The One-in-a-Million Boy (14 page)

. . .

It's an old-fashioned phonograph. A record player. The first song I ever heard was “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the president's daughter.

. . .

Good Lord, no, it was terrible. That poor girl sang like a strangulated mosquito.

. . .

I couldn't. I'm not good at this kind of thing.

. . .

Oh, I don't know:
meeeem meeeem meeeem,
like that. Kind of like that.

. . .

Don't laugh, she couldn't help it. Oh, now you've got me doing it!

. . .

Yes, so there was Howard on the corner of Elm and Congress, flagging me down in his gentleman's voice. “Miss Vitkus, is it not?” he calls to me. You know the type? Mr. Charming?

. . .

Well, I
was.
I was
delighted
to be recognized. By someone from home, especially. Last I knew he was running a music store on Mercantile Street in Kimball. Oh, the times were so bad. I was nineteen years old, a grown woman, but I think I was still waiting for Maud-Lucy to come back for me. And now here was this hat tipper who remembered my name. I was a dunderhead who mistook my own delight for love.

. . .

Here's the World War I part: Howard exceeded the draft age by a considerable amount—closing in on thirty-nine years old—but he'd signed on as an ambulance driver when everybody else was applying for deferments. I'll give him that. He came back ruined, but his particular ruin didn't show in the usual ways.

. . .

For starters, his hearing was conked out on one side and he had to listen close, so people mistakenly thought he'd come back from France just dying to reconnect with his fellow man. He looked and acted perfectly normal, a salesman with immaculate manners.

. . .

Stanhope Music Company. He'd sold his Kimball store to go to war and after that moved to Portland to take over his father's store of the same name. It was over on Forest Avenue. I went to work for him, just as the first Mrs. Stanhope did back in Kimball. Eight months later, in an unforgivable failure of imagination, I married him.

. . .

Because I was lonely, I suppose.

. . .

Well, thank you. It did seem like a perfectly good reason at the time. Our house on Woodford is still there. Somebody turned it into a place where they lard you with seaweed to make your skin look young.

. . .

Of course it doesn't work. Nothing works. There isn't a magic trick on earth that could restore my youth and beauty.

. . .

How kind. You tell your parents they raised a polite young fellow.

. . .

Your mother, then. Where was I? Howard. I didn't know how war-wrecked he was until it was too late. You should tell your Mr. Linkman that the women got shocked up, too. You should ask some of these young wives right now, in this idiotic war going on right this minute in a country most of us can't find on a map, all these poor men—and women, too, imagine that, women with babies at home!—dragging back to America all wracked up with the things they've seen and done.

. . .

I didn't mean you. I've no doubt you can point out Iraq on a map. Oh, let's not talk about war. For a lot of people war isn't a topic, it's a stone on their heart. Did you know I cast my first vote in 1920?

. . .

Exactly, the first year women were allowed. You certainly know your historical dates. Oh, I told you another fib. I did cast a vote, but it wasn't official.

. . .

Because I was two months shy of twenty-one on voting day. That whole fall, Howard was getting recordings into the store—two a month, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican. Two dollars each, for a three-minute speech. Howard made his Republican customers buy theirs, but you could hear the Democrat for free. People came in by the dozens to listen to Governor Cox. On purpose.

. . .

Same gobble-gobble as nowadays, about President Wilson's war saving civilization. I don't mean to make more of it than there was, but as Election Day got closer you could hardly get through the door.

. . .

Of course not! Howard wouldn't let me near that gramophone! My job was to provide cider and cookies, but secretly I was planning my vote.

. . .

Because it happened that one of our customers was in the same boat as me, another January birthday. Jane, her name was. Jane Baxter. The Baxters lived in a handsome house in the West End; this was way before landlords began chopping those beauties up. Mrs. Baxter came to the store once a week for her sheet music—she played the viola—and if I was tending the counter we'd chat.

. . .

