Saturday Night Book Club

“I need a good book.” Mary Jane Russell stared at the graying part at the top of her mother’s head, a dull line between the tightly permed blonde curls on the rest of her head. They were in Betty Russell’s dining room having their Friday night tuna, egg noodles, and cheese casserole. Betty used her fork to scrape a shred of tuna from between her teeth, speaking as she did.

“I don’t get your fascination with books. Television and movies were good enough for your father and me.”

“I remember you reading,” Mary Jane said.

Betty rolled her eyes. “Your father enjoyed a few books, as do I—and of course, we read our Bibles.” Scooping a spoonful of saltine cracker crumbs from the top of the casserole bowl, she blew on them before placing it on her tongue. “Are you looking for fact or fiction?”

“My book club members don’t care for non-fiction.”

“Then why did you ask for my advice?”

“I wasn’t asking for advice. I was commenting on my need to find a book to recommend for next week’s meeting.”

“I think reading a book every week is a bit taxing. You’ve got your real estate business to think about, and the others in your group have jobs and responsibilities. Some of them have children. They were fruitful and multiplied.” Betty drew in her lips and narrowed her eyes as she watched her daughter push a chunk of tuna around her plate with her fork.

Mary Jane lowered her head for a moment, then raised her eyes and looked across the table at Betty. “Reading a good book is balm for the soul, Mother, and the book club is good for business. It’s all part of networking. Jane Corson is a real estate lawyer, and Sandy Perkins works with new employees at the university. They’re both good contacts for my agency.”

Betty sighed. “Jesus is balm enough for the soul.Your father and I never let reading get out of hand, and why join a club? If you read a book, read it quietly, keep it to yourself, and attend to business.”

“I don’t remember Daddy reading anything except the newspaper, Sports Illustrated, and car repair manuals.”

Betty arched her eyebrows and leaned toward Mary. “Your father was a man of substance and faith.”

Mary Jane looked at her mother in silence.

They ate tuna casserole. Their forks clicking against the plates were the only sound in the room. After several minutes, Betty left the table. Mary Jane continued to eat as she stared at the print of Currier and Ives’ “Home for Thanksgiving” on the wall behind where her mother had been sitting. Faded, the glass dusty, it had once hung on her grandmother’s dining room wall beside a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. She had been looking at it for as long as she could remember.

Betty returned with a book and handed it to Mary Jane. “Your father was reading this book when he passed on. He kept it on the back of the toilet in his bathroom.”

“Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam. “Daddy read this?”

“Religiously, a few pages every morning as he went about his business in there.”

Opening the book to the first chapter, Mary Jane read aloud. “‘All in a Day’s Work: The Single Well-Aimed Shot.’ That’s a chilling title for a chapter.”

“Borrow it if you’d like,” Betty said. “Your father said it was chapter and verse on how to be a good sniper. He wished there’d been a book like that when he was over there.”

Mary Jane continued reading. “‘In terms of economics, the innovative use of snipers in Vietnam meant that nearly every bullet produced a body count—a statistic drastically different from bullet to body ratios for other wars…’ I don’t think my book club would care for this.” Closing the book with a loud clap, she slid it toward her mother.

“Just leave it on the table, dear. I’ll put it back in your father’s bathroom after we do the dishes.”

“He’s been dead for five years and it’s still his bathroom?”

“I have mine, he has his. There’s no reason to take his away from him.”

“He’s dead, Ma. He’s not coming back. The dead stay dead.”

“I don’t need two bathrooms. I leave his just as it was the last time he used it: the toilet lid up, his toothbrush on the side of the sink, and that book on the back of the toilet tank. Besides, Lazarus came back. Jesus raised him up. The Bible says the saved will arise on the Day of Judgment and ascend into Heaven singing and dancing and clapping. We’ll follow Jesus up a golden staircase to the foot of God’s throne and sing his praises for eternity. It’s possible that between the time Jesus resurrects your father and the time we follow him up the golden staircase, your father will need to go to the bathroom. It will be a comfort to him to find it just as he left it, with a full roll of toilet paper and a good book to read.”

