Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Susan snorted a laugh, saw he was serious, and stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk.

  J.J. reluctantly hove to beside her. “Throat specialist from the West Coast,” he rattled off in the same low tone. “Studied in Vienna. First woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons. Please don’t be looking at me that way, people have to be told something.” He handed her the satchel. “I’ll meet you at the el again tomorrow, same time. Be sure to bring your doctor bag.”

  * * *

  Monty grimly plowed at his brought-in meal. It was a mess, one-handed eating. He still was on milk toast, but even so, the bowl and spoon had minds of their own and his throat did not want anything to come near it. He had made it clear to J.J., practically in block letters, that he did not want anyone around when he had to tackle food like this. The kitchen helper from the E & B who lugged in the hot-water caddy three times a day and fished out the bowl of sick man’s grub always cleared out anyway as soon as the dish was on the table. Couldn’t blame him. Tongue-tied invalid propped up by plaster of paris and tablet paper; who wants to hang around in that sort of company?

  He negotiated another mouthful of milk-sopped toast as carefully as he could, slopping some of it even so. Damn, but being a patient was hard work. He was unbelievably tired all the time with this. At least he would be able to sack out again this afternoon. Sleep was the one thing he could look forward to. Bed rest. Read the newspapers J.J. brought. Take it easy, was everyone’s prescription for him. He wished he could find anything about this that was easy to take. J.J. was being an absolute ace, but he couldn’t run his business by way of the kitchen telephone forever. The Major was pretty much out of the picture, it was his Montana time of year for months yet, and he couldn’t be expected to hand-hold a person endlessly either. Meanwhile the bankbook with the name Rathbun, Montgomery on it was going down as if a plug had been pulled.

  Which only brought the worries as far as the medical side of things. Tomorrow he would be put through another round of doctor appointments over at Presbyterian Hospital. How many ways were there to say “inconclusive”? So far the sum of their diagnosis was that his damaged shoulder would only be an inch lower than his other when it finally mended and somewhere down the line he would have his voice back; but a voice that sounded like what?

  And on top of it all Susan Duff had materialized, right in this room. Didn’t she know when enough was enough?

  * * *

  “Going on six years, how can it be,” Vandiver was saying, as if marveling at how calendars took flight, when he and Susan faced each other across the light-grained expanse of his desk; mahogany, she noted, not true oak. She knew that much of his job was as official greeter, and right now he was addressing her as if she had just descended the gangway from one of the ocean liners down there at the Hudson docks framed by his office window. His was a bracing style, a conscious bit of brine to it, like the air here so close to the working river. People came into the headquarters of the Over There Memorial Committee expecting a war poet, some consumptive stick of a soul who had glimpsed humankind’s worst fate in the reddened mud of Flanders and dedicated himself to making sure the waste of so many lives would never be forgotten. But Vandiver looked like Tom Mix unhorsed. His big impressive hands were clasped on the desk in front of him as if they were a gift put there specially for her. “Life has been treating you well, I hope?”

  “As well as I have a right to expect, Van.”

  Vandiver canted into a pose of appraisal. Odd woman. He knew from something she had mentioned back there at the St. Mihiel event that she had once partaken of Greenwich Village life, before the war, in its storied era of longhaired men and shorthaired women. A blunted singing career, the way he heard it, that not uncommon souvenir of New York. But after she was dislodged by family obligation or the whim of changing her vocal vocation to teaching or the lure of the suffrage movement in the West where it had seemed to be doing some good—the particular story that followed Susan Duff wandered back and forth over all of those—she had chosen to burrow herself away in Montana ever since. He had to wonder about that. Her efforts out there for the committee had been miraculous, and every autumn she could be counted on to subscribe for a contributor’s ticket to the Armistice Day observance; at Carnegie Hall going rates, that was not a negligible amount. Before her last trip to France he had written to persuade her to stop over here and for once attend the great event, he and his wife would be glad to put her up and show her around for a few days afterward, but she replied that she had already arranged to sail from Montreal to have a headstart on French, thank you very much. Now, though, here she sat, running a caretaking eye over his view of the ocean liners and the docks they were nuzzled to, as if they were her personal aquarium. He cleared his throat. “Susan, may I ask—what brings you to New York at last?”

