"You'll grow up soon enough, and have a husband, and a house, and maybe a horse, if you want, and even some kids maybe, like Mom and I have you."
"Will you be there with me. Daddy?"
"Probably not."
"Why, Dad?"
"Weil, where were we? Let me see now. Your husband wouldn't want me there to begin with, and—"
"Why not?"
'That's the way it goes. Freedom and age and propriety. A right sort of life at times. And he'll want you for himself, of course. We all have our lives to lead."
"Daddy, do you love me?"
"Well, yes, of course I do!"
"Then why won't you be there, Dad?"
"I'll have to let you go."
"How come?"
"I'll have to, that's all. And you'll want to, too. Nature has to run its course."
"But why. Dad?"
“Because I love you'' he cries under his breath, and has no need to wonder why these unaccountable tears of his keep showering over the cloudlike, daffodil-glowing, sun-lightened heaven of her honey-gold hair.
28
A FAMILY ALBUM
Its black cover has a pebbly texture and the edges of it are ashen-colored, worn through, crumbling and clothlike to the touch, and its pages of heavy black paper have been leafed through over so many silent evenings by so many hands that several of them have come loose. A black cord with silken tassels at each end is laced through a pair of metal eyes along its left side, and the cord is tied in a bow that's been pressed into the same shape for ten years. On the heavy pages are rows of photographs, held in place by black corner mounts, and a careful hand has written a caption underneath each in white ink. Piled into its front and back, and interleaved among its pages, are postcards of vacation spots the family has visited, an envelope holding a lock of the oldest son's first hair, their father's report card from the eighth grade, a folded purple felt pennant from the college both parents attended, a birthday card signed "Much love, young one. Grandma” with a rabbit on it holding up a white number two, an immunization chart for one of the children with only the first series of shots filled in, a recipe for orange cake, a letter written by a seven-year-old on his first vacation away from home, a mournful face repeated over and over oh strips of school pictures which weren't traded away by a son who had trouble making friends, a pressed corsage from a prom one daughter attended, somebody's ribbon, pink, a threaded needle, a smell of frailty and age that seems to rise only from this heavy black paper, as though the past itself were composed of elements as permanent-seeming yet frail, and dozens and dozens of photographs that there was no time to mount
29
THE PTA
They'd hardly settled down to the meal when his father whispered, "Where's the script? Do you have the script, Jerome?" He'd been asking the same question in different variations all evening, and Jerome answered, once again, "Yes."
"You'd better give it to me, then. I think I'll use it after all. God, all this noise!"
Jerome gave the frayed and finger-stained script to him and he tucked it under his plate and stared toward the stage, and then around on all sides, where folding chairs and tables were set up in rows on the floor of the Forest Creek gymnasium and four hundred people were eating beneath a noisy sea of conversation and silverware clashing, and screwed up his lips; he was here at Elaine's behest. She was chairman of the entertainment committee of the Pettibone-Forest Creek PTA, and she'd asked him to perform at this celebratory spring banquet, the first held by the consolidated schools, and said she wouldn't allow him to say no: "You've been a fool to sit around the way you have. It's unhealthy, you know. You've got to get outside and get out in public more, and if you don't start right now, Martin, you never will, knowing you as I do."
"All right," he said. "I'll read one poem and I know which one I'll do." It was "Laska" by Frank Desprez. Jerome helped him rehearse for a week, even though he was so familiar with the piece he had it by heart nearly the first run-through, and on some evenings was thrown off-guard when his father dropped lines as if to catch him asleep, and then he'd look up to see him confused. Jerome liked the piece well enough for what it was, but felt his father should do something more topical or light-hearted; he was adamant, however; no, he said, this was one of Alpha's (he'd just started using her name to Jerome) favorites, and in a way he was doing it for her. And then paled.
It was a monologue in rhymed verse, about a hundred lines long, that began:
I want free life and I want fresh air;
And I sigh for the canter after the cattle,
The crack of whips like shots in battle . .,
The green beneath and the blue above,
And dash and danger, and life and love.
