Tod nodded, had not stopped nodding.
He gazed down at Tannie’s little stick arms. The skin was white and paper dry but a vein, thick and powerful as a snake, coiled on her wrist.
“Now watch this,” said Jack in a lower voice but not minding if Tod and Tannie overheard him. “This is what I mean by an ongoing couple relationship. Tod!”
Tod went on nodding and rolling pills.
“Tannie!” cried the chaplain.
Tannie went on snoring, chin on her chest.
“Tod and Tannie! Give us a little song!”
Tod did not stop nodding but one hand seemed to rise of itself and give Tannie a poke in the ribs. “Sing, Mama!” said Tod in a hoarse whisper.
As if he had pressed a button, Tannie’s head flew up, her eyes opened, showing milky-blue, and she began to sing in a high-pitched girlish voice. Tod’s hand conducted and his head lilted from side to side instead of nodding. He came in on every third word or so.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage,
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!
“For two,” said Tod.
The instant the song was finished, Tannie’s head sank to her chest and she began to snore. Tod stopped conducting and went back to nodding and pill rolling.
“Well?” asked Jack Curl in the hall.
“Beats television,” he said vacantly, moving his head to make the yellow light race around the beveled glass of the front door.
“You better believe it. Now, Will.”
“Yes?”
“Now. What I want you to imagine is the two of them, Tod and Tannie, and two hundred couples like them, from sixty-five on up, each with their own little rustic villa, coming back after evensong and lifting up their eyes to the hills. What do you think?”
“Okay,” he said, unable to move his eyes from the sunlit door.
“Okay?” Jack Curl rounded, came closer, in excitement. “You mean—”
“I mean I will do as you say. I will imagine them.”
“Oh. Good. I think.”
When an old person died at St. Mark’s, often there was no one to claim the body. Marion would go to great lengths to trace the family and arrange the funeral. Yamaiuchi would chauffeur them in the Rolls, leading the way for the hearse to distant Carolina towns, Tryon or Goldsboro, where after the funeral in an empty weedy cemetery they would head for the nearest Holiday Inn in time for the businessman’s lunch. Marion, animated by a kind of holy vivacity, would eat the $2.95 buffet, heaping up mountains of mashed potatoes and pork chops, and go back for seconds, pleased by both the cheapness and the quantity of food. Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. All the while he gazed in bemusement at the ragged Southern cemetery, empty except for the Rolls, the hearse, Yamaiuchi, and three Asheville morticians (he was usually the fourth pallbearer for the casket light with its wispy burden), and then gazed around the bustling new Holiday Inn and the local businessmen come to eat. Live men and dead men.
The shotgun lay beside the man on the wet speckled leaves. In his father’s eyes he saw a certitude. He had come into focus. How does it happen that a man can go through his life standing up, not himself and dreaming, eating business lunches and passing his wife in the hall, that it is only when he lies bleeding in a swamp that he becomes as solid and simple as the shotgun beside him?
“What?” He gave a start. The chaplain was saying something.
“I said when I come over tomorrow, perhaps you and I and Leslie can have a little powwow. About this ah do-it-yourself wedding.”
“Sure.”
“I want to get your old friend Mrs. Huger in on it too. I have a feeling she can handle Leslie. She’s quite a lady.”
He was looking down at his hand. A shaft of light struck it. The yellow light, refracted by the prism, shaded into blue and red on his skin like a bruise. It was still possible to feel the buck of the Luger in the bones of his wrist.
“You’re so lucky Mrs. Huger turned up when she did, Will. You’ve no idea how helpful she’s been. Isn’t she an old flame of yours? She’s a doll. Did you know she’s my main contact with Leslie and the groom’s family? Why is it women know so much more than we do?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Huger. Your old—”
Oh, Kitty. Kitty Vaught Huger. My old flame. What in hell was Kitty doing up here? She and her grinning dentist-husband. They were everywhere, all over the golf course and in his house. Kitty had a woman’s managerial way with her. For a fact she had been helpful. Even Yamaiuchi liked her. Last Saturday when the Cupps flew in from California she and Yamaiuchi had fixed the hors d’oeuvre. What did she want? What did her husband want? Like many people who want something, he had a way of coming at you from the side and grinning back to his eyeteeth. Both came closer than people usually do. When they greeted you, they fell forward and laid hands on you. When Kitty touched him, he felt showers of gooseflesh but not exactly excitement. It was the sort of gooseflesh you feel when a child, not knowing about such things, puts his hands on you.
Kitty had changed. When he thought of her, he thought of sitting next to her in the Alabama twilight in her father’s Lincoln, her knees together, eyes cast down, silent; crossing lonesome red-clay railroad cuts filled with ironweed and violet light. But now she came shouldering up to him. She was bolder, lustier, better-looking but almost brawny, a lady golfer, brown and freckle-shouldered. Her voice was deeper, a musical whiskey-mellowed country-club voice with a laugh he didn’t remember. When she sat, she straddled good-naturedly, opening her knees. When she leaned toward him, her heavy gold jewelry clunked.
He was sitting in the Mercedes looking at the Luger. It was getting dark. A few old people were in the Kennedy rockers on the front porch, but most were inside watching giant-screen TV. Mr. Arnold, one of Marion’s patients who had come to the house, spied him and tried to say something, but one side of his face was pulled down and his lips blew out like a curtain. One hand was fisted and held close, cradled like a baby by the other arm.
The Luger felt good. Its weight and ugliness and beauty made him smile. He shook his head fondly. Why did he feel good? Was it because for the first time in his life he could suddenly see what had happened to his father, exactly where he was right and where he was wrong? Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don’t have to and I won’t. Right, old mole, and if you were here in rich reborn Christian Carolina with its condos and 450 SELs and old folks rolling pills and cackling at Hee Haw, you wouldn’t put up with that either.
Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn’t even look. That’s the difference between us. I’m going to find out once and for all. You never even looked.
Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?
He hefted the Luger. His father took it off an SS colonel, it and the colonel’s black cap with its Totenkopf insignia and some photographs — his father: a captain in the 10th Armored Division, which joined Patton at Saarburg, where he, his father, had his picture taken standing up in the hatch of an M4 Sherman tank, which did not look at all like the snapshot of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank taken in the Ardennes (even though I somehow know it was exactly what he, my father, had in mind when he had his picture taken: the Tiger in all its menacing beauty). Strange that he, my father, often spoke of the Ardennes and the Rhine and Weimar but never mentioned Buchenwald, which was only four miles from Weimar and which Patton took three weeks later, never mentioned that the horrified Patton paraded fifteen hundred of Weimar’s best humanistic Germans right down the middle of Buchenwald to see the sights, Patton of all people, no Goethe he who said to the fifteen hundred not look you sons of Goethe but look you sons of bitches (is not this in fact, Father, where your humanism ends in the end?). Yet he, my father, never mentioned that, even though I read about it in his own book, a history of the Third Army, that the 10th Armored Division was there too. Why did he keep the photographs of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank which I found in the attic in Mississippi and not one word about Buchenwald? Why did he talk about the SS colonel so much if the Nazis were so bad and why did he think Patton not the SS colonel ridiculous with his chrome helmet and pearl-handled revolvers?