Jane Smiley - Some Luck

THE NEXT TIME he saw her was at a Sigma Nu party. Jack Smith was a Sigma Nu, and he liked to have Frank come to the parties for some reason, maybe just to see what Frank would wear. Frank could not say that he had inherited anything from Lawrence, but he had two jackets that Lawrence had helped him pick out at a secondhand store, three pairs of shoes (he especially enjoyed the spectators), and four ties. His inheritance was knowledge of where to go to get the best styles and the best goods, because Lawrence had loved looking sharp. After Lawrence, Frank even knew how to wear a hat, and the difference between a fedora and a Panama. He had one of each. He didn’t wear those to fraternity parties, though.

She was talking to one of the boys. She looked up at him and then looked back at the boy, but Frank could tell that she had lost her train of thought. He passed through to the next room and then out onto the veranda — the porch, except that it was big and had columns. On the porch, the guys were downing shots. Frank downed a shot and lit his cigarette. She came and stood next to him. It was in fact difficult to say anything if you absolutely refused to make the slightest effort at being cordial or even at having good manners. Thanks to Walter, Rosanna, and Granny Mary, Frank had good manners. Which meant that he had nothing to say. He was surprised that he still felt absolute antipathy toward her, as if no time had passed since Lawrence had collapsed into her lap and she had paused ever so momentarily before laying her hand on his head. Frank dared her to mention Lawrence’s name.

She said, “What does Hildy see in you?”

He flicked the ash of his cigarette into the bushes.

She said, “At least, that was what Lawrence always wondered.”

He inhaled another lungful of smoke, blew it out, and said, “Do you come to these parties to pass out and get fucked?”

Her lips formed the barest smile.

After that, Frank knew even then, it was only a matter of time.

The char, of course, didn’t work out. Nor did the saltpeter. It got too cold for the tent, and Hildy said that friends of her summer employer would rent him a room with its own entrance. The leaves fell off the trees, and the grass burst out with a last flash of green, and the ducks and geese vanished from Lake LaVerne. It rained. He and Hildy saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Maltese Falcon and Dumbo . They talked about the draft lottery, but the war seemed distant and abstract. He was affectionate and chaster than she was, which made her love him even more. Other things made her love him, too — he told her, with real remorse, how he had tormented his brother Joe for Joe’s entire life, and now here he was, Joe, making so much money off his crop this year (fifty-six bushels an acre) that he could buy himself a car, a new car — no one in their family had bought a new car in Frank’s lifetime. His one regret was how he’d treated Joe. He told her how kind and beautiful Lillian was, and how Henry sewed his own outfit that time and then wore it into rags, and he laughed when Hildy reproduced little bits of funny business that she saw in movies, and he listened when she described her topics for English essays and biology experiments, and he proofread her essays and gave her suggestions that improved her experiments. She said, “Oh, you seem so happy, Frank. You’ve loosened up. It’s because we’re better friends.” He cried one night in her arms (in his room) about Lawrence.

But it was Eunice that he was thinking of every moment, Eunice that he was seeing — standing in every doorway, sitting at every table, walking ahead of him down every path and street. It was Eunice who said that she would never see him or speak to him again, and who always came back for more. It was Eunice that he told to get out and stay out, Eunice that he looked for and sensed the presence of. He and Hildy had a daily life, with tasks and assignments and weather, days and nights that had names — Thursday, October 16—that measured the passage of time and the growth, or at least the accumulation, of something. Eunice walked around in a blaze that was not a nightmare and not a dream, but was as timeless and separate as that. His feelings for her did not change even as he came to recognize that she was just a girl, just a kid, just someone fixing her hair in the morning and going to class. Whatever she was in that way, to him she was something else entirely — she was the only female he had ever desired. In a way, it was like one of those movies where the man and the woman only say mean things to one another because they’d had bad experiences, and then, in the end, they learn their lesson because one of them is about to die, and you know it’s love. But Frank hadn’t had any bad experiences, and he didn’t care about Eunice’s experiences, bad or good. He most especially did not want to know what she had done with Lawrence, and so he got up and walked away whenever she started going on in her semi-Southern Missoura accent about anything at all. More than once, he walked away from her, and returned to find she’d disappeared. But she always came back — or, rather, she always reappeared in the vicinity — and often enough, he got her in private somewhere and got enough of her clothes off to be able to fuck her. He could not have told anyone why his cock went absolutely rigid at the thought of doing her, without any coaxing on his part, but it did. In the course of the autumn, he got to her four times, and he only knew that because he noted it down. If he hadn’t noted it down, he, Mr. Organized, who knew every molecule that had gone into that one terrific batch of gunpowder, would not have known the difference between two and forty.

As far as Frank was concerned, the Pearl Harbor attack did not come soon enough. The week after it happened, he finished his remaining essay, took his exams, and then went down to the enlistment office and signed up. When he went home and told Rosanna, she was fit to be tied that he hadn’t at least waited to graduate. “All that money down the drain!” And why hadn’t he graduated in June? She would never understand Frank. He said nothing at all about what was driving him out of Ames, and Walter commended his patriotism. He did not even drop Hildy a note. He figured Eunice would get to her soon enough, and between them they would put two and two together.

IN LILLIAN’S OPINION, Pearl Harbor wasn’t the worst thing to happen that winter. When they started school after Christmas vacation, her history teacher, Mr. Lassiter, had them skip the Civil War for two weeks in order to learn about the attack, and the geography of the Pacific, and the history of Japanese aggression all over Asia since the Russian-Japanese War of 1904. Lillian was surprised by all of that — but, on the other hand, they didn’t know any Japs or Russkies, as Mr. Lassiter called them. At home, there was more talk of what was going on in Europe, especially since Eloise came home fairly often now, and had some news of Julius, who was in France, or maybe not France, but England or somewhere like that. They listened to the radio, and it was always something. Frankie was at a fort in Missouri. It was a new fort — that was all Lillian had heard about it.

The worst thing to happen was that Mrs. Frederick had a stroke one day in January, and now all she did was sit in a chair, and everything had to be done for her. In the morning, Mr. Frederick and Minnie got her up (they had moved a bed into the dining room, and that’s where she slept); at night, they put her back to bed; in between, Minnie did everything. She had to give up her teacher’s job at the school.