by Belva Plain
“He died a few months ago. He had cystic fibrosis.”
“My God.”
Two of them, she thought, and suddenly saw again the face in the photograph that Ralph Mackenzie had shown to her, the wistful face of Timmy’s brother. Those Crawfields—had they done the best for him, for her poor child? And yet, here stood Tom, more hers, really, than that other who was unknown. She was torn, riven in half.
“You must never let Timmy know what he died of, Tom. We must think of something else. A ruptured appendix, that’s it. That’s what he died of.”
“Who are these Crawfields, anyway?”
“I only know what the lawyers told us. Mr. Fordyce has talked to theirs, who of all people happens to be Ralph Mackenzie, and he says they are very respectable people. They own that department store across from the capitol where we bought your raincoat last year after you lost yours.” She hesitated. “I understand they have another child, a girl about seventeen.” Hesitating again, she then plunged forward. “They are Jewish, Tom.”
He was electrified. It seemed to Laura that his nerves had jumped, first with astonishment, and next with outrage. Then he did a strange thing: He ran to the mirror that hung above the mantel to switch on a light and stare at himself.
“Me,” he whispered. “Me. It isn’t possible.” He whirled upon Laura. “Look at me. Look. Do I look like one of them? Do I?”
She said gently, “They come in all sizes and shapes, the same as Protestants or Catholics. And none of them wears horns.”
“Don’t try to appease me. There’s nothing you can say. I hate myself. I ought to put a noose around my neck and hang myself in the backyard. I despise myself,” he shouted. “Why the hell don’t I drop dead right now?”
“Don’t say that. Oh darling, please, we want you alive.”
But he had already raced out of the room. She heard him clattering up the stairs.
A moment later Bud came in holding a glass. “Brandy,” he said. “I needed it. You’ve told him.”
“Yes. Somebody had to do it.”
He apologized. “I know I should have been here, too. But Laura, it’s as if somebody had used a hammer on my brain.”
He had gone white, a sickly green-white. It came to her that he might faint, or even have a heart attack.
“You know, I’m pretty tough. I can take a lot on my shoulders, but this is the worst. I’m ashamed to be falling apart while you’re holding together.”
“Holding together.” When there was such a drumming in her head … And she had a wild thought: Am I possibly imagining things?
“Crawfield! God, what bitter medicine. Our Tom. A Jewish department store. God!”
In the yard Earl was barking a shrill welcome, which meant that Timmy had come back.
“Let’s go upstairs and close our door,” Bud said. “I don’t want him to see me this way.”
The late afternoon sun streamed into the bedroom. From the windows they watched Timmy put the bicycle in the shed, hug Earl, and walk toward the back door. He looked so small. He looked so vulnerable. And now he would have to know that his beloved brother, his hero, his model (I look just like Tom, don’t I?) was not his brother.
They were both waiting, deliberating whether it was better to go in to Tom’s room or to let him alone, when the bedroom door, which no one ever entered without knocking, burst open and Tim shouted, “Dad! Mom! I went to Tom’s room, and he told me. He’s crying so—”
Tom sobbed and punched the pillow. “Oh Mom, oh Dad, I want to die.” His face contorted when Laura went to him. “But you’re not my dad, not my mother.”
She sat down on the bed and cradled his head. “We brought you to this house when you were three days old and cared for you. We love you. Just suppose you had been adopted. There’s nothing awful about that, is there?”
“That’s different. That’s entirely different. These people didn’t give me up for adoption. Now they’ll want to see me. And I can’t, I won’t—”
Bud, forlorn at the foot of the bed, and Timmy, teary and openmouthed, stood silently. And Laura, still stroking Tom’s head, asked, “Would you like to see Dr. Foster? Perhaps a talk with him will help you.”
“No,” Tom said bitterly, “with all respect to our minister, I don’t need him. I can tell you right now what he’ll say: ‘God tests you. He never gives you any trouble too heavy for you to bear. You’ll come out of this ordeal stronger and better than ever—’ Bah! No, I don’t want him. I don’t want anybody.”
