Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

“What’s his name?” I said. I already knew the answer.

“Ed,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I figured. That was the name I wanted.”

“You wanted for what?”

“For my baby,” I said.

“For Laurel?” she said. “What kind of sense does that make?”

“No, the second baby,” I said.

“You’re pregnant again?” she said. “Congratulations.”

“But I wanted the name Ed,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe this one will be a girl also.”

“Berne thinks it’s a boy,” I said.

“How are things?” she said.

“With Berne?” I said. “Oh, you know.”

“That bad?” she said.

“No, no,” I said. “They’re good. He is who he is. He works so hard to get things right. Do you know that he hung the painting?”

“What painting?” she said.

“That portrait Dave left for me,” I said. “One day I came home, and it was hanging in the kitchen. Berne went and got it framed and everything. I didn’t say a word about it, and then a few days later we were eating dinner, and he looked up at it and said that he liked it. ‘There’s something about it,’ he said.”

“There is something about it,” Sarah said. “Listen, I should go. I’m glad you called. And I’m sorry I took the name you wanted.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “James isn’t such a bad name for a little boy.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not at all.”

After I hung up, I went outside. It was cold, so I bundled up, and it wasn’t until I got out there that I realized that I was wearing the blue scarf Berne had found in the barn. I hadn’t been in the barn much since Dave left. Laurel was scared of it; I was, too, a little bit. But the cold stung, and suddenly the barn didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I went in through the main door, brushing a web out of my face.

Dave’s bed had been in the back of the barn. I stood where his bed had been and fingered the scarf. Then I thought about taking it off, throwing it high in the air, and counting until it came down. I wondered how high I could count before it reached the ground. But I didn’t throw it. Instead, I imagined throwing it into the air, and counted in my head. I got to eight, then imagined throwing the scarf again. The second time I got to ten.

THE YEAR KICKED OFF WITH AN EVENT THAT I FEEL CONFIDENT describing as godly. There were floods in London that grew the river to monstrous proportions; the banks were rendered meaningless. I had an acquaintance there, and I heard about the floods in a letter. “More than a dozen souls have perished in the Thames,” Edith wrote. “Strange as it may seem, all but one were malign. Nature did its part to sweep the city clean. It was a clarifying moment.” A few days later, the moat at the Tower of London, which had been drained midway through the last century, was completely refilled by the brute force of a flood wave. On this topic, Edith was droller. “I suppose it wished to visit the Tower,” she wrote.

That was how the year began, and it continued on in that headlong spirit. In February massive hailstones rained down in both the south of England and the south of Nebraska, killing eight all told. In April, Chicago was host to what became known as the Pineapple Primary, in which more than sixty bombs were lobbed into polling places and the Nineteenth Ward committeeman was shot to death in front of his wife and daughter. The murderess Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing. Edith commented upon these events in letters she sent me over the course of the spring and summer. She had a healthy appetite for both the global and the local, and a penchant for anything involving death, destruction, or disruption. As she wrote in one of her missives, “Estonia changed from the mark to the kroon; Chang Tso-lin was murdered in June. History is quite lyrical these days.” I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday in early July, and when I looked at that portion of life that stretched before me and that which trailed behind me, I realized that I was in no condition to do what I had promised to do, which was to marry Samantha Noble, the beautiful girl who wanted to marry me, and who was, as luck would have it, Edith’s daughter.

I was in good with the family, as should be clear. And why not? I had been good to their daughter. In return, she had been good to me, in some ways more than others. Over the course of the year, Samantha and I had courted, had promised ourselves to one another, and, formalities dispensed with, had proceeded to investigate one another carnally in a rather rapacious manner. We held the line against the most fearsome of intruders, of course, until we did not: the surrender (or conquest, depending upon your perspective) came shortly after my birthday, just as the Olympics were beginning in Amsterdam. (They followed the winter games in St. Moritz; I learned about both sets of Olympiads from Edith, who had a thing for them.) My parents had settled me into a small apartment in New York City that Samantha had never seen — how could she have? — and one fine afternoon, after a walk through Central Park, she sat on a bench and clutched her stomach with a loud cry. When I asked if she needed a doctor, she shook her head. “I just need to lie down for a few moments,” she said. “Isn’t your apartment nearby?” The pain on her face had to be seen to be believed — or rather, I should never have seen it, and then I could have disbelieved it.

I led her upstairs. Her hand was hot inside mine. I put her on the daybed and sat down to read a bit of Calkins. I was deep into a chapter when I noticed that there were hands at the sides of my head, and that they were connected to arms, and that those arms were bare of any petticoat and connected to a body that was every bit as bare. “My stomach is feeling better,” said Samantha, and took my hand as if to show me, though she missed her stomach by a good half-foot: a very good half-foot, as it turned out. Amelia Earhart had successfully taken an aircraft across the Atlantic just weeks before, and that was what Samantha recalled to me as she piloted me toward the daybed. I was powerless to think of anything but what she was showing me, and yet I thought mainly of her mother, Edith, who was at that moment sitting in her drawing room in London, innocently considering the recent declaration of Malta as a British dominion, entirely unaware of the fact that I was accessioning her daughter. I felt for that woman and what she did not know. And yet, what matter? A tidal wave had filled the Tower moat, and now one filled me. I dreamed of an airship crashing into an icy plain. I knew that something like that had happened near the North Pole, but within my dream the event seemed fully original.

The dream must have been pushed up right against my wakening, for I came into the morning light with a sharp fear. For starters, one of my thumbs was sore, as if it had been bent backward nearly to the breaking point, and that concerned me greatly until I remembered that it had. But, in addition, there was a pain in my right eye, and I had a cottonmouth, and my ears could not decode the sounds they heard. Samantha was sleeping beside me, and I began to put my symptoms in order so that I could convey them to her when she woke. I thought that perhaps I was catching whatever she had contracted that had caused her stomachache, and it was a few moments before I remembered that the stomachache had been contrived, and that the contrivance had in fact led directly to the events that had dried my mouth and bent my thumb. The eye and ear I could not account for entirely.