Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  Jonathan, no. You can’t go this time. Will went, Maddie went, you went, and where did that leave me, and all the time I know that pa is Alma-this and Alma-that, but it’s Maddie he misses, and even Henry Work because Henry never minded helping him in the offices all that clutter.

  Will, I’m sorry about your helmet, you know I didn’t mean to wreck it that I was planting flowers in it where your head had lived and it seemed to me a sentiment, a sort of sweetness. But you know that, wherever you are …. As much as I love you pa I have the right to my opinion do you have any idea how embarrassing this is to me? You don’t, do you. How, right along, from school on, it was forever the same terrible laughter, Alma’s father? why he’s squirrelly, cracked, bats, and look at what her crazy sister went and did, nearly drove poor feebleheaded Sophie Berkeley to distraction. I mean, though, not that any of their families ended up having done so much better that car crash who was it and they found out what’s-his-name had been drinking killed his two best friends, and that family where the daughter got pregnant and her boyfriend busted for pushing, and some of the worst of them who just went on ahead and graduated high school, went off to college, got their job, settled right back into the same predictable routine they despised their parents for following. That much, John, I give you. You did get out of here. You went ahead and did something that at least makes some sense of what you were protesting about when you were younger. You made something of yourself, I mean you invented yourself, made yourself up, and you’re still at it, so that much cannot be taken away. Aren’t I doing that a little bit, too? I live mostly in New York now and that’s something in itself, right? I’m finding a career for myself, not as quickly as you did, I know, but … so, John … I’m sorry, I apologize, you apologize, and there is this business of taking care of pa and so we’ll do that, right? right.

  Jonathan lit the citronella pots Alma had arranged at intervals around the porch. He liked the tang (sliced lemon) and the light (flickering orange) they cast: they were supposed to be used to drive off the mosquitoes that rose up from the stagnant inlets at the river’s edge, or in busy clouds off nearby brown ponds that would be tarped in August at their shores by algae. Alma thought they’d help warm up the porch so they could sit outside and talk. The pots gave a Halloween atmosphere to the night.

  “When you haven’t seen somebody that long it’s hard to picture them moving, it’s more like assorted snapshots,” as he shifted the pail of yellowish-orange wax to a low ledge. It gave off smoke. “We haven’t seen her since she was sixteen. She seemed different—more special than the rest of us—but for example, I can’t remember what her voice sounded like. Alma’s accused me of romanticizing her.”

  “I have not.”

  “But I can see the day, but in a kind of dream, when she left. She took me into town to get my hair cut. It used to be there was a paved road, that ran back there about a quarter of a mile behind the part that went up and down the towns along the river. She took me on the bus into town. She had a knee-length green coat on, with black buttons. There was snow but it was just in patches under trees or along the shady sides of buildings. She took me to the barber’s, so strange because I can smell the place as I sit here, sweaty, sweet. You know the kind of place, mirror behind the swivel chairs, the shelves of pomades and talcs, witch hazel. Lucky Tiger. Wildroot tonic. Funny-shaped bright bottles. The leather strops they used to use, for honing their razors, those old straightedges. She went out, to get something from the drugstore. Mario Schianello, Alma you remember him? He was the barber, he knew the family fairly well, knew Owen. They were friends, odd pair, played cards once in a while, before he”—and Jonathan pointed a finger up toward the second floor of the house—“got so reclusive. Mario didn’t think anything was amiss until about an hour later. He was finished with me, and no sign of Maddie. He must’ve sent somebody out to look for her but nobody had seen her in the drugstore, or anywhere else. To cut a long story short she had run off with this black man, named Henry Work. I always liked him.”

  “I always hated him.”

  Jonathan thought, Poor Alma’s the same dyed-in-the-wool bigot as her father. “I remember being so surprised I thought it was that I just hadn’t understood, that I was too young to understand why everybody was so upset.”

  A bat swooped through the dark in the middle distance just beyond the lights cast from the porch where the three sat. It scissored the darkening atmosphere. Its thin, high peeps marked acute angles and broad curves. Dill heard it, wondered what it was doing here so late in the season, and chewed his fingernails, obliviously. His hands were sore from the little cuts that covered them, the result of working that afternoon with Jonathan.

  “The barber drove me home. The house was in chaos. I remember feeling like it was all my fault.”

  “They put the police out after her and I was thinking to myself, What’s all the commotion? She’ll come walking in here any minute now laughing her head off at us. That would have been Maddie all over.”

  “Well, that was it, though,” continued Jonathan. “She never did come back, the police never caught up with them. She did, two or three weeks later, send a letter, saying that she was all right, she was happy, don’t worry about her. When it arrived, I don’t think there was any mention of Henry Work in it, but Owen made up his mind immediately, and never changed it after that.”

