Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "When Dad was about to retire, I went to him and I said, 'Dad, for God's sake, for the family's sake, for your own sake, for your peace of mind, why don't you fold this corporation up, let it go, just dissolve the damn thing! Lord knows it's caused you enough headache and grief as it is. Here's your chance to be rid of that. Sign it away! You've got enough to live on. Relax! If there's anything you want or need, let your sons take care of you for a change. And he said, 'No, what's always kept me going was the idea that I was building up this business for you boys.'

  " 'Fine,' I said. 'But what if they don't want it?' I don't I want it, I told him. I never did, and I'll never have anything to do with it. The only reason I ever did carpenter work—or plastering, either, as far as that goes—was there didn't seem any hope for a while and it was a good way to wear myself out so I could sleep nights.

  " 'And look at Jay,' I said. (Your Uncle Jay was the first to really work with your grandpa, but that was so long ago you wouldn't remember.) 'You waited for Jay to get out of the service and pick up with you where he'd left off, you could hardly bear waiting, and then when the war was over and he came back and saw an opportunity to make money elsewhere, in plastering, off he went into that. A few years later Vince joined up with him. I always wanted to teach. Emil went into government service practically right out of high school, and Davey went off to college and then more school. Who's left?' " He ticked off on his fingers. " 'Fred and Tom. That's it. Two.'

  “ ‘I’ve always considered my sons-in-law part of the family,' he said.

  " Fine,' I said. ‘Scott and Kev. Four. However you want to count. That's four out of how many. Dad? And how do you know that those four are perfectly satisfied with what they're doing?'

  "I don't,' he said. 'And I'm glad most of you found out so soon what you wanted to do. But I built up this business for one reason, you boys, and as long as even just one of you's interested in it, I'll keep it going.'

  "But Dad. Dad, maybe the other boys want to get off on their own. too,' I said. 'Lord knows they're old enough. Maybe they're just staying on to please you. I know Scott wants to get off on his own. He can hardly wait! He's been doing jobs on the side and over the weekends for years now. Maybe Fred and Tom want to, too. Maybe they look at Jay and think, By God, I could be like him. For goodness' sake. Dad, look at Jay yourself. Compared to you, he's a wealthy man, gol-dammit!"

  He struck the tabletop and the bowls bounced.

  Laura set steaming mugs in front of them, and then put a hand on his sleeve and whispered, "Please. You mustn't get so upset. I'll leave you two alone now. I know you want to talk." She massaged the muscles of his shoulders, and said in a changed voice, "What time would you like breakfast—" and stopped short, it seemed, of a term of endearment.

  "Seven. Fred and I have to go early to see about arrangements."

  "Seven, then. Don't overtire yourself. Your mother will need you tomorrow." She kissed his forehead, and his lips quivered and compressed. She looked at Jerome, then away, unease in her eyes, and said, "Good night. If you boys need me, I'm here."

  She closed the door to the other side of the house behind her.

  The upstairs steps started to creak with the weight of someone descending them, and Tim came into the kitchen in undershorts, skinnier than ever, half asleep, his eyes dazed and melting, and grabbed Jerome's hand and shook it hard. A mature yet impulsive gesture, and so unexpected Jerome knew he was afraid.

  "Where's Chuck?" their father asked.

  “He's in—" Tim's voice hit its adolescent register and cracked. "In bed. I don't think he's feeling too well."

  Their father glanced toward the door to the other side, and said, "That's where you better get yourself, too, and right this minute, unless you put on some decent clothes."

  "Oh," Tim said, and stared down at himself. "Oh, yeah."

  He turned away like a somnambulist and went up the stairs.

  "He hasn't been doing as well in school,” their father said. "He's in a fog most of the time."

  Jerome remembered Tim mentioning months ago that Einard might have some surgery done, of a corrective sort, Jerome inferred, since Tim said Einard was doing it mostly to oblige a doctor. Jerome hadn't asked any particulars. Why? A Freudian slit in which fissure? Fear? Einard was the same age as their grandfather. Damn. He got up, astir with restlessness, went to the percolator and poured a splash of coffee in his mug, then filled his father's, which was empty, and sat again.

