Nothing but a Smile Page 28

  When she told Mort to send the bill to the same address, in care of Wink's uncle, Mort told her, “Don't be absurd. This is a wedding present. Or a moving present—whatever.” And then he asked to speak to Wink.

  When she cupped the receiver and opened the folding door to tell him, he squinted back at her as if talking to Mort was the last thing he wanted to do. Besides, Wink didn't need to give his permission. She'd already cleared it with him on the drive to town. He'd shrugged and said, “It's yours to give away or not, Sal. It's always been.” But he took the phone now, plastered on a wincing little smile, and said, “Hey, Mort. How're tricks?”

  She'd never heard him say anything so trite, and she chalked it up to his discomfort. She stayed in the booth, curious to know what this was about. It was a tight fit with her belly, but Wink tipped the receiver away from his ear, and she squeezed up against him to listen.

  “Dutton. Listen. I understand your immediate concern is primarily potential retaliation—the intruder and altercation the other night, making sure you're all safe. Only natural. But in terms of these federal agents who were coming around earlier, I feel I should advise you, unofficially, that they have since been round to ask me questions about your activities—”

  “Christ on a duck.” Wink inhaled deeply, like he was bracing himself. “What'd you tell them?” Sal found she'd started stroking his chest, as if this might calm things down.

  “I told them nothing, really, partly because I know my rights and partly because I don't know the answer to such personal questions as what your political leanings are, if you are a subversive, whatever in the wide world that means. But I have to say, these investigators appear to be people with a real agenda. Have you heard of HUAC?”

  “I think,” Wink said. “Something to do with industrial cooling systems, or … ?”

  There was a pause on Mort's end. “Well, no matter. Suffice it to say I took it upon myself to contact some actual free speech advocates I know out east—not like your Mr. Price—and it sounds as if certain elements on the federal level are currently beating the bushes for pawns to help them stir things up in the coming months. Really bring their agenda to the fore. They appear to be intent on finding any accomplice to help execute their investigations, no matter how coerced. The way these people think, it makes your Mr. Price look like small potatoes, and so I'd be cautious in returning to Chicago, were I you. If you do return, I've been thinking they might actually try something as manipulative as charging you under the Mann Act—that is, transporting a female across state lines for immoral purposes.”

  “What?”

  “I know, I know. Never mind that she's your legal spouse and you'd merely be returning to your home or that immoral purposes, at this stage, I'm sure, would only be to assist you in producing cheesecake … I could thoroughly imagine these people employing just such a spurious distortion of the statute. But this is only one tack they might take I thought you should be wary of. These people seem capable of all manner of trumped-up charges simply to get witnesses before them and making the sorts of allegations they clearly want them to make. I … I'm just saying be careful.”

  There was a long pause while they waited for more. There wasn't more. Finally, Wink said, “Thank you, Mort. I appreciate the straight dope on this. I mean it.”

  After he hung up, she asked Wink if he understood any of that.

  He shrugged. “I guess just … Don't go back to Chicago?”

  What she'd taken away was Stay away from J. Edgar Hoover and overzealous congressmen, but her husband's interpretation seemed like a more practical approach.

  “Let's go,” he said. “We should get home before it gets dark.”

  She followed him to the Buick, not saying what she was thinking: that she hoped the farm wasn't really going to end up being home home and that they would soon be in a place where they didn't think in terms of the dark.

  96

  The day they drove down to talk to the Ann Arbor bank about buying the store, they got there an hour before their appointment, so he drove out past the stadium and showed her where Uncle Len once took him to see his first real football game. Then they crossed back down to the river. He couldn't figure out where the beach was, but he remembered, very young, visiting some cousins or someone and swimming in the river.

  She frowned a little when she saw the murky water and said, “Count me out on that one, pal.” He wondered if she was thinking of the trouble they'd had at the last beach they visited.

  At the bank, while the loan officer was going over their application for a GI loan, he and Sal got to talking about just how long they might be able to make do living over the new shop and the pressing need to find a better place to live.

  The loan officer stopped reviewing their application and watched them discussing this, smiling as he waited. When he had their attention, he had Wink sign at a few designated spots and then acknowledged he'd been eavesdropping, saying, “Sounds like you're looking for a place to live, too, maybe?”

  Wink suspected he had the job on account of he was probably a vet himself. He seemed about his own age, mid-to late twenties. Short stocky guy, but handsome. Rode a tank, was Wink's best guess.

  The guy nodded his head a little, looking like a doctor dishing out a troubling prognosis. “Well, housing's tight here, just like anywhere. Maybe more so in a town like this, all these fellas coming back to school. They're building, though. Like gang-busters. If you can wait for construction—”

  Wink patted his wife's belly. The loan officer's eyebrows jumped a little, like Wink had passed gas or done something really off-color. “Sort of on a schedule,” Wink reminded him. “Already built's far preferable.”

  “Say!” The loan officer snapped his fingers. Wink had never known a guy to actually snap his fingers when getting an idea, outside of in the movie pictures, but this character did it. “I know of one house actually—beautiful place, right next door …”

  For a second, Wink thought he meant right there, adjacent to the bank, but the guy cleared this up.

