Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  But that comes later. In Florida Jean was relatively cheerful. He enjoyed telling stories, particularly dialect stories, and always made my mother laugh. He swam a mile a day, read Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain in paperback, ate well, slept well, and was content. When I started to become a problem he felt uninvolved and left discipline to my mother. He was probably right. I doubt that he could have helped me.

  It began slowly: balking at my chores (helping with the dishes, watering the sandy lawn with its nonviable baby palm trees, sweeping the floor, all the countless empty jobs adults give children), never coming home on time, sulking. Gradually I slipped into the state of being in trouble, a pedal point of tension that was to grow steadily until I understood little else about myself, until the fact of being alive became synonymous with the fact of being in trouble.

  The first year in Florida was my last good year until I became a man. The woods, Tobey, bikes, running, nakedness, freedom—these were the important things. It was the end of childhood.

  At night we’d ride our bikes down a long, flat, empty road through the woods to the drive-in movie at the edge of town. Kids were allowed in free. We’d sit on a long bench just under the screen, or lie on the sandy ground and stare up at the immense figures moving against the sky. Going home, the movie would stay with us for a while. We’d act out the best scenes, shouting the lines. Nervous, filled with passion, we stood up on the bikes for more speed and pedaled deeper and deeper into the woods. Halfway home the movie was gone. We’d ride easily through the balmy air, gliding, listening to the faint hiss of the tires on the asphalt. We’d sing Hoagy Carmichael (“Ol’ buttermilk SKY!”) or swerve the bikes stylishly in long arcs back and forth. The road was always empty. There were no houses, no lights—only the stars.

  3

  Going North

  JEAN had a plan: to build a house next to ours and rent it out. All he needed was money. For that we’d go back North where wages were higher.

  Tobey came to see me off. I remember him standing in front of the house as we pulled out of the driveway. He waved once and then stood quietly. I’d told him I was coming back the following summer, that I’d come back even if it meant running away. I watched him walk over to get his bike from against the tall pine in the yard, watched him spin the pedal with his foot and lift his head. I waved through the back window and then we turned a corner and he was gone.

  A curious thing happened in the car. Nobody spoke. For miles and miles we rode in silence. It couldn’t have been sadness. They were leaving nothing behind, not a single friend, no lovers, no enemies. They could pick up and leave for New York as easily as going to the beach. Jean and my mother always lived that way. They were rarely asked anywhere, made no friends, and lived, except for an occasional boarder in the house, in total isolation from the rest of humanity.

  Alison was glad to go back North. For her it was the end of a period of loneliness and disturbing proximity to the rest of the family. She was older than me, and living without privacy, almost in the same room with Mother and Jean, was extremely difficult. I was certainly no help to her. My favorite trick, when I saw her making for the outhouse, was to sneak up behind her, push a sapling through a crack in the wall, and tickle her bare behind. She never failed to scream. In fact, on the first occasion she burst through the door of the privy and out into the sunlight screaming her heart out—blue jeans around her ankles, white tail in the air, fast-shuffling toward the safety of the house like an hysterical majorette. The few tentative friends she’d made at school lived miles away, and in any case couldn’t, she felt, be asked home. Living in Florida she had neither a real family nor a supporting outside world. She was glad to go North, and as it turned out, she never came back.

  For my mother the decision to return to New York was undoubtedly a relief. All year she’d been secretly holding back money from her pay checks in an attempt to keep one or two hundred on hand for emergencies, and all year Jean, with an uncanny sixth sense, had known just when he could go over the budget. Instead of acting as a safeguard her emergency fund encouraged Jean’s already dangerous financial irresponsibility. He began to believe he couldn’t be broke with his wife around. In eight years with my mother he never held a steady job. It may be significant that once he was alone, without emergency funds, or support checks for his children, faced in fact with the appalling prospect of being broke with nowhere to turn, he settled down to driving a taxicab and has worked hard ever since.

