The explosive elements, cobwebbed now in the garden shed, must be got rid of, and one day he gathered them up and took them down to the harbor, meaning to pour them in. Kneeling on the bank where the waves lapped under a crust of foam, he felt suddenly as if he were trying to rid himself of a terrible secret, and with it must give up his father’s memory, too. He turned back up Victory Boulevard hugging the stoppered tubes to his chest, as if they contained a precious essence, and thought of people turned back from suicide to life, with all its dangers and disappointments. That night he dreamed Big Steve was showing him how to steer a boat: he heard his father’s voice, felt his presence as if he were standing right beside him again. Awakened, he cried in gulps like a child, which so shamed him—he was in his last year of high school, played varsity basketball, almost a man himself—that he forgot all of it, even his father’s qualities that he’d been so grateful to see again in the dream.
When he went away to school (a two-year business course, inexpensive and, as his mother said, “appropriate”—she’d been afraid his fiddling, as she called it, would lead him into the trades, nor did she care to throw good money and time away on a university education), he took the mercury and the phosphorus with him, reasoning that this was the best way to protect his mother. He was a poor student—he’d always learned through his hands, or by studying how one part fit another, and he shrank from abstractions like price/earnings ratios. And his father had ridden so magnificently astride the world of business that the son hardly dared imagine such a mount for himself. Sealed in plastic, immersed in the dormitory toilet tank, the phosphorus lived as a secret energy source in Stevie’s mind. He always checked it before an exam and the little surge of confidence he felt, just knowing it was there, would sometimes dispel the inner fog so he’d discover as he ticked down the rows of questions that he knew more answers than he’d dreamed.
Smoldering in the darkened doorway of the cafeteria, surrounded by the pert girls from St. Elizabeth’s who’d been bussed in for a dance, stood one Theresa Lester. Would Steve light her cigarette? A funny question, as clearly she could ignite anything with a glance. He struck the match and felt something in himself catch, too; from that instant his life was refocused, on her. Could she really long for him as she seemed to, or was he the butt of some terrible joke? If he gave in and admitted his feelings, would she taunt him, who was so gullible he’d imagined she could love such a timid boy? He could never really own the man’s broad-shouldered body he saw in the mirror—it bore no relation to the quavering heart inside.
But Theresa was desperate—thank God! She had no choice but to love him. Her father had walked out, and poverty, or loneliness, had driven her mother into an alcoholic daze. It was easy for Steve to forgive Theresa’s tempests, when he knew their origins—she screamed, she threw whatever came to hand, because she guessed he was about to be cruel to her. Cruelty was all she knew—of course it was what she expected. When he forgave her she threw herself against him and sighed as if she could sigh a life’s unhappiness out now she was safe in his arms, and made love to him ravenously, without a qualm. This while his friends were exultant over getting a finger under a date’s brassiere strap—but Theresa wasn’t like the others; she belonged to nature, to the genuine heart of the world. Her narrow cat’s eyes—even golden like a cat’s—looked out of the wilderness at him, begging him to take her in.
Sex itself upset him: the pitch of his own feeling, the way she lay back and flowered around him while he rose over her as if she were prey. He wanted to apologize for his rude intrusion into her body, make amends to her somehow. So, he would marry her, take care of her. His father had left enough money so that really Steve had no need to work, though his mother would have gasped at this idea. But this life reduced to figures—inventories held, sales expected—with no meaning, no purpose but money, numbed him, and he was determined to escape. She, Theresa, held the meaning. When he was deep inside her it seemed he had almost touched it.
She was such a creature as his mother could not imagine. “Sweetie, no…,” Edith said, smiling in puzzlement: surely he couldn’t be serious? A poor Catholic girl from a broken family, a girl who glowed less with beauty than ambition? Anyone who saw them together would know her son a fool. “We don’t want to disappoint Evelyn,” she said quietly. Evelyn’s father was also in shipping, and for the last few years his mother had lost no opportunity of mentioning Evelyn’s travels in Europe, her excellence as a golfer, her efforts with the Junior League.… Steve looked at his mother more with pity than defiance; the poor woman had been sheltered until she was nearly blind.
“I don’t think it will come as a big disappointment to Evelyn, Mom,” he said.
Though the tilt of Theresa’s chin, as she walked down the aisle toward him, gave him a momentary chill. She looked more proud than happy, as if she’d made a brilliant acquisition and was planning her next move. Her mother, a dithery creature in a feathery hat, did not look capable of unkindness, and having downed several vodka martinis at the reception recited “The Owl and the Pussycat” so tenderly Steve’s eyes filled with tears.
They were moving upstate, into the country. He’d found a house that fit them; it had begun as someone’s folly, a pile of fieldstones mortared together, used as a hunting lodge with only the fireplaces for heat. It lay in a hollow—a brook wove along beside it and a long meadow spread out in front with a big old sugar maple blazing in the middle. It was a place such as a child might draw in crayon, the yellow rays of the sun touching the blue water and green grass—happiness on a page. And soon there were children, four in quick succession: Katherine; Stephen III and Michael, the twins; and finally Stella, who was somehow most clearly his own. He stood on the porch watching them catch fireflies in a June dusk, trying to take pleasure though he felt only foreboding: if he died, like his father, at fifty, he had only twenty years to go.
