The Search for Joyful (8 page)

 
THE DRIVE-IN MOVIE was in the country, and the gas coupons must have cost a bundle.

“It's probably our last chance. The rumor is that they're going to black out the city,” Crazy Dancer said.

I'd heard that too and was glad they'd held off. I'd never been to a drive-in and was curious. There were dozens of spaces. You drove into one, dropped your money into a slot, and were hooked up to the picture. Instantly the sound of a love scene flooded the car.

“Haven't you ever been before?” he asked.

“No. It's strange—the sound right in the car with you. You feel as though you're part of the movie.”

“Actually”—he hesitated briefly—“the movie isn't that important.”

“It isn't?”

Crazy Dancer draped an arm casually over the back of the upholstered seat, and gradually lowered it to my shoulders.

I moved nearer the door. His other hand dropped to my thigh.

“What are you doing?” I said, pushing him away.

“What everybody in all the cars are doing.” He reared back and gave me a penetrating glance. “Don't tell me you don't know what drive-ins are all about?”

I looked wildly around at the other cars. No one was watching the movie.

“Stop right there, Crazy Dancer. Because if you don't, I'm going to walk home.”

“All I had in mind,” he protested, “was, you know, a little making out. You don't mind a kiss, do you?”

“It depends,” I said tentatively.

“One like this maybe. . . .” And he pressed me so close that I felt the door handle in the middle of my back.

I sat straight up. “If it comes to this kind of holding and this kind of kissing . . . it's not going to be in a borrowed car. And don't tell me you're being shipped out and before the week's over you'll be at the bottom of the ocean floor.”

Crazy Dancer regarded me with grave eyes, but his mouth was laughing. “How well you make my argument for me.”

I asked, suddenly frightened for him, “Is it true?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

We sat and looked at each other, while lovers vowed vows in our ears. I felt ridiculous sitting there, while all around us . . .

“I'll take you back,” he said, and put the car in gear.

When we arrived at the hospital parking lot, he didn't open the door, but continued to sit there. “If you didn't make out with me . . . ,” he said slowly, reasoning it through, “does that mean you don't make out with anyone?”

“I feel like an idiot,” I said. “Any other girl would have known when you suggested a drive-in.”

He was still unraveling a skein of thought. “Would you call what we had a disagreement or a fight? With a fight you can kiss and make up,” and he shot me a glance.

“A disagreement,” I said emphatically. He looked so disappointed that I reached over and gave him an emphatic kiss. Then, jumping out, ran for the nurses' entrance.

F
our

THAT NIGHT AS I lay on coarse hospital sheets rinsed in disinfectant, I wondered at myself. I had said one thing and then turned around and undid it in a moment. Why had I kissed him? And what would he remember, the lecture I'd given him or the kiss?

I knew, of course, and hugged myself in the dark as I listened to the litany Mandy insisted on most nights. I didn't mind her going on about Robert Whitaker because I'd found out quite by accident that she'd had the chance to room with someone else but elected to stay with me. That obligated me to hear more examples of her young intern's sterling character. As she enumerated his peerless attributes, I thought—Crazy Dancer has none of those. In the first place he hasn't a proper kind of name. Robert Harley Whitaker II, now with that name one could be a banker, a trial lawyer, the head of a corporation, an admiral in the navy, or the first-rate surgeon he would become. Someone named Crazy Dancer couldn't aspire to any of those positions.

“Robert's such a gentleman,” Mandy went on.

I laughed inwardly at the thought of Crazy Dancer being a gentleman.

“And he dances divinely. . . .”

Ah, here we were on common ground. Or were we? I visualized Robert Whitaker with Mandy on his arm doing a box-step fox trot; I could see his black polished patent leather shoes treading lightly.

What did Crazy Dancer wear when he danced? Probably he painted his body and wore a corn-husk mask and bells on his ankles and moccasins scuffing the earth and maybe a breech-clout. This time I laughed out loud.

“What are you laughing at?”

