“It can be like that again,” he said. “The children will bring back the light and the warmth.”
“Oh, I hope so, Alex. I really do.”
“Believe in me,” he said, “and believe in them, and it will happen.” It sounded like a religious prediction, but she didn’t mind the overtones. She longed so for the happier times that she was willing to make small sacrifices.
If only they can remain small sacrifices, she thought.
“I’ll try, Alex. I promise.”
“Thank you, Sharon,” he said, and he smiled the smile of the old days—wide and warm, full of life and hope. It touched her; it caressed her. It even brought a sexual excitement, and she thought maybe, just maybe, Alex would be so cheered by his success with the children that he would become a whole man again.
The promise of a full and rich life once again was enough.
“I’m glad they forgave me,” she said. Alex looked as though he would cry. It brought tears to her eyes.
“I love you for that, Sharon,” he said, and he left her feeling more fulfilled than she had thought would be possible again.
Alex was as good as his word. The children went at the work with a vengeance. They were a veritable little army on the attack who saw the enemy in every rust spot, in every piece of blight, in anything that was broken and in anything that was dirty. The work was enhanced by the fact that it was an unusually early and warm spring for this part of the Catskill mountains. During the past few years, they had had some rather cold, rainy, sleety days throughout March, and even some snowfalls in early and middle April, but here it was only the beginning of the last week in April and the weathermen were predicting highs in the mid- to upper eighties.
The sunshine and the warmth made dismal things look better anyway, but with the children out there scrubbing and painting, the Echo Lake Manor began to stir in a way it hadn’t stirred for years. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Sharon couldn’t help but dig in herself. She looked over the house and saw all the things she had neglected—the rooms that needed new coats of paint, the rugs that should have been cleaned or replaced, the curtains that should have been taken down and washed, the dusting and the vacuuming that was long overdue. Sections of the house that had been heretofore relegated to the past, deserted and unused, suddenly became important again. Who could say for sure about all this anyway, she thought. Alex might come to her one day and say he had decided to bring the place back into the ranks of the tourist industry. After all, it still had a great deal to offer tourists. She had often thought about that possibility herself. They didn’t need the money, but they could sure use the activity. And with the children here now…why it could provide them with gainful employment and healthy contact with people.
She decided to broach the subject with Alex, and to her surprise, he didn’t reject it out of hand. He didn’t agree to anything, but he did say he would give the suggestion some serious thought and might even bring it up with the children at one of their meetings.
She wondered if there would ever be a time when she would become part of those meetings. She was getting along much better with the children and sensed that they weren’t only being polite when they spoke to her anymore. There was some sincere warmth. Donald would talk to her, even let her touch him, stroke his hair and fix his clothes. And one day without her trying to start it, she found herself in a real woman-to-woman conversation with Elizabeth.
“Did you ever like an older man?” Elizabeth asked. Of course Sharon suspected she meant Alex, but after a little more conversation, Elizabeth revealed that she had a terrible crush on her English teacher, Mr. Knots. “He has these beautiful blue eyes,” she said, “and just a little grey hair right here,” she added, indicating the temples. “His skin is so dark he looks like he always has a tan. I could listen to him talk forever.”
“It’s not unusual to like an older man,” Sharon said.
“I feel good when he’s close to me,” Elizabeth said. “Especially when he leans over to look at my paper or when he calls me up to his desk. He smells good, too. I think he’s one of the handsomest teachers I’ve ever seen.”
“I had a crush on a teacher or two in my time,” Sharon said.
“I think this is more than a crush,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes he looks at me very hard. Men have looked at me like that before.”
“You mustn’t read anything more in it than there is,” Sharon warned. Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed.
“Or I’ll get into trouble again?”
“No, I’m not worrying about that,” Sharon said. She was, but she disguised it. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, emotionally, that is. Is he a married man?”
“Yes, but I’ve been with married men before,” Elizabeth said. Sharon wondered who really had the more experience. Who should be advising whom?
“You’re not…you haven’t done anything to encourage him, have you, Elizabeth?”
“What could I do?”
She’s teasing me, Sharon thought.
“A girl as pretty and as mature as you are can do things. I don’t have to tell you, do I, Elizabeth?”
“I’m not doing anything. Maybe he likes what he sees.”
Sharon began to get frightened. This could be very bad, she thought. She wondered if Alex had any inkling.
“You haven’t told…told Alex about this, have you?”
“No. This is a woman’s problem,” Elizabeth said, but there was something in her face that made Sharon wonder if she should believe her.
“My advice to you is to try to get it out of your mind and to do nothing that would encourage either you or Mr. Knots. Let him be your teacher and you be his student.”
“Maybe I’ll just talk to him about it,” Elizabeth said.
“How could you do that?” Sharon really wanted to know. Maybe this girl could teach her some things.
“I’ll simply go up to him and ask to meet with him after school. Alone. Then I’ll go into his room and tell him what I feel and see what he says. Alex says it’s always better to be straightforward. People can’t hide behind their feelings as much if you don’t hide behind yours. When you’re direct, you force them to be direct.”
