The Confessions of Frances Godwin (14 page)

“Jack it in,” someone shouted. Someone else laughed. I could see Jimmy through the open window, his head jerking as he looked from one mirror to another. I thought he might be looking for help. Finally he got out of the cab.

“Somebody’s got to move this goddamn truck,” he shouted, banging on the side of the Leshinsky Potato Company truck. “There’s not enough room to get in.”

“You just got to jack it in,” somebody shouted again.

I wasn’t sure what this meant.

“Fuck it!” Jimmy shouted.

The big burly man who was unloading potatoes laughed.

“Move the fucking truck,” Jimmy says. “You can see I don’t have enough room.”

“Let your girlfriend back it in.”

“Go shit yourself.”

“Who you talking to?”

“To you, Polack asshole.”

The burly man pulled a produce hammer out of his back pocket and started for the Jimmy. At least it wasn’t a knife.

Jimmy whipped off his belt, which had a heavy buckle on the end, and whirled it around his head.

What was it Keats said about a quarrel in the streets? More exciting than a poem?

But Tommy intervened before things went any farther. “
Basta basta basta.
Take it easy. Put your hammer away, Leo,” he said to the Leshinsky driver. And to Jimmy: “Put your belt back on before your pants fall down. Stop acting like a punk and I’ll buy you a drink.” He put his arm around Jimmy. And led him off toward Nachmann’s Market Bar.

I stayed to talk to Stella, who was out of the cab now, looking over the situation. The truck was blocking the entire street. “Later, Ma,” she said, glancing at me.

She climbed into the cab and made herself comfortable, then pulled forward till the back of the trailer was near the opening between the two trucks and then adjusted the back wheels, the tandems, all the way forward so she could make a shorter turn. I could understand the principle, but I couldn’t imagine turning the wheel left to get the back of the truck to go to the right. And vice versa.

She started to back up, and I thought she was going to back right into the Wilkins truck. I could see her talking to herself, bending the truck to her will, and suddenly the back of the trailer swung around into the opening.

I could see her checking her mirrors and pulling on the wheel, a white light behind her, filling the cab. All of a sudden the angle changed again and it looked as if she were going to back right into the Leshinsky potato truck. And then the trailer magically straightened out and the cab followed it into the hole.

Later, in the bar—we were sitting in a booth—she said, “Sometimes when I’m in a tight spot I tell myself that there’s a perfect line to follow. That’s what they taught us in truck-driving school. If I could find that line, a line that would put the truck straight into the hole the first time . . . That line’s the line you’d follow if you were pulling
out
of the hole, right? So you just follow the line that you take pulling out of a space and sink the trailer right
into
the hole. But you have to visualize that line.

“Sometimes there’re going to be two lines . . . ” She went on to explain how the two lines worked, and I knew then that Jimmy was going to kill her if I didn’t do something to stop him. But what could I do? The waitress brought out coffee.

“You keep the temperature at sixty degrees?” Tommy asked Stella.

“All the way.”

“They’re hauling black-market tomatoes,” Tommy said, turning to me.

“Black market?”

“Florida tomatoes. Not exactly black market, but I got a cousin in Pompano Beach figured out how to grow tomatoes that taste good in the winter. Like real tomatoes, not cardboard. But they don’t look too good. Like those tomatoes with all the bumps and cat faces on them you see in Italy. So the Florida Tomato Growers Association decides he can’t sell them out of state because they don’t meet minimum beauty standards. Because of the bumps. I can’t sell them to the chains without making a stink, but restaurants, they’re another story. Not just Milwaukee, Chicago too.”

That night Tommy made sauce with some of the black market tomatoes. Paul would have loved it. He cooked some garlic in olive oil, then cut the tomatoes in half and squeezed the juice into the pan with the oil and garlic. He cooked the juice down to concentrate it and then added what was left of the tomato halves. So the juice was concentrated, but the meat of the tomatoes cooked for only a short time. He put the tomatoes through a food mill and served the sauce on spaghetti. No Parmesan cheese. “Parmesan cheese is the emperor of cheeses,” he explained, “but every dish is a little drama. Parmesan cheese is a strong actor. You don’t want Parmesan cheese to upstage the lead.”

Jimmy disagreed. He wanted Parmesan cheese.

“Grate it yourself,” Tommy said, but Jimmy couldn’t find it in the refrigerator and Tommy had to help him.

Jimmy couldn’t let the truck-backing-up business rest. “Old man Leshinsky and his fucking potatoes,” he kept saying.

“Don’t talk like a punk,” Tommy said, but Jimmy was determined to be disagreeable.

“He could of moved the fucking truck.”

I could see where things stood. But could Stella see? Had she waded in too deep to turn back?

“I could of backed it in, but it just made more sense for that fat-ass Leshinsky driver to move his truck.”

For a second course Tommy served thick pork chops, browned in olive oil and then baked with fennel seeds, followed by a salad. Later on Jimmy and Stella went out to a club.

“Stella knows how to drive,” Tommy said. “That school must have been pretty good.”

“What
I
want to know,” I said, “is if she’s going to be all right.”

“You mean, is she going to turn things around for Jimmy. I’m glad to see him with a good woman. She stuck by him all that time he was in prison. Visiting every week.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Love,” he said. “What do they know that we don’t know?”

“There’s more than bed to marriage.”

He laughed. “You got that backward,” he said. “That’s what
we
know that they don’t know.” And for a while we explored the mystery of love. We didn’t disagree about anything, but we didn’t take the argument very far beyond the obvious.

“He did good work on the house,” I said, not mentioning the chandelier.

“He’s not afraid of work,” Tommy said.

“What happened to his parents?” I asked.

“My brother was killed on the back loading dock,” Tommy said. Crushed by a truck backing up. His wife couldn’t manage on her own, died a year later. “He’s my brother’s son. We took him in, treated him like he was our own. My wife . . .” He crossed himself. “I promised my brother I’d look after him. Blood is blood. You’ve got to understand that. You look after your own.”

And I thought he’d just told me everything I needed to know.

But it turned out there was more. Isn’t there always more? A lot more?

“I’m going to put the dishes in the dishwasher,” he said, “but let me put something on to lift the spirits. He had a fancy stereo system that could handle LPs as well as cassettes and CDs. I recognized the overture to
The Marriage of Figaro,
which Paul and I had seen in the Arena in Verona
.
And I experienced a peaceful easy feeling, like the old Eagles song, as if we were not doing anything special, as if we just happened to be walking along side by side, heading in the same direction.

We met twice, in Chicago, to see
Turandot,
at the end of February, and
Norma,
in the middle of March (at the end of the season). Both times I took the Illinois Zephyr from Galesburg, and Tommy, who took the North Shore down from Milwaukee, was waiting for me in Union Station. We took a cab to the Lyric Opera and sat on the mezzanine. Tommy was a subscriber.

We had a recording of Joan Sutherland singing “Casta Diva”—
Joan Sutherland’s Greatest Hits
—but hearing June Anderson live was heartbreakingly beautiful. More than beautiful. It was like being seasick or coming down with the flu, but somehow wonderful, as if our limited physical responses had to do double duty, had to stand for the flu or for joy, the way the same notes on a piano score can sometimes represent the flute and sometimes the violin.

We stayed at the Palmer House, in separate rooms after
Turandot.
That was the first step. The second step was easy. After
Norma
we shared a room, and a bed. No one wants to imagine the sexual desires of an older woman. But let me tell you something, they’re the same as yours: to be touched, stroked, embraced, to be held. That’s the long and short of it. To feel the earth rolling under your shoulder blades, to share a glass of wine, one glass for the two of you, to drink a cup of coffee together in the morning. That’s what we did. Coffee and eggs Benedict in the hotel.

Inside I was as dizzy as a teenager who’s just lost her virginity, as unsteady as a drunk trying to walk a straight line, but outwardly I remained calm as we walked north on Wabash to the river, leaned against the railing, looked down at the tour boats. I felt flirtatious, in command, still able to surprise a man. Myself too.

We talked about
Norma
from every possible angle—the difficulty of staging, the difficulty of coordinating the words and the music, the difficulty of finding a balance between carnality and spirituality.

“I never thought it was a problem,” I said.

He laughed.

June Anderson’s performance—I started to hum the aria—was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Tommy explained bel canto singing, and opera singing in general.

“It’s totally different,” he said. “You got to link your different registers, and you got to do it with no microphones, no amplification. You got to make yourself heard. It’s a kind of controlled screaming. It takes years to learn. You got to sing pianissimo over the orchestra and be heard in the back row of the top balcony. What you do is you make a column of air in your body and then ride it like a wave, like you’re on a surf board.”

I took a deep breath and tried to form a column of air deep within my body and then jump on that one word at the top, which I recognized as
pace
and ride it down to the end. I wasn’t worried about anyone hearing me. Too much noise. Too much traffic on Michigan Avenue, too much traffic on the river.

Tommy put his arm around me. “Careful,” he said. “You need to do some warm-ups first. You don’t want to ruin your voice.”

We ate a late lunch in one of the new restaurants underneath the station, and I left on the California Zephyr. I could have stayed longer and taken the Illinois Zephyr, but I was still shaky and I thought I’d better get home. Tommy saw me off. The California Zephyr is a big train. When it leaves the station it’s more like an ocean liner leaving the port than an airplane taking off.

I walked home. The apartment’s only a block from the Amtrak station. I’d had an unsettling glimpse of a new life. But what stayed with me was not so much the possibility of a new life, but the music, the aria.
Casta diva.
Chaste goddess. Like first love, it promised to vindicate life, or at least point toward what’s important in life.

I went down to the garage, which was full of banker’s boxes full of books. Some labeled. Some mislabeled. Some not labeled at all. But I found what I was looking for: our old
Scribner Music Library,
ten volumes of folk songs, popular songs, piano classics, and two volumes of opera excerpts. I took them upstairs and looked up the piano score for
Norma—
excerpts from
Norma.
The music for “Casta Diva”
wasn’t difficult. I sight-read my way through it without stopping. Then I played it again. Then I started to sing. The beauty was overwhelming. Not the beauty of my decent alto voice, but the way the melody holds its breath at the top and then pulses its way down to the tonic. I tried to sing the words, an octave low, but it was like trying to sing when you’re seasick:
“Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ce .
.
.”

I played it again, tried to form a column of air deep within my body, but I didn’t know what it would feel like if I succeeded. But I recognized the experience now. It wasn’t seasickness, it wasn’t the flu; it was homesickness.

The doorbell rang. It was Lois, in her bathrobe. And Camilla. “I thought you might want your dog back,” she said.

“Thanks, Lois,” I said. “Sorry. I got carried away.”

“You can tell me about it tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going back to bed.”

7

“Truth Comes in Blows” (April–June 1997)

Paul’s memorial service, held on Shakespeare’s birthday, was everything a memorial service should be. If you’re part of a small liberal arts college, you don’t need religion. You don’t need a church. The college will provide all the things the people used to expect from a church: a sense of community, an active interest in the large questions about the meaning and purpose of human life, and even a memorial service when you die.