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1910: Armistice Day

By Nick Arvin

Published September 23, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Charles Chamberlin

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1. The Wallet

Peace has come, and in the Manhattan on Larimer Street, where the menu offers steak for 35 cents, a chaotic, exuberant noise rises from the tables. Over the last week the Spanish flu epidemic has ebbed, and today came word of a signed armistice - soon the boys in France will be coming home! Few still bother to wear the gauze masks that the city mandated to combat the influenza, but a pair seated at a table near the front door wear theirs - white cloths tied back over the ears, covering nose and mouth.

"Someday you'll kill me," the big one says to the little one.

"Sure I will."

"That's what sons do to their fathers."

The boy looks about 10 years old. His father has a deep crease fixed into his forehead, as if his mouth, frustrated by the mask, migrated upward. The boy has small, dark eyes, and he is unlikable. His father is also unlikable, however, which works out, in a sense. If only one or the other had been unlikable, they would work at cross-purposes, but as it is they project a peculiar energy together and seem, if unlikable, also singular.

They cut pieces of steak, lift their masks to put the food into their mouths, let the masks down again to chew.

Their unlikability has already impressed those at the tables around them. The two talk loudly while watching the door and the celebrating crowds that wander outside. They have a small, round table but sit nearly side by side. The father, eating left-handed, jostles his son, right-handed.

"What're you going to kill me for?"

"For picking your nose and a funny look," the boy says. He lifts his chin to speak in a curious, mock-theatrical style.

"You have a very disrespectful manner."

"If there's an apple on the ground, chances are the tree's nearby."

Men, arm in arm, pass the door singing. A paperboy casts his voice into an unnerving register, calling the headline, "THE WAR IS OVER!"

"You are assuming that you are, in fact, my son."

"I'm hoping I ain't."

"I indulge, but you may provoke me only so far."

"Your patience is legendary."

"You are a little cur."

At the nearest table sit two ladies and two men, all well dressed. One of the men, particularly wide in shoulders and chest, with a scar across his nose, glances over repeatedly.

"A son of a bitch, then," the boy says.

"I'll put you over my knee right here," the father says.

The boy lifts his mask and places a piece of steak in his mouth.

The waitress comes and looks at them and goes away.

"You should tell her that we can't pay," the boy says.

"I can pay."

The father and son look at each other. The father reaches into his jacket, draws out a wallet, opens it, peers inside.

He curses; the table goes over and crashes as he falls on the boy, knocking over both their chairs; the boy screams. All around the restaurant people stand to look. The father punches his son in the chest.

The man with the scarred nose gets there first and lifts away the father; the boy, still screaming inarticulately, slips out; the father scrambles and writhes, bellowing guttural syllables, while the man with the scar tries to pin him. The boy presses close, livid, and shouts insults.

Suddenly the boy backs away. A half-second later the man with the scar stands straight up to feel the pocket of his pants. "You!" He turns to follow the boy, but the boy is gone. The man peers out the door. His wallet has been taken, and when he turns back, the father - the accomplice - has also vanished. The diners begin to chatter again among themselves. The man looks out once more at the passing happy crowds.

2. The Phonograph

In a one-room apartment a floor above the celebration and noise, a woman sings opera while a son lies dying.

A desperate father paces the room. Every so often he goes to the phonograph that stands against the wall and restarts it.

He wishes it had struck him, let it take him, old, weak, widowed, alone. But his son, young and strong, is the one who has the Spanish flu, is the one who lies gasping, bleeding from the nose and ears, hot as a griddle to the touch.

His son owns a jewelry store in Chicago. He attends operas and polo matches, he has a wife and a daughter, he has done well, much better than his father. Still he comes back to Denver every year to visit. He came alone this time; his wife wouldn't travel with their daughter while the Spanish flu was rampant. He brought the phonograph along instead, as a gift. Entering his father's apartment, he looked around and smirked. "I knew you wouldn't have bought one for yourself."

With a rag daubed in a bucket of water, the father wipes his son, who lies naked on the bed. The apartment's two windows admit a cool November breeze, as well as the hullabaloo from the streets, but his son still sweats thickly. Small blood blisters have formed all across his pale skin.

His son set up the machine and showed him how to run it.

"Whose voice is that?" he'd asked his son.

