The Stand

  "About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it's not--"

  Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. "I don't want to hear about that."

  "Okay," he said. "Listen, Ma--what's the best theater around here?"

  "The Lux Twin," she said, "but I don't know what's playing there."

  "It doesn't matter. You know what I think? There's three things you can get everyplace in America, but you can only get them good in New York City."

  "Yeah, Mr. New York Times critic? What are those?"

  "Movies, baseball, and hotdogs from Nedick's."

  She laughed. "You ain't stupid, Larry -- you never were."

  So he went down to the men's room. And washed the blood off his forehead. And went back and kissed his mother again. And got fifteen dollars from her scuffed black purse. And went to the movies at the Lux. And watched an insane, malignant revenant named Freddy Krueger suck a number of teenagers into the quicksand of their own dreams, where all but one of them--the heroine -- died. Freddy Krueger also appeared to die at the end, but it was hard to tell, and since this movie had a Roman numeral after its name and seemed to be well attended, Larry thought the man with the razors on the tips of his fingers would be back, without knowing that the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.

  In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.

  CHAPTER 12

  There was a grandfather clock standing in the far comer of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated.

  Her favorite room in the place was her father's workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove. The door was good to begin with: small and almost hidden, it was deliciously like the sort of door one encountered in fairy-tales and fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did -- her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to. It was an Alice in Wonderland door, and for a while her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith's workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earthen sides and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of wet soil and damp and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies, one which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party ...

  Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there, but to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called "the toolshop" by her father and "that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer" by her mother) had been enough. Strange tools and odd gadgets. A huge chest with a thousand drawers, each of the thousand crammed full. Nails, screws, bits, sandpaper (of three kinds: rough, rougher, and roughest), planes, levels, and all the other things she'd had no name for then and still had no name for. It was dark in the workshop except for the cobwebby forty-watt bulb that hung down by its cord and the bright circle of light from the Tensor lamp that was always focused where her father was working. There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe, cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something. Because the smell of smoke seemed an integral part of her own childhood.

  "Hand me that wrench, Frannie. No --the little one. What did you do at school today? ... She did? ... Well, why would Ruthie Sears want to push you down? ... Yes, it is nasty. Very nasty scrape. But it goes good with the color of your dress, don't you think? Now if you could only find Ruthie Sears and get her to push you down again and scrape the other leg. Then you'd have a pair. Hand me that big screwdriver, would you? ... No, the one with the yellow handle."

  "Frannie Goldsmith! You come out of that nasty place right now and change your schoolclothes! RIGHT ... NOW! You'll be filthy!"

  Even now, at twenty-one, she could duck through that doorway and stand between his worktable and the old Ben Franklin stove that gave out such stuperous heat in the wintertime and catch some of what it had felt like to be such a small Frannie Goldsmith growing up in this house. It was an illusory feeling, almost always intermingled with sadness for her barely remembered brother Fred, whose own growing-up had been so rudely and finally interrupted. She could stand and smell the oil that was rubbed into everything, the must, the faint odor of her father's pipe. She could rarely remember what it had been like to be so small, so strangely small, but out there she sometimes could, and it was a glad way to feel.

  But the parlor, now.

  The parlor.

  If the workshop was the goodness of childhood, symbolized by the phantom smell of her father's pipe (he sometimes puffed smoke gently into her ear when she had an earache, always after extracting a promise that she wouldn't tell Carla, who would have had a fit), then the parlor was everything in childhood you wished you could forget. Speak when spoken to! Easier to break it than to fix it! Go right upstairs this minute and change your clothes, don't you know that isn't suitable? Don't you ever think? Frannie, don't pick at your clothes, people will think you have fleas. What must your Uncle Andrew and Aunt Carlene think? You embarrassed me half to death! The parlor was where you were tongue-tied, the parlor was where you itched and couldn't scratch, the parlor was dictatorial commands, boring conversation, relatives pinching cheeks, aches, sneezes that couldn't be sneezed, coughs that couldn't be coughed, and above all, yawns that must not be yawned.

  At the center of this room where her mother's spirit dwelt was the clock. It had been built in 1889 by Carla's grandfather, Tobias Downes, and it had ascended to family heirloom status almost immediately, shifting down through the years, carefully packed and insured for moves from one part of the country to another (it had originally come into being in the Buffalo, New York, workshop of Tobias, a place which had undoubtedly been every bit as smoky and nasty as Peter's workshop, although such a comment would have struck Carla as completely irrelevant) , sometimes shifting from one section of the family to another when cancer, heart attack, or accident pinched off some branch of the family tree. The clock had been in this parlor since Peter and Carla Goldsmith moved into the house some thirty-six years ago. Here it had been placed and here it had stayed, ticking and tocking, marking off segments of time in a dry age. Someday the clock would be hers, if she wanted, Frannie reflected as she looked into her mother's white, shocked face. But I don't want it! Don't want it and won't have it!

