The Maid's Version

  “Caddy for somebody else, can’t you? There’s other rich men golf.”

  “Arthur pays me double what the other cheapskates pay, and tips big fat tips, too.”

  “He’s Arthur to you now, is he? Pshaw! I’m still tellin’ you to keep away from his company from now on, for good.”

  “No.”

  “For good.”

  “No.”

  “You’re my son, and I’m tellin’ you.”

  “Can’t you see I’ve got work to do? Mr. C and me and Masha need to weed all these rows and get it done before dark.”

  “I’m tellin’—”

  “Tell me ’til you’re blue in the face, Mom. I don’t much care.”

  They stayed that way and would until after the war, John Paul not comforted by his mother’s presence, her known obsessions and rages had kept him in such wringing turmoil, and Alma said too often how sorrowful she was that her youngest boy had any truck at all with the man who done for his own aunt Ruby, who loved him so, and all those others who died innocent, too. There were meetings of mother and son and occasional meals, but no ease could be found between them. On every Christmas Day John Paul received Alma’s standard gifts of two pairs of bib overalls and a can of tooth powder to see him through the upcoming year. He might not speak to her for weeks at a time and that distance came to be accepted with relief by both.

  John Paul loved the Cherenkos—Mr. C was the only father figure he ever lived with or learned from and Masha an encouraging presence, long on understanding and seldom cross—and the love was returned. They survived on meager cash and always would but knew how to fend well, and John Paul gave them most of the money he earned. They never asked for money, and if he had none to offer for a week or two or three they didn’t bring the subject up or even hint. The evenings were spent with pots of tea, books, and knitting, Mr. C reading literary classics or ancient history in Russian, Masha knitting something warm for the cold days that were already present or soon enough coming. John Paul would on occasion in these quiet moments catch wind of a po’ boy raid, melons or cobs or squash being snatched from the garden, and the first time he hopped up to run toward the voices and give chase, but was stopped. Mr. C had raised a weathered and large-knuckled hand and said, “Is okay they take not too much, boy. Let them be away and eat—you are never been hungry?”

  After Pearl Harbor was bombed, and as the nation mourned coast to coast and recruitment centers stayed open until midnight to process stampedes of enlistees, both Cherenkos pleaded with him not to rush off to this fresh war and die for some vague and inflamed notions he’d never even examined. Mr. Cherenko had known violence and killing, terror and flight. He’d been a hopeful worker standing in peaceful protest outside the Winter Palace in early January of 1905, and witnessed hundreds of his own slaughtered, shot down in the snow by the army, falling everywhere dead or wounded to be bayoneted by fellow peasants in uniform, but survived that debacle in the blood-dappled snow and saw a few more that went similarly before escaping the country during December of that same year, and now had precious little regard for military actions of any announced purpose no matter how pure or just the rationale sounded to the ear. But John Paul heard no ambiguity in the American bugles and their call to duty, and finally they asked if he’d at least graduate high school first, plenty of chance to then go over somewhere that isn’t home and die for Rockefeller, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan—all wars always about land and gold, boy. All.

  “Not this one.”

  “All.”

  On Graduation Day, they both took to bed after the ceremony to lie in shadows and darkness and didn’t come out, not the first morning or the second, and he made okroshka for them, delivered the bowls bedside without comment, and on the third morning they had breakfast ready when he woke.

