Since he had so little to his name when he died, the reading of Henry Fromm’s will went quickly. But if you subscribed to the Gloucester Daily Times, there was plenty to read. Maybe more than you ever wanted to read about Henry Fromm.
But Henry was a dancing fool, that’s for sure. And he was in major dance mode on New Year’s Eve at the old Halibut Inn up in Folly Cove, right on the Gloucester-Rockport border.
The music Henry Fromm was doing his WWF waltz to was a piano-bass-vocal rendering of the blues tune, “Stormy Monday.” The pocked old pianist with the split lip was also the pocked old vocalist, drooling and nearly drenching his tux lapel as he split-lippishly howled the black-guy lyrics in a white-guy Ipswich clamdigger accent. “I’ve heard tomcats do better,” shouted Henry, spraying unchewed canape bits into Laurette’s ear as he wrestled her around the jam-packed floor.
They whammed into one couple and then another. “Hey this is like bumper cars at Salisbury Beach,” yelled Henry. “Happy fucking New Year!”
As “Stormy Monday” closed with an electric squeal and a big, sour-note piano flourish, Henry swung Laurette into a deep dip and held her there, sweating and straining from the weight – his and hers. The two of them owned and operated a TrimUp Treadmill franchise in the Gloucester Industrial Center, right off the 128 rotary. Not exactly a booming business, but you’d think they’d be in better shape.
“Stormy Monday my ass,” shouted Laurette. “This is foggy Wednesday, and
you’re so shi-fahzed you can’t see straight.”
The TrimUp twosome managed to wobble off the floor without permanently damaging anything or anyone, including themselves. Although Henry felt a twinge in his shoulder, almost as if his shoulder had a funnybone in it. They returned to their table of seven, where Phil Healy, who reported for the Gloucester Daily Times, was doing his own news show, holding forth like an AP wire machine.
“Not the deer story, Phil,” begged Phil’s Kahlua-infused wife, Chrissy. “They’ve got Phil on the animal beat or something,” she said to the table, screeching over the paper horns and a new assault of split-lip white-man blues from the band. “All he tells me about are rabid skunks chasing old ladies or fisher cats chasing goddam cats up a tree.”
“Well screw you and your skunk friends,” yelled Dave Corcoran, the Plasticon engineer. “Me and Mishy drove all the way up here to the North Shore from the freaking South Shore and we nearly damn died in the fog.”
“It’s that dumb boat trailer you drag everywhere, fog or no fog,” sniped Dave’s wife, Mishy. “Damn rickety-tickety boat trailer made us fishtail on 133 and Dave nearly took out a gas pump.”
Phil didn’t need Mishy whining to the whole table, sounding like chalk against a blackboard, to learn about the near-miss with the pump, and about the New Year’s widow who appeared in the fog. Dave had told him everything in the parking lot of the Halibut, where chance had the two couples pull in at the same time: Phil and Chrissy in their still-like-new teal Civic; and Dave and Mishy in their thrice-owned Ford Ranger with the boat trailer.
“Why does he need a truck and a trailer?” nagged Mishy. “That Elephant Girl will give me nightmares.”
Mishy alternately called her the Elephant Girl and the Thalydomide girl, and she made nasty, mocking faces for emphasis. But Dave told Phil a different story; or at least Phil heard a different story, the story he wanted to hear. This lonely, homely girl, this girl with a terrible lopsided mound in her brow, was the only person tending the gas-and-convenience store as Dave and Mishy swerved in with their trailer. Dave called her so beautiful everywhere else it almost made up for the mound. Even her voice was a piece of music, and she had long luminous hair.
“Was she all alone?” Phil asked, as the four of them walked up the stairs to the Halibut Inn, which was already so filled with music and noise the clapboards seemed to throb from the bottomless bass.
“Of course she was.”
“All alone on New Year’s Eve,” said Phil. “They always are. The widows.”
