27
The New Day Dawns
The next morning, Uncle Sugar called up and Mother said to Daddy, her hand cupped over the phone, “Sugar’s upset. You talk to him.” Daddy was reading Beetle Bailey in the funny pages and still had L’il Iodine and Peanuts to go, while finishing his oatmeal and looking forward to his cup of Folger’s coffee. He said to tell Sugar to call back later. “Talk to him,” said Mother. “He’s on the verge of tears.” She put the phone up to Daddy’s ear and he took it as if it were a live bomb. To have a male relative weep in his ear was nothing Daddy cared to be part of. But he held the phone and heard the whole sad story. Sugar had been in the Chatterbox Café the night before and Mr. Berge walked up to him and said, “What’s this I hear about your daughter shacking up with the Guppy boy?” The news was all over town, evidently, if a slow leak like Berge had got wind of it. Daddy tried to pass the phone back to Mother, Sugar’s tinny voice sawing away inside, and she shook her head—this was Daddy’s family, his sister’s husband, and he could do some of the listening for a change—and then Sugar went to pieces and Aunt Ruth came on the phone, all distraught, asking Daddy about mortgaging their house to raise money to send Kate away to a Home for Wayward Girls in Indiana and Ruth was sobbing and then pausing to mop up the liquid, and Daddy stiffened as if he were on the electric chair. And then suddenly I can see why.
It is a dazzling writerly moment for yours truly.
I am—I hesitate to say this, my fellow countrymen, sensing your views on the matter, but let the truth be judiciously weighed and a fair verdict rendered—taking notes on paper napkins on my lap as Daddy listens to Sugar and Ruth. For breakfast, we use cheap brown napkins, not so soft as the deluxe we bring out for company, and the cheap ones make excellent notepaper, and I am jotting down key phrases of conversation with a ballpoint as, with my left hand, I hold my toast and jelly, and in this state of heightened attention, I notice my own father’s eyes watering and his nostrils twitching and a redness spreading on his face, and suddenly it dawns on me: He dreads tears for fear that he himself will cry. And right there Daddy opens to me like a book. All his grumbling and grouching, his crotchets and glooms and snits and stews, are mere camouflage for a sensitive heart, and I, a writer, am afforded this slight insight, and it is my sacred duty to look upon the heart, as God does, and to reveal it.
I almost burst into tears myself.
The big sister sits crunching her Sugar Pops and reading a Susan Davis, Student Teacher novelette and pouting because Sugar’s phone call has taken the focus away from herself and her complaint to Mother about me typing late at night and keeping her awake. She is oblivious to the deeper things, but I am a writer and depth is a writer’s natural element. We are divers, and divers do not lounge on the beach inviting the admiration of the naïve, we plug our ears and tighten our goggles and go down below.
Mother moves to the sink and washes her cereal bowl and Daddy looks to her for rescue as Ruth’s tiny voice gibbers in the receiver, describing the tragedy at their house. Daddy’s eyes are red, his lips purse as if he might be losing control, about to blubber at the thought of it—Ruth and Sugar’s life plunged into despair by the wild, wild ways of their only daughter—the lost lamb on the rocky steeps and the shepherd parents descending to rescue her—and what if they fail? Their hearts will be broken forever, they will turn to drink, lose their home, wind up at the county poor farm—meanwhile, the big sister is absorbed in the valiant Susan’s struggle to persuade the flinty School Board to replace the smoking furnace at Sunnyvale Elementary, and I am writing things on a napkin, and out of the blue Mother says, “I can’t get over how beautiful the lawn is.”
“Let me have you talk to the boss,” says Daddy in a trembly voice and looks to Mother.
She is right, our house is surrounded by the loveliest yard in town and such luxuriant turf, praise be to God.
Why do we keep such a yard? For the love of our people, that they mayest behold it and feel uplifted by its stately quietness, Selah.
Why do I take notes on a napkin? For the love of our people, that our joys and travails may be held up to heaven and to ourselves, that we may see what it means to be human.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to rush into anything,” says Daddy, to Ruth, and hands the phone to Mother, who shakes her head and refuses to take it.
