“The hell with Jack. We don’t have to go up. I wish we could get somewhere away from the crowd, though.”
“Ah, so do I!”
Her vehemence gladdens him. The small white scar like a check mark above her eyebrow is a deliberate defect to emphasize her perfection. Her throat and shoulders rise from the strapless green taffeta like a lily from its sheath. His legs are weak with how beautiful she is. Very lightly, tentatively, questioning her with his eyes, he raises his hand and with the tips of his fingers touches her bare shoulder. Whatever prince woke Sleeping Beauty touched her that way, reverently, holding his breath. Her eyes fly to his, and hold.
Abashed, they stand smiling at one another. Her dark un-plucked brows lift in a question. He feels that his face has gone lopsided, like that of a wax doll left too near the fire. “We could go outside and walk around,” he says. “We could go sit in the car.”
“All right.”
“Which?”
“I don’t care.”
The light in her dark eyes is not reflected, but comes from within. Not breaking his deep look into them, he sees with the lower edge of his vision the golden throat, the beginning cleft between her breasts, and another image overtakes and over-powers it: his mother’s face so close that the freckles blur across her nose, and the nightgown falling open to show the flatness, the scar with its angry stitch marks.
Apologetically and confusedly (why? because he has not been able to put his mother entirely out of his mind? because he will use even her illness to involve this girl in him?) he says, “I shouldn’t go home with a breath, anyway. My mother’s sick, and if I come home smelling like a still she’ll lie awake all night convinced I’m ruined.”
Nola says with a smile, “I didn’t know you were such a mama’s boy. Does she always wait up for you?”
For a moment he is angry. She is making unjust assumptions. She doesn’t know what she is talking about. “She’s got cancer,” he says. “She had one breast removed a couple of weeks ago.”
He hears how bluntly his words rebuke the lightness of her question, how ugly a sound they have in this place, and he adds, “Not a very pleasant subject.”
“Ugh, that’s terrible,” she says. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine anything like that. Has she got somebody with her?”
“No, the old man had to go to L.A. I’m her nurse. When I’m home.”
Now he is getting even, he is covertly blaming her for leading him to neglect his duty. It is perhaps a compliment of a kind, but she hears only the rebuke, and is upset. “You should be home. You shouldn’t have brought me to this prom.”
The moment she accepts blame, he absolves her of it. “I wanted to bring you to this prom. If we were missing this prom I’d cut my throat.”
“But she shouldn’t be left all by herself.”
“She isn’t that sick. She’s been getting up a little every day. I told her I’d try to get home early.”
Once more, unable to refrain, his fingers come up and touch the satiny, cool shoulder. “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know if I’m man enough to dump you off on your front porch like some foul ball I want to get rid of.”
“Bruce, why don’t we go see her?”
“Now?”
“Right now, yes.”
“We’d miss dinner.”
“Who cares? Anyway, it wouldn’t take long, would it? We could be back in half an hour. I hate to think of her alone and sick while we’re having fun.”
“I don’t like it much myself.”
“Would she mind, do you think?”
“Mind!” He can see the two of them smiling in at her from the doorway of her bedroom, she in her emerald silk, he in his dinner jacket, a vision from one of the glorified compartments of his life to which she has never had entry.
With his arm around her, he turns her exuberantly toward the doors. “Boy,” he breathes, close to her ear. “You know something? You’re some woman.”
God help him, that is probably what he said. Mason moves himself out of the doorway to let them pass, ready to laugh at what he sees of himself in that callow youth, and bemused by how assumptions and usages change. In those days of innocence they did not call themselves men, as even boys did now. They were the boys. But girls were not girls, nor had they yet become babes or broads or birds or chicks. For a while there at the beginning of the twenties they were chickens, and briefly they were flappers because for a season or two they flopped around through snow and wet in unbuckled galoshes. Some were hot mamas. But generally, to the boys around 1928, 1929, 1930, the females they went out with were women, even if they were hardly more than teenyboppers. I’ve got a date with a woman, they said; or, I’m taking my woman to the picture show.
