Orchard (9 page)

16

The children were lined up at the back of the school gymnasium, waiting for the piano chord that signaled they were to begin marching up the aisles. Sonja was twisted around in her folding chair, trying to find June, and that was the very moment Henry chose to tell her that the previous Saturday he’d almost wrecked Reuben Rosicky’s truck driving up from the Oxbow.

Sonja spun quickly back to face her husband.

“That’s right,” Henry said. “I thought for sure I was going to pile into a tree.” He shook his head and chuckled at the memory. “I looked up and there it was, like it had been planted smack-dab in my path. Of course, it was there first, so there wasn’t much I could do but try to go around it.”

Sonja leaned forward to try to determine if he had been drinking, but that made no sense—it was not now she wanted to know about, but then.

“And you know what I was thinking when I was headed for that tree?”

That within a year’s time I would have lost both my son and my husband, Sonja thought to say, but instead she shook her head. Perhaps he wasn’t really talking to her. She could hardly be the right audience for Henry’s little story, because he plainly considered it humorous, yet while she listened she felt her stomach tighten and go cold while her scalp hotly prickled.

Mrs. Manserus, the music teacher, began to play “Joy to the World,” and the children started to sing and march forward. Their voices wobbled and teetered at first, but by the time they reached “The Lord is come,” they found their balance. Similarly, their initial steps up the aisle were bunched and halting, but that rhythm soon returned to them as well. The angels, of which June was one, came last, and because of their wings, they had to keep a greater distance between each other than Joseph and Mary, the shepherds, the wise men, or the children without costume.

“I thought,” Henry said, “Reuben’s going to kill me when he sees what I did to his truck. But just as sudden it came to me—what the hell does it matter? I’ll likely be dead myself.”

Sonja placed her hand gently over her husband’s mouth, but she did not stop his speech for the sake of their daughter, who was coming closer, or for the rest of the children or for their parents seated nearby or for the holiday itself or for any reason except that she could not hear any more of accidents or death.

When June marched past, she did not look in her parents’ direction, but that was all right; Sonja knew June was concentrating on remembering the words to the carol and on keeping the proper spacing between herself and the angel in front of her. June looked so lovely that no real angel could equal her beauty, but then Sonja had to banish that thought. If there were angels in heaven such as these, they could only be the souls of dead children, like her son, and therefore, to keep from thinking of June and death in such proximity, Sonja had to tell herself that these were merely earth’s children, the sons and daughters of the mothers and fathers who helped build those wings of wire, cardboard, and aluminum foil.

Snow had been
falling when they entered the school for the program, but it was coming down much harder now, a heavy, wet snow that resisted the rising wind’s efforts to blow the flakes off their fast, vertical descent. Henry and Sonja sat in the truck waiting for June. The heater ran full strength, but so far it wheezed out only cold air. Henry turned on the windshield wipers, but they could not keep up with the snow that seemed to splat against the glass in clumps. They had only a thirteen-mile drive home, but Henry knew the road would be slick and he’d be lucky if he could see a hundred yards.

He began to bounce his legs impatiently.

“Are you cold?” Sonja asked.

“Not especially, but I’d like to start before it gets worse.”

“The teacher has gifts for them. Do you want me to go in and hurry her along?”

Henry could have said, yes, we have to get going. He could have pointed out that they didn’t have any weight in the back of the truck for traction, and he hadn’t gotten around to putting on the snow tires. He was worried they might not get out of the parking lot, or, worse, start for home and slide off the road. But although he was still angry with Sonja for shushing him when he tried to tell her about driving up from the Oxbow, he kept all his concerns about the weather and the roads to himself.

“Let her get her present,” he said.

In another moment, June came running toward the truck, her knees lifting high to help her clear the ridges of snow made by the tires of the cars that had already left the lot. Once June was inside the truck, both her father and mother edged closer to her so their bodies might help warm their daughter.

Outside town, conditions were worse. The wind was having its way now, hurling snow at the truck as if its motion were an affront to the storm. Henry gripped the steering wheel and tried to keep the truck aimed toward the double track that vanished and appeared at the wind’s caprice.

Henry wished he would have gone ahead and told Sonja about what happened with Reuben’s truck. He hadn’t meant to alarm her with the story. Just the opposite—it had a theme that he thought might hearten her. When he was heading for that oak tree, he had no doubt: He was going to hit the tree head-on, and all his efforts to avoid it would come to naught. And then he was past, safe, not so much as a scrape of fender and bark.

And that was what he wanted to convey to Sonja, that perhaps a measure of power and control was edging back into their lives. The lesson of John’s death was wrong. They didn’t have to lie down and submit. What looked to be inevitable might not be, and if Sonja could have been with him in Reuben’s truck, if she could have felt what he felt when he arrived intact at the top of the hill—the exhilaration!—she’d understand.

