If Morning Ever Comes

15

“Gary,” Ben Joe said. “Hey, Gary. Wake up, will you?”

He hated to wake people up. His grandmother had told him after breakfast that it wasn’t good for people to sleep late and especially not in the middle of the living room, and that it was his job to see that Gary got up, but Ben Joe had put it off all morning. Now it was almost eleven; he had spent the last half-hour whistling very loudly in other parts of the house and kicking the furniture in the hallway, but Gary was still peacefully asleep with his mouth open.

“You’re worse than Joanne,” Ben Joe said to the freckled face. “Gary?”

Gary opened his eyes, opaquely blue, and stared up at Ben Joe. “Hmm?” he said.

Ben Joe was instantly embarrassed, caught peering at the privacy of a man’s face asleep.

“Uh, would you like some breakfast?”

“That wouldn’t be half bad,” Gary said. It was amazing how quickly he came alive. He sat straight up and swung his incredibly long, pajamaed legs off the couch and scratched his head.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“About eleven.”

“Oh, Lord.”

He reached for the faded blue bathrobe at the foot of the couch and stood up to put it on. “It’s a disgrace,” he said, grinning happily. “I should’ve been up hours ago. What goes on in this house at night? All night long it sounded like mice above my head, just scurrying around as busy as you please. They went to bed so early and I thought it was a peace-loving family. And then I find out they didn’t go to bed at all, seems like, just adjourned upstairs to carry on where they’d left off before, slamming doors and visiting back and forth. Me, I’ve always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn’t nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I like to see the covers turned down and waiting and the pillows puffed up so I can hop right in. And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping, so to speak …”

He was dipping his arms into his robe and tying it and then folding up the bed clothes as he talked, stopping every now and then to gesture widely with one arm. There was something fascinating about that constant flow of speech. He was the way he had been the night before — big and graceful and always in the center of the room, chattering happily away in a steady stream that left his listeners virtually speechless. Even Ben Joe, who had been an incurable talker as a small boy and had once lost a family bet that he could keep totally silent for fifteen minutes straight, could find no place to break in.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Gary was saying. “I just think it’s worth commenting on it, is all. For years now I’ve been wondering at Joanne, wondering where she got her habits. You’ll have to admit they’re kind of odd. She’s the only mother I know of that used to keep waking the baby all the time, instead of the baby waking her. And making milk shakes in the Waring blender at two a.m. Now, where, I’d think, as I’d wake up and hear her whistling and the blender going and the dishes clattering, where did she learn to live like that? Well, I’m mighty glad to meet your family, Ben Joe. It’s good to see you.”

He stuck out one long, bony hand and Ben Joe, taken off guard, stared at it a minute and then shook it.

“Uh, how about that breakfast?” he asked.

“Sure thing.”

“I’ll get it.”

Ben Joe fled. He was glad to get out to the kitchen; Gary was much better than he had pictured him, but at the same time he felt inadequate around him. He couldn’t welcome him or say he was glad to see him or make one small response to all that puppy-dog friendliness because Gary was too busy talking to hear. Where had Joanne ever met him? He dropped an egg in the frying pan and stared out the window, trying to remember, but it seemed to him that Joanne had never said. She had simply announced that she was married. Well, Joanne never was one to tell much of her personal life. Her letters were full of things like how much wool cost in Kansas nowadays and what movies they had seen and how crabby Carol’s pediatrician was. Everyone in the family wrote like that when they were away; it was probably because of Jenny’s being the official letter writer. What else could you answer to a letter of Jenny’s except the price of wool in Kansas? Still, he wondered where Joanne had met Gary. He cracked the second egg into the frying pan and went to the refrigerator for orange juice.

Gary appeared the instant his breakfast was ready, rubbing his hands together. He was dressed in a plaid shirt that clashed with his hair and a pair of corduroy slacks and he looked exuberant.

“Boy oh boy,” he said, “I just love a big breakfast. They tell you what we had before bed last night? Pizza. A great big pizza with all kinds of stuff on — You seen Joanne?”

“She went out,” Ben Joe said. “Downtown, I think.” He cleared his throat. “I was just wondering where you and Joanne ever met up with each other.”

