WLT (33 page)

“I'm flabbergasted. I thought of you as a janitor. And a caretaker.”

“That's what a Lutheran pastor does, Frank. Lutherans don't require much theology, just caretaking. When God talked about believers as sheep, He was thinking of Lutherans. Anyway, I was out there on the windswept tundra, ministering to the lonesome and the outright desperate, and believe me, I was set upon by large women on a regular basis. These were farm women, big-boned, meaty women with sinewy arms and powerful haunches and quick on their feet, from years of herding animals, and something about me aroused them—I was younger then and had hair—and I'd be sitting in the kitchen drinking their coffee when suddenly they'd make a play for me. Brush against me, adjust my lapel, straighten my hair. Then they'd be leaning across me to reach for something—Oh, don't move, they'd say, and reach over for the salt and I'd feel a breast jab my arm, or they'd lean down to pour me coffee and there it is, the old mountain of love, pressed against my shoulder, and pretty soon she's all over me, arms akimbo, sitting on my lap. There's a women's trick from way back, the lap hold. Once I was saying goodbye to a woman who'd been edging around me for an hour, nudging, brushing, rubbing, and sliding, and she cries out, ‘Oh, let me give you a big hug.' Well, I knew it was a hug I'd never get out of alive, and I took off running and she took off after me—around the chicken coop and the corn crib and into the barn and up to the haymow—and I was about to plunge out the haymow door and into the manure pile when I felt that hay hook grab my jacket and she hoisted me into the air and there I hung, my feet dangling down barely scraping the ground and my hands up over my head, tangled in the jacket that was hanging on the hook. I hung by my wrists for fifteen minutes while she had her way with me and it was ugly and shameful and I don't want you to ever ask me about it again, but just remember: don't let her sit on your lap. In a chase, however, I believe you have the advantage of her.”

It was the most words Frank had ever heard Mr. Odom speak at once. He looked drained, as if he had used up a week's worth of language and here it was only Monday.

“Would you like to be addressed as Reverend Odom?” asked Frank.

“That would please me very much,” he whispered.

Frank donned his blue jacket and a red tie and spritzed a whiff of Lilac Rémoulade behind each ear and walked down three floors. When Lily Dale opened the door, the apartment was ablaze with candles. He counted sixty. Dinner was on the table, lamb chops and tiny potatoes, and the Victrola was playing soft piano music. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek and she held on to him and gave him an embrace. “Oh, you darling,” she whispered. “You beautiful darling. I do love you, and you know it, don't you.”

She ate twelve lamb chops and three big helpings of potatoes and drank quite a bit of wine with dinner, which put her in a weepy mood. She sobbed into her chocolate cake and then had some cognac and brightened up a little. They sat on a green divan. She gave him a pad and a pencil to write the obituary with.

“My mother was named Helen Pointer and she was such a saint. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in abject poverty, but nevertheless learned to cherish beautiful things, but I believe it was poverty that led her to marry my father, who was Norwegian. His name was Molde and it suited him well. My brothers take after him in certain ways. He was in the ice trade and it suited him well. He was a hard man. Nothing pleased him. He criticized and made fun of everything about me.
Nothing
was good enough. My only pleasure was when I sang in church. I was the alto soloist at Hennepin Avenue Methodist. It was my one moment of grace and beauty, Sunday morning, and I did that for years and then my brother Ray invited me to sing on the radio station. I remember that moment exactly. It was the moment that saved my life. Everything was so beautiful then, and people were so very kind to me, and so are you, Frank. Take me to bed.”

“What?”

“I want you to take me to bed now.”

And with pounding heart and panic in his brain, so that he could hardly think, he helped her into the wheelchair and pushed her through the hall toward the bedroom. He had waited so long for this moment, had rehearsed in his mind exactly how it should go, where to put his hands, what to whisper, the order of the removal of clothing, the rapid succession of thrilling moves and the seismic upheavals and the moaning and shouting, but he had never imagined that the woman would be as big as this. The thought of intimacy with this immense pile of flesh—where would a person begin? And who had enough lust in his heart to be able to get the job done?
Me
, he thought. But of course she had meant no such thing. “Help me up,” she said, and he did, and she took a step toward the bed and folded up on it and a moment later she was snoring. He put a comforter over her, turned out the light, cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, and closed the door behind him, leaving behind the pad of paper on which he had written the names of her mother and father.

“O
ne of these days I'm going to tell Roy Jr. I want a real job, not just be his office boy, I'm sick of running errands,” Frank announced to Maria, and that same morning, Roy Jr. asked him, “You like baseball, don't you? You got your evenings free, right?” And Frank, who thought baseball was slower than watching paint dry and who tried to spend every evening with Maria at the movies, said, “Sure.”

Roy Jr. told him to go sit in the press box for a couple weeks with Buck Steller, The Voice of the Millers, and keep score for him and see how the games were broadcast. “Buck asked for someone to keep score and go for coffee, and you're him,” said Roy Jr., “but as long as you're there, keep your eyes peeled and see how much the old weasel is betting on games. You ever hear about the Black Sox scandal? Good. We don't want that here. Buck came here from Chi Town, he was the Voice of something down there before we got him. So go see what he's doing.”