Nevertheless, when they left Tom’s room, they telephoned Dr. Downs, who never made house calls but probably would make an exception for this extraordinary situation, and could certainly be trusted to let no word about it slip.
Alone with Tom, he spent an hour and a half upstairs, while downstairs Laura tried to fix a little supper, which neither one wanted, for Bud and Timmy.
“I’ve given him a very mild sedative, enough to take the edge off his grief,” the doctor reported. “He’ll be all right, I’m confident. He’s young and resilient. And then he added, “Poor boy. He has some image of how a ‘real man’ mustn’t let his emotions show. He’s embarrassed because he broke down. I tried to set him straight about that. I told him, when I was in Vietnam I saw many a brave man cry.”
* * *
There was no refreshment, no sweet relief in sleep that night. Laura was tossed from one dream of frustration to another. With all her power, she ran from a pursuer and was yet unable to advance a step. She arrived at an airport without her ticket, raced home to ransack the house and could not find it. Late! Too late, she cried, and woke up to the awareness of Bud in a brandied sleep beside her and of Tom in his room alone. She had to make sure nothing had happened to Tom.
At his bedside she stood looking down at where he lay in a dim beam of light that came from the hall. It was queer to think that she had been angry at him only two days before. Her love for him was a knot in her chest, an ache that flowed through her flesh.
“Mom? I’m not asleep,” he whispered. “Mom? Will they want me to leave this house?” He spoke quietly, and she was grateful that the sedative had taken hold. “I’m not going to leave you and Dad and Timmy. They can’t make me.”
She reassured him. “There’s no question of that. You’re over eighteen. You can do what you want.”
“Will I ever have to meet those people, though? I can’t do it.”
She considered the matter practically. Naturally, they would want to see Tom. Even if he refused, they would contrive to see him. In their position, who wouldn’t?
“You do owe them something,” she said. “You know how you feel, but imagine their feelings, too.”
“I don’t care about their feelings. I have nothing in common with them, anyway.”
“Because they’re Jews, you mean? Just that?”
“That’s enough.”
“Mr. Fordyce spoke to their lawyer and both agree that you really must meet.”
“I’m being tortured.”
“No, I’ll be with you. It won’t be unbearable. Hard, but not unbearable.”
“Well, in any case, I want Dad there, too.”
“I don’t know whether he’ll do that, Tom. He’s taking this harder than you are in some ways. He won’t admit that all this is true, and that worries me because ultimately he’ll have to admit it.”
“I just don’t want to meet those people,” Tom repeated. “I’m sure you don’t either.”
She surprised herself by her own response, which needed a minute to take shape.
“Well, mostly I don’t, yet in a certain sense I do. I’d like … I want to see what kind of home Peter had,” she said, and heard the crack in her own voice.
“They named him ‘Peter’?”
“Yes,” she replied, thinking that it must cross Tom’s mind that ‘Peter’ would have been his name if—
“Why?” Tom blurted. “It’s all past, finished, what difference does it make where he lived? You never knew him
.”
Laura’s chest was sore with pity. How could a boy of nineteen be expected to understand a person twice his age, a woman, a mother?
“Tom, Tommy—” she hadn’t called him “Tommy” in years—“this has nothing to do with my loving you so much that there are no words for it.”
He looked gravely back at her, nodded a little and said, “Mom, you won’t mind? I’d like to be by myself now.”
“Of course. We’ll talk some more tomorrow.”
* * *
Almost immediately, he telephoned Robbie. He thought he would start to howl if he couldn’t confide, couldn’t in some way impart his agony to a person who would understand it.
By her voice, he knew he had awakened her. “So late? What’s up, Tom?”
“Just needed to talk to you.” Then he knew this was a thing he couldn’t talk about over the telephone. For this he would have to be in a quiet room behind a closed door with her arms around him. “Can I see you tomorrow?”
“Tommy darling, I tried to reach you earlier tonight to tell you, but nobody answered your phone.”
