The Evening Star (66 page)

“What do you think about her French boyfriend?” Vassily asked Theo after the party had piled back into the Cadillac and lumbered away.

“Who says he’s her boyfriend?” Theo asked.

“Well, he was with her—unless you think he was with Rosie,” Vassily said. He found that he had developed an interest in Aurora, but he didn’t say so—better to wait and see which way the wind blew, the next time it blew.

“He looked half dead to me,” Theo said, feeling a little melancholy. He sensed that complications might lie ahead. Usually when he spotted complications on the horizon, he moved to another country—but he had about used up the countries, and just at that moment didn’t feel like moving. Still, it seemed to him that a hurricane of complications was building up, just offshore.

“I hope the dead half is from the waist down, then,” Vassily said.

“Uh-oh, I knew it, you’re falling in love,” Theo said.

“I ain’t falling in nothing, I just don’t trust no Frenchman,” Vassily said.

15

When Jerry took Juanita to the Saturday night dance, as agreed, he expected to feel like a grandfather dancing with a teeny-bopper, and he did sort of feel that way, but he was the only one who noticed. The dance hall was a barn of a place on North Main; it was packed with people, many of them Mexican-American couples as old as he was or older, all dancing vigorously and many dancing well. At first Juanita, dressed to the nines and chewing gum like crazy, was a little dismayed by the stodginess of Jerry’s performance on the dance floor, but then she discovered that, unlike Luis, he didn’t become jealous or enraged when she danced with other men, so she danced with a steady stream of young guys while Jerry stood on the sidelines, happy just to drink beer and watch. Juanita got a little drunk and very sweaty, but she was having a good time—Jerry’s limitations as a dancer didn’t really bother her much. When she’d had her fill of dancing she grabbed his hand and took him home—or rather, she took him to a home she had borrowed for the occasion, mainly because she was still a little nervous about Luis. He hadn’t showed up at the
dance, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be trouble if he showed up at her apartment and caught the two of them in bed.

“You’re gonna be my boyfriend now, I want someplace where we can be peaceful,” Juanita said.

The place was a girlfriend’s hot one-room apartment on 7½ Street. Becoming boyfriend and girlfriend turned the bed into a puddle of sweat, but their sleep was peaceful, as Juanita had wanted. The next morning Juanita awoke in the mood to see Jerry’s house.

“Luis won’t find us there, we can fuck all day,” Juanita said, though in fact her sexual interest was perfunctory—it was just part of being a boyfriend and a girlfriend. It left her not deeply stirred.

On the way to Jerry’s house they stopped for pancakes. While they were eating, Jerry told her he had decided to leave town—then, between bites, as her young face fell, he asked her if she’d like to go with him to Los Angeles.

“Oh, man, you bet—my dream is coming true,” Juanita said, her black eyes shining.

Jerry wanted to pack a thing or two and leave that afternoon, but Juanita, despite her eagerness to be in L.A., the city of her dreams, got a little scared by the suddenness of it all and asked if they could wait a week.

“My sister, she works in Galveston, she was coming up for the dance next Saturday—I guess I oughta see my baby sister one more time before we split,” she said.

She was a very pretty girl, and the knowledge that the main dream of her life was about to come true made her prettier. They spent the whole day at Jerry’s house, watching television or sitting around his backyard draped in towels, drinking sun tea. The feeling of being a grandfather with a teeny-bopper arose in Jerry again—without makeup, Juanita looked like a bright-eyed girl of fifteen. She was all animation, chatter, excitement, happiness. He watched her, entranced, and yet with a little edge of sadness beneath his affection. As he listened to Juanita chatter and chirp, he also thought of his patients—the patients he would be leaving in
a week; the patients he would have preferred to leave that very day.

His patients, it seemed to him, were at the opposite pole of being from Juanita. She was a pretty girl on the rise, all energy, frivolity, bounce. His patients, on the other hand, were all people on the slide, people whom the downward curve of life had caught and would never release. The force of the curve would only take them down and farther down, until the bottom stopped them.

