Charms for the Easy Life (19 page)

I asked whether Tom was ignorant of all this. Did she think he had any idea I might be more than some girl he felt like calling on the phone?

“He has a glimpse of it,” she said. “He can’t see everything, but he can see enough. I bet you the phone rings tonight. He wants to see the rest. Part of the fun will be showing it all to him.” Then she jabbed me on the arm and said, “Ask him what he thinks of Mr. Faulkner. I’ll hide and listen.”

That evening I typed Tom’s letter to his mother, making no changes. My grandmother included a note for her, stating her opinion about the ragged stitching and also that she had advised he be given codeine. She closed by saying, “I imagine we’ll be meeting shortly.”

But the next letter, the one from the Mississippi boy to his mother, was a complete fabrication. I told her that he appreciated the letters from the parishioners and that the crucifix over his bed meant the world to him. I enclosed the previous Sunday’s comic strips with the letter, excluding
Little Orphan Annie.
The same thing could’ve happened as had happened with the Lumberton boy, but I did it anyway. She was as real to me, and as sad, as the mother I’d imagined sitting and crying on the cowboy-and-Indian bedspread. I could see her in her house in Jackson: She was a large woman. Her ankles tended to swell in the hot months. She dyed her hair. She was a maniac when it came to defending the Catholic Church and her family. I imagined the day her son would go home to her. She’d see him walking up the sidewalk, and she’d fall all over herself getting out the door to run and knock him down with kisses. She would scream and cry and blow her nose with a gaudy handkerchief and drag him inside the house and encourage him to have a big slice of day-old pound cake she had bought in honor of his return.

There would be much crying and nose-blowing, and then she would say something like, “Let’s go over by the Bucket of Blood and show you off to your old daddy.” They’d go and sit at the bar, and the father would ignore his yelling barmaids while he poured one drink for his son and two for himself, toasting the boy’s exaggerated role in nipping the Nips, slurring bawdy jokes that had enjoyed circulation when he was (probably) a private in the First War and which didn’t seem that funny anymore. But all the people in the saloon would laugh because they would be either drunk enough to laugh at anything or sober enough to know that as long as the father of this returned sailor was merry, they could drink for free.

The father and mother and their son would hold each other up when they staggered home at daybreak. They’d drink chickory all morning, visit their neighbors all afternoon, and head back to the Bucket of Blood that night. I imagined that one of those horsehair Jesuses hung in every room of their house, grinning down on them at all times.

The phone rang at ten o’clock, just a few minutes after my grandmother had gone to bed. When I congratulated Tom for being up on his feet, he said he’d stunned the ward by getting out of bed to use the phone. “I credit my rise to your grandmother and the painkillers,” he said. “Tell her the pills are doing a swell job.” I liked that he was addicted to this word in spite of his education and taste in good literature. He asked when I was coming back to see him. He had the uncontrollable urge to dictate many letters. I told him I’d be there for the holiday party, pouring punch. He said it again. “That’s just swell!” We ended the conversation by promising to keep our eyes open for each other.

M
Y GRANDMOTHER told me to wait to tell my mother I’d met someone who’d caught my eye. She said, “Tell her and you’ll kick yourself. Wait awhile. Wait until she calms down.” Why was my mother agitated? She was overly preoccupied with whether or not Mr. Baines would give her an engagement ring for Christmas, and constant thoughts of this had ground her nerves down to the quick. It was as if she were walking about our house snarling, “How about the two of you leave me alone so I can worry in peace?” I knew even without being told that after the matter was settled, after he had proposed on Christmas, I could tell her a young man had finally shown more than an academic interest in me and that I intended to show him the same. Mr. Baines had all but bought radio time and billboard space announcing his intentions, but my mother still had enough insecurity left over from her marriage to my father to cause her to pace about, calculating the odds of a happy ending, sniping at my grandmother and me if we chewed and swallowed too loudly.

