Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (31 page)

All my love, Your Mother

Orville drained the bottle of bourbon, his chin to the ceiling.

“You know, Mom,” he said out loud, still looking up, “you're right.”

“About what?”

There she was, floating at the level of the gold ball on the flagpole outside his bedroom window. She again wore the cobalt gown. Her hair was permed in the style of the 1950s, and again her face was strangely whole. She hadn't flown all that much when he was with Miranda and Cray, except toward the end when things had begun to fall apart. Now that Miranda and Cray had disappeared, she had flown more often. Once, floating overhead at Geiger's Junkyard as he tried with Hayley's husband Clive to rescusitate a Columbian who had put his finger into a live socket. Again one afternoon as he drove the Chrysler across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, she doing aerobatic swoops from high up over the superstructure down almost to the water and then under the bridge deck and, waving gaily, up into the wild blue yonder over the Catskills. And most recently when he was at the county's newly christened Scrimshaw Airport to identify the remains of a flyboy who'd backed into a propeller, there she was in her Amelia Earhart outfit, practicing takeoffs and landings.

“Everything, Mom. You're right about it all.”

“Good. So we're cool, and you'll stay. See ya later, alligator.”

“Stay? Get real.”

“Wish I could. Those days are over. Bye now.” She was banking away.

“Wait!”

“Can't. Gotta
fly!
”

“Where to?”

“The Schooners',” she said enthusiastically, as if her flight were to a storewide sale at Macy's up in Ballston Spa. “That Henry's
such
a sweetheart. He was always a
zeesa boyala,
a sweet boy, and now he's such a caring, concerned, comforting man. Not like
someone
I know.”

“You're going over to the Schooners'?”

“You bet,” she sang out. “It's the place to
be!
” She turned away, hesitated, and turned back. “Oh, and by the way, Dr. Know-It-All—about your breakup with Miranda?” He stared at her, unwilling to respond. It was all too raw. “That'll teach you to try to keep
me
out of your love life! I was in the middle of it the whole darn time!”

“Where is she? Do you know where she is?”

Gone.

Dazed, he tried to follow her flight across the square, but she was lost in the parched oaks and maples.

Doorbell. He looked at his watch. Almost eleven. He stumbled downstairs and opened the door to Nelda Jo Schooner.

She was a vision from a certain heaven, blond hair swept back, eyes gleaming with what he could not help but see as mischief, lips the peach color of Starlight's face, and a body poured into her pink tank top and tan shorts.

“Hi,” she said. “Can I come in?”

· 25 ·

“Sure,” he said to Nelda Jo. “Would you like a drink?”

“You got bourbon, honey?”

“You bet. George Dickel and I have gotten real close. It's upstairs. I'll get it.”

“No need. I'll go with you.”

He led her up to what Selma and Sol called “The Family Room,” facing Prison Alley. They sat on the leather couch in front of the dead
TV
. The room was dim. “I forgot a glass,” he said.

“Where I come from, you share.” He poured, handed the glass to her, and she lifted it in a toast. “To your going through a helluva shitty time, Orvy, and to our friendship.”

“Friendship,” he said, raising the bottle in reply, thinking Why, with Schooners, is it always about friendship? And why the tag team match tonight? The bourbon felt sexy. He followed it with a fresh beer from the six-pack in the cooler at his feet.

“I came over for a coupla reasons,” she said. She took his hand. It felt strong, aerobic. “You're a beautiful man, and you surely don't deserve this.”

“This?” He glanced at her hand, into her blue eyes, aware of her body.

“Miranda and that darling boy Cray. I worry about them, nobody knowin' what happened. You must be frantic with worry.” He nodded. “But you can't isolate yourself from your sources of support, from your family and your friends, from me and from the Good Lord. The first time I saw you I really liked you, Orvy, the gentle way you have, the quiet way, like you're always seeing me like I really am, you know?”

“Thanks. I like you too.”

“I can tell.” She squeezed his hand. “You and Henry had a rough old time in your youth. I've got no dog in that fight. I'm here for myself.” Orville nodded. “You are well aware of how I am my own person, an independent woman—running the health spa 'n' all, running the family. Received my
MBA
from
OU
. Not that I use it but still—I write it off as an ‘opportunity cost of doing business.' Know somethin'? I think of you a lot. Too much, maybe.”

“Why, Nelda Jo, how could that be?”

