The Maid's Version (12 page)
On the cold night of November 10, 1933, James Dunahew hid inside the Glencross garage, knife drawn and opened, blowing on his hands for warmth, cap pulled low, listening to repetitive mockery from the goddam singing trains. When Arthur Glencross arrived home late he did not park inside the garage but left the car on the driveway and turned toward the front steps. James rushed from the garage back door. Glencross began to woozily turn to the sound of movement and James tripped the man, shoved him onto his back and fell upon him, stabbed his blade high in the body. He stabbed twice and Glencross looked up into his face and said, “Oh.” The man did not resist past the sighed “Oh,” and James shoved his small blade through the heavy overcoat a third time and the blade bent. He had intended to become a murderer this night but recoiled when engaged in the act, repulsed by the feeling in his hands and the forlorn grunts from his own chest and the shock delivered him by Glencross’s abject acceptance of the assault. There was no blood visible on the coat. James never said a word, but withdrew his blade and started to stand, then dropped again and pulled the black leather gloves from the wounded man’s hands. He raised upright and looked at Glencross where he lay, pulled the gloves on and nodded one time, then ran toward the singing rails, boots stomped on the street with loosened soles flapping, breaths gray as ash tossed into the air behind, and was gone from this town forever.
Two days later Alma came unstuck and wailed to pieces in public. Glencross received fourteen stitches at the Bogan Hospital and told Sheriff Bob Jennings that he’d been cut by two pasty-faced men with severe northern accents who’d driven away in a white coupe he’d never seen before, but he told Alma the truth and she broke. She broke and yawped accusations at the town in general and the gentry by surname and released blanket lamentations for all the needlessly dead during one full day and most of a morning. That knife in his hand was not aimed to kill by James alone, and the guiltiest are amongst us without shame at themselves or respect for others every minute, hour, day, world without end, amen. Mrs. Glencross was the concerned citizen who contacted the Work Farm and helped the caretakers track Alma through the cold-snapped flurrying town, trying to guess where mad sorrow runs, until finding her atop Sidney’s grave (for which Mrs. Glencross, guided by unspoken guilt and honest anguish, had secretly paid) facedown with snowflakes resting on her back.
At the Work Farm she fell more deeply into the hole, the blue hole that beckons beneath all our feet when lost for direction or motive for moving at all, the comforting plummet past common concerns and sensate days, down the blue gaping to the easy blue chair that becomes ruinous for its comforts provided in that retreated space, and it takes from years to forever to garner enough replenished zip for the stalled occupant to merely stand from the soft blue avoidance, let alone walk back to the hole and climb toward those known perils of the sunlit world.
For two years she sat facing a yellowish wall in a room without decoration. The room held another woman who stared at the opposite wall and they sat that way without speaking to each other but speaking often, ate when spoon-fed and slept sitting in their chairs. In 1935 Alma developed pneumonia and the doctor gave up but her body didn’t. The Work Farm cook, Miss Daiches, who’d been in service for many years to the Etchieson family on Grace Avenue, and had during that time often relaxed for a spell amongst maids gathered at the Greek’s, began to pull Alma to her feet daily and make her walk and spit heavily into the hallway spittoons. Kate Daiches walked her down the hall and back, and down and back, and after weeks walked her down the stairs and back, and by the next spring she’d walk her outdoors around the two-acre garden maintained by the less damaged residents. Alma spoke in streaks but not sensibly until on a garden walk in June, with dew dampening her feet she stopped and pointed at a wooden stake standing with a vine fallen over slipped string loops and draped limply to ground, and said, “Them ’maters want tyin’ up.”
Within three months of that utterance she was helping Kate Daiches in the kitchen. The residents admired her fairy-tale hair but not in their soup, so Alma began the ritual daybreak brushing and brushing and pinning she would repeat daily for the rest of her life. She did at first help only with those aspects of cooking that did not require the use of a sharp knife—boiled water, washed produce, tore lettuce, pulled the strings from string beans, measured molasses, sugar or meal, mixed and rolled biscuit dough, washed dishes and put eating utensils on the table. She worked grief out through her fingertips and before the next summer began to hum as she worked.
