Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism Read online

  The parade rounded a corner where a Buddha of a man sat surrounded by devotees. An aluminum chair was folded into his fat like spit into chewing gum. It was Lefty Reisenbach, the only major leaguer Hayesville has ever produced. I had seen him play shortstop for the playground team, slim as a knife, and as flashing. Then, on rudimentary Fifties television, as a blur of gray sparks, cocking his bat, squinting toward third base for the sign. Now he was back home and bloated on fifteen years’ worth of local beer. Old ballplayers are like ruined temples: their gifts have blown through them and left not a trace, just a hollow inscrutable pomp.

  The secretary of my high-school class broke from the crowd and ran along beside us. She had been lithe and wasp-waisted, a cheerleader and a wing on our undefeated girls’ hockey team. Her weight had doubled since then, but she still moved athletically, matching the limousine’s pace with easy strides. Her chest, her bouffant hairdo, the upper parts of her arms all bounced. “Bobby!” she called. “Are you married?”

  The sirens, and a marching band from the coal regions hitting hard on “The Marine Hymn,” made it difficult to hear. “We’re divorced!” I shouted.

  “I know that,” she called impatiently, beginning to be winded. “It was in People! Have you married again?”

  “No,” I called back, as the limousine jerkily accelerated. “I’m living with a woman! Everybody’s doing it!”

  “Not around here … they’re not,” she responded faintly, curling up and falling away like an autumnal leaf. There was something amiss, some secret, as always in Hayesville, I was not privy to. The day, which had mustered itself under one of those white hazed skies that represent sunshine in these humid parts, was clouding; large ragged scraps of cloud, with plum-colored centers, had gathered above the dark green crowns of the Norway maples that line the borough’s straight streets. The horse-chestnut trees—the guardians of my childhood with their candles of bloom, splayed fingerlike leaves, and glossy, inedible, collectible nuts—had been mostly cut down.

  The parade ended way over on Buttonwood Avenue, where the sycamores form an allée and the trolley tracks used to head out of town. The parade did not disperse but had become a vast collapsed mob. Jostling tubas and glockenspiels uttered random notes and leggy twirlers in their white boots and braid-encrusted jackets giggled in anticipation of what came next. What did come next? The four aldermen had gathered, making a single black sloping mass, Gus Horst foremost and leaning dolefully forward. Behind them rose a temporary structure of raw new pine—a platform for speeches, I guessed at a glance. With a shudder of its gummy carburetor, our limousine at last stopped. When I opened the door and tried to step from it into freedom, Scabs’s steel-hard, bullying hands seized my arms. Several of Hayesville’s sleepy-eyed young policemen moved in to back him up.

  A certain reverential hush overtook the crowd as it parted for us. Drawing nearer, near enough to smell the resinous fresh lumber, I saw the structure to be a gallows. Of course. It was for me. It was what I deserved. Terror thickened in my throat and then vanished. By ever leaving Hayesville, I had as good as died anyway.

  1976

  FIRST WIVES AND TROLLEY CARS

  WILLIAM FARNHAM, though as tough and flip as most denizens of this eighty-two-percent-depleted century, was sentimental about first wives and trolley cars. A trolley line had been threaded down the center of the main street of Wenrich’s Corner, his home town, leading one way to the minor-league metropolis of Alton and in the other direction to a town so small and rural that its mere name, Smokeville, was enough to make the boy Farnham and his flip pals laugh. Yet it was the ride toward Smokeville that lingered sentimentally in his memory.

