He’s up. He’s in the hallway—he had apparently wakened and found her gone. “Jesus,” he says. “I woke up and you weren’t here.”
“I didn’t go anywhere,” she says, and she smiles at him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, starting to cry. “God, Janey, I’m so sorry. I’m all messed up here. I’ve got to go to the bathroom again.”
She helps him. The two of them stand over the bowl. He’s stopped crying now, though he says his hands hurt something awful. When he’s finished he thanks her, and then tries a bawdy joke. “You don’t have to let go so soon.”
She ignores this, and when she has him tucked safely away, he says quietly, “I guess I better just go to bed and sleep some more if I can.”
She’s trying to hold on to the feeling of peace and certainty she had in the garage. It’s not even noon, and she’s exhausted. She’s very tired of thinking about everything. He’s talking about his parents; later she’ll have to call them. But then he says he wants his mother to hear his voice first, to know he’s all right. He goes on—something about Milly and her unborn baby, and Teddy Lynch—but Jane can’t quite hear him: he’s a little unsteady on his feet, and they have trouble negotiating the hallway together.
In their bedroom she helps him out of his jeans and shirt, and she actually tucks him into the bed. Again he thanks her. She kisses his forehead, feels a sudden, sick-swooning sense of having wronged him somehow. It makes her stand straighter, makes her stiffen slightly.
“Jane?” he says.
She breathes. “Try to rest some more. You just need to rest now.” He closes his eyes and she waits a little. He’s not asleep. She sits at the foot of the bed and watches him. Perhaps ten minutes go by. Then he opens his eyes.
“Janey?”
“Shhh,” she says.
He closes them again. It’s as if he were her child. She thinks of him as he was when she first saw him, tall and sure of himself in his uniform, and the image makes her throat constrict.
At last he’s asleep. When she’s certain of this, she lifts herself from the bed and carefully, quietly withdraws. As she closes the door, something in the flow of her own mind appalls her, and she stops, stands in the dim hallway, frozen in a kind of wonder: she had been thinking in an abstract way, almost idly, as though it had nothing at all to do with her, about how people will go to such lengths leaving a room—wishing not to disturb, not to awaken, a loved one.
CONSOLATION
Late one summer afternoon, Milly Harmon and her older sister, Meg, spend a blessed, uncomplicated hour at a motel pool in Philadelphia, sitting in the shade of one of the big umbrella tables. They drink tropical punch from cans, and Milly nurses the baby, staring out at the impossibly silver agitation of water around the body of a young, dark swimmer, a boy with Spanish black hair and eyes. He’s the only one in the pool. Across the way, an enormous woman in a red terry-cloth bikini lies on her stomach in the sun, her head resting on her folded arms. Milly’s sister puts her own head down for a moment, then looks at Milly. “I feel fat,” she says, low. “I look like that woman over there.”
“Be quiet,” Milly says. “Your voice carries.”
“Nobody can hear us,” Meg says. She’s always worried about weight, though she’s nothing like the woman across the way. Her thighs are heavy, her hips wide, but she’s big-boned, as their mother always says; she’s not built to be skinny. Milly’s the one who’s skinny. When they were growing up, Meg often called her “stick.” Sometimes it was an endearment and sometimes it was a jibe, depending on the circumstances. These days, Meg calls her “honey” and speaks to her with something like the careful tones of sympathy. Milly’s husband was killed last September, when Milly was almost six months pregnant, and the two women have traveled here to see Milly’s in-laws, to show them their grandchild, whom they have never seen.
The visit hasn’t gone well. Things have been strained and awkward. Milly is exhausted and discouraged, so her sister has worked everything out, making arrangements for the evening, preserving these few hours in the day for the two of them and the baby. In a way, the baby’s the problem: Milly would never have suspected that her husband’s parents would react so peevishly, with such annoyance, to their only grandson—the only grandchild they will ever have.
Last night, when the baby started crying at dinner, both the Harmons seemed to sulk, and finally Wally’s father excused himself and went to bed—went into his bedroom and turned a radio on. His dinner was still steaming on his plate; they hadn’t even quite finished passing the food around. The music sounded through the walls of the small house, while Milly, Wally’s mother and Meg sat through the meal trying to be cordial to each other, the baby fussing between them.
Finally Wally’s mother said, “Perhaps if you nurse him.”
“I just did,” Milly told her.
“Well, he wants something.”
“Babies cry,” Meg put in, and the older woman looked at her as though she had said something off-color.
“Hush,” Milly said to the baby. “Be quiet.” Then there seemed nothing left to say.
Mrs. Harmon’s hands trembled over the lace edges of the tablecloth. “Can I get you anything?” she said.
At the end of the evening she took Milly by the elbow and murmured, “I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive us, we’re just not used to the commotion.”
“Commotion,” Meg said as they drove back to the motel. “Jesus. Commotion.”
