Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel Read online

  Let Me Count the Ways

  A Novel

  Peter De Vries

  Contents

  I.STAN

  II.TOM

  III.STAN

  About the Author

  STAN

  one

  MAN IS VILE, I know, but people are wonderful. Within a couple blocks where I lived as a child there was a woman who wore blotters in her shoes to absorb the unhealthy vapors that arise from the ground she said, and another who carried a chihuahua in a leather handbag zipped just far enough shut so its head could protrude from the top. We boasted a contractor who built a house on the wrong lot, and one of them cranks now largely disappearing from the American scene, who drive cars with signs on them reading, “This lemon was sold to me by the So-and-so Motor Agency.” This bird also paid bills he considered exessive in inconvenient sackfuls of pennies. One of them utterly standard but in their way always refreshing crackpots. And let’s see. There was a family named Muchbetter, who didn’t seem to mind. They took it in stride. Our neighborhood hero was a bedridden man, Mr. Hadley, who played the trumpet flat on his back. In summers he would lie on the screened sleeping porch where he would keep we kids enthrawled blowing the saliva from a special valve in his instrument, slightly less so with his renditions of “Blue Moon” and “By the Waters of Minnetonka.”

  Most of those personalities have gone, and those of us who were kids then have grown up to take their place. One or two of us still live there on Sparrow Street, which exept for television aerials is still the same old neighborhood, rows of frame cottages so close together you can hear your neighbors quarrel and sometimes even snore, the back yards divided by fences over which our wives gossip and our bushes grow, so that we smell each others roses and eat each others razzberries. I married a woman from the Polish section of town farther down by the river. Elsie was a Wishnotski before she become Mrs. Stanley Waltz.

  My wife is one of my favorite people. One day a few years after we were married I see a letter she wrote to one of them health commentators she listened to on the radio. It went: “Dear Mr. Emmett, Can you recommend a good book on personal hygiene? I think I’ve got it.” At such times I just shut my eyes and imagine she’s Hawaiian. Or that my senses are deceiving me and I didn’t actually see or hear what I think. We all have to overlook things in one another, and what we overlook somehow adds in the end to the love, even when we are shaking our head over the other party. I could let such things roll off my back and come home after a day on the moving van and walk up to the stove where she’s cooking dinner and with a friendly slap on the peach halfs say, “Well old girl, what are we suffering from today, acute diagnosis?” and no harm done. But there are limits to what a man can adjust to, the punches he can roll with. One blow fell that I was absolutely not prepared for. That threatened to finish us. She got saved.

  Anybody who has ever been up against that sort of thing (I don’t mean intellectual converts to Catholicism or cetera, I mean being plain lowdown, cornball, meat-and-potatoes Jesus Saves saved) knows that such people are beyond redemption. When I heard Elsie singing hymns in the tub and saying grace over the food while it was still on the stove so it would include my portion too, I knew she was hopeless. She spent her spare time at the Gospel Mission where she first seen the light, or testifying on street corners and handing out religious tracks. Once when the piano crew I was working on that day came out of a diner where we had stopped for coffee-and, lo and behold there was my wife on the sidewalk handing out leaflets. Smilingly she hands one to McGurk, to Art Salerno—and to me! Her husband. I ask you to close your eyes a minute and imagine having your wife distribute you a pamphlet on the public street corner. What would you do? I said to her through my teeth when I got home: “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “It’s my duty to do everything I can to save your immortal soul.”

  “I haven’t got any. Neither do you. How many times do I have to tell you? All right, where did Cain get his wife?”

  “We’re not going through all that again.”

  “The hell we aren’t.” I grabbed her by the wrist and swung her around from the icebox where she was. I had been drinking, as what husband wouldn’t who wakes up and finds he’s married to the bride of Christ. I pinned her arm behind her back and repeated, “Where did Cain get his wife? I won’t let you go till you answer. Who must he of married, if we take the rational approach?”

