We’ve slept till now, Ellen and I, on single beds from my old house. A conceit of Doris’s and much prized then, they are “convent” beds, which is to say, not even proper singles, narrower and shorter rather. For thirteen years my feet have stuck out, five with Doris, three alone, five with Ellen. Nuns must have been short. White-iron, chaste, curious, half-canopied the beds were, redolent of a far-off time and therefore serviceable in Doris’s war on the ordinary, because at the time it was impossible to sleep in ORDINARY BEDS.
Did Mrs. Prouty wink at me? Across the weeds we gaze at each other, smiling. Her olive arms hug herself. A nyloned hip polishes a pipe-fitting. Mrs. Prouty is a good-looking good-humored lady. Whenever she used to see me buying a bottle next door at the Little Napoleon, she’d say: “Somebody’s going to have a party. Can I come?” Her lickerish look comes, I think, from her merry eye and her skin, which is as clear and smooth as an olive.
When I ordered the brass bed, she swung the catalogue round on its lectern, leaned on it, and tapped her pencil on the counter.
“I know where I’d spend Christmas, huh, Docky?”
“What? Oh,” I say, laughing before I take her meaning. Did she say Docky or ducky?
After I ordered the boots, she leaned on the catalogue again.
“These can go under mine any day,” she says, merry eye roving past me carelessly.
“Ma’am? Eh? Right! Har har!”
These = my boots?
Mine = her bed?
Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harrr harrr.
Three patients come. Two Bantu businessmen, one with ulcers, the other with hypertension. Their own docs did ’em no good, so they want me to make magic passes with my machine. I oblige them, do so, take readings, hoard up data. They leave, feeling better.
The third is old P.T. Bledsoe. Even though he lost everything, including his wife, when the Bantus took Paradise and Betterbag Paper Company, he didn’t leave and go to the Outback after all. Instead, he moved out to his fishing camp and took to drinking Gallo muscatel and fishing for speckles. All he comes to me for is to get his pan-vitamin shot to keep his liver going. Out he goes rubbing his shiny butt and rattling off in his broken-down Plymouth.
Hm. Eleven dollars. Not a bad haul. My patients fork over cash, knowing I need it, five from each Bantu and one dollar from P.T., who also brings me a sack of mirlations and a fifth of Early Times. Not good. But he didn’t know I had stopped drinking.
Mrs. Prouty is still on the ramp.
Now she points to her wristwatch.
Does she mean it is almost noon and she’ll be off and why not have a little Christmas drink?
For she’s spotted the Early Times. Rising, I unshuck gift box from bottle.
Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smelclass="underline" of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.
Insert thumbnail into plastic seal between glass rim and stopper. The slight pop is like a violation.
Comes a knock. Patient number four.
Put away the Early Times in the drawer of Bayonne-rayons.
It is a new patient, a young coffee-colored graduate student with intense eyes and a high bossed forehead like the late Harry Belafonte. Seems he has a private complaint. Nothing for it but to close the back door. He leans forward in a pleasant anxious way. I know what is wrong with him before he opens his mouth, but he tells me anyway.
Chief complaint: a feeling of strangeness, of not feeling himself, of eeriness, dislocation, etcetera etcetera.
Past history: native of Nassau, graduate of U. of Conn. and Syracuse. He tells me it is his plan to “unite in his own life the objective truths of science with the universal spiritual insights of Eastern religion.”
Ah me. Another Orientalized heathen Englishman.
“Well, let’s see,” I say, and take out my lapsometer.
When he’s gone, I open the back door. The Sears ramp is empty.
Ah well. To my fat ladies, to the A & P for a turkey, to the toy store and home.
“Fore!”
“Good mashie, old man!”
In a bunker I notice that, December or not, weeds are beginning to sprout.
A tractor pulling a gang mower stops beside me. The driver is greenskeeper Moon Mullins, a fellow Knight of Columbus, Holy Name man, ex-Pontiac salesman. Moon stayed because he owns half the shacks in Happy Hollow, now inhabited by peckerwoods, and can’t sell them.
“How goes it, Moon?”
The greenskeeper shakes his head dolefully. Really, though, he’s fit as can be. What he doesn’t remember is his life as a Pontiac salesman in a Toyota town, standing around the showroom grinning and popping his knuckles while his colon tightened and whitened, went hard and straight as a lead pipe.
“You want to know where it all began to go wrong?” Moon asks me, nodding toward a foursome of sepia golfers.
“Where?”
“It started when we abandoned the Latin mass.”
“You think?”
“Sure. You think about it.”
“All right.”
Off he roars, whistling a carol and showering me in a drizzle of grass cuttings.
“See you tonight!” he hollers back.
He comes down to the chapel now. Most A.C.C. (Cicero) Catholics have moved away. Monsignor Schleifkopf was transferred to Brooklyn. Moon and others who stayed have drifted back to Father Smith.
After holding fat clinic at the club, I am served lunch in the hall. The placing of my table in the hall between the men’s bar crowded with golfers and the dining room overflowing with Mah-Jongg ladies is nicely calculated not to offend me.
I eat with the English pro.
From one side comes the click of Mah-Jongg tiles, from the other the rattle of poker dice in cup. My Bantu ladies, the weight watchers, are a hefty crew. They are all dressed in the fashion of the day, in velveteen, mostly green and wine-colored with hats to match, hats with tall stove-in crowns and large cloche-shaped brims.
The food is good — it comes straight from the rib room and is the same roast beef and Yorkshire pudding everyone is served. I eat heartily. Better still, I don’t have to listen to “Christmas gif, Doc!” and I don’t have to worry about tipping. Instead I get tipped. Beside my plate I find an envelope with check for $25 and poem attached. From my fat ladies.
Merry Longhu6 for our Doc
Who tries to keep us slim.
Don’t get discouraged, Doc, we’ll try harder
More power to him.
Reading poem and nodding and chewing roast beef.
The bell rings for midnight mass. Ellen decides to come with me.
“Thanks again for the bell, my son,” says Father Smith on the tiny porch of the chapel. With his deep tan from fire-watching and his hairy Spanish futbol wrists he looks more than ever like Ricardo Montalban.
The bell is the plantation bell from Tara. It is the original bell provided by David O. Selznick for the original Tara. Lola hid it in the well before the Bantus came.