Odd Jobs (6 page)

Past the corner, the tracks, which had hogged the center of Alton Avenue all through town, now moved to one side, so the trolley car skimmed and swayed along in the shade of old buttonwood trees, on the edge of front yards where men in suspenders were trimming their hedges and fat women in cotton dresses were bending to their flowerbeds. The last brick rows of Wenrich’s Corner were left behind, and a ragged area of open fields and scattered stone farmhouses was traversed, with relatively few stops. The tracks seemed to give the car a livelier ride; the shiny straw seats and the stiff porcelain hand-loops glittered in the shuttling, slanting sunlight, and the air that rushed in through the window grates of crimped black wire had the smell of moist hay. Farnham was always thrilled by a spot where the trolley car, on Smokeville’s outskirts, leaned into a long curve and deftly rattled across a spindly wooden trestle bridge at a sudden scary height above a stagnant brook; from its glaring black surface a few white ducks would thrash up in alarm. These ducks would resettle while still in sight, making concentric circles on the water. The wire grate was always dirty, and dust came off in squares on Farnham’s face as he pressed to see.

An isolated row of asbestos-shingled houses, gaunter and meaner somehow than those in Wenrich’s Corner, would fling into view, and then a long brick building that people said was a hat factory, and more drab houses, while the irritable conductor moved along the aisle slamming seat backs into the other position. Smokeville was the end of the line, where the cars reversed direction. Farnham and his partner would hoist up their packets of circulars and step into the town; the boys were sent out in pairs because two could work both sides of a street and one could watch that the other didn’t dump his leaflets down the sewer. This had happened more than once, it was said, though Farnham could scarcely believe such evil existed in the world. Smokeville was considered undesirable duty by the movie-circular boys, because of its steep streets and the long cement stairs up to the porches. Yet often, Farnham remembered, he and his companion, when their circulars were at last all gone, would agree to buy candy bars with their trolley dimes and in the resilience of youth walk the three miles back, along the tracks. Milk-white water trickled in the ditches near the hat factory, and the gaps between the ties of the rickety trestle were giddying if you looked down at the white ducks hiding in the reeds.

Three miles the other way from Wenrich’s Corner, along an avenue whose general slope was downward as it passed between tall tight rows
of houses with octagonal cupolas roofed in slates like fish scales, lay Alton, where Farnham’s father worked and his mother shopped. When Farnham reached high-school age, in that era before the century was even half depleted, he and his pals would take the trolley to town just for the nightlife—for the bowling alleys and the packs of strange girls roaming the wide pavements and the big first-run movie theatres, with names like Majestic and Orpheum, where the same show played for weeks at a time and plush curtains lifted in thick crimson festoons to reveal the lightstruck screen. The trolley cars had run all through the war and it seemed they must last forever. But while Farnham was at college they were phased out and replaced by belching, dark-windowed buses, and by the time he was married and living far away, even the old tracks were torn up and buried, buried everywhere but at Wenrich’s Corner itself, where a few yards of track glinted through the asphalt like the spine of a dinosaur drowned in tar, or like a silver version of those curved lines whereby cartoonists indicate swift motion, with a word like “
Zip!
” or “
Zoom!
”

Farnham in his middle age was susceptible to images of trolley cars in old photographs of city streets. To think that Manhattan, and Bangor, and Kansas City were all once webbed with their inflexible, glinting paths! He was moved by glimpses of them in fiction, such as Augie March’s recalling “those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont” or, in
Ulysses
, the onomatopoetic sentence “Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel” or Bellow’s description, in “The Silver Dish,” of “an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer” as it heroically battered north against a blizzard on the Western Avenue line. Glimpses of first wives, in fiction, moved him also: often discarded before the author found his full voice, they figure as shadows in those first, awkwardly tactful and conventional novels; as marginal obstacles to the narrator’s slowly unfolding, obscurely magnificent quest; as tremulous rainbows cast by the prism of his ego, bound at a cloud’s passing to pale and wink out. Yet they return, vividly. In John Barth’s
Sabbatical
, the first wife returns in malevolent triumph as a CIA operative and withers with a few stern words the ingenious hero’s eager foliage of invention and lovableness. And Hemingway’s Hadley, seen so wispily in those early short stories, returns in
A Moveable Feast
to dominate his dying imagination.

