Alive and Dead in Indiana Page 6

  Then I go back to the American Legion and search for you. In my file is a new commendation from Chennault. I answer mail. Write letters. Make notes in the margins of radio traffic logs.

  I do not know how many letters this makes to you. For a while after the Arbor Day I spent in Georgia, I would send them to your sister there. She would write back as you. She had practiced your hand from the letters she had from you during the war, tracing them as she grew up the way other children trace animals or flowers out of encyclopedias. We both went a long way toward believing. She cut short her hair and nails, carved our initials, yours and mine, into one of the trees. She had her picture taken by the tree while she wore your old work clothes. But the closer she got to you, the more I missed the things that she was not. Maybe I am cursed with too much memory. Maybe I write these letters as a way of forgetting. I watch the nicotine stains on my fingernails grow out as the nail grows out, and I think to myself that by the time the yellow splotches reach the tip, I will be over this. They do and I am not and I smoke more and my nails are stained. Perhaps I will clip them and send them off with this letter.

  Of course, there are other men. Mr. Lee, who brings me the fried bananas and the fortune cookies without fortunes he buys half-priced at the bakery thrift shop. There’s him. He clips articles for me from the National Geographic. He takes me to movies at the Circle Theatre. There is the floorwalker at L. S. Ayres, who began by suspecting me as I wandered around the mezzanine near the stamp corner. But I was innocent, and he led me to the perfume counter where he spotted my arms with samples. What could they say to me? “He is dead and gone.” They are too polite for that. To them, I am a story they could tell their grandchildren. “I knew a woman once.”

  Recently, I met another man.

  At my table at the Legion, I found a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I thought someone had forgotten them from the day before, and I tried to turn them in to the woman at the desk. She said no, they were for me. “A Mr. Welch left them for you himself.” Welch’s was the brand name on the box.

  That night as I watched television, he appeared in the jinriksha, bedecked with flowers. “Audrey, my dear, come for a ride with me.”

  The men watching television looked to see him too, a tall man in a linen suit and Panama. “I am Robert Welch,” he said. “It was I who left the bonbons for you.” The women in the gutter clucked. “Come here,” he said, “I have things to tell you about your Captain Birch.” Such a nice smile. He held out a candied egg. “For you.”

  The men had turned back to the television in the window. The women leaned together. “I have irrefutable proof that John Birch was killed by Communists in nineteen forty-five.”

  Mr. Lee said, “What gives, Pops? Can’t the lady watch TV in peace?”

  The man said, “The meter’s running, Audrey. Please, come with me. We can talk. I have been looking for you these last five years. I have good news of John Birch.”

  “You told me he was dead,” I said.

  Mr. Lee said, “Scram. Beat it, Pops.” Now everyone was watching the scene in the street. The men who had been nearest the store were now in back, looking for an opening to see. Mr. Lee, sensing he was now the center of attention, continued to yell. I thanked Mr. Lee, apologized to the television audience, and got into the seat next to Mr. Welch. As we left Chinatown, the children in pajamas ran after us collecting the stray blossoms that fell from the jinriksha.

  What else could I do? Another lead to track down. Such a gentleman who had given me candy, your name. I suppose that Mr. Welch, Robert, had thought I would be grateful for the truth. The truth was that the truth didn’t interest me as much as a convincing lie. Later, I found out that that was his mission, truth telling. Another truth not yours, John. He believed all he had to do was tell people the truth and they would act accordingly. Not that easy.

  As we clopped around and around the monument circle he told me some more truth.

  This is what the man said. He said he had made his fortune in candy and then sold the business to Nabisco. He said he spent his time and money studying the spread of Communism, that he kept a little score-card in his wallet. He knew the political positions of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah. He said he came across your name when you helped Doolittle, and that, as he pieced together your life in China, he turned up my name. My first name. Our affair. Our engagement. The mystery of your leaving. Now, as he looked for Communists, he also looked for me. He said he’d found, in your life and death, the ordeal of an age.

