Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  He had stood there with his briefcase, broad-shouldered in the old tweed jacket he went on wearing generously year after year and watery-eyed from tossing his cookies. “Maybe it’s the grease,” he had said.

  “You’re the one who wants your eggs fried in bacon grease,” she had reminded him. “But you threw them up scrambled and soft-boiled, too.”

  Then William had left, and there had seemed some incongruity in a man’s going to Washington, D.C., on a business trip for his high-powered company and yet throwing up his breakfast first, day after day, because his new job and his new boss made him nervous. While knowing how dependent she was on William, she believed she had a different strength; she knew she had more guts, because she’d hardly ever thrown up in her life, and then usually for the reason her mother taught her, which was when she’d drunk too much alcohol. Stick your finger down your throat, her mother advised. Recently, William had thrown up one night more terribly than anyone she had ever heard, after being invited by a stepmother he’d never seen to come for dinner in New York and collect some personal effects of his late father’s. These things turned out to be quite useless—an engraved, flat, silver cigarette case and diamond cuff links—causing Laurel to wonder at her austere mother-in-law once married to someone as debonair as William Powell. They came home, and William shut himself in the bathroom.

  All the time he was being sick, she prayed he might also vomit up all the mystery, pain, and loss, all the guilt, about never seeing again the father who left when William was four. She had determined, early on, she’d never take Rick away when he was small. How could she do it, even now, when William cared almost inordinately about his son? Whenever she thought how awful her parents had been, she was glad at least to have known where she came from.

  William had a last faceless memory of his father. Awakened in dampish Dr. Denton’s and brought into a room with subdued lamplight, he stood rubbing his eyes, with the rear flap of his sleepers hanging open. Privately, Laurel thought William had projected himself into a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post, but she had never said so and went on sharing with him that image of himself. William had been taught to say Ma-Ma and Pa-Pa in the French manner, with accent on the final a. She never mentioned that was a long way from Southern pronunciation: which was Momma and Poppa even when similarly spelled; most commonly people said Daddy, even into adulthood. She did not know any Southerners who called their parents Mom and Dad.

  “Dear,” his mother had said that evening, “your father and I are divorcing. That means we’re not going to live in the same house any longer. Please tell me now which of us you’d rather live with.”

  Understanding only that he wanted to go back to bed, he put his head into his mother’s lap, and the die was cast. For a child that age, it was a strange question. But Mrs. Perry was an artist in the grand sense of the word. “My mother the painting machine,” William called her. “It’s only by accident that she’s a person.” She was the only woman Laurel had ever known whose career was more important than anything else. But then, she had known few women who did anything besides keep house.

  His paternal grandmother had wanted William, and urgently, eagerly, Mrs. Perry would have turned him over at any time. But his father, having lost, refused ever to see William again. “What kind of man could he have been,” Laurel said once, “not to see his son. He must have been crazy.” Though he tried to agree, William was convinced there had been something wrong with him to have been so abandoned. As a father he invented the relationship between himself and Rick he’d dreamed of as a fatherless child. It was sometimes a little hard on Rick. Once Mrs. Perry confided to Laurel that after divorcing she realized she should never have married at all, and for a moment put her hands over her face. Laurel had wondered what she was thinking. She had been surprised to realize just how locked into convention and its pressures women always had been, for no one could be more intelligent, motivated, strong-willed than Mrs. Perry. Yet she had felt she had to marry and have a child.

  They had lived with his Aunt Grace, who spoke fluent French, and always, too, William had the feeling of living in someone else’s house, not his own. When she and William bought this second, larger house in the suburbs, where they planned to stay forever, he walked about, a little teary, saying at last he was home. Laurel’s eyes had prickled in sympathy, though his insecurity was essentially foreign to her, as she had always lived in her own true house. To think of an emotional man as a sissy was a stereotyped idea, she kept telling herself. But she had to go on fighting her feeling that most highly educated Eastern men she knew were somehow effeminate.

