He wanted to get something for her, anything, but he did not want her to feel him let go of her hand.
He put his ear to her chest. He heard a soft beat, a flutter, and then her heart stopped. There was nothing to hear, there was only a curious cool rushing. He didn’t know if the sound was in her chest or only in his ears.
“God bless you and keep you with Him … and with your folks,” Crawford said, words he wanted to be true.
He gathered her to him on the bed, sitting against the headboard, held her to his chest while her brain died. His chin pushed back the scarf from the remnants of her hair. He did not cry. He had done all that.
Crawford changed her into her favorite, her best bed gown and sat for a while beside the high bed, holding her hand against his cheek. It was a square, clever hand, marked with a lifetime of gardening, marked by IV needles now.
When she came in from the garden, her hands smelled like thyme.
(Think about it like egg white on your fingers,” the girls at school had counseled Bella about sex. She and Crawford had joked about it in bed, years ago, years later, last year. Don’t think about that, think about the good stuff, the pure stuff. That was the pure stuff. She wore a round hat and white gloves and going up in the elevator the first time he whistled a dramatic arrangement of “Begin the Beguine.” In the room she teased him that he had the cluttered pockets of a boy.)
Crawford tried going into the next room—he still could turn when he wanted to and see her through the open door, composed in the warm light of the bedside lamp. He was waiting for her body to become a ceremonial object apart from him, separate from the person he had held upon the bed and separate from the life’s companion he held now in his mind. So he could call them to come for her.
His empty hands hanging palms forward at his sides, he stood at the window looking to the empty east. He did not look for dawn; east was only the way the window faced.
CHAPTER 46
“Ready, Precious?”
Jame Gumb was propped against the headboard of his bed and very comfortable, the little dog curled up warm on his tummy.
Mr. Gumb had just washed his hair and he had a towel wrapped around his head. He rummaged in the sheets, found the remote control for his VCR, and pushed the play button.
He had composed his program from two pieces of videotape copied onto one cassette. He watched it every day when he was making vital preparations, and he always watched it just before he harvested a hide.
The first tape was from scratchy film of Movietone News, a black-and-white newsreel from 1948. It was the quarter-finals of the Miss Sacramento contest, a preliminary event on the long road to the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
This was the swimsuit competition, and all the girls carried flowers as they came in a file to the stairs and mounted to the stage.
Mr. Gumb’s poodle had been through this many times and she squinted her eyes when she heard the music, knowing she’d be squeezed.
The beauty contestants looked very World War II. They wore Rose Marie Reid swimsuits, and some of the faces were lovely. Their legs were nicely shaped too, some of them, but they lacked muscle tone and seemed to lap a little at the knee.
Gumb squeezed the poodle.
“Precious, here she comes, hereshecomes hereshecomes!”
And here she came, approaching the stairs in her white swimsuit, with a radiant smile for the young man who assisted at the stairs, then quick on her high heels away, the camera following the backs of her thighs: Mom. There was Mom.
Mr. Gumb didn’t have to touch his remote control, he’d done it all when he dubbed this copy. In reverse, here she came backward, backward down the stairs, took back her smile from the young man, backed up the aisle, now forward again, and back and forward, forward and back.
When she smiled at the young man, Gumb smiled too.
There was one more shot of her in a group, but it always blurred in freeze-frame. Better just to run it at speed and get the glimpse. Mom was with the other girls, congratulating the winners.
The next item he’d taped off cable television in a motel in Chicago—he’d had to rush out and buy a VCR and stay an extra night to get it. This was the loop film they run on seedy cable channels late at night as background for the sex ads that crawl up the screen in print. The loops are made of junk film, fairly innocuous naughty movies from the forties and fifties, and there was nudist camp volleyball and the less explicit parts of thirties sex movies where the male actors wore false noses and still had their socks on. The sound was any music at all. Right now it was “The Look of Love,” totally out of sync with the sprightly action.
There was nothing Mr. Gumb could do about the ads crawling up the screen. He just had to put up with them.
Here it is, an outdoor pool—in California, judging from the foliage. Good pool furniture, everything very fifties. Naked swimming, some graceful girls. A few of them might have appeared in a couple of B-pictures. Sprightly and bouncing, they climbed out of the pool and ran, much faster than the music, to the ladder of a water slide, climbed up—down they came, Wheeee! Breasts lifting as they plunged down the slide, laughing, legs out straight, Splash!
Here came Mom. Here she came, climbing out of the pool behind the girl with the curly hair. Her face was partly covered by a crawl ad from Sinderella, a sex boutique, but here you saw her going away, and there she went up the ladder all shiny and wet, wonderfully buxom and supple, with a small cesarean scar and down the slide Wheeee! So beautiful, and even if he couldn’t see her face, Mr. Gumb
knew in his heart it was Mom, filmed after the last time in his life that he ever got to really see her. Except in his mind, of course.
The scene switched to a filmed ad for a marital aid and abruptly ended.