“I don’t think the Bible says anything about singing and dancing and following Jesus up a golden staircase.” Mary Jane covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t like the idea of spending eternity singing praises to anyone or anything, but there was nothing to be gained by arguing with her mother. There was certainly nothing but a whirlwind to reap by telling her that making a shrine out of her husband’s bathroom was pathetic. There was a time when she would have started an argument, one that would have ended with her mother shouting, crying, and going into her bedroom. She would slam the door and stay until Mary Jane went home, or to a bar where she’d get drunk and complain about her mother to anyone who would listen.

It was after such an evening ten years earlier that she had driven across the Connecticut River into Turners Falls, ending up at a bar where she had spent hours washing shots of Jim Beam down with pints of beer. Later, driving back to Greenfield, she swerved to avoid a coyote standing in the middle of the road and crashed into a tree, totaling her car. She woke up in the hospital, a deep gash on her right cheek and her left leg missing from just above the knee. Now, by putting her hand over her mouth, she was telling herself to shut up and to allow Betty to see a smile when she lowered her hand. It was too costly to get worked up.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got your bathroom and don’t need Daddy’s.”

“I’ve no use for it.” Patting the sniper book, she sighed. “I still read books, sometimes.”

“What’s the last book you read, Ma?”

Betty clicked a spoon against the edge of the dish, her brow wrinkled, and took a deep breath. “Plumb Stupid, or something like that.”

“How was it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember. Plumb stupid, probably.”

They laughed and cleared the table. When the dishwasher was loaded and running, Mary Jane pulled on her jacket and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Next Friday?”

Betty smiled. “Next Friday. Do you have a date tonight?”

Mary Jane shook her head. “No. I’ll go down to the Pint, have a beer, and listen to whoever’s playing music.”

“Don’t drive if you have more than one beer.”

Mary Jane patted her prosthesis. “I’ll park at home and walk downtown.”

 

§§§

She stood at the entrance to the People’s Pint brew pub. Five fiddlers, a mandolin player and a guitarist at the rear of the room were playing French-Canadian tunes. There were no open stools at the bar, and all the tables were taken.

“It’ll be twenty, twenty-five minutes before I can seat you,” the hostess said—Angela, according to the plastic badge on her t-shirt.

Mary Jane sighed. “I think I’ll go home.”

Angela pointed to a small round table where a man sat alone. “You could sit with Dr. Sawey. He teaches at the community college, and he’s by himself.”

“I don’t know him.”

Angela pointed at two full tables. “Those people didn’t know each other when they came in, but they all wanted to eat and drink and listen to the music, and I convinced them to sit together. They seem to be enjoying themselves. Dr. Sawey doesn’t bite, and he isn’t a lecher, in spite of the way he looks.”

Mary Jane shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“I’ll introduce you to him. What’s your name?”

“Mary Jane.” She followed Angela and stood beside her at Sawey’s table.

“Hi, Dr. Sawey. This is Mary Jane. Can she join you?”

“Sure.” Sawey stood and gestured for Mary Jane to sit. Tall and thin, she thought his wing bones looked as though they might cut through the back of his shirt. In his mid to late sixties, he was bearded, his hair pulled back in a gray ponytail, his shirt open to the third button, and there was a small POW/MIA pin on his breast pocket—a medallion with what appeared to be a cross embossed on it hung from a silver cord around his neck.

She sat and Angela handed her a menu.

“How’re you doing, Ange?” Sawey said.

“Doin’,” she said.

“The divorce go through?”

“Six months ago.”

“The kids?”

“With the creep. I see them Saturday afternoons for two hours.”

“How’s that going?”

“I can’t be with them without a social worker in the room.”

“It’ll get better.”

“Yeah, right.” She gave him a quick smile and walked back to her stand by the entrance.

“Ted Sawey,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Mary Jane Russell.” She looked at his medallion.

He held it out for her inspection. “You think it’s a cross, right?”

Mary Jane’s face felt warm.

“Most people do at first glance. It’s a T, for Theodore. There’s no way I’d wear a cross.”

