Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “K-k-k-Katy, in the k-kitchen,” sang Uncle Solbert, off-key. Gordon felt a hot blush rise up his neck to his cheeks. His mother obviously hadn’t passed on the little secret about Bev.

  But there she came. His mother was wearing a charcoal-gray dress, which was almost entirely hidden by a wraparound blue apron. She had something in a dish in her hand. Her piercing dark eyes were looking not at him but at Beverly, and he was astonished by the sharp pang of joy and pride he felt when he saw the genuine warmth in the gathers of crow’s feet—the smile lines—around his mother’s eyes. She went straight to Beverly and, holding the dish out to one side, leaned forward and kissed her, but really kissed her, not just the air beside her cheek, and spoke a single word, “Beverly.”

  Beverly took a step backward and said, “I’m so…t-tickled to meet you.” At once she had offered Gordon’s mother the tiny hesitation and catch that he found so entrancing: a pause, as verbal choices came to her, and then a little splutter of emotion, tripping over a plosive consonant, as she settled on a word that sounded a bit odd but must have been, as usual, exactly what she meant.

  Gordon’s mother greeted him with a tight one-armed hug and then turned at once and hurried back to the kitchen, holding the dish high in her right hand to show the company why she was in such haste. Everyone drifted back to the living room. As they walked in, Gordon heard music coming from the old Capehart. Sibelius’s Seventh. Ah, yes, one of his mother’s favorites, that swooping deep-toned utterance, sad as whale song, from a country where for months the sun never came up over the horizon. Yet the sound was part of what made Gordon’s spirits rise; it belonged, as he did, in this room, with its dark mahogany wainscoting and twisted black ironwork fireplace tools and mock-candle sconces holding tiny, dim, flame-shaped light bulbs; all those things were embedded in, and had somehow failed to darken, his makeup. Bev’s face, as he quickly checked it now, reinforced his pleasure. Her eyes were twinkling at the sights in the room—that the look might contain elements of ambiguity: delight yet at the same time something like disbelief?

  He saw that a bar had been set up on the old tea wagon in the corner of the room. “Have a Thanksgiving libation?” he quietly asked Bev.

  “You can bet your…b-bottom dollar I will,” she said. She surprised him by asking for gin and bitters. She usually sipped Dubonnet or Cinzano.

  “Did you see that Macy’s had a huge toy elephant in their parade?” he heard Miss Rankin say as he crossed to the tea wagon. The Persian rug he walked over was worn down to the warp in the trafficway from the hall and in front of several chairs.

  “I wonder if those gigantic balloons in the parade aren’t dangerous,” Miss Alderhoff said. “I mean, if it’s windy.”

  “There’s wasn’t a breath of air yesterday,” Aunt Beth said, and then she laughed hard, having given a little too much emphasis, Gordon thought, to “yesterday.”

  Leaning over the bar, looking for the gin, Gordon saw a bottle of amontillado with a little cardboard tag hung around its neck on a slip of ribbon. Looking more closely, he read the words written in his mother’s hand on the tag:

  BEST SHERRY

  DO NOT USE

  He would wait and see whether to tell Bev about that. He mixed her drink—he found bitters in a tiny square cruet—and shook up a manhattan for himself.

  With his arrival in his mother’s house he felt it proper that he should take over from Peter, two years his junior, the duties of a host, and when he had given Beverly her drink, he turned and said, “Anyone else? Mr. Cannahan?”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Mr. Cannahan said, tearing his eyes away from the tantalizing knot that held Beverly’s shawl in place, and rubbing his stomach to remind Gordon of the ulcer he had harbored there for so many, many years.

  “Of course,” Gordon said, remembering. “Forgive me. Beth? Pete? You ready?”

  “I can get our own,” Peter said.

  Gordon sat down. He heard a thunking sound as the Capehart turned a record over. Then the dark Finnish keening resumed.

  “And what do you do, Miss Swimmer?” Mr. Cannahan asked.

  “Zimmer,” Bev said sharply.

  “Ah, Miss Zimmer,” Mr. Cannahan said. “Lovely name.”

  “I do…n-nothing,” Beverly said.

