Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

I never knew her mother. Mrs. Kramer had died a number of years earlier. I have seen pictures of Mrs. Kramer, though. The pictures show her to have been a small woman with dark hair like her daughter’s, parted severely to one side, and she appears to have had a thin little mouth, which at least while she was being photographed she held tightly closed. But I know very little about her; Nora did not talk readily about her mother. For Mrs. Kramer had died horribly when Nora was eleven years old. And Nora had seen it happen.

She told me about it once, just once, speaking in a monotone voice as if she were reporting some event which had happened not to her but to someone else, as if what had occurred when she was eleven didn’t concern her at all anymore.

It happened that she and her mother had gone to Denver on a Saturday morning to shop at May D & F’s, which was a big department store downtown, and it was just before Christmas, a bright clear day, so the sidewalks were crowded with people carrying packages and calling pleasantly to one another, dropping coins into the red Salvation Army buckets. And then while she and her mother were standing at the street corner waiting for the light to change, Mrs. Kramer had been pushed or jostled by the crowds so that she was shoved off the curb out into the path of one of the big city buses that was coming up the street. Mrs. Kramer was able to avoid being hit head-on by the bus, but as it went by, her winter coat was caught by something and suddenly she was being pulled along beside it; then she lost her footing and she was being dragged along on her back beneath the bus. Nora began to run after her. But the bus driver didn’t see her, or see her mother either, apparently. Then up the block Nora saw that her mother’s coat had torn free, so that she was no longer being pulled along the street on her back. But though her mother had stopped moving, the bus hadn’t. And then Nora saw the black wheels of the bus roll over her mother’s chest and head. She stopped running then. She began to scream. She screamed and screamed, she told me, until finally someone came and put his coat over the thing in the street, which had been her mother, and she remembers that she continued to scream until the ambulance arrived at last and one of the attendants gave her a shot. Later at the hospital she was asked to provide identification. She was able to do that. But when she was asked whom they should call, she couldn’t remember her father’s phone number and she began to scream once more.

She told me this story one night in our bedroom, early in our marriage. Afterward I turned in the bed and held her and brushed my hand over her face, expecting tears on her cheeks. But there weren’t any tears. And after a while she went to sleep. Then the next morning she would not say anything more about it.

Thus, so far as I know, that long-ago Saturday morning in Denver was the last time that Nora Kramer ever screamed about anything. She would not allow herself to show intense emotion ever again. Not even when Toni, our daughter, was sixteen and there was good reason to show emotion.

But no: I do not wish to cause her further harm. She’s had enough. I am not at all eager to stir up things for her. I am merely glad she seems to be happy again. Still I do feel compelled to make this account of things as accurate as I can. For my own reasons.

But perhaps it’s enough to say that after two years of dating Nora Kramer in Boulder, after two years of turning myself inside out for her, so that I hardly knew myself who I was anymore, and after meeting her father repeatedly in the living room where he would be sitting in a chair beside a lamp, reading Bunyan and maybe a little of Milton too, a little of Paradise Lost for variety’s sake, to clear his palate — those nights when I tried to make conversation with him while he read and while I waited for his black-haired daughter to come down the stairs so we could leave the house and go outside where I thought I might remember how to breathe once more — after all of that Nora and I were married in the summer of 1964 and we moved to Holt where I began to work for my father on the local paper. But Nora didn’t like Holt very much, even from the beginning. It wasn’t a thing like Boulder and Denver were. And I recall now what Stewart Fliegelman said about our prospects.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You still think she’s some kind of violin and you just haven’t learned the fingering yet?”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘She isn’t a violin,’ for Chrissakes. Aren’t you listening to me?”

“I’m trying to,” I said. “But it’s so goddamn loud in here I can’t hear anything. And you never make any sense anyway.”

Then Fliegelman leaned across the picnic table and started to shout into my face.

We were sitting in the Sink, one of the student bars on the hill near campus. You sat on wood benches at picnic tables; the tables were all carved and scarred on top and around you all of the walls and the low ceiling were painted black. There were beatnik sayings and slogans on the walls, spray-painted over the black in dripping colors, and toward the back there was a room which had a dirt floor. It was always crowded in the Sink, but it was especially crowded on Friday nights when everyone was trying to make a date for the weekend: an intense place then, packed and smoky and loud and really filthy and still wonderful, with students drunk on the seventy-five-cent pitchers of beer and shouting to people three feet in front of them above the scream of the jukebox. It was the place to go on a Friday night if you were a student in Boulder. It and Tulagi’s. Tulagi’s had a big dance area and live music while the Sink had atmosphere and also Sink Burgers with special sauce that ran down your chin.

That evening I had just come in and I had sat down on the picnic bench, after a date with Nora Kramer, looking characteristically confused and hang-faced, no doubt, wanting consolation and understanding, or at least a Sink Burger, and now Fliegelman was shouting into my face about violins.

“Because there isn’t any music there,” he shouted. “You hear me?”

“I hear you. But what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s an extended metaphor, for Chrissakes. Don’t you know what that is?”

“What?”

“It’s what you and Nora Kramer aren’t. That’s what it is.”

“Jesus Christ,” I shouted back at him. “You’re drunk, Fliegelman. You’re from Chicago and you’re drunk and you’re full of shit.”

“Like hell,” he said. He sat up straight from the picnic table as if I’d said something which offended him. “It’s beer. And I’ve done all I can for you, Arbuckle. I’m going to go liberate my bladder. It’s my right as a citizen.” Then he stood up from the table and made his way drunkenly back across the dirt floor toward the rest room, moving through the dense pack of student bodies as if he were some redheaded gnome at a bacchanal.

Well, our generation was full of talk of rights and liberation then and of music too (though more about electric guitars than of violins), and as it turned out, although I paid no serious attention to him at the time, Stewart Fliegelman was right about Nora Kramer and me. There wasn’t any music there. Nor much that resembled liberation. And as for Fliegelman himself, his first attempt at marriage wasn’t exactly Beethoven’s Ode to Joy either.

Jack had been home from the Army for almost two years by the time Nora and I moved to Holt. After graduation in June we were married in Boulder in the Episcopal church. Stewart Fliegelman stood up with me and Nora had a friend of hers as attendant. Then when it was time for Dr. Kramer to escort his daughter down the aisle toward the altar he did so without once looking at her — it was as though he just happened to be passing through the church on his way to work, or as if he were still deep in thought about Milton and Bunyan — and Nora looked lovely too, in her white veil and white dress and with her dark hair pulled away from her face like a young girl’s. Afterward, though, perhaps as an offering of consolation to her (for the old man certainly felt she deserved consolation, marrying me), he insisted that we take a week’s honeymoon in New York at his expense.