Fat Man and Little Boy (15 page)

ROSIE DOES THE MATH

John, dressed for work in a large gray shirt and leather suspenders, follows Matthew out of their cabin. Matthew's dressed for school: short pants, blue-collared shirt, brand new beret. There are more than three feet between them at all times—the length, roughly speaking, of the fat man's arms. This is an ominous radius.

Matthew mounts the bike. He puts one hand against the cabin wall and leans that way, raising his kickstand from the mud. He heels it back. Now he's upright, ignoring his dependence on the wall. John may offer Matthew help. From this distance it's impossible to hear. John grips the bike by its seat and sets it right. Matthew tries to pedal away. John holds him still and slips some cash into his pocket. He pushes Matthew along. The bike teeters, finds its balance. Matthew rings his bell three times.

Rosie likes to see them get along. The sun is rising. The air is cold with a bit of wind. She's still asleep. Rosie needs her coffee.

John waves at her and totters her way. He's getting larger. Knock him on his side and you could roll him like a barrel. Someone could get squished.

He says, “Have you been to the museum yet today?”

“Not yet,” says Rosie, rubbing her eyes beneath her glasses. The grease of her fingers is of course smeared on the lenses when they fall back into place. “I was going to have breakfast.”

“Can I cook for you?” He thumbs his suspenders. “I swear I'll do better than last time.”

Rosie is wiping her glasses clean on her blouse. “You better. I still can't get the taste of it out of my mouth.”

“I told you what to do about that.”

“And if I get sloshed, who's going to keep you and your little hellion from burning the place down?”

John looks genuinely hurt. “We would never do a thing like that.”

She touches his arm, sliding her glasses back into place. “Just joshin'. I know you wouldn't. Although, you know, he might.”

John makes her puffy pancakes. He puts fat cubes of butter on each stack and sprinkles a generous helping of powdered sugar over each plate, then the syrup. She makes her own coffee while he works the kitchen cabin's griddle. Her griddle, her pancakes, her butter, her sugar, her syrup. The fat man is liberal with her things. As the pancakes cool, he fries bacon. Grease flecks his shirt. The part of her that wants to sleep in peace tonight is at odds with the part of her that wants to calculate the meal's cost. An offer to cook is an offer to use her things, is an offer to further deplete her savings. He surely means to be kind. If he added up the money he might save by eating with her, if this is a shrewd money-saving strategy, then he is at least taking care in the cooking. He knows she has a weakness for butter, and that she likes her bacon soft and yellow.

If you don't have to pay electric, gas, or water, and if you bought the land outright, you can run a hotel on a war widow's government checks, assuming nobody comes there to stay. With several guests—and Rosie has only the newlyweds, Mr. Parcel, and Mrs. Dryden—one is required by decency and business sense to purchase more provisions than those guests will use: they expect options. No one wants to look at his neighbor and see an identical spread on the plate. They've got to feel special. So there's excess. Given time the unused eggs go rancid. You've got to throw those out. Sometimes Rosie gets antsy; she has a lot of egg dinners. The bread molds but you can trim it away if you catch it early, sometimes even if you don't. Then the rest is yours.

Rosie does resent living on her own scraps. The fact this bacon would go to rot if they didn't eat it, the fact the butter might otherwise sour, complicates her calculations. It might be saving them money in the long run. The long run is a lot to think about.

They don't say much while they eat. John drinks her orange juice. She knocks back two mugs of coffee before she's halfway through the pancakes. His silverware—her silverware, in his hands—is loud on her plates.

“We've got a new guest on the way,” says Rosie. “He speaks
Japanese
.”

“That puts us at five languages. My French and yours, our collective English, your burgeoning Spanish, Mrs. Dryden's Chinese, and now the newcomer.”

“My Spanish does not burgeon. It putters at best,” says Rosie, lowering her eyes. “It's too many guests. The budget will be very thin. If we can attract a few more, perhaps find another retired lodger—”

“Bless Mrs. Dryden,” says John.

“—Then we might start to turn this ship around. There might even be a margin.”

“A
profit
margin?”

“The same.”