  For several years he delivered free movie-circulars for the Wenrich’s Corner Movie Theatre, walking up and down the rectilinear maple-shaded streets on Saturday mornings, darting up cement walks and tossing the leaflets onto porches as if playing Halloween pranks in broad daylight. The leaflets announced the week’s coming attractions and were distributed not just throughout Wenrich’s Corner but in the neighboring towns as well. Some Saturdays, Farnham was assigned Smokeville and given the two dimes’ trolley fare there and back by the tall bald man, the town’s only Jew, who owned the movie theatre. The shows changed three times a week, with B-movie double features on Mondays and Tuesdays, free dishes to the ladies on Thursday nights, and free Hershey bars to children after the Saturday matinée. All Hollywood’s produce poured through that little theatre, with its slanted cement floors and its comforting smells of steam heat and bubble gum. There were some minimal wall decorations in what Farnham thought of as Egyptian style but he now knew to have been Art Deco, reduced at this remote provincial level to a few angular stripes of beige and silver paint.

  Farnham was eleven, twelve. He believed in the movies, and in the Sunday-night radio shows broadcast from Hollywood, where Jack Benny would drop by at Ronald Colman’s house to borrow a cup of sugar, just like neighbors in Wenrich’s Corner. The boy Farnham’s simple joy in the Jack Benny program was only slightly troubled by certain paradoxes. If Benny and Mary Livingstone were married, as the newspapers all said, why didn’t they live together and why was her last name different? And why, when Dennis Day sang his song, was it always to show Jack and Rochester what it would sound like when he did it really on the Sunday-night show, which they all admitted existed but which never, on the air, arrived, except in the form of rehearsal? These were mysteries, like what girls were thinking and why all heroes in comic books wore capes.

  The movies as well as trolley cars and comic books cost a dime, if you were twelve or under. When admission went up by a penny tax for the war effort, this tiny increase drove Farnham, whose weekly allowance was thirty-five cents, to deliver circulars in exchange for a week’s free pass. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a nickel for the Sunday-school collection. He often went to the movies three times a week, walking, unaccompanied by a parent, in these far-off days before television and R ratings, when Hollywood’s fantasies were as safe as the family living room.

  On the way to Smokeville, the tracks rounded the eponymous but no longer central corner—the town had grown east, toward Alton. Wenrich’s Inn had stood here until Prohibition. Throughout Farnham’s boyhood, the building, stuccoed sandstone with a long second-story porch rimmed in peeling jigsaw carpentry, had been dismally boarded up; after the war, it opened as a camera store at one entrance and a bakery at the other, with two dentists and a chiropractor upstairs. On his last sentimental visit to the town, Farnham, an art historian who had found tenure in southern California, saw that the inn had been re-established as an eating place, with exposed beams and fancy prices. The streetcars had negotiated this corner with much plaintive friction of metal on metal and sometimes a shower of sparks that indicated the trolley had lost its electrical connection overhead. The motorman, generally a rude and overweight Pennsylvania Dutchman, would shove off from his high metal stool, let himself out of the clattery folding doors, step on a step that flopped magically into place, and run to the rear of the stalled car, where with a single angry thump he would set things right. The motor resumed its throb, that incessant mechanical pulsing as of a heart trapped beneath the long, dirt-blackened floorboards.

  Past the corner, the tracks, which had hogged the center of Alton Avenue all through town, now moved to one side, so the trolley car skimmed and swayed along in the shade of old buttonwood trees, on the edge of front yards where men in suspenders were trimming their hedges and fat women in cotton dresses were bending to their flowerbeds. The last brick rows of Wenrich’s Corner were left behind, and a ragged area of open fields and scattered stone farmhouses was traversed, with relatively few stops. The tracks seemed to give the car a livelier ride; the shiny straw seats and the stiff porcelain hand-loops glittered in the shuttling, slanting sunlight, and the air that rushed in through the window grates of crimped black wire had the smell of moist hay. Farnham was always thrilled by a spot where the trolley car, on Smokeville’s outskirts, leaned
into a long curve and deftly rattled across a spindly wooden trestle bridge at a sudden scary height above a stagnant brook; from its glaring black surface a few white ducks would thrash up in alarm. These ducks would resettle while still in sight, making concentric circles on the water. The wire grate was always dirty, and dust came off in squares on Farnham’s face as he pressed to see.

