The Sweetheart Season Page 2

  These people had just fought and won a war. Everything they later learned about this war affirmed the necessity of it. Perhaps uniquely in the history of American warfare, it was a war with popular support. But even beyond that, as it was performed on the radio and sent home in dispatches, it was a war that seemed to provide an entire generation with evidence of their essential goodness, their innocence, their generosity. It seems to have been a war waged in an almost total absence of doubt. To us today, of course, this might as well be fairyland. The people who raised us are no more like us than the fairies are.

  Irini was nineteen years old, and even though she’d lived through a whole war, nothing yet had hurt her enough to leave a mark. This makes her even harder to imagine.

  She had dark hair that changed color with the seasons. In the fall it had a red tint, in the summer, gold. Her eyes were brown. She accented her full lower lip with dark lipsticks, curled her hair with home permanents, and wore it fastened back with bobby pins. She made herself earrings by attaching golden sequins to her lobes with clear fingernail polish. She padded her shoulders, tweezed her eyebrows. She wore stockings with a seam down the back, when she could get them, and made the seam line with eyebrow pencil on her bare leg when she couldn’t. She used a peppermint-scented soap, so she always smelled of peppermint, overlaid with whatever other spices they might have been using that day in the Kitchen; some days peppermint and thyme, some days peppermint and cinnamon. And after several months in the Scientific Kitchen, the muscles of her right arm were so enlarged that once, just outside a Chicago trade fair, a sculptor begged her to model for him, just her arm, for a Winged Victory. “Your arm is like something by Michelangelo,” he told her. "Your arm could be in the Sistine Chapel." At her peak she could mix fourteen loaves in a single morning, best record in the Kitchen by three.

  The Scientific Kitchen was a sea of stainless-steel sinks and spotless white counters. It smelled of yeast and caramelized sugar and was kept always at the perfect temperature for growing bread—warm. Its purpose was to see that no woman, whatever her lack of talent, judgment, or experience, would ever again suffer the humiliation of a failed meal. The Kitchen combined the technology of the home with the procedures of the laboratory. Ingredients were measured with pharmaceutical accuracy. Temperatures were checked with scientific precision. Results were noted in lab books and shared in weekly meetings.

  The linkage of housework to science was Henry Collins’s particular pet. In the collective mind of Margaret Mill, the typical housewife was intelligent, methodical, and forward-looking. The Platonic idea of housewife was Maggie Collins, a tidy, indefatigable, even-tempered, ageless woman with a working knowledge of the chemical properties of gluten, a penchant for standardized weights and measures, and a proselytizing impulse when-it came to the seven basic food groups. She dressed in an apron rather than a lab coat; she relied on measuring spoons rather than graduated cylinders; but she shared the scientist’s obsession with reliable, predictable results and she might have made pipettes an ordinary everyday kitchen item if they hadn’t been so hard to clean.

  She was as interested in innovation as she was in codification. During the war she was magnificent. Food shortages brought out her creative side. She published a meatless spaghetti recipe using half a pound of pureed breakfast cereal rolled into balls and browned quickly in hot grease, and also a four-part piece on raising rabbits in the home. “Contrary to popular belief, they can be housebroken,” she wrote. And suggested, “After you’ve eaten them, a lovely coat can be made of the pelts.” She created “flurkey,” a sort of wartime turkey dinner with stuffing and potatoes and relishes—with everything, in fact, except the turkey itself.

  “Don’t talk to me about the French,” Henry Collins sometimes said, as if anyone in Magrit was likely to. “Don’t talk to me about the genius of the male chef. There’s no one so willing to take a chance on a spice she’s never heard of than our Maggie Collins. She was using saffron in the thirties.”

  Henry’s retirement years coincided with the shrinking activities of the Magrit part of the mill, but he continued to take an interest in the Kitchen. He didn’t come in often. He would get absorbed in something else, space travel or bird migrations, but then he would suddenly be back, showing up at the odd moment, wandering through, and taking in deep breaths of yeast. A hand-painted sign was hung over one of the sinks as guidance and inspiration to his employees. “What would Maggie say?” it asked enigmatically.

