Chapter One

talking

Is there something you want to talk about?" my father said.

    He was propped up in the old mahogany four-poster bed in my grandmother's back bedroom. It was a room that was rarely used, at the end of a crooked corridor in her dark Victorian house. The lavender flowered wallpaper was peeling off the walls like huge scabs; the floor was mottled, and rough as a cough; the dirty manila-colored shades were drawn, their soiled ring pulls dangling in the dim light.

    He was staring at me expectantly, as if I'd done something wrong and should confess. But I was less afraid than irritated.

    "No," I said.

    He set his mouth and looked away. We had come to my grandmother's house in Elm Grove, Iowa, the house in which my father grew up, at the beginning of August for a vacation. I hadn't wanted to go. My grandmother, a pinched-up bird-like woman with sunken eyes and a thin hard mouth, made me nervous. Her face always looked as if it were in the shadows. She wore silk housedresses, a hair net, and too much powder and rouge.

    Her favorite name for me was "Mr. Smarty-pants." She pronounced "smarty" as "smeerty." If I accidentally spilled something on her velvet sofa, or tracked mud onto her oak floors, or dropped a glass as I was carrying it to the kitchen, she always said, in a faintly disgusted voice, as if she'd known all along that it would happen, "Well, Mr. Smeerty-pants. Look what you've done now."

    Her house was huge and angular, with a spiral staircase to the second floor, a basement that smelled of must and decay, and an attic full of cobwebs and dry rot. I had never been in the back bedroom before. It seemed somehow set off from the rest of the house, a place from which, if you went there, you might not come back.

    My grandmother never left the house. She didn't have to. Elm Grove was a small town, and people looked in on her periodically. The local market delivered groceries weekly, and the Presbyterian minister called often. The walls were filled with faded pictures of Jesus with his boyish face, wispy beard, and long brown hair, and with needlework homilies and commandments: Honor thy father and thy mother, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, God bless this house .

    I hadn't wanted to come. I would have preferred to stay in St. Louis with my friends and play baseball in the streets of the bright new suburb where we'd lived for the past five years. The white sidewalks, the neat familiar brick ranch houses, the meticulous lawns and small trees seemed so much friendlier than these towering frame structures, the looming oaks, the old folks sitting on benches in the town square.

    We were only supposed to stay two weeks, but my father had had a severe reaction to a new sulfa drug he was taking. I wasn't sure how severe. He had had multiple sclerosis for about five years and we had come to expect sudden alterations in his health.

    Years ago he had wanted to be a baseball player, and had been playing semipro ball when the dizzy spells began. He would be out in center field waiting for a long fly when suddenly the ball would begin to dance back and forth crazily, multiplying itself in midair, until he couldn't tell which ball was the ball. He'd have to guess, and, more often than not, he'd guess wrong. At first it was comical, my mother said, the team ribbing him about his uncharacteristic clumsiness. But soon he was off the team, and people in town were talking behind his back about alcoholism as he weaved down the sidewalk on his unsteady legs.

    When the disease was finally diagnosed, we moved to St. Louis because the doctors thought that a warm climate might bring about a remission. For five years he tried every experimental treatment they gave him, but the disease gradually deepened, and he had recently progressed from a cane to crutches. He had been on the experimental sulfa drug for several days with no appreciable side effects. We were sitting at dinner, my grandmother chewing her small food carefully and noiselessly, my mother distracted, my father hunched over his plate.

    Suddenly, my father's arm swept across the table, knocking me backward in my chair. "Elbows off the table!" he snapped.

    I hadn't realized that my elbows were on the table; it was one of the little things I did that drove him crazy. Lately, most of the things I did seemed to drive him crazy.

    "Jim," my mother said.

    "Go ahead," my father said. "Take his side again. You always do."

    My mother looked hurt.

    My grandmother stared at her plate, chewing. "Mr. Smeerty-pants," she said to her spinach.

    My father grabbed his crutches, which were propped on the wall beside him, and pulled himself up from the table. "Well, pardon me for living," he said, and stalked off.

    "It's okay, Petey," my mother said. "Your father's not feeling very well today."

    When the crash resounded from the next room, my mother was up from the table and in the living room and I was behind her before I had time to think. My father was sprawled on the floor, one crutch flung in a corner with a broken lamp, one poking awkwardly from beneath him like a bone.

    "Jesus," my mother said.

    "Just leave me alone," he said.

    That night boils broke out all over his body, his temperature rose to 104 degrees, and he began urinating blood. The town physician was chagrined.

    "You didn't tell me he was allergic to sulfa drugs," he said.

    "We didn't know," my mother said.

    "Well, now we do," he said.

    Shortly after my father moved to the back bedroom he called me in with a "business proposition." He said he would pay me a dollar a day to empty the large jug of urine at his bedside. He was so weak that he couldn't get out of bed to use the bathroom, and he didn't want my mother to have to do it.

    "What do you say?" he said.

