Wolf at the Table, page 2
Mickey turns the radio on to Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz.”
I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee waltz
When an old friend I happened to see…
It might be the saddest, most romantic song Myra has ever heard.
“How old are you?” Mickey finally asks.
“I just turned thirteen in June,” she says.
“June what?”
“June fifteenth,” she says. “I’m a Gemini.”
“I was an October baby,” Mickey says. “October twentieth.”
“That makes you a Libra,” Myra says.
“What exactly is a Libra?” he says.
“In astrology it represents the scales of justice.”
“So that makes me a weight-measuring device?” he says. “How boring. I’d rather be a lion or a fish.”
They laugh and their laughter seems to mix well with the lilt of Patti Page’s voice.
From his pocket Mickey produces a ball of Dubble Bubble chewing gum, its wrapping wrinkled, and offers it to Myra.
“Oh, no thank you,” she says.
He sets the gum on the dash in front of her. “In case you change your mind,” he says. After a silence he adds, “You’re very pretty, Myra. I know that might be rude of me to say.”
She thanks him, feeling the heat again in her cheeks, which she has to resist hiding with her hands.
“I don’t meet many girls like you,” he says.
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” she says. “I’m not much to look at.”
“You are, though,” he says. “Those eyes of yours could do a lot of damage. Are they gray or green?”
“My mother says they’re hazel.”
“I noticed them as soon as I came over to your booth.”
Myra bites her lower lip to keep from smiling. She wishes she could somehow make her hazel eyes surge and put him under a deep spell.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he asks.
“Three sisters and two brothers,” she replies. “I’m the oldest.”
“Such a large family,” he says. He seems to consider something, intensely, for a moment, and then, under his breath, adds, “Too large,” and shakes his head.
“Too large for what?” Myra asks.
“Oh, I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” he says. “It just seems like it would be a lot to manage.”
“It is,” Myra says. “My sister Joan is mentally handicapped. She can dry the dishes but she’s not allowed near the silverware. Her mind is quite stunted. And I have a baby brother now, too, so my mother relies on me to help with the others.”
“How old is your baby brother?”
“Two months. A June baby, like me. His name is Archibald. We call him Archie. He can be very fussy but he quiets down after Mother feeds him.”
The new song on the radio is Perry Como’s “Hoop-Dee-Doo.” The rain hitting the passenger’s-side window seems to be momentarily in cahoots with the song’s jaunty polka rhythm.
“Tell me all their names,” Mickey says.
“Fiona, Alec, Joan, Lexy, and Archie. That’s everyone, in order. Sometimes Alec calls Joan ‘the Bullfrog.’ He can be mean.”
“And you’re Myra,” he says, smiling.
“The oldest,” she says.
His smile makes her imagine him brushing his teeth, washing his face, combing his hair, even peeing in the toilet. She shoves these images from her mind.
Another car enters the park and wheels past the Bel Air. Mickey watches the car keenly for a moment, craning his neck. He even rolls down the window partway. It’s still light out, but darker than usual because of the rain.
After he rolls the window back up he says, “Lincoln Cosmopolitan.”
“You like cars?” Myra asks.
“I do,” he says. “I prefer Chevrolet to Lincoln, though.”
“Yours is lovely,” Myra says, immediately embarrassed by her flattery. The words feel clumsy to her, as if she uttered them through a loose tooth.
Mickey doesn’t acknowledge the compliment and the two of them are quiet again. Only Perry Como on the radio. Myra feels a strange peace sitting with this older boy in his car. Might they drive away together? Might he take her back to Kansas City with him?
“Can I give you a picture?” he finally says.
“Of what?” she asks.
“Of me,” he says.
“… Okay,” Myra hears herself say, doing her best to hide her excitement. Her teeth nearly begin to chatter.
Mickey reaches into his back pocket and produces a billfold, from which he removes a small snapshot. He unfolds the black-and-white photo and hands it to her. Myra smooths it out on her lap. Staring back at her is a boy in a military uniform. He has taken a knee. His right hand clutches the snout of a rifle, its stock driven into the dirt. The boy wears camouflage fatigues and a combat helmet and he’s smiling proudly.
“That’s you?” Myra asks.
“It sure is,” he says. “Over in Osan, Korea.”
“It’s a lovely picture.”
“I want you to have it.”
She thanks him and secrets it away in her pocketbook. After she snaps it shut he asks her for a picture.
“I don’t have any with me,” Myra says.
“Will you send me one?”
“You’ll have to give me your address.”
“Just send it to me at Yankee Stadium.”
“What’s your last name?” she asks.
“Mantle,” the boy says. “On the envelope just write ‘Mickey Mantle, in care of Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, New York.’”
When he drops Myra off in front of her house he gives her a silver dollar.
“What’s this for?” Myra asks.
“For being you,” the boy says. “I’m tempted to flip it but I’ve already made my decision.”
“About what?” she says.
“About you,” he says, and winks at her.
She kisses him goodbye on the cheek. As she walks into her house she can still taste the faint salty tang of his skin.
“You’re thirty-five minutes late,” Ava Larkin tells her daughter as she enters the kitchen. Ava is rinsing a rag in the sink.
