Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 8

  "Are you through with high school?" he asked.

  "I'll be a junior next year."

  "You're sixteen?"

  "Not quite fifteen." She lifted her straight legs toward the dash and touched its bottom with her shins.

  "Do you like his part of the country?"

  "No."

  He parked on the main street of Courtenay, in the central block, and she first opened her fist, glanced into it, and then jumped out of the car and ran off. The object she'd been gripping so tightly, he saw, was a silver dollar. It was one of the few times in his poor provincial life he'd seen one ("It was a novelty to me," he later said to her) and he realized it must be the only cash the Jones family had. Whatever Alpha purchased with it was in a green paper bag. He took her home and over the days that followed couldn't remove her image, or afterimage, from his mind, and thought of driving over to the Jones place and asking her to the county fair, but then thought better of it; she was too young.

  Two weeks later Mrs. Jones gave birth to Lionell, who was so undersized and sickly that he and his mother had to be hospitalized for a week, and this could only have added to the Joneses' financial woes; and sometime during the same summer, Elling, in Wisconsin, rolled his aunt and uncle's car, while drinking, it was said, and escaped without a scratch, but the car caught fire and burned to a bare hulk, and now he was wondering if maybe his dad couldn't help him pay for it.

  That fall Martin went off to Grand Forks and began his first year of college at the State University. He'd been promised a baseball scholarship by one of the university's roving scouts. He was a pitcher. He'd pitched a string of no-hitters in high school, and in the summers, while still in school, pitched for the Courtenay men's team. But when he got to the university, he learned that none of the coaches had heard of him, and that the scout, who was caught recruiting for Minnesota colleges on the side, had been removed from the university's payroll. There was no scholarship. After the first semester his money ran out and he came back home.

  Alpha had befriended his sister, Elaine, a senior, and came to the house often to visit and study and stay overnight. His oldest brother, Vince was about Alpha's age, but a year behind her in school, and began driving her home after her visits, and then, when the weather turned nicer, walking her there, and he took longer and longer to return from these walks, so Martin put her out of his mind altogether. He attached a bucket to a wall of the barn and pitched at it for control; he'd become so fast over the year that none of his brothers, not even Fred, would catch him anymore.

  The Wimbledon businessmen offered him fifteen dollars to pitch for their team that summer, a step upward, since Wimbledon was four times the size of Courtenay, and this was a paying job; he accepted, and one hot Sunday traveled with the team to Bismarck to play the inmates of the State Penitentiary. Some of the prisoners had been in the farm leagues, others were from big cities in the East, and they practiced every day and were out for the only sort of blood they could shed now; notorious for spiking, hitting catchers with a backswing of the bat, tripping and elbowing base runners, flashing mirrors into outfielders' eyes—they knew every inch of the courtyard they played in—and because of this had an unbeaten record.

  The game went into extra innings and Wimbledon didn't have a relief pitcher. Martin grew tired and frustrated and let the prisoners who comprised the cheering section (behind wire mesh, nevertheless unfettered in their use of language) get on his nerves, and when they realized the effect they were having, their language got so foul he felt they could be locked up just for it. He started throwing harder than he ever had. His control stayed, surprisingly enough, and he fanned two batters with six pitches, but then something slippery and excruciating (was there a doctor in the prison?) happened inside his elbow. His fastball was gone. The only pitches he could manage were a floating roundhouse curve and a knuckler that didn't travel much faster than it appeared to; and after each pitch his elbow straightened less. The prisoners started hitting him as if it were batting practice and the cheering section went wild. Wimbledon lost the game, of course, and his pitching career, if indeed there'd been the possibility of one, was ended; he hadn't been able to throw a fastball since.

  Jones commiserated with him the next time he saw him. Jones said that he, during his youthful peregrinations, had been a baseball player himself, a professional, actually, and he could imagine how Martin must feel, but that was no need not to buck up. No, Jones hadn't been a pitcher; he'd left that up to the big, muscle-bound fellows. Jones held up a hand. His short fingers were enlarged and square-shaped at each knuckle.

