The Fires (12 page)

“What’s this?” My father was at the door. Scott threw down the chalk and quickly erased the board. “Get out of here,” my father said in a voice so low you could barely hear it, his knees 88 / RENÉ STEINKE

popping in and out, his hands pressed flat in his armpits as if to keep them from flailing out.

It wasn’t that I resented him for coming into the room and seeing that—what I regretted was that I couldn’t have scared Scott away myself.

My father was especially worried about me that year. I was at the age he’d been when his own parents had died in the car accident, “smashed into a tree in the rain” was always how he put it, specifically, as if he still had to rehearse the details to himself.

Driving me to school in his truck, he would offer me a lot of advice out of the blue. He’d be listening to the crackly news on the radio and suddenly say, “If you smile and look people in the eye when you talk to them, they will always like you.” Or he’d be quizzing me on history dates or spelling words and interrupt to say, “As long as you’re honest, people will listen.” I think he didn’t have a clue how to help me.

What had saved him, he believed, from a life as a meatpacker or farmhand, was the library, and he began to take me with him more often to the one in Porter.

There had been a library down the street from the orphanage in Munster. He’d gone there almost every day after school for seven years, and when he graduated, won a scholarship to IU in Bloomington, where he’d studied music. “Without that library,”

he used to say, “I would have just shrunken up.” Every year he donated money to the Porter Library, and because of this, his name was engraved on a copper plaque near the entrance.

“It’s for the invisible part,” he would say, pointing at his head, when we stood at the circulation desk.
The part no one can see. The
place that’s not scarred.
Wilma Kohl, thumping the date-due stamp on our cards, would smile with her little red mouth. She wore bifocals on a string of bright Indian beads and had a mole on her neck like a pendant. My father would lean toward her THE FIRES / 89

with a snappy word about the weather or the popcorn festival, and she would say something like, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

He had to keep renewing all the lengthy books on philosophy and history he liked, because he could absorb only a few pages at a time. He would hold a book open with one hand and peer into it, one hip elegantly jutted to the side, the brick-colored spines accordioned past him on the shelf. Even when boys ran and slid on the slick floor, or a mother scolded her girl for ripping out a page, he didn’t look up.

My favorite books that year were romances, and except for the ones in the “Classics” section, they were kept on stacks behind a curtain in a section marked “Adult.” If my father was preoccu-pied, I could sneak behind the curtain, read as much as I could, sweating in the close air, then mark the page where I’d left off with a bobby pin. If he’d caught me, he probably wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t want him to know I thought about those things and would have been mortified.

I remember one book about a beauty with a port-wine stain on her forehead. A handsome doctor fell in love with her and discovered a way to remove birthmarks, but after he removed hers, she fell in love with a race-car driver, an arrogant man, whom, in the beginning, she hadn’t liked at all. Almost all of the heroines, in fact, fell in love with the very men they’d loathed in the beginning. This happened so often I began to think this was the way love worked, and wondered if my mother had begun by disliking my father when they’d met at that picnic, and if I would end up with Russ, the bully who called me “Chicken Skin.”

Coming out from behind the curtain I’d see my father in the aisle stooped over a book, his small shoulders shadowed, and when I came closer, his frown of concern.

VI

S
adly fiddling with the button of her blouse, as loose on her now as the white choir robe she used to wear, my mother had asked me to go to church with them that Sunday and to lunch afterward at the Housemans.

We sat near the front, behind the Zeitlers with their six combed and curled children, each holding a small toy. Pastor Beck looked surprised when he saw me from the pulpit. He closed his eyes and prayed for a moment, then rose up on his toes and blossomed, as if God had made him taller and brighter. I’d always liked him because he’d denied ever hearing my father miss a note, knowing, I thought, how much it upset him.

While Pastor Beck preached, a horn of light blasted through the high, square windows near the ceiling. I looked over at the stained-glass window with the Holy Spirit dove arrowed down at the apostles with serrated flames on their tongues. Finding it hard to listen, I thought about the time a man stood up in the front pew, though the directions in the bulletin clearly said

“Congregation remain seated.” All around him, people whispered.

