It Burns a Lovely Light (7 page)

He grinned, his dimples going deep. "Then you're missing out on some perfectly good words."

The mean woman from St. Xavier's was indeed Dion's mother. Mrs. Piotrowski picked her daughter up after dinner, wearing a housedress and a permanent puss on her face. She could be heard screaming at poor Dion before
the car even left the driveway.

After dinner the kids walked down to Grady Square for ice cream. Joe and William took their cones to the river. Farley and Henry sat on a bench to eat theirs.

"Your aunt brags about you all the time, you
know," said Farley, licking her cone.

He covered his eyes with his non-ice cream hand, pretending nervousness. "I'm afraid to ask."

Farley imitated Veda Marie's Carolina accent. "An
absolute
angel
, that Henry. Never gave his parents a
day
of worry! And a regular Chef Boy-Ar-dee in the kitchen. A hoot! Sweet. Honor student, top of his class." She reverted back to her own voice. "It
was enough to make you sick."

Seeing Henry laugh made her flush with pleasure.

On the way back up the hill, Farley shared her dream of photographing the world. She liked the way Henry listened, and treated her like
a real person instead of a goofy kid. After a while, she realized she'd been doing all the talking and asked him about his restaurant plans.

"I want all of my ingredients to be fresh," he
said, using his hands to accentuate his point. "Some of the best meals I've ever tasted were good because of the freshness of the food, not because someone found a wild new way to prepare it."

"Do you have a name picked out?"

"I'm going to call it 'Freeman's.'" He paused. "I flipped my first pancake when I was seven years old. I've been dreaming of owning my own restaurant ever since."

She stopped walking. "I know exactly what you mean. Photographing the world is so real to me, I can taste it."

Crossing his arms, Henry rocked back on the heels of his feet. "But why do you have to do that alone?"

"I love not knowing which way I'll turn or what's over the next mountain. It's hard to wander free with someone else attached." She raised her chin. "I might only be twelve, but I've seen enough of the
world to know I want more."

"All right, then," he said. "Let's do it. I'll have my restaurant. You'll go out and capture all of the beauty of the world. And we won't let anything stand in our way."

"No matter what."

"No matter what." He stuck out a long, bony hand. "Deal?"

She started to spit on her hand, the ultimate seal of an oath, when she remembered Henry's queasy disposition. Instead, she grabbed his
hand and shook it, hard. "Deal!"

Years later, she had to wonder at the innocence of it all.

"We've been hit."

The Phantom F-4's warning panel came to life.

Jack and his navigator, Rudy, were returning from a combat mission, successfully locating and photographing the assigned missile site.
North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire battered the Phantom F-4.

Both hydraulic power control systems in the lurching two-man aircraft were losing pressure. Once the systems failed, control of the aircraft
would be impossible. Jack turned the plane east. He would put it down in the Gulf of Tonkin, where U.S. ships patrolling the sea could pick them up.

"Going feet wet," he told Rudy.

"Roger that."

To prevent seat collision, Rudy's rear canopy would fire first, with Jack's following 3/4 of a second later. As each canopy jettisoned, it would automatically pull the safety pin that catapulted the men out of the
aircraft. Jack checked the pressure gauges as the F-4 approached the coastline. Almost zero. Hold on...closer...closer. All right, here we go.

"Eject on my count of three," Jack exclaimed. "One...two...three."

Both men pulled their ejection handles. With a roar, Rudy's canopy departed the aircraft and his ejection seat catapult fired. Jack's did not. He looked up. His canopy was still attached to the aircraft.

His movements were deliberate and calm, in spite of how fast
everything was happening. For emergency jettisons, there were limited options; he could recite them in his sleep. Again he pulled the seat handle between his legs. Nothing. Reaching above his head, he pulled the second handle. The canopy
failed to fire.

The nose of the aircraft started down. With barely enough hydraulic pressure and manual rudder control remaining, Jack leveled the wings and brought the nose back to level flight. He reached for his final option, the
canopy jettison handle located above the instrument panel.

"Pauline!" he cried, pulling the handle.

"Listen to this," said Farley, reading from a book
on the French poet, Anatole France. "'If the path be beautiful, let us not question where it leads." She let out a dramatic sigh. "I can't wait to follow beautiful paths, no matter where they lead."

She and William were sitting on their small kitchen counter, watching their mother put the groceries away.

Pauline unwrapped a new roll of paper towels. "Can't you just talk about boys and pimples like a normal girl?"

"Mom, it's a commendable goal. That's the exact word Henry used. He said mine was a
commendable
goal."

It had been over a month since Henry and Mary's visit and Farley was still talking about the deal she and Henry made. If anything she
seemed to be picking up steam.

