers ahead to climb into the sloping fuselage. As he was about to board they shook hands and his father said, “Don’t worry about Bonnie. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll both pray for your happiness, Johnny.” The care and urgency in the callow, handsome face was deserving of all of his attention and was pitiful. “Johnny, we are all one in God’s infinite love. I know that so well! I know you don’t believe what we believe, but I know it so clearly in my heart!”
The stewardess was waiting, as was an attendant who wanted to roll away the stairs. The starboard engine gave the tearing, metallic, screaming cough that was the beginning of power, and then so did the port engine, which blew all their words away. In his father’s face was the sweet grin of failure. Another handshake, quick but infected with longing, and John entered the silver airplane.
33
Her mother, with her sad bony face, had come into her room sometime during the languor of sleep.
“Doris,” her mother said, the name tentative and guilty because whenever her mother said her name there was the implied accusation.
She didn’t sleep all the time. She got up to eat sometimes, and to go to the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror she looked gaunt and transparent, the eyes of the girl in the mirror larger and nearly black, as if they wanted to merge into one cyclops eye. She listened to Debbie’s radio, which her mother had brought into her room, and read The Leah Free Press, which her mother brought up to her after her father was finished with it.
Her mother said, “He come in Friday, on the Peanut. It’s been three days. How come he ain’t come to see you?”
That needed no answer.
“Don’t it make you wonder?” her mother said.
It was morning, her mother and father about to go to work. The car idled down on the driveway. Once the information her mother brought her might have been interesting, more than just interesting. When she’d first retired she thought her rest would be temporary, like a vacation—just a while and maybe she could get going again, more or less, and at least not seem so queer, as if she were sick.
“I told you Everett Sleeper seen him,” her mother said. “He never come to see you or let you know he was back.”
“It’s okay, Ma. Go on, now,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mother said unhappily, and left the room. Her steps on the narrow stairs, the way she turned her feet a little toward the wall, her hand on the rail, had been familiar in the house before she and Debbie were born. The car crunched down the driveway.
Now she was alone. Some of the things she’d done at first seemed strange. Once she went to Debbie’s room and stuffed a pair of Debbie’s pink panties into her mouth, as much of them as she could jam into her mouth. The silky cloth turned harsh and absorbed all of her spit. It was impossible to scream; all she could do was make an urr, urr, almost intimate in its lowness, no matter how desperately she tried to scream out.
The voices of Cascom Manor were still with her and seemed the voices of the world, telling her what she hadn’t once minded so much that she’d known. “So one wog bumped off another wog“—the assassination of Gandhi, in January. She had seen John Hearne in January, downstreet, she in boots and mackinaw, and they’d said hello. When you were small you had to trust, but would you trust your life? A bird lands upon a hand able to crush it at a whim. Why? “Masaryk, the typical fool! Of course the Bolsheviks threw him out a window!” “Now the Semites are hooking noses over a piece of desert. May they eat each other up!” “That rube in the White House—what a chance to use the bomb while he’s the only one who has it! Tell them to leave Berlin alone or else! Pouf! There goes Moscow!” “Now, Mala
n—an intelligent man, with a will!”
Oh, those voices, the world having its constant tantrum. “They are beginning to understand just who fought for Western civilization!” Who was Dory Perkins to have opinions counter to these? Her mother and father never seemed to notice the news; it was none of their business. Her mother’s cousin, Everett Sleeper, had seen John Hearne step down from the Peanut, though. That was their kind of current event.
But the others—the bitter, gloating voices. The Jean Dorlean who called himself a “democrat” and who was as snidery pleased and as superior as the rest. The ways of the race. She would ponder for a longer time whether she would join all this cruel incompetence, in any fashion. There had been others, legions of them, who had decided not to. Betty Salmon. Debbie had not been allowed to choose.
