The Maid's Version (13 page)

“I enlisted in forty-two—I can stand to hear whatever is true.”

“I’ll only say this much, buddy—the Jap officers had swords.”

“What’d he do? Tell me.”

“Asiatic bucked when they shoved him around,” the man said, and made a whooshing sound while drawing a hand across his neck.

If ever John Paul Dunahew cried twice as a man, the second time was that night. He received his discharge papers at Treasure Island and rode those singing wheels on twin rails back to West Table in early summer of 1948, but he never told Alma that her firstborn son had been taken prisoner and beheaded on a faraway beach where the soft air smelled of tropical flowers and coconuts dangled, or that he’d missed the Cherenkos far more than he had her.

J
oe Breen didn’t fish. Joe didn’t hunt. Joe didn’t play ball—baseball, football, basketball—he wouldn’t even give a try at any game that featured a ball. He didn’t do the things people expected an Ozark boy to like doing, and that was noticed, especially by other boys, some of them mean. Joe read his way through the books on the wall at the public library, spent hours drawing pictures on butcher’s paper or cardboard, some of them shocking for the shrewd revelations of personality he managed to make manifest in a sketched face. He wandered the rivers and creeks collecting stones, dolomites, quartz, the occasional geode, and shoved them all under the bed in his room where they scarred the hardwood floor, scars yet visible there. When a hog was slaughtered by Dad, he didn’t ask to hold the knife or blood bucket, had important homework to do elsewhere, and when Mom snatched a chicken head off in the yard and tossed it to the cat, he kept his eyes on a blade of grass and waved away floating pin feathers. He could keep his own company and amuse himself for long spells, an unusual specimen of boy sitting under the apple tree alone, ever alone, but quite content keeping company with a rock or butterfly, garden slug or anthill.

Then at the midpoint in senior year a way-tall, sway-necked goof of a brainy girl moved here from Wisconsin and was put into his history class, and Joe Breen had a beginner girlfriend before Friday. Nobody knows how it happened. She must’ve leaned his way and said something that started them up, because Joe was unlikely to start any conversations with anybody. His mother saw the couple holding hands on the square before she’d heard the girl’s name; Molly Steinkuhler. They took to mooning around town everywhere, love-stunned calves that couldn’t get enough of licking away on the skins of each other. It could be an uncomfortable romance to watch or hear up close. Very soon most folks accepted as fact that they would marry, though that assumed certainty hadn’t actually been mentioned (Joe was eager to attend the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in the fall, while Molly had been accepted into Lindenwood College) by either of the young lovers.

They were both so ill made for the social ramble that folks who cared felt nervous for them when they did go out to join the human parade, afraid one misfit or the other might spill a drink that stained a popular girl’s dress, or during a fast song, trip by accident someone given to sneered and eminently repeatable sarcasm, or that mean boys who’d arrived stag would come up with a rough prank and spring it on Joe in front of Molly, make him shrink to nothing in her eyes, and his own. But the misfit couple wanted to do what others do, go out on a beautiful Saturday night and dance in a crowd, and Joe and Molly did, they did dance, danced as long as the music lasted and still are said to be cutting a rug among friends whenever that Black Angel shimmies.

A
rthur Glencross wandered the many rooms of his house and felt dead to himself in each. He wept at windows in the more remote chambers when alone at first, and made excuses if caught by Corinne, Ethan, or Virginia, but within weeks stopped offering even halting, incomplete excuses for weeping while standing at windows so strangely, and in the following year on a night of wet black streets and fog that seemed to relay a message for him alone composed in weather, told his expectant and hovering wife: With all the splendid sinning that had gone on between them, it was somehow Ruby in her simplest and most open moments that took his heart and came to mind every hour of every day—those gone-now-forever respites spent spooned together and drowsing in a rented bed, his best parts at rest and touched to her rump, his fingers at her cleaving, the sun dipping to the west sending light through the blinds in bright slats that climbed the walls like a limber staircase. But when the door closed behind they again must not from this time until the next know each other by face or name if they crossed paths or anybody asked.

Corinne said only two large words in response: “I know.”

“She smelled good and different in a way that only she did.”

“I know what the girl smelled like.”

“She knew things.”

“I don’t doubt that she did.”