  “He married his sister,” she said at last, and I let go, to let her rub her arm.

  “All right. So incest. The whole human race is the product of incest, some crown of creation, if your hodgepodge of ancient documents is true and the Blue Book I gave you to read on evolution is not.” I sat down at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer. I brooded, wishing again she was a Catholic, a highly sophisticated sect where even the priests are educated enough not to know a damn thing about the Old Testament.

  “I wish you wouldn’t eat in your undershirt,” she said. “It’s so common. Nobody does that.”

  This sent me into a rage. “Then in that case it’s not common, it’s rare!” I said, rising, and, as luck would have it, belted her one.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she would always say later, after this kind of extreme, and I would tell her, “I am! What kind of person do you take me for? This kind of thing is harder on me than it is on you. I got higher standards. That’s why I wish you wouldn’t rile me the way you do.” We keep forgetting that people are a lot better and a lot worse than we sometimes think.

  Insisting you’re wrong and admitting it are two different things. Now I wanted to apologize to her. But one trouble. I have to be oiled just exactly right for that sort of thing. Its one of the most wearing things in human relations, worse than a pitched battle. I always need a few to get me into the mood—but that mood is a very narrow waveband and very short lasting. One too few and I’m not mellowed enough. One too many and psshht, I’m over the line and on the warpath again. Especially when one of your favorite people turns out to be this stranger, bringing your life to such a pass.

  So the next day I am trying to limit my after-work intake to get into this pleasant simmer without boiling over. Then Elsie joins me in the parlor with a glass of vegetable juice left over from the health fad days and begins to lecture on the dangers of alcohol—which calls for a drink in itself. “It helps us bear things,” I said, looking at a stack of pamphlets on the table. One or two were on booze. Yes, added to the evils now raising their heads in the house—faith, innocence, absolute honesty—was now temperance. She was after me to take the pledge put out by some Temperance Union she had joined under the influence of a woman she met at the mission, whose friendship was evidently important to her. This woman tells her, “People who drink have nothing within themselves.”

  I remedied that with another stiff double, and says, “You’ve got to drink to be temperant,” bringing my fist down on the table in a way that awgured ill for any meeting of minds. “Temperance means moderation. You can only take something in moderation, not leave it alone. You’re intemperant.”

  “I have never raised my voice to you in public or private.”

  “Well raise it. It’d be better than this patient longsuffering aimed at making you a martyr and me an I don’t know what.”

  “I have never tried to make you out any such thing. You do it yourself. You say you’re an atheist, and that’s intellectual, but you behave on a completely physical plane the most of the time. And you don’t realize what a spectacle you make of yourself, especially when you’re strutting your stuff.”

  “When do I strut my stuff? Name some times. A few examples please. I’m all ears.”

  “You’re do
ing it now. You do it on the truck when you get your back under a piano with a woman watching. This beautiful mass of muscle. You can’t even go out and cut the grass or clip the hedge without an audience. A regular peecock.”

  “Drink is a better escape than church going or temperance unions or health fads. Isn’t life hard enough without all these damn solutions!” I said, sweeping the pamphlets to the floor. “Audience? Peecock? What are you talking about? Who is this stranger you’re describing? Explanation please. Some enlightenment.”

  She took a sip of the vegetable juice, some cocktail hour together, some relaxation at the end of the day’s weary toil.

  “Have you ever noticed how you always manage to be out there when the college girls are out of their summer classes and going down to the river for a swim? You seem to time it, or spot them coming down the street in their shorts and halters, and instead of eyeing them, that would be human, you throw out your own chest and start showing off your beautiful brown muscles. Clipping the hedge naked to the waist, a splendid specimen of manhood.”

  “So this is Christianity. This is what Christ died for. This is how we practise it, his followers. What ever happened to the ignorant, delightful girl I married?”