“How do you know she was a widow?” Dave said, as flummoxed as Phil was focused. “She was about twenty two.”
The thing with Dave, Mishy and the widow had happened hours ago, before the brewskis started going down. But the image of the girl at the gas pumps never left Phil’s mind, no matter how slap-happy things got. From the pit of his stomach to his tear ducts he was stuck on the widow thing and it spread over him, and soon he found himself brooding over that sad sack Donna, Laurette’s friend down the far end of the table: what the Christ did she have besides the two bags under her eyes? Not a soul, not tonight. Another New Year’s widow, as far as he was concerned.
Through his Guinness brain-haze Phil watched Laurette ask Henry to dance with Donna. Henry made a very visible yuck face and refused. “Henry’s an asshole,” Phil stage-whispered to Chrissy. “You don’t behave like that around someone whose husband left her for another man.”
“For a fruit,” said Chrissy, talking into the sloshing pink Cosmopolitan glass as though it were a mike.
It had happened to Donna on Thanksgiving. After seventeen years, two kids and two miscarriages, a Boston tint-and-foil stylist got his hands into the pants of her schoolteacher husband, who up and fled the salty North Shore for a big-city brownstone in the gay South End - turning Donna into a Zoloft zombie. Laurette practically needed to borrow a trawler winch to drag Donna out of her bed on New Year’s Eve. You could see the makeup slapped over the crow’s feet, the jaundice, and the wattle that once was a comely neck.
“Why’d they bring her here just to shit on her?” Phil asked Chrissy. He got a hiccup and a yawn for an answer.
Chrissy was a former Miss Rockport. Sixth in the Miss Massachusetts pageant. Nobody shit on her.
Phil continued, “Homo, hetero, who gives a flying fuck? – everybody’s got a hungry heart.” This ancient song meant something to Phil, who was a hard news guy who got his biggest kicks when , once in a blue moon, they let him do a human-interest piece on the Features page.
“Shit, it’s almost midnight,” hollered Henry. “I can’t eat a fucking noisemaker. When do they serve the main course?”
The prix fixe menu offered baked lamb or baked stuffed lobster. The Halibut Inn was run by Greeks; hence lamb. But this was Cape Ann, the North Shore, fish country. Almost everyone had chosen lobster.
“With that gut, maybe you should eat a noisemaker,” said Laurette.
Everyone laughed. But not Henry. He was too busy noticing the pocked piano player, then the bass player and drummer as well, take seats at the very next table. The table was the only empty one in the house, and marked with cards on the white cloth that said, “reserved.”
Suddenly a waitress loomed, shouldering a well-stacked tray. She put the tray on a stand and proceeded to lay down a bread basket, a relish tray, salads and three heaping plates of baked lamb in front of the three musicians. It was more than Henry could take. The hors d’ouevres were all gone, not a cheeseball left, and they had ordered their main courses two hours ago.
“Hey, Cruella de Vil,” Henry beefed up at the waitress, “what about the paying customers? It’s eleven thirty.”
The waitress, an iron-pumper at the Gloucester Y, looked like she wanted to brain Henry with the tray. But the piano player was the one who spoke up, explaining that they were on break. “It’s a take-five, governor,” he said to Henry. He did a good job maintaining a diplomatic tone, considering that he was basically talking to a mean New Year’s drunk. The split lip that slurred his blues-singing was hardly in evidence when he was using his mouth to speak.
Phil had covered petty felonies so long he could sniff one coming from anywhere, even another galaxy. What his nose suspected here was an incipient fray that could wind up on the police blotter. If it did, he’d have to be up at crack of dawn filing the story, Guinness hangover or no, because he was an eye witness.
Admonishing Henry to chill, Phil scooped up his 24-oz. schooner and switched seats with Chrissy. This put him right next to Henry and closer to Laurette and Donna too. “Henry my man,” Phil pleaded, “they’re eating lamb. We ordered lobster. Lobster takes time. Hey, let me tell you my deer story. Dateline, Mass. Pike…”
“Fuck your deer story. Deer makes me hungry.”
