by Anne Tyler
When they reached the A & P on Main Street, Jenny parked the car. “We’ll be in here awhile and then to Barton’s for Tessie’s shoes,” she said. “If you’re back in the car by then I’ll drive you home. Otherwise you can just walk back whenever you’re ready. Hurry, Ben Joe, you’re holding Lisa up.”
Ben Joe was sitting forward but not getting out. Lisa nudged him impatiently. “Come on, Ben Joe. I thought you were the one in such a rush.”
“Okay, okay.”
He climbed slowly out of the car and then just stood on the sidewalk beside Joanne with his hands in his pockets.
“Well,” he said.
Joanne looked at him curiously. Jenny and Tessie were already heading toward the A & P, and Lisa was staring at a sweater in the window next door.
“Maybe I’ll go wherever you’re going,” said Joanne.
“No.”
“Well, where is it you’re going?”
“Um. To call on Miss Potter, for one thing. You go on and do your shopping. Maybe I’ll meet you in Stacy’s for a cup of coffee later.”
“All right.”
She stood there still looking at him with that little half-smile. He wished she weren’t so nosy. The others didn’t know the meaning of privacy, they were continually bursting into his room unannounced or reading his postcards, but at least they didn’t go ferreting around to see what he was thinking about, the way Joanne did. Sometimes he thought she had even succeeded in her ferreting—like today, when she remained absolutely motionless and smiled her knowing smile. He scowled back at her.
“So long,” he said.
“So long.”
When she still stood there, he whirled around abruptly and headed for the drugstore at a businesslike pace. Once inside, he peered out the glass door and saw that her back was to him now; she was calmly waiting for a car to pass before she crossed the street.
The drugstore smelled like his house did when all the girls were getting ready to go out on dates at once. It was spicy and perfumey, with several different kinds of scents that were mingled together and made him want to sneeze. He headed toward the back, where the toilet articles were kept. From the rack on top of the counter he chose a pack of razor blades, taking a long time to compare prices and brand names, and then he turned to the magazine counter and picked out a crossword-puzzle book that was made of dull comic-booklike paper, which would depress him before he finished the first puzzle. These he paid for at the cash register; he counted out the exact change to pay a white-haired man he had not seen before.
“Don’t bother about a bag,” he said.
He dropped the razor blades into his shirt pocket, next to the pink envelope and his cigarettes. The crossword-puzzle book he rolled up carelessly and stuck into his back trouser pocket. Then he looked out toward the street again. This time there was not a sister of his in sight. He smiled good-by to the man at the cash register and headed outside.
Beyond the A & P, which was the last real store on Main Street, the millworkers’ houses again. At first they were the big old houses that had been built by well-to-do families but had turned gray and peeling with “Room for Rent” signs on them. Their side yards, once grassy and shaded with oak trees, were now cement squares where Esso stations sat. And beyond these were smaller, grayer houses, most of them duplexes. Dirty-faced children played on the porches in skimpy sweaters; the yards were heaped with old tires and rusty scrap metal. Behind the houses, barely visible above the tar-paper roofs, were the tall smoking chimneys of the textile factory where all these people worked. They made blue denim, day in and day out. It was toward these chimneys that Ben Joe headed. He crossed a vacant lot, knee-high with weeds and brambles, and stumbled over a rusted-out potbellied stove that lay smack in the middle of the field. Then he was on the gravel road that ran down to the muddy little river where the factory was. Opposite the factory was Lili Belle Mosely’s house.
