Beautiful Man: And Other Stories

Beautiful Man

and Other Stories

by Jack Mauro

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Beautiful Man

and Other Stories

Copyright © 2012 by Jack Mauro

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-3245-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-3246-6 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/2/2012

Contents

Foreword

Jack

Week Three

Music and Coffee

Kerry Barry

Emilia

Christmas for Mo

Unnatural Confederacy

Beautiful Man

Myself, Uncle Gage

Inventio

Reasons to Live

Cousin Mary

In Memory of Marge

Foreword

It seems that, if you are a writer and you choose to set all of your fiction within one town, you are at least a little obligated to explain the choice. That is reasonable. I am a writer and that is pretty much what I do. Yet it strikes me that the obligation is very much like another I have dealt with, since I first came to Knoxville nearly twenty years ago. I wasn’t writing then, but friends and family were puzzled enough by the move as it was. Why Tennessee? Why Knoxville?

At first, I came here because of curiosity mixed with a desire to be somewhere I did not know, and a latent fascination with the South. Later – soon, in fact – the impulse grew into a great deal more, some of which I struggled to set out in Gay Street: Stories of Knoxville, Tennessee. The city became something to me. As that occurred, it also made me want to write. Years passed, and I came and left, and came and left again. This was the case with my writing, too, which went off in directions as removed from my core as the other cities I briefly, and usually unhappily, settled into. But there was always time to come back, I would think. To both, as living, writing, and Knoxville were hopelessly intertwined in my thinking and feeling.

All of which is a fairly simple and honest answer, and which nicely puts to rest the two questions in one stroke.

Still. There is more to the actual fact of this one town serving as my canvas. When I was very young, I loved the Jane Marple detective stories of Agatha Christie. That genteel old lady never failed to confound Scotland Yard and identify the murderer because she saw everything through the lens of St. Mary Meade, the village of her life. The London scoundrel was admired by all, but Jane knew he was a fiend because his quick patter reminded her of the unscrupulous fish merchant from her town. The society matron was respected, but Jane had seen lust overtake a similar woman, years before, in St. Mary Meade.

I believed, and believe, there is a profound wisdom in this. See the corner on your street properly, and you see the world. In a sense, I keep my people and their dramas in Knoxville because there is no need to go anywhere else. If it is good and bad, promising and discouraging, it is all right here, and moving in eddies between North Central and Hill, just over the river. I suppose that is why I myself come back, too. Knoxville never fails to present me with as much life as I want, or want to close my door to.

When I first arrived here twenty years ago, I saw place in a way I have never been able to do before or since. I began to really believe that the arrangements of streets say something about the essential nature of a town, as I believe is true to this day. I began to believe that, if there are strange properties in meadows and natural landscapes that both reflect and influence life, the same, organic sort of process may be traced to brick and asphalt.

I came back to Knoxville one weekend this past year, in the brutal July of ‘11. I took the bus from Atlanta and stepped onto North Central feeling…safe. I had thought that my history with the town, tumultuous and absurdly personalized by me, would trigger the same emotional grip I had felt when I came back in ‘98, when I could not walk fast enough into the center of town. This did not happen. With the first few steps, headed to the bleak stretch of railroad ahead, I had no turmoil. I had certainty, and of the most comforting and comfortable kind. I literally thought: well, all right, then. This feels very fine. I know every single paving stone before me. I will pass people I do not know, but I will still know them.

I perceive this only about Knoxville, Tennessee. It may be true of other places, if it is true at all, but I do not have the ability to see beyond this first, and lasting, astonishment. However it happens, it is the only place in the world where I perceive people as most real, and dimensional. It is the only place in the world where I am fully comfortable in being of the world.

One thing more:

The photograph on the cover is the work of Knoxville poet Judy Loest. I don’t recall the year, exactly – it was somewhere in the ‘90’s, and obviously before Krutch Park was so sadly stripped of its elegant, iron fencing – but this came to me on a Christmas card from Judy. I remember talking about it with Jack Neely, the city’s justly legendary, and legendarily diffident, chronicler. He had gotten one too, and his reaction mirrored my own. I think he said it almost made him cry. I know it brought out a little gasp, or sob, from me when I first saw it. And there were stories, all kinds of stories, within it.

