Pontoon (3 page)

“Hey, Precious. Couldn't sleep after I got your message on the machine. Sorry I wasn't here. Guess you've turned in. Gimme a call in the morning, okay? I saw a great deal on airfare to London and I thought maybe we could do that trip to Italy if you like. Fly to London in September—take a train to Rome. Let's do it.”

Barbara stood by the dead woman's bed as the man talked to her.

“I don't know how we got this old, kid. But like you said, after you turn eighty, you've gotta live fast. Anyway, I'm sitting here thinking about you. How long does your answering machine let me go on? I forget. Maybe I'm just talking to the wall. Hey, it wouldn't be the first time, right? I was trying to figure out today when our anniversary is—I mean, do you date it from when we first met? Or is it when we got together again? Now there would be an anniversary. Does Hallmark put out greeting cards for that? Ha ha.—Thinking of you on our Special Day when you and I went all the way—huh? Ha. I think I saved the room key. Listen, I know I'm just nattering on here but what the hell. I'm not the sort of guy who writes things down. So the way I remember is if I tell someone, and who can I tell, right? You. So here I am, yakking into your answering machine. I remember you brought chocolate-chip cookies. And we got into bed and then you got up to use the bathroom and it was the first time I'd seen you without clothes on since the Dyckman Hotel in December of 1941—and you hadn't changed a bit. This tall slip of a girl getting up out of
bed like a goddess rising from the ocean waves and all of a sudden that day in 1941 came back so clear, I could smell the floor wax. Nineteen forty-one. December. The Friday before Pearl Harbor. We went to the dance at Fort Snelling and that colonel made a pass at you and we got the hell out and walked along the river and talked, and we stopped and kissed and I told you that my brother was the night clerk at the Dyckman and you said, ‘Let's go.' So we caught the Hiawatha streetcar and you were quiet all the way downtown and up to the room and we sort of groped around in the dark and you said, ‘Not so fast.' I remember what you said, you said, ‘I wish I could make this minute last for a whole day.' And then you rolled over on top of me and we went to town and when it was over you said, ‘That was pretty good.' I'll always remember that. ‘Pretty good.' Oh God, why do I keep going back to that? You never look back. I do. Because after that, everything happened so fast. You got that boil and you were so sick, I went to General Hospital to see you and the doctor said it was fifty-fifty, at best. They said only immediate family could see you. Your mother was in the hall crying and I went over and said I was a friend of yours and she looked at me and just cried harder. And then they shipped me to Chicago and the train stopped on an overpass and I could look down Portland Avenue to the hospital where you were and count up to the fourth floor and there was a light on in a room. And then it went out. I cried all the way to Chicago. God, I feel like I am going to cry now.”

She pressed stop. That was enough of him. He sounded like a lot of old men she knew. You put a nickel in them and they told their life story twice.

She dialed Kyle's number at his apartment in Minneapolis. He picked up on the third ring. He sounded distracted. Kyle was a sophomore at the University, an English major, and he studied all the time.

“It's Mother, honey. I'm awfully sorry but I have bad news. Grandma died.”

“Omigod.” He let out a breath. “When did she die?” And a girl's voice said, “What?”

“She died in her sleep. Last night. It must have been sudden. She was reading a book and it fell on the floor and she just died.”

He was crying and the girl was comforting him, she said, “It's okay, it's okay.” And she hugged him. Barbara said, “I know it's a shock. Me, too. I just walked in and there she was. She must've had a heart attack.”

“When did it happen?” He was crying, he could hardly get the words out. The girl whispered, “Who died?”

“Last night. Late. She went out for dinner with her buddies and came home and went to bed and she died. In her sleep. She was very peaceful.”

The girl was whispering to him. “My grandma,” said Kyle. “Last night.”

Barbara said that Grandma was not afraid of death, she looked it straight in the eye, and don't you think she had such a good life because she knew life was short and that pushed her to do more than most people her age would dream of—she talked, listening to him try to take a deep breath and compose himself and this girl, whoever she was, nuzzling him and then it dawned on Barbara that the two of them were naked. Something in the pitch of their voices. A mother can tell. Two naked young people, her freckle-faced boy
weeping, and this other person—she imagined a bosomy girl with studs in her nipples and a butterfly tattoo on her butt.

She didn't tell him that she was, at that very moment,
sitting
on the bed where the dead body lay
. She could see the shape of Mother's left hand under the sheet. She could have reached out and touched it.

“Are you okay?” he said. Yes, of course she was okay, she only wished she could tell him what it was like to walk in and to find her own
mother
, for crying out loud, lying in bed
with her eyes
open
. “I suppose I'm in shock,” she said. “I don't know what we're going to do without her.”

