Victory Over Japan (3 page)

“Just this week,” she said. “Just until Friday. I'm making A's, Daddy. This is the easiest school I've ever been to.”

“Well, don't be smart-alecky about it, Rhoda,” he said. “If you've got a good mind it's only because God gave it to you.”

“God didn't give me anything,” she said. “Because there isn't any God.”

“Well, let's don't get into an argument about that this morning,” Dudley said. “As soon as you finish school I want you to drive up to the mines with me for a few days.”

“For how long?” she said.

“We won't be gone long,” he said. “I just want to take you to the mines to look things over.”

Rhoda french-inhaled, blowing the smoke out into the sunlight coming through the kitchen windows, imagining herself on a tour of her father's mines, the workers with their caps in their hands smiling at her as she walked politely among them. Rhoda liked that idea. She dropped two saccharin tablets into her coffee and sat down at the table, enjoying her fantasy.

“Is that what you're having for breakfast?” he said.

“I'm on a diet,” Rhoda said. “I'm on a black coffee diet.”

He looked down at his poached eggs, cutting into the yellow with his knife. I can wait, he said to himself. As God is my witness I can wait until Sunday.

Rhoda poured herself another cup of coffee and went upstairs to write Bob Rosen before she left for school.

Dear Bob
[the letter began],

School is almost over. I made straight A's, of course, as per your instructions. This school is so easy it's crazy.

They read one of my newspaper columns on the radio in Nashville. Everyone in Franklin goes around saying my mother writes my columns. Can you believe that? Allison Hotchkiss, that's my editor, say she's going to write an editorial about it saying I really write them.

I turned my bedroom into an office and took out the tacky dressing table mother made me and got a desk and put my typewriter on it and made striped drapes, green and black and white. I think you would approve.

Sunday Daddy is taking me to Manchester, Kentucky, to look over the coal mines. He's going to let me drive. He lets me drive all the time. I live for your letters.

Te amo,

Rhoda

She put the letter in a pale blue envelope, sealed it, dripped some Toujours Moi lavishly onto it in several places and threw herself down on her bed.

She pressed her face deep down into her comforter pretending it was Bob Rosen's smooth cool skin. “Oh, Bob, Bob,” she whispered to the comforter. “Oh, honey, don't die, don't die, please don't die.” She could feel the tears coming. She reached out and caressed the seam of the comforter, pretending it was the scar on Bob Rosen's neck.

The last night she had been with him he had just come home from an operation for a mysterious tumor that he didn't want to talk about. It would be better soon, was all he would say about it. Before long he would be as good as new.

They had driven out of town and parked the old Pontiac underneath a tree beside a pasture. It was September and Rhoda had lain in his arms smelling the clean smell of his new sweater, touching the fresh red scars on his neck, looking out the window to memorize every detail of the scene, the black tree, the September pasture, the white horse leaning against the fence, the palms of his hands, the taste of their cigarettes, the night breeze, the exact temperature of the air, saying to herself over and over, I must remember everything. This will have to last me forever and ever and ever.

“I want you to do it to me,” she said. “Whatever it is they do.”

“I can't,” he said. “I couldn't do that now. It's too much trouble to make love to a virgin.” He was laughing. “Besides, it's hard to do it in a car.”

“But I'm leaving,” she said. “I might not ever see you again.”

“Not tonight,” he said. “I still don't feel very good, Rhoda.”

“What if I come back and visit,” she said. “Will you do it then? When you feel better.”

“If you still want me to I will,” he said. “If you come back to visit and we both want to, I will.”

“Do you promise?” she said, hugging him fiercely.

“I promise,” he said. “On my honor I promise to do it when you come to visit.”

But Rhoda was not allowed to go to Saint Louis to visit. Either her mother guessed her intentions or else she seized the opportunity to do what she had been wanting to do all along and stop her daughter from seeing a boy with a Jewish last name.

