Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  I start to say no, to tell him I’m in kind of a hurry. Despite Julie’s propensity for melodrama, her phone call, the more I think about it, has me worried. But I also realize that this means a lot to Mr. Purty, so I go around the passenger side and climb up and in. I’m a tall man with long legs, and even for me it’s a pretty good step up. I can’t help smiling when I think of my mother, “the aristocat,” who will require a helpful hand under her fanny.

  Mr. Purty turns the key in the ignition to its auxiliary position and slips a tape into the stereo. Patsy Cline’s voice thunders forth from the speakers at a decibel level loud enough to wake Patsy Cline. Mr. Purty lets it stay that way for a few seconds, until he’s sure I’ve had the full benefit of the system. “Good speakers,” he says when he’s turned the music down so that we can converse. “You’re like me, though, I can tell. You don’t like your music loud.”

  I admit that this is true.

  “How ’bout your ma?” he wants to know. “I bet she don’t like it loud either.”

  “You do that to her, she’ll have you arrested.”

  I can tell that Mr. Purty takes this warning seriously. Like most of our conversations, the purpose of this one is to allow me the opportunity to give him tips on how to handle my mother. I know her better than he does, is his thinking. What he doesn’t quite grasp is the size of the gap between my knowledge and his own. Even if he managed to get the phrase “chewed him down” correct, he’d be surprised to discover that anyone would object to it. He imagines that what his own approach needs is a little fine-tuning. I don’t even know how to begin to tell him how wrong he is.

  He punches Patsy out of the tape deck, inters her in the special compartment behind the gearshift, slips in another tape. It’s Willie Nelson this time, and Willie can’t see nothin’ but blue skies. “I picked up Patsy for your ma,” Mr. Purty explains. “Me, I like Willie. What about your pa?”

  “Unless he’s changed, he prefers silence.”

  Mr. Purty shrugs, as if to acknowledge there’s no middle ground between those who like music and those who prefer silence.

  I smooth my hand over the dash, admire the interior of this truck that Mr. Purty, poor bastard, has purchased to impress my mother. “Pretty spiffy,” I say, hoping one more compliment may release me from the cab. Fat chance.

  “It’s got antibrakes,” he explains, pointing at the floor, as if you could tell antilock brakes by looking at the pedal. “Extracab.”

  I admire the space between the seat and the back of the cab.

  “That tark’s usually extra,” he explains, “but I made the kid give it to me for no charge.”

  I myself have no idea what a tark might cost because I don’t know what a tark is, until I follow Mr. Purty’s gaze out the back window and into the bed of the pickup truck, which is covered with a slate gray tarp.

  “You think your ma will like it?”

  With a tark and antibrakes? How can she not?

  “Let’s eat breakfast,” he suggests, indicating The Circle, which I never would have guessed served food.

  “I ate breakfast about four hours ago, Mr. Purty,” I tell him, though it occurs to me that I also lost it shortly thereafter. Perhaps because of this, I’m hungry again, and in truth Mr. Purty has cheered me up. The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.

  “I like breakfast,” Mr. Purty says. “Lots of times I eat it for lunch. Sometimes even dinner. Your ma like breakfast, does she?”

  “I’ve never known her to eat it,” I say truthfully.

  He nods morosely. Figures. “This place here’s got the best scrapple in Pennsylvania,” he assures me. “I bet you never even ate scrapple.”

  “Never,” I have to admit.

  “Well, come on then,” he says wearily, as if he doubts I’ll care for the taste, but at least I’ll be glad for the experience.

  It turns out that scrapple is like a lot of food that’s conceptually challenging. That is, better than you might expect. We chew our intestines in silence until Mr. Purty sees me grinning and reads my thought. “I’d never ask your mother to eat scrapple,” he assures me.