    I was twelve, it was 1956, a dollar seemed like a lot of money, and I didn't think I really had a choice in the matter. It seemed less a request than a duty.

    "Okay," I said.

    I emptied the jug twice a day--once in the morning and once in the evening. It was heavy, and the sluggish mixture of blood and pus and urine made me queasy. The jug was attached to a catheter tube that disappeared up under the sheets. I'd pull the tube out of the jug and put it in a silver urinal, the tube still dripping fluid. The jug itself was heavy, like a cider jug, and although I'd try to hold it away from my body as I carried it to and from the bathroom, I usually ended up hugging it to me to keep it from slipping. It was sticky, and my clothes retained the faint sickly smell.

    "Is there anything you want to talk about?" my father would say.

    September came with its clarity and dust, the cornstalks outside of town turning yellow and brittle in the dry wind. The frogs at old man Miller's pond grew quiet, and the cricket song subsided in the long nights.

    My father was improving slowly, but he couldn't be moved. My mother suggested that rather than miss the first weeks of school, I might attend the local grade school with a neighbor boy I'd gotten to know. We'd mowed lawns together during August, which had been wet and lush, each taking one side of the heavy rusted push mower's handle, and, with all of our strength, forcing the blades through the thick grass. We got paid a quarter apiece for each job, and we immediately spent it on root beer floats at the soda fountain of Williamson's Drugs on the square. The root beer floats were fifteen cents, but Mr. Williamson always gave us two for a quarter, and we usually drank both at one sitting.

    Old Mr. Williamson had copies of Playboy magazine behind the counter, and he liked to pull them out when nobody was in the store and flash them by us.

    "Give you boys an education," he said. "I could tell you things about your mom and pop, too."

    "Like what?" I said.

    "I remember Violet," he said. "She worked for me, you know. Scooped ice cream behind the soda fountain. She came in here a puny girl, and I made a woman of her. You should have seen the muscles she got scooping ice cream.

    "I remember your pop, too. He used to come in here all the time with his buddies. Goofing around, mostly. Never bought anything but ice cream. I wondered why he was in here so often, and only when Violet was working.

    "Then one day I was in back stocking shelves and I saw him come in and order ice cream. I was behind him, so I could see your mother from his perspective. When she bent down to scoop the ice cream, her blouse hung down and you could look right in. You know, that's what your father was doing, getting her to bend over so he could look down her blouse." He laughed. "Bet you didn't know that about your pop."

    Anything you want to talk about? my father said.

    No, I said.

    "One time," Mr. Williamson continued, "he ran off to Chicago. Your mother's brother, Wilford, had to drive down there and get him. Found him in some whorehouse drunk or something. Wonder why she married him. A nice girl, Violet. Her father the church organist and all. He didn't like it much, but what can you do? These kids."

    When I told my mother about it, she shook her head. "Don't listen to him," she said. "Mr. Williamson's lonely. And he just likes to make up stories."

    I started school with Norman. It was on the other side of town, across the square, a farm implement store on one side and cornfields on the other. I was smaller than most of the kids there, but smarter. They were doing work I'd done the year before. They talked slow, had no sideburns, had never heard of Elvis, and thought Eisenhower was great. They all wore little buttons printed in red, white, and blue: "I Like Ike." While they giggled and talked together, I sat by myself, watching.

    Outside at recess I watched them play football. I'd never played football in St. Louis, and I wasn't sure I could. When Norman finally dragged me into the game, he told me I was the blocker. And for several days at recess I stood on the line, confused and self-conscious, getting knocked down and trampled on every play.

    One afternoon, when we stopped at Williamson's on the way home from school, something seemed different. We were the only ones in the drugstore. Mr. Williamson was mopping the counter with a damp rag. The air seemed charged.

    "The root beer boys," he said. And then to me, "You know, kid, your grandma ain't your real grandma. Anyone tell you that? I suppose not."

    "What do you mean?" I said.

    "Your grandma ain't your real grandma, but your pop's a real bastard," he laughed.

    "You shut up," I told him, whirling off the stool.

    "Take it easy, kid," he said.

    When I got to my grandmother's house, I told my mother what Mr. Williamson had said.

    "You don't listen to him," she said. "You stay away from him. He's just an old man."

    My father was looking better. The boils had subsided, and he was sitting up in bed. The shades were raised, and the late afternoon sun sent spotlights of dust dancing through the room.

    "How's school?" he asked.

    "Okay," I said.

    "The doctor says we'll be out of here in a week, ten days at most. You hang in there that long?"

    "Yeah."

    The urine jug was cleaner, the fluid a pale yellowish- pink. I detached the catheter tube, emptied the jug in the bathroom across the hall, returned, and reattached the tube.

    "Won't have to do that much longer," he said cheerfully. "I'm feeling strong. Like I could walk without crutches. In fact, maybe I could make it to the bathroom myself. Here, give me a hand."