  "Breaks," he said. "Every one of them's been broken at least once, and I've played a whole game with a break or two. I caught." Jones cut quite a figure in the uniform, if he might say so himself, and could have made a career in the league—there was only one professional league then, of course—if he hadn't had such a love for horses and this unholy need to be a jockey. So he'd jocked for a few years, imagining it was the romantic life, and had got this broken nose out of it and some occasional tail. Also, there was trouble with his first wife—he'd been married once before, you know—and he'd had to run from her and hide himself out West for a while, and there wasn't any real baseball, paying baseball, that is, here in the West in those days, as Martin surely knew, didn't he?

  Could this man be believed?

  He yammered on in his mad and effusive manner, mentioning dead and retired players he claimed as friends, and citing statistics that dated back to the 1900's, and his face suddenly took on the wild and crusty look of Casey Stengel; he could be Casey's twin. His fierce eyes were flashing and his big jaw moving so fast Martin couldn't keep his eyes off it, and then he realized that Jones must have sensed his disbelief, and felt he had to vindicate himself: he replayed several games from the past, running through the batting order in particular innings, mentioning which hitters were weak and why, and which men he threw out, before he let Martin go. The next time Martin was in Jamestown, he went into the library and got out a baseball record book and found, in a column of old players such as Hughie Jennings and Wee Willie Keeler, EDWARD JONES, b. Galena, Ill., Oct. 31, 1871. Jones was listed as a rookie catcher who had the highest batting average of any rookie up until 1923. Jones hadn't mentioned his hitting. Martin closed the record book, and with its dull, declamatory thump, felt that something unalterable had happened between him and Ed Jones.

  He went back to school, at last, in the fall of 1933 not to the university, which he was soured on for good,' but to the state teachers college in Valley City, about fifty miles from Courtenay-Wimbledon. Alpha was also on campus. Her brother Elling was paying her tuition and room and board. Elling and Mrs. Jones wanted one of the children to finish college, and it was assumed that Conrad wouldn't attempt school; there would always be time later for Jerome and Lionell and the young girls, and 'Elling himself had been expelled from Concordia in St. Paul when he was discovered in a closet in the women's dormitory with a flask of gin on him, and refused to give the name of the girl if there was a particular girl, with whom he'd planned his rendezvous. He had two pairs of blue bloomers in his coat pocket, too. He was now a salesman of heavy machinery in Minneapolis-St. Paul.,

  Martin occasionally saw Alpha at school and once in a while they rode the same train home. They were merely polite. It was as though they were shamming at education, being farmers by birth, and could expose each other's duplicity. The possibility of this seemed to shame Alpha more than he would have thought, considering her father. At times she seemed too vulnerable to exist. For years he'd carried her image, suffused with the blue-dazed warmth, the heat of that day he'd driven her to town, and in all that time no woman had displaced it. Oh, there'd been the usual interest and flirtations; he'd dated the Carlson girl down the road a few times, and for a while at school had been attracted to a pretty blonde, Norma Egstrom, the daughter of the depot agent in Wimbledon; he hadn't paid her court or much attention, while she was in town. She was too young. They met at the c
ollege radio station, KOVC, where they were performing in a Christmas pageant; she was a soloist for the musical interlude, he was playing the part of Joseph.

  She was beguiled, as she put it (and he was, too, to tell the truth), by the theater and dramatics and the idea of entertaining in general, although in her case the interest lay almost exclusively in singing, an unfortunate choice on her part, he thought, since she was such a natural actress and her singing grated sexually on him (then again, he was tone-deaf), and the two of them appeared together in other radio programs, including one based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and in several theatrical productions at the campus auditorium. He considered himself a dependably entertaining character actor on the order of Edward Everett Horton, but played mostly leading men. They made a handsome couple, people said. She was attractive in every aspect of her hearty, big-boned Scandinavian healthiness, a little overweight at times perhaps, with a wide mouth set in a soft pout at its center, and could be cold-eyed and immovable when she knew she was right. She fell in love with her voice coach, it was rumored, and Martin felt less rebuffed than a victim of her contradictory whims. He'd heard that sometime since, within the last year or less, she'd gone off to Fargo or St. Paul or somewhere, determined to become a professional singer, and had changed her name to Peggy Lee.

