ProetryPlace Blog 20               MAMA’S BOY (part three)

    Nora didn’t bother with a note when she finally left Morris and Jimmy for the pleasure of another man. What could she say, really? For all her dreams of glamour, life with them was just too mundane to bear.

    Neither father nor son spoke of her again after the third day of her absence. Jimmy had pounded and shaken his father, demanding, “Where’s Mama?”

    “Damned if I know or care,” his father replied, not bothering to look at his son.

    Morris Masters was a small man in almost every way. He worked second shift at the factory after graduating from high school and rarely encountered the office staff. He had worked there almost two years when he first met Nora Hembein, the new clerk in accounts and records, when he stopped by the office with a question about his Labor Day overtime pay. She treated him as coldly as yesterday’s gravy, and he determined at once to marry her.

    He confided to Hank, his one good buddy. “I am going to ask Nora out—you know, the looker in the office.”

    Hank laughed at him. “She’s out every night with a different guy. You ain’t got . . . “

    “You’ll see. Bet you a sawbuck.”

    Three weeks later, Hank forked over a ten spot to a grinning Morris Masters and listened to his tale of triumph.

    “I spent half a week’s pay for tickets to see Led Zeppelin, that new rock band. Seemed like she was about to laugh in my face until I showed her the tickets—front row, center!”

    After the concert, still aglow with images of Jimmy Page in her mind and numbed by the swigs of Southern Comfort Morris kept pushing on her from a silver flask, Nora had capitulated to his back seat advances. What the hell, why not. Give the poor sucker a break.”

    The next day Mory applied for and was granted first shift work in the shop. He needed to see his conquest regularly. He gave up his lunch break to visit her in the office break-room. He brought her flowers, sweets and small gifts. She accepted these with pleasure and satisfaction although reluctantly, not wanting the others to recognize any special relationship between them.

    Nora never accepted his pleas for a second date.  Then one day she whispered in his ear, “I’m pregnant.”

    Morris and Nora were married on a cold and dark December afternoon. Mory was as proud and as tall as he had ever been. Nora, detached and dreamy, was pulled, surprised, from her reverie by the JP asking, “Will you, Nora, take this man . . . ?”

    She had been thinking: Jimmy. We’ll call the baby Jimmy. And he will have long hair and play guitar Yes, Jimmy.

    When Nora left Jimmy and Mory ten years later to fend for themselves, Mory seemed to shrink even smaller than his paunchy five foot five and one half inches. He had started drinking seriously years earlier in the sham marriage. He managed to keep his factory job another year after Nora left, then handouts and unemployment checks provided meager subsistence—enough for a daily fifth of rot-gut and little else.

    “Dad. Dad! Wake up for chrissake. You puked on your shirt. Clean up. Go to bed.”

    Young Jim became the parent of his father. He dropped out of school. He took odd jobs with any tradesman who needed an extra pair of unskilled, low-paid hands. And one day, not long after he turned 16, he discovered his father and the few dollars he had socked away in his bureau drawer were gone.

To be concluded

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com