Sometimes a Great Notion (104 page)

“The reason I came out—”

“I was wonderin’—”

“—is about an insurance policy the doctor claimed exists.”

“By gosh, that’s right. I remember something about a policy. . . . Viv, chicken?” He called, though she still stood only a few feet behind his chair, toweling her hair. “You know anything about them life-insurance papers? Are they up in the desk?”

“No. I cleaned the desk of everything but papers to do with the business, remember? You said you couldn’t find anything?”

“What did you do with the other stuff.”

“I took it up to the attic.”

“Oh Christ.” He moved as though to stand. “The motherin’ attic!”

“No, I’ll get it.” She tossed her hair back and turbaned the towel around it. “You’d never find it. And it’s drafty up there.”

“Okeedoke,” Hank said and settled back in his chair. I saw Viv start up the stairs, her tennis shoes pit-patting a dim print, and I had sense enough to realize that this pit-pat was probably the final, fading knock of my last opportunity to be alone with her.

“Wait . . .” I dropped my apple core into Hank’s abalone-shell ashtray “. . . I’ll come with you.”

At the end of the hall past the bathroom and the room used as an office, a ladder, made of two-by-fours nailed like horizontal bars across the window there, took us up through a hinged trapdoor into the peaked top of the house . . . a gloomy, dusty, musty room that ran from the front of the house to the back, like an elongated pyramid braced upright with crisscrossing diagonal beams. Viv slid up through the trapdoor behind me, quiet as a burglar. I helped her stand. She wiped her hands on her Levis. The trapdoor fell shut with a muffled thump. We were alone.

“I haven’t been up here since I was five or six,” I said, looking about me. “It’s as delightful as ever. It would have been a nice little nook to repair to on some of these long rainy Sunday afternoons to sip tea and read Lovelace.”

“Or Poe,” she said. We were both whispering, the way one does in certain rooms. Viv stretched out a leg and rolled a mangy Teddy bear over with the point of her tennis shoe. “Or Pooh.”

We laughed beneath our breaths and began to move carefully forward through the dim clutter. A small window at each end of the long room provided space and light enough to be a building site for spiders and a cemetery for flies; what light was left over strained through the little warped panes and sifted like soot from a chimney across an ominous array of boxes and chests and trunks, rough-hewn packing crates and ornate bureaus. A dozen or so orange crates were lined up on end, appearing to stand at brooding attention, like geometric ghosts. About this array of larger objects, like lesser spirits of gayer and freer form, were gathered incidentals like the Teddy bear Viv had rolled over . . . fifty years of paraphernalia, tricycles to tambourines, dressmaker’s dummies to diaper pails, dolls, boots, books, Christmas ornaments . . .
you’re wasting time
, and, over everything, dust and mouse manure by the bale.

“Of course,” I whispered, “one would have to bring more than a book and a cup of tea: I think I might like a knife and a shotgun, and perhaps a radio so I could call in reinforcements in case I needed to put down a revolution.”

“A radio by all means.”

“By all means.”

When this is all over
, I told myself,
you will hate yourself for wasting so much time . . .
“Because some of these natives look restless and very revolutionary.” I prodded a stuffed owl and it responded with a high-pitched squeak and produced from its feathers a little brown mouse which scampered off behind some Japanese lanterns. “See? Very restless.”
When you get yourself alone later you are going to call yourself all kinds of names for not taking advantage of this situation.

Viv had reached the window and was looking out through the webs. “It’s too bad there isn’t a room up here—I mean for living in . . . you can see so well. The garage across there, and the road and everything.”

“It is a nice view.”

I was standing right beside her, close enough to smell her damp hair—
go ahead! try something! at least try something!—
but my hands stayed in my pockets, safe and well-mannered. A wall of protocol and passivity rose between us—she would not breach it; I could not.

“That policy . . . where would you think we might find it?”

“Boy, in
this
mess,” she said brightly, “finding anything is going to be a chore. Here; you start on this side and I’ll start on the other and we’ll work our way down to the other end. It’s in a shoebox, I remember, but old Henry was always up here moving things around . . .”

