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CHAPTER EIGHT
There were only two neon signs in Alma. Both were of a lipstick red as my Grandmother’s lips, signifying something I could not name. South of the Novelty Theater, was the sizzling sign of the Red Rooster cafe. It was Mecca for me even at that age, an unashamed beer joint, center of sin, socialism, and patrons lost to the church.
The Hotel Bruxelles (English spoken), had the other red neon sign in block letters like a garish in-your-face whorehouse. The large two-story brick hotel was placed squarely between the magnificence of the red sandstone Immigration Valley Stake tabernacle to God on the south, and across the street, the county courthouse with two white pillars. Mirroring the columns were two dark fir trees half a hundred feet tall and thick as the Pillars of Hercules.
We entered the door of the hotel and stamped snow from our boots onto the threadbare oriental carpet. The lobby was still as a tomb, full of the ghosts of drummers and miners and even visiting church dignitaries too late to find free lodging at the Bishop’s house. Old rockers with leather seats stuffed with horsehair and curved oak arms sat in mute witness to the comings and goings of the patrons of the Hotel Bruxelles.
Maxwell Taylor’s mother did not choose to appear to greet her new guest. My father went to the rotating register and signed Rada Buxton, Pocatello, Idaho. He replaced the pen in the inkbottle, blotted the ink with a rocker shaped blotter, and then turned to look at the three of us.
“Looks like your favorite room facing the street is open,” my father said. Rada always preferred that room with the sizzling neon glare that came through the curtains all night. Their apartment in Pocatello was across the street from the Atom Club, and I remember waking often to wonder at how people could sleep with that beacon blazing into the windows. My grandmother said her accustomed room in the Hotel Bruxelles reminded her of home. Bucks apartment in Pocatello was directly across the street from the screaming scarlet sign over the Bar: THE ATOM Club. Rada said she slept better with her room illuminated by neon. Room 210 was ideal then, I thought. And she could see the traffic down on the street, such as there was– another reminder, I guess, of the city.
My father led us down a corridor to the stairs. We passed the pair of closed double French doors to the dining room, tables set and silent, linen white as ice in the small light from a Coca Cola sign and the red echo of the neon-devil’s gas– sizzling outside in the night. In the hallway above each door were tear shaped bottles in wire racks filled with a fluid that looked like red diesel fuel; fire extinguishers of a primitive kind.
My father, having taken the key to grandma’s room from the slots behind the desk, opened 210 and stood back to let the two women inside. He motioned for me to stay outside, so I waited, ear to the door, angry at being shut out. I wondered why I had not been invited into the room. I could see the red glow of the sign through the curtained window before the desk light was snapped on. I listened, shivering.
“I don’t think he’d dare show up just now,” Grandmother ventured, and I could hear a rustling of coats, imagining the single steel spring bed with a brass head stead, the steam radiator clanking to life after one of them had twisted a rusty valve, the lace curtains and the same worn carpet that lay on the floor of the lobby downstairs.
“I’ve known Buck long enough to think you’d just better get out of this situation, Rada,” my father said, his voice icy, yet carrying a kind of sympathy.
“Give it some time Jonathan,” my mother advised. “We’ll just settle mother in for a few weeks, and see if he’ll cool down.”
“But he had nothing, no reason . . .” Grandma’s voice sobbed again above the violent banging of the steam through the iron tubes.
“It’s that bar, you should never have consented to buying that bar with him. You knew his habits,” my father said, but there was no accusation in his tone, or reprieve, just a statement of fact.
“It is the only other thing he knows. And it is successful . . .”
“If only he weren’t so fond of his own medicine,” my father said, the puritan of his faith blending sarcasm with heat at the violence alcohol bred in some men like a living beast.
“I just can’t have people seeing us like that. The whole apartment building heard us fight. It is so humiliating, and I’ve failed.”
“You haven’t failed mother. He was a good man for the time I was growing up, he loved us.”
“He loves nothing now. Oh, he claims to love me, but his jealousy is just crazy. He even wants me to quit my job. He says that I am seeing other men at the office. It’s just so dammed unfair!” This outburst was followed by silence.
“Perhaps you could move down here, stay with us until he straightens himself out,” my mother said. I knew her eyes would be drilling into my father’s eyes. My mother had become a very faithful Mormon, a convert to my father’s faith. She was submissive, skilled in the kitchen, as naive as spring. Rada had protected her only child from the harshness of her life with a protectiveness that was as ferocious as a primal mother. But when it came to my grandmother, my mother had the final word, and my father accepted that with some grace.
I knew Grandma had opposed their marriage on account of his religion– she loathed the LDS church, one more thing we had in common. But once the marriage was accomplished, with full and holy marriage ceremonies performed in the LDS temple in Idaho Falls, she accepted it, stopped trying to reason with her daughter. Over the years, had accepted the truth that Jonathan Lattimore was the best man my mother could have ever hoped for in this world, and, according to the faith, the next as well.
“I just want you to think remember there are other ways,” was Grandmother’s whispered admonition over the years regarding the church. My grandmother never let an occasion pass, when we were alone, to remind me that Mormonism was the Devil’s workshop. If my mother or father ever discovered her warnings they would have been appalled. To my knowledge, Grandmother R. had no religion at all. “I want you to be more than that to which most of them aspire. I want you to live,” she’d tell me anxiously. Perhaps she thought her daughter’s potential had been wasted by her marriage to my father. Perhaps she was trying to save me from becoming another Buck Buxton.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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