May the Lord bless my people at breakfast, their juice, their Post Toasties, their eyes tight and red from unshed tears over the funny pages, the cheap novel open and crumbs of toast falling into the crevice, the low rumble of the man on the radio on the counter giving the weather forecast and a joke or two, the vexations around us, the luxuriant lawn.
And I think a thought to Kate: Do what you will, park with Roger Guppy on a lonely gravel road and the gearshift between your legs, unbutton your blouse with no bra, your small friendly animals run to greet him, open your mysteries to his throbbing manhood and so forth, come together naked and weeping and greedy in the darkest dark and thrust and pulsate, moan, throb, etc., do what you will and only let me write about it.
I am the unseen guest, the silent listener. In my house I have many brown napkins. My ballpoint runneth over. Let me watch from the shadows, O daughter of Jerusalem, and hear you sing to your beloved, and I will take you in my own arms, all your words, your lovely visage, your everlasting soul, and bring you to my Underwood.
“What are you staring at, stupid?” says the sister.
Thank you, O Lord, for those who doth persecute and bite and harry, for they only do Thy Will and keep us on our toes.
“Wake up, Shakespeare.”
Even the sister is clear to me now—the swift avenging sword of this sanctified sourpuss—she who glories in her skill at hunting the sinner and running him naked up the tree and baying at him there cringing in the upper branches—oh, I do pity her—and may the Lord bestow such blessings and riches on her as to embarrass her poverty and meanness.
“I’m talking to you, Mr. Toad.”
“That’s no way to speak to your brother,” says Mother, ever hopeful that we should be a happy family like those on the radio.
“Mr. Toad is what he calls himself in stories.”
“I don’t care. It’s not nice.”
Aunt Ruth’s voice is still, finally. She has told Daddy a long story, some true and most of it sheer imagination, about homes for unwed mothers operated by the Salvation Army, and women Ruth once knew who were packed off on the train to spend their confinement in long echoey rooms in musty old mansions behind iron-speared fences and give birth to their babies among rank strangers and sign the babies over to other strangers and return home to friends who now behaved like strangers and how shattering this was and so many of those unfortunate girls never recovered their poise and gumption but accepted any man who showed interest in used merchandise such as they were and thereby they landed in loveless marriages to sour old bachelors—oh, the sorrows that a young woman is susceptible to—and now, finally, Aunt Ruth is finished, and Daddy says, “We’ll just have to hope for the best and see what happens.” And says goodbye and hangs up the phone.
And brushes the crumbs from the funny pages and starts in on L’il Iodine.
And Mother pours him his coffee.
The window is open to the summer breeze redolent of new-mown grass and last night’s rain and the Stenstroms’ morning glories. The dog sits by the screen door, tail thumping on the stoop. A page turns and Susan Davis, having stoked the furnace and bled the radiators, leads her third-graders through their fractions. A radio quartet sings about a cream that prevents mastitis. Mother runs the hot water and drops a blob of detergent into the stream and our nostrils twitch at the sweet astringent smell. Somewhere my cousin lies in a dim room staring at the ceiling, hearing Sugar and Ruth charging around downstairs like two spooked horses, and the cousin herself a little queasy at the thought of what life might have in store for her. She does bad things. If Grandpa and Jesus are worried about me, they must be really amazed at her. The rock is about to drop. And here, one street over, we wash dishes and attend to L’il Iodine and savor the morning coffee.
Whatever happens, I will write it down.
I will write no more poems to please my teachers. I will write no more of boogers and farts to curry favor among the cruel and callow. I will no longer toy with tornadoes and talking dogs and fatal blood diseases as if making a puppet show.
I will sit at the table with my family and write down their sighs, their little pleasures, their kind hearts, their faithfulness. In the face of sin and sorrow and the shadow of death itself, they do not neglect to wash the dishes.
I shove the napkin and pen into my pocket. I take a clean white towel out of the drawer and start drying the plates and cups. “Why, thank you,” says Mother. The big sister snorts: “Will wonders never cease!” Daddy turns the page and starts on the cross-word. Mother looks out the window over the sink toward her garden of tomatoes, peas, beets, carrots, pole beans, onions, cucumbers, red and green peppers, parsnips, Bibb lettuce, asparagus, Swiss chard, rhubarb, summer squash, resting in the blessing of bright sunshine, awaiting their death and resurrection in salads and soups.