Dr. Koenig, possessor of the biggest hands and broadest fingers he's ever seen (a judgment that has nothing to do with seeing them close up when the doctor works on his teeth), is the master of ceremonies; he's got through the preliminaries with Charles's mother, just inside the double doors, and now turns to Charles. "Got the jitters, boy?" he asks.
"Not half as bad as I have," she says.
"Well, you can't blame a kid for a case of the nerves. I've got them myself, just knowing I've got that introducing to do."
"He'll be all right. So will you."
"I'm glad to hear it!" the doctor cries, in the same tone he'd say, bringing a tooth up in front of Charles's eyes, I got it, boy! "And I hope you get that prize of ten silver dollars right off! Your first year! I bet you haven't had that much in your hand at one time, have you. Chuck?"
"Yes, he has," she says. "And anyhow. Doc, the money's not the important thing."
They both laugh.
"Where's your brothers and that baby sister of yours?" the doctor asks.
"At home," Charles says to him.
"With your dad?"
"Yes."
"I bet he has his hands full, the poor guy."
"Jerome is good with Tim," she says.
"How is that baby sister of yours growing?"
"Fine," Charles says.
"Just like a weed, huh?"
"Like a girl," he says to him. "They'll be here."
His mother puts her hands on his shoulders and turns him toward the stage.
"Just a second," the doctor says.
They all study one another in quick and searching sudden looks.
"There's this." The doctor holds up a jar filled with scraps of paper, and shakes it until his bluish jowls also shake. He offers the jar to Charles. "We have to find out when you come up in here. On the program, I mean, of course."
"Don't get your hand stuck in there," she warns him.
Charles unfolds the paper, looks at her, then at the doctor's round eyes with tan-colored circles haloing them, then at her, and says, "Five."
The doctor sets the jar on a wooden folding chair, takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, takes a pencil from behind his ear (each movement resplendent with the precision and ominousness Charles finds so frightening in the dental chair), traps the paper against the wall with one hand, and says as he writes, "Number 5, Children's Division, Chuckle Neumiller. You'll go on right after Nick Schonbeck sings us a song. The boys and their mothers are using the dressing room to the left of the stage, so that's of course the one you all'll have. The girls are in the other. Oh, does your play-act have a name?" " 'Bronco Boy,' " she says.
The doctor tilts back his chin and releases his rusty but resonant laugh, which, as always, ends abruptly, with bewilderment in his eyes, as though laughter were an enigma to him. " 'Bronco Boy'! Sounds like a good one to me, all right!"
"I didn't title it," she says, and takes Charles by the hand, gives a jerk to get him started, and leads him down the side aisle toward the dressing room. There aren't any people in the rows of folding chairs on the auditorium floor, and the stage spots haven't been turned on, but the blue twilight shining down on him from the high windows at the side of the building gives the place a theatrical glow, and the chairs themselves are like the audience, cold and folded in containment, waiting for the first mistake, or least betrayal of fear. He looks away and sees, on the walls and the ceiling, dangling from thumbtacks, scraps and strips of crepe paper of every color—some of it faded, some stained, some looking new—and recalls that at the carnival last winter he was allowed for the first time to stay up until the children were told they could tear the decorations down, but didn't enjoy it; his mother wasn't there. She'd sat alone at a side table most of the evening, fiddling with a trinket he'd won at the Fish Pond, ignored by most of the women her age and older, and finally said she was tired and put on her coat, pulled its collar around her throat, and went home, leaving him and Jerome with their father.
From the dressing room he can hear excited voices that flow over him with more force when his mother opens the door; he takes in the female legs above (the dressing room is up a few steps), the smoke and lights, the smell of burnt cork and makeup. Faces turn toward them, there's a catch in the noise, and then it picks up again at a lower level. She leads him down the dressing room, narrow as a corridor, past women putting rouge on their sons' pale cheeks, wiping away streaks of dirt with saliva-moistened handkerchiefs, going over the do re mi, and, in one instance, taking Scotch tape off a wave of hair taped to a forehead. Nobody greets them.
