“What motorcycle?” Mona asked.
“No,” I said to Mr. Phillips. “Of course not. My mother has probably helped remove donated organs from many a motorcycle accident victim.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Phillips said. “The perfusionist. I almost forgot.”
“So she’d probably be pretty dead set against it.”
“I’d say she’d have a point if she was.”
“You’re getting a
motorcycle?”
Mona asked.
“No,” I said. “Mr. Phillips and I were just talking man-talk the other day. We’re both alpha males, and I was trying to one-up him.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” he said.
“I know someone who was decapitated in a motorcycle accident,” Mona said, a little too proudly.
“You still know him?” I asked. “How does that work?”
“Well, I never really
knew
him. He was my friend’s cousin.”
“So it doesn’t bother you, then? The danger of it?” Mr. Phillips asked me.
“It’s a consideration, of course. Would it be too much of a cliché to point out that the danger is part of the appeal?”
“It’s not that it’s a cliché that I find objectionable,” Mona said. “It’s that it’s
dumb.”
“Ahhh, Billy.” Mr. Phillips savored my name as if it were a warm sip of his precious Jamaica Blue Mountain. “Billy. Billy boy. Hey—anyone ever call you Willy?”
“No.”
“Willy. Old Willy. That reminds me of a little story,” Mr. Phillips said.
“Yeah?” I said, hoping to move away from the motorcycle topic. “Maybe you should tell it to us.”
Mona shot me a look that I couldn’t interpret.
“In Korea, I served with this guy named Willy. Birdless
Willy, we called him. He was a little crazy. And he was missing the middle finger on his right hand.”
“How’d he lose it?” I asked.
“It was shot off. He had it shot off in a bar.”
“What?” Mona said.
“I’m telling you. Swore he gave a guy the finger once in a bar and the guy pulled out a piece and just shot it clear off his hand.”
“He was lying to you, Mr. Phillips,” Mona said. “Either that or you got that out of
Blazing Saddles
or something.”
“Well, whether or not the backstory was a lie, the guy didn’t have his right-hand bird.”
“How’d he shoot his gun, then?” I asked.
“He didn’t shoot. He was the company cook. But the real interesting thing about Willy is he got a second chance at a middle finger.”
Mr. Phillips paused dramatically.
“You see, at Old Baldy, some joker whacked a dead Red’s finger off and brought it back for Willy.”
“What’s Old Baldy?” I asked.
“That’s pretty
sick,”
Mona said. “And on a number of levels.”
“Well, honey. War is sick.”
“Did he keep the finger?” I asked.
“Now, that’s the real interesting part.”
“He kept it?” Mona said. “How? Did he salt it like jerky?”
“Hold your horses. No, he didn’t salt it. He joked that he boiled it down in one of our soups and picked out the bones to keep for himself. Left the fleshy finger bits in the soup. But I doubt that. We’d have gotten the squirts from that finger. That finger sure wasn’t fresh by the time it got to Willy.”
“God!” Mona said.
“He’d always claim he had the finger bones in his pocket. He’d jangle at his pocket, claiming he was gonna give one of us the finger someday. That is, leave the bones under one of our pillows, or in one of our bowls, or something sneaky like that. He’d say it pretty cryptic, like. So you weren’t sure if you were supposed to want the finger or not. Like it could be a curse, or it could be a good-luck charm. He’d say things like ‘Who here wants to stay in Korea forever? Well, let’s just see who gets this here finger.’”
“That sounds more like a curse to me,” I said.
“But some days, he’d say things like ‘Maybe I’ll just keep this little finger for myself. I kind of like having a finger again. I got my balance again. I got my yin and I got my yang.”
“He didn’t say that,” Mona hissed.
“Oh, he did, honey.”
“Americans didn’t know anything about Asian philosophy in the fifties,” Mona insisted.
“We were in
Korea
, for God’s sake. We knew a couple of things. And it was a Chinese guy’s finger, after all.”
Mona cringed.
“So who got the bones?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I got my stateside wound before Willy ever gave them to anyone. But I was glad it wasn’t me. Something told me those bones—whether or not they really existed—were like the key to Willy’s rubber room. Get the bones and you’d find yourself occupying it with him. If he ended up giving them away, I never heard who got them.”
“Didn’t you keep in touch with any of the guys in your company?”
