The house above, whose layout and rooms and stairwells and airiness formed a physical part of his past, was started soon after the war, when materials were difficult to get and mostly second-rate, and from the day it was finished had a lived-in, slightly ramshackle feel to it; floors creaked and didn't seem quite true, window frames parted from the siding, which was fir and shed paint like snake-skin, a motley of different tiles was used on the basement stairs and entry landing (the carpenter's children sometimes went without rooves), and then he felt himself (a plumber's son?) travel up the fizzing nozzle of the shower to the tub on the second story where a loose faucet was always falling off with a clong. Twist-lock electrical outlets that only an adult could operate, without anybody saying, "No, no, don't!"
Up three steps from the entry was the kitchen, whose vintage cabinets of marine plywood had been replaced by his grandfather with cabinets of oak, as he sang "Roll out the barrel" all one afternoon while Jerome helped. The pill cabinet his father had mentioned, where his grandfather kept his cigarettes until he was told by Lauflin to quit smoking (and then didn't really quit, but switched to tipped cigars), was above a broom closet here, too high for him and Charles to reach when they were younger, so they boosted one another up to the cartons of Spuds, later Salems—like finding treasure, at that age, to see a carton of cigarettes in one place—both trying to stifle their laughter, and stole a pack each time they came to the house. Once their grandfather walked in on them with Charles high in the air, and stepped back, and said, "If you want a cigarette, ask for one. You’ll ruin your health smoking, as I have, but if you're going to, I'd rather you did it in front of me instead of behind my back.”
They couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen and no mention was made of their stealing. How prepared he seemed for situations that came up. Was he for death? His breath resounded in his lungs as loudly as a rale at times, or he'd suddenly start coughing—his fist to his mouth and his face turning blue—so hard you had to look away and hold your breath for his sake. Surely he had emphysema.
The dining room, then, with big windows looking onto the terraced lawn, and, to the left, opening onto the living room, a ten-foot arch; on recessed shelves on both sides of it were the salt-and-pepper shakers his grandmother collected; and the wall above the dining table was one long mirror lined with glass shelves that held more of them, over seven hundred pairs, at his grandmother's last count, doubled in the mirror—windmills, gas pumps, skunks, flower buds, statuettes of nuns and gnomes, a Billy on a pot, a baseball and glove, a hammer and anvil (anything, really, that came in pairs), and these could be taken down by the grandchildren, over thirty of them, and used as toys.
From the day their mother died until Jerome and Charles went off to college, their family sat at this table every Sunday for dinner. Their grandmother called them "my second family" and prepared meals for them as large as for her first; a main course of roast or turkey with stuffing, creamed mashed potatoes, homemade bread or rolls, vegetables, a salad or two, a fruit bowl, and a dessert that was usually fresh-baked—an extravagance of food, and perhaps one of the few balanced meals they had all week. There were so many side dishes, and so many servings in each, they stayed on for the afternoon, watching television with flushed faces, satiated and drowsy, or went wandering as though underwater through this house so different from theirs, and yet partly theirs, with its order and cleanliness, well-heated rooms, aubusson-colored carpet on the floors and flight of stairs to the second story, plus so many pieces of plush furniture there was an enveloping seat for everyone, and then had supper from the leftovers from dinner, often with -uncles and aunts and cousins who'd dropped in, and still there were leftovers. The house seemed a source of bounty that could never give out.
And then he saw, to the left, the door to the bedroom where, just this morning, his grandfather fell dead. He could visualize his grandmother waking with the religious statues and framed absolutions for the family signed by secretaries of two Popes, gifts from Davey, in the room around her, and making up the double bed, and the image of her doing this kept going on and on into the future until he wished his mind would give out.
She was formidable to him years before, fleet and graceful, small, but such a bulwark of authority it seemed she was carrying within her a part of the country of Germany and a great deal of the Catholic Church. She'd mellowed, though, put on weight, and was so at ease with herself and others that if he was asked what she was like now, he'd say, "Gentle and serene." She still had strength, but kept within the boundaries of her solid self, and was gay and girlish about it, as if she hadn't been able to express herself until the last of her children was raised. She and his mother would get along now.
