Weep for Me (3 page)

He beamed at me. “How’s it go, Kyle? Any of that stuff stick to your fingers today?”

I laughed no more and no less than I had laughed a thousand times before. When he gets a joke, he sticks with it.

So I gave my usual answer. “Someday they’ll stop searching me when I leave.”

“How does that porch furniture look to you, Kyle?”

I turned and stared through the windows. “Say! Looks fine. I didn’t even notice it. I thought you were going to wait until I could help you paint it.”

“Got ambitious Monday night.”

“It sure looks dandy,” I said. I went on into the kitchen, kissed Mrs. Lane on the cheek, and said, “Hi, Mom.” It took me a long time to get used to calling her that, the way Jo Anne does. I call her father Ed.

“Poor Jo Anne,” she said. “They turned on the airconditioning in her office today. She’s got the sniffles.”

She was at the stove. I leaned against the sink and lowered my voice so Ed couldn’t hear. “How about your health, Mom? Did you make that appointment today?”

“Now, don’t start that again, Kyle. I’m a perfectly healthy woman.”

Both Jo Anne and I were worried about her. Ed didn’t seem to notice it, but she had grown gaunt in the past year. And you could see something in her eyes. Like in the photograph that is published after somebody is dead.

“Mom, you’ll go get a checkup if I have to take the day off to take you.”

“Ssh,” she said.

“I mean it.”

“All right, all right. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I heard Jo Anne coming down the stairs. She came into the kitchen. As I went to kiss her she turned her head aside. “This is a cold you don’t want, honey,” she said.

I took a good look at her. The end of her nose was red and her eyes looked puffy. But she certainly looked pretty. A fluff-headed blonde, with blue eyes, a firm cleft chin, a bouncy, abundant, slim-waisted little body. She was always talking about diets and looking ruefully at her hips in full-length mirrors, but I kept telling her that I liked her just the way she was. I had a hunch that by the time she was forty she’d be just as round as her old man.

“Feel bad, darling?” I asked her.

“Biserable,” she said with a loud snuffle. “Dab airconditioning!”

“Don’t swear, dear,” Mom said comfortably. “It sounds like hell.”

When dinner was almost ready, three phone calls—less than the usual number—rounded up Daphne, the kid sister, and she came panting home on her bike, full of the usual excuses. It didn’t take any psychologist to see that Daphne, at fifteen, gave much promise of being quite a handful. She was a silver blonde with sharp cheekbones and a breathless manner. And already she knew how to use her eyes. I was a stuffy old bank person, to her, but a legitimate target for the tools she was sharpening in preparation for the heterosexual world.

Ed and Daphne got into one of their traditional arguments at dinner, and when his face resembled a hothouse tomato, Mom stepped in and shunted the conversation over to whether Jo Anne and I would want any of Aunt Milly’s “good pieces” that were stored in the little room off the attic.

“But, Mom!” Jo Anne cried. “All that stuff is so big and heavy. Won’t it look kind of silly in a teensy apartment? I mean, you need modern things in an apartment.”

“You children have to be sensible,” Mom said. “With the way prices are going, you know we can’t afford to help you very much. And Kyle, your dad certainly can’t do much for you. You’ve said how you’re going to get a car for your wedding trip and all that. If you buy new furniture too, you just won’t have anything left, will you?”

“But that old stuff is ugly!” Jo Anne said. I saw to my surprise that she was quite close to tears.

“We can take a look at it again, baby,” I said. “You know, with some of that old stuff, if you saw off the legs a little and paint it white and antique it, you get some smart-looking things.”

She sighed heavily. “All right.”

“Gosh, you haven’t even got the apartment lined up yet, have you?” Daphne said with hauteur.

“They’re going to have Hilson Gardens open for inspection a week from Saturday,” Jo Anne said. “The first unit. And the second unit will be available for renting as of August first. And Mr. Anderson has promised to reserve one in Kyle’s name until we get a chance to inspect them, smarty.”

“Gardens they call it,” Daphne said in a superior tone. “Just a great big muddy field with brick buildings on it. I went by there on my bike last week end.”

As Ed was telling her to be still, I glanced at Mom. Her eyes were closed and she was holding tightly to the edge of the table and her face had a gray twist to it.

