Abide With Me, Page 7

  A loud metallic creak, as the back door of the car opened, and the quick, scrambling commotion of someone entering—Charlie jerked with such fear he shouted, “Jesus!”

  “Sorry, Dad.” The kid, his older son, was now in the seat behind him. “Were you sleeping? Sorry, Dad.”

  Charlie didn’t answer. Sometimes the boy did this, sat in the car with him during coffee hour, cracking his knuckles, moving his feet across the gritty floor mat, his presence behind Charlie like a cobweb spreading down over Charlie’s head.

  “Sorry,” the boy said again softly.

  “I wasn’t asleep. You want some of the paper?” Charlie gathered up the newspapers left on the seat beside him, and the boy must have taken this as an invitation, because he was sliding headfirst over the back of the seat, his long, skinny body stuck now—he was too big to do this, and his dark pant leg was practically in Charlie’s face, the long black shoe ready to make contact with his cheek. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Charlie, taking the tangle of gawky legs and helping to pull him over. The boy laughed nervously, as though he were still a young child, instead of the terrible in-between mess of pitiful self-consciousness that made up his thirteen-year-old self.

  Finally he was there, his Sunday-school coat too short in the sleeves, twisted around him as he arranged himself, his bright red hair darkened in streaks from the rain, a few drops still making their way down in front of his big, pale ears. He did not yet have the pimples of his older sister, but Charlie thought the boy was, in a way, one of the homeliest kids he had ever seen, his nose large and then suddenly round at the end, his chin—there was no way around it—would be the chin of a “weak-chinned man,” and if the kid’s face got any longer, you might not find the chin at all. Charlie didn’t know for sure, but he thought the boy had few friends. Maybe he didn’t have any friends at all.

  “Dad, what d’ya think about that Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, huh?”

  “What about it?”

  “Pretty swell, huh? Fifty-five thousand people in there. It’s going to cost twelve million bucks, Dad.”

  Charlie nodded, looked at the paper he was holding. Fathers talked to their sons about sports. He read the words in front of him. Six hundred and fifty million dollars for urban renewal. What would that do to the Combat Zone in Boston? Renew what? This country wasn’t old enough to renew.

  “Hey, Dad. What d’ya think about the NHL letting the goalies wear a face mask? They’re thinking about it, you know. Look—” The kid thrust before Charlie a picture of Jacques Plante with a basketlike thing across his face during a scrimmage game. Charlie looked hard at the picture. You couldn’t blame the guy, he supposed, for not wanting to get any more teeth knocked out by a puck sailing a hundred miles an hour. But he didn’t even look like a man anymore with all that stuff on and the face hidden by that basket. The guy looked crazy, to Charlie. We’re all going crazy, he thought. Even in sports. Everyone scared and vicious. He felt an unaccountable surge of fear; he thought of all the juvenile delinquency in the country now; there it was on the third page—in Brooklyn a principal had committed suicide because he had so much delinquency in his school. People thought it was just in the cities, but it was making its way up the river. Charlie had seen some hoods loitering in the bus station in Hollywell last week, not much older than his own kid, whose eager, homely face was watching his father, waiting for an answer—kids wanted fathers to have answers.

  “A good idea,” Charlie said. “It’ll change the nature of the game, but what the hell.”

  The boy nodded, looked back down at the paper, the side folded just the way the newspaper on Charlie’s lap was. That he had reproduced any part of himself seemed to Charlie a mistake of almost biblical proportions. That this reproduction should present itself in such big-eared, pale-skinned innocence brought a searing pain to Charlie’s troubled stomach. For years he had taught at the Academy, and he viewed the variety of his students’ awkwardness from behind a safe shield of indifference; they had the benefit, after all, of not being his. He closed his eyes, and an image came to mind: walking up behind his boy, wrapping an arm around his skinny body, pressing his own cheek against the boy’s, saying quietly, “You are good, and you are loved. And for your own sad sake I wish you hadn’t been born.”

  ON THE STOVE TOP sat three baked potatoes, their skins indented and dark. “Thank you, Mother,” Tyler said.