  "How are—”

  Tim walked in in a pair of blue jeans, pulled up a chair across from Jerome, crossed his arms over his bare chest, and began nodding off.

  "How's Unc?" Jerome asked; Tim’s name for Einard.

  Tim's eyebrows raised so much he should have been wide-eyed, but his lids stayed at half-mast. "Oh, fine," he said. "Just fine."

  "That operation of his turned out all right?”

  "Oh, sure."

  “What was it for?”

  Tim shrugged.

  "Abdominal hernia," their father said.

  "Where'd you get that?" Tim asked.

  "From one of the relations. Olivia, I think." This was Sue and Grandma Jones's oldest sister.

  "How come you didn't tell me about it?”

  "If you'd write to them more often, the way I keep telling you to, you might have heard it from the source."

  "Was it serious?" Jerome asked.

  "It could have been, from what I understand of it. The way she sounded, they got it just in time."

  They all leaned back from the conversation, as if a corpus of their creation was burning on the table, or about to be burned.

  "Will Emil be here?" Jerome asked.

  "Of course," their father said. "He's flying out."

  Everybody withdrew even more.

  Emil was Jerome's boyhood hero, a resident of New York, the most adventurous city, and an agent for the FBI. He'd wanted to enlist in the Army, as Fred and Jay had, but a doctor discovered the scars left by the hd of the gasoline barrel, and X rays revealed a three-inch gap in his tibia bridged by a piece of bone the size of a pencil, and he was rejected; the same with the Navy and the Air Force. He decided to join the FBI, and there was a family story that he'd slept on a park bench in Washington, D.C., until he was accepted; then worked as a file clerk while he went to Washington and Lee, then was made a special agent and assigned to Manhattan, and it was known, in a general way (he couldn't really talk about it, but Fred kept pumping him), that he'd worked on the Brink's and Hiss cases, and was once pinned down by gunfire in a Louisiana swamp for five days. When Jerome was in the seventh grade, he went with his father to visit Emil and his family and went walking a ways from the home on Long Island they'd just moved to, out to the beach, and had his first glimpse of the ocean, that watery plain that washed on foreign shores, and though it was March, he took off his shoes and went wading in it, he was so excited (and so he could say he'd been in the Atlantic Ocean), and gathered a shoe box of shells. Emil took them to Times Square and Rockefeller Center, the U.N., the Fulton Fish Market, and Chinatown, and what Jerome remembered most was how alert and at home Emil was in the crowds—Jerome kept craning up at skyscrapers and bumping into people, even when he took pains not to —and how Emil kept glancing at his wristwatch, and every hour excused himself and stepped into a building or phone booth. "What's all that espionage about?" Jerome's father final y asked. "Since I'm sort of wandering loose, I have to cal in on a regular basis," he said. They later learned he hadn't been out of the office for months because he was carrying information on an underworld fie-ure that only he could testify about. Then why in the world had he taken them on a tour, Martin wondered. You re protective coloration. Also, I was going stir-crazy in—" a

  "Tim!" their father shouted so loud that chairs scraped. "Get to bed!"

  Tim's arms were crossed as before, and he blinked rheumy, bloodshot eyes. "What?"

  "If you’re going to just sit there and sleep, get to bed!"

  "Oh. O.K."
>
  He was drifting toward the stairway when Jerome said, “I’ll see you in the morning."

  "Uh-huh."

  The sound of his feet, bare, padded, went up the stairs, and their father called, "If I thought you'd hear it, I'd say good night."

  "G'night," Tim's retreating voice said, and then his footsteps were silent.

  A cameo of Jerome's face, resting on the onyx surface of his coffee, grew larger and larger as he raised his mug until all that was visible was the bold nose and two glassed-in eyes the size and cast of grapeshot. Sheee-it, as Fred would say. He couldn't taste anything but heat. Why did he associate coffee with funerals and death, and why drink so much of it if he did? Tasting the edge? Pouring through to his past?

  “I'll hardly know what to do with myself," his father said.

  “Do they know what it was for sure?"