The evening of the hospital party, Mr. Baines took my mother to the YMCA to hear a program of Filipino Christmas music. Who would’ve thought there was such a thing? After they left the house, I was eager to go ahead to the hospital, but my grandmother made me stay home with her until a special homefront broadcast of
Command Performance
was over. She had been excited about it since she had read the announcement on the entertainment page of the paper that morning. It promised a “can‘t-miss, won’t-miss performance by Benny Goodman and a star-studded cast.” She never missed an opportunity to hear Benny Goodman. I remember sitting by the radio with my coat and gloves on, waiting for her to say she’d heard enough to please her, but she didn’t. All she said was, “Don’t worry. He’ll be there, and he’ll not go anywhere. It’s good to make him wait a little.” We listened to the whole program. It was by far the best time I’d ever seen my grandmother have listening to the radio. Benny Goodman played all his hits. Nelson Eddy sang “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” Johnny Mercer sang “Deep in the Heart of Texas” for what seemed like fifteen minutes, and Hazel Scott played the “Minute Waltz” through the regular way once and then announced, “Now I’m going to break it down.” It was eight o’clock when my grandmother let us leave.

By the time we reached the hospital, the party was going at full tilt. Louise Nutter greeted us very warmly and introduced us around to the doctors and their wives who had stopped by. Very nonchalantly, I asked her how the Hawkings boy was doing. She told me he was much better and would surely put in an appearance, as he had been caught earlier that day bribing an orderly to have the already overworked hospital laundry press his dress blues for the occasion. She added, “That’s just like him. I know a few nurses who’ll be relieved the day that one walks out of here.” I gathered that she believed his bribing the laundry was reflective of his pushy nature.

All the doctors seemed thrilled to see my grandmother, more or less lining up to talk to her. I didn’t see Tom anywhere, but as I listened to my grandmother’s conversations, my eyes roamed about the room. One surgeon engaged her in a long discussion about Sister Kenny. This woman was an Australian nurse, later made famous by Rosalind Russell, who revolutionized the treatment of infantile paralysis. My grandmother told the surgeon that she’d been performing the therapy for years. She described her method: Instead of immobilizing a patient’s legs, she’d wrap them in hot blankets and flex the feet, and thus the leg muscles, for intervals of five minutes, for an hour a day or for as long as the patient could stand it. The surgeon asked how it worked for her. She told him it wasn’t the miracle it was now trumped up to be, but it did make her patients more comfortable. He said he was amazed she had strayed from orthodox practice on her own authority. I could tell she was pleased with herself. She didn’t tell him anything like, “Oh, but I specialize in the unorthodox” or “I am a great believer in variations on a routine.” She didn’t respond in any way that would’ve been thoroughly appropriate and justified. She merely smiled and, in the most cordial way, invited herself into his operating room. She wanted to see some new method of cauterization she’d read about. He told her she was welcome anytime.

Then he brought up the subject of “the operating fool,” a California man who had recently been arrested for operating on people without a license. My grandmother said, “If you intend the story of his capture as a moral lesson to me, you can save your breath.” He started to tell her he had mentioned the story only because it was humorous, but he stopped when she began talking over him, listing her kitchen table surgeries, from the sawmill worker and the red thread on through five procedures for major lacerations, several amputations of toes and fingers, and one failed attempt at reattaching a finger lopped off by a bread knife. This attempt she blamed on the knife: “It was the serrated edge. That’s why I couldn’t do it.” The surgeon gently told her that reattaching appendages was beyond medical science. She said, “It might be, but I still think I could’ve done it had the woman been using a smooth-edge. I know I could have.” The surgeon had by then heard enough to let her have her way.

I excused myself to pour punch. I told my grandmother I’d be back when my shift was up. It seemed endless. A clot of young men started hanging about the refreshment table. They recognized me from having seen me on their wards, reading and writing letters, but unlike the young men I’d helped with letters, these five seemed intent on, as was said at the time, making me. If they weren’t telling me a sob story they were handing me a line. One held a bandaged hand up in front of my face and asked, “Know how this happened?” I remember I had to pull my head back to keep the hand from jabbing me in the nose. I said I was sorry but I didn’t know how he’d been hurt. “Guess. Just take a guess,” he said. From the smell on him, I suspected he had liquor hidden somewhere and this would make him overbearing and relentless. I was right. He wouldn’t let go. I kept saying I had no idea how he’d gotten hurt, although my instinct was that he’d been wounded not in a battle but in a bawdy-house brawl. His chums were saying things like, “Yeah, girlie. Take a shot at it.” This teasing persisted even as I was pouring punch for people who came up to the table. These people stared at us, but they would give me no relief. I finally said, “Listen, I’m really busy. How about you all find somebody else to quiz, okay?”

