Against the Day (97 page)

   
“I know
it must’ve come as a shock.”

   
“Well,
yes and no. Maybe not so much.”

   
“Merle
is still the same person, you know.”

   
“Yehp.
Course that always was a mixed blessing.”

   
“Now,
Dahlia—”

   
“And
you, you sound just like him.”

Her mother was quiet for a moment. “You
never know what’s going to happen. Walking back down Euclid from the cemetery
with a couple dollars to my name, here came that Merle in some crazy old wagon,
asked if I wanted a ride. Like he’d been waiting up that particular side street
just for me to come by.”

 
“You’re partial to women in mourning?” Erlys couldn’t help
wondering out loud then.

   
“It’s
almost dark and you’re on foot. Was all I meant.”

You could smell crude oil in the air.
The first wheelfolk of summer, in bright sweaters and caps and striped socks,
went whirring gaily in battalion strength along the great viaduct on tandem
bicycles, which seemed to be a city craze that year. Bicycle bells going
nonstop, the massed choruses of them, in all sorts of ragged harmonies, loud as
church bells on Sunday though maybe with a finer texture. Roughnecks went in
and out of saloon doors and sometimes windows. Elms cast deep shade over yards
and streets, forests of elms back when there were still elms in Cleveland,
making visible the flow of the breezes, iron railings surrounding the villas of
the welloff, roadside ditches full of white clover, a sunset that began early
and stayed late, growing to a splendor that had her and Merle gazing at it in
disbelief, and then at each other.

“Will you just look at that!” She
trailed a black crepe sleeve across the west. “Like those sunsets when I was a
kid.”

“I remember. Volcano blew up, out
there in the East Indies someplace, dust and ashes stayed aloft, all the colors
changed, went on for years.”

   
“That
Krakatoa,” she nodded, as if it were some creature in a child’s story.

   
“This
ship’s cook I run with briefly, Shorty, he was there—well, a couple

hundred miles downwind, not that it mattered, said it was
like the end of the world.”

“I thought sunsets were just always
supposed to look like that. Every kid I knew. We all believed it for a while
till they started getting back to ordinary again, then we figured it was our
fault, something to do with growing up, maybe everything else was supposed to
fade down that way, too
. . .
by the
time Bert asked me to marry him I wasn’t all that surprised nor disappointed to
find how little I cared one way or the other. Guess that’s no way to be talking
about the deceased, is it.”

   
“But
you’re still just a kid.”

   
“Better
get some new ‘specs’ there, oldtimer.”

“Oh, feel as old as you like, o’
course.” The minute she’d settled into the seat next to him, her billowing
widow’s rig had got redisposed to reveal her neatly gravid waistline, at which,
now, he nodded. “How soon is she due?”

“Around the first of the year maybe.
Who said it’s a girl?”

“Let’s see your hand.” She held out
her hand, palm upward. “Yehp. Girl all right. Palm down, see, it’s a boy.”

   
“Gypsy
talk. Should’ve known just from the looks of this wagon here.”

   
“Oh,
we’ll see. Put a little money on it if you like.”

   
“You
planning to be around that long?”

Which is how it got arranged, faster
than either of them really noticed at the time. He’d never asked her what she
was doing alone on foot at so awkward an hour, but she got around to telling
him all the same—the faro debts, the laudanum, the laudanum with whiskey
chasers, bad loans and worse creditors, Bert’s family the Snidells of Prospect
Avenue, the sisters in particular, who hated the air she breathed, a list of smalltown
miseries magnified up to Cleveland scale that Merle must’ve run into once or
twice in his rounds over the years but considerately sat and let her go over in
detail, till she was calm enough not to take what he offered the wrong way.

“It ain’t a Euclid Avenue mansion,
you may’ve noticed that already, but it’s warm and solid built, there’s a
leafspring suspension of my own design that you’d think you were riding on a
cloud.”

“Sure, well being an angel I’m used
to that.” But the brightest part of that luridly exploding childhood sky was
now right behind her face, and some of her hair was loose, and she could detect
in his gaze enough of what he must be seeing, and they both fell silent.

He was renting some space over on the
West Side. He heated them up a kettle of soup on a little oil stove that burned
overrun from down at the Standard kerosene works. After supper they sat and
looked across the Flats and watched the river reflecting the lights of
steamboat traffic and gas lamps and

foundry fires for miles up the twists
and bends of the Cuyahoga. “It’s like

looking down into the sky,” she said, drowsy with the long
day.

   
“Best
you get some shuteye,” said Merle, “you and your friend there.”

He was right about that wagon. She
recalled later sleeping there better than she ever had before, maybe since. The
weather was still merciful enough that Merle could sleep outside, in a bedroll
under a waterproof up on sticks, though some nights he went into town to raise
some species of hell she didn’t inquire into, and he didn’t come back till well
after sunup
. . .
as fall started to
creep in, they headed south, on down through Kentucky and into Tennessee,
keeping ahead of the changing year, staying in towns she’d never heard of,
always with somebody he knew, some brother craftsman to steer him to where
there was work, which might be just about anything from running trolley cable
to putting in a well, and soon as she got comfortable with the likelihood that
even in hard times there would somehow be work, she could sit more quietly,
just let her worries slide away somewhere else, pay full attention to this baby
on the way, understanding one day so clearly, “That of course it would be not
just ‘a girl’ but you, Dally, I dreamed about you, night after night, I dreamed
your little face, your exact face, and when you were out in the world at last,
I sure did know you, you were the baby of those dreams
. . . .
”

With exaggerated patience, after a
moment of thought, “Yehp but then the next part is, first chance you get, you
just—”

“No. No, Dally, I was going to come
back and get you. I thought I’d have time, but it seemed like Merle didn’t
wait, just took off with you, no word of where to.”

