Because (a) it was none of their business; and (b) they didn’t want to give us the satisfaction.
And now, if we had all joined hands around the Formica table and swayed, chanting, no one would have said a word.
We tried to get Stanley to stop crying.
“Stop it,” I told him. “You’ll remember this tomorrow, and cringe.”
“No I won’t,” he said, sobbing afresh. “Tomorrow will be no different from today.”
“You must stop,” said Hilda. “Be kind to yourself.” This was the first time I had seen her show concern for anyone beside Guy, and it bothered me until I realized she was just pretending. She was really protecting Guy, who was visibly upset by Stanley and his horrible problems.
“I despise cancer,” said Guy, looking angrily at his clenched white fingers.
“You must stop,” said Abigail, gripping Stanley’s arm, pouring beer into his wineglass.
“Why?”
“Because you’re ruining my wedding day.”
“I’m sorry,” said Stanley, blinking, and stopped.
We ordered another pitcher. Conrad Lowe ordered a double bourbon with a dash of bitters. He was drunker than I had ever seen him. He kept staring, in an unfriendly way, at his new wife, and at Stanley, back and forth between them, as though he were adding them up over and over again. He had, of course, not said a word while the rest of us were trying to console Stanley. At last he cleared his throat and asked, “What kind of cancer?” He would.
Stanley wordlessly placed one hand over his heart and squeezed, tenderly, a delicate imaginary mass. All three of us women hunched over a little then, instinctively, and kept our hands from shielding our own breasts.
Conrad Lowe smiled. “See that? Nothing scares ’em like breast cancer.” He took a long drink. “I diagnosed a number of cases myself, when I was in practice.”
“I bet you did,” I said.
“I might surprise you.”
“I doubt that.”
“Could we please talk about something else?” asked Hilda.
“Once,” said Conrad Lowe, “when I was in residency, I took a long weekend at Lake George. I was going to stay at a lodge, but there was a nudist colony close by, a real posh place with new pine cabins and a decent chef and tennis courts. Not volleyball—grass tennis courts. And young clientele. And, let’s face it, naked broads. So I thought—we thought—I had an intern friend with me—we thought, what the hell.
“Well, it turned out to be pretty boring. Within a couple of hours I was used to it. This was such a predictable response that I was kind of disappointed in myself. It turns out to be true, though, what they say about clothes, and perversity.
“Anyway, I’ll never forget, they threw this cocktail party on Sunday, and this well-preserved gal in her forties, real looker, great figure, ash blond hair, that colorless hair, great tan, and smart too, you could tell, well, she and some guy, I’m sure it was her husband, stood around for a while talking to me. Didn’t know I was a doctor or anything. Talking about Vietnam, mostly. He was phony, but she was really upset about the whole thing, sincerely. A nice woman, beautiful, and standing there naked, with dignity. Not much power, though, now that I think of it.” He flashed a grin at me. “She wasn’t sucking her stomach in or anything. Not that she needed to.” He flashed a grin at Abigail. “She just wore her skin, and worried about Vietnam.
“Only all the time she was talking I couldn’t take my eyes off her right zoob. I mean, I could take my eyes off it, I made myself do it, but I had to keep sneaking glances. She had an inverted nipple. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but…This one meant something. Not just the shape of the breast, but the whole picture, the nice woman, beautiful body, bad news. The whole thing fit together. A presto diagnosis.”
“What did you say to her?” asked Abigail.
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I mean, she didn’t know I was a doctor. She hadn’t come to me for consultation. What was I supposed to do?”
“You didn’t tell her, did you?” I said. Of course he didn’t.
“Did you ever see that movie Death Takes a Holiday? Well, I was on vacation, for Christ’s sake. They never made Death Takes a Busman’s Holiday, did they? Hell of a downer that’d be.”
Stanley began to chortle. “No rest for the wicked,” he said. “Busman’s holiday. Hee hee hee.”
“Is that how you think of yourself,” I asked. “As Death?”
