Keeper of Dreams (72 page)

“You don’t have to try for summer,” said Rainie. “You just have to have the guy come and service the air conditioner.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said, looking appalled.

“Oh, aren’t ghosts allowed to tease old eccentrics?”

“I didn’t name him for just any old summer, you know. I named him for one summer in particular. The summer of 1928, to be exact, the perfect summer. Twelve years old. Living in Grandpa’s and Grandma’s boardinghouse with my brother Tom. I knew it was perfect even at the time, not just thinking back on it. That summer was the place where God lived, the place where he filled my heart with love, the moment, the long exquisite twelve-week moment when I discovered that I was alive and that I liked it. The next summer Grandpa was dead, and the next year the Depression was under way and I had to work all summer to help put food on the table. I wasn’t a kid anymore after summer 1928.”

“But you were still alive,” Rainie said.

“Not really,” said Grandpa. “I
remembered
being alive, but I was coasting. Summer of ’28 was like I had me a bike at the top of Culligan Hill and from up there I could see so far—I could see
past
the edge of every horizon. All so beautiful, spread out in front of me like Grandma’s supper table, strange-looking and sweet-smelling and bound to be delicious. And so I got on the bike and I pushed off and never had to touch the pedals at all, I just coasted and coasted and coasted.”

“Still coasting?” asked Rainie. “Never got to the supper table?”

“When you get down there and see things close, it isn’t a supper table anymore, Rainie. It turns out to be the kitchen, and you aren’t there to eat, you’re there to fix the meal for other people. Grandma’s kitchen was the strangest place. Nothing was anywhere that made sense. Sugar in every place except the canister marked sugar. Onions out on the counter and the knives never put away and the spices wherever Grandma last set them down. Chaos. But oh, Rainie, that old lady could cook. She had miracles in her fingers.”

“What about you? Could you cook?”

He looked at her blankly.

“When you stopped coasting and found out that life was a kitchen.”

“Oh.” He remembered the stream of the conversation. “No,” he said, chuckling. “No ma’am, I was no chef. But I didn’t have to do it alone.
Didn’t get married till I got back from the war, twenty-nine years old in 1945, I still got the mud of Italy under my fingernails and believe me, I’ve scrubbed them plenty, but there was my Marjory, and she gave me three children and the second one was a boy and I named him Douglas after myself and then I named him for the most perfect thing I ever knew, I named him for a dream . . .”

“For a ghost,” said Rainie.

He looked at her so sadly. “For the opposite of a ghost, you poor child.”

Douglas opened the parlor door and leaned out into the night. “Aren’t you two smart enough to come in out of the cold?”

“One of us is,” said Grandpa, but he didn’t move.

“We’re starting up,” said Douglas, “and it’s still your turn, Ida.”

“Coming,” said Rainie, getting up.

Douglas slipped back inside.

She helped Grandpa Spaulding out of the swing. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, patting her back as she led the way to the door. “I like you. You’re really something.”

“Mmm,” said Rainie.

“And if I can feel that way about you when you’re pretending to be something you’re not, think how much I’d like you if you actually told the truth about something.”

She came through the door blushing, with anger and with embarrassment and with that thrill of fear—was she found out? Did Grandpa Spaulding somehow know who she really was?

Maybe he did. Without knowing the name Rainie Pinyon, maybe he knew exactly who she was anyway.

“Whose turn is it?” asked Tommy.

“Ida’s,” somebody said.

“What is she, an emu?”

“No, human. Look, she’s a human.”

“How did she get so far without us noticing?”

“Not to worry!” cried Douglas Summer Spaulding. He raised a red-lettered card over his head. “For the good of the whole—Release the Pigs!”

The others gave a rousing cheer.

“Give me my good karma,” said Douglas. Then he grinned sheepishly in Rainie’s face. “You have only five life-pennies and there are seven piglets and the pigpath is only three dots long, so I sincerely hope with all my heart that your karmic balance is of a sort to send you to heaven, because, dear lady, the porkers from purgatory are going to eat your shorts.”

“Heaven?” said Rainie. “Not likely.”

But she popped every one of the pigs before they got to her. It was like she couldn’t roll anything but ones and twos.

“Grandpa’s right,” said Tommy. “She really
is
a ghost! The pigs went right through her!”

Then she rolled eighteen, three sixes, and it was enough to win.

“Supreme god!” Tommy cried. “She has effed the ineffable!”

“What’s her karmic balance?”

She flipped over the karma cards. Three evils and one good, but the good was a ten and the evils were all low numbers and they balanced exactly.

“Zero counts as good,” said Douglas. “How could anyone have supposed otherwise? So I bet I come in second with a balance of nine on the good side.”

They all tallied and Grandpa finished last, his karmic balance a negative fifty.

“That’s the most evil I ever saw in all the years we’ve been feeding the baby,” said Tommy. He switched to a Midwestern white man’s version of black dialect. “Grandpa, you bad.”

Grandpa caught Rainie’s eye and winked. “It’s the truth.”

They all stayed around and helped finish off the refreshments and clean up from dinner, talking and laughing. Tom was the first to go. “If you’re coming with me, Ida, the time is now.”

“Already?” She shouldn’t have said that, but she really did hate to go. It was the best night she’d had in months. Years.

“Sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got to scrape some moles off people’s faces first thing tomorrow, and I have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or I accidentally take off noses and ears and people get so
testy
with me when I do that.”

“That’s fine, I really don’t mind going.”

“No, you go on ahead, Tom,” said Douglas. “Somebody else can take her home.”

“I can,” said Raymond.

“Me too,” said Jack. “Right on my way.”

