A Shroud for Aquarius (10 page)

“She turned you down.”

That pudgy face turned into a scowl; it was like seeing a Cabbage Patch doll get pissed. “She didn’t just turn me down. She laughed at me. Said I was… pathetic.”

I knew how he felt; she’d called me that once.

“We fought.”

“Fought?”

“Don’t make anything out of it, Mallory. We had an argument. Words. Like we been having since I was six and she was four, okay? We
never
got along.”

“Then why’d you ask her for money?”

He looked shocked. “Hell—family’s family, isn’t it? Blood’s thicker than water.”

Ginnie’s was; I’d seen some of it at her farmhouse last night.

His cigarette was down to the butt; he tossed it at the street, trailing orange sparks. Another car with boys and heavy-metal music rolled by.

“If you were such a great friend of hers,” he said, dripping sarcasm, “where were you when our father died?”

That had been last October; I’d been at a convention.

“I was out of town,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt anyway.

“Did you come around and see Mom? Did you go see Ginnie?”

“I sent your mother a card,” I said. “And I called Ginnie. If it’s any of your business.”

“You don’t like it so much when somebody asks
you
questions,” he said, and waddled inside.

I sat on the steps of the funeral home.

Ginnie’s father.

Jack Mullens. What a great, great guy. Took me fishing once when I was thirteen; let me, a junior-high kid, sit in and play poker with him and his friends, more than once; made me feel like an adult. I could see his blue eyes, under the shock of red hair, in a face full of faded freckles, smiling, the butt of a cigar clenched in his teeth as he studied a hand of poker like it was his private joke on the rest of us. It usually was.

Ginnie and her old man were close, very close; she disdained her mother as an unimaginative housewife, tied to her home and her son and her bottle. A symbol of everything the new liberated female wanted not to be. But Dad, wheeler-dealer Dad, hustler Dad, a born salesman, most of his life spent on the road, he was a guy who knew how to live life to the fullest. He’d died in a head-on collision with a livestock truck; he’d only been going 55, the cops said. That was his age, as well.

I went in and said goodnight to Mrs. Mullens, gave her a kiss on the cheek, smelling “medicine” on her breath, and nodded to her lump of a son. I paused at the casket, the closed casket, but somehow couldn’t imagine Ginnie in it.

Then I went home and tried to write, tried to get the new novel going, and couldn’t.

I lay in bed thinking about the last time I saw Ginnie, thinking about my class reunion.

The class reunion had been held at the local Elks Club, a massive two-story brick building facing Mississippi Drive, overlooking Riverview Park, which overlooked a Mississippi River view, as chance would have it. It was a cool June evening, and under a full moon the river looked gray and was stippled with gentle waves; I felt strangely detached. Somewhere between an out-of-body experience, and watching a rerun of a TV show you hadn’t much cared for the first time around. I was alone. Most of the people getting out of the cars filling the Elks parking lot were paired off. I wasn’t half of a married couple, however; I was a complete single male. Technically complete, anyway.

I felt a little awkward about the whole thing. I’d purposely missed the ten-year reunion, having just had a rather nasty experience with an old girl friend from my high school days. Actually, she went back to my junior high days, but had haunted me through high school as well. Then, ten years later, she and her larcenous husband reentered my life, and, well—that’s another story.

Anyway, on the off chance that Debbie Lee would be at the ten-year reunion, I’d made sure I was out of town that weekend; later I learned that she hadn’t attended (probably ducking me just as I was ducking her) but that a number of my old buddies had made a trip back to Port City, some of whom I hadn’t seen
since graduation. I was sick about missing them, and pledged (to myself, and a few people who checked up on me later to see why I’d stayed away) to attend the fifteenth reunion.

