Yes, it was something, Arthur realized, in the church’s favor. But a child from an insane mother? “You said a minute—”
Arthur was interrupted by the Reverend’s suddenly sitting forward. “I think it’s time I took my leave.”
“I was going to mention insanity,” Arthur said, setting his tea glass down on the coffee table. “When an insane or mentally disturbed person—as you called Irene Langley—gets pregnant, she has the baby, too?”
“Yes,” replied Bob Cole. “I’ve no doubt she’ll have that baby. Because she wants it.” He smiled sweetly, as if he were christening the baby at that very minute.
“And suppose she’s telling a lie?” asked Arthur.
“About what? Having a baby?” Bob Cole’s smile spread.
“About my father being responsible,” Arthur said, aware that his mother’s hands writhed in her lap.
“Well, is that the point of anything?” asked Bob Cole. “What she says? Who can prove it or disprove it?” Now the Reverend stood up. “Human life is the point, Arthur. Everyone knows Irene’s a little strange. Had a hard life, too—unbelievably hard. That’s why we all try to help her in every—”
“The point is, that’s why my father’s dead, why Robbie shot him,” Arthur said.
“That is true, Bob.” Lois stood up, looking at Bob Cole as if she were half afraid of what she had just said. “It’s true, because Robbie believed what his father said. And he was so shocked—Robbie, I mean. I couldn’t calm him down Sunday. He had such an idea that sex—anything to do with physical relations outside of marriage—was so evil. Really evil. But as I said to Arthur—no, to Eddie Howell—is it worth killing somebody over, after all? But he learned that at the church. He never used to be like this, when he was ten and twelve, honestly. And there was Richard—not giving me any help at all!” Lois gasped and tossed her head back, as if determined not to cry.
“Loey,” said Joan, getting up. “Just for today try—”
“I’m sorry, Mama, but I have to say—I don’t care if Richard is responsible or not. He’s dead. That’s what matters to me.” Then she couldn’t speak anymore.
Bob Cole, still upright, put his hand on Lois’s arm. “There, there. I understand, Lois. I really do.”
Arthur stood with his hands on his hips, repressing an impulse to fling the Reverend’s hand off his mother. Keep your goddamn “secrets,” Arthur wanted to say, and if not for his grandmother’s presence, he would have said it.
His mother and grandmother saw the Reverend to the door. Much mumbling of comforting phrases.
“Two-faced bastard,” Arthur said as soon as he heard the front door close. He headed for the fridge and a cold beer. “Evasive, don’t you think, Grandma?” Arthur said over his shoulder.
“Yes,” said his grandmother firmly, and she gave Arthur a quick smile. The smile was more sad than amused.
FRIDAY MORNING, ARTHUR TOOK HIS last exam, during which time his mother attended the hearing on Robbie. His grandmother had gone with her, intending to wait in the car or in a nearby café, if there was one, his grandmother had said. Her plane was at 1:45 p.m., and his mother was to drive her to the airport.
Arthur was home when his mother arrived at 3. For once she had taken the afternoon off.
“He’s got to be in a boys’ detention place for six months,” his mother said. “It’s near Indianapolis, a place called Foster House. For boys up to eighteen. They have schooling there, and gardening—carpentering—”
Arthur had expected something like this. “But what did they say?—How many people there at the hearing?”
“Oh—five or six. They said he’d been influenced by his father. Overly influenced, I mean, which of course is true. They said he was obsessive. You know—those phrases.” She leaned against a cupboard, untied the scarf at her neck and yanked it off so quickly it made a snapping sound.
“Sit down, Mom. Want a coffee?—Was Robbie there?”
“For fifteen minutes or so, yes. Then they took him out. He said—his father had admitted to a sin and he said what it was.” She glanced at Arthur, then sat down on a straight chair.
Arthur winced, imagining his mother’s feelings. He was making instant coffee for her.
“And I had to say, because it’s true, that Robbie had all this influence in the last year. And in a way I think that helped in his defense.”
Arthur listened to the water getting hot. “And what happens after six months?”