  There are snapshots of John Paul taken in China, of himself and other swabbies in various seaport dives and cathouses, a local woman with arms draped over him from behind, one sitting on each knee, and empty beer bottles crowd the tabletop upon which he might rest an elbow, sailor’s hat askew, an agog grin on his dimpled, pleasured face. In some poses he and the women have misplaced the majority of their clothing, and though in every one of them he’d recovered his skivvies before the image was made, some of the women chose not to don a solitary stitch. In a few he is fully uniformed and dangerous looking, standing on a gangplank, wearing a thick web belt and a forty-five pistol in a black holster, twenty-two or -three years old and off to deliver the military mail onshore in Tsing-tao or other raucous and luring ports. World War II was over, but his service was not, and he was married by then but shipped with all human needs accompanying to the other side of the world, and he stashed his wedding ring inside his ditty bag for safekeeping when going ashore. (I had to protect the photographs when Mom caught me studying them at around age fifteen and tried to rip the entire album from my hands to burn in the yard, and she still searches for it with matches in her pocket whenever she visits and thinks I’m asleep.) On ship at night, seven thousand miles from home, John Paul watched forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kaishek blasting artillery at each other in the distant hills, making the night pulse with low crescents of light chased by faded booms. In the months ahead the pulsing crescents came closer, refugees crowded toward the docks in crowds larger than he’d ever seen or would see and more desperate, and eventually he could watch orange tracers flying after sundown, hear small-arms fire crackling amidst heightened pleas from the cornered refugees, and it was time to pull anchor.

  In his six years at sea he saw great vistas and the back rooms of irresistible dumps from Nova Scotia to Hong Kong, had his most miserable hours in the Alaskan Sea, got into a fistfight at the Blue Room in New Orleans with members of Les Brown’s Band of Renown, and encountered scenes of biblical squalor and horror in Chinese circumstances. He’d strangely never been hurt or truly terrified during the actual war, luck of the draw, though in the postwar years abroad he did on three occasions (Tsing-tao, Tsing-tao, and Halifax) reckon he was about to be stabbed or stomped to death but each time somehow wiggled off the hook and came out okay. If ever John Paul cried once as an adult, it would’ve been in 1946 when a letter arrived from July Teague telling him that when a savage hailstorm passed at twilight both Cherenkos rushed into the garden to rescue tomatoes before they were pulped by flying ice and caught summer pneumonia, then died at home within hours of each other during the first week of August.

  Alma would have been the very first Gold Star Mother in West Table (that distinction went to Mrs. Lee Haas, who lost her only children, Jeremiah and Samuel, in the early months of war when the Marblehead was hit, and Mr. Haas, fatigued and disoriented from battering grief, fell asleep on the divan in the parlor still smoking a cigarette and completed their ruin) had the government known the necessary details, but it was not until 1945 that a cable arrived announcing that Seaman First Class James Maurice Dunahew had perished from his injuries on the island of Guam, on or about December 10, 1941. James had gone away with no word of him received (he likely thought a prison sentence awaited him at home and silence would spare Alma from speaking necessary lies to conceal his whereabouts) until word of his death. In the third year after V-J Day John Paul wandered into a San Francisco nightspot near Union Square and met a bartender who’d been a sailor on Guam and a prisoner in Japan and asked if by chance he’d known his brother. “The men called him Asiatic because he’d sailed in those waters and farther over three or four years, maybe five, and liked all those places around there a whole hell of a lot, which not everybody does. Plenty asked the navy to send them somewhere else, but he asked to stay. Asiatic had been in long enough to be plenty salty, you know, and came running down to the beach with only a carbine, like the rest of us had, when maybe five hundred Japs were storming ashore. Some men wanted to lay down on the sand and surrender right off the bat—don’t make the Japs angry, since we didn’t have much to fight with, anyhow—a few didn’t, though, and started shooting, and Asiatic wa
s one of them. The fight … just went pitiful, sailor. No other way to put it. There was a little bunch of marines and a little bunch of us, and … He was alive when they took us, but … you don’t want to know.”

  “I enlisted in forty-two—I can stand to hear whatever is true.”

  “I’ll only say this much, buddy—the Jap officers had swords.”

  “What’d he do? Tell me.”

  “Asiatic bucked when they shoved him around,” the man said, and made a whooshing sound while drawing a hand across his neck.

  If ever John Paul Dunahew cried twice as a man, the second time was that night. He received his discharge papers at Treasure Island and rode those singing wheels on twin rails back to West Table in early summer of 1948, but he never told Alma that her firstborn son had been taken prisoner and beheaded on a faraway beach where the soft air smelled of tropical flowers and coconuts dangled, or that he’d missed the Cherenkos far more than he had her.

