Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  She put a few peanuts beneath a counter. “I wish I could see the little guy,” Rick said, shrugging into a heavy sweater. “You will,” she said like a promise. He had turned loose his three chipmunks in the house and they ran about, hiding at will, until they escaped outdoors. One had begun to return, finding its way in from behind the stove. She looked up from reading, quiet afternoons in the house, and the tiny thing sat on its haunches staring at her, sharing moments in a way she would not have thought possible. When she lay still, it climbed all over her. William, in wool, went by in a whiff of mothballs. She should have aired out things better from the attic.

  When the house emptied, she sat in her housewife’s silence, near tears. Because someday the chipmunk would simply not appear anymore and someday she would not sit in this house again either. It seemed so difficult to think of leaving.

  In the houses where they lived, William kindly gave her the extra room for her writing, saying it was only fair since he had an office in New York. He did not keep much business at home. In the top of his closet there was a box with things filed for income tax time. Laurel walked the box off the shelf with her fingertips. It had a folder with numerous receipts for dinners for two at Trader Vic’s. She got a chair to replace the box exactly in its dust marks. William could see up that high without help.

  Dearest Hal,

  There are so many kids here in the afternoons, I drove my mother to a nearby cemetery to talk. I told her about new evidence. She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have talked you out of a divorce before. William’s a sexual deviate.” I told her, “Only in the sense he needs the excitement of a chase. He’s not turned on by sleeping with his housekeeper, which is what a wife is.”

  “He’s a cock-chaser,” she said.

  I nearly fell over. “Mother, that’s not a term I’m familiar with,” I said.

  “I just know a lot more than you think I do,” she said. “I heard your daddy and his friends talk nasty all those years.”

  “I believe the word you want is cunt,” I said. A nice ladies’ conversation.

  She said, “Listen, I can’t stay in this cemetery any longer. I’ve got to pee.”

  “You mean piss,” I said.

  My mother and I are being brought closer together.

  Then I had to tell her. “Mother, wait. There’s something else.…”

  “What!” she screamed. “Throw your life away on somebody who’s never drawn a sober breath? A mur—” but she couldn’t go on with that. I said alcohol was available in prison and you’d never taken a drink in a year. Then she said, “Oh. If he hasn’t had a drink in a year, then he can quit.”

  There you have it from the horse’s mouth: she did. “Bah,” she said. “Two years. Anything can happen. Period.”

  Her opinion is Sallie will never let you go, and that Rick will never move south. She would not either, she said. She wasn’t going to move in with me when I was a poor divorcée. I wouldn’t have thought of asking her; but up here is so expensive. The cleaning lady asked me for a raise. Forty dollars for two days and she leaves at two thirty! I remember your being surprised by that term, but I can’t switch now to cleaning woman.

  After a glimmer of consolation, she began berating me for my whole life. How embarrassing I had been for her and how unstable. I wanted so much to ask her, didn’t she realize how her drinking and her instability had affected me? But I lack that kind of courage. I like to spare hurt. The truth is only in the eye of each beholder. I see you as someone else from the way a lot of others see you. My mother said, once I was divorced I was nothing but a failure. I told that to my editor and he said quietly, “Most mothers would be very proud of you.”

  As soon as she sees a place to dig in, she’s going to; now she sees a flaw in William. Why had I picked him? I wanted to laugh; always before she’s been so proud of my marrying into such a family and someone like William so devoted to his son. Though she simply accepts infidelity as part of the male character; having grown up with that idea, I do too. It’s the degree we’re talking about, and neglect. If only William had slept with me too we wouldn’t be in this mess.

  She said I was vindictive, that I always had to get back at people and was getting a divorce to get back at William; that I’d done it to her by making her an alcoholic in my last novel. I muttered under my breath, “You were one.”

  Further, I thought, you told me you never read that book.

  The thing about my mother is, she doesn’t mean half she says.

  Laurel thought of Rick in his nighttime attire, black watch cap and dark clothes, stealing about the cemetery with a friend, an eerie figure turning over gravestones. She thought his behavior boyish pranks; she was brought up to believe little boys were devils. Her mother said they all stank. Her father said he soaped hilly streetcar tracks as a boy, and her uncles blew up rural mailboxes.

  Rick had had to atone because they were strict, yet they could not help being a family that laughed. “Old buddy,” William had said. “No one with real criminal intent would have gone the night before Easter to desecrate a Catholic cemetery: not in a town where the entire police force is Italian. And the family custom is to lay wreaths on graves on Easter.” He went on shaking his head. With every policeman in town assembled the next morning, a few overturned gravestones became a cause célèbre. No stone was left unturned (pun intended, Laurel said) till the culprits were caught. When the same duo broke out a downtown plate glass window, she cried, “Rick, why the bookstore when I’m a writer?” They’d never exhibit her books; in all her years in the town they never had. “Of course not,” said a Jewish friend. “You’re a goy.” I knew I should have moved to Darien, Laurel said.

  Heavily, she and her mother contained their secret talk.