Jack

Jack is a fine name.

Jack is a name like a knife, is what Ruby Carr Prentiss thinks. She dishes out peas with bacon and onions onto her plate, but says nothing. Her husband Colm, uncontradicted, continues.

A fine, simple name. No one responds. "A strong name," he adds, making it worse.

The talk at the table is of baby names and nothing else, and is otherwise genial. Opal Bodie, Colm and Ruby’s daughter, is due in two months. The feeling runs high that a boy is coming, although no determination of gender has been made. Strangely, David Bodie would like this information; it is Opal who refuses to learn the sex.

It won’t do, Ruby says, breaking the silence. Opal watches her mother’s face; it is impassive, like stone. Ruby moves peas this way and that with her fork. Her movements are jerky, and frightening to Opal. The tension has dropped like a heavy curtain quickly, with the mention of the name. Always. Even here, in Opal’s own kitchen. They bring it with them everywhere, she thinks.

Look at ‘er, for Heaven’s sake. This boy is gonna be big. You call a big boy ‘Jack’, it makes him out an idiot.

Suddenly, it is all right. This rationale from Ruby, spun out of nowhere, eases the air. Bodies sit back once more, heads shake a little in amusement and relief. David, Opal’s husband, says, Mama. You are crazy. And laughs appreciatively. Opal herself exhales luxuriously, running her hands over her massive stomach. Proud and protective. Her baby is now safe from that swift appearance of the ugly and unclear.

It is Knoxville, Tennessee, and it is the summer of 2007. The Bodie kitchen simmers and smells of pork. August is on the Tennessee Valley like a fat, sleeping dog. Sweat is dew on four adult brows. The central air conditioning is rarely on; having married into a family with more money than his own, David Bodie displays his admirable sense of economy to them in this way.

The stillness of the heat, with Opal’s condition as the focal point, makes the room tribal. They might be aborigines, conducting a sticky, linear rite over a meal.

To her plate Ruby is inflexible. Crazy? You think on it. Big, big boys don’t do well with ‘Jack’. People look at ‘em, think they’re simple. Red sauce glistens in small, stagnant puddles on the plastic tablecloth. A fan in the window makes streamers of pale yellow curtains. Baby Ruby – six years old, and with the unassuming desire to please in the large brown eyes she will have forever – looks from her mother’s face to her grandmother’s, and then to her father’s. She sits like a little lady, and wipes barbecue from her fingers after every bite of ribs. All she knows is that her mother was briefly afraid, but now it is over.

I’m thinkin’ ‘David’, Mama. Opal makes the effort to rise, knowing that a renewed witnessing of her burden must soften any contrary reaction to the pronouncement.

A big belly don’t al’ays make for a big baby. Colm Prentiss says this ponderously, not having heard his daughter’s decision. It is important that he dispute his wife’s authority in front of the family, just a little. The Carrs were drapers, the shop on Knoxville’s Gay Street well-known and prosperous since 1925. He was a strikingly good-looking boy, but good looks fades and men get bellies too. Besides, he was a Prentiss, and the Prentiss’ were nothing.

Ruby does not argue, save to say, "Oh, you know. Old man." Colm is not yet fifty-five years of age. Nor is his wife. Ruby Prentiss is in fact fifty-three, but she is frequently taken to be both older than that, and the older spouse. With Ruby, fading came early, as though to rescue, as though prompted. But this is of no concern at all to her. A time when a woman’s middle-aged vanity would have resisted aging, when traces of a girlish pride might have prevailed, could not have been. With Ruby’s face, there was nothing to regret as lost.

Maybe I do, Colm says. You can’t go far wrong with ‘Jack’.

Jack is a knife, a blade. Ruby, dull strands of hair pasted to her forehead by beads of sweat, is thinking that this day is gone, ruined. She literally thinks: he will do this until I am dead. She wonders now, as she has before, how so much hatred can be between them in this way, forever, breaking in now and again like an infection. There will be an hour or so later, when they are home and he naps, that she will sit and hate all over again. It is unthinkable that she is still despised for having done nothing wrong.

