Ash Wednesday (13 page)

Beth told her then about their plan to have a baby, and Mary grinned, putting her glasses back on like a happy-face mask.

"Are you pregnant now?" she asked.

"Not yet."

"Well, don't worry about a thing. I'll see you get maternity leave for as long as you want. As for leaving, it would be convenient if you could finish a year rather than leave in the middle of one."

"With a little lucky timing," Beth said, and both women laughed.

"Oh, it's time. How old are you, Beth?"

"Twenty-six."

“Well, you wouldn't want to wait much longer. Is Jim excited?"

Beth nodded. "I think he wants one more than I do."

"
Reg
was the same way. But when the twins came he changed his mind." Mary put a hand on Beth's shoulder. "You go ahead and
do
it," she said. "There'll be a job for you when you're ready, even if I have to make one." And then her sixtyish, blue-haired principal said something that amazed Beth. "And if you want to get pregnant fast, put him on the bottom and when it happens, just
sit
on it. Don't move a muscle." She grinned crookedly. "If you can help it." They both giggled like schoolgirls.

When she got home, Beth told Jim what Mary had said. They laughed about it, then they tried it.

Beth was pregnant by February. She requested maternity leave for the 1973-74 school year, and was granted it. By June she was starting to show, and the mounding of her stomach brought out all the protective instincts that Jim had never realized he'd had. He also got a job moonlighting for the
Merridale Messenger
.

Jim had known Bill Gingrich since Jim was in high school. When his eighth-grade English class had gone on a tour of the
Messenger
offices and press room, Gingrich had acted as guide. Jim had been fascinated by the workings of the small weekly, and talked to Gingrich for such a long time that he nearly missed the bus back to school. His interest in journalism grew, and in his freshman year he became a junior reporter for the
Merridale High Sentinel
, which was printed at the
Messenger
's offices. Jim would consistently volunteer for the little-loved job of going to the offices Wednesdays after school to pick up the papers for Thursday distribution.

He'd always used the time to talk to Gingrich, who spoke gruffly but was secretly pleased to have an audience to whom he could tell his stories of working on the
Lansford Courier
in the forties.

So when Jim entered the
Messenger
offices twenty years later and told Gingrich his name, Gingrich, a little balder and a lot fatter, grinned. "Jimmy—the kid who used to make me tell all my war stories!"

Jim laughed. "Was I that big a pest?"

"Nah. Hell, I liked it. So what can I do for you?"

Jim told him that he was looking for a part-time job, explaining the situation with Beth and the expected baby. "I suppose I could stock shelves or something," he said, "but I'd rather do something that I know about and like. Frankly, Mr. Gingrich, I don't know where else you could get my experience for the money I'm willing to take."

"What kind of stuff do you want to do?" Gingrich wasn't smiling anymore.

"What do you need?" Jim shrugged. "I'll do it."

"Well, there
have
been two things
that've
been a pain in the ass lately. One's the advertising. I guess I'm just getting too old and fat to toddle around town trying to sell the shit."

"You mean you don't have a permanent-space agreement with any store owners?"

"Oh, a few, but most of 'em only advertise when they've got a sale or a little money to burn. Keeping them buying
regularly's
like pulling teeth. The other thing's the 'Around the Square' column.
Lettie
Parker'd
been handling that for me, but her husband got transferred and I've been doing it myself. There's a lot that people call in, but never enough to fill it up, so I
gotta
go hunting and I got no time to hunt."

"What kind of hunting?"

"Calling churches, the Lions, Moose, the high school, asking them what the hell's going on, then writing it up. A few little gossipy things—who went to Europe on their vacation, who visited who in Florida . . ."

Jim smiled. "Sounds like Marie
Snyder'd
be a natural for it.

Gingrich barked a laugh. "
That
old bitch? But you're right. She'd be a damn good source. I'd
doublecheck
everything from her though."

"I will."

"You
will?
Hold it, kid. We haven't talked money yet. I'm not a rich man, in spite of my luxurious surroundings." He gestured expansively around the cluttered office at the scattered papers, dented furniture, and a multitude of empty Styrofoam coffee cups.

Jim chuckled, still liking the man and his style. "Oh, I think we can come to a mutually acceptable agreement."

"Listen to him. He even
sounds
like a journalist. You use those two-dollar words in my quarter rag, kid, and you're out of work." He frowned. "How's five bucks an hour for working the advertising sound? And twenty-five a week for 'Around the Square'?"

Jim thought for a minute. "How many hours a week will the ad stuff take?"

"Seven or eight. Thursday or Friday nights or Saturdays." Sixty-five a week. Jim thought it would help, and he'd probably enjoy it. He nodded. "Sounds good."

"Hot damn, I got me a sucker.
Wanta
start next week?”

“Sure."

"Tell you what," Gingrich smiled. "How about another column? Write it all by yourself, an extra fifteen bucks a week."

"Great. What about?"

The older man shrugged. "Leave it up to you. Just connect it with the town somehow. And not too political or controversial,
y'know
."

Jim nodded cynically. "I'm used to that."

"I bet you are, working at Linden. Everybody's running scared, especially with that
dumbo
Nixon and this Watergate mess. It's gonna open a few eyes before it's all over, see if it doesn't."