Before I could think over a cozier way to hunt, she was off, rummaging through crates and crannies, and I was forced to follow suit.
But you can still talk with her, idiot; go ahead and tell her how you feel.

“I hope . . . you didn’t have anything else you were doing.”

“Me?”—from the other side of the room. “Just breakfast dishes . . . why?”

“No reason. I didn’t want to drag you away from something to help me beat about the attic.”

“But I drug
you
away, Lee. You volunteered to come with me, remember?”

I didn’t answer. My eyes had become accustomed enough to the gloom to see a path leading between the beams through the dust and debris to a corner with a pronounced diminishment of spiderwebs. I followed the path to an old rolltop desk somewhat less dusty than its surroundings. I opened the rolltop of the desk and finally found the shoebox I was seeking. Along with a museum of mementos so maudlin that I would have burst out laughing had not the laughter stuck in my throat like a fishbone.

I intended to joke about the find. I meant to call to Viv but I was voiceless, as in a dream, and I experienced again that bright billowing medley of excitement and trepidation and outrage and guilt that I had first felt that first time I placed my eye to a hole in the wall and spied breathlessly on a life not my own. For once again I spied. Except the life before me now stood bared so much more, so terribly much more, than had the lean white body that had come with snarls and grunts to mount my mother in the lamplight so long ago. . . .

Before me in the desk was a careful and terrible litter . . . of high-school dance programs pinned with flaky brown carnations, of certificates for letter awards, of dog collars, scarves, dollar bills with dates inked across the pressed faces—
Christmas 1933 John, Birthday 35 Granpa Stamper, Birthday 36 Granpa Stamper, Christmas 36 Granpa Stamper—
all tacked onto a shop-class breadboard with the woodburned inscription “Not by god Alone!” There was a feeble stamp collection and a shell collection, precious as diamonds in a jewelry-store necklace box . . . and a flag mounted on a suction cup, and a foxtail, and stacks of Christmas cards, an album of Glenn Miller 78s, a cigarette smoked to the fading lipstick stain, a beer can, a locket, a shot glass, a dog tag, a service cap, and pictures, pictures, pictures . . .

The pictures were as typically American as the suction-cupped flag. There were sets of snapshots in their little yellow envelopes; and studio portraits in glass frames; and family reunion shots swarming with devilish youngsters making faces between the legs of pompous grown-ups; and the five-dollars-for-a-dozen pictures signed and exchanged your senior year in high school and generally thrown away the year after. I picked up one of these from its place on the shelf; across her white cashmere a sultry sixteen-year-old had penned: “To Hank the Hunk; a gorgeous Hunk of male I hope to let clean out my car pocket once again. Doree.”

Another hoped he might “see fit to be a little more friendly in the future with certain interested parties.” Still another advised him that any such interest “wouldn’t get him nowhere so don’t go getting any ideas.”

I had seen enough; I tossed away the bundle . . .
high school pictures!
I would have never believed my brother to be so banal. I picked up the boxful of policies, planning to sort through them in the better light downstairs, and was just turning to announce my find when I noticed, sitting behind a large maroon photo album, one of those cheap pasteboard frames holding a photograph of Viv seated beside a small bespectacled boy. The child, about five or six—one of the up-and-coming younger Stampers, I surmised—glowered solemnly in the direction of the photographer’s telltale shadow that fell across the grass before him. Viv was seated with her skirt spread about her, hair swirling, laughing open-mouthed at some remark made by the clever shutterbug intending to pierce the hard looks of the youngster.

