Tomcat in Love (42 page)

“Like you did?”

“No, Tommy. Not like me.”

Even in the frail silence that followed, it seemed he was trying to tell me something, or to warn me.

I moved closer to the window, looked out at the nighttime lawn party. The clan was busy lighting Roman candles, shooting the sky
full of color, but in a curious way it was like watching someone else’s dream. Lorna Sue’s dream. And I was no longer part of it.

Herbie stepped up beside me. Together, almost touching, we watched the fireworks.

“So what’s your point?” I said.

Herbie made a short, ragged sound—maybe laughter, maybe not. “Think about it, for Christ sake. I’ve never gotten married—never got close. Never had a life of my own, not one day, not a single hour.” There was that ragged sound again. “Take a look, man. Out there. That’s why.”

“Lorna Sue?”

“She’s not some innocent lamb. This whole family … sometimes I think I’m the only—” He cut himself off, shook his head bitterly. Outside, the Roman candles were opening up like great orchids, greens and yellows. Herbie’s skin seemed to absorb some of the color. He looked ill, his face carved up and careworn.

“The only
what
?” I said. “The only sane one?”

“Maybe. They are who they are. Not bad people, really, except it was like growing up in an old monastery. Dark Ages. Pearly gates and harps.”

“I thought you were part of all that.”

“I was. Maybe I am. Who the fuck knows?” He took my arm again. “Drink?”

“Of course,” I said. “Big one.”

He smiled again and nodded. “Like old times, right? You were the only solid thing I had. Halfway normal.”

“Halfway, yes.”

“That airplane of ours—remember that?”

“I do,” I said.

Peculiar, is it not, how moods come and go? How they collide? How in the midst of rage we will sometimes break out in capricious laughter, or collapse in tears, or both at once? And how a moment later the rage comes rushing back all the stronger?

So it was for me.

After Herbie moved off toward the kitchen, five or six minutes ticked by, most of which has evaporated from memory. My only firm recollection is of standing at that filthy window, watching both the fireworks and my own eerie reflection. I realized with bone-deep certainty that my old life was now finished and unsalvageable. Who knows how the mood struck? That house, maybe. Fireworks. Lorna Sue. At one point the word
ridiculous
came to mind—the charcoal on my face, my ill-fitting uniform. In the window a gaunt, piteous, broken-down Thomas H. Chippering was superimposed upon Lorna Sue and her tycoon. Curiously, this made me yearn for a hot, sudsy bath. Wash away the charcoal. Take Mrs. Kooshof out to dinner—a steak, perhaps, or a pair of succulent Rock Cornish hens.

That mood swirl: I wanted to hug Lorna Sue. I wanted to wish her well.

I also wanted to blow her to smithereens.
^*

I was studying myself in the window when Herbie returned with two large, frosty glasses of essential refreshment. “You okay?” he said. “You don’t look—
”

“I’m fine. To plywood airplanes.”

“Sure. And engines.”

“Turtles,” I said.

Herbie grinned. “Turtles. Almost forgot. What the hell did turtles have to do with anything?”

“Life mystery. Turtles and tycoons.”

There was a clumsy silence.

“Yeah, well. The man has a name.”

“Not for me,” I said. “A nonentity.”

“Right, but maybe she needs somebody like that. A cipher, you know? Don’t take this the wrong way, Tom, but some things you’re totally blind to. You just don’t know. Never did.”

“She was my wife.”

“True. But still. That fucking cross.” Outside, the sky went fuzzy with reds and golds. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, you know. It was like an experiment or something, like research. I was just so goddamned
curious
. Wanted to see if she’d go to heaven. If I’d go to hell. If the skies would open up.
Curious.
”

The booze, I could tell, was having an effect on him. He lifted his glass.

“Here’s to curiosity,” he said, far too brightly. “The sacred mysteries. And now everybody’s messed up. Me too.”

“You were a boy,” I said.

“And now I’m not.” He finished his drink, reached out, and took my glass. “One more won’t hurt, will it? The Fourth. Big celebration.”

He turned and left the room.

I heard a toilet flush, water running. When he returned, his eyes had taken on a red puffiness. He strained for a smile, which seemed to snap in half, and handed me my glass.

His own drink was already mostly gone.

“This whole mess, Tom. My own fault, I know that, but all the guilt—tons, I mean—it’s not easy lugging that around your whole life. Can’t ever put it down. Catholic, right? Doing my penance, looking after her, making sure she doesn’t—” He stopped abruptly, moistened his lips. “Like I said, it had an effect on her. Made her different.”

“Different?”

Herbie rolled his shoulders. “Unique. Complicated.”

Outside, another skyrocket exploded—brilliant red.

“She
wanted
me to do it,” he said quietly. “The cross, I mean. She kept pestering. I’m not absolving myself—I don’t mean it like that—but it wasn’t like I forced her. She was part of it.” He stopped and gave me that plaintive look again. “We were
both
curious. Both kids. I end up in reform school.”

“I cannot see the relevance of—”

“Let me finish this. I go to reform school, I come home, I’m nine years old, packed to the gills with guilt. Bad shape, you could say. And Lorna Sue wasn’t exactly the same person either. Superpious. Superreligious. Hanging out in the church basement, playing nun, talking with God. Delusions almost, except there was this incredible hatred too. Lots of it. I mean, you can’t blame her—blame
me
—but it seemed like she despised the whole world. Everything. Even God. Especially God.” Herbie turned and looked at me. “Those fires, remember? In the church.”

“That was you,” I said.

“No.”

“Don’t try to—”

“Tommy, wake up. She’s sick.”

