by Mark Spencer
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick
What you smell is death. I’m 99 years old. So listen—even if you don’t want to know the truth.
*
January 1963 was cold as a witch’s shriveled tit, as my daddy always said, but I was warm at the old gas stove Norma Jeane had in that little clapboard place of hers. I turned the bacon over. It sizzled and popped. I cracked eggs into a pan. The eggs were from a half-dozen chickens she kept in the backyard penned up and hopefully safe from raccoons.
It was Sunday, and Norma Jeane was lounging at her kitchen table with its chrome legs and red Formica top, watching me, when she purred, “Happy birthday, Mr. Principal. Love of my life.”
God, the good smells.
Bacon, coffee. Biscuits coming out of the oven.
I liked cooking. I especially liked cooking for Norma Jeane.
She had shown up in town the past August when the newspapers were full of screamer headlines about her with lots of photos, but not a single human being in Warren, Arkansas, recognized her. That might seem amazing, but it’s not, really.
She drove a 1960 Chevy Nomad with New Mexico tags (Land of Enchantment) and was alone and shy. “Mousy,” I heard more than one old bitty say about her. I thought of her as “the mysterious stranger” the first time I glimpsed her at the Piggy Wiggly.
When pressed for her autobiography and motives for moving here by powdered and over-rouged smiley faces whose dentures clicked, she said she had been married and was making a new start. No, she didn’t have any children, she answered. Yes, that was sad. Yes, she was aware that the negro side of town started only one street over from her little place, but she didn’t mind. Yes, she supposed she had a strange attitude, she said, and she promised to be safe. You have a blessed day, too.
For lack of information, townspeople invented gossip about her hiding out from a mean ex-husband (some speculated that he was a brown or black man), but folks were generally good about leaving her alone except for the occasional knock on the front door when the powdered over-rouged smiley faces invited her (click click) to fellowship (at First Baptist, Second Baptist, or Third Baptist Church). She would gush with appreciation (quite an actress) and then would always sleep late on Sundays.
Shortly after she arrived in town, she got a part-time job at the county library. She had her hair pulled back in a bun and wore a loose-fitting dress, the kind my mama would have worn, a navy blue with little yellow tulips. The first two times I checked out books, she wouldn’t look at me directly or say more than “Due back in one week.” Then the third time, she let me see her eyes and said, “You’re re-checking James Joyce’s Dubliners?”
“I want to re-read all the stories. Especially ‘The Dead.’”
“So you didn’t understand the stories the first time, or you want to relish the nuances?”
“I’m a big fan of Joyce. Nothing beats ‘The Dead.’”
She smiled. “No, nothing.”
I had been leaning on the circulation desk, but I straightened up now. “No American writer can match his genius,” I said in my teacher voice. “Maybe Hemingway. Maybe Arthur Miller.”
She coughed.
I added, “Another favorite writer of mine is William Butler Yeats.”
“Most men haven’t even heard of Yeats.”
“How many loved your moments of glad grace.” Her lips parted and she looked a little startled. At the time, I thought she merely admired that I could quote Yeats. Later, I realized she thought I had recognized her. I broke what seemed an awkward silence with “You must love working here.”
She took a deep breath and sighed. “No place smells better than a library.”
That had been four months before that good-smelling morning in her kitchen. Only four months, and here she was announcing that I was the love of her life. Me!
(You see the way you’re eying me. I know you think I’m a senile fool.)
Anyway, when I placed the steaming breakfast in front of her, she said, “You treat me like I’m a movie star or something.”
“I treat you like my favorite librarian.”
“Well, I am under seventy years old, and my boobs haven’t fallen to my knees yet.”
“The other librarians have boobs?”
She had bedhead and wore a too-big pale-blue terry-cloth robe with matching slippers. Her neck was long and white as she stretched up for a kiss. She had the robe tied loosely at her waist. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world. Got my little house, my chickens, and my Southern gentleman lover.”
In such a robe or in a modest dress, no makeup, wearing tortoise-shell cat-eye glasses, her hair its natural brown and curly, she fit in here in southern Arkansas. She was a fairly attractive woman approaching forty, gaining a little weight (mainly because of my cooking). If she had been a teacher at Warren High School, where I was the principal, some of the boys might have been crushing on her, but no one would have compared her to Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe.
“I mean it, Mr. Principal. You’re the one.”
“What about you-know-who?”
“I’m dead to him. To all of them. And I like it that way. And by the way, you’re the handsomest man I know.”
She really did say that to me. Of course, you’re not going to believe it, me in this wheelchair, everything sagging, white hair sprouting out of my ears.
*
My mama was born in 1909, and everybody said she looked like President William Howard Taft. Butt chin, jowls, a bit of a mustache. Sweetest girl in the county, though. My daddy was the handsomest man and the most popular backdoor lover in maybe the whole great state of Arkansas. Everybody said so. But by the time he met Mama he was blind as a bat because of first-batch moonshine, and he didn’t understand why her nickname was “Taft.” First batch of moonshine is going to blind you or kill you. If daddy had been able to see Mama, I might not have ever been born.