"Jeanne Gerville-Reache. I saw her once, onstage. My favorite contralto. A couple of years ago she died in her pregnancy."

"She's dead?"

"This was recorded shortly before she died. A beautiful lady."

Together they sat listening to the voice of a dead woman.

Now, in the street below, a brass band slowly passes, braying a version of Oh! It's a Lovely War!

A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150


A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150

We asked 11 authors to pick a decade in Denver's history and turn in 2,500 words of fiction set in the city. Each week we've featured a new story and an interview with the author. Today, look for a special section in print compiling all the stories, plus one additional piece: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, the winner of our story contest.

His son had spent the last week sleeping on a cot under the window. When the father went out to work, his son visited old friends or went to see shows at a little theater that had stayed open despite the city's injunctions to combat the influenza. Evenings, the two of them sat drinking from bottles of wine that his son bought and listened to the phonograph, mostly to the contralto. At a certain point he realized that they were both longing for her, this woman whom he knew only by a voice, and who no longer lived.

He tries not to think of the telegram he will have to send to his daughter-in-law and granddaughter, tries to convince himself that, against all evidence, his son might still survive. Tries not to think of solitude. Of his wife who died many years ago, hacking with tuberculosis.

Toward the end of the recording, the singer's voice rises until she strikes against the limits of the machine's capabilities, and there it warbles strangely.

A raw fleshy scent fills the room. He wipes the blood from his son's face. In reality, he knows, all he is doing is all he can do: waiting for the end.

The contralto sings in a language that he doesn't understand, and he can't even guess what it is.

3. The Photo

"I wish it weren't already over," says the boy, 16. He looks around at the celebrants with dismay. He wears a pressed, new jacket that is too long for him and carries his hands in its front pockets.

"I guess you think you want to go to war." His father walks beside him, carrying a framed photograph.

"Yes!"

"I think I felt that way once, too."

The boy scowls and spits. He has been up, jittery with excitement, ever since the dark early-morning hours, when the newspaper companies began setting off a series of explosions to alert the city to the good news, and to sell their special editions. Now, a dozen hours later, the crowds on 16th Street are still chanting, cheering, singing, beating pans, whistling, throwing confetti, waving flags. A car drags clattering pieces of stovepipe. A truck carries a pole with a hanging effigy of the Kaiser.

The boy tugs down his hat, which is also new, identical to the one that Harold Lloyd wore in Two-Gun Gussie. He stops to watch a young woman stroll by.

"Here," says his father, beckoning from a storefront: Mile High Photo.

Inside, in the quiet, the photographer fusses with his flash pan. "It will be better," he says, "with one of the backdrops. It will add some style."

The father looks at the photo in his hand. "No backdrop. Just a white wall."

The photographer shrugs, eager to move along. He's been busy all day.

"You kneel there," the father says. "I stand here."

"We can both stand," the boy says.

"No, the point is to make it just the same."

The boy, sighing, kneels. The father puts on his hat, and the boy does, too.

"No, no," the father says, "you hold yours on your knee."

"You're wearing yours."

"Yes, but yours goes on your knee."

"I'll wear it."

The father holds out the framed photo, making little sounds with his lips. "Look here - with my father, I had it on my knee. He wore his."

"Did Grandpa tell you to put it on your knee?"

"That's just how it turned out."

"I'll wear mine."

"When you have a son and you take this photo, you can wear the hat."

"I'd let my son wear his hat if he wanted."

"Sirs," the photographer says.

The father lets the boy wear the hat. "Wear it back, so the camera can see your eyes," he adds, to regain some authority. He sets aside the framed photo, and at the last moment he takes off his own hat, thinking there will be a symmetry in that. But after the flash shoots off - and briefly consumes the world with brilliant light - he begins to rue it.

They step outside into the moving crowds and come to 15th Street before he realizes that he's forgotten his framed photo in the photographer's studio. He tells his son to wait while he goes back for it. When he reaches 15th again, his son is smoking a cigarette - where did that come from? - and talking to a young woman in a long coat and a wide straw hat. She's pretty.

From behind her he gestures to his son and goes on alone. He walks looking at the framed photo of himself and his father in their old-fashioned clothes - frock coats and tall bowler hats. It's a photo of a man with a great silly grin standing just behind a boy on one knee, a boy who looks both desperately serious and thrilled just to be there, having his photo taken with his father.

