River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “I say we do the job right and put in asbestos,” Hat said.

  “I heard it was dangerous,” Thaddeus said.

  “Me too,” Grace said. “Rilly.”

  “Well,” said Hat. “You hear a lot of nonsense from people who don’t know the first thing about anything, but dime for dime you’re not going to do better than asbestos. Handled with care? There’s nothing better. They feed that stuff to a bunch of rats, and the rats go cross-eyed and next thing you know all the fiberglass companies are up there in Albany trying to get the politicians to pass a bunch of laws. We are turning into the most regulated society on earth, as bad as the Russians. Asbestos is a good product, but it’s like anything else. Poison, dynamite, firearms—you have to know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t think we’d want poison or dynamite down in our cellar, either,” offered Grace.

  The front door banged open suddenly, and a howling gust of frigid air blew in, as insistent as a pack of dogs. The door slammed shut again.

  “Mrs. Kaufman?” a tearful voice cried out. It was Laura Duran, their child-care worker. They referred to her as their child-care helper—worker was just a bit raw to their taste. Laura called them Mr. and Mrs. Kaufman. Grace’s not taking Thaddeus’s name was something Laura averted her mind’s eye to, as if it were something Grace would rather not be noticed, like a scar.

  “In here, Laura,” Grace called out. Her voice awakened both babies in the bassinet.

  Laura lumbered in, a large woman in her mid-twenties, radiating the night, its obdurate winds, its freezing implacability. Her blue jeans were tight and her ski parka looked like the outer shell of a hand grenade. Her light brown hair was curly one week, wet-combed the next, then straight and prim beneath a headband the week after that. Today she was back to curly and the ringlets were icy. She had a pugnacious manner and the face to go with it—a blunt nose, a strong jaw, a defiant gaze that warned men away without meaning to.

  But tonight she was distraught and in tears. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. She rarely cried and hadn’t developed the skill of hiding her tears. She wept openly, liquid streaming from her eyes and nose.

  “It’s fine, it’s nothing,” Grace said. “What happened, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ll get you something to drink,” Thaddeus said. “Come on, sit. Sit.”

  “Love troubles?” Buddy Klein asked, in a somewhat humorous drawl.

  “I frigging wish,” Laura said. Then, to Jennings: “Oh, hi. I didn’t even see you.”

  “You okay?” Jennings asked, a familiarity and concern in his voice that did not escape Muriel. All these months that Laura had been living in the big house, it had not been evident that she and Jennings knew each other. Muriel had never seen them together and Jennings, as far as Muriel could recall, had never once said Laura’s name. But it was a small town, and they probably at one time or another were at the same skinny-dipping party, or got blasted in the back of somebody’s van, perhaps they had made out, or worse.

  “Laura, honey, what the hell happened?” Grace said.

  “My mother,” Laura wailed. Her mother was a nurse at Windsor Psychiatric, a looming brick behemoth a few miles south of Orkney.

  “My mom was slammed into the linen cart,” Laura said. “Right here.” Laura touched her temple with three fingers and moved them gracefully toward her ear. “They know who did it. This guy’s been locked up since before she even started working. One of the frigging incurables. She took thirty-eight stitches and there’s probably going to be a scar. You know how Mom feels about her looks,” she added, looking directly at Jennings.

  “You know her mother?” Muriel said.

  “My mom gave Jennings his first beer, a reward for teaching me to drive.”

  Jennings smiled, but looked down at his shoes, and Muriel’s face colored deeply: stained glass in the church of putting two and two together.

  “Oh, look at these two lovebirds!” Laura said, looking down into the bassinet. The infants seemed to have had a tonic effect on her. “Hello, Davey. And is this yours, Jennings? Is this the little girl I hear so much about?” She blotted her tears with her forearm.

  “Just don’t tell me they took your mother to St. Bartholomew’s,” Hat said. “Bunch of quacks there running wild.”

  “It was where the ambulance took her,” Laura said, and picked up David. He touched her face with the palm of his hand, and then leaned away from her, watching for her reaction.