They would all be told now, Mason thinks, that they needed their consciousness raised. The contemporary harpies who pass for women would probably spit on this sexism of deference, this disguised momism or whatever it was. But perhaps the boys knew something that the present has forgotten: that the only place one can first learn love is from a woman, that all tenderness, of any kind, derives from what is learned at the breast. Given a learner as insecure as young Bruce Mason, safety may well reside in some woman, mother or lover or wife or whoever. Whether women have difficulty getting credit cards or not, it is not they who racket around through empty universes hunting for a place on which to come to rest. They are themselves such a place.
So it seemed to Bruce Mason then. So it seems to Mason now. From the mezzanine rail he watches this boy escort his woman across the lobby toward the revolving doors. He is voluble, deferential, proud, absurd. She moves as serenely as the moon.
The elevator that he enters smells lingeringly of hair spray. He pushes the 6 button, and unreality rises under his soles. His mind is with them in the car, heading up South Temple. When he puts his key in the lock of 623 and opens the door, his mother in the light of the bed lamp lowers her magazine and looks up. Her eyes jump in alarm to the face of the Big Ben on her bed table, and then back to Bruce.
“What is it? You’re home early. Is something wrong?”
Keeping Nola out of sight, he says, “I broke my leg and they were going to shoot me, but I got away.”
“You what?”
“I got away. They’re after me.”
“Oh, poof!”
She is so easy to dismay; she is never prepared for jokes. He doesn’t suppose she would ever be taken entirely by surprise if something drastic happened to him, for she has imagined every possible catastrophe in the dark of sleepless nights. She has only this one basket. He is her only remaining egg.
Now he pulls Nola into the doorway. “This is Nola, Mom. We came out to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh, my goodness!”
In consternation she sits up, tugs her robe tighter around her, pulls her braid across her breast, tries to smooth the mussed bed clothes, and within a second is back against her pillows, at bay. Everything she is feeling, Bruce is feeling, too. She is embarrassed to be caught unprepared and disheveled, and he shares her shame. He should have picked up the room before he went out. She doesn’t want to look old, sick, faded, or mutilated to the girl who smiles at her from the circle of Bruce’s arm, and he agrees: she deserves protection and disguise. He should have thought of that.
But even in her confusion she is taking Nola’s measure and making note of the familiarity with which her shoulders wear Bruce’s arm; and while that detail brings the ears of her apprehension pricking up, she is going pink with pleasure at having been remembered. More than that. The eyes that take Nola in are dazzled, too. He can see admiration growing in them, and right on the heels of the admiration a caution: This is serious, he’s gone on her; and in another split second, Oh, I don’t blame him, she’s lovely!
His mother has never met one of his girls, and would be flustered even if she were not caught unprepared in an untidy room. They bring the fresh air in on their clothes; Nola’s coloring is too rich and al
ive beside his mother’s pallor. The contrast stares like blood on a sheet. And is there, in those first seconds, some contest going on? Is it Nola’s natural warmth and sympathy, or is it her triumphant sense of being young and beautiful and immortal that makes her so gentle with a woman sick and perhaps doomed? It is no contest, really. They flip a coin for him, but the coin has two heads. While it is still in the air, his mother concedes, gives her blessing. She cannot help loving what he loves.
“Aren’t you both nice!” she cries as Nola stands over her holding her hand. “But you shouldn’t have left your dance.”
“It’s intermission,” Bruce tells her. “We’re not missing a thing except a five-course dinner, delightful company, solid-gold favors, champagne, and a few little things like that.”
“Champagne? Do they really serve champagne? How can they …?”
“You can’t trust a word this one says,” says Nola.
“Ah,” his mother says. “You’ve found that out already. But he’s sort of nice, too, don’t you think? I’m just sorry you’re going to lose your favor, the little compact, Bruce showed me. Don’t they put those at the girls’ places at the tables?”