He had been here before, many times. The first time was when his father was still alive, living at Lili Belle’s as if it were his home and having his patients call him there in the night if they needed him. He had first rented a room there; people said that one night he had finished mending a millworker’s arm and was setting out for home when it suddenly hit him that he couldn’t bear to go home again, so he had stopped here and rented a room. His wife, hearing about it, clamped her mouth shut and said that was his lookout, nothing she could do about it. She said the same when she heard that he had taken to sharing a room with the landlady’s daughter; and the same when she heard about little Phillip’s being born. But Ben Joe, who never could resign himself to the fact that it was his father’s lookout alone, had come to see his father at Lili Belle’s one night with his heart pounding and his eyes wide with embarrassment. They had fed him supper—green beans cooked with fat back, hash-brown potatoes in a puddle of Mazola, pork chops coated with grease that turned white when he let the chops cool on his plate. Everyone laughed a lot, and his father ate more than Ben Joe had seen him eat in years. And Ben Joe had not been able to say a word to his father about coming home. He hadn’t tried.
As he stood now, facing the long, squat house with its dingy front porch, he could almost see how he must have looked coming out of it. His head down, his face puzzled, his feet dragging. Not just once, but many times, because he had gone back again and again. First he had gone to see his father. Then his father died and left a request that Lili Belle and her son get a little money each month, which Ben Joe’s mother could have contested but didn’t; she said it wasn’t worth her bother. So Ben Joe took Lili Belle her money in person once each month. And once each month his mother said, “Ben Joe, have you mailed off all our bills for this month?” and Ben Joe said, “Yes’m,” not ever letting on he had taken it in person. Every month he had taken it, up until he had left for New York and turned the money matters over to Jenny. Now Jenny mailed the money, as she was supposed to, in a business envelope. She wouldn’t have that feeling Ben Joe always had, looking at his mother with pure guilt on his face and wondering why he kept on lying to her and visiting a woman whose name was never mentioned in the house. He couldn’t have given a reason. When he was a senior in high school, his father came home for an hour one day (after he’d been gone a year) to say that all his life he had been saving the money for Ben Joe to go to Harvard and now there was enough. Ellen Hawkes said that unless he came home she wouldn’t take a penny, and he said, well, he didn’t see that it would really matter to her if he never came home again. Ellen Hawkes didn’t answer that. So Ben Joe went to Sandhill College. But even so, even knowing that Lili Belle was the reason he had to go there, he still came to sit in Lili Belle’s house and talk to her about the weather and he still threw little Phillip up in the air and caught him again, laughing.
He crossed the scrubby little yard and climbed up to the porch. The wooden floor boards made a hollow sound under his shoes. At the door he knocked and waited, and then knocked again. One corner of the chintz curtain rose slowly. The door swung open.
“Lili Belle?” he said.
“It’s me, boy.”
It was her old mother standing in the shadows behind the door. Ben Joe had seldom seen her before. She was fat and puffing but very dignified, and she had kept out of sight for sheer shame ever since the day her daughter’s baby had been born. Now she closed the door sharply behind him and said, “What you want, anyway?”
“I want to see Lili Belle.”
“Hmm.” She crossed her fat arms under the shelflike bosom of her black crepe dress. “Lilian Belle is very tired, Benjamin,” she said. “Got troubles of her own. What you wanting to see her for?”
“Mrs. Mosely, I won’t stay long. I just wanted to see her a minute. It’s important.”
“Well, I’ll tell her. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He followed her across the small, mousy-smelling hallway into the alm
ost totally dark sitting room. Against the shaded window he could make out the outline of an unlit lamp, double-globed and beaded. Mrs. Mosely stood like a mountain barring the rest of the view; she called into the room, “Back.”
Lili Belle was in the shadows, sitting on a cane chair. She stirred a little and said, “You say something, Mama?”
“Back again to pester us.”
“Who?”
“Him.” She jerked a thumb behind her. “Ben Joe.”
“Oh, my goodness. Benjy, honey, come in!” She stood up and ran to the windows to raise the shades. In her right hand was a bowl of soup, which she shifted awkwardly to her left hand when she tried to maneuver the shade. The room was suddenly light again. With the light a feeling of relief came to Ben Joe; this wasn’t going to be as hard as he thought. He always forgot how easy Lili Belle made him feel the minute he saw her.
