Where You Once Belonged (5 page)

But she was living with her father at the time. Dr. Kramer was a well-known professor on campus. He wore bow ties and dark suits to class every day and taught graduate seminars in the English Department. His concentration was in the Puritans. He was great for John Bunyan and thought
The Pilgrim’s Progress
was literature. He had studied at Yale as an undergraduate and I believe he considered the students at Colorado to be beneath his abilities. Nevertheless he had been able to resign himself to teaching at Colorado for more than thirty years. He was not a lot of fun to meet in the living room when I called on Nora for a date.

I never knew her mother. Mrs. Kramer had died a number of years earlier. I have seen pictures of Mrs. Kramer, though. The pictures show her to have been a small woman with dark hair like her daughter’s, parted severely to one side, and she appears to have had a thin little mouth, which at least while she was being photographed she held tightly closed. But I know very little about her; Nora did not talk readily about her mother. For Mrs. Kramer had died horribly when Nora was eleven years old. And Nora had seen it happen.

She told me about it once, just once, speaking in a monotone voice as if she were reporting some event which had happened not to her but to someone else, as if what had occurred when she was eleven didn’t concern her at all anymore.

It happened that she and her mother had gone to Denver on a Saturday morning to shop at May D & F’s, which was a big department store downtown, and it was just before Christmas, a bright clear day, so the sidewalks were crowded with people carrying packages and calling pleasantly to one another, dropping coins into the red Salvation Army buckets. And then while she and her mother were standing at the street corner waiting for the light to change, Mrs. Kramer had been pushed or jostled by the crowds so that she was shoved off the curb out into the path of one of the big city buses that was coming up the street. Mrs. Kramer was able to avoid being hit head-on by the bus, but as it went by, her winter coat was caught by something and suddenly she was being pulled along beside it; then she lost her footing and she was being dragged along on her back beneath the bus. Nora began to run after her. But the bus driver didn’t see her, or see her mother either, apparently. Then up the block Nora saw that her mother’s coat had torn free, so that she was no longer being pulled along the street on her back. But though her mother had stopped moving, the bus hadn’t. And then Nora saw the black wheels of the bus roll over her mother’s chest and head. She stopped running then. She began to scream. She screamed and screamed, she told me, until finally someone came and put his coat over the thing in the street, which had been her mother, and she remembers that she continued to scream until the ambulance arrived at last and one of the attendants gave her a shot. Later at the hospital she was asked to provide identification. She was able to do that. But when she was asked whom they should call, she couldn’t remember her father’s phone number and she began to scream once more.

She told me this story one night in our bedroom, early in our marriage. Afterward I turned in the bed and held her and brushed my hand over her face, expecting tears on her cheeks. But there weren’t any tears. And after a while she went to sleep. Then the next morning she would not say anything more about it.

Thus, so far as I know, that long-ago Saturday morning in Denver was the last time that Nora Kramer ever screamed about anything. She would not allow herself to show intense emotion ever again. Not even when Toni, our daughter, was sixteen and there was good reason to show emotion.

But no: I do not wish to cause her further harm. She’s had enough. I am not at all eager to stir up things for her. I am merely glad she seems to be happy again. Still I do feel compelled to make this account of things as accurate as I can. For my own reasons.

But perhaps it’s enough to say that after two years of dating Nora Kramer in Boulder, after two years of turning myself inside out for her, so that I hardly knew myself who I was anymore, and after meeting her father repeatedly in the living room where he would be sitting in a chair beside a lamp, reading Bunyan and maybe a little of Milton too, a little of
Paradise Lost
for variety’s sake, to clear his palate—those nights when I tried to make conversation with him while he read and while I waited for his black-haired daughter to come down the stairs so we could leave the house and go outside where I thought I might remember how to breathe once more—after all of that Nora and I were married in the summer of 1964 and we moved to Holt where I began to work for my father on the local paper. But Nora didn’t like Holt very much, even from the beginning. It wasn’t a thing like Boulder and Denver were. And I recall now what Stewart Fliegelman said about our prospects.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You still think she’s some kind of violin and you just haven’t learned the fingering yet?”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘She isn’t a violin,’ for Chrissakes. Aren’t you listening to me?”

“I’m trying to,” I said. “But it’s so goddamn loud in here I can’t hear anything. And you never make any sense anyway.”

Then Fliegelman leaned across the picnic table and started to shout into my face.

