Honeydew: Stories (21 page)

Helen did something unusual for those times—she telephoned Steve and, without preliminary remarks, invited him to the movies.

“I didn’t know you liked me,” he said that night, wonder steaming his face.

“I always liked you,” she fibbed.

“I’ve always been crazy about you,” he said. That claim probably wasn’t true either, but no matter. She liked him now. He was crazy about her now. And it turned out that he was a passionate woodworker, and that he was devoted to his three young nephews, and that he was slow to anger, and that he was able to forgive her spurts of unkindness.

And so, when Helen caught Marcie’s bouquet, she left the other bridesmaids and carried the flowers to Steve. He drew her into the harbor of his embrace.

She was protected by his devotion for the next forty years, through all their woes: his job lost, twice; a malformed infant who lived a week; her brother’s intractable depression; the prolonged defiant adolescence of each of their surviving children. Even when she briefly left him, haring after a woman who had no long-term use for her but who liked to be tied up, liked to be taken from behind—he gravely withstood the desertion, gravely welcomed her back.

There was nothing written on Sallyann’s paper.

In the corner of the porch, she folded it again and then unfolded it, looked at both sides several times, took off and put on her glasses. She held the paper up to the moon.

Was it accident? Was it the intervention of fate? Through the years that followed she sometimes remembered to be puzzled. At the time, though, she felt only blessed. A delay had been granted: a secret reprieve.

Many decades later she did mention the queer incident to her mother.

“No!” Her mother raised head and shoulders with such sudden force that the IV pole shook.

“Lie down, dear,” said Sallyann, glancing at the monitor.

Her mother subsided into the pillows. “I assumed that you drew Maurice.”

“I drew a blank.”

“You married Maurice,” her mother reminded her.

“Among others,” Sallyann reminded her in turn. “Franco and Nils—who knew then that they existed? Their names weren’t even in the hat.”

“Franco,” her mother murmured; and even though her voice had been weakened by the troublesome business of dying, it managed to convey the distaste she had felt for Sallyann’s middle husband.

Sallyann smoothed the pillows. “My gorgeous Franco had a bad character but he was passion made flesh. All cats are
not
gray at night…Did you really think they were?”

Her mother’s heart was unstoppably failing but she was in no pain and her mind was clear. “I thought—I still think—that people are more similar than different. I think that any reasonable couple can…invent its own romance…make its own happiness. See how right I was with Helen and Steve, with Marcie and Biff.”

“Marcie and Biff both play around, I hear.”

“Look who’s talking,” her mother said. Her affectionate hand found her daughter’s.

Sallyann wore contact lenses these days. Her still fiery hair was coiled around her head. She had fulfilled all possible promises: had become stunning, had become worldly, had become an important anthropologist, had lived in various places, had married and divorced and borne interesting children. Though nearly seventy she would probably marry yet again. It had become a gratifying habit, more enjoyable each time she did it; but the man in the fedora still occupied pride of place in her heart. Now she had returned to Godolphin to nurse her ancient, twice-widowed mother.

“So it was you who drew the blank,” her mother was whispering. “All along I thought it was June.”

No one will ever know the name of June’s intended. She pocketed the paper she had lifted from the hat. While the other three girls were reading theirs—or, in Sallyann’s case, trying to read hers—June was merely musing. Once home, she went into the bathroom and, face averted, tore the paper into many pieces and flushed the pieces away.

She too felt relief, deeper than Sallyann’s. She would not merely delay; she would retire. She could pretend that Celibacy was the name she had drawn; she was freed now to become that endearing thing: an old maid.

At college in Maine she had been languidly studying the history of music. Now she switched to biology; and in graduate school she made fungal morphology her specialty; and there, among the mushrooms, she found her life’s sustaining interest. It was a particular organelle called individually the parenthesome, though it always came in pairs. She spent her postdoc investigating its properties, and, with a succession of cherished lab assistants, she spent the years afterward discovering its many uses. She, and they, received awards and honorary degrees. When she was fifty she bought a cottage on a hill. She grew roses and dahlias and poppies. She was the cellist in an amateur string quartet that met faithfully every week and gave occasional recitals. She kept in touch with old friends.

“You knew there was a blank?” Sallyann asked her mother.

The old woman briefly lifted her chin: Yes.

“Did you put it into the hat?”

The barest side-to-side motion: No.

“But you let it stay there.”