“They’ll see how he’s doing and if he can come home.” His mother smiled suddenly. “He mentioned joining the Marines! But I thought a boy had to be seventeen. Nobody made any remarks in the hearing.” She laughed. “He’ll be sixteen soon, and I was afraid they’d put him behind bars somewhere, which of course wouldn’t do him any good at all. This Foster House—it sounds like the next thing to a summer camp.—Thanks, dear, for the coffee.”
Arthur was sick of Robbie. He didn’t care if Robbie was behind bars, in a room with one other delinquent or a dorm with forty others with beds in a row. “When’s Grandma coming back?”
“She said probably Tuesday.—Oh, the woman from Richard’s office is coming this evening to take some of Richard’s papers.”
That sounded dismal. “I might go over to Gus’s tonight. After supper.” He stood up from the bench seat. “And I’m going to tackle that carpet now.”
“What do you mean, tackle it?”
“Get it up. Hopeless to clean, Mom.”
His mother did not remonstrate, and he went to the study and did what he could with his hands first, then fetched a claw hammer and pliers. His father’s desk was heavy, and he lifted one side at a time and shoved the green carpet under it with a foot. Finally he had the carpet in a heap by the backyard door. He had wanted above all to get the fuzzy-edged stain out of sight, but there it was again, sharper-edged and still like France, on the beige wood of the floor. He swept the floor, and for what it was worth, attacked the spot again with soapy water and a brush. This yielded no visible pink. He put newspapers over the wet place on the floor. Then he slung a rope around the carpet, pulled it onto the lawn and into the garage, and with a couple of heaves got it into the hatch of his father’s car. He took his father’s keys from the hook in the kitchen and backed the car out.
Arthur drove to the nearest public dump he knew, ousted the carpet, and turned at once homeward. It was the first time he had driven his father’s car, and he detested it. It had a loose, uncertain steering. Play, it was called. The wheel suggested phoniness, evasiveness and double meanings.
By a quarter past 8, Arthur was at Gus’s house. All Gus’s family seemed to be in the kitchen.
“We were so surprised by that news!” Gus’s mother said. “How is your poor mother? . . . And where is Robbie now? . . . Give your mother our love, would you, Arthur?”
Gus and Arthur went upstairs to Gus’s room with Cokes and beers.
“Jesus!” Gus said, shaking his head.
Gus was looking at him as if he were someone returned from the moon, or so Arthur felt.
“Mighta gone to the funeral that morning, Art, but I had an exam,” Gus said.
Arthur gave a laugh. “So did I. I didn’t go.”
“What happened?”
Arthur told him about Sunday afternoon.
Gus popped open two beer cans. “What’d your brother say to you?”
“Say to me? Or anybody! Not a damn thing! I took the gun out of his hand! He was sitting in his room with it—maybe two minutes after he fired it. He just takes the attitude he did the right thing.”
“What d’y’mean?” Guss was still standing in the center of his small room.
Arthur sat down on the floor, his back against a leg of Gus’s table. “Well, if you haven’t heard—You haven’t heard? About Irene at the Silver Ar
row?”
“No. What?”
“Well, she says my dad was responsible for her being —um—pregnant.”
“You’re kiddin’!”
“I am not. She said it to me too last Friday night when I went to the diner by myself. I didn’t believe her, y’know? Then I found out she’d said the same thing to my mom—and then Robbie—”
“You mean it’s true?”
“Could be. I think so.” Arthur glanced at the closed door. It was going to come out, Irene’s story, and he had preferred to tell Gus himself. “You won’t say anything to your folks, would you? No reason for it to get any more spread around.”
“No, no, sure.” Gus had sat down on his bed. “What does your mother say?”
“I know she doesn’t want to believe it. But I think she has to.—Because my father the same as said it! I didn’t hear him, of course; I wasn’t there.” Arthur stared at Gus’s carpet, then looked up at Gus. “Pretty awful to imagine, isn’t it? Coming anywhere near Irene.”