And, so, now I was here. There was to be a dinner, a banquet, so I’d worn a navy sports coat and gray slacks and white shirt, and a skinny red tie I’d had for years, but which was passing these days for “new wave.” Even so, I was a little underdressed. It was like a latter-day prom—guys in suits, their “ladies” in gowns, or damn near. There were, of course, a few exceptions; Ginnie, among them, in her layered earth tones and funky jewelry, the late sixties meets Annie Hall in a health food co-op. Her red hair was a mid-sixties shag, and she wore almost no makeup, just freckles and a face that I suddenly realized for the first time in my life was very beautiful. Before this, I’d always looked at it and had just seen Ginnie; now I realized she was a stunning girl. Woman. She hadn’t been a girl for a long time, really—not since I was a boy.

“Looks like you’re another single-o,” she said, finding me in the mob in the wide Elks hallway, slipping her arm in mine. “Let’s pair up.”

“Why not?” I said, and pecked her on the cheek.

A hundred or so “kids” thirty-three to thirty-five, most of them my former classmates, were waiting to go into the dining room. The walls herding us in were papered in a garish red with brocade fleurs-de-lis; in big fancy gold-filigreed mirrors, we looked back at ourselves and saw how old we were; subdued electric lighting hiding in elaborate glass chandeliers attempted to work a soft-focus magic on us. But it wouldn’t take: we just weren’t eighteen anymore. We weren’t even twenty-five anymore. Nobody thirty-three to thirty-five likes to think it, but we were middle-aged.

“Shit,” Ginnie said.

“You’re that glad to see me?” I asked.

We were still arm in arm.

She said, “I was just thinking how old we’re all looking.”

“You look about thirteen.”

“It’s the freckles. You’d never know I was a thirtyish junkie.”

I looked close at her, trying not to seem to be, wondering if she was kidding.

She looked around her, a child taking in her surroundings. “Boy, I haven’t been in the Elks Club since the prom. They remodeled since then, didn’t they?”

“Appears so. Quite the decorating scheme.”

“Early Whorehouse,” she smirked, nodding toward the red brocade paper. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dolly Parton came down those stairs with her personality hanging out.”

We were in fact at that moment being herded slowly past a wide stairway on which some of our former classmates sat, uncomfortable in their suits and fancy dresses, looking like old kids, but chattering like young ones. The racket in the hallway was less than deafening, but just barely. Faces were overly animated, as current personalities faded and old, younger ones reemerged; the return of youthful personas made the age lines stand out even more.

“Wishing you’d stayed home, Mal?”

I found a smile. “No. I’m getting to see you, aren’t I? I don’t see Jim Hoffmann or Mike Bloom anywhere, do you?”

“No. I doubt they made it back. Hoff’s in Colorado, isn’t he? And Bloom’s in Council Bluffs or something? A lawyer?”

“Yeah. With a bank, I think. Ron Parker probably won’t be here; he’s still in the service, running an officer’s club in Hawaii.
Tough duty, huh? But I wonder if John Leuck’ll make it, and Wheaty, and the rest of the guys.”

“They were here at the ten-year,” she said. “All except Wheaty—rumor is, he became a circus clown. But that’s probably just a story.”

Somehow it surprised me she would attend the ten-year reunion—even though here she was at the fifteenth. “So you made the tenth?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “It was a great reunion. Just about everybody was there, except you.”

“I wish I’d gone.”

“And stayed home tonight.”

“Not at all. I’m sure I’ll see plenty of the guys.”

“Not to mention the gals.”

“You forget, Ginnie—I didn’t date much in high school.”

“Ah, yes—stuck on Debbie Lee. Will she be here tonight?”

I shrugged. “Probably not. She moved to Michigan or Wisconsin or someplace. I get those states mixed up.”

“Yeah,” Ginnie said, smirking again. “I get states with more than one syllable mixed up all the time, myself.”

I grinned at her. “You never change, do you?”

Her smirk turned to a smile; on reflection, I think it may have been a sad one.

“That’s not necessarily a compliment, Mal.”

“I meant it as such.”