His new fondness for Juanita made him wish that he could really help her escape the downward curve. He wished it could be that her friendliness and spirit would buoy her up, let her keep rising. It was their first day as lovers. Jerry wished he could make a wish for her and have it come true; yet he felt sad, because he didn’t think his wish for this lovely girl
would
come true. The downward curve of life caught everybody—the wasting of the generations would soon bruise Juanita too.

That night they went to a movie with one of Juanita’s girlfriends, the one who had lent them the tiny hot apartment on 7½ Street. The friend was a tall, skinny girl named Maria, who talked nonstop, including during the movie.

Driving home later, Jerry thought of Aurora. He missed her, as she had predicted he would—for a moment he had the impulse just to drive by her house and knock on her door. He realized that he wanted to tell Aurora goodbye—though rarely, in his many leavings, had he told anyone goodbye. He had been moody most of the afternoon, and he knew it had to do with delay: he had wanted to be out of Houston that morning. Waiting a week so Juanita could go to one more dance with her sister didn’t feel quite right to him.

Leaving meant going: pure freedom. Any hitch made him feel a lot less free. So, by the same token, did saying goodbye. Telling people you were leaving moved leaving into a whole different category. It civilized it, which sort of contradicted the point.

Jerry had no intention of saying goodbye to Patsy, or Lalani, or Sondra, or any of his patients. But he would have liked to see Aurora again and hear her voice for a few minutes,
even if her voice was saying cutting things about his character and behavior. If anyone held her own against the downward curve, it was Aurora.

He let himself drift to the edge of River Oaks, but then he caught himself and went on home. Aurora didn’t want to see him, and no reason she should. He sat on the couch and watched television until three in the morning—
The Late Show
and then
The Late Late Show.
There was a Doris Day festival in progress—both movies featured Doris Day.

During commercials or when his interest in Doris and her antics flagged a little, Jerry went through the files of his patients. Since he was going to be here another week, he felt he might try to connect one or two of the more severely troubled patients with another psychiatrist. But sorting out the more severely troubled was not easy, since mainly what they all suffered from was neglect. Mrs. Fry was a typical case: her husband hadn’t shown any interest in her sexually in eighteen years. Mr. Milbank, same story: his wife got sick at her stomach every time he tried to make love to her. Mrs. Henwood’s three children never called her, even on Christmas, even on Mother’s Day. She lived alone. Mrs. Dawson also lived alone—the daughter who had had thirty-seven strokes had to be sent to a “place,” as Mrs. Dawson called it.

It occurred to Jerry that he ought simply to mail his whole file to some young doctor who was just getting started. If he or she took on all of Jerry’s patients there would be an immediate income, and also a solid introduction to the psychiatrist’s life work.

His patients mainly were people in whom everyone had simply lost interest—all interest. They were just people who were getting older. Most of them had never been particularly interesting to begin with, even in their prime, but as they slipped past their prime they became even less interesting—to neighbors and friends, mates and children—than they had once been. In time, once everyone around them lost interest in them, they began in consequence to lose interest in themselves: to slip, to not take good care of themselves, to skip little duties, to abandon their modest schedules, to ignore their bills. But the slippage wasn’t total, else they wouldn’t
have bothered coming to him. The thought that they must be at least a little interesting, that someone ought to pay their troubles at least a little attention, seemed to be what brought them to him.

Now he, too, was going to fail them: to demonstrate by vanishing that he hadn’t been able to become very interested in them either.

That was the story—sad, but common—of most of his patients—but it wasn’t the story of Mr. Mobley, who, in 1946, had run over and killed his own baby son while backing the family car out of the driveway in order to pack it and leave on a big family vacation to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mr. Mobley had only been married five years at the time, his young family had never been able to afford a vacation before, and, in the excitement of packing for it, everybody somehow lost track of the baby, who was crawling in the driveway, trying to catch a grasshopper, when he was run over and killed.