We were sitting in the Sink, one of the student bars on the hill near campus. You sat on wood benches at picnic tables; the tables were all carved and scarred on top and around you all of the walls and the low ceiling were painted black. There were beatnik sayings and slogans on the walls, spray-painted over the black in dripping colors, and toward the back there was a room which had a dirt floor. It was always crowded in the Sink, but it was especially crowded on Friday nights when everyone was trying to make a date for the weekend: an intense place then, packed and smoky and loud and really filthy and still wonderful, with students drunk on the seventy-five-cent pitchers of beer and shouting to people three feet in front of them above the scream of the jukebox. It was the place to go on a Friday night if you were a student in Boulder. It and Tulagi’s. Tulagi’s had a big dance area and live music while the Sink had atmosphere and also Sink Burgers with special sauce that ran down your chin.

That evening I had just come in and I had sat down on the picnic bench, after a date with Nora Kramer, looking characteristically confused and hang-faced, no doubt, wanting consolation and understanding, or at least a Sink Burger, and now Fliegelman was shouting into my face about violins.

“Because there isn’t any music there,” he shouted. “You hear me?”

“I hear you. But what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s an extended metaphor, for Chrissakes. Don’t you know what that is?”

“What?”

“It’s what you and Nora Kramer aren’t. That’s what it is.”

“Jesus Christ,” I shouted back at him. “You’re drunk, Fliegelman. You’re from Chicago and you’re drunk and you’re full of shit.”

“Like hell,” he said. He sat up straight from the picnic table as if I’d said something which offended him. “It’s beer. And I’ve done all I can for you, Arbuckle. I’m going to go liberate my bladder. It’s my right as a citizen.” Then he stood up from the table and made his way drunkenly back across the dirt floor toward the rest room, moving through the dense pack of student bodies as if he were some redheaded gnome at a bacchanal.

Well, our generation was full of talk of rights and liberation then and of music too (though more about electric guitars than of violins), and as it turned out, although I paid no serious attention to him at the time, Stewart Fliegelman was right about Nora Kramer and me. There wasn’t any music there. Nor much that resembled liberation. And as for Fliegelman himself, his first attempt at marriage wasn’t exactly Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
either.

• 5 •

J
ack had been home from the Army for almost two years by the time Nora and I moved to Holt. After graduation in June we were married in Boulder in the Episcopal church. Stewart Fliegelman stood up with me and Nora had a friend of hers as attendant. Then when it was time for Dr. Kramer to escort his daughter down the aisle toward the altar he did so without once looking at her—it was as though he just happened to be passing through the church on his way to work, or as if he were still deep in thought about Milton and Bunyan—and Nora looked lovely too, in her white veil and white dress and with her dark hair pulled away from her face like a young girl’s. Afterward, though, perhaps as an offering of consolation to her (for the old man certainly felt she deserved consolation, marrying me), he insisted that we take a week’s honeymoon in New York at his expense.

So we flew to New York, attended a play on Broadway, saw the sights, ate in restaurants with male waiters in white jackets standing over us, and we held hands under the table—all as you’re supposed to do—and it was in New York that we began those icy exchanges in bed which not only characterized that first week of our marriage but the next eighteen years as well. Then in the middle of that week Nora got sick with something, a summer cold or the flu, so we cut short the time in New York and flew home again. The change in air pressure in the plane caused her ears to pain seriously, I remember, and her face was chalk-white when we walked down the ramp. We stayed that night in Boulder with her father and the next day when Nora felt better we drove the three hours east to Holt. The day after that I went to work at the paper and Nora began to plant rosebushes behind our house in the dirt along the garage. It was not a pleasant beginning for either one of us.

But Jack Burdette seemed to be doing very well. He was home from the Army and it was obvious that he still thought of himself as having had a very good time for those two years while he had been in the service. That is, being a soldier, he had perfected his beer drinking and his poker playing and he had seen something of the nightlife in the towns near the bases he was sent to. Also, he had discovered that money, if he had enough of it, would buy many things that he hadn’t known before that it would buy, not excluding the temporary services of other human beings. He told us that he had developed a respectful view of the healing powers of penicillin. We heard all about it once he was home again. There was one story in particular that he told. It involved three German girls and two bottles of champagne and one hotel bed, the kind of arithmetic Jack said he understood. “Them German fräuleins won’t refuse you nothing,” he said. “You ought to try one yourself.”

Thus the Army had served as a kind of finishing school for Jack, a form of postgraduate work in the essential life skills. They had even given him a diploma in the guise of an honorable discharge to prove that he had passed, to show that he had learned their fundamental lessons.