“Wouldn’t it embarrass you to say some of these things?” Sharon asked. She couldn’t imagine herself even attempting such a thing when she was Elizabeth’s age. She couldn’t imagine herself doing it now.
“Never be embarrassed by your true feelings,” Elizabeth said. Sharon was sure that was another Alexism.
“Sometimes that’s easier said than done.”
“Nevertheless, I think I’m going to do it.”
“Do you want…do you want me to come to school and be with you?” Sharon asked. She had contradictory feelings about the idea. She wanted to be close to the girl, but she couldn’t imagine herself in the room when Elizabeth said these kinds of things to a grown man.
“Oh no. Thanks, but this is something very, very personal. Besides, you might not like the outcome,” Elizabeth added. “Thanks for talking to me about it,” she said, and left Sharon trembling in the kitchen.
She didn’t know what to do. She was afraid that if she told Alex and he said something to her, Elizabeth might hate her for it and she would have ruined a possible good relationship, just when it was beginning. On the other hand, what if something serious happened and Alex found out she knew and hadn’t told him?
She still didn’t believe she could know something that he didn’t about one of the children. One night after he had slipped into bed beside her, she decided to test him, but to do it in such a way so as to pull back if she wanted. Hurting her growing new relationship with Elizabeth was too great a risk.
“Elizabeth and I had a very nice conversation about her work in school the other day,” she said.
“That’s nice.”
“Especially in English. She’s very fond of her English teacher, did you know that?” He was silent. “From the way she described him, he sounded like a very nice m
an and a very good teacher. He makes the subject…exciting.”
“She said that?”
“Well, in a way, yes.”
He was quiet so long that she thought he had fallen asleep. It pleased her to think that Elizabeth had confided in her and in her only. But her happiness was short-lived. Alex turned over on his back.
“She didn’t say anything about his good looks?”
“His good looks? Yes, yes she did, Alex.”
“And how he looks at her?”
“She told you?”
“No, she told Richard and he told me.”
“Oh, he shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “Elizabeth would be devastated if she found out.”
“Why?”
“He betrayed her trust. I know how girls are when it comes to such things. Now she’s going to think that I told you and she’ll resent me again.”
“That’s exactly the kind of thinking I have to eliminate,” he said. “Richard told me because he trusts me with the knowledge. I can’t believe that you knew this for a couple of days and did nothing about it.”
“I did do something about it; I gave her advice,” she said, but she didn’t add that she felt sure Elizabeth wasn’t going to take that advice.
“What kind of advice could you give her? What do you know about such matters?”
“What do you know about them, Alex? You weren’t a young girl, were you?” He was silent. “I think I would have more of a chance of identifying with her problems, don’t you?”
He remembered his father’s words: “The feminine element is important. We are all of one flesh. Good and evil is not only a man’s concern.”
“Evil knows no sex,” he said. “It houses itself without discrimination in any living thing. I understand that, and that’s all I need to understand.”
“But she’s a young girl with a young girl’s sensitivity.”
“She’s a woman who has had her body abused and tormented. She’ll never be a young girl again,” he snapped.
“Well, what are you going to do?” she asked, her voice filled with retreat. “You don’t think this teacher is really making advances toward her like she thinks he is, do you?”
“When he looks out on her class,” he began, “he must be drawn to her.” Sharon felt a cold chill move over the tops of her shoulders and settle into the base of her neck. Alex’s voice was different; it was the voice of someone under a spell, hypnotized by his inner thoughts. He sounded more like a narrator. She could almost see the scene that he envisioned. “Every time he looks up from his books or turns from the blackboard, he feels her eyes on him. Everything that makes him a man tells him that she has a vision beyond her years. He has to be stimulated; he has to be moved. I’m sure he fantasizes about her. She comes to him in dreams…radiant in her youth, her breasts taut, her lips wet. Sometimes he stops in the middle of a sentence and forgets where he’s at. She holds him in the grasp of her gaze and turns him to her with the power of a puppeteer. The primeval hunger claws its way back over the centuries tearing at the fabric of civilization.”
He paused. She thought he did so because he felt her trembling beside him.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. It came out in a whisper. “Are you going to speak to him? Are you going to speak to her?”
“What has to be done will be done,” he said. That’s all he would say. He turned over again. His back looked wider and darker than ever. As usual, he had dropped a wall between them.
Outside, the moon and the clouds played havoc with the shadows. They had them dancing madly on the wall opposite the window. She was reminded of the night she had come upon Alex’s father standing in the shadows.
She had walked home from playing bingo in the firehouse. There was just a slip of the moon prying its light down through the scattered clouds. When she reached the top of the driveway, she saw him standing near the large maple tree.
“Is that you, Pa?” she’d asked. There was no reply. “Pa?” He said nothing. It gave her the chills. She debated walking on to the house and leaving him there, but in the end, she decided to go to him. “Pa,” she said, “what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer me?”