  CHAPTER

  18

  If possible, Julie and Russell’s house looks even more forlorn in the daytime, its incompleteness more pronounced, its windows more darkly vacant, Julie’s little Escort more of a contrast, sitting in the double garage large enough to accommodate a couple of minivans and a riding mower. Since the Escort is sitting there by itself, however, I can rule out one of the scrapple-induced scenarios that occurred to me as I drove over the mountain from The Circle and down into the village of Allegheny Wells. I half-expected to see the long drive full of familiar vehicles, including Lily’s. Inside, they’d all—friends, relatives, loved ones—be waiting for me, ready to intervene on my behalf. My wife has already done one such intervention with her father, and she may have decided it’s time to try one with me. The possibility struck me with such force at the top of the mountain that I pulled off at a scenic overlook to think it through. Up in the cold, rarefied air, it had almost seemed as if Occam’s Razor might be applied. An intervention might have explained, sort of, Julie’s strange telephone call. And Lily has been insisting for some time that she’s not the only one worried about me. Maybe they’ve all gotten together, I thought. Maybe the duck episode has convinced my loved ones that I need to be reined in.

  The trouble with scenic overlooks is that you can’t see the details on the ground below, and when I open the car door now and hear last autumn’s brittle leaves stirring in the breeze, the sound might be that of William of Occam having a quiet chuckle at my expense. The point of an intervention, after all, is to modify a specific behavior. In Lily’s father’s case, for instance, his children and grandchildren were trying to prevent him from drinking himself to death, a fairly unambiguous intention he’d all but announced. The charges leveled against him so relentlessly by the gathered clan were all variations on a single theme. Here’s how your drinking has affected me, hurt me, humiliated me, angered me. An intervention on behalf of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., would lack this sort of focus. Teddy Barnes would remind me that I don’t love Lily enough. My mother would express her disappointment that I’ve become a clever man. Billy Quigley would regret that I’m a peckerwood, his daughter Meg that I lack the courage to eat a peach. Finny (the man) and Paul Rourke would accuse me of being unprincipled, Dickie Pope of being too idealistic. In other words, I’m a rather vague pain in the collective ass.

  I enter my daughter’s house through the kitchen, knocking but not waiting for my knock to be acknowledged, the prerogative of a man entering a house that so minutely resembles his own. Once inside I hear Johnny Mathis on the stereo, strong evidence that Julie is the only one home. Russell is a blues man, not the sort of fellow who’d listen willingly to a lyric that included a phrase like “the twelfth of Never,” reinforced by weeping violins.

  She’s in the living room, my daughter, sitting at one end of the long sofa, staring out the patio door in the general direction of the wasps’ nest, which, I note, is still attached to the eave. Surely she’s heard me come in, but she doesn’t get up, or say hello, or even turn. From the doorway I can see that she’s still in her bathrobe, though it’s now early afternoon. Seen from the shoulders up, with her slender, graceful neck, she could be her mother sitting there.

  I go around the sofa and over to the patio door, my eye attracted by movement in the air. And there, under the eave, unbelievably, half a dozen black wasps are hovering about the cone, darting toward the dry, gray parchment, then veering away, as if repelled by an invisible shield.

  “They don’t learn,” Julie says, and when I turn to answer her, I see her left eye, the same one she injured as a child, is swollen almost shut. The eyeball itself, the small part that’s vi
sible, is a web of broken blood vessels.

  “Julie,” I say helplessly, standing there.

  “I want him out of the house,” she says.

  “Russell did this?”

  “I’ve packed a couple suitcases …”

  “Julie,” I say. “Stop a minute. Russell did this?” Am I wrong that the words need to be spoken?

  She reacts to my simple question thoughtfully, as if it contains a philosophical dimension I’m unaware of.

  “Did Russell hit you, Julie?”

  Again, it takes her a long time to formulate a response. “I fell,” she says finally.

  “You fell.”

  “He shoved me,” she tells me carefully, “and I fell.”

  Throughout this exchange, Julie has made no move to get up from the sofa, and I have not taken so much as a step toward her. What we’re missing, of course, what we need most, is Lily, not so much so we’ll know what to do as so we’ll know how to feel, to be sure which emotions are valid. There are times when I can read my wife’s soul in her face, and in such moments I can almost read my own.

  “Where is he now?” it occurs to me to ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Why? Do you want to check out my story?”

