As soon as they were out on the sidewalk he said, “Can we go to a movie?” but with no real hope in his voice, and when she replied, “No, but you can stay up in the room until eight-thirty,” he did not protest, but fell into step with her as she strolled, without aim, from one lighted shop window to the next. The Fanny Farmer candy boxes in the drugstore windows and the Early American driveway signs (The Smiths Live Here) in the hardware-shop windows were no different from those in Montclair, and if that was all there was to see they might just as well have never left home—except that at home you couldn’t buy divorces.
The men’s furnishings stores, though, of which there were an unusual number, were flamboyantly Texan and aggressively masculine. Hats and boots, hats and boots—who would have thought that the putty-colored men in this scrubby border town could drift into such stores and slap down seventy-five dollars for a pair of hand-tooled boots, or one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a Stetson? Suddenly she caught sight of her reflection and her son’s in a mirror behind these overpriced peacock displays.
She looked tall and pale, pale and sexless, sexless and unloved—a lanky and uninteresting woman in a wrinkled linen dress and soiled cotton driving gloves. Beside her stood the boy who resembled her so strongly that she felt sorry for him. Long-armed, long-legged, short-waisted and broad-shouldered as she was, he stood staring at the cowboy boots as she did, with his hand pressing down hair as straight and mouse-brown as her own. Even his expression in repose, now that he was not pleading for something or frowning over a book, bore that deprived look which she hated in herself. At least I earned it, she thought angrily, my father didn’t leave my mother and me to chase blondes, he died on us and left us broke; what has happened to Dickie, except maybe me, to make him look so hangdog, as though something vital had been withheld from him?
In truth, however, his face reminded her as much of Roger as it did of herself: those large jug-handle ears, that classically carved but bridgeless nose that grew straight from his short forehead. And those nervous athlete’s hands …
Louise sighed. “Enough, Dickie,” she said. “Let’s head back.” And she was dismayed to see how amiably he obeyed her, how eager he was to please in the small things—just like his father.
Back in their room he propped up the pillows behind him and disappeared into one of his endless collection of Hardy Boys books while Louise washed her hair and rinsed out their underthings in the bathroom. At least, she thought, he did not seem lonesome or shaken up—not yet. But that would come later, no doubt, when the vacation and the sightseeing were over and he had to face up to a fatherless routine.
“Time’s up,” she called out. “Turn off your light.”
“I’m writing a letter. As soon as I finish.”
When she had draped shorts, panties and nylons over the shower curtain rod, she stepped back into the bedroom, prepared to bawl Dickie out for not listening to her. As she opened her mouth, however, she saw that he had fallen asleep over his letter, with the light on. His book, the sheet of hotel stationery and his ballpoint lay on the quilt by his outstretched hand.
She switched off his bedlamp, smoothed out the covers and took the letter over to the bathroom doorway to see what he had written.
Dear Daddy, she read, We got to the border. We can see Mexico from our room. Tommorrow we will ride over the Bridge and we will be in Mexico. Mommy says they are poor there. Everything is cheap. So I will get my mitt there instead of in Texas the lether is just as good, mommy says. It is stiffling here just like in Georgea. It is going to be a hot day in Nuevo Laredo, love Dickie
Louise placed the letter on the bureau and scrounged through her purse for her pills. If only, she thought, someone or something could reassure her that all this would come to an end; if only she would not have to be reminded so brutally of Roger every time her son struck a pose, caught a ball, wrote a letter. Even his poor spelling came from his father. When there was no longer any necessity for the letters, there would be phone calls, visits, weekends together. Then why the divorce? Only because it would free Rog from the obligation to make those eternal excuses and apologies, and it would free her from having to ask herself why she remained tied to someone who was not merely unfaithful but shallow and foolish to boot.