  Jean went North with some apprehensiveness, but he knew he needed money to finance the building of the house, and he was willing to work if it meant easy street later on. He liked Florida because it was warm. The warmth meant something to him and he was uneasy leaving it. (When he split up with my mother he went straight to Florida. I’ve seen the same reaction in other people. A friend from college, in terrible shape after leaving school, breaking up with his girl, and leading a lonely life in New York suddenly announced he was going to Florida “because it’s warm.”)

  I didn’t want to leave Fort Lauderdale. Tobey had become my best friend. There was nothing waiting for me in New York.

  Our first stop was Jacksonville, Florida, my father’s birthplace. Alison and I were to see Minnie, our grandmother, who lived there with a hired companion. Minnie was old and rich, and a little crazy.

  Through the quiet suburban streets of Jacksonville. Early morning, and the sun is still cool. The car moves forward smoothly under the trees. My mother turns to check our appearance. For the first time in a year or more I am wearing a tie.

  “Maybe she’ll take us out to lunch,” Alison says, remembering a day in New York when Minnie took us to the Waldorf-Astoria. She smooths the skirt of her dress, pleased at looking nice. “Someplace downtown.”

  “Here we are,” Jean says, pulling up to the curb. “Too late to turn back.” Easy for him to laugh, I think. He doesn’t have to go in.

  We get out slowly. Mother leans down and says to Jean through the open window, “I’ll be back in a second.” Our footsteps seem unnaturally loud on the pavement. I look down at my feet. The polished shoes seem unfamiliar, as if they didn’t belong to me. I make a point of stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk.

  “Remember not to talk about Jean,” my mother says. “All right. Here we are.” She rings the bell.

  The door is opened by Miss Smith, a pleasant-looking woman of fifty-five or sixty. She wears a dress with large green flowers in the design and around her neck a string of pink pearls, rosy against the dry skin. The moment she sees us she smiles. “Well, just look who’s here!”—as if she hadn’t been expecting us—“Isn’t this nice!”

  My mother steps back from the door. “I won’t come in just yet. I’ll say hello when I come back for the children.”

  “That’s fine,” says Miss Smith, nodding her head, still smiling. “That’ll be just fine.” Her voice has a kind of sing-song rhythm, vaguely reassuring, as if nothing could surprise her. “All right, children.” She leads us into the hall, closing the door behind us. The house is cool and dark, with a peculiar musty, sweet odor hanging in the air. At the end of the hall she gently puts her hand on my shoulder, stopping me, and goes into a room. “Minnie!” We hear her voice raise slightly in pitch. “Isn’t this nice? Frank and Alison are here to see you.”

  My grandmother’s response is electrifying. Her voice ascends in a strange shrill noise, a cross between a shriek and a coo, a cracked, warbling, shaky cry, meant, I finally realize as Miss Smith returns still smiling, to indicate pleasure. Again the gentle hand on my shoulder, this time urging me forward into the sitting room.

  Minnie sits by the window in an old-fashioned wooden wheelchair. Puffy, snow-white hair explodes radially from her face in a halo of brightness and her sharp blue eyes move back and forth between us. “The children. The children ...” she murmurs. As we approach she lifts her skinny hands from the armrests and holds them fluttering in the air like two weak birds.

  To my complete amazement Alis
on goes right up to the old lady and kisses her on the cheek. Minnie is suddenly calm, her eyes look straight at me, almost as if Alison weren’t there. Miss Smith gives me a surreptitious nudge and I go forward. Under the slippery black sleeve my grandmother’s arm is impossibly thin, not much thicker than a walking stick and just as hard. Her cheek is cool against my mouth, not unpleasant, but a strong odor rises from her body—lavender, urine, a sweet decay. Dry fingers light as feathers touch my cheek. “Well, well, well ...” her cracked bird-voice says in my ear. I step away, glancing at Miss Smith. We all sit down and Miss Smith begins to chat, filling the silence.