“When I did, there were always more important things to discuss than Willy’s magic finger bones. Anyway, it’s important to know when to let a thing end.”
“I like how your story ends,” I said.
“It doesn’t exactly have an ending.” Mona looked disappointed.
“Sure it does. It ends with Mr. Phillips getting to go home.”
“With a hole in his gut,” Mr. Phillips added.
“Can I ask,” said Mona, folding her hands primly on the table, “if this is one of the stories that so moved Mary Anne?”
Mr. Phillips raised an eyebrow at Mona, and then turned to me.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think Mary Anne would have appreciated that one.”
Mona sighed. “Well then. While we’re on the subject of Mary Anne, I have a few questions for you. Nineteen fifty-one brings up some interesting findings.”
I took out our two most recent cits:
But we are talking about how I got here. And here in a different sense. That story begins, oddly, quaintly, with a cup of tea. Every morning, after his smile disappeared into his corner of the office, there was one other luxury. A cup of tea. A glass of tea, since my drinking glass from home doubled as an unconventional tea vessel. A teaglass, if you will. Teaglass. Is that a word? Every day I’d make a
nebbish
of myself, going down to that pointy, constipated cafeteria woman, and asking, Oliver Twistlike, “May I have some hot water please?”
4
Then you said you thought I’d have finished it by now, that you’d heard I eat books like candy. I wondered from whom
you could have heard this. And I thought you were just taunting me, Red, and that you knew very well where the book had gone. Were we now sharing an explosive secret? No, I said, trying to give you a
killer
stare. I wouldn’t have you in on it. I said again, No, not yet. And you said all right. I think I saw you hesitate before you walked away. None of the usual wink. Just a defeated posture as you moved on to the pencil sharpener.
33
“Now, let’s talk a little about this Mary Anne,” Mona began. “Billy told me you said her name was Mary Anne, and I looked at the credits for some of the books that were published around ’85. Like the second edition of the kids’ dictionary. There’s a Mary Anne Wright. Does that sound correct?”
“Sure,” Mr. Phillips said. “I don’t think there have been any other Mary Annes at Samuelson, so I guess that’s her.”
“I Googled Mary Anne Wright,” Mona confessed. “There are a lot of them out there.”
“Can’t help you there. Keep in mind, she might be married now anyway.”
“Right. Well then. Moving right along … Do you remember this conversation? About this book?”
“No. I lent her a few books, though. So it probably happened.”
“Do you remember her acting strange at any point, while she was working at Samuelson?”
“Strange? Can’t say as I did. Looks here like she thought I did.”
“You think she was capable of killing?”
Mr. Phillips guffawed and looked at me. “Girl’s a lot more direct than you, Homer. Who am I to say who’s capable of
killing, dear? Mary Anne was a sweet kid. If she killed someone, I’d be mighty surprised. I can tell you that much. You know, I don’t like how all of this is starting to sound. Maybe you two ought to chat with Dan about this after all.”
“Why would we chat with
Dan?”
Mona demanded.
I tried to give Mr. Phillips a subtle little shake of the head, but he either missed it or ignored it. I’d meant to tell her. I just hadn’t decided
how
yet.
“You didn’t tell her?” he asked me. “Why not? You’re a sneaky little sucker, aren’t you?”
“Tell me what?” Mona wanted to know.
“Billy, are you a … cunning linguist?” Mr. Phillips laughed and gave me a quick, jerking wink. “Excuse me, Mona. Heard that one yet, champ? Cunning linguist?”
“Is this really happening?” Mona asked, turning to me. “Did he actually just say that? Tell me
what?”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape now.” Mr. Phillips sobered quickly. “I’ll tell you. Mary Anne was Dan’s girlfriend.”
Mona gasped.
“No!” she said. I was so accustomed to her sarcasm that at first I couldn’t believe the genuine depth of her surprise.
“Yup,” said Mr. Phillips.
Mona took a moment to compose herself, but then started firing questions at the old man.
“What kind of relationship did they have? Was it volatile?”
“Well,” Mr. Phillips said, “I wasn’t exactly privy to that kind of, uh—”
“Well, what was she like? Why would he go out with her?”
“She was cute. Pretty. By Samuelson standards.”
To my surprise, Mona let that go. “Why’d she leave?” she asked.