  In this room there were dried flowers under glass bells. There was in this room a dove gray carpet with dusky pink roses figured into the nap. There was a graceful bow window that looked down the hill to Route 1, with a big privet hedge between the road and the grounds. Carla had nagged her husband with a grim fervor until he planted that hedge right after the Exxon station on the corner went up. Once it was in, she nagged her husband to make it grow faster. Even radioactive fertilizer, Frannie thought, would have been acceptable to her if it had served that end. The stridency of her remonstrations concerning the privet had lessened as the hedge grew taller, and she supposed it would stop altogether in another two years or so, when the hedge finally grew tall enough to blot out the offending gas station completely and the parlor was inviolate again.

  It would stop on that subject, at least.

  Stencils on the wallpaper, large green leaves and pink flowers almost the same shade as the roses in the carpet. Early American furniture and a dark mahogany set of double doors. A fire
place which was just for show where a birch log sat eternally on a hearth of red brick which was eternally immaculate and untouched by even a speck of soot. Frannie guessed that by now that log was so dry that it would burn like newspaper if lit. Above the log was a pot almost big enough for a child to bathe in. It had been handed down from Frannie's great-grandmother, and it hung eternally suspended over the eternal log. Above the mantel, finishing that part of the picture, was The Eternal Flintlock Rifle.

  Segments of time in a dry age.

  One of her earliest memories was of peeing on the dove gray rug with the dusky pink roses figured into the nap. She might have been three, not trained for very long, and probably not allowed in the parlor save for special occasions because of the chance of accidents. But somehow she had gotten in, and seeing her mother not just running but sprinting to grab her up before the unthinkable could happen had brought the unthinkable on. Her bladder let go, and the spreading stain as the dove gray rug turned to a darker slate gray around her bottom had caused her mother to actually shriek. The stain had finally come out, but after how many patient shampooings? The Lord might know; Frannie Goldsmith did not.

  It was in the parlor that her mother had talked to her, grimly, explicitly, and at length, after she caught Frannie and Norman Burstein examining each other in the barn, their clothes piled in one amicable heap on a haybale to one side. How would she like it, Carla asked as the grandfather clock solemnly ticked off segments of time in a dry age, if she took Frannie out for a walk up and down US Route 1 without any clothes on? How would that be? Frannie, then six, had cried, but had somehow managed to avoid the hysterics which impended at this prospect.

  When she was ten she had ridden her bike into the mailbox post while looking back over her shoulder to yell something to Georgette McGuire. She cut her head, bloodied her nose, lacerated both knees, and had actually grayed out for a few moments with shock. When she came around she had stumbled up the driveway to the house, weeping and horrified at the sight of so much blood coming out of herself. She would have gone to her father, but since her father was at work, she had stumbled into the parlor where her mother was serving tea to Mrs. Venner and Mrs. Prynne. Get out! her mother had screamed, and the next moment she was running to Frannie, embracing her, crying Oh Frannie, oh dear, what happened, oh your poor nose! But she was leading Frannie back into the kitchen, where the floor could safely be bled upon, even as she was comforting her, and Frannie never forgot that her first two words that day hadn't been Oh, Frannie! but Get out! Her first concern had been for the parlor, where that dry age went on and on and blood was not allowed. Perhaps Mrs. Prynne never forgot, either, because even through her tears Frannie had seen a shocked, slapped expression cross the woman's face. After that day, Mrs. Prynne had become something of a seldom caller.

  In her first year of junior high she had gotten a bad conduct mark on her report card, and of course she was invited into the parlor to discuss this mark with her mother. In her final year of senior high school, she had received three detention periods for passing notes, and that had likewise been discussed with her mother in the parlor. It was there that they discussed Frannie's ambitions, which always ended up seeming a trifle shallow; it was there that they discussed Frannie's hopes, which always ended up seeming a trifle unworthy; it was there that they discussed Frannie's complaints, which always ended up seeming very much unwarranted, not to mention puling, whining, and ungrateful.

  It was in the parlor that her brother's coffin had stood on a trestle bedecked with roses, chrysanthemums, and lilies of the valley, their dry perfume filling the room while in the corner the poker-faced clock kept its place, ticking and tocking off segments of time in a dry age.

  "You're pregnant," Carla Goldsmith repeated for the second time.

  "Yes, Mother." Her voice was very dry but she would not allow herself to wet her lips. She pressed them together instead. She thought: In my father's workshop there is a little girl in a red dress and she will always be there, laughing and hiding under the table with the vise clamped to one edge or all bundled up with her scabby knees clasped against her chest behind the big toolbox with its thousand drawers. That girl is a very happy girl. But in my mother's parlor there is a much smaller girl who can't help piddling on the rug like a bad dog. Like a bad little bitch puppy. And she will always be there, too, no matter how much I wish she would be gone.

  "Oh-Frannie," her mother said, her words coming very quick. She laid a hand against the side of her cheek like an offended maiden aunt. "How-did-it-happen?"

