Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (11 page)

    "Humor him," she said, as he drew close. "He thinks he's Roy Rogers."

    "I keep telling him that I'm the Pecos Kid. He was in an old pulp magazine I read as a kid."

    "Pecos never carries a gun - " she smiled, " - just a briefcase."

    He kissed her on the cheek. If either of them felt badly about the death of Richard Conners, they were doing a good job of keeping it to themselves. I'd expected them to be an unhappy couple, but the contrary seemed true. The way they kidded each other was spontaneous and intimate.

    "McCain here thinks you killed Richard," she said.

    He looked right at me and said, "I did."

    I must've looked shocked.

    "God, I'm kidding. I mean, in my mind I killed Richard hundreds and hundreds of times. And I'm sure he killed me hundreds and hundreds of times, too. I resented his popularity and power, and he resented my mind and my bitching. I'm a past master at bitching, just as he was a past master at being disorganized and forgetting to keep promises he'd made - sometimes very serious promises. We loved each other and hated each other the moment we first met. He never gave me credit enough for what I did for him - and I never gave him credit enough for what he did for me. We both had giant economy-sized egos, I'm afraid. And who knows, maybe someday one of us would actually have killed the other. We were in very bad need of a divorce, I'm not denying that." Nicole had come toddling over. He bent down and picked her up and kissed her on the cheek. "But I didn't kill him." He grinned at Chris. "I'd be much more likely to kill my wife because she won't leave me alone about moving. I love your little town, McCain, and I want to stay here."

    "You knew this Rivers fellow?"

    "Knew of him. And certainly knew his group, those America First bastards. They've been after Richard for years. But I never met him personally."

    "Dana is under the impression that you and Rivers might have been plotting against Richard."

    He shook his head. "Poor Dana. So jealous and insecure. All these imaginary plots going on in her mind. The day we went to see Khrushchev, she accused Richard and Chris of having an affair."

    It was surprising how different he was away from Richard. The day I'd seen him with Richard at the Khrushchev outing, he'd had the air of a secretary, always walking two steps back, subservient. This was a very different Bill Tomlin. And he'd just explained why Chris and Dana had been arguing that day.

    The phone rang inside the house.

    "I'd better get that," Chris said.

    "I'd better go too, it may be for me."

    I looked at them. "You two are handling your grief very well."

    "Yes," he said tartly, "aren't we, though?"

    I rowed back across the great river just as the first stars appeared in the vermilion-streaked sky of early dusk. The water was cold. But not nearly as cold as the eyes of Chris and Bill Tomlin.

    

    

    If you look closely at the gravestones and markers, you'll see a lot of them from the 1890s. That decade, at least for Black River Falls, makes you wonder if some dark cosmic force hadn't conspired to punish the town. Two droughts, a long siege of cholera, and - absolutely true - not one but two plagues of crop-destroying grasshoppers. The town's population shrank by about a third during that decade. Not even the Civil War thirty years earlier had reduced the number of residents so severely.

    In the 1950s, something along the same lines happened to our little town. But the dark force produced different symptoms and a different name: polio, or infantile paralysis. This plague had been building steadily all century. In a three-month period in 1916, twenty-seven thousand cases were reported in the United States. New York City alone had nine thousand cases. Because nothing else killed as many children as polio, it became the bogeyman for several generations, certainly for mine. Every day at school, you'd see a dozen kids clacking painfully down the hall, metal supports on their legs, crutches tucked under their arms. But as much as you felt sorry for them, there were kids far worse off: in wheelchairs or dying in iron lungs. Summer was the time of terror. You played around other kids - polio being highly communicable - or went to public swimming pools or movie theaters knowing that this might be your unlucky day. Moms and dads swallowed down panic whenever you said you might be running a fever or had a headache or felt a soreness in your muscles.

