Now and on Earth Page 17

  And we—

  Not yet, Pop! Seventy years and thirty-five years, and we didn’t speak, and Jo and Roberta are coming, and I want to—

  And—

  Pop! POP!…O Christ, just for a minute…

  “Come to bed, honey. Want me to fix you a little drink? You’ve not had much. Want to take a drink and come to bed?”

  “Pop was here. He’s been talking to me.”

  “There, there, honey.”

  “He came to take me for a walk,” said Jo. “He was shaved and he had a haircut, and he had on a suit without any back.”

  19

  Mom came in early last week. She shared expenses with some people who were coming this way in a car, so the trip cost her only twelve dollars. She was pretty much worn out. They drove straight through without an overnight rest, and she hadn’t eaten much. She couldn’t have eaten very much. She didn’t have the money to do it with.

  Pop had a burial insurance policy for a hundred dollars, but the stuff they furnished for that price wasn’t even decent. The cheapest thing she could get next to the hundred was a hundred and fifty—“and it wasn’t at all bad”—so she had ordered that. She’d paid ten dollars down and signed a note for the other forty. And then there had been the lot to buy, and that was ten dollars down and a note for a hundred and ninety.

  “There were a lot of people there, Jimmie. Pop’s picture, one of the old ones they’d taken when he was running for Congress, was in the paper and there was quite a long piece about him. People I’d never seen before, real well-dressed people, kept coming up and speaking to me and looking into the casket. And there were all kinds of flowers.”

  “How was Pop dressed?” said Jo.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m glad you did things right, Mom.”

  “Well, I felt like we couldn’t do much less. But we’ve got those notes to pay. They come to twenty dollars a month all together—”

  “And don’t worry about that either,” I said. “We’ll take care of the notes.”

  I expected Roberta to stiffen up and say something, and I was prepared to say something back. But she didn’t. She didn’t say what I expected her to.

  “No, don’t you worry a darned bit, Mom,” she said. “I thought as much of Pop as I did my own father. I only wish we could do more.”

  And I squeezed her hand and was proud of her; and Mom kind of took a deep breath as if she’d just jumped a chasm.

  Frankie didn’t say much. She started to cut loose once, but I stopped her with a look. Frankie’s motto is there’s no time like the present, and I didn’t think Mom was in any condition to hear what she had to say. On top of everything else, she was worried about Marge. Walter’s about to lose his job—or says he is—and he blames it on Marge.

  The next night when I got home, Frankie was already there. She’d taken sick down at the office. And Mom had been told, and she was all torn up about it.

  I will say this: We don’t have many inhibitions. You can’t have when you live as close to each other as we do. Anyone can discuss anything at any time, and everyone feels free to put in his two cents’ worth.

  The powwow began as soon as I hit the door, and it continued on into the night until the chief participants, Jo among them, gave up and went to bed. And, of course, we talked about everything under the sun except the subject at hand. And, of course, we didn’t get anywhere.

  Mom said I shouldn’t have let Frankie do it; I should have been looking out for her.

  “And how should I know what she was doing?” I said.

  “Yes, Mom, how could we know?” said Roberta. “We looked up all of a sudden and they were gone. They told us they’d gone to get a tire fixed.”

  “Well, Jimmie ought to have talked to her,” Mom said. “I warned him a long time ago that she was going to get into something like this.”

  “Oh, Mom,” said Frankie, “you know I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Jimmie! The way he—”

  “What?” said Roberta. “Why not?”

  “Nothing,” said Frankie. “I was just saying that I was twenty-five years old. If I don’t know what I’m doing by this time, I never will.”

  “Well, it’s a fine mess,” said Mom, her mouth working. “It just looks like there’s always s-something to—”

  “Oh what’s the use of getting in such an uproar?”

  “But what are you going to do? You can’t send for Chick, can you?”

  “Heavens, no! He’s not that dumb.”

  “Well what, then?”

  “What do you think, Jimmie?”

