Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken Page 7

  This time he ripped the water smoother than a kingfisher, with a sound like tearing silk.

  The last dive today would not offer similar potential for trauma. A simple forward one-and-one-half somersault pike, it was the dive with which he traditionally capped off each days practice.

  As he was flexing his calves, moving ineluctably and reflexively into the complete matrix of micromotions, he heard the screen door bang open on the farmhouse. Up in the air, spinning already, he heard his mother call out, “Rory, telephone! Come on down!”

  Well, gosh, Mom, he felt like saying, What choice do I have?

  In the next thirty seconds of arrowing poolward, Rory Honeyman, knowing himself on the verge of a mysteriously alluring future, felt history rushing through his mind like the wind past his face.…

  Attendant on Rory’s birth, changes came to the Honeyman household. Horst Honeyman was sixty-eight, Freyda sixty. Rudy was thirty-six, Roz twenty-four. Youth, as it often will, began to elbow aside the elder generation, and the youngest member ruled most completely. Infant Rory’s needs dominated all else. As the child’s proxy, Roz easily slipped into the role of burgeoning dictator. Long-established routines and habits crumbled, to be replaced by new legislation.

  Horst and Freyda graciously consented to this upheaval. Happy to have all the generations under one roof, the senior citizens proved flexible, willing to fade into the background if necessary. Freyda found contentment in being allowed to run the kitchen, albeit with some advice from Roz. (“Not so heavy on all that butter and cream, Mama.”) Horst meanwhile began to grudgingly accept some of the innovations in beekeeping that Rudy wished to introduce. After the War many drugs such as fumagillan and tetramycin became available to fight bee diseases. Reluctant at first to use them—he claimed he could taste a difference in the output of the dosed bees—Horst assented fully after a bout of nosema wiped out nearly a fifth of their colonies. Rudy had taken the first steps toward full sovereignty over the family business, and the ease of the transition shocked him. Where was the rocklike Horst of yesteryear, who had once uprooted his whole family on sheer principles?

  Soon Roz was redecorating the house, replacing faded floral wallpaper with abstract postwar designs, and Rudy was placing phone calls to wholesalers and distributors, arranging wider markets for Honeyman’s Honey. (Each jar bore a label with a picture of the farm and a poem written by Mister Parker: “From the flow’ry banks of the Wapsipinicon / To your happy breakfast table / Golden tributaries run / From bees that are ready, willing and able.” Roz’s father expressed perpetual disappointment with the rhyme between first and third lines, but had confessed himself unable to improve it without total abandonment of his themes.)

  Three-year-old Rory loved to sit in Grampa Honeyman’s lap and listen to his stories. At age seventy-one, sitting and narrating constituted Horst’s major activities. Arthritis had set in, as well as cataracts that he stubbornly refused to see a doctor about. And although some old-timers had claimed that bee-stings would cure his arthritis, Horst had never been able to provoke his swarm to sting him. The irony did not escape him.

  The story Rory liked best involved how Grampa and Granma and Daddy had journeyed to this place and met Mommy when she was just a little older than Rory was now himself. It seemed like a fine fairytale, better even than “Little Red Riding-Hood,” when the woodsman split the wolf’s guts open with an axe.

  Another thing Rory liked was being allowed to comb or ride old Axel the Second, who at age fifteen was docile and slow enough to be trusted with a toddler atop him.

  The January when Rory was six his Daddy and Grampa had a big fight.

  “We need to expand,” said Daddy. “That land to the south of us will allow us to increase production to meet demand.”

  “I wont sign any damn bank papers,” countered Grampa. “Goddamn loans. Usury, plain and simple! Unamerican, that’s what they are. Never took a loan in my life. If you want something, save up and pay cash, that’s what I say. That’s how I started this business, goddamn it.”

  “Times have changed. You have to use credit nowadays, Dad. There’s no shame in it. Everyone does it.”

  “That’s what old Storch told me when the colony converted to using money, and now look at them. Not a trace of their heritage left. Money’s bad enough, but credit’s even worse.”

