Ice-Cream Headache (12 page)

Sylvanus and Norma were getting married in the spring. She was getting her two-week vacation the first two in August and wanted to spend half of it with him. Michigan was too far to travel for just a week and she had to spend the other week of it at home with her folks. Norma was telling them that she was spending this week with a girl friend in Brazil she knew from college. Norma’s mother was very careful of Norma, especially now since the Frys were planning on their daughter’s marriage in the spring. Norma hated to lie to her parents, but it was the only way.

“You dont know how strait-laced my family has always been, Van,” she told Sylvanus. “If you did, you’d understand. It would kill them if they knew, and they’ve done so much for me. I owe them that: they’ve taught me all I know.”

“I understand them,” Sylvanus told her. “And I know they mean well. But they don’t realize you’re a big girl now, capable of running your own life. And they don’t like me.”

“But they do like you, Van,” she protested. “Its just that they don’t understand you like I do. They cant see the possibilities in you that I can. They cant see the potential goodness in you.”

“They sure cant,” Sylvanus Merrick grinned. They did not like it because he had tended bar at the Moose Lodge over home in Illinois, before his stories started selling.

“They dont approve of you just up and taking off to all over the country for six months at a time,” Norma said. “They think its time you settled down.”

“So do I,” Sylvanus said. “But I don’t have to sell cars to do it, do I?” Mr Fry had the biggest car agency in Vincennes and he wanted Merrick to come in with him when they got married, and do his writing on the side. Mr Fry had a personal friend in Detroit who spent two hours at his typewriter every morning and still carried on his business.

“It isnt that,” Norma said. “Its just that they cant see much future in writing.”

“They’re dubious of most of my ideas,” Sylvanus said. Mr and Mrs Fry had read some of the stories when they first came out, but they could not see anything much to yell about. They certainly could not see an adequate recompense for having taken his mustering-out pay and the two thousand dollars gambling money into the North Carolina mountains, when he could have invested it as capital. Sometimes Sylvanus Merrick thought it was unbelievable that they could have had a daughter like Norma Fry. And then, of course, there was always the Army.

“It was the war,” Norma explained, “and George Field being so close to Vincennes. You cant really blame the folks, No one in our income bracket bought more bonds and gave more to the USO than Dad did, but they cant understand your refusing to go to officers’ school.”

“I’m neurotic,” Sylvanus said. “Tell them that.”

“Van,” Norma said. “I know you werent like most George Field soldiers, Van.”

Sylvanus did not say anything.

“I love you, Van,” Norma said. “Do you think if I didnt feel in my heart that I was your wife already, that I’d be doing what I’m doing? To them?”

“I’m sorry honey,” he said. “Its just that …”

“I live under quite a strain myself, Van,” she said.

“I know you do, honey.”

They were driving back from a dance at Zook’s Nook and he stopped the car and put his arm around her.

“Lets not, Van,” she said. “Not now.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Nope.” He started the car.

She watched him drive a while “You know, Van, sometimes I think I cant stand it, the duplicity, living like this.”

“If we take this cabin, it’ll only be for a month.”

“Its not just this vacation. I’ve been masquerading under false pretenses to my parents for over a year now.” She gave a sharp little laugh. “It isnt easy, Van.”

“Cheer up,” Sylvanus grinned. “I’ll make an honest woman of you come spring.” He looked around at her so they could share this joke. Her face looked as if she had been slapped. Tears came in her eyes as he watched. He was shocked. “Good Lord, whats the matter?”

“You think its funny,” Norma said.

“But I was only kidding you,” he protested.

“Kidding?” she said. “Or razzing. Or needling. There are lots of different ways to kid a person, Van.”

“Now listen, honey,” he said, to right it. “I didn’t mean anything. If you’d rather, we can call this whole Fandalack deal off right now.”

“Now why do you say that? Did I say anything about calling it off?”

“No. No, you didn’t. But I don’t want to make you unhappy.”

“I’d be a lot unhappier if you went to Michigan,” Norma said. “I cant bear the thought of you so far away.”

“I dont have enough dough for that trip anyway,” Sylvanus said. “I could borrow it from Russ or Arky though, I suppose. They’ve been winning lately. Poker’s been going pretty good over home at the Moose lately.”