Conrad made a droll face at me, a moue they used to call it in the old Nancy Drews. “Dorcas baby, in a case like that, the messenger becomes the message. The fact is indistinguishable from the telling. You’ll see. I’ll see myself, someday. You’re immortal until some jerk in a white coat gives you three months to live.”
“You should have told her.”
“Kill the messenger!” cried Stanley.
“I am become Death,” Guy intoned. “Destroyer of worlds…” Guy often quoted J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhavagad Gita when he’d had too much to drink.
“Stop it,” said Hilda, quite harshly, to Conrad Lowe. “You’re upsetting him.”
Abigail, who had been ruminating through all of this, put her arm around Guy and hugged him against herself. “It’s okay,” she said. “Everything’s okay.”
“We’re doomed,” he said.
Abigail clapped her hands on Guy’s ears and wrenched him around to face her. His chin was buried in her right breast, and he had to look up at her face from the angle of a nursing infant. She handled him as easily as if he were a homemade doll with a loosely stuffed neck. This was the closest he would ever come to Abigail’s actual body. “Look at me,” she said to Guy, “and say that again.”
“Ooooomed,” said Guy, but we could all see the pink creeping up the back of his neck to the base of his baby-bald skull.
“What? What was that?”
Guy made some noises with his lips and then immediately relaxed, like a lobster rubbed on its stomach, and then his head lolled against her breast and he was still. Hilda looked at Abigail with shining eyes. “How can I thank you?”
“Look, this is my wedding day, if you don’t mind. I’m not going to listen to your husband whining about the bomb on my wedding day.”
Stanley was convulsing. He gasped something that I couldn’t catch. Apparently this was the first time in months he had loosened up. I think that Stanley was the only person in our party who actually profited from this horrendous occasion. “Rude,” he finally got out. He cackled hysterically. “Impolite to mention…holocaust…at a reception…”
“Well,” I said, gathering up my sweater and purse, “this has been fun.”
“So soon?” asked Conrad Lowe, an ugly smile on his face.
“Come on, Stanley.” I grasped the man’s arm. “I’ll take you back to Providence.”
“Announcement!” Conrad Lowe suddenly stood, bumping the table hard with his thighs, so that everyone’s beer sloshed over onto the tabletop. He spread his arms out like a revivalist. “Announcement!” he said again, in a louder voice that commanded the entire bar.
Stanley rose to his feet. I thought he was rising to join me, but he stepped in front of Conrad Lowe, literally upstaging him, and addressed the bar. “God is dead!” he said, then burst out laughing again, sagging back against the wall, spilling more beer.
He had everyone’s attention all right. No one at the bar liked Stanley’s announcement.
“Siddown and shuddup!”
“Have some respect!”
“And you, a priest!”
“I’m no priest,” said Stanley. “I’m a Unitarian.”
“That’s worse!”
Conrad Lowe leaned forward and whispered something vicious into Stanley’s ear. Stanley pivoted and sat, hard, as though a spring had been retracted beneath him.
“Drinks on the house for every man here,” said Conrad Lowe.
There was a smattering of grudging applause.
“And doubles for every man w
ho ever fucked my wife.”
It struck me afterwards, when I reached out then and smashed him across the face with my bag, that there was a stylized, decadent quality to the act. I was already sick of it before the bag made contact. There was none of the “I can’t believe this” quality that’s supposed to accompany sudden violence. I didn’t hit him in slow motion. I had known this moment was coming all afternoon. My sister’s face crumpled, and the tears that rolled down her face seemed to have been ready and waiting to spill. Guy stirred, blinked at the scene, Hilda blushed horribly, Stanley sagged back into hopeless despair.
But the men at the bar! Stout fellows all! There must have been twenty, all ages, and I would estimate that at least fifteen had been intimate with Abigail. They all shut their mouths and regarded Conrad Lowe with identical, twenty-fold contempt, and turned, in a practiced, solemn way, away from the spectacle of our group, and back toward the bar.
Then I took Stanley with me, and I threw up in the parking lot, and we went to the Blue Moon, and then to another place off Route 10, and I threw up in front of a statue of King Philip of the Wampanoags, and somehow we ended up back at the First Unitarian Church, and Stanley punched out a stained-glass window.
