The Laments, page 26
“Women are pigs. They dump their purses out on the sink and leave used tissues, lipsticks, old Band-Aids. Men don’t do that.”
“Men leave a little splash of piss under the urinal,” observed Will.
“That’s just the old guys. It’s a matter of bad aim.”
Calvin explained that his brother had had bad aim ever since his accident.
“You mean when he stole the chainsaw?”
Calvin looked at Will. “Roy’s a liar. My brother didn’t steal nothin’. Roy’s uncle stole the chainsaw and blamed Otis for it.”
“Why did he run across the tracks, then?”
Calvin shrugged. “All I know is, my folks sued the railroad and won. That proves he was innocent. Otis got a hundred thousand bucks for his leg. Lawyer said if the train had rolled over his balls, it would have been a lot more.” Calvin sighed, as if his brother’s castration would have been worth it.
After his first week, Will had mastered his job so efficiently that he asked Eddie for more to do.
“What d’ya mean, more?” said Eddie.
“I’m getting finished pretty early. Anything else I can do to fill up the time?”
“Yes,” said Eddie. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“If management finds out you can do twice the work we’ll all be working twice as hard, get it?”
Will took care of Building A’s bathrooms. Calvin polished the floors. A couple of high school girls, Felice and Roberta, cleaned the offices. The girls took smoking breaks together, wore identical “wedge” haircuts and Day-Glo lipstick.
At the end of the week, Felice accepted a ride home with Calvin. She chatted with Will while Calvin bought soda at a 7-Eleven.
“I like your accent,” said Felice. “You’re from Africa, right?”
“Right,” said Will.
“Tarzan was from Africa,” she reminded him.
Will sighed. “Yes.”
He was relieved to see Calvin return. But Felice pouted when she saw the big bottle of orange soda under his arm.
“I thought you said we were havin’ cocktails!” said Felice.
“We are,” said Calvin, emptying some of the soda onto the asphalt. Then he produced a shiny tin canister from beneath his seat. Will recognized the bottle from one of the labs.
“Calvin,” he said, “this is pure ethyl alcohol. You can’t mix it like gin—it’ll rot out your guts! Besides, you’ll get fired if Eddie—”
“He ain’t gonna fire me,” said Calvin, smirking. “I got seniority.” He opened his glove compartment and the contents, all items from Dutch Oil, spilled out—rubber gloves, tubing, a bottle of ether, paper napkins, conical cups from one of the water coolers.
When Calvin offered a cup to his passengers, Will refused.
“Cocktails in a Dixie cup?” said Felice.
“C’mon, Felice . . .” muttered Calvin. “Use your imagination, for chrissakes!”
“Calvin, don’t do it,” said Will. “This stuff will eat out your insides!”
Unheeding, Calvin poured some of the mixture for Felice, who took her cup as if it were a urine sample.
“Calvin,” she said, “what about my insides, I mean, what he said?”
“Your insides are fine!” exclaimed Calvin. To prove it, he tossed the cup’s contents down his throat. His Adam’s apple rose and fell in one defiant throb. After glancing at Will through the rearview mirror, Calvin closed his eyes with a smile of exultant satisfaction.
“Oooh, I want some of that!” said Felice, but before she could tip her cup, Calvin shuddered, and all at once his arms and legs began moving in spastic jerks.
“Calvin!” cried Will.
Calvin struggled to answer, but his jaw stiffened and his eyes rolled up into his head. The car rocked as the boy’s convulsions became wilder and more violent.
“Calvin, honey, are you all right?” sobbed Felice.
“We’ll have to get him to a hospital,” said Will, trying to climb out of the backseat. But the car was a two-door, and it was impossible for him to get past Calvin.
“Felice, let me out!” he cried, but Felice seemed paralyzed by the sight of Calvin’s convulsions.
Then, as if the demon spirit had decided to wrench itself from his body, Calvin slumped forward over the steering wheel. He was still as stone, the cold moon icing his wild hair. Felice, her chest rising and falling in great heaves, uttered a deep wail.
“Oh God, don’t let him be dead!” she cried.
