Beverly Lamartine wanted to claim Henry junior and take him home.
In the Twin Cities there were great relocation opportunities for Indians with a certain amount of natural stick-to-itiveness and pride.
That’s how Beverly saw it. He was darker than most, but his parents had always called themselves French or Black Irish and considered those who thought of themselves as Indians quite backward. They had put the need to get ahead in Beverly. He worked devilishly hard.
Door to door, he’d sold children’s after-school home workbooks for the past eighteen years. The wonder of it was that he had sold any workbook sets at all, for he was not an educated man and if the customers had, as they might naturally do, considered him an example of his product’s efficiency they might not have entrusted their own children to those pages of sums and reading exercises. But they did buy the workbook sets regularly, for Bev’s ploy was to use his humble appearance and faulty grammar to ease into conversation with his hardworking get-ahead customers. They looked forward to seeing the higher qualities, which they could not afford, inculcated in their own children. Beverly’s territory was a small-town world of earnest dreamers. Part of Bev’s pitch, and the one that usually sold the books, was to show the wife or husband a wallet-sized school photo of his son.
That was Henry junior. The back of the photo was A “To Uncle Bev,” but the customer never saw that, because the precious relic was encased in a cardboard-backed sheet of clear plastic. This covering preserved it from thousands of mill-toughened thumbs in the working-class sections of Minneapolis and small towns within its one-hundred-mile radius. Every year or so Beverly wrote to Lulu, requesting another picture. It was sent to him in perfect goodwill.
With every picture Beverly grew more familiar with his son and more inspired in the invention of tales he embroidered, day after day, on front porches that were to him the innocent stages for his routine.
His son played baseball in a sparkling-white uniform stained across the knees with grass. He pitched no-hitters every few weeks. Teachers loved the boy for getting so far ahead of the other students on his own initiative. They sent him on to various higher grades, and he was invited to the parties of children in the wealthy suburb of Edina.
Henry junior cleared the hurdles of class and intellect with an case astonishing to Beverly, who noted to his wistful customers how swiftly the young surpass the older generation.
“Give them wings!” he would urge, flipping softly through the cheap pulp-flecked pages. The sound of the ruffled paper was like the panic of fledglings before they learn how to glide. People usually bought, and only later, when they found themselves rolling up a work-skills book to slaughter a fly or scribbling phone numbers down on the back of Math Enrichment, would they realize that their children had absolutely no interest in taking the world by storm through self-enlightenment.
Some days, after many hours of stories, the son became so real in Bev’s mind that when he came home to the apartment, he half expected the boy to pounce on him before he put his key in the door. But when the lock turned his son vanished, for Elsa would be there, and she was not particularly interested in children, real or not. She was a typist who changed jobs incessantly. Groomed — Mod with exquisite tawdriness, she’d fashioned for Bev the image of a modern woman living the ideal career life. Her salary only fluctuated by pennies from firm to firm, but her importance and value as a knower-of-ropes swelled. She believed herself indispensable, but she heartlessly left employers hanging in their times of worst need to go on to something better.
Beverly adored her.
She was a natural blond with birdlike legs and, true, no chin, but great blue snapping eyes. She smoked exotically, rolling smoke off her tongue, and often told Bev that two weeks from now he might not be seeing her again. Then she would soften toward him. The possibilities she gave up to be with him impressed Bev so much, every time, that it ceased to bother him that Elsa only showed him off to her family in Saint Cloud at the height of summer, when they admired his perfect tan.
The boy, though, who was everywhere in his life and yet nowhere, fit less easily into Bev’s fantasy of how he lived. The boy made him ache in hidden, surprising places sometimes at night when he lay next to Elsa, his knuckles resting lightly against her emphatic spine. That was the limit of touching she would tolerate in slumber. She even took her sleeping breath with a certain rigid meanness, holding it stubbornly and releasing it with small explosive sighs. Bev hardly noticed, though, for beside her his mind raced through the ceilings and walls.
One night he saw himself traveling. He was driving his sober green car westward, past the boundaries of his salesman’s territory, then over the state line and on across to the casual and lonely fields, the rich, dry violet hills of the reservation. Then he was home where his son really lived. Wu came to, the door. He habitually blotted away her face and body, so that in his thoughts she was a doll of flour sacking with a curly black mop on her head. She was simply glad that he had come at last to take the son she had such trouble providing for off her hands.
She was glad — add Henry junior would be wafted into a new and better metropolitan existence.
This scenario became so real through the quiet hours he lay beside Elsa that Bev even convinced himself that his wife would take to Henry junior, in spite of the way she shuddered at children in the streets and whispered
“Monkeys!” And then, by the time the next workday was half over, he’d arranged for a vacation and made an appointment to have a once-over done on his car.
Of course, Lulu was not made of flour sacking and yarn. Beverly had realized that in the immediacy of her arms. She grabbed him for a hug when he got out of his car, and, tired by the long trip, his head whirled for a moment in a haze of yellow spots.
When she released him, the boys sauntered up, poker-faced and mildly suspicious, to stand in a group around him and await their introductions. There seemed to be so many that at first he was speechless. Each of them was Henry junior in a different daydream, at a different age, and so alike were their flat expressions he couldn’t even pick out the one whose picture sold the record number of home workbooks in the Upper Midwestern Regional Division.
Henry junior, of course, was perfectly recognizable after Lulu introduced him. After all, he did look exactly like the picture in Bev’s wallet. He put his hand out and shook manfully like his older brothers, which pleased Bev, although he had trouble containing a moment of confusion at the utter indifference in the boy’s eyes. He had to remember the boy was meeting him for the first time. In a child’s world strange grownups are indistinguishable as trees in a forest.
Even the writing on the back of those photographs was probably, now that he thought of it, Lulu’s.
They went away, started shooting their guns, and then Bev was left with the unexpected problem of the mother of his son, the woman He would just as soon forget. During a moment of adjustment, however, he decided to go through whatever set of ma nip80 MEN — ado W WON Ulations were necessary. He wanted to handle the situation in the ideal, firm, but diplomatic manner. And then, after he’d recovered from the strength of her hug, he had absolutely no doubt that things would go on according to his plan.
“My my my,” he said to Lulu now. She was buttering a piece of bread soft as the plump undersides of her arms. “Lot of water under the dam.”
She agreed, taking alert nips of her perfectly covered slice. She had sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar over it, carefully distributing the grains. That was how she was. Even with eight boys her house was neat as a pin. The candy bowl on the table sat precisely on its doily. All her furniture was brushed and straightened. Her coffee table held a neat stack of Fate and True Adventure magazines. On her walls she’d hung matching framed portraits of poodles, kittens, and an elaborate embroidered portrait of Chief Joseph. Her windowsills were decorated with pincushions in the shapes of plump little hats and shoes.