Time Out
My Library
Squanto Library is a brick building the size and shape of a single-family dwelling set down on two acres of land on the Miracle Mile, otherwise known as the Massasoit Trail. Right across the street you’ve got your Frome Plaza, with your Star, Frome Job Lot, Bastinado’s, Zeno Discount, and Tile World. To our left, facing the Plaza, are Mr. Meat and the Ottoman Empire; to our right Sippy’s Pizza (the only nonfranchise holdout on the Mile) and Mr. Clam, and a little farther east, rising big as Atlantis in an asphalt sea, the mammoth Food Land, a bag-it-yourself, rip-open-your-own-carton-of-black-olives kind of place, with a produce section twice the size of the Star and thirty-foot ceilings. Everyone in Rhode Island, everyone actually From Around Here, shops at Food Land once a month, many at three in the morning. (Not a few academics shop here too, for the “interesting ethnic vegetables.”)
Squanto Library sits on two acres, then, of solid gold, for which we could receive, from teeth-gnashing Italianate developers, enough money to pay for a building three times this size, not to mention quintupling our volume count. But on the board are no fewer than three Yankees, two false, one almost real, all of whom claim to remember when the Massasoit Trail was a horse pasture or some damn thing, which is horse poop because the oldest member has only ten years on me, and the Trail looked like hell in 1948. There weren’t franchises then, of course, but aesthetically there’s not a whole lot to choose between your Atomic Cleansers and your Mr. Clam.
But according to the Yankees the Mafia ruined the Trail. (They always call it “the Trail,” in tones which encourage you to imagine, if you will, sure-footed Narragansetts, fleet Wampanoags, gliding soundlessly down the overgrown forest path with their maize and bags of wampum.) And even though they admit that the ruin is permanent, they keep us here out of spite, and every other year or so they plant another row of those goddamn ornamental cherries, just to “get” those “Italian bastards.” In late spring you can’t even see the library building for the rioting pink and white blossoms. Sometimes people drive in thinking we’re a nursery, or a festival.
Squanto himself, the noble Indian for whom the library is named, was a wonderful man who greeted the Mayflower colonists in their own tongue and saved their necks that first deadly winter. He’d been abducted by an English sea captain as a boy and sold into slavery in North Africa. Somehow he’d escaped and made it to Europe, worked as a servant in a number of households and monasteries, and finally was brought back to the New World and jumped ship at Narragansett, only to find that his whole tribe had been wiped out by chicken pox.
Squanto was a visionary, a natural man who recognized the wave of the future when it broke over his head and sucked his feet out from under him. The Pilgrims may not have looked like much, and they weren’t bright enough to come in out of the cold and feed themselves properly, but Squanto (my Squanto, my own well-imagined Indian) had seen St. Peter’s Basilica, the operas of Monteverdi, the magnificent London slums. Squanto knew what these clowns could do and Squanto wanted a piece of that.
He was the best and truest friend the first settlers had, in exchange for which he got their trust, their vague promises of his ultimate acceptance into the white man’s heaven, and a small fortune in protection beads from neighboring tribes of Narragansetts, who paid to keep Squanto from siccing the white men on them. Squanto was America’s first racketeer.
I pointed this out once to the board, but the irony escaped all but the Irishman and the Jew. Show me a false Yankee and I’ll show you a horse’s patoot. I ought to know. I’m of good false Yankee stock myself.
These same idiots, who wring their hands over the Trail, can’t say enough in praise of that excrescence, that monument to moral bankruptcy at the other end of town, the Wampum Factory Mall. The mall is a converted jewelry factory, which was turning out costume pieces as late as 1964, a place where half the middle-aged women in Frome worked when they were young, and fully a quarter of them lost fingertips in their rush to meet the quotas. These women do their shopping today on the Miracle Mile, but the mall salutes them with The Sweat Shoppe, The Clothes Shop, The Piece Works, The Assembly Line, and the Machiner’s Local 182 Pub.
