Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  But hear these chords, these suspensions, resolutions, and more chords, Laura. I can see you in your swivel chair, your book in your lap, scowling at this. You do know your music and must feel the hate in this. Soon you'll come over with your martyred look and ask me to stop. I will. I feel sorry for you for the latest you've gone through. Jerome is the only one who's been kind to you and Jerome is never here anymore, lately, I say, as I send out more rays of—

  Let's switch to the she of you for a more comfortable tune: Last summer she had to quit smoking because it bothered her so much in "this humid downstate air," and then went to a doctor who found one of those lumps that every woman must fear from the time she develops, as I have, and had to go into the hospital and have a breast removed, her left. Then had to be driven to Peoria for some sort of treatments under a machine, but never talked about it to us. For two months her arm was in a sling and then was so painful to move, she had to support it with her other hand. Now she was cured, the doctors said, and wore something to make her look whole, but for months after it happened, and now, still, I feel I’ll never want to have sex. Not that that's the cause, of course (Marie and I decided right away that both of them were too old), but that's how I feel.

  Males! I've helped Dad grade papers from the time I was eight, picking up math and parts of speech from him, and enjoyed the help I was able to give over those years when he was alone, but lately he's been handing me all his papers to grade, while he goes off with you. Did you know that? And there are the games Tim and Charles used to play when we were too young to understand what they were doing. I know Ginny's brothers were never as involved in that as those two. Somewhere in one of the albums is a pair of pictures taken by Charles the day he got out the makeup kit and created two different faces of me. Look them up. In one I'm wearing an Angora tam and have mascara-ringed eyes, rouged cheeks, a rosebud mouth, and look like my conception (formed in later years, of course) of a French whore. In the other, there are wrinkles and lines in my face, bags under my eyes, some of my teeth blacked out and others made to look like fangs, and I've got on a frizzy wig that Tim used to wear, plus a cone-shaped hat for the occasion: a witch. Oh, boyohboyohboy.' Which of the two of us is his idea of the real me, or women in general, I wonder, huh? Because another time, later, Laura, when Marie was budding and I was just beginning to start, he came up with his lieutenant, Tim, who had a tape measure, and said. Ah, maybe we should marry—uh, measure your, ah, you-know-whats.

  What do you mean? Why? What?

  For brassieres.

  Glong! Coming out with a tape measure yet! Just so they could get their fingers on us and then with all the measuring and adjusting and rearranging and remeasuring they had to do, I felt my fur tighten and fringes tingle along the edge as— Oh, damn them!

  Let's be friends. I'll make this move in a mouselike way, assuming that's what you want, just to get out of this place and see where my mind can begin, if you'll stop looking so martyred and meet Dad each day with your usual smile. And bring this piano along. Are you listening to me? One last phrase. It's the piece I heard you improvising the afternoon you thought you were alone in the house and drew me walking to you to see who it was who played, and though I can't do it with your grace or skill, or experience, or technique, here:

  She watched him empty all of himself into her and he-come molecular and indistinct, mingling with her feelings for him and all the hard fantasies she'd ever had of men, boards and stones under her back, rocks in her pillar, and then he was a speck afloat on the sea of her breaking around an endless peninsula, and the faster and erratic sounds sent her revolving farther and farther over unexplored and then uncharted shores, until she cried out and kicked the bed and the wall and then him again with the end of it, and floated back down to herself through herself, through layers of many-hued and anomalous shapes, like late water lilies in the bay of a lake, and kissed his face.

  So then who am I? And who am I to talk?

  Plump tiddle lump pump, whang! whang!