  “Hellfire, Dad, you’re so out-of-date that sometimes you’re a regular pain in the ass.”

  Horst Honeyman catapulted to his feet. “Freyda! Did you hear your son’s foul mouth! Is this what you learned in the Army, to insult your elders? I wont stand for it. Freyda, get your coat on! I won t spend another night under this roof”

  Rory watched with wide eyes as Grampa and Granma bundled up and left the house, slamming the door. Eight o’clock at night, and the frozen Iowa landscape stretched away dark as a coal-bin.

  “You should go after them, dear,” said Mommy nervously.

  “Oh, we needn’t bother. He’ll stomp around in the barn for awhile then come back in. Do him good.”

  They waited through a plausible cooling-down period. After fifteen minutes Daddy got up.

  “Where the hell is that stubborn old fool?”

  The barn door swung to and fro in the chill wind. Axel and the sleigh were missing.

  Judging by the spacing of the hoof prints, Horst must have whipped Axel into a superannuated frenzy. Unfortunately, in the angry confusion all parties had apparently lost their sense of direction. The runner tracks ran toward the river, not the road.

  Rory and his mother ran after Rudy, slipping and floundering in the snow. The tracks went all the way to the riverbank, down a gentle incline and onto the ice. They continued upstream straight down the middle of the river for an endless, frosty-breath’d, aching-lung quarter-mile, straight as a geometry lesson, until they ended at a gaping jagged-edged hole.

  As a teenager, Rory would frequently wince at the recurring realization that his grandfather had reversed the diver’s mistake: instead of losing the water, he had found it.

  Daddy tried to toss himself into the black river. Mommy stopped him. All three Honeymans were bawling their eyes out. Yet somehow they jogged back home. The air felt like bee-stings in their lungs.

  The whole town of Independence turned out to walk the riverbanks with lanterns. Cars lined up with their headlights focused on the blank-faced ice. Volunteer divers were helicoptered in from Waterloo before dawn. All to no avail.

  Everyone agreed that Horst and Freyda had met a relatively painless and quick death, and that their bodies would be recovered in the spring.

  After this tragedy Daddy got quiet and stern all the time. When not working furiously, he often sat looking at old pictures of happier days for hours on end, including the one of his old Army buddies titled “Honeyman’s Heroes.” Around this time he began insisting that friends and strangers refer to him as Lieutenant Honeyman. He lettered the title on the apiary’s sign, as if doing so could roll back time.

  Mommy was sad too of course, but she recovered more quickly, never blamed Daddy, and seemed to cheer him up insofar as he would tolerate cheering.

  One day toward the end of that March, Rory finished his usual day at school. (Mister Parker had retired some time ago, and the new school featured a different room for every grade.) The bus let him off at the end of his driveway. Daddy was waiting for him.

  “The ice is breaking up,” he said.

  Together with Mommy they walked down to the fateful spot and stood on the bank. They strained their eyes to detect amid the jostling floes any sign of the sleigh, or human or equine bodies.

  Rory watched the moving ice until he felt hypnotized.

  The next thing he knew, he had impulsively hurled himself off the high bank.

  Luckily he plummeted into open water.

  Daddy was pulling him out of the frigid water. Then Mommy was alternately shaking and hugging him, yelling, “Are you crazy, are you okay? Are you crazy, are you okay?”

&
nbsp; Rory said nothing. His mother released him for a moment. He ran and threw himself into the river again.

  After the second rescue they bundled him up in Daddy’s plaid lumber jacket and carried him home, took him in the truck to the hospital. He stayed there for one whole week. Doctors came and talked to him. They asked him why he had done what he had done. He pretended not to know what they were talking about. The answer seemed obvious to young Rory, and if they couldn’t see it, that was their problem. They were too stupid to talk to.

  After a while they let him go.

  By this time all the ice had disappeared wherever winter goes in spring. Neither corpses nor sleigh had turned up, not for miles downstream. Everyone said that Horst Honeyman was so stubborn that he had kept lashing Axel forward underwater, all the way down to where the Wapsipinicon met the Mississippi. Rory tried to picture Grampa and Granma living in the easy sunlight of New Orleans, a city he had seen pictured in a book at school.