After college in Fayetteville, I came back to Warren to teach Hemingway, Faulkner, and Twain and a bit about pronoun-antecedent agreement and remind teenagers about the dangers of moonshine. Then I got hooked into being principal after only three years. Maybe it was five. My memory is fuzzy sometimes.
In ‘56, I hired a math teacher who became my wife. Bertha. Yeah, I know what you’re visualizing—some sad cow—but Bertha looked like Grace Kelley. Better, really. Slim, elegant, blonde. More beautiful than Norma Jeane, but I never told Norma Jeane that.
*
Excuse my intermission: Cough up some phlegm. Try not to think about my prostate. I ask the aide to move my wheelchair out of the sun coming through the tall window because I’m getting hot. Sitting in the cool shadows, I smell less like death but feel closer to it.
*
The third worst day of my life was a Friday that winter of 1963—the week of Lincoln’s birthday on Tuesday and Valentine’s Day on Thursday. (See how sharp my memory is.) The number one worst day of my life was when Bertha died in childbirth in ’58, and the second worst came later in ‘63.
On their way to school that Friday morning, three junior boys on the basketball team and two sophomore girls, twin sisters named Mandi and Randi, had tried to beat a logging train in the heavy fog. They likely could barely see the train’s headlight, if at all, and their rattletrap old Dodge stalled on the tracks.
I summoned the whole school into the gymnasium, and we talked about God and tragedy and grief and teenage drivers and the danger of driving in fog.
A veteran of the Great War staggered into my school wearing his ragged doughboy uniform with the bottom buttons undone because of his belly and smelling of a moonshine breakfast. I patted his shoulder, and he sat down on the first row of bleachers. He lived in a tar-paper shack near the railroad tracks and had waded through the fog after he heard the impact and had seen the immediate aftermath of the train’s obliteration of that Dodge, those three lanky boys, and pretty little Mandi and Randi. Imagine crumbled steel, shattered glass, and twisted body parts. “Worse thing since France in ‘17,” he whispered to me. Gray-faced, red-eyed, stinking like a moonshiner’s shack, he sat mumbling to himself about a greenish-yellow fog. When you get old, it gets hard to fight the memories. You always lose. The memories torture you so that you want to die. My daddy used a shotgun. He used to hunt with Ernest Hemingway up in Piggott on the old Pfeiffer place around 1929. That’s where a possessive woman or her jealous husband (Daddy was never sure which) gave him the bad moonshine.
There was a lot of crying on those hard bleachers. The basketball coach sobbed and rocked and raised his fist and kept saying, “Why, Jesus, why?” The preachers from First, Second, and Third Baptist showed up throughout the day, and everybody got worn out with praying.
That afternoon after I told the kids and teachers to go ahead and go home and cling to their loved ones, I phoned Norma Jeane to let her know I had paperwork piled up and I’d be late. The night before, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, I had baked catfish and sweet potatoes, and she had made a strawberry cake. I gave her a first edition of The Great Gatsby. It had the original dust jacket (a bit tattered) with the carnival and the fireworks and the eyes hovering over all of it. Norma Jeane looked at me through her tortoise-shell cat-eye glasses and told me again that I was the love of her life, that I was the one. She hugged the copy of Gatsby and inhaled its scent.
I said, “You’re my Daisy.” Yeah, I was corny and dumb as hell.
That Friday afternoon, she was breathless on the phone and said not to bother coming over, to finish up my paperwork and go home to my place and get some sleep, but after I left the school in the hands of the night janitor, I didn’t want to be alone and made my way toward Norma Jeane’s house, which sat on the tail end of Rose Street past three vacant lots of crumbling brick foundations and high weeds, the road petering out beyond her side yard to nothing but thick woods.
It was a brilliantly clear night with a sky full of stars and a supermoon. A good bit up the street from her house, I halted my Ford Custom when I came in sight of five dark sedans and at least a dozen men in dark suits all around the place. I drove up at a snail’s pace, cranking down my window before I got to the second vacant lot, and one of the dark-suited men stepped into the street and called me “sir” and grimly informed me that the road was closed for repairs.
I heard Norma Jean’s chickens squawking and wondered whether these men in dark suits were upsetting them or maybe the raccoons were trying to get to them again. The raccoons would climb all over the chicken wire, pausing occasionally to reach their nasty little claws through the openings.
I sat too long listening to the chickens. “Sir,” the man said. “You need to move along.”
“Oh.” I blinked at him several times. “Yes. Sorry.”
“Besides,” he pointed out, “this street is a dead end. Maybe you didn’t know?”
*
Excuse me, again. Another intermission: I’m not crying. It’s allergies. I warn you I sound like a klaxon horn when I blow my nose.
*
“He just showed up,” she told me. She was wearing a shiny red silk robe cinched tight at her waist. “Imagine my surprise!” The look of surprise was straight out of Some Like It Hot.