Gus nodded thoughtfully. “Y’know, just a couple of days ago I read in the paper about a fourteen-year-old fellow in Texas shooting both his parents dead just because his father wouldn’t let him take the car. Imagine that.—But Robbie’s re-eally weird. I can even understand the Texas guy better.”
Gus had more questions. How long was Robbie going to be where he was? And could his mother afford to keep the house? Arthur said he wasn’t sure. Gus went down for more drink, and Arthur put a cassette on, with the volume very low.
“Got a joint. Mary Warner,” Gus said when he came back. “Want to share it?”
They knelt on the floor and smoked by the open window. Gus said his parents had noses like foxes. Arthur tried to believe he was getting a big kick from the joint. He wanted to feel floating, going out into space, able to float anywhere.
“There’s one,” said Gus, grinning, pointing out the window at the darkening street below. “Pot her!” Gus pointed a finger. “Bang-bang! Gotcha!”
Arthur suppressed a wild laugh. A woman was walking along the sidewalk in an interestingly languid way, by herself, under the trees. “One place I don’t want to go to tonight.”
“Where’s that?”
“Silver Arrow.”
“Hah!”
Arthur drew the last of his share and handed the rather soft cigarette to Gus.
29
Arthur stood in front of his parents’ closet in the bedroom, pulling his father’s clothes off hangers, making a heap for the Salvation Army. He hated the chore, and his mother had given it to him, he supposed, because the clothing was “men’s things.” The chest of drawers yielded shirts, sweaters, several mufflers, scarves, handkerchiefs. Arthur was to put aside what Robbie might use—shirts and sweaters, Arthur supposed. Arthur felt baffled and depressed after ten minutes, wanted to ask his mother if she could finish the rest, but she was at the table in the kitchen answering letters of condolence she had received, which seemed to number fifty or sixty, so Arthur kept at it.
It was Saturday afternoon and raining lightly, when Arthur would have liked to be fooling around in the backyard. That morning his mother had gone to visit Robbie, this time taking him a few of what she thought were his favorite books, one of Jack London’s and one called Woodlore with a gaudy cardboard cover that made it look like a book for ten-year-olds, which it probably was. His mother had also taken Robbie a jar of homemade strawberry jam from last year. Robbie was to go to Foster House on Monday.
Arthur went to his father’s study and took several stamps and a couple of stamp books that he remembered were lying on a corner of his father’s desk. He put these on the table where his mother was writing. “Coffee, Mom?”
“Yes, please.—Some of these letters are so sweet,” said his mother. “Listen to this one. Where is it? From Cora Bowman at the Home. You remember her?”
Arthur did not.
“‘Richard always had time for people and the kindness to say a sweet word when they needed it.’ That’s a happy thought, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Arthur. He thought his mother looked tired. She had washed her hair after lunch; it was nearly dry, and she hadn’t combed it out. “Mom, can’t I do some of that answering for you?”
She remonstrated, saying the letters were addressed to her, but Arthur won her over by saying surely some of them were “mixed.” So Arthur got a pen and set about answering the first letter he opened. This was from Myra and Jack O’Reilly, whom Arthur didn’t know from Eve and Adam. Arthur wrote:
On behalf of my mother and myself, I write this to thank you for your words of sympathy in our days of grief here . . .
As he went on with other letters, varying his words but not the idea, the blatant phoniness that he felt in himself disappeared. He was doing the right thing. What he wrote and signed had nothing to do with himself. His house was supposed to be a house of grief now, but it was a more cheerful house already than it had been in more than a year. In fact, how sincere were all these letter-writers? After nearly forty-five minutes of this, Arthur dropped the pen and telephoned the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army promised to come and collect before 9 on Monday morning.
“We might change Robbie’s room around. Don’t you think so, Arthur?” his mother asked. She was standing at the threshold of Robbie’s room.
“Sure.”
“It’ll be more cheerful for him—different, when he comes home. The bed could go against the opposite wall with the head near that window.”
Arthur saw what she meant, but was not interested. Worn-out cardboard boxes cluttered the corners of the room, some holding childhood games, Arthur knew, and maybe some held ammunition. Robbie had always hoarded things. “Mom—the carpet for the study. