8 Plus 1 (16 page)

“We’re under attack,” someone cried.

A window shattered.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jean-Paul yelled, dropping his bag as we neared the end of the street.

I aimed my last tomato and began to gallop after the others, hearing the sounds of pursuit. A few more steps and I would be out of danger, because there was an area between Alphabet Soup and Frenchtown where there were no street lights and darkness would offer protection. Trailing my companions, I turned on my speed, despite the burning in my lungs. Footsteps drew dangerously close behind me. Suddenly, I tripped and pitched headlong to the gravel. A body flung itself upon me, and I twisted around to defend myself.

I found myself staring into the eyes of Jefferson Johnson Stone.

Those eyes. Stunned with surprise, as if a twig had snapped across them. Wide with disbelief. And a terrible bewilderment, such a bewilderment that he loosened his grip, and I took advantage of it to pull myself away and leap to my feet.
My face was stiff with the burnt cork, and my arm ached where I had fallen upon it. Footsteps pounded around us as other people from the Soup carried on the chase. I wanted to say something to him—but what? And I was still in danger; I had to get out of there. So I turned and ran, tears spilling down my cheeks and my arm throbbing. I didn’t look behind.

The weather broke in in the next few days, the dry, dusty heat washed away by rainstorms—heavy, stay-in-the-house kind of rain, rain to read the latest Penrod and Sam by. But I was restless and uninterested. Even the arrival of the new Ken Maynard movie at the Globe failed to arouse my enthusiasm, although I spent my last ten cents to attend.

I arrived home late in the afternoon in the melancholy of a gray, sad rain, to see a scarlet patch flung across our back door; someone had thrown tomatoes at the door, and the juice ran down the wood like blood from a wound. I found a rag and filled a basin with water and began to wash off the scarlet stains. My mother sputtered, watching me, indignant at what the world was coming to.

“Who would do such a crazy thing?” she asked. I didn’t say anything.

A few days later, I journeyed again to Alphabet Soup. The rain had ceased and the storm clouds had moved off, taking summer with them. Most of the gardens sagged dismally, tomato poles leaning wearily, some having toppled to the ground from the force of the rain. My footsteps lagged; I was reluctant to face Jefferson. Would I be able to explain to him? About the face I wore
that night? My failure—not bringing him to Frenchtown? A thousand things?

Finally, I arrived at the Soup and stared unbelievingly at Jefferson’s house. The place was deserted, the house wearing the unmistakable look of vacancy.

“They’re gone.”

I turned to see Nutsy calling from across the street.

“Where?”

“Back to Boston,” Nutsy said.

I thought of Jefferson’s eyes, eyes that could flash with anger, eyes that could blaze with hate. Proud Jefferson. I thought of the dignity he wore like a suit of armor. And those tomatoes hurled at my back door.

I knew that somewhere in Boston, somewhere in the big world outside of Alphabet Soup and Frenchtown, I had an enemy, an enemy for life, waiting, waiting.

“Hey, Canuck. You one of them that attacked us with the tomatoes? All blacked up like niggers?”

A denial sprang to my lips, but I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t look so tough without Jeff around,” Nutsy said, advancing, his eyes still yellow.

But I didn’t run.

My chin trembled and tears welled in my eyes, and I thought
Oh Jefferson, Oh Jefferson
, and I knew that Nutsy was bigger and a better fighter, but I stood there anyway, waiting for him to cross the street.

“Bunny Berigan—Wasn’t He a Musician or Something?” is in sharp contrast to the other stories in this collection. There’s not a child or a teenager—or a wife—in sight.

Why include it then? Because wives and children are very much presences in this story. Although they don’t appear physically, they haunt almost every paragraph and lurk between the lines.

For those reasons, the story is included here in addition to the first eight—the discordant note that perhaps deepens the sound of the others.

There’s also another reason.

The story is a particular favorite of mine because it emerged on paper exactly as I envisioned it. Which does not always happen, of course. Ordinarily, readers don’t see how far short the writer falls of his goal, how impoverished the actual story is compared to the original concept. Readers see only the finished product; they haven’t seen the stumbling starts, the waste-basket pages, the metaphors that went askew, the stillborn phrases.