    And then along came a doctor named Jonas Salk, who'd created a polio vaccine. He got permission to try it out in Iowa, as well as two other states, and it worked. I was too old to participate in the trials when Salk's people came to town but I wasn't too old to get drunk the afternoon it was announced that the Salk vaccine had proved effective. The only other thing I can liken it to was the day the war ended. There were celebrations everywhere. The bogeyman had been slain. When Dr. Salk came through town a couple of weeks later, people lined the streets, applauding, and both women and men cried openly. Because of him, their children would be safe. He was a great man. He was offered a New York City ticker tape parade, and he turned it down. I always thought that defined him. His work mattered more than any acclaim.

    All this was too late for Robert Emmett McCain, my older brother. He'd died of polio in the fall of 1952. My people are small and Irish, and most of us bear the ineluctable air of immigrants, the sense that we aren't quite good enough to belong here - here being wherever we are. Not Robert Emmett McCain. He was all things to all people: the complete athlete (baseball, basketball, track, and swimming) for the boys; handsome, talented (he had a great singing voice), and playful for the girls; honest and reliable for our folks (he'd taken damned good care of me and my kid sister, Ruthie, when Dad was in the war and Mom was working at the Red Cross). He was going to be the first fully integrated McCain. Not only would he leave the Knolls, the poor section where we lived; he would leave Black River Falls and take his rightful place in the world at large - not unlike Richard Conners.

    I still remember the night he got sick at the dinner table. Rushing him to the bathroom, Mom said, with great hope, "He's just been out in the sun too long, that boy." But unspoken was the dread that it was much worse than simple exposure to the sun. Little Ruthie said, "I'll say a prayer for him, Mom." We all said many, many prayers in the days to come. I remember kneeling by my bed so long my knees hurt, hoping God would take those hurting knees into account and spare my brother. But he didn't. It was polio of the most virulent kind. Graham Greene called it "The terrible wisdom of God." Its wisdom was lost on me (I guess that's why only Job, of all the Bible writers, makes a hell of a lot of sense to me), but the suffering Robert went through, only to die suffocating inside his iron lung, was terrible. As was the attendant horror for my folks that maybe Ruthie or I would come down with it next. But we didn't. The Lord spared us.

    

    

    Mom and Dad were at Robert's grave when I reached the hill, Crow Creek Hill, high enough to see a long way downriver. Lore has it that squaws stood here for a glimpse of their warriors, coming home from battle in their painted canoes.

    Mom and Dad knelt at the grave, the grass browned and sparse with fall. Mom's fingers were rosary-wrapped and she was crying, though softly. Dad's face, which the war had seemed to change so much, was hard. And that's how it had been with them - after my brother's death, I mean - Mom grieving and Dad hard, almost angry. They'd put a bouquet of autumn flowers in front of the stone, Dad shooing away a curious jay intent on closer inspection. The breeze from off the blue winding water below carried a clean scent of fall with it. The birches and cedars along the shore below had started to blaze with the season.

    Dad stood up, and I took his place. I gave Mom a kiss on her tear-warm cheek and then addressed myself to my brother. How fine and splendid his life would have been. I'd not only loved him, I'd admired him. And God, how I'd copied him! I wore my hair the way he did, whistled the same songs, crouched in the batter's box the same way, even tried to copy the way he pleased the girls. He always encouraged me. He was a handyman, a good student, and a natural athlete, and he'd been kind enough to pretend that I was all these things too, even though I couldn't pound a nail in straight, never did get the hang of math, and tripped and fell over second base the only time I ever hit a ball into the outfield. He didn't care. I was his kid brother, and he was there to take care of me.

    So I said the kind of prayer you say when you're not even sure there's anybody to hear you, fragments of loss and hope and sentiment and emptiness and fear that there's just this beautiful autumn day and nothing else, that the end is really the end, just the cold earth, with no chance of seeing any of the loved ones you've lost along the way. When I thought seriously about life, I always thought about Job, God's imperfect man. I was a lot more like him than I wanted to be. I had not been blessed with blind faith.