  “He’s in love with her,” Fanny May warned Irini when she first started in the Kitchen. Fanny ran the Kitchen. She was ten years older and built to a much larger scale than Irini. There was enough difference in their size to make them look incongruous together, a dachshund and a shepherd, a canary and an emu.

  The Mays were an old Magrit family, descended not through but around the same Opal May who went over the falls rather than marry. Their offspring tended toward the female. Fanny was particularly female. In fact, she was a dish.

  Fanny showed Irini a blue ceramic cookie jar on the counter in a corner. “If you say out loud that Maggie isn’t real, and Mr. Henry hears you say it, you have to pay a fine. You have to put money in the cookie jar. And then Maggie gets to spend the money on something she really wants.”

  This would be a practical item. Maggie had lived through the Depression.

  The blue cookie jar was in the shape of a grinning pig whose head came off. Irini looked inside. She saw seventy-six cents—three quarters and one zinc penny. “It’s not the problem it once was,” Fanny added. She was referring to Henry Collins’s reduced hearing.

  In 1947, people believed that no two snowflakes were alike. Current research has thrown this into doubt, but holds it to be true for ears instead. You’ll be surprised, I bet, to hear that even identical twins do not have identical ears. But I digress.

  Henry’s ears were quite large, with lobes as big as thumbprints. From time to time he would stick a finger into the hole and vibrate it alarmingly. “His brain itches,” his wife, Ada, offered as explanation. It was fondly said. They all knew that Henry had a busy brain.

  Fortunately his ears did not stick out, but were nicely folded back. In shape they resembled the leaves of an exotic tropical. But they were all show. By this time Henry had persuaded himself that his hearing loss was an actual asset, that it gave him an additional cunning, making him that much harder to deceive.

  We are often told to value our eyes over our ears—seeing is believing, and don’t believe everything you hear, and one picture is worth a thousand words—but these aphorisms are only words themselves and therefore testify against their own validity. In fact, it is as easy to show a lie as to tell one and maybe easier. Henry’s own large and capable-looking ears were a case in point.

  One evening in early April Irini’s father asked Cindy May, Magrit’s telephone operator and Fanny May’s littlest sister, to call her. “Your pop wants you at Bumps,” Cindy May said. “Again. He says you’re his little love and it won’t take but a minute.” Bumps was her father’s most frequent location, a bar within easy walking distance from home.

  “How far along is he?” Irini asked.

  “Somewhere between pensive and patriotic.”

  Irini’s father’s patriotic stage was usually short-lived. Uniquely in Magrit he had had difficulties with the war. Too old to serve, and too honest to pretend he minded, Irini’s father was uncomfortable with the national spirit of elevated morality. He found the war as reported at home preposterously glossy. "Just because the Nazis were bad, that doesn’t automatically make everything we did good," he might suggest when no one had said that it did.

  Or he might want to talk about the bomb. “The human race is hanging by a thread,” he would shout, not without a certain relish. He had a superior tone, as if he were the only one in Magrit who was concerned, when Maggie Collins herself had addressed the issue in a column published back in 1946. “Over and above all else you do, the prevention of atomic war is the
thought you should wake up to, go to sleep with, and carry with you all day,” Maggie had written, and you couldn’t get much more concerned than that.

  But let’s be fair. The Japanese military had behaved despicably at Pearl Harbor and even worse throughout Asia. And the bomb had ended the war. The Hiroshima maidens would come to the United States for the best plastic surgery the world could offer, all bills to be paid by Uncle Sam. American lives had been saved. In fact you could argue, as Vannevar Bush of the Carnegie Institute had already argued, that Japanese lives had been saved as well. Without the bomb, Bush pointed out, Japan might well have faced its eventual defeat with a nationwide orgy of ritual suicide.

  And then there was the Atomic Energy Commission, already predicting a future of atom-powered cars, cheap and abundant food, plenty of leisure time for all, and no more wars, ever, as the new critter, Mr. Atom, worked his magic. Irini’s father was stubbornly refusing to see the bright side. This was so like him.