Instinctively, I looked out at the lawn. The fireworks had died out; the backyard was sheathed in a flat, impervious dark. Something twitched at the back of my thoughts. The word
sick
. Disbelief, at first. Then certainty.

“The bombs,” I said sharply.

I swung away from the window. Five or six items occurred to me in rapid succession. A Shell/Hell sign. A fountain pen. A summer day in 1952, the three of us sitting in a withered apple tree, Lorna Sue urging us to fill our jars with gasoline. (“It’s a dare,” she’d said. “You aren’t scared, are you?”) And the interrogation in Father Dern’s office. How Herbie had withheld things, so mute and evasive. Other items too: the girlish graffiti on the church steps, the defiled statue of Christ on his cross—lipstick and mascara and breasts.
And Herbie’s constant watchfulness over the years. Headlights in the dark. (That night back in high school, parked in her driveway, those smudgy faces at the window. “They’re
watching
,” Lorna Sue had said. “
He’s
watching.”) Old facts, new spin.

I turned toward Herbie.

“It seems feasible,” I said, “that I’ve misjudged you a little. I always thought—”

“I know what you thought, Tommy.”

“A blunder,” I said. “Incorrect call.”

“But
incest
, for God’s sake?”

“I’m human.” I glanced out at the backyard again, where an explosive finale was in progress. “Those bombs,” I said. “I think she might have them.”

“Come on, you aren’t serious?”

“Mason jars, gasoline. They were in the garage, now they’re gone.”

A web of wrinkles formed along Herbie’s forehead—a puzzled expression, then anger. He pushed to his feet, roughly seized my elbow. “Let’s hear it. Fast.”

Over the next several minutes, under a measure of physical compulsion, I outlined my activities of recent date. Near the end Herbie grasped my shoulders, shook me hard. “For Christ sake,
why
? What the fuck were you thinking?”

“Thinking?” I said.

“The purpose, Tommy. Bombs—what were they
for
?”

I pulled free.

This was not the proper moment to call attention to his inelegantly suspended preposition.

“Some noise, some thunder,” I said fiercely. “I wanted her to
notice
me, that I’m alive, that we used to—”

Sadly, my voice box was not functioning properly, nor my sense of self. (Like Herbie’s preposition, my spiritual health dangled from the most tenuous of threads.) I managed to blurt out a few words more, but these were largely lost amid what had become a wailing noise, a childish blubbering that mortified me even as it rushed
from my throat. I sank to the floor, rocked on my knees, and tried to explain that the whole idea was to make her care, to make her remember. “I was her prince!” I yelled. “She used to love me—that’s a fact! She did!” I took a breath. “
Didn’t
she?”

Herbie hoisted me to my feet. “Sure,” he said.

“There, you see? Real love.”

I sobbed again, then laughed.

Because I knew otherwise. A Lady Whitman had come to mind, and separate bedrooms, and noodles with onion powder, and a greedy night in Vegas, and the word
if
, and that cold, opaque, practical look in her eyes when she finally instructed me not to be an eighteen-year-old. Yo-yo, I thought.

Herbie led me down the hallway to the front door.

“Go on home, Tommy,” he said. “Sit tight, don’t budge. I’ll handle this.”

Which in a sense, I now understood, was exactly what he had been saying to me all his life.

But then he did an odd thing.

He took my hand. He pressed it to his cheek, held it there for a moment.

“Lock your doors,” he said.

I did not immediately rejoin Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Rather, minutes later, I found myself standing at the old white birdbath in the backyard. For some time I simply existed in the summer dark. A great fatigue pressed down upon me, the weariness that a lost hiker must feel after a long, circular journey that has taken him back to the embers of last night’s campfire.

I stripped naked, dipped my hands into the birdbath, rinsed the charcoal away, lay in the grass to dry.

Lovely night, I thought. Stars.

A squandered life.

All those years of willful ignorance. Hiding from the truth. Fooling myself. The girl of my dreams—my one and only—but like
the summer stars she was beyond reach, utterly unknown, a bright and very distant mystery.

I stood up, naked as a baby, and let the Fourth of July bathe me.

Each of us, I suppose, needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred.

But what a waste.

(Late Night)

I
showered, shaved, slipped into my unlaundered robe, prepared two cups of tea, moved to the bedroom door, knocked, stepped inside, and begged Mrs. Robert Kooshof to marry me. I made promises the saints could not keep. I meant virtually every word.

An hour later, near 10:00
P.M.
, her eyes betrayed her. She was a woman; she adored me. Her better judgment, I reckoned, was good for another two hours, tops.

At midnight, on schedule, she said, “Well, maybe it’s possible, but you need help, Thomas. The professional kind.” (Uncanny echoes of the past, obviously. Nonetheless I nodded and slid beneath the covers.)

“Done,” I said.

“No phony shrinks. I’ll be watching. I’ll check under the mattress.”

“Indubitably. Who could blame you?”

“I
mean
it,” she said.

And I am very sure she did mean it, insofar as words can ever carry firm meaning. (Note the vaporous flexibility of the following: “I love you.” “I do.” “
Ja, und Gott helfe mir.
” “Sacred.”) Much more significantly, Mrs. Kooshof then looked at me, rolled her eyes, and laughed—loud, husky laughter. At what, or why, I cannot be certain. Granted, there was a patently mirthful aspect—even, dare I repeat, a ridiculous aspect—to our beleaguered relationship, yet on this occasion I saw no cause for such foolish sniggering. I felt cuddly; I felt safe.

After a second Mrs. Kooshof snapped off her bedside lamp.

We lay in the dark for a time, silent, thinking our thoughts. Even with my ear fast to her bosom, I could barely detect her breathing.