Those Across the River

CHAPTER NINE

THE MORNING LIGHT coming in through the lace curtains did much to restore my constitution. It was a grey light, threatening rain, and the wind was beginning to move in the boughs and under the eaves, but, as I watched Dora comb out her bob of blond hair in the mirror, I felt the unease slipping from me. It was a new day. There was nothing simpler or more healing. France and all its horrors had receded, taking that penny dreadful in the forest with it. Maybe I hadn’t seen the boy at all. My exhaustion and the poor light had made my eyes play tricks on me. The bruises and welts weren’t from stones, but from the little spill I took off Martin’s bicycle. I nearly believed all this revisionism.

I looked at Dora in the mirror and her reflected eyes met mine, asking, Is it alright now? Have you come back to me? Then her gaze shifted slightly off mine as she noticed the firmness I was developing under the sheet. Yes, I suppose we are fine and well this morning. A smile broadened across her face, taking its time. I got out of bed, holding the sheet before me like a torero’s cape. She liked this game. She backed up, displaying the hairbrush before her in the en garde position, but I moved in on her quickly, wrapping the sheet around her head and shoulders. I threw her down on the bed while she squealed protestations that turned to softer noises when I set my mouth to the middle of her, her own mouth a damp indentation in the sheet.

At length, we breakfasted and took coffee. Dora cleaned up and put on a summer dress, as well as the hat with the dried rose, while I selected a tawny vest and my favorite sky-blue tie.

“I hope the old sawbones knows what he’s doing. It would be a shame to bleed on this fine summer outfit,” I said.

“Bleed all you want, as long as you pass,” she said, adjusting a garter.

“Me? What about as long as you pass?”

“Oh, I’ll do just fine.”

“Of course. I forgot that you took one of these before.”

“That was unkind, sir,” she said, smiling, then reapplying lipstick. “I will remind you that one of us was rolling around Paris and London in the most undesirable company while the other was still drawing hopscotch squares on the sidewalk.”

“Yes, and one of us put down her hopscotch chalk and marched straight for the altar.”

“A frightful mistake. I insist on a civil ceremony this time.”

“A pity you weren’t a Catholic. You could have gotten it annulled. You could have said you showed up in your confirmation dress and this mean priest changed all the words around.”

“My point, sir. You used that one before.”

“No, I didn’t! When?”

“On a whiskey roar at your brother’s in May. The same evening in which you told everyone what a good teacher I would make because the perfection of my bottom would stun the class into silence when I turned my back to write on the blackboard.”

“Forty-love,” I conceded. “Now, if your face is sufficiently painted, I suggest we get that blood test before my syphilis finds my forwarding address.”

WE TOOK THE measly and petty dirt roads that surrounded Whitbrow until they joined up with the highway that led to the mill town. Fat splats of rain hit the windshield about halfway there, but the sky withheld the deluge that farmers across six counties had been concocting strange prayers and even writing letters to the president to bring. One dispossessed family walking down the road was glad the rain had not come yet. The father carried a mattress on his back and looked only where he was going, but the wife and the older children watched our car pass them as if we might have the deed to their new house rolled up in the glove box.

By two o’clock the blood was sitting in vials at the clinic waiting to be sniffed for corruption. Eudora found a telephone and rang her lawyer in Michigan, who confirmed that her divorce was settled and the papers would be in her hands within days, provided the post office did its job.

We decided to celebrate, so we went to a little family joint called the Victoria Café. Our roast beef, rich and fatty, would have tasted better without the image of the starving family marching down the road.

“I wonder if they have a soup kitchen here,” she said.

“I suppose. Why?”

“I should like to work in it.”

I said nothing, just looked at her and kept chewing.

She continued.

“I know it’s not practical, or perhaps even possible, it’s just that it’s so damned dismal here, and it’s hard to eat roast beef.”

“You want to work in a soup kitchen so you’ll feel better about eating roast beef?”

“Do you think things are worse here than in Whitbrow?”

“A mill town with two out of three mills boarded up is a hard place to scratch up a nickel. I suppose it is worse. At least in Whitbrow they can grow enough to eat. I mean, nobody there is starving, but they haven’t got things.”

“I know they haven’t,” she said. “Do you know that the teacher of the lower grades makes a present of a bar of soap to her best pupil every month, and the kids fight over it. A bar of soap.”

She looked out the window at a freckled old man who stopped on the sidewalk to look up at the sky, which was still holding forth the prospect of rain. He held his hat to his head to keep a gust of wind from blowing it off.

“Lots of kids with bare feet, too,” she said. “It seems they could buy an awful lot of shoes for the price of a healthy sow. Why do they do it, Frank? The Chase, they call it. Looks like they’re chasing money they can’t spare off into the wilderness. They must have just herds of wild pigs running around those woods.”

Pigs, and something else besides.

Where are your pants, my friend?

“I don’t know why they do it. Why do people build cathedrals, or flagellate themselves or throw salt over their shoulder? Maybe it makes the corn grow greener.”

“So you approve?”

“I’m not saying I approve or disapprove. I’m just saying it’s not our place to judge them.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“So don’t like it.”

“So don’t like it,” she said, parroting me, stirring a piece of meat around in its gravy.

“Dora, we’re here to have a gay time. In the big city. Let’s not quarrel.”

“Well,” she said, her eyes shining with good humor, “what we’re actually here for is to see if we’re going to expire from a horrid social disease. But while we’re in town, it wouldn’t hurt for us to see the picture show. And try not to quarrel.”

WE SAW A matinee, a pirate epic full of booming cannons that made me edgy. After the show we stopped for bottles of wine and bourbon before we got in the car and headed home. She rested her head on my shoulder, but the air was heavy between us. I wanted to peek into that lovely head and know what she was thinking, even if it hurt me. Even if she was remembering a time before she knew me and thinking that was better.