Will squeezed her shoulder, and there was a silence as they both considered this desperate wish, and its obvious futility. Then a whistle of air seemed to burst from Calvin’s chest, and he hiccuped and began to laugh.
“Oh, you guys,” snorted Calvin, “that was beautiful. You would have saved my life. I’m touched, man, really touched!”
The Vigilant One
Howard was nursing a solution to the family’s problems. His theory was that the sale of the house after two years’ accrued equity would yield enough to travel to Australia and set up house again. If there were quibbles about its condition, he would take a lower price and move to Canada—someplace nice like Vancouver, a port city. Julia would never consider an idea like this in theory, but if he could present her with a dollar value for the house, the numbers would surely convince her.
The night before the agent came, Howard tossed and turned. After a few hours he went to the kitchen, where he could pace, thinking about all the good things that could come of moving. Imagine the Pacific Ocean lying just beyond the kitchen window. Imagine a fresh start. The exhilaration of a new town, a new culture, and the relief of leaving this wretched existence behind.
The fellow showed up promptly at ten, just as Howard had planned, when everybody was out of the house. Howard poured on the charm, referring to the house in reverent terms, as if he were its first and only owner. He led the agent hastily past the fallen porch (an easy repair), then quickly through the living room, where the patched ceiling resembled an exploding white tumor. The useless kitchen stove, he promised, would be replaced once a sale was made.
“Who did the ceiling?” asked the agent.
“Actually, that’s my work,” said Howard proudly.
The agent nodded and whistled. He peered into the bathroom and sighed. “You know, I been in this business twenty years and I never saw wallpaper like that.”
“I’m thinking of patenting the idea,” explained Howard.
The agent squinted.
“Educational wallpaper.” Howard glowed. “What if you could have the Magna Carta in your library? Or the Kama Sutra in your bedroom?”
The agent gave him a worried smile. “You’re certainly full of ideas, Mr. Lament.”
After surveying the basement, with its muddy watermark and rusted tools, the agent announced that he had seen enough. But he hesitated on the stairwell, pausing to admire a carved acorn on the banister post: the man caressed it as one would touch a wounded animal for which a quick death is the kindest option.
“Well?” said Howard, rubbing his hands. “What’s the good news?”
ON THURSDAYS, WHEN JULIA had her group meeting, Howard started taking long walks from which he would return with an odd assortment of items that he stored in the basement: a wrought-iron rocking chair, an oil painting of a dog smoking a pipe, a set of buck’s horns mounted on a Dutch oven, a little bedside bureau with seashells glued to its surface, and a plastic bust of Liberace, which he placed on a lime-green toy piano. One Thursday Howard came back with two rusty Yankee Clipper sleds he’d pulled from a large trash heap.
“I’ll take you sledding!” Howard said to the twins.
“It’s spring, Dad,” murmured Julius, without lifting his eyes from the TV. “Won’t be any snow for a year.”
“A simple thank-you would have been sufficient!” Howard snapped.
Since that awful Christmas, Julius and Marcus had come to treat Howard as a tired joke. They snickered at the yellowed cricket jersey and stained khaki pants he wore daily. Except for his Thursday night rambles, Howard ventured out of the house only to buy cases of tuna and canned fruit, just as his father had done before him.
“We eat like we’re in prison!” cried Marcus.
“We are in prison,” muttered Julius.
Late on Thursday evenings, Will kept vigil in the kitchen until his parents came home. Perhaps it was an echo of his infant state, long ago, when he yearned for their return. Or perhaps the family seemed particularly vulnerable on Thursday evenings. Julia looked invigorated when she returned, but her smile was always tempered by the sight of Howard shuffling in from a ramble, hollow-eyed, carrying some old and peculiar object.
“Did you talk about anything interesting with the ladies tonight, Mum?” Will would ask, or, to his father, “What did you find, Dad?”
Though terse in their responses, his parents were appreciative of Will’s concern, for he never went to bed until they were safely home.
ON ONE SUCH EVENING, long after his parents had gone to bed and the house had settled, Will thought he smelled something burning.
