Elmore Leonard: Up in Honey's Room

“Heinrich Himmler was born the seventh of October, 1900. Which is the same day I was born.”

“Really?”

“In the same hospital in Munich.”

This time she said, “Wow,” impressed, and said, “You think there’s a chance you really are Himmler’s twin?”

“The same hospital, the same day, the same time of birth and, as you see, the same likeness. The question I ask myself,” Walter said, “if Heinrich and I are of the same blood, from the loins of the same woman, why were we separated?”

Honey’s intercom buzzed while she was getting ready to go to work. The male voice said hi, he was Kevin Dean, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; he’d like to talk to her about Walter Schoen. Honey said, “You all are just getting around to Walter? I haven’t seen him in five years.”

Kevin Dean said he knew that, he still would like to talk to her. Honey said, “He didn’t do anything subversive then that I know of and I doubt he has now. Walter isn’t the real thing, he pretends he’s a Nazi.”

She buzzed open the door downstairs and put her flannel bathrobe on over her bra and panties, her hose and garter belt. Then paused and said, “Hmmmm.” Took off her bra and the bathrobe and slipped on an orange-colored kimono with red and ochre trim to be more comfortable.

It was a morning in late October 1944, America at war nearly three years. In the Philippines again since yesterday.

Honey was a buyer now in Better Dresses at Hudson’s, moving up in her world from a flat in Highland Park to a one-bedroom apartment on Covington Drive, a block from Palmer Park where she’d learned to ice-skate in the winter and play tennis in the summer. At night she would hear the streetcars on Woodward Avenue turn around at the fairgrounds and head back six miles to downtown and the Detroit River.

She had returned home only once since leaving Walter, late last year taking a bus to Harlan County for her mother’s funeral, dead of respiratory failure, Honey with a twinge of guilt standing by the casket, the daughter who’d left home for the big city to live her own life, meet all kinds of people instead of coal miners and guys who cooked moonshine. She did ask her sister-in-law to come to Detroit, stay as long as she wanted, and Muriel said as she always did she’d think about it.

Well, since Honey was in Kentucky anyway, she might as well hop a bus over to Eddyville and see how her brother Darcy was doing in prison. My Lord, he actually seemed quieter and listened for a change. Or was it seeing Darcy sober for the first time in years? He had taken prison courses to finish high school at age thirty-two and no longer acted bored or like he knew everything. He’d grown a mustache and actually did resemble Errol Flynn a little. She told him, “You do, ” and Darcy said, “Oh, you think so?” He’d have his release pretty soon but wasn’t going back to digging coal. “You’ll be drafted,” Honey said, “if they take ex-cons.” He grinned at her the way the old Darcy used to grin, sure of himself, saying he had learned meat cutting and planned to get in the meat-processing business, make some money and stay out of the army. Honey thinking, Maybe he hasn’t changed after all.

Then this past August she got a phone call out of the blue, Muriel wanting to know if she’d seen Darcy.

Honey said, “He’s here in Detroit?”

“Somewhere around there. I gave him your number.”

“Well, he hasn’t called. What’s he doing up here, working in a plant?”

“How would I know,” Muriel said, “I’m only his wife.”

Honey said, “Jesus Christ, quit feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your butt and come up here if you want to find him.”

Muriel hung up on her.

That was a couple of months ago.

Kevin Dean came in showing his ID, quite a nice-looking young guy who seemed about her age, Honey thirty now. He said he appreciated her seeing him, with the trace of a down-home sound Honey placed not far west of where she grew up. She watched him gather the morning paper from the sofa and stand reading the headline story about the invasion of Leyte, his raincoat hanging open looking too small for him. She saw Kevin as a healthy young guy with good color, not too tall but seemed to have a sturdy build.

“I have to fix my hair, get dressed, and leave for work,” Honey said, “in ten minutes.”

He had his nose in the paper, not paying any attention to her.

“If Walter’s all we’re gonna talk about,” Honey said, “let’s get to it, all right?”

He still didn’t look up, but now he said, “We’re back in the Philippines - you read it? Third and Seventh Amphibious Forces of the Sixth Army went ashore on Leyte, near Tacloban.”

“That’s how you pronounce it,” Honey said, “ Tac loban?”

It got him to look at her, Honey now sitting erect in a club chair done in beige. She said, “I read about it this morning with my coffee. I thought it was pronounced Tac lo ban. I could be wrong but I like the sound of it better than Tac loban. Like I think Ta ra wa sounds a lot better than Tar awa, the way you hear commentators say it, but what do I know.”

She had his attention.

“You’ll come to the part, General MacArthur wades ashore a few hours later and says over the radio to the Filipinos, ‘I have returned,’ because he told them three years ago when he left, ‘I shall return,’ and here he was, true to his word. But when he waded ashore, don’t you think he should’ve said, ‘ We have returned’? Since his entire army, a hundred thousand combat veterans, waded ashore ahead of him?”

Kevin Dean was nodding, agreeing with her. He said, “You’re right,” and took a notebook out of his raincoat and flipped through pages saying, “Walter was quite a bit older than you, wasn’t he?”

Honey watched him sink into her velvety beige sofa. “Your raincoat isn’t wet, is it?”

“No, it’s nice out for a change.”

“Have you talked to Walter?”

“We look in on him every now and then.”

“You’re wondering why I married him, aren’t you?”

“It crossed my mind, yeah.”

“Being fourteen years older,” Honey said, “doesn’t mean he wasn’t fun. Walter would show me a political cartoon in his Nazi magazine, the Illustrierter Beobachter, sent from Munich he got a month later. He’d tell me in English what the cartoon was about and we’d have a good laugh over it.”

She waited while Kevin Dean decided how to take what she said. “So you got along with him.”

“Walter Schoen was the most boring man I’ve ever met in my life,” Honey said. “You’re gonna have to pick up on when I’m kidding. You know Walter and I weren’t married in the Church. A Wayne County judge performed the ceremony in his chambers. On a Wednesday. Have you ever heard of anyone getting married on Wednesday? I’m saving the church wedding for the real thing.”

“You’re engaged?”

“Not yet.”

“But you’re seeing someone.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about Walter. What if I asked if you’re married?”

Having fun with him. She could tell he knew what she was doing and said no, he wasn’t married or planning to anytime soon. Honey wanted to call him by his first name but pictured a guy named Kevin as a blond-haired kid with a big grin. Kevin Dean had a crop of wild brown hair Honey believed he combed in the morning and forgot about the rest of the day. She knew he packed a gun but couldn’t tell where he wore it. She wondered if she should call him Dean, and heard lines in her memory, It was Din! Din! Din! You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been? Left there from a ninth-grade elocution contest. And saw Dean in the sofa waiting for her to say something.