"Wait a minute," said Jim carefully. "I thought you were a Nixon man."

"Ha!
That
stinker? Don't believe everything you read in the paper, kid, especially mine. As goes Merridale, so goes the
Messenger
. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat my whole damn life. The paper supports Republicans because it's
bought
by Republicans. Hell, you run Mussolini as a Republican, this
town'd
vote for him." He shook his head sadly. "And I'd probably write an editorial supporting him. Welcome to yellow journalism."

Jim liked Bill Gingrich's brand of yellow journalism. The Saturday visits to the town merchants to peddle ads were not at all unpleasant. On the contrary, he enjoyed talking to these men and women who had put their stake in Merridale, and even if he didn't come out of a store with a sale, he came away with a feeling of warmth and communication nonetheless, of his batteries being charged in the dynamo of small-town humanity, so different from the calculated heartlessness of Linden Industries.
These
businesses were manned by human beings, not automatons whose sole loyalty was to profit. And in the stores and small businesses of Merridale there were no scapegoats to blame, no gray faceless clones far down the line. In Merridale if something went wrong, it was the owner who took the blame, and if he succeeded, it was due to his own efforts. Rugged individualism still survived here—in Stephen's Drugs,
Byer's
Book Store, the Friendly Gift Shoppe, and dozens of other one- to five-man businesses that ran up and down and across Market and High Street like marchers in a parade.

That was the very image Jim used for his first fifteen-dollar column. It was shamelessly pro–small town and pro–small business, and he wrote it in a white-hot patriotic fervor that seemed strange to him even as he did it. "Good stuff," Gingrich said after reading it. "A little thick for my blood maybe, but everybody
else'll
eat it up." He looked at Jim a bit suspiciously from over the top of his glasses. "You really meant what you wrote here, didn't you?"

Jim smiled.

"Don't be embarrassed," said Gingrich. "Nothing to be ashamed of. I'm just a little surprised you feel this way.”

“I
like
Merridale."

"Yeah. I do too. Only reason I've stayed here so long." He leaned back and propped his feet on the desk top. "Got a lot of nice folks here. Got a lot of assholes too. Now the secret is that there are assholes everywhere you go. You can't escape them. But me, I've learned that I like the Merridale assholes better than the assholes anywhere else." He grinned. "They're Norman Rockwell assholes. I like Norman Rockwell. How about you?"

"He's okay."

"You'll weaken with time. Wait till you have your kid and he starts getting bigger. You'll
love
Norman Rockwell."

Jim wasn't sure of that, but he was sure of his love for the town. It shone through his columns and even in "Around the Square." He discovered that people were not merely willing but anxious to report on the most pedestrian doings of their lives and organizations. It amused him and delighted him as well, for in a solipsistic way they were right: Don and Rachel Martin's trip to Vermont and the St. John's Chicken Corn Soup Supper were, in the universe of Don and Rachel Martin and the ladies of the church, far more important than the talks between Henry Kissinger and the representatives of Ho Chi Minh, or all this fuss in Washington about the burglary at that Watergate place, or the earthquakes in Nicaragua. No one from Merridale had ever
been
to Nicaragua, except for Pastor Craven and his wife, and that had been a good fifteen years earlier.

Oh, yes, Jim thought and thought again, Merridale was as self-centered as a Broadway star on opening night. But was that such a flaw? After all, he was beginning to believe himself that the world revolved around the town. "All is dross that is not Merridale." When one lives their whole life in one place, doesn't that place become life itself? Life and death and birth.

And in October 1973, as was his father, Terence John Callendar was born in Lansford General Hospital and taken home to Merridale, where he was shown off to sundry relatives and loved, Jim felt, as no baby had been before. Beth was an excellent mother and spent more time with Terry than Jim had ever expected her to. "I've got him for a year, all to myself," she told him, "before I have to go back to the school. So I'm really going to make it count." Jim wished that he had more time to spend with the two of them, but Linden stole his days, and the
Messenger
took most evenings and much of the weekend. It was far from an ideal situation in which to form a strong father-son bond, but he tried, writing after Terry had gone to sleep, and getting up early on Saturday mornings so that he could often finish his ad work by noon.

Beth's attention paid off, for Terry was a bright, lively, healthy baby whose infectious spirit proved strong enough to reactivate even Jim's grandfather. Although speech never returned to Dan Foster, they were able to work out a simple yes-no code with eye squints.

When his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep in the nursing home, Jim was in the hospital himself, about to undergo an operation. Beth, although she knew of Grandpa Foster's death, did not tell Jim. He was upset enough. He'd begun coughing in June, three months before. It was a dry
phlegmless
cough that refused to disappear. Finally he'd gone to Dr. Page in Merridale, who could find nothing wrong. "Give it another week," he told Jim, and gave him some antibiotics. "If it's still bad, call me."

Four days after the exam he started to cough up small gobbets of dark red blood. The next day he called Dr. Page, who reexamined him and sent him to a throat specialist at Lansford General. At the hospital, Jim went through a battery of tests that revealed a growth on his trachea. The doctor was strangely unsmiling, uncomforting. "We'll have to remove it." he said across a desk top littered with indecipherable papers.