  “Next to my house, I mean. In the Burns Park neighborhood. For sale by owner.”

  They'd passed that neighborhood, he was pretty sure, going out to the stadium earlier. It looked a great deal like the one she'd liked coming into town, the one the real estate agent had called the Old West Side.

  The loan officer was smiling wide. “We'd be neighbors!”

  Wink told him to set it up, and he said he would; that he'd even bring them over there personally, put in a good word for him with the seller.

  They shook hands. It was all falling into place.

  The muggy weather and the dwindling supply of clothes they'd packed continued to remind him of the need to get all their stuff in one state. He was working on it. This time of year, Uncle Len couldn't really afford to leave the crops for even one day, but he did, hauling one load of furniture and darkroom equipment from Chicago to Ann Arbor in his ancient REO stake truck. Meanwhile, Keeney and Reenie were working on packing the apartment and the shop and would drive a load of mostly housewares in Keeney's panel truck while the Rooney brothers minded the news shop. Wink estimated that would probably leave him with one return trip, probably with Uncle Len's truck, to get the last of it, but he would wait to do that till they had everything in order in Ann Arbor.

  The current owner of the retail space had agreed to let them store their property on the premises before the closing, a thing which Wink found damn neighborly. “This,” he told Sal, “is why we're in Michigan now. You picture this kind of cooperation going on back in the city?”

  Sal didn't say one way or the other whether she could picture that, just made a little face. Lately, the baby was making her very tired. He could tell she needed a place of her own and soon.

  97

  She'd been holding it in as long as she could, but Sal finally had to admit after a few days of this that she was just too exhausted to continue carting herself back and forth to his uncle's farm. So they were
staying at a motor court out toward someplace that was honestly called Ypsilanti until tomorrow, when they'd have the closing on the new shop and they could move in there, at least for the time being. The cold snap they'd driven into had passed, and it was just plain sticky now—not a fun time for a pregnant lady, summertime in southeastern Michigan.

  She tried to think positive thoughts about the Burns Park house they'd be looking at tomorrow, after the closing for the shop. If it was as great as it sounded, maybe they wouldn't even have to temporarily move the rest of their household stuff into the new camera shop. Maybe, very soon, they'd finally be home, not waiting up on the farm or in this Ypsilanti place.

  Wink had tried to cheer her up earlier with some claim that the original Rosie the Riveter—the tough gal behind the famous picture—lived right around here. She wasn't sure where he got that, and besides, it wasn't going to make her feel any better about living out of a suitcase.

  She watched him through the open window, crossing the dark parking lot from the manager's office. He'd been using the pay phone to check on several elements of the whole exhausting upheaval, and from the way he was walking, she knew something was wrong.

  He said it right away, as soon as he was through the door. “The shop is gone.”

  She didn't understand how this could be. “You mean they got a better offer, or … ?”

  He was shaking his head, jerking his thumb in the direction of—what? The pay phone? Downtown Ann Arbor? “The old shop,” he said. “Your shop. There was a fire.”

  Apparently, Reenie and Keeney were fine. The second load, mostly of housewares they'd packed for their trip out to Ann Arbor the next day, was also safe. Keeney hadn't felt his panel truck would be secure enough out on the street, so he'd parked it in a garage for the night, ready to go the next morning. They were at the Berghoff, having a late dinner, when they heard the sirens coming up Adams.

  Keeney told him the fire inspector told him, “Well, it looks like they at least waited till you were safely out,” and that Reenie had said this:

  “Bilge. They were just waiting for dusk.”

  What had burned was mostly overstock in the basement— supply inventory, the photo paper and darkroom chemicals, boxes of Kodak film, and a wall of the specials they'd published themselves. And, of course, the building itself. There would be no third load of belongings coming from Chicago.

  She reminded Wink that they had insurance on the property, that even if they could no longer sell it or use it as collateral, between his savings and the insurance money she'd collect and the lenient nature of GI loans, they'd be okay. She wasn't going to cry about it.

  Still, it didn't stop her from trembling. She'd lived there since she was a little girl.

  “I know,” Wink said, putting his arm around her and rubbing her belly. “We'll be fine. We'll be just jake, just dandy … Those fucking ass-fuckers.”

  98

  He supposed it was possible Price had nothing to do with the fire. Maybe it was Kid Fortunato, acting alone, paying them back for the KO in the alley. But either way, it didn't matter. Those people were involved, either way, no matter how much of an arm's distance the fake Little Lord Fauntleroy liked to keep from the rough stuff.

  And so Wink got out the papers Doerbom had just sent him and they got the manager of the motor court, who had a little cardboard sign in his bug-screened window announcing he was also a notary public, to notarize their signatures. And then he escorted his wife back to their unit, where he took a match and burned the bottom of the document, fanning the flame just until it had eaten away their signatures, then snuffing the edge with a hiss in the toilet. Part of the embossing seal remained, a raised arc of blisters that indicated it had, moments before, been official and legally binding, and then he borrowed Sal's lipstick and wrote in red across it:

  ALL DONE!