  “I like to help,” his mother answered. “When there’s no one left for me to help, I will just be a worthless old woman.”

  At the dining-room table, while the rain tapped against the porch roof outside, Jeannie reached for the butter dish while Tyler said grace. Her grandmother, opening one eye, pushed the butter dish farther toward the center of the table. Katherine ate some potato and left her chicken alone. Her grandmother said, “Children in some areas of the world right now are crying. They are so hungry they can only cry, and then they get too tired to cry. Some children are so hungry they have eaten dirt.”

  “Mother, it’s all right,” Tyler said. “Her stomach’s been a little upset.”

  Sitting in the living room after the meal, watching the girls down the hall tie a doll’s bonnet around the patient head of Minnie, Tyler said nothing to his mother about the conference with Mrs. Ingersoll or the church organ or the visit from Doris. He simply listened as his mother recalled, “I made mackerel that night. And roasted potatoes. He said, ‘Thank you, Megs,’ and sat down in his chair. His last words, Tyler. ‘Thank you.’ “

  Tyler watched the girls and wondered why it was people told the same story over and over again, wondered fleetingly if he did this, too. He didn’t think he did.

  “Your father was a good man.”

  “Yes, he certainly was,” said Tyler.

  “ ‘Always be considerate,’ he used to say. ‘Always think of the other man first.’ Do you remember how he told you that?”

  “Every night.” Tyler nodded. “And then you’d climb the stairs and hear my prayers.” His father, due to a sledding accident years before, had been too lame to climb stairs—had in fact, referred to himself as a cripple.

  “Say,” said his mother, “do you remember Saul Feiffer’s wife?”

  “Sure,” said Tyler. “Ilse. Saul met her when he was over there liberating the camps. She was practically a kid at the time.”

  “That’s right. Seventeen years old when she met him. They were active in that small synagogue outside of Arrington.”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “Well, the woman killed herself.”

  “Who did?”

  “Ilse.”

  Tyler closed his eyes.

  “Horrible thing to do,” his mother said. “Imagine surviving the camps just to commit suicide one day. They lived in a nice house. Saul had it built for them. And they were so pleased when they had that little boy. Evidently there’d been some question if that could happen because of Ilse’s health, the earlier malnutrition. She hated dogs. I remember that. Hated them.”

  Tyler opened his eyes. “Mother—”

  “Oh, they can’t hear me. They’re in the other room. But an awful story, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” said Tyler.

  “Maybe Jews don’t find that a sin.”

  Tyler stood up. “What are the girls doing?”

  “Do you know, Tyler? If the Jews find that a sin?”

  “My understanding,” said Tyler, “is they believe as we do. Our souls are not ours to extinguish.”

  “All the more galling when you think of her little boy, and Saul, I think, is a decent man. I wish your sister had married a better man. Not a Jew, of course. That would hardly work out.”

  “Tom’s a nice fellow,” Tyler said. He heard the girls laughing down the hall, and seated himself once more on the couch. He did not look at his mother.

  “He drives a bus, Tyler.”

  “Well, that’s an honest living.”

  “Your sister’s unhappy, and there’s nothing I can do.”

>   “I think Belle is fine.”

  “You do, do you. Ay-yuh. I’m going to gather my things.” She called down the hall, “Katherine, kiss your sister good-bye.”

  Katherine loved her sister. Anyone paying attention could see how this was true. While Katherine seldom reached out to pull Jeannie toward her, she would stand close to the toddler and wait for the small hands to pat her. Katherine would smile, pat her back, and once, when Jeannie fell, running across the dining-room floor, banging her head hard enough to make her cry, Katherine tried, with her own small arms, to hold her sister, whispering, “Hush, hush.” But how much did anyone notice?

  Margaret Caskey noticed that her son’s study, when she peered in while he was at church, had the fetid smell of a schoolboy; she suspected that he slept on the couch there, rather than in his bedroom, and she found the thought distasteful. Facing Tyler now, she said, “The good Lord willing, then, we will see you next week.”