  Hours later. The room is getting warm and an old electric fan has been turned on. Standing on a table in the corner, it sweeps slowly back and forth, a huge black insect turning its head. At Minnie’s insistence Alison and Miss Smith have gone downtown to get Alison a new dress. I sit on a kitchen chair facing my grandmother, who has dozed off. A horn sounds from the street and her eyes open.

  “Do you know where your father is?” she asks.

  “In the hospital.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Yes, of course,” she says sharply, “but what’s wrong with him?”

  After a moment I say, honestly, “I don’t know.”

  For some reason this seems to please her. “Will you go and see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  I try to think. “I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  Her long ropey hands tremble in her lap. She says nothing for several moments, and then out of nowhere suddenly asks, “Do you love me?”

  My face flushes with heat. “Yes. Of course.”

  She leans forward from the wheelchair, a fierce bird, her eyes on mine. “Do you really love me?”

  “Of course I love you, Grandmother.” The unfamiliar word seems overformal but I don’t know what else to call her.

  With an ambiguous sigh she leans back, her eyes finally releasing me. “I am your grandmother,” she says unnecessarily. “Miss Smith always wants me to send you money. She always says, ‘Don’t you think it’d be nice to send something to Frank and Alison?’ ”

  “Thank you for the check on my birthday.”

  “Birthdays and Christmas, Christmas and birthdays. You don’t have to thank me. Do you keep it or give it to your mother?”

  “Oh, we keep it. She cashes it for us.”

  “You need a new suit. Get one in New York and have her send me the bill.”

  “Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

  She slams her hand against the armrest. “Shut up.”

  I watch the black head of the electric fan moving back and forth, back and forth.

  “Why should I give you money? You’re her children, not mine.” Soon she falls asleep again.

  Alison and Miss Smith return. Minnie remains in the sitting room while we eat sandwiches in the kitchen. Alison talks animatedly to Miss Smith. Sipping at my Coke I am envious of my sister. She can jolly up Minnie, too, in a way that seems completely genuine. Is it? I look up at Alison’s flushed, smiling face. Does Minnie mean anything to her, an old woman we’ve seen three or four times in our lives? Am I missing something that Alison is getting? She’s older than me, of course. Suddenly I know that Alison is only acting. She plays it out as if we were ordinary grandchildren visiting an ordinary grandmother, as if we were the sort of people Alison had read about in the magazines. I look at Miss Smith, at her kind face, her lips moving in encouragement as Alison talks. My mind halts. I’m too young to know what I’m watching. Two women, one old, one young, keeping up appearances.

  Our ’36 Ford was a remarkable car. Driven nonstop from Jacksonville to New York, it never complained, never faltered. Its small V-8 engine drank very little gas, its temperature and oil pressure remained reassuringly constant, and in every respect it seemed dependable if not indestructible. Jean had bought it second hand for two hundred dollars. At three o’clock in the morning, humming along through the flat swamplands of the Carolinas in the moonlight, he and I watched the odometer move from 99,999.9 to 00,000.0.

  “That engine hasn’t been opened once in a hundred thousand miles,” Jean said. “Of course it’s just luck. I got this and someone else got a lemon.”

  “What does it mean, really, when a car is a lemon?”

  “Every once and a while on the assembly line a car gets put together the wrong way. Everything goes wrong—little things at first and then bigger and bigger things. If you ever buy one sell it right away before it gets expensive.”

  “Did you ever buy one?”

  “No.”

  The idea fascinated me. Watching the empty road ahead of us I turned the concept of lemon over and over in my mind. It seemed the perfect word—a bright yellow car mysteriously endowed among all its brothers with an individual fate. Automobile number 142241, ostensibly the same as all the others, but actually a composite of manufacturing errors, a collection of mistakes. It made a great deal of sense to me. Instead of spreading the mistakes equally over all the cars produced, certain cars, known as lemons, were packed efficiently with everything that could possibly go wrong with an automobile. In this way one knew that the other cars were okay.