“Oh, she was dating a buddy of mine. This was when I was in the Marines, back east. She was one of those gals that flits around a lot. Danced with practically everyone at this dance and I was one of them. Keeping her with me, now, that was harder than just dancing one dance with her. And she didn’t like it that in civilian life I’m a salesman. Said salesmen always smiled even when they didn’t want to, so how could she trust me. That’s what she kept harping on, how could she trust me. And, besides, she thought I had no manners. You ever seen Joanne’s feet?”

“What?”

“Her feet. You ever seen them?”

“Well, of course,” Ben Joe said. “She’s always bare-foot.”

Gary nodded and shoveled half a fried egg in his mouth. “That’s why,” he said with his mouth full. “Why they look like they do, I mean. The rest of her is kind of slim, but her feet are wide and smooth and brown like a gypsy’s maybe, or a peasant’s. You see her barefoot and you’ll know what I mean. I always liked her feet. First time she ever met my mother she had little bare sandals on and her hair piled high and I was so proud of her I said, ‘Mama, this is Joanne Hawkes. See her peasant feet? ‘

“And after we were alone again, you should have seen the row. She kept saying, ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life before; see my peasant feet, see my peasant feet?’ and kicked me in the shin with one of them peasant feet so hard I can still feel it if I think on it awhile. That’s why she said I was bad-mannered. That and this door-opening business. I believe in opening a car door for a girl when she gets in, mind you. But when she gets out, well, she just sits and sits useless in the car while you get out and plod all the way around to the other side …”

He held his hand out toward the cream pitcher and Ben Joe, mesmerized, placed it in his hand while he kept staring at Gary’s face.

“So, “ Gary said, “I went off on a fishing boat named the Sagacity one weekend with a fellow from Norfolk. Figured there wasn’t any use staying around right then. Joanne said she didn’t trust me far as she could throw a tractor and then went and accepted five dates for that weekend. Five, mind you. There was this about Joanne back then: seems she liked drawing people to her. Once she got them, she sort of forgot what she was planning to do with them, like. But if you drew away, she’d be out to draw you to her again. So when she heard I had left she got them to radio the Sagacity to come in again. Saturday, it was. They kept calling the Sagacity but the catch was this: it was a borrowed boat and me and my buddy, who was the captain, thought its name was the Saga City. We didn’t connect them, you see. Makes a difference. So the man told Joanne there wasn’t an answer and he didn’t know what could be the trouble, and she started crying and all; and by the time the mess was straightened out we were on dry land again and Joanne had her arms around my neck and said she’d marry me. That was quite some day,” he said.

Ben Joe nodded, with his mouth open. Gary laid his fork down and rocked back easily on the kitchen chair.

“So we got married and all, and of course Carol came along. You get to see that first picture we took of her?”

“It’s somewhere around the house right now,” Ben Joe said.

“Well, I’m glad. It’s a real good picture, I think. I was hoping you all thought so too. I always wondered why your mama didn’t come when Carol was born, or one of your sisters maybe. Almost a custom, you might say. But no one came.”

“Well, anyway, we were glad to hear about it,” Ben Joe said.

“That so?” Gary looked happy.

“Um …” said Ben Joe. He bent forward to lean his elbows on the table. There was a long string of questions he wanted to ask, like why was Joanne here now and why was Gary himself here, but he would hate to see that happy face of Gary’s get a closed, offended look. In the tiny silence he heard the front door open and a pair of high heels walk in, with little, soft baby steps beside them. He looked up at Gary to see if he had heard too, but Gary was musing along on some path of his own. The high heels climbed the stairs, and Ben Joe in his mind followed their journey to Joanne’s bedroom.

“I’d like to have a lot more children,” Gary said unexpectedly. “Dozens. I like kids. Joanne takes too good care of just the one. She needs a whole group of them. She’s always saying how Carol’s got to be secure-feeling, got to have no wonders about being loved or not. But this way she just makes Carol nervous — follows her around reading psychology books. Wants to know what her nightmares are about. I say let her alone — kids grow up all right. But that’s just like Joanne. She got in this Little Theater play once back in Kansas and had a whole bunch of lines to learn and got all worried about it. So did she just take a deep breath and start learning them? No sir. The night before the play opened I asked her did she know her lines and she said no not yet but she had got almost all the way through this book called How to Develop a Super-Power Memory. If that isn’t just like her …”

He smiled into his plate and then clasped both hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling.