This made things worse. One of them said I was cute when I was mad. I threatened to have one of the military policemen who was guarding the fire exits arrest him. The one with the bad hand said, “For what? Trying to get to know you? You sure are a cold one, girlie.” They were of the unsavory sort who whipped up the zoot suit riots, much rougher characters than the hoodlums I’d always been so easily able to disperse in the school parking lot. I was used to saying, “Okay, guys, let’s pick up those bottles and butts and move along,” and having boys twice my size nod, bend over, pick up their litter, and throw it in a trashcan. I hadn’t changed since those days.

I like to think I had a demure way about me and didn’t appear to be fodder for this gang. But for all these fellows knew, I could’ve been secretly easy, and all they had to do was make me admit what I
really
wanted. I could’ve been one of those homefront girls they’d been hearing about who had grown so lonesome for a man that they would toss all morals aside and hop in the backseat. I could’ve been listening to too much Frank Sinatra, longing for romance, something trite like that. I could’ve been without my boyfriend for six months, and consequently so full of untapped passion that I was ready to explode. Or I could’ve been another Arlene, mindlessly ranging around, sampling whatever was handy.

I imagined Tom appearing, chivalrous and larger than life in his dress blues, telling these guys to go crawl back under their rocks, but he was nowhere to be seen. I remember glaring at my grandmother’s back as she held forth to her string of doctors, hoping I could will her to turn around and see me. She would’ve come over screaming and offered to castrate all five of them. But she wouldn’t turn around. Mrs. Nutter finally saw my plight and came over with an officer. He called the five by name and stripped them of radio, visiting, and general dayroom and recreational privileges for the next week. They responded with a sharp salute and moved away from the table, still in that one clot. Mrs. Nutter apologized, relieved me of the rest of my shift, and reminded me to tell my grandmother when hers started.

My grandmother had just left the group of people she had accumulated around her, and had taken a seat in a row of chairs set up against the wall. This put her in the middle of all the girls who had come that evening in hopes of finding a lonely single fellow and his allotment check. They had that look about them. Girls like these, who showed up at dances, went in carloads to the coast to wave troop ships off, and hung about downtown outside the Enlisted Men’s Recreation Room, were called “Allotment Annies.” This hospital group made as captive an audience as they were likely to find anywhere. Although the public was trained to spot such girls, the ones who had come to the hospital party didn’t seem to be suffering from their shameful reputation. Patients who could get around well enough to dance picked them off the wall, danced and chatted, and then delivered them back to wait for the next partner. The girls rotated in and out of their chairs so fast that I doubt the seats had time to get cold.

There was, or at least I hoped there was, a great visible distinction between these girls and me. I had on white gloves. They had bare hands. My hat had been made in Washington. Their hats appeared to be from Woolworth’s. I had on stockings. Most of these girls were wearing Liquid Stocking, and perspiration from all their dancing had streaked color down the back of their calves. I remember their purses especially: I was sure that for whatever was in them, they could’ve been left at home. If the girls had been asked to dump out the contents of their purses in the middle of the floor, think of everything that would’ve spilled out: nickels and pennies, hard candy, dime-store lipstick, rouge, and nail polish, compacts, rabbit’s feet, loose stale cigarettes, and butts they’d picked out of their fathers’ ashtrays and straightened out. I thought of how the young men who had harassed me could’ve saved themselves valuable wolfing time had they gravitated first to this crowd. And then I saw them, down at the far end of the row, working on a few of these girls, showing that fellow’s bandaged hand around. I wondered whether they were telling them about the stick-in-the-mud they’d run into over by the punch bowl.