Five years passed. The Mobley family had not quite recovered, but they were functioning and were even planning a big Christmas for their two daughters, May and Billie, eight and nine respectively. But something went wrong with the Christmas-tree lights. May and Billie had two little girlfriends over for a slumber party and all the girls had just gone to sleep. Mr. Mobley was gone, hauling lumber to Alexandria, Louisiana, for the lumberyard where he worked. Mrs. Mobley slept upstairs. When she realized there was a fire, the smoke boiling up the stairs was so thick she couldn’t face it: all she could do was jump out the window. Later the coroner told her the little girls were likely all dead by then anyway because of the smoke. All four died, the worst tragedy the little town of Cypress, Texas, had ever experienced during the Christmas season. Mr. Mobley heard about it on the truck radio as he was hurrying back from Alexandria to be with his family for Christmas.

Mrs. Mobley died of a stroke a few years later. Mr. Mobley, who described himself as “off and on a Christian,” considered that it was merciful of the Lord to take her. He himself
had not partaken of this mercy. He was in his eighties, still dressed neatly, lived on Social Security, watched a little television, gardened a little, smoked a lot, drank occasionally, and was tormented, night after night, year after year, with intolerable visions of his children’s deaths.

“If I had known something could have happened this bad, I would never, no way, have had no children, bless their little hearts,” he said to Jerry on every visit, when he had gone, once again, through the preludes to the deaths, in a hopeless, repetitive attempt to try to find the clues to whatever slippage of attention had destroyed his children and ruined his life.

Those words were Mr. Mobley’s chorus, his lament, his cry. He came to Jerry once a week to say them—always, as he started to talk, he lost control of his voice, cried a little, recovered himself, and jerked on through the terrible story.

“I’d like to die tonight,” he always said at some point during his hour. “Hell, I’m ready to die this afternoon. It’s all I’m waiting for.”

Once, tentatively, wondering if the old man felt anything at all that could be called hope, Jerry asked him his views on the afterlife. Did he expect to be reunited with his wife and his little ones, once the knell had finally rung?

Mr. Mobley shook his head. “Heaven? I ‘spect that’s just stories,” he said. “If I can just die and it’ll make my mind go blank, that’s enough. You know, switch it off like it was the TV, so I won’t be seeing them terrible pictures no more.”

Jerry wrote a short letter to a young psychiatrist he had met in the Astrodome one night at a baseball game. He gave him Mr. Mobley’s address and phone number and asked that he give him a call. Then he wrote a note to Mr. Mobley, giving him the young psychiatrist’s name and phone number; he mentioned that he had asked the young doctor to call him. He added that he was sorry not to be able to treat him anymore, but he felt that the time had come for him to move back to Nevada, his home.

He sealed the letter and then, on impulse, took another sheet of paper and wrote “Dear Aurora,” at the top of it. He
put in the date as well. Then his mind seemed to stick. He could not think of what he wanted to say—could not decide whether he really wanted to say anything, could not even come up with a first sentence.

The piece of paper with Aurora’s name on it lay on his desk all week, untouched. One by one his patients came, one by one they left. Mr. Mobley shuffled in and uttered his cry against the fates one more time; after he left, Jerry mailed the letter referring him to the young doctor, and mailed the note to the young doctor, too.

On Friday, after the last patient was gone, the three neighborhood teenagers he had hired to pack and store his psychiatric library began their work. They worked all night and took the last load to the storage bin on Airline Road about the middle of the morning. One of the teenagers had been given the key to the house the week before, when Jerry had first thought he was leaving. They had been put on hold for a week. They were restless—Jerry had told them they could have a party in the house whenever he did leave. They were to clean up, take the furniture to the Goodwill, and give the key to the landlord. They had been well paid and they tolerated the delay, but it was clear that they were anxious for him to go. They wanted to have their party.

Finally, just before he was to go get Juanita and her sister to take them to the dance, Jerry picked up the sheet of paper with Aurora’s name on it. He had been carefully moving it around all week, but now that he was going, he couldn’t leave it around any longer. Using an empty bookshelf as a desk he quickly wrote:

D
EAR
A
URORA
:

You were right. I’ve missed you very much. I’m leaving Houston today—moving back to Nevada, I think. I don’t plan to go straight home, but I imagine I’ll end up there eventually.