She laughed, a kind of Southen football hoot, and her breasts shook a little in that tight-fitting pink. He refilled the glass. She drank. “And I pray for you in this time of trial. Even if you don't believe in prayer, I think it could prove right helpful to you. This may sound naive but ever since I was born again, I feel a lot better about my life and life on earth and eternal life, too.”

“Good, good. Pray for me. Give it a shot.”

“Deal. There's one more thing. A medical thing? Can I ask you to look at something?”

On that body? Have I died and gone to heaven?
He said, “Now?”

“I'm so worried! I can't sleep. Dr. Shapiro said it's dangerous, could be a melanoma, and I should get a biopsy but it's in a tender spot. And I don't trust him.”

“Join the crowd.”

“Really?” He nodded. “Oh, my. Maybe we should all come to you?”

“It'd be my pleasure.” Everything she was saying and doing—even praying for him, because someone as fit and sexy and good as she might very well entice God to intervene—was like a sweet dream. He hadn't had any of those kinds of dreams for weeks.

“I'm a little embarrassed,” she said.

“Don't be. I've seen everything.”

“'Kay.” She put down the glass and crossed her hands over her chest and pulled her pink tank top over her head and he was face-to-face with breasts and shoulders and abs as perfect as the woman athletes in Holland. She turned halfway away. “It's this mole. See?”

The mole was on her right side, alongside her breast. His doctor's bag was on the floor, and he reached into it for his high-intensity flashlight. Sure enough, it was a mole, and pitch-black, and he was aware of that awful question floating into the healthy sensual space between them:
Is this death?
Lit up in profile her breast swooped out large, a Mount Rushmore to male fixation, the nipple plumped up. Aroused, he felt like he was again “playing doctor” with Faith as a kid. Diligently he palpated the crown of the mole, ran his finger along the edge, inspected the margins (smooth and regular), asking questions like how long has it been there? (“Years”) and has it grown lately (“I don't think so but it's hard to see—my bra irritates it, I've been going without”) and have you ever had any others (“Just beauty marks since I was a kid”). Before he clicked off the light he noticed on one arm a nasty fresh bruise, as if she'd fallen or been grabbed, hard.

“Well?” she asked, turning full toward him without bothering to cover up, searching his eyes for the verdict.

“It's just a mole, that's all. It's nothing.”

“Jesus!” she said and threw her arms around him, hugging him hard, so that she knocked him over and they wound up with her on top of him on the couch. She pulled away, their eyes met, and she kissed him full on the lips, her tongue an added touch of gratitude for the diagnosis of benign mole. He kissed back.

“Damn but you
are
a beautiful man.” She sat back, took a sip from the bottle.

“And you're something else.”

“Whew,” she whistled, fanning her naked chest with her hand, “hot—and I do not mean the ambient temperachure.” They laughed. “I'd better go.”

“Yeah. I'll probably get paged soon anyway.” He watched her cover those Muscat nipples and gorgeous breasts with stretched pink.
Ah, to be that pink, upon those breasts!

“Y'know, you shouldn't stand on formality. You oughta just drop in sometime. Nobody up North drops in on anybody. In Oklahoma, people drop in all the time. Don't be no stranger, y'hear? With ole Henry away campaignin' all the time, I get morose.”

“Hard to believe, you, morose.”

“Wrong word. ‘Wantin' company' is better.” She stood, smoothed things down, tight, fit, sleek as a swimmer. “Like they say in the South, ‘Y'all come see us.'”

He walked her downstairs and waved her along, away. He stood there watching her stroll across the square. In his vulnerable and angry state, he wanted her terrifically. Why had she done that? Was it relief at the diagnosis, or was she really inviting him in? Had Henry sent her? But why? She reminded him of the sex with the athletes in Holland. He wanted her and that, sure, but with Celestina and Miranda he had come to realize he needed something else. Progress had been made. What he needed was what he had lost.

For a while Orville resisted the pull toward that glowing golden porch light inviting him into what he nicknamed “Schoonerland.”

Sometimes of an evening he'd see the Family Schooner sitting together out on the porch, Henry and Nelda Jo in white wicker rockers, Junior in a colorful Guatemalan hammock, Maxie playing on the steps. They would sit for seeming hours, chatting with neighbors and friends strolling by through the husky summer nights. Orville would watch as these Columbians often would stop, stay—yes, drop in. Before long, snatches of laughter, exclamation and song—even song!—would hurry across the 134 steps of the cement pathway and up the four steps to his front porch, where he sat smoking a cigar, downing boilermakers, feeling left out. Even Selma seemed to pull him toward Schoonerland. From time to time he would have brief glimpses of her heading toward or away from the Victorian, as if she lived there or nested there or had a hangar there, complete with dedicated mechanics for maintenance.