  Once home, he faced a stern discussion with his parents.

  “It’s just family, now, Rory, you can talk to us freely. Why did you jump into the river that day?”

  Rory studied the earnest expressions worn by his parents. Were they kidding him, or were they really as dumb as the doctors? He decided to test them.

  “I like diving,” Rory said.

  His father scowled, hard eyes drilling into the boy. His mother snorted and got up to pour herself a glass of piestengel.

  Failing to make Rory squirm, his father turned to faux-naïve sarcasm. “You like diving, huh? All right then, okay—diving will be your goddamn hobby from now on.”

  So. They were just as dumb as the doctors, Rory decided.

  Years later, he had cause to rethink his appraisal of Rudy’s and Roz’s intelligence.

  When the ground unfroze completely, Rudy Honeyman summoned Ernie and Dan Parker. The men arrived with a backhoe and began digging up a huge portion of lawn. They swiftly and expertly knocked together wooden forms in the hole. Cement trucks arrived and started pouring their growling slurry. The forms came down and the construction was rendered watertight. Painted depth markings illustrated the slope. A springboard grew to crouch just above the fire- department-supplied water. A regulation diving platform towered into the Iowa sky.

  In a retrospective eyeblink, the Honeyman Apiary had sprouted a swimming pool identical to the ones seen during the recent 1956 Olympics on the tiny screen of the Honeyman’s Philco.

  Rudy stood beside Rory at pools edge during the first week of May. “Okay now, son, there’s no need to use the river. You can dive safely right here to your heart’s content.”

  Rory looked up at his father. Things broke and shifted inside the boy, and he began to cry. The Lieutenant hugged the small trooper against his side.…

  A few feet above the water, his mother’s voice still ringing in his ears, Rory brought his arms gracefully around and down in completion of his dive, palms extended flat to the water’s sun-torched surface. He slid into the cool wet otherworld like a greased eel. He did not brake his motion but kept going until he touched the pool’s bottom.…

  Despite his small emotional breakdown, young Rory did not immediately develop any real affection for the pool. His father’s large and dramatic gesture in building it frightened him. The bold countermove placed too much importance on Rory’s own defiant actions. He knew his parents did not want him to dive into the river because they were scared he would disappear into its depths just like Grampa and Granma and Axel. And truth to tell, Rory shared his parents’ fear of the Wapsipinicon. Nonetheless, something still drew him to the river, the safe and permissible pool ignored. He had unfinished business with the flowing waters.

  Knowing this, his mother kept constant watch on him after school all that summer whenever he played outside. Denied his former liberty, he was immediately leashed by Roz’s voice whenever he strayed an inch toward the river.

  Roz’s vigilance stymied Rory. Finally in June he hit on a new tactic. He would ask outright to go swimming in the river, just as he had been allowed to last year and the year before that. Perhaps his mother and father could be fooled by his apparent honesty. If so, he could continue his pursuit of his grandparents.

  “No,” said Roz simply, undeceived.

  Rory felt anger swelling in him like a party balloon. What right did these big people have to interfere with his goals? When had he ever signed any agreement allowing them to boss him around? Criminy, it made him mad!

  Smarting from Roz’s refusal, Rory wandered outside toward the barn, quietly seething. The empty barn increased his anger. Where was Axel, whom he had loved almost as much as Grampa? Life wasn’t fair!

  Rory took an immaculately clean hoe from its wall rack. He moved coolly from window to window, smashing each one.

  When his father returned for lunch with the hired men (the expanded apiary required extra workers now), he discovered the vandalism.

  For the first time in his life, Rory took a thrashing from his father. The novelty of the fierce punishment so astounded him that he forgot to cry until he found himself in bed with alluring daylight leaking in through his drawn curtains.

  Only then did the beating catch up to his spirit, but with beneficial effects. The stone of grief and guilt he had been carrying within his breast for months seemed to dissolve. No longer did this weight drag him toward the river bottom. No longer did he feel the desire to follow his grandparents south to New Orleans. The physical pain seemed to have re-anchored his soul to the material world.

