Those Across the River (3 page)

“That’s no good for your eyes,” I said.

“You’re the one who needs glasses.”

I cut a slice of pear and lipped it off the knife. Dora allowed herself a sideways glance just in time to see a fat drop of juice miss the plate and fall into the sparse hair on my chest. She blinked and cut her eyes back to the book.

“It’s better in French, you know,” I said.

“I’m sure it is for those of us who speak French.”

“Although some people find the content objectionable. Not the sort of thing that promotes marital fidelity.”

“We’ll have to take our chances,” she said. “Are you going to let me read?”

“Of course, of course.”

I took another bite of pear. She cut her eyes to watch me eat again. I swallowed, then said, “Have you gotten to the part where she poisons herself with arsenic and dies in agony?”

She closed the book.

“Orville Francis Nichols, you are a first-class son of a bitch.”

“And how you’ve learned to swear. That book is eroding your morals.”

“You have no idea,” she said, taking the pear, knife and plate from me. She cut a moon-shaped sliver and set it on her inner thigh. I raised an eyebrow. She pointed at me with the knife, then pointed at the sliver. I bent to her and ate it.

“Slower, you fiend,” she said, placing the next piece higher. I ate it. Slowly. She placed the next piece even higher. Then another. She had to move her nightgown to place the last one.

 

 

 

LATER, WHEN THE pear was gone and the book was on the floor, Eudora knelt over me, backlit by the candles. I was on my stomach. From the corner of my eye, she looked so powerful and beautiful in that posture that it occurred to me she might be a Sphinx.

“I like it that you let me touch your back now,” she said, and I felt her finger lightly trace the scars. Then she kissed each one. Then my left ear. She lay down on top of me now and dug my left hand from under the pillow, kissing the nub where the pinky should have been. “I wish I could make it all better,” she said.

“You do.”

“You need a shave!” She giggled, rubbing her cheek on mine. “All these little white ones like grains of sugar make you look like old man Moses. Lucky for you, your hair’s still brown. You look young and juicy when you shave.”

Now she reared up over me, straddling my back.

How like a Sphinx in her nightgown.

“It is a man,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“A man goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening.”

“Ah, but you didn’t wait for my question. Now I shall eat you by the gates of Thebes.”

“I’m game.”

“But I really do have a question.”

“Okay.”

“Are you happy? I know we’re getting on well. We always get on well. But are you . . .
content
?”

“Alright, this sounds serious. Get off me so I can see you.”

She flopped down beside me and I got my spectacles from the nightstand. One of the candles guttered behind her. I tried to see her eyes in the poor light.

“Yes,” I said. “Unreservedly happy.”

“It’s just that we’ve been running ever since Ann Arbor. I feel like Adam and Eve, thrown out of the Garden of Eden, just barely making it. Sponging off your brother in Chicago. Now you come into this house and that’s swell, really it is, and I have work . . . but something’s wrong.”

“Are you ashamed of me because I haven’t been working?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. Everybody’s got it tough now.”

“Are you afraid I won’t write?”

“Maybe I’m afraid that you will.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your great-grandfather, the one who owned the plantation near here.”

“Lucien Savoyard.”

“Yes. I don’t like him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Not if you write a book about him.”

“There are books about Napoleon, and he’s still dead.”

“But not completely. And I’m not sure a man who killed his own slaves for sport deserves that kind of resurrection. Even if he was a general.”

“Brigadier general.”

“I beg his pardon.”

“Then don’t think of it as a book about him. It is, of course, but it’s also about the slaves who rose up against him.”

“And killed him.”

“Yes. As he deserved.”

“With hammers and axes and homemade spears. It’s all so brutal. Only men care about these things.”

“I disagree. And it wasn’t just the men who overthrew him, at least according to the Union soldiers who spoke to the slaves when it was all done. The women took up weapons the same as the men. All of them rushed the house.”

“I would have, too, considering what he was doing. But then I wouldn’t talk about it. Or read about anything like that. Violence like that is private, don’t you think? You don’t like to talk about France.”

“No.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“There’s something to be learned here.”

“And not France? Why don’t you write about France?”

“I can’t. Someone else will, later.”

“I see. You’ll write theirs and someone who’s in diapers now will write yours.”

“It sounds silly when you put it like that.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I understand a little.”

“Think about it . . . A Confederate military man who refuses to free his slaves and fights off a Union detachment, only to die at the hands of a blacksmith and half-starved field hands. I think the title will really make people want to read it.”

“
The Last Plantation
.”

“Yes.”

“It’s good. You’ll be the boy-king of States’ War historians.”

“Yes! By God, you get it!” I laughed.

“And get a fresh start at a new university. I know how much a book will help you with that. I’m just so sorry I spoiled everything for you.”

“Dora.”

“If you’d never met me, you’d still be in Ann Arbor.”

“Lonely.”

“But a professor.”

“Cold.”

“With nice coats and firewood.”

“And some dull wife.”

“Who could give you babies.”

“I’m indifferent to babies, and they sense it. They cry at me in protest. This isn’t helping.”

“No, it’s selfish. Poor whore-of-Babylon me.”

“You’re not from Babylon.”

“I know you liked it better before. And I ruined it. I ruined your career.”

“We don’t need to talk about it, Dora-Dora. Tabula rasa, remember? Everything shiny and new. I lost one job and I took one licking. If you and I stay together, I paid cheap.”

“I don’t know if we’re done paying,” she said.

She closed her eyes and I imagined the film she was playing in her head.

 

 

 

BLACK AND WHITE. Jerky. A silent picture. Organist at the side. Stephen Chambers, professor of British literature, steps into the office of O. F. Nichols, professor of American history, a short walk from his own office in Angell Hall. He flings the door open. The adulteress, surprised, takes a step back from the desk of her lover. Stares at her husband. Does he know? Why else would he be here?