Not to mention the nuclear clock on the cover of Harper’s: four minutes to Armageddon now. Seize the day, there may not come another. Steve had his real estate license, worked—when he could make himself—out of an office in Tiverton Center beside the feed store. He loved the old farmhouses, the torn curtains at broken windows, overgrown orchards, root cellars opening out of grassy hills, rusty harrows abandoned in the fields. Whole lives billowed inside those houses, like the willow growing through the floor and out the windows at the old Atwater place. Once he found a shelf of spiced peaches in mason jars, glowing in the basement of a ruined cottage, fresh and delicious though their maker had long ago died.
The few souls who might bother to look at such places quickly lost heart, and sales were rare, but he accepted this with peculiar good cheer, as a chance to affirm again that money was a small thing to him. Was success more important, after all, than family? He’d leave the office early, go home and build the kids a dollhouse or a child-size dory with a red sail. Once he saw a ragtag circus in a parking lot and convinced the manager to sell him a pony foal that was tied up at ringside while its mother gave rides. He got it halfway into the back of the Buick by piling sugar cubes on the seat, then held its back legs to keep it from kicking him and pushed it the rest of the way. It nipped at his shoulder all the way home, but that was nothing next to the looks on the kids’ faces.
Scarecrow as they named him, for his manginess, fit Steve’s two major purposes: he astonished the children and infuriated Theresa at once. She was disappointed, bitterly, in marriage, in life, in him. Whatever it was she had wanted he had not been able to provide it, and now she turned her anger on him. The more she tore at him, though, the stonier he became. “A pony,” she said, disgusted. “I’ll have to take care of it, of course.” Little Stella rested her head against the pony’s shoulder, with a shy, cozy smile. “It’s not enough the sheep and the chickens and the dogs, we have to have a pony! The kids don’t give a damn about ponies—they want a father, that’s what!”
But what father had ever loved his children more? It was intoxicating to see his own ref
lection in their eyes: the conjurer of Tootsie Pops and ponies, the master of this world. And the phosphorus waited in the basement freezer for the moment when Steve could pass along his knowledge of the earthly miracles. Though the children were growing impatient with his tricks and games. He found himself posturing, trying to act the part of father, talking with put-on sophistication about things he didn’t understand. Stella and the boys played along, listening with earnest interest, trying to respond as he would want, but there was always a shadow of suspicion on Katherine’s wary face, as if she were keeping watch on the false thread that ran between them and would pull it out one day. Stella had nightmares—a monster came, Daddy couldn’t save her. The kind of dream Steve used to have after his father died.
Work cluttered his life. His days off turned to weeks off, until he had stopped going in to the office altogether—his secretary could handle most of it anyway. The old farmsteads were in demand, suddenly, as second homes, though he detested the type of man who was buying in—cocksure, more likely to demolish than rebuild. They reminded him of his brother, his big successful brother, and sensing their condescension, he found himself defensively explaining that he didn’t care for money and prestige, it was his kids that mattered, after all. One morning his secretary called to say someone had come in wanting to look at places “in the million-dollar range.” “A million dollars, and he was so nice, so thoughtful!” she sighed. As if no one had ever been nice to her before. Like all women, she looked at a man and imagined his bank account naked. “You take him,” he said, and drove north into the mountains, caught six sleek trout for dinner. Ralph Lauren bought the Atwater place, willow and all, and the boom began in earnest, but Steve had lost interest in real estate. They lived by borrowing against his inheritance, Theresa in a black boil of fury that turned to pure seduction when she was near a stronger man.
“Sweetie, I don’t know.…” His mother was always dubious about the loans, though it was she, he thought, who was wasteful, a wealthy woman throwing away her life on measures of thrift, molding the last bits of soap together into one bar, going from bank to bank every week to deposit a few hundred dollars and get a “free gift” until her attic was piled with boxed clock radios and toasters. She understood money no better than physics or philosophy, and she had long forgotten that her husband had amassed that fortune for his children. Well, Steve would have every mote, every cent that was left of his father. And, of course, his mother gave in and lent him another fifty thousand, chiding him, a few minutes later, for throwing away a perfectly good paper bag.
This time it was winter, there was a blizzard swirling upstate, no trains and even the Thruway was closed. He’d have to stay with his mother another day, and was surprised to realize how glad this made him, as if he was getting to stay home from school. He called Theresa, who said they were all fine—there was no power, but they were playing pioneers, had a fire in the woodstove, and the twins had braved it up to the barn to feed the animals.… It was romantic, really, with the winds battering the house and the five of them inside. Then she sent the kids out of the room and her voice turned to ice. “Alone here, with four little children in the snow, but then what do you care about us? You’re home with your mommy.”
“Treesa…” he said, but he recognized the blind, lost rage he’d heard in her voice when he first knew her, the feeling he’d been certain he could cure. She had turned toward him with eyes wide with grateful amazement, had taken him so deeply into herself he’d felt immersed, tangled undersea, until he gave in and breathed water, was drowned and transformed. Now he’d become the thing despised. She slept at the edge of the bed. If he brushed against her in his sleep, she curled into herself all the tighter.