Dave always claimed Mishy had ears like a German Shepherd, and he was right. Despite all the hornblowing, she heard Henry’s deer comment and barked that he should order a triple martini. She said that way he could have three times as many olives to eat, and nutrients as well.
Although Mishy was making culinary suggestions and Phil was trying to ward off a felony assignment, Dave was tuned to another station. Maybe on Jupiter.
“Phil baby,” said Dave. “You didn’t happened to bring the classified section, did you?”
“The classified,” Mishy said. “Are you out of your mind? Why would he bring the classified on New Year’s Eve?”
“No harm asking, is there? Hey, we brought the boat trailer. You never know; maybe we get a deal on a dinghy while we’re up here on the North Shore. Winter’s when you want to buy dinghies. You wouldn’t know that.”
“Go tell the Elephant Girl,” Mishy said, waving for a waitress. Her sixth Tequila Sunrise had sunk into the melting ice.
A waitress did appear – the same iron-pumper who had served the musicians – and she lugged over a bonanza. A massive tray laden with lobster dinners, all seven of them. Everyone cheered except Donna, who kept her head down, staring at a wine glass that was down to one finger of Sutter Home Zinfandel.
“Bring that girl another hit of Stutter Home,” Laurette said to the waitress. “Maybe it will to wake her up,”
Or better yet, knock her out,” Henry added.
“Assholes,” Phil stage-whispered to his wife.
As the lobster dinner landed in front of him, Henry reached down and popped a pants button, relieving his stomach from the torment of the waistband.
“Will you please not unzip in public,” said Laurette. “One of these days you’ll get picked up.”
“I’m not exposing myself, dammit,” said Henry. “I can’t eat if I can’t breathe.”
“So much for Lycra,” sighed Laurette, spearing a nugget of stuffing with her little lobster fork. She could have used any one of her ten red, white and blue nails - so long you could stir a cocktail with them. The patriotic claws had been pasted on earlier at Nails by The Sea.
Henry grabbed his utensils too, but before digging in he had a few words for the musicians at the next table.
“You boys better finish up and get back up there. In five minutes it’ll be time for the countdown.”
Once again, the piano player was the spokesman. “You just take care of that lobster tail. We’ll take care of the music.”
The words “lobster tail” gave Henry a jolt. He blinked, as though something, a real, live tail, had slapped him in the face. He poked at his dish with his fork.
“Hey, where’s the rest of this thing,” he bellowed. “All I got is a tail.”
Henry was so bullshit loud he stopped everyone, three tables around, in mid-bite. Then he went into a conniption over the origin of the lobster. He took a bite of the meat and he was certain. When a lobster comes with no claws, tail only, and the meat is puffy with a washed-out taste, there is no way it has ever crawled the pristine icy waters of New England.
“I’m from Gloucester, motherfucker, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and we eat our own lobsters, fresh from the ocean. This spiny bastard is from South Africa or some place. It’s frozen.”
Henry looked so crazed Phil reached over and touched his arm. “Be cool, be cool,” Phil said. “This is New Year’s Eve. It’s not about food.”
“A hundred bucks for a frozen tail. Who makes this red cockroach, Bird’s Eye? Fucking Greeks, if you don’t order their lamb they fuck you.”
As Henry said the word “lamb” he threw a vicious glance at the musicians.
“The lamb is good,” said the piano player. He was about to suggest that Henry trade in his lobster plate for a lamb plate, but Henry cut him off.
“Watch out,” Henry warned, “or you’ll get lamb in your lip.” And then he was on his feet, lobster-red, lunging at the piano player.
