12.
They never used the lamp until it got almost too dark to see. Saving on the electricity bill, I suppose. Besides, Lee was a workingman. He went to bed early, and she went when he did. The first time I checked the tape, what I had was mostly Russian-and draggy Russian at that, given the super-slow speed of the recorder. If Marina tried out her English vocabulary, Lee would reprimand her. Nevertheless, he sometimes spoke to June in English if the baby was fussy, always in low, soothing tones. Sometimes he even sang to her. The super-slow recordings made him sound like an orc trying its hand at "Rockabye, Baby."
Twice I heard him hit Marina, and the second time, Russian wasn"t good enough to express his rage. "You worthless, nagging c.u.n.t! I guess maybe my ma was right about you!" This was followed by the slam of a door, and the sound of Marina crying. It cut out abruptly as she turned off the lamp.
On the evening of September fourth, I saw a kid, thirteen or so, come to the Oswalds" door with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Lee, barefoot and dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans, opened up. They spoke. Lee invited him inside. They spoke some more. At one point Lee picked up a book and showed it to the kid, who looked at it dubiously. There was no chance of using the directional mike, because the weather had turned cool and the windows over there were shut. But the Leaning Lamp of Pisa was on, and when I retrieved the second tape late the following night, I was treated to an amusing conversation. By the third time I played it, I hardly heard the slow drag of the voices.
The kid was selling subscriptions to a newspaper-or maybe it was a magazine-called Grit. He informed the Oswalds that it had all sorts of interesting stuff the New York papers couldn"t be bothered with (he labeled this "country news"), plus sports and gardening tips. It also had what he called "fiction stories" and comic strips. "You won"t get Dixie Dugan in the Times Herald," he informed them. "My mama loves Dixie."
"Well son, that"s fine," Lee said. "You"re quite the little businessman, aren"t you?"
"Uh . . . yessir?"
"Tell me how much you make."
"I don"t get but four cents on every dime, but that ain"t the big thing, sir. Mostly what I like is the prizes. They"re way better than the ones you get selling Cloverine Salve. Nuts to that! I goan get me a .22! My dad said I could have it."
"Son, do you know you"re being exploited?"
"Huh?"
"They take the dimes. You get pennies and the promise of a rifle."
"Lee, he nice boy," Marina said. "Be nice. Leave alone."
Lee ignored her. "You need to know what"s in this book, son. Can you read what"s on the front?"
"Oh, yessir. It says The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s, by Fried-rik . . . Ing-gulls?"
"Engels. It"s all about what happens to boys who think they"re going to wind up millionaires by selling stuff door-to-door."
"I don"t want to be no millionaire," the boy objected. "I just want a .22 so I can plink rats at the dump like my friend Hank."
"You make pennies selling their newspapers; they make dollars selling your sweat, and the sweat of a million boys like you. The free market isn"t free. You need to educate yourself, son. I did, and I started when I was just your age."
Lee gave the Grit newsboy a ten-minute lecture on the evils of capitalism, complete with choice quotes from Karl Marx. The boy listened patiently, then asked: "So you goan buy a sup-scription?"
"Son, have you listened to a single word I"ve said?"
"Yessir!"
"Then you should know that this system has stolen from me just as it"s stealing from you and your family."
"You broke? Why didn"t you say so?"
"What I"ve been trying to do is explain to you why I"m broke."
"Well, gol-lee! I could"ve tried three more houses, but now I have to go home because it"s almost my curfew!"
"Good luck," Marina said.
The front door squalled open on its old hinges, then rattled shut (it was too tired to thump). There was a long silence. Then Lee said, in a flat voice: "You see. That"s what we"re up against."
Not long after, the lamp went out.
13.
My new phone stayed mostly silent. Deke called once-one of those quick howya doin duty-calls-but that was all. I told myself I couldn"t expect more. School was back in, and the first few weeks were always harum-scarum. Deke was busy because Miz Ellie had unretired him. He told me that, after some grumbling, he had allowed her to put his name on the subst.i.tute list. Ellie wasn"t calling because she had five thousand things to do and probably five hundred little brushfires to put out.
I realized only after Deke hung up that he hadn"t mentioned Sadie . . . and two nights after Lee"s lecture to the newsboy, I decided I had to talk to her. I had to hear her voice, even if all she had to say was Please don"t call me, George, it"s over.
As I reached for the phone, it rang. I picked it up and said-with complete certainty: "h.e.l.lo, Sadie. h.e.l.lo, honey."
14.
There was a moment of silence long enough for me to think I had been wrong after all, that someone was going to say I"m not Sadie, I"m just some putz who dialed a wrong number. Then she said: "How did you know it was me?"
I almost said harmonics, and she might have understood that. But might wasn"t good enough. This was an important call, and I didn"t want to screw it up. Desperately didn"t want to screw it up. Through most of what followed there were two of me on the phone, George who was speaking out loud and Jake on the inside, saying all the things George couldn"t. Maybe there are always two on each end of the conversation when good love hangs in the balance.
"Because I"ve been thinking about you all day," I said. (I"ve been thinking of you all summer.) "How are you?"