    After a time, we were all standing up and hugging each other, small Irish people, my mother a beauty still with that wry Myrna Loy wisdom in her blue eyes, my dad starting to wear down after a Depression spent in the Knolls and four years of war overseas.

    

    

    "Got a letter from Ruthie," Mom said.

    "How's she doing?" I asked.

    A few months ago, Ruthie had gotten pregnant. Eleventh grade. Unwed mother. Mom had a widowed sister in Chicago. Ruthie went there and her pregnancy was going well. Ruthie had my dead brother's good looks and brains. She'd been planning on Northwestern and then on to New York, and God help all those Manhattan sophisticates when this small town girl started wrapping them around her finger. All that was unlikely now, though it was still a dream we all paid lip-service to. Hard to storm the offices of Time or The New Yorker with a wee one tucked under your arm.

    Then my dad said, "You see that blue Nash down there, honey?"

    I smiled. "I thought we had an agreement about that. You agreed to stop calling me honey after I turned twenty-five."

    He laughed, and in that moment you could see the kid in his face. I gave him a hug. He always loved to tell the story of how he'd dropped me off at a Rocky Lane-Gene Autry-Whip Wilson triple feature at the theater one Saturday afternoon and forgot himself and gave me a kiss as I was about to get out of the car. Right in front of all the other nine-year-olds in the ticket line. "I still feel like hell about it, though, honey," he'd always say. "I never saw a kid blush the way you did that day."

    "She got out a pair of binoculars about ten minutes ago," he said. "Aimed right up here. You don't know who she is?"

    "I wish you didn't have to work for the Judge," Mom said. "She doesn't care how dangerous things get for you."

    "I'll be fine, Mom. Really." I kissed her, and then I gave Dad a peck on the cheek. "'Bye, honey," I said to him, and he gave me a mock punch in the belly. "Look, Mom, Dad's blushing."

    I stepped over to the grave and touched it a final time. So long, Robert.

    Then I walked over to my car. I wanted to find out who the woman in the Nash was.

    

    

    I called Jeff Cronin's office. Wasn't in. I swung out to his house, a new ranch style that was set about two hundred yards away from the other homes in the development, as if it didn't want to get contaminated. The woman in the Nash stayed a long, respectable block behind me.

    Jeff's black Studebaker - the one that looked even more like a spaceship than the Edsel - sat basking in its own glory in the driveway. Cronin, like Dana and Dorothy, was raking leaves and putting them into bags that his wife, Jane, helped him with, a plump but sweet-faced woman. He had a couple of cast-iron deer in the front and an American flag flapping on a pole.

    He stopped raking the moment he saw me pull into his drive. We weren't exactly friends. I saw him say something to his wife and wave her inside the house. The antichrist was coming.

    I knew enough not to try and shake hands. He'd decline.

    He was chunky but strong-looking, wearing the same black burr cut he'd had as a fishing-pole prairie kid. His gray sweatshirt was sweaty in the armpits. His jeans were baggy and faded.

    "I'm not changing my mind," he said, "in case that's why you're here."

    "Changing your mind about what?"

    He looked surprised. "About Helen Toricelli. Howard Fast is on every list of communist sympathizers I've ever seen." He spat. "Communist sympathizers, my ass. They're communists and everybody knows it. But you have to be careful because they can sue you."

    

    

    "She's a fine woman. She was raised in the Depression. She saw a lot of people starve. She doesn't want to see that again, so she looks around for ways to prevent it. She reads a lot of different things and shares her thoughts with her students. She's one of the best teachers I've ever known. And one of the nicest people, too."

    "I'm going to surprise you here, Sam, and agree with you. About being a nice woman. She's salt of the earth. That's why this doesn't make me happy. I've talked to her a dozen times about not teaching some of the material she does, but she refuses to quit. As a school board member, what choice do I have? I've got to try and get rid of her for the sake of our kids."

    Then he wagged his head toward the back yard. I followed him. In a side window I saw his wife, Jane, peeking out between the curtains, probably trying to figure out where we were headed.