The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “Your suit is beautiful,” I said. “It looks wonderful on you.”

  She stopped in the middle of the floor and tugged at the bottom of the jacket. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No hidden meaning. The suit is lovely.”

  “Barbara helped me dress. She was very sweet about it, actually. It’s not every day I have a date, you know.”

  In fact, it wasn’t any day. To my knowledge, Agnes had been out on only one other date since Davis had left her. That had been with a chef who worked at a chain seafood restaurant in a mall near her condo. Shortly after they left the house, he’d made the insane suggestion that she calm herself by snorting coke with him. The experience had traumatized her in some profound way, and despite her evident loneliness, she’d turned down all other offers that had come her way.

  Initially, Donald had suggested he drive to New Hampshire and take her out to dinner. But Agnes didn’t think it was a good idea to let a stranger into her house, especially since she’d heard unconfirmed rumors that a woman on the other side of West-Woods had been murdered two weeks earlier. Rumors of murderers entering the complex and slaughtering residents in their sleep abounded. Some of the condos had security systems so complicated the owners had to take courses to figure out how to use them. A neighbor of Agnes’s had started a drive to have the entire appalling complex—parking lots, swimming pool, and all—enclosed behind a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire. While the community was working to keep the outside out, there had been several domestic disputes inside that had ended in violence, suicide, and, in one case, homicide.

  But watching my sister pace, I realized that she’d probably been reluctant to let Donald come to New Hampshire out of fear that my father would sabotage her date, pounding on the ceiling with a stick or having a seizure on the staircase. It struck me as a well-founded and sensible fear, even if she was unconscious of it.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind baby-sitting Barbara?” she asked.

  “Not at all. Is she still up for a movie?”

  “Oh, probably. She spends every weekend in that eighteen-screen place near the condo. She buys a ticket and wanders from one movie to the next all day long.”

  “Alone?”

  “Usually. She spends too much time alone. It’s hard when you live out in the country.”

  I hated the thought of my niece burying herself in a cineplex or upstairs in her room with her microwave and her spray paint. The alienated essence of the picture reminded me too much of my own adolescence. I’d been much happier assuming that she had a circle of malcontent friends than acknowledging that she was outside of even the outsiders.

  In the next half hour, Agnes and I picked our way through a minefield of topics that produced only minor irritation when we veered too close to anything real or significant. Finally, she collapsed into a chair, possibly out of exhaustion from walking back and forth in the path between the eaves. It was probably ridiculous to think that Agnes and I might ever develop a truly open and intimate relationship; for as long as I could remember, she’d faced life with a subterfuge of coded language. She turned her anger and frustration into reckless anxiety and dolled it up with enough nervous energy to fuel a jet. When I wasn’t outright lying to her, I was carefully dodging the truth and reshaping the facts, like the biographer of a heartless Hollywood idol, or attending to a debilitating headache. It was as if all the things we shared, all our common longings, formed a wedge between us instead of drawing us together. If she and I had been able to discuss Diane, Roger, and the whole matter of my father’s malingering and manipulation, it probably would have made both of us feel better. But we were holding on to the tattered belief that if we played things Dad’s way for long enough, we might finally be graced with his acceptance and love.

  Around the time she was due at Donald’s, she pulled a wide roll of masking tape out of her handbag, arranged it so the adhesive side was facing out, and asked me to run it over the shoulders and the back of her jacket. She went into the bathroom and emerged ten minutes later surrounded by a protective bubble of Summer Meadow.

  We exchanged an awkward kiss, and I told her I hoped she had a nice time.

  Then, as she was about to walk out the door, the phone rang.

  Agnes put her hand to her chest, as if a ringing telephone, like one of those intrusive special news broadcasts, could only mean catastrophe on a global scale. When there was no immediate response to my hello, I quickly hung up. “How do you like that?” I said. “No one there.” I ushered Agnes out the door and down the front stairs before our father had time to redial.

  Each time I saw Barbara, her face seemed to have changed. It had to do with the way her skin was settling on the bones of her cheeks and jaw and the way her complexion was darkening, losing some of its peachy innocence. She went to extravagant lengths to alter her looks, piercing her nose and shaving the sides of her head and plucking her eyebrows and slathering on black lipstick, but the changes underneath all the makeup and hardware were the ones that were working subtle, significant magic in transforming her into a young, nearly pretty adult.

  About an hour after Agnes left, my niece lumbered into the apartment carrying Otis under her arm, as if he were an especially heavy algebra book. He looked perfectly content, tongue out and ears up. She kissed me on the cheek with the detachment of a dutiful child. She had on her inevitable overalls and flannel shirt and, over those, a waist-length pea jacket covered in lint and animal hair. Her own inky-black hair was shooting out from the back of her head, looking like she hadn’t combed it in weeks or, more likely, had just spent a couple of hours carefully disarranging it. She set Otis down on the floor, and he did one of his best tricks, one I was always describing to my dog-walk pals, a sort of backward hully-gully on his hind legs. Barbara and I looked on with rapt appreciation. I kept a few miniature Milk-Bones in my pocket, treats with which I could bribe him into loving me, or at least get him to hang around me with a panting, pleading look that I could interpret as love when I needed to. I tossed him one of these, and he hurried off to a corner to devour it.