When Orville chanced upon a Schooner—even Maxie or Junior—it was as if it was a great event in their day. They gave normal waves, normal smiles, held normal conversations. Henry and Nelda Jo seemed always to be around, doing normal summertime things, occasionally dropping in together with a homemade pie or a Havana cigar, always with a kind word and an acceptance of his not yet accepting their standing invitation. They never parted without a “God bless you,” and, in Henry's departures, with an added, candidate's “and God bless America.” Whenever Orville encountered the Schooners, even the Columbian weather seemed more normal. The frantic heat lost its edge, the sweating air its humidity. Summer showers were gentle and useful to crops. Thunderstorms brought not just relief but a natural pruning of deadwood and a welcome measure of drama and passed through quickly, doing little damage. Nelda Jo, after that night of the mole, though still flirtatious, never again came alone.

Orville pictured Schoonerland as not just a geography but as a hagiography. It was a suffusion of normal America directly into the Schooners, without harmful additives. It was unfiltered and uncluttered, relentlessly normal, wholeheartedly accepted. Even worshipped, for the Schooners were solid members not only of St. Mark's Episcopal (Henry) and Shiloh Baptist (Nelda Jo), but they made a point of attending various ecumenical services—Jewish, black, Hispanic, Ukrainian, and Dutch Reformed out in Spook Rock. Schooners attended most everything in town and county. Schooners showed up.

Not only was normal America suffusing the Family Schooner, Orville realized, but in a kind of alchemy, normal America, encountering Schooners, was reflected back as an amplified and purified substance, more substantial and crisply defined and even innovated and improved upon. America, through Schooners, made progress, became more perfect. That perfected image radiated back out from each of the smiles of little Maxie, Junior, Nelda Jo, the Filipino servants, and Henry himself, smiles revealing teeth that shone like ice in new Amana refrigerators.

Yes, that perfected image was beamed back out as a happy porch-glow in the July dusk and then, strolling across the putting-green perfect yard and moving lightly past the Courthouse Square with its war memorials to Great Dead Columbians starting with the Revolution and General Worth's War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War whatever that was and the War of the Secession, otherwise known as The Civil, to The Great War, which wasn't all that great if you wound up dead, and then The War To End All Wars, which didn't, and The (strange) Korean War and then, heading toward Vietnam—The War We Lost And Pretended To Win But It Wasn't A Real War Anyway So The Loss Didn't Really Count—the perfected image veered so as not to get too close to
that
war and then, free from the drag of these war memorials, the image gathered itself up in denial and took off through the July dusk and diffused all over Columbia, from swamp to swamp and river to cemetery, and then out through Kinderhook County and America and the world.

America found Schooners, and Schooners illuminated America to the ends of the earth. After all, Orville found himself thinking, what do you hear on top of a Himalayan peak? The Beach Boys. What are they wearing, paddling your canoe up the Amazon? Michael Jackson stuff. What do you drink on the Moroccan edge of the Sahara? Coca-Cola. What's playing in Bangkok? Arnold Schwarzenegger. What's constant in the world? Mickey Mouse. All of it an ad for America the Good—if not the Best.

The Schooners seemed so normal that Orville felt sick.

He had lost his fighting edge. His spirit had sunk, broken not so much by the bullying of his mother telling him he was abnormal but more by the queasy feeling that she was dead right. Given the evidence of his failures to be normal with Miranda and Cray and Amy and the dread Penny and the concrete Milt and the poor ethereal Celestina and the psychoanalyzed Lily and yes, even the Schooners—well, he was finally cowed into thinking she was right.

Your mother is right. You are so abnormal you should be illegal.

From that first afternoon as a child in the field looking up at the clouds passing across when he had discovered the “something else” and when, on bringing it back to his mother he'd been told he was crazy because “there's nothing else but this,” Orville had lived with a deep, secret, abiding sense that he was abnormal. His unexplained infertility had sealed it. Abnormal, most definitely. Alternative to the culture, always. Even, years ago in college at Syracuse and medical school in Dublin, alternative to the alternative sixties—talking the talk but not walking the walk.

Now, Orville was more and more fascinated by Henry because the guy seemed to know clearly who he was, what he was placed on earth for, what he was aimed at, and how he would get it. The man was
tenacious.
Orville hated to admit it, but Henry Schooner seemed to know how to live.