She listened hard for the girl to say something.

“When's the funeral?” Kyle asked.

“Well, that's what I called you about.” And she read him the letter. Word for word.

“That is so awesome,” he said. He wasn't crying anymore, he was half laughing. “Wow. A bowling ball!! You mean, like a real bowling ball?”

“I found it in her closet. It's green. Like green marble. Expensive. It looks Italian.”

“And no eulogy, no prayers. Boy. She had a whole other life, didn't she.”

“I am just a little worried about this Raoul. What if he shows up?”

“Of course he'll show up. We'll invite him. He was her boyfriend. He loved her.” Kyle sounded a little giddy. “God, Grandma! I always thought she had something else going on!”

“You think we should? Really? I don't know what to do,” said Barbara.

“We're going to do it just exactly the way she wanted it,” he said. “I'm going to do it myself.” He was all excited now, bouncing around and yipping about his parasail—the one he had built from a kit—
what was a parasail? (parasol?)
—and now the girl's voice said, “Kyle, I can't let you do that. You
know
how I feel,” and he walked away from her. He was naked in a bedroom in Minneapolis with a girl. Barbara wanted to ask, “Who's there?” On the other hand she didn't want to know. A redhead maybe, one of those freckled Irish beauties, howbeit with tiny silver hammers stuck in her nipples. A little trollop who could seduce and ensnare a bright but naïve young man, and lead him off to an itinerant life of miming for spare change on street corners, her smart little boy so good in school, so innocent in the ways of the world, and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of losing him. The boy who achieved Eagle Scout and who put on the white robe every Sunday morning and carried the cross down the church aisle—who had almost not gone to college but his mother made him go, who was on the road to becoming somebody—he was in the clutches of the trollop. Maybe she had interrupted them in the midst of hot sex. She tried to imagine his skinny body intertwined with a girl's. How weak men are! Educate them all you like, make them read philosophy and history and poetry, but when the waitress leans over the table and her shapely breasts hang like ripe fruit, men go blank, their pants enlarge, intelligence plummets, they are ready to buy whatever is offered and pay any price. Give them the check, they will sign it! Take their shoes, their watch, the loose change jingling in their pocket—they will look at you in awestruck wonder, little girl, and whisper Thank You as you wave good-bye.

“It's okay, Mom. Call up the mortuary. Not Lindberg. I don't think he does cremations. Call one in St. Cloud. Look in the Yellow Pages. I'll be there tomorrow morning. Do you need me to find Raoul?”

“No, I'll find him myself. Soon as I hang up.”

“Promise? You can't leave Raoul out.” Kyle laughed.
Raoul
. She had visions of a dance instructor in a storefront studio, Raoul's House of Samba, a lounge lizard in black slacks and flamenco shirt, his specialty: mature women, unattached. Twenty dollars a dance, no extra charge for the squeeze.

E
velyn Frances Powell. Born March 14, 1923, in her grandma Crandall’s bedroom in Anoka. Fourth child of Frank and Susan. Ruby, Frank Jr., Florence, Evelyn. Her dad farmed 140 acres near Holding-ford. She grew up gardening and feeding chickens and then the farm went under. Her dad bought a tractor to replace his team of horses and the tractor sparked and the barn caught fire and the hay in the loft went up like a torch and the cows perished and that was the end of them. The bank took over and they moved to Lake Wobegon. Uncle Ev owned a machine shop there. Her dad felt “liberated” by the farm failure and pursued his true calling, which was invention. He invented a double-flange rotary valve trombone, a hawser spindle for a capstan whelp, and though his patents found no takers, he was a happy man, a fount of innovation. “Work,” he told Evelyn. “That’s the secret of happiness.” He had a lathe, a drill press, a forge, all he needed. He invented a bifurcated grommet for an oarlock, and a two-way spring-forced sprocket. He invented the two-bit drill chuck, the semi-rigid rear-mounted eyelet, the twin-turret baffle effector. The sheepshank fish hook. Although nothing he made had immediate applicability, he went to his work-bench every day with a song in his heart. Evelyn took after him.

In 1938, he went through a bad episode, hallucinations and restlessness and vocal outbursts (he shouted things like “Clear the decks!” and “Get ’em off me!”) and Florence and Evelyn moved in with their maternal grandparents on Cedar Avenue in south Minneapolis.

When she got to Minneapolis, she took the name Eve for a few years and got a taste of stardom at Roosevelt High School. Eve played center on the 1937–38 Rosies basketball team who went to State, and she recited “The Raven” in speech tournaments, dressed in a long white gown, long wild brown hair, barefoot, and according to her sister, she was mesmerizing.