  It was Jesse's question. That was what really pissed her off; it was the same question he had asked.

  "Since you had two kids yourself, Mother, I think you know how it happened."

  "Don't be smart!" Carla cried. Her eyes opened wide and flashed the hot fire that had always terrified Frannie as a child. She was on her feet in the quick way she had (and that had also terrified her as a child), a tall woman with graying hair which was nicely upswept and tipped and generally beauty-shopped, a tall woman in a smart green dress and faultless beige hose. She went to the mantelpiece, where she always went in moments of distress. Resting there, below the flintlock, was a large scrapbook. Carla was something of an amateur genealogist, and her entire family was in that book ... at least, as far back as 1638, when its earliest traceable progenitor had risen out of the nameless crowd of Londoners long enough to be recorded in some very old church records as Merton Downs, Freemason. Her family tree had been published four years ago in The New England Genealogist, with Carla herself the compiler of record.

  Now she fingered that book of painstakingly amassed names, a safe ground where none could trespass. Were there no thieves in there anyplace? Frannie wondered. No alcoholics? No unwed mothers?

  "How could you do something like this to your father and me?" she asked finally. "Was it that boy Jesse?"

  "It was Jesse. Jesse's the father."

  Carla flinched at the word.

  "How could you do it?" Carla repeated. "We did our best to bring you up in the right way. This is just--just--"

  She put her hands to her face and began to weep.

  "How could you do it?" she cried. "After all we've done for you, this is the thanks we get? For you to go out and ... and ... rut with a boy like a bitch in heat? You bad girl! You bad girl!"

  She dissolved into sobs, leaning against the mantelpiece for support, one hand over her eyes, the other continuing to slip back and forth over the green cloth cover of the scrapbook. Meantime, the grandfather clock went on ticking.

  "Mother--"

  "Don't talk to me! You've said enough!"

  Frannie stood up stiffly. Her legs felt like wood but must not be, because they were trembling. Tears were beginning to leak out of her own eyes, but let them; she would not let this room defeat her again. "I'll be going now."

  "You ate at our table!" Carla cried at her suddenly. "We loved you ... and supported you ... and this is what we get for it! Bad girl! Bad girl!"

  Frannie, blinded by tears, stumbled. Her right foot struck her left ankle. She lost her balance and fell down with her hands splayed out. She knocked the side of her head against the coffee table and one hand sent a vase of flowers pitching onto the rug. It didn't break but water gurgled out, turning dove gray to slate gray.

  "Look at that!" Carla screamed, almost in triumph. The tears had put black hollows under her eyes and cut courses through her makeup. She looked haggard and half-mad. "Look at that, you've spoiled the rug, your grandmother's rug--"

  She sat on the floor, dazedly rubbing her head, still crying, wanting to tell her mother that it was only water, but she was completely unnerved now, and not really sure. Was it only water? Or was it urine? Which?

  Again moving with that spooky quickness, Carla Goldsmith snatched the vase up and brandished it at Frannie. "What's your next move, miss? Are you planning to stay right here? Are you expecting us to feed you and board you while you sport yourself all around town? That's it, I
suppose. Well, no! No! I won't have it. I will not have it!"

  "I don't want to stay here," Frannie muttered. "Did you think I would?"

  "Where are you going to go? With him? I doubt it."

  "Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose." Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well. "Not that it's any business of yours."

  "No business of mine?" Carla echoed, still holding the vase. Her face was parchment white. "No business of mine? What you do when you're under my roof is no business of mine? You ungrateful little bitch!"

  She slapped Frannie, and slapped her hard. Frannie's head rocked back. She stopped rubbing her head and started rubbing her cheek, looking unbelievingly at her mother.

  "This is the thanks we get for seeing you into a nice school," Carla said, showing her teeth in a merciless and frightful grin. "Now you'll never finish. After you marry him--"

  "I'm not going to marry him. And I'm not going to quit school."

  Carla's eyes widened. She stared at Frannie as if Frannie had lost her mind. "What are you talking about? An abortion? Having an abortion? You want to be a murderer as well as a tramp?"

  "I'm going to have the child. I'll have to take the spring semester off, but I can finish next summer."

  "What do you think you're going to finish on? My money? If that's it, you've got a lot more thinking to do. A modern girl like you hardly needs support from her parents, does she?"

  "Support I could use," Frannie said softly. "The money ... well, I'll get by."

  "There's not a bit of shame in you! Not a single thought for anyone but yourself!" Carla shouted. "My God, what this is going to do to your father and me! But you don't care a bit! It will break your father's heart, and--"

  "It don't feel so broken." Peter Goldsmith's calm voice came from the doorway, and they both swung around. In the doorway he was, but far back in it; the toes of his workboots stopped just short of the place where the parlor carpet took over from the shabbier one in the hallway. Frannie realized suddenly that it was a place she had seen him in a great many times before. When had he last actually been in the parlor? She couldn't remember.