  44

  THE END

  Charles was the first of the children to marry and put out the lines to link his generation of the family to families other than his. He began to find regular employment as the voice-over for television commercials, and moved from the Lower East Side to the East Fifties, where he met Katherine. She'd graduated from Columbia but had become disenchanted with the confines of academic life, and was now one of the numberless apparitionlike beauties who can be seen covering the midtown streets of Manhattan with a portfolio in tow, looking for work as a model; she'd been a dancing-singing extra in a series of commercials for a soft drink that all but promised eternal youth, and was featured below the knees in a photo campaign for a foot deodorant called Ahhh! A dream job. Until she married Charles, she'd been largely supported by her father, an industrial contractor from Cicero, a widower who had no sons and wasn't able to stay in school beyond the eighth grade, and was indignant at the use she was making of her college education. He refused to attend her wedding ("The guy makes money talking on TV?") and said, "I won't have anything more to do with you, Kath, and there won't be any more dough." But about once a month he'd call at four or five in the morning, drunk and maudlin, and talk to her as if she were still seven. She miscarried in the first year of their marriage and there was an aura about her and Charles, an introspective sadness and an attention to the smallest moods in one another, that made you feel they'd never have any children; they couldn't be near one another without touching or holding hands; they had a dog. Lady.

  Tim was married a year and a half later, in September, and Charles couldn't attend the wedding because he was deep in the miasma of analysis. Tim had met his wife, Cheri, in the registrar's office of the university he attended, where she worked as a secretary, and they were secretly engaged until Tim received his B.A. Cheri had a straightforward look, impish and flirting, that seemed to appraise the world outside with the healthy appetite some people have for food. After she and Tim had been dating awhile, he learned that she was a Catholic, which he was trying to be, and that she'd been raised on a farm only twenty-five miles from Sue and Einard's, where Tim still lived; and although Tim and she hadn't met before, they discovered, as they sifted through their pasts, that they'd been to many of the same dances and social gatherings of the small-town rural area—River Falls, Bay City, Hager, and Red Wing—when they were younger. Tim was hired that summer as an instructor in high-school biology in northwestern Wisconsin, and within a year Cheri gave birth to a daughter, Martin's first grandchild. She was given Alpha as her middle name.

  Jerome was doing an additional internship in general practice at Cook County Hospital, in order to broaden his spectrum of experience, and on the weekends and when he wasn't on duty, he went to a Panther storefront clinic in a South Side neighborhood and worked there, donating his time and any medications he could shake free from the hospital; at the end of a long letter to Tim, he wrote, "I'm trying, as I think you can see, to be a Savior." He'd once sat up for three days with a woman dying of uremia.

  Marie was majoring in Special Education for the mentally retarded, handicapped, and clinically insane. She'd become the most handsome of the children, with a high noble forehead somewhat like their father's, large eyes with many-hued depths of sympathy in them, and a mouth that looked swollen and bruised in a way that she, being airy and innocent-minded, probably wouldn't think of as sexual. Susan, who was the brightest and certainly the most carefree of the children, or so she seemed to the rest, quit college at the end of her first year, as Martin had unhappily predicted ("Because she's so headstrong and has her own ideas, like her mother"), and married the boy she'd been dating there. They moved to a Chicago suburb, where he started as the produce manager of a supermarket, and then was moving up to managing the store when he won a lottery that guaranteed him a sizable income for the next ten years, and now was trying to decide what to do while still keeping on at his job. Susan was the bookkeeper for a physician and worked six day
s a week.

  Ginny was now taller than Laura, well over six feet, and was still as thin as before, but her braces had been removed and with them a degree of awkwardness went, and her face cleared and took on an inquisitive, ascetic look. She wanted to become a model and Katherine was her heroine. Ginny wrote her long, affectionate letters, asking about the clothes she should wear to complement her height, what hairdo would go best with her shape of face, and was it difficult to become a model? Charles and Katherine invited her to New York over a spring vacation and took her for walks down Park and Madison and Fifth, around the fountain and into the Plaza for lunch, and on the long hack ride through Central Park; and one night Charles took her to the Rainbow Room, paid a waiter for a table next to the orchestra, and he and Ginny danced close to the microphone where Duke Ellington stood and cheered them on. She was doing a younger, Chicagoish version of the dance he was doing, and he realized he must look like a dirty little old gangster out with his daughter. He'd been drinking too much lately and drank too much again that night, and when they got back to the apartment gave Ginny a smeary kiss, sat her on the couch and let his head fall in her lap, and said, "Agh, Ginny, babe, how I'd love to eat you up."