It was Kate Daiches who told Alma in the kitchen as they shelled peas that autopsy X-rays revealed Freddy Poltz, when found blown into the alley, had two bullet wounds behind his left ear. Mr Etchieson, the inquiry cochairman, used to gab plenty during cocktail hour at his home amongst friends and he even had the X-rays in his desk and shared them with esteemed guests who questioned his assertion. Half the country club crowd had seen the proof of murder and remained mum in public. Eventually she’d snuck a look at the stark images and saw that the slugs had been closely spaced and remained obvious and lodged inside Freddy’s skull. Kate had always wished she’d tracked Mae after she’d been so meanly chased out of town and shared this fact, but hadn’t. She did at night search her soul through self-recriminations stated sharply while staring into a mirror, then on the holiest of days raised her chin and asked Mr. Etchieson about Freddy’s murder and had been rebuffed and soon after informed that her services were no longer required. But she thought Alma should know and the town should know and wished she had the courage to spill the beans herself, and she did not, but knew who did when well.
“And you are getting well.”
After being returned to town by July Teague, one of the first things Alma shared with her new employer was an account of the bullet holes. July already knew of their existence and she and John Teague had been shown the X-rays at a frolicsome summer party on a gin-soaked night that turned both somber and charged with suspicions as they stared and calculated the significance of two bullets behind the ear. Alma and July told each other all they had to tell, or most of it, anyhow, and soon Alma became aware that she’d been hired as an ally in the pursuit of answers as much as she had been for domestic chores. The women got along well on the instant, and Alma settled into a life that though familiar in many details felt fresh on her skin, then went looking for John Paul.
She had been told by John Paul and others that he lived now with the Rooshian, so she asked the exact whereabouts and went there. The old man and the boy and the old woman were at work in the great garden. Alma laid a hand on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence near where they crouched and told John Paul what was most on her mind. “I don’t care ever to hear any more talk that you take money from the hand of that man Glencross.”
“I caddy for him. At the country club. You get paid for that.”
“Caddy for somebody else, can’t you? There’s other rich men golf.”
“Arthur pays me double what the other cheapskates pay, and tips big fat tips, too.”
“He’s Arthur to you now, is he? Pshaw! I’m still tellin’ you to keep away from his company from now on, for good.”
“No.”
“For good.”
“No.”
“You’re my son, and I’m tellin’ you.”
“Can’t you see I’ve got work to do? Mr. C and me and Masha need to weed all these rows and get it done before dark.”
“I’m tellin’—”
“Tell me ’til you’re blue in the face, Mom. I don’t much care.”
They stayed that way and would until after the war, John Paul not comforted by his mother’s presence, her known obsessions and rages had kept him in such wringing turmoil, and Alma said too often how sorrowful she was that her youngest boy had any truck at all with the man who done for his own aunt Ruby, who loved him so, and all those others who died innocent, too. There were meetings of mother and son and occasional meals, but no ease could be found between them. On every Christmas Day John Paul received Alma’s standard gifts of two pairs of bib overalls and a can of tooth powder to see him through the upcoming year. He might not speak to her for weeks at a time and that distance came to be accepted with relief by both.
John Paul loved the Cherenkos—Mr. C was the only father figure he ever lived with or learned from and Masha an encouraging presence, long on understanding and seldom cross—and the love was returned. They survived on meager cash and always would but knew how to fend well, and John Paul gave them most of the money he earned. They never asked for money, and if he had none to offer for a week or two or three they didn’t bring the subject up or even hint. The evenings were spent with pots of tea, books, and knitting, Mr. C reading literary classics or ancient history in Russian, Masha knitting something warm for the cold days that were already present or soon enough coming. John Paul would on occasion in these quiet moments catch wind of a po’ boy raid, melons or cobs or squash being snatched from the garden, and the first time he hopped up to run toward the voices and give chase, but was stopped. Mr. C had raised a weathered and large-knuckled hand and said, “Is okay they take not too much, boy. Let them be away and eat—you are never been hungry?”
After Pearl Harbor was bombed, and as the nation mourned coast to coast and recruitment centers stayed open until midnight to process stampedes of enlistees, both Cherenkos pleaded with him not to rush off to this fresh war and die for some vague and inflamed notions he’d never even examined. Mr. Cherenko had known violence and killing, terror and flight. He’d been a hopeful worker standing in peaceful protest outside the Winter Palace in early January of 1905, and witnessed hundreds of his own slaughtered, shot down in the snow by the army, falling everywhere dead or wounded to be bayoneted by fellow peasants in uniform, but survived that debacle in the blood-dappled snow and saw a few more that went similarly before escaping the country during December of that same year, and now had precious little regard for military actions of any announced purpose no matter how pure or just the rationale sounded to the ear. But John Paul heard no ambiguity in the American bugles and their call to duty, and finally they asked if he’d at least graduate high school first, plenty of chance to then go over somewhere that isn’t home and die for Rockefeller, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan—all wars always about land and gold, boy. All.