“She could tease me and have me like it. At the Arlington, one time, the races were rained out because a thunderstorm moved in to settle, and rain was coming down in sheets, rattling the windows, the afternoon gone black, and she became an imp the way she would, curled her hair around a finger, then wanted to dance the Charleston in that room without clothes on, and did, did dance that way, so funny, and … she modeled her new hat with a rained-on windowpane for a mirror, naked girl in a hat, standing so brazen at the window to the street seeing herself in the glass, and you know what she said over her shoulder? She said, ‘Arthur, it seems like if you really loved me it wouldn’t be raining today.’

“I said, ‘It’s not raining a drop in here.’

“ ‘Oh? Well, I love you, too.’

“And we … we just … Ruby made so many hours turn to magic, Corinne, gloriously hot-blooded magic and all kinds of slick … and pleasing … to touch, and those hours are when I felt altogether alive, the only times, ever … ever … and they are spun to … memories I can’t let go of and wouldn’t want to, either.”

“You can have all those memories, Arthur.” Corinne approached in the unlighted room and hugged him from behind, squeezed him at his middle, rested her face against his back. “But please stop weeping where the children can see.”

He gave himself to his work at the bank and welcomed the winged loneliness that darted into and out of his chest at any time of the day, in any setting, any company. His drifting at those moments came to be expected of him, one of his oddly winning traits, to disappear briefly in spirit from the table and return abruptly, speaking to the subject at hand. He put in long, long hours and gave himself little rest. Rumors about him and the Arbor Dance Hall had begun before the mass funeral and have never quite faded away and shouldn’t. Certain segments of the town found the rumors to be an enhancement, presenting Glencross as a man with some intriguing qualities, being given to wayward romance and possessing volcanic potential. It gradually became known through social contact that he had no burn scarring on his arms at all, but did appear to have a small round divot above his right elbow. Canoe trips, the country club dressing room, swimming pool parties, all venues served to discredit publicly at least one part of his claimed story. He showed no protective modesty on those half-clothed occasions, left his unburned skin on view to be noted and discussed by peers later over drinks.

Corinne said, “Do you want everyone in town to know?”

“That wouldn’t be prudent, would it?”

“Darling, put something on and ease my mind.”

“It’s too late for all that to matter.”

In 1932 he would spontaneously launch into a mumbled confession to the other three golfers from his Saturday foursome while standing in the club parking lot. He said it all in an unbroken streaming with his head lowered and gave himself no quarter. He spilled what he knew and shaved nary a detail from his own role. His audience stood between parked cars to listen—Judge MacDonald Swann, J. William Etchieson, and Harlan Hudkins. The men did not react as though they were hearing shocking or even unsuspected news, exactly. The Judge heard him out and said, “To allow a banker to be charged with anything at all in the climate of this Depression, Arthur, concerning that subject in particular, with hatred of bankers running so high generally, might very well result in no trial at all and an impromptu hanging. We need you where you are, Arthur, to protect our solvency. The town needs you to do that. The gone are gone.”

He walked daily from home to work to home. If others on his route wanted to speak, he paused and spoke pleasantly enough, otherwise he nodded to men when passing and touched his hand to the crown of his hat and mimed a doffing to women, and continued on his way. His hair turned a stately white and he came to appear rather impressive, well dressed and closely contained. The heartbreak evident in his face attracted women, quite a few, but he craved only one in the grave and loved one at home and that was enough, so he doffed when approached and flirted with, but kept walking. On arriving home he would every evening go directly to the study and pour a large scotch whisky into crystal and sit in the swivel chair at his desk as night came down or evening stretched.

One day stuck at his window inside the bank, staring absently at sunbeams and movement, he observed John Paul lugging newspapers around the square and those wings took flight between his bones and he stepped out of doors in pursuit. He caught the thirteen-year-old by the arm, startling him. “I want you to consider becoming my caddy.”

“I don’t play that game—I’ve never even seen it played.”

“You needn’t play—I play—you caddy. That’s how golf works, Dunahew.”