  I study my daughter, her accusation. In truth, I do not want to believe this about Russell, whom I have always liked and whose part I have occasionally taken, on those rare occasions when I’m permitted to take a part. And in truth I would like to ask more questions, keep asking them, in fact, until I’ve ruled out the possibility that this is some kind of accident, some misunderstanding. No doubt Julie has intuited this wish and interpreted it as an act of disloyalty, which perhaps it is.

  She looks down at her hands. “I want him gone. Out of my house.”

  I note the pronoun, let it go. We seem to have gotten through some initial stage and arrived at a point where action is called for, the point where I am thought to excel. “Okay,” I tell her, “you’d better come over to our place for a day or two, until …” I can’t quite finish my thought, it seems, because I’m not quite sure what we’ll be waiting for. Russell’s return? Lily’s return? God on a machine? “Why don’t you get dressed and pack a suitcase?”

  To my surprise, Julie offers no objection, and when she gets to her feet she’s suddenly in my arms and sobbing, “Oh, Daddy,” over and over. This all happens so quickly that I don’t know whether she’s come to me or I’ve gone to her, not that it matters.

  While she throws some things in a suitcase, I study the wasps outside the patio door. Julie’s right. They don’t learn. If this flimsy parchment death trap isn’t home, then what the hell is?

  There are two cars parked in my drive when Julie and I pull in. One’s an anonymous midsize, the other is Paul Rourke’s red Camaro. Seated on the top step of my deck, barefoot and wiggling her toes, is a young woman I recognize, after a moment’s hesitation, as the second Mrs. R. Julie studies her, then sends an accusing glance my way. At least I assume that’s what’s going on behind the dark glasses. “Quit,” I tell her. “That’s a good way to get another black eye.”

  I again count the cars blocking the entrance to my garage, arriving at the same total—two. Unless the second Mrs. Rourke drove them both, we’re short at least one person. Her husband, it occurs to me, may be off in the trees, bringing me into focus in his crosshairs. This thought makes the skin along the back of my neck prickle, even though I know that Occam’s Razor cannot be applied to this dramatic scenario. If Paul Rourke is going to shoot me from the woods behind my own house, he doesn’t require even one car, much less two, and presumably he wouldn’t want to establish the second Mrs. R. at the scene, unless he’s got a third Mrs. Rourke in mind, some pretty twenty-year-old in his English lit survey course, perhaps. The second Mrs. R., who’s eating a yogurt on my top step, looks like she’s got some good miles left on her, though. She’s licking her plastic spoon suggestively, it seems to me.

  “They’re around back,” she calls down when Julie and I get out. “Planning their strategy.”

  “Good for them,” I say, confident that no strategy that isn’t grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me. I reach back inside the car and hit the garage door opener so Julie can go inside with her suitcase.

  It turns out that “they” is Paul Rourke and Herbert Schonberg, who apparently meant it about tracking me down this afternoon. They come sauntering around the corner of the house, their heads down, their hands in their pockets. Herbert seems to be urgently impressing some point upon his companion, who’s neither buying nor selling. They’re a pretty odd couple. Normally Herbert and Rourke wouldn’t have much use for each other, but these are not normal times.

  It’s Herbert who makes a show of being glad to see me, hurrying forward, hand extended. “We took a walk in your woods, Hank,” he admits. “I hope you don’t mind.” He’s puffing heroically, a small man with a large belly, unused to physical exertion. Rourke, I note, is not breathing hard.

  “You’re a hard man to corner,” Herbert continues, after we’ve shaken hands. His tone is jovial—no hard feelings about my being so slippery, he seems to be saying.

  “I’m not cornered yet, Herbert,” I remind him. “You’re not parked behind me, I’m parked behind you.”

  Paul Rourke, who knows me far better than Herbert, and therefore knows that I’m not cornered, doesn’t pretend he’s glad to see me. When Herbert and I shook hands, he didn’t even take his own out of his pockets. Instead he follows Julie into the garage with his eyes. He does not appear to be trying to figure out what’s behind the sunglasses, or why my daughter has a suitcase. His gaze is noted by not only the young woman’s father but the second Mrs. R., who drops her plastic spoon into her empty yogurt container. “What?” Rourke wants to know, glancing up at her.

