I’d have been better pleased if he’d let me say something once, but at least he seemed to mean well, and I went to the cottage to dress, as at least I had slacks, sport coat, and a couple of clean shirts.
Dinner, I must say, was remarkable, verging on art. Some of it, the hot vegetables and cold dessert, came from the Thermos buckets, the ones he brought from the Ladyship. But the steak was out of the storage room, the biggest piece of sirloin I think I ever saw. He brought it in the living-room, and told me crease with my fingers where I wanted mine cut. I creased an inch, and with the knife he marked an inch and a half. He marked his own, a half-inch minute steak. But when he went to the kitchen she followed him out. I heard her say: “No, Val, please! Cut me one like Duke’s and take the rest of it back. I shouldn’t have that much, and besides it’s too thick to broil.”
“Broil? I’ll bake it!”
“But it’s three pounds of meat and—”
“You’ve been down to St. Mary’s, and after that mule meat they eat down there, you need something to stick to your ribs.”
I thought to myself: “Is he giving her all the rest of that chunk? Doesn’t he know it’s practically murder, considering that weight she carries?” That was the answer, though, as came out when she waddled back and sat down to wait. She said: “Duke, he tries his best to make me happy — but he’s like all the others — he can’t understand — what this affliction is. It’s glandular! If the food is there on my plate, I have to eat it, I can’t help myself. No overweight person can. Not saying I don’t need a lot, else I get so terribly weak. But — all that meat—”
An electric stove cooks fast, and in a few minutes he was back, saying we’d eat in the nook. We went in there, and I caught the light in his eye as he served the meal, so pretty it was like an ad in the Saturday Post. I also caught how she ate, very dreamy, once she tasted that steak. She cut each piece off slow, sopped it in blood, and closed her eyes as she chewed. So as not to be caught looking, and more or less make like sociable, I put it on with a squirtgun, how wonderful everything was.
Even for goose grease he didn’t seem to have time, and took it over himself, smearing it the way he wanted it. He said: “The steak I admit is O.K. But my real contribution, Duke, is the lunchbox I gave you today. Mr. Val’s Take-Out, I call it, and it’s a revolution on behalf of the American wife. All she does, Duke, is ring us, and she gets it — a unit, to fit other units. One person, one box, that goes in one stove, complete as is, without even breaking the string. When it’s hot she opens it, and it’s ready to eat, there on its plastic plates. When it’s eaten, the plastic burns, it’s all gone, and she’s free. She’s spent five minutes at the stove, and five more at the incinerator — ten minutes out of her day, and the whole family is fed. She has leisure, she can play, she can hold a job, for cash! I tell you, it’s tremendous!”
I piled more compliments on, and for perhaps a minute he listened. Then, in the middle of a word, he cut me off. He said: “O.K., Duke, let’s get at it.”
“...Get at what, sir?”
“All of it. What led you astray, the whole story. Wait a minute, while I put these dishes in the washer, and we’ll sit in the other room. I want to go into this. Thoroughly.”
The dishes took some minutes, my fire some minutes more. I said I was proud of my wood, but actually wanted to stall, because how I wanted to go into it was practically not at all. But at the end of a half-hour or so she was camped on the sofa, in close to the flames, he on the other end, his knees under his chin, I on the love seat across from them, with the cocktail table between. He said: “Now!” — and I couldn’t stall any longer. I said: “...I wanted to be a fighter.”
“Why did you?”
“Well... why not? I’m six feet high, strong as a bull, and weigh a hundred and seventy. As a light heavy I looked like a natural. And in the Army it helps. With — whatever you’re bucking for.”
“Army? Where was this?”
“Germany.”
I edged it to the hitch I’d served, how I got to be technical sergeant, and got my honorable discharge. I worked back to my very young days, when I was a kid out in Nevada, to the car crash that killed my parents, and how I was raised by my grandmother. He asked if she was still living, I said no, and he seemed to be sidetracked. But then: “All right, let’s get to the point. You wanted to be a fighter. What then?”
“I found out I couldn’t hit.”
“What then?”
“...I found out I could.”
“Listen, Duke, stop gagging.”
I said I wasn’t gagging at all, and tried to explain how it was, as a doctor had explained it to me. I said: “Seems to be a question of adrenalin. What gives you the strength to hit. Some fighters have it as needed, and they can hit for money. I didn’t have it at all — no killer instinct, the sports writers called it. Except, unfortunately, I found out, if I got sore enough, I did have it — maybe a little too much. I broke a champion’s jaw, and—”
“Then you were light-heavyweight champion?”
“This was in training camp.”
“Why would you do it there?”
“He gypped me out of some dough.”
“I don’t get this at all, Duke.”
“I was working for him. If you can’t hit you’re just a punk and help train guys that can. I was his sparring partner, at Ojai, California, and I stretched him out on the grass. I also broke his jaw. And, with the smart money that was back of him, I had to get out of the state. I hopped a truck, at Ventura, and kept moving, headed east. Then I went a little bit haywire, and pulled this stick-up, last week. And then didn’t have the adrenalin to scram. I just lay there, on the bed in that little hotel.”
“Wait a minute, Duke.”
“That’s all. Then the officer came.”
“Wait. Smart money?”
“Gunsels.”
“Duke, will you forget about adrenalin, punks, gunsels, and all such irrelevant things and give me a straight answer on a simple question of morals, so—”
“He did give it!”
She was standing there, in the light dress she had put on, like some pink blimp with electric lights for eyes. She said: “Are you deaf, Val? Or stupid? Or what? He’s been trying to tell you, he couldn’t hit for money, but he could hit for the right. Isn’t that straight enough? And is it so terrible? I tell you right now I wouldn’t have him here if it was the other way around. Sometimes, Val, I don’t understand you at all. All Bill needed was just one look, and he knew Duke had been in the ring, that he was decent, and—”
“Bill saw Duke?”
“I told you he was here.”
“That’s all I want to know.”
They had it some more, he giving ground fast, and why Bill should settle it I couldn’t quite figure out, as there seemed to be more to it than a favorite brother-in-law. But at last they calmed down, and he said we’d look at the stump. As he led the way outside, she said to me very quiet she’d fallen into the barbwire, at her father’s sawmill in St. Mary’s — “which of course you couldn’t know.” That seemed to cover that, and at the tree I made them stand back while I chunked it with a bar, to knock the red charcoal off and break it down to embers. Then we walked around, and he looked at the house, as it shone in the night, the shells sparkling in front. I looked at the moon, which looked so beautiful now, with no bars between. What she looked at I couldn’t tell, but it seemed the farthest of all.
But after a while we went in, and when I said goodnight, they walked with me to the cottage, to make sure I had enough blankets. As they stepped out on the porch, he said: “Wilkes Booth knocked on that door.”