  “Best occupation in the world!” Uncle Solbert shouted.

  Gordon was trying to think of something sensible to say when his mother came into the room and took a chair. She had removed her apron. “Dear me,” she said. “Such confusion. Flo says she’ll be ready to serve in five minutes.”

  “What nice earrings,” Beverly said, to Gordon’s delight. She was going to be wonderful.

  Gordon’s mother put her hands over the amber pendants at her ears. “They hurt,” she said. “But do you know? I had a brainstorm. I put Dr. Scholl’s corn plasters on the screw pads. Perfect!”

  “Perfect” was a word his mother often used, with an ever-so-slight Englishy softening of the r. She posted many little signs and notices around the house, like the tag on the sherry bottle, and Gordon thought of the one that used to be stuck beside the shower handle in the guest bathroom: FOR BEST SHOWERBATH, TURN TO TEN O’CLOCK. WAIT 45 SECONDS. PERFECT! But she was far from being a perfectionist; nor, Gordon had long since acknowledged, was she herself perfect. He sometimes thought that she considered one’s manner of speaking more important than what one said. A person’s emotional tone, a person’s feeling toward her, toward the world, was what counted with her. Sometimes she nattered, rattled on without hearing herself. She was kind and warm, though, and always wanted to boost other people’s morale. He remembered how, when Daddy was alive, she used to sound off about his being the big man around the place. “The eye of the owner is good for the land,” she would say. Her George was “the only man on the island.” Yet she had that appetite for quarrels. She often accused her husband, in front of the boys—absurdly, Gordon thought—of letting other women flirt with him. Not of his having flirted himself. She asked friends what was troubling them, really dug out the dirt; she wanted to sympathize, wanted to help, wanted to be loved for being loving. This last craving had sometimes struck Gordon, especially when he had troubles of his own, as a need for something much less adorable than it might seem—a need for some kind of firm grip on your arm. The miracle, though, was her persistent cheerfulness since Daddy’s death. She seemed not to have a trouble in the world. Thinking of her now, Gordon had a sudden vivid and very happy memory of hot chocolate, French bread, honey.

  He looked at Bev. She was smiling. She had loved that thing of the earlobe remedy. Her hair was still a mess. It didn’t matter. The emotional tone was what mattered.

  * * *

  —

  Flo, the cook, appeared in the archway from the hall and shouted, “All right, Mrs. Bronson!” Flo was a New England woman; she had her ways.

  Brother Peter was the first to stand up. All his life, Peter had been hungry. “Come on, folks,” he said. “Get your trotters in the trough.”

  Gordon went over and turned the Capehart off, and then he offered the crook of his arm to his mother. Taking it, she smiled at him and said, “I want you to carve, son.”

  Everyone exclaimed at the sight of the table. Glass and silver winked in the afternoon light. Between two newly polished silver candelabra, each bearing five lighted candles of a garish red, stood a display, looking like fireworks bursting in air, of odd varieties of late autumn’s greatest pride, the chrysanthemum. Pairs of bottles of red and white wine and two carafes of sweet cider stood on silver circlets on a tablecloth with beautiful doilies of Devonshire lace scattered about. At each place, next to a pale blue napkin folded to stand up, lay one of those crepe-paper tubes for children’s parties with tabs to pull from the ends which make a little firecracker sound—each doubtless containing a colored paper hat and a favor of some kind. S
trewn here and there were gravy boats and bowls brimming with all the things that Gordon had known Bev would love: watermelon-rind pickles, tomato marmalade, peach chutney, quince jelly, spiced Jerusalem artichokes, green-tomato mincemeat, and, of course, loads of cranberry sauce.

  Gordon’s mother seated everyone. Gordon at the head of the table, herself at the other end. She put Peter at her right, and Mr. Cannahan at her left. Beverly was between Mr. Cannahan and Uncle Solbert; both men beamed at their luck. The others were scattered around. Gordon had Aunt Beth on his right and Molly on his left.

  When they were all seated, Gordon’s mother tinkled her wineglass with a knife, and after she had complete silence she said, “Peter, dear, would you say grace, please?” This was evenhanded: Gordon would carve, Peter would pray—a special privilege at Thanksgiving dinner.

