Some Luck (35 page)

The dentist came out as soon as he saw them, and they told him what had happened to Lawrence. Hildy said, “I can’t understand it. How—”

“Massive infection. That kind of pain he had was a symptom of massive infection. I think I’ll call the fellow who operated.…”

And so it went, all the discussions of every little thing. Not even
Eunice knew the truth, Frank thought, the truth of how Lawrence had lain there in that room, the truth that had nothing to do with what the doctor did or the nature of the infection. The truth would have been in that face that Frank was so familiar with—the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the expressions that passed over that face as life gave way to death. Everyone had missed that, that was the betrayal. It was okay to live or die, Frank thought (there was Rolf, for whom it was okay to die), but it was not okay that no one was there to see the passing.

Everything that others found comforting—fond memories of the dead, weeping, analyzing the last doomed decisions, praying, keeping silent, giving comfort, receiving comfort—Frank found pointless and enraging. The hearse drove the corpse away, Eunice went to Shenandoah for the funeral, someone was hired to take the car, Hildy wrote him every day from Decorah. Once he got back to the farm, Frank said nothing to Mama or Papa about the death, and when Eloise asked him how his friend Lawrence was, all he said was “Dead.” Which shocked her. But he walked away before she could ask any questions, and he went back to campus two days after Christmas, saying that he had to get back to work.

1941

I
T WAS HENRY
who asked for a cake for Claire’s second birthday. Rosanna, who didn’t feel especially well, had let the thought slip her mind. When Henry began looking into cupboards and climbing on chairs, she said, “What now?”

“I’m looking for Claire’s cake.”

“I didn’t make Claire a cake. She’s too young for a cake.”

“She likes cake,” said Henry. “She knows it’s her birthday.”

“Goodness me,” exclaimed Rosanna, thinking of all the beating of eggs and the sifting of flour, but then she felt that particular torment she always felt when she was caught overlooking Claire in some way. She said, “Well, you can help me. Lillian can play with her in the front room.”

“Can we have chocolate?”

“We have no chocolate. But angel food is much healthier, especially for a little girl.”

Henry scowled for the barest second, until Rosanna said, “You can separate the eggs.” They had plenty of eggs, and separating twelve of them would keep Henry well occupied. They had cream for whipping as icing, too, and there was white sugar left over from Christmas baking—thank Heaven for that. “Go tell Lillian.” Henry ran through the door to the dining room, calling “Lil! Lil!” and Rosanna found the tube pan. The range was hot—hot enough to
warm the kitchen, as always in January—so she had nothing to complain of.

But Claire was Walter’s child, and it was true, as much as she tried to hide it, that her own services for Claire were tinted more with obligation than with adoration. What she told herself was not that she did not like Claire—Claire was a very good child. It was that adoration had not paid off—look at Frankie. And as soon as she looked at Frankie, she wondered what motherhood was for. Everyone said you could not ask for a better son than Frank—successful, personable, and so handsome. Even Walter was satisfied with him, at last. But Rosanna knew better. Frank didn’t care a fig about any of them, not even her, his adoring mother. But did every child have to be a loving child? When they were your brothers and sisters, you accepted without hesitation that they had reservations about your parents. In fact, in her own very private opinion, her brother Rolf had not had enough reservations about their parents—her father told him what to do all day, and her mother told him how to do it—and look what happened. Rosanna had been more independent, at least more than Rolf. And Eloise was practically a renegade. And then there were the three boys (now all grown up—Kurt worked in Mason City, Gus was married to an Irish girl who hated farming, and John worked for her father). Six children, six different degrees of love and respect for her parents, and occasional discussions about exactly in what ways Mary and Otto Vogel deserved what they had gotten.