  “Why, the usual thing, I suppose.”

  “You mean a prescription or—”

  “No, medicine won’t do you any good. Not if you’re really caught. You’re sure you are, are you?”

  “I know I am.”

  “I don’t know why you had to get in such a fix,” said Mom. “I’ll declare, Frankie! The way I tried to—”

  “You’ll have to get a doctor.”

  “I can’t seem to find out about any. I’ve been kind of feeling my way around with some of the other girls. But—”

  “I told you we’d find one. I’ve never been—” I stopped, and avoided Roberta’s eyes. “I’m pretty sure we can find a doctor. But it’ll cost to beat hell the way things are out here now. They’re all getting by so good, and they won’t touch it unless you make it worth their while.”

  “Fifty dollars?”

  “That’s depression rates. We might get it done for a hundred.”

  Frankie flexed her bare toes and looked down at her fingernails. “I guess I could get it if I had to. Some loan-shark would let me have it, probably, at 100 per cent interest.”

  “You’ll not do anything of the kind,” said Mom. “My goodness! You talk as if hundred dollars grew on trees, child! We’ll just make that fellow Moon pay for it, that’s all. Jimmie, you just tell him he’d better get the money and get it quick or he’ll wish he had.”

  “No, don’t do that,” said Frankie. “I don’t want you to.”

  “I’d look fine telling him he had to come through,” I said. “The first thing I’d know I’d be walking down the road talking to myself. I’ve got about a month to go before I’m eligible for unemployment compensation. I don’t care what happens after that, but I’m sticking around until then.”

  Roberta looked at me. “Oh,” she said, “so that’s it! That’s what you’ve been thinking about when you sat around here evenings looking off into space. If you think for a minute, James Dillon, that I’m going to skimp along on fifteen or eighteen dollars a week when you could be making—”

  “It’d be around twenty. And you could have it all. I’d go off some place and kind of get straightened out, and—”

  “No sir! No sir-ee! Any time you go, I’m going right along with you. You’re not going any place unless the family and all of us go, too. Get that idea out of your head right now.”

  “But if I could get away, and start writing again—”

  “I guess if you really want to write, you can do it here. You sold that last story, didn’t you? Well?”

  “Yes, I sold it. I sat in here and picked it out at fifty words a night. And I average ten cups of coffee and a package of cigarettes to every line. I didn’t write. I just kept reaching out and throwing down handfuls of words, and I moved them around and struck out and erased until I secured combinations that weren’t completely idiotic. And in the end I sold the thing to a fourth-rate magazine. I can’t do it again, I won’t do it again.”

  “I thought we were going to talk about me,” said Frankie.

  “Why Jesus Christ,” I said, “I don’t see how you can ask me to! What if you’d been a singer—not a great one but pretty good—and you knew how a thing ought to be sung, but your voice was cracked—you needed some repairs before you could sing again. It was in such bad condition that it was plain hell for you to listen to it, and you knew it was at least as bad to others. So you weren’t singing. You c
ouldn’t, and the effort of trying left you so sick and discouraged with yourself that if you kept on you would never recover. Well then, under those circumstances, would you still take engagements? Would you—”

  “I would if I could get a hundred dollars,” said Mom.

  And Roberta said, “Jimmie’s always been like that, Mom. Why one week when he got five hundred dollars for two little old stories, he was going around pulling his hair and swearing and saying that he was ruined, that he’d forgotten how to write. You’d’ve thought the world was coming to an end.…Now you know you did, Jimmie! You know you’ve always been like that.”

  Well—I guess I have. I guess every writer has. But there was a difference, a difference that only another writer can understand.

  “Oh, see here,” said Frankie, “can’t we stick to the—”

  “And that’s another thing,” I said. “When and if I do start writing again, there’s going to be no more of this crap. I’m getting plenty sick of writing with a picture of a cop and a kindergarten tot pasted on my paper carriage. Never again, you understand? All of you get that through your heads. I’m going to write what I want to write, and the way I want to write it.”