Myra looks at the clock over the stove and it’s true. “I got caught in the rain,” she lies.
“That’s a poor excuse,” her mother says. “Archie’s running a fever,” she adds, squeezing the water out of the rag. “I need you to make him a cold bath.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At two months old, Myra’s baby brother still possesses the bald, wrinkled face of a stunned elderly police officer. Following church services, Ava likes to mill about the parking lot with the other mothers, baby Archie hoisted in her arms. Myra’s three sisters—Fiona, Joan, and Lexy—will busy themselves picking dandelions in St. John the Baptist’s front lawn. Fiona dutifully marshals four-year-old Lexy, keeping her close, while the heavyset, mentally slow Joan, who just turned seven, is content to stay in one place. Often she’ll happily sit cross-legged and stare at the church’s ancient sugar maple as if it will someday bestow upon her a great secret.
Ava and the other mothers will gather around their Packards and Hudsons and Plymouth Cranbrooks and gossip about the teachers at Holy Family Junior High School, especially Sister Rose, who’s far too pretty to be a nun, and the water level of the Chemung River, and President Truman’s sourpuss wife, Bess, and the troops in South Korea, and how Steve and Myrtle McCrae’s boy, Cotter, just landed in Busan, and the Soviet Union and their dastardly atomic bomb, and the recent lightning storm that felled the Blubaughs’ copper beach tree over on South Magee Street, and how at least two gallons of whole milk from Houch’s Dairy went bad, and what about the new salesman at Triangle Shoes, doesn’t he look exactly like that handsome detective character from Where the Sidewalk Ends, the one played by Dana Andrews? They talk and smile and smoke their Old Golds, somehow indifferent to the hovering gnats.
At nearly six-three, Myra’s mother looms over her children like a creature in a fable. Donald Larkin, a head shorter than his wife, often stands beside her like some dutiful, ever-ready attendant. At thirty-two, despite having already given birth to six children, Ava is slender and pretty, with rich, youthful skin, and only a few strands of gray shooting through her boot-black hair. Myra admires her mother’s beauty, her steady poise, her physical strength.
After Myra fills the baby’s basin with cold water in the upstairs bathtub, she brings it down to the kitchen, where her mother is at the counter next to the icebox, cleaning the mess between Archie’s legs.
“Next Sunday there will be no free time following Mass,” Ava tells her. “You’ll remain at the church with your sisters. You can mix with the other children in the lawn and keep an eye on Joan.”
Myra nods. The disappointment of having that hour taken from her feels like a blow to the backs of her legs. How will she read her book? Holden’s train has just arrived at Penn Station and anything could happen. The thought of not having that time with him almost makes her sick, but she knows better than to argue.
Archie’s legs swim out as her mother wipes up the greenish, foul-smelling muck. Myra grabs a clean diaper from the compartment below the silverware drawer and sets it beside the basin.
“I need to be able to rely on you,” her mother tells her, unfolding the diaper.
“Yes, ma’am,” Myra says.
“I don’t enjoy taking your privileges away.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Myra repeats.
“You have to set the proper example for your sisters. I’m not sure if there’s much hope for Alec, but Fiona and Lexy have a real chance and they look to you.”
Myra is struck that her mother never includes Joan in these talks about her siblings. It’s as if Joan is not quite a person, or worse yet, as if she’s something unnameable and heavy that must be transported from room to room in order for the Larkins to survive, like some huge bag of sand that, if not continuously moved, will eventually fall through the weakening floorboards and take everything with it.
Back in her bedroom Myra finds a strip of her seventh-grade class photos. She scissors one of them away, sure to trim the edges just so. She thinks she looks naive, like a little girl, slightly stunned by the flashbulb, as if the photographer had sneaked up on her. But her smile is okay—nice, even—and it’s the only recent photo she has. She writes a short note, folds it in half, slips the photograph into the crease, and seals it in an envelope, which she addresses to Mickey Mantle, care of Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, New York, NY, 10451, just as he instructed. She licks a stamp and affixes it to the upper-right corner. She’ll mail it first thing tomorrow, following her morning chores.
After that she opens her diary and tapes the silver dollar onto a new page. Under it she writes the following letter:
Sunday, August 19th, 1951
Dear Holden,
Today I met a boy at the diner. He was very handsome and polite. His name is Mickey and he’s a professional baseball player who is an outfielder for the New York Yankees and he also fought in the Korean conflict. He has blond hair and blue eyes. He gave me a silver dollar, which I’ve taped to the page above. He also gave me a picture of himself from when he was in the army. He is so young to have accomplished so much. I think if you met him you’d like him. You might even be friends. I know how you prefer polite people to those who are cruel or rude, like your annoying dormitory neighbor, Robert Ackley. Mickey is very polite. He even gave me a ride home in the rain. He has a very nice yellow car.
Other noteworthy news is that my baby brother, Archie, is sick with a fever. My mother was angry with me because I was late coming home, so I won’t be able to go to the diner next week. I will miss you.
I’m sure Archie will be fine. Babies get sick all the time.
In closing I want to write that I consider this to be a special day and I’m glad that I could share it with you.