It was not that she hated Rog or even disliked him any more. It was rather that he made her dislike herself, made her wonder if she really loved her only child. Was she deluding herself now about Dickie as she must have been about Rog, when he had conned her into giving up her hard-won Cornell scholarship for marriage, with only one year left for her degree? What could have possessed her? She had not been impressed with his looks—on their first date she had thought him funny-looking—or with his money—she had known boys with more. He had been persistent, that was all, and so blandly convinced, that young man who had always gotten everything he wanted, from catboats to tennis cups, that he had wound up by convincing her too.
Was that all? Was there nothing about him that had charmed her, seduced her, bowled her over? If so, the very memory of it was gone now. Instead she recalled with shame those evidences of his true nature that had been manifest even in the earliest days of their courtship—his turning to appraise other girls’ legs when they were out walking together, his grinning mockery of her attachment to those large ideals from which he had gradually won her away. But then she couldn’t even say that she had loved him for his weaknesses, as other women had so obviously married because their men were drunkards or mother’s boys begging for redemption. Roger hadn’t dissimulated—he was what he was—while she … Louise touched her fingertips to her eyelids and lay quietly, awaiting the sleep that would carry her away from all the questions.
Finally it came, but it was soon over. Dickie was up at dawn, eager for his new country. Once she was fully awake, in fresh clothing, and with the sun not yet too high, Louise too began to share his anticipation. They packed swiftly, checked out, ate a more rapid breakfast than she would ordinarily have countenanced, and drove onto the international bridge with Dickie clutching their birth certificates bravely.
“Well, we made it,” she said after their car had been stickered and they were saluted ahead. “Does it feel different?”
“It sure does. Doesn’t it to you?”
Louise laughed. “I’ll let you know in Monterey. I’m going to run into the tourist office to ask a few questions and get a map. Will you come in with me, or would you rather wait in the car?”
“I don’t want to go in any old office. It’s more fun out here. You won’t take long, will you?”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
But when she emerged onto that dusty street, that poor, cheap flyblown imitation of the American streets across the river, the sun was already blindingly high overhead and Dickie was no longer in the station wagon. Taken aback, Louise slipped on her sunglasses and peered anxiously up and down the block.
She was relieved to see Dickie’s unmistakable figure framed in the blank daylight at the end of the street, and she hastened toward the shop before which he stood, his nose virtually pressed to its dirty window. The sidewalk was crowded with tobacco-colored women carrying bundles and babies, bony dogs already listless in the baking sun, and barefoot, mud-stained children, none as pale or long-legged as her boy, who turned at the sharp clear sound of her heels and gestured eagerly.
“Hey, Mommy, look here!”
As she approached him, slowing her pace, so did the street urchins, beggars and vendors bearing boxes of junk jewelry and chewing gum. If she did not remonstrate, they would continue to cluster around her and Dickie as thickly as the insects that buzzed about them all.
“Vayase!” she said sharply, waving them away, and then, to Dickie: “You mustn’t give them anything, or they won’t leave us alone.”
“Mommy,” he demanded, pointing, “look at the leather stuff here. Look at those neat holsters! And that saddle! That’s all they’ve got here is leather, nothing but leather. I bet we can find
a mitt inside.”
“Well, we’re not going to look.”
“Just for a minute? It’ll only take a minute.”
“I told you yesterday, there’s no sense in carting a baseball glove all over Mexico.”
“But, Mommy, we’ve got a great big station wagon. I can tuck a mitt away so you won’t even notice it. Please, Mommy, can’t we just look?”
Louise did not honestly know whether it was his logic or his whining that annoyed her more. “I said I’d get you one on the way home. Not now. It’s a matter of principle.”
“Please?”
“And I told you not to nag.” She was beginning to perspire. “When you’re ready to behave like a ten-year-old instead of a five-year-old, you can come along with me for a walk. Until then, wait in the car. Here are the keys.”
And she strode off without looking back, determined not to yield, but sweating with the guilt that breaks out when the inflicting of punishment affords unforeseen satisfaction. Never mind, she thought, I’d rather accuse myself of harshness and unfairness than of overindulgence; one Roger is enough.