In the days that came she'd have to decide whether to begin a new life or not. And it would be difficult with none of the children growing up and at home. Maybe Marie or Susan could live with her for a year or more, which might also ease the situation at home here, if there was one, as it seemed. Marie would be best. She was more emotional than Susan, and though you could be stalwart and intellectual about death, it helped to be able to empty yourself of it in the most primitive ways. That was why their father had been able to endure all he had, but today he'd begin to show emotion and then retreat from it, as if Laura might find it unmanly in him, and hadn't even been able to speak until he got home. Then the explosion.
Jerome sat, crossed an ankle over his knee, and reached for his shoe; his father used to claim he lay in suspense below waiting for the second one to drop. Fred must feel awful. When he took over the business, it was assumed by everybody, especially Tom, that Tom would have some say in how it was run, since he was the only other son still in it, but Fred handled him no better or worse than any of the foremen—not so much highhanded as unaware Tom was being hurt, because he enjoyed giving orders, manipulating figures and people so much, he assumed everybody shared m the enjoyment. Tom was boyish and nursed his grudges. He and Fred got into shouting arguments over petty details and Tom would throw down his hammer and walk off the job. But then he'd return, shamefaced, knowing his father was being hurt.
Jerome heard Tom's and a lot of the others' grievances in the office where he kept books and made out the payroll, a job that kept him home over the summer when the rest of the family was on vacation. He didn't care. He lived in his grandparents' basement. He sometimes felt the office had a shingle on it. Tom thought he should be allowed to operate with as much autonomy as Scott, Elaine's husband; but Scott operated that way because he never listened to Fred, considering him a philanderer of the business world and a bag of wind, and Tom, who was dutiful and knew his brother's worth, did.
Fred was an intuitive estimator who could look at a set of plans and say within a few hundred dollars what the finished building would cost, and then a day's work on a calculator would prove him right. He could walk through a remodeling job and within minutes hand in a bid on it. His manner won over stuffy and timid prospects, and when he was in the mood and not drinking, he could build period furniture from scratch, from slabs of hardwood, with a craftsmanship that awed even his father. "The Old Master," he'd say of himself with a smile, and bite into his cigar. "How do you get such a finish?" people would ask. "Why, it's hand-rubbed!" He'd stroke the oil glands alongside his nose and hold up a fingertip. "With this."
Tom was a former track star, tall and massively built, and so powerful Jerome had seen him pick up and throw a few yards a three-hundred-pound table planer that broke down and angered him. He and Fred had become so distant their only means of communication was notes on a chalkboard in the shop. If Tom had been able to tell Fred what was bothering him, then their relationship surely would have changed, for Fred was, above all, down to earth and reasonable, and couldn't bear anything he didn't understand or couldn't tinker with until he got it going good.
"She's a broom binder," Tom would say about any job that looked particularly difficult to him. "She's a barn burner," Fred would respond, and suddenly they'd be l
aughing so hard they were embarrassed, and those two phrases, which must have come from somewhere in their childhood and never failed to amuse them, were about their only way of relating as brothers. Unless one of them could fart, and Jerome had seen them walking around a construction site straining and red-faced, trying to rip one off. "A katooshmaker. Lord Windowsmear!"
Fred lived down the street and across the railroad tracks from his parents (the tracks ran through the center of Forest Creek and gave the houses there regular shakings), and after he took control of the business you could hear, more and more, outside the grandparents' house, arguments coming from Fred's. His wife, Gayle, was a tall and handsome woman, nervy and authoritative—"Fred runs the corporation the way he'd like to Gayle," a wag once said—and had a tendency toward theatrics. One day she came in in a fury to see Jerome's grandfather, and versions of the conversation had been replayed so much in the family it had become tenuous domestic history; Jerome's grandmother and Davey were within hearing distance. Jerome was on the cot in the basement.
Gayle began by saying she was concerned about Fred's drinking, and then started to complain about it and berate Fred's manliness.