  “God in heaven,” Peter said, with his head down and his eyes squeezed tight shut, “we thank you for this wonderful American tradition, we are grateful for prosperity and our mother’s good health, we thank you for family values”—Gordon thought he heard awful little Freddie give a tiny grunt at that—“and the heritage of freedom you have granted our nation. And thanks, by the way, for the turkey-lurkey.”

  During this performance, Gordon had not bowed his head; he had watched Beverly. She had not lowered her head either but had stared at Peter with a look that gave Gordon a little twinge of concern. But then she laughed with everyone else at Peter’s nonsense at the end, and when Uncle Bert started clapping, she joined in with the rest. Peter, acknowledging the applause, clasped his hands above his head, like the winner of a gold medal.

  Flo came in, her face pink, her hair flying every which way, and her apron splashed with gravy, carrying a huge, glistening turkey up at a level with her head, and now everyone both clapped and cheered. She put the bird down in front of Gordon and stood there gloating at it.

  “What’s in the stuffing, Flo?” Uncle Solbert called out when the hubbub died down.

  “Well, now, there’s chestnuts, and country sausage—that’s the thing!—onions, celery, let’s see, thyme, sage, bread crumbs, of course, stale bread crumbs. And,” she added, with a little lurch in her stance, “perhaps I shouldn’t say, folks, but there’s Madeira wine in there!” And she went off to the kitchen, cackling.

  Picking up the carving knife, Gordon glanced at Beverly. She was looking at him. Her face was glowing. He stood up, took some passes, which he hoped looked skillful, with the knife-edge at the sharpening rod. He leaned forward to start his work.

  While he carved, Flo brought in one dish after another, setting each down with a decisive little bang on a doily on the tablecloth, alongside serving spoons that were already dispersed there, and announcing each as she put it in place: mashed potatoes, both white and sweet, in separate casseroles, with browned marshmallows on top of the latter; oysters in cornmeal hasty pudding; cut green beans with rosemary; creamed onions; mushrooms braised with sorrel leaves; baked turnips flavored with maple syrup.

  Waiting to be served, people pulled favor-crackers with their neighbors, and exclaimed cheerfully at the cheap things they found inside. Mr. Cannahan and Uncle Bert had a brief tiff about who would get to pull Beverly’s cracker; Uncle Bert won by sheer force of the bourbon in his veins. He let Beverly pull Mr. Cannahan’s cracker, though. Uncle Bert was the only one at the table to put on a crepe-paper hat. It was bright orange. Everyone was talking at once.

  Flo brought in Mr. Cannahan’s lunch: two bananas, mashed with a fork into a pulp on a plate. It was all his ulcer was going to allow him to eat. A general cry of commiseration went up, but Mr. Cannahan, looking right at Bev, called out, “I don’t mind: it’s the company that matters on holidays, isn’t it?”

  “You’re a good sport,” Gordon’s mother said, patting Mr. Cannahan’s hand.

  There was great confusion while the plates went around and volunteers served things up in passing. “Light or dark?” Gordon kept calling out to various customers. The teenager Caroline couldn’t make up her mind. She threw a beseeching glance at her mother, looking as if she might break into tears.

  “You like white, honey,” Molly said.

  “I don’t either,” Caroline said.

  “Suit yourself, kiddo,” Molly said. “It’s your funeral.”

  Gordon put a helping of both on Caroline’s plate, and she flashed him an angry look.

  At last things settled down. Gordon could sit. His back hurt a little from leaning over, but he felt important. He saw that Beverly had chosen red wine. People were tucking into their food, and for a while the room was quiet.

  Then old Miss Rankin and old Miss Alderhoff started the ball rolling.

  “Wasn’t it sweet,” Miss Rankin said, “that Jackie Kennedy had her baby on Thanksgiving night?”

  “I was so offended,” Miss Alderhoff said, “that AP fellow trying to take Mrs. Kennedy’s picture on the way back from the delivery room. Is there no privacy in this world anymore? I mean to say, the President-elect’s wife!”

  “Another John Fitzgerald Kennedy, did you see what they’re naming him?” Peter said with his mouth full. “Another Kennedy named for old Honey Fitz, the biggest crook in Boston history. How ’bout that?”