Pastor Beck had made an odd motion with his hand, pushing it down as if a little dog were jumping on his leg and he were slapping its head. A few people, unsure who was right, stood up with him,

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then sat down again, like children playing musical chairs. The man stood there, stiff as the prow of a boat, one tail of his suit jacket stuck to his waist with static, and my father chuckled so loudly from up in the balcony that people turned around and looked up.

The only time he had sat next to me was the service when one of the steward’s sisters-in-law was in town and wanted to play the organ. He was so upset at her mistakes, he tore his bulletin into little squares that he let snow on the floor below us.

Even now the lack of him made it hard for me to concentrate, and the high-school girl’s pedantic jag through the first hymns had annoyed me. Halfway through the sermon, I stood up, wriggled past knees and dress shoes to the side aisle, and walked out to the narthex. Staring at the cluttered bulletin board, I waited for Marietta and my mother to come out.

When we arrived at the Housemans’, my mother leaned her crutch against the wall and sat down in a rocking chair near the table. No one had said anything about how thin she was, though I’d noticed the shock in Marietta’s face when she’d got into the car, her red dress hanging from her bony limbs like a deflated balloon. Erma Houseman must have assumed it would be rude to notice a woman’s thinness when her father had just died.

None of the Housemans’ clocks was set to the right hour, and whenever I was there, I felt time getting heavier, this humid thickening in the air. Erma had hair dyed the color of molasses and an aggrieved voice, as if life was simply too hard for her. She said I should go say hello to Fred Houseman and Russel Frye, and as I walked into the living room, I heard Marietta and Erma begin to argue about how long the pie would take.

Fred was standing at the fireplace, and Russel Frye sat in a chair. The tiny cottage of a cuckoo clock perched on the mantel.

Against the wall stood a grandfather clock with a stern face that I’d always

92 / RENÉ STEINKE

thought of as Fred’s twin brother. He had a tall, square body, his eyes and mouth thin, even lines. Russel and Fred were talking about the tornado that had touched down the week before. Russel Frye pushed his glasses to the bridge of his pink nose. “We were lucky that time,” he said. “No one was hurt.”

“I can hear it when a twister gets close,” Fred said, jiggling the change in his pockets. “I’d know it just from the sound—that high-pitched whistle—whether or not to go down. And that one was at least five miles off.”

I told him I’d stayed at the front desk, even when I’d seen the hail balls, that I hadn’t taken shelter in the basement with the guests. Russel’s ruddy face looked stricken. He was a pharmacist and valued caution the way an athlete values strength or speed.

I traced a leaf pattern on the couch.

“The problem is, you don’t have enough respect for the weather,” said Fred Houseman. “You have to know it. When you’re out in the fields and you see a storm blow toward you or when a drought turns everything to stone, then you see how small we all are, how insignificant.” His son had died in Vietnam, and he always seemed sorry that he himself hadn’t yet collided into a danger big enough for him.

Russel turned to me. “Henry taught you better than that.” He clicked his tongue and crossed his legs so that his pants hitched up to expose the white patch of skin over his black sock. I wondered if he’d meant more than what he said, if he’d heard about my trips to the Paradise Lounge.

I started to agree and shake my head at my own carelessness, but something stopped me. “My grandfather worried too much,”

I said. “He had too much on his mind all the time.”

“You’ll see,” Russel said. “The older you get, the harder it is to avoid.” Erma called us into the dining room. He uncrossed his legs and heaved himself up from the chair.

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Erma had made German food, as always, heavy dishes the color and texture of rocks. We sat down around the steaming platters and bowls. “Shall we pray?” said Fred. We bowed our heads as he recited the prayer in an even voice with an undertone of anger, his awkward imitation of authority. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest…”

He served the beef roladen from a large silver tureen, and we passed around the potatoes and sauerkraut, the buttered green beans, and the small, heel-shaped rolls. “You look pale, Catherine,” said Russel. “You’d better take seconds today,” said Fred, chuckling as he spooned meat onto her plate.