John Paul was on the bags twice a week after that and always overpaid for his efforts, overtipped, and deep down understood why he received such largesse, but the do-re-mi came in so very handy. Glencross knew what he was doing on the links, a fine golfer, tall and limber, long off the tees, good touch around the greens. He became very informal with John Paul, made shrewdly penetrating wisecracks about his golfing companions, a few of which John Paul employed in self-defense many years later at Hudkins. The two became easy with each other and John Paul enjoyed those outings more than he believed he ought to, but … Eventually the caddy began to whack a few balls along the way, and Glencross watched, then said, “You are innocent of instruction and swing freely. Learn the rules, but don’t listen to anybody who tells you to change that swing.”

When the Great Depression had begun to lift elsewhere, Citizens’ Bank surprisingly developed a rupture, a serious crisis, and Corinne and her worried parents quietly took a huge risk and loaned two hundred thousand dollars of family money, and Glencross sweated bullets day and night but did keep the bank going and once again solvent, and few depositors ever knew of the rupture. Nobody in town lost life savings entrusted to his care. Postwar politicians curried his favor and sought donations and in return he pushed them to open a modest extension of the state university in West Table, which was built and opened to freshmen and sophomores in 1961. Glencross never forgot that he’d had to leave the myriad pleasures of schooling before he was ready because of money, only money, and quickly created a scholarship program for locals of high merit but no financial resources, and eight students a year had their futures buffed and worlds expanded. When apprised of the need, he personally helped recruit doctors to the area, wined and dined and otherwise inveigled enough good docs that he soon pressed for a new hospital to be built, and thus the only sizable medical facility within a sixty-mile radius then and now came about.

At the hospital’s groundbreaking ceremony during August of 1963, only five months before a cerebral hemorrhage claimed him (his body fell on the square within a few paces of the spot on which his statue stands), he said to a reporter from the
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, “This town might grow now beyond even my own dreams for it.”

In spring of 1953, John Paul had been broke, between jobs, without prospects, and his second son was newly born (born with pneumonia and something else more difficult to diagnose, and Dad was for many years knotted with deep worry that it would prove to be a repeat of the nightmare Sidney knew) while he lived miserably at Hudkins and his marriage frayed. He went for marathon walks alone to burn off excess energy and accumulating hostility, walking at high speed with his hands in his pockets and his eyes looking down, and on one such walk a black Cadillac shadowed him up Jefferson Avenue late on an inanimate Sunday afternoon, crept alongside, crept and crept until John Paul turned to face the windshield, his expression sullenly asking the question, What the sam-hell do you want? Glencross lowered the driver’s-side window, and said, “Dunahew, I’ve got something for you. Something I’ve owed you for a long time—I forgot to give you an adequate tip on a soggy day in 1938, I believe it was. With accrued interest and substantial penalties I must absorb because of my thoughtlessness, it comes to this amount—come over here.”

He handed John Paul a wad of greenbacks that appeared to have been grabbed blindly out of a bag, an unordered nest of crinkled bills that when straightened were tallied at more than seven hundred dollars.

“I can’t take this, Arthur.”

“Hogwash.”

“It’s too much.”

“No, no, you earned it—I beg you to let me pay my debts and feel freed of them.”

A memory that had come to mind so often and that he mentioned many times to Corinne during dwindling, melancholy hours, was about how close he’d come to being murdered for love, actually murdered for love—that when James Dunahew stabbed him, he recognized how deeply bound together he’d become with this family from a shack, as James wore a shirt he knew, he was being stabbed to death for reasons rooted in love by someone wearing his own old shirt, a shirt he’d given Buster, who he’d failed so, and as the boy sat atop him and the blade went in again, their two breaths were joined as a cloud in the cold air between them and hung there, just hung there, a cloud.

I
t just started coming. The story poured from her in dollops and cascades and drips of known details, vintage innuendo and flat-out guesses. She gave her summation of the tragedy while lying in bed, sick at the stomach (too many ears of sweet corn), with pillows stacked behind to prop her at a reclined angle, long hair unbraided and released to drape onto the hardwood floor with the surplus spread there as pooling below a waterfall. She told me to fetch a glass of water and mix in a teaspoon of baking soda. The sun was still up but diving so that stripes of light glamorized the ceiling and made a loamy glowing there. It was Friday and I’d be going home on Sunday and she had more to tell, more for me to know, more to remember. She drank the water, waited for a good burp to erupt and be relished, beat the pillows into shape, sat a little taller and tied it all together for me.