Nine Stories (11 page)

Lionel
leaned forward in his seat, letting go the tiller. He held out his
hands in catching position. "Throw it?" he said. "Please?"

"Let's
keep our seats a minute, Sunshine. I have a little thinking to do. I
should throw this key chain in the lake."

Lionel
stared up at her with his mouth open. He closed his mouth. "It's
mine," he said on a diminishing note of justice.

Boo
Boo, looking down at him, shrugged. "I don't care."

Lionel
slowly sat back in his seat, watching his mother, and reached behind
him for the tiller. His eyes reflected pure perception, as his mother
had known they would.

"Here."
Boo Boo tossed the package down to him. It landed squarely on his
lap.

He
looked at it in his lap, picked it off, looked at it in his hand, and
flicked it--sidearm--into the lake. He then immediately looked up at
Boo Boo, his eyes filled not with defiance but tears. In another
instant, his mouth was distorted into a horizontal figure-8, and he
was crying mightily.

Boo
Boo got to her feet, gingerly, like someone whose foot has gone to
sleep in theatre, and lowered herself into the dinghy. In a moment,
she was in the stern seat, with the pilot on her lap, and she was
rocking him and kissing the back of his neck and giving out certain
information: "Sailors don't cry, baby. Sailors never cry. Only
when their ships go down. Or when they're shipwrecked, on rafts and
all, with nothing to drink except--"

"Sandra--told
Mrs. Smell--that Daddy's a big--sloppy--kike."

Just
perceptibly, Boo Boo flinched, but she lifted the boy off her lap and
stood him in front of her and pushed back his hair from his forehead.
"She did, huh?" she said.

Lionel
worked his head up and down, emphatically. He came in closer, still
crying, to stand between his mother's legs.

"Well,
that isn't too terrible," Boo Boo said, holding him between the
two vises of her arms and legs. "That isn't the worst that could
happen." She gently bit the rim of the boy's ear. "Do you
know what a kike is, baby?"

Lionel
was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he
waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a
little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into
the warmth of Boo Boo's neck. "It's one of those things that go
up in the air," he said. "With string you hold."

The
better to look at him, Boo Boo pushed her son slightly away from her.
Then she put a wild hand inside the seat of his trousers, startling
the boy considerably, but almost immediately withdrew it and
decorously tucked in his shirt for him. "Tell you what we'll
do," she said. "We'll drive to town and get some pickles,
and some bread, and we'll eat the pickles in the car, and then we'll
go to the station and get Daddy, and then we'll bring Daddy home and
make him take us for a ride in the boat. You'll have to help him
carry the sails down. O.K.?"

"O.K.,"
said Lionel.

They
didn't walk back to the house; they raced. Lionel won.

For
Esme:--
with Love and Squalor

JUST
RECENTLY, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that
will take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding
I'd give a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first
arrived, I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip
abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I've since discussed
the matter rather extensively with my wife, a breathtakingly
levelheaded girl, and we've decided against it--for one thing, I'd
completely forgotten that my mother-in-law is looking forward to
spending the last two weeks in April with us. I really don't get to
see Mother Grencher terribly often, and she's not getting any
younger. She's fifty-eight. (As she'd be the first to admit.)

All
the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don't think I'm the type
that doesn't even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting.
Accordingly, I've gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on
the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should
cause the groom, whom I haven't met, an uneasy moment or two, so much
the better. Nobody's aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify,
to instruct.

In
April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took
a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by
British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems
to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there
wasn't one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially
letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line
of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn't
using. When we weren't writing letters or attending classes, each of
us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days,
in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat
in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a
ping-pong table.

The
training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very
rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to
entrain for London, where, as rumor had it, we were to be assigned to
infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By
three in the afternoon, I'd packed all my belongings into my barrack
bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I'd brought
over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I'd slipped through a
porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if
the enemy ever did use gas I'd never get the damn thing on in time.)
I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset but for a very
long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger
finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back
the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of
V-mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away
from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes,
woollen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I'm still told,
I wore at an angle all my own--slightly down over both ears). Then,
after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I
walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the
flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on
them or they didn't.

In
the center of town, which was probably the wettest part of town, I
stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly
because the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my
attention but partly because, after three years in the Army, I'd
become addicted to reading bulletin boards. At three-fifteen, the
board stated, there would be children's-choir practice. I looked at
my wristwatch, then back at the board. A sheet of paper was tacked
up, listing the names of the children expected to attend practice. I
stood in the rain and read all the names, then entered the church.