  “The rain’s letting up.” Tyler looked out the window. “That’s good. I hate to think of you driving in the rain.”

  “Tyler, listen to me. There’s a girl Sara Appleby knows. She left school to care for her mother, who I guess recently passed away, and the girl—it’s very convenient, Tyler. She lives in Hollywell. Sara says she’s a lovely person and you should give her a call.”

  “Jeannie,” said Tyler, as the girls chased the dog down the hallway into the living room. “Be easy with the doggie.”

  “Minnie loves the attention,” said the child’s grandmother, her gaze on Katherine. “Any improvement in that particular department, Tyler? Because there doesn’t seem to be.”

  “Coming along, I think.” He waved his fingers at Katherine, who looked over as though she knew she was being talked about, her eyes shining out from behind her hair.

  Tyler said, “What’s the name of this girl Sara knows?”

  “Susan Bradford. Give it a chance, Tyler.” His mother looked around the living room. “It becomes unhealthy. You can’t go on like this.”

  He hugged the wiggling Jeannie good-bye, stood by the door, resting a hand on Katherine’s head, and watched as his mother pulled out of the driveway. The rain had stopped, but a darkness and a wetness remained, and inside the house it was quiet.

  THAT EVENING ORA KENDALL CALLED, and he was glad to hear her droll, unexcited voice. “Ora,” he said, “how nice to hear your voice.”

  “Fred Chase thinks you’re starting to look Catholic.”

  “Oh, well,” said Tyler, “that’s rubbish.”

  “Of course it’s rubbish. He doesn’t like the way you raise your arms when you pray, and truthfully, Tyler, I don’t give a damn what you do with your arms, but I haven’t seen a minister pray that way. When did you start that? Fred says it looks like a Catholic priest. Skogie says it looks like you’re about to start a Southern revival and have us all hold hands.”

  “Well, Ora. I can’t say I’ve been to many Southern revivals lately.”

  “You make people touch each other, Tyler, and you’ll be out of here in no time.”

  “No touching, Ora. Promise.” He glanced down at Katherine, coloring on the floor nearby. “I’ve been meaning to tell you—the chrysanthemums have been beautiful this month.”

  “You told me already,” Ora said. “Good night.”

  CHARLIE AUSTIN WAS the only person in town who knew that Connie Hatch was being investigated by the state police. Charlie was privy to this information because his cousin, who was not on the force but worked in their office in Augusta, often told Charlie things on the side. Last night he had mentioned this to Charlie. It seemed some money and valuables had disappeared from the county farm at the time Connie last worked there, now more than two years ago. Connie was one of three women being investigated, and Charlie was not supposed to tell anyone.

  Charlie, as he watched Doris this morning, making orange juice from a frozen can, was nevertheless tempted to say, “Hey, Doris, do you think Connie Hatch might be stealing from Tyler?” But he didn’t much care if that was the case, nor did he think Tyler had an extra nickel to steal, and so he just sat at the table, running his hand down his face, still smelling the Dial soap from his morning shower, and realizing slowly that Doris was in a particularly foul mood, banging away at the frozen orange juice with the back of a wooden spoon.

  Doris stopped to tug on her bathrobe. “I hate winter,” she said. “I hate the dark and I hate to think about months of snow.”

  Charlie loved snow. But he said nothing.

  “It makes getting around just hellish,” his wife said. “This isn’t going to thaw in time.” She glanced at the clock.

  “It’s okay,” Charlie told her. “We can live one morning without orange juice—can’t we, kids?”

  “Sure,” said his younger son, with a kind of buoyant hopefulness.

  “Mother,” said Lisa, “forget it. Sit down. Your toast is cold.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” said Doris, working intently, pressing the frozen stuff with the back of a spoon.