Henry came back into the kitchen and went over to the sink and washed his hands. He was good about that, and about doing all kinds of things that Frank and Joe had never cared about, like taking his supper plate to the sink and, for goodness’ sake, changing his underwear. Henry did what Lillian did, and Lillian was perfect. But Henry did not look into his mama’s eyes and adore her. Rosanna set a bowl on the table in front of him, a bowl with a thin rim, and next to that she set two smaller bowls, and the egg beater. He looked up at her eagerly. She said, “Okay, Henry. Now, remember—what should you remember?”

“Crack them good, so the shell breaks rather than crumples.”

“Right.”

“Then put the white first in this small white bowl, and then, if it’s clean, pour it into the big bowl.”

“Okay, get started.”

While he was cracking the eggs in his direct but careful way (no wonder he had learned to sew—his hands were amazingly adept; Minnie always complimented his penmanship, too; maybe Henry was the genius she was looking for?), she buttered and floured the tube pan and looked for the old 7 Up bottle that she hung the pan on to cool after it came out of the oven. She said, “What sort of jam do you want to ice it with?”

“Strawberry!” said Henry.

“Claire’s favorite,” said Rosanna.

“I love Claire,” said Henry. Rosanna did not ask why, but she thought of it.

IT TURNED OUT
that Eunice was in his English class. Frank saw her across the room the first day, but he came in late and was sitting beside the door—she was in the front row and didn’t see him. The professor, a very old man, mumbled on and on about Alexander Pope and a poem Frank hadn’t read yet called “The Rape of the Lock.” Frank couldn’t hear him very well, because the pane of the window next to his seat was rattling in the west wind. It was six weeks since Lawrence’s death. Eunice looked as if nothing at all had happened—she was wearing the same green sweater she’d had on the day they drove him to the hospital. As he sat there, Frank felt absolute hatred for Eunice begin to soak through him. And hatred for Lawrence, too, that he’d taken up with this cold fish, this self-important bitch whose body temperature was 88.6 rather than 98.6. Frank dragged his gaze away from Eunice, across the front of the room, the podium, the blackboard, the backs of the heads of the other students, and looked out the window. It was snowing, but not blizzarding—the path across the campus in front of the building had a white dust on it. Hildy and her brother, who was a freshman, had an avid love of snow, and of skiing—any kind of skiing. The smallest hill was fun for them, and the fact that Birger Ruud, of Norway, had won the gold in ski jumping at the ’36 Winter Olympics was a matter of personal pride. Hildy’s brother, Sven, thought ski jumping was the ultimate sport, way more important than baseball, for instance. It was windy out there—first he saw someone slip and sit down on the pavement, a
professor-looking type, then he saw a girl’s scarf blow right off her head, and though the girl grabbed for it, it blew away.

Toward the end of the class, Eunice happened to look around, yawning, and to see him. She didn’t smile, but she did keep looking. After a moment, she lifted her fingers in a wave.

She was first to the door, but she waited for him, and he couldn’t avoid her. Without even greeting him, she murmured, “I came by your room, but you were at work.”

“Yeah,” said Frank.

“I want to give you something.”

“What?”

“Some photos Lawrence took. There are about ten of them. You and him over where your tent is. Dead animal skins in the background. He’s in four of them with you. You want them?”

“You know my address. Mail them.”

“I can bring them to class Wednesday.”

They walked down the hallway, then down the stairs and out the big front door. She turned left, and marched away without saying anything more.

It was lunchtime, so he was going to meet Hildy at the Union. She was standing beside the wall that commemorated the dead from the Great War, and as she turned toward him, he said, “Lot more names coming to this wall.”

She said, “Yeah, it’s terrible in Norway.” But she said
“ja,”
which struck him as funny. “The ones who can’t run away are eating their shoes.” He glanced at her. She looked pained, not joking. She pulled his arm tight around herself and leaned into him. They went up the stairs and into the dining hall.

“I saw Eunice.”

“Oh, poor Eunice.”

“I don’t think she cares.”

“Of course she cares. She’s heartbroken. They were going to get married.”

“She says.”