  Fortunately, his drinking gave Magrit a way to be forgiving. “It’s just the liquor talking,” someone would say, buying him another, pushing him quickly out the back of his probing stage and into his pain-free.

  Soon after this, he would begin to sing. “Lili Marlene,” perhaps, if he was nostalgic, or his personal favorite, “Take a Leg from Any Old Table,” if he was playful. Songs in which love was hopeless or had gone bad and you either died of it or had expected it to turn out this way all along.

  And yet, from his mother to his wife, whom he’d married late, to his daughter, his own life was rich in women who loved him.

  Irini put on a heavy coat, blue with leather buttons, and black knitted gloves. Crusts of tired snow lay on the grass along the streets. There were no sidewalks in Magrit except for those in the two blocks constituting the downtown. There the walks were the kind that glitter. “Step lightly. You’re walking on diamonds, Irini,” her father said once and for many years she took this literally.

  The day was just past sunset, still light out but extremely cold. Sometimes, but not often, April was spring. This year it was the dead end of winter. There had been snow that very morning, big flakes but not many, so they only stuck in the hollows and the shaded sides of trees where there was already snow to hold them. They had performed the kind of spring cleaning of which Maggie Collins does not approve. Not a real cleaning, nothing that involved muscle. Just a new clean layer over the soiled old one, the way you sweep dirt under the rug, cover a stained tablecloth with a fresh.

  This was not a pretty effect, merely a tidy one. The snow was as dry as Styrofoam. The grass on the hills was the color of straw, tall but dead and brittle. Even the evergreens were gray. In contrast, the birches were more beautiful than ever, with their thin, elegant trunks and the white of their bare branches lacing against the evening sky.

  It was hot inside Bumps. Her father was seated at the bar, talking animatedly to a man she didn’t know. With one hand he gestured to Norma Baldish, the Bumps evening bartender. With the other hand he drank. “Norma’s great-grandmother once subdued a violent lumberjack with nothing but a potato masher. Just drew it, never even had to mash with it,” he was saying. “In this very bar. Isn’t that so, Norma?” Her father was a poetic, sentimental man, a wonderful storyteller who often moved himself to tears.

  Behind the bar was a sheet of polished brass, pressed with a pattern of flowers. It was a piece of the original bar, saved by the original Baldish family from the fire of aught-five. Irini’s father saw her approaching in it, warped and repeated in the petals, a daisy with eight Irini faces, all growing large as they headed his way.

  “Irini!” He took a gulp and spun around on the bar stool. He didn’t look like a corporate chemist. He had the thin, lupine, four-o’clock-shadowy look of a partisan. “What a delightful and totally unexpected treat. What a surprise! This is Thomas Holcrow.” Her father gestured to his drinking partner. “He’s from Los Angeles. He plans the train schedules. Can you imagine how methodical the man must be? So many people depending on him. Can you imagine? Thomas, this is my daughter, Irini.”

  Irini attempted without success to smooth her father’s hair, still rumpled from the winter cap that now covered one knee. Holcrow watched her with an unsteady gaze. She stood five foot three and weighed 105 pounds. The heavy coat probably made her look even smaller.

  “You’re on,” Holcrow told her father.

  Her father had bet his bar bill Irini could beat Holcrow arm wrestling. Irini took off her coat, but not her gloves. Holcrow’s breath was wet and inflammable. His hand was much bigger than hers and even through the gloves she could feel how warm it was. The match lasted less than a minute. “Holy mackerel,” he said as he went down for the count.

  “Isn’t she something? A face like Maureen O’Hara and an arm like Jack Dempsey.” Her father’s spirits were unbearably high. “Cheer up, Holcrow,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink.” To Norma Baldish he said, “Two beers.” To Irini, “You run along home now. This is no place for an impressionable young girl. Does your father know where you are?” To Norma, “Just put them on my tab.”

