making her mad at first, until she'd joined in the laughter, but punched my arm all the same. I'd liked the idea though, despite my teasing. At least, I'd liked it with Sally in the picture. Now the thought only stoked up my guilt
'Hoke?' There was a quiet huskiness to her voice. 'Are you all right?'
I could just see the outline of her hair and her arm in the darkness, the vague glint of her eyes. As I drew on the cigarette she was briefly bathed in its warm glow.
'Sure, I'm okay,' I replied.
'You were telling me about your parents.'
Lighting the fresh cigarette had interrupted the flow; the aroma of our lovemaking had rekindled a memory.
'Like I said,' I went on, 'Ma was English, with a touch of Irish thrown in. Peggy. 'Peg o' my Heart' Dad liked to call her, naturally enough. They first met when he was over from Wisconsin for an agricultural fair
- he dealt in farm equipment, bought 'n' sold anything from machinery to fertilizers. Had a fair little business going just after the Great War and he was kind of anxious to get a head start with all the new technology for farming.'
'That's where you're from - Wisconsin?'
I nodded in the dark, and added a 'yes' for Muriel's benefit
'Peg was a maid in one of your small, country hotels Dad was staying in, and when I was growed up enough to be interested he told me it was her 'sparklin eyes' he first fell in love with, the rest of her 'bout two days later.'
'And your mother - did she fall for him so quickly?'
'Guess she must have, because when he left eight days later she went with him. Just took off, the pair of
'em, bill paid, notice given, but no explanation to anyone. Back to Winona, Wisconsin, USA They got hitched right away and a year later I arrived.'
'Wasn't she afraid? A new country thousands of miles away from her own family?'
'Ma had none to speak of. Her old man had been an Irish immigrant, who hadn't treated Grandma too well. Peggy was his only daughter. When his wife died, he returned to Ireland where he probably killed himself with booze, according to Ma. Oh, he'd found his kid a job in a wash-house before he'd left, so I guess he figured he'd done his duty. And that was fine by Ma - at fourteen years of age she figured she was better off without him. When she married Dad, she didn't know if her old man was dead or alive, and she told me years later she hadn't cared.'
Muriel's fingers moved to my arm and she stroked it, elbow to wrist.
'She was never bitter about it though. Hell no, she was too thankful for her new life with Joseph, my dad.
But y'know, although she never had a family to miss, she had something else to hanker after. Ma never got tired of telling me about her home country and I never got tired of listening.'
Muriel couldn't see me, but I was smiling at the memory. It felt good to talk about my folks after all this time and, for a while at least, it was holding down thoughts of Sally.
'She regretted leaving England?'
'No, I didn't say that She'd found her happiness in Wisconsin, but that didn't mean she didn't get homesick now and again. She read me books by English authors all the time, and when I was old enough, got me to read 'em myself. Got me interested in the country's history, too. Maybe the only regret she had was that I wasn't getting an English education and I wasn't being brought up the British way. She took a lot of pride in the traditions and manners of this country of yours, even though she was only from working stock, and sometimes I wondered if those funny wire-framed spectacles she wore later on in life weren't just a little rose-tinted. Her dream was to bring me over here for a short while, show me all those things she'd told me about, but the cancer put a hold on that.'
My smile was gone and I took time to inhale smoke. Muriel's hand was still on my arm.
'She passed away in '38, and Dad followed her eight months later. His ticker, the doc said, disease had worn it out. I always believed it was heartbreak that did it, though; or at least, hurried it along. I think he just didn't want to go on without his Peg any more.'
My smile had come back. It gave me some comfort, the thought of Dad going after his Peg, darned if he was gonna let her explore the great unknown on her own. 'Your ma's got no sense of direction,' he'd always joked with me. 'Lose herself in the parlour if she didn't have me around to call her.' Well, wherever she'd gone, I hoped he'd caught up with her. And I was kind of glad they'd both missed the horror that was to come.
'You were left alone?' Muriel's hand tightened around my arm.
'Alone ain't so bad,' I lied. Alone was hell on wheels. Alone was a slow trip to insanity. Alone was the worst thing any man, woman or child could live with. My smile was gone again, wilted away in the shadows.
'By that time I was living away from home anyway,' I went on before self-pity set me blubbing again. 'I was in Madison, attending the University of Wisconsin, studying engineering. Dad's company was in bad shape by the time he died, and his brother, a wiseacre even Dad didn't like, offered to take it off my hands, lock, stock and barrel, for no money at all. Well, that suited me just fine - what did I want with a pile of debts and a head full of problems when I was barely scraping eighteen? My uncle was welcome to
'em. Besides, I was supporting myself well enough by bike racing and some barnstorming at weekends.'
'What's barnstorming? I've never heard of that one before.'
'Air acrobatics, I guess you'd call it'
'You were flying at eighteen?'
'Sure. When I was ten years old, Dad took me over to a barnstorming show in a field just outside town.
Gave me a dollar to spend while he looked over a couple of crates he had in mind for crop-dusting, something that was becoming pretty popular about that time. I wandered off towards an old airplane I'd spied soon as we drove in, a beat-up Fairchild, as I recall, and when I handed its pilot the dollar and asked for a ride, well, he sized me up, bit the dollar, and lifted me aboard. 'Course, I told him Dad said it was okay, and that was good enough for this flyer, whether he believed me or not. And once I was up there in the clear blue air, high over the whole goddamn world, everything below shrunk into insignificance, well, I never wanted to come down again. I knew flying was the thing I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
'But Ma-'specially Ma - and Dad didn't agree with my ambition, though when I kept ducking school so's I could wander around our local airfield we came to an arrangement. They'd pay for me to take flying lessons if I promised to stay in school and study hard. Anyway, I think Dad had an idea floating around in the back of his mind even then, because by the time I was sixteen I was crop-dusting for his farmer friends and acquaintances in our own second-hand plane.'
I leaned forward in the bed, wrists resting over my raised knees, cigarette butt warm between my fingers. I kept perfectly still, ears keen, eyes straining at the reflected moonlight on the opposite wall
'What's wrong?' Muriel sat up next to me, the sheet falling around her waist.
I shushed her, listening still. I felt her body go tense beside me.
'Thought I heard something,' I said eventually. 'Must've been wrong.'
Relaxing against the headboard again, I reached for the cigarette pack on the bedside cabinet. This time I remembered to offer one to Muriel, but she shook her head, a movement I barely caught in the darkness. Lighting one for myself, I stubbed out the old cigarette in the full ashtray by the bed, and dropped the pack into my lap. Smoke drifted across the room, thin spectres that caught the light by the windows. Muriel rested her head on my shoulder, her hair tickling my flesh.
Tell me more,' she urged, as if my story reminded her of a different reality, a better time than the present
'There's not much more to it.' A second lie, but there was only so much I was willing to tell. 'When war broke out in Europe, I knew immediately what I wanted to do. All those tales Ma told me, about her life in England, the places she'd worked and lived in, about the kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, all those books she'd read to me and the ones I'd read myself when I was older - hell, I even knew the rules of cricket. Dad had always kidded me I was more British than American, and I kind of liked that, made me feel different, something special. I guess that was because I thought Ma was so special. Huh, sometimes when I was little I even copied her accent' I gave a