The episode had been so seductive that Henry couldn’t help but flirt with its counterpart out here on the snow-packed hills, curves, and straightaways of Highway 42. He drove a little too fast for the reach of his headlights, and when the truck’s tires began to slide he waited just an instant longer than he should have, letting the danger rise into his throat before he steered them back on track.

From the corner of his eye he could see Sonja lean forward and cast a questioning look his way. He didn’t say anything, but he wanted to tell her to sit back and relax.
If something happens, at least it will happen to all
three of us.

No one spoke from the time they left the school parking lot until they pulled up in front of their home, and then it was Henry who broke the long silence. “Well, I got us here,” he said. “Safe and sound.”

He half-expected to hear an expression of gratitude or admiration for his driving skill, but none was forthcoming.

Later, when June
lay in bed with her unopened peppermint stick on the nightstand, her mother crept quietly into the room. She sat on the bed and gently stroked her daughter’s hair. “I could hear you,” Sonja said. “Out of all those children, I could still hear my baby’s voice. You sang so beautifully.”

June could think of nothing to say in response to her mother’s compliment. At more than one rehearsal, Mrs. Manserus had corrected June for singing off-key. June did not understand what it meant to be either on-or off-key, so after she was chastised a third time, June rectified the problem the only way she knew how. She sang softer and softer until tonight at the actual performance, she was no longer singing at all but only mouthing the words to every song.

17

Ned Weaver lifted his cup to propose a toast. “What is it—two o’clock? We’re barely half a day into the new year and we’ve already had a taste of failure.”

The only patrons in the Top Deck Tavern were Weaver and his friend Jake Bram. They sat in barrel-backed chairs in front of a fire so low it did not blaze but glow. Both men were smoking and drinking brandy and coffee.

Two hours earlier, they had parked their cars behind the Moravian church and set out on what had become for them a New Year’s Day ritual—snowshoeing a four-mile trail that took them through a small forest, along a high ridge that looked out over the frozen harbor, and back through a golf course. Today, however, the weather got the better of them. They had been dressed for the cold—the temperature never rose above ten below that day—but once they left the shelter of the trees and stood on the high bluff above the lake, the north wind had unobstructed access to the two men, and within minutes they felt as if they had been lacerated with whips of ice. They altered their course and made for the Top Deck, the nearest establishment they could be sure would be open on the holiday.

Jake Bram raised his own glass. “To 1954. May failure not be its theme.”

“Yes,” Weaver said, “I don’t need another year like the last one.”

“The work doesn’t go well?”

“It does not.”

“Have you ever thought the problem might be your standards? Now me, I’ll accept any kind of crap that rolls out of my typewriter.” Under his own name, Jake Bram wrote paperback Westerns; under the name J. B. Fall he wrote hard-boiled detective novels.

“And it all sells,” Weaver said.

Jake shrugged and put a match to his pipe. “It does. But I keep my standards low in that regard as well.”

Weaver scraped his chair closer to the fire. “I don’t give a good goddamn if I never sell another work. If I’m not making something new— and making the discoveries that go with it—life isn’t worth shit. Making art—that’s all there is. The rest is just killing time and keeping myself amused.”

“Maybe having become a successful merchant is obscuring your artistic vision.”

Weaver waved away the suggestion. “I could do that shit with one hand behind my back and one eye closed.”

“Paint it or sell it?”

“Either one.” He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire. “No, I need something to shake me up. Something to scare the hell out of me. To mystify me. Something to help me get someplace I haven’t been before.”

“Try painting with your left hand.”

“I take that remark to mean I should try a new technique. This has nothing to do with technique. I’m talking about vision.”

“Well, hell. Why didn’t you say so?” Jake rolled the brandy around his glass. “Drink up. Vision guaranteed. Followed by blindness.”

“Come on, goddammit. I’m putting myself at your mercy here. What works for you?”

Jake stirred and packed the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with a kitchen match. He scraped the match into flame on the underside of the table and relit his pipe. “I sign a contract.”

Weaver stood and, taking the poker from the rack, pushed and rearranged the logs to allow more air into the fire. When one of the logs threatened to roll from the grate, Weaver shoved it back with the toe of his boot. He had a brief impulse to hold his foot in the fire to impress Jake with the seriousness of the matter at hand. Instead, he sat back down, leaning forward as if he were speaking to the rising flames and not to the man at his side.

“I need a new model,” Weaver said. “Someone who has a face and a body I can find stories in.”

“Are you sure you’re not confusing the muse with fresh pussy?”

Weaver turned to his friend. “Are you sure they’re supposed to be separate?”