“Treess it’s the snow, it’s not that I don’t want to…” This was the deepest truth. Even when he was there at home he wanted to be with them. He watched his children like a man looking in through a lighted window—he’d have reached in to touch them but he didn’t know how.
Theresa was silent, and he looked out to the wide double strand of lights over the Narrows—the Verrazano Bridge. If Big Steve could have seen that bridge! A steel garland, spanning an incredible distance in one exuberant sweep—just what he’d expected of the future, and here it was, right here now.
Steve slept, that night, in his childhood bed, as he hadn’t slept since he left home. In the middle of the night it was no different—he was no different—from twenty-five years ago when the future was still before him. It seemed he could still smell his father’s cigars.
At four A.M., though, he sat bolt upright, out of a nightmare. The test tube of phosphorus was still in the basement freezer, and the power was out, it would thaw. Five children had died Christmas night, trying to hide under a bed from a fire. He’d seen it in the paper and couldn’t stop thinking of them, so soft and trusting, certain of safety under their parents’ wing. He tiptoed into the living room, not to wake his mother, and dialed Theresa—he’d tell her just to throw the phosphorus out into the snow—but before it could ring he hung up. She was looking for a good reason to despise him; it would not be wise to tell her he’d hidden a bomb in her larder. He took a deep breath—without electricity there would be no heat: the phosphorus might thaw, but it was hardly likely to reach room temperature. He would let it lie, and as soon as he got home would dispose of it once and for all.
But carrying the stoppered test tube out to the brook, he thought better. You couldn’t buy yellow phosphorus anymore. He ought to save it for the boys. And if Theresa left him—no, he might need it; he couldn’t bear to throw it away. So he took it across the log bridge into the woods and suspended it in between two stones in one of the old stone walls there. He never walked this way without thinking of the men who’d cleared this land, wrenched enough stones out of the soil to build these miles of walls, tilled it and worked it and nevertheless nature had overtaken it all. The fields were grown into forests now—oaks and maples and cherries whose new leaves and blossoms, deep red, translucent green, were stippled together in a pale haze in spring. Standing here now, he looked down over the house and saw the roof sagging on the western side where the weather hit it.… Rain leaked into the wall there, and the paper was peeling off: the bedroom smelled of mildew. The place was a morass of half-accomplished projects, things he couldn’t lift his heart to finish.… The bills were so overwhelming he’d stopped opening the mail. What did such things matter, anyway, in a transitory world? He still felt like a naughty child when he took out his toolbox, and when he saw men working in the open air his heart sank as if they were gods on a mountaintop and he only mortal. His father—but his mind flinched back from the thought of his father, and a plan sprang up instead: he’d dig a moat around the playground … the kids could swing across on a knotted rope …
Yes, he’d failed, failed and what of it? How many lives are misspent succeeding … amassing a useless pot of gold? He had lived for his children … in the anguish of his impotent love for them, watching them tuck their bears into bed at night, fluffy as chicks themselves in their sleepsuits, their downy heads on the pillow, their little starfish hands holding tight to his. His throat closed, he couldn’t think of such fragile creatures subject to life, fear, pain.
* * *
Katherine was thirteen; picking her up from school he switched to public radio: “Listen, a polonaise!” he said. “A polonaise is like … like dessert!” Her glance flicked away; she knew his favorite songs were “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” tunes his father used to hum. Katherine had arrived at adolescence ungainly, cringing one minute and grandiose the next, embarrassed and, supremely, embarrassing, rushing from the room crying in gulps and snorts after the smallest criticism, her face covered with pimples, clothing so tight it seemed a plea for sex. She was taking after her mother, he thought, too sharp and aggressive, all claws and no womanly softness. He could hardly look at her, he was so disappointed—and she ignored him in kind. She sat down to her algebr
a problems and he saw over her shoulder that she had written Isaiah over and over in the margin. The name of a wretched boy who lived in a trailer in the valley, with whom she imagined herself in love.
“Why is it so foggy, out back?” she asked, looking up. “I mean, why out back and not in the front at all?”
Theresa sat across from her—she was taking a correspondence course, aiming toward a law degree. Steve had only discovered this when the first lesson came in the mail. Theresa took it from him with a look of defiance. She was figuring a way to escape him. This would be no mean feat, as she’d become a wraith, haunting her own house, her hair in tangles, her bathrobe cinched at her waist so tightly you could see she’d done it as she did everything—in a rage. And why? He had never been unfaithful, she had this house, these children, everything she’d wanted so long ago. What could be wrong, here in the sunlight, on a brilliant autumn day? A ripple of shame ran through him—it was his lack that left her longing. She would leave him: he thought of his father—he could not bear such a loss a second time.
“I think of fog as a spring thing,” Katherine went on, in her over-serious, teacher’s pet voice, meaning, “I don’t have to admire you, I see further than you do already; I’ll find my own way.” She took an encyclopedia volume into bed with her at night—she intended to figure everything out, to surpass him. Theresa looked toward the window, but blindly. Steve refused, as always, to look where Katherine was pointing.
Darling? Page 16