Jo Anne saw it when I did. She jumped up and went around to her mother, her arm around her shoulders. “Mom, are you all right? What’s the trouble?”

Mom opened her eyes and gave a weak smile. Her color started to come back and her knuckles lost their ivory whiteness. “Just a little twinge. Probably my own cooking.”

“Aren’t you losing weight, Myra?” Ed asked.

“Very observant of you, Daddy,” Jo Anne said acidly.

Ed’s jaw dropped. “What’s wrong with you, child?”

“She’s sick and she’s been sick for months and she won’t admit it and she won’t see a doctor.”

Ed straightened. “We’ll
see
if she’ll see a doctor.”

“I’m going tomorrow, definitely,” Mom said.

Ed and I watched a TV news program while Jo Anne helped Mom with the dishes and Daphne dug into her homework. I don’t know what it is about news programs. When you’re a little kid the American Legion has parades and when they have Fourth of July speeches they tell you how the First World War made the world safe for democracy. Way back there they were saying that war is no way to settle international disputes. Then comes World War II, and it takes a chunk out of your life and you hear a few distant shots fired in anger, and everybody says, “This time we really ended world wars.” The U.N. takes over, and then, too soon, along comes the Korea business and you sense that it bears the same relation to World War III as did the Spanish Revolution. Just a place to try out the weapons, a place to show your teeth.

And you know, just as sure as you’re alive, that World War III is going to come along and mess up your life and maybe kill you. You think that we can win this third one too—but what about the fourth? There’s no end to them, and they are coming along faster and faster, with fewer of the good years in between them.

The news programs make you feel like a fool when you do any long-term planning, like taking out insurance, or wondering when you’ll make chief teller, if ever. You think about marriage and about educating your kids and then wonder if the school they go to won’t be a place where they learn how to harden an arrow tip in a camp fire.

The bloodhound face of the newscaster, his mournful voice and tragic eyes, all seemed to tie in with the restlessness I had felt all day. I watched him, broadcasting to millions, and I was just one little guy watching like a million other little guys, all of us like rabbits in a big lab. All you could do, when they started experimenting on you with radiation, H blasts, and flame throwers, was plan on being one awful quick rabbit.

I was a lab rabbit who spent every working day behind
a bronze grille, handling the stuff that made the world go round.

After the dishes, Ed and Mom settled themselves to watch a TV program that neither Jo Anne nor I cared for. I raised one eyebrow at Jo Anne and scissored my fingers.

“We’re going for a walk, Mom,” she said.

“Take a sweater, dear. You don’t want that cold to get worse.”

She went up and changed from a cotton dress to a wool skirt and wine-colored sweater. Under daylight time, dusk was still an hour away. Her parents had darkened the living room to make the TV screen bright. We walked slowly down the narrow residential street. Jo Anne was born in that same house. If it were not for the big elms, the careful tending of the small yards, the clipped hedges, the houses themselves would look pretty shoddy.

People sitting on their porches spoke to us. Kids raced around on bikes and roller skates. An ice-cream bike came down the road, bell tinkling. I bought us both ice cream on a stick and we ate it as we walked.

“You’re acting odd, Kyle,” she said.

“Odd?”

“I don’t know. Far away.”

“I wasn’t aware of feeling far away,” I said stiffly.

“Well, at dinner you were looking at me sort of … speculatively. Like I could be some girl you didn’t know.”

That had been exactly what I was doing. I had been trying to look at her with complete objectivity, as though meeting her for the first time. But it annoyed me that my expression should have been so obvious. “Colds must make you imaginative,” I said.

She took my arm, hugged it close to her body. “Hey, we even
sound
married, mister.”

“Practicing, maybe,” I said lightly.

Still holding my arm, she looked down and scuffed her heels. “Kyle?”

“What, baby?”

“Do you ever wonder whether we’ve made a mistake, waiting so long? I mean you’re twenty-nine and I’m twenty-eight. Daddy and Mom treat us like kids, but we
aren’t really. When Mom was my age, I was seven years old.”

“You don’t look a day over fifteen, baby.”

She looked up into my face, her eyes solemn. “Let’s not joke about it. We’re going to start a baby just as soon as we can, Kyle.”

It gave me an odd, trapped feeling to hear her say that. “How so?”