Before Jake could answer, from behind the bar Frankie Rawling, the owner’s wife, called out to the two men, “Hey! Either of you want a baked potato? I got an oven full of them, and I’m going to have to throw them out otherwise.”

“Baked potatoes?” Weaver and Jake Bram asked in unison.

Frankie approached them carrying a bottle of brandy. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” she said. “I miscounted or something. I ran out of prime rib early last night, but I got all these goddamn baked potatoes left over.”

Without a request from either man, she poured brandy into their glasses.

“Frankie,” Jake said, “do us a favor. Stand over there by the fire.”

She seemed to know instinctively that she was being asked to pose, for she positioned herself in front of the mantel, faced the two men, held the bottle in one hand, and with the other balanced an imaginary tray. She cocked her head to one side and smiled.

“What about it?” Jake asked Weaver. “Feeling inspired?”

Frankie was Owen Rawling’s second wife, and she waited on tables and tended bar both before and after her marriage to the owner. She was younger than her husband, and the rumors about her as an adulteress were both numerous and specific: She took many lovers but only one at a time, and after she wore a man out, she’d move on to another and never go back. These men had to be of her choosing; walking into the Top Deck and making a pass at Frankie Rawling would get you nowhere. She favored men who lived in the county, but occasionally she would select a summer tourist if she knew he would be around for at least a week.

“I don’t know if it’s inspiration,” Weaver said, “but I’m definitely feeling something.”

Frankie had black hair, wide hips, large breasts, and a face that looked a little pushed in. She was a woman you might not look twice at were it not for the fact that she carried herself with the unapologetic confidence of someone sure of her attributes. Then, when you looked again, she returned your gaze directly, and the dark of her eyes held out promise of more darkness and directness.

“Make up your mind,” Frankie said. “And decide about the potatoes too. If I don’t get any takers I’ll start chucking them into the snow.”

“Patience,” Jake said. “Some things can’t be rushed.”

“Mind telling me what part I’m up for here?” she asked. “I’m not exactly dressed for the audition.” She wore a man’s white shirt, stained from her work in the kitchen, and a pair of stiff dark blue dungarees turned up at the cuff.

“This role you’d undoubtedly
undress
for,” Jake told her. “You’re being appraised by Mr. Ned Weaver himself, and he is in search of a model, a muse.”

“All right,” Weaver said softly to his friend. “Enough.”

“Yeah?” Frankie said to Weaver. “I thought you only painted landscapes.”

“Those,” Jake said, “are his lesser efforts.”

“I almost bought one—the church in the snow?—but the price! Jesus, you aren’t shy, are you?”

“Perhaps an arrangement can be made,” suggested Jake. “In return for inspiration, Mr. Weaver here might give you one of those watercolors you admire. Or perhaps he might paint one especially for you.”

“Jesus,” Weaver said, “are you my business manager now?”

At this moment, Owen Rawling came out of the kitchen to see his wife standing in front of the fireplace while two men stared at her. “Do them two want any of the goddamn potatoes?”

With the brandy bottle still in hand, Frankie made hurrying gestures to the two men. “Well?”

“Are they hot?”

“Hot? You’re fussy, aren’t you? No, they’re not hot. They’re leftovers, for Christ’s sake.”

“Tell you what,” Weaver said. “Bring us a platter of those potatoes, along with some butter and salt, and we’ll see how much damage we can do. And draw us a pitcher of beer.”

As Frankie scurried off to fill their order, she said to her husband, “Step to it. A pitcher—and it’s on the house. Small price if we can unload those potatoes. Nothing I hate more than seeing food go to waste.”

“I told you,” Owen said. “We could take those over to Kirking’s tonight.”

Frankie’s laugh sounded as though it could take at least two inches off a man’s height. “Now, what the hell do you think they’d say if we showed up with
potatoes
?”

Jake waited until both Frankie and Owen were in the kitchen. “Well?”

“That hair . . . Who’s that supposed to be in imitation of? Jane Russell? Ava Gardner?”

“Don’t evade the issue. You think you could do anything with her? Because she’d sure as hell do it.”

Weaver shook another cigarette from the pack, put a match to it, and inhaled deeply.

“Too zaftig?” Jake asked. “You looking for something that lives closer to the bone?”

“No mystery,” Weaver said.

“By God, she was right. You are fussy.”

Weaver hadn’t told the entire truth. On this subzero day, Frankie Rawling still had a touch of summer tan. She was likely one of those women who lay out for hours under the sun, baking until her skin was as dark as saddle leather, and Weaver was mildly curious to know whether she sunbathed in the nude or if her body was striped with flesh as pale as the soles of her feet.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your efforts,” Weaver said. “But I already have a candidate in mind.”

Jake tilted back in his chair, balancing like one of the western marshals he wrote about. “And here I’ve been working my ass off on your behalf.”

