He tries to follow what his daughter and that fellow George, his son-in-law, are saying. It isn’t really difficult if he concentrates. He recognizes the names even without the elaborate reference points and documentation his daughter insists on supplying each time her narrative turns a corner or comes to one. He has been a sailor. It isn’t difficult to orient himself.
“You remember, Dad. He used to have that TV show on Sunday mornings where he healed people of their sicknesses. Well, he’s minister at Virginia Avenue Baptist now. That big old church that used to be Catholic? You remember. It was just over from Crown’s? You used to take us to Crown’s and treat us to ice cream when you came back from a trip. That time George got his Buick we went there. You, Mom, George and me — all of us. We had to park three blocks away because mass was still going on, and you told us about that river pilot who’d put into shore on Sunday mornings just to find a mass he could go to.”
“Channel 11,” Mr. Mead said.
“You hear that, George?” Louise said. “Dad still remembers all that river talk.”
“That was the TV station he was on — Channel 11.”
“What’s that, Dad? Oh. Well he’s the one who wants George to give the sermon.”
His son-in-law brings the young man into the bedroom with him. He has his dinner but doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He has never seen visitors in the house before. Perhaps he thinks that Louise and George are from the City, that they have come to sweet-talk him into going into a Home. Perhaps Louise thinks the young man is an official, that the City of St. Louis caters her father’s meals.
“Oh, look Dad, it’s your dinner. What did they bring you today? Ooh,” she says, “tuna noodle casserole. Hot Billy roll and butter. Peach slices served on romaine lettuce with creamy dressing.” She used to work in a school cafeteria. She actually recognizes this stuff.
As the young man feeds him — his daughter makes no move to take the tray from him — Louise rambles on. “Mr. Laglichio — you remember Mr. Laglichio, Dad; it was his truck George used when you got Mom that stove — has to hire a new driver. Lewis — you never met him, Dad; he came after you were already bedfast — won’t go into those neighborhoods anymore. Mr. Laglichio told him half the people in the city go into those neighborhoods. Cops, the people who deliver their mail and read the meters and fix the phones. All the delivery people. Even cab drivers. Social workers.” She looks in the young man’s direction and blushes. “Anyway it might be a good opportunity for some young fellow. And George can’t be expected to handle all the work himself. Maybe one of your mates knows someone looking for a job. I’ll write Mr. Laglichio’s number down and make a note what it’s all about so you don’t forget.”
“Write it on my chart.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Aren’t you going to eat your nice peach slices? You should eat fruit, Dad. That’s what makes BM’s. You don’t want the man to tell them at City Hall that you waste food.” She winks at the young man. “Dad knows better. He used to be a cook on the river. You cooked on the river five years, didn’t you, Dad?” This is not like her. She talks this way, Mr. Mead thinks, because she loves to fuss over him and he is so invalid she thinks he can no longer be embarrassed. She’s right, he can’t. “It’s all a damn bother anyway,” she says suddenly, feelingly. “You don’t have to eat fruit, and the last thing you need to worry about is whether Laglichio gets a replacement for Lewis. Lewis doesn’t have to be afraid of the jungle bunnies anyway. The cops could go down there without their guns and pull cats out of trees. The man who reads the meter could read it in the darkest cellar as if it were the best news in the paper. The delivery man is welcome as Santa Claus, and the postman safer than the guy who brings the Bumsteads’ mail.”
“Louise,” George says.
“Louise,” says Mr. Mead.
“Well it’s so,” Louise says. “Isn’t it so, George? You’re saved. I mean all you got to do is pray. All you got to do is pray for us. Just open your mouth and let her rip. ‘Make things swell, Lord. Do all the other folks like you done me. Make things grand altogether.’ Ain’t that about the size of it, honey?”
“That’s about the size of it,” George says.
“I have another delivery,” Messenger says.
“Hey, don’t run off,” Louise tells him. “Stick around while my husband changes the world through prayer.”
Mr. Mead laughs. Then George and Louise do. Cornell Messenger also starts to laugh.
“What?” Mr. Mead asks. “What?”
“I hate to come into this neighborhood,” Cornell manages.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” his daughter says. “You thought we forgot, didn’t you? Oh,” she says, “I bet you forgot yourself. I’m ashamed of you, Dad. That means you forgot Mom’s, too, because hers was yesterday. Did you forget that, Dad?”
“I did,” Mr. Mead says.
“Is today your birthday?”
“She says so.”
“Of course it is,” Louise says. “I made pumpkin pecan pie. I’m going to fix you a piece too, Mister. I hope you don’t mind using a napkin on your lap instead of a plate.”
“I pray he don’t mind,” George says quietly.
“I forgot my own birthday,” Mr. Mead says approvingly. “I was a sailor twenty years and lived by landmark and azimuth and time. I was a sailor twenty years, five of them cook. I was already old but even down there in the galley I always knew where I was, could tell which farms we’d passed from one seating to the next.”
“Tell about the time the boat was stuck in the ice, Dad. When you and Mom and the rest of the crew had to walk across the river to the Arkansas side.”
“No, no,” Mr. Mead says. He wonders why he said that about being a sailor. He is too old to make overtures, too old to give assurances that he had once been young or known a world wider than the room in which he now lies. Evidently he has not always been so reticent, though he has no memory of decorating his life with anecdote. Perhaps she heard the story from her mother, though it’s possible she had it from him. People had their own frequencies, were constantly sending messages of self, flashing bulletins of being, calling stop press, overriding, jamming the weaker signals of others.
George wonders about the Meals-on-Wheels man. He knows of course, as Louise must, despite what she’s said to the old man, that he doesn’t work for the city. He doesn’t have the look of a civil servant. He would look out of place at the Hall, even paying a traffic fine or property taxes. He can’t imagine him buying license plates or going to the clinic for a vaccination. He suddenly realizes that he’s been denied access to an entire class of people. He has never been in their homes or done business with them. He watches Cornell pick at his pie as if it were somehow extraordinary, something ethnic.
“How about another slice?” George asks.
“Me? No thanks. It’s really quite good.”
“Sure. It’s from a recipe.”
“You remember, Dad. I got the recipe in trade school that time I thought I’d bake for the school lunch program. You thought it was delicious but told me all those ingredients would have tied up the galley.” She turns to Cornell. “There wouldn’t have been anywhere to store the pumpkins.”