  An isolated row of asbestos-shingled houses, gaunter and meaner somehow than those in Wenrich’s Corner, would fling into view, and then a long brick building that people said was a hat factory, and more drab houses, while the irritable conductor moved along the aisle slamming seat backs into the other position. Smokeville was the end of the line, where the cars reversed direction. Farnham and his partner would hoist up their packets of circulars and step into the town; the boys were sent out in pairs because two could work both sides of a street and one could watch that the other didn’t dump his leaflets down the sewer. This had happened more than once, it was said, though Farnham could scarcely believe such evil existed in the world. Smokeville was considered undesirable duty by the movie-circular boys, because of its steep streets and the long cement stairs up to the porches. Yet often, Farnham remembered, he and his companion, when their circulars were at last all gone, would agree to buy candy bars with their trolley dimes and in the resilience of youth walk the three miles back, along the tracks. Milk-white water trickled in the ditches near the hat factory, and the gaps between the ties of the rickety trestle were giddying if you looked down at the white ducks hiding in the reeds.

  Three miles the other way from Wenrich’s Corner, along an avenue whose general slope was downward as it passed between tall tight rows of houses with octagonal cupolas roofed in slates like fish scales, lay Alton, where Farnham’s father worked and his mother shopped. When Farnham reached high-school age, in that era before the century was even half depleted, he and his pals would take the trolley to town just for the nightlife—for the bowling alleys and the packs of strange girls roaming the wide pavements and the big first-run movie theatres, with names like Majestic and Orpheum, where the same show played for weeks at a time and plush curtains lifted in thick crimson festoons to reveal the lightstruck screen. The trolley cars had run all through the war and it seemed they must last forever. But while Farnham was at college they were phased out and replaced by belching, dark-windowed buses, and by the time he was married and living far away, even the old tracks were torn up and buried, buried everywhere but at Wenrich’s Corner itself, where a few yards of track glinted through the asphalt like the spine of a dinosaur drowned in tar, or like a silver version of those curved lines whereby cartoonists indicate swift motion, with a word like “Zip!” or “Zoom!”

  Farnham in his middle age was susceptible to images of trolley cars in old photographs of city streets. To think that Manhattan, and Bangor, and Kansas City were all once webbed with their inflexible, glinting paths! He was moved by glimpses of them in fiction, such as Augie March’s recalling “those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont” or, in Ulysses, the onomatopoetic sentence “Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel” or Bellow’s description, in “The Silver Dish,” of “an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer” as it heroically battered north against a blizzard on the Western Avenue line. Glimpses of first wives, in fiction, moved him also: often discarded before the author found his full voice, they figure as shadows in those first, awkwardly tactful and conventional novels; as marginal obstacles to the narrator’s slowly unfolding, obscurely magnificent quest; as tremulous rainbows cast by the prism of his ego, bound at a cloud’s passing to pale and wink out. Yet they return, vividly. In John Barth’s Sabbatical, the first wife returns in malevolent triumph as a CIA operative and withers with a few stern words the ingenious hero’s eager foliage of invention and lovableness. And Hemingway’s Hadley, seen so wispily in those early short stories, returns in A Moveable Feast to dominate his dying imagination.

  In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. First wives grow in power and size, just as the children we have had by them do. They knew you when, and never let that knowledge go. Their very ability to survive the divorce makes them huge, as judges and public monuments are huge. Tall and silent, they turn at the head of the stairs, carrying a basket of first-family laundry, and their face is that of Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring, of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, of all the women who look at us over their shoulders in endless thoughtful farewell.

  They were so young. They were daughters. Captured from their still vigorous and menacing parents, carried off trailing ribands and torn threads of family connection, some clasped teddy bears and dance cards with all but the tangos filled in. Some still smelled faintly of their fathers’ shaving lotion. Their bodies were so fresh and smooth, it was hard to make a dent in them. Tomboyish, they stuck out their chins and kept their legs under them; later wives by comparison crumple like wastepaper, and bruise easy as peaches. Of course, a first husband is young too, and perhaps his wallop lacks substance. They looked at us level, our firm-bodied Eves, and demanded, “O.K., show me this apple.”