“I was thinking of Caroline,” Weaver said. Caroline was Jake Bram’s young wife.

Jake continued to teeter back and forth. “I don’t know if I should be amused or offended.”

“Why not flattered?”

“Maybe because I know your track record with your models. Has there been one yet you’ve failed to fuck?”

“That’s not the kind of count a man is supposed to keep, is it?”

Jake’s pipe had gone out again, and he took it from between his teeth and stared into the bowl. “You wouldn’t mind if I sat in on the sessions, would you?”

“Hell, yes, I’d mind. How would you like it if I looked over your shoulder while you wrote?”

“You could sit on my fucking lap, for all I care.”

Frankie returned from the kitchen, and the two men stopped talking and turned in her direction. She pulled the tap and expertly filled a pitcher with a minimum of foam. She brought the beer, along with two glasses, to the small table. “I know I’m fascinating to watch, but you two don’t have to stop talking every time I walk into the room.”

“We’re struck dumb by your beauty,” Weaver said. He watched her closely for a trace of blush, but he saw none. Perhaps she caught the trace of irony he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

“I’ll believe half that.” She poured beer into each glass. “Owen will bring the potatoes in a few minutes.”

Both men continued to watch Frankie as she walked away. The January wind that had cut short their trek gusted hard, trembling the window in its casement. A sudden draft of air found its way down the chimney, and for an instant, the fire raised its voice above a murmur.

Weaver crushed out his half-smoked cigarette, and when he began to speak, he directed his remarks to the ashtray. “So let’s see if I have this right: You’ll offer up Frankie Rawling because you’re sure she’s slut enough to take off her clothes for any man. It would never occur to you I’d want a model for any other reason. Just as it wouldn’t occur to you that your wife might pose for me but choose not to disrobe. Or that I might not ask her to. Or that she might not choose to sleep with me. Or that she has any choice at all in any of these matters. My God, you have a low opinion of the woman you married. And it’s no wonder you’re a hack. You have absolutely no goddamn understanding of art or artistry whatsoever.”

Without disturbing the position of his chair, Weaver stood slowly. “Don’t get up,” he said to Jake Bram. “You sit there. Sit there and eat potatoes until they come out your ass.”

Weaver did not
count this quarrel with his friend as the second failure of the day. That occurred later, after dark, when the wind finally subsided, and Weaver strapped on his snowshoes again. With the aid of a flashlight, and by cutting through the windswept corridors of an apple orchard, he made his slow, high-stepping way back to the Top Deck. He hoped that Frankie Rawling might be there alone, that her husband had taken the leftover potatoes and fulfilled their social obligation without his wife.

The Top Deck’s windows, however, were dark, both in the first-floor business establishment and in the second-floor apartment where the Rawlings lived. Weaver knocked on the door anyway, by that time thinking as much about the fireplace as Frankie Rawling’s combustible nature. There was no answer. Halfway home, the batteries in his flashlight flickered, grew faint, and finally gave out, but he had no trouble following his own trail of darker indentations in the dark snow.

Weaver’s friendship
with Jake Bram was restored within the month when Jake came to visit and brought with him, as a goodwill offering, his wife, Caroline, who expressed her eagerness to pose for Weaver.

As it turned out, she was not the model he had been hoping for. She had about her certain physical features—an especially elongated philtrum and a waist unusually thick for a woman so boyishly slender—so that when Weaver tried to render her, first in pencil and then in pastel, the resulting image seemed to be a mistake, an artist’s failure of proportion. When Weaver tried to correct these anomalies, a different, even more unsatisfactory distortion occurred—he was prettying up reality, rounding its corners, smoothing its rough edges, and that was something he refused to do in his art.

A physical relationship between artist and model did not eventuate until Weaver persuaded Caroline to run off to Chicago with him. They phoned their spouses and told them that Weaver had found himself unable to paint, so they decided to drive to Chicago in hopes of finding inspiration in one of the city’s museums. They would have returned that night, but a snowstorm suddenly skidded in across Lake Michigan trapping them in the city.

The two of them toured the Art Institute, ate jaeger schnitzel and drank dark beer at Berghoff ’s, and then checked into the Drake. That evening they went for a walk, and Weaver showed Caroline Bram where his father was run over and killed. Later, they made love in a room so high above Michigan Avenue the sounds of traffic could barely reach them.

Making love to Caroline Bram was a singular experience, for in her Weaver found a body eerily similar to his own in size and shape. Hence, his every move—every squeeze, flex, thrust, and roll, every push and every pull—found an almost synchronous response, as if her body was answering his mind rather than his physical being. For the night, Weaver could not get enough of Caroline Bram, yet when they checked out of the hotel the following day, he had no regrets about driving her back to her home and her husband. Weaver was finished with her as both model and lover.