Late in 1962 then, after spending his last paycheck in a final protracted binge, he had returned to Holt. He was heavier and stronger now, beginning to spread out and to take on mass, to develop a heavy gut which daily beer drinking had something to do with, and certainly he was more experienced than he was when he left, but he was probably not any wiser. That didn’t matter, though; Wanda Jo Evans was still here and so was his job at the Co-op Elevator. In short time he had taken up both.

In the meantime Wanda Jo Evans had undergone some changes herself. She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more beautiful than she had been before and that she was still warmhearted and utterly devoted to Jack. At twenty-one she had reached that brief moment of physical perfection. The baby fat was gone, her strawberry blonde hair grew long and full to her shoulders, and now each morning when she walked to work at the phone company she wore nylon hose and heels and a nice skirt and blouse. Consequently it was at about this time that some of the men in town began to make it a point to be drinking coffee at the front tables at the Holt Cafe so they could stare out the windows and watch her walk across Main Street. The men hoped that a sudden gust of wind would rise and lift her skirt to reveal more of her legs, or that a sudden breeze would come up and blow her skirt tighter against her thighs. Failing these, they were there every morning anyway, to watch her mount the curb when she reached the other side of the street. For she was something to see. But she was still a very nice girl, still entirely innocent and guileless, and she herself cared only about seeing Jack Burdette.

When she had begun to earn money as a secretary after she had graduated from high school, she had moved out of her mother’s home and had rented a tiny one-bedroom house of her own. It was over there on Chicago Street on the east side of town where there are mainly small one-story frame houses painted white and yellow and sometimes pink, with little gray slap-sided toolsheds in back along the alleys and vacant lots between the houses, with here and there an old wheelbarrow or an old car, a DeSoto or a Nash Rambler, say, rusting on blocks among the pigweed and redroot under the stunted elms. She worked steadily, efficiently, at the telephone office every day, and she kept her little house clean, mowed the lawn on summer evenings, shoveled the snow off the walks in winter, and for two years while Jack was gone she composed letters to him, following him from El Paso to San Francisco and then to Germany, all by mail, by letters—letters which Jack himself only rarely answered and then only to allow, as he would, I suppose, that he was in California now or that he had arrived in Germany, or perhaps (and this is more likely, knowing Jack) simply to complain that he had lost his weekend pass for some minor infraction of military rules and so had nothing better to do with his time than to scribble her a brief note on Army paper while he waited for the other men to come back so he could begin to play cards again.

But finally in the winter he had returned to Holt once more and it was all right again. Or perhaps for Wanda Jo it was better than all right, since for the next eight years she continued to go out with him, believing all that time that he would marry her yet.

Well, it was an abject kind of love. And it took many forms. But clean socks was at least one of them.

I think it must have been a matter of barter to Wanda Jo, a kind of romantic transaction. It was as if she believed that washing his socks and laundering his shirts was not only the obvious and logical progression from making crib sheets for him when they were in high school, but that now doing his laundry each week was also the fair means of exchange for the privilege of going out with him on Saturday nights. Because for eight years, Jack would park his car in front of her house on Chicago Street, on those Saturday nights, and then he would get out and saunter up to her house and under his arm he would carry to her front door a brown paper bag—a bag which would never contain roses or carnations or even a handful of daisies but which instead would always be stuffed to overflowing with another week’s accumulation of his dirty clothes, his dirty socks and his greasy shirts. Then Wanda Jo would open the door to him and take that paper bag from his hands. It was as if she thought he’d brought her a gift, a present, a romantic offering, as though she believed he’d given her something which was actually valuable and considerate. And of course in return she’d have something to give him too; she’d hand him that other paper bag, the one with his clean clothes in it—his sour socks and his old work shirts and his soiled jeans transformed now, sweet-smelling, washed and tumble-dried and still fragrant of soap, as though in the intervening week she’d managed to perform some miracle or magic. And in truth she had: she had accomplished a kind of domestic and loving alchemy.

Then Jack would say: “Thanks, Wanda Jo.” Or he might even become extravagant; he might say: “Thanks a lot, kid.”

So they’d leave her little house on Chicago Street then. They’d walk out to his car together, with Jack’s big arm draped over her smooth silky shoulder under her strawberry hair, and at the car Jack would throw the sack of clean clothes into the backseat. Then they’d go out for the night, to drink at the tavern on Main Street or to drink and dance at the Legion on Highway 34. It was all a weekly occurrence; it happened every Saturday night. And afterward, after the bars had closed and after Jack had told his last joke to the last man still there in the bar who was still sober enough to laugh in the right places, they would usually go back to Wanda Jo’s house again. Then for an hour or two there would be another kind of exchange in the back bedroom where, we understood, Jack would teach her the tricks he himself had paid to learn while he was in the Army. And none of us doubted that Wanda Jo was obliging about that too. Because she loved him. Because she still thought of him as a big black-haired man with a good sense of humor. She was willing to wait for him for all those years—for him to make up his mind about marrying her—because she still believed he would eventually. She hadn’t anything else in mind for herself. Jack Burdette was the sum total of what she hoped for in life. She told me that once.