David reaches for his father-in-law’s plate, and Colm’s surprisingly swift and graceful hand bats him away. Laughing again, David says, Well, I won’t be arguin’ with ‘David’. Always been good for me. He leans with great effort across the table, to pull Opal to him in a kiss. It is a thank you of sorts, and Opal is grateful for it. Her mother takes note of the kiss, as she has steadily taken in every unsought expression of affection – kisses, hugs, hints of intimacy – she has witnessed David give her daughter, from the start.

Lookit Babe Rube, Colm says. He moves to pinch her cheek but the girl shies away, jumping down from her chair to help her mother. "You was big with Babe Rube, Opal. An’ she’s just a little bitty thing." On ‘thing’, he spins in his seat with shocking agility, to take hold of his granddaughter. Who squeals, in varying degrees of pleasure, fear, and guilt.

"Daddy. Ruby, come here, honey. Get the bowls out for Mommy. She moves to the refrigerator. There’s Jell-O, an’ there’s ice cream." Mindlessly, she goes to the counter and passes soup bowls to her daughter’s outstretched hands.

Colm becomes serious, as though a weighty issue has just been introduced. What kind?

Lime.

No, t’ ice cream.

Peach.

Peach. He considers. Never having had to render the verdicts, large and small, that provide for a family, he imbues trivial matters with undue gravity. This was adopted by him long ago, with the onset of his marriage. He has a shadowy awareness that this was not always the case.

Peach is fine. I’ll have peach. Ruby, her arms crossed on the table before her, looks at her husband during this exchange. He has beauty, still. It has not so much faded, as matured into a variation on male handsomeness. He has in fact taken on a resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks in his middle years: premature white waves of hair, dashing gleam in the eye, wry smile twisting up in one corner. This is in itself odd, as his good looks were of a very different kind in his youth. Perfect fair skin and china blue eyes, a dirty blonde and sporty head of hair, Colm was an American dream from a trash family. This latter day and unanticipated change of his appeal is extraordinary to Ruby. As though nature or God sought to reward twice, and to reward for nothing.

Mama?

I don’t care for anything, baby. Opal does not press the issue. Since girlhood she has learned to beat her mother at her own game by taking everything at its own, obstinate face value.

Less than an hour later, it is dramatically cooler in the home. Something is of course changing. A summer storm moving in heralds itself with perverse and broken gusts of chilled air. The kitchen becomes too vulnerable a place, and everyone moves into the small parlor. Colm and David take the sofa; the child Ruby sits with a coloring book on the ancient carpet. It is felt and never said in the Bodie house that the girl is too easy to mind, and that the boy – it will be a boy, large, as the grandmother foresees – will make them pay for this blessing. Already Ruby’s gentleness comes with a cost.

Honey, you goin’ to see your little friend? Opal asks this while laboriously maneuvering her bulk into an easy chair, and the effort gives her words a plaintive import; it cannot be assumed she will rise again any time soon, and her daughter’s immediate plans must be known.

No. I don’t know, Mama. Meaning: if Christy comes to the door, I’ll go.

No one’s goin’ anywhere, just now, Ruby Prentiss dictates. The sky has gone gunmetal gray in a matter of scant minutes. She sits in a stiff little chair by the wall. Only passably average-looking as a girl, she has aged into a cruel sameness. The years have added no depth to her face, no interest to compensate for a youthful lack of allure. She has merely gotten older. Always a small woman, dull brown hair surrendering to a duller gray now hangs untidily about her face, adding to the impression of plainness ravaged by time. The hair seems put on, a nasty joke, an old lady’s wig set upon a moderately lined and nondescript face.

The remote control is stabbed by David. Channels flicker and roar, and canned laughter explodes only to give way to the modulated tones of advertisements. Finally a rebroadcast of a Tennessee Vols football game is selected. The two men recline further into the sofa as one, the dilemma over.

"David best be big. Damn, he kicks big." All eyes turn to Opal upon this. Little Ruby does not understand, although the mechanics of what is occurring within her mother are known to her. It is the blind violence of the unborn she cannot fathom. Why is the baby kicking?