Near the back, a woman is telling her son, who's slumped on a bench and crying, to grow up and act like a man, because he's going to get out there and sing whether he likes it or not. Nick Schonbeck.
Charles's mother stops and releases his hand. "What's wrong?" she says to Nick.
"Oh, don't ask me!" Mrs. Schonbeck cries, and blows air out of her lower lip, lifting a wisp of hair from her forehead. "I've been after him for weeks about tonight, and a couple of days ago he seemed all for it. He said he'd love to do it, sure he would, of course, and now at the last minute he wants to up and quit on me."
"He decided just two days ago?"
"That's right."
"Well, when has he had the time to rehearse?”
"Well, he's been singing in school all along, and so much at home it gets on the husband's nerves. So all we had to do was find a piece he liked that I could play on the piano."
Charles's mother kneels in front of Nick and takes his hand in hers. "Are you scared?"
He nods at her, his jaw trembles, and his tears, having wet paths prepared for them, slide down his cheeks.
"What grade do you get in singing at school?"
Nick opens his mouth wide and bawls, "AAAAAA's, Ma, don't I!"
"Charles gets C's. I tell him a C means he can sing like a canary, but it's a lie and he knows it, too. Have you ever heard him sing, Nick?"
Nick snuffles and studies her with a mixture of skepticism and shame.
"What does he sound like instead? Think of an animal with a name that starts with a C."
Nick wipes the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and looks at Charles. Then he grins with all his teeth. "A cow! He sounds like a cow to me!"
"Exactly. Now, knowing there are people who sound like that, and how you do, and what a wonderful gift it is to have a voice like yours, don't you ever wonder if it isn't a little strange for you to be afraid? Aren't you even a little ashamed of it, as good as you are?"
Nick lowers his head and, after a moment, nods it twice to her.
"That means you're sorry for being this way, causing your mother such worry, which means you'll sing twice as well—see if I'm not right!—to make up for it."
She pats him on the knee, rises, and takes Charles to the back of the room, where she sits him on a wooden bench, and, as she begins to undress him, says, "Don't be jealous. If you'd like, you can be angry. I didn't appreciate the way he said that either, about the cow. But you're a pro. And you're grownup enough to understand why I said what I did or I wouldn't have. Here, now! Stand up straight!"
Then, as she helps him on with his costume, which feels chilly and stiff after his street clothes, she generates a silence that shields him from the disorganization and tumult of the room, and he leaves the hubbub about them, conscious only of her, of her hands moving up the buttons of his shirt, her eyes traveling over his face and clothes, examining them quickly but with care to each detail, her breath passing over the side of his neck, pausing, passing over it again, and once again he senses that he's an adult, and thinks, This will last forever.
From the gentleness of her touch he understands more what she meant about Nick than her words could say, and realizes that this gentleness, present no matter how straightforward or unpredictable she might be, was communicated to Nick when she took his hand. And then he's jealous, and his face burns as with the fever of pneumonia.
&nb
sp; She rechecks the tissue in the hat, the bandanna, the belt of the holster ("Whatever you do, don't click that thing!"), and the broad, bow-curved, tooled-leather belt of the chaps, and says, "Just do what you've learned," and leaves him.
He goes out the side of the dressing room and stands in a darkened wing of the stage, filled with her serenity, her gift to him, and walks to a traveling drape gathered near the cyclorama, takes the drape in one hand and turns several slow circles, wrapping himself up in its folds, and remains there until he's heard applause for the first performer, and then unwinds himself, and sees light, and feels a detached, trancelike pall over his emotions. Why is he here, now, tonight?
Mary Beth Friewirth, in the opposite wing, makes a hurried sign of the cross and walks into the spotlights in a white dress, her First Communion dress minus the veil, and sings "Dear Hearts and Gentle People." Applause. Edward Hyerdahl, dressed as Uncle Sam, does a tap dance to "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." The clash and rattle of his metal taps on a Masonite square. Applause. Nick Schonbeck, with blackface covering whatever remnants of fear his face might betray, stands with his back to the audience, polishing imaginary shoes, and sings "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" to the jangling and thrum of his mother's piano and at one point a cry of "Go to it, boy!" Applause. Then Dr. Koenig's penetrating bass voice, "Doing a thing called 'Bronco Boy'!"