  "His heart stopped is all I've heard." His voice was drawn inward and so small it seemed Susan's.

  "Had you seen him much lately?"

  "Much? Every day! He and I were trying to decide what to do about this bankruptcy business. In fact, I talked to him the same night—Last night," he said, and paled.

  "How did he seem?"

  "In low spirits, but perfectly healthy as far as I could see. There was a rumor going around that Fred had lost a check from a job—for nine hundred dollars, supposedly —in a poker game.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, well, you know how these stories get around. I’m sure there isn’t any truth in it, but I suppose Dad heard it, on top of the bankruptcy news. He seemed very depressed.

  If there was an irreconcilable deficit in the books, Fred would sometimes take the money to cover it, fifty dollars and above, out of his billfold, bite into his cigar so it stood up at an angle, and say, “Easy come, easy go, bookkeeper boy.

  “You don’t think it’s true, then, about the nine hundred?”

  “Oh no. No, Fred might have a lot of faults, but not that kind. No, he probably got a few beers in him and made up the story himself. You know how he likes to be the center of attention. Oh hell, everybody does.” He gave Jerome a wavering look. “Is it possible Grandpa was alive this morning?”

  “He wasn’t complaining about anything, or seeing doctor?”

  “No. No, he stopped going to his regular doctor last spring.”

  “Lauflin?”

  “That airplane-flying fellow toward Easton he’s been going to the last ten years.”

  “Why? Lauflin’s good.”

  “Dad said he gave him too many pills.” His eyes had been lusterless and introspective, but now a swell of feeling surfaced in them. “My Lord, he was taking fifteen different pills a day—he had a special cabinet in the kitchen he kept them in—and none of them did any good for what was really bothering him, that terrible cough that used to double him up and what he referred to as his stomach trouble. Whatever that was. It was finally decided it wasn’t an ulcer. Anyhow, one day he took the conglomeration of pillboxes out of the cupboard, took them out to the incinerator, and burned the. Ha! ‘I never felt right about having those in the house,’ he said. ‘I was always afraid a grandkid might get into them.’ He stopped seeing Lauflin and started going to a chiropractor instead.”

  “A chiropractor?”

  “Yes, some fellow over at San Jose, about seventy or so—a guy who doesn’t look well enough to pop a paper bag, much less crack somebody’s back. He wears an old hat and a long overcoat whether it’s April or August, and either must be a crackpot or just doesn’t care.”

  “Did he do Grandpa any good?”

  “Oh, Dad said he felt pretty good after each treatment, which is more than the pills did. Personally, I think he just like to talk with the old guy.” Now shrinking to Susan’s voice again.

  “Did Grandpa ever see Luis and Martita?”

  “Oh sure. They were the ones who satisfied him it wasn’t and ulcer.”

  Luis and Martita were a man-and-wife medical team who’d come from Cuba during the Castro insurgency. They were members of the Pettibone parish, and were frowned upon by some parishioners; Martita prayed aloud in a rumbling Latin fervor, crossed herself with her rosary, and kissed its crucifix with a smack you could hear through the Church. Some of their children and their relatives had to be left behind in Cuba, and every year, as their practice expanded, another member or two of the family would appear in town. They knew about Jerome’s ambition and called him “Doc” in a bantering but fraternal way, and insisted he call them Martita and Luis.

  “Dr. Martita’s been the soul of goodness to your grandma today. She’s done everything medically she can and then she sat down and talked with her for two hours. But then Mom came apart again. I don’t know how she’ll make it through this. I’ve never known her to e irrational, and she’s not the sort to get irrational no matter what the cause, but she’s irrational now. All those sedatives and none have helped. She’s still irrational. I have to get to bed.”

  He shoved back his chair and left the room.

  Jerome drew off his glasses and put his arms on the table and laid his head down on them; it was heavy, off-balance, his sinuses as impacted and raw as when he swam for hours in a chlorinated pool, and he wondered what conversations, if any, were taking place in the homes of his aunts and uncles at this hour. It was a quarter to twelve. He held his hand at arm’s length and studied it, first the palm, then the back, and understood that he’d arrived in the world when he had to replace his dead uncle. What depths of futurity did his mother have in her? Was she free now?