  That evening as William came from the bathroom, he blamed his being sick on his stepmother’s dinner. She said flatly, “Roast beef, boiled potatoes, and string beans? It wasn’t the dinner, it was seeing somebody connected to your father.” Then she added, “I’m not sick,” which meant nothing since her emotions did not affect her stomach but made her face break out. Once, after Rick’s birth, William confided he’d always been sorry she never had morning sickness. She asked, “Why, so you could have it vicariously?” and all he did was nod without shame.

  Last night she had made a gelatin salad and this morning, lifting waxed paper, she shook the mold tentatively. The salad seemed jelled, a success; she had only to dread the moment of turning it out onto a platter, praying it stayed whole. She had started the dishwasher, and its sounds made her temples ache. When she asked herself, What is wrong with me, a sinus headache? she knew she was lying. She had a hangover.

  Years ago, at the height of her own alcoholism, newly widowed, her mother had said, “If you get past the first drink in the morning, you’re all right for the day.” But Laurel never got up thinking of a hair of the dog. She had heard secondhand about things that happened in those years her mother lived as a widow in Delton, drinking, before she moved east. She knew how fractured her life had been because of her parents’ behavior, the years when so little attention was paid to children growing up.

  Laurel considered what she had read on the subject. Was alcoholism inherited? Or had her own liking to drink come from her initiation in Delton—in the days of brown bagging? Confronting her own tendency, Laurel gave her mother credit. She came once to babysit with Rick when she had been drinking, and William announced, “Kate, we love you. But if you come around Rick anymore when you’ve been drinking, you’ll never see your grandson again.” She admired William, but admired her mother more. Hers was the harder part. Her mother quit drinking cold turkey, those years ago.

  Married to William, Laurel felt that her hardest times were living in a New York brownstone until Rick was two years old. Nothing in her life as a Southerner had prepared her for such an existence. All day, she was alone with a baby in a fourth-floor walk-up; she looked from a bay window to a sliver of Hudson River, her one contact with nature except for treks to the park along Riverside Drive, where she sat among strangers. Mostly, these other mothers were native New Yorkers with whom she had nothing in common, whom she understood no better than shopkeepers on upper Broadway, rude in a way no one in the South was ever rude. She began realizing what she had left behind, a circle of girlfriends having their babies together and ever-present black help even on a young married’s low income. She had well understood ghetto mothers throwing their babies off rooftops and down air shafts. Despairing, she once dosed Rick with paregoric to make him sleep, needing respite. Then, panicked, she threw the bottle away, not to be tempted again.

  It was back then she began talking so affectionately about the South, this place she eagerly left, until William was forced to say, “I didn’t bring you east, Sister. I found you here.” She could only accept his words in silence while considering two things—that “Sister” was not a particularly endearing way to address one’s wife, and couldn’t he have said, instead, Here is where I fell in love with you? All right, Buster, she had always wanted to reply. But she did not want Rick to hear the anger and arguments she grew up knowi
ng, so Laurel was silent.

  In their dating days, back in Greenwich Village, William commented then that she could drink him under the table—all that bourbon and branch water she’d taken for granted. She had explained people she knew drank like that in the South; there wasn’t much else to do in her part of the country. She had added, “I had an Irishman to teach me,” and told him about Kevin Shea—a boy William would thereafter refer to as the double Irishman and sometimes, rather piercingly, as her first husband. “My parents had it annulled,” she would say. “It doesn’t really count.” Several teenage couples that summer, after graduating from high school, went to a justice of the peace in Mississippi, beyond Delton’s city limits. It was something to do, I suppose; she had shrugged, telling the story. Nobody had expected to settle down in a vine-covered cottage, or at least she hadn’t. She never knew what Kevin had in mind, for by the time she went off and got married to him, she half perceived that he was stupid as hell. “Why would you go through with it then?” William asked, who that summer had been a virgin camp counselor in Maine lusting after the somehow nubile mothers of his campers. Now at her New England window, Laurel remembered touching Kevin’s high school fraternity pin dangling over her bosom—they’d been going steady for two years—and telling him she wanted to change her mind. Wildly, in his manner, he drove into a weedy ditch bank and told her he’d leave her. The thought had been so terrifying she’d gone ahead down the highway and faced the old man with tobacco juice on his galluses. Since she cried during the ceremony, the justice thought she was a trembling, happy bride, but she knew better.

