At length, we breakfasted and took coffee. Dora cleaned up and put on a summer dress, as well as the hat with the dried rose, while I selected a tawny vest and my favorite sky-blue tie.
“I hope the old sawbones knows what he’s doing. It would be a shame to bleed on this fine summer outfit,” I said.
“Bleed all you want, as long as you pass,” she said, adjusting a garter.
“Me? What about as long as you pass?”
“Oh, I’ll do just fine.”
“Of course. I forgot that you took one of these before.”
“That was unkind, sir,” she said, smiling, then reapplying lipstick. “I will remind you that one of us was rolling around Paris and London in the most undesirable company while the other was still drawing hopscotch squares on the sidewalk.”
“Yes, and one of us put down her hopscotch chalk and marched straight for the altar.”
“A frightful mistake. I insist on a civil ceremony this time.”
“A pity you weren’t a Catholic. You could have gotten it annulled. You could have said you showed up in your confirmation dress and this mean priest changed all the words around.”
“My point, sir. You used that one before.”
“No, I didn’t! When?”
“On a whiskey roar at your brother’s in May. The same evening in which you told everyone what a good teacher I would make because the perfection of my bottom would stun the class into silence when I turned my back to write on the blackboard.”
“Forty-love,” I conceded. “Now, if your face is sufficiently painted, I suggest we get that blood test before my syphilis finds my forwarding address.”
WE TOOK THE measly and petty dirt roads that surrounded Whitbrow until they joined up with the highway that led to the mill town. Fat splats of rain hit the windshield about halfway there, but the sky withheld the deluge that farmers across six counties had been concocting strange prayers and even writing letters to the president to bring. One dispossessed family walking down the road was glad the rain had not come yet. The father carried a mattress on his back and looked only where he was going, but the wife and the older children watched our car pass them as if we might have the deed to their new house rolled up in the glove box.
By two o’clock the blood was sitting in vials at the clinic waiting to be sniffed for corruption. Eudora found a telephone and rang her lawyer in Michigan, who confirmed that her divorce was settled and the papers would be in her hands within days, provided the post office did its job.
We decided to celebrate, so we went to a little family joint called the Victoria Café. Our roast beef, rich and fatty, would have tasted better without the image of the starving family marching down the road.
“I wonder if they have a soup kitchen here,” she said.
“I suppose. Why?”
“I should like to work in it.”
I said nothing, just looked at her and kept chewing.
She continued.
“I know it’s not practical, or perhaps even possible, it’s just that it’s so damned dismal here, and it’s hard to eat roast beef.”
“You want to work in a soup kitchen so you’ll feel better about eating roast beef?”
“Do you think things are worse here than in Whitbrow?”
“A mill town with two out of three mills boarded up is a hard place to scratch up a nickel. I suppose it is worse. At least in Whitbrow they can grow enough to eat. I mean, nobody there is starving, but they haven’t got things.”
“I know they haven’t,” she said. “Do you know that the teacher of the lower grades makes a present of a bar of soap to her best pupil every month, and the kids fight over it. A bar of soap.”
She looked out the window at a freckled old man who stopped on the sidewalk to look up at the sky, which was still holding forth the prospect of rain. He held his hat to his head to keep a gust of wind from blowing it off.
“Lots of kids with bare feet, too,” she said. “It seems they could buy an awful lot of shoes for the price of a healthy sow. Why do they do it, Frank? The Chase, they call it. Looks like they’re chasing money they can’t spare off into the wilderness. They must have just herds of wild pigs running around those woods.”
Pigs, and something else besides.
Where are your pants, my friend?
“I don’t know why they do it. Why do people build cathedrals, or flagellate themselves or throw salt over their shoulder? Maybe it makes the corn grow greener.”
“So you approve?”
“I’m not saying I approve or disapprove. I’m just saying it’s not our place to judge them.”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“So don’t like it.”
“So don’t like it,” she said, parroting me, stirring a piece of meat around in its gravy.
“Dora, we’re here to have a gay time. In the big city. Let’s not quarrel.”
“Well,” she said, her eyes shining with good humor, “what we’re actually here for is to see if we’re going to expire from a horrid social disease. But while we’re in town, it wouldn’t hurt for us to see the picture show. And try not to quarrel.”
WE SAW A matinee, a pirate epic full of booming cannons that made me edgy. After the show we stopped for bottles of wine and bourbon before we got in the car and headed home. She rested her head on my shoulder, but the air was heavy between us. I wanted to peek into that lovely head and know what she was thinking, even if it hurt me. Even if she was remembering a time before she knew me and thinking that was better.
CHAPTER TEN
MARTIN CRANMER SAT across from me, absently brushing the wooden cheeks and mane of the knight he had captured. He had made that knight with his own hands, along with all the other pieces, the chessboard, the table it sat on, and the chairs beneath us. He had built his crude little house from scratch, from the hickory beams to the pine shingles. All of this was very humbling to a man like me who had trouble hanging a painting without mashing his thumb.
I could tell from the kingly way he jutted his chin up while waiting for my move that he felt good about the game; he had taken a pawn unanswered, then made me double up my pawns in another exchange. The knight he was so affectionately grooming had been hedged in and taken at the cost of two pawns. But the time he had spent getting up on matériel was going to cost him; I had castled my king away safely in the corner, and now both rooks had found open pathways to the center of the board, pointing into Martin’s splayed forces like a brace of cannon.
“Suddenly I don’t feel so cocksure,” Martin said, striking a match on the rough surface of his table and lighting a potent, home-rolled cigarette. He offered a second one to me, but I shook my head and pulled a civilized little Chesterfield from the cigarette holder in my trouser pocket. I could not remember having sat in a room so heavily impregnated with smoke, nor having met anyone so thickly cured with tobacco as this taxidermist.
I moved my queen, forking Martin’s rook and the bishop Martin had left undefended in the earlier bloodletting. He moved the knight out to protect the rook from the queen’s diagonal attack, so she slid laterally and captured the bishop.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Martin said, standing up and gesturing with open hands as if to show a stuffed beaver on the bookshelf what a tale of woe was unfolding on the board. He paced for a moment and sat back down. His eyes remained nailed to the chessboard as he took another swallow from the jar of white lightning sitting on the corner of the table. It was not yet noon.