In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. First wives grow in power and size, just as the children we have had by them do. They knew you when, and never let that knowledge go. Their very ability to survive the divorce makes them huge, as judges and public monuments are huge. Tall and silent, they turn at the head of the stairs, carrying a basket of first-family laundry, and their face is that of Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring, of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, of all the women who look at us over their shoulders in endless thoughtful farewell.

They were so young. They were daughters. Captured from their still vigorous and menacing parents, carried off trailing ribands and torn threads of family connection, some clasped teddy bears and dance cards with all but the tangos filled in. Some still smelled faintly of their fathers’ shaving lotion. Their bodies were so fresh and smooth, it was hard to make a dent in them. Tomboyish, they stuck out their chins and kept their legs under them; later wives by comparison crumple like wastepaper, and bruise easy as peaches. Of course, a first husband is young too, and perhaps his wallop lacks substance. They looked at us level, our firm-bodied Eves, and demanded, “O.K., show me this apple.”

A quality first wives bestow, of dismissability, turns out to be precious, as the aging world needs us more and more and lets our traces deepen, like initials carved in the expanding bark of a beech tree. We sat light on the world once; the keys to this lightness first wives have taken with them, along with the collected art books so thriftily budgeted for, the lithographs carefully selected at the gallery together, the
objets
nested in the excelsior of remembered lovemaking, the slide projector, the ground-glass screen that unfurled, the card table the projector sat upon, and the happy pink infants cradled in their Kodak Carousels. With a switchy swiftness, in bikinis daring at the time, with narrow tan hands and feet, they move as fledgling mothers through home movies taken at poolside or by the back lawn swings, movies we will never see again, movies they will show their second husbands, who will be polite but bored.

The night of the day when Farnham’s first wife remarried, he had a vivid dream. She was crouched by a wall naked, and he, fully dressed, was trying to extend a measure of protection. There was, out in the center of the street or room, a crowd that her nakedness must confront and pass through, as through a sieve. Farnham was alive simultaneously to the erotic appeal of her nudity and to the social embarrassment of it. She was not quite naked; a thin gold ring glinted on the third finger of one
hand. He conferred urgently with her, pouring down advice from above, from within the armor of his clothes, while still revolving within himself the puzzle of how to get her, so vulnerable and luminous, through that gathering. The problem being insoluble, he awoke, with an erection of metallic adamancy.

Mournfully the palms outside his window rattled. Southern California was soaked in moonlight. The woman asleep beside him was pale and, like a ghost, transparent. Everything was black and white. Only his dream had been in color.

In those far days before suburban shopping malls and inner-city decay, the more enterprising people of Wenrich’s Corner took the trolley car into Alton to shop, to be entertained, to seek refinement. Farnham’s mother enrolled him in a futile series of lessons there—piano, clarinet, and, worst of all, tap dancing. Such metropolitan skills were thought to be a possible way out of the region; the assumption was in the air, like the hazy high humidity, that one would want to get out. But instead of being taught how to fly in white tie and tails across a heavenly sound stage with an effortless clatter of taps, the child was set in a line with others and put through a paramilitary exercise whose refrain was “Shuffle
one
, shuffle
two
, kick, kick, kick.” His mother amused herself in the stores, rarely buying anything, during this hour of torture. When they were reunited, his noon reward and weekly treat was a sandwich—bacon, lettuce, and tomato, cut into quarters, with each triangular fourth held together by a tasselled toothpick—and a pistachio ice-cream soda in a drugstore with a green marble counter that seemed, with its many chrome faucets, the epitome of luxury. It was in such Forties drugstores, redolent of beauty aids, that Hollywood stars were discovered. Farnham was surprised to learn, years later, at about the same time that the trolley cars were replaced by buses, that this drugstore, Alton’s finest, had closed and been replaced by a gloomy outlet that sold name-brand clothes at factory prices.