“It’s okay, Mama,” she was saying now. “You can go on now. Come on in, Benjy honey. I do apologize for sitting in the dark like this, but my eyes is strained.”
“It’s okay,” Ben Joe said.
He looked at her closely, noticing how tired she looked. It was hard to tell how old she was. Nine years ago, when his father had first met her, she had been about twenty. Now she could be any age. Her face seemed never to have resolved itself but stayed as vague and unformed as when she had been a girl. Her hair was straggly and colorless, and she was never anything but homely, but she had an enormous, bony frame that made people look a second time when they passed her on the street. There was not an ounce of fat on her. When she walked, her bones seemed to swing loosely, and she never hit hard upon the earth or seemed, for all her boniness, to have any sharp corners to her. Yet he could see the strain lines beginning around her eyes and mouth, and the way the skin of her face had grown white and dry.
“You sit yourself,” she was saying now. “Wait a minute …” She looked around among the straight-backed chairs, searching for the most comfortable. When she found it she pushed the bowl of soup into Ben Joe’s hands and ran to pull it up. “If we’d of known,” she said, “I’d of cleaned up house a little. How come they’ve not told us you were back?”
“Well, I only got here yesterday.”
“Sit, now. Oh my, let me take that soup bowl off your hands. What you think of New York?”
“I like it all right.” He sat down on the chair and stretched his feet out in front of him. On the table under the window, among the doilies and flower pots and bronzed baby shoes, sat a photograph of his father. It was taken when he still had his mustache, long before he had ever met Lili Belle, but he looked much the same as he had when he died—rumpled hair, black then with only the first touches of white, and crinkling gray eyes and a broad, easy smile. Except for Gram’s bedroom, where Ben Joe’s mother never set foot, this was probably the only place in the world that still had a picture of Phillip Hawkes. Ben Joe reached out and turned it a little in his direction, looking at it thoughtfully.
“You have to excuse Mama’s being so rude,” Lili Belle was saying. “She has gotten like that more and more. The other day this lodger of ours, he stopped to talk to me on account of wanting to know where the clean towels were kept, and Mama clunked him in the chest with the griddle-cake-flipper. Didn’t hurt him none, but I had a whole heap of explaining to do.”
“Was she right about your having some kind of trouble?” Ben Joe asked.
“I’d say she was. That’s why I was sitting in the dark like a spook. Little Phillip is in the hospital with pneumonia and I was resting my eyes from sitting up with him so much. I don’t know where he got it. Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it. I told him and told him. When it was serious and I had reason to be worried I was just possessed by the thought of those puddles. I had it in mind, in this dream I had one night, to take me a vacuum cleaner and go vacuum all the puddles up. But the worrying part is over now. Doctors says another ten days or two weeks and he’ll be out.”
“How long’s he been in?” Ben Joe asked.
“Two weeks.”
“How’re you managing the bills?”
“I plan to make it up gradual. I been working at the mill part time since little Phil started school, but not a full day, because I like to be home when he needs me. Oh, Mama would take care of him—says she’s ashamed he was ever born, but I notice she’s right fond of him. But I’d rather it be me. I’ll work full time till the bill’s paid off and then go back half-days again.”
“We’ve got some money in the savings account,” Ben Joe said.
“No, honey, I don’t want it.”
“But we never even touch it. It’s the money Dad saved up and Mama won’t use it no matter what—says it’s only for emergencies. You’re right, you shouldn’t work when little Phillip’s at home.”
“I wouldn’t take it, Benjy. It bothers me to take what we do take offen you all. Your sister Jenny’s been bringing it real regular.”
“Been what?”
“You know—the once-a-month money. She’s not missed a time.”
“But I thought—Doesn’t she mail it?”
“Why, no.” Lili Belle stopped playing with the folds of her skirt and looked up at him. “Neither one of you’s ever mailed it,” she said. “What she said the first time she came was, she would bring it the same as you’d always done.”
“For Pete’s sake.” Ben Joe sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. “I wonder how she knew.”