  “You want my advice?” Hat said. “Get her out of there. You have a constitutional right.”

  Laura gazed down at Jewel. “If you want, I can take them upstairs.”

  “You’ve had a long day, Laura,” Grace said, with a faint note of uncertainty.

  “It’s okay,” Laura said. “It can get my mind off of things.”

  “You want to let her take the babies off our hands for a while?” Grace asked Muriel.

  “That could be nice,” Thaddeus said. Primarily, he wanted Laura to leave the room. He understood that she had always needed to raise her voice in order to be heard, but sometimes her hoarse honk tightened his nerves. He realized his aversion to certain voices was less than democratic. People raised in large families had big voices. People who worked around machinery had big voices, too. A guy who worked in a body shop is used to making himself heard over hammers, sanders, the hydraulic tire press, and the blasting radio and he can blow your eardrums out with the volume of his conversation. Guys who worked on road crews had outdoor voices, pitched to cut through wind and carry long distances. Cop and army voices finger-poked you in the chest. Masons’ voices were white scratchy and dusty and housepainters sounded stoned because they were.

  “It’s okay,” Muriel said. “I’ll keep her with me.” She took Jewel out of the bassinet, and the baby started to cry.

  “See, they don’t want to be apart,” insisted Laura.

  “She’s hungry,” Muriel said, and undid the many tiny pearlized buttons that ran along the side of her satin blouse, a shimmering antique purchased that afternoon from the hospital’s consignment shop.

  Grace looked on with considerable amazement while Muriel folded down the shiny fabric of her blouse and just as quickly undid the snap on her nursing bra, revealing a swollen, girlish breast. Jewel made a series of little noises as she groped for the nipple.

  “You make it look so easy,” Grace said.

  “It doesn’t look easy to me,” Buddy said.

  “You don’t have to look,” said Jennings.

  “Still kind of hurts,” Muriel said, wincing.

  “You got yourself the whole nine yards there, Jen,” Laura said. “Happy for you, honest to God.”

  “You tell your mother I send my best,” Jennings said.

  “Maybe. Mom never much liked you.”

  “Nurse Ratched,” murmured Buddy.

  “You need a haircut, Buddy,” Laura said.

  “You want to cut it for me?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. She was running her ski jacket’s zipper up and down its track. “But seriously. A haircut and a shave.”

  “Oh, I’ve given up. Surrendered.” He peered at her, furrowing his brow. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

  “How should I know?” Laura said. She stopped moving the zipper up and down, settling at the down position. She gave the tab an extra yank. The two halves of her jacket parted farther.

  Buddy’s interpretation: she is saying I’m available. He was suddenly emboldened. “What about being my date for dinner?” he asked, placing his hand on his chest. “Not my party, and certainly not my house, but here on the river there’s always room for one more.”

  “It’s okay,” Laura said. “I’m pretty tired. I guess I’ll crash for a while.” She stopped and turned before leaving the library. “I’m here if you need me. If these lovebirds start fussing.”

  They all sat in silence, listening to Laura’s percussive footsteps mounting the stairs and making their way down the h
all to her room next to the nursery. Jewel made a noise that sounded like humming while she nursed.

  Muriel’s breast looked like the topping on a dessert, a festive little swirl of sweetness. Thaddeus could not turn away. How could white be so various, with hints of yellow and pink, intimations of silver? Grace cleared her throat, snapping Thaddeus out of his lonely, lustful trance. At last, Muriel disengaged Jewel from her meal. The baby was glassy eyed with satiation; she moved her head in a slow, lolling circle. Shrugging her way back into her blouse, Muriel brought the child to her shoulder and rubbed her back, making quick little circles until Jewel emitted a resonant burp.

  “Thank you, Jewel!” Thaddeus exclaimed, clapping his hands. “Dinner is served!” He looked at Jennings but quickly averted his gaze. He wasn’t sure if he was conjuring this out of a troubled conscience, but Jennings seemed to have something very close to murder in his eyes. Had he seen Thaddeus glancing at Muriel’s breast, or was Hat’s fall a wrong that was still waiting to be righted? Or was it as obvious and obdurate as one man was living in a small yellow house that he did not even own, and the other man was rattling around in a mansion?