There were weeks of pleadings and threats. It all ended one Sunday night when Mrs. Manning lost her temper and made the statement that Jews were little peddlers who went through the Delta selling needles and pins.

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Rhoda screamed. “He's not a peddler, and I love him and I'm going to love him until I die.” Rhoda pulled her arms away from her mother's hands.

“I'm going up there this weekend to see him,” she screamed. “Daddy promised me I could and you're not going to stop me and if you try to stop me I'll kill you and I'll run away and I'll never come back.”

“You are not going to Saint Louis and that's the end of this conversation and if you don't calm down I'll call a doctor and have you locked up. I think you're crazy, Rhoda. I really do.”

“I'm not crazy,” Rhoda screamed. “You're the one that's crazy.”

“You and your father think you're so smart,” her mother said. She was shaking but she held her ground, moving around behind a Queen Anne chair. “Well, I don't care how smart you are, you're not going to get on a train and go off to Saint Louis, Missouri to see a man when you're only fourteen years old, and that, Miss Rhoda K. Manning, is that.”

“I'm going to kill you,” Rhoda said. “I really am. I'm going to kill you,” and she thought for a moment that she would kill her, but then she noticed her grandmother's Limoges hot chocolate pot sitting on top of the piano holding a spray of yellow jasmine, and she walked over to the piano and picked it up and threw it all the way across the room and smashed it into a wall beside a framed print of “The Blue Boy.”

“I hate you,” Rhoda said. “I wish you were dead.” And while her mother stared in disbelief at the wreck of the sainted hot chocolate pot, Rhoda walked out of the house and got in the car and drove off down the steep driveway. I hate her guts, she said to herself. I hope she cries herself to death.

She shifted into second gear and drove off toward her father's office, quoting to herself from Edna Millay. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”

But in the end Rhoda didn't die. Neither did she kill her mother. Neither did she go to Saint Louis to give her virginity to her reluctant lover.

The Sunday of the trip Rhoda woke at dawn feeling very excited and changed clothes four or five times trying to decide how she wanted to look for her inspection of the mines.

Rhoda had never even seen a picture of a strip mine. In her imagination she and her father would be riding an elevator down into the heart of a mountain where obsequious masked miners were lined up to shake her hand. Later that evening the captain of the football team would be coming over to the hotel to meet her and take her somewhere for a drive.

She pulled on a pair of pink pedal pushers and a long navy blue sweat shirt, threw every single thing she could possibly imagine wearing into a large suitcase, and started down the stairs to where her father was calling for her to hurry up.

Her mother followed her out of the house holding a buttered biscuit on a linen napkin. “Please eat something before you leave,” she said. “There isn't a decent restaurant after you leave Bowling Green.”

“I told you I don't want anything to eat,” Rhoda said. “I'm on a diet.” She stared at the biscuit as though it were a coral snake.

“One biscuit isn't going to hurt you,” her mother said. “I made you a lunch, chicken and carrot sticks and apples.”

“I don't want it,” Rhoda said “Don't put any food in this car, Mother.”

“Just because you never eat doesn't mean your father won't get hungry. You don't have to eat any of it unless you want to.” Their eyes met. Then they sighed and looked away.

Her father appeared at the door and climbed in behind the wheel of the secondhand Cadillac.

“Let's go, Sweet Sister,” he said, cruising down the driveway, turning onto the road leading to Bowling Green and due east into the hill country. Usually this was his favorite moment of the week, starting the long drive into the rich Kentucky hills where his energy and intelligence had created the long black rows of figures in the account books, figures that meant Rhoda would never know what it was to be really afraid or uncertain or powerless.

“How long will it take?” Rhoda asked.

“Don't worry about that,” he said. “Just look out the window and enjoy the ride. This is beautiful country we're driving through.”

“I can't right now,” Rhoda said. “I want to read the new book Allison gave me. It's a book of poems.”

She settled down into the seat and opened the book.

Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;

The second love was water, in a clear blue cup;

The third love was his, and the fourth was mine.