  “Another book, I suppose,” said Roberta.

  “Lord deliver us,” said Mom.

  “All right,” I said, “maybe I will write another book. What’s so funny about that?”

  “Nothing, as I remember,” said Frankie. “But I thought we were—”

  “I’ll say it wasn’t funny,” said Roberta. “You remember, Mom? He’d come home from work at night and you’d’ve thought he was walking in his sleep. He’d sit down, and maybe he’d speak and maybe he’d just stare at you; and if you said anything to him, he wouldn’t answer, or what he would say didn’t make sense. And half of the time you’d think he’d been in a wreck—his clothes all sloppy and his vest buttoned up wrong, and cigarette ashes and coffee stains from one end of him to the other. He always wore such good clothes, too. It just made me sick to look at him.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Yes, oh God,” said Roberta. “That’s what I used to say. He’d finish his supper—and it didn’t make any difference how nice it was he never noticed—and then he’d fuss and fidget around and get his typewriter out and put it right down in the middle of the table before I could get the dishes off. It didn’t make any difference if I’d finished my coffee—”

  “And then the dirt-daubers would start coming in,” I said. “There was—”

  “That’s what he called my friends, Mom. Dirt-daubers. They were real nice ladies, too.”

  “Women, Mother,” said Jo.

  “Will you shut your mouth?”

  “There was that four-eyed bitch,” I said, “that was always telling you you ought to make me help with the housework. And that half-wit you’d met over at the grocery store. And that droopy-drawered gal—I don’t think you ever told me her name; I don’t think she knew what it was herself. And you’d get in the other room and talk just loud enough so that I’d know you were talking, but not so that I could hear what you were saying. And it would go on, by God, for hours.”

  “Yes, Mom,” said Roberta. “I’d have company in, and I never knew it to fail there’d be collectors coming to the door all evening and I’d have to go and talk to them with everyone listening. I couldn’t let Jimmie go because he’d either swear at them or promise them the world with a ring around it to make them go away. I tell you—”

  “Oh, I know how it was,” said Mom. “I know how Pop—”

  “I got so mad I wanted to kill him sometimes. All he was getting was a teeny little old fifteen-dollar-a-week-advance, and we just barely had enough money to get by on, and he could have been making all kinds of money. MacFaddens wanted him to do a serial, and Gangbusters was calling him long-distance and sending wires, and Fawcetts was begging him to go to that governors’ convention and pick up ten or twelve little editorials on crime-prevention—it wouldn’t have taken any time at all and he could have gotten seventy-five dollars a piece for them—”

  “Well I finally gave in,” I said. “I rushed the book on out.”

  “Rushed it, the devil,” said Roberta. “You talk about being slow, now. You couldn’t have been any slower and written anything at all. I thought I’d go crazy. And—and Sunday was the worst day of all. We couldn’t go any place. We’d hardly get out of bed before Jimmie’s friends—they weren’t my friends, I’ll tell you!—would start coming in. And they’d be there all day, drinking coffee and scattering cigarette ashes all over everything, and—and you’d have thought it was their place instead of ours! They’d flop right down on my clean bedspread and sprawl around on the floors, and go to the toilet—and you could hear them going, Mom. They’d go in there and leave the door wide open and holler in to the front room when they had anything to say. And if they wanted something to eat, they just went right into the kitchen and helped themselves. There was one fellow that always wore dirty old corduroys, and I know he hadn’t had a bath in years, and he was the worst one of all. One Sunday I had half a roast I’d been saving and he got it and brought it into the front room with the salt and pepper shakers. And I want you to know that he sat there, shaking salt and pepper all over my clean carpet, and he ate every bit of it. Gulped it right down, Mom, sitting right there in front of everyone, just as unconcerned as—as anything. I never got so—”