“I dont want you to borrow money from gamblers,” Norma said.

“They’re all right. They’re good guys. You just don’t understand them. They’re not gamblers; they’ve never murdered a soul, unless you want to count a few Germans.”

“I still don’t want you to borrow money from them,” Norma said. “Please, Van.”

“I don’t need to borrow money from them, if I’m not going to Michigan,” Sylvanus said.

“Promise me you wont borrow money from them,” Norma said. “For anything. If you need money, I can get it from Dad.”

“Okay,” Sylvanus said grudgingly. “I promise.”

“I never said I wanted to call it off about Fandalack,” Norma said. “I dont want to call it off at all. It was the folks I was thinking of. You’re an orphan, you dont know how they are.”

“Oh yes I do,” Sylvanus said, thinking how little wild cheering there had been when they announced to Mr and Mrs Fry that they were getting married. As it was, the only reason Norma would be able to get away nights was because she was not living at home. The school chum from Bloomington Norma shared the summer apartment with slipped her boy friend in at night all the time, so that Norma felt free to stay away at night.

But that was not what was worrying Norma. What worried Norma was her getting into the Park. It came out later on in the evening when they were in his place, over home in Illinois.

“Its all right coming in the evening, Van, because lots of people come to swim then. But what about driving out through the gate at four every morning? After the first couple of times the gate guards will suspect something.”

“Let them suspect,” he said. “What can they do?”

“They could do a lot. You know how strict the Park authorities are about that. You know what people think of a girl who does what I’m doing. And how do you think I’ll feel, having them stare at me funny.”

“They wont even notice you,” Sylvanus said. “Listen, this Fandalack deal wasn’t my idea in the first place. I’d just as soon we got married tonight, if it wasn’t for all those big plans for a church wedding your mother is making.”

“Its not the plans for a church wedding that are keeping us from getting married right now,” Norma said meaningly.

“Okay,” Sylvanus said. “I know it. But is it unreasonable to want to wait until that novel comes out in the spring so I’ll at least have a little money? We couldnt live in a one-room apartment like this, without even cooking facilities.”

“It wouldnt be unreasonable,” Norma said, “except that you dont have to do it.”

“I’m not going to go into your father’s business!” Sylvanus said.

Norma was not looking at him, and her face looked to him to be sagging, like a dead sail without wind.

“Anyway,” he said hastily, “at least not until this one book is done.” Maybe they would pick it for the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Norma was looking at his mantel, at the Jap bayonet hanging crossed over its scabbard that he had cut off and made a fighting knife out of when the medic who brought him in had stolen his, and at the grandfather’s old cap and ball rifle with its tiger-stripe maple stock his grandfather had hunted the stump for and carved out himself. She was not looking at him.

“All right, Van,” she said resignedly. “You run it. And if we get into trouble over not being married, you run that too.”

“Listen,” he said. “We’d go right down and wake up a JP right now, if we could, and get married right now, if we could.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said desperately. “We’ll tell them we’re married. I’ll tell the guy when I rent the cabin.”

“But we arent, Van. Not by the law. What if they ask you to see the license?”

“They dont ask to see the marriage licenses, what they want is your money. They want it too bad to take a chance of offending you.”

“All right,” Norma said tiredly. “You run it however you want.”

“It’ll work out fine that way. And they wont look at you funny. Honest they wont.”

“All right,” Norma said tiredly.

“Okay then,” Sylvanus said happily. “Then its settled. Come here to me. And lets see you smile with that pretty face,” he grinned at her happily.

“All right, Van,” she said. She smiled tiredly. “But, Van, women don’t …”

“Stop that,” he grinned. “Hear me? Or I’ll stop it for you. In fact, I think I’ll just stop it anyway,”

He did not hear what she said then, against his mouth. It sounded something like, “Is that
all
you
ever
think about?” But he did not care.

So they left it at that. He wrote for the cabin. There was no trouble at all. Mr Lemmon, who had the contracts for the concessions, was very nice when Sylvanus drove the old Plymouth over to see him. He made out the gate passes for both Sylvanus’ car and his wife’s without noticing or commenting that her license was
Indiana
and his own
Illinois.
Sylvanus took the cabin for a full month, the last two weeks in July and the first two of August.