  Joe Breen didn’t fish. Joe didn’t hunt. Joe didn’t play ball—baseball, football, basketball—he wouldn’t even give a try at any game that featured a ball. He didn’t do the things people expected an Ozark boy to like doing, and that was noticed, especially by other boys, some of them mean. Joe read his way through the books on the wall at the public library, spent hours drawing pictures on butcher’s paper or cardboard, some of them shocking for the shrewd revelations of personality he managed to make manifest in a sketched face. He wandered the rivers and creeks collecting stones, dolomites, quartz, the occasional geode, and shoved them all under the bed in his room where they scarred the hardwood floor, scars yet visible there. When a hog was slaughtered by Dad, he didn’t ask to hold the knife or blood bucket, had important homework to do elsewhere, and when Mom snatched a chicken head off in the yard and tossed it to the cat, he kept his eyes on a blade of grass and waved away floating pin feathers. He could keep his own company and amuse himself for long spells, an unusual specimen of boy sitting under the apple tree alone, ever alone, but quite content keeping company with a rock or butterfly, garden slug or anthill.

  Then at the midpoint in senior year a way-tall, sway-necked goof of a brainy girl moved here from Wisconsin and was put into his history class, and Joe Breen had a beginner girlfriend before Friday. Nobody knows how it happened. She must’ve leaned his way and said something that started them up, because Joe was unlikely to start any conversations with anybody. His mother saw the couple holding hands on the square before she’d heard the girl’s name; Molly Steinkuhler. They took to mooning around town everywhere, love-stunned calves that couldn’t get enough of licking away on the skins of each other. It could be an uncomfortable romance to watch or hear up close. Very soon most folks accepted as fact that they would marry, though that assumed certainty hadn’t actually been mentioned (Joe was eager to attend the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in the fall, while Molly had been accepted into Lindenwood College) by either of the young lovers.

  They were both so ill made for the social ramble that folks who cared felt nervous for them when they did go out to join the human parade, afraid one misfit or the other might spill a drink that stained a popular girl’s dress, or during a fast song, trip by accident someone given to sneered and eminently repeatable sarcasm, or that mean boys who’d arrived stag would come up with a rough prank and spring it on Joe in front of Molly, make him shrink to nothing in her eyes, and his own. But the misfit couple wanted to do what others do, go out on a beautiful Saturday night and dance in a crowd, and Joe and Molly did, they did dance, danced as long as the music lasted and still are said to be cutting a rug among friends whenever that Black Angel shimmies.

  Arthur Glencross wandered the many rooms of his house and felt dead to himself in each. He wept at windows in the more remote chambers when alone at first, and made excuses if caught by Corinne, Ethan, or Virginia, but within weeks stopped offering even halting, incomplete excuses for weeping while standing at windows so strangely, and in the following year on a night of wet black streets and fog that seemed to relay a message for him alone composed in weather, told his expectant and hovering wife: With all the splendid sinning that had gone on between them, it was somehow Ruby in her simplest and most open moments that took his heart and came to mind every hour of every day—those gone-now-forever respites spent spooned together and drowsing in a rented bed, his best parts at rest and touched to her rump, his fingers at her cleaving, the sun dipping to the west sending light through the blinds in bright slats that climbed the walls like a limber staircase. But when the door closed behind they again must not from this time until the next know each other by face or name if they crossed paths or anybody asked.

  Corinne said only two large words in response: “I know.”

  “She smelled good and different in a way that only she did.”

  “I know what the girl smelled like.”

  “She knew things.”

  “I don’t doubt that she did.”

  “She could tease me and have me like it. At the Arlington, one time, the races were rained out because a thunderstorm moved in to settle, and rain was coming down in sheets, rattling the windows, the afternoon gone black, and she became an imp the way she would, curled her hair around a finger, then wanted to dance the Charleston in that room without clothes on, and did, did dance that way, so funny, and … she modeled her new hat with a rained-on windowpane for a mirror, naked girl in a hat, standing so brazen at the window to the street seeing herself in the glass, and you know what she said over her shoulder? She said, ‘Arthur, it seems like if you really loved me it wouldn’t be raining today.’

  “I said, ‘It’s not raining a drop in here.’

