Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (47 page)

I knew the purpose of their visit would not be a cheerful one. It was hard to put a good hat on our situation. I also knew that the odyssey we had begun in the immediate aftermath of the war was approaching its conclusion. They followed me into the living room and showed me the photographs and the typed note Linda Gail had gotten in the mail. “Who do you think sent these?” I said.

“I showed them to Roy. He said they came from someone who was miserably unhappy,” Linda Gail replied.

“Such as his wife?” I said.

Hershel had not taken off his coat and was looking out the front window. It was a grand gold-and-green winter day, the kind that makes you remember the Deep South with fondness. “You didn’t gather your pecans this fall,” he said.

“Didn’t have time,” I said.

“Remember in the Ardennes when I was fussing about Steinberg? You know, about him being a Jew and getting the heebie-jeebies on patrol?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“You remember it, Weldon. You told me to knock it off. Then you asked me what my folks did at Christmastime. I told you we picked pecans on the gallery and my mother baked a fruitcake and my daddy made eggnog with red whiskey in it, not moonshine, and we went squirrel hunting with a colored man who worked on shares with us. I remember it just like it happened yesterday.”

I smiled but didn’t say anything.

“The pecan and oak trees in your yard look just like they do in Louisiana this time of year,” he said. “They have a soft quality, like in an old postcard. It’s like going back to when we were kids, isn’t that right, Linda Gail?”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Don’t be looking at those photographs,” he said. “They’re meant to hurt us. Don’t give these people any more satisfaction.”

“I think you’re right,” I said, and put the photos and note back in the mailer.

“Would you mind if I go out there and gather up some of your pecans?” he said.

“Not at all.”

That’s what the three of us did. I got a quart of eggnog out of the icebox, and we sat on the porch steps in the sun and cracked the pecans with a pair of pliers and picked the meat out of the shells and ate it, and passed the eggnog back and forth, drinking from the carton, ignoring the fact we were adults and that William Blake’s tiger still prowled the earth and that somewhere on the edges of the park or the neighborhood or the city limits or the country’s borders, thieves waited to break in and steal.

“What do you want me to do with the photos and the note, Weldon?” Linda Gail said.

“Burn them,” I replied.

After they left, I went back to the county psychiatric ward where Rosita was being held and was told she had been transferred to the hospital at Wichita Falls.

When I returned home, I went into Grandfather’s bedroom. “I’ll have to be gone for a few days,” I said.

“Where to?”

I told him.

“They perform lobotomies there?” he said.

“It’s the asylum where my mother probably would have undergone electroshock treatment if we hadn’t gotten her back.” I saw a painful flicker in his eyes.

“What are you doing with that Luger?” he said.

“I haven’t thought it through.”

“Take me up there with you. Maybe they’ll listen to an old man. It’s the only advantage that comes with age. You can yell at people and they cain’t do anything about it.”

We both knew the folly of his words and the level of hopelessness they represented.

I
CALLED A RURAL
air service in Tomball and hired a pilot to fly me to Wichita Falls. I was almost out the door with my suitcase, one that contained clothes for both me and Rosita, when I saw Roy Wiseheart’s metallic gray Packard coming down the street. I set down the suitcase inside the door so he couldn’t see it, and waited for him under the porch light. The night was cold and black, the stars a snowy shower across the sky.

I was filled with conflict as I watched Roy turn in to the drive. I would be justified if I rebuffed him. I was tired of his rhetoric and his Byronic affectations and his self-manufactured aura of martyrdom. I wondered if he had any idea of the damage he had done to Hershel; if he had any idea how much Hershel loved Linda Gail. I wondered if he had any idea how courageous and humble and decent a man Hershel Pine was. I wondered if Roy ever thought about anyone except Roy.

I stepped down off the porch and met him in the middle of the yard.

“You headed out somewhere?” he said. He was holding a package the size and shape of a cardboard mailer, wrapped with black satin paper and silver ribbon.