  “What was he like, really?” This is what he asked.

  I was eating the candied egg. I told him what he wanted to hear. A truth teller always has such simple notions of truth. I said, “A pious man. Deeply religious. His soldier’s shell temporarily assumed. A gentleman. A happy warrior. Cheerful. A tinkerer. A lover of children. All the things you would expect from a man descended from a Mayflower Pilgrim and related, through blood, to four U.S. presidents.”

  I did not tell him about the rice paper, your calligraphy. The way you squatted against the wall of the hut. The bathtub.

  He gave me his handkerchief to wipe the caramel from my hands. When I offered to give it back, he told me to keep it. We returned to my building and he walked me to the door.

  He said, “Audrey, I must continue to see you. It is important to the Free World. You, who knew and loved John Birch, can understand what he and we should stand for.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  Robert took me to the 500 after we had spent the weekends in May at the time trials. We sat in the infield while the cars shot around the track. Before the race, he led a prayer for the war dead, cried when they played “On the Banks of the Wabash.” He took me to restaurants. He praised you over John’s Hot Stew. We went to Indian baseball games, to the state fair. The judge slapped the rump of a steer. He said, “A farmer, that’s all John ever wanted to be.”

  Always at my desk, I would find some type of kiss. I could not concentrate on your file. All the women seemed to be weeping more than usual.

  I smoked more cigarettes and bought Hershey bars from the stand in the lobby of the building. In all the public buildings, the Marion County Association for the Blind run the concession. They say they know by touch the denomination of the bill. They make change easily. They sit, their creamy eyes floating in their heads, surrounded by candy. No matter how quiet I am. “Yes, may I help you?”

  I buy some gum and return to my place. I write letters to the floorwalker. I tell him I did steal some stamps. “I’ll never be able to see you again.” Also a letter to Mr. Lee, breaking it to him gently.

  One night Robert took me to his room at the Fox Hotel. French windows led out to the balcony where he had set up a white telescope. Ten stories up you could see down to the spokes of the lighted streets as they radiated from their circles. The circles were phosphorescent craters. All along the mall, the government buildings were flooded with lights. Car lots on the south side were having sales. Surplus spotlight beams waved back and forth. I looked at the city and saw it for the first time. Robert, through his telescope, searched for Sputnik.

  “There, there! That’s it!” He was so happy. “Look at it as it goes by.”

  The stars are different in Indianapolis. I can see no dragons, no bears, no crabs. My eyes came back down to the red neon of the insurance companies on Meridian.

  I am sitting here now in my usual place writing you another letter. I can’t say things right. I cannot wait any longer. And, now, I am here at the signature, the farewell. Who is the John of this Dear John letter? I imagine you somewhere at mail call. The names of the dead shouted out, packages passed along on fingertips. Envelopes thrown, arms reaching out. “Yo! Here! That’s me!”

  What should I do? Robert will soon ask me to marry him. We will honeymoon in England, the better to study the evils of Socialism. He will read to me from newspapers over breakfast. We will talk about you as would a father and a sister. He will ask me to marry him as I walk out
of this building for the last time having left a box of chocolates for the kind woman at the desk. I will wear white gloves and inspect the equipment on the lawn in front of the building. The gun barrels crisscross above our heads. The grass has grown up around the tires of the caissons and the tracks of the tanks.

  Robert has shown me a picture of your funeral in Hsuchow. I have it here. I will send it to you. The Japanese probably wonder how they got into this. They want to go home now that the war is over. They look over Drummond’s shoulder at the casket. The Chinese, in their German-looking helmets, are drawn up in a row, bayonets fixed but sheathed. They go out of focus as they approach the camera. There are too many stripes on the flag. Is this hope? Is it just me? The one flaw that gives the deception away. The foliage looks flat, a painted flat. The whole thing staged, a postcard from a wax museum. Why was the picture taken? Can no one believe you are dead?