  Dill, who had been sitting in the canvas chair, in his white shirt, now slipped on his sweater, buttoned it in one place, rolled back the sleeves. The lemon scent given by the hot citronella was waxy and full and had grown stronger.

  “He legally disowned her.”

  “When that letter arrived—”

  “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “—he seemed calm at first. Ma had sent me to the offices to get him and when he came downstairs she handed him the letter without uttering a word. I think sometimes she was afraid of him, you know.”

  Jonathan looked up from the mosaic pattern of the brick porch whose cracks were tinted by moss and through which the sprigs of dead dandelions poked in clusters. He turned to Alma for affirmation and saw she’d left. The porch, situated adjacent to the kitchen on the west side of the house, was covered in a second scent. The parsley which Alma now was drying in the oven smelled of a hot confiture: grape preserves. Too, Jonathan’s subconscious study of the design in the brickwork, over which his vision trailed as he spoke, produced another analogy, and then two more: a tartan’s kilt; the fretwork in a molding of a Doric cornice he once saw on a trip to Greece. And the image of a herringbone jacket, stain of ice cream, butter brickle, on its sleeve. These transpired within the time it took him to inhale the twilit air, air charged with hot parsley, citronella fumes, grass, his own breath, “But so was I really.”

  “Maybe he’s changed.”

  “I think my fear of him came from the guilt of being the last to see Maddie, as if there was something I could have done.” Jonathan rubbed the back of his neck. “After he read her letter, I’ll never forget as long as I live what he did. He read the letter. Didn’t utter a word. We were all there with him in the room, Alma too, all waiting for him to say something. Well, he folded the letter back up and put it in its envelope and put it in his”—

  herringbone, Jonathan realized, herringbone with a butter brickle stain on its

  “—jacket pocket and left the room. We were all standing in that open foyer off the front door. He went upstairs. There was such deliberateness to the way he went up those stairs. We might have looked at each other, Alma and I, but we knew better than to say anything. I think by that time mother might have been crying. Upstairs, we could hear him going to it. He was in Maddie’s room breaking things. Chairs, pictures. By the rhythm of it, though, it wasn’t like a demolition executed in a rage, so much as it was like a kind of scientific dissection of each of the pieces and elements that went to make up the character of the room. Maybe I was hallucinating by then but I swear I could hear cloth tearing, slowly. D
resses, her sheets she slept in. One of those frilly canopies over her poster bed. It was finally a terrifying experience, to think about it now. And with ma there, crying quietly, trying to weep with a kind a stoicism. Pathetic. All of us. She kept saying, ‘Don’t. Don’t.’ But you probably know how those moments go. You never really know whether the ‘don’t’ is addressed to one person or another. The whole thing was over in a few minutes. Here he came down the stairs again and in his hands was a beautiful porcelain bowl. It was her favorite object in the world. She used it for potpourri. Anyway, he brought it down with both hands, and walked to the front door. He tucked it under his arm, opened the door wide. Then he threw the bowl onto the porch outside. Some of the potpourri blew back in. He shut the door, didn’t slam it. And he said something to the effect that as of now this family has five members—”

  Three deer were grazing a hundred yards away at the edge of a clearing north of the toolshed. Dill craned his neck and squinted. Presences in the twilight, they lifted their heads, conscious of the slight change in timbre of the voice that emanated from the hill above. Behind them the sunset spread a violet murk above the line of trees.

  “You’ve never heard from her or Work again?”

  “Well,” and Jonathan lay back in his chair. “They weren’t that hard to trace. Ma put some man on to finding them. She had to do it behind Owen’s back, but that didn’t stop her. You see, Work’s mother was a maid. Penny. When we were growing up she’d come here a couple of times a week to do laundry and some house cleaning. Penny Parker Work. She didn’t know how to drive, so Henry would bring her out in his car and we kept some animals, some horses, a goat, laying hens. So after a while, Henry was hired to take care of the stables. He was an ex-Marine. He was a boxer, too, in the service. I gathered that once he got out of the service he lived with his father down somewhere in the South for a while, but they didn’t get along, so he moved up here to be near his mother.”

  “And that’s how he met Madeleine.”

  “She was always a rebellious one, and she didn’t try very hard to conceal things. Work would bring his mother out in the morning and pretty soon began chauffeuring Maddie to school. They’d see each other at lunch. Half the time when she said she wanted to go out in the evening with girlfriends, Alma and I knew where it was she really was going to be. My father wouldn’t tolerate it, so he fired Work’s mother and told Maddie not to see him anymore. It sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t even understand in the beginning that Owen’s problem with Maddie’s running off was because Henry was black. Didn’t gibe with his politics, didn’t gibe with his science.”

