“Hush.” Dick said, frightened. “Hush, Mrs. Dormer. Please hush.”
“I’m going to say it. Let me, for God’s sake, will you please? You’re killing me, Dick boy.”
“Go ahead, Mrs. Dormer. Go ahead, ma’m.”
“I want … I want … to thank you all. You’ve been … my family. Now I know, I know it’s awful for an old dying woman to call up and oppress folks this way and give them bad dreams. It’s awful. It’s vulgar, a phone call from the death bed. It’s inexcusable and I’m sorry, and now all this other has come out and I’ve made a mess — but I did have to tell you all goodbye and thank you for the happiness you’ve given me. And this is the only way I have, don’t you see? I had to make peace with my friends and give them my love. I had to. Goodbye, all my good friends, and God bless you. God bless you, Dick boy. Goodbye, my dear.”
“Goodbye,” Dick Gibson said. “Goodbye, Mrs. Dormer. I love you.” He waited a moment to see if she would answer, but he heard nothing and finally he hung up and took another call.
There was a call on the Tennessee line.
“Night Letters. Go ahead, please.”
“You can wish me a happy birthday.”
“Happy birthday. Who is this?”
“Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“Help me out. Where in Tennessee are you calling from?”
“Knoxville.”
Dick opened the directory and turned to the Knoxville page. The voice was thickish with no hint of a Southern accent. Quickly he ran down the one- and two-word descriptions of voices he had penciled in beside each of the names. Next to one he found the word “whiskey.” He had a go. “Harold Flesh?”
“That’s right.”
“Get any cards from the Mail Baggers?”
“Them Mail Baggers come through when you’re laid up in the hospital. When you got a broken leg they come to your room and write their names on your cast.”
“Well, Harold, so many of the Mail Baggers have trouble, you see.” Recently he had begun to detect a note of piety in his voice. It was not unpleasant. “They’re kept pretty busy cheering up our Mail Baggers who really need it. An awful lot of our people have trouble, Harold.”
“They’re trouble shooters.”
“Well, there’s a lot of fun in them too, Harold.”
“They pitch in for a wreath. They sit with the kids when it’s time for the funeral.”
“That isn’t all there is to it, Harold.”
“They knit and they bake. They read to the blind from newspapers.”
“I think you’ve got it wrong, Harold.”
“Have I, yeah? They have the names of cleaning women and lend you Consumer’s Report. They bring back an ice cream when they walk to the corner. Naw, I didn’t get no cards from them. I can stand on my feet, nothing’s broke. I didn’t get no cards.”
“Do you know what I think? I think that as soon as you hang up folks are going to call to wish you a happy birthday. I’ll bet that’s exactly what happens. I’ll bet some of them sing their greetings right over the phone. You see if I’m not right.”
“Big deal.”
“You’ll see.”
“Big deal.”
“I’m certain of it. They’ll wish you happy birthday and sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’”
“Sure, sure.”
“They will.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll bet. I can imagine.”
“Mark my words.”
“Big deal. Federal case.”
“That’s what I think, Harold. The Mailbaggers—”
“We’ll see,” Harold cut in. Hurriedly he told Dick goodbye.
Then Henry Harper called.
“I’ve been trying to get Mrs. Dormer in Sun City since that night she spoke to you. Nobody answers the phone. Is she alive? Is she all right?”
“I don’t know, Henry. I haven’t heard.”
“Tell her she’s got to take her pills. That was foolish what I said about courage. She has to take her medicine. Mrs. Dormer, do you hear me? Please take your pills. You mustn’t have pain. You mustn’t have pain on my account.”
“My ears were pierced when I was ten years old,” a woman told him from Ft. Lauderdale. “It was the central event of my life.”
“How come?”
“My mother did it herself. She used a needle — like the gypsies — and for an anesthetic she held ice cubes to my lobes. The ice melted and soaked the collar of my dress. There was a lot of blood. It mixed with the melted water from the ice cubes, and with my tears too, I guess. Ice isn’t a good anesthetic. And Father was weeping to see me in pain, but Mother saw that the aperture would close. ‘Run,’ she said, ‘bring something we can slip through the hole.’ You’re supposed to use an earring, but Mother’s own ears had never been pierced and we didn’t have any. The colored girl offered hers but Mother wouldn’t take them. Father brought nylon fishing line. ‘It’s fifty-pound strength,’ he said, ‘it’s all I could find.’ They tried to push the fishing line through my ears, but it was too thick, of course, and Mother jabbed at my ears some more, pressing with the head of the pin this time, and a little white flesh fell off on my shoulder like the rolled-up paper in a punch- board, and after a while they could just slip the fishing line through. Father had used it before and there was salt from the ocean on the line—”
“This is a terrible story,” Dick said.
“Wait. The point isn’t pain. Wait. It isn’t the mess they made. There’s mess at birth. Wait.”
“Well, go on.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Wait. … I slept with the fishing line in my ears and the wounds suppurated and they took me to the doctor. The doctor was furious, of course. He removed the fishing line at once, and treated me with salves and antibiotics. ‘We’ll be lucky,’ he said, ‘if the ears don’t turn gangrenous. You came to me just in time.’
“But evidently we didn’t, or the infection hadn’t run its course, because the pain was worse than before and every morning there was blood on the pillow. Father wanted to take me back to the doctor, but something had happened to Mother. She’d become fierce. As I say, like a gypsy. ‘The doctor’s a fool,’ she said, and brought a newborn kitten and set it beside me on the bed and poured milk on my ears, and the kitten licked the milk, licked the ears, nursing my lobes. It felt strange and fine, and when the kitten wearied of licking at the dry lobes I would daub more milk on them and set the kitten back at my ears.
“In a few days the kitten came by herself and would lick at the lobes even without the milk. Maybe she thought the blood and the pus were part of the milk. Mother was a modern woman. I don’t know where she learned about this; maybe she read it, or maybe she just knew. So there we were, this ten-year-old Madonna and kitten, and even after my ears had healed I went around with it on my shoulder, transferring it from one shoulder to the other, its tongue at my ear, as though it were itself an earring.
“Then one day the kitten was gone. It disgusted Father, Mother said. Anyway, it had already done its job, she said. I cried, but Mother said Father had forbidden me the kitten and that was that.