And Laska!
Laska is described as bold, wild, passionate, self-sacrificing, and dangerously jealous (she once stabbed the narrator, nearly fatally, in a fury), and she rides beside him on a "mouse-gray mustang." One night a herd of cattle stampedes and she throws herself over the narrator to protect him and is killed. He digs a shallow grave and buries her.
And there she is lying, and no one knows.
And the summer shines and the winter snows;
For many a day the flowers have spread
A pall of petals over her head.
And ends thinking:
I wonder why I do not care
For the things that are like the things that were.
His father unpursed his lips and looked across at the stage again, where PTA officials and school administrators were sitting with the dignity a stage bestows, sucked air through his teeth, and tapped the script with his fingertips held in a row, as he tapped When he was playing pinochle, but kept it up in a way that distracted Jerome, and was somehow out of time. His hands were whitish-gray from the effects of lime, as bloodless-looking as a corpse's, and his fingernails were black-rimmed even tonight. When the meal was over, he went up to the stage and sat, and Jerome saw that he'd left the script underneath his plate after all, an oily drop on it. There was a business meeting, a woodwind trio played a Sousa march and "Greensleeves," and then the stage was turned over to him. He came up to the podium, gave a few surprisingly witty introductory remarks, considering they were as off-the-cuff as Jerome knew them to be, gave the title, and with the first word of the poem something was wrong. His voice was too high and had a faulty tone to it, as if it were caroming around at the top of his throat, and didn't carry. His voice? People leaned forward to hear. He cleared his throat with a vehemence that must have startled some, pardoned himself, and began the poem again, and then Jerome saw, as if they'd sprung intact from his face, a shining trail of tears down each cheek. A phrase broke in his throat, he shook his head as if flinging it clear, started the phrase again, and suddenly his hands went high in the air, gestured, gestured and fell, and then he walked off the stage into the locker room, and the noise of the audience rose as though with a governed purr and soon was at its original level again.
30
TRACK MEET
From the way the children, all five tonight, gathered around him at the dinner table, he knew there'd be troubles and remorse. He put his fork beside his plate, leaving untouched the "toofla" he'd prepared and heaped there, and leaned his forehead on clasped hands as if to say grace. He was reaching his limit. Behind his closed eyelids, inflamed by lime bums and bits of sand, he saw glistening trailways, as though his vessels were of neon, and then the strength of his limbs pressed upward, pulsing, and he felt out of touch with his body, imprisoned within the sphere of his eye. The size of his world now.
He'd quit work late, drive from wherever in the three-county area his plastering business had taken him that day, back to Forest Creek, and pick up the little ones, the girls, at his parents', and then drive back home and cook supper and call the boys in to the table—now that it was spring, they spent most of their time outside—only to see that they were trying to conceal they'd misbehaved. And then another circuit, familiar as the firs
t, began. He'd have to travel through their day, forcing his way into it, find the troubling incident, find the troublemaker, and then set him right,-or, if there'd been fighting, punish him. He hated it. It was hard for him to judge the children and even harder for him to see them hurt. Alpha had always handled the discipline.
