Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  There was no doubt I had ruptured myself carrying her to bed, as a trip to the doctor proved. “It’s not too bad,” he said, after poking me around a bit. “Just go easy for a while. I see by your chart we had a little hernia there several years ago. More or less standard—a loop of intestine dangling through the abdominal wall. What we call acquired hernia. Comes from straining or lifting a heavy object. Why don’t we fix you up with a little support?”

  I wore a truss for a while, which was uncomfortable at first, but I gradually got used to it. I didn’t let on to Lena what had happened of course, as that would of been a breech of gallantry. Thus the one chivalry I did extend her she would never know about because it was impossible to tell her. I called the other woman’s studio several times but no answer, meaning she had probably gone to the artists colony on the Dunes where she said she might spend part of the summer.

  I now drank moderately all day instead of heavily in the evenings and nothing before. One night I came home about ten o’clock to find Elsie just returning from the mission with the kid. This was a direct violation of her agreement not to take him to any of the midweek revivals in return for my permission to go to Sunday School, those being the emotional whoopups I wanted to keep him free of. Elsie said, “I notice we don’t object to a little reviving when we think the world is coming to an end.”

  “What you saw was not a sinner reviving,” I said, “but an atheist backsliding.”

  Psychologists tell us we come down on people twice as hard when we know we are in the wrong. So I let her have it. I backed up what was a rather neat point, I think, with far more muscle than the case called for, reminding her of my basic principle: That it takes a lot more faith to live this life without faith than with it; that I may of lost my courage momentarily in what was admittedly a night of grade-A confusion, but that I instantly repented of my remorse (another pip) and that it gave her no legitimate excuse for reneging on our agreement about midweeks after having already done so by having the kid baptized behind my back. “I therefore hereby revoke my permission for him to go to Sunday School.”

  “Did you expect me to leave him home alone?”

  “I’d of stayed home if I’d known you wanted to go. You knew that perfectly well, but you purposely let me go out without mentioning it so you’d have an excuse to take him with you. We’re back among Christian ethics I presume. Right in the thick of it again. What a summer! The kid’d been better off back at Tippewawa,” I said, a camp that was so awful even the counselors got homesick.

  “You can’t veto the Sunday School now, that just won’t do, mister man. They only tell them Bible stories there, and you say yourself you have no objection to children learning them as stories.”

  “Well he don’t need no sob sister teaching him. I can do that myself.”

  An unfortunate experience arose out of this. After the others went to bed I sat in the parlor brooding about the latest skirmish. The more I thought about it the more I was ready to stack up my knowledge of the Bible with anybody else’s. The only thing is I discriminate, I don’t swallow the hogwash and tribal superstitions along with the high moral teachings. So I carried a can of beer into the bedroom where Elsie was reading in bed and repeated that my position was not based on ignorance of spiritual matters, like I was often accused, that I knew as much about religion as the next man and maybe more. That I didn’t know whether she could recite all the books of the Bible by heart but I could, and would. Only, to keep my intellectual integrity, I was going to belch them.

  She looked up at me in alarm. “Stan, you wouldn’t.”

  “One point. I won’t in so doing be ridiculing the contents of the books as literature, only the use their put to by the gullible and the undiscriminating, who swallow the baby with the bath. Its time the human race became mature. Ready?”

  “You wouldn’t do this if you weren’t drinking. Stan, you’ll live to regret it.”

  “That will prove my point exactly. Because lets call on gods the way they did in the Old Testament which we’ll begin with, and allegedly got answers. Fire from heaven and what not. If this being exists who you claim punishes people for their sins, let him strike me dead before I reach the end. Let him give me a sign. You see, I have my faith too. Now I’ll begin.”

  I took a slug of beer to fuel up, so to speak, and made a good start. Say I got to Deuteronomy on the first lap. Then I took another pull of beer and let go with six or seven more books. But here a development occurred I hadn’t figured on.

  I began to get a little dizzy from being winded frankly. Lack of oxygen will do that to you, as anyone knows who has attempted this type of thing, or even just breathed in short pants for a while. The result—gasping for air like a stranded fish while the room and contents are starting to go bye-bye—hardly becomes a stormy petrol they call them. Iconoclasts willing to go to bat for their convictions. I was prepared to go whole hog and no pussyfooting. So I struggled gamely on. But halfway through the minor prophets I started feeling definitely faint and had to lay down. By this time Elsie was out of the bed and running around to my side.

  “Stan, are you all right? Speak to me!” she said chaffing my wrists.

  “I’m all right,” I said, heaving myself up onto my elbows. But I wasn’t. There were spots dancing before my eyes. My head swam and the room went around in circles. The empty beer can dropped from my hand to the floor. I blacked out altogether and fell back, cracking my head against the brass rails of the bed.

  I came to I don’t know how many minutes later, with Elsie slapping my face and calling to me in a panic. My shirt and tie were loose, as well as pretty well stained, as I had evidently been drooling a good deal out of the corners of my mouth.

  “Promise me you’ll never, never do that again.”

  “I never knocked the contents of the books as such, only the frau—frau—”

  “Quiet please. If you don’t stop this you’ll be called to judgment. Maybe you are right now. Called to account for your sins and mockeries.”