“She was like that about me once,” he said. “Followed me around reading books about marriage. But when Carol came along she got sidetracked, sort of. It happens. So if she was too busy with Carol I’d just go bowling with the boys or watch TV maybe. And Joanne’d start feeling bad — say it was her fault and she was making the house cold for me. First time she said that was in a heat wave. You couldn’t hardly see for the little squiggly lines of heat in the air. ‘Cold?’ I says. ‘Cold? Honey, you make this house cold and I’ll love you forever for it,’ but Joanne, she didn’t think it was funny. Carol was crawling across the table in rubber pants and Joanne picked her up and spanked her for no reason and then started crying and saying history was repeating itself. Huh. You believe in history repeating itself, Ben Joe?”

“Well, not exactly,” Ben Joe said.

“No, I mean it, now. Do you?”

“No,” said Ben Joe. “I can’t believe history’s going anywhere at all, much less repeating itself.”

Gary lit a slightly bent Chesterfield that he had pulled from his shirt pocket. He was enjoying himself now — as wrapped up in his story as if he were watching it unfold right there on the kitchen ceiling, he never even looked at Ben Joe.

“Course she meant you-all’s history,” he said, “which is so confusing I never have got it straight and don’t intend to. Hardly worth it at this late date. But whatever it was, it’s got no bearing on us and Joanne’s house wasn’t a cold one, no. But Joanne, she gets i-deas. And up and left one day. Well, I don’t know why. But here I am, come to get her. I always say,” he said, looking suddenly at Ben Joe, “no sense acting like you don’t miss a person if you do. Never get ’em back pretending you wouldn’t have them if they crawled.”

“I hope you do,” Ben Joe said suddenly. “Get her back, I mean.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you. It’s a right nice house you have here. You born in this house?”

“Yes.”

“I figured so. I always have wanted to come visit you all. Joanne, she sometimes talks about this place when she’s rested and just sort of letting her mind drift. Tells about all the things that go on here just in one day. It’s right fascinating to listen to. Tells about your daddy, and how his one aim in life was to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and watch real country-music singers, the way some people want to go to Paris, only he never did get there—”

“I’d forgotten that,” Ben Joe said.

“Oh, Joanne didn’t. She was full of things. I know about the time when your mamma and daddy were just married, and he bet her that she’d drop out first on a fifteen-mile hike to, to …

“Burniston,” said Ben Joe.

“Burniston, that’s it. Only neither one of them dropped out, they both made it, but what really got your daddy peeved was that the whole town of Sandhill followed them for curiosity’s sake, and none of them dropped out, either … O, ho …” He threw his head back, with his mouth wide and smiling for pure joy, so that Ben Joe had to smile back at him. “And how you are the only boy in Sandhill that they made a special town law for, forbidding you to whistle in the residential sections because it was so awful-sounding. And Susannah’s cracker sandwiches, made with two pieces of bread and then a cracker in between—”

“Joanne told you all that?”

“She did.”

Ben Joe was quiet for a minute. For the first time he actually pictured Joanne married, telling a person what she had noticed in a lifetime and giving someone bits of her mind that none of them had even known she had. What bits, he wondered, would he give Shelley (if there were any to give)? And how did one go about it? Would he just lie back and say what came into his mind the minute it came, removing that filter that was always there and that strained the useless thoughts and the secret thoughts from being made known? But how could that be any gift to her? He frowned, and marked the tablecloth over and over with his thumbnail.

“I’ll do the dishes,” Gary said.

There were some things Ben Joe didn’t want to tell; he didn’t care if she was his wife. He wouldn’t want to tell all about his family, for instance, the way Joanne had done. Or about the little aimless curled-in-on-themselves things he was always wondering, like if you were an ant, how big would the rust on a frying pan look and could you actually see the molecules going around; and why was it that a sunlit train going through a tunnel did not retain the sunlight for a minute, the way the world did just at twilight, so that it was a little trainful of sunshine speeding through the dark like a lit up aquarium — useless things that a child might think and that Ben Joe had never seemed to grow out of. What would Shelley say to him if she knew all that?