  Buddy eased himself out of his chair, holding the small of his back. “So what’s the consensus? Do I go upstairs?”

  Muriel was the first to speak. “I think she’d like that.”

  “And I think you’ve already made up your mind,” said Grace. “So why drag us into it?”

  “I just don’t think Laura should be alone,” Buddy said. “What with Nurse Ratched suffering a broken head and all.”

  “Come on, Pop,” Jennings said. “You want me to give you a hand?”

  “There’s no ice on these floors,” Hat said. “Don’t be rushing me off to some home or another.” Nevertheless, he held on to Jennings’s arm and with his other hand lifted the vodka bottle by its opaque neck. As he allowed his son to lead him out of the library and down the center hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house, he haltingly recited a Carl Sandburg poem:

  “A father sees his son nearing manhood.

  What shall he tell that son?

  ‘Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.’”

  “Whatever you say, Pop. Can you lift your feet?”

  Thaddeus had not recovered from the sight of Muriel’s breast. He coughed nervously, grateful for the flimsy fingery mask of a hand over his mouth.

  THADDEUS AND GRACE DID NOT often have occasion to entertain, and when there were fewer than eight guests for dinner, they served in the kitchen, which was especially pleasant and cozy in the winter. The table was a large oak monstrosity the color of burned honey. It must have been built right where it stood—it was too heavy to budge without risking a hernia, and neither of the kitchen’s two doors was wide enough to permit its exit. Thaddeus and Grace wanted to eat off that table for as long as they lived, as would David, and his children after him, and so forth into the future, even when people just swallowed a couple of gel caps instead of consuming actual food.

  Thaddeus and Grace traded glances as they took their places at their ends of the table. The argument they’d been having for weeks, and which seemed to have been resolved, was slowly rising from its casket of silence. All along, Grace had believed there was something naive and egotistical in Thaddeus’s desire to make such a large gift to Hat. He was insisting upon going to a lawyer who would draw up an agreement allowing Hat to stay in the house for the rest of his life for a dollar a year, no matter what. From now on the work Hat did around Orkney would be compensated at an hourly wage they would all agree on. Grace understood that this was Thaddeus’s way of apologizing for sending Hat up that tree with a fist full of live wires, but the extravagance of the reparation seemed ludicrous to her. I can be like Tolstoy without having to write War and Peace, he’d said, trying to joke his way through, but the two of them had fought bitterly over it for days, until Grace finally gave up.

  As dinner was served, Thaddeus worried that what they were serving might strike their guests as somehow stingy. A T-bone steak on every plate floating merrily in a pool of its own succulence would say “we’ve spared no expense” in a way that linguini in a primavera sauce simply would not. Would their guests understand that zucchini this small and tender in the dead of winter was a luxury item, the Parmesan cheese came from Thaddeus’s favorite shop on Carmine Street down in New York, and that the two bottles of Barolo cost over a hundred dollars each?

  Even the nursing mothers were more interested in the wine than the food. Jennings swirled it around his glass before every sip, frowning at how good it tasted. Ah, the things that money could buy!

  Hat pushed his chair a little farther out so he might stretch his legs, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “Don’t go to sleep on us now, Hat,” Thaddeus said. “I’ve got something I need to talk over with you. We both do.”

  They had drunk their first glasses of Barolo without a toast, but after Thaddeus refilled the glasses Jennings lifted his glass. “To friendships,” he said, moving his gaze around the table—but seeming to skip Thaddeus.

  “To friendships!” they concurred, especially Thaddeus, his voice rising.

  “And success, and the good things in life,” Jennings continued. He was looking directly at Grace now, his gaze calm and unswerving, as if he were observing her through a two-way mirror.

  Grace’s hand went to her throat, and stayed there.

  “Jennings here is looking to go into some kind of business,” Hat said. He seemed basically to be talking to himself, though rather loudly. “But he finds himself hoisted on what we call his own petard. Tricky asking a loan officer at Leyden National for funds when you have either kicked his rear in high school or had unlawful carnal knowledge of his wife.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Jennings said, though he did not sound particularly upset.