She was about to say ‘if it walks like a cross and quacks like a cross’ when the waiter came. She ordered a turkey burger and pale ale. By the time the waiter left, she had decided her comment was better left unsaid.

“The hostess said she’d had a Lit. class with you.”

“Angela,” he said. “Good student the first semester, burned out the second. Her husband left, took the kids. She was drunk and drugged up for months. Got an A the first semester, flunked the second.   I helped her get into rehab.”

“Do you give that kind of help to all your students?”

He made an evil smile. “Just the ones I want to have sex with.”

She puffed air and shook her head. “You’re that kind of professor?”

Sawey laughed. “No. I wanted to see your reaction. That’s the kind of professor I am. I say outrageous things and sit back to watch peoples’ expressions.”

“Why?”

He was silent for a moment. “I suppose because if they were true, I’d be more interesting than I am, and I’d get laid more.”

“You’re not interesting?”

“I don’t find myself interesting.”

“What does interest you?”

“Books. Writers. Students.”

“Students you can screw?”

“You’re a piece of work, Mary Jane.” He smiled. “I’m interested in students who show promise and progress. students I can help grow.”

“You’re an altruist.”

He shook his head. “I’m a teacher.”

“Maybe an English professor is just what I need.”

He laughed. “That’s something I’ve never heard anyone say. Why?”

“I’m the president of the Greenfield Saturday Night Book Club.”

“President? A book club needs a president?”

“Somebody has to organize things.”

“Then call yourself Convener, or Secretary, or Club Chair. Anything but President.”

“What’s wrong with President?”

“You’re asking for a lecture.”

“So lecture me.”

He cleared his throat. “Presidents like to present themselves as saviors, but they’re all egomaniacs who crave power, demand respect and do anything to get their way. Presidents of powerful nations or self-proclaimed presidents-for-life who have assumed dictatorial power over people they claim to represent, presidents of tiny island nations, presidents of ivy league universities and rural community colleges, presidents of corporations, city councils, school committees, neighborhood watch associations, presidents of rod and gun clubs, yacht clubs, community cable television stations boards of directors, presidents of Polish-American, Italian-American, Hispanic-American, Sino-American, Irish-American, Afro-American, Mayflower-American, Native-American, Serbo-Croation-American societies, presidents of hospital boards, bar associations, medical associations, teachers unions, prep school boards of trustees, truckers unions, trucking companies, tea parties, presidents of animal rescue centers and country clubs, presidents of legislative bodies and presidents of book clubs; all of them cry ‘respect me’, ‘love me’, ‘obey me’, ‘give me my way because I know what is best for you, my people and the cause I serve. I am your savior, worship me.’ I don’t have much use for saviors.”

Mary Jane choked on her beer laughing. People at the next table applauded.

“You don’t think much of presidents,” she said.

“A president cost me my right leg.” He pulled up the right leg of his jeans to reveal an artificial leg. “Nixon winding down the war in Vietnam did this to me.”

Mary Jane pulled up the left leg of her slacks.

“Damn,” Sawey said.

“Jim Beam and a ’94 Mercury did this to me.

“Whiskey and a god, eh?” Sawey laughed.

Mary Jane smiled. “Besides Nixon, what did it to you?”

“A land mine. Another guy stepped on it, and I was too close. His death saved me, but I paid for it with my right leg.”

“Better that than your right arm.”

Sawey clasped his hands behind his head and chuckled. “Where in the hell did you come from, Ms. Mary Jane?”

“I live within walking distance of this place, on Congress Street.”

“Is walking distance any shorter for you than it is for someone with two natural legs?”

She shook her head. “Is it for you?”

“I run marathons.” He unclasped his hands and let his open palms slap against the table top. “And I live one block away from you on Grinnell Street. How is it that I’ve never seen you?”

“I don’t spend my time with academic types.”

“Smart move. I prefer the company of the maintenance staff to most of my colleagues at the college. Janitors and Plumbers and electricians and groundskeepers don’t believe they’re God’s gift to the ignorant. They’re also usually better card players, better deer hunters, better drinkers, and a good many of them are better and smarter people than most of my fellow faculty members. What do you do for a living?”