“She’ll get one,” Bruce says. “Maybe three. Why else am I on the committee?”
They beam at one another, thinking of things to say. “Aren’t you hungry?” his mother says. “Dancing is hard work.”
“Especially with Nola,” Bruce says. “It’s like rocking a car stuck on dead center. Only one thing to do—put her in high and push her backwards.”
“You ought to be ashamed to say a thing like that. I’ll bet she’s a beautiful dancer.”
Nola’s smile is slow and untroubled. “If I don’t just plant my feet he walks all over them.”
It is an extraordinarily happy moment. Their cheerfulness lights up the room. Again his mother says, “Aren’t you hungry? You ought to have your milk every two hours—has he admitted he’s on an ulcer diet? He probably wouldn’t. Let me just …”
Bruce pushes her emerging feet back under the covers. “You want milk or ginger ale?” he asks Nola. “There are some compulsory cookies. I made them myself.”
“Did he really?”
“Yes, he did. He can do all sorts of things.”
“You’ll make some woman a good wife.”
She comes close to expressing a thought that is in all their minds.
From the kitchen, while he pours three glasses of milk and fills a plate with the oatmeal cookies he made the evening before to tempt his mother’s finicky appetite, he can hear the getting-acquainted talk going on in the bedroom, one voice clear, one husky, one asking questions, one making answers. The ranch, the brother and sister, the horse Bally, school. He hears Nola say she doesn’t suppose she’ll ever get to go back and live on the ranch, she’ll have to live in Salt Lake if she wants a job. No music down there, either, except playing for dances with the Robbers’ Roosters, and she had enough of that in high school. But she loves it down there. Maybe she can get down in June, her sister is getting married again, her first husband was killed in an accident in a coal mine in Helper. But that will be only a visit, a day or two. She’ll have to get a job this summer. She has another year before she gets her teaching certificate.
He hears it with his mother’s ears, noting what she will have noted. One more year in school. Probably safe until she’s finished college. By then he’ll be twenty-one, at least, and will have saved more. With both of them through college and working, it might be all right.
That is something he knows she wants to believe. She does not like her own caution, learned from failures of too many kinds. She can’t help loving what he loves, and wants him to have it.
He puts the glasses and the plate on a tray and hoists the tray on his palm and goes on in with it balanced above his shoulder. Satisfying screams tell him to be careful. Expertly he rotates it down and sets it on the bed table, shoving aside the clock and medicine bottles that he should have cleared away in advance. His mother grabs and rescues a bottle about to topple onto the floor. Then, as he straightens up, light cuts under the drawn shades and moves across the wall. Bruce and his mother look at one another. A car is idling right below the windows. While they listen, its door shuts solidly. In a moment the garage doors creak open.
“Why, that’s your dad!” she says. “He must have driven straight through.”
The pleasure goes out of the room. Quietly she says to him, “Maybe you’d better go let him in, he may not have his key.”
Of course he has his key. What she means is that Bruce should warn him there is someone here, so that he won’t come in carrying something or saying something that shouldn’t be seen or heard outside the family.
He goes back to the kitchen, angry that his father has interrupted their happy little party. They should have checked on his mother and gone away again while the going was good. He switches on the stair lights and opens the door, and his father is already there with his key in his hand, in shirt sleeves, his eyes bloodshot, a two-day grizzle of beard on his jaws, his hands and arms greasy from working on the car. He stares at Bruce in his monkey suit.
“What’s this?”
Bruce raises his finger halfway to his lips. “Somebody’s here.”
His father steps inside. “This time of night? Who?”
“My date. We came back from the prom to see how Mom was doing.”
The bloodshot eyes are on him hard. “Why, is she worse?”
“No, she’s all right.”
Grunting, his father reaches a glass from the cupboard and draws himself a glass of water. He watches Bruce as he drinks, and when he has gulped the glass empty he wipes the back of his dirty hand across his lips. “What were you doing at a prom, anyway? You should have been home here looking after her.”