  CALL IT

  A DRAW.

  He folded it back up, sealed it in a business envelope addressed to Price (no return address), put the whole deal in the manila envelope addressed to the lawyer, and walked it back to the big mailbox by the manager's office.

  He knew in his gut that would be the end of it. Because guys like Jericho Price sometimes went after things just to go after them; just to squeeze some of the juice out of the lemon. Since they had no creative talents, once the lemon was wrung dry, guys like that were shit out of luck. Whereas, Wink knew, he and Sal would go on to do other things in their lives. He would create other images. Sal would have other projects. They wouldn't live and die by Weekend Sally or Winkin' Sally, whichever the hell was which.

  The licensing had never honestly felt like all that much of a priceless commodity to Wink. They'd made a nice profit on the specials, but only because Sal had calculated ways to keep the overhead costs down, to put them out for cheap. And the fan mail that had come in, in care of all the preexisting magazines, that had been satisfying and rewarding in a way, and it helped sell each subsequent photo story they pitched, sure. But it wasn't as if Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth were looking to buy the movie rights to make some watered-down Hollywood version for MGM—The Two Sallys or something. There was only so much actual value in the trademarks. No, Jericho Price had wanted to horn in, mainly, just to horn in, because he couldn't bear to see these upstarts make something of their own.

  Price must have known, too, especially once Sal was about to be a mother, that the girls probably wouldn't be modeling much longer. They would have to find another pretty girl. Or two. And as long as they were changing girls, why not cook up new catchy names for them? Different pretty girls, different catchy names … Wink adored Reenie and, obviously, Sal, but what was the difference, really?

  No, it really wasn't that much of a unique commodity Price had been trying to get his hands on. He'd just wanted to wring the lemon dry. He just wanted to push.

  Which, of course, made him a fucking ass-fucker, as he'd already stated, but it didn't mean he'd actually stand to gain anything in all this.

  Wink stood at the edge of the gravel turnaround, looking out past the dark road for a moment, wondering which light out there might be the home of the real-life Rosie the Riveter, that biceped, grin-and-bear-it girl with grit, and if, in fact, she was still out there. He felt pretty sure she was. They hadn't all turned back to housewives.

  He wondered, too, if his own mother might have done something like Rosie—rolled up her sleeves and did what had to be done. He knew he'd likely never know anything about her life after he got sick and she hightailed it, but he liked to think that at some point, she'd landed somewhere downstate like the Willow Run Bomber Plant, that she'd ended up doing something on behalf of the war effort, doing her part, getting by. The thought made him like her more, picturing her with her hair in a bandanna, toughing it out.

  Turning to head back to his own amazing woman—this wife of his who had just been told the only home she'd ever known had been torched and yet was facing it not with unstoppable sobs and shrieks but unflinching plans and agendas of what they must do next, what was on the docket for tomorrow and the next day, he had the thought that Maybe if the baby's a girl, rather than Manuela, maybe we should name her Moxie …

  99

  She'd never heard them before coming out here, but the heat bugs, as Wink had explained they were, were buzzing and screaming at a high zingy pitch when Reenie and Keeney pulled in with their stuff the next day, the last load of belongings they'd gotten away with before the fire, and Reenie hopped off the running board, skirt flying, before Keeney even got it into park.

  “Easy, tiger!” he called to his wife. “Settle down now.”

  They hugged and cried and she'd never seen her friend quite like this, not trying to put up a front. Even Keeney threw his good arm around Wink and pulled him in close.

  The good thing was, they didn't have a lot of time to sit and stew over what had happened. They had to meet the loan officer at his home in the Burns Park neighborhood and take a look at this house the neighbor had to s
ell.

  It was late afternoon, and the light through the trees was summer gold on the homey little lawns as they followed the loan officer's car through the residential blocks just south of the university campus. Before they even pulled in the drive, she wanted to live there.

  Reenie whistled, low, sitting on Keeney's lap.

  “You said it,” Sal said.

  The loan officer got out of his car, and his wife came out of their house with a toddler in her arms and met them in the driveway. “Welcome, welcome,” she said all around, and when she got to Sal, she touched her belly and said, “You hurry up and have that baby, won't you, hon, so our Jack'll have someone to play with?”

  It was almost enough, she thought, to make a person forget they'd been the victim of arson in the past twenty-four hours.

  Then the homeowner came out on his porch. He was all smiles and hearty handshakes with the men, declaring, “Good neighbors let their current neighbors help pick their future neighbors!” He said it twice, as though he thought it was clever, something to be needlepointed on a sampler.

  He was a professor of some sort and would be teaching somewhere else in the fall, so they needed to sell. His wife and two kids were up north at a camp called Michiana or something, so the kitchen and laundry room part of the tour, he explained, would have to be left in his own “incapable hands.” She found it a little annoying, the way he seemed to be both apologizing for his lack of domestic knowledge and also bragging about it, but the house was adorable, especially the kitchen, and the dining room with French doors and built-in glass-fronted bookcases. It seemed like a professor's house, she thought. And there certainly was enough room.