She was at the periphery of every thought of his, closing around his mind and conscience like a second self. His ideas, before he could speak them, were observed by her and he gave them up. His intuition, before he could act on it, sent off warning signals because of what had happened with her, and he held still. The sheen of her hair was in the hair of Marie, who was seven now, and to run his hand over it was excruciating and as close as he came to a sin. She was in his voice when he started arguing with Jay on the job over details he'd never have noticed without her eyes. Jay suggested that he bid on patching and specialty jobs, which were profitable, and which he could do as he wanted, working as hard as he liked, on his own time. Jay said that he himself would rather get into commercial work and leave the fussy jobs, as he put it, to a man with patience and a knack for dealing with people. So Martin traded the old Chevrolet in on a used International pickup (M. Neumiller & Sons, Plastering, he hand-lettered on its doors and tail gate), Jay paid the balance on it, and now he had what could be called a business of his own. The hours were longer but he was making twice as much as he had a year ago. Still he never got ahead and had no idea where his money went, or why, or when the last had gone. Alpha had always handled that. He went to her every payday and handed her his monthly or weekly check, and even during their poorest times, as when he farmed with Evan, they'd always had money ahead, plus untouchable savings and an emergency fund, plus health and life insurance ("You're the perfect one to be selling it; nobody has a better life"), and now he was in debt for the house, in debt to his father for two thousand dollars, and even deeper in debt to Jay. How had this come about, he'd ask as plaster purled across a wall under his trowel, and where was the remedy? He never really knew whether Alpha believed he'd received such a strong promise of a teaching job, or whether she thought he'd moved to Illinois merely to be closer to his mother, and now he never would. He knew she was hurt that he'd turned from teaching again, but now there was no reason to turn back. He'd quit carpentering for his father because it displeased her so, and when he started working for Jay she was too ill for him to tell how she felt from what she showed. The torment was more than grief; it grew, linking one memory to another, linking networks of them together, and the nets and web-work wouldn't let her go.
"Dad? Are you all right?"
He let his arms drop beside his plate. "Yes. Just tired."
All they had for transportation was the pickup. In winter and when it was raining hard, the six of them rode in the cab, the boys holding the girls on their laps, a smell of a bad electrical circuit and gasoline enwrapping them. The girls sang at the tops of their lungs and could harmonize already, and the boys' bodies beneath jolted with the blows they gave one another in silent anger in the dark. Bags of plaster color broke and spilled and spread over the floorboards and merged into a muddy gray, and all six tracked it into the house. In summery weather, the boys rode in the box of the truck and at first they liked it so much they whistled and shouted, they stood and made wings, or held their arms like Superman, and he had to keep knocking on the rear window and signaling them to sit. But when they went anywhere lately the boys huddled down with their backs against the cab, silent and withdrawn, and he could see, as they climbed out over the tail gate at their destination, her gestures and her averted eyes when she was suffering the silent humiliation she suffered most of her term on earth.
He would have taken his own Life just to end the torment, to be at peace, as he'd once told Jerome and Charles (and maybe be with her; who could say?), if it wasn't for the five here at the table. And when they were bad or unhappy, he felt there was no use. The boys used up any money he left with them buying candy, and ate breakfast food for most of their meals. None of them ever mentioned their mother.
He looked across at Charles, who sat with his elbows on the tabletop and his eyes lowered, forking food into his mouth as fast as he could. His big skull had a bluish tint to it. A few days ago, for some unaccountable reason, he'd taken out the electric razor and shaved off all his hair.
"Well, what kind of trouble did you cause today?" he asked, and his words made him feel weary and resentful. He was being unjust. He couldn't help it. Charles was always the guilty one, it seemed, and more so since he'd been spending his vacations with Lionell; he might be from another family. He had a bad temper, a savage energy, and was unpredictable. Alpha tended to favor him, yet he was the only one she lost her temper with; one day she caught him striking matches along the foundation of a house and came up behind him and grabbed his arm, grabbed up a bundle of the matches, struck them, and held them under his hand until he understood what it was like to be burned. He couldn't stand to lose. If a game or argument didn't go in his favor, he started a fight, and when he was left alone with the little ones he sometimes set up strict rules, such as no singing or talking, no TV, no dinner, or made them march in unison around the room, and if they violated a rule, or disobeyed him, he hit them or shoved them into a closet and held them in darkness until the pickup pulled into the drive again.
Charles gave an impatient scowl, and said, "What did I do? Nothing." His eyes looked larger now that he had no hair, and his long eyelashes, catching the light of the bare bulb overhead, sparkled as he blinked several times. He was also a practiced liar.