A
dozen or so adults were among the pews, several of them bearing pairs
of small-size rubbers, soles up, in their laps. I passed along and
sat down in the front row. On the rostrum, seated in three compact
rows of auditorium chairs, were about twenty children, mostly girls,
ranging in age from about seven to thirteen. At the moment, their
choir coach, an enormous woman in tweeds, was advising them to open
their mouths wider when they sang. Had anyone, she asked, ever heard
of a little dickeybird that dared to sing his charming song without
first opening his little beak wide, wide, wide? Apparently nobody
ever had. She was given a steady, opaque look. She went on to say
that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words
they sang, not just mouth them, like silly-billy parrots. She then
blew a note on her pitch-pipe, and the children, like so many
underage weightlifters, raised their hymnbooks.

They
sang without instrumental accompaniment--or, more accurately in their
case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and
unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more
denominational man than myself might, without straining, have
experienced levitation. A couple of the very youngest children
dragged the tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer's
mother could have found fault with. I had never heard the hymn, but I
kept hoping it was one with a dozen or more verses. Listening, I
scanned all the children's faces but watched one in particular, that
of the child nearest me, on the end seat in the first row. She was
about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an
exquisite forehead, and blase eyes that, I thought, might very
possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate
from the other children's voices, and not just because she was seated
nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding,
the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady,
however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or
perhaps just with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw
her yawn. It was a ladylike yawn, a closed-mouth yawn, but you
couldn't miss it; her nostril wings gave her away.

The
instant the hymn ended, the choir coach began to give her lengthy
opinion of people who can't keep their feet still and their lips
sealed tight during the minister's sermon. I gathered that the
singing part of the rehearsal was over, and before the coach's
dissonant speaking voice could entirely break the spell the
children's singing had cast, I got up and left the church.

It
was raining even harder. I walked down the street and looked through
the window of the Red Cross recreation room, but soldiers were
standing two and three deep at the coffee counter, and, even through
the glass, I could hear ping-pong balls bouncing in another room. I
crossed the street and entered a civilian tearoom, which was empty
except for a middle-aged waitress, who looked as if she would have
preferred a customer with a dry raincoat. I used a coat tree as
delicately as possible, and then sat down at a table and ordered tea
and cinnamon toast. It was the first time all day that I'd spoken to
anyone. I then looked through all my pockets, including my raincoat,
and finally found a couple of stale letters to reread, one from my
wife, telling me how the service at Schrafft's Eighty-eighth Street
had fallen off, and one from my mother-in-law, asking me to please
send her some cashmere yarn first chance I got away from "camp."

While
I was still on my first cup of tea, the young lady I had been
watching and listening to in the choir came into the tearoom. Her
hair was soaking wet, and the rims of both ears were showing. She was
with a very small boy, unmistakably her brother, whose cap she
removed by lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a
laboratory specimen. Bringing up the rear was an efficient-looking
woman in a limp felt hat--presumably their governess. The choir
member, taking off her coat as she walked across the floor, made the
table selection--a good one, from my point of view, as it was just
eight or ten feet directly in front of me. She and the governess sat
down. The small boy, who was about five, wasn't ready to sit down
yet. He slid out of and discarded his reefer; then, with the deadpan
expression of a born heller, he methodically went about annoying his
governess by pushing in and pulling out his chair several times,
watching her face. The governess, keeping her voice down, gave him
two or three orders to sit down and, in effect, stop the monkey
business, but it was only when his sister spoke to him that he came
around and applied the small of his back to his chair seat. He
immediately picked up his napkin and put it on his head. His sister
removed it, opened it, and spread it out on his lap.

About
the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me staring
over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house-counting
eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It
was oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are.
I smiled back, much less radiantly, keeping my upper lip down over a
coal-black G.I. temporary filling showing between two of my front
teeth. The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with
enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress--a
Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress
for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. "I
thought Americans despised tea," she said.

It
wasn't the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or
a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything
but tea. I asked her if she'd care to join me.

"Thank
you," she said. "Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment."

I
got up and drew a chair for her, the one opposite me, and she sat
down on the forward quarter of it, keeping her spine easily and
beautifully straight. I went back--almost hurried back--to my own
chair, more than willing to hold up my end of a conversation. When I
was seated, I couldn't think of anything to say, though. I smiled
again, still keeping my coal-black filling under concealment. I
remarked that it was certainly a terrible day out.

"Yes;
quite," said my guest, in the clear, unmistakable voice of a
small-talk detester. She placed her fingers flat on the table edge,
like someone at a seance, then, almost instantly, closed her
hands--her nails were bitten down to the quick. She was wearing a
wristwatch, a military-looking one that looked rather like a
navigator's chronograph. Its face was much too large for her slender
wrist. "You were at choir practice," she said
matter-of-factly. "I saw you."