Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

Turning onto Route 33 at Wilton, Riley is very tired. His memory reaches doubt: A dozen pages short on CF, out of time. And when Riley asked, okay. She and her niece stripped to their underwear, took to the floor in genre grapple poses, hair-pulling, all of it. He shot three rolls of black-and-white (ASA 200) with a borrowed Minolta. And Moretti said, “Man, great stuff. I mean these girls really hate each other.”

What had Riley missed?

He walks the bike now, counting down the even numbers of Beadle Street. Green gutters and trim, the man at the Texaco said. Not a very big town, his mental picture ludicrous against it. No stately spaces here. Everything is shoved down. The daffodils are plastic.

“Why?” she says, and again, quietly, “why?”

But she steps back from the door to let him in.

“I biked all the way.”

Why had he thought it would sound impressive?

“It’s all right,” she says, seeing how he peers. “They came from the Center to take him for a ride.”

Won’t she go change out of her pajamas, or put coffee on? Riley can’t look at her, instead substitutes the painting of JFK and John XXIII against fleecy clouds, Jordan almonds in a shell dish. He smooths his hands together.

“Honest to God, Riley, you seem right at home. So what’re you doing here?”

He looks at her, breathing carefully. Did she sleep in all that makeup or just put it on?

They sit on the porch drinking Cokes. Her long legs are stretched out across the railing. The air is still.

“Your problem is you look at home anyplace because nothing stands out.” She says this solicitously, as though he might see a doctor about it. “It’s like the day I knew we were going to split was when Nina and me did those wrestling pictures. You remember? I go, ‘Well, he might want to do something after, with both of us.’ Not like I wanted you to, though probably it would’ve been okay. But naturally, you wouldn’t even think of it. No curiosity.”

“It was an assignment for work.”

Her eyes are closed; she’s not listening. Riley could shake up the Coke with his thumb over the hole and …

A man across the street is getting set to clip his hedge. First he goes inside with the long orange cord so he can plug in. Two little girls scream in the spray of a hose, taking turns. Somebody ordered a cab; the driver honks, honks, but no one comes.

She says: “Go down and get some rye bread, I’ll make sandwiches.” Her eyes are still closed.

Riley’s legs are so tired that it’s a joy to pedal. The store is cool and empty. He gets a Slurpee, and bubble gum packaged like chewing tobacco. Magazines are every which way in the rack. Hit Paraders and Playgirls and Omnis and Motor Trends and Cavaliers and one sun-faded Global Detective from last June. “Artist Model Drowns in Punchbowl,” one of his favorites. He goes out into the sun and sits on the curb to read.

CONLAN BOUNCED IN THE Ford and his fresh cigarette rolled under the pedals. He tried to stamp out the coal and lurched. How could the road be so muddy and still bounce him? Conlan was no scientist, that he’d grant. Breath plumed out of his mouth, made a milky blue patch on the windshield. His tongue was dry. It wanted to taste raspberry.

“Mutual trust,” Mr. Tunbridge said every September. “That’s what makes the stars come out.”

And then he gave Conlan something in advance.

“MULLED cider, cocoa, herb teas,” the brother said in answer to the question of how he could keep his soda fountain open through the winter.

Conlan looked up and down the street, which had only two summers ago been paved. “Herb teas,” he repeated. “You’re dreaming.”

“People need a wholesome place to come,” the brother said. “After the sleigh ride, after the skaters’ party. And the community sing. That’s every week.”

“You’re a bloody public servant now?” Conlan spat with finesse. “You’ll put bloody marshmallows in the cocoa, and no extra charge.”

The brother was waiting for the Syracuse truck that brought him gassed water.

“And what would you have me do, then? Go out on the lake with you and fish through the ice?”

“Nah, you’d find a way to drown.”

Conlan felt his nose going red in the sun. The street was giving up vapors.

EVERYTHING was bare, except for the oaks, always the last to let go. The birches were right without leaves, their black limbs striping the white sky, their white paper bark mottled black. Conlan viewed uncreased gray water through them, the lake, Racquet Lake, which the Tunbridges could have named after themselves, but hadn’t, which they owned in some different way than their ore mountains and smelters and ships. More intimately, more seriously. Conlan went into the boathouse. He looked at the racked canoes, smelled varnish. His palms felt cold; his fingers tingled and twitched as if he had just held someone under, fatally.

FOR a living, the brother had cut wood and shot quail and hung windows and so on. People in the town liked his thrift. Then he wooed and won Miss Loretta Frame, who had served eight years as governess to the younger Tunbridge children, and they liked his sand. The brother had foresight, and was not ashamed. His fountain had a veined marble counter, checkered floor tiles, filigreed taps and faucets, an etched blue mirror, and in their season, fresh flowers at every table. Father Voss, the Lutheran, who liked a tulip sundae, said the brother’s place was so comfortable it made him think about retirement. The brother had to have new dentures, he smiled so much. Conlan wasn’t exactly jealous; but he was irritated. It was weak to take the money. He told Loretta the children wept whenever her name was mentioned.

THE Tunbridge family carried history the way soda carried the colors of syrup. They knew things by instinct.

Riker, the in-law whose cups of tea were always laced, lectured on eugenics at Cornell. While the rest of the family was under sail, racing one another from cove to cove, Riker stayed uncoaxable in shade, painting the wicker.

“I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “of Mrs. Elise Winch of Oneida being bitten by an owl. She was only thirty-four.”

Inside the house, in the hexagonal library on the third floor, where planets were painted in color on the ceiling, the skull of Garrison Tunbridge, Sr., who found copper in Wyoming and guano in Peru, was displayed under glass.

“One must expand or go mad,” said Auntie Vera, who could dance in Italian.

Conlan imagined the nests of hair under her arms.

THUNDER rolled away across the northern scarp. Hat brims dripped and shingles glistened. Inside the rain-battered cups of columbine and tiger lily, bees died of exhaustion.

“Lemon phosphate.”

“Cherry phosphate.”

The twins exchanged looks in the blue mirror. Their faces were as identical as their coifs, bicycles, leg-of-mutton sleeves.

“With ice, please,” they said.

The temperature swing brought on by the storm made the brother ill. His skin was clammy and he trembled. With disagreeable vividness came recollection of the home left near forty years ago, tea and treacle by a peat fire.

“And extra straws.”

The matched white faces looming, dead white under freckles.

AS Conlan swept the porch, he heard stones click in the lapping water. The lake at its deepest was said to be twelve hundred feet. It was terribly cold there and all the fish were blind. The music room and parlor, as Conlan peered through the windows, seemed deep in that forbidding way. He shivered, imagining the piano keys’ slick cold like some ancient ice unpleasantly preserved. Red-brown geometries floated up. He turned away, mouth curling around the taste of foreign carpet.