  They drove into the yard, and Rick greeted them with kisses in front of his friends, a boy not yet old enough to be embarrassed. “So sweet,” Laurel told him. “I was thinking of your nighttime capers. I ask you again, Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  In saying goodbye, her mother whispered, “Sleep in a separate bedroom.” Laurel moved into the guest bedroom in the middle of the night. William asked next morning if he had snored. She did not see why William cared if she slept elsewhere, but unfortunately William did care.

  Laurel:

  I’m so glad you’ve spoken to your mother. I don’t understand, though, why she so continually berates you. It’s as if she’s stopped drinking but has found nothing else to replace it and still has her alcoholic’s personality. In a critical pinch I have a habit of holding an informal conversation with God. When we couldn’t meet as planned, I questioned whether He was trying to tell us something. I consider that most things we hold dear, very valuable, don’t come easily and that’s what makes them so precious, for if they were that easy to obtain, they’d be cheapened, wouldn’t they? I don’t believe He was trying to tell us our love was not to be, for it is. It exists already.

  Missing one another that time has made the sexual tension even worse. I had hoped I was through with this teenaged sexual throb. But damn it, it happened again last night. I hope it stops before the real cold weather sets in here or I’ll freeze getting up and changing shorts. Speaking of that, I wonder what the others think about me throwing my underwear in the hamper in the middle of the night. We toss it into a cotton sack in the middle of the cage—no way to be secretive. Oh, Laurel.

  You’ve told me to go ahead and feel every emotion but hate. Older convicts have told me many times I’d experience both hatred and bitterness before I got through. I did not believe them. Now I see so clearly what they meant. But Laurel, who? No person has done anything to me as an individual. Do I hate society, the system, the Establishment youngsters talk so much about? I don’t hate anyone or any of it. I am just filled with an overwhelming sadness and sorrow.

  Last week was revival week here. A Baptist minister showed up bringing a busload of schoolchildren to sing at various camps—Brother Walker. It turns out,
Laurel, you know him. He mentioned previously he’d had a church in Itna Homa and I asked if he knew your uncle and aunt. And then found out he knew you, Rick, and Buff too. I wanted to say, Preacher, we are saying nice things about the girl who belongs to me and with whom I’m going to spend the rest of my life, once the state returns it. I’ve never even held you as tightly as I’ve wanted. I’ve hardly touched you. If we hadn’t come so close to having a few hours, perhaps it would have been easier. This evening while those children were singing, I wanted to walk off. The tears just fell down my face, as they have before. And I couldn’t tell anybody why. I had to get the pastor to drive the bus back to the administration building, rather than me, while I sat in the dark with those children. A man needs to be alone to cry, and I never am.

  As a Presbyterian, I don’t understand these Baptist services. Why do they want you to come forward like that? It looks like you’d be saved dozens of times if you did as they ask you to do. Hell, I’ve already been saved, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I? I hate prison! In the cage, everybody’s in a violent argument because of the revival. Separate discussions are going on and Bibles are fluttering all over the place. One old con said, “This prison is a dressing room for the Kingdom of Heaven.” My own opinion is it’s a toilet bowl for hell. Every time I get into a conversation they think I’m spying as editor of Prison World and want to make sure I know how to spell their names.

  Hal, she wrote,

  I don’t know which is worse, going to bed longing for you or waking up longing for you. There’s an article in Time about the loneliness of wives of men in Vietnam, and I feel like one of them. In memory your voice does things to me I can’t describe. Now I have you but I don’t have you. It’s cold here. But I think only of standing in a dusty cotton field with you, kissing.

  As a mother, she did not want to be sitting with erotic thoughts outside a school waiting for her child. Rick had to go to town for new shoes. Loaded yellow school buses pulled away, and then he came toward her wearing the special shy smile kids wear when they are being picked up. His shoulders were broader and moved in a more manly way. She remembered her own sense of importance about going from grammar school into junior high. No longer carrying a book satchel but her books stacked to her chest, the way she’d watched older kids carry them so long, and having a locker in the hallway and changing classes rather than staying with a homeroom teacher. She had to tell Rick about the divorce today, away from home. To tell him there would taint that house forever, she felt.

  “Mom. Guess what! I was made quarterback.”

  “Fantastic. Exactly what does one do?”

  Rick closed the car door. He patiently explained as he’d known he would have to. She began to cry; she lied and said she cried over wishing her father could have had a kid who made quarterback. Rick understood about her childhood. He’d even asked once in whispered wonder, “When will you ever get over it?” How could she tell him and take the stars out of his eyes when he had been made quarterback?

