Authors: N. S. Köenings
A hardness in her voice, so different from the softness and also from the sobbing Gilbert thought that he had wished for,
did some tonic work. Something like cold water on a distraught person’s face. Gilbert slowly took his hand down from his eyes.
Careful, he
sat up against the headboard. “Hiccups, Sarie. I have—a case of hiccups.” These he demonstrated, ably.
Sarie rolled her eyes. She quickly thought:
A blushing man; a man with rashes on his skin; a man who gets the hiccups. What a husband. Quel mari I have
. But there were some things Sarie could not do. Her nurse’s bent prevented her from cruelty. She knew very well that Gilbert’s
hiccups usually came with other pains that cannot be outdone by clove-brews, salty things or bars of sulphur soap. She thought
briefly about sugar, water swallowed backwards, sudden scary noise. “Hiccups,
tiens
. What is it, then, what’s wrong?” She considered shocking him by saying, “I have taken on a lover!” but did not. Gilbert,
tired, and resentful because he felt in this condition that he merited attention, spoke the next thing rather sharply. “I’d
like to tell you why, if you could bring yourself to li—sten.”
Sarie, too mixed up just then to feel surprised that Gilbert (who hated, hated, confrontations!) had just accused her of neglect,
sniffed again and took the light blue thing from him. She read. As her face changed, Gilbert imagined he could see the fine
hairs at her nape and temples stand on end. This pleased him; surely she cared, too. His squawks subsided for a moment. With
the sausage of his tongue, he pushed against the twisting in his throat, tried to breathe in, slowly. He remembered that he
had not eaten since a modest lunch of beans. “Well?” he said. Briefly safe, he took up a yellow fruit. They might do him good.
Sarie, letter on her lap, examined the pale sheet. She blinked, and bit her lip. Yes, she could see why Gilbert was upset.
But, having just come from another bed, she could not support him fully. She had no wish either to soothe him or to make him
feel she understood his trouble (their trouble. She wished it to be
his
). As he had been, she was moved by Uncle James’s punctuation; she chose to comment on this first. “He is angry! Look at that!”
she said,
without moving, without making any gesture to show Gilbert what she meant. “Yes, look at that.” She meant the vividness of
it, the wildness of the writing.
Gilbert felt his wife had missed the point. He moved a little on the bed. A hiccup came from him. “Did you—did you read it?
The part about—the money.” Of course Sarie had. But she wasn’t ready to discuss it. Among the heavy curls and towers of the
letters and the patches of spilt ink, Sarie sought a weapon, and she found one.
I cannot support your wife and children any longer
. Sarie thought a moment. She took this very personally.
Children?
Agatha was all they’d managed, the only one they had.
One
child. Had Gilbert let the man believe that she had borne a brood? Three children, even four, and boys, moreover, so Uncle
James would send along more money? Worse, had Gilbert meant to put her through that swollen business once again? Did he
want
more than one child? What could that plural mean?
Gilbert hiccupped loudly. His hips and chest rose up in concert from the bedding in a high, unmanaged jerk. Sarie noticed
that her husband’s feet, high-arched, fat-toed, landed sideways on the sheet like two fleshy letters C. He jerked again, again.
Each hiccup yanked his big toes towards him in a spasm, thrust the eight remaining digits back. She wondered if he knew how
strange, how ridiculous, his feet looked. “Gilbert,” she said, loudly, leaning forward, a banana in her hand. She wished he
would stop moving. “Gilbert!” The sharpness of her voice did still him. Breath free for a moment, Gilbert, hoping once again
for gentleness and wondering if he’d get it, peeked out rather gingerly between a forefinger and thumb. A soft bleat came
from his lips. “
Au pluriel?
” she said. When Sarie spoke to him in French, Gilbert knew that she was moving back from him, receding, looking at the world
from a vantage point he could not share—one from which he and everything
he stood for was foreign and disdained. “Gilbert.” She poked her husband’s trousered leg with the unpeeled part of her banana.
“You told him we had children,
au pluriel?