  “Did you and Ben have a nice time?”

  “It was all right.” She took a CD out of the pocket of her jacket and flipped it through the fingers of one hand with great dexterity, as if it were as light and flexible as a playing card. “He told me I’d like this one, but I kind of doubt it. Earl Hines. I’m not big on jazz.”

  “Why did you get it?”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint him. It was his attempt to show me something new. He looks up to me.”

  “You can always return it.”

  She put the disc back in her pocket. “I don’t think so, Clyde. It wasn’t that kind of purchase.” She stood next to the kitchen sofa and let her body fall onto it in a big heap. “My mother go off on her date?” she asked, uttering the word with so much sarcasm, Otis looked up from his treat.

  “She did,” I said. “She told me you helped her pick out her clothes. Good choices.”

  Barbara frowned at this and, as if to shed whatever embarrassment I’d caused her, said, “It’ll be her luck to get raped or something.”

  She stretched out on the sofa and rested her head on the knotty-pine arm. From the pocket of her jacket she produced a straw, stuck it in her mouth, and started to twirl it between her teeth. She looked sturdy and resilient lying there and, at least compared with Agnes, remarkably self-possessed and calm. Perhaps it was the self-possession that made me feel I could confide in her in a way I hadn’t been able to confide in Agnes.

  “Your grandfather . . .” I said.

  She stopped twirling the straw and looked over at me expectantly. “Did he call here?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I know the routine, Clyde. He was all worked up because Mom was leaving him and his girlfriend for one night. So she made them both dinner before we left town.”

  “That’s what he called about. He couldn’t find the food.”

  �
��Mom was so nervous she put the plates in the freezer instead of the refrigerator. I saw her do it, but I didn’t say anything. Serves him right.”

  “So you and Agnes have met. . .”

  “Diane? The past couple weeks, she’s been coming up looking for ice around four every afternoon. Cocktail hour. I think she’s living down there, but Mom keeps pretending she’s a nurse. She ought to kick them both out. Grandpa’s healthy as a dog.”

  Barbara’s attitude toward the whole situation was so pleasantly matter-of-fact, I felt especially foolish at being suddenly and fiercely jealous that she and Agnes had met Diane. I didn’t dare mention Roger; since Barbara hadn’t brought him up, I preferred to assume he hadn’t entered the New Hampshire picture yet.

  I pulled out a newspaper and we went through the listings of every movie in town; Barbara had seen them all, some, even the ones she insisted were trash, as many as four times. So far as I could tell, she viewed movies with the same pragmatic contempt she had for school and, for that matter, her mother. Movies were for her a necessary evil, an unavoidable part of life and the insipid cultural landscape.

  As a last resort, I checked the listing for the Brattle Theater, the one remaining revival house in town. “I’ll bet you haven’t seen this,” I told her. “Carousel.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a musical. Technicolor. ‘If I Loved You,’ ‘When I Marry Mr. Snow.’ Sound familiar?”

  “I don’t think so, Clyde. Maybe we could rent a video.”

  “The theater has a balcony,” I told her.

  She brightened at the mention of this architectural wonder she’d heard described but never seen.

  The Brattle is a compact theater with a soaring ceiling, busted-up seats, and a screen set at the back of a stage designed for live shows. The place had been renovated recently, but the floor wasn’t pitched, the sound system was extraordinarily bad, and the movies were projected from behind the screen. It wasn’t easy to see or hear the films, which somehow didn’t detract from the lunatic charm of the place. The theater drew big crowds who thought nothing of waiting for hours in long lines in snowstorms or in scorching August heat. The audience was usually made up of fanatical cinema buffs who sat through triple bills eating vast quantities of messy food—meatball subs and fried chicken and entire four-course Indian dinners—while they talked back to the characters on the screen and carried on running political commentaries and lectures on cinema history.

  “Weird,” Barbara said when we walked in, but she raced up to the balcony, took a seat in the front row, and leaned over the railing to survey the crowd as it filed in. The theater’s ventilation system was second-rate, too, and it was always strangely humid, as if the air were saturated with the sweat of all those hungry, excited filmophiles and the steam rising off their odoriferous dinners.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “It’s great. Too bad they have to show a movie.”

  Eventually, the lights went down. The ticket collector, in the middle of a coughing fit, clomped to the front of the auditorium and pulled a set of heavy velvet drapes across the exit door. The film began, ran for a few seconds, and then sputtered to a stop. The lights went back up, and the picnic below picked up exactly where it had left off, with no signs of disappointment or disapproval. Barbara and I leaned over the railing together. “I wish I had something to throw,” Barbara said.

  “You do not. You’re too old for that.”

  “I know.” She sighed and rested her chin on the railing. “It’s sad, isn’t it? Growing up?”