"I don't know why you've come to me,” Jerome's grandfather said.
"You mean you're not concerned about his drinking?” "Of course. But it's not my place to interfere in his life. Or in yours, either, and if you were my own daughter I'd tell you the same."
"Well, what do you expect me to do about it?” "Work this out with him, between the two of you, as man and wife."
"I've been thinking of a divorce," she said. Jerome tried to imagine his grandfather's face, and could guess how a Catholic divorce would be looked upon in Forest Creek—a laughing matter, at the least "If you've gone so far as to think of that, you've made a breach between the two of you that's going to be hard to mend. And you've made me a party to it. No matter what I say, you'll do what you're inclined to, but since you've made me a party to it, I'll tell you what I think you should do. Get a divorce. You're unhappy, and I can't think of anything worse than living with a man who made me unhappy."
Jerome removed his shoe, then the other, and stood and undressed, hanging his clothes over the chair at his desk in darkness, then set his glasses on the desktop and got under the covers. He was supposed to take after Jay in temperament, not in any physical sense, certainly;
Jay was over six feet, long-boned and good-looking, like Tim, and carried himself with an athletic grace that made it seem he was perpetually walking over a well-sodded fairway toward the next green. He loved golf and hunting upland game. He'd been a photographer during the war, stationed in England, and flew in bombers' underbellies to record the effectiveness of their raids; he'd photographed the fire-bombing of Dresden. He brought home a piece of shrapnel the size of a plate that imbedded itself in a wall a few inches from his head during a V-2 shelling of London. The world's wars.
Jerome heard, years later, that Jay had wanted to marry an older Englishwoman, but hadn't, and when he came home was drinking and behaving so unlike himself that the priest from Havana, Father Hart-Donovan, began following him around to bars and drinking at his side. He married, eventually, a girl who was the assistant postmistress in Pettibone, and was, still, the most attractive and well turned of any of Jerome's aunts. She and Jay lived next to his grandparents, beyond the playground, in a house that had begun as a model-looking place for a pair of newlyweds, and had been added on to in a rambling manner with the birth of their children and with Jay's ascendance in the business world over the years, until it covered the end of the block. Jay had four daughters, the only Neumiller without a son, and hadn't drunk since the shivaree for his marriage.
He'd developed a method of plaster-finishing he called peacock-tailing, in which the swirled circles in the sand finish of a ceiling lined up in straight rows no matter which angle they were looked at, and now had a half dozen crews scattered over this area of the state. He'd loaned Jerome five hundred dollars when he started college, and said he'd help pay his way through medical school. If indeed Jerome was taciturn, as everybody implied, then he wouldn't know what name to give Jay's manner. He'd go to see him about a small loan, or merely to talk, hoping to get a feel of how Jay managed so well in the world, and there'd be five- and ten-minute silences as Jay doodled on a pad, or simply stared at Jerome, his fingers steepled under his lips, and finally he'd come out with a line that seemed non-sequitur or purposely cryptic, such as, "Did you see The Old Man and the Sea' in Life?" which took Jerome three years to understand, and then there’d be ten more minutes of silence.
He was on the road most of the time making estimates, so Vince had become his head foreman. Vince lived on the other side of Forest Creek, in a modern ranch-style house, and was the most private and misunderstood of the Neumillers, perhaps; he had the fewest children, a son and daughter, and everybody who worked with him said he was difficult to get along with, although Jerome never found him to be. Perhaps his work didn't agree with him. He'd tried a variety of other occupations—farming, speculating in oil, working toward a pilot's license, mining (near Zap, North Dakota), TV repair, raising chinchillas —and seemed to abandon all at the moment they were about to turn his way. He'd been troubled by ulcers since he was twenty-one and finally, last fall, underwent semi-experimental surgery in which a length of duodenum and one-third of his stomach were removed; his hair grayed after the operation and furrows deepened in his face. He'd always resembled his father more than any of the sons, but now looked like his father's brother, an older one. He stayed home and read novels and biographies until he dropped off, and exuded a sorrow and listlessness Jerome saw as belonging to an imprisoned artist.