The waiter brought her turkey burger and pale ale. She answered as she took a bite. “I sell real estate.” She took a card from her purse and laid it on the table.

“Russell Realty, so that’s you? I’ve always liked the alliteration in your company’s name.” He slipped the card in his shirt pocket.

“It was unavoidable.”

“You said maybe I could help you.”

“I need a good book.”

“Most people do, whether they know it or not.”

“My mother tried to push a Vietnam book on me, In Back of the Crossed-eyes, something like that, about snipers in Vietnam.”

“Behind the Crosshairs.”

“You know it?”

“I lived it. Michael Lanning, the author, was my platoon leader when my leg got blown off. It’s a terrible book, frightening.”

“My book club doesn’t do non-fiction.”

“All books are fiction. Everything’s a fiction: history, sociology, psychology, physics, theology, and philosophy, even memory. All fictions. It’s your book club, and you’re the president?”

Mary Jane washed a mouthful of turkey burger down with beer. “It’s not my book club; it’s just a book club, although starting it was my idea, and we’ve been calling me the president since the beginning.” She smiled. “I could be called something else.”

“It doesn’t matter. I like to rant.”

“Any ideas about a book for me?”

“I wrote a novel about Vietnam. It’s my only book. Scribners published it, and it lost a lot of money. Never even made the New York Times Worst Seller list, and it’s long out of print. I’ll give you copies if you think your book club would read it.”

“What’s the title?”

“A Farewell to Glory. It’s derivative. Everything I write is derivative. It’s the fate of the English professor.”

“If we read it, would you come to our meeting?”

He emptied his glass. “Let’s go back to my place.”

She waved a hand in the air near his face. “Why professor Sawey, you’re awfully forward.”

He flushed and shook his head. “For the copies of my novel for your club.”

“What’s it about?”

“Have you read Hemingway?”

“No. He’s too depressing. Wasn’t he hung or something?”

“Probably not well enough to suit him.”

She looked at him in silence.

“Besides,” he said. “It’s ‘hanged’ if you’re talking about a person’s suicide or execution, and how can you say he’s depressing if you’ve never read him?”

“Because he hanged himself.”

“No, he didn’t. He blew his brains out. Suicide’s a Hemingway family tradition.”

“See, depressing. Why would I want to read him?”

“To understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Futility. Despair. Beauty. Clarity. Nothingness. The perfect sentence. The death of God.”

“Futility and despair aren’t good topics for someone who sells real estate, and the death of God certainly isn’t for the Greenfield Saturday Night Book Club.”

“Then you probably wouldn’t like my book. It’s about the same things, just not as well written as Hemingway’s stuff.”

“It would be different.”

“How so?”

“If you would speak to us, we wouldn’t have to like the book so long as we like you.”

“Do you think your members would like me?”

She smiled. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Instead of answering, he asked, “What are the last five books they’ve read and discussed?”

“Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Predator by Patricia Cornwell, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich, and Ellen Glascow’s Barren Ground. We like to mix older books with recent ones.”

“They’re not exactly uplifting stories.”

“But they’re not about despair and nothingness.”

He moved his head from side to side. “They’re all by women. Why make an exception for me?”

“You’re local, and you’re giving us the books.”

“I’ve got five cartons of them that I can’t give away. Having you take them will be like a gift from Heaven.”

“Good. I’ll finish my burger and beer, and we’ll go to your place.”

 

§§§

“I converted the second and third floors into apartments,” Ted Sawey said as they walked up to a large purple Victorian house. The gingerbread trim was painted the same pink as the trim around the windows and doors. The front door was a brilliant crimson.

“I’ve wondered who lived here,” Mary Jane said.

“Like it?”

“No. Every time I look at that purple, I shudder at the thought of trying to sell it. Especially in today’s market.”

“You hate it.”

“It would be a bear to sell, unless you repainted it.”

“I have no intention of selling it.”

“Are the apartments rented?”

“The second floor’s got three bedrooms. An art professor and her son live there. She uses the third bedroom for a studio. The third floor’s a one bedroom. A local prep school rents it for visiting faculty.”