“I know. At least you didn’t mean it meanly. But some patterns are tough to break out of, when you’ve been locked into ’em since you were a kid.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How’s the writing coming?”

“Changing the subject on me?”

“No—just wondering what a girl has to do to get a book dedicated to her. I was there when it all started, kiddo. I always believed in you, you know.”

I sensed she was apologizing again for her long-ago tactless putdown in the cafeteria, but I didn’t say as much. Not in so many words, at least.

I just said, “That’s nice to know. Thanks, Gin.”

“Don’t mention it.” She stood on her tiptoes; the crowd was slowly moving into the dining room. “Is that Brad Faulkner up ahead?”

I looked, but didn’t know why; I hardly knew Faulkner back in school, and wouldn’t recognize him today if he came up and introduced himself.

But I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I hear he’s divorced.”

I didn’t know he was married.

“No kidding,” I said.

She was still on her tiptoes, presumably looking toward Faulkner.

“Tell me something, Ginnie.”

“Anything, my sweet. Or anyway, damn near anything.”

“How’s life treating you these days? ETC.’s must be making you a bundle.”

Shrugging, she told me, briefly, about selling out to Caroline Westin.

“I thought you’d hang onto that place forever,” I said.

“Nothing lasts forever,” she said. She assumed a tough-guy, side-of-the-mouth expression. “‘Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.’”

“Willard Motley, 1947,” I said.

“Right!
Knock On Any Door
! Great book! You remembered that?”

“Ginnie, I gave you that book.”

Her smile melted. “That’s right,” she said, strangely sad. “How could I forget?”

“Ginnie, it’s no big deal. We both turned each other onto a lot of books.”

“He was black, did you know that?”

“Who?”

“Motley. Willard Motley.”

“Yeah, actually, I did know that. He usually wrote about white people, though.”

“It was the times,” she said. “He was better off passing for white, in his way. He could get his book read more widely, I guess. It’s better now, don’t you think?”

“How do you mean?”

“The world’s improved. Things have changed for the better, a little.”

“Maybe, a little.”

“It wasn’t all just talk.”

The crowd was moving faster now, toward our meal, and though I was following along like a good sheep, I wasn’t able to follow Ginnie’s line of thought.

“What are you getting at, Gin?”

“Just thinking about the sixties, those days. The things we marched for, and protested about; things really did change, we really did stop a war.”

“I suppose.”

We were jostled close together; her eyes looked wide and blue and empty and yet fathomless. Freckles or not, she looked suddenly old. I didn’t know she was the oldest person in the
room, that she had a month to live, when she said, “I’m dreamin’, aren’t I? It really isn’t much better. We didn’t really accomplish much, did we?”

“We’re just another generation, Ginnie. Like most generations, we thought we were special.”

“And weren’t?”

“Maybe we were. Maybe we weren’t. But I know one thing we most certainly were.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Kids.”

They alternated serving plates of rare roast beef with well-done, giving you the opportunity to barter with your neighbor; we sat in the huge dining room, passing plates around, children in coats and ties and fancy dresses, exchanging food as if in the high school cafeteria. (“Trade you my dessert for your roll.”) Like all children, we weren’t content with what we were given; we had to change things to our liking.

“You know, we did change things,” I said to Ginnie, who was sitting beside me, with whom I’d swapped my well-done beef for her rare (she wasn’t eating the beef anyway, as she was strictly veggie).

“What?” she said, through a mouthful of lettuce. I’d given her my salad for her cherry cobbler. She was busy eating and had already forgotten our “heavy” conversation out in the herd.

“We changed the world,” I said, “but not to make things better for the common man. Just for ourselves.”

That got her going.

“What about Vietnam?” she said. “It wasn’t rich kids dying over there, you know.”

“No, it was some middle-class kids and lots of poor kids. White and black alike.
Most
males of the ‘love’ generation
were at least
threatened
by that war, Ginnie. Guys my age were against the war because they were afraid of getting drafted. So they protested. A purely selfish move.”