  “A regular Adonis furniture mover. Well that was all right years ago maybe, but you’re older now, and yes fatter too. You could use for Pete’s sake a halter yourself!”

  That was when I hauled off and psshht, belted her another. People use to say they liked to visit the Waltzes but they’d hate to live there.

  Naturally I worried about the effect of all this on our ten-year-old son, Tom. Was it already too late? A mother’s influence can louse up a child emotionally at a very early age, psychologists tell us. They’ve shed some alarming new light on that. Unstable characters and the havoc they keep wroughting can definitely be traced to early maternal influences. The hand that rules the cradle rocks the world! I can remember my mother taking my hand when she thought she was dying and making me promise to go to church. She attended St. Michael’s where most of the local Polaks went. I promised of course, with the fingers of the other hand crossed. What else can you do? I’m outside the pail, but I do have principles. St. Michael’s was the church I wished Elsie had gone to. She wouldn’t now be a convert to this godawful Gospel Mission in a rented store downtown, that she was trying to drag the kid to, this corny revivalism typical of the Bible Belt—which still exists you know, don’t you forget it, and which runs through the entire country, not just the Middle West. Though what we’re talking about here happens to be the Middle West. We live in a town called Slow Rapids, Indiana, really a small city of about 40,000 nestled in a bend of the Wayne River by a rather tame waterfall, as the name implies. Three miles upstream is a really boiling cataract from which the current abruply eases, broadening toward this gentle falls which even the unadventurous like to take in canoes.

  All those years Elsie was harboring under the delusion that I was a potential convert too. The bitterness of my hostility proved that I was wrestling with God. Once she seen me dozing over a copy of Awake!, that Bible Society magazine I’m sure you’ve had thrust into your hand at one time or another too, and mistook it for open-mindedness. I made it clear that my mind was made up. I was not in the market. “Some sort of overall Intelligence I’ll accept, yes,” I said. “Farther than that I will not go.” In time I abandoned even that position and became an out and out atheist. No doubt encouraged to that conclusion by the example set for the other position in my own house.

  I got far more intellectual companionship from a friend of ours named Lena Salerno. Her husband worked for me at the time. I own a small moving and storage business which I built up from scratch after a few years on the van for somebody else. Art Salerno wasn’t the best furniture mover in Slow Rapids, being on the slight side, in fact he was called the hat-box man, which is movers slang for somebody who can’t really lug his weight, but he could crate like a house afire. He did nearly all my packing and crating for long distance, but occasionally you had to send him out on the truck, sometimes even on the piano crew, where you just hoped he wouldn’t strain his milk and wind up at the doctor’s with another hernia. The Salernos and we were neighbors as well as friends, and stepped out as a foursome once a week or so to dinner or a movie, sometimes for a spin to Chicago, thirty miles away. There were times when I simply had to get the taste of provincialism out of my mouth and up to old Chi.

  One night when we had a dinner date with the Salernos I hightailed it home early, leaving the office in charge of a girl who worked for me, with Art still crating on a job that had to go out to Denver first thing in the morning. I was bucking for a beer with Lena before our respective spice arrived. I needed somebody sympathetic to unload my head of steam on or I’d be a foul ball the whole evening. I dressed while waging the usual battle with my wife over the big crisis—how to raise the kid. “You want to raise him as a believer,” I says in the bathroom doorway drying my back after a shower, “I want to raise him as an atheist. O.K. we’ll compromise. We’ll bring him up an agnostic. That’s my last offer. That’ll be middle ground, from where he can make up his own mind later.” Elsie said, “That logic is a little like your argument when we were going together, remember? You said, ‘You want to get married, I don’t. We’ll compromise—we’ll live together.’” “That was a joke,” I shouted, “for Christ’s sake!” “I hope so, Stan,” she said, and giving me a serious look added softly, “for Christ’s sake.” I pretended she was Hawaiian and got dressed.