Budgetary concerns aside, it's nice to sit with him this way. She pours her third and final coffee. John has calmed in recent days. It shows especially in his eating. He used to be frantic, furtive—weird, frankly. He would hold things at a certain distance, on fork-end, until he was ready, and then he would take them in one bite. Chew, gulp, swallow. The next morsel, meanwhile, held again at that ominous distance. Now he's holding his rasher of bacon in his bare fingers as he speaks, waving it like a conductor's wand.

He washes the dishes. They will be used again in several hours, when their guests—the retired Mrs. Dryden, the lazing newlyweds, and the old man Parcel—wander from their cabins. Now they are curled in their blankets or loading coal into the fire, trying to squeeze a little more warmth from the stove and a little more sleep from the morning.

“Did you want to see the museum now?” says John. “If you have a moment. I know you're busy.”

“I am busy,” says Rosie. She doesn't want to think about it. “I'll have a look. The museum is a very important part of what we're here to do.”

With his slow gait, he leads her there. He touches the back of his neck often and lets his head hang. From behind he looks like a lump. Already his armpits are deeply stained. She wonders how he does his laundry. There are whole days they don't see each other, though so few live or stay here. He never talks about himself.

They pass under what is, at first glance, an unremarkable tree. Brown bark, green leaves, standard. Rosie doesn't know about trees beyond a few species. Poplar. Oak. Redwood. Sequoia. Pine. Willow. She could not, with any confidence, assign those names to any actual existing trees. She might know a willow. This one is like a willow, but with a thinner trunk, and fewer branches, though tightly packed. They are not as long as a willow's would be. They do droop in a certain way—they seem to weep. The green teardrop leaves flutter on the breeze. The breeze stops. With a sudden rustling they snap to one angle. As John passes, the tree reaches for him and follows. Or it seems.

Rosie asks, “Has this tree always been here?”

He stops and slowly turns. “It has.”

All the tree's branches are still, quiet, strained for reaching. Its trunk bends very slightly toward him. A single leaf comes loose and falls on him, sticking to his face, just next to his mouth's corner.

Rosie walks beneath the tree. It does not reach for her.

They come to the museum cabin, once the prisoners' playhouse. He opens the door with such hesitance that she worries what he's done.

“It's wonderful,” she says.

At the entrance the ground is empty but for signs of shoes: skid marks from old leather; mud crescents from heels; scuffs. As if just the day before several dozen people had been trudging, walking, pacing, running through. Rosie wonders how many were made by John himself. How many were intentional? Whose shoes did he wear while he did it?

The walls are covered with paintings and a sequence of cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse. No artists are credited beyond their signatures, if they left them, because so few can be identified. Here a portrait of a grave little girl with hair too thin. Here a watercolor of several bright, exotic birds perched together on a tree. Here a painting of a broke-down cabin of the sort this one used to be, the lines precisely accurate, the colors pointedly wrong, even ill.

The stage is where they found it. Empty, not counting the long shadow Rosie casts from the doorway, which mounts the stage and climbs the far wall. Before the stage, there are fifteen rows of chairs and stools, some improvised, some poorly repaired, some only moderately degraded by the passage of time. Several out and out broken—collapsed, legs splintered or half-gone, lopsided on the ground. On each seat, a token: a cup, a spoon, a shoe, a bracelet, several gold fillings, a toothbrush, a rubber spider, an empty can of corn, a pair of dice, shoelaces, tin jewelry, a sheriff's star, a dog bowl, a crushed hat, a knife, yarn, needles, twine, wire, crayon, comb, candle, card, cufflink, joy buzzer, jacks, pill bottle, pencil nub, underwear, watch face, thimble, pocket change, cigarette stub, half a belt, a pie tin, buttons, a shirt collar, a zipper, nylons, tongue depressor, false teeth. They all seem on the verge of a terrible collective rattle.

“Do you really love it?” John walks along the left wall, pretending to examine the paintings, the seating. He almost trips.

“It's depressing as hell,” says Rosie. “But wonderful.”

“It's supposed to feel bad, you know.”

“I'm not an idiot, John.”