The concept of this story came to me in a flash. I saw it all in my mind, like scenes from a passing
train—the characters, the events, the tone, the second level. But it wasn’t written in a flash. The story was written painstakingly, sentence by sentence, but with tenderness and care and with the certainty that the material was under control, the characters behaving the way they should, the mood sustained until the final word.

I can’t imagine a collection of my stories without this one.

Bunny Berigan—Wasn’t He a Musician or Something?

One thing I’ll say about him. He didn’t stall, he didn’t beat around the bush or try to justify himself with excuses and alibis. He didn’t even wait for the martinis to be served. As soon as the order was given he said, “I asked Ellen for a divorce last night.”

I had heard rumors about Walt and some girl, and so I wasn’t completely surprised, although I had discounted the whispers at the time. Walt Crane and another woman? Ridiculous. Maybe a cocktail once in a while, but not in some secluded rendezvous. And maybe some flirting in a half-joking way, because I had heard that the girl was a knockout, a model, and she and Walt were thrown together occasionally at the advertising agency where he worked. But it would have been nothing more than that because these things didn’t happen to people like Walt and me. We weren’t kids anymore; we had children almost grown up. We took naps after supper and were
slightly overweight. We were getting nostalgic and sentimental, beginning sentences with words like “I remember when I was a boy” while the kids looked skyward in thinly disguised impatience. Walt and I were old friends who had been through school and a war together, and we didn’t get divorces from our wives. Until now.

“What happened, Walt?” I asked, stalling for time. “Last I heard, you and Ellen were thinking of buying a new car, and little Sandra had the measles, Tommy had got a lousy report card and Debbie was walking on air because she was going to her first formal. And now, all of a sudden, a divorce?”

He grimaced as if absorbing pain, and looked up gratefully as the waiter returned with our drinks. I watched him sipping the drink and figured that it probably did some good to have me conjure up a picture of his home and kids and Ellen, who was lovely and tender even though she possessed a quick temper that exploded over small annoyances and sent her into the prison of migraines.

He put down the glass and raised his hands, palms upward, in resignation. “I know what you’re thinking, Jerry. That I’m the villain of the thing. Fine, I admit it. But it’s never quite that simple.”

Oh, hell, I thought, who am I to act as judge and jury? Yet I thought of Ellen—“poor Ellen,” people would be saying now—and I looked around for a weapon.

“How did Ellen take the news?” I asked, knowing,
of course, that he didn’t want to discuss her at all. And I knew I had found my weapon.

He frowned, shaking his head, avoiding my eyes. “Hard, Jerry, she took it hard. She didn’t have an inkling; she hadn’t suspected a thing. Oh, she knew I’d been acting different lately. But she thought I was worried about the job, working too hard on the new presentations.” His words came out helter-skelter, falling on top of each other, and I was surprised at the genuine pain in them.

“Anyway, I think she’s numb right now. She cried and my heart broke for her, but there was nothing I could do, Jerry. I had to tell her. I had to make the break …”

“Is it the model?” I asked.

“You’ve heard about her?”

“Rumors. Vague stuff. I figured it was just a lot of talk.”

“You figured it wasn’t possible, right?” he asked laconically. “Not good old Walter Crane. Old faithful. Captain of the bowling team at the office. Past treasurer of the PTA. But it happens, Jerry, to people like me. To people like you and me. We don’t go looking for it, but it happens. Or change that—maybe we are looking for it, maybe everybody is, but we don’t like to admit it …”

His accusation wasn’t sharp enough to cause me any pangs of conscience. I was safe, sitting across from him, thinking about the bonus that was scheduled later in the month at the office, wondering whether my latest sales figures would break a record for October, remembering suddenly the birthday party that night for Kathy, my teenaged daughter, who lived in a world of either
brilliant laughter or desperate tears. And hadn’t Harriet asked me to bring home two gallons (
two
gallons?) of ice cream this afternoon?

“Ah, Jerry,” he was saying, his fingers steepled, his voice hushed as if he were in church, “she’s terrific. Wonderful. Her name is Jennifer West and she’s so beautiful it hurts.” He shook his head, his eyes reaching for distances, a poet trying to pin down the one word that would describe it all.