Yours Sincerely,
Myra Lee Larkin
DURING DINNER, VERY LITTLE is said. Everyone is concerned about Archie, whose fever hasn’t broken. Ava has placed him in his bassinet, which is parked beside her, at the foot of the table. There are cucumber slices arranged on his naked torso. When Lexy asks her mother why there are cucumbers on him, Ava tells her that they help to draw the fever out.
Fiona picks at her meat loaf and Joan seems to be arranging her peas as if to protect them from the rest of the food on her plate. At the head of the table, her father eats with a slow intensity, his eyes cast down. Myra waits for any cue from her mother that will signal she needs help. The smallest look can send her into the kitchen for more salt or napkins, or a clean fork. Alec still hasn’t come home from who knows what—his only friend Roland’s house? throwing rocks off a bridge?—and no one seems interested in mentioning it.
A portrait of Jesus hangs on the wall above the dining room table. It’s been in that spot for as long as Myra can remember. Jesus’s golden hair is wavy, his brown eyes deep and kind and round. Sometimes Alec will tilt the frame so it looks crooked. Ava will correct it without comment or, apparently, suspicion. Tonight Jesus looks different. His face, usually imbued with benevolence, seems beset by mischief, as if he’s harboring a naughty joke he’s just overheard.
Archie makes very little sound, only a chirp here and there. Ava keeps dipping her napkin in her water glass and dabbing at his forehead. She quietly sings to him:
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning
Give me oil in my lamp, I pray
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning
Keep me burning till the break of day
Myra’s mother has a beautiful voice. She sings in the choir at church and often gets a solo during the Christmas recital. Joan stops eating and stares at her, entranced. Lexy joins in with the singing, not quite forming some of the words, and warbling other shapeless vowels, as if under a spell.
Sing hosanna! Sing hosanna!
Sing hosanna to the King of Kings!
Sing hosanna! Sing hosanna!
Sing hosanna to the King…
AFTER DINNER MYRA GOES into her father’s study, where Donald sits in his plaid recliner, smoking a pipe and reading the Star-Gazette. Beside him, his old Philco Cathedral radio reports the news.
More than a hundred people are dead from a hurricane in Jamaica…
Reds threaten the U.N. with annihilation…
Major battles erupt on the Korean front…
Myra’s father is a machinist at the tool-and-die in nearby Horseheads. He’s a year younger than Myra’s mother and speaks so infrequently that many Elmirans believe the war—specifically his difficult time in the Hürtgen Forest—took his voice away. He’s more apt to talk at home, especially after dinner, when he sits by the radio with his pipe and newspaper. Myra can sometimes coax entire sentences out of him—quiet, careful half sentences, really—but she looks forward to these few minutes with her father, who, except for Sunday Mass, rarely changes out of his drab gabardine work clothes. He can be seen in the Larkins’ driveway nearly every Saturday morning, polishing the Chrysler’s engine with vinegar.
“Come sit,” he tells Myra, who perches on an old dining room chair that squeaks, the only other one in the room.
Donald’s study is a glorified alcove, really, with a window and the two chairs and a floor lamp and the radio handsomely centered on a cherrywood side table. All of this is arranged on a small rope rug made fuzzy by their cat’s claws. Myra thinks her father loves the radio almost as much as his car.
The pipe smoke smells like plums and pepper. Her father is starting to go gray at the temples. Myra has always considered him handsome, though his tired expression obscures it. There are deep lines in his forehead that appear as if engraved. He sometimes works more than sixty hours a week. His hands, pale and callused, are large for his size.
He draws on his pipe and sets the newspaper down.
“Do you know anything about Mickey Mantle?” Myra asks.
Her father rarely misses a game. The Yankees are his favorite team and he prefers to listen to them on the radio to watching them on the television set. Joan will often come sit on the floor beside him and he’ll give her the foul ball he caught at Yankee Stadium when he was a boy. He caught it with his bare hands and wrote the date on it in black ink: July 5, 1930. He keeps the ball on a small saucer next to the radio. During the Yankee broadcasts, Joan will rotate it in her hands and rock back and forth hypnotically.
“Mantle’s that young hotshot rookie who can really run,” Donald says. “Got sent down to the minor leagues last month. I think they got plans for him to take over in center after DiMaggio retires.”
“He fought in Korea, right?”
“I believe he had some sort of medical condition that may have prevented him from serving. But I couldn’t tell you for sure.”
Her father returns to puffing on his pipe. This is the most he’s spoken in weeks. Sometimes Myra wonders if he’s been issued an allotment of words. Once he reaches that number he’ll fall silent again.
“What’s got you so interested in Mickey Mantle?” her father asks.
“I overheard some people talking about him at the diner,” Myra says.
She rarely veers from the truth, and is surprised at the little thrill she feels lying to her father. It’s like sneaking a bite of a Hershey bar during Mass. She will be confirmed in the spring. What will these white lies mean then? She imagines that the process of getting closer to God might feel like having her hair aggressively braided.
“He certainly had a fast start,” Donald offers. “At the beginning of the season Stengel had him leading off a bunch. Not sure why they demoted the kid. I think he was hitting around two-seventy.”