"Nothing? Then what's the matter? Why do you act so guilty? Why are you all so quiet?"
"We're eating," Charles said.
Jerome sat next to Charles, and Martin said in a restrained and altered tone, as though to an arbiter, "Jerome, what is this?"
Jerome was twelve but knew all of the children's needs, anticipated their whims, and was guileless and gentle, and thus cared for them better than most adults. He looked out of his intelligent eyes, his lips sober, and then shook his intelligence and made himself a blank.
"Jerome," Martin said, placing both fists, broad as saucers, on the tabletop. "I asked you a question. What's going on here?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I don't think I really saw it."
"Saw what?"
"Anything that happened."
"Then something did happen."
"I don't know."
"You just said it did!"
"I didn't see it happen."
"Ach!"
It was futile. The girls, at the side of the table to his left, their wide eyes fastened on him, were cringing at the tone of his voice. It angered him to keep at it this way, to give it such importance, but he couldn't help himself, and his interrogations and reprimands had a purpose; if he could prove that whatever they'd done had made them so unhappy he could see it, how could they want to put themselves through such unhappiness again? He seldom punished them physically, as she sometimes had; he believed it was unnecessary and wrong, and besides, it frightened him to see an adult's strength (his face disfigured with anger) thrown against a momentarily parentless child. He was especially afraid of his own strength. He stared at the open lime bums on his knuckles, clenching and unclenching his fists, angered even more by his indecisive-ness, and then reached for his fork.
He stopped.
Tim, who was across from the girls, alone at that side of the table, was looking with fear at him, then at his brothers and then at his food, which he'd hardly touched.
Tim, who was changed so by her death, had become his favorite. He was no longer serene and good-natured. He fought so ferociously with Jerome and Charles he sometimes hurt himself, or them, and lately he'd been bringing home his own friends—the most tattered, backward, underfed outcasts in his class. When Martin tried to talk to him, he pinched his eyes shut and bared his teeth in a false smile, as though to keep from being reached, or assumed a stunned,
dumb look, answered in grunts and winks, and went clumping around like Donny Ennis. He spoke a made-up language Martin couldn't understand, and somehow had acquired a foul tongue; once when he was fixing a trike, he whispered, "You old cunthole." "Hey!" Martin cried. "Where'd you hear that?" Tim paled, crossed one eye, bucked his teeth, and said, "I don't know, kind sire, but once I did I surely latched on to it." Some nights he sleepwalked through the house carrying a blanket, calling her by name, and if his wanderings and his voice didn't wake Martin, so he could take him into bed with him, he walked through the entire house, went out the door into the back yard, to the incinerator where she'd planted hollyhocks, and lay down there and slept until morning, or until he was found.
Now his eyes, light green, large and seductive, were traveling around the table with a harried look, as if to find a point to cling to.
With his lime-burned hand, Martin reached out and touched his shoulder. "You didn't do anything, did you, Tim?" he asked, and gave him a shake, and Tim, shrugging off his hand, turned around and took hold of the back of the chair and broke into coughing sobs.
"Jerome! What's this about? Answer me!"
"I don't know how to," Jerome said, and looked aside at Charles, who was still eating as fast as he could.
"Did he hurt Tim?" Martin demanded. "Is Charles the cause of this?"
Jerome lowered his eyes.
"Tim, you can tell me," Martin said. "You don't have to be afraid."
"I'm done," Charles said, and scraped back his chair. "I'm going out."
"You sit right where you are till I'm through with you!”
Charles sat, piled more food on his plate, and started eating again.
"And if we have to sit here all night until I find out what's been going on, we will!"
Tim shifted his weight, his eyes made an anxious circuit of the table, and then, shrinking back in his chair, he cried, "He kicked Arvin!"
"Who?"
"Chuck!"
“Kicked him?”
"Then Arvin went home. He was crying!" Arvin Becker, a frail boy who'd just moved up from Cairo, was Tim's most recent and most enduring friend.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 37