  “Only the fraudulent uses their put to by some but not all religious leaders.” No harm in qualifying. “Bamboozling suffering humanity into false hopes, feeding empty bellies with promises of heavenly feasts. Two, as poetry a lot of the Old Testament is second to none. I’ve always said it.”

  “Don’t bother with no fine distinctions now. Its no time. Just say you’re sorry for the whole thing and it will never happen again, till we see what’s what. I think you got your sign. You were struck down. So repent. What harm can it do.”

  “I suppose your right.”

  “Oh, thank God! Oh, what a house for a boy to be brought up in.”

  “I disagree. He’ll be the stronger for it. Let him learn there are different points of view in the world, right in this house. Me the intellectual,” I said as she wiped my chin with my tie, “you the believer. That gives him both sides of the age-old conflict.”

  “You’ve had your say, now let me have mine. I want to say a little prayer for you. Close your eyes.”

  I did, no objection to that. While she prayed for me, there was another embarrassing development arising directly out of the first, and of a piece with it. On account of the large quantities of air I had swallowed, I got the hiccups. Every few seconds out would come that sound like the putt-putt of a motor boat. Worst of all, the hiccups didn’t blow over. They wouldn’t stop and they wouldn’t stop. Normally an attack will run you five, six minutes—ten at the most. An hour is bad enough. But occasionally it continues for days, and that can be very serious.

  All night I laid in bed hitting on one cylinder. A minute might pass and I would think at last I’m over the hump, and then putt. I’d start to doze off and putt— wide awake again. By morning I was a wreck. I phoned the office to say I wouldn’t be in, doing so myself rather than let Els, in hopes that the physical act itself would straighten out what was haywire inside me (irritation of the diaphragm to be accurate about it). I started to tell Stella, the office girl, tha
t I was a little under the weather, but my condition made itself obvious over the wire. “I’ve got a bad case of the hic-putt-cups,” I finally admitted.

  “You’ve got the hiccups?”

  “Oh, yes. And I’m sure it’ll clear up soon. You carry on, and I’ll keep in putt touch. When the crew gets back from the Willis job send McGurk and Desmond out on the next one and have Art Salerno crate the lot going out to Shaker putt Heights.

  Two days later I was still in bed, making like an outboard motor, and growing steadily weaker. I tried not to think of all I had heard and read about this affliction, the dire consequences it might have. To no avail. I was haunted especially during the haggard night hours as I recalled how people had died of it, or anyhow with it, including one pope. It would be ironic if I went the same way as a great religious leader—not that the gulf between us was as wide as it had once been. No sirree. Daylight hours restored a measure of sanity. Kind friends volunteered remedies—all the usual things such as sips of water taken a certain way, sudden frights and so on. One neighbor blew off a shotgun under my window, with no results exept a near heart failure. On and on I putted, like a failing engine. One gossip, a woman Elsie had the sense to keep in the parlor, brought an almanac over with interesting medical oddities including the longest-running hiccups cases on record. I quick plugged my ears so as not to hear the top figures, but I thought I caught something about forty-some days, rung up by a woman in Ohio. Maybe I heard wrong, and maybe I misunderstood the motive in bringing these statistical tidbits to our attention. The friend may only of meant to show how long you could live with them, but uppermost in my mind was the understanding that you could die of them. I later learned you don’t die of them, but of the things that cause them, or in a general deterioration of which they are a part. As a last resort they can cut something called the phrenetic nerve or something. Els was the soul of kindness and patience, sitting with me and sometimes taking trays into the bedroom so we could have meals together, over which we said grace believe me.

  She had called the doctor but he just gave advice over the phone. Now she said, “I’m going to make him come.” She went to the telephone and did so. But by the time she was through with the call, the hiccups were gone.

  I didn’t dare mention it right away, for fear of false hopes, but it was true. I counted off ten minutes, fifteen, then twenty, before telling her. I lay back on the bed in exhausted relief. “Thank God,” I said.

  “I hope you will, Stan. God’s hand was in it. He laid it on you—and he took it off. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the named of the Lord.”

  “Amen.”

  As the day wore on, though, I began secretly to feel it was the fright thrown into me by the almanac entry that did it. The thought that you might break the world’s hiccup record is enough to scare hell out of anybody. But I said nothing about it. I kept my own counsels.

  That night I slept like a log, twelve hours of solid oblivion. But in the middle of it I had a brief dream, like a small picture in the center of a blank canvas, that I could remember in vivid detail the next morning. It was about what I occasionally imagined in real life—that Lena Salerno was on the piano crew. There I was working side by side with her, with one important difference however. She was on heavy corner while I was carrying keyboard. McGurk was topping, and kind of grinning down at us, or at me. Then the scene changed as it will in dreams, and instead of moving an upright we were moving a grand. A grand of course is hauled with the legs off, on its side, with the same weight to carry for all, roughly speaking. Which would seem to mean that the dream had to do with equality between the sexes—but wait. Hold it. Topping the fiddle is now none other than not McGurk at all, but Elsie. My wife. She’s on top.

  An example of the way she has of staying there (by remaining downtrodden) took place at dinner the next day.