Colm and David return to the game. This was a great victory for the university last fall, a surprising upset against a favored team from Miami. Colm’s hand blindly finds David’s forearm and grasps it. I was there. I remember. Hell, I was there. With…Gordon. Gordon Patteson. He smacks the saying of the full name with gusto, pleased with the speed of his recall.

Not Gordon. His wife utters this blandly, uninterested but correcting by rote, a thin voice coming from behind. In the space of minutes, the family has settled into a post-dinner inertia of indeterminate duration. Opal takes up her sewing, which she does badly and does not enjoy, yet never abandons. Begun in her girlhood, it took the place of the candle-making, which she wanted no part of, ever. To quit, even now, so many years later, would be to reveal the sewing as the sham it was.

Little Ruby colors, weighing crayon choices with artistic care. Ruby Prentiss herself sits with her back to the wall, slim legs crossed, a sentry inviting no diversion. A woman who would slap any such offering away.

Bluish black surrounds the home, rain comes. The men watch the game. They might have been there, all of them, like this, for hours. They might have been there for days. There is no point to waiting until she and Colm get home. Do it now, Ruby tells herself. From the television rabid fans scream encouragement to players long since graduated, or in another town. Ruby undergoes a feeling, a letting in she knows very well. Years and years of this path – she can do it so easily, needing only a kind of cue. It is enough that she can see the back of her husband’s head.

It is not nearly enough, that Jack Sams is dead. But she never thought his passing would help, anyway.

s

She had courted Colm Prentiss. This was long ago, forever ago. Everyone knew it but there was no shame in the wooing. It was understood that an equity of sorts was at play; the plain girl from the good family was in love with the shining boy from the bad. A rightness to her pursuit was felt by even the young people in their school, if felt intuitively.

Their parents, all of them, saw more clearly the desirable settling of two potentially troublesome futures in the arrangement. The pretty boy would be saved from the mistake of pairing with a beautiful, and consequently probably worthless, girl. The pretty boy would have to grow up, and a best friend would assume his correct place in the scheme of things.

From the floor Little Ruby says, Mama, you wanna see? Opal tells her, Later, baby. When it’s done. These words come as echoes to Ruby Prentiss. Her eyes are closed but the lids flutter. The voices belong, she knows, to her life, but she is at the moment ignorant of the part of it to which they fit.

And the plain girl would have the boy everyone loved. The Carrs were good people, and good merchants. The Carr daughter should have a prize, and no one begrudged it. Even the beautiful girls from of the town, girls who had gone out with Colm and fallen in love a little, sanctioned it. It was as though they elected to give up one of their own. A sacrifice, to make things more even, and a way to punish Colm for not loving any of them back.

OK, says the little girl, drawing out the letters like a song. A commercial bellows about snack chips, and the rain is unceasing and purposeful, an assault. One eye opens for a fraction of a second and takes in Opal Bodie with her needle, jabbing at a blouse. She has no talent for it. But, Ruby reflects, a similar failure with the candles would have been worse.

When in fact Ruby Carr had learned to make her candles, when she had worked long enough with her own grandmother, Carr’s on Gay Street began selling them. Not prominently, and not aggressively; a painted wooden set of shelves to the left of the store, by the damasks and brocades, the expensive draperies rarely purchased but often examined. The candles – pale in color, scented with almost indiscernible subtlety – did not sell extravagantly. The day when such items would be fashionable had not yet arrived. But they sold some. Inexpensive, they made for a redeeming purchase for the browsers unable to buy the finer fabrics. And the introduction of the familial tradition enhanced the local prestige of the shop.

The bell tinkled. Colm Prentiss came in with Jack Sams. Well, of course. The friendship was famous, to all of Knoxville. Blond and winning Colm, the darker and more slyly handsome Jack. They terrorized schoolrooms only a little, only insofar as was necessary to maintain the requisite image of young bucks at large. It was understood that they were decent boys. This in turn corroborated the pleasure the town took in them. Excellent on the football field, no cause for real worry when the play was done. The only unresolved issue in the minds of their admirers was how such a boy as Colm came from the Prentiss line.

No – there was something else, Ruby knows. The friends were never apart. A teacher called them, Damon and Pythias, references meaningless to their peers.