This was not posed as a question; and she hadn’t the strength to reply; and anyway there were too many answers. Because she had been acting as agency, not executive: she’d been as passive as the fedora. Because chance allows itself an occasional collaborator. Because Helen needed an opportunity to discharge her malice. Because the one blank paper made the game more interesting. It was only a game, after all. Who could have known that the girls would play it so seriously. Who could have predicted that a woman addled by bereavement could wield such influence over four sprites with their lives ahead of them, with choices thick at their feet.

Sallyann saw that her mother could no longer speak. She bent over the loved face. “You did a marvelous thing,” she said. “We are all happy enough.”

O
f all the books Mindy’s father received during his illness and convalescence, his declared favorite was
Legends of the Jews.
Fat warty Rabbi Goldstone lugged the set into the sickroom on one of his unwelcome visits and deposited all six volumes with a godly thump onto the bed, as if the learning inside might overcome ills of the flesh. Mindy’s mother, Roz, gave the rabbi one of her ambiguous smiles—this one, Mindy knew, meant “Strike me dead if I open one of those tomes.” The book Roz grabbed from a stack sent by patients was
B.F.’s Daughter
—the first J. P. Marquand since the war. She admired Marquand’s well-bred characters.

As for Mindy and her two sisters, they liked best the optical-illusion book,
Masters of Deception,
brought to the door by the maid of Mrs. Julius Barrengos, who lived in a grand house on the next street.
Masters of Deception
’s illustrations included paintings and engravings by Dalí and Magritte and Escher. Impossible things made possible—a hat floating between clouds like a bird, a watch dripping like syrup. Transformation was the game: just what the Margolis girls were looking for.

Retransformation, really. Their father had already been transformed from a hearty man into an invalid. So Mindy and her sisters wanted to return to what they’d all lately been—a reasonably contented family of six: two parents; one maiden aunt, Cecile—
she
chose the latest Perry Mason from the stack; and three princesses, otherwise called daughters. “Fairy tales always have three daughters,” Thelma noted. “The older two are mean, the youngest is nice.” At twelve, Tem was the youngest. “Though Beauty’s sisters are not so bad…”

“Three sisters are endemic in drama,” said Talia, the oldest. “Chekhov wrote a play of that very name, and think of Lear…”

“I never think of Lear,” said Mindy.

“What’s a Lear?” said Tem.

Talia at sixteen was the family intellectual. She was in the eleventh grade’s first group in the three-track high school. Mindy, two years younger, was in the ninth grade’s first group. Tem was still in untracked grammar school.

Talia persisted. “Lear, a king, had three daughters: Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia.”

“In the gender category our family doesn’t balance,” Mindy said, disregarding those made-up names.

“Dad and Mom hoped you’d be a boy,” Talia told her.

“After me they hoped that Tem would be a boy,” Mindy said.

“I
am
a boy,” Tem said. “Sometimes.”

Whatever Dr. and Mrs. Margolis had hoped for, they expressed only satisfaction with the brainy, underweight Talia, the curly, pretty Mindy, the sturdy Tem. Tem had a talent for drawing—faces in particular—which she exercised with particular vehemence during her father’s recovery. It was Tem who had first lit on
Masters of Deception.
She soon learned to reproduce the optical illusions at the beginning of the book. Her favorite was the standard schema of profile confronting matching profile with a space between them. Anybody staring at the drawing got freed suddenly from profiles and found herself looking instead at the silhouette of a vase created by slanting foreheads, prominent noses, rounded lips, and jutting jaws. Tem drew pairs of matching profiles with a neat vase between them, and then pairs of nonmatching profiles producing severely asymmetrical vases in danger of falling over.

As for
Legends of the Jews,
all three girls could see Dr. Margolis, through the half-open bedroom door, propped up in bed with one of the volumes splayed on his lap. Every so often he turned a page. So Talia abandoned
Deception
and chose a volume of
Legends
for herself and read it in the living room on her father’s leather recliner. She copied phrases into a spiral notebook. Uninvited, she read pages from the
Legends
out loud to her mother, who, Mindy noticed, only
seemed
to listen; to Tem, who glared as if annoyance could transform Talia into a pillar of salt; and to Mindy, who liked the thought of God becoming soft, melting like a watch, saving Isaac, saving Jonah.

But Mindy liked best the paintings of Arcimboldo. He was a famous sixteenth-century Italian, the book told her. His portraits were composed of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. That is, he painted representations of fruits, vegetables, and flowers so arranged that together they formed the likeness of a grotesque person. They had helpful titles, and after a while you saw that, say, the portrait called
Autumn,
a face in profile, had a pumpkin for a hat, grapes for hair, a potato for a nose, a cherry for a wen. His cheek was an apple, his ear a lemon slice.
The Gardener,
an assembly of oversize root vegetables, bore an unhappy resemblance to Rabbi Goldstone. Each vegetable or piece of one was rendered so precisely that Mindy wanted to eat it right off the page, or, if hygiene demanded, plunge it into boiling water first.