He opened the front door, and they walked into a large hall lit by a single spiral fluorescent bulb in a ceiling fixture. The staircase to the second floor was on the left and blocked by a door. A second door led to the first floor apartment. Three bicycles were lined up along the walls, secured by chains fastened to a pipe screwed along the top of the wainscoting. Several boxes were piled in one corner, and a series of pegs held jackets and scarves, boots and shoes scattered on the floor below them. Unlocking his door he ushered her into the living room, switching on the lights as they entered.

“It’s beautiful,” she said with surprise, looking at the paintings on the walls, the thick oriental rugs on the floor. Through a wide arch she could see into a study; soft lights shined on a wall of bookcases. “You’d never know it was purple and pink on the outside.”

“Come see the kitchen.” He led her through the study. Three of the walls were covered with crammed bookcases, some with books stacked on top of those that were upright. A light maple desk took up the entire width of the fourth wall. Covered with neat stacks of paper and half a dozen pens carefully lined up, the desk held a computer, its screensaver displaying a changing array of photographs: Tuscan hillside towns, English countryside villages, a series of cathedrals and churches. To the left of the computer was a framed picture of a young man in a graduation robe. Underneath the desk were five unopened cardboard cartons.

Mary Jane pointed to the picture. “That you?”

“My son.” He picked the picture up, running a finger over its surface. “He’s with the Special Forces in Afghanistan. I told him that war was just another president’s folly, but he said he had to go.”

“Why?”

“I suppose to prove something to me.”

“What does his mother think?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “We haven’t spoken in twenty years.”

“Bad divorce?”

He returned the picture to the desk. “She was a nun. I met her when I was teaching in California,” he sighed. “We fell in love. She left the convent, and we spent a year in Paris, another in a Rada, a small town in Tuscany. We came back to the States, and I took a job teaching at a church-related college in upstate New York, figuring it would be an environment in tune with her religious sensibilities. We were happy enough, until she got pregnant. The thought of a baby freaked her out. I mean a total, absolute, mind-boggling freak out. She knelt by the couch in the living room and prayed day and night, wouldn’t eat anything, and drank one glass of water a day. After five days of that, she passed out. When I picked her up to take her to a hospital, her knees were bloody from scraping against the rug. They released her from the hospital, and she disappeared. Seven months later, she showed up at my house with the baby. ‘Take him,’ she said. I never heard from her again.”

“You don’t have any idea what happened to her?”

He shook his head. “For all I know she could be in a convent, be a crack-whore in Salt Lake City, or a literary agent in New York. Let’s look at the kitchen.”

She stepped into the kitchen, exhaling in surprise. “This is beautiful. Even with that god-awful purple paint job, I could sell this house in no time.”

“It’s my sanctum,” he said.

“I see why.”

The floor was made of wide pine boards with a matte polyurethane finish. A large porcelain sink sat beneath a picture window, a stainless steel refrigerator on one side of it, a ten burner commercial cooking range on the other. The tops of the center island and counters were gray polished slate. Above white wainscoting, the walls were painted dusky red, the paintings on them lit by fixtures recessed in the ceiling. A table and chairs sat by a bank of casement windows. An arm chair in one corner faced a flat screen television mounted on the opposite wall. In another corner, a small monkey chattered and jumped around in a cage hanging from a hook in the ceiling, its eyes fixed on Sawey the moment he and Mary Jane entered the room.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, walking toward the monkey.

“Don’t put your fingers near the cage. He bites. He’s quite a nasty little fellow. When I let him out, which I do only when I’m alone and at my most masochistic, he’ll shit wherever he might be when the need comes on. He tears up books and newspapers, pees on my bed, and generally makes a mess of the whole place. If I’m not careful, the little bastard will leap onto my back and hold on to my flesh until it bleeds. I can’t shake him loose until he’s ready to get off. I can jump up and down like a monkey myself, bang up against the wall, and the damned beast will hang on as though there’s a purpose to what he’s doing.”

“Why keep him?”

“Nobody wants him. I can’t sell him or give him away. God knows I’ve tried.”