"I"m fine." (I"m lonely.) "How about you? How was your summer? Did you get it done?" (Have you cut your legal ties to your weird husband?) "Yes," she said. "Done deal. Isn"t that one of the things you say, George? Done deal?"
"I guess so. How"s school? How"s the library?"
"George? Are we going to talk like this, or are we going to talk?"
"All right." I sat down on my lumpy secondhand couch. "Let"s talk. Are you okay?"
"Yes, but I"m unhappy. And I"m very confused." She hesitated, then said: "I was working at Harrah"s, you probably know that. As a c.o.c.ktail waitress. And I met somebody."
"Oh?" (Oh, s.h.i.t.) "Yes. A very nice man. Charming. A gentleman. Just shy of forty. His name is Roger Beaton. He"s an aide to the Republican senator from California, Tom Kuchel. He"s the minority whip in the Senate, you know. Kuchel, I mean, not Roger." She laughed, but not the way you do when something"s funny.
"Should I be glad you met someone nice?"
"I don"t know, George . . . are you glad?"
"No." (I want to kill him.) "Roger is handsome," she said in a flat just-the-facts voice. "He"s pleasant. He went to Yale. He knows how to show a girl a good time. And he"s tall."
The second me would no longer keep silent. "I want to kill him."
That made her laugh, and the sound of it was a relief. "I"m not telling you this to hurt you, or make you feel bad."
"Really? Then why are you telling me?"
"We went out three or four times. He kissed me . . . we made out a little . . . just necking, like kids. . . ."
(I not only want to kill him, I want to do it slowly.) "But it wasn"t the same. Maybe it could be, in time; maybe not. He gave me his number in Washington, and told me to call him if I . . . how did he put it? "If you get tired of shelving books and carrying a torch for the one that got away." I think that was the gist of it. He says he"s going places, and that he needs a good woman to go with him. He thought I might be that woman. Of course, men say stuff like that. I"m not as naive as I once was. But sometimes they mean it."
"Sadie . . ."
"Still, it wasn"t quite the same." She sounded thoughtful, absent, and for the first time I wondered if something other than doubt about her personal life might be wrong with her. If she might be sick. "On the plus side, there was no broom in evidence. Of course, sometimes men hide the broom, don"t they? Johnny did. You did, too, George."
"Sadie?"
"Yes?"
"Are you hiding a broom?"
There was a long moment of silence. Much longer than the one when I had answered the phone with her name, and much longer than I expected. At last she said, "I don"t know what you mean."
"You don"t sound like yourself, that"s all."
"I told you, I"m very confused. And I"m sad. Because you"re still not ready to tell me the truth, are you?"
"If I could, I would."
"You know something interesting? You have good friends in Jodie-not just me-and none of them know where you live."
"Sadie-"
"You say it"s Dallas, but you"re on the Elmhurst exchange, and Elmhurst is Fort Worth."
I"d never thought of that. What else hadn"t I thought of?
"Sadie, all I can tell you is that what I"m doing is very impor-"
"Oh, I"m sure it is. And what Senator Kuchel"s doing is very important, too. Roger was at pains to tell me that, and to tell me that if I . . . I joined him in Washington, I would be more or less sitting at the feet of greatnesss . . . or in the doorway to history . . . or something like that. Power excites him. It was one of the few things it was hard to like about him. What I thought-what I still think-is, who am I to sit at the feet of greatness? I"m just a divorced librarian."
"Who am I to stand in the doorway to history?" I said.
"What? What did you say, George?"
"Nothing, hon."
"Maybe you better not call me that."
"Sorry." (I"m not.) "What exactly are we talking about?"
"You and me and whether or not that still makes an us. It would help if you could tell me why you"re in Texas. Because I know you didn"t come to write a book or teach school."
"Telling you could be dangerous."
"We"re all in danger," she said. "Johnny"s right about that. Will I tell you something Roger told me?"
"All right." (Where did he tell you, Sadie? And were the two of you vertical or horizontal when the conversation took place?) "He"d had a drink or two, and he got gossipy. We were in his hotel room, but don"t worry-I kept my feet on the floor and all my clothes on."
"I wasn"t worrying."
"If you weren"t, I"m disappointed in you."
"All right, I was worried. What did he say?"
"He said there"s a rumor that there"s going to be some sort of major deal in the Caribbean this fall or winter. A flashpoint, he called it. I"m a.s.suming he meant Cuba. He said, "That idiot JFK is going to put us all in the soup just to show he"s got b.a.l.l.s.""
I remembered all the end-of-the-world c.r.a.p her former husband had poured into her ears. Anyone who reads the paper can see it coming, he"d told her. We"ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. Stuff like that leaves an impression, especially when spoken in tones of dry scientific certainty. Leaves an impression? A scar, more like it.
"Sadie, that"s c.r.a.p."
"Oh?" She sounded nettled. "I suppose you have the inside scoop and Senator Kuchel doesn"t?"
"Let"s say I do."
"Let"s not. I"ll wait for you to come clean a little longer, but not much. Maybe just because you"re a good dancer."
"Then let"s go dancing!" I said a little wildly.
"Goodnight, George."
And before I could say anything else, she hung up.
15.