Stony River (25 page)

DECEMBER 16, 1956
. Buddy started going to Sunday matinees with Tereza when it was too cold to do much outside for Dearie. He went the first time because he wanted to see
Battle Cry
again—an “encore performance,” the theater had called it, trying to put one over on them.

Tereza wasn't big on war movies but Buddy said they helped him understand what his father went through. He didn't call him his old man. Buddy was born the month the war started—a bad omen, he said. His father lived in a photo on a radiator cover in the parlor; a tall man with wide shoulders, standing hands behind back, army pants tucked into combat boots. Next to the picture was the Purple Heart he'd gotten for letting a shell fragment pierce his heart. He'd volunteered after Pearl Harbor, Buddy said. Had been in only four months before he got zapped. After Buddy told her why he liked watching war movies, Tereza didn't mind seeing them. She pictured her own father, not Jimmy, as one of the happy-go-lucky film soldiers who give speeches about what they plan to do when they get home, right before falling on a grenade to save a bunch of other kids' fathers.

They went to a theater in an Italian neighborhood—not much danger of running into anybody she knew there. The lobby stank of sausage as well as popcorn but the theater had a crystal chandelier and a Wurlitzer organ. They'd go early enough to nab two seats in the
balcony. They were watching
Love Me Tender
when he first put the heel of his hand on her mound and curled his fingers under her crotch. She hardly breathed. The theater was packed with screaming girls, making Buddy's gutsy move even more impressive. She glanced over at him staring at the screen, chin thrust out all intense, as if that hand couldn't possibly belong to him. They sat across from each other at Sunday dinner that night like nothing had changed. But Tereza felt the way she had after scoring a home run on the empty lot beside Vinnie's house.

The next week Buddy did the same and the week after.

Never looking at her, not saying anything after.

She put her hand on his fly the first time during
The Mole People,
expecting he'd swell up under it. He didn't.The next time he covered her hand with his and pushed down on it so hard his balls had to be shrieking, but it did the trick. You'd never have known by his face, though. It reflected only the flickering screen. Tereza had to take short, hard breaths to cool down.

They'd sat that way today, groping each other, Tereza trying to be as blasé as Buddy while squeezing tight. Later, at the dining-room table, they went on and on to Dearie about how much they liked the clove-speckled ham, the creamy scalloped potatoes and the peas. Tereza was sure she could hear Buddy's heart laughing as hard as hers at their secret.

Hanky-panky!

How strange love was. She could almost understand how Ma had ended up with Jimmy.

DECEMBER 19, 1956
. Dearie stood in the parlor, her breath fogging the window as she watched Ladonna trudge down the sidewalk with the shopping list, any skip in her step long gone, if it had ever been
there. Two little girls half a block behind her had stopped to play hopscotch. Dearie could hear their excited laughter. The weather was too mild for Christmas, but school would be out any day now. Buddy'd be working full days at the A&P through New Year's.

The parlor smelled of the Scotch pine he'd lugged home a week ago. The three of them had decorated it with the blue lights and ornaments she and Alfie had collected over the years, including Junior's red and green paper chains, faded now, and angels that Buddy had cut out of black oak tag when he was little. Ladonna seemed to get a kick out of throwing the tinsel any which way. Dearie was surprised Buddy hadn't gotten annoyed at that, him being such a neatnik.

It seemed to make Ladonna feel important to think some truant officer would nab her if she didn't come home by the end of the school kids' lunch break. Dearie didn't think that was likely. Ladonna might have a tiny chassis but her face was older than her years. “If you ask me, Alfie,” Dearie said, “the only ones who care about that little girly are me and Buddy. Over a year and nobody's come looking for her.” Dearie sent her out with a list every day so that Ladonna would get some sun.

Dearie didn't mind having some time to herself now and then either, for personal things like dusting Junior's picture. It needed attention every few days; even the skimpy winter light coming in from the window right now showed every speck of dust. She studied her son's face, so like Alfie's and Buddy's, especially the long, thin nose. Tried not to think of Junior's bones mixed up with the hundreds of others the Japs had dumped in a mass grave after marching the soldiers to death in the Philippines. At first, the army reported only that Alfred Eldon Jukes, Jr. was missing. Nearly two years later they sent a medal and admitted his unit had been captured.

The Purple Heart had come in a box Dearie kept closed so the fancy ribbon wouldn't fade and the medal wouldn't lose its shine. She opened it and ran a finger lightly over George Washington's face,
raised in gold against the purple like a cameo on a fancy brooch. Alfie had made up the story about the shrapnel for Buddy's sake. “Nobody could fault you for that,” she said. The prisoners had been starved and beaten, some bayoneted and others beheaded with samurai swords. How could you tell a boy that?

She picked up Junior's picture. Rubbed her cloth slowly in and around the pewter frame's embossed curlicues, imagining as she always did that it comforted Junior. She kissed the cool glass, something she would feel silly doing in front of Buddy or Ladonna. But Alfie understood.

She often pretended that Junior had refused to surrender and was hiding somewhere, not knowing the war was over or that Moira had taken off practically the minute she heard he was missing. Dearie wondered if regret over marrying that fickle girly hadn't driven him to enlist. Alfie built the room in the attic for Moira and Buddy when Junior went overseas. Moira hadn't wasted any time taking advantage, going out togged to the bricks nearly every night, leaving Buddy with Dearie. She'd come home half-lit, her hair and makeup a sight.