  “Nothing.”

  Rourke snorts, as if he’s not surprised it’s nothing, given the source.

  So far he hasn’t acknowledged my presence with eye contact, which is fine by me. For years, since the day he threw me up against the wall at the English Christmas party, we’ve avoided open conflict by not taking each other on directly. If our arena of conflict were a boxing ring, he’d have conceded to me the entire perimeter. I can dance and run and play on the ropes with impunity, like the lightweight coward I am. He has no desire, he lets on, to chase me, an activity that would be undignified for a heavyweight like himself. But if I’m ever foolish enough to venture into the center of the ring, he’ll make short work of me, as he has before. This is his public posture, maintained with sly insults and knowing sneers, the occasional taunt. I suspect that his leering after my daughter is a taunt of sorts.

  I’m not a coward, but I can play that role. I turn my attention to Herbert, and grin at him all friendly-like. I can take Herbert. One arm tied behind my back.

  “We’re hoping you’ll give us a half hour of your time, Hank. Paulie here has offered the use of his place if that’s more convenient.”

  “Nah,” I say. “It’s nicer over here.”

  Rourke’s jaw works a little, but that’s his only reaction. It’s a nice long jab I’ve got. Sometimes I can nail him from the corner of the ring, sitting atop the turnbuckle.

  “Is Lily home?” Herbert wants to know.

  My wife’s name must have been part of his briefing out there in the woods. “You mean Lila?” I ask.

  Herbert, alarmed, glances over at Rourke, who sighs.

  “Just kidding,” I say. “Some people call her that.”

  “ ’Cause this has got to be strictly private,” Herbert says, regaining his equilibrium.

  “Can I come in?” the second Mrs. R. wants to know, her voice following us inside.

  “Maybe she could chat with your daughter awhile?” Herbert suggests.

  “They could have a pajama party,” Rourke offers.

  “Actually, Julie isn’t feeling so hot,” I tell them.

  Occam is waiting impatiently at the kitchen door,
beside himself with delight at the prospect of company. If I could be sure it would be Rourke he’d groin, I’d let him go, but I’m not sure, so I grab his collar until we’re all inside and let him out to do laps. Then I let the second Mrs. R. in before Occam can charge up the steps and groin her. She immediately settles onto the couch, puts her feet up on the coffee table, and locates the TV remote. “You’re right,” she says without looking at me, settling in. “It is nicer over here.”

  I direct Herbert and Paul Rourke to the room I use as a study, close the door behind us, and clear off a couple surfaces so they’ll have a place to sit.

  “Marriage,” Rourke remarks, probably in reference to the second Mrs. R.’s comment, “is essentially a ball-busting experience.”

  “You only say that because my wife isn’t around to hear you,” I tell him.

  “You think that’s it?” he wants to know.

  “You’re tough,” I tell him. “But you aren’t that tough.”

  Herbert, I can tell, has had enough banter. “Hank,” he says, “you’re a pretty sharp fella, so my guess is you’ve figured out we’ve got a major shit storm brewing.…”

  He pauses, perhaps to let this sink in, perhaps to see if I’ll betray a reaction. I’m not sure what William of Occam would make of this prologue. There’s the obvious attempt to flatter, of course. Herbert’s willing to concede I’m “sharp,” or at least “pretty sharp,” on his own scale of dullness. He also knows that my intellectual acuity is hardly the issue, since stupid people are fully capable of listening to rumors.

  “I have been hearing there’s a storm on the way,” I admit, intrigued and amused by the fact that both Dickie Pope and the union he’s trying to bust have apparently arrived, independently, at the same metaphor. “You’re the first to identify the type of precipitation.”

  Rourke surrenders another of his nasty smirks at this. Having gone on record as saying that I’m never funny, he can’t allow himself the luxury of a real smile.

  Herbert is also serious, though he hasn’t, to my knowledge, weighed in on the subject of whether or not I’m amusing. “What I hope you realize is that this is not a local phenomenon. These aren’t isolated showers we’re looking at here. It’s gonna rain like a son of a bitch, Hank. Forty days and forty nights. That sort of thing.”