“Well, they hadn’t bought the ring yet.” She turned her eyes toward him and then away. Her eyes were always such a surprise. “But they’d looked at them.”

“He would have told me.”

“Maybe he thought it was private.”

“Maybe she thought she’d caught him.”

“I don’t know why you hate her. She’s nice.”

“For a buck,” said Frank.

Hildy stared at him. “I know you’re putting that on. I know you don’t mean that.”

He took her hand and squeezed it, then said, “But I do.”

“Oh, Frankie darling. You don’t mean half the things you say. You’re a softie in the middle.”

He raised an eyebrow. Just then, some of Hildy’s friends headed their way. He knew they thought he was a little scary but interesting, an A student, mysterious. Not one of them knew that his father was a farmer from Denby, forty miles away. He thought that was the funny part.

LILLIAN AND JANE HAD
a fight. In eight and a half years of school, they had never had a fight, so Lillian was floored, not only at Jane for saying, “You think Phil is a goof; well, he’s not, and I’m tired of you being such a snob!” but also at herself for saying, “Open your eyes, Jane, he is a goof!” And he was, but goofy guys were everywhere, and what did Lillian care if one of them had attached himself to Jane? The top of his head came up to Jane’s nose, and he was always laughing, ha-huh-ha-huh, and if he ever had a handkerchief, Lillian would be thunderstruck. Still, he was nice enough, she didn’t dislike him, and he was in three of her classes. But Jane stood by the flagpole outside of the school when all the kids were waiting for the hack and shouted at her, “Stop being such a snob! Stop being such a snob!” And when Jane burst into tears, Lillian actually looked around to see who she was yelling at, and she saw the other kids looking at her.

The next day was the worst day of her life. It started at breakfast, when she had Claire on her lap, and Claire gagged up some sausage and it landed on her white blouse, which she had pressed the night before; then she argued with Mama about whether you could still see the spot, and flounced up to her room to change, but there was nothing that went with that skirt, so she had to put on an outfit she had already worn that week. While she was dressing, she saw the hack pass outside the window, and so she had to run to catch it, all the
way past Minnie and Lois’s house, so she was out of breath and her hair was a mess by the time she was sitting in her seat. Lillian knew that she was a perfectionist, and that that was a bad thing, but sitting there, and then after she got down and went into school, she could not stop thinking about the wrong things—her outfit and her hair, and her feeling that she was already late to everything for the rest of the day. One look at Jane, in math class, sitting with Betty Halladay, told her that Jane was still furious with her; both she and Betty stared at Lillian for a long time before turning their gaze away.

It did seem as though no one at all spoke to her all morning, and then, when her geography test came back, she saw that she had missed almost every state capital—eight right and forty wrong—not merely an F. When she looked more closely, she saw that she had misread the pattern of the answers, and filled in the wrong circles—if she had been paying attention, she would have gotten three wrong and forty-five right (and who knew anything about Olympia, Salem, and Carson City, anyway?). She had even gotten the capital of Iowa wrong—she had marked it as Topeka. The paper had “See me” written along the top. For lunch, there was liver. She hated liver, and it didn’t help that everyone seemed to hate liver, and two of the boys in her class started throwing all the liver on the floor of the cafeteria, until some teachers ran over and gave everyone detention.

After lunch, she was so hungry that she fainted in English class and fell out of her desk chair, and so she ended up being walked to the nurse’s office by Mary Ann Hunsaker, who held her elbow in a tight grip “in case you fall down.” The nurse took her temperature, which was normal, and felt her head, and told her that if she felt sick again she should put her head between her knees, which Lillian could not imagine doing in front of the other kids. And still Jane did not look at her or talk to her in their last class of the day, which was Latin, irregular verbs. When she got on the hack to go home, she saw Jane and Betty across the lawn in front of the high school. They were right next to one another, their heads bowed, and they were laughing. The hack was cold, too—they drove straight into a bitter wind all the way home.