Milly looked down into the sleeping face of her son. “My little commotion,” she said, feeling tired and sad.
Now Meg turns her head on her arms and gazes at the boy in the pool. “Maybe I’ll go for a swim,” she says.
“He’s too young for you,” Milly says.
Meg affects a forlorn sigh, then sits straight again. “You want me to take Zeke for a while?” The baby’s name is Wally, after his dead father, but Meg calls him Zeke. She claims she’s always called every baby Zeke, boy or girl, but she’s especially fond of the name for this baby. This baby, she says, looks like a Zeke. Even Milly uses the name occasionally, as an endearment.
“He’s not through nursing,” Milly says.
It’s been a hot day. Even now, at almost six o’clock, the sky is pale blue and crossed with thin, fleecy clouds that look like filaments of steam. Meg wants a tan, or says she does, but she’s worn a kimono all afternoon, and hasn’t moved out of the shade. She’s with Milly these days because her marriage is breaking up. It’s an amicable divorce; there are no children. Meg says the whole thing simply collapsed of its own weight. Neither party is interested in anyone else, and there haven’t been any ugly scenes or secrets. They just don’t want to be married to each other anymore, see no future in it. She talks about how civilized the whole procedure has been, how even the lawyers are remarking on it, but Milly thinks she hears some sorrow in her voice. She thinks of two friends of hers who have split up twice since the warehouse fire that killed Wally, and whose explanations, each time, have seemed to preclude any possibility of reconciliation. Yet they’re now living together, and sometimes, when Milly sees them, they seem happy.
“Did I tell you that Jane and Martin are back together?” she asks Meg.
“Again?”
She nods.
“Tied to each other on a rock in space,” Meg says.
“What?”
“Come on, let me hold Zeke,” Meg reaches for the baby. “He’s through, isn’t he?”
“He’s asleep.”
Meg pretends to pout, extending her arm across the table and putting her head down again. She makes a yawning sound. “Where are all the boys? Let’s have some fun here anyway—right? Let’s get in a festive mood or something.”
Milly removes the baby’s tight little sucking mouth from her breast and covers herself. The baby sleeps on, still sucking. “Look at this,” she says to her sister.
Meg leans toward her to see. “What in the world do you think is wrong with them?”
&
nbsp; She’s talking about Wally’s parents, of course. Milly shrugs. She doesn’t feel comfortable discussing them. She wants the baby to have both sets of grandparents, and a part of her feels that this ambition is in some way laudatory—that the strange, stiff people she has brought her child all this way to see ought to appreciate what she’s trying to do. She wonders if they harbor some resentment about how before she would marry their son she’d extracted a promise from him about not leaving Illinois, where her parents and her sister live. It’s entirely possible that Wally’s parents unconsciously blame her for Wally’s death, for the fact that his body lies far away in her family’s plot in a cemetery in Lincoln, Illinois.
“Hey,” Meg says.
“What.”
“I asked a question. You drove all the way out here to see them and let them see their grandson, and they act like it’s some kind of bother.”
“They’re just tired,” Milly says. “Like we are.”
“Seven hundred miles of driving to sit by a motel pool.”
“They’re not used to having a baby around,” Milly says. “It’s awkward for them, too.” She wishes her sister would stop. “Can’t we just not worry it all to death?”
“Hey,” Meg says. “It’s your show.”
Milly says, “We’ll see them tonight and then we’ll leave in the morning and that’ll be that, okay?”
“I wonder what they’re doing right now. You think they’re watching the four o’clock movie or something? With their only grandson two miles away in a motel?”
In a parking lot in front of a group of low buildings on the other side of the highway, someone sets off a pack of firecrackers—they make a sound like small machine-gun fire.
“All these years of independence,” Meg says. “So people like us can have these wonderful private lives.”
Milly smiles. It’s always been Meg who defined things, who spoke out and offered opinions. Milly thinks of her sister as someone who knows the world, someone with experience she herself lacks, though Meg is only a little more than a year older. So much of her own life seems somehow duplicitous to her, as if the wish to please others and to be well thought of had somehow dulled the edges of her identity and left her with nothing but a set of received impressions. She knows she loves the baby in her lap, and she knows she loved her husband—though during the four years of her marriage she was confused much of the time, and afraid of her own restlessness. It was only in the weeks just before Wally was taken from her that she felt most comfortably in love with him, glad of his presence in the house and worried about the dangerous fire-fighting work that was, in fact, the agency of his death. She doesn’t want to think about this now, and she marvels at how a moment of admiration for the expressiveness of her sister could lead to remembering that her husband died just as she was beginning to understand her need for him. She draws a little shuddering breath, and Meg frowns.
“You looked like something hurt you,” Meg says. “You were thinking about Wally.”
Milly nods.
“Zeke looks like him, don’t you think?”
“I wasted so much time wondering if I loved him,” Milly says.
“I think he was happy,” her sister tells her.