  “If I remember rightly,” I said, “he paid rather handsomely for everything he ever got from us. He was just about the best painter in the Southwest. Before he went to Washington to do some murals, he gave us a portable electric phonograph and a complete set of Carl Sandburg recordings and—”

  “Don’t mention those records,” said Roberta. “I never got so sick of listening to anything in my life. I heard them from morning until night. Every time Jimmie couldn’t think of anything else to do; when he was tired or nervous or cross—and he always was when he was working on that crazy book—he’d get those records out. And of all the disgusting filthy— That’s where he got that ‘Foggy, Foggy Dew’ business, and ‘Sam Hall’—”

  “They’re old English folksongs. You can’t expect—”

  “Old English folksongs, my eye! I guess I know when I hear filth, and I certainly heard those things enough.”

  “Well, I got rid of them.”

  “Yes, you got rid of them! After I—”

  “I got rid of them, and the people, and the book.”

  “And after you’d put me through all that, the book wasn’t published!”

  “Wasn’t it?” I said. “I’d forgotten. It must have been quite a disappointment to you.”

  “Well,” said Roberta, “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Funny how it slipped my mind,” I said. “But of course I wasn’t really interested in the thing.”

  Roberta’s mouth shut, and there was the old helpless puzzled sullen look around it. “I don’t know why I can’t ever say anything—”

  “You’re doing fine, honey. You’ve said quite a bit.”

  “Jimmie,” said Frankie, “give up. What I want to know is—”

  “I think that’s the thing to do, Jimmie,” said Mom, plucking absently at a safety pin in her dress.

  “What—give up? I already have.”

  I knew that wasn’t what she meant. She’d been having a long discussion with me—even if I hadn’t heard it—and she (we) had reached a satisfactory conclusion. I knew it, but I wouldn’t admit it. That is one trick of Mom’s that exasperates me.

  “Do what?” I said. “What are you talking about anyway?”

  “Why—about the story. We can send it to this last magazine, they liked your work so well, and we could have a check back inside of a month. Frankie would pay you back, of course, but it would save borrowing from…”

  I looked at her. I looked at Frankie and Roberta. Jo was grinning. Everyone else, apparently, seemed to think it was all right. Mom had pulled a rabbit out of a hat. She had dive
d down into the muck and come up with a diamond.

  “Well, I will be goddamned!” I said. “I will be damned by all the saints and Christ and Mary. Willingly, by God. They can damn me individually and collectively, and I will not say a word. They can come in pairs and squads and regiments, in trucks and sidecars, on roller skates and bicycles, and they can damn me to their heart’s content! What in the name of—”

  I got the bottle out of the kitchen and had a slug.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Mom,” said Roberta. “He’s just acting crazy.”

  “Now look,” I said. “Once and for all, I am not—”

  “Jimmie! You’re spilling that stuff all over the rug!”

  “—I positively will not write another story. I’ll peck horse-turds with the sparrows—”

  “Jimmie! You dirty thing!”

  “I’ll swill slop with the hogs; I’ll peddle French postcards; I’ll bend over bathtubs—”

  “Jimmie!”

  “I’ll adopt Frankie’s triplets or whatever she has and give them the same thoughtful and tender rearing I’d give my own. But I will not—I utterly by God will not write another story!”

  I sat down again.

  “He means he won’t write another story,” Frankie remarked idly to Roberta.

  “Oh,” said Roberta.

  “Well,” said Mom. “I don’t see why not.”

  I choked on the drink I was taking.

  “Mom,” said Frankie.

  “Well, I don’t,” said Mom. “Of course, this isn’t the best place in the world to write, but you can’t always have things just like you want them. Why look at the way Jack London did, Jimmie! He—”

  “Now just a minute,” I said. “I want to introduce a piece of evidence. Will you look at this for just a minute?”

  Mom looked at the black-and-white photostat and handed it back. “I don’t see what your birth-certificate has to do with it.”

  “It establishes the fact that I am not Jack London? It proves conclusively that I am not Jack London, but a guy named James Dillon? It—”