  “Recuperation.”

  When she realized Vandiver had no idea what to make of that, she tacked on: “A friend’s, after a bad accident. I came to help with the care.”

  Vandiver waited, but that appeared to be all. After a bit, he ventured: “You’re available to us, do I gather?”

  “I apologize, Van,” she said with a start. “Talk about out of practice—it’s been an age since I was any kind of job applicant. But yes. I need a steady wage while I’m here, and I thought—”

  The big hands spread apart on the table as if measuring out the invitation. “We can always use your talents,” Vandiver delivered it along with the practiced smile, “I’ve told you that before.” He cautiously ventured a salary figure. “It’s not as much as I’d like to offer, but—”

  “Fine, then,” she responded. “Oh, did I mention, I must have mornings for myself. The, ahm, recuperative chore. Although if you’ll furnish me a typewriter, I can take any amount of work home and do it at night.”

  That set an executive nerve to twitching in him, she could tell. But when he spoke, it was to say he supposed they could work around that, since it was her. As if that reminded him of something, he cocked his head to one side again. “You’ll need to find lodging, I suppose? Miss Cooper or Mister Lehrkind could go around with you. Or, my wife’s mother knows Mrs. Maeterlinck in the Village, she might take in—”

  “That’s quite all right. I’m taken care of.”

  Susan’s return glance having firmly sealed off that topic, Vandiver cleared his throat more extensively. “It’s really quite lucky, for you to show up just now. I know you have a particular interest in the archive. It’s become a struggle to keep up with it.” Hearing what was coming, she resigned herself to sorting paper; cataloguing, to put the most elegant job-name on the dryest task. Well, she told herself, somebody had to do the chores. “Susan, I spend what seems like every minute of my life raising funds,” Vandiver seemed to be going a long way around to get to the point. “The monument, the Armistice Day observance—they take everything we’ve got. The archive collecting, I’m ashamed to admit it, has had to be neglected. Other chapters weren’t as quick off the mark as you were in Montana.” He gave her another of his off-angle looks, but this time she didn’t care, she could already tell she was being spared from paper-sorting. Vandiver got up as if it was time for both of them to go to work. “I would ask you to apply your knack at rounding up war letters and diaries and what-all for us.”

  IT WAS a week later, although to Monty it seemed a lot more than that off his life. The doctors had counseled that he not use his voice for one more week, and all they could do then was to test his windpipe capacity. He couldn’t help thinking that while they were waiting on a medical miracle that way, they ought to try to come up with one that would take the pester out of Susan.

  There she sat, same time, same place, those simmer-brown eyes of hers giving him no rest. Behind the closed kitchen door J.J. could be dimly heard trotting the virtues of one of his other acts past some theater owner or another. Monty started to write, made an impatient face, and scratched out the first word of the salutation needed for him to fr
ame this the right way. With quite scholarly care he formed down onto the paper a fresh version:

  Susan. Can I call you that? Saves words.

  “You may. You’d better.”

  Susan, listen for once.

  “I take it you mean, don’t spout back until you’re good and done.”

  He nodded with more vigor than had been possible the week before and went to extended writing.

  J.J. and you deserve all the credit there is for thinking I am worth one more try. But what’s happened is something I don’t think my voice can ever get over. I don’t much like the idea of going out in front of an audience and wondering if somebody out there is going to clobber me, either. You have your own notions of what a person can and can’t do, and good for you, but I can only tell you how it feels in my windpipe and for that matter the rest of me. No good.

  “You’ve had worse.”

  Worse? The pencil was nearly burning holes in the paper. Worse than an earthquake worse, and a crazy SOB trying to separate my head from my shoulders as soon as the shaking quit?