“Did you hear me?” Gary said. “I said, I’ll do the dishes.”

Ben Joe pulled his thoughts together. “No,” he said, “Gram gets mad if we do them. She says that the only thinking time she has is when she’s doing the dishes.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then …”

For the first time that Ben Joe knew of, someone managed to interrupt Gary. It was Gram, bellowing from somewhere near the front of the house:“Soft as the voices of a-angels …”

“What on earth,” Gary said.

He scraped his chair back and stood up to head for the sound, with Ben Joe trailing aimlessly after him. They found Gram in the den, standing in the middle of the floor with her head thrown back and her arms spread like a scarecrow’s, roaring at the top of her lungs:“Whispering ho-o-ope

Da da da da da …”

In front of her, Carol sat in her rocking chair and rocked like mad. Her little feet stuck out in front of her; her head was ducked so that she could throw her weight forward.

“You’re not listening,” Gram told her. She dropped her arms and beamed at Gary and Ben Joe. “I’m teaching her ‘Whispering Hope.’ ”

“What for?” asked Ben Joe.

“What for? Every little girl should know something like that. So she can stand up in a lacy little pinafore like the one she’s got on now — that’s what reminded me of it — and perform before refreshments are served on Sunday afternoons when callers come. All your sisters know how to do it. Joanne used to recite Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’ and then Susannah would sing ‘Whispering—’ ”

“I don’t remember that,” Ben Joe said.

“Well, we never actually did it in front of guests. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. But we had our own private tea parties, sort of.”

“Well, I’m leaving,” Ben Joe said.

But behind him, as he left, Gary was saying, “That’s a great idea. Do you know ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’? I’d like—”

Ben Joe climbed the stairs two at a time and crossed the hall to Joanne’s door.

“Joanne?” he called.

“Who is it? That you, Ben Joe?”

“Yes. Can I come in?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

He opened the door. Joanne was at the door of her closet, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung there. She had on one of the gypsy-red dresses that she used to wear in high school and that had been left behind in her closet because it had faded at the seams. Faded or not, it was still a brighter shade of red than Ben Joe had been used to seeing lately. He blinked his eyes, and Joanne laughed and turned around to face him.

“I found it hanging there,” she said. “I’d forgotten I had it. Do you remember when I used to wear this?”

“Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. “You wore it up till the time you left home.”

“I’d forgotten all about it.”

She spun once more in front of the mirror and then stopped smiling and sat down abruptly on the bed with her shoulders sagging.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

“Well … no.”

“Is Gary up?”

“Yes.”

He took his hands out of his pocket and crossed to sit in the platform rocker opposite her.

“How do you like him?” she asked.

“Oh, fine.”

There seemed to be no words that would fill in the silence. He got up again and wandered aimlessly around the room. At the bureau he stopped and began looking through a silver catch-all tray under the mirror, full of odds and ends like rolled-up postage stamps and paper clips and pieces of lint.

“Hey,” he said, “here’s my nail clippers.”

“Take them.”

“I can prove they’re mine. See this little license tag on the chain? I got it from a cereal company when I was about twelve. It has the year on it and the—”

“Take it, for goodness’ sakes.”

She lit a Salem and threw the match in the direction of the window. With the nail clippers in his pocket Ben Joe wandered back to his seat, still with nothing to say.

“I’ve been looking all over for them,” he said finally. “Also there’s a dent in the file part, where Jenny bit it when she was only—”

“Ben Joe!”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said after a minute.

“Well, what’d you say ‘Ben Joe’ for?”

“No reason.”

“It seems kind of funny,” he said, “just to scream ‘Ben Joe!’ at the top of your lungs as a way of making small talk. Why, I could think of a better topic than that if I—”

“Are you trying to irritate me?”

“Well, maybe so.” He examined his fingernails. “Yes,” he said after a minute, “I liked him fine. I did. Gary, I mean.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

He looked up, saw that she was waiting for him to go on, and went back to frowning at his fingernails. “Came all the way here for you,” he said finally. “That’s something.”

Joanne blew out an enormous cloud of smoke and nodded. She seemed still to be waiting for him to say more, but there was nothing else he could think of to say. When she saw that he was through speaking, she went over and sat down at her dressing table, still not speaking. She put her cigarette in the groove of a glass ash tray and began unpinning her knot of hair.