  Thaddeus noticed Grace giving Jennings a long, appraising look, and finally nodding her head.

  “To our children,” Muriel said, raising her glass higher.

  “Yes, the children,” said Grace. “Wouldn’t it be something if they actually turned out to be . . . you know: really close?”

  “I think we can clear Buddy’s plate,” Thaddeus said. “I heard him leave.”

  “Good,” said Grace. It hung there for a moment, and she added, “I mean that Laura didn’t have to deal with him.”

  “I didn’t even know you and Laura were such old friends,” Muriel said to Jennings. She ran her fingertip along the rim of her glass, as if this might create an impression of nonchalance.

  “Beaucoup casual,” Jennings said. “We ran with the same pack.”

  “Did you now?” Muriel said, making it sound vaguely lewd. “Oh forget it,” she said, and with an angry wave got up to fetch her baby, but Jewel was sleeping peacefully next to David, and Muriel returned to her seat empty-handed. She drained nearly all the wine in her glass in a long furious gulp, and longed to be back in Bakersfield, back in her slanted room with the plywood floor, her too soft little bed with one leg propped up on a compensatory brick, her poster of Nadia Comaneci, who her father called the Little Red Dwarf. As many times as he tore the thing off Muriel’s wall, Muriel smoothed it out and retaped it in exactly the same spot. Something about the little gymnast moved her, even though uneven bars and balance beams were as foreign to Muriel as humidors or hockey sticks.

  “What do you hate worse?” Thaddeus asked everyone. “The seventies or the eighties?”

  “We haven’t had the eighties yet,” Grace said. “Isn’t it too early to start hating them?”

  “It’s always good to get an early start,” Thaddeus said. He seemed to be focusing mainly on Muriel. He refilled her glass, and his own, and it was only then that he took care of Grace and Jennings. “We were lucky to get out of the seventies,” he said.

  “For most people the labels we give the different decades don’t have anything to do with their lives,” Jennings said. “Everyone talks about the sixties like the whole country was wearing beads an
d going on peace marches, but most people were just working their tails off trying to put bread on the table, just like the year before and the year before that.”

  “The seventies, though, man, the seventies,” Thaddeus said, shaking his head. “They were so fucked up. Horrible. I don’t know about up here, but New York was ridiculous. Shootings, stabbings, the city completely broke. Empty stores, boarded-up buildings, piles of garbage fifty feet high. And the homeless wandering around like people after a plane crash. Then they call this the me decade? Who the fuck is ‘me’?”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” Jennings said. “To me it’s the them decade. I guess all of them.”

  “We’re having one of those dinner parties in which the men do all the talking,” Grace said.

  “Okay with me,” Muriel said, laughing. “This is the best wine in the world.”

  “Did you ever hear about Nero’s Fiddle out there in Bakersfield?” Thaddeus asked her.

  “Thaddeus,” Grace said.

  Muriel looked at him keenly. “The restaurant where everyone has to take off their clothes?”

  “It wasn’t a restaurant,” Thaddeus said. “Though they did have food. Horrible, disgusting food.”

  “Time to change the subject,” Grace said, with a false lilt.

  “I’m just saying it’s not a restaurant,” Thaddeus said. “I think it’s important to establish that, at least.”

  “There was nothing like that in Bakersfield,” Muriel said. “A lot of titty bars, though.” Her expression was placid, as if topless bars were no more notable than taco stands.

  “Men who cannot keep their peckers in their pockets, that’s the story of Africa,” Hat said. “I guess I’ll try that wine after all,” he added.

  Jennings knew full well that Nero’s Fiddle was a swingers’ club, where people went at it in twos threes fours fives and sixes squirming like maggots on wall-to-wall mattresses. Buddy Klein had told him all about it. Jennings studied the look on Grace’s face and knowledge plunked like a stone in a well—she and Thaddeus had gone to Nero’s Fiddle. He felt a mixture of satisfaction and revulsion.