Fruit played its part in the
Legends
too, Talia told her: Eve’s apples of course, but also many other juicy foodstuffs, like pomegranates. “‘Moses was commanded to cause a robe to be made for Aaron,’” she read. “‘Upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet…and bells of gold between them…Aaron’s sound shall be heard when he goeth unto the holy place before Jehovah, and when he cometh out, that he die not.’”

Mindy’s class had done mythology last year. “In Ancient Greece the pomegranate was a symbol of death.”

“Shut up,” Tem said to both her sisters.

There were no pomegranates in Arcimboldo’s work, but there was all that familiar produce. It reminded Mindy of Louie the vegetable man.

Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop. He was called the vegetable man because he owned a fruit-and-vegetable truck.

Before Louie the Margolises had had a different vegetable man—Paci, born in their middle-size New England city but of Italian descent, like almost one-third of the population. Another almost-third was Irish. The third nearly third was Yankee. There were Negroes too, slighted in so many ways—housing, city services, schools, employment—that it was a wonder they didn’t revolt. To Roz, instructed in hierarchies by her beloved Marquand, the city’s ethnic groups formed a ladder—Yankees on top, then Jews, then Italians, then Irish, then a bunch of others like Armenians, then Negroes. She graded Jews within their category too. On the Jewish ladder the rungs were occupations: professors on top (there was one Jewish professor in the local college), then doctors, then lawyers, then businessmen (unless very successful, in which case they moved above lawyers). Beneath middling businessmen were high school teachers, inevitably unmarried, living with their mother or taking up residence in their younger brother’s house, like plain Cecile; and then people who worked with their hands, like chiropodists, and then tailors who worked on their knees. Beneath tailors were vegetable men. Like the lone professor, there was just one of those, Louie.

These rankings were flexible; personal characteristics like beauty, musical talent, and tragedy could elevate a person’s status. Murky pasts, schnorring relatives, disappointing children, and the failure to marry could lower it. This ordering of people, Talia informed her sisters, was rather like the divisions in heaven, where…

“Don’t tell us!” Mindy said.

Talia’s eyes watered. Mindy had noticed that Talia was less know-it-all these days, even though her new glasses made her look like a genius. That was
paradoxical,
Mindy thought (she was improving her word power).

“Okay, tell us,” Mindy relented.

“
You
are not heavenly material,” snapped Talia, recovering. “Here on earth Mom’s rankings show how uneasy she is about us.” Though by being children of a doctor they occupied the next-to-highest rank, Talia explained, there was always the danger of unfortunate friendships leading to inappropriate attachments or—God forbid—inappropriate marriages. “Mom’s seen it happen in life, she’s seen it in—”

“I will marry an appropriate prince,” said Tem, who was apparently a girl today.

“—Marquand. So she wants to teach us where everybody stands.”

Their mother’s instruction was casual: murmurs over the slender shoulder as she stood at the sink, her face not quite in profile—curls obscured a portion of the smooth brow and the cheek, and all you could see was the brief nose. Or perhaps during a trip to the ice cream store: pretty Mrs. Margolis and her girls. Of Mr. Shapiro, who sold insurance, she confided: “Men in the insurance business can’t make a living doing anything else.” Of a nurse at the hospital, an ebony beauty: “I wonder if white boys fall for her.” Sex appeal could lead directly to miscegenation. Of Mrs. Barrengos, who’d attended college out of town and didn’t play canasta and wore prewar clothing: “She’s like a Yankee.” Embezzlement could move somebody’s level from high business to criminal (below vegetable man). The discovery that a seeming aristocrat was in fact Jewish moved him above even the Yankees he had infiltrated. Roz Margolis liked Houdini, or at least the idea of him.

In fact, she liked just about everyone. Position on the ladder did not indicate human worth. She liked Louie. She had liked Paci too, even though he’d left the vegetable trade for a position in an unspecified enterprise. The city had an active Mob.

Louie arrived in the back vestibule every Thursday afternoon around four. Usually his son came with him. His son was in Mindy’s grade, but he was in group two with mostly Italians. He was Louie’s image, but a little shorter. It would have been hard to be much shorter. He had the same large curved nose, and he wore similar secondhand clothing. Louie called the boy Sonny and referred to him as Sonny, though Mindy knew his name was Franklin. Sonny had inherited or adopted Louie’s deferential manner.