It was a nice cabin, set on a little hillock between two tiny brackish inlets on one of the long fingers of clean lake, in a patch of second- and third-growth timber. It cost him $30 a week, and he rented a boat for the four weeks at a dollar a day. They charged 50¢ an hour for a boat, otherwise. The whole thing came to about $170, after he stocked up some canned beans and bacon and bread.

Last year he had spent three weeks up on Sheepshead and Betsy Lakes back in from Tahquamenon Falls in Chippewa County Michigan for $95. But then he didnt have any cabin then, only the sleeping bag. And he hadnt had any Norma.

He had to borrow almost a hundred from Arky to make the hundred and seventy, but he did not tell Norma that.

Up there on Sheepshead, there hadn’t been a sound in the silence for days except the sound of his breathing and the plop of the plug in the lake and the wind in the tops of the tall spruce on the lake. Here, cars of shrill tourists hummed by on the asphalt a stone’s throw from the door and you could always hear babies crying faintly in the distance and the strident-voiced mothers’ commands. Even out on the lake fishing you could not escape babies crying faintly and strident-voiced mothers trying to command a good time. They came and went in boats all around you. He preferred the big woods. In the big woods there never seemed to be garbage, and he felt safer out in the woods than he did in the towns. The bears and the deer and the cats seemed so placid and calm, after people, and who would ever want to drop an atom bomb on just woods?

This was a town camouflaged to resemble a woods, complete with all modern conveniences such as flush toilets and trash baskets and fountains. The tents of the traveling campers were as closely packed as the bungalows in a residence section of Vincennes or over at home, so that the campers had practically all of the discomforts of living outdoors, and almost none of the benefits, and all of them in the eyes looked soul-hungry. That look in the eyes bothered him, and he worried whether Norma would like it after all.

But Norma liked it a lot when she came up the first evening. She loved the little patch of woods hemmed in by the fields, He was glad because he knew then if she could only see the big woods she would like them too, and he described them to her—the island of high ground like a ship in the gray sea of buckbush and leatherleaf that stretched off to the wooden ridges, the great tall sweet-smelling spruces like a grove of ships’ masts in the flesh that he camped under where there had once been a pole-shanty deer camp.

As he talked, she tinkered with the kerosene stove and made up the beds with sheets and hung up some curtains she’d bought and got him to take her fishing.

“Oh, it is wonderful, Van,” she said in the boat. She looked off across at the trees that echoed themselves upside down in the water and her face seemed to bloom, open up. “And I wouldn’t have come, if you hadnt insisted. Thanks, Van, for insisting,” she bloomed lambently.

“Wait till you see the real woods,” said Sylvanus.

“Lets make a pact,” she smiled brimmingly, “to do something like this once every year after we’re married. Just get out and go and get away from it all. Getting married doesnt mean people have to stop having adventures. What shall I cook you for supper? I feel like cooking. I brought something along to take the place of those old beans.”

“You wait,” he said. “You’ll see. We’ll live like this
all
the time after we’re married, only better. And not just two weeks out of the year to be free. We’ll be free
all
the time. Life should be
all
adventure. Not romance, but adventure.”

Norma pulled her line up and flipped it back in and the bobber danced drunkenly, repeatedly shattering the mirror as it re-formed. “But it has to be serious too, Van,” she smiled. “Dont forget that. Life cant be all play.”

“Play!” he said. “Play?” He had started to say something. He couldnt remember it. “Say,” he said. “Listen, you’re not still planning on me going into your father’s business, are you?”

She pulled her line in again and looked at the bait. The bait was all right. She threw it back out. “I want you to do what you want to do, Van,” she smiled. “Thats all I want.”

It was almost dark when they got in to shore and Sylvanus Merrick, adventurer, half-hitched the boat on the arm of the stump and helped his mate up the steep part of the path. She had green corn all ready to put on and the chicken she had brought up to fry and the salad, already made in the icebox. She was efficient, and an excellent cook, and it was fine food.