“You know, I don’t remember,” Mr. Phillips replied. “But
it was rather sudden, I believe. I went to her desk one day and she was gone. She probably gave her notice to Ed and just didn’t let the rest of us know.”
“What do you think might’ve happened?”
“I don’t know. You know, dictionary work isn’t for everybody. Young editors tend to come and go, and we don’t ask a lot of questions. There are always more suckers out there willing to come in and help us answer letters from the clink.”
I heard a little catch in Mona’s breath.
“What did Mary Anne look like?” I asked him.
“She was delicate,” Mr. Phillips replied.
“You mean, petite? Like Mona?”
“Naw. She was built like a
real
… I mean, she wasn’t small. Just girlish. I don’t think they make ’em like that anymore.”
“Girlish
how
?” Mona insisted. “Pink dresses and eyelet lace?”
“No. It wasn’t how she dressed. It was … uh … physical. She just looked like someone who should have a flower in her hair. A little old-fashioned, even then. Long blonde hair. Strawberry blonde.”
The dreamy way he said it made me think Mr. Phillips might be partial to strawberry blondes.
“Did she let you call her
honey?”
Mona sneered.
“What do you think Dan liked about her?” I asked hastily, hoping to ask a more engaging question before Mr. Phillips registered Mona’s.
“Jeez,” Mr. Phillips said. “I can’t really say. There was a lot to like. She did good work. You got the feeling she was smarter than she knew. She was a good definer, but she didn’t have a lot of confidence. She was always running her definitions by me, even long after training.”
“What did she study?” Mona asked. “I mean, in school, before they hired her?”
“Damned if I know.” Our barrage of questions was irritating
Mr. Phillips. “I can’t remember that kind of thing. You know how many definers I’ve trained? You’re lucky I remember this little girl at all. I think she went to that ritzy girls’ school, though. Most of ’em came from there around that time. Same one Grace went to.”
“Middlebrook?” said Mona.
“Yep.”
“I went there,” Mona said.
“Is that right?” Mr. Phillips replied. “That figures. For a time, nearly every female editor came outta that bluestocking factory over there. And most of the men from the Ivies. La-di-da. Now they change it up a little more. Only recently did they start hiring kids out of the state university. That was Dan’s innovation. And you’re one of the lucky beneficiaries, huh, Billy?”
“Where did Dan go?” Mona asked. “Ivy League?”
“Yep. Yale. Funny thing, though. Did you know he almost went to the Naval Academy? Told me that once, few years ago. Said he changed his mind at the last minute, something like that.”
“Why?” Mona demanded.
Mr. Phillips shrugged. “Can’t say as I know, kids.”
It seemed to me Mona was just asking about Dan to satisfy her own curiosity. I didn’t think any of this information would get us any closer to the full story. After glancing at the cits again, I said, “Why ‘teaglass,’ of all things? It seems like she’s trying to stress that somehow.
‘A teaglass, if you will. Teaglass. Is that a word?’
”
Mona and Mr. Phillips both replied to me at once.
“I’m way ahead of you, champ,” Mr. Phillips said.
“I already tried that weeks ago,” Mona said.
They eyed each other suspiciously. Mona stuck her hand out, gesturing for Mr. Phillips to speak first.
“Nothing much in the cit files,” he said. “Nothing she wrote, certainly.”
“Mostly cits for these Moroccan glasses they use to serve mint tea,” Mona added. “Not enough for an entry in a regular dictionary. And a few of the cits had it as two words. ‘Tea glass.’ Kind of self-explanatory too, right?”
“But ‘teacup’s’ in the dictionary, right?” I asked. “And ‘teacup’s’ self-explanatory, I think. ‘Tea.’ ‘Cup.’ ‘Teacup.’”
‘Teacup’ is an entirely different story,” Mr. Phillips interrupted. “Applying self-explanatory rule is an art, not an exact science. You kids have got to develop a sensitivity for it. Anyway. Regarding Mary Anne—I think she’s just got a sense of humor.
‘Is that a word?’
She’s parroting the dumbest question we ever get at Samuelson. The most common question too.
Is this a word? Is that a word?
Really, anything is a word if you can grunt it out of your mouth and it means something to you. Is that so hard for people to understand? Criminy!”
Mona peered at me as she sipped gingerly at the last of her latte.
I quietly gathered the cits into a neat little pile. I had a feeling this discussion was over.