  He started dating Alpha then, in 1934, in the late spring when the Juneberry trees came into bloom, the grass greened and darkened with its health assured, and the sound of tractors plowing nearby fields could be heard across the campus.

  "Don't you want to be out in the fields?" Alpha said to him.

  "No. I want to be here." She was kneeling beneath a low-crowned blossoming Juneberry.

  "Would you always like to be?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?" Beside you here on the grass, the full moon on the blossoms making them glow like stars around your shadow-darkened hair?

  "Here in Valley City," she said.

  "Sure, I guess."

  "I would. It's the most beautiful city I've seen. Whenever I'm ready to settle down, if I ever am, it'll be here for sure, you can bet your shirts on that, boys."

  Her if I ever am opened another new wound in him. The school year was over in a week. They returned home and the next day he drove over and asked Alpha to a movie. Mrs. Jones wouldn't let her go. Mrs. Jones, he learned, was a Missouri Synod Lutheran of the strictest sort, and didn't approve of motion pictures, popular songs, dating in automobiles, tobacco, alcohol ("Just a snort. Ma," Jones would say when he was juiced. "It'll put starch in your drawers"), profanity, cards, and gambling; and she had a hardly mentionable low opinion, like most Lutherans of her mold, of Roman Catholics. It seemed unsavory to her, just to begin with, the way they bred so much.

  Well, Martin did have a lot of brothers and sisters, so many he couldn't keep track of their ages and birthdays himself; none of them had asked to be born, of course nor did other children, as far as he knew—but each arrived with such a naturally formed, individual nature and abided by it in ways nobody could predict, as though moving to an inner melody, it seemed they'd asked. And now that they were a part of this world and his memory, it was impossible to imagine himself existing without their related lives.

  Alpha's mother couldn't be called unkind, couldn't be faulted in any of the ways that might suggest sin, but she'd remained standoffish toward him, a cold uncoiling barrier, and he caught himself thinking, now and then, that maybe it had as much to do with the Joneses' finances as his faith. Mrs. Jones and Alpha often talked about the former places they'd lived in, the large farmhouses and big rooms, the furniture they'd had, the pure-bred livestock, the machinery and conveniences and cars. The fireplace in their present home made the place endurable for them, they said, because it was one of the few to be found in a country home in Stutsman County, N.D. One of the possessions that Mrs. Jones had clung to, through all of the moves and family upheavals, was her upright piano, certainly the most unwieldy, but one that bore value and status; an anniversary clock on its top, enclosed in a glass bell, spun golden balls in a ring-around of time's spin. The guiding words and light of her life seemed to be "getting ahead."

  It made him uncomfortable just to drive into their yard, knowing they had no automobile; and he didn't run many more errands for Mrs. Jones—the better she got to know him, the less she seemed able to ask favors—and this Christmas, hardly a week ago, he'd brought a package over and placed it on their kitchen table, and said, "Mom sent these over for all of you," and then opened the box to show them; it was filled with brownies, divinity, and pfeffernuesse packed in layers of tissue.

  "Boy, are these delicious," he said, and picked up a pfeffernuesse and popped it into his mouth.

  And Mrs. Jones said, "I can remember when your little brothers and sisters were so hungry they used to walk over to our house here, poor, bony things, and come to the back door and ask would I please give them a peanut-butter sandwich, would beg for food. I can remember—" Her frail voice had gone into high and girlish modulations, and then it broke, and Martin, who still had pfeffernuesse on his tongue, was astonished to see tears curve around her mouth. She stalked out of the kitchen into her bedroom and slammed its door with a bang.