It was on one of those Saturday nights. It was in March or April, toward the end of winter, after Jack had been back in Holt for six or seven years.

I had been working late at the
Mercury
rather than going home to Nora and a silent house. Nora would be reading as usual, wrapped up in an afghan in the front room, and Toni, our little girl, who was two or three then, would already be asleep in her bed upstairs under a white comforter. So I had gone back to the office after supper to try to work on an editorial I was writing for the next week’s issue of the paper, and afterward I had walked up the block to the Holt Tavern on Third and Main streets. I wanted noise and laughter; I wanted to drink a beer among friends before going home again. At the tavern I stood at the bar talking to Bob Sullivan for a while.

Bob Sullivan was a semiretired farmer who had moved to town recently, and at the moment he was seriously disappointed in his granddaughter Amy. She had married a local boy named Jerry Weaver six months earlier. “And the kid wasn’t any good for her,” Sullivan said. “I told her so. Here she’s just a year out of high school and then this Weaver kid talks her into a church wedding before she even has time to turn around good and see what else there might be in the world waiting for her.”

“How old is she?” I said.

“Nineteen.”

“It’s pretty young to get married.”

“That’s what I mean.” Sullivan said. “But do you think you can tell these kids that?”

“No I don’t.”

“Well you can’t.”

Sullivan ordered another Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. After it was on the bar in front of him he drank half of it at once.

“So,” he said, “after I see she’s going to go through with it, I decided: hell, all right, then, I’ll make it easier on her. I’ll buy her a nice double-wide trailer as a wedding present. And I did. It was brand-new too when I give it to her.”

“That was good of you.”

“Because you don’t think that kid has any money, do you?”

“His family has two or three sections of wheatland. They ought to have some money at least.”

“But do they spend it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“They don’t. And now I wish I didn’t either. I’m going to tell you why.”

“I’m still listening.”

“Because,” Bob Sullivan said, “the last time I go out to Amy’s house it was a month ago Sunday afternoon. I sit down at the kitchen table like I usually do and Amy brings me a cup of coffee. And after I’ve litten a cigarette to smoke with the coffee, she looks across the table at me and says: ‘Grandpa,’ she says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my house anymore.’ ‘What?’ I say. ‘Grandpa,’ she says, ‘I just would appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in my house anymore.’ ‘You would, would you? Well I’ll be damned.’ ‘Because it’s a house rule,’ she says. ‘Is that right?’ I say. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it is. Jerry and me made up that rule last week after you was here the last time. I’m sorry, Grandpa.’ ‘So am I,’ I say. ‘And I’m getting sorrier.’ Then do you know what I did?”

“No. But I can guess.”

“I stood up and went outside. That’s what I did. I drove home again mad as hell about it. And I haven’t been back there since. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds pretty sudden to me.”

“That’s what I think. Because I’d already taken out my lighter and litten my cigarette. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had just told me before I’d already litten. But she never.”

“She’ll probably get over it,” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s been more than a month.”

“Give it awhile longer.”

“Sure. But do you know what, Pat?”

“No.”

“Do you know what the damn hell of it is?”

“No I don’t.”

“I miss her. That’s what the damn hell of it is. I miss Amy. I miss going out there, talking to her and drinking coffee with her. And tomorrow it’s going to be Sunday afternoon all over again too.”

Then he looked at me and I shook my head. He drank the rest of his Jack Daniel’s and afterward he sat there at the bar stirring the ice in the glass with his finger. Finally he stood up very slowly and went back to the rest room.

While he was gone I moved farther down the bar. I ordered another beer. Toward the back, sitting at a table by herself, I saw Wanda Jo Evans. She waved at me and I walked back to her table and sat down in the chair next to her. Jack Burdette was standing over by the pool table talking to a circle of men, heavy, solid, massive, an imposing presence, standing there talking, gesturing with a full glass of liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his face far above those other faces, florid now and animated, his eyes a little bit shiny. The men were all watching him while he talked.

“You’re looking lovely tonight, Wanda Jo,” I said. “Is that a new dress?”

“Do you like it?”