  “That bull’s horn. I didn’t see any reason to tell you at the time, but that goring should have finished you as a singer, before you even started.” She watched him rock back from the table at that, staring at her as if she had put over a swindle on him. “And somebody gave you an earlier working-over in Helena, I remember,” she kept right on. “Those bruises?” She mapped them out on her own ribcage and chest frontage as if he needed reminding of each contusion.

  Monty absorbed with interest her pantomime of that particular pasting the Zanzibar Club had handed him, then went to work on the tablet again.

  Any of that, I brought on myself. But this—it’s like terrible weather that just never quits.

  “It’ll clear up when—” she began, and he threw down the pencil at having handed her that opening.

  Susan dry-scrubbed her face with her hands, then peered blearily at him over her withdrawing fingertips. “We are both overly touchy, it’s the fault of the situation. But you’re being too leery. I don’t care what the doctors say, I wouldn’t think of inflicting voice exercises on you after that examination next week.”

  Cautiously he retrieved the pencil.

  You wouldn’t? Promise?

  “Not until you have your cast off.”

  He gave up.

  OUR routine must have half of Harlem wondering by now whether we are testing foghorns in that building, she made her way back into the diary three weeks after that.

  * * *

  Monty had yawned miles’ worth, feeling ridiculous, their first day.

  “Again,” she coaxed unmercifully, “but tongue flat as a rug this time.”

  Dubious as he was about the amount of control anyone could exercise on the human tongue, he willed himself to give her another gape if that’s what it took. The jaw-hanging yawn this time drew her in on him. “I need to see in there, hold it open . . . hold . . . yes, that’s good, your palate is lifting nicely.”

  As she backed away he closed up like a man who’d had a toothache explored. Rubbing his tired muscles of face and jaw, he said in the hoarse tone he hated to hear coming out of himself: “Susan, he didn’t hit me in the palate, you know.”

  “Now then,” she marched right past that, “trap shut, please. You’re relaxing that jaw nicely, so you’re ready to hum. Have at it until I tell you to stop. Lips together, tongue flat in there, quit gritting! Your teeth need to be apart enough so they don’t vibrate against each other—tsee, like zis,” she showed him as if holding a pencil between her teeth. “Ready? One, two, three, hum. That’s it, hmmm mmm mm, keep it going, work on the resonance, make it carry all the way up to here.” She tapped each side of the bridge of her nose indicatively. “Put your fingers up there by your eyes, feel the vibration?”

  For whatever it was worth, he could.

  * * *

  So we have proceeded, these first weeks, from the bottom of the barrel of music up to the spigot where fully rounded sounds must come out. The work needed to bring the sounds from his voicebox up and resonating out as they should is chore, chore, chore, translated in musical terms into ah ay ee oh oo and the like. While it is too much to say that Monty finds any pleasure in the endless pitch exercises I make him do, he did smile just a smidgen when I threatened that any time he let his voice break on a vowel I would yell, “Timbre!”

  * * *

  “You’re unbelievably lucky to have someone Scotch for this,” she was assuring him, “vowels are the currency of our realm.” He could have sworn she brought the scent of heather into the overstuffed apartment by the way she uttered that. He’d heard her slip into her inherited burr before, but this time she was laying it on as thick as if she was fresh off the boat. “All right, we’ve been over the drill,” she pranced her voice as if his was bound to follow, “now let’s go through it a few times. I’m the customer, I come into your dry-goods store looking for, oh, let’s say a new shawl”—she glanced around and felt of the hem of the nearest antimacassar—“and I’m not just sure what material it is I’m finding. Remember, you answer only with the vowels like a temporary Scotchman. I ask,” and now she trilled, “Wool?”

  “Oo,” he dutifully confirmed in a resonant drone.

  “My good man,” she sang, the vowels of each word so sweet and rounded he thought something would break inside him, “you are sure it’s wool?”

  “Ay, oo.”

  “All wool?”

  “Ay, aw oo.”

  “All ewe wool?”

  “Ay, aw ew oo.”

  “All one ewe’s wool?”

  “Ay, aw ae ew oo.”