On the trolley ride home, the car clanged and bucked its way through the dense blocks of Alton’s south side and up over a big bridge whose concrete had the texture of burned coconut cookies. Tough local boys swaggered and hooted from the broad wall of this bridge; unlike Farnham, they would never get out. The ill-tempered motorman pounded the warning bell with the heel of his black shoe, and there was a smell of something, like oily rags burning, that Farnham years later was told
must have been ozone. Cumbersomely the car halted and started, bunching auto traffic behind it, and swung its bulky long body into the double-track turnouts, where one car waited for another, coming in the opposite direction, to pass. The row houses with their turrets and fish-scale slates slid by, mixed with used-car lots and funeral parlors and florist’s greenhouses and depressing brick buildings that manufactured Farnham didn’t know what. He felt sorry for these factories; they looked empty and shabby and hopeless.

The return trip sloped slightly uphill, which made it seem longer and more obstructed. The distance to the stop in Wenrich’s Corner where he and his mother could most conveniently alight was now two miles away, less than fifteen minutes; but minutes and miles can seem infinite to a child, and nausea was creeping up from underneath the grooved and blackened and throbbing floorboards, the ozone mixing with the tastes of bacon and pistachio and the oppressive monotony of shuffle
one
, shuffle
two
.

His mother was watching his face grow paler. She squeezed his hand, so he felt how damp his palm was. “Only seven more stops,” she promised him.

“Seven,” he repeated. The number had no end to it, it had curves and plateaus within it, which doubled and redoubled.

Amid his discomforts was a wish not to spoil this outing for his mother. He felt her life had few pleasures, and a Saturday excursion to Alton was one of them. He was eight, nine. She was, he realized now, herself young. The hand of hers not holding his rested gracefully in her lap, wearing its thin gold wedding ring. It was sad, he thought, the way she never bought anything in the stores. There was a poverty in her life that pained him.

(Years later, Farnham’s first wife was told by a doctor that she suffered from depression. This, too, pained Farnham. They were not poor, and he could not imagine any other reason for depression.)

The trolley car struggled and swayed. Shapeless nameless trees, houses with drawn front curtains, front yards he would never play in crawled past in fitful starts that he timed with held breath, willing the contents of his stomach to stay down. The air on the outside of the window grate seemed a precious clear fluid, the transparent essence of freedom. The things to see inside the car—the sun-faded curved advertisements and the old faces of the other passengers and the pale-green pamphlets the trolley company gave out free from a little tin box behind the motorman’s
head—had all become a kind of poison; if he rested his eyes on them even a second, he grew sicker.

(Years later, the idea very slowly grew upon him that
he
might be the reason for his wife’s depression.)

There was a long wait at a turnout while the motor throbbed like a trapped thing. The woman beside him kept glancing down at the side of his face, and her concern joined the other pressures afflicting him. The worn straw seats repeated and repeated their pattern of tiny, L-shaped shadows in the sunlight that slanted in through the dust; her wedding ring glinted in her lap.

(Yet when he first suggested the possibility of separation her reaction had been fear and tears.)

His trolley-car stomach now was riding high in his chest, and swallowing only made it bob lower for an instant, like a hollow ball in water. His whole skin under his clothes was sweating like his palms.

“Just four more stops,” his mother said brightly. “See—there’s the poorhouse lane.”

Four: the number multiplied within him, enormous, full of twos. The idling motor throbbed. Farnham stared rigidly at the motionless world outside, a kind of paradise that could be attained only through dishonor. Beyond the poorhouse lane, the grassy open acres of the school grounds began, and it was possible to get off here and walk diagonally across them the half-mile to his home. Each trip, each Saturday, the boy vowed not to make his mother get off the trolley car early.