  And so, that first summer home from school, after they'd started dating, it was a strain on Alpha and him, and on their families, for the two of them to be alone together too much. Jones himself was friendly, at least at first; he'd come out with his cane when the Model A appeared, so garrulous and exclamatory he was a welcoming party in one, and clap Martin on the back, Ha! and call him "boy" and "son" and speak to him as an old-timer about Roosevelt, "the ass-kissing oaf," draft horses and thoroughbreds, the repeal of Prohibition, and their common interest, baseball. It was impossible for Martin to look Jones in the eye when the subject was brought up, and Jones sensed this and finally dropped mention of it altogether, which was even worse. Who was it in Martin who'd opened that book in the library—an academician, or something unformed?

  And then, out of nowhere, Jones started teaching Jerome to pitch. "Well, well, we've got to have one in the family, eh, boy?" Jones said to Martin, who'd pull into the yard and see the two of them working away out there, as though they'd seen his car coming and said, "Let's go " Jones down in a crouch with a farmer's cap he never usually wore turned backward on his head, snapping the ball to Jerome and keeping up a natural chatter, Jerome going into the pump and windup and working on the stretch and form and control, so absorbed that Jones would only glance at Martin between pitches, with a look that was businesslike, and then get on with it. Or talk to Jerome so personally you wanted to leave them alone as father and son. Was Jones purposely trying to antagonize him"?

  Alpha couldn't say. She couldn't categorize her father's behavior or character—"I don't know if he's cruel; I don't know If he's kind"—and spoke of him as though he were an enigma to respect and beware of. She knew little about his past; she understood that, besides playing baseball somewhere and riding horses, he'd traveled as a supporting lead with an itinerant Shakespearean company and had worked for a while as a ballroom-dancing instructor That made her laugh. This was before he'd hurt his leg, which was shattered at the knee by the kick of a horse He'd traveled through most of the East and Midwest, moving m many strata of society, and was, as he said, part Welsh part Scotch-Irish, part Norsky ("Norsky" to irritate her mother, a full-blooded Norwegian), and part sonofabitch He married Alpha's mother when she was nineteen and he m his forties. Nobody knew his exact age, not even his wife; he sometimes claimed he was born in 1869 and then swore it was 1879, and he'd also mentioned every year within that decade, saying his memory slipped. He was more than vain, considering he was a farmer, and wore, in spite of the family poverty, shirts and suits that were obviously hand-tailored and looked brand-new. But Alpha said, "He's worn the same clothes as long as I can remember. It's the way he takes care of them, I guess." He was courtly yet flirtatious with every female he met, combining in himself flattery, deference, intricate c
ourtesies from another century, smooth talk, and winks. He felt he'd been plagued most of his life by missed opportunities, that his sense of timing was out of tune with the world's, that his closest friends had betrayed him the worst, for they'd all betrayed him, and that a curse had been placed on his life by a hostile and unremitting God. He was an alcoholic, of course.

  Once when Martin came for Alpha, her face was parched-looking and discolored from tears, and she said she had an "awful truth" to confess.

  Had Jones beaten her? Had she taken a lover at one time? Had it been Vince? Martin felt arteries from his groin to his temples dilate and strum, and couldn't get his breath. "Well?" he said. "What is it?"

  "Daddy's been married before this. Mama's not his first wife. He's been divorced. Mama just told me. You might as well take me home. Oh, eeee!"

  Martin had to smile, partly at her way of referring to her parents in the diminutive, when their personalities, to him, were so large and intimidating. "But, Alpha, I was aware of that."

  "You were? Well, how, for God's sake!"

  "I assumed it was common knowledge. I believe your father even mentioned it to me once."

  "He did?"

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "A couple of years ago, I think."

  "Then why didn't you say something about it to me, you lame-brain? Just how do you suppose this makes me feel?" Her eyes were as furious and fulminating as her father's.

  "But, Alpha, I hardly knew you then. I—"