So Frank had to tell Maria that he was off movies for awhile. “I have very cowardly tendencies,” he said. “I've got to learn to speak up for myself.”

She said it was all right, that she didn't mind if he worked at night.

“You mean you didn't enjoy going to movies with me?”

“We were going to the movies every night.”

“I thought you wanted to.”

“I did.”

“You mean you don't anymore?”

She sighed. He took her hand and apologized. A little too fulsomely, because she put her hand over his mouth. Her little warm hand with its slender fingers. He was glad to shut up.

It wasn't that Frank loved movies so much as that he liked to sit as close to her as possible. After
Friendly Neighbor
they went to a matinee of “Up a Tree” with Marie Wilson, Harold Peary, and Henry Morgan, and he put his arm around her and she laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep. She fit perfectly against his side. He put his face in her black hair and kissed her glorious shampoo and touched her perfect little ear and listened to her peaceful womanly snore. “I love you,” he whispered into her hair. On the screen, the three comics were entangled in a love triangle at a lumber camp, complicated by a flapjack-flipping contest and a log-rolling and a small black bear, and in his arms lay the love of his life, except that she maybe had a boyfriend in Milwaukee named Merle.

“A
friend
,” said Maria. “A very dear friend.”

“How dear?” he asked.

“I'll tell you after I see him again. He's not a letter-writer.”

“How long since you've seen him? Not that it's my business.”

“It can be your business. I haven't seen him for more than a year. But what difference does it make?”

“You ready to make a change?”

“Change from what? He's a
friend.
”

“Not a boyfriend?”

“We were very close at one time.”

Merle was an actor too, that was where they met, she said. They went to acting school together.
Did you sleep together?
he wondered. Actors did, all the time. Look at Hollywood. But, being actors, they didn't know their true feelings as other people do. Look at all the divorces. Actors were gypsies, they never knew where the jobs would pop up or when, so they had to suck up to people all the time, grin and kiss and toss their handsome heads and flatter each other up one side and down the other, it was their job to, but actors were also down to earth and looked out for each other and they were free spirits. This one was. She was so different from other women, she was like a different gender. When you were with Maria, she was utterly
present
, alert, nose to the wind. When she looked at you, you were the only man in the world, bathed in blue light.

Outside the Bijou, he took her hand, and they waited for the Nicollet streetcar and when it hove into view over the hill and came screeching along, sparks flying from the trolley arm, he kissed her. And breathed, and kissed her again.

“I do love you in my own way,” she said, and kissed him a third and sweeter time, and hopped aboard.

He rolled the sentence around in his mind as he walked to the ballpark. He didn't know how to read her kisses, she being an actress, a professional kisser, so to speak, and this made no sense either: how could you love somebody in your own way? Love isn't up to you. You don't decide it. Love is love.

Nicollet Field was an old green woodpile of a ballpark, one city block paved with grass, with the pavilion on the southeast corner and bleachers strung out north and west and the green board fence beyond, and in straightaway center field, a four-story apartment building where dim tiny figures moved through the rooms. Nobody stood at their windows and watched, but then the Millers were not a longball team. They were a foul ball team. Heavy chicken wire protected the press box high above home plate, and night after night, as Frank sat up there, wedged in tight between Buck Steller and his pal, The Pressbox Padre, Father John Ptashne, Frank looked beyond the bright green field toward the center-field apartments, the glow of windows, and wished he were in a dark room with Maria.

The press box perched atop the grandstand, a shack on a cliff, and the writers sat at a rickety plank table pock-marked with thousands of cigarette burns. Under the table were coffee cans where the men urinated during the game. The wall behind them was gouged and splintered and adorned with violent and disgusting writing, everything that a person could never put in a newspaper. Above them, on the roof, the purring of hundreds of pigeons. The ceiling was barely six feet high. Every so often a writer would stand up and pound on it with both fists and the pigeons would rise in a burst of pigeon hysteria, to return to the roost a minute or so later. There was room for twelve at the table, plus Sparks the Western Union man at the end, but because certain men refused to sit next to certain others, the seating was complicated. Buck, for example, insisted on keeping an empty chair to his right, and the
Star
man couldn't be near the
Tribune
man, who had once stolen his coffee can, and the man from the
Dispatch
was kept as far from everybody as humanly possible. He was a hard drinker and became elaborately ill.

Frank had never met people quite like sportswriters, not since he was a small boy; they were cruel as a matter of art—cruelty for its own sake—and they devised elaborate pranks, such as tying a rope to the
Dispatch
man's ankle and then throwing him out of the window, and simple ones, such as pouring urine in his beer cup. They gawked at women in the seats below and scanned the rows with their field glasses to pick out good specimens. They gabbed about pussy, pussy, pussy, but they never talked about any woman in particular or recalled good times with a woman. They were most passionate about distant tiny unknowable facts—questions such as “Against which pitcher did Heinie Spartz hit his inside-the-park homer when the ball got stuck in the outfielder's glove?” or “Which Miller did
not
pitch in the famous 32-inning Uncalled Rain Game of 1919?” could get them going for hours, and a question like “Who was better, Zez Hoover or Tooty Beck?” could touch off ferocious discussions for days. But none of them looked as if he had ever swung a bat himself. And none of them looked like a ladies' man.