“If I could just get organized,” she said. “I never have believed in going backwards instead of forwards.”

Ben Joe looked up at her. He knew suddenly, without her telling him, what she had decided she was going to do about Gary. He could tell by her face, half happy and half embarrassed at having to announce that she was as reversible as anyone. He could almost read what she was thinking, and how she was trying to figure out the best way to say it gracefully.

Her hair fell to her neck in a little puff. She put the bobby pins in a china coaster, and picked up a comb and began pulling it through her hair. The red dress made her different, Ben Joe thought. It turned her into exactly the same old Joanne, right down to the swinging hair that she tossed with a little teasing movement of her neck. And this could be any day seven years ago: Ben Joe in the chair watching her get ready to go out, funny old fussy Ben Joe telling her she really should start coming in earlier; and Joanne thin and quick and vaguely dissatisfied in front of her oval mirror. Any minute one of the children would come in (they were still called “the children” back then, not “the girls”) to watch, too. Going out was something exciting and mysterious then, something only Ben Joe and Joanne and Susannah were allowed to do; and the others always liked coming to watch the preparations. He felt suddenly sad, thinking about them — as if instead of merely growing up and still being right here they had died, and he was only now realizing it. He pictured all the children in a circle on the floor, newly bathed and ready for bed (it would have to be evening, then), all looking in the mirror to see the miraculous things Joanne did to her face. Joanne would be talking rapidly, teasing the children behind her and giving that saucy smile as she stared at her mascara in the glass—”Oh, it’s only old Kim Laurence I’m going out with. I think I’ll just stay home and let the baby go instead. You hear that, Tessie?” She would turn around and make a little face at Tessie, only three years old and already half asleep in the lap of a twin. “And won’t Kim Laurence be surprised when his date comes rolling toward him in a baby carriage?” Or: “I’ll tell you who I’m seeing tonight — it’s Quality Jones. Quality Jones, and he’s taking me to a New York night club and he’s such a fascinating conversationalist. All he says is, ‘What time is it, Joanne?’ and I say, ‘If morning ever comes, Quality, I’ll be happy to tell you.’ ”

The image of the real Joanne, seven years older, glimmered in the mirror. Ben Joe bent his head and laid his index fingers across his eyelids, just lightly enough to cool them, but the muscles of his throat stayed hot and aching with all those tears held back, pressing forward for no reason he could name.

“Headache?” the face in the mirror asked.

Ben Joe nodded silently.

“I’ll get you an aspirin.” She stood up and started for the door. When she was directly in front of him she stopped there — looking down at him, he guessed — but she didn’t say anything and after a minute she went on out.

She was gone long enough for him to be sitting up straight and whistling a little tune under his breath before she entered again.Soft as the voices of a-angels …

he whistled. Downstairs Gram’s voice, coming loudly and only a little indistinctly through three closed doors, tramped along with him.

“Here,” Joanne said. She handed him an aspirin and a glass of water.

“Thank you,” he said cheerfully.

He swallowed the pill with one gulp of water and set the glass down on the floor beside his chair. There was a frown on his face now; he sat with his hands clasped tightly together and tried to think of a way to help Joanne say what she wanted to.

“Um, if by any chance you changed your mind about leaving Kansas …”he said.

He paused, waiting without realizing it for Joanne to interrupt, but she didn’t.

“If just by chance you did,” he said finally, “I don’t know that I would call it going backwards instead of forwards. Sometimes it’s not the same place when a person goes back to it, or not the same …”

That little inner mind of his, always scrutinizing him as if it were a separate individual from him, winced. Ben Joe nodded and tipped his hat to it; the separate mind returned his bow and withdrew.

“Not the same person,” he finished.

“Oh,” Joanne said. She was looking down at her hands, acting as if this were a brand-new idea that would have to be given time to soak in.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. Her voice was relieved, and lighthearted. “That is something to think about, I guess …”

Ben Joe stood up. “Thank you for the aspirin,” he said.

“That’s all right. Bye.”

“Good-by.”

He bowed again, this time for real, and left, clicking the door gently shut behind him.