  Charlie watched her, then looked away, because he did not want to watch her. She could have been a stranger, yet her physical presence was as familiar to him as the sight of his own hand, which he now spread out on the table and stared at. The woman in Boston had said you could tell the size of a man’s cock by the size of his hands, but in his case, she said, it wasn’t true. She had told him his hands were medium, but he was huge. He did not think he was huge, but he knew, from locker rooms in college, and his time in the army, that he was bigger than most. Doris did not know this. She had never seen any other man.

  “Charlie, hold on,” said Doris, looking over at him. “I think you can drink this in a minute. I know you like your orange juice.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I just told you it was all right.”

  He did not want to dominate her. He did not want her to be frightened of him. He did not want anything at all, except to have his children healthy and to be in a hotel bed in Boston, where the woman had spoken to him in such appallingly frank and dirty terms, had become, herself, so excited by his excitement that she made sounds he never knew a woman could make.

  “Dad?”

  He turned to look at Lisa.

  “I just asked you a question.”

  “I didn’t catch it,” he said.

  “I asked have you heard of Operation Blue Skies?” Lisa said this with a kind of arrogant self-consciousness; she was showing off.

  Doris said, “What’s Operation Blue Skies?”

  “I was talking to Dad,” Lisa said.

  He should say, “Lisa, be polite to your mother.” But he didn’t like the smell of the kitchen. The boys were eating oatmeal, their heads too close to the bowls. Oatmeal must have burned in the pan. He looked over at the stove, frowned. He said, “No, I haven’t. Or maybe I have. Is that the government project on biological warfare?”

  “I’m tying you up,” the woman had said. “Because you are a bad, bad man.” She had used his necktie first—dark blue with red stripes, a birthday present from his sons, picked out by Doris; he had seen in their eyes when he opened it and thanked them that they hadn’t looked at it before—but the woman had other ties in her bag.

  “Have you heard about the vigil?” Lisa asked.

  “No,” Charlie said. “What vigil is that?” But he was pushing back his chair, standing up. “Let’s go, kids,” he said. “Finish up.”

  “There’s time, Charlie. Lisa is talking to you.”

  And so he forced himself to look at his daughter, but she seemed uncharacteristically vehement, self-righteous. He felt frightened. She was telling him how every day a group of people stood outside the gates of Fort Detrick in Maryland. They wanted to stop the research on germ warfare. What did he think?

  “Who?” Charlie asked.

  “You,” Lisa said.

  “Think of what?”

  Lisa began to cry. Her pink face, with its series of tiny red pimples across the top o
f her forehead, got splotchy. “Dad,” she said, “you’re not listening.”

  “Why aren’t you listening?” asked Doris.

  Charlie sat down again. “You’re such a bad boy,” the woman had said. “You need to be tortured.” Running her hand down over him. “I need to hear you beg.”

  He felt sick. “I’m listening,” he said. “You were talking about people holding a vigil every day to ask the government to stop research on germ warfare. See? I heard every word.”

  Lisa’s mouth trembled. “I just wondered what you think,” she said.

  He looked around the kitchen. Doris was pouring orange juice into glasses. The boys sat with their heads down.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said.

  “Well, I just thought,” Lisa said, rolling her wet eyes, “since you’ve been in the war, you know, you might have an opinion.”

  He could think of nothing to say. He could not remember any of his children mentioning to him, before this, that he had been in the war.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Doris said, setting down the orange juice. “I think we better know how to defend ourselves, and if we know about germ warfare maybe the Russians won’t start an atomic war.”

  “Why don’t we build a bomb shelter?” asked the younger boy in earnest. “The Clarks are. And the Meadowses have one. They have two cots and cans of food—”

  “We don’t need a bomb shelter,” Charlie said, putting his hand out to stop the boy’s words. He would rather melt in an atomic blast than be stuck in an underground shelter with his wife. If he couldn’t be stuck in a room with the woman in Boston, he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.

  “I think your mother is right,” he told Lisa. “You can be damn sure the Russians are doing their own experiments on biological warfare. I think your mother is right.”

  “I don’t,” Lisa said. “People shouldn’t be making bomb shelters, either, you little idiot,” she said to her brother. “That makes Russia and us think it’s okay to use bombs. Stupid.”