The photograph itself was of very bad quality; obviously blown up from a small and very bad snapshot, it was practically a masterpiece of the hazy focus and the direct lighting . . . yet, for all its faults I understood why it had been chosen for enlargement and framing. That the photograph did not resemble the Viv that one saw every day wiping back a delinquent lock of hair as she hummed over a skillet of frying sausage, or sweeping dried mud into a dustpan or hanging wet clothes over the stove in the living room or rummaging about the attic in dirt and tennis shoes . . . this was not important; the picture’s singular charm lay in the accidental entrapment of the girl one sensed waiting
behind
that skillet of sausage or that pan of dust. The laughter, the blowing hair, the tilt of the head showed her caught in an attitude that perhaps for that one instant fulfilled completely all that her slight smile perpetually suggested. I decided I must have that picture. Didn’t I deserve at least a bit of a snapshot to show the boys back home? The photograph was rubber-banded to a small bundle of other papers for which I had no use, but if I could detach the picture and slip it inside my shirt no one would ever be the wiser. I set about trying to slip the rubber band off but it was sticky with age and I only succeeded in binding the picture more tightly to the bundle.
Don’t, picture, please . . .
I brought the packet to my mouth to try to bite the sticky bands; my hands were shaking and I was nervous beyond all proportion to my theft.
Don’t be this way. Please. You can be mine please. You can come with me please . . .

“I can’t, Lee.”

Until she answered I had not been aware that I was talking out loud.

“I just can’t, Lee. Don’t, oh, Lee, don’t . . .”

I had not even known I was crying. The photo flowed before my eyes, as the girl swept across toward me, through dust and cobwebs. “Why not, Viv?” I asked stupidly. She had almost reached me. “
Why
can’t you just flick everything here and—”

“Hey . . .” A hoarse word stopped us. “. . . ain’t you two found that outfit yet?”

He was speaking from the trapdoor; his bodiless head could have been mistaken for another piece of the clutter.

“You clucks oughta get some more
light
up here, for chrissakes. It’s like a grave. Find anything . . . ?”

“I think I have it here,” I called to him, trying to control my voice. “A lot of policies to check through. We’re almost finished.”

“Okay. Say, listen, bub: I’m gonna go slip into some clothes and run you back across. The air’ll do me good. You be ready to move when I get my clothes on.”

The head disappeared. The trapdoor thumped shut. She was in my arms. “Oh, Lee,
that’s
why.
He’s
why. I can’t leave him like he is now . . .”

“Viv, he’s just putting you on with this sick bit; he isn’t sick . . .”

“I know that.”

“And he knows, too. He knows about us, couldn’t you tell just now? This sick bit, he’s just doing it to keep you.”

“I know that, Lee . . . but that’s
why
I say I—”

“Viv, Viv, baby, listen . . . he’s no more sick than I am. If he and I were off out of your sight someplace he would probably beat the daylights out of me.”

“But don’t you see what that means? How that means he
feels?
”

“Viv, baby, listen; you love
me!
If I ever knew anything I know that.”

“Yes! Yes, I know! But I love him
too
, Lee . . .”

“Not as much as you—!”

“Yes! As much! Oh, I don’t know . . .”

Desperately, I grasped her shoulders. “Even if that’s so, that you love him as much, I need you more than he does. Even if you love us equally, it’s all the more reason; can’t you see I
need
you to keep—”

“Need! Need, is that
all!
” she wailed against my chest, her voice muffled by the heavy wool and her near hysteria. “Viv,” I started to say again, but she pushed back to seek my eyes. Beneath us we could hear Hank returning, heavy-heeled. “Let’s make it,” he called from below the trap. “Hear me Lee? Viv?”

At the sound, her look of conflict and anguish suddenly changed, and her eyes dropped, as though borne to the ground by the weight of an awful shadow, that same shade I had seen across her face at the front door but hadn’t recognized. Because, I would have never believed it possible to find that shadow on Viv. But, now, it was unmistakably nothing more mysterious than plain old shame. I had not recognized it earlier because it was not shame for herself or her guilt, or for me in mine, but shame for the man so weakened by his illness that he was unable to let his wife disappear momentarily from his observation into the attic, so stricken with fever that nothing would do but take me across the river himself to keep her from being alone with me that little time more . . .

“Say, Viv, can I borrow this family album for a while? To show off my heritage back at school?”

And being responsible for some of this weakness, she was trapped by it. It would be her memento of the thing we almost had, just as that photograph hidden inside that album was mine. I could think of nothing to say. She walked from me, away from the trapdoor toward the window—“You better go, Lee; he’s waiting, “—moving slow, weighted. That a shame focused on another should burden one as terribly as the personal variety was practically inconceivable to me. The poor kid is just too compassionate, I told myself . . .