”
Once he’d woken the next day, Gilbert, struggling still with pockets of trapped air, unsure of his breath, went nonetheless
directly to the Frosty-Kreem, where, he thought, he might be treated kindly. Because it was a Saturday, the place was overrun;
he had to wait outside. The air was bland and silky, swollen and too warm. The morning light glowed dull. In the grayish gloom,
behind twenty-seven boys and girls who formed a thick, unruly line outside the door, he waited on the pavement for over half
an hour. Several pairs of parents—women in approaching middle age, broad-torsoed in their shining weekend wear, mustachioed
men with canes—watched their offspring proudly. An older man with spectacles and the refined mien of a schoolmaster laughed
kindly with the daring ones who jockeyed for positions closest to the door. Schoolboys in short-pants, girls in colored dresses
made of knees and elbows, they jostled one another, shrieked. Gilbert stood behind them trying to look stern, arms folded
on his chest. But he was tortured, still, ungallantly, by sporadic closures of his throat.
Near him, a lean boy with early stubble on his cheeks and a comely curve in his oiled hair announced that he felt rich enough
this Saturday to purchase something other than a cone (“An Italian cup! Pink and brown and white!”). A round girl with fifty-two
small braids huddled on her scalp (Gilbert counted, to pass time) pointed the boy out to her companion; they frowned in his
direction. Someone said, “Thinks he is a Jeevanjee! A Topan!
Arre baba!
” and a tiny boy in short-pants who had been attempting to sneak
past Gilbert in the line paused in his attempt to let his mouth fall open at the sound of so much change.
A Jeevanjee. Gilbert felt oppressed. So much glee, children with new coins hard and bright in their hot hands, so much noise,
so much Saturday behavior! He scanned the young, thrilled crowd; its members, he was suddenly, bitterly, quite sure, had more
funds than he could even dream.
Millionaires and capitalists
, he thought.
Each and every one
. His gaze settled on a parent in a dark blue tailored suit whose neatly combed mustache gleamed bluish like wet silk. The
man raised a soft, clean hand up in the air against a band of flies (which scattered!); at his wrist a gold watch shone. And
Gilbert, lost, abandoned by the world, said quietly between his teeth: “Parasites, each one.”
His stomach hurt. Desperate for Sarie’s company, for talk, for something kind to make him feel less fear, he had been hiccupping
all night. But Sarie’s sleep had been so firm that when he tapped her three times on the shoulder, on each occasion offering
a new term of endearment (“Sarie-love?” “Dear?” “Sweetheart?”), she had not even groaned, or pushed his hand away.
When he finally made it to the door and stepped into the Frosty-Kreem, he was, as always, startled by the coolness of the
place and by how sound was different there. Though the customers were tightly packed and many, their voices came out muffled,
and this softness was principally due to one of the Frosty-Kreem’s two defining features: a herd of multicolored animals—plush,
crocheted, and furry—that hung down from the ceiling. Yellow monkeys, red and orange kittens, polka-dotted donkeys, a dozen
vivid zebras, mute themselves, suckled at the people sounds. The clash and clink of spoons on bowls, the drizzle of cold coins,
the trilling of the metal bell, had a weird, dry softness to them. Behind the scarlet counter, Kazansthakis, dispensing chocolate
and vanilla cones with
what looked like eight quick hands, was plush and soft himself
A bear
, thought Gilbert idly.
My friend would be a bear
. The Frosty King did not speak to him, but he was sensitive to changes in the air—to
grown-ups
in a room—and he noted Gilbert’s presence the moment he came in. He’d deftly slipped a cone to Mrs. Frosty (a pink one, for
a change) and asked her please to place it into Gilbert Turner’s hands so he’d have something to do.
Behind the door, pressed against the wall, Gilbert folded—
Like an aerogramme
, he thought—each time a set of boys and girls came in and each time a set went out. He hiccupped, hiccupped, still. With
each attempt to press the cone against his mouth, his insides tightened and his jagged throat shut down. Some children noticed
him and stared, elbowed one another. Their close attention was difficult for Gilbert to withstand because (and this was feature
two) the Frosty-Kreem’s four walls each boasted a mirror. A single laughing child was therefore 4, or 16, 64, 256, a staggering,
incalculable repetition beneath the breeding toys. He saw himself, himself, himself, and them, and them, and them, the back
of Mr. Frosty’s head as well as its red front, again, again, again. The reflections made him dizzy. Against them all, Gilbert
closed his eyes. By the time the rush died down and Kazansthakis stopped to wipe the counter, Gilbert’s ice cream, uneaten
for the spasms, had melted thickly all across his hands. His pale brown eyes were red.