Caressing his happiness cloak, William touched a spot on Farley's face. "Speaking of pimples, you have a gigantic one on your
chin." He squinted. "It might even be a boil."

Farley pushed his hand away and hopped off the counter.

"Whoa," she said, pretending to admire one of her many photographs taped to the refrigerator. "Could this be...a Farley
James?"

Pauline leaned in. "By God, you're right. Don't you love her fresh, prickly insight?"

"She really forces you to look," agreed Farley.
She nudged her mother with her shoulder. "They say she wanders far and wide with her trusty camera."

Pauline puckered her lips. "That's a vicious rumor. I have it on good authority she still lives with her parents and her brother,
happy as a clam."

"Doorbell!" William hopped off the counter. "I'll get it!"

"Hey, fella." Dion handed William a rolled-up
magazine. "I brought you an article on Computerized Axial Tomography."

"Hi, hon," said Pauline. "Farley's in the kitchen, planning her career."

"Look, Mom!" William was already rifling through
the magazines pages. "Dion brought me an article on Computerized Axial Tomography!"

"A what?"

"
Mom
." William rolled his eyes. "A CAT scan. Only the most important medical breakthrough since the X-ray."

Pauline glanced at Dion as she dug through her purse. "That's awfully heavy for summer reading. Shouldn't you be reading Nancy Drew or something?"

"Not if I'm going to be a nurse, Mrs. James."

"You kids blow me away. How can you be so sure of the rest of your life? You've barely hit puberty, for crying out loud."

"
Mom
!" Farley appeared, holding two cans of
Tab.

"I know I'm going to be a superhero," said William.

"Of course you are," said Pauline. She waved a pair of tweezers in the air. "Whew! Found them. I'll be in the car if
anyone needs me."

Farley gestured for Dion to follow her to her room. "Come on."

The girls were obsessed with Don McLean's song, 'American Pie.' They knew every word by heart, and had even worked up a dance routine,
which they were constantly modifying behind closed doors. William was painfully jealous. He loved to sing, although he couldn't remember more than a line or two of any song, never mind the corresponding dance steps.

"What's your mom doing in the car?" asked Dion.

"She's plucking her eyebrows. She says the rearview mirror is the only honest mirror."

"She plucks her eyebrows while she's driving?"

"No, silly. She does it in the parking space."

Farley pulled the record out of its album cover and slid it down the thin pole of the record player. After a scratchy start the needle got
on track.

"Shut the door," she said. "I want to show you some new moves I made up for this part..."

On the other side of the bedroom door, William hummed along:

"...touched me deep inside, the day the music died."

Pauline adjusted the rearview mirror and examined her handiwork, tilting her face from side to side.

"Hang in there, girl," she whispered. "One more month and Jack will be home. Thirty-one more days."

Sometimes in the middle of the night she would lie awake, haunted by how close she had come to not meeting her husband. Released from
West Point for the weekend with no set plans, no family to visit...he might have gone anywhere. What if he had taken a different train, or hadn't sat next to Paddy? What if Claire hadn't been sick, leaving it up to Pauline to meet
Paddy's train? And so it went. And then there was her horrible compulsion with the wedding ring.

"You need to come home now, darling."

William sang as he ran toward the car, his voice shrill and
wobbly.

"Something touched me deep inside, the day the mewwwwwsick died!"

"What's up, kiddo?"

"A man is on the phone!" He hopped up and down,
one hand down the front of his shorts. "I said 'James' residence, William speaking,' and I used my peaceful voice and everything!"

Pauline hurried up the stairwell with William trotting behind her.

"First the man said 'is your mother home' and I said 'she's not exactly
home
, home. She's downstairs in the car pulling her eyebrows out!'"

"Oh, dear," giggled Pauline, opening the apartment
door.

Pauline's high heels, Farley's high-tops, and William's Hush Puppies made a discordant racket as they pounded full speed down the hospital's shiny white corridor. Farley and William got to his room first. They stopped at
the open door, unused to seeing their father injured, vulnerable. His left leg was elevated and a thick white bandage covered part of his head.

"Jack!" Pauline blew past them and threw herself
into her husband's arms.

"Pauline," he sobbed, burying his face in her hair. "When the plane was going down, all I could see was your face. Nothing else; just your beautiful face."

William and Farley watched from the doorway. For a moment,
before she remembered that she was the luckiest girl in the world, Farley wondered what happened to the rest of their faces.

Pauline bought her children lunch in the hospital cafeteria.
Carrying their trays, they found an empty table next to a young doctor who appeared to be studying.

"Best seat in the house!" exclaimed William, clearly worked up.

Pauline helped William unload his tray. "Let's keep it
down, kiddo."

"Sorry, am I getting all shrill again?"

"Shhhh," said Farley.