It was hellishly hot. She had to force herself to go on past the seedy arcades, dabbing at her face and neck and glancing into the gloomy grogshops, the side-alley groceries and one-man barbershops without customers, the nameless stores with no signs saying what they sold. And the last-chance bargains stacked up as they were all over the world in every last-hope town at the end of the line—watch charms and wineglasses, bracelets and book-ends, ashtrays and earrings, scarves and serapes, baskets and belts, monkeys woven from wicker, pillows embroidered “Souvenir of Mexico.”
Her head ached, flies rose droning from the horseballs in the gutter, importuning voices whistled Señora, Señora in her ear, a Spanish lover sang tinnily in the cavernous cantina, clouds of dust blew like powder, carrying the wail of a baby, the hoarse quarreling of two men, the last-ditch pleas of the sidewalk merchants. The medley of noises that filled the ramshackle streets, not just unfamiliar but frankly foreign in its steady persistence, deafened her for a moment to the wail she should otherwise have recognized at once.
She whirled about. Dickie stood where she had left him, but his hands were gripping his gut, and he swayed as though he had been shot on this preposterous Southwest movie set. His face was contorted; his usually pale features flamed hotly.
“Dickie!” she cried, her voice quavering. “Dickie, what’s wrong?”
As she ran unsteadily toward her son, cursing herself, the half-circle of Mexican children that had formed around him wavered and broke.
“Dickie, are you all right?”
Before he could answer, a bold little boy with flat Indian features thrust a box at her and cried in English, “Chiclets, lady? Jus’ one peso?”
She turned from him to her son, but a girl who came only to Dickie’s shoulder loosened the greasy black rebozo which she wore like a parcel, pulled back its edges, and revealed a baby whose face was covered with sores. Louise recoiled and drew Dickie to her.
“Have you got cramps?” she demanded.
Dickie shook his head wordlessly. Tears were coursing down his cheeks. The Mexican children looked on interestedly, offering suggestions, making comments she could not catch. The boy with the box of chewing gum wore sandals made from truck tires; the others stood barefoot in the dust.
Louise cradled Dickie’s head in her arm and pressed his abdomen with her fingertips. “Let’s make sure it’s not appendicitis,” she said, the words sounding ridiculous even as she uttered them. “You might have a touch of food poisoning.”
“I’m not sick,” he muttered, shuddering. “I’m not sick.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t stand it,” Dickie buried his boiling face in her blouse. “They’re so poor.”
Louise felt her legs give way. As she slipped to the curb, pulling him down with her, she heard him say, “I gave them twenty-seven cents. It was all I had. I divided it up. What else could I do?”
“Of course,” she murmured. She could not remember when she had last cried like this, helpless and broken by the loss of innocence. But no, that was not true; the twanging spasms of her boy’s sobs were her own. They revived in her now the stifled memory of the undead past. Her father, fallen out of life without warning, like a precious coin flung carelessly into a fountain, and she weeping in Roger’s arms. That fraternity boy, who laughed uncomprehendingly at her infatuation with the distant poor, proved to her how instinctively, without guidance or instruction, he understood the terror of deprivation when it shook and retched within the circle of his arms. And because he proved it, she believed gratefully that he had proven himself, and she fell in love with him.
“It’s hard to explain, Dickie,” she said to her son. “I tried to, but it was a bum try. Particularly since I didn’t realize whom I was talking to. You’ll have to forgive me. Here, blow your nose and we’ll go look for a mitt.”
“I don’t want it! I don’t want it any more! Don’t you understand?”
Louise gazed at him pensively. If she did now, she had not before—that was sure. And it struck her that it was not Roger’s early compassion but its perpetuation in his son that was his best gift to her. Now that she was grateful again, maybe it would serve her better.
“I’ll try to,” she said to Dickie, “if you’ll give me another chance. And it looks as though you’ll have to, because you’re stuck with me.” As she arose, drawing her son up with her, she added, “For the time being, anyway. Come on, Dickie, let’s head for Monterey.”