  He did not come home for supper that night. Just before midnight she woke to the sound of his voice. “I will not wake my daughter,” he was shouting. “Not for anything.” He stood on their front step and she could hear him through the window just as if he were in the room with her.

  Holcrow had followed her father home and was demanding a rematch. Irini inferred this; she could not hear Holcrow at all. “She is not some sideshow exhibition. She is a growing girl.” Her father’s voice was crisp with indignation. “Go ahead. Break the window. Break down the door! I’ll never get her up. She has work in the morning!”

  Irini heard the sound of smashing glass. Two minutes later her father knocked on her bedroom door. The knock was ever so soft, a knock designed to bother her as little as possible. “Irini, can you help me? I seem to have cut myself.”

  Irini put on her bathrobe. “Did Mr. Holcrow break our window?”

  “No. I dropped my bottle.”

  Irini went to look out the front door.

  “He’s gone,” her father said. “He had an engagement. Just as well. What a sore loser. I swear, it almost makes a man afraid to ride the trains.” Her father held out his hand. He had cut across the tips of two fingers and was bleeding. “No need to put anything nasty on it. Some of the whiskey splashed over it on the way out of the bottle. It’s as clean as can be.”

  Irini went to the medicine cabinet for the iodine. Her father closed his eyes. “I’m just a little sorry everyone at Bumps saw you win,” he said. “I could have lined up the matches if I’d thought it through more. It was just a happy inspiration and I didn’t think it through. You were a trump, though. You were beautiful. Two seconds and you had him pinned. Did you hear that little squealing sound he made? If I’d thought it through more I would have told you to make it look more difficult. Ouch, Irini! Ouch, my love!”

  Maggie Collins writes: “No open wound, however small, can be considered trivial. Bacteria gather at the site and begin to enter the body immediately. The quick use of an antiseptic is the first priority.”

  Maggie Collins writes: “Every girl must learn early not to compete in sporting events with men. It is not the possibility that she might lose that must be avoided. It is the very real possibility that she might win.”

  “No good ever came to me from arm wrestling men,” my mother always told me, and these are the words I’ve tried to live by.

  2

  Upper Magrit:

  The history of the mill was outlined on the back of the Margaret Mill pamphlet. This brief account told you that Lewis Collins, Henry’s father, was a schoolteacher and amateur ornithologist, that Margaret Collins, his mother, was the daughter of an alderman, and that this happy union had produced a visionary. Confirmation was provided by Henry himself. He gazed soberly out from the back page in a photograph taken perhaps in his fifties, straight out so you hardly saw his ears, a
nd captioned, “I have always been a man who sees things other men don’t see.” The pamphlet concluded with the statement that Henry chose Magrit Falls as the site of his mill because of its special human resources, as well as its perfect aspect of water.

  To some small extent this was even true. The water around Magrit had a temperate effect on the climate. Magrit had fewer subzero days than many places far to the south.

  But in fact, Henry Collins had to change the landscape some considerable amount in order to build his mill. Before 1898 the town had been divided into the Upper and the Lower, a few big homes below the falls, a few small homes above. The water above the falls ran through a deep shale ravine called the kill. Henry wanted a millpond and a dam. To get them on the scale he envisioned, he had to drown Upper Magrit. He did it with dynamite and politics.

  Of course, the families of Upper Magrit were compensated. Ten cents on the dollar, as the Upper remembered, but generous, said the Lower, since, according to the Water Dam Act of 1840, no compensation of any kind was required. In addition to this, Henry put the project to a vote. He wouldn’t go ahead unless the community wanted the mill. And of course, the residents of the Upper had ample time to pack and relocate. It was a tiny community back then, the Lower said. Hardly anyone lived there at all. And among those who did, some wanted the mill as much as anyone, the Lower said.

  Still, when the residents of the Upper resettled into the Lower, they brought, along with their belongings, animosities that lasted for generations. Their lost homes continued to exist in their memories, fully furnished and actually seen, very occasionally, by moonlight. It was as if the surviving town had a shadow, preserved under the water of Henry Collins’s millpond like a trout under aspic.