Eve had a future in Hollywood. Many people thought so. She was a natural. Like Garbo. She shone. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. At the 1939 Minnesota State Fair, she was sculpted in butter. She recited “Invictus” on WCCO’s “Stairway to Stardom” broadcast at the Aquatennial, and Randolph Scott, who was Grand Marshal of the Torchlight Parade that year, told her she was the genuine article and she should come to Hollywood and he would get her a screen test at RKO, but nobody encouraged her. In any decent fairy tale, someone would have offered her a ride out west and dropped her on Sunset Boulevard with her cardboard suitcase, squinting into the setting sun, and she would’ve caught the eye of Jack Warner, driving by in his yellow roadster, and he’d stop and offer her a small part in
Babes Ahoy
. But instead she clerked at Dayton’s and then went to nursing school. Three months later she got a boil on her butt that popped, which, in those pre-antibiotic days, almost killed her. She lay in General Hospital for two weeks with a 104 degree fever and came home to Lake Wobegon to recuperate.

The brush with death derailed her, and she sat discouraged in her mother’s dim parlor, reading pious novels about goodness rewarded, and listened to the moaning that passed for conversation
in that house, and that was when Jack Peterson walked into her life. He was the nephew of the next-door neighbor. Simple as that. He came over and shoveled the walk. He was a dark Norwegian in Navy whites, due to report for duty in thirty days, and in a burst of patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor, she married him.

She felt sorry for him, said Florence. He was all torn up inside about the futility of war and he believed he was going to die. He was sure that Hitler would be marching down State Street in Chicago by Labor Day and the Japs would invade Los Angeles. The Wehrmacht would blitzkrieg west across the Plains, just as they had rolled over the Poles and the French, the Luftwaffe leaving cities in smoking ruins. America was full of Germans—New Ulm, New Munich—look around you—and they formed a fifth column of spies and saboteurs. The end of the world was at hand, there was no God, how could there be? He was soaked in defeat, death was waiting for him in some stinking jungle. He wept on her hand. She fixed him a chocolate malted and he said it probably was his last. There was a Last Visit to the old high school, and a Last Ice Fishing Trip, and a Last Movie. They sat in the back row. He clung to her and she allowed him to slip his trembling hand up inside her shirt. She just wanted to bring some sunshine into a sailor’s life. But some town girls saw what happened and they told and back in those days necking was sex and sex led to marriage—No U-turns Permitted—and the next day he threw himself at her feet and said she was the only ray of hope in his life, and she felt obliged to go ahead and do it. February 7, 1942, at 11:30 in the morning. The two of them and the wooden-faced minister and his cross-eyed wife and Mother and Florence. Jack looked whipped. Evelyn wore a lovely shimmery green dress that had been Mother’s. The couple drove away in Jack’s rattletrap Model A, and Mother and Florence burst into tears the moment the car disappeared around the corner. They cried their eyes out.

“He’s not good enough for her,” said Mother. “So why did we let her go?” They were blinded by the uniform, said Flo. The starched cap and the gold braid. Evelyn was sacrificed for the war effort, as if she was scrap metal.

Mr. and Mrs. Peterson drove toward the Wisconsin Dells and he was half-asleep and ran the car off the road and onto a frozen pond in River Falls and they skidded to a halt and the right front tire sank in a hole in the ice. Jack tried to lift the right front end and couldn’t and he flopped down on the ice, sobbing, “Nothing I do ever turns out right.” They spent the night with an old bachelor farmer named Wilf who towed the car out with a team of horses. Evelyn lay on a filthy couch, her husband on the floor, and considered having the marriage annulled. But what if he died in the service? She’d feel horrible. He was going off to fight for his country in three days and she would make those days the best days of his young life. She imagined his ship would be torpedoed. She would stand by his bier in the cemetery as the bugler played “Taps” and the honor guard saluted and she would grieve for him. That was what Jack expected, and she did too. But he was sent to Los Angeles, taught Morse code, and assigned to a spotter’s station at the end of the pier in Ventura where he watched for Japanese planes that never came, his finger on the telegraph key. Three years of staring at the horizon. She wrote to him every Sunday, though he seldom wrote back, cheerful letters about Minneapolis and Vocational High, where she trained as an auto mechanic and her friends there, Ina and Margaret and Grace and Ruby and Marian and Elsie, and the family they had bonded with on Oakland Avenue, the streetcar rides to Excelsior Amusement Park, the picnics in Annandale and Medicine Lake. The gas coupons they pooled to drive to the North Shore in Ina’s car, the sing-alongs, the gaiety of it all, and then he came home. He walked in the door and said, “I made it.” And he had. There he was. And she was married to him.