“Do you love me more than David and John?” he had asked, pursuing the line of questioning even though he was afraid, even though he knew it would soon irritate his mother. “I’ve never had any favorites. I love all my children the same,” she replied, a note of impatience edging her voice. She had returned to the cupboards. “You know,” she said, turning to look at him, “Dr. Scanlon told me the day you were born that you’d be a great comfort to me when the other boys were grown up”—the other boys were grown up, and Tommy did not feel that he was being a comfort to his mother now—“and now look at you!”
“Do you love Daddy?” Tommy persisted. “Of course I love Daddy,” his mother replied. She was really exasperated now. “He’s my husband! He’s your father! Now Tommy, stop being a pest.” But Tommy, unable to resist, asked, “Who do you love more, me or Daddy?”
“I love you both,” his mother said, softening a little. “It’s a different kind of love, that’s all. When you get older, you’ll learn that love is a lot more complicated than it seems, my darling. A lot more complicated. It’s not at all simple.”
It seemed simple to Tommy. Love was love, he thought, and that was that, the only difference being that you loved some people more than others. How could there be different kinds of love? He loved his mother; he wasn’t so sure about his father. He wasn’t really sure his father loved him. His father used to love him, though—his mother had said so, how much his father had loved him when he was a baby. Tommy had heard his Aunt Elizabeth say, “Mac adores children until they’re old enough to talk—then they talk back.” Tommy thought of the photograph of his father holding him in his arms on the dock at the Island. Tommy was a baby then. He still had the blond curls his mother liked so much. Tommy was looking straight into the camera, his hands outstretched, and his father was looking at him with an expression of mild amusement or maybe puzzlement on his face, as if he might be about to correct him, or tell him something. Tommy wondered what his father was thinking in that photograph, and what he was thinking, too.
Tommy loved his brother John, although not so much as his mother, of course. He definitely did not love David, and the feeling was mutual. You were supposed to love your neighbor, and Tommy did love Mrs. Slade—he certainly liked going to her house, anyway—but he didn’t think his mother loved her. That, too, was a different kind of love, his mother had explained, when he had once tricked her into agreeing that yes, she did love her neighbor, and therefore forced her to say that she loved Mrs. Slade, though he knew she didn’t. Mrs. Slade had never even been in their house.
Tommy wanted to ask his mother if she loved his father more than she had loved her own mother, but he didn’t. His mother was being nice now, and he was afraid that if he kept this up she would threaten him with the Ping-Pong paddle that lay all too accessible in the next room. Anyway, he knew, if he asked about his grandmother Bigelow, what she would say: that she was a wonderful woman or a truly fine woman; that there was not another woman like her; or that she was a good mother and sacrificed for her children; or that she had an aristocratic nose, and a whole lot of other things besides, none of them, Tommy thought, very interesting. And none of them would answer the question. But regardless of which of his grandmother Bigelow’s virtues she mentioned, his mother would invariably add that she’d treated her mother with respect. His mother always said that. “I never once talked back to her. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. No, I never talked to my mother the way you talked to me.” True, sometimes Tommy did not talk very nicely to his mother, and he could torment her with questions. She was a nice mother. Maybe, Tommy thought, he should stop acting like the brat he knew he was being, the brat Madge McGhee referred to when she asked David, “Where can we stow the brat?” There was no doubt Tommy could be really awful, really mean, when he put his mind to it, and usually he didn’t have to work very hard at it, either. Sometimes he just wanted to be bad; sometimes he didn’t know what he wanted. He wasn’t even sure he wanted answers to the questions he kept asking, so much as he was curious to see how his mother would react to them. Maybe his questions were unanswerable. He didn’t get answers, in any case. He didn’t get the Ping-Pong paddle either, not that day. Tommy’s mother gave him a little squeeze around the shoulder instead, and told him, “You’re the apple of my eye, the apple of your mother’s eye. Oh, you were such a sweet child! What happened to that child?” his mother asked him. She gave him a big hug. “Let’s bring him back. I want him back. I want that cunning baby in the sweet dresses I sewed until my fingers bled from the needle. I thought I’d go blind, all those fine stitches! I even put lace on your little slips.” She looked into the distance. “My eyes were better then,” she added, kissing him and walking him out of the kitchen. “I think you need a nap. You look tired.” Tommy thought it was more likely his mother who was tired; he certainly wasn’t.