It’s just as well the women can’t afford to shop there, since they would hardly know what to do with designer dresses from Drop Dead, Victorian lingerie (What the Butler Saw), and Edwardian frocks (where the hell do you wear those things?). There’s a vegetarian pizza stand. There are little booths that sell shoe trees, gift boxes, ascots, live goldfish in Lucite paperweights. There’s a pedicure parlor called Foote Fetishe.
The mall is just the kind of thing that made Pompeians, those Italian bastards, glance up at Vesuvius occasionally at twilight with bleak longing in their lustrous oval eyes.
They were lucky. They had something to glance up at. Rhode Island has the third lowest mean altitude of the fifty states. After Florida, after Louisiana, comes our state, flattening out above sea level at a staggering two hundred feet. You could look it up in any good reference department. I certainly have.
Our only chance, then, is a tidal wave. And so, on days like today, we look to the east. We watch Narragansett Bay roil up. We pretend to be afraid. In 1954, during Carol, people drove down to the South County beaches to see the big wave come in. It came, they saw, and some of them left with it. We always assume, in polite conversation, that they were careless thrill-seekers out for a morning’s free entertainment. Perhaps, like Squanto, they were noble gamblers.
We’ve got two rooms for fiction now, one for biography and history, one for reference and periodicals and magazines, and one for everything else, and the long corridor to the back stairwell is lined on both sides with mysteries. None of us can see into the hallway, which ends in a back door kept unlocked during business hours, because of the fire laws. Naturally, this makes mysteries the easiest books to steal. Which is a perfect setup, my idea, actually, thank you very much, since mystery aficionados are our most law-abiding patrons. Mysteries rarely disappear, and are even more rarely vandalized. Mystery readers are shocked by the mere idea of real-life crime.
When I first came to work here I was young and as impassioned as I would ever be. This was 1964, and best-sellers were big fat quasi-historicals about the bubonic plague or the War of the Roses, and quasi-biblicals, about Salome and Sodom; and generally the sort of thing that had been understood, during the previous decade, to be pompous smut, but now seemed staid and safe. People left them out on their coffee tables, as their cultural bona fides. For by then the pop alternative was the smarmy exposé, which was in its heyday. Every American institution, from the urban high school to the bucolic New England village, was shown to be a snake pit of perverted lust.
Of course, these books look wistfully innocent today. But thi
s is America in the waning days of the second millennium, and therefore (Mather’s Law) Everything Looks Good in Retrospect.
In those early days, when regular patrons would come in and demand the latest Douglas C. Harbinger or Mitchell Lloyd Caldwell, or come to the checkout desk and present me, in wordless, blushing defiance, with an upside-down battered copy of Hormone County or High School After Dark—when these misguided souls, all of whom, I was convinced, were basically decent, and parched for beauty and truth, would hand me a pile of trash to date-stamp, I would let a sad smile play across my features (God knows what that must have looked like) and sigh and in general assume the worldly, tragic air of a young priest in the confessional. And if, within the pile of trash, or more likely on top of the pile, the person were also checking out a classic, or some new thing praised by the New York Times, I would favor him (usually her, actually) with a smile intended to be warm and congratulatory, and murmur something awful like, “You’re in for a real treat!” or “We always come back to the classics, don’t we?”
People were patient with me, the way they are apt to be with young idiots. My patronizing intentions must have been apparent to all but the most obtuse. None of these kind people told me to mind my own business. It took Miss Marotte, the head librarian, to take me aside and explain to me what bad manners it was even to notice what a patron was reading. “It’s one thing,” she said, “to chat with them when they want you to, but you must let the patron start it. If she asks, for instance, ‘Do you know if this is any good?’ then you may speak. Tactfully.” I said that my only response in most cases would be negative. “If you don’t care for the book yourself, then tell her what you’ve heard about it. They’re really not interested in your critical assessments, dear. What they’re really after is the opinion of the book-reading community.” I thought about this for a minute. I said, “That’s terrible,” and Miss Marotte said that it wasn’t as terrible as censorship, which was what my inhibiting them amounted to. This shut me up, “censorship” being the dirtiest word in a librarian’s vocabulary.
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 14