  Jonathan glanced down the hillside but it was too dark at the edge of the park to see whether the deer were still there grazing.

  “Ma had them traced to Work’s father’s place down in the South. They were living together in a trailer house in back of his old man’s. They’d gotten married. To make money, Henry had gone back to boxing, traveled some circuit doing exhibition fights, whatever was available, I gather. Ma might have sent some money to them, but it’s all pretty vague after that.”

  “I wonder where they are now.”

  Jonathan sat forward forearms on his thighs. Dill saw only half his face, illuminated orange by the light of the flames; the other half was lost in shadow.

  “I know that Henry Work was beaten half to death by some young fighter in a training camp down South. He only worked the circuit for a year or two and then he was hired on somewhere near Birmingham as a sparring partner for younger fighters. Well, as I understand it, he was really badly hurt, taken off to the hospital only half-conscious. He’s never been able to get in a ring again. And I know, too, that an acquaintance of mine found him a job in New York somewhere. These calls that Alma’s been telling me about—has there been anyone named Krieger around here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about Corless?”

  “No.”

  A light went on upstairs. Jonathan looked up. A form left the frame of the window, a shadow. It had to have been his father up there, peering down at them.

  “Maddie was his great love. I’m a bit of an outsider in this family, so it’s easier for me to see it. He was never going to get anywhere with all his ridiculous gerontology-fussing upstairs, and he must have known it. The whole thing was very dumb and very privileged, if you ask me. This business of collecting sugar cane from Vilcabamba, manuscripts of neurological research in Abkhasia and the Hunzucuts, wilco seeds, aculpa, the list goes on—doda of the shamans of Ecuador, cascarilla bark, matico, all this crazy junk. It all got out of control after Maddie left.”

  “Alma believes that his work is important.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s wrong.”

  “But he’s been telling her that he’s on the verge of some sort of breakthrough.”

  “What he’s on the verge of is a breakdown, and anyway he hasn’t been serious about any of his work for years. He collects things for the same reason most people collect things—he could never do it himself, so he surrounds himself with bits and pieces of others’ accomplishments, that ship’s prow in the front room, such hokum.”

  Dill felt as if he were being asked to choose sides in a dispute he was neither qualified nor inclined to judge. “Why’d he get so interested in longevity in the first place?”

  Jonathan laughed and looked up to the window. The light was out. “That’s the best question of all.”

  Alma was calling them to dinner. Jonathan snuffed out the flames in the citronella pots. The whitetails had drifted closer to where they sat, talking, unaware. They could smell the lemon smoke that trailed in ribbons down the rise, before their breathing dispersed these in skeins moistened and warmed by giddy lungs. They couldn’t hear the man’s answer to the other man’s question. “It’s not like he’s interested in ours,” was all Jonathan could come up with.

  7.

  OWNE OPENED THE leaded windows. It took some effort, so long had they been kept closed. They were half fused into their casements. He looked down where Jonathan and Dill were doing something but his eye caught on a frail frame of lead and followed its course around a pane of glass. He was struck just for an instant—fully struck, even overcome—with a sense of remorse. The window leading was like a vein run dry, a capillary out at the farthest edge of the house. Who knew how much blood continued to flow through the rest, or whether its heart beat at all? He listened. No, he still could faintly hear its pulse. And the air which came tentative into the rooms assured him the thing was yet alive—the house, that is.

  A voice. Alma’s. She was going down to join them. What were they doing? Jonathan had a scythe out, was mowing like a symbol of death the bridle path grass. Busy with something always, Jonathan, or he wasn’t happy. Not like Will. Will has more of a reflective nature. Had. He could sit still when sitting still was the thing to do. Also, he could fight, meaner than any lion, if that was what he was called to do. And who could remember Madeleine anymore?

  Jonathan had been in here. Nothing was out of place but the rooms felt different. You didn’t spend so many hours of your life in a place and not come to know a fourth, or fifth, dimension of it. Always busy, that boy, remember how he and his sister used to come back from their afternoons of exploration with some piece of bric-a-brac or other from who knows what generation of the family, little locked diary hidden in the south attic once, broken meerschaum pipe carved with the elephants and the dolphins. Alma, and John—who would guess them as twins now? Same busyness coming in here, all predisposed to incriminate and judge. The cages undisturbed. Horace, Virgil, Hesiod, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Theocritus, and all the others. The wonderful routine of their feedings. Augustus the monkey, the hamsters Martials I, II, III, Phoebus-pig, all of them hardly more than glorified pets at this stage of things, and at that hardly glorified. Solitude and prayer, and Mahler on the looped tape. Not such an awful life, not necessarily squandered given the prospect ahead.