  “The poor little thing’s in a respirator,” Miss Rankin said.

  “Really?” said Gordon’s mother, who never read the papers. “Why is that?”

  “Premature,” Miss Rankin said. “Six pounds three ounces. They say preemies are subject to, you know, breathing problems.”

  “Well!” Miss Alderhoff said. “It wasn’t just that. They had to take it with a cesarean.”

  “Another Caesar in the Kennedy family,” brother Peter said in triumph.

  Beverly shook her forefinger sidewise at Peter. “Doesn’t follow,” she said, sounding testy. “The operation wasn’t named for Caesar. Caesar was given the name that the operation already had, sectio caesaria, because he was born that way. That’s the story that…P-Pliny the Elder tells, anyway.”

  Peter looked as though he’d been slapped. Gordon suddenly felt breathless, as if he had been jogging a little too fast.

  “Actually,” Beverly good-humoredly went on, “that doesn’t make too much sense, because in those days they used cesareans only to save the baby when the mother died in ch-childbirth, and we know that Caesar’s mother lived for more than f-fifty years after he was born. The f-first recorded cesarean on a living woman was about f-fifteen hundred. It was done by a Swiss…p-pig-gelder on his own wife.”

  The whole table was in silence. Only Uncle Bert, still wearing his orange hat, went on chewing. Gordon got up the courage to look at his mother, and he saw that she was beaming at Beverly. She had a look of amazement and delight on her face. “Mr. Cannahan,” she said, “give Beverly a little more wine.” Gordon, vibrating with pleasure, saw that the day was going to be a total success after all. The one thing he had been nervous about was Bev’s unpredictable spurts of contrariness. He had been afraid of an inadvertent collision of some sort. Bev didn’t mean anything by these little bumpy moments; they were for fun, though sometimes others didn’t look at them that way. She had an octopus of a memory, and she knew a great deal (some of what she “knew” wasn’t exactly so, but never mind), and it would have been hard to say whether she loved best sparring with brilliant people or straightening stupid people out. It was a secret of the constant peacefulness between her and Gordon that she seemed to consider Gordon neither brilliant nor stupid but just comfortably sensible. At this moment he felt a surge in his appetite. He loved Flo’s oyster dish.

  Miss Rankin piped up. “I wonder if they’re going to have the Kennedy family nurse to take care of the baby,” she said. “I imagine she took care of Jack himself and all his siblings when they were little. Think of the continuity of it! Miss Hennessy’s her name.”

  “I doubt if they use the ‘Miss,’ ” Miss Alderhoff
said. “They’d just call her by her last name. ‘Hennessy, would you change the baby’s didies, please?’ ”

  “You better believe no Kennedy would have anything to do with dirty diapers,” Peter said with some spirit, looking right at Bev.

  But Beverly seemed to have lost interest in Peter. Gordon saw that she had picked up one of the highly polished silver serving spoons that had not been used and was looking at her reflection on the back of it. What a long balloon face she would have in such a mirror! Yet she apparently saw the mess her hair was in, because she began patting it into place. Gordon thought with pleasure, She wants to leave herself in this house—for Bev had a theory that faces printed themselves on mirrors and stayed there forever. She had given herself to one of his mother’s spoons.

  Peter apparently didn’t like Bev’s not paying attention to him, and he said, still looking at her, “He’s not President yet, thank God. I should have put that in my prayer.”

  Gordon rose to this. “A little more time for your fatuous Ike to play golf—right? Or like this week, taking care of shop on a quail shoot on some guy’s estate in Georgia?”

  “Now, boys,” Mrs. Bronson said, “act your age. How many times have we seen this, Amos?” she said, smiling at Mr. Cannahan. “Every time these two grown men come home and sit down at the table, it only takes them half an hour to slip back and be ten and eight years old. Isn’t that so?”

  Mr. Cannahan obviously wanted to agree with his old friend the hostess, but you could also see that he didn’t want to offend Gordon and Peter—not at their mother’s table—and especially not the lovely young thing on his left, around whom these family breezes seemed in some mysterious way to be swirling. He held his tongue.