Heavens, no, Jane was far too rich to be my friend. A different class of woman altogether. She wore diamond studs, a gift from her handsome husband. She was planning a practice election in her house for twenty-year-old women too young to make the vote. Twelve noon until one o'clock, results revealed at the stroke of one fifteen. She invited me.

. . .

You bet I did! I got to Neal Street at twelve sharp on voting day and the place was brimming with women. All those fresh, polished rooms, with feathery masks from Africa hanging all over the walls. We had punch and cream puffs, and Jane's sister played a shined-up harp. The voting booth was at the back of the parlor, where we marked our sample ballots.

. . .

I don't recall. It didn't matter, not to me, whether they resembled real ballots or not. I filled one up and put it into a decorated box. Jane's sister tallied the votes and recorded them in the exact kind of ledger we used at the store. The suspense was delicious. There were a lot of suffragette types, as you might imagine. Mr. Baxter was nowhere to be seen.

. . .

A lady who agitates to get the vote. They went around the country making speeches. Some were a bit on the mannish side, to be honest. Sometimes people threw things at them.

. . .

Oh, yes, and some got hauled off to jail just for speaking their mind. But there were plenty of other types there, too, mousy little ladies like me with babies on the way.

. . .

Twenty-seven women in all. I didn't know a single one of them save for Jane. We sipped our punch, we predicted which man would win, we joked about putting Jane's sister on the ballot. There was so much laughter, so refreshing. Jane's other sister, who was thirty, came over before the final tally and spoke for fifteen minutes on what it was like to vote for real.

. . .

Oh, it was thrilling. But by the time I got back home I'd fallen into a gloom.

. . .

Well, I'll just tell you: I had no friends. Not Jane Baxter, not anybody.

. . .

Now, that's a shame. A boy your age shouldn't know how that feels. I had it easier than you, because Randall was born a month later, and you forget about friendship when you're raising babies and running a store and keeping your husband from stabbing the furniture with a carving knife over his failure to publish his lamentable songs.

. . .

Howard asked me the same thing, so I told him: Eugene Debs. “A Socialist?” he said. He couldn't believe it. Like this, all pop-eyed: “My wife voted for a
Socialist?
”

. . .

I know. My vote didn't count. That's how Howard looked at it. But secretly, I fancied that Mr. Debs might find out, through friends and associates of the Baxters, that an underage lady voter on Woodford Street wanted him to be president.

. . .

The next time? I had two babies by then and voted for Mr. Robert La Follette, and this time it counted.

. . .

Oh, goodness, Howard was beside himself. “Another Socialist?” he said. “He's not a Socialist,” I told him right back, “he's a Progressive.” Poor Howard was spitting out his oatmeal. “Why, Ona? For God's sake, why?”

. . .

Because I could. That's why. I was a married woman who owned nothing. Not even my clothes. But I owned my vote, didn't I? Why wouldn't I vote for the Socialist? Sometimes I can't believe how long I lived with that stingy, suspicious, sad, sad man.

. . .

Twenty-eight years. A blot of time, really. I got another twenty years after that at Lester Academy, sitting at my rolltop desk outside Dr. Valentine's office, feeling every minute as if something pizzazzy was just about to happen.

. . .

No, not really. I typed and filed all day long. But it's the
feeling
I loved—that feeling of expectation.

. . .

I suppose it was, a little. A little like going for a record. And after that,
zing bang,
another twenty years as a retiree. They zipped right by, too. Then twenty more, as the old crab. And now—

. . .

Oh. Well, thank you. But my point: I might have another twenty in me. And here I thought I'd lost all my fight.

. . .

You betcha, my steadfast little fellow. We'll get that Frenchwoman's goat yet.

. . .

Oh, all right:
meeeem meeeem meeeem.

Ona watched from the window as Quinn dispatched his duties, ending with a hose-down of the front walk, his T-shirt puckering with sweat. He had excellent forearms and muscular hands, probably a side effect of playing guitar all his life. When he sauntered into the house and took a brownie without asking, she realized how long it had been since someone paid her the compliment of presumption.

