Those Across the River Read Free Page A

checker?”
     
     
     
    ON THE WALK home I thought about how light the sack felt without a bottle of burgundy in it. Just pears, cheese, bread, eggs and coffee for the morning. No sugar. Dora would be sad about that with her sweet tooth, but not as sad as I would be without wine to help me sleep. I had a taste for it ever since I was a boy, when Father let John and me drink a glass each at the table. Mother had already died by then trying to push out a dead daughter, and Father dove headfirst into a bottle. He had good taste in booze, though, and the money to acquire it; the hutch was always full of wines from France with their mysterious labels. The more alluring bottles, though, held strange liquor and cordials, amber colored and ruby and clear. These were forbidden. They were part of the grown-up world, along with pipe tobacco and mustache trimmers and the gun above the hall mirror that I couldn’t reach without a chair. But Papa wasn’t a mean drunk; just a sad, sleepy one. He didn’t hit much.
    The one time John got the fist instead of the belt was when he stole the hutch key and got into the Grand Marnier, adding water to even out the bottle. He was shit-faced by the time Papa got home from the Cicero racetrack with his friends in nice suits. They laughed their asses off, but my father didn’t laugh. He just set about busting John a good one in the mouth, knocking him down. I didn’t have any booze; I knew better. But because I was older I still got the belt for not putting a stop to it. Hard, too. We always got it worse when Father had guests. Like they had some running contest to see who was best at whipping his kid’s ass. Come to think of it, that was the last time he ever hit me at all. This was a year before I went overseas, where I would one day recognize a bottle of Grand Marnier and drink it from the mouth of a plain-faced whore in the sixth arrondissement in Paris. I got no whipping that time, neither with belt nor solution of Mercury, but a buddy of mine in the next room was less lucky when we had to pull our britches down for short-arm inspection.
    I looked up at the sky. Just enough cobalt blue lingered behind the western trees so you couldn’t call it full dark.
    “My Lord Jesus drinketh wine,” I said aloud to nobody. “Quite a lot of wine. He hath a port wine nose. He walketh drunkenly with me as I march home. Left . . . Left . . . Left, right, left. Keep up, Jesus.”
     
     
     
    THE LOCUSTS SANG hard as I walked up the path and into the Canary House. I knew by the darkness of the house that Dora would still be sleeping. I went upstairs as quietly as I could, but when I entered the bedroom she woke at the sound of a creaking floorboard and sat up, the curve of her shoulders and the crown of her head faintly outlined in the near absence of light. She gasped and swallowed before she said, “Frank.”
    I recognized the pause.
    She had nearly said “Stephen.”
    That had been her husband, tenured professor and world-class stuffed shirt Stephen Chambers.
    The first time I saw Eudora socially was at a U of M faculty luncheon where she and her spouse shared a table with a poet and two Japanese exchange students. That’s where the pretending started, with a game of stolen glances while one of the girls tried, in wobbly English, to describe the intricacies of the tea ceremony.
    That girl was plainly nursing an infatuation with the poet, a carefully coiffed but metrically disappointing former protégé of Robert Frost whose work was most enthusiastically received by nonnative English readers. Meanwhile, Professor Chambers trotted Dora before his colleagues like an expensive racehorse, too impressed with himself to see that she knew it. And hated it.
    She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.
    We were in love before the salads came.
    That had been four years ago.
    The affair had lasted