    He threw the sheet off and swung himself to the side of the bed. It was the first time I remembered ever having seen him naked. The catheter was attached to a kind of rubber rolled over his flaccid gray penis. He slipped it off, put his hand on my shoulder and started to pull himself up. Then he sat back down. "Maybe not," he said.

    He lay back in the bed, the sheet up to his waist. "I'll be up and about soon, though," he said. "Anything you want to talk about?" "No," I said.

    I didn't sleep well that night. I dreamed that I was standing in the angular corridor at the door to my grandmother's attic. I could hear muffled voices through the door, and, frightened as I was, I opened it. A dim glow floated at the top of the stairs, with what sounded like my mother's and my father's laughter. I walked slowly up the stairs, a tread squeaking with every step. I stopped on the third step from the top, my head just above floor level. The attic was filled with dusty boxes. A dress manikin jutted up in one corner, an old Victrola hunched in another. Clothes were strewn all over the floor. There was movement in the shadows, and then there were voices. It's him , they said, coming toward me. It's him. Mr. Smeerty-pants , they said. I screamed, soundlessly. And then I was down the stairs and back in my bed and it was morning.

    "What's the matter, Pete?" Norman said on the way to school.

    "Nothing," I said.

    "Look, are you sore about the blocking? Hey, today I'll make you the ball carrier."

    "It's not that," I said.

    "What is it?"

    "Nothing," I said.

    At recess, in the huddle, Norman said he'd hand off the ball to me and I'd run for a touchdown up the middle. He winked. The other kids protested. "He can't play football. He's no good."

    "Just this once," Norman said.

    I took the ball and ran for a touchdown. And for the rest of the week, every time they handed me the ball, I'd run up the middle, knocking down tacklers all the way to the goal line. "He's pretty good," they said.

    The Friday before we were to leave for St. Louis, I stopped at Williamson's Drugs. My mother had told me not to, but I wanted to see Mr. Williamson again, to find out what he meant.

    "Forget it, kid," he said. "I shouldn't have said anything."

    "But I want to know."

    "Have a root beer on me," he said.

    At dinner that night my father was cheerful. "Well, Petey boy, I guess you'll be glad to get to St. Louis and your friends. Hasn't been much of a summer for you, I'm afraid. How was school today?"

    "Okay," I said.

    "What kind of answer is that?" he said.

    "A short one," I said.

    My mother laughed.

    "Mr. Smeerty-pants," my grandmother said.

Years later, after my father died, I did find out what Mr. Williamson meant. My grandmother had been moved to a nursing home, her feet fat boats of cancer. My mother and I were cleaning out her house, and I found a packet of letters in the attic--correspondence between my grandfather, Robert, who had died of a stroke when my father was twelve, and his brother, Vergil, a farmer in Minnesota. In the dusty gloom of the quiet attic I pieced the story together.

    Vergil had been married to Anna for ten years and had three children when Maureen came to work for him as a farmhand. Maureen was young and attractive, and Anna was increasingly moody and depressive. Vergil began sleeping with Maureen. When he confessed that he had gotten Maureen pregnant, Anna hanged herself from a rafter in the barn.

    Maureen went to Minneapolis to have the baby, and Vergil, feeling that it would be unwise for him to marry Maureen and acknowledge the child and the cause of Anna's death, asked his brother, Robert, for help. Robert, a lawyer in Elm Grove, offered to adopt the child since his own wife, Virginia, had been unable to bear him any children. Virginia, who had gained the reputation in town of being "peculiar," soon began telling everyone that the child was really hers. In time, she came to believe it.

    On his deathbed, Robert told my father the truth: that "Aunt" Maureen was really his mother, and that "Uncle" Vergil was really his father, and that Virginia was no relation to him at all. After Robert's death Virginia insisted that the story was untrue and she was his real mother. Rumors spread around town, and whenever other kids wanted to enrage my father, they'd call him a bastard.

    My mother corroborated the story as we packed the pictures of Jesus and the needlework homilies into boxes for the auctioneer.

    "It was hard for him," she said. "By the time we were seniors in high school, he knew that the story was true. Our families were very religious, and Jim thought I'd never marry him if I knew. He thought somehow the whole thing was his fault. I said it didn't matter. But all his life it ate at him. He thought the multiple sclerosis was God's punishment for his sin. He worried about you. I wish he could have talked to someone about it. Once he got sick we never really talked much about anything. I don't think he talked much with anyone about anything."

    Is there something you want to talk about? my father was always asking me, propped up in bed, slumped over in his wheelchair, sitting at the kitchen table, glancing up over his glasses and his newspaper.

    The question irritated me, made me taciturn and sullen. It irritated me and seemed like such an effort. I had to be out in the streets playing ball with the guys, or upstairs doing homework, or off somewhere with my girlfriend, or going to graduate school, or making money. It irritated me, and anyway, I had nothing I wanted to say to him, and there was never enough time for talking.

    Now I'm talking, talking. And there's all the time in the world.

Copyright © 2000 Ron Wallace. All rights reserved.