  Martin had been attending night school at Bradley University, and one time when Tim came home, his father led him over to the other side of the house and pointed out a Master's Degree that hung, framed, on the wall. He said he was looking for another job; he couldn't advance any further in Pettibone, now that he was superintendent, and the duties of an administrator in a small-town high-school district bored him. And Laura had never liked living downstate; the heat and humidity affected her so much she had to lie in her bedroom on the worst of the summer days with the shades drawn and the air conditioner going, in order to breathe. She missed the department stores of Chicago, the restaurants there, her beauty parlor, the theater, the museums, the municipal pace, the nightlife, and her friends. She and Martin were sometimes reduced to going to drive-in movies, where there were always a few of his students who honked and waved at them and gave the O.K. sign. Laura became so despondent the doctors believed she was beginning her change of life, and then the tumor was discovered and her breast excised.

  Martin was offered a job in Eglington, a medium-sized town in northern Illinois, near the Wisconsin border, in an area of hills and unclouded lakes, only fifty miles from Chicago; he'd work as a guidance counselor, the kind of job he'd always wanted, where he'd be involved in one-to-one relationships with a large number of students, and might have a hand in helping them decide their future lives. He found a house on a double lot landscaped with evergreens, elms and oaks, and a weeping willow fifty feet tall. It was a one-story ranch-style house, nearly as wide as it was long, with stout walls of poured concrete, rambling and big, pink, really two houses in one; it had been a neighborhood clinic and had a full basement where the doctor and his family had lived, while the upstairs, which had since been remodeled, had held the emergency. X-ray, and examining rooms. The living room itself, formerly the waiting room, was over thirty-five feet long, and had a fireplace in it. The house was large enough to accommodate all the children, both Laura's and his, if all of them wanted to gather at one time.

  It was decided. They sold the house in Pettibone and moved into the new one, and Martin later said to Jerome, "You know, I just learned that Laura never liked that place of ours. It wasn't her house and she never felt comfortable in it, and to tell you the truth, I was glad to get out. There were too many ghosts in the walls."

  Before the school year officially began, Laura became ill and had to undergo another painful series of radiation treatments, and once done with them couldn't stand the smell of cigarette smoke, and then the smell of coffee. She seemed otherwise recovered, however, and when Charles and Katherine visited at Christmas, the first Katherine met Laura, she looked healthier than Charles had seen her, and was in high spirits the whole time; teasing Martin until he blushed, cajoled him into serving and having some Christmas cheer, persuaded Katherine to go bowling with her, although Katherine disliked, to say the least, the sport (but won); and when she wasn't busy in the kitchen, was at her typewriter, typing reports for Martin. She'd made all her Christmas gifts by hand that year, and gave Katherine and Charles a knitted afghan. ,

  At the beginning of the next summer she became ill again and was sent to Madison and went through another series of radiation treatments and received, in addition, injections of a new drug being tested experimentally in the treatment of cancer. The injections left her so ill they had to be discontinued. Sometime later, in New York, Charles woke to the phone at four in the morning, got out of bed groaning about Katherine's drunken, déclassé father, and discovered Jerome on the line; he said that Laura had just undergone another operation. "When Dad told me about it, I got in touch with the specialist who's been working with her, and made sure it was the kind of operation I thought it was. I don't want to sound like the Grim Reaper, but from what little I know about medicine, I think it's safe to say that this operation is usually only done as a last resort, to try and prolong the patient's life a bit more."

  "How long?"

  "A few months."

  "Does Dad realize this?"

  "I told him."

  "What did he say?"

  "He seemed to know as much. He asked me to call you."