“Rosita has been moved to the asylum at Wichita Falls. I think your friends want to physically destroy her brain.”

“These are not my friends, bud.”

“You come out of the same background, you belong to the same clubs, you went to the same schools. You make a religion out of denying any connection with the world that has given you everything you have. The reality is, you’re one of their acolytes.”

“That hurts me deeply.”

“I have a feeling you’ll survive.”

“I came to ask a favor. Please give this to Linda Gail when she’s alone. It’s my way of saying good-bye. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over her.”

“What is it?”

“Bunny Berigan’s recording of ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’ She loved this song.”

“Your wife told me you gave that record to her.”

“I’m surprised she remembered.”

“I’ll say good night to you now, Roy. I wish you well. I don’t think I’ll be in contact with you again.”

“You’re disappointed in me?”

“Who am I to judge?” I replied.

Typical of Roy, he didn’t let go easily. He walked to the porch and leaned the gift for Linda Gail against the bottom step. “You’re a heck of a guy, Weldon. Make them wince,” he said.

“That last part is your father’s mantra.”

“Sometimes the old man gets it right,” he replied. “By the way, in case you didn’t read it in the paper, Lloyd Fincher died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. It’s a great loss. Half the hookers in San Antonio will be out of work.”

L
INDA GAIL ALWAYS
loved books and did well academically. Even after skipping ninth grade, she was placed in the high school honors program. Her favorite treat during the summer was the visit of the old WPA bread truck/bookmobile to her rural neighborhood, where many of the parents were barely literate and her peers spent their spare time shooting songbirds with air rifles or making what they called “nigger shooters” from willow forks and strips of inner tube. Her favorite books were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Richard Halliburton’s
Book of Marvels,
Anna Sewell’s
Black Beauty,
and
The Yearling
by Marjorie Rawlings. Rarely did she get to read books like those in Honors English. In her sophomore English class, the students memorized and recited long passages from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Evangeline.” Linda Gail made up for her lack of interest in the material by outdoing everyone in the class. While others barely got through a recitation in front of the class, Linda Gail memorized twice the number of lines and kept going until the teacher had to stop her, out of fairness to the student who was supposed to follow her, whose recitation Linda Gail was making redundant.

The third time she did it, the teacher had her dropped from Honors English. When the principal told her to report to a class filled with students who could barely stay awake until three
P.M.
, she charged into the office of the teacher after school, crying and in a rage. She called him a snarf and a jerk and a dog turd and said she was going to write the governor about him.

“What’s a snarf?” he asked.

“A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats,” she replied.

He placed a box of chalk on the desk and told her to write “I will not call Mr. Shepherd a snarf” one hundred times on the blackboard. She picked up the box of chalk and threw it at his head. “You were born for the stage, Linda Gail,” he told her. “That’s not a compliment.”

As she fixed dinner for Hershel and herself, she wondered why, at this time in her life, those memories from her adolescence seemed so important. Unfortunately, she knew the answer. The best moments in her young life had been with the books she discovered on the shelves of the bookmobile. Roy had told her he loved her for her innocence. That was the way she wanted to remember herself, as Judy Garland singing among the Munchkins. She knew the reality was otherwise. Even as a child, she had always been self-centered, never passing a mirror or a store window or the glass trophy case in the school hallway without looking at her reflection. Linda Gail not only stole the lines the other students had stayed up all night memorizing, she committed an act of theft upon herself. She had lied about who she was all these years. The innocent child she wanted to remember had never existed. She was a fraud then and a fraud now.

She wanted to talk honestly with Hershel without hurting him more than she had hurt him already. How do you tell someone you don’t love him, that you are not drawn to him physically, that even during your most intimate moments, images of other men have always lived on the edges of your consciousness? Is that person supposed to be consoled because you add that you admire and respect him? There are certain things you never say to another human being. An apology from an adulterer is an apology from an adulterer. Telling the person whom you married and slept with for years that you never loved him was nothing short of calculated cruelty.