After Rosie and John part ways, he sees the new guest, the Japanese gentleman, approaching in a hired car. John goes to meet the car, which stops halfway down the central road dividing the hotel grounds. It's slowed by the thick layer of mud that coats each tire. The gentleman climbs out, hopping several feet clear of the car so as to avoid the displaced muck. He's dressed in white top to bottom. John reaches to shake. As their hands touch, they share a gaze into each other's eyes. One of John's knees goes crooked, corrects itself. They hold hands too long. There is perhaps a jolt of recognition. The gentleman points to the trunk and John retrieves the luggage, sinking ankle-deep in the moat of mud surrounding the car. There are many bags. The Japanese gentleman pays the driver through the window. Once John has burdened himself like a mule he leads the gentleman away, making polite conversation Rosie can't quite hear from this distance. The gentleman does not offer to help with his bags.

She goes to her cabin. She goes to do the books, to find out how long they have left if things keep up this way.

Start at the beginning. Take the money her husband left. Reduce it by the cost of her journey, the paltry expense of the land, and the more serious cost of reconstruction. Subtract the cost of her multilingual peacetime library. Subtract her living expenses. Subtract the salaries of two employees. Subtract the cost of feeding the guests and providing them with certain niceties—complimen­tary chocolates, fresh towels, unlimited coal for the stoves. Subtract what she sends home to her mother to keep body and soul together. To be safe, assume two hundred dollars a year will unexpectedly catch fire and their ashes will blow away on the wind. Remember the tendency of things to become more expensive over time, and very rarely less. Add her government war widow checks. Repeat the annual deductions until the sum is zero. Three years is all they have. Two if she can bring herself to hire a real cook.

When the money runs out she'll still have the land, the cabins. She cannot imagine where John and Matthew would go—even John is strangely childish, dependent. They need a mother. If it comes to that she can sell the books to buy time and buy food. Some of the Jewish paintings in John's museum might be quite valuable. She could try to get a job in town.

She's been working in bed, cross-legged, the books spread out before her. Her mud-caked shoes are looking lonesome on the floor. She falls asleep sitting up, her back against the headboard.

When she wakes it's nearly time to practice languages. She corrects her hair. She slides into her mud-caked shoes. The sun is high and the air a little warm. Warm enough. She goes to the library. The newlyweds are in the southeast corner, hidden behind as many shelves as they can put between them and the entrance. The young husband reads an English book to his pretty wife because it sounds exotic. His pronunciation is a molasses amalgam of British and southern American. He reads her
The Big Sleep
. It gradually becomes clear they're reading for the bad language, the punches, the booze, the guns, the sexual provocation—the only English words they really understand. Mrs. Dryden is asleep in a chair in the large, open reading area, a French history of the first great war fallen to the floor from her hand, open, pages down, pages bent. Rosie lifts the book, closes it, and puts it on the end table beside the old woman's chair, marking it where it fell open. It's unlikely that Mrs. Dryden has made it to this chapter on the war's origins. She is a very slow reader, except in Spanish, where she takes perverse pleasure in rattling off words through a tommy gun mouth, explosively trilling her R's, spitting consonants, rendering the lot incoherent. Not a language in her mouth: an attack.

Rosie sits down with a French dictionary and an early edition of
Les Miserables
. She feels the sleep coming on again. She blames Mrs. Dryden.

John's arrival is announced by his shadow on the carpet—it blots out the sunlight that comes through the library door. He's brought the Japanese gentleman with him.

“Mrs. Cummings,” says John.

She smiles up at him, and then the gentleman, a beautiful man.

“This is Mr. Wakahisa Masumi, our newest guest.”

“You can call me Masumi.” He tips his hat very slightly without really lifting it from his head. “I was excited to learn that you encourage your guests to learn as many languages as possible.” He glances in the direction of the invisible, tittering newlyweds. Allows himself a brief smile.

“What languages do you speak, Mr. Masumi?” says Rosie.

“Ah, this is not quite right. In Japanese names the surname is first. I would be Mr. Wakahisa. I invite you to use my first name. Just Masumi.” He goes to a bookshelf loaded with American novels. “I have English, Japanese, French, und ein bisschen Deutsch.”