“Well, we could be selfish and have some time to ourselves first, but that would mean I would be over thirty, maybe, for the first one. And they say a first baby when you’re over thirty is pretty difficult. Remember, when I was measured that time, he said I wouldn’t have an easy time.”

“Let’s get married and then talk about it, baby.”

“They say men are jealous of babies when you have them too soon after you’re married.”

I stopped. “Look, I don’t want to be difficult. Let’s just change the subject. Shall we?”

She gave me a hurt look. “Of course, Kyle.”

When the street lights went on, we were near the neighborhood shopping center. We had a coke in a booth in the drugstore. She sat across from me. The counter was packed with high-school kids. I looked across at Jo Anne. I had been thinking, all along, that she looked exactly the way she had in high school. I saw that I was wrong. Jo Anne didn’t look like any high-school kid. Not with those tiny parentheses at the corners of her mouth. Not with the little parchment areas under her blue eyes. Not with the two horizontal wrinkles across her throat. Not with the look of the veins on the backs of her hands.

“Now you’re looking at me that way again,” she said, smiling.

“That’s my bank-teller expression. Always size up the customer.”

She leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh, Kyle. I love you so!”

“You’re going to prove that in a New York hotel.”

The blush moved up her throat and across her cheeks. “I was thinking about that, Kyle. Won’t two weeks like that be dreadfully expensive?”

“We’ve been planning on it a long time. Since before the war.”

“But babies are so expensive. And they won’t let me work in the office after the fifth month. I was talking to Alice Rand the other day. She says you can rent a wonderful camp on Blue Mountain Lake for only—”

“We’re going to New York the way we planned it!” I said, and it came out louder than I had expected.

Her lips compressed tightly. “All right, Kyle. Whatever you say.”

“Don’t be sore.”

“Am I supposed to like it when you shout at me?”

“I wasn’t aware of shouting.”

Her face softened. She leaned toward me again. “Oh, Kyle, darling! We shouldn’t quarrel. Not over a thing like a honeymoon. Should we?”

“It is sort of silly, isn’t it?” Her blue eyes smiled. Open, honest blue eyes. Quite different from eyes of a brown so dark that it was difficult to see where iris stopped and pupil started.

We walked slowly back through the night, away from the neon of the shopping center. Big evening. Forty cents total investment. Twenty for bus fare, a dime for the ice cream, a dime for the Cokes. Real riotous living. Kids raced across the shadowed lawns, leaping the hedges. “You’re out!” “I am not!” “You are so!” “I’m not!” “You are!” “Mamma! Tommy’s not being
fair!
” “You children play nicely, or you’re going to have to come to bed.”

We went up onto the porch. Through a gap between shade and window frame I could see the glaring white of the TV screen. We sat on the canvas cushions of the swing.

“I suppose,” Jo Anne said, “that it’s natural for us to get a little irritable with each other. The time left is so short. And we’ve waited so long. Just nervousness, I guess.”

“Probably it,” I said.

The TV comedian, knocking himself out in the living room, was an explosive counterpoint to our low-toned conversation.

“It will be a good marriage, Kyle. We like the same things, think the same way.”

“Trying to talk me into it, honey?” I asked her teasingly.

She sneezed so hard that she shook the couch. “Damn!” she said, and blew her nose on a wad of Kleenex.

“Better stay home tomorrow and get rid of that cold.”

“I’ll see how I feel in the morning.”

I slid my arm around her shoulders, tilted her chin up with my free hand. “Don’t, Kyle! You’ll catch my bugs.”

But it was important for me to kiss her. It was important that I make her stir me up. Emily Rudolph stood, quiet and amused, in the back of my mind, and she was watching me. She was looking down at my drab little life and promising an exciting tangent, a special deviation from the pattern I had set myself. And the thought of such a tangent excited me. Excitement had to be smothered by excitement of another kind. And my Jo Anne was there on the dark porch beside me.

“I’ll risk it,” I said, and pressed my mouth down hard on hers. We had grown into the cautious habit of keeping our kisses casual. I had no intention of keeping this one casual. Emily Rudolph still watched me. I was aware of her watching me. She seemed to be telling me that her victory over me was an astonishingly easy one because I knew this girl I was kissing far too well. There was no mystery left in Jo Anne. I knew her so well and had waited so long that when at last I had her, it would be something so long anticipated as to become boring before the accomplishment.