“STEPHEN . . .” in white letters on a black screen.

The husband, a shorter man than me, is breathing hard through his nostrils. Dora’s mouth opens now.

White letters, black screen: “HE KNOWS.”

Organ music. Stephen raises his pointed finger, his mouth a hole beneath his neat mustache.

“THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE IN THE HIGHER CIRCLES OF LEARNING.”

I stand up. My height goads the smaller man, who leaps around the desk as if he were playing tennis.

“NO, STEPHEN!” from Dora.

The husband strikes the lover, knocks my glasses off, strikes me again and knocks me awkwardly to the floor. Keeps striking. The lover does not raise his hands. My hands. My tie hangs over one shoulder like a tongue. Dora speaks. Please remember the white letters on the black screen.

“STEPHEN . . . IT IS MY FAULT!”

The camera takes my perspective now, looking up at my attacker, teeth bared under the civilized mustache, wild eyes enhanced by eyeliner, too much powder on the face.

“I WILL KILL YOU!”

My nose breaks. I have time to wonder if I have lost a tooth. The adulteress rises up behind her husband now and begins to strike him hard with the heel of her pump, and this is funny. This is so funny I laugh hard with blood on my teeth. Again and again the cuckold’s small fists flash. The shoe rises and falls. I laugh. Other professors appear at the door, assemble themselves into a totem pole of surprise; the one on top has his hands on his cheeks, his mouth a huge oval.

“STOP THEM!”

They pull the smaller man off. His hands are too badly broken for him to unmake his fists. He looks at the camera, holding his ruined hands up as evidence.

“DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?”

The organist turns to look, too.

 

 

 

“EUDORA . . . TABULA RASA.”

She opened her eyes.

B
Y AND BY I slept.

And, alas, I dreamed.

Not of the trench fight; that was the worst.

And not of Metzger’s death, which was nearly as bad.

But I did dream of the trench.

Something about a gas attack, and I couldn’t find my mask. But there was a dead guy half in the mud gripping his mask in his hands, and I couldn’t get it loose. I was holding my breath and jerking at it, and pulling at his fingers, but they were like iron, even though his head was lolling. He was being stubborn. I was going to die. I woke up gasping.

But I hadn’t yelled; Dora was still sleeping.

Morning?

Yes, morning.

It was dark, but the roosters were going at it.

Goddamn
roosters
.

How did I end up in Georgia?

I stuffed the pillow over my eyes and ears and just lay there for a long time, still mad at the dead guy who wouldn’t let me have his mask.

 

 

 

WHEN I WOKE up the second time, I smelled bacon.

My stomach pulled me downstairs to investigate, and there was Eudora frying up breakfast; now that I was good and close I could hear the sizzle. I slipped my arms around her waist from behind while she slid three fried eggs onto a plate that already held bacon.

“Whose bacon is this?” I said.

“Roosevelt’s bacon. What a question. And he stood up straight and chopped the wood for the stove, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank the president.”

“Really, where did it come from?”

“Pigs, of course.”

“You’ve been to town.”

“What else was a girl supposed to do with her morning while her gentleman-friend slept? Moving all that furniture must have worn you out. It’s nearly noon.”

“I didn’t see any bacon at the store.”

“Neither did I. So I inquired. What a funny little town. Do you know, the butcher’s shop is also the secondhand shop? Dresses and the like, all in the back part of the building. You can get nylons and pork chops all in the same trip. And not just pork chops. Game, too. They really like to know who they’re eating around here; mostly everything still had a head on it.”

I remembered my dream from last night and stopped chewing for a moment. Movement caught my eye and I watched a spider make his way across the ceiling towards the top of a cabinet. Dora looked up, too.

“Are you going to kill that for me?”

“It eats the bugs.”

“It is a bug.”

“I’m feeling magnanimous.”

“I’m not. I’m a fascist,” she said, knocking the spider down with a broom and stepping on it.

“Maybe that fellow had a mother. Did you think about that?”

“He should have written more.”

I chuckled.

“Speaking of writing, are you going to drop Johnny a note and let him know we’re in safe?” she said.

She was fond of my little brother. So was I. So was everyone. I might have gotten the height in the family, but he was the charmer; and deadly with the ladies. Many nights Dora lay next to me in our narrow, borrowed bed, giggling because she said she could hear Johnny making some little bird coo upstairs. He was like the Prince of Chicago, bartending at the Drake.

“I’ll write him a few lines today.”

“He didn’t want us to come here, Frankie.”

“The bacon is really good.”

“Did he?”

“Is there pepper?”

“On the counter.”

I fetched the pepper.

“Did he?”

“No,” I said.

And he wasn’t the only one.

 

 

 

Dear Orville Francis,

My name is Dorothy Mccomb, older sister to your mother, Katherine, I doubt whether you have heard much of me owing to the troubles your mother had with our father who was ----- to her, and owing also to her desire to leave this town and never to return, and cannot say as I blame her and envied her for her strength in cutting herself loose from Whitbrow which is and shall always be bloodied, though they leave us be for now.

I would have left you alone, but i am sick with the cancer, it is in my stomach and the medicine stopped helping; but do not fear for me as I have made my peace and have not long to suffer, my husband and our two children, one drowned, one had his heart outside him, born dead, have gone before me,

Soon you will be contacted by my attorney mister Stowe. He will have you to Atlanta for a reading of my last will and testament which names you Orville franknichols as the heir to my house and possessions and some little money that I have saved back, your brother john jacky/ will get the larger share of the money, since the house is yours, which you MUST SELL