Just as Henry landed on the piano player, Laurette landed on him - on his back, to restrain and save him - but the net effect was that two large bodies instead of one came crashing down on the table, the lamb plates and the piano player. And in the blink of an eye all of the physical action in the crammed dining room of the Halibut Inn - all the screaming and hugging and backslapping - became concentrated in a single furious, three-person mound - Henry, Laurette and the piano player, gasping and howling and flailing - while two hundred holiday revelers froze in their tracks and watched.
Then the combatants froze as well, subsiding the way a pile-up of football players subsides when the official blows the whistle on the play. They ended the fracas as they had begun it: the pocked piano player, skinniest of the three, buried on the bottom, Henry bulging in the middle of the mound, and Laurette swarming on top, her bangled red, white and blue New Year’s dress heaped over everything like a fallen circus tent.
Laurette climbed off first, dazed and hysterical.
She rushed at Chrissy and buried her head in her arms.
Even more dazed was the piano player, who somehow extracted himself from the huge mass of Henry, crawling out like a snake departing the underside of a rock.
But the rock itself did not move. Henry lay there, totally inert, his Lycra-waisted pants dragging well below the boulder belly, as the mike came alive and shattered the silence, some Greek-accented voice bellowing numbers at an audience too stunned to make any sense of them. “Ten, nine, eight…”
Phil and Dave and the two other musicians kneeled over Henry, whose face had gone from lobster red to a hideous purple. Dave tore away the necktie and the top button on the shirt collar.
The voice on the mike proclaimed, “two, one…Happy New Year!”
There was a smattering of applause. And Phil, who had chased enough police cars and fire trucks to have seen this sort of thing many times before, watched the purple drain from Henry’s face and give way to a pallid yellow, the color of a figure in a wax museum.
It was no longer Henry, only his likeness. Henry had left the building and, possibly, the universe.
That meant there would indeed be a story. Even if Henry revived there would be a story; and Phil, who could grumble about overwork but in the end devoutly worshipped the Ernie Pyles and the Hemingways, pulled a pen and envelope out of his suit coat. He scribbled as he knelt over the victim, scribbled as the feeding frenzy of onlookers grew bigger and wilder.
“I didn’t touch him, I swear,” pleaded the lamb-smeared piano player, too insane with panic to control his lip. The word swear came out as shhwear.
A big lumper from the Gorton’s fish-stick factory stood up and hollered, “a hundred bucks a plate. Can’t you remove that body.”
The ensuing melee brought forty eight casualties to the Addison Gilbert Hospital. Phil dutifully captured them all in a box on the jump page: everything from skull fractures to forks stuck in the abdomen.
As the fists and other weapons flew, Phil and Dave hovered over Henry, just to keep his remains from being stepped on.
“We got to do something,” roared Phil. “We got to get him out of here. Let’s put him in your truck.”
Dave shook his head. “No room in the truck. I got a cord of wood in there.”
Mishy heard them and leaned down. “The boat trailer,” she hissed. “Put him in that.”
Led by the iron-pumping waitress, the four women fled through the kitchen and took refuge in the walk-in refrigerator. Sitting on lettuce crates Donna fussed over the now-berserk Laurette, whose patriotic talons had drawn jagged streaks of blood from the skin of her own face. Chrissy and Mishy went on a rampage, pushing and kicking at the stacked beverage cases seeking something, anything with alcohol.
Outside the building, Phil and Dave found lugging Henry through the parking lot was even more than they bargained for. On top of the weight, on top all the brew sloshing inside them, there was the fog to contend with. It was so thick Phil and Dave staggered by the trailer two times before they saw it. Phil felt the cool mist curl against his face and had visions of the girl at the gas-and-convenience store. If it were his story, the story the paper would never let him write, the fog would be a huge gray blanket that the girl somehow would have caused to unfold. Phil thought of her standing there outside the Halibut Inn, with her sad and strange forehead and her luminous hair. Standing watch over the trailer that had nearly come crashing into the gas pumps on New Year’s Eve, as the blanket drew itself over Henry.