“Oh, girls’re smarter than you think.” She laughed, and then became quiet again and looked at her hands. “She’s a real nice little girl,” she said. “First time she came I was just merely polite, you know, figuring that what’s your mama’s is your mama’s and I didn’t want to seem to be trying to make friends of your mama’s own daughter. But she was so friendly—came in and taught little Phil how to play this game about scissors cutting rock and rock covering paper, or something. Real good with children, she is.”
“She is,” Ben Joe said. He sat quietly for a minute, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Lili Belle?”
“Hmm?”
“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”
“Well, I’m listening.”
“I thought I should get it said, in case I don’t come back to Sandhill for a good while again. I figured …”
He was silent.
“I’m right here listening,” she said. Her face was gentle and interested; Ben Joe wondered if it would become angry by the time he was through talking. Did Lili Belle ever get angry?
“I’ve got this letter,” he said miserably.
“This …?”
“Letter. Letter.” He touched his pocket, where the rim of the pink envelope showed. “This, um—”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ma’am?”
“Letter.”
“Yes. And I wanted, wanted to show it to you because—”
“Well, I seen it before, Benjy honey.
“I know you have. That’s what I’m trying to—”
“No, I mean I seen it on you before.” She laughed gently, startling him. “Sure. First time you came after your daddy died, I seen it. Little piece of pink in your pocket, just like now. You’d not been to see me for two whole months, and then you came by but never said nothing about the letter. I figured you had found it in your daddy’s office and read it, all about how I was asking him to come back to me and little Phillip. I was afraid you’d come to taunt me with it.”
“Why to taunt you?”
“Account of the spelling, of course.”
“The what?”
“The spelling. I never spelled too good.”
“Oh,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say; he was too surprised. For a moment he sat staring at her blankly and then he ha
d to smile back at her.
“When you never did mention it,” she was saying, “I figured you had just brought it along that one time to show me you had it safe. To show me you had took it from his office after he died so that no one else could see it. That why you brought it, Ben Joe?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“No?”
“No, I took that letter before he ever died. What I came to tell you is, I took it before he even saw it.”
He was afraid to look up at her. When he finally did, when she had been silent so long that he had to look, he saw that she didn’t seem shocked or angry but was just absorbing the news still, shaking her head a little and trying to fit all this in with what she already knew.
“Lili Belle, I am awfully sorry,” he said. “It’s bothered me for so long I couldn’t see any way to get rid of it now but to tell you, and say how sorry I am.”
“Well, that’s all right, Ben Joe.” She licked her lips nervously, still frowning off into space. “That’s all right—it didn’t make no difference, did it? Everything would’ve happened the same, I reckon, letter or no letter.”
“But I—”
“You didn’t do nothing wrong, Benjy. Why, it seems to me your family is kind of queer-like sometimes. Meaning no offense. It’s not natural to come see me and all, not even to speak to me on the street, but you do, and I reckon it’s even a little relief, maybe, having you do something on your mother’s side like most would do.”
“Well—” Ben Joe stopped, not certain what to say. “What bothered me,” he said, “is that maybe Dad would have gone back to you soon as he got your letter. And then, who knows, not had that heart attack a week later. Old Gram, she’s blamed herself forever for forgetting to refill the ice-cube trays. Says that’s why he died—going downtown to get ice. Though Mom says he could have stepped next door if he’d been sober enough to think of it. But sometimes when Gram gets on those ice-cube trays I’m almost tempted to show her the pink envelope, to prove it’s not she that’s to blame.”
“Well, it surely ain’t you,” Lili Belle said. She bent forward to rub her eyes, tiredly, and then leaned her head back again and smiled at him. “I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other. If your mother’d said one word he’d have stayed with her, always would have. He was just wanting her to ask him. But she didn’t. He waited two weeks, and I guess he would have waited that long if I’d sent fourteen letters, even. Then he came back to me, not even planning to but just drunk and tired, and I took him in.”