  Why did you leave me, John? That is the heart of the matter. Robert showed me how to read the cowlick on the chocolate shells. All the assorted pieces before him, semisweet and milk, in the pleated paper cups. Each had its own dripping crest that told its center. A crown of thorns for coconut, a halo for cherries. That is what we all need. Our own braille, like phrenology, to tell us the difference between cordials and hard centers.

  I am in Indianapolis. Robert is inviting some friends to come and talk about the world, about its future, about you. I will meet them. I will be as close as they come to you.

  I am going through my file of letters to a dead man. One of the first things I learned were your last words, reported by Lt. Tung:

  Wo pu neng tsou le. I cannot go on. I cannot go on. Yet I fear we cannot live without you.

  THE GREEK LETTER IN THE RED

  The skull over the door is stolen from the biology lab. There are red Christmas tree lights in the eye sockets. The triangle has something to do with champagne. They don’t tell me what. The TKE sign stays on all night. Sometimes, the boys from the other houses steal our light, and, sometimes, my boys steal theirs. They hide them in my suite. My suite fills up with Greek letters. I stack them against the wall with the light bulbs still warm. “You boys,” I say. In their plywood frames the bulbs are the size of grapefruit and look like a package that Harry and David, the fruit people, would send. My furniture is alphabetized. When a boy comes in to talk with me about how he misses home, he parks himself on the Tau by my dresser.

  These chaise longues must be replaced next spring. The weather wrecks them here on the porch. An alumnus lends us furniture his motel can’t use. We have the finest furniture on campus, and that helps at rush. But the alumnus causes problems now and then, appearing unexpectedly at house parties and telling anyone who will listen about the parties they had when he was a pledge. The boys say you are a Teke for life, but I know his only reason for being there is to watch out for his couches. He doesn’t want anyone to be sick on them.

  Of course, I have my own key and even my own entrance around back over the kitchen, but on nights like this one, I like to use the front door to see who is sleeping in the public rooms and the TV lounge. Make sure they’re warm enough. Or I stay up with one and talk about the party. I let him make promises to me that he will never drink again. I pick my way through the bodies. Snores and sour smells. These are the unlucky ones. No one to sleep with so they sleep with each other.

  The boys at Wabash call themselves gentlemen. If one of them entertains a lady for the evening, he hangs a knotted tie on the knob of his closed door. There are no locks. Late some nights, when I can’t sleep, I walk through the house with my Boston. We troop down a whole corridor of doors sporting ties. Ties I’ve tied for them. It is the only time they are used. The boys come to my suite with the tie in their hands. I make them stand in the mirror, and I reach over their shoulders, putting together a bold Windsor as a man would do it. I never learned the motherly way of facing them. They slide their ties off, knotted, over their heads. Thanks.

  I know why they send me away when they have house parties and mixers with sororities from Hanover or Depauw. One night I found my boys and their dates spread out around the house, peering in the basement windows. They ruined my borders, moss roses and impatiens. Inside, a pledge was earning all of his points by making love to a woman on the billiard table. He was being supervised by his big brother—that’s part of the rules. Usually, you earn your points by vacuuming the hallways or cleaning the head. Outside, everybody hedged in between me and the windows. All I could see were two bare feet sunk in the corner pockets. The next night, I asked that pledge to sit next to me at my table during dinner. He gave the prayer and nothing else was ever said about it.