The retort jumps to Bruce’s tongue: Why weren’t you here looking after her? But he keeps it in; he falls back on the watchful, obscurely sullen silence that has been his response for years. He thinks his father hears it, unsaid as it is.
His father’s eyes travel down Bruce’s black-and-white length. He is the kind of person for whom a tuxedo is automatically sissy or comic. Outlaw or not, within the limits of his experience and comprehension he is incredibly conservative. He accepts only what he knows. When he sees Bruce duded up in riding breeches and English boots he can’t keep from chirping with his lips and slapping his leg and saying, “Giddap,” laughing and looking for corroboration at whoever else is there. Now he just looks.
“Your girl’s in there, you say?”
“Yes.”
He works his cheeks as if they were cold. Briefly he leans to bare his teeth at himself in the mirror beside the kitchen door. He examines his greasy hands, and for a moment Bruce hopes he is going to go and wash, so that he and Nola can get away before he comes out of the bathroom. Instead, his father shrugs and pushes out into the dining room. Bruce comes along behind, apprehensive and ready to be ashamed.
His father’s entrance is disconcertingly like Bruce’s own of a few minutes before. He stands hidden outside the door, and intones, sepulchral and singsong,
Then I sees within the doorway of a shy, retirin’ dugout
Six Boches, all a-grinnin’, and their Cap’n stuck ’is mug out.
On the last words, wearing a rubber-lipped grin, he sticks his head around the jamb.
He has not yet made any sign that he knows Nola is there. Bruce watches him go in and bend over and kiss the woman in the bed—and that is surely showing off, that most certainly reflects his awareness of an audience. Except when he is showing off or clowning, he makes no such standard gestures of affection.
Bruce’s mother’s voice, fluty and high, is as false as his kiss. “I didn’t expect you so soon. How was the trip?” Then, before he can answer, “This is Nola Gordon, Bo. These nice children left their dance to come out and see me.”
Now finally he turns toward Nola. Bruce can’t see her, but he can see the jolt she gives h
im. He has probably visualized Bruce’s date as some flat-chested flapper with her hemline above her knees and her waistline around her hip bones, her hair cut like a boy’s, her jaws going on a wad of gum—the whole John Held picture. He has not expected someone like this.
At once something humorous and alert comes into his dark face, his lips remain quirked into a half smile after he has said hello. Nola’s low voice murmurs something. Bruce knows exactly how she is looking at his father, her eyes curious and interested, seeming to waver but actually steady, only the light in them changing. He can’t stay out of it. He pushes in, crowding the little room with one person too many.
At once he feels compared and judged. Beside his father’s size and weight and shirt-sleeve dishevelment he feels like the overdressed figure on a wedding cake. Though he is as tall as his father, he weighs fifty pounds less. He is not bearded, dirty, heavy-shouldered, smelling of physical exertion. The old helpless feeling of inferiority oppresses him. He is angry that he has brought Nola here and tried to mix the unmixable oil and water of his life.
In his mother’s watching eyes there is an expression he cannot read. Understanding? Sympathy? Pity? Warning? In a too casual voice she says, “You’re all greasy. Did you have a flat tire or something?”
It is a cue his father has been waiting for. A short laugh erupts from his throat, he spreads his hands and looks at them, he regards Nola with an indescribable waiting slyness in his face. Bruce reads him—oh, he reads him! He has a tale to unfold. He is going to shine.
“Nothing so serious as a flat tire,” he says. “I tipped over.”
Bruce’s mother sits straight up. “Tipped over!”
“Ass over teacup,” he says cheerfully—and is there a deliberateness in the profanity, a calculated nudge? Bruce wishes Nola had kept her coolie coat on. Her shoulders are too naked for this room and this company. His father rolls his hands as if winding yarn. “Down the bank, clear over, and up on her wheels in the ditch.”