They all knew where she was living, of course. It made her smile. Whether I knew them or not, they cared enough about me to notice where I lived. Smalltown nosiness could be ugly if you looked at it one way, but kind of sweet and comforting if you looked at it another way entirely.

After a while she drifted away from the conversation in the kitchen and began wandering a little in the house. It was a bad habit of hers—her mother used to yell at her about it when she was a little kid.
Don’t
go wandering around in strangers’ houses. But curiosity always got the better of her. She drifted into the living room. No TV, lots of books. Fiction, biography, history, science—so that’s what accountants read. I never would have guessed.

And then up the stairs, just to see what was there. Not meaning to pry. Just wanting to
know
.

Standing in the upstairs hall, in the near darkness, she could hear the children breathing. Which room is which, she wondered. The bathroom had the nightlight in it; she could see that the first two rooms belonged to the kids, one on the right, one on the left. The other two rooms had to be the one Douglas shared with his absent wife, and Grandpa’s. A houseful. The extended family. Three generations present under one roof. This is the American home that everyone dreams of and nobody has. Dad goes off to work, Mom stays home, Grandpa lives right with you, there’s a white picket fence and probably a dog in a nice little doghouse in the back yard. Nobody lives like this, except those who really work at it, those who know what life is supposed to be like and are determined to live that way.

Lord knows Mom and Dad weren’t like this. Fighting all the time, clawing at each other to get their own way. And who’s to say that Douglas and Jaynanne aren’t like that, too? I haven’t seen them together, I don’t know what they’re like.

But she did know. From the way the kids were with their father. That doesn’t come out of a home torn apart with power struggles, with mutual fear and loathing.

She walked down the hall—just to see—and opened the last two doors. The one on the right had to be Grandpa’s room, and she closed the door immediately. The one on the left had the big bed. Douglas’s room.

She would have closed the door and gone downstairs at once, except that in the faint light from the bathroom nightlight she caught a glimpse of bright reflection from an old familiar shape, and suddenly she was filled with a longing that was so familiar, so right, that she couldn’t resist it, not even for a moment. She snapped on the light and yes, it was what she had thought, a guitar, leaning against the wall beside the dresser that was obviously his—cluttered on top, no knickknacks.

Pulling the door almost closed behind her, she walked to the guitar and picked it up. Not a particularly good make, but not a bad one. And the strings were steel, not that wimpy nylon, and when she strummed them softly they were perfectly in tune. He has played this guitar today, she thought. And now my hands are holding something that his hands have held. I don’t share the having of children with him, I don’t share this sweet impossible house with him, but he plays this instrument and I can do that, too.

She didn’t mean to play, but she couldn’t help herself. It had been so long since she had even wanted to touch a musical instrument that, now that the hunger had returned to her, she had no will to resist it. Why should she? It was music that defined who she was in this world. It was music that gave her fame and fortune. It was music that was her only comfort when people let her down, which was always, always.

She played those old mournful melodies, the plucked-out ones, not the strumming tunes, not the dancey, frolicking ones. She played softly, gently, and hummed along, no words, no words . . . words would come later, after the music, after the mood. She remembered the hot African wind coming across the Mediterranean and drying her after a late-night swim on a beach in Mallorca. She remembered the lover she had had then, the one who yelled at her when he was drunk but who made love in the morning like no man had ever made love to her before, gluttonously, gorgeously, filling her like the sun coming up over the sea. Where was he now? Old. He’d be in his sixties now. He might be dead now. I didn’t have his baby, either, but he didn’t want one. He was a sunrise man, he was always gone by noon.

Tossing and turning, that’s what sleep was like in Mallorca. Sticky and sweaty and never more than a couple of hours at a time. In the darkness you get up and stand on the veranda and let the sea breeze dry the sweat off you until you could go back inside and lie down again. And there he’d be, asleep, yes, but even though you were facing away from him you knew he’d reach out to you in his sleep, he’d hold you and press against you and his sweat would be clammy on your cold body, and his arm would arch over you and his hand would reach around you and cup your breast, and he’d start moving against you, and through it all he’d never even wake up. It was second nature to him. He could do it in his sleep.

What did Mallorca have to do with Harmony, Illinois? Why were tunes of hot Spanish nights coming out of this guitar here in the cold of December, with Christmas coming on and the little dying firs and pines standing up in the tree lots? It was the dream of love, that’s what it was, the dream but not the memory of love because in the long run it never turned out to be real. In the long run she always woke up from love and felt it slip away the way dreams slip away in the morning, retreating all the faster the harder you try to remember them. It was always a mirage, but when she got thirsty for it the way she was now, it would come back, that dream, and make her warm again, make her sweat with the sweetness of it.

Maybe there was a noise. Maybe just the movement at the door. She looked up, and there were young Dougie and Rose, both of them awake, their faces sleepy but their eyes bright.

“I’m sorry,” said Rainie, immediately setting the guitar aside.

“That’s Dad’s guitar,” said Rose.

“You’re good,” said Dougie. “I wish I could play like that.”

“I wish
Dad
could play like that,” said Rose, giggling.

“I shouldn’t be in here.”

“What was that song?” asked Dougie. “I think I’ve heard it before.”

“I don’t think so,” said Rainie. “I was making it up as I went along.”

“It sounded like one of Dad’s records.”

“Well, I guess I’m not very original-sounding,” said Rainie. She felt unbelievably awkward. She didn’t belong in this room. It wasn’t her room. But there they were in the doorway, not seeming to be angry at all.

“Can’t you play some more?” said Dougie.

“You need your sleep,” said Rainie. “I shouldn’t have wakened you.”

“But we’re already awake,” said Rose. “And we don’t have school tomorrow, it’s Saturday.”

“No, no,” said Rainie. “I have to get home.” She brushed apologetically past them and hurried down the stairs.