  A quality first wives bestow, of dismissability, turns out to be precious, as the aging world needs us more and more and lets our traces deepen, like initials carved in the expanding bark of a beech tree. We sat light on the world once; the keys to this lightness first wives have taken with them, along with the collected art books so thriftily budgeted for, the lithographs carefully selected at the gallery together, the objets nested in the excelsior of remembered lovemaking, the slide projector, the ground-glass screen that unfurled, the card table the projector sat upon, and the happy pink infants cradled in their Kodak Carousels. With a switchy swiftness, in bikinis daring at the time, with narrow tan hands and feet, they move as fledgling mothers through home movies taken at poolside or by the back lawn swings, movies we will never see again, movies they will show their second husbands, who will be polite but bored.

  The night of the day when Farnham’s first wife remarried, he had a vivid dream. She was crouched by a wall naked, and he, fully dressed, was trying to extend a measure of protection. There was, out in the center of the street or room, a crowd that her nakedness must confront and pass through, as through a sieve. Farnham was alive simultaneously to the erotic appeal of her nudity and to the social embarrassment of it. She was not quite naked; a thin gold ring glinted on the third finger of one hand. He conferred urgently with her, pouring down advice from above, from within the armor of his clothes, while still revolving within himself the puzzle of how to get her, so vulnerable and luminous, through that gathering. The problem being insoluble, he awoke, with an erection of metallic adamancy.

  Mournfully the palms outside his window rattled. Southern California was soaked in moonlight. The woman asleep beside him was pale and, like a ghost, transparent. Everything was black and white. Only his dream had been in color.

  In those far days before suburban shopping malls and inner-city decay, the more enterprising people of Wenrich’s Corner took the trolley car into Alton to shop, to be entertained, to seek refinement. Farnham’s mother enrolled him in a futile series of lessons there—piano, clarinet, and, worst of all, tap dancing. Such metropolitan skills were thought to be a possible way out of the region; the assumption was in the air, like the hazy high humidity, that one would want to get out. But instead of being taught how to fly in white tie and tails across a heavenly sound stage with an effortless clatter of taps, the child was set in a line with others and put through a paramilitary exercise whose refrain was “Shuffle one, shuffle two, kick, kick, kick.” His mother amused herself in the stores, rarely buying anything, during this hour of torture. When they were reunited, his noon reward and weekly treat was a sandwich—bacon, lettuce, and tomato, cut into quar
ters, with each triangular fourth held together by a tasselled toothpick—and a pistachio ice-cream soda in a drugstore with a green marble counter that seemed, with its many chrome faucets, the epitome of luxury. It was in such Forties drugstores, redolent of beauty aids, that Hollywood stars were discovered. Farnham was surprised to learn, years later, at about the same time that the trolley cars were replaced by buses, that this drugstore, Alton’s finest, had closed and been replaced by a gloomy outlet that sold name-brand clothes at factory prices.

  On the trolley ride home, the car clanged and bucked its way through the dense blocks of Alton’s south side and up over a big bridge whose concrete had the texture of burned coconut cookies. Tough local boys swaggered and hooted from the broad wall of this bridge; unlike Farnham, they would never get out. The ill-tempered motorman pounded the warning bell with the heel of his black shoe, and there was a smell of something, like oily rags burning, that Farnham years later was told must have been ozone. Cumbersomely the car halted and started, bunching auto traffic behind it, and swung its bulky long body into the double-track turnouts, where one car waited for another, coming in the opposite direction, to pass. The row houses with their turrets and fish-scale slates slid by, mixed with used-car lots and funeral parlors and florist’s greenhouses and depressing brick buildings that manufactured Farnham didn’t know what. He felt sorry for these factories; they looked empty and shabby and hopeless.