“Hangdog,” defined Talia.

“Preoccupied,” Mindy said. She thought that Sonny had things on his mind, even though his mind was not superior…not yet, anyway. Talia knew of a few kids who had started in group two and got shifted to group one and ended up at Harvard. Talia herself was planning to go to Harvard.

“Sonny has green eyes,” Tem said.

Mindy hadn’t noticed. On the following Thursday she did notice. Yes, large eyes the color of blotting paper. They must have come from Mrs. Louie.

Despite the impoverished look of Louie and Sonny, their truck was a royal wonder. Paci’s wares had been arranged hodgepodge, heaps of beets consorting with mountains of potatoes only more or less separate from apples. Bruisable items were slumped in boxes blackened by age and weather. Perhaps Paci’s vehicle had sometimes been swept, but what could be seen of its floor was always covered with dirt and twigs and the squashed remains of things stepped on.

In Louie’s truck, boxes filled with produce were fixed to the sides, large ones below, then middle, then small, in a hierarchy of size. Louie kept his lettuces silvered with moisture—Sonny watered them at various stops in the journey. Sometimes Sonny filled a watering can from the Margolises’ outdoor spigot; Mindy, wandering outside from the breakfast nook where she did her homework, admired his deftness even at this low-value task. He didn’t waste motions, though he would pause briefly to say hello.

“Hello,” she’d say.

He watered the lettuce. Behind him, within the truck, potatoes were dotted with the wholesome dirt they’d been wrested from. Carrots came in mischievous shapes. Summer squash and zucchini lay side by side like gloves in a drawer. There was a makeshift aisle between the wares for the convenience of Louie and Sonny. It narrowed sharply as it approached the rear (really the front, just behind the cab), distorting perspective; the aisle seemed to go on for a mile. In the very back, a treasure within treasures, seasonal flowers stood in buckets. Every so often, after business was done, Louie would go into his truck and return with a bouquet which he presented to Mrs. Margolis, his cap still on his head.

Arcimboldo’s work reminded Mindy of the vegetable man, and the vegetable man’s abundant stock reminded her of Arcimboldo. Sometimes, standing at the rear of the truck, Mindy spotted a butternut squash like a bulbous nose or strawberries that side by side would have made a perfect mouth. You could put those tiny pearl onions between the berries, she said to Talia. Teeth.

“Nature imitates art,” Talia explained. “That’s an apothegm,” she added. Again there were sudden tears behind her glasses. “I wish Daddy would get better.”

On Thursdays Mindy continued to watch Louie or Sonny or both fill several slatted baskets and carry them into the kitchen and leave them there. Next week, emptied, they’d be waiting in the vestibule. Louie’s system was considerate, his truck was pridefully kept in order, and though he couldn’t have made a living in the insurance business, he was an excellent vegetable man.

And Sonny, second group notwithstanding, was an excellent apprentice. After awarding him her one-word greeting, after silently admiring the truck, Mindy always returned to the breakfast nook. She had a good view of the vestibule. Louie stood there having his audience with her mother. Mindy watched the two of them, Louie recommending, her mother thinking, and saying, Yes, two pounds; or Yes, a couple of good ones; or No, not today. Louie wrote the requests in a spiral notebook. Beside him, Sonny did the same, in a notebook of his own. When enough had been ordered for a one-person haul from the truck, Louie nodded at Sonny, and Sonny went outside. The rest of the Margolis order was inscribed in Louie’s notebook alone. Then Louie joined his child; and soon they both entered the kitchen with baskets.

Mindy guessed she’d feel sorry when she had to stop watching this routine. But next year she hoped to play her viola in the school orchestra, which had afternoon rehearsals. Or she might go out for basketball. And sometime in the future there might be embarrassment between her and Sonny. She was destined to become desirable—all three sisters were. Their mother, like a good witch, had promised them loveliness one Saturday after an afternoon of unproductive shopping. Talia sniffed, as if she knew that tall skinny bespectacled girls rarely underwent transformation. “Can’t I be a lovely boy?” Tem wondered. But Mindy trusted the prediction—she already resembled her desirable mother. She was destined to become the prettiest daughter of an acclaimed doctor—of a late acclaimed doctor, if the worst happened. Sonny was destined to remain a vegetable man’s son. If he loved beyond his station, loved Mindy or some other elevated girl, that love was doomed. But this predictable disappointment seemed as far away as the receding back of the truck; now, on this year’s Thursdays, Mindy still sat in the breakfast nook taking silent part in the domestic performance.