It was Mrs. Frosty who gave Gilbert the push. He told her almost everything. The threat. How he needed but could not imagine
having an idea for a business, something for his selfish Uncle James, to keep the money coming. How he couldn’t, couldn’t,
no, how it was all beyond him and how he couldn’t face it, did not know
what to do. Mrs. Frosty smiled. Child of Polish prisoners of war, she had a few ideas about emerging from misfortune. Seated
on a leather stool, rag in hand, eyes bright, Mrs. Frosty said to Gilbert: “Agreeing to a change is hard. You will feel that
you are getting your fat feet into a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit.”
With Mr. Frosty’s love of talk, and her hours turning cream, it wasn’t often that she got to tell anybody anything. She didn’t
care for most of Mr. Frosty’s friends—the French couple (too pious!) and the Danish engineers (she thought of them as boys,
so arrogant and careless!). But there was something about Mr. Turner, who always looked like a lost thing though he had seen
(she thought) so much—something about Gilbert that could turn her talking on.
This man
, she thought,
likes to listen
. Well. He liked listening to
her
. She was always very gentle.
“‘Shoes?’ “ The Frosty King brought Gilbert a washcloth for his hands and patted Gilbert’s back when a hiccup snapped his
throat. “What does Mrs. Frosty tell you of the shoes?” He set to straightening the plush green monkeys and a tiger that had,
in all of the excitement, clung to one another. “Don’t listen to my husband, Mr. Turner,” Mrs. Frosty said. “
He
can’t remember how it happened. He’s forgotten all my work.” The Frosty King blinked absently at her, smacked Gilbert on
the back, and slid away into the storage room to check on their reserves.
“What you have to do,” said Mrs. Frosty—golden eyebrows arched, generous torso settling nicely on the Bakelite before him,
“is to make a working plan. An idea for the uncle.” Mrs. Frosty’s voice was clear and high and warm. Gilbert was aware of
her reflection in the walls. He managed not to see himself; instead, he saw an army, a regiment of brave and handsome women,
buxom, kind, determined only to help
him
. Mrs. Frosty and her loving twins and triplets. She spoke wisely again, smiling all the while.
“You need an idea. But here’s what you must do.” She pressed her hands against the counter and stretched her fingers out.
Leaned in conspiratorially and said, “If you want a last thing from your uncle, Mr. Turner, you must make it sound… like smashing!”
She slapped the Bakelite. He started. “Smashing!” she said. “Like a fortune.” She leaned in. “Believe that something very
big, so big, is going to happen. Surely going to. Because
you
will make it so.”
When she half closed her pale eyes, Gilbert saw the roundness, the smoothness of her eyelids, and was moved. He closed his
own eyes for a moment, and there he had a vision. He saw plump, delightful Mrs. Frosty unpin her coffee-colored hair and stretch
her thick arms towards the Frosty King on an evening filled with moonlight and the ruby shine of leaves. He saw Kazansthakis
look up from his account books and move towards Mrs. Frosty like a long, unhurried, and inevitable train. How safe those two
must be! What he saw in the temperate space behind his eyes—the certainty in her, reaching for her man, the able tilt of Mr.
Frosty’s arms—inspired Gilbert Turner. When the breathing, warmer, living Mrs. Frosty placed her hand on his, her touch was
like a shock. Gilbert came back to the Frosty-Kreem and looked at her again. He blinked. “Believe in it,” she said. She lowered
her round voice. “That’s how I make Mr. Frosty do all the things I want.”
A strand of hair had snuck out from her bun to make an s-shape at her throat. Gilbert’s hand went damp. She said, “You know
what I mean.” And Gilbert thought he did. “Think big.” He moved his hand from hers and uncurled his thick fingers. Yes. He
felt a good deal better. While Mrs. Frosty tugged at her soiled apron and put her hair where it belonged, he breathed in and
he breathed out. He opened his mouth wide and waited, but no cruel hiccup came.
Believe in it
, he thought.
Kazansthakis came back into the parlor and gave Gilbert some
ice cream to take home. “Pistachio Promenade,” the Frosty King announced. And then, on seeing that the wobbly guest was leaving,
said, with a pout: “So soon?” He would have asked about the boy, the mystery father, and what Gilbert had learned; he’d been
hoping for a story to wrap up the afternoon. But Gilbert, apparently recovered, said, “I really ought to go,” and Kazansthakis
sighed, looked elaborately dejected, which Gilbert appreciated more than he could say. Mrs. Frosty stepped towards him and
squeezed his suddenly firm arm. “You’ll see,” she said. “You will think of something.” He felt her sweet breath on his face
and briefly thought of cherries. “And now,” she said, “you must hurry home.” She gestured to the bag he held. “Before it melts
again.”