Her own thought processes were driving her crazy.

She fixed his favorite dinner—pork chops and sweet potatoes and canned spinach mixed with mashed-up hard-boiled eggs. She set out clean place mats and the good silverware and lit the candles on the candelabra and set it in the middle of the table and sat down across from him. She ate in small bites, her eyes on the plate, wondering what she should say. “Did you know your color has come back?” she asked.

“Think so?” he said.

“I believe it’s because of our visit with Weldon. Gathering pecans and sitting on the gallery, like people do in Louisiana.”

“Yeah, I’m glad we did that. It was nice, the weather and all.”

“He was proud you remembered the time in the Ardennes when he was kind to you. He thinks very highly of you, Hershel.”

“You ever notice how your accent comes back all of a sudden?”

“Did you know I have the same speech coach as Audie Murphy?”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“We’ve gotten ourselves in a mess, haven’t we?” she said.

“I want you to go back to Hollywood and finish your picture. I can take care of myself. There’s no problem here, Linda Gail.”

She touched the tip of her fork to a piece of pork chop but didn’t lift it from the plate. Nor did she raise her eyes. “I don’t believe I’m cut out for Hollywood. Even if I were, I think they’re pretty well done with me.”

“No, ma’am, they’re not. I always believed your name was going to be up in lights. You were born for the screen.”

“My Honors English teacher said something like that years ago.”

“He was a smart man.”

“He was telling me I was a self-centered brat.”

“He was probably jealous, that’s all. Sometimes prophecy can come from the mouth of a fool.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I just made it up.”

“I’m sorry for all that I’ve done to you, Hershel,” she said.

“When people make mistakes, there’s usually a reason for it. These pork chops are something else.”

She knew at that moment that Hershel Pine was probably the best human being she’d ever known. She also knew that others aside from her had done terrible damage to her husband and their friends. She determined then that they would pay for it, one way or another, starting with one person in particular.

E
ARLY THURSDAY MORNING
Linda Gail drove downtown to a photography store and had multiple copies made of the typed note and the photos of the four female mental patients. Then she drove to the post office and sent two airmail manila envelopes to Los Angeles.

When she got home, Hershel was working in the yard, repairing the damage he had done to the St. Augustine grass and the flowerbeds. She went into the kitchen, her pillbox hat still on her head, and drank a cup of coffee at the drain board. Then she called Roy Wiseheart’s house. A maid answered. “May I speak to Mrs. Wiseheart, please?” Linda Gail asked.

“She’s taking a nap, ma’am.”

“This is Mrs. Pine. Wake her up, please.”

“She don’t like to be woke up, ma’am.”

“It’s in regard to her appearance at the meeting of Daughters of the American Revolution. It’s quite important.”

“I’ll go look in on her and be right back.”

Linda Gail waited for two minutes, staring out the window. Hershel saw her and waved. She heard someone pick up a second receiver, scraping it out of the phone cradle. “What do you want, Mrs. Pine?”

“I received the photos and note you or one of your assistants sent me. I wanted to thank you personally for being so concerned about our friend Rosita Holland.”

“What photos?”

“Of the lobotomized women. Hershel and I showed them to Weldon and also to Roy, which I’m sure is what you wanted us to do.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t send them?”

“Why would I send you photos of any kind? We share nothing in common. We have no kind of relationship. Because you slept with my husband doesn’t give you access to my private life. I think you should talk to a psychiatrist.”

“I felt it was only appropriate that I alert you to some phone calls you’ll be receiving. You’ll be receiving an appreciable degree of media attention, not the kind that impresses members of the DAR. I saw in the newspaper that you’ll be their guest of honor at the River Oaks Country Club next week.”

“What phone calls?”

“I sent the photos and the note special delivery to Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.”

“Why should either of them care about photos of mental patients? Mrs. Pine, I’m convinced you’re impaired. Why Roy decided upon a dalliance with you is beyond me. He usually likes Hispanic girls he finds in the Islands.”