I could see Mandy was offended so I changed the subject.

 
ANOTHER NIGHT LATER in the week, with our window wide open and spring in the air, Mandy whispered from her cot to mine. Robert had three tickets for Delormier Stadium. They were hard to come by and expensive. So when she urged me to go with them I was tempted. I figured out I would have to miss three Saturday movies to see a game. But I was pretty sure Crazy Dancer would show up, so I said no. It crossed my mind once or twice to wonder how Robert was able to afford such things. Supposedly he was a poor boy from a poor family. But somehow he seemed always to have money.

Toward the end of the week we had another bed-to-bed talk. Mandy had gotten to know a lot about Montreal. Robert was alert for any local color and passed it on to her. There was a section in the French quarter that no respectable girl would venture into. Certain hotels rented rooms for twenty minutes at a time all through the night. The town, according to Robert, was wide open—sports betting, lottery tickets, chemin d'fer, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, craps, and barbotte. While even the war failed to put an end to drug smuggling. But the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul said their novenas, sang their prayers, and kept sin away. They attempted to do the same with the wounded and dying—but they kept coming.

I had expected to hear from that crazy Indian, Crazy Dancer. I hadn't. Mandy too was without a date for Saturday night, as Robert had been preempted by Dr. Finch for an evening at his home. “To meet his ugly daughter.” Mandy made a face and mounted a campaign to get me to go with her to the canteen that was set up in a high school gym. “It's not the Victoria Rifles' Ball or the debutantes' coming out or even the St. Andrew's Annual, but for heaven's sake, Kathy, it's all there is, and I don't want to go alone.”

I agreed, mainly to get some sleep. Next day I discovered she wouldn't be alone, Ruth was going too. Mandy lent me a flowered scarf to dress up my outfit, and we started off.

Harsh unhooded lights revealed an upright piano, but no visible player. A handful of servicemen hung around a couple of card tables. They held paper plates with potato chips and not much else. A Crosby record was wobbling on the phonograph.

We stood uncertainly in a bunch. Two sailors homed in on Mandy. I didn't blame them. Mandy was the girl next door, or at least what they wishfully remembered the girl next door to be.

Ruth, on the other hand, was self-conscious about her braces and the cheap silver fillings, which she was replacing out of her meager army pay. Her main worry was that Mr. Right would come along before she was finished. Each Saturday morning she spent at the dentist, returning with all sorts of dental horror stories including the one her dentist told on himself. The reason he had chosen that particular profession was because as a kid his wisdom teeth came in at an angle and stuck right through his cheek.

Ruth had joined us with a great deal of perturbation, afraid she would be asked to dance and afraid she wouldn't. She'd be asked, was my guess, because if she neither laughed, smiled, or spoke she was quite attractive.

Tonight, hopefully, she'd find something other than teeth to talk about.

I put my arm through hers. “Let's get some potato chips.”

We started for the tables, but another sailor approached and, with a grin and a few mumbled words, invited Ruth to dance. One glance of panic in my direction and she was whirled away. I held to my course—at least I was going to have something to eat. This time it was a soldier, Canadian army, who came up to me. “There's beer in that wash bucket,” he said.

I hadn't noticed the galvanized pail sitting under one of the tables. “No, thank you.” I wasn't sure whether he was offering it to me or not.

“Want to dance?”

“All right.”

It was a pretext he didn't bother to make too convincing. He held me too close and talked incessantly. I was glad the record was almost over.

“My name's Ed.”

“Mine's . . . uh . . . Trisha.” I don't know why that name came to mind. I guess the Whites Only sign still rankled.

“Look, Trisha, we've got to go someplace, get out of here.”

No, I wasn't the girl next door, I was the girl you took to the nearest drive-in.

“I'm . . . meeting someone.” I gulped and looked around for Mandy. I could see she was having a good time, and I didn't want to stand there explaining, so, mumbling that I was going to the restroom, I slipped out. The strains of the newest song on the Hit Parade followed me: “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.”