  They send me away on Thursday nights so they can tell their dirty jokes and have food fights or drop eggs from the third-floor landing, trying to hit the heads of pledges in the basement well below. Or the girls arrive for a football weekend. Most of the boys will be lawyers or doctors, and most of the girls want to be those kinds of wives. Meanwhile, I am with the other housemothers in a cottage off campus, playing bridge very fast, eating desserts our cooks make, and boasting about our boys. I wish sometimes we would play euchre instead. Loll says it is not seemly for housemothers to play it. She is from Sig Ep and yaks on about her dead husband. “A man,” she says, “like no other man.” As if she knew. “Loll,” she says he said, “you are like no other woman.” And he would know because he knew a couple of the other housemothers back when we were all younger. He was the football coach and most of the housemothers are local girls. I don’t think Loll knows. That’s when Dorcas will say, “Mighty fine Texas cake, Marcella.” And Marcella will answer, “Well, thank you, hon. More nuts this time.” They are partners and Loll snips at some code. It’s code, all right. All of us have lived too long. Too long with boys. Too long without anything else. Room and board are free, remember. And the boys are always the same age. It keeps me young. The campus never changes. Most of the time we are the only women around. And the boys pretend to be gentlemen. I feel as I have always felt.

  Here is a story I always want to tell at those card parties. When I went to Washington, I visited the Capitol. In a room that has all these statues, there is a certain spot you can stand on and hear what’s being whispered on the other side of the room. Hear every word. My room is like that hall. That is how it is in my room in the house. The heating ducts and tunnels, the thin paneling and the laundry chutes must all crisscross above my bed. Nights, I hear the sounds the couples make in the rooms, and I know they are listening, too, to one another through the walls. This is what I want to tell the other housemothers. Listening as if I were on the bottom of some sea with all those noises swimming around my bed, I breathe out a kind of moan and listen to the middle of it being picked up and passed from one mouth to another, sinking back into the new wing where there are bunk beds, a couple above and a couple below, and back again. Each room adds its own layer and then it comes to me, a round dollop of sound, suspended above me. And me, the mother of pearl. No, I never interfere. That is not what a housemother is.

  Thursday nights in the cottage are for buttermints and the little stadium pillows Blanche brings for the folding chairs embroidered with “Sit on Depauw.” Autumn nights, we can hear the boys singing. One house might come by to serenade us, singing “Greensleeves” and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Or a wife of some faculty member will bring a covered dish and her Avon samples. But we don’t have much truck with the wives. We aren’t wives now, after all. Not mothers either, except to places, to houses. And because we keep houses, we are thought to be deaf and dumb. I probably am. We are for appearances only and our appearance—the same Butterick pattern in sixteen fabrics. “I thought that man would be the death of me,” Loll says. “Always after me.” Some nights we play hearts instead.

  Nor will I tell them about that fellow, Pound, the crazy poet, and how I was the one who made him leave this place. When it is my turn to deal, I deal. But it is true. I was the woman in his room that night. Becau
se of me he went to Europe, and that’s where he got famous.

  I was with a circus that fall, and Crawfordsville was the last show before we wintered at Peru. I took tickets mostly, guessed weights and ages on the little midway we had. I read minds. I stayed in Crawfordsville after being paid off, hoping to go south. I spent the first night in the open with some flyers who next day left for parts unknown. That’s how I met Mr. Pound, near a mailbox on Grand Avenue. He was mailing a stack of letters—there must have been twenty. He was mailing them one at a time, reading each address before pushing each envelope in the slot. He wore a big white Panama, and he had a malacca cane. Not to mention a red beard.

  “You look cold,” he said.

  “I am cold,” I said.

  I was cold. Crawfordsville has never been friendly to a single woman. The college is all men. The town is used to men. At the circus, most of the crowd was made up of boys from the college in collarless shirts and crew-neck sweaters, hanging around an older man, a professor. What girls there were always carried an armful of dolls and teddy bears, those were just becoming popular, escorted by the boys who kept winning the prizes. I was waiting for a Monon passenger going south.

  “You must stay with me,” he said. “I need someone to talk to, and you’ll do very nicely.” He rapped his cane against the mailbox. “Besides, it will be fun getting by the housekeeper.”

  The day had been bright but never warm with those flat-bottomed, fast-moving clouds that seem to make the land flatter and the wind colder. Now that it was night, it had a head start to the first frost. Besides, it was nothing new. I had been in a circus.