CLAUDINE’S BOOK
Not so long ago, in the town of Phoenix, a shopping center for upstate New York and western Vermont farmers since the days of the American Revolution, there lived a very bright young girl named Claudine.
Claudine’s father, Fred Crouse, was a widower. He had brought his unmarried sister Lily over from Loudonville to cook and keep house for them, which she did very well, except that she was high-strung and got to feeling that she was wasting her life away in an old eleven-room house with no closets but a cupola big enough for a fancy-dress party. As soon as Claudine was old enough for school Lily got a part-time job, working at the local library four afternoons a week. It kept Lily in touch with the higher things and made her feel more worthwhile, but it meant that Claudine was left alone a lot.
Claudine didn’t mind. She liked best hanging around her father’s Mobilgas station on the state highway, but he didn’t want her making all those crossings between school and the station; besides, the language of the truckers was apt to be kind of vulgar for a little girl’s ears. Claudine didn’t bother to tell her father, who worked thirteen hours a day and was harried with many worries, that she knew all those expressions already. Nothing ever happened in Phoenix was the main trouble. In fact, nothing ever had, not since Joseph Walker, whose widowed mother drank and took in sewing, got drafted and was captured in Korea and then wouldn’t come back when the war was over. A turncoat, Aunt Lily called him, and said that when it was in Life Magazine about his refusing to come home from China, two New York reporters had interviewed his mother, his school friends and the librarian. But all that was before Claudine was born. Nothing else had happened since Joseph Walker had come back, which he finally did one day, to dig footings for contractors when he felt like working, and looking like the most ordinary man in the world.
But then Claudine looked like the most ordinary girl in the world. At least, you wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance that extraordinary things were going to happen to her. Lily always said that Claudine’s eyes were her best feature, which is what you always say about a girl who isn’t pretty. She was long-legged and short-waisted, so that she seemed always to be groping up through the tops of her jumpers, like a giraffe reaching out over the fence; her nose was long, with widespread nostrils, like her father’s, and had a tendency to run with the first frost. What was more, her short upper lip (Aunt Lily said that she had been a thumb-sucker) made her teeth s
eem unusually long, like Bugs Bunny’s. Over all, she looked woebegone—although she rarely felt that way.
Claudine had only one friend. The other children at the consolidated school thought she was stuck-up, or funny-looking, or even dumb. When they caught her making faces at herself in the mirror of the girl’s room—even though they did it sometimes themselves—they decided that Claudine was queer and left her to herself.
There was Robin Wales, though. He found none of these aspects of Claudine annoying, maybe because he had his own problems. First of all there was his name: it did him no good to bring up Robin Hood or even the great pitcher, Robin Roberts, because he didn’t even try to hide from his tormentors the fact that he despised baseball. “It’s boring and stupid,” he said, and that finished him off in Phoenix, which prided itself on fielding a good Little League team.
Besides, Robin had no use for people who tried to push him around or play rough. “I’m not afraid of those guys, Eddie and Walter and the others,” he told Claudine, and she knew that this was true, that he simply preferred going his own way, doing what she liked to do too.
In addition to his being more intelligent than any other sixth-grader, Claudine thought that Robin was quite handsome, despite his ears, which looked like the handles of a cream pitcher, and his mouth, in which there glittered a fat silver brace. The only thing about Robin that really bothered her—aside from his constantly trying to boss her, simply because he was a boy—was his transistor radio, which he wore suspended from his braided Indian belt that had his name spelled out defiantly and which he never turned off. All his allowance went for batteries, because he loved to surround himself with sound (just as Claudine, when she was not playing with him, loved to surround herself with silence).
“Weather in a word,” he would shout when they met after school, “sultry!” But at least he knew what the word meant, and what the pollen count was, and underground testing, and Cambodia, as well as every rock-and-roll hit on the Top Ten from week to week and the Bargain of the Day at Giveaway Gordie’s Used Carnival.
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 37