In the pool the boy splashes and dives, disappears; Milly watches the shimmery surface. He comes up on the other side, spits a stream of water, and climbs out. He’s wearing tight, dark blue bathing trunks.
“Come on,” Meg says, reaching for the baby. “Let me have him.”
“I don’t want to wake him,” Milly says.
Meg walks over to the edge of the pool, takes off her sandals, and dips the toe of one foot in, as though trying to gauge how cold the water is. She comes back, sits down, drops the sandals between her feet and steps into them one by one. “You know what I think it is with the Harmons?” she says. “I think it’s the war. I think the war got them. That whole generation.”
Milly ignores this, and adjusts, slightly, the weight of the baby in her lap. “Zeke,” she says. “Pretty Zeke.”
The big woman across the way has labored up off her towel and is making slow progress out of the pool area.
“Wonder if she’s married,” Meg says. “I think I’ll have a pool party when the divorce is final.”
The baby stirs in Milly’s lap. She moves slightly, rocking her legs.
“We ought to live together permanently,” Meg says.
“You want to keep living with us?”
“Sure, why not? Zeke and I get along. A divorced woman and a widow. And one cool baby boy.”
They’re quiet a while. Somewhere off beyond the trees at the end of the motel parking lot, more firecrackers go off. Meg stands, stretches. “I knew a guy once who swore he got drunk and slept on top of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. On Independence Day. Think of it.”
“You didn’t believe him,” Milly says.
“I believed he had the idea. Whole culture’s falling apart. Whole goddamn thing.”
“Do you really want to stay with us?” Milly asks her.
“I don’t know. That’s an idea, too.” She ambles over to the pool again, then walks around it, out of the gate, to the small stairway leading up to their room. At the door of the room she turns, shrugs, seems to wait. Milly lifts the baby to her shoulder, then rises. Meg is standing at the railing on the second level, her kimono partway open at the legs. Milly, approaching her, thinks she looks wonderful, and tells her so.
“I was just standing here wondering how long it’ll take to drive you crazy if we keep living together,” Meg says, opening the door to the room. Inside, in the air-conditioning, she flops down on the nearest bed. Milly puts the baby in the Port-a-Crib and turns to see that the telephone message light is on. “Hey, look,” she says.
Meg says, “Ten to one it’s the Harmons canceling out.”
“No bet,” Milly says, tucking the baby in. “Oh, I just want to go home, anyway.”
Her sister dials the front desk, then sits cross-legged with pillows at her back, listening. “I don’t believe this,” she says.
It turns out that there are two calls: one from the Harmons, who say they want to come earlier than planned, and one from Meg’s estranged husband, Larry, who has apparently traveled here from Champaign, Illinois. When Meg calls the number he left, he answers, and she waves Milly out of the room. Milly takes the baby, who isn’t quite awake, and walks back down to the pool. It’s empty; the water is perfectly smooth. She sits down, watches the light shift on the surface, clouds moving across it in reflection.
It occurs to her that she might have to spend the rest of the trip on her own, and this thought causes a flutter at the pit of her stomach. She thinks of Larry, pulling this stunt, and she wonders why she didn’t imagine that he might show up, her sister’s casual talk of the divorce notwithstanding. He’s always been prone to the grand gesture: once, after a particularly bad quarrel, he rented a van with loudspeakers and drove up and down the streets of Champaign, proclaiming his love. Milly remembers this, sitting by the empty pool, and feels oddly threatened.
It isn’t long before Meg comes out and calls her back. Meg is already trying to make herself presentable. What Larry wants, she tells Milly, what he pleaded for, is only that Meg agree to see him. He came to Philadelphia and began calling all the Harmons in the phone book, and when he got Wally’s parents, they gave him the number of the motel. “The whole thing’s insane,” she says, hurriedly brushing her hair. “I don’t get it. We’re almost final.”
“Meg, I need you now,” Milly says.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says her sister.
“What’re we going to do about the Harmons?”
“Larry says they asked him to say hello to you. Can you feature that? I mean, what in the world is that? It’s like they don’t expect to see you again.”
“Yes,” Milly says. “But they’re coming.”
“He called before, you know.” “Mr. Harmon?”
“No—Larry. He called
just before we left. I didn’t get it. I mean, he kept hinting around and I just didn’t get it. I guess I told him we were coming to Philly.”
The baby begins to whine and complain.
“Hey, Zeke,” Meg says. She looks in the mirror. “Good Lord, I look like war,” and then she’s crying. She moves to the bed, sits down, still stroking her hair with the brush.
“Don’t cry,” Milly says. “You don’t want to look all red-eyed, do you?”
“What the hell,” Meg says. “I’m telling you, I don’t care about it. I mean—I don’t care. He’s such a baby about everything.”
Milly is completely off balance. She has been the one in need on this trip, and now everything’s turned around. “Here,” she says, offering her sister a Kleenex. “You can’t let him see you looking miserable.”
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 38