It’s not a joke,
I thought.
She’s starving.
At first, the polite clattering of yellow silverware on china plates muffled any conversation.

Food was the one vice the men allowed themselves, and they cut, speared, and chewed greedily, as if it provided them with some answer to a question that had been dogging them for a long time.

If my grandfather had been there, he’d have nodded in thanks to Erma with each bite of a new dish. They all tasted like pickles to me. I kept looking at the place where he usually sat, where Russel was now. It made me angry to think they might have invited him to make my grandfather’s absence less obvious.

My mother smiled at whoever was talking, pushing the food around on her plate as if she were looking for some detail in the china pattern underneath. Fred and Russel were complaining about Plymouth Steel, how it would bring blacks closer to Porter.

The buttery string beans began to make me nauseous, and I wished I hadn’t agreed to come, or that I could leave. “People just aren’t going to stand for it,” said Fred, lifting his chin. As I watched them talking, the skin on their faces seemed to slide forward and, in that dim light, dripped a little around the stubble of their beards.

I untied the little purse of meat in the beef roladen, scraped 94 / RENÉ STEINKE

the pickle and bacon from the inside, and took a bite of bland meat. Marietta and Erma started to argue about which was better for you, eggs or oatmeal. “Eggs are the purest kind of energy,”

said Erma.

“But they’re bad for the blood,” said Marietta. I looked at her rouged high cheekbones, the skin above them sunken, at her wide-set eyes thickly mascaraed in crinkled lids, and the wrinkles pursing her red lips. Old people still talked about how beautiful she had been, but it had somehow misshapen her, I thought, twisted her faculty for empathy and swelled the muscle that protected her heart. Why wasn’t she more worried about my mother?

I pushed away my plate and folded my arms over my stomach.

“The spooks tried to buy that house on Locust,” said Fred. My father wouldn’t tolerate this kind of talk. His best friend at the orphanage had been black. His name was Roger, and he’d gone on to become an engineer in California. My father would have said something like “They have as much right to live here as you do,” and Fred and Russel would have resented him for it, maybe even nodded to one another in confirmation of his pretension.

“Ella,” said my mother, “do you eat enough eggs?”

I shrugged. They were putting up a smug gate, a white fence with a stubborn lock, defending themselves from fear. But fear might have made them humble; it might at least make them feel something. “Before you know it, we’ll have South Chicago at our doorstep.”

I looked down at my plate, at the smear of potato salad, the flecks of pink bacon, the sauerkraut that reminded me of worms.

I wondered if this was how my mother had lost her appetite, disgusted by all the endless chewing and talk.

Erma was blinking back tears. “When we were girls, Porter was a hundred-percent American. When we were young, something

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like this would have been taken care of. It wouldn’t have been allowed to happen.”

My mother was trembling, trying to look at anyone’s face but mine. Erma smoothed her hair and bobbed her head. “I want to show you something, Ella,” she said. She got up from the table and went over to the closet. While she rummaged in its cluttered darkness, Marietta tried to change the subject again. She laid her voice out over the table like an extravagant piece of purple velvet.

“Of course, we had things like diphtheria to worry about when we were girls, too. They called it the monster. It was so sad to see the little coffins, the tiny blue fingers and noses, as if they were turning into china dolls, these beautiful little children.”

There was an old photograph on the wall—a spirit picture—of a mother and father sitting in front of a house. Next to them, the giant cut-out figure of a toddler in a christening dress floated over the yard, one of the Housemans’ dead siblings.

Erma came back to the table, holding a book with yellowed pages that had to be unlocked like a diary. She took out a tiny key, turned it in the lock, and unhooked the clasp, opened it in front of me to a creased poster that said, “Churchgoers, the Women of the Klean Up Society of America invite you to a social followed by a rally for America.” She turned the page. There was a newsbill that said, “Go to Church Sunday—One of the Foremost duties of a Klanswoman is to WORSHIP GOD. Every Klanswoman each Sunday should attend the Church of her choice.”