He examined the oven first, but it hadn’t worked for weeks. Then he followed the troubling odor to Marcus’s door. The knob, which was worn, wouldn’t turn. Will ran to the kitchen for a skewer, and sprang the lock. The door opened to reveal a foot-high stack of comics on fire in one corner of the room. A funnel of white smoke spilled out into the hall. A Navajo blanket covered Marcus’s unconscious form.
Will grabbed the blanket and threw it over the comics. Smoke rose through the fibers and subsided. Then Will shook Marcus roughly, but he refused to wake.
“Marcus? Get up! There’s a fire!”
His words seemed to have no effect, but then Marcus began coughing so violently that he hacked himself awake.
“Did you fall asleep smoking?”
“Of course not,” Marcus replied, glancing at the remains of the cigarette stuck in the pincers of his prosthesis.
Marcus watched as Will wrapped the billowing stack of comics in the blanket, twisted it tight, and tossed it through the window into the rain, which was now drumming the roof like so many impatient fingers.
“My comics!” cried Marcus.
“They’re burning, you idiot.”
“They’re worth a fortune—or they will be,” Marcus said, explaining his plan to be a comic-book millionaire in adulthood.
Will reminded his brother of the bonfire incident in England, when he’d found Marcus rolling in flames.
“You keep having these accidents,” he said.
“Just lucky that way,” Marcus grimly replied.
Surveying the bedroom for some clue to his mental state, Will settled on a poster of a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Dad found it in somebody’s trash. . . . It’s Ganesh, protector of the home,” explained Marcus. “His father chopped his head off and replaced it with the head of an elephant. . . . I feel just like him sometimes.”
Will looked at his brother’s fading smile.
“You weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you, Marcus?”
“Kill myself?” Marcus looked incredulous. “No. I’m going to be very rich when I grow up.” He glanced at the window. “Maybe not with comic books, but somehow, I will. I’m determined.”
Marcus raised his prosthesis and put a fresh cigarette into the pincers, then hesitated, realizing that Will had never seen him smoke before. With a sigh, he flicked the lighter open and lit up. Will noticed the SEMPER FIDELIS engraving on the cover. Marcus wore a green army jacket and collected patches and stripes from the local Army-Navy. Deep in his subconscious, the military clothing and his missing hand went together. One gave dignity to the other.
The rain was drumming harder now. Marcus took a draw and gave Will an anxious glance.
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing,” Will replied. “They’ll just get worked up and do something crazy.”
“They are crazy,” said Marcus.“You know, sometimes I think Julius and I are adopted.”
Will had to smile. “Both of you? Why?”
“Nothing they do makes sense. If they were our real parents, wouldn’t their insanity seem logical to us?”
“Marcus, you’ve got Mum’s face and hair, you idiot.”
“Well, perhaps I’d rather be adopted,” replied Marcus.
Will offered no reply to this. The idea of being adopted would explain some things, but it scared him, too.
Abroad
Mrs. Pritchard’s trip to Rome was awful, the temperature unbearable, the petrol fumes stifling. Near the Fontana di Trevi, dark-eyed women clutching wailing children hemmed her in against a railing until she threw them coins. At St. Peter’s she waited forever to get into the Sistine Chapel, and couldn’t enjoy the view for the crick in her neck and the swelling in her feet. Everywhere she looked, there were longhaired Americans with peace signs on their shirts. She didn’t think much of the Colosseum, either. If only Venable had been alive, he would have spun a story or two about the Caesars or the Borgias, to put her in the traveling spirit.
Amid the columns at the Palatine Hill, Mrs. Pritchard found a bench and caught her breath. She composed a postcard to her sister. “Dear Olivia, can’t say enough good things about Rome!” (which was the honest truth). When Mrs. Pritchard had finished, she noticed a stranger sharing the bench: a trim elderly woman a few years older than herself, wearing a black dress with tiny white polka dots.
They exchanged a brief smile and surveyed the poplar trees on a far hill. A breeze blew a candy wrapper past the stranger’s black leather pumps.
“What a ghastly mess,” sighed Mrs. Pritchard. “Blessed with the ruins of one of the greatest empires on earth, and they can’t keep it clean!”