  I once read something in a magazine I’ll never forget. It was a quotation from a writer whose name I can’t recall. Maybe it was somebody named Swift. He said: “You can’t reason a person out of a position he hasn’t been reasoned into.” Check, but away we reason—to stone walls. What got my cork was Elsie’s refusal to be ruffled any more than she could be budged. All my rantings, which finally become blasphemous, were met with the same meek longsuffering: she was witnessing for the truth while men reviled her. Not being able to get a rise out of her was like the frustration of trying to slam a door with one of them suction stops on it—which was the case with the screen door I tried to huff out of. It just sprang back at me with a Christian sigh. I had more luck with the alley gate out of which I turned to walk the half block to the Salernos.

  So to wake up and find your married to somebody who isn’t an intellectual companion can be one of the worst things on earth. I don’t mean I’m a brain, or anything much more than just another Polak piano mover who worked up his own business, a lot more than most people get to achieve, let’s not forget that, but I do try to use what gray matter God gave me. Oops, there isn’t any. I do try to read my way out of the ignorance and superstition I was born into. Ingersoll, Tom Paine and Clarence Darrow are my heroes. Well the main thing is that Tom must have a college education and climb out altogether, and on that Elsie is at least agreed. She has got law on her mind for him, I don’t know why. Probably because the only relative she has who made it is a lawyer, a shirttail cousin in Chi who got into Polak ward politics there, she claimed, and worked his way up to persecuting attorney (sick). I don’t care what profession Tom chooses but profession he shall have as long as his father can hump furniture.

  I hoped Lena Salerno would be ready when I got there.

  two

  LENA WAS SETTING out nuts and potato chips on the terrace where we were to have our drinks. She is a horse, but at forty still firm in outline, beautifully rounded muscle, not fat. No, not by a long shot yet. We should have her carrying keyboard on the piano crew instead of Art! That was what I often thought working the heavy corner beside Art as we came downstairs under a soggy Chickering upright, most of the weight on my hump.

  Lena is one of them Earth Mothers they call them, a burst of sheer Life Force that kills everything in its path. Flattens all oppositions in a scorched earth policy. A childless Earth Mother has to work off this creative energy in some form, and hers was disseminating birth control informa
tion for some society fighting the population explosion, endeavoring to educate people to the evils of overcrowding the planet and one thing and another. So she hands out tracks too but what a difference! “Don’t fill hungry bellies with more babies,” was a typical title. When she wasn’t distributing tracks she was meeting with reasonable Catholics who are trying to get the church to liberalize its stand.

  There was no want of subjects for missionary work right here on Sparrow Street. Next door to the Salernos was a family named Gromulka with five, six, finally now eight kids, and the usual nother one on the way, no need to go to India with the pamphlets. Mrs. Gromulka, the neighborhood blimp, resented the pamphlets Lena was always trying to hand her, and finally refused to accept no more. So Lena would fling them over the high stockade fence that separated their back yards, calling out, “Read this through please, Mrs. Gromulka. See what you’re doing to the world. We must stop breeding from the bottom!” And back Mrs. Gromulka would holler in even shriller tones, “I’ll breed any way I damn please! What we do is none of your business,” and back the pamphlet would come over the top of the fence, fluttering like a dead bird at Lena’s feet.

  There had been just such a low scene when I turned in at the alley gate I could tell. The tail-end of Mrs. Gromulka’s diatribe could be heard as Lena set out the snacks. I could tell she was boiling, her complexion having that mottled look it takes on when angry. The screen door over there banged shut on the wail of some child being dragged into the house.

  “Mrs. G. sounds fit to be tied,” I says.

  “She should be tied.” That’s our Lena—funny as a crutch and twice as perceptive. Her humor is bitter. “There ought to be a law demanding it—or sterilizing the husband. Serious thinkers are beginning to urge it. That when a man who already has more children than he can support has another one, he should be sterilized. It’s a simple operation that in no way interferes with sexual pleasure.”