Oh, there were times when Tommy did hate, even though he knew it was a terrible thing, and sometimes he wondered if he didn’t hate too much, if he sometimes secretly hated his own mother, and his father, too. But of course he didn’t really, and he’d better not, either, or they might hate him, and then where would he be? Sometimes he just wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing. He joined in the end of the hymn:
Gather Thou Thy people in,
Free from sorrow, free from sin...
Come, with all Thine angels, come,
Raise the glorious harvest-home.
Mrs. Steer, gazing at the feast, asked of no one in particular, “You’d hardly believe there was a Depression raging outside, would you?” Mrs. Steer mentioned the Depression a lot—it had changed her life—but she said President Roosevelt was getting us out of it, while his father said the President just made it worse. That was a boring argument, and Tommy hoped it wouldn’t come up today. There was one good thing about eating at his own small table: he didn’t have to listen to the arguments. But Mrs. Steer was right. Looking at that dining room with its oak wainscoting, the plate rail that held his grandmother Bigelow’s fancy plates with latticed borders—what was left of the Hopkins china that matched the platters and the tureen—the silver, his grandmother MacAllister’s china and the damask cloths gleaming in the pale thin light of the November afternoon, all the food on the table...well, you wouldn’t know there were poor people outside. They were hoboes, and they lived in Hobo Jungle just beyond the railroad station in shacks hammered together from tarpaper and scraps of wood and metal, and they kept warm over open fires. Sometimes they came to the door, usually to the back door, asking for a meal. Once when Tommy’s mother wasn’t home his father had brought two of them right in the front door, through the house and into the kitchen where they sat down at the kitchen table while his father made peanut butter sandwiches for them. Tommy really liked peanut butter; so did they. That was the only time Tommy had seen his father make anything in the kitchen, even a sandwich, though he did sometimes cut a piece of cheese that he put on a cracker. When his mother was home, she had the tramps sit on the back porch while she or Rose gave them something to eat. Sometimes they were Rose’s friends, Indians, and his mother thought they looked awfully rough. Sometimes they did, too. Bill used to come regularly, to meet Rose and to get something to eat. Bill was all right—he was her husband—but some of the other Indians frightened his mother, and she told Rose that if another man was going to meet her, he should wait for her at the corner and not at the house.
But not all the poor people were strangers. There was his mother’s sister Louise, who lived on the farm and didn’t even have electricity or running water, and there was his father’s brother Archibald, who kept moving from apartment to apartment with Pat, his wife. Tommy supposed that Archie was not so poor now that his grandmother was dead. Not that Tommy’s grandmother was rich; “comfortable” was how his mother described her situation. She had been comfortable. Tommy figured that was something like well-to-do but not quite. Nice people didn’t talk about money because it might embarrass people who didn’t have as mu
ch and hurt their feelings. That was why he was punished when he gave a nickel to the street sweeper. It might have embarrassed him, and you were supposed to be nice to poor people but you didn’t want to make them feel bad.
