“Mr. Porter gave me housework assignments as though I were earning my keep. He didn’t think I knew that the agency paid him my living expenses.”
“This kind of work can be done well only if the person doing it does it with a full heart,” Joe said. “That’s why I hold off until I really want to do it,” he added. He laughed at his own comment, but Jonathan only nodded in understanding.
“Is that why Solomon never did any of this sort of thing?” he asked. “Or why you never made him do any of it?”
“Probably.”
“Why did he feel that way?”
“I don’t know. He was my kid, but a lot about him was a mystery to me,” Joe added with a frankness that surprised even him. He looked up at Jonathan. “He did things for Martha.”
“Maybe you didn’t spend enough time with him.”
“Maybe. Who knows what’s enough time?” he added.
Before Jonathan could say anything else, they heard Martha bang on the inside of the next window. She opened it quickly and poked her head out.
“I just heard some terrible news,” she said. “From Judy.”
“What?”
“You know the Pedersen boy and Gerson Weiner’s boy?”
“I don’t know them,” Joe said. “I know the families. So?”
“There was a terrible accident, a fire in the Pedersen boy’s car last night. He had left a can of gas in the backseat. It spilled, and some electrical wires touched the soaked floor when they started the car.”
“My God.”
“They’re both dead. Donald died only a few hours ago.”
“That’s terrible. Did you know them, Jonathan?” he asked.
“Only vaguely,” he said.
“Damn. Spilled gas,” Joe muttered. Martha shook her head and retreated, closing the window. “Funny,” Joe said thinking aloud, “but I thought I smelled . . .” He shook his head. “Funny.”
Joe went back to his window frame, and Jonathan worked above him carefully. Hardly a drop had fallen. Joe was impressed with the boy’s dexterity and concentration.
“That’s really good work, Jonathan,” he said.
“Thanks,” Jonathan said without pausing. Not skipping a beat, he added, “Maybe Solomon never felt confident enough to do these kinds of things because you didn’t give him encouragement or praise. People, especially people my age, need a lot of that,” he concluded, sounding more like a child psychologist than a teenager.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Maybe we oughta change jobs when we make the turn around the building,” Joe said. He wanted to change the subject quickly. He felt the heat rise to his face. “You look like you’re straining now. I really don’t have a high-enough ladder for you.”
“Why?” Jonathan paused to examine the work he had completed. “Is it looking bad?”
“No, but there’s no point in your straining.” Jonathan was standing at the top of the ladder at this point, although he did look as steady and as secure as a professional housepainter. In a way, Joe resented that, too. He never felt comfortable on ladders, especially when he was Jonathan’s age.
“I don’t mind.” He held the roller away from himself.
“Nevertheless, we’ll change jobs around the corner.”
“Whatever you want,” Jonathan said. There was no sound of resentment. Joe felt it was more like the boy was talking down to an idiot he had to humor.
They both heard the front door open and close and knew that Martha was coming out to watch. Even though Joe was sorry Jonathan seemed to only want to talk about Solomon, he was unhappy about Martha’s impending arrival on the scene. Since yesterday and their service trip, he had permitted himself to believe it was possible to develop a good relationship with the boy, one that was more akin to the father-son relationships he envied in other families. Yesterday he had enjoyed the privacy of their discussions, and he hoped to get back to that feeling today, but he knew it would be different once Martha was here.
“Can’t believe that about those two boys. Horrible,” he said. Jonathan didn’t respond.
Joe turned his back on Jonathan and rushed to complete the final window frame, just as Martha made the turn around the house to join them. But before he had his brush to the wood, he heard her scream and spun around to see Jonathan fall from the ladder as it toppled. He landed on the lawn, striking the ground first with his right foot and then hitting with his right shoulder and hip. He rolled over on his back and groaned.
“JONATHAN!” Martha was at his side first. “JOE!”
“What the hell . . .” He knelt beside the boy. Jonathan moaned; he closed his eyes, and then he reached for his shoulder.
“Why did you put him on the ladder?”
“He was on it when I came out,” Joe explained. “All right, just let him be a moment. Jonathan, how you doing?”
Martha held his head between her thighs, couched against her pelvis as she squatted beside him and brushed back his hair. Jonathan opened his eyes and continued to rub his right shoulder.
“Just a bad bruise, I think,” he said, and looked up at Martha pathetically. Joe could see the pain in her face. It was as though she and Jonathan were of one body and what happened to one, happened to the other.
“Maybe he broke his arm,” she said. Joe felt along the bone.
“Naw. Like he says, just a bruise.”
“That’s going to hurt a lot more tomorrow,” Martha said. “Those kinds of things always do.”
“Can you stand?” Joe asked him.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Why did you leave him on the ladder?” Martha demanded as she helped Jonathan to his feet.
“He was already up there and doing a great job. We were going to change just as soon as we made the turn around the building.”
“It’s all right,” Jonathan said. “It’s my fault.”
“No, it’s not. Joe should have known better. He’s the adult here.”
“Jesus,” Joe said. Martha glared at him.
“How is it?” she asked as Jonathan swung his arm up and down to test it.