4. The Leg

"Now Jack will soon be home."

Ralph has heard Mother say this twice already as she bustles around, bringing in cookies, then tea, and he has noticed that each time she says it, Father shifts his hands a little.

Ralph is sitting in the parlor of his father's Victorian house in the Highlands, in an ornate wooden armchair. His crutches are propped against the chair back. He gives two cookies to his son, who gravely and silently pockets them. To Ralph this seems strange behavior for a boy, but is it worrying or only amusing? He's not sure. When he returned from France two weeks ago - or, rather, when most of him returned, excepting the left knee, shin and foot - his son screamed and cried at the sight of him. Ralph thought at first that it was because of the leg. But no, the boy simply had no idea who this man was.

"I wonder if he'll recognize Jack?" Mother says.

But Ralph has no doubt that the boy will. Jack - who could make coins appear out of noses, who could crawl around with his nephew for hours playing with tin soldiers - had been extremely popular.

Again Father's hands twitch.

Finally Mother stops moving, sits at the edge of a chair. She adjusts the plate of cookies and says, "Will you remember your Uncle Jack?"

The boy stares at her. He says, whispering, "Yes."

In the quiet afterward the noises of celebration carry to them. Church bells. School bells. Steam whistles.

Mother says to the boy, "I bet your mama is glad to have your daddy back to get you out of the house, so she can get a thing done."

The boy only stares.

Mother looks around the room, turns to the boy again. "Would you like to see if there's any dough left in the mixing bowl?"

The boy leaps from his seat, and so the two of them exit. Ralph feels inclined to run after them, but he remembers his leg, looks at his father and sits still.

It'd been a surprise when Jack enlisted. He'd never expressed any interest before, but he'd gone to sign up while his arm was still in a sling, before the general conscription even began; he'd volunteered.

The sling resulted from a beating that Father gave Jack. Ralph had gone with Father in the Studebaker for an afternoon of fly-fishing, but Father had stepped on his rod and broke it, so they returned early; then, entering the house, they heard something strange upstairs and discovered Jack, naked, with another boy, also naked. Ralph had never seen the other boy before or again, only glimpsed him running past, wild blond hair, tanned, penis flapping.

When Ralph dragged Father away, he'd been afraid that Jack might already be dead.

"Do you suppose," Ralph says, "there's any chance at all that Jack could be home for Christmas?"

"When he left," Father says, "he told me that, one way or another, we would never see him again."

In the kitchen, the boy squeals and Mother laughs, the noise of them muffled by the door. Ralph pushes up to go to them, forgetting his leg, and falls.

5. The Dance

Is it the crowds or the crying baby? He contemplates the hysterical noises from the street of people shouting and smashing pans together, and he considers the urgent, remorseless vocal agony of the child. The problem is the baby. He could sleep through a celebration; it has nothing to do with him.

He needs sleep.

He grows angrier and angrier as insufferable minutes pass into an hour, and then another. He cannot sleep, and without sleep he will have no energy for his work. He might lose the job; others will be happy to do it. He cannot lose the job. And he cannot sleep. He cannot sleep because the baby won't be quiet. How can the baby continue like this? It seems inhuman. It seems pure malice, pure hatred, of him, the baby's father.

Finally he scrambles out of bed, throws the door open and strides into the other room. His wife slouches in a kitchen chair with the baby in her lap, and he falls to a crouch before them and raises his fist over the shrieking creature.

His wife licks her lips. "Stop that," she says.

Her look catches him. "Can't I joke?" he says.

But she stares in a way that twists into him, and suddenly he understands that he will regret the gesture a long time. Already it makes him sad, to think of it, to think of thinking of it.

In repentance, he asks, "Is he sick?"

"It's the noise outside that keeps prodding him. Take him, please. He'll quiet for you. He always does."

He takes the baby to his shoulder. He paces and bounces his step. The trick involves adding movements within the movements, and he thinks of it as dancing very delicately. He has described it to his wife, but she isn't able to do it.

In a minute, the baby quiets.

A few minutes later, the baby curls and sleeps. Then his wife, too, sleeps in her chair.

He continues to circle the room, inhaling the baby's crude human scent. He can put him down - the baby would sleep on - but he keeps the baby on his shoulder.