Another word dropped from the ether:
sūnus.
Meeting the father had put her in mind of sons.

She gave him some milk and looked him over. “Your hair wants cutting,” she said, intending to sound affectionate, but her voice contained the static of old age and blandishments came out like everything else: inverted. She was a walking opposite.

He laughed. “Haircuts cost money, Ona, and you've been fleecing me blind for weeks.”

Had it been weeks? Really? He'd put up her screen doors, taken down her storm windows, reseeded the dregs of a lawn that had once filled her with pride. She'd been out there herself in these suddenly bright days, weeding around the rhodies and reviving a dormant yen for physical exertion, resuming her daily, now halting, walk down the street. The neighborhood looked verdant, changed, almost foreign, as if she—or it—were returning from a very long trip.

“Wow, have you ever been holding out,” he said, popping the rest of a second brownie into his mouth. He ate like Frankie, as if he'd never had a meal. And he had Frankie's eyelashes, long and wet-looking.

“The secret ingredient is crushed walnuts,” she informed him. “I'll make another batch for you next Saturday.”

He halted mid-bite. “Ona. Today's my last day.”

“Oh.” Everything stopped. “I'll be darned. Are you sure?”

“Seven weeks. This is week seven.”

“I must have lost track,” Ona said. The fact of his leaving began to thud painfully, like a heartbeat, a tender spot heretofore unrevealed. “I suppose I should have been counting.”

He picked up her playing cards, which was not allowed. “How about one for the road?” he asked.

She snatched them away lest he discover the stacked aces for Invisible Vision, a trick that depended on a digital dexterity he could only dream of, he of the long, lovely, guitar-playing fingers. The trick had returned to her during the news one night, a keenly recalled set of instructions. It was worth something, this trick. Five dollars was a bargain.

He waited her out. Presuming. Expecting a trick for free. Then he smiled again, a shock of a smile that made her wonder about the ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent of his life that did not take place here on Saturday mornings. Asking for a trick today was a kindness, she realized; a kindness to a creaky old woman who would miss him. He had never insulted her with pity; not once, until now.

“Five bucks,” she said.

“No can do.”

“Were you dissatisfied with the previous tricks?” she asked. “Did I not provide the suspense and satisfaction for which you willingly paid?”

“Seriously, Ona. I'm out of fives.”

“Maybe if you didn't drink so much you'd have enough left over for entertainment.”

He laughed out loud, and she had to laugh, too, because she knew he didn't drink, and that once he had. Her rejoinder recalled an earlier stage of their friendship; it acknowledged the subtle trajectory of their brief acquaintance; it implied a road that had rippled and dipped and wound up here, now. She had not trusted him; now she did.

“Are you actually going to refuse me a trick?” he asked.

And Louise: she'd done hundreds of tricks for Louise, especially in her last lucid days. Beautiful, dying Louise. From the cloudless anywhere dropped another word:
draugas.

Friend. She might as well admit it: her heart was breaking.

“What?” Quinn said.

Her body went hot—like a hot flash, really. She felt fifty again. “Pick a card,” she said. She snatched the ace of spades from his hands, jammed it back into the deck, then reached behind him to pluck a card from his collar. “Is this your card?”

“You know it is.”

“If you're going to go, Quinn, you might as well go.” She crossed her arms. “
Iki,
” she said.

“Is that goodbye?”

She nodded, her eyes stinging. “Don't ask me how I know. Because I don't.”

How could she blame him for leaving? The difficulty of the parent completing tasks begun by the child was not lost on her. When Frankie was killed she'd been the one to close his modest bank account, to give away his books and guitar, to inform the college in which he had been enrolled that he would now be deferred for all eternity.

Parents outlived their children sometimes; this was a fact. But the boy hadn't been at war, like Frankie; or, like Randall, a cancer victim in late middle age; he was just a Boy Scout doing who-knows-what at five o'clock in the morning. Why had she allowed herself the modest pleasure of falling for him, even a little? She'd entered her second century believing she was through with death, not counting her own.