Rose Marie and her husband, Kev, had always lived in Pettibone, "to be away from the family," as Rose Marie archly put it; Pettibone was five miles from Forest Creek. "But then Kev’s family lives here," she said. "You can't win."
Elaine and Scott lived in the country beyond Forest Creek.
Tom had sold his house in Forest Creek a year ago (nobody knew why) and was now living on the outskirts of Pettibone.
Davey was in Chillicothe, teaching high-school Latin.
Charles cried out from the other room.
Jerome sat up. What tangle of dreams was he fighting his way through? When Jerome was running the experiment for the psychologist, he'd asked Charles to be a subject, since subjects received a ten-dollar fee and he knew Charles could use the money, although it was against his better judgment; good results depended on the neutrality of the tester. He was taking Charles through the first series of tests, holding up picture cards two feet from his face, a tactic meant to intimidate, and when he came to the photograph of a bushy mons Veneris, which had been preceded by a mushroom, Charles slapped the table and started laughing so hard Jerome broke up. Charles was abandoned from then on, lost in some sort of inner contact, as he pressed buttons to match flashing patterns of lights on the wall, and then back to more picture cards, and later, when he was done and had left, Jerome sat in the darkened room with the test lights blinking around him, and saw that according to the scale set up by the psychologist, Charles was a borderline psychotic. Anybody with his results was supposed to be given the MMPI. But Jerome wasn't sure he hadn't affected his responses, and as he sat in the room and stared at a wall and then at the mathematically correlated graphs, at the uneven reaction times, the unfurling reels of Charles's breathing and heartbeat, he felt unequal to being a scientist. "Tester botched," he wrote in the logbook after Charles's name, and tore up his results and buried them in a wastebasket.
He turned and lay on his back and put his feet against the wall, flexing and unflexing his toes. G.P.? Pedia— The texture of the plaster, the darkness and the oblong above him made him want to masturbate. He rolled on his side and punched the pillow into a mound. He'd been having trouble sleeping at night, although he could sleep perfectly well during the day. Psychiatrist, pediatrician, Ph.D.? He'd have to make a decision in a few weeks. It de
pended upon the kind of life he wanted to live, because once the decision was made, that life would take over. He tried to travel outward to the source of power, as he had in Hyatt, but the shape of Illinois, like a half-formed arrowhead, deflected him, and then he saw his profile against the pillow as though on a fluoroscope, with the whorls of his brain gleaming gray-green and neonlike inside the delicate cage of his skull.
He got out of bed, turned on the light, took a psychology text from among the books and clothes in his suitcase, and began to read its wobbly lines one after the other until the print and then his mind came to a close.
*
He rose to the smell of coffee, the oblong above him now sunlight. He'd been dreaming of a day in the fifth grade, a spring afternoon with fall light falling through the high windows, when everybody sat at his desk carving a bust of Abraham Lincoln out of a bar of Ivory soap. The teacher was Mrs. Strawrick. "Quite a name, huh?" she said the first day, introducing herself, and then explained what it meant. She was a stocky woman amused by some unrevealed aspect of herself, and had a noisy laugh that other teachers complained about. She was in her forties and pregnant for the first time that year, due at nearly the same date as his mother, and when she was nearing term she introduced her replacement, her cousin, who was built exactly like her but on a smaller scale, and was named Rakestraw. "She rakes the straw for the rick!" Mrs. Strawrick said, and the two women stood at the front of the room shaking with laughter in an identical way, and he relaxed at his desk, realizing there were more inexplicable interrelationships than would ever be revealed to any one person in a lifetime. When Mrs. Strawrick returned to school after her delivery, after his mother had died, she took him aside and said, "I've been thinking of you all this time at home and felt so miserable for you. Then I remembered that maple-leaf cup shelf you made for her at Christmastime, and the industry you worked at it with, cutting it out so well, and then sanding and finishing it just right, and I thought. Surely that gave her a great deal of pleasure in the last days of her life."
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 48