“Not this one.”
“All.”
On Graduation Day, they both took to bed after the ceremony to lie in shadows and darkness and didn’t come out, not the first morning or the second, and he made okroshka for them, delivered the bowls bedside without comment, and on the third morning they had breakfast ready when he woke.
There are snapshots of John Paul taken in China, of himself and other swabbies in various seaport dives and cathouses, a local woman with arms draped over him from behind, one sitting on each knee, and empty beer bottles crowd the tabletop upon which he might rest an elbow, sailor’s hat askew, an agog grin on his dimpled, pleasured face. In some poses he and the women have misplaced the majority of their clothing, and though in every one of them he’d recovered his skivvies before the image was made, some of the women chose not to don a solitary stitch. In a few he is fully uniformed and dangerous looking, standing on a gangplank, wearing a thick web belt and a forty-five pistol in a black holster, twenty-two or -three years old and off to deliver the military mail onshore in Tsing-tao or other raucous and luring ports. World War II was over, but his service was not, and he was married by then but shipped with all human needs accompanying to the other side of the world, and he stashed his wedding ring inside his ditty bag for safekeeping when going ashore. (I had to protect the photographs when Mom caught me studying them at around age fifteen and tried to rip the entire album from my hands to burn in the yard, and she still searches for it with matches in her pocket whenever she visits and thinks I’m asleep.) On ship at night, seven thousand miles from home, John Paul watched forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kaishek blasting artillery at each other in the distant hills, making the night pulse with low crescents of light chased by faded booms. In the months ahead the pulsing crescents came closer, refugees crowded toward the docks in crowds larger than he’d ever seen or would see and more desperate, and eventually he could watch orange tracers flying after sundown, hear small-arms fire crackling amidst heightened pleas from the cornered refugees, and it was time to pull anchor.
In his six years at sea he saw great vistas and the back rooms of irresistible dumps from Nova Scotia to Hong Kong, had his most miserable hours in the Alaskan Sea, got into a fistfight at the Blue Room in New Orleans with members of Les Brown’s Band of Renown, and encountered scenes of biblical squalor and horror in Chinese circumstances. He’d strangely never been hurt or truly terrified during the actual war, luck of the draw, though in the postwar years abroad he did on three occasions (Tsing-tao, Tsing-tao, and Halifax) reckon he was about to be stabbed or stomped to death but each time somehow wiggled off the hook and came out okay. If ever John Paul cried once as an adult, it would’ve been in 1946 when a letter arrived from July Teague telling him that when a savage hailstorm passed at twilight both Cherenkos rushed into the garden to rescue tomatoes before they were pulped by flying ice and caught summer pneumonia, then died at home within hours of each other during the first week of August.
Alma would have been the very first Gold Star Mother in West Table (that distinction went to Mrs. Lee Haas, who lost her only children, Jeremiah and Samuel, in the early months of war when the
Marblehead
was hit, and Mr. Haas, fatigued and disoriented from battering grief, fell asleep on the divan in the parlor still smoking a cigarette and completed their ruin) had the government known the necessary details, but it was not until 1945 that a cable arrived announcing that Seaman First Class James Maurice Dunahew had perished from his injuries on the island of Guam, on or about December 10, 1941. James had gone away with no word of him received (he likely thought a prison sentence awaited him at home and silence would spare Alma from speaking necessary lies to conceal his whereabouts) until word of his death. In the third year after V-J Day John Paul wandered into a San Francisco nightspot near Union Square and met a bartender who’d been a sailor on Guam and a prisoner in Japan and asked if by chance he’d known his brother. “The men called him Asiatic because he’d sailed in those waters and farther over three or four years, maybe five, and liked all those places around there a whole hell of a lot, which not everybody does. Plenty asked the navy to send them somewhere else, but he asked to stay. Asiatic had been in long enough to be plenty salty, you know, and came running down to the beach with only a carbine, like the rest of us had, when maybe five hundred Japs were storming ashore. Some men wanted to lay down on the sand and surrender right off the bat—don’t make the Japs angry, since we didn’t have much to fight with, anyhow—a few didn’t, though, and started shooting, and Asiatic was one of them. The fight … just went pitiful, sailor. No other way to put it. There was a little bunch of marines and a little bunch of us, and … He was alive when they took us, but … you don’t want to know.”