  “How often do they turn up?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Every couple or three thousand.”

  “They ought to do something about it. They shouldn’t sell them.”

  “They don’t care. Now you take the Tucker. There was a really modern automobile. He cared about making a good car and look what they did to him.”

  “It’s too bad we’ll never be able to get one.”

  “They squeezed him right out.” Jean’s voice rose suddenly and in the back seat Mother and Alison stirred in their sleep. “He was too good. They squeezed him out.”

  “Victor says Tucker was a thief. An embezzler.”

  “Victor! What does Victor know? I’ve seen the car. The embezzlement charge was a conspiracy of the big automobile manufacturers. It’s the same old story. They couldn’t meet the competition so they framed him.”

  “Can they get away with that?”

  “Get away with it?” Jean laughed hoarsely, his choked cry even more explosive than usual. “They can get away with anything they damn please! They run the whole show. Don’t you know that yet?”

  “Hush up. We’re trying to sleep,” Mother said from the back.

  “For someone who’s supposed to be so smart,” Jean said softly, turning to me with a faint smile, “you don’t use the old bean very much.” This was a familiar phrase of Jean’s, a favorite accusation against me, and always, like some final incantation at a religious rite, a signal that the dialogue was over, a reminder that Jean, as leader, was privy to secrets beyond my ken. It was an appeal to my faith, delivered gently, with an almost apologetic smile whenever he sensed hesitancy in my response to him. I always took it as a compliment.

  I did hesitate, though, at his explanations—not so much because I didn’t believe him as because the way in which he delivered explanations left very little room for response. Jean’s intellectual touchstone was clarity. All problems were reduced to a simple proposition—race prejudice was exclusively an economic problem, dentists refused to tell people not to eat sugar because in doing so they would put themselves out of business, religion was nothing more than superstition, if you ate the right foods you would never get sick, there was no such thing as heredity, everything started from zero when the sperm cell met the egg cell, no one could learn to play the piano except by practicing eight hours a day—and so forth and so on. His style almost never varied. First a slow and elaborate introduction to the subject at large, and finally, at the right moment, a sudden reduction to the essential. It was simple and remarkably successful—after the bewildering opening verbiage many people grasped the cleverly introduced reduction with the tenacity of bulldogs. (Jean once had a bulldog.) He would turn eagerly, his ey
es sparkling and his head thrown forward in a parody of anticipation to see the effect of his logic. It was always a difficult moment. Jean wanted more than a sign of recognition, a sign that you had understood; he wanted you to become him, to discard immediately all ideas of your own and totally accept the closed frame of reference in which he saw whatever problem it was you were discussing.

  Jean’s technique and tremendous verbal energy impressed me, but I could never surrender completely. I sensed he was too tricky to be altogether right. (Yet even now, knowing what I know, I am vaguely ashamed of my hedging.) But in those days Jean was good-humored about the resistances he found in his fellow men. He was accustomed to them after all. Half his life had been spent wandering like some profane messiah telling people not to eat white bread and they had gone right on doing it. He had a certain good-natured stoicism in those days.

  Jean was a sucker for any diner with a truck in front of it—we were even fooled once by a huge cardboard cutout of a semi cleverly half hidden in the shadows. “Trucks Welcome. Trucks Stop Here! Truckers! Eats Bunks Showers ...” In all of them the juke boxes played one tune, “Red Silk Stockings and Green Perfume,” a long, twangy hillbilly dirge. I remember a place in Virginia where the waitress had a glass eye.

  “Howdy,” Jean said. He always used this curious word with working people, saying it slowly and tentatively as if to reassure them that despite his aristocratic profile he was just plain folks. Howdy. A cross between cowboy talk and mountain talk, it was as exotic to Jean as it was to me.

  “What’ll it be?” she said, peering through her one movable eye.

  “What kind of pie’ve you got?”

  “Apple cherry blueberry rhubarb pecan and banna cream.”