“How did all this happen?” I asked wearily. I didn’t really want to hear the details—how they had met, who had introduced them, the tentative advance, the first drink together, the looking deep into each other’s eyes, the first caress. He did not have to spell out those details because everyone has read or heard about those things a million times or more, and it is not new or exciting or meaningful except to the newest lovers who are discovering it all over again. And I was reluctant to have Walt recount the details because I had become too accustomed to him in another role—delicately pulling a splinter from little Tommy’s finger that time we all went on a fishing trip to Maine, or splashing Debbie mercilessly at the beach on the Cape to get her mind off her broken heart, or sitting on the sagging porch of a rented cottage after a day of sunshine and water, the kids sleeping inside, he and Ellen and Harriet and I sipping beer quietly, agreeing in one of those sudden profound moments of contentment that life was good, life was kind … I had seen him too often in the role of husband and father, and that was why I was reluctant now to hear him
speak of a love affair that had nothing to do with splinters and splashing daughters.

“At first I thought it was ridiculous, Jerry,” he was saying, “that this girl could care for me, could see anything in me. I mean, here I am, an old married man, all settled down. And there she was, young, beautiful, and maybe a thousand guys waiting for her to give them a tumble …”

Again he shook his head at the wonder of it all. “Anyway, it happened accidentally. The heel came off her shoe as she walked into my office, and I was coming around the corner, and …”

“Like in the movies,” I said.

His lips pressed themselves into a grimace, and I could have sworn that I saw some terrible sadness cross his features, a sadness that had nothing to do with my gibe. Somehow he suddenly seemed vulnerable.

“Go ahead,” I said, softening the edge in my voice. “Tell me the rest.”

“There isn’t much to tell, Jerry,” he said, the eagerness returning, the sadness gone as swiftly as it had appeared, “because a lot of stuff you can’t put into words. Do you think I’m kidding myself? I know what you’re thinking, and it’s the same thing I’d be thinking if the shoe were on the other foot—that I’m a damned fool, that I’m throwing myself away, my whole life away, on a girl who …”

I realized then that my role of antagonist was ridiculous, that it would gain neither of us anything.

“Getting back to Ellen,” I said. “Did she agree to let you go?”

“I think she will eventually. She was too upset last night to settle anything. But she knows that I’m not just talking. I packed my clothes …”

“Where are you living?”

“In Jennifer’s apartment building,” he said. Then he held up his hand as if halting traffic. “But not in her apartment. Upstairs, directly over her place.” He had a look of self-righteousness on his face.

“Did you make any arrangements with Ellen?” I asked. “I mean finances, things like that. It’s going to be tough, Walt, juggling two households.”

He signaled for two more martinis, and the waiter caught his eye immediately. Previously he had resembled me—unable to capture a waiter’s attention, standing in the line that didn’t move at the bank, betting on the wrong ball team. Now, seeing his instant success with the waiter, I wondered if he had become endowed with a new quality, if the girl had brought him a certain assurance and an aura of success.

We were silent while the waiter served the second round. After his departure, Walt leaned forward, his knuckles white where he gripped the stem of the glass. “Jerry, Jerry,” he said, his voice oddly pained. “Don’t you think I’ve been through all this? You talk about finances, money … that’s only a small part of it, the smallest part. Jennifer earns enough to make up the difference so that I can take good care of Ellen and the kids. They’ll have nothing to worry about on that score. But it’s the other things …” He sipped the martini, looking away from me. “Like kissing the kids goodbye last night. They didn’t know I was kissing
them goodbye, of course. Ellen was in the living room, huddled up, crying quietly, trying not to make a scene. Good old Ellen. And I went upstairs and looked in on the girls. They looked so innocent, as if they had no defenses against the world. I kissed them in their sleep, and I never loved them as much as at that moment. And then I felt sadness come over me, because I knew that I was committing myself. Up until that time I’d been carrying on an affair with Jennifer, and it all had been wild and wonderful in spite of knowing that I was the biggest heel in the world behind Ellen’s back. But it was still terrific, like being drunk on champagne and never getting a hangover. There in the bedroom with the girls, though, I realized that by telling Ellen, I’d committed myself, I’d burned my bridges …” His voice faltered.