  Black people were in a car ahead, an unusual sight for the town. She could not forget the uproarious town meeting she attended last spring; there was a discussion about bringing a few black students into Soundport from a nearby industrial town. A panel member in favor of the idea said he’d received threatening telephone calls about his wife; someone in the back of the room jumped up crying, Who gives a damn about your wife! What about our kids? She was stunned by the rudeness; in the South people she knew would not have yelled. How preciously false liberals in this town were when confronted with the reality of a minority being put on equal footing. These liberals were filled with compassion only when gazing out a train window at Harlem. They liked being supercilious about the South, seldom knowing anything first-hand. But one of her periodic live-in Southern maids when Rick was small put things straight forever: Down home you know where you stand, she had said. Up here prejudice is hidden. Sara made her pronouncement during an afternoon rest period when she drank beer and wore William’s house slippers, and Laurel hadn’t had the courage to ask her to stop either practice. She remembered coming home from that meeting filled with fury, saying, What do these Soundport liberals think will happen if three black students infiltrate the school system? She thought the woman driving ahead must be the mother of one of the students finally admitted.

  “How’s the black student in your school doing?”

  “He’s dumb as hell,” Rick said.

  “Rick.”

  “Whaaa …? He’s dumb as hell.” He threw out his hands.

  “He hasn’t had your advantages.”

  “I’m not into something heavy. You asked me and I told you.”

  “It’s not his fault, and I certainly hope you have compassion.”

  “Gid outta here,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that bullshit.”

  She said automatically, “You shouldn’t talk to me like that. It’s not bullshit.”

  He got down onto the back of his neck. “I wish we’d never brought up the subject of the little nigger.”

  “Rick!” He was kidding, but she was jarred.

  “Relax,” he said. “I was captain of the basketball team in gym and picked him first.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good.”

  “Yeah. He’s the tallest boy in the seventh grade.”

  “Jeez, you’re a great guy.”

  “I ate lunch with him, though. Some of the kids won’t.”

  “That’s incredible. If you hadn’t had your exposure to the South, maybe you wouldn’t either. What’d you talk about?”

  “Mostly what his older brother tells him about making out with girls.”

  “I’m sure that was interesting.”

  “I’m not sure it’s all true.”

  “I’d imagine it all is.”

  “I’d ask you, but I can’t.”

  “You can ask me.” He slid farther down. She said, “Has it occurred to you I might know?”

  “Mom.” He sat up. “Shit. This isn’t the kind of thing guys want to talk to their mothers about. Anyway, guess what else. I got invited to a Jew-in.”

  “Rick!”

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “That’s what the kid who invited me to his Bar Mitzvah called it.”

  “Jesus,” she said. Her stomach was nervous, and in town she fell back on a Southern remedy and said, “Let’s have a Coke.” She walked fast toward a luncheonette but Rick stopped outside a drugstore. “I’ve got to get something.”

  “What?”

  “Pencils and some baby powder.”

  She jerked his sleeve. “No, you don’t,” and she went on.

  “What the—” He was probably afraid to curse again, thinking his mother about to go over the wall.

  “I’m sick of that stuff dusted all over your room. I have to clean it up.”

  “Dad uses it.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s his problem.”

  “I don’t even want to go in there and have a drink with you.”

  “I don’t want to have a drink with you either.” She heard the childishness of her tone, and they were made to argue when they almost never argued. She had to have the courage to do what she had put off so long, and thought herself ready to fly on her own wings. “Go on to the shoe store. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “You’re weird,” he said.

  Laurel pushed into the drugstore as if into a headwind. There was the smell of hot roads suddenly pockmarked by a cooler rainstorm, but it was an odor from the prescription counter. She dialed William’s number, scarcely thinking of the numerals, she had called it so long. Not to falter, she spoke quickly. “This is Laurel. I’ve told you before I was going to get a divorce. And now I am. I’ve got a lawyer, and I advise you to get one too.”

  She hung up wondering if she was a coward to have done this by phone. As always, seagulls were wheeling and dealing over the river through town. The day was growing dark toward 4 P.M. Many people did not like night so early, but she and Rick liked
being at home and cozy, pulling down the shades, being safe where you belonged. She entered the shoe store. Rick’s feet looked huge in Keds he was trying on. “You’ll grow to your feet.” She repeated an expression she always heard, even about puppies. They did not hold grudges, and Rick was no longer mad. “Want some socks?” she said. “New bedroom shoes? How about tasseled loafers?” She spoke out of a generosity he would shortly understand.

  “What about Dad?”

  “Wear them home and then we can’t return them.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’re a good kid, even if you are a juvenile delinquent.”

  “I’m going to wait. We’d better ask Dad.”

  She drove them a route home longer than necessary, along the Merritt Parkway. And abruptly she pulled into a commuter’s parking area and stopped the car. “Rick, there’s something perfectly terrible I have to tell you. I’ve got to get a divorce from Dad.”

  Rick’s face changed color. Total comprehension crossed over it, the pupils of his eyes darkening. “If you and Dad are getting a divorce, I’m splitting.”

  “No,” she said. “No. You mustn’t do that.”

  They drove home in silence. Rick went to his room carrying his new shoes, and she began dinner. William phoned and said in a terse voice, “I’m taking an earlier train. The five-oh-two.” Laurel could not help but wonder if there had not been other times William could have taken that train. She knocked on Rick’s door before going in. “Dad’s coming home earlier. We can have dinner together around six thirty.”