  He put the mugs in the sink, unplugged the percolator, switched off the lights, and started up the stairs. He stopped at the head of them. In a niche above the landing lit by the light in his room, was the hope chest his grandfather had built for her when the engagement was announced: built in the furnace room of a grade school where he worked as a janitor, Jerome’s father had told him, and sometimes slept overnight during the worst of the North Dakota winters in order to keep the furnace stoked with lignite, and was at a loss what to do with himself when he wasn’t lugging or shoveling the punklike coal (he’d once in one night burned sixty-seven wheelbarrows of it), and so this chest.

  It wasn’t cedar or cedar-lined, but plywood stained a cedar color, its outer edges trimmed with brass studs, and the conditions it had risen out of were too far removed in years and experience to affect his judgment of it. It was a durable piece of careful craftsmanship. It had survived the years and all of the moves without a scratch. He could remember his mother using twine to tie a rug around it when they moved from Hyatt. She was the outcast of the family, or so it seemed now, because of her persistent refusal, at first to convert to the Church, and her outspokenness, too, perhaps, but she and his grandfather were good friends. He once walked into the kitchen in Forest Creek, where they were sitting at the breakfast counter, and saw them laughing in a way he’d never seen either of them laugh before, and realized they were sharing a moment they couldn’t share with anybody else, even their own marriage partners, and nearly let the pebbles he had in his hand to show her scatter over the floor. Forgave them. Her especially, and himself. And then had to walk with his head bowed out the back door.

  Her laughter. He’d just heard it out of that moment from the past again. He hadn’t been able to hear her laughter for years. He touched the chest. A well-worked satiny texture. He could see the reflection of his hand. Inside was the needlework she’d done over the years, plus a few articles of each of the five’s baby clothes, and mementos of her engagement and marriage; he’d opened it once, and parted some stacks to see deeper into it, and that was enough. He had no desire to handle or examine any of it or look again, ever.

  He crossed the landing, went down the old catwalk, and looked into the other room, where Tim and Charles lay on twin beds, the bulks of their covered bodies outlined and leaden-looking in the moonlight. He and Charles lathed and plastered the room a summer ago, paneled the long wall along the stairwell, build in cabinets
and desks, put down tile, and then looked at one another in wonder: Why hadn’t they done this before? He stepped into his room, shut off the light, and sat on the edge of the bed, feverish, at the threshold of physical illness or depression, and massaged the muscles of his neck; then lay back.

  An oblong of moonlight rested on the ceiling above him, defined by the walls of the dormer, so translucent against the plaster it was like an opening into a room a story above. Stairs that let down in a ladder of light. When he was a child and couldn’t sleep, he’d lie on his bed in the house in Hyatt, and think, Beyond the bedroom wall is Mon and Dad’s bedroom, and all of the other rooms around it, and then the yard around that, and beyond the yard is the town and the countryside with its farms and all the other towns of Stusrud County and then the rest of the counties filling in the state, and beyond North Dakota are the rest of the states and Canada (vague, reassuring shape), and then the oceans beyond North and South America, the globe, until he felt close to a vast source of power, God or the sun, and fell asleep against it. Grandiosity. What an onomatopoetic word.

  He turned on his face and felt the coolness of his grandparents’ basement, the basement that had once held so many lives, flow up around him. At the far end was the room that had been a bedroom for a while, then for years was his grandfather’s office, and now held the loom his grandmother used to make rugs of discarded clothes. The rest was open play area, with the baby swing there, the Ping-Pong table for internecine tournaments, or to spread buffets on when the family gathered, in the center; the rocking horse here, still redly at it in his adolescent mind, beside the cot where he’d had his first cop of tit after a sweaty game of Ping-Pong. A tall cabinet that held toys and games for children of every age, a refrigerator, a washer-dryer, a laundry sink of slate, and in the far corner, a shower that was merely a raised quadrant of cement with a plastic curtain around it. She bathed there. Alpha among the Indians.