  *

  Charles opened his eyes. The ceiling was the wrong color, the walls too far away, and the bed more giving than it should be. He'd been to the Gypsy Tea Kettle on Forty-second Street a few days ago, and the black-haired, handsome woman had sat across from him and flipped over a card, and said, "Oh. A dark woman will be troubling you soon. You know her. She's troubled you before. It has to do with distance, traveling maybe, and there might be death involved," and Charles had immediately assumed that the fortuneteller was referring to his mother.

  Why do I always think of me, he thought, and lifted up on an elbow and looked out the window. It was late September. The foliage of an oak outside shuddered gold-crimson, and the white bench beneath the oak, where he'd once seen Laura sit and read, and the stone birdbath beside the bench, were Uttered with fallen leaves. The grass of the lawn was bright green. Two postcards of pastoral scenes were inserted in the sash of the window before him, and on the walls were a bronze crucifix, two portraits of children Laura had drawn, and a reproduction of Dali's "St. John of the Cross." Laura was dead. This was her bedroom.

  He turned to Katherine. She lay on her left side, her shoulders bare, her curly hair streaming over her pillow and the bedclothes; the curve of her cheek and her straight forehead, the scattering of faint freckles over her shoulder blades, a pale vein beside her spine that made her seem more vulnerable than she was, her breath indenting a bulge in the sheet. No, he couldn't touch her now. An oblong of reflected sunlight, rippling like water from the agitated leaves outdoors, strummed on the ceiling above him; the cortege, the casket resting over the grave, the handshakes, the veiled faces and tears, and then the smell of his father's cigar as they rode back in the rented limousine, Laura laid to rest in a Chicago cemetery, in a family plot next to her first husband, the funeral banquet over, and now this: "What did you think of it?" "What?" Charles asked. "The funeral."

  Charles glanced at his father, surprised at the question, and wondered for the third or fourth time in the past couple of days. Who is this man? He sat back in a corner of the limousine, looking out the window, his cigar ash only inches from the glass, a black hat pushed back beyond his broad forehead, exposing a wide irregular widow's peak and coils of gray in his hair. "What do you mean?" Charles asked.

  "How did you think it was handled?"

  There were two limousines for Laura's immediate family, besides the hearse burdened with her and her flowers, a police escort that led the cortege from Eglington to the cemetery in Chicago, over a hundred people who sat down to a three-course meal in a suburban restaurant afterward, where Charles met Laura's relatives from Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, an
d the West Coast, plus an airlines pilot with a cabin in the Canadian north, who said to Charles, "I see we're friends," Laura's mother, as youthful and handsome as Laura, but with silver hair, was, in spite of her wordly mien, the trial-crossed mother of a dead oldest child. Many of Charles's relatives from Pettibone and Forest Creek were there and seemed surprised to see him, and did his father now want his opinion, or the opinion of somebody from a city in the East? Wouldn't the chauffeur, who was also the head of the funeral home, overhear?

  "I thought it went fine," he said. "The church service, too?"

  It was in a big brick church in Eglington, Charles's first encounter with the new Mass, where the priest stood behind the altar, facing the congregation, and spoke English instead of the familiar Latin; no silver-sounding altar bells sanctifying the air at the consecration; none of the pomp and circumstance and costuming that in the past had seemed arbitrary, and sometimes out of line. The plainsong of the Requiem, sung by a children's choir, was effective no matter the language it was sung in. "I thought it went well, yes."

  "I didn't like the eulogy," his father said, and glanced at him. The priest had had a look that could be called illuminated or cruel, and spoke in a dry and detached way of Laura and her faith, of her suffering and serenity even to the end; and all the while he went on, a black speck, a fly, kept circling and hovering near his head and he kept slapping at it, always missing, and Charles remembered a poem about a fly being present and buzzing when somebody died.

  "Did you see the way that fly kept pestering him?" his father said. "I think Laura would have liked that She couldn't stand that priest.” "Oh, really?"