After all this time the weight of anxiety was not constant. It was fickle, now, and waited for the right moment. All of what she saw and expected turned rotten, the sunlight rotten, its heat rotten. She could wonder at it, that the world which she knew to have been beautiful at times, in which were people she had thought she loved, was now intolerable. It would be better not to be part of it. She herself had coyly fished for praise while Debbie screamed. She had been despicable. There had been a time when the knowledge of cruelty was not intolerable, but now it was. The hands of her race were in it, her own hands in it. The vanity—imagine the strutting, the self-importance, the stinking rotten humor. Imagine the stupidity of its preaching and teaching. There was her window, now, gray sunlight on trees shaking like maggots.
When John Hearne got off the Peanut, once called the Penultimate when it had been a fast express to Montreal, he thought how Leah, of all the towns in the world, was the one he least wanted to be in. The tall elms around the station, though dignified and handsome, hung their grayish leaves far overhead in an inexplainable attitude of threat. Leah was the town in which he’d cried, run away, lied, stolen, shit his pants and done all the other cowardly, needful, arrogant and self-pitying stupidities of childhood. Maybe Winota, with a certain sweet candor, had forgiven, but Leah, the elms implied, remembered everything.
He stood on the undulant red bricks of the station platform and watched the Peanut—a steam engine and three grimy passenger cars—huff and hiss and move away. It was a warm September afternoon, getting on toward dusk, and the air was all the sweeter for a sniff of cinders. He was prepared to walk the mile or so to Amos’s house—up a block to the Town Square, then down Bank Street. The suitcase was a little awkward but that didn’t matter. He could walk all the way back to Boston if he had to, turn around and walk back. There were no limits to what he could do with his misplaced strength.
He hadn’t gone a hundred yards when Paul Columbard stopped beside him in a ’38 Plymouth coupe so dented and pounded out along its side and fenders it had the texture of a used paper bag. “Hey, Johnny!” Paul said, so he went around the Plymouth, put his suitcase behind the seat and got in. Strange that even now, after the war, when they had all supposedly grown up, it could still be taken for granted that Paul was at his service. A large, heavyset, crumpled sort of fellow with a sweet nature, Paul Columbard had always done whatever John Hearne told him to. It had been an odd responsibility he hoped he had never really betrayed.
They went first to Futzie’s to have a beer. Paul had been married since June to Natalie Dionne, and wanted to know if John had ever seen, or used, what were called “French ticklers,” a form of condom that might have been just a mythical element in boy culture but which supposedly had an end like the snout of a star-nosed mole and drove women mad.
“Doesn’t she like it plain?” John asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I just thought…” Here Paul sensed John’s disapproval and changed the subject. “You heard about Debbie Perkins?”
“No,” John said, and was told what Leah knew. It had happened at Cascom Manor, in August.
“What about Dory?”
“She’s at home, I guess. She had a nervous breakdown, is what I heard.”
“Christ, I better go see her.”
Paul’s look asked, but John had no definitions. Nothing was steady.
“Well?” he said, meaning that Paul should drive him “home,” which Paul obediently did. John promised to come to supper some weekend when home from school.
Then, after Paul let him off in front of the neatly kept house on Union Street, came the distractions. As he entered the back door and stepped into the kitchen he heard a low, rasping human sound coming from the living room. Glass crunched under his shoe. The kitchen, looked at now because of the soft crunch of glass into linoleum tile, became clearer than its mere expected continents and seas and was wrong, dusty and scummed across surfaces. The glass was the remains of tumblers and more than one gin bottle, their thicker bases intact here and there, the square bases of the bottles frosted glass. The refrigerator door was open an inch upon an insistent hum. He stepped delicately across the floor into the dining room, which was intact, and into the living room, where he found Amos lying, too long for the davenport so that one knee was on the floor, breathing the noise he had heard.
He went back and closed the refrigerator door, then came back to make a judgment upon Amos and the anarchy implied by this situation.
Amos, unshaven, dirty along his seams and in obvious disrepair, slept. John quickly went upstairs and through the rest of the house. Martha, along with certain critical possessions of hers, such as suitcases, jewelry and half the contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet, was gone.
Dory’s house was dark, hovering over there in the dusk. He called and let the phone ring a long time, but no one answered.