A sensation that's only skirted him before, brushing him when he imagines performing, making him aware of the complexity of his insides, falls over him with its full weight, and his intestines sway to one side as if to make room for greater fear. His tongue is hard and dry; there's a rope around his throat as he walks into the brilliant light, blinking against it, and though the outer elements exert so much pressure it seems he's growing smaller with each step, his composure keeps them outside; but they have an exhilarating effect, bearing down on his senses, and he feels he's taken his first steps onto the broad swath of the world. He notices details he wouldn't under normal conditions—the shade of his thumbnail (why is it so purple?); a strand of hair on the chaps, longer than the others, that's discolored (what from?); the grain in the boards of the stage; the specks of dust, brightly lighted, that seem to have been arranged over the grain with an eye for symmetry; a piece of blue thread stuck to the sole of his boot, and the shadow of the thread, also blue—and takes them in in a matter of steps.
The houselights are off, but he can see rows of faces and identify separate people. He finds his mother and, closer up front, Tim and Jerome, and sees that the contestants who've finished are sitting on the floor below the stage (Nick Schonbeck appears) along with some of the Rimsky boys, Kuntz, who cries "Wowk! Wowk!" and Ribs, off to one side, alone, and realizes that he's not only made it to the apron and executed his bow but is smiling and ready to begin, prepared for anything but the giggling all around, and not just at Kuntz. Then the white arms of some girls in the front row point at him. They're laughing at the chaps! His Grandpa Jones would thrash them all if he knew they were mocking anything of his, and his mother has worked over the chaps for hours to assure a perfect fit, so where's the reason to laugh? Are they laughing at her? Who? In the many-layered level of impressions, through anger and hints he's received of her attitude, he thinks, Those people out there are dumb farts. Hicks. He hates them. And once emotion has broken through, the details fall away and he sees only white. Blue-white. Blue, and then races at a rattling speed through the speech without a thought to the phrasing and imagery he's worked on with her, each line emerging with a spattering flay of fierceness it's
never had, and at the climax, "Yippeee!" to close off the fools, he grabs the hat and pulls it down over his eyes. The big hand of Dr. Koenig settles across the width of his back and propels him in the proper direction, offstage into the wing.
He pulls the hat free, and the tissue lining its crown drops to the floor. What will she say about this? He tries to recall if he clicked the trigger and can't. He can't even say if he finished the speech. Was the cap pistol there? And that isn't all. The audience is still making a sea of noise that supports the loudest cries, and above it all he hears Dr. Koenig wheedling, saying something about wool and eyes, and finally, after another swell, there's absolute silence out there. He bends down, trembling, and picks the tissue off the floor, as if it's essential to salvage every part of this he does have, and goes into the dressing room. His mother is there, alone, waiting for him, and before he can say he's sorry, she grabs him by the scruff of the neck—a button pops off his shirt— drags him to the rear of the room, and slams him down on the bench so hard that a warm pain sends out tentacles of numbness from the base of his tailbone.
"Why did you pull that hat down?" she says in a fierce whisper, shaking his shoulders. "What kind of a second-rate performer are you, anyway?"
A wave of emotion smothers his words, hoarse empty voice.
"I've never been so mortified in my life! Do you think I took you through two weeks of rehearsal to see you ruin it at the last minute with a piece of cheap slapstick like that? What's the matter with you?"
She begins to undress him, and his shirt rips under the armpit. Only children feel with such acuteness what's communicated through hands, and these are the hands of his mother. He feels desecrated all the way through. The gentleness, the tremor of understanding usually there even when she spanks him, isn't, and when she tugs wrathfully at one leg of the chaps without unbuckling the belt first, the tears that have been building beneath his eyes gather on his lashes, send around turning tines of light, sidewheeling rays, and then burn with an acidity from holding them back.