The next day I was in the middle of a nightmare. That same soldier showed up, the one I'd danced with. I couldn't believe it. I heard him at the front desk asking for Trisha.

There was nothing for it but to intercept him. I plastered a stern look on my face and approached.

The look was wasted. “Trisha!” he bellowed. “I'm so damned glad to see you. What happened last night? Had a devil of a time finding you. I asked all over.”

“Did it ever occur to you I didn't want to be found?” I made it as frosty as I could, and anyone else would have backed off. But this guy was impervious to nuances, subtleties, and, I suspected, a hammer over the head. Sister Mary Margaret, trying to be helpful, asked if we cared to step into a private room.

“No,” I said as he said, “Yes.”

At this moment Trisha herself appeared. “I heard someone was asking for me?” This was addressed to me, as she had already taken Ed's measure. His name had come back to me, and I attempted an introduction, but Trisha was sure the soldier was my revenge, and poor Ed was totally confused by two Trishas. I threw up my hands and left.

I heard later through the grapevine that they had straightened things out to their mutual satisfaction, and ended by going out together. Maybe I did have my revenge.

 
I WAS MOVED to the trauma center. Duty there drained the life out of you. I saw terrible things, great ragged holes opening in layers, receding deep into flesh.

Sister Egg saved me. Egg was a mother hen to us girls. She caught me in the hall. A severe look lay over her normally good-natured expression. In a clipped, businesslike manner she said, “Kathy, no questions. You are to come with me.”

Good heavens, what now? I tried to think which rule I had inadvertently broken as she bustled me out of the building.

“No need to be so somber, Kathy.” She burst into smiles. “We are embarked on an expedition to save the caterpillars.”

“To save the caterpillars?” I echoed, thinking I hadn't heard correctly.

“Yes, in the park, right across from the elementary school. I fill in teaching the fifth grade part time and I learned to my dismay that the science class is coming tomorrow to collect caterpillars. They intend to chloroform them, stick pins through them, mount them—need I say more? I decided to get to the park first and hide them. And I thought . . . well, I chose you as my coconspirator because I know you have a kind heart.”

I laughed until tears came into my eyes. This roly-poly little nun and I made quite a team.

“Tell me, Kathy, am I a good judge of character?”

“The best,” I assured her. And when Sister Eglantine, with a guilty look around, got down on all fours, I did the same. The hunt was conducted on hands and knees. We investigated grass blades, wildflowers, small branch stems, leafy shrubs. I made the first find, a lively black fuzzy one journeying along a sunflower stalk. Into Sister's basket it went. Sister found the second and third. It was hard to see the green ones, but I saved several, millipedes I think they were, with so many feet you couldn't count them. It was fun to outwit fifth grade science. It was May and the sun slanted in broad stripes along the grassy floor and, when I squinted, hung in prisms of color.

I needed that day with Sister.

 
THE NAVAL WAR had turned into a debacle. Wolf packs stalked our shipping in the North Atlantic, mostly sloops, World War I destroyers, carriers with obsolete aircraft, and, it was whispered, insufficiently trained crews. The way it worked, apparently, was that when a U-boat spotted a convoy, it would radio Brest or another French port the Germans had taken over, and word would go out to all the subs in the area. While the original wolf tracked the victims, the rest of the pack converged at high speed, often being refueled and resupplied on the high seas. The packs no longer limited themselves to cutting out stragglers or picking off isolated vessels. They engaged the cruisers and gave battle to the entire convoy.

I read the lists of missing and dead posted in the window outside City Hall and listened when I could to the CBC shortwave in the lounge. It broadcast not only from London but the war fronts. From these sources it was apparent that the losses were dreadful.

Human remnants of these engagements wound up on our wards. To cheer myself I concentrated on the cartoons in the Sunday supplement: a Mountie astride a sinking U-boat, another U-boat about to be devoured by a grizzly bear, and Adolf Hitler with a startled look running from a wild-eyed moose, who had just bitten out the seat of his pants.