Louise and her husband, Arthur, and Archie and Pat weren’t coming for Thanksgiving dinner. Tommy’s mother told him she didn’t think they’d feel comfortable, and probably they wouldn’t; they never seemed much at ease when they visited Tommy’s house, which wasn’t very often. So Tommy and his father had taken a turkey and a carton of Lucky Strikes to Archie and Pat, and some whisky to Louise and Arthur, the weekend before Thanksgiving. They hadn’t taken Louise and Arthur a turkey because they raised them on the farm, and chickens and cows, too. Tommy didn’t know why they didn’t take any whisky to Archie and Pat, but he guessed it was because his father thought they bought enough of it on their own. Tommy had never been in any of Archie’s apartments—usually he stayed in the car with his mother while his father went inside—but this time his father insisted he come in with him. “I want you to see how you never want to live,” he had said. His father hadn’t smiled. Tommy wondered if he were angry; sometimes it was hard to tell. Archie and Pat’s apartment was very small—just a kitchen and a living room, both with linoleum on the floors, and a tiny, dark bedroom. The place had a peculiar smell. It wasn’t very neat; there were a lot of newspapers stacked around, and dirty dishes in the sink. Tommy knew his father thought that was no way to keep a house. Tommy liked Pat, though, even if she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. He could tell she wanted to be friendly. He liked her better than Louise. Louise seemed goofy, and she had a high-pitched nasal voice that grated in his ears. He didn’t feel comfortable around Archie, who was fat and didn’t talk much. Tommy never knew what to say to him. Tommy’s father took Archie into the kitchen, and Tommy saw him pass Archie some bills. He did it quickly, as if he didn’t want it to be noticed. Probably he didn’t want to embarrass him. Then Archie asked his father if he’d like a drink, but his father said no, it was too early. Tommy’s father also gave Arthur some money when he was talking to him in their kitchen, and Arthur let Tommy stand on a stool and work the pump to make water splash into the sink. The pump had to be primed. Tommy’s father seemed to like Arthur, probably because Arthur was a farmer and his father liked farms. When they left, Arthur thanked his father for the money and also for the whisky; he didn’t seem at all embarrassed. Neither did Archie.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Tommy and his mother had fixed a box for the poor people. His mother called it a basket but it was really a cardboard box. They had filled it to overflowing with sacks of flour and sugar, cans of pumpkin and squash, sweet potatoes, apples and nuts, and some of their old winter clothes that she was getting rid of, and they had left it at the church. They were all good, nourishing things, his mother had said, but their own Thanksgiving dinner looked a lot better to Tommy. The big dining table seemed to hold every candlestick in the house, and every dish, too, filled with acorn squash and potatoes, both mashed and sweet, extra dishes of stuffing, green beans, boats of gravy, glass dishes with green and black stuffed olives, pickles and celery and carrot sticks, cranberry sauce that his mother had made herself, hot rolls and butter, and of course the turkey on its big platter, flanked by two smaller, matching platters, empty now but that would be used for serving the meat of the great bird and the stuffing from its cavity. In the center, small squashes, a pumpkin, Indian corn, nuts in their shells, apples and grapes and other fruit overflowed and surrounded the china soup tureen with the handles that looked like living squirrels. You lifted the tureen by the squirrels’ tails and the lid by an acorn, though Tommy was never allowed to because it was precious. The tureen matched the platters and the dishes on the plate rail. Usually the tureen sat on the sideboard, but the sideboard was filled now too, with plates for salad and for the fragrant pies—mincemeat and pumpkin and apple—that would be served later with the Canadian cheese his father liked so much but that Tommy had never eaten since his Uncle Christian told him it got its flavor from being buried in a manure pile. Tommy didn’t know how that cured the cheese, but it instantly cured him from eating it. There was a smaller centerpiece on the children’s table, and more candles, although the dinner plates were not the same. There wasn’t enough of his grandmother MacAllister’s china with the deep red borders edged with gold, so the children got the plain white plates with the gold bands. Tommy’s mother called it the wedding-band china. It was Japanese and not so good as his grandmother’s. Oh, the whole room sparkled with china and silver and glass and the flames from the candles, and steamed with delicious smells. Yes, Mrs. Steer was right. Tommy wished that she instead of Emily Sedgwick were sitting at the children’s table; Emily could be fun but Mrs. Steer was more interesting. His cousin Julie would like her Pi Phi pin, though.
All the guests had found their places now, grace was said, and they were sitting down, beginning to unfold their napkins and put them in their laps. The grown-ups behaved just as Tommy had been taught to do, and none of them put his elbows on the table, either. Tommy’s father stood at the head of the table, his back toward the big bay window that looked toward the Slades’, and picked up the bigger of the two carving knives, giving it a few sure, swift strokes against the steel. The blade glinted as he sharpened it, and the sound of steel striking steel gave Tommy a chill. Spearing the turkey with a long fork, his father began to carve, deftly, expertly, laying slice after slice on the serving platters that Rose and Ruth began to pass among the guests. From another platter Emily served the children, who all wanted the breast.