Using her chin, she pointed to the doctor beside them. His
face teetered a few inches above an open notebook.

"He's probably been up for days," she whispered. "Look at him; he's asleep on his feet."

William's foot bounced up and down as he considered this.
Technically, the man was sitting.

Inspired by her own - and now Henry's - dreams, Farley was drawn to the idea of fierce dedication. She felt sorry for anyone who didn't have ambition. After all, what was the point of getting up in the morning if
you don't have something to go all-out for?

"You two enjoy your lunch," said Pauline. "Do you remember how to get back to Dad's room?"

A group of nurses stared unashamedly after Pauline as she high-heeled it back to Jack. Perhaps to counteract their identical head-to-toe uniforms, each woman's lunch was on a different color tray.

"That is so unfair," said Red Tray, gawking as
Pauline weaved her way toward the exit.

Yellow Tray balanced a square of jiggling Jell-O on her fork.

"I'd sell my soul to the devil himself to have a figure like that," she said. "I'd throw in my husband's soul, too."

Blue Tray took a bite of her sandwich and waved it in Farley's direction.

"This one must take after the father," she said, in a weak attempt at a whisper.

"Talk about unfair," said Yellow Tray. "How'd you like to have a mom like that, while you're so..."

William clicked his tongue as Farley turned to the women.

"I'm big-boned," she said, her mouth full of macaroni salad.

Dear Henry,

I hear you hit the floor during your sauce exam. Veda Marie
ran that one up the telephone lines before you had time to dust off your chef-training-pants. To think you almost made it through your first year without a single incident.

Farley

P.S. I took this picture of scrambled eggs and peppers in a dive in
Mexico.

Dear Dion,

Thanks for the article on the fine art of French kissing. (Where do you get these things?) I can't believe your mother found your scab
jar. On second thought, I believe it. You're lucky she let you back in the house.

Farley

Dear Henry,

Next stop, Travis Air Force Base in California. I'm usually
glad to move - fresh start and all. But lately something has been bothering me. Moving a lot means you never really need to face your mistakes. If I have a fight with a friend, who cares? We'll be gone soon anyway. Not popular in
school? Better luck next base. Each time I promise to stay in touch, but then my new life begins and everything about the old base seems to get lost in the move. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't say this in person, but it's easier on paper: I'm worried that I don't know how to be a real friend.

Farley.

PS. Sorry this was all about me. I hope your pastry is improving.

Dear Farley,

I kicked ass on the pastry exam, thank you very much.

Regarding your 'real friend' concerns, I can only judge for myself but you've been a good friend to me. I've got a stack of postcards with words of encouragement, and some pretty damn good photos you took the time to
send me. So quit whining and go take some pictures.

Your friend,

Henry

Dear Henry,

Congratulations on surviving culinary school! You're a free
man, Freeman. (Ha-ha!) Now go get a job. You've got to start saving up for your own restaurant. Just think, you're one step closer to your dream. As I write this I can practically smell the food coming out of Freeman's kitchen. We're moving to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. I know. Ohio. Oh, well. It
won't be for long. It never is.

Your friend,

Farley

Dion,

So what if you didn't make cheerleading. Those uniforms didn't look
very flattering, anyway. And who cares if you can't do the splits? You've got better things to do with your time. I'm really proud of you for getting straight A's again. You could even be valedictorian next year!

So much for my junior year. I've ruined it already. I sort of made a name for myself after giving my so-called boyfriend a tastefully photographed self-portrait of me 'au natural.' Who knew he was such a sharer? I got a major
lecture from my parents about the risks I'd taken - not only with my reputation, but with my Dad's shot at an upcoming promotion to full Colonel. Apparently fathers who can't keep their kids in line don't make good leaders. It's not fair that he should pay for my stupid mistake.

Farley

Dear Farley,

Thanks for the postcard. I'm sorry I haven't written in so long. My job is insane. The head chef sweats all the time - yes, into the food
- and is constantly screaming something in Italian that no one understands. I know kitchens are traditionally frenzied, but this is ridiculous. Everyone runs around like a miserable maniac. At least I'm learning a lot about what I
don't
want in my restaurant. I plan to leave as soon as I can find the time to look for another job.

Your friend,

Henry

PS. You need to get out of the nudie-photo business. It doesn't suit you. (Sorry, Veda Marie spilled the beans.)

Henry,

Frenzied??
Are you sure you're American?

I'm sorry your job is insane. According to my dad, it's best to start in the bowels of the mailroom and work your way up. You, my friend, are
in the bowels. Dad got promoted after all, in spite of my nudie-photo antics. We're being transferred to Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas. I can't wait. I plan to spend my entire senior year making up for my junior year. Fresh start,
here I come!