  It was at that moment that we saw Marcus and Sheila stumble into the theater. They were windswept and flushed, perhaps because they’d just run through Harvard Square, and they had the look of people aware of the way they complemented each other’s beauty. Marcus was neatly tucked into khaki pants and a denim shirt, an outfit that Sheila had bought for him and had shown to me with embarrassing pride one morning over coffee, before she’d presented it to Marcus. At least she’d broken with tradition by buying him something other than underwear. She had on one of her thermal undershirts and, over it, a tweed sports jacket of Marcus’s that was jauntily falling off one shoulder. She scanned the audience, took Marcus’s arm possessively, and led him to a pair of seats in the middle of the third row, apologizing insincerely as they stepped over people. When they’d settled into their seats, Sheila flung her curls and nestled against Marcus’s shoulder.

  “At least my mother got over her crush on him,” Barbara said. “That was even more ridiculous than most of the things she does. And I hate that girlfriend of his. I hate her! ‘What makes you think they’d let you in?’ Can you believe she said that to me? As if it’s any of her business. She doesn’t even know how many courses I’m flunking.”

  “I thought you liked Marcus.”

  “He’s irresponsible, Clyde. He’s a big baby, just like my father. He wants attention.”

  “Well.” The description struck me as uncannily apt, and I tried to defend my housemate, hoping the defense would prompt Barbara to reinforce her criticism. “Ben’s been spending some time with him. What does he think of him?”

  “We don’t spend all of our time talking about you,” she said, piling all adults into one loathsome lump. “Anyway, he knows the only reason they’ve been spending time together all of a sudden is because Sheila thinks it’s cute Marcus is Ben’s father.”

  The lights went down, and Barbara groaned and settled back into her seat. She had her arms crossed over her chest and was squinting at the screen, as if she was having trouble making out the faded images.

  I leaned over her and whispered, “Who told you he’s Ben’s father?”

  “Ben did.”

  “When?”

  “How should I know? Today.”

  Someone in the row behind told us to shut up, and Barbara turned around and gave him the finger. Our muted conversation couldn’t have mattered all that much, since the audience downstairs was already commenting loudly on Gordon MacRae’s performance as an angel polishing stars on a ladder in heaven.

  The portion of the movie I was able to concentrate on was a good deal more dated—glorious music notwithstanding—than I’d remembered. Much of the dialogue was drowned out by the audience, who hissed and booed at every line that defended the wife-beating hero. Not that Shirley Jones fared much better; a roar of laughter greeted every one of her wholesome Technicolor close-ups. Barbara paid attention for about fifteen minutes, then slumped in her seat and fell asleep. I was so distracted thinking about Ben and Marcus, I wasn’t sure when she regained consciousness. But for the last twenty minutes of the film—the scenes in which Billy Bigelow returns from the grave to try and make things right for his daughter—Barbara watched attentively. At the end, when the sound track swells with a heavenly choir doing a reprise of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Barbara and I, along with the rest of the jaded audience, collapsed in tears.

  We watched Marcus and Sheila file out of the theater and then made our own way out. “Cornball,” Barbara said, once we’d reached the street. “That actress gave me the creeps.”

  “But a nice voice, don’t you think?”

  “The inside of my head started to itch every time she sang. She reminded me a little of my mother.”

  It was a clear night, mild for early November, and the streets were crowded with students and tourists walking slowly in loud little groups. There was an acrobat performing at the end of one block and a little man in a Pierrot costume reciting poetry in the doorway of a shop. “Fake Shakespeare,” Barbara said, after listening for half a minute. I tried to talk her into going to a coffeehouse for dessert, but she insisted we go back to the house. “My mother’s probably having a panic attack because we’re not back.”

  It was almost ten o’clock when we got to the apartment, but Agnes still hadn’t returned. Barbara looked around the living room and sank into the one chair that didn’t have a light anywhere near it. She crossed her legs,
ankle on her knee, dropped Otis onto her lap, and picked up a magazine from a stack beside the chair. It was one of Marcus’s unreadable academic journals. Barbara appeared to be studying the table of contents in the dim light. She fingered the tiny stud in her nose, turned to one of the articles, and, to my utter amazement, started to read.

  Fifteen minutes later, she slammed the thing shut and threw it to the floor. “It’s supposed to be about sex, but it’s all statistics. I couldn’t tell if it was about people or plants. That Marcus is such a loser. I can’t believe he reads these things. ‘What makes you think anyone would ever let you into college, even if you did want to go?’ Can you believe she said that? My mother let her get away with it, too, just because she was with Marcus.”

  “I’m not saying Marcus is Ben’s father, but how did he find out about it?”

  Barbara shrugged. “He figured it out. You act as if it’s a big deal. Who cares about their stupid father? You don’t think my mother’s going to sleep with Donald, do you?”

  “It’s only their first date.”

  “That’s why she dragged me along—so she’d have an excuse to leave at nine.” Barbara picked up another of the dull journals from the floor and started to leaf through it. “I hope she does sleep with him, though. Anyway, it would serve my father right. I guess you know he’s getting married.”

  “I didn’t know.”