Tommy looked beyond his table and the big table with the adults all laughing and talking, and gazed out the bay window onto the tangled, leafless branches of the thornapple and chokecherry thicket that grew between their house and the Slades’. There had been a cold snap, and there was already a dusting of snow lying in thin patches on the dry, frozen ground. There was no life there. The squirrels and chipmunks had already retreated into their snug houses in the trees for the winter; only the squirrels on the tureen, the animal heads on the platters and on the latticed plates on the plate rail still seemed strangely alive, Tommy thought, their porcelain eyes gazing softly out from beneath the glaze. Tommy almost expected them to move or to speak; maybe—he smiled—to cry out with alarm at the slaughter taking place below them. When he ran his hands over them, as he did standing on the sideboard sometimes if no one was looking, he was always surprised that he felt only cold porcelain instead of warm fur. Soon everyone was chewing away at the meat under the mild eyes of the rabbits and the hares, the stags and the does and the wild creatures whose names Tommy did not know, those animals that gazed down at them from their places on the plate rail that bordered the room.
3
THAT NIGHT, lying in his bed with the sound of Steve’s shallow breathing coming from his small solid body in the cot nearby, the words and music of the hymn kept sounding in Tommy’s head. “Ere the winter storms begin.” The winter storms, Tommy thought, had already begun. The leaves had long since fallen, and the northwest winds spattered snow across the river. The days were short and dark; it was barely light in the morning when he went to school. It seemed as if he had been in his winter underwear for a long time. The underwear was flannel, prickly and one-piece. It buttoned down the front and had short sleeves and baggy legs that came halfway down his thighs. It was just barely shorter than his pants. In the winter he had to wear long brown ribbed stockings held up by garters that were suspended from his shoulders. He felt as if he were in harness, and he didn’t like it. The farm boys who rode the school bus might have smelled bad, but at least they got to wear long trousers.
Margie Slade’s father died the day of the first big snowstorm, just a few days after Thanksgiving. Margie was in her last year of high school, and David had begun to see a lot of her again. That was the day Tommy had gone to school in his snowsuit—the farm boys didn’t have to wear snowsuits, either, but boots and mackinaws—and hu
rriedly pulling off his snow pants in the cloakroom, he accidentally pulled his trousers down with them, to the gleeful shrieks of the other children. There he stood, in astonished crimson embarrassment, his skinny self revealed in garters and harness and underwear, but he could see the humor in it and he laughed, or pretended to, and quickly pulled up his pants. It wasn’t their seeing him in his underwear that bothered him so much as the ridiculous garters and harness. Short pants were all right in the summer, when he could wear short socks, but they were terrible in winter, when he had to wear high shoes, too, instead of the oxfords he liked. That he had to wear garters to hold up the stockings he had to wear because he couldn’t do the sensible thing and wear long pants, thus making it necessary to wear a snowsuit, too—well, that was the final humiliation. Who made these rules, Tommy sometimes asked himself, and why? What was the sense? There was no satisfactory answer.
Margie Slade could do anything she felt like. Margie wore her mother’s fur coat, if she wanted to, and sometimes her diamond bracelet as well, just as if it were an ordinary piece of jewelry. She even wore them to high school, if she felt like it. Her mother had died a couple of years before, and now they were hers, and if she wanted to wear them, she did. Emily Sedgwick wore a fur coat when she was very dressed up, but she certainly didn’t wear a diamond bracelet, and she was in college. Emily might wear her Add-a-Pearl necklace. She was very proud of it. All the pearls were real, and they had all been added. But Margie had a pearl necklace, too. She also had a gold ankle bracelet with her initials on it. “My mother wouldn’t allow me to wear an ankle bracelet,” Emily once told Tommy’s mother, “but I think it does look nice on Margie. She’s big enough to wear it.” Sometimes Margie even wore two or three on the same leg. Tommy’s father acted as if he didn’t notice. But Margie didn’t have a mother to tell her what she couldn’t wear, and her father had loved her so much he let her do anything.
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