  William, on that date in the village, had said his mother strongly disapproved of alcohol. She would not let him drink a soda after dinner, afraid he’d get used to something fizzy at night. Then he told her about his mother’s accomplishments and about his Aunt Grace, who was a landscape architect ahead of her time. He told of an uncle who wrote tomes about naval history and of one who died an untimely death just after being appointed to the Supreme Court. She listened to him mention lawn bowling at the family seaside summer place—lawn bowling? Without asking, she quickly imagined what it must be. And there was Roque, a complicated croquet, William added. Oh, yes; she nodded affably. Every evening at bedtime, his mother read him Dickens.… Laurel lost track of his words, wondering where she might have been if she’d had parents who had heard of Dickens. She only told William she spent childhood summers at her maternal grandmother’s in Mississippi, forty-five miles from Delton, and had loved it there, without saying her grandmother kept a cache of Garrett snuff in her closet, or that she had uncles who were what her father called dirt farmers; William got a kick, like everyone else, out of the fact her father sold dynamite—that’s a blast, Rick had said.

  The enormous differences in their backgrounds had not been insurmountable, and the problems she and William had they would have brought to any marriage. What seemed important was how they reacted to each other’s insecurities.

  In this different milieu to which she’d brought herself, unlike her original one, she’d learned iceberg lettuce was considered fit only for rabbits, and despondently she washed the head bought yesterday. Ennui filled her at the idea of having to pat dry all those cupped leaves on the counter. There were patches of snow, still, under forsythia bushes only beginning to flower, while in Delton spring’s full flowering was almost over and summer nearly begun. When she thought of the place, she smelled sweet scents, warm earth, as if April were there perpetually.

  Usually, she did not telephone anyone in the morning because of her working schedule, but this morning was different: the book group was coming, and with an incipient hangover she could not think. She decided to phone her mother, to break up her mother’s routine of silence in the morning. Laurel pictured her watering the geranium in the kitchen while her solitary egg boiled. The radio would be on for company. A puff of breath sounded against the mouthpiece when her mother answered, and then she coughed several times. A smoke ring would be in the air, Laurel thought. Living alone, her mother said her voice grew husky from not being used. Sometimes she phoned Information, making up a name, just to use her vocal cords. Laurel hoped without hope her mother would ask her something important, like, How’s your novel coming? rather than always asking what she was having for dinner, what train William was taking, or what she was going to do with a bloodhound. Too frequently, her mother’s conversation held dire hints that things would go wrong. In turn, Laurel wished she might confide something close to her heart or on her mind.

  I’m dying for a cock between my legs.

  Suppose she just blurted that out, she thought; though since she was forty-one and married, she guessed her mother assumed a cock was available. However, she was certain that if she mentioned sex, her mother would reply, “Ugh.”

  “Mother, what’s a surefire way of turning out an aspic ring?” She spoke with a happy, ringing voice to indicate her mother was a necessity in her life.

  “Don’t talk so loud, I’m not deaf,” Mrs. Wynn said. Then she said, “There’s not any way.”

  “Mother, I remember something you used to do.”

  “Nope. Put a hot dishtowel over the bottom.”

  Laurel closed her eyes, telling herself she ought to be used to these non sequiturs.

  “William take his umbrella? It’s raining in Washington.”

  “Yes,” Laurel lied, to spare herself conversation about how she and William ought to look at television more so they’d know the weather.

  “At least, with him gone, you get a rest from cooking those two damn dinners every night, Rick’s and then yours. I don’t know how you’ve stood it. You’ve cooked more than I ever did in my entire life.”