The old man’s eyes were wide and he was staring out at the darkness as though he had seen something terrible.
“I’m getting weaker,” he’d whispered, “and they know and they’re coming closer. Every night, they come closer.”
“Who?” She’d turned and looked into the shadows. When she turned back, the old man was gone, as though he had been a shadow himself. Later, in the house, she’d questioned whether or not she had imagined it all. When she told Alex, he’d said, “Let it be. Just let it be.”
She had but maybe that had been a mistake.
6
During the next week, Sharon put Elizabeth’s problem aside. Later on, when she was able to analyze herself more objectively, she concluded that she’d repressed it. The cloak of mystery that Alex threw over the situation, the deep sexual overtones that stimulated her own hungers, and a basic fear of getting herself involved in something that was, in her opinion, beyond her, all closed around the memory of her conversation with Elizabeth and her conversation with Alex. Perhaps she hoped, as she knew many modern-day parents did, that the situation would solve itself. Time had a way of thinning out the severity of things. Isn’t it always true, she thought, that when I look back on something, I wonder why it was I got so upset about it?
It was easy to forget when every day that week was filled with new and wonderful things being done to the Echo Lake Manor. Alex rented two jackhammers and he and Richard, with Carl as a relief man, went about breaking up the pithy cement walkway at the front of the house. It was a sight to see—he and the two boys, their shirts off, their skin gleaming in the sunlight, working hard, side-by-side. She and Elizabeth brought them cool lemonade and sandwiches when they worked on the weekend. After the broken cement had been removed, Alex ordered a delivery of new cement. He and Richard built the frames, and all that had to be done was to have the cement truck back up and dump the load. As soon as that was done, they went about smoothing it out.
Despite his distaste for handyman’s work, Alex had a knack for it. He had been forced to do enough of it to know what he was doing; only now, with the children at his side, he seemed to enjoy the labor. As a teenager, Alex had had to do much of what his father should have been doing. His father had taken advantage of him. At least, that was what Sharon thought, and what she suspected Alex believed. His father’s defense had been that same old axiom—hard work keeps a man honest and good. It had been designed to keep Alex out of trouble, as though trouble was something that loitered just over the property line of the Echo Lake Manor, just waiting for Alex to relax and walk to it.
It wasn’t hard to understand why he hadn’t had many friends when he was young. Alex’s father had been suspicious of boys and girls Alex’s age and never made them comfortable if they did come to the Manor. Alex had always been too busy to participate in high school activities, even though he could have been a great athlete. He’d told her the coaches of the various sports were always trying to draft him to join their teams. Because he hadn’t joined any, because he rarely, if ever, attended school parties or sporting events, he had gradually become ignored and forgotten.
“I know they thought I was a weirdo,” he’d once told her, “but it couldn’t be helped. In the spring and summer, we had to work like mad to prepare and keep up the tourist house for the resort season. During most of the fall and a good part of the winter, we did the major reconstructions and repair work. It seemed like there was always something that had to be done around here. The place had grown too big for a family with only one son, and don’t forget, my parents weren’t young when they adopted me.”
When she asked him more about that, he confessed that he’d always been afraid of losing them.
“Pa always seemed old to me, and my mother was such a workaholic I was sure she would drop in t
he middle of something one day, just come puttering to a stop and collapse in the midst of a meal or cleaning a room. Imagined we’d find her on the floor, folded up like a deboned duck.”
“But your father was so strong. I remember the stories about him—how he lifted the backs of cars, how he could bend a horseshoe with his bare hands. Didn’t I see him lift one end of that oil burner all by himself when that crew came to deliver it and it got stuck on the basement steps? Everyone was amazed.”
He laughed. “He was just impatient and disgusted with them, and when Pa got like that…he gathered an inner strength that was phenomenal. I suppose, now that I think about it, it was silly for me to worry about his doing too much physical work, even in his fifties and sixties. But I was terrified that if they died, I’d be farmed out again. So I worked when I could have played, so what?” he said, but she felt he resented what had happened.
The kind of work he and the children were doing now was different, though. None of them complained. If one wasn’t working as hard as the others thought he should, they came down on him, including little Donald, who was assigned to smaller but still significant jobs. He painted moldings, brought the others the tools they needed, gathered the garbage and discarded materials, and learned how to use the lawnmower.
Sharon couldn’t help feeling sorry for all of them when they came in after the work. Their faces and hands were smeared with grime and paint, their hair was matted down from sweat, and their eyes revealed their fatigue. All of them marched up quietly to their rooms and took their showers in turn.
Alex had developed a system for everything they did. There was always an order. Richard went first because he was the oldest. Elizabeth followed, but Donald came before Carl, because Alex placed a certain importance on the last position. He told them that whoever was last had to cover up for everyone. The others had to be careful so his burden wouldn’t be too great, but nevertheless, he had a major responsibility. It was too big of a responsibility to leave for little Donald. Carl understood and even felt proud in being given the position.
Child's Play Page 10