Dearie hadn't been able to come up with a good-enough story about his mother's desertion to patch Buddy's torn heart. “Remember that poor boy looking for her every morning, not even over missing his daddy yet?” He was scared to sleep upstairs alone after Moira left. Dearie and Alfie made up a bed for him in the dining room, but he crawled in between them most nights for almost a year, smelling sour from fear and whimpering like a kicked puppy. He wouldn't drop off until he couldn't fight the exhaustion any longer, afraid he'd vanish if he went to sleep.

Moira was a hard one to forgive, even at Christmas.

Dearie wiped off the glass and put Junior back on the radiator cover. If he came home now, he'd be proud of his son overcoming so much. He'd tell Buddy he didn't have to be the he-man he thought his daddy had been, didn't have to prove himself anymore. Junior
could help, too, with what the doctors had called Buddy's
condition
. They said it could get worse over the years, but so far he'd only had one serious episode since the first. Oh, he could flare up like a struck match all right and let gloomy thoughts get the best of him, but only at home, it seemed. As far as Dearie knew, his temper hadn't shown up at work or in class, so obviously he could control it if he put his mind to it. Junior could give him some tips on that.

She wondered if she'd been wrong to build up his father so much in the boy's mind. She could have told him Junior had surrendered. But picturing Junior giving up to those murdering Japs shamed her more than she liked to admit. What would it do to Buddy?

She closed the lid on the medal box.

Besides, it might not even be true. Alfie always said you could never see the whole truth, just like you could never see all the stars in the universe.

JANUARY 19, 1957.
When the twilight is gone—wah ah—and no song-birds are singing—wah
.

Linda had set up her record player to repeat the song over and over. The Platters sounded like black butter, an observation she'd never share aloud lest anyone think she was prejudiced which she absolutely was not. For goodness' sake, she'd even begged for and gotten the colored baby doll advertised on
Amos and Andy
when she was little. Normally she could listen to records and do homework at the same time, despite what Daddy claimed. But this night, she struggled with an essay as snow fell like feather dust outside her window.

When the twilight is gone—wah ah—you come into my heart—ah
.

Her English class was supposed to look to
Our Town
for inspiration. Miss Firkser had taken them to a community theater production of
the play before Christmas and then assigned them an essay describing Stony River in a way that would reveal its essential character, whatever that was. Linda had sat next to Connie Boyle during the play and they'd both cried. Poor, dead Emily traveling back in time to her twelfth birthday, only to realize that the living never take time to look at one another. Linda remembered her own disappointing twelfth birthday. When the Stage Manager said the dead didn't stay interested in the living for long, she'd thought of Mother, shut up in her room across the hall, showing little interest in anyone or anything. It made her feel hopeless and angry.

And here in my heart you will stay while I pray.

The Platters and groups like the Satins and the Penguins with their harmonies and high notes gave Linda goose bumps and caused her to lose her own grip on the earth for a few minutes. Make-out music. She'd yet to make out with anyone—party kissing games didn't count—but whenever she heard a
shoo do be shoo be wah
she thought she knew what it would be like to have your heart all aglow. Honestly, sometimes it embarrassed her how badly she longed for it. She practiced kissing on her arm and prayed every day to keep her feelings for Richie wholesome.

My prayer is to linger with you, at the end of the day, in a dream that's divine.

Should she write about the past like in
Our Town
? Had Stony River been much different when her father was born in the very house she lived in now? He was baptized at the same church as she. Had gone to the same school. She could see him as the Stage Manager:

“Over yonder, two blocks south and three blocks east,” he'd say, sounding more Kansas than New Jersey, “is Mister and Missus Sulo's house, on a piece of land once deep in blackberries. Ma would send me out in my knickerbockers to fill buckets of them so we could enjoy her jelly and jam all winter long. The Sulos came here from Linden right after Ike took office. Flush enough, I declare, to buy
one of them new houses with the fancy colored stoves and fridges. The missus is a cute little thing, a nurse in the hospital's new maternity ward, and the mister, well, we don't see him much. A travelin' salesman of some sort. Truth be told, neither of 'em is home enough to steer their boy, Richard, down the straight and narrow, though he does keep the lawn mowed all summer, got to give him that.”

Miss Firkser said the Russians had banned
Our Town
for making family life appear too attractive. Linda felt sorry for communists with their drab collective-farm existence. But they were screwy if they found family life in Grover's Corners attractive. As for Stony River, it had many more people than Grover's Corners but was just as small in spirit. She could write something scathing—she loved that word— but a good grade might require a flag-waving essay. Ever since Korea, it seemed that criticizing anything American was unpatriotic.

My prayer is a rapture in bloom
.

“Write about Bartz Chemicals,” Daddy said. “How it's the center of the wheel from which radiate the spokes of Stony River life.” And from which spilled the goo that stank up the river. It bugged her that Daddy asked “Father work at Bartz?” whenever she mentioned a new kid at school. Many dads
did
work where he did—the plant employed six thousand, after all—but Linda objected to the implication that if you worked anywhere else you weren't as good.