He went downstairs and swept up the glass, thinking that this act of responsibility was logical because when he left he’d have to traverse this floor. When the sweeping was done, however, there were other choices, or imperatives, he couldn’t seem to avoid. He had to go into the living room, arouse that dangerous consciousness he had from childhood avoided and find out what was going on. Then again, he really didn’t have to; he could go somewhere else. Something sustained him against his urge to run away, perhaps many things. He would think more about this when he had the time, but now he went, deliberately, to poke a snake.
Amos was more of a mess than he’d thought. He reeked—the word hit the brain directly through the nose—of booze, urine and thin vomit. His oily forehead was hazed with yellow, his narrow mustache a wavery line of ink across his shadowy lip. Shaken carefully awake, he came into a sort of passive hysteria, no real force in it. Martha had been gone for two weeks. She left a note. She was gone, gone. Amos blubbered, he sat up and clasped his face with long but childishly dirty hands. He produced from his side pocket the now-grimy note.
Dearest Amos,
I have fled with my life’s love, my passion.
It is all beyond my strength. I’m so sorry
for my poor Amos but it is written in
the heavens that I must follow my Prince.
Affection always,
Skytop
“Skytop” was her version of what Amos often called her: “Shylock.”
Amos, in his self-pity and dramatic dissolution, didn’t treat him as Johnny Hearae, but as an authority, neutral in this matter. It had all of the revolutionary quality of a dream.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” John said, finally, and half carried the long, disjointed parts of Amos upstairs. He helped him off with his soiled clothes and got him into a tub of hot water. Agua caliente.
He was about to go down and make some coffee when the phone rang. He picked up the upstairs phone and said hello.
“Johnny? Johnny? Is it Johnny?” It was Martha, sounding far away, crying. “Oh, Johnny! Oh! Oh!”
“Okay,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Is Amos all right?”
“He’s okay.”
“Is he terribly upset?”
“Yes, I guess so. I just got here and found him passed out and the place pretty much
a mess.”
“Johnny…” He recognized in her voice a certain calculation—that this was a welcome answer—but she went on crying and said that she was in a hospital in Rochester, New York, where “they cut my organs out.”
“They what?”
“They cut all my organs out.”
He managed to get more information. It was her womb and other related parts that had been removed. Her Prince, a Celotex salesman, had abandoned her; she was broke and they were kicking her out of the hospital tomorrow. He and/or Amos was to come get her. He got a telephone number, said he’d consult with Amos and call back.
Amos, his long hairy knees in the air, received this information with, at first, horridly vociferous and weepy satisfaction, called her the expected names and then commenced to sob and writhe gigantically, water sloshing all over the floor.
They drove all night, John driving Amos’s new 1948 four-holer Buick, on the same roads be had taken in daylight on his motorcycle in June. Amos had never let him drive any of his cars before, but his drivmg now was, after all, part of the revolution, part of the year.
At the hospital the next afternoon Martha, all made up, looked tragically from her pillow and said with quivering longing, shame and vibrancy, “Amos!” Amos said in the same mode, “Martha!” and they kissed and cried.
They stayed in a hotel that night so John could get some sleep, then took two days coming back. Once when they’d stopped in a restaurant to eat and Amos was in the men’s room, she said, “Well, I guess this has taught him a lesson!”
“Who?” John asked.
“Amos,” she replied.
John drove all the way, the two lovebirds in the back seat, Martha’s orgy of self-mcrimination something John could not help but admire for its effectiveness and its mendaciousness.
“I’m so weak,” she said once, in the triumph of her power, “but, oh, my two strong men!”
Error, John thought. Error. Amos sulked for several miles, a bull pricked hard by the invisible, the quick, the agile cruelty of what he needed. She’d meant to say what she’d said. Sooner or later the Celotex salesman, too, would emerge into their chaotic discussions, but for now her crinkly cute frailty forbade that. Not an error, no. She hadn’t been able to convince a seven-year-old prisoner that she could alter reality, but Amos, who was not growing up, was another matter.
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