"After a stunt like that, you don't deserve to win a dime."
"I don't want to!"
"You've performed and you'll be judged. Except for that slapstick, it's the best you've done the speech. I thought they'd never stop applauding! Oh!"
"I did it because they made fun!"
"When you're performing, you have a duty to yourself and your audience, and can't lose control—you were so good!—and when you're onstage you might well expect to be laughed at. Isn't that one of the reasons you're out there? You're not there to vent your temper, you know. There's more than enough opportunity for that in everyday life. And if you don't learn to control your temper there, too, in everyday life, I mean—your temper and that terrible pride of yours—life's going to give you an awful lot of trouble, believe me! I know!"
She kneels in front of him, picks up the tissue he's dropped, puts it in his hand, and closes his fingers around it. "Here," she says. "Dry your eyes now. Pretty soon they'll be announcing the winner. You."
A few minutes later he walks onto the stage to receive, as she's predicted, the first prize of ten silver dollars. The houselights are on, illuminating the auditorium, but he sees the audience only vaguely, and the faces of his friends and their applause have little effect on him. He accepts the prize money from Dr. Koenig, thanks him, and as he turns away is grabbed up under the arms, above the head of the doctor, who waltzes him around the stage in big dips a few times to the cries and amusement of the audience, singing something under his sweet-smelling breath that seems to have the streets of Detroit or of old New York, or both of them, mixed up in it, and then Charles comes down near the edge of the traveling curtain, walks into the wing and places the money in the hands of his mother, his real, his unequivocal, and, as the slow unfolding of years will come to prove, his only competitor, his only stumbling block, and his only real friend for life, or so it seems at times, here in the present, as he looks up to find himself alone in a room.
17
PLUMBER'S SON
Now I'm known as the plumber's son (or I was then, after I graduated from being called the principal's son for so long it gave me a sense of character and pride), and it gives me such pleasure to walk in the wake of my father with a coil of copper tubing slung over my shoulder, along with some pipe fittings laced on a wire, I couldn't care less what anybody says about either of us. He's given up his principalship at the high scho
ol, and since the summer has been known in town as the man with two jobs. Actually, he has four; he sells life insurance the year round, he works on a book of memoirs that nobody knows about but Charles and Jerome and me, he drives tractor on a farm in the spring and fall, and, fourth, in his spare time, he and I do any plumbing in the area that needs to be done. If we didn't, they'd have to hire a union man from McCallister, and they'd be surprised at the prices they'd have to pay these days. Everybody in Hyatt is putting in plumbing, now that the new mains are in, so there's always work for us to do over the weekends, or on the days when Dad isn't driving across the countryside and state, to Grand Forks, or Minot, or Devil's Lake, or Bismarck, to sell insurance. We buy our materials at Pflager's, which faces the tracks and the depot, and is down the street from Eichelburger's, beyond Bill Faber's blacksmith shop. The Pflagers are the only family in town with two cars, and they also have a pickup at the hardware store for making deliveries. They live in a big, gold-colored house, kitty-corner from the front of ours, their yard surrounded by a fence made of iron bars with big spearheads on their tips. Mrs. Pflager is known as Penny, although her real name is Margaret, because of her red-gold hair. She grows marigolds along her fence and garden and a copper-colored spaniel—purebred, they say—exercises in the yard behind the fence, its metal tags clanking like car chains in the night when you want to sleep but a car is on a prowl of town.
Penny has a set of twins, Chris and Heidi, with hair like hers and her complexion; and though the twins are likable, and both my age, naturally both, I hardly ever play with them, and neither do many other kids. The twins spend their time in their yard and seem to speak a language of their own, and are so intent upon one another it feels embarrassing to intrude on them. The Pflagers' porch is crowded with cages of tropical birds and plants from all over the world, one of which eats bugs; I make sure it stays away from me. The Pflagers say the area is growing and prospering (optimists, my father calls them) and that someday Hyatt will be built up as big as McCallister, or bigger, and I hope that happens. It'll give us more plumbing to do.
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