Book Twelve: Two Cop Parties
95. Cold weather hung on. . . .
Cold weather hung on until the vernal equinox, but with the approach of Easter and Spring Break, the height of the sun sent the women’s flapping overcoats on their annual migration into closets. Girls hurried along wearing jackets or sweaters above miniskirts, their white legs scissoring over the grit-darkened sidewalks, their unleashed laughter startling the squirrels. I began to appear on campus wearing my band hat and necklace, drawing looks of interest from the chicas; I sported my fine beard proudly, even managing to swagger a little after hiding my face in my collar all winter long. While robins sang outside my apartment one sunny afternoon, Grace and I fell into another hour of unfathomable transcendence, when we woke from coupled sleep to whirl above our bodies like intoxicated maple seeds suspended on the warm spring wind. But, as before, when what lifted us had passed and we returned to ourselves, we had nowhere to go with the experience, and we parted as if we’d only read about it happening to someone else. It was to be our last meeting before she left with The Goon for Las Vegas.
I spent so much of each day looking at women that I had little time to study. I did find time to pursue my interest in David Jones and In Parenthesis; I even developed a useful approach, which was to claim that Eliot complained about the Twentieth Century in intellectual terms, whereas Jones’s pain was personal and immediate. But wherever I turned to look for source material, I found that either Strange or Rey had preceded me, and I had no burning desire to complete the project in any case. Spring held me firmly by the swollen nuts, and whenever I entered the dusty library I imagined I inhaled the perfume of Selva Andersen.
I took it out on Julia. We usually did it on Shemansky’s desk, sometimes on the floor, sometimes in my squeaking swivel chair. Once she asked me, “What if I got pregnant, Jonas? Just supposing.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What are you and Jerome using for birth control?” I still thought of Jerome Weld as her main lover, though God only knows whether Jerome got it into her as often as I did. He’d have had to have been pretty busy for a middle-aged man.
“Oh, we’re using— Something.” She wouldn’t be specific. I didn’t press her on the subject because I didn’t think that Julia would ever be my problem. If she needed an abortion, I told myself, surely Alex or Uncle Ben would slip her the money.
One morning I got another call from Toni McFerrin; she invited me to come to their youngest’s christening, and to the party to be held afterwards. “There’ll be lots of beer,” she said. “It’ll give you a chance to get to know the opposition.”
“They’re not my opposition,” I said. “They’re cops, that’s all.” Her invitation put me to brooding on religious matters. The God who oversees the sex life of the spadefoot toad has a sense of humor and is probably someone I could get along with. On the other hand, a God who demands to be flattered and lied to just like any President is not my cup of tea. I’ll pay my taxes and fly or march through Hell, but please don’t ask me to vote for the son of a bitch.
Anyway the ceremony was on Tuesday of the week before Easter, at four in the afternoon. I slept unusually late—Tuesday was a day on which I had very little to do—and slouched on the sofa reading until it was time to shower and get dressed. I put on my band shirt and some presentable slacks, and the Harris tweed jacket my dad got me out of the Sears catalog the year I graduated from high school. Standing in front of the mirror, I tried on the necklace as a substitute for a tie, then took it off. The jacket’s sleeves were already an inch too short when the old man bought it for me, but I loved the harsh texture of the rough tweed cloth. It made me feel like the lunatic son of an English lord, escaped from the asylum and wandering the streets of America.
The McFerrins were Congregationalists, regular churchgoers in fact, though they didn’t get that from my mother’s side of the family. Their church was in my favorite part of Lincoln, a historic district south and east of the Capitol where several of my professors lived; the orange-brick building complex was large and relatively new, a sumptuous design with a separate bell tower, sitting on an oddly-spaced block that interrupted streets coming from two directions. It was a puzzling choice unless you saw beneath Toni McFerrin’s warm exterior a determined woman clawing upward after the shirttails of the upper middle class.
I parked my truck next to somebody’s black Lincoln and went inside, seeking down the long cool hallways for a sanctuary suitable for a modest baptism. Near the front of the church (I had used the back entrance) the sound of a child’s fussing led me through a heavy wooden door into a room where everything had been painted yellow, on whose walls someone had created a world of chicks and duckies and skipping rabbits, each with a sinister springtime gleam in its eye. Humpty Dumpties looked down haughtily from their crumbling perches, spotted fawns cavorted in toxic grass, and a Happy Face sun shone over all. Each creature had the zapped-out Warner Brothers smile that R. Crumb recycled in his cartoons.
Toni stood alone at the other end of the room, holding the kid, who arched his back and angrily flailed his arms; when she bent and put him on the floor, he clutched her leg and squalled to be picked up again. “Hi, Jonas,” she said to me. “He wants to nurse. Always at a convenient time, of course.”
“Can’t you give him a cookie or something? Where’s Dale?”
“Dale has the boys in the other room. The minister isn’t here yet. No, he doesn’t want a cookie. Watch the door and tell me if anyone is coming, will you?”
So, I stood with one foot in that yellow room and one foot in the next, guarding the pass. The baby quieted; nobody came. Somewhere down the hall I could hear the running steps of the older sons and Dale’s grumbling voice. “Why on earth did you have four of them?” I asked Toni. “I mean, accidents will happen, but really.”
“I kept hoping for a girl,” she replied cheerfully. “If some kind angel had told me I’d be raising four red-headed boys, I’d have drowned myself.”
After a couple of minutes, Toni asked me to take the baby while she rearranged her clothing. I held the brat at arm’s length, daring him with a level stare to puke on me. He looked around at the decorations, focusing on a plastic butterfly; I carried him over to it, and he began trying to scratch it off the wall. “Go for it,” I told him. “It’s nothing but a flying worm. Eat that thing.”
Soon the minister arrived along with a heavy-set young woman who’d been Toni’s schoolmate and was to be godmother. Dale came in looking at his watch, and the boys clattered in behind him. “Hello, Jonas,” he said. “We asked you along for a spare. Good thing, too; looks like we’ll need you.”
“Do you think Frank’s not coming?” Toni asked him.
“They put him on rush hour at the last minute,” Dale said. “He said he’d come by in uniform, but anything can happen.”
I shortly found myself in a little alcove with a plaster statue of Jesus looking down, being instructed in the duties of a godfather. I promised to teach the kid the ways of the Lord and to see that he got brought up a proper Christian in spite of being a McFerrin same as his dad; help with college expenses, the affable preacher said, would be appreciated but wasn’t mandatory. The child was baptized, Toni’s friend took a picture, and then Dale got the oldest boy to take a picture of all of us. Then I took one of the family, Toni and Dale and the four boys all together, the minister looking a little worried behind them. “Well, that’s it,” Toni said as we all shook hands with the pastor. “Party time.”
“Do you know Mattie Halliday, the Unitarian minister?” I asked him. “She’s a friend of mine.”
“I know Mattie well,” he replied warmly. “Give her my love.”
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