  “We’re getting there,” she briskly dusted her hands of the exercise. “Tomorrow we’ll do ‘eel oil.’ Now let’s work on your—”

  In from the kitchen came J.J., showing stress. He brought his arms up like a man in a holdup and pointed to both his ears. “Nothing against what you’re at, mind you, but I’m going to cut, over to the Lincoln. They’ll let me set up shop at the backstage telephone this time of day. Quieter there.” He gave Susan a mingled look in which the only clear sentiment was that he hoped she knew what she was doing. “I’ll be back in time for your noon train. Bring you anything, Monty, besides the usual?”

  “No. Don’t forget that, though. You did yesterday.”

  “That was yesterday,” J.J. said breezily, and left them to themselves.

  * * *

  Her pen paused in mid-page as if listening. The first metallic wheeze from across the street was always as if the siren was gulping in enough breath to last, and now the firetruck howled off as if baying on the scent of smoke. So much for my cosmopolitan airs, she twitted herself for not nearly the first time during this New York residency. On her hunt for housing, it had taken her only one transit of Greenwich Village to convince her that its changeover to teahouses and poseur garrets would be too depressing, and she opted instead for a set of rooms in a reminiscently scented neighborhood nearer the docks where French silk merchants once clustered. Smitten with iron-trellised balconies and creeper vines and the air-promised presence of bread and cheese, she had managed to entirely miss the presence of the firehouse in the middle of the block.

  As the siren wound away, she glanced at the clock. Nearly the middle of the night already. The city ate her time when she wasn’t looking. Visitational as a cat, it sneaked pawfuls of hours away every time she turned around to do something. Its appetite for her nights was insatiable; now that she had taken up membership in a light opera group that met once a week, somehow two nights or three went to its persuasions. An evening at the Vandivers’ or an occasional Broadway show, and she was abruptly short of portions of the week for Over There work. The morning trips up to Harlem, distinct as a picnic during her hours with Monty, turned into an agonizing nibbling of her time all the long ride back downtown on the el. Held in the sway of the train, she perpetually had to try to make up for the lost top of the afternoon by composing in her head that day�
��s plea to the state chairman in Georgia to get in there among the peach crews and harvest their war letters, or to coax the one in New Hampshire that some Granite Stater must have overcome reticence enough to write home during the hundreds of days the American Expeditionary Force was in the frontlines.

  * * *

  She and her chronic escort were at the foot of the station stairs when it occurred to her. She moved to one side as the usual trample of Harlem home-goers came heading toward the two of them. “Before I go, Mister Jackson—”

  “Could you please stop with that? Mister Jackson is my grandfather the undertaker—I’m used to answering to ‘J.J.’ ”

  “J.J., then, here’s what I need to ask. I don’t know what Monty says about me, but when he wants to grumble about you in this, he’ll always say you treat him like a boot recruit. Do you come by that because you were in the war?”

  “To the gills.”

  “You keep in touch with the others from here, do you?”

  J.J. halted at the top of the first ramp and turned to consider her. As he stood there, slim as a clarinet, Susan wondered how he felt navigating these streets beside a white woman who could have picked him up under one arm. She saw curiosity getting the better of him, until he decided to provide:

  “To some extent, sure. There’s a bunch of our old regiment in James Europe’s orchestra—we run into each other at benefits and such. Plenty others work at the post office. Redcaps down at Penn Station, you practically trip over Harlem vets there. They’re around, why?”

  “Because to me you’re all men of letters.”

  * * *

  Yet I made time again today, didn’t I, the pen picked up her chronicle of all this, to go hear the confusion concert.

  It was not many blocks out of her way on the walk home from work, and the first time she heard it in the middle distance she laughed incredulously and made straight for it. The neighborhood was a few away from hers, but she knew that was only by luck of the moment. Back in her younger experience here, she had learned that New York perpetually colonized itself. A stretch of street that was a lens grinders’ district the last time you looked would have turned through some cosmic New York logic into a major center of the making of lampshades, and the spot on the river where you bought imported perfume was all at once where the banana boats came in. She couldn’t remember what these precise blocks of ironfront buildings had been before, but now they were unmissably the radio district.