   
“All
his fault, huh.”

“No, Luca was dragging his feet too
. . .
kept saying, ‘Yes, we could do that,’
not ‘We will’ but—”

   
“Oh,
so it was all
his
fault.”

   
A
narrow smile and headshake. “No mercy, no mercy, not this one.”

The girl beamed at her falsely, but
feeling no more malicious than that, allowing Erlys do the work of reckoning up
what her child could still not forgive.

“I won’t try to fool you. Luca
Zombini when he came along was the first real passion of my life—how was
I going to say no to that? With Merle, yes, moments of desire had ambushed us,
even though he was, to be fair about it, what you’d call reluctant to press his
case on a pregnant young widow, not so much out of courtliness as past
experience—more or less bitter would be my guess.”

   
“So
you and Luca went wild the minute you laid eyes on each other.”

   
“Still
do, for that matter—”

   
“What.
You two—”

“Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm,” Erlys, with a
disarming deep gaze, sang in a descending minor triad more or less.

   
“And
little babies tend to put the kibosh on that sort of thing, I’ll bet.”

“Except that, as we began to find out
all too soon, it didn’t. And I was missing you more and more with the years
slipping by one by one, those brothers and sisters you should’ve had all around
you, and I was so frightened—”

   
“What
of?”

   
“You,
Dahlia. I couldn’t have borne it if—”

   
“Please.
What was I gonna do, pull out a pistol?”

“Oh, my baby.” Dally was not ready
for the chokedup treble she heard then, and what it seemed to
betray—better late than never, Dally supposed— of selfreproach,
maybe even sorrow. “You know you can have anything from me you want, I’m in no
position—”

“I know. But Merle told me I couldn’t
take advantage. Is why I was never fixin to do more than drop in, say hello, be
on my way again.”

   
“Sure.
Get me back for leaving you the way I did. Oh, Dally.”

The girl shrugged, head angled
downward, hair brushing forward along her cheeks. “Turned out to be all
different anyhow.”

   
“Worse
than you thought.”

“You know, I was expecting
. . .
some kind of a Svengali? customer in
a cape, with you all sapheaded under his hypnotic spell and—”

“Luca?” Dally had known her mother to
chuckle, but not to make a spectacle of herself. Passersby actually turned and
promenaded backward for a while just to take it in. When Erlys could catch her
breath, “Now I’m embarrassing you, Dally.”

“All’s I was gonna say is how strange
it is how much he keeps reminding me of Pa. Of Merle.”

“You can say ‘Pa.
’ ”
Still ablush and her eyes all lit up.
“Maybe all I am’s just some old Glamorous Assistant—you
think?—always cursed to be drifting into the arms of one magician or
another?”

It was drawing on to dinnertime.
Detachments of diningroom staff came hurrying from the ship’s greenhouse with
bushels of carnations, tea roses, and cosmos. Stewards crept along the decks
striking miniature gongs with velvetpadded hammers. Cooking odors began to find
their way out the galley ventilators. Mother and daughter stood by the aft
rail, arms round each other’s waist. “Not a bad sunset there,” Erlys said.

   
“Pretty
fair. Maybe another volcano went off someplace.”

Before dinner, as Dally was helping
her with her hair, Erlys happened casually to inquire, “How about that young
man who keeps looking at you in the dining salon?”

   
“When
was that?”

   
“Miss
Innocent Lamb.”

   
“How
would I know? You sure it isn’t Bria he’s gogglin at?”

   
“Don’t
you want to find out?”

   
“Why?
A week on this scow, then it’s all over.”

   
“One
way to figure, I suppose.”

Dally pretended fascination with the
steel edge of the horizon. Wouldn’t you know it, of course her mother had
tumbled right away. How could she have forgotten him? When was she supposed to
start forgetting him? Trick questions, because she might as well’ve been back
in R. Wilshire Vibe’s ballroom and having that first momentous glance.

   
Erlys
said, “He’s a Yale man. Going over to Germany to study mathematics.”

   
“Say,
just my type.”

   
“He
thinks you’re snooting him.”

“Oh them Elis, they’re fine ones to
talk, they
invented
snooting—wait, wait, how do you know what
he—Mamma? Have you been
discussing
me? With some . . .”

   
“Eli.”

   
“Just
starting to think I could trust you, too.”

This had to be more than intent to
tease. Didn’t it? Erlys bent a beady eye upon the girl, wondering.

The firstclass dining saloon was full
of palm trees, ferns, flowering quince. Cutglass chandeliers. A twentypiece
orchestra played operetta songs. Each water glass was carefully tuned to a 440
A, Champagne glasses an octave higher. The orchestra, when tuning up, by
tradition encouraged guests to strike the edges of their empty glasses, so that
just before mealtimes a pleasant glittery chiming filled the space and scattered
out into the passageways.

Fourth class
was separated from the weather decks
by only the flimsiest of glassandsashwork partitions, a space long and narrow
as a passenger coach in a train, rows and rows of bench seats and racks
overhead for luggage. There were stewards just like in the other classes, who
brought blankets with
Stupendica
insignia woven into them, Triestine
coffee in mugs, newspapers in several languages, Viennese pastry, ice bags for
hungover heads. A whole collection of American students bound for study in
Europe