  “ ‘Oh? Well, I love you, too.’

  “And we … we just … Ruby made so many hours turn to magic, Corinne, gloriously hot-blooded magic and all kinds of slick … and pleasing … to touch, and those hours are when I felt altogether alive, the only times, ever … ever … and they are spun to … memories I can’t let go of and wouldn’t want to, either.”

  “You can have all those memories, Arthur.” Corinne approached in the unlighted room and hugged him from behind, squeezed him at his middle, rested her face against his back. “But please stop weeping where the children can see.”

  He gave himself to his work at the bank and welcomed the winged loneliness that darted into and out of his chest at any time of the day, in any setting, any company. His drifting at those moments came to be expected of him, one of his oddly winning traits, to disappear briefly in spirit from the table and return abruptly, speaking to the subject at hand. He put in long, long hours and gave himself little rest. Rumors about him and the Arbor Dance Hall had begun before the mass funeral and have never quite faded away and shouldn’t. Certain segments of the town found the rumors to be an enhancement, presenting Glencross as a man with some intriguing qualities, being given to wayward romance and possessing volcanic potential. It gradually became known through social contact that he had no burn scarring on his arms at all, but did appear to have a small round divot above his right elbow. Canoe trips, the country club dressing room, swimming pool parties, all venues served to discredit publicly at least one part of his claimed story. He showed no protective modesty on those half-clothed occasions, left his unburned skin on view to be noted and discussed by peers later over drinks.

  Corinne said, “Do you want everyone in town to know?”

  “That wouldn’t be prudent, would it?”

  “Darling, put something on and ease my mind.”

  “It’s too late for all that to matter.”

  In 1932 he would spontaneously launch into a mumbled confession to the other three golfers from his Saturday foursome while standing in the club parking lot. He said it all in an unbroken streaming with his head lowered and gave himself no quarter. He spilled what he knew and shaved nary a detail from his own role. His audience stood between parked cars to listen—Judge MacDonald Swann, J. William Etchieson, and Harlan Hudkins. The men
did not react as though they were hearing shocking or even unsuspected news, exactly. The Judge heard him out and said, “To allow a banker to be charged with anything at all in the climate of this Depression, Arthur, concerning that subject in particular, with hatred of bankers running so high generally, might very well result in no trial at all and an impromptu hanging. We need you where you are, Arthur, to protect our solvency. The town needs you to do that. The gone are gone.”

  He walked daily from home to work to home. If others on his route wanted to speak, he paused and spoke pleasantly enough, otherwise he nodded to men when passing and touched his hand to the crown of his hat and mimed a doffing to women, and continued on his way. His hair turned a stately white and he came to appear rather impressive, well dressed and closely contained. The heartbreak evident in his face attracted women, quite a few, but he craved only one in the grave and loved one at home and that was enough, so he doffed when approached and flirted with, but kept walking. On arriving home he would every evening go directly to the study and pour a large scotch whisky into crystal and sit in the swivel chair at his desk as night came down or evening stretched.

  One day stuck at his window inside the bank, staring absently at sunbeams and movement, he observed John Paul lugging newspapers around the square and those wings took flight between his bones and he stepped out of doors in pursuit. He caught the thirteen-year-old by the arm, startling him. “I want you to consider becoming my caddy.”

  “I don’t play that game—I’ve never even seen it played.”

  “You needn’t play—I play—you caddy. That’s how golf works, Dunahew.”

  John Paul was on the bags twice a week after that and always overpaid for his efforts, overtipped, and deep down understood why he received such largesse, but the do-re-mi came in so very handy. Glencross knew what he was doing on the links, a fine golfer, tall and limber, long off the tees, good touch around the greens. He became very informal with John Paul, made shrewdly penetrating wisecracks about his golfing companions, a few of which John Paul employed in self-defense many years later at Hudkins. The two became easy with each other and John Paul enjoyed those outings more than he believed he ought to, but … Eventually the caddy began to whack a few balls along the way, and Glencross watched, then said, “You are innocent of instruction and swing freely. Learn the rules, but don’t listen to anybody who tells you to change that swing.”