“Nothing’s broken.”
“We should take him to the doctor, Joe.”
“Sure. We’ll go up to the emergency ward at the hospital.”
“Naw, I don’t hafta do that,” Jonathan said. “I’ve had bruises like this before,” he added, and looked at Martha knowingly. She understood that he was making reference to maltreatment at previous foster homes, and this increased her feeling of sympathy.
“You poor kid,” she said. She kissed him on the forehead.
“I just gotta soak it for a while.”
“That’s right, but if it’s still bothering you later today, you’re going to the hospital like Joe says.”
“What about the foot?” Joe asked. “I would have thought that would be worse. You landed on it first, didn’t you?”
“Broke my fall,” Jonathan said, “but I lost my balance.”
“How did you fall from the ladder? You looked so secure up there.”
“How do you think he fell?” Martha said with a tone of chastisement. “He didn’t belong up there in the first place. He got distracted.”
“I don’t know. One moment I was all right, and the next I was falling.”
“It’s all right; it’s not your fault,” Martha said.
“I didn’t say it was,” Joe said. He shook his head.
“Come on. Let’s get some hot water on that shoulder,” Martha said, and began to lead Jonathan away.
“But Joe needs help,” he said.
“He’ll finish this himself,” she said, turning to Joe, her eyes flashing.
“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll just do a little more. One side of the house a week’s enough anyway,” he said, half kidding. He watched Martha continue to assist Jonathan as they made their way around the house and to the front door. Jonathan was leaning heavily on her, but she didn’t seem to mind the weight. Joe had the sense that the kid was enjoying t
he tender loving care and perhaps playing it up.
He shook his head after they disappeared, amazed at how quickly events had turned on him.
Joe made the turn and decided to complete all the window frames in the rear of the house, but as he began to work on the first, he felt guilty about continuing the effort without first finding out if the boy was truly all right. He put his brush aside for the moment and closed the lid on the paint can. Then he wiped his hands quickly and went into the house through the back door.
He didn’t expect them to be downstairs, so he went right to the stairway. Halfway up, he called, but neither Martha nor Jonathan heard him because of the sound of water running hard and fast into the bathtub. They were both in the bathroom. He stopped by the door.
“Martha?”
“We’re in here,” she said.
He opened the door.
“How’s he doing?” he began, and then stopped abruptly. Jonathan was already in the tub, and Martha was kneeling behind him on the tile floor massaging his back and shoulder.
“His neck hurts,” she said, without turning to him. “He must have twisted it when he fell and not realized it.”
“Sure,” Joe said. The warm water continued to rush into the tub, steam rising. Jonathan lay his head back against Martha’s breasts. She brought her hands over his shoulders and down over his biceps. “Do you want me to do that?” he asked, conscious of the shakiness in his voice.
“No, I can do it,” she said. “We’re going to rub in some Ben-Gay as soon as we’re finished here.”
“Uh huh.” He continued to stare for a few moments. “I’ll just finish up out there,” he said. “Call me if you need me.”
Neither she nor Jonathan replied. He watched her press down on his shoulders and run her hands back over his neck. Jonathan kept his head back, his eyes closed. He looked like he was enjoying it greatly. Joe backed out of the bathroom and closed the door.
He wiped his face with the palms of his hands and stared at the closed bathroom door a moment. Then he turned abruptly and went back to the stairway. He descended slowly, confused by his feelings. He knew that Martha would say she was being a good mother, treating the boy’s injury, caring for his pain and discomfort; but he was almost sixteen years old, and he was not her real son. There should be some modesty. Wouldn’t most sixteen-year-old boys be too embarrassed to strip down and get into a tub in front of a woman they barely knew? He knew he would.
How had they developed such intimacy so quickly? He wasn’t just jealous; he was concerned for good reasons. What was the right thing to do here? Should he be critical? He didn’t want Martha to think he blamed her for anything, and yet he was well aware of the definite dangers. He needed some objective advice, but to whom could he go? How could he talk about it without bringing back the painful past? He knew he had to find someone or some way to get Martha to understand, but in the meantime . . . in the meantime, it was best not to say anything, he thought.
And then when he got back outside and thought more about it, he concluded the intimacy probably stemmed from the boy’s own longing for motherly concern. He might act and look like an older teenager, but he was really only a disadvantaged child who had been deprived of warmth and love. Such a child would be willing to sacrifice modesty for affection. That was understandable.
However, seeing them like that in the bathroom reminded him of Martha’s intimacy with Solomon. Neither hesitated to parade nude in front of the other, even when Solomon was an adolescent. He was gently critical, but she laughed it off.
“Solomon’s my child,” she said. “He emerged from my womb. He sucked on these breasts. What could possibly be wrong about him seeing me naked or my seeing him?”
“It’s just that he’s getting older,” Joe said. “It might be embarrassing for him.”
“If it is, he hasn’t indicated so,” she replied. “Don’t worry about it. I think I would realize if something I did embarrassed Solomon,” she added. He had to admit that was true. Two people couldn’t be more simpatico. He wasn’t protecting Solomon. When it came to something like this, Solomon could very well protect himself.