And after that, I always get them all mixed up.

Oh, God, this is good, she thought. She sat up straighter, wanting to kiss the book. Oh, God, this is really good. She turned the book over to look at the picture of the author. It was a photograph of a small bright face in full profile staring off into the mysterious brightly lit world of a poet's life.

Dorothy Parker, she read. What a wonderful name. Maybe I'll change my name to Dorothy, Dorothy Louise Manning. Dot Manning. Dottie, Dottie Leigh, Dot.

Rhoda pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of her purse, tamped it on the dashboard, opened it, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a gold Ronson lighter. She inhaled deeply and went back to the book.

Her father gripped the wheel, trying to concentrate on the beauty of the morning, the green fields, the small, neat farmhouses, the red barns, the cattle and horses. He moved his eyes from all that order to his fourteen-year-old daughter slumped beside him with her nose buried in a book, her plump fingers languishing in the air, holding a cigarette. He slowed down, pulled the car onto the side of the road and killed the motor.

“What's wrong?” Rhoda said. “Why are you stopping?”

“Because you are going to put out that goddamn cigarette this very minute and you're going to give me the package and you're not going to smoke another cigarette around me as long as you live,” he said.

“I will not do any such thing,” Rhoda said. “It's a free country.”

“Give me the cigarette, Rhoda,” he said. “Hand it here.”

“Give me one good reason why I should,” she said. But her voice let her down. She knew there wasn't any use in arguing. This was not her soft little mother she was dealing with. This was Dudley Manning, who had been a famous baseball player until he quit when she was born. Who before that had gone to the Olympics on a relay team. There were scrapbooks full of his clippings in Rhoda's house. No matter where the Mannings went those scrapbooks sat on a table in the den.
Manning Hits One Over The Fence
, the headlines read.
Manning Saves The Day. Manning Does It Again
. And he was not the only one. His cousin, Philip Manning, down in Jackson, Mississippi, was famous too. Who was the father of the famous Crystal Manning, Rhoda's cousin who had a fur coat when she was ten. And Leland Manning, who was her cousin Lele's daddy. Leland had been the captain of the Tulane football team before he drank himself to death in the Delta.

Rhoda sighed, thinking of all that, and gave in for the moment. “Give me one good reason and I might,” she repeated.

“I don't have to give you a reason for a goddamn thing,” he said. “Give the cigarette here, Rhoda. Right this minute.” He reached out and took it and she didn't resist. “Goddamn, these things smell awful,” he said, crushing it in the ashtray. He reached in her pocketbook and got the package and threw it out the window.

“Only white trash throw things out on the road,” Rhoda said. “You'd kill me if I did that.”

“Well, let's just be quiet and get to where we're going.” He started the motor and drove back out onto the highway. Rhoda crunched down lower in the seat, pretending to read her book. Who cares, she thought. I'll get some as soon as we stop for gas.

Getting cigarettes at filling stations was not as easy as Rhoda thought it was going to be. This was God's country they were driving into now, the hills rising up higher and higher, strange, silent little houses back off the road. Rhoda could feel the eyes looking out at her from behind the silent windows. Poor white trash, Rhoda's mother would have called them. The salt of the earth, her father would have said.

This was God's country and these people took things like children smoking cigarettes seriously. At both places where they stopped there was a sign by the cash register,
No Cigarettes Sold To Minors
.

Rhoda had moved to the back seat of the Cadillac and was stretched out on the seat reading her book. She had found another poem she liked and she was memorizing it.

Four be the things I'd be better without,

Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain,

Envy, content and sufficient champagne.

Oh, God, I love this book
, she thought.
This Dorothy Parker is just like me
. Rhoda was remembering a night when she got drunk in Clarkesville, Mississippi, with her cousin, Baby Gwen Barksdale. They got drunk on tequila LaGrande Conroy brought back from Mexico, and Rhoda had slept all night in the bathtub so she would be near the toilet when she vomited.