I had sat in my brown Ford down the road close enough to watch her house and had seen the black sedans leave about three in the morning. They crept right past me with their headlights off.
Now at 3:15 a.m., her old sofa was lumpy, and the fabric was rough. “Why did you contact him? I thought you—”
“I just wanted him to know I was okay. That I was alive. . . . And happy. I knew he would be sad. He cares about people.”
“Uh huh.”
“He does. He really does. He’s strong but sensitive.”
“You sound like a Goddamned campaign sign. Vote for Strong But Sensitive!” I jumped up, clenching my fists, looked around at the peeling florid wallpaper. The room was spinning. I was trembling, not like now, not this little bit of quivering of a worn-out 99-year-old body. I was trembling like I was standing on railroad tracks and a train was coming.
She said softly, “It’s all right. I’ll make it up to you.”
I blew out a long sigh and sat back down, rubbed my face.
“Will he come again?” I asked, noticing for the first time that she was barefoot and her toenails were painted bright red.
When she didn’t answer, I looked at her face. Her wide-eyed expression was from The Seven Year Itch. In the movie, the look was amusing.
She wore remnants of makeup—white eyeliner, layers of lashes, crimson lipstick, enhanced beauty mark.
“He will, won’t he? He’ll come here again,” I said.
The chickens were squawking out in their pen. She looked in the direction of the back door. “I’ll need to check on them soon,” she said.
“So what am I?” I said. “Now? What can I expect? Are they going to be watching your house? Will I have to sneak in? Is his brother going to be showing up, too? . . . Jesus.”
She leaned toward me, looked me in the eyes. She didn’t have her glasses on. She now smiled radiantly (she had done something that made her teeth whiter) and spoke softly. “You know what you are, Mr. Principal.” She laid both her hands on my forearm. “You’re the love of my life.”
She kept smiling, trying to blind me. The movie star. The actress. I didn’t say anything. The place smelled like the stench of Jockey Club cologne.
But I knew better—I knew what I would be from that day on. Her sometime lover. Her secret lover. Her backdoor man.
Not the love of her life.
*
He never came back to her house, but every two or three weeks, a car would come pick her up and take her to a military airstrip and she’d be gone for a day or two. When she’d disappear, I would read the newspaper and watch Walter Cronkite to see where he—the big man, the true love of her life—was. DC, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Hyannis Port, Martha’s Vineyard, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. Los Angeles. My head would roar. I changed my voter registration to the other party. I visited Bertha’s grave, and that always helped. When Norma Jeane returned, I never asked her how DC was. Or Boston. Or Chicago. Or any of the other places I knew she’d been. With him. She would lie, of course, and say, “It’s so good to be home. It’s so good to be with you.”
*
Oh, Goddamn. I need another intermission: I am horrified now at the thought of what I might have done if he’d ever come to her house again. I still had the shotgun my daddy killed himself with.
*
When they killed him in Dallas in November, Norma Jeane’s hair turned mousy gray overnight and she shriveled up. The bags under her eyes drooped to the corners of her puckered gray lips. Her teeth turned yellow. By Sunday, her hair started falling out. She wrapped herself in a blanket and didn’t talk. She (and the whole country) watched everything on the TV. The world was grainy black-and-white. She saw the patsy die. She watched the riderless horse, saw the little boy salute. When I offered bacon, pancakes, eggs, tea, toast, she looked at me with her huge sunken eyes like she didn’t know who I was.
We didn’t have school the Monday after the killing. I was with Norma Jean the whole time. Her nail polish cracked and flaked off. Her skin turned crepey.
Then I had to go back to work on Tuesday. As I drove to the high school that morning, the logging train was loud. It rushed through town shrieking. Sleet assailed my car like God was spitting finishing nails.
The teachers didn’t try to teach. Everybody talked about the killing. About the patsy. About the killing of the patsy.
During lunch time, I carefully navigated the icy streets to Norma Jeane’s place to check on her. She was standing in her living room looking out the picture window. I went inside, and her back was to me. She was skeletal in a forest-green dress, long-sleeved and with a high neckline.
“Really icy out there,” I said.
She kept her eyes on the glazed trees, the glazed grass, the glazed road.
I stood next to her. “Your dress is pretty. You feeling better?” I could see only her shriveled, wrinkled, spotted, moldy profile.
“Joe is coming,” she muttered.
“Joe? Joe who?”
She didn’t say anything more. She smelled bad. She smelled the way I do now. At one point, the phone burst to life, and I let it ring a dozen times before I picked up. The black receiver was heavy as lead. Nobody said anything. I could hear no one breathing.
Finally, I had to get back to work. I kissed her brittle hair, and when I got outside, I looked back at the window she was still standing in. I waved. She didn’t wave back but she was looking at me. I swear she was looking at me. She was remembering who I was.
Late that afternoon, when I went back to her place, she was gone. She had taken nothing, left with only the forest-green dress on her back.
I never saw her again. I never heard from her. Her chickens were gone too. I figured the raccoons finally got them.