  She wished to say, You didn’t do any housework, Mother, because you lived in the South, but that would leave her open to the remark that she hadn’t had to leave home.

  “Your bourbon and lettuce leaf club coming?”

  Laurel thought she answered in a level voice, but Buff flickered pretty eyelashes her way. “My book group,” she said between her teeth, though what right had she to feel this way? Because wasn’t her mother maddeningly right, as usual? She had an uncanny habit of speaking to the truth of matters she knew little about, and this month Laurel had not even bothered to get the selected book.

  William, in his infectious jovial manner, laughed about Mrs. Wynn’s common sense, and she would say, “You mean I’m country.” “Not at all,” he would cry truthfully, and jolly her back to a good humor; he and her mother were uncommonly close. Mrs. Wynn had been moved to remark, “I feel sorry for William. I feel I’m the only mother he’s ever had,” and he would tell anybody, “What do you think of a guy having a mother-in-law who gets up and gives him the most comfortable chair when he walks into a room?”

  “He get his briefcase fixed?” Mrs. Wynn asked.

  “It’s not fixable. He just carries it anyway.”

  “That banged-in case? To New York? To Washington?”

  “You know what aplomb William has,” Laurel said.

  “I swear,” said Mrs. Wynn.

  Not wishing to be disloyal to William, Laurel thought his behavior had been silly when he bashed his briefcase on the hood of a cab on Sixth Avenue because the driver started up too fast while William was still crossing with the light; the case was an expensive ostrich-skin one she had given him, and she hated its demise. William carried it on into the city, and now to Washington, where in his raconteur’s way he’d regale everybody with the story, turning it into a fable about how the tables were turned on him, imitating perfectly the cab driver’s New York accent when he cried, “I don’t want no altercation with no individual!” Rick, laughing when he heard the story, had said, “Dad,” meaning inimitable Dad. Was she the only one who thought William’s behavior a bit cuckoo?

  However, she thought about a man earning money and having to share so much of it with his family, and how William put suede patches on the elbows of his jackets, and had the lapels
of his overcoat covered with velvet when the edges wore out, starting a fashion trend in his office. “Why don’t we go in together and get him another case?” she asked.

  “Why should I?” said Mrs. Wynn. “I didn’t ruin that one.”

  “Never mind.” Laurel had another inspiration. “Mother, why don’t you get a kitten?”

  “I don’t want a goddamned cat in this apartment. A cat box! Are you crazy?”

  “Yes,” said Laurel.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I have to go. The fuel guy’s here.”

  “Go on. I’m not stopping you. Don’t make the towel too hot.”

  Wait! How hot’s too hot? She held the dead connection, feeling, as she often did, that she wanted to call right back and tell her mother something, or ask her a question. Something was unfinished, something languished that needed saying; all their conversations about nothing were wasted moments, when something important should have been accomplished.

  She went toward the door. A young man stared through the glass panels, and she saw herself as an idle rich housewife still in her nightclothes. “I’ve got a cold,” she told him, opening the door and standing back. He came in and stood so close she read tiny yellow stitching on the pocket of his brown uniform: Earl. What’s up, Earl? she thought, flooded by memory of a plumber telling her and William the suburbs were a field day for service people while “you gray flannel types,” he’d said, eyeing William, “are in the city.” Nobody could know how many times he answered a call to find a housewife in a revealing negligee, he’d said.

  Having told Earl the problem, she led him to the basement, feeling his breath at her back and aware of the rising and falling movements of her behind under the robe; it caught in her crack and mercifully released itself, for she’d never have had the nerve to reach around and pull it out.

  The house suddenly seemed too large for three people, and she was embarrassed, though Earl had no idea who lived here. There was a difference in a house when a man was in it. It seemed more solid. Laurel wanted to turn and cry out to Earl her troubles since William had been gone, ask him to solve her pencil sharpener’s falling off the wall and scattering incomprehensible screws, have him change the burned-out bulb that wouldn’t come unscrewed and figure out if the iron’s cord was dangerous now that Jubal had chewed it.