  I had been griping about how familiar a sight Polish sausage and bean soup was getting to be on the kitchen table, and now was dismayed to see it on deck again. I had seen a silver candlestick on sale in the window of an antique store and gone in to buy it. One of those impulses. I let Elsie unwrap it for a surprise. Then I put a candle in it that I had also stopped for, set it on the table, and lit it.

  “It’s still light,” Elsie said.

  “It’s not to supply illumination, it’s to add a touch of romance. Women complain their life lacks romance after three, four years of marriage, so what could be more romantic than dinner by candlelight?”

  “Especially with you eating in your undershirt.”

  “It’s hot in here.”

  “So the heat of the candle will help cool it off.”

  “Not as much as a good pot of hearty sausage and bean soup left over from last night, and the night before that.”

  The sausage was dreadful. I finished mine with a solid sense of achievement. Elsie wonders how anybody can eat anything as piping hot as me without scalding the roof of their mouth to death. She doesn’t see how they can be human. Still I was feeling good and I said to Tom, “Ma claims the missionary told a funny story at the tabernacle the other night. Can you repeat it? Let’s inject a little humor into the discussion at home, the way you say you do at school.”

  “Sure,” said Tom. He set his spoon down and, looking across the table between the two of us, told the following.

  “There was this colored missionary—the one who spoke—who had a congregation of converts in the African jungle. Or has rather. The story’s a true one. So once some ministers from America who were traveling in the Congo came to visit his church, of thatch and straw, and all during the service the members of the congregation kept turning around to look at them. They had never seen white people before. So finally the missionary—he was preaching—stopped in his sermon and said to the congregation, ‘Never mind them. Their skins may be white, but their souls are just as black as yours.’”

  I roared. “That’s a good one,” I said, slapping the kid on the back. “And well told.” He beamed with pleasure, and as usual in such moments of delight and amusement his nose seemed to get more pointed, increasing his resemblance to a fox. I suddenly felt he would come out all right in the end. His sense of humor would keep him from taking religion too seriously, or being damaged by an unfortunate home example. A new evangelist was on the horizon, Billy Graham, and I even thought of giving Elsie permission to take the boy to Chicago to hear him. What harm could it do? He couldn’t be any worse than the local Bible banger, a self-righteous character who you knew was always thinking, Why can’t people be more like Jesus like me?

  But now I sensed a subtle shift in mood elsewhere at the table: Elsie feeling excluded from the comradeship between father and son. It had sprung up around a story from her end of the battlefield, yet I think she detected in the way we shared our appreciation of it an element that left her out in the cold somehow. Maybe she guessed my secret line of reasoning about the kid: that my tolerance would win him over in the end. I don’t know. At any rate she was quiet the rest of dinner, and when it was over made a move that really took the cake. It was one of them marital chess plays that freeze the opponent on the board. She rose, shoving her chair back, passed her hand across her brow with the put-upon look, picked up the candlestick with the still burning candle in it and carried it to the sink to do the dishes by.

  Top that if you can. As for the kid, I was glad to see by the toothpaste and shaving cream tubes that he was his old self again. He would secretly twist the caps on with a pair of pliers, so tight that you had to use pliers to screw them off again. The only thing, I wished he would smile once in a while, instead of just grin all the time.

  six

  AS FOR LENA, there were times when I wished I was married to that battleax. I’d show her a thing or two. Or was I boasting? Who did I know that had ever gotten the best of her—or even the last word? That temper, those comebacks. Lena was like those litter bins with the swinging tops that you have to pull your fingers out of quickly before they
get bitten off. Lena snapped back at you in the same way before you even finished what you were saying. Then there were the towering rages she was nice as pie in between.

  I didn’t see her alone all that summer and fall. Aside from everything else, I hardly fancied the idea of going to a rendezvous in a truss. Nor were there those brief moments we use to snatch together when the four of us went out, the whispered exchanges and the melting glances. So the affair simmered down, though I suppose each of us in his mind kept it on a back burner.

  One day Art stopped in the office at quitting time to see me. I knew he had something special on his mind from the way he hung around till the office girl left. When she finally did and we were alone, he said, “Stan, I’ve been thinking about my life and future. I don’t think it’s in this business. You, yes, you own your own, but there’s not enough security in it for a guy who doesn’t, especially if he’s married. When you get to be forty you suddenly realize it’s now or never if you want to make that switch into something permanent. Besides the question of security, the furniture gets heavier as you get older. And I have got this rupture.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “Even just crating, you have to handle the stuff. So if you told me no more truck, it still wouldn’t meet these objections.”

  “I understand that perfectly, Art. Just what do you think you’d like to go into? You talk like you’ve got something spotted.”

  “I’ve been looking into the vending machine game, and it looks pretty good, at least with the company I’ve been investigating, and who’ve been investigating me. They have a nice little deal they’ll set you up in, if you qualify. What they do is, they supply the candy and cigarette machines on a kind of loan basis. You pay them off out of your monthly take. They even find the locations for you. It’s an outfit in Chi. I’ve been in to see them a couple of times, and since things look like they might be firming up, I thought I owed it to you to tell you.”