“How long have you had him?”

“Seven years. He’s my personal plague.”

“Why did you buy him?”

“I didn’t. My mentor in the doctoral program at Drew University willed him to me.”

“Why keep him?”

“To remind me of what we came from.” He pointed at the cage. The monkey turned around and stuck its ass as far out of the bars as it could. “We evolved from common ancestors, from things a lot like what he still is.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Jesus H. Darwin.”

She laughed. “He really is beautiful.”

‘I hate him.”

“Why?”

“He reminds me of what we came from and what we’ll return to when we devolve. I have fantasies of cutting him up and stuffing him down the garbage disposal.”

Mary Jane gasped. ‘You wouldn’t.”

“I could. I really hate him.”

Jesus chattered and jumped around the cage.

“Someday I’ll shoot him, put my .22 pistol between his eyes, and be done with him.”

Wrapping his fingers around the bars, Jesus shook with a fierceness that made the cage jump and rattle on its chain.

“He heard you,” Mary Jane said with an uncomfortable laugh.

“Sometimes I wake up at those terrible hours of the night and think I hear him out here talking in tongues. I want him gone, dead. I put myself back to sleep imagining that I’m strangling him. If he was gone, perhaps I could forget him, forget what he represents.”

“You’d never forgive yourself.”

“Forgiveness is overrated.”

“I don’t agree.”

“It’s not worth arguing over. Would you like a cup of tea?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got an early morning appointment to show a house. If I don’t get to bed soon, I won’t be at my real estate selling best tomorrow.”

“I’ll get the books.”

She followed him into the study. He pulled a carton from under the desk and ripped it open with a box cutter.

“How many? I’ve got more than I’ll ever be able to get rid of.”

“Would fifteen be all right?”

He took fifteen paperback books from the carton and stacked them in a brown grocery bag. “It’s not a bad book.”

“Maybe the club members who actually read the books we discuss will think it’s a good book,” she said.

“There’s no telling what makes a good book.” He smiled. “You should reconstitute your club so that it doesn’t have a president.”

“We might do that.”

“Presidents come with baggage.”

“Everything comes with baggage.”

He pulled up his trouser leg and rested the heel of his prosthesis on the seat of the desk chair. “Show me your leg again.”

“Don’t you think this is a little odd?” She pulled up her slacks and put her prosthesis next to his.

“Of course. So what?”

She laughed. “When my mother asks me why I don’t date, I tell her that at my age there are more single men than single women. The odds are good but the goods are odd. You’re pretty odd.”

“We haven’t dated yet.”

She picked the box cutter up from the desk, tapped her prosthesis and then tapped his. “We may be pathetic creatures, but we can do pretty neat things. There’s not a monkey in the world that could make a fake leg to stand on.”

“There’s not.” His voice was flat.

She picked up the bag. “I have to go. Is your phone listed?”

“It is.”

“I’ll call you with the date, time, and place of our next book club meeting.”

He opened the doors for her and stood on the porch as she left. Starting down the sidewalk, she turned. “Thanks for the books.”

He waved. “Sure.”

She walked on, and he called to her. “Perhaps I’ll kill little Jesus tonight.”

She turned again, their eyes locking. “How many times have you said that?”

“Every night but one for seven years. The first night I thought having his company was a blessing. The next day he was shredding the flesh on my back.”  His face turned solemn. “But I need to get him off my back forever. Tonight will be my last night with little Jesus.”

She thought his face was drawn and sad like that of a man in mourning. Waving one last time, she walked along the sidewalk. A cold wind blew against her face. The sky was dark, clouds covered the stars and the waning quarter moon. Halfway down the block, she heard a soft popping sound, like a single firecracker going off. She shivered once, wiped her eyes, and squaring her shoulders limped home carrying the bag, heavy with books.

No cars passed, and not another person walked along the pavement. Stopping on the sidewalk outside her house, she looked at the darkened windows but saw only the reflection of the street lamp on their blank surfaces. For the briefest moment she thought she heard a long soft moan, but quickly decided it was only the wind rushing through the bare limbs of the surrounding trees.