The stranger nodded. “Shocking, and so typical of the Italians.”
Mrs. Pritchard stole another glance at the woman and felt an eerie sensation that had come upon her several times during the journey when she had misplaced something or forgotten a simple, pertinent fact. Her companion looked familiar, and she worried that they might have crossed paths recently.
It was awful, this forgetfulness. Pride compelled Mrs. Pritchard to remain silent, but she stole another glance at her companion: her hair was white and thick, held in place with a handsome silver clasp at the back. She had probably been beautiful as a younger woman, her face marred only by a faint blue vein running down her left cheek.
“The French are no better, you know,” said the woman. “The Seine is filthy!”
“I’m not surprised,” replied Mrs. Pritchard, comforted by sentiments so similar to her own. That said, the stranger offered her a farewell nod and continued on her way.
Mrs. Pritchard returned to her hotel, slept fitfully that night, ate a hurried breakfast in the morning, and boarded the nine o’clock train to Florence. She found an empty compartment and opened up her copy of Middlemarch. A few moments later, a voice greeted her in English.
“Hello again.”
It was the woman from the Palatine Hill, carrying a calfskin leather suitcase and a matching bag and settling herself into the compartment. Mrs. Pritchard still couldn’t place the woman in her past, but she became seized by the idea that they were meant to meet.
Cautiously, each lady then confessed a few facts about herself that proved coincidental: they were both widows, both single, and both traveling to Florence. Mrs. Pritchard learned that her companion was not a Southern Rhodesian but a South African, from Johannesburg. At one point, the woman left to powder her nose, leaving a cardigan on the seat with a little address book poking from one pocket. As the minutes passed, Mrs. Pritchard debated glancing at the book. Surely curiosity wasn’t a deadly sin? After peering down the corridor for signs of her companion’s return, she seized the book and leafed quickly through its worn pages.
The names were written in large curly script with little notes scribbled in the margins: two dentists; several doctors; a podiatrist; a homeopath (marked “quack”); three hairdressers—one marked “cheap,” one marked “expensive but worth it”; florists; cleaning ladies (“never avail. Tuesdays”); and a piano tuner (“lock up the scotch!”). Mrs. Pritchard began to feel ashamed of herself as she found names crossed out, with the word “dec.” beside them. But then she saw a word that made her regrettable Italian holiday take on a fateful significance.
Lament.
Of course! This was the mother of that unfortunate woman whose child was stolen at Mercy Hospital. Her hair had been deep black at that time, but Mrs. Pritchard remembered the blue vein on her cheek. There was nothing wrong with her memory now. She recalled the late Dr. Underberg’s efforts to bring a mother back from the brink, and the tragic result. She remembered trying to decide what color tab to put on the file afterward, since it was an unofficial adoption and no forms had been filed. What a breach of procedure. What a blemish on her record. After Dr. Underberg’s death, she had longed to confess the matter, but to whom?
When Rose returned to her seat, she sensed that her companion was seized by some dilemma. Or perhaps it was merely the condition of strangers that they are forever searching for a soul with whom to share the truth about themselves.
With this in mind, Rose proposed that they meet for dinner that evening. She knew a wonderful restaurant, and with the wine flowing freely, they might both unload whatever burden they wished.
Shortly before the meal, Rose went for a walk near the Uffizi Gallery. At sunset an amber glow suffused the buildings. Such glorious light! The evening breeze was delightfully cool, and even the traffic sounds were muted and respectful of this magical hour. Rose gazed down at the Arno, winding through the old city like a vein of gold. This was why she came every year. Though her husbands changed, Florence was as constant as the points of the compass.
Rose met her new friend at Resistance, a small restaurant nestled in the crypt of a church near the river. The staff always remembered her, inquiring about her stay and her lodgings. The tables were set in limestone cells with candlelight and red carpeting. Mrs. Pritchard seemed quite moved by its name, and noted that the anti-Fascist resistance had been shot down a short distance away. Then, with alarming speed, the ex-matron polished off her first glass of Chianti.
