As I carried Nelson’s snare drum out to the loading ramp near the school commons, I heard Cass telling Dundee that she would just love to see Dr. Strangelove, she had heard it was a perfectly marvelous film, but she knew that Love with the Proper Stranger was playing in Westport, and Steve McQueen was her absolute favorite, so couldn’t they go there tomorrow night instead? “Hello, Cass,” I said as I went by, and she said, “Oh, hello, Wat, you were terrific.” and I said, “Yeah,” and walked off. Nelson was waiting outside on the ramp, the big bass drum in his hands.
“Where’s your father?” he asked.
“I don’t know, don’t you see him?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s get the rest of the junk,” I said. “He’ll be here.”
Cass was heading for the phone booth when I went inside again, undoubtedly to give her mother a ring, tell her she might be delayed as she had run into one of the school’s intellectuals and they wished to discuss the satirical content of Dr. Strangelove.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh, hi,” she said, “did I tell you you were terrific?”
“Yeah, you told me,” I said. “What’s with Dundee?”
Cass shrugged. She was a slender, diminutive girl with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders, dark brown eyes, a frightened smile that tentatively budded on her mouth even when she was deliriously happy, as she seemed to be now. “He’s very nice,” she said, and I immediately said, “He’s a hood.”
“Well, I have to make a phone call,” Cass said. She was wearing a gray flannel jumper over a white turtleneck sweater, and she tossed her long blond hair now, and smoothed her skirt, and went clicking oft down the corridor to the phone booth while I glared at her with something less than masked hostility. Nelson helped me lift the organ, and we carried it together out to the ramp. The Ford station wagon was waiting at the curb, but my father was not behind the wheel. Instead, my mother was sitting there, staring straight ahead through the windshield.
“Hey, hi,” I said in surprise. “Where’s Dad?”
“Stuck in the city,” my mother said. “How’d it go?”
“We didn’t even show.”
“We got robbed,” Nelson said.
“You want to lower this back window, Mom?”
“Who won?”
“Sound, Incorporated.”
“Which group is that?”
“You don’t know them, Mom.”
“They stink, Mrs. Tyler.”
“I thought Rog was going to start crying,” I said from the tailgate of the wagon.
“We should have taken it, I mean it, Mrs. Tyler.”
“Am I dropping you off?”
“If it’s okay,” Nelson said.
“Sure.”
“Something wrong?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“You seem...” I shrugged. “Give me a hand here, will you, Nelson?”
I could see the back of my mother’s head as we loaded the drums and organ into the car. She wore her brown hair short, the collar of her beige car coat high on the back of her neck. She was sitting very stiff and straight, staring through the windshield, puffing on a cigarette even though she’d given up smoking more than a month ago.
“I see you’re back on the weed again,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “I just...” and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Shove the bass drum all the way back,” I said.
“Why don’t we put the organ in first? I’m getting out before you.”
“Good thinking, Maynard.”
We arranged the equipment with meticulous care, stacking it in tight to prevent it from sliding or bouncing on the rutted country roads. My mother sat silently smoking as we heaved and pushed and adjusted. The radio was on, classical music, QXR, I supposed, her favorite station. The engine was running, a bluish-gray exhaust rising lazily and steadily on the brittle air. At midnight, the news came on, and I listened vaguely as I worked, the words floating back through the heated car and out over the lowered tailgate, “... three months after the assassination of Diem and his brother, General Minh’s regime was itself overthrown tonight in a coup that took most Saigon citizens totally by surprise. Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh, thirty-six years old, considered by United States military advisers to be one of South Vietnam’s ablest corps commanders...”
“Where’s that other mike stand?” I asked.
“I’ll get it,” Nelson said.
“We ought to mark them, you know? I’m always afraid somebody’ll walk off with them.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said.
“... five miles from the Cambodian border, inflicting the worst toll upon South Vietnamese troops to date: ninety-four dead, and thirty-two wounded. Three American advisers were also killed in the bloody battle.”
We shoved both mike stands in alongside the organ, wedging the heavy metal bases in solidly against the covered hump of the spare tire.
“You can roll it up,” I said to my mother.
“... won’t expire until March of next year. Mayor Wagner, though, apprehensive after New York’s 114-day siege, has already begun talks...”
The roads were deserted. The newscaster’s voice gave way to recorded music, Stravinsky, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure. We passed the university, where lights still gleamed in the new science building, and the three chapels sat like snow-cowled nuns, and then drove past the old campus on Fieldston Street, where buildings erected in 1876 rose in turreted stillness against a sky dusted with stars. On the other side of the wooden bridge near the university’s western gate, the car’s headlights illuminated a mole who stopped dead still for just an instant and then waddled clumsily to the side of the road. We climbed the hill over Corrigan and then took the short cut through Pleasant, my mother handling the wheel expertly around each hairpin turn, although she looked somewhat like a gun moll, with the cigarette dangling from her mouth that way.
“You’re going to lose that ash,” I said, annoyed.
“Thank you,” she answered, and took one gloved hand from the wheel, flicked the long ash into the ash tray, and immediately put the cigarette into her mouth again. She did not put it out until we were in Nelson’s driveway. I helped him unload the drums and then carried them in with him through the garage entrance.
“We rehearsing tomorrow?” Nelson asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll buzz Connie in the morning and let you know.”
“Okay,” Nelson said. He paused for a moment, idly worrying a pimple near his mouth. “We got robbed,” he said, almost to himself, and then from the open garage door called, “’Night, Mrs. Tyler. Thanks a lot.” In the idling automobile, my mother raised her hand in farewell. By the time I got back to the car, she had lighted a second cigarette. I glanced at it but said nothing.