But he did think it was wrong for Solomon to have such easy access to their bedroom, and he did insist that the boy learn to knock first. Solomon seemed to resent the rule, but he followed it, always managing to make it into something annoying by knocking too hard or at the wrong times.
Even when he was fourteen, Martha didn’t think anything of Solomon’s crawling into bed beside her. In fact, to Joe’s annoyance, they used to carry on long conversations like that. He would usually have to ask the boy to go to his room so that he could get into bed himself.
He was also bothered by the topics of their conversation. Some of it should have been reserved for talks between him and Solomon, especially the conversations about sex. But Martha encouraged it all. Nothing embarrassed her; nothing unnerved her and Solomon obviously felt he could tell his mother whatever he wanted to tell her.
Joe didn’t know whether he was angry because he was somewhat left out, or he was angry because, as Kevin Baker said, he was jealous of the relationship his son had with his wife, what Kevin called the reverse Oedipus. In any case, it always annoyed him to find them whispering together in his bedroom.
After a while, he came to accept and ignore their intimacy, an intimacy he traced to the power of blood and genetics. One couldn’t underestimate the significance of that umbilical cord, he thought. Yet how ironic it was that Solomon almost strangled on it at birth. It was wrapped around his neck so tightly, his face was blue. The doctor had to work quickly to free him from it.
Perhaps the umbilical cord had strangled him in the end after all, he concluded. But then he quickly repressed all such possible scenarios that could have driven Solomon into taking his own life. It was something neither he nor Martha were able to face.
EIGHT
Martha was ready to accept it as an accident, albeit an easily preventable one. Young boys Jonathan’s age were prone to showing off. It was understandable that he would volunteer to go up on the ladder and do the more dangerous work, but Joe should not have permitted it. She thought he should have known better, even though he was never really good with children and teenagers. His role in the raising of Solomon proved that.
As she continued to massage Jonathan’s shoulders and arms, she recalled more about Joe’s relationship with their son. He was always misreading Solomon, she thought, expecting him to do things at the wrong times, expecting him to have the same interests as a grown man had. Sometimes she wondered whether or not Joe had had a childhood himself. He seemed incapable of understanding the problems of adolescence. It was all so foreign to him.
Whenever she questioned him about it, he invariably referred to those ridiculous comparisons. When he was a boy, he didn’t have this or he didn’t have that. Nothing came as easy as it came to Solomon, and he had had real chores to do. He was expected to work with his father; he was expected to help around the house.
“In my house no one tolerated moodiness, and that was certainly no excuse for not helping out.”
According to Joe, his parents were frugal by necessity, and toys were rare, although he admitted his father bought him a bike. Never would he think of being insubordinate to his parents, subtly or otherwise. His father was intolerant and had a quick and violent temper.
“God forbid I told my father I had better things to do than mow a lawn.”
However, from her discussions with Joe’s sister, Brenda, Martha concluded that Joe exaggerated his past. She thought he might even be fantasizing about it as a way of avoiding his present failure with his own family relationships. Whatever the reason, Martha believed that Joe either could not understand or refused to understand his own son.
“He can’t be a carbon copy of either of us,” she once told him when he was particularly frustrated by Solomon’s behavior. “He’s different because he’s an individual, and just as you’ve got to learn to live wit
h different people at work and in the world around you, you’ve got to learn to live with him.”
Joe didn’t argue, but she knew he didn’t agree. He walked away from the conflicts whenever she made it clear that she was going to take a firm stand on something concerning Solomon. However, sometimes now, when she thought back, she wished he would have argued. He left too much on her shoulders. Eventually, she became more of a mother and father than just a mother.
She had hoped for both their sakes that things would be different with Jonathan. Perhaps Joe wouldn’t feel as pressured since Jonathan wasn’t his own flesh and blood. That ridiculous sense of competition that exists between father and son, something she saw occur within her own family between her brothers and her father, wouldn’t be. Maybe he had learned significant things from his life with Solomon.
However, now she could see that she would have to control and direct events almost as much as she had when Solomon was alive. Joe was just inept when it came to young people. This was her conclusion as she looked down at Jonathan in the tub, but then he added new information that challenged her thinking.
“I didn’t tell the truth out there,” he said, his head yet back, his eyes yet closed. The water was still so warm that the steam rolled off his skin. She turned on the exhaust fan to draw out the moisture. Her own face and neck were wet, and she had to unbutton her blouse.
“The truth? What do you mean, Jonathan? Truth about what?” She traced a ribbon of water down his right cheek with her right forefinger, recalling the many times she had come into the bathroom to wash Solomon’s back. He so enjoyed the attention, right up to . . . right up to a few days before he died. He probably knew then what he was going to do, she thought. He wanted his death to be a shock and a surprise. He did it that way in order to punish us more.
“About why I fell,” Jonathan finally said. He opened his eyes and sat up abruptly, but he didn’t turn to her. He looked down into the water. She realized it was difficult for him to say what he was going to say, and that made her tense. She reached for the towel and wiped her hands quickly.
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