  That summer Rory was scheduled to join the local 4-h club, but he declined, saying it was too boring for a kid who spent all his time on a farm already. Thus freed from organized activity, unleashed by a tentatively renewed trust on Roz’s part, he surprisingly drifted only toward the pool. After some initial dabbling, he experienced a growing interest in this new medium. Soon he was using the springboard and the lowest levels of the platform with real pleasure. Roz secured instructional books for him from the library, and he studied the stick-figure drawings and photographs, trying to improve his technique.

  This unassisted self-improvement continued for six years, until Rory turned twelve.…

  Rory burst into the air, stroked easily to the edge. He hauled himself out of the pool and reached for a towel. He canted his head to the left, pounding above his right ear with the heel of his palm. Goddamn left ear was still clogging, throwing his balance off slightly. The trouble had started with that infection during the past winter, and seemed intent on becoming a permanent disability. Rory had never worn earplugs while diving. At first he simply hadn’t known about them; later he had learned to enjoy hearing the appreciative crowd noises when he dived. Now he might have to consider such artificial aids.

  Drying himself as he walked to the house, he regarded his mother standing impatiently on the doorstep.

  Roz Parker Honeyman wore white patent-leather square-toed shoes with chunky heels and gold buckles; polka-dotted pants with flared bottoms; and a paisley-patterned blouse. A dozen large pastel plastic bracelets had slid back toward the elbow of her upraised right arm as she held the screen door open. Her ungrayed red hair was piled elaborately atop her head and sprayed into place. She had purchased the outfit and hairdo on her most recent trip to Chicago, a more-than-usually exciting trip. All anybody could talk about was the upcoming Democratic convention.

  “It’s Coleslaw Tubas,” said Roz.

  “Mom, I really wish you wouldn’t call him that. What if he heard you?”

  “I’ve already called him that to his face.”

  Rory studied his mother. Was she putting him on? Impossible to tell. Sometimes he wished she acted more like other guys’ mothers, less freaky. But in his heart of hearts, Rory truly enjoyed his mother’s nonconformity.

  Rory moved past her and into the parlor, where he picked up the uncradled phone from the endtable where it rested. Beside the receiver sat a striated block of beeswax. Rory found himself pinching off a smal
l pellet of the familiar substance and rolling it between his fingers as he talked.

  “Hello, Czeslaw?”

  The voice of Czeslaw Dzubas sounded funny through Rory’s bad ear. He couldn’t make out the import of Dzubas’s accented speech. Rory switched the handset to his good ear.

  “—excellent news of unprecedented magnitude, my boy!”

  “Really?” asked Rory, somewhat leery. “What?”

  “Did you not pay strict attention to my succinct explication? I have succeeded in obtaining for us the sponsorship of Speedo swimwear. They will underwrite many of your expenses now. Your father will be over-ecstatic. Think of all the money he will save! And all the agreement involves is for you to wear the product while you compete.”

  Rory had shaped the beeswax into a miniature egg. “But I don’t like Speedo briefs. And besides, hasn’t the IOC clamped down on sponsorship? Look at all the trouble those skiers got into at the Winter Games in Grenoble. They couldn’t even pose next to their skis with the brand-name showing.”

  Dzubas brushed aside Rory’s trepidation. “Nonsense. Everything will cohere magnificently! Just leave the details to me. No one knows how to handle capitalists better than a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. I will sell them the gun with which they will shoot themselves in the foot.”

  “‘Rope that they hang themselves with.’”

  “Rope, gun, whatever, it matters not. Listen my boy—leave your old trunks behind when you pack. And remember—I will be choogling down your driveway promptly at one. Our flight leaves with typical American exactitude at four. See you later, crocodile.”

  Rory hung up the phone. Then he stuffed the warm softened beeswax into his left ear. He made it conform to the inner topography of his ear canal with the pressure of his forefinger. It felt good. Certainly the natural plug would make a watertight seal. He dug out the wax with a fingernail, picked up the parent block, and went upstairs to pack.