True. They had all heard it ringing and had just let it ring.
“I wanted to tell you I’m going away till the first of next month.”
Tom’s heart sank. “Going away?”
“Yes. I’m so excited, wait till you hear! My chemistry professor reached me yesterday, he’d been trying to get me. I can hardly talk, it’s so wonderful.” She laughed. Her laugh always trilled up the scale. “There’s a three-week summer course up in Iowa someplace that’s supposed to be stupendous, some famous analytical chemist, you wouldn’t know the name, I didn’t, but anyway, Dr. Morgan says that there’s even a little stipend for traveling expenses—” Breathless in her joy, she bubbled, “He had recommended Joe Miles for it, but last Monday Joe’s father got sick and now he can’t go, so Morgan called me instead. Isn’t that fantastic?”
“It’s wonderful. I’m proud of you.” And he was proud. Beautiful and brainy she was. Analytical chemistry. He wished he was able to feel her enthusiasm right now.
“This will be great on my record. It should do a lot toward getting me some grant toward graduate school. With that and my waitress job I really do think I may make it.”
“Good luck, darling. I’m glad for you. Oh, but I’ll miss you.”
“It’s only for a few weeks. Are you okay, though? You sound dreary.”
“I am dreary without you.”
“Listen, get busy working for Jim. That’ll take your mind off things for the time being. He’s fighting hard. Did you read yesterday’s speech! He really trounced Mackenzie. It was great!”
So the talk moved on, and after a while the sheer flow of it began to soothe him. When she hung up, he felt more calm. There was such strength in Robbie! She would be back soon, and her love would strengthen him.
CHAPTER
11
We are all nerves, a collection of jitters, Margaret thought as, passing the hall mirror, she caught sight of her twitching lip.
The rest of them were sitting in the living room waiting, stiff as a congregation at a wedding or a funeral. Arthur, trying to read the morning paper, hadn’t gotten through the first page. Holly was doing a crossword puzzle at the game table.
“Do sit down and calm yourself,” Arthur said, looking up.
“I’m quite calm. You’d be surprised how calm I am,” Margaret replied.
“I would be surprised. You haven’t stopped for breath. Leave those flowers where they are, they’ll do perfectly well,” he said, for Margaret had shears in her hand to cut fresh marigolds from the garden.
She laid the shears down. “It’s only that I want things to look right. The boy—Tom—” She stopped as the control that had kept her going ever since this meeting had been arranged began to wane.
And uncertain what to do with herself, she surveyed the room, from the circular sofas to the splashing primal colors of the abstract paintings, to the subdued mosaic of book bindings on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Everything that could be dusted, polished, or vacuumed had been cared for.
Her thoughts went somersaulting. “Ralph says their house is lovely, very old and full of antiques. He says the Paiges, her side, have been here since before the Revolution. It must be good to be rooted like that in a place where your people before you have always lived.”
Arthur said quietly, “ ‘Before the Revolution’ is a little over two hundred years ago. My grandparents lived in Germany in the same town since the expulsion from Spain in 1492.”
“I wouldn’t need to go back that far. I meant a place like those Confederate-style houses with high ceilings and double staircases.”
“The Confederate past is not yours. Be happy with this brand-new house.”
“Arthur, I am happy with it. I only meant—”
She closed her lips. They all were on the thin edge, ready to be pushed over. Now her gaze shifted to the dining room table, which was visible across the hall.
Arthur, following her gaze, assured her, “There’s enough food for twenty, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I know, but the drive is over a hundred miles, and they must have left early. They’ll be hungry.”
But maybe they wouldn’t. After all, she knew nothing about them, about Tom or—or his mother. And again her mind went somersaulting. If I can get through this, I guess I can get through anything, she thought, bringing her mind back to rest. Think of the lunch: chicken salad, fruit, her mother’s almond cookies …
“She sounded very nice on the telephone,” she said, although she had already told the whole family ten times over about that call. “I would gladly have gone there, but I could see she preferred it this way. Her husband is very upset, she said.”
“Upset!” Arthur grumbled. “Ralph finally got himself to admit the truth. Rice is in a fury because we’re Jews.”
“I know. So he’s not coming. It’ll be just she and the boy.”
Margaret looked at her husband. Pain struggled on his face; she supposed it must be struggling on her own, too.
Holly, hearing the name, looked up from the puzzle. “And he’s supposed to be my brother,” she said. “A redneck bigot. My brother.” She was hot with outrage. “Can you believe it?”
“Holly, don’t,” Margaret warned.
“I can’t help it. I’m sorry. But the things I’ve heard about that group at state U are so horrendously awful, that—”
“That’ll do,” Arthur commanded. “It’s cruel to upset us any more than we already are. And don’t say ‘supposed to be.’ He is your brother, and as such we must accept him and love him.” His voice broke.
“All right, Dad. But all I can say is, this whole thing’s insane. It makes me feel disloyal to Peter. My brother was Peter, not this Tom person.”
“Holly, don’t,” Margaret said again.
Silence followed. The mantel clock, an antique with a man-in-the-moon on its face, gave a rattle and banged out the hour. Noon. They would be here any minute. And Margaret’s eyes roved, moving from Holly’s flute to Arthur’s history books, to the photograph of Peter, and last to the photograph of Tom that Laura Rice had so thoughtfully sent last week. It was still in its cardboard folder, not yet framed. Whenever she looked at it, her legs went weak and she had to sit down.
I must remember, she thought, that Laura Rice feels everything that I am feeling, all my loss and sorrow, all my fear and anger. Yet more: She has had two sick children, and one of them, the one she never knew, is dead. Now she will never know him, while I at least have a chance to know mine, I hope. She will ask about Peter, and I suppose I shall have to tell her all of it, the rectal prolapse when he was two, the pneumonia, all the crises, and the death. How am I going to do it?
Holly, who had gotten up to stand at the window with the curtain pushed aside, reported, “There’s a car coming slowly down the street as if they’re looking for the number.”
“Do get away from the win
dow,” Margaret admonished. “It’s rude to peer out like that.”
When the curtain fell, Holly peeked through the parting. “Yes, there they are. She’s driving. It’s a Mercedes. The husband didn’t come. They’re getting out of the car. They’re coming up the steps. She’s pretty, tall and blond. He—”
The doorbell rang.
They had left home shortly after nine o’clock, crawled through morning traffic, reached the highway, and were now headed eastward into the glare. Without explanation, Laura had taken the wheel; ordinarily, she gave Tom the macho pleasure of steering this fine car, but today she was too tense to be a passenger. She needed to concentrate on something, something other than their destination.
The red sun presaged a long heat wave. She had never thought in just this way of how one’s view of the natural world depends upon mood. On a day of happiness, this red sun would be like a circus balloon hanging in the sky, but today it was a burning coal, ominous and sullen.
Her heart went out to Tom, who had been silent all the way, staring at the depressing interstate and the approaching city as strip malls, ten-screen movie theaters, and factory outlets with their fashionable shoddy wares flashed by.
Soon came the outskirts of the city, heralded by new, multistoried office buildings, oblong glass boxes stood on end. They passed through the city, made a wrong turn and retraced the way, coming at last to a suburban quarter, it, too, so new that the trees were still saplings.
“We’re almost there,” Laura said. Her mouth was parched and her hands were clammy cold.
“We’re going to regret this, Mom. It’s a big mistake.”
“If it is, there’s nothing else we can do because we have no choice. You do understand that, Tom.”
“Dad made his choice.”
“Ah Tom,” she answered sadly, “poor Dad is only fooling himself. You can’t escape reality.” She slowed the car. “Here it is, number seventeen. Here’s our reality.”
It was all blurred, a fog through which he walked half blinded and half deafened; yet penetrating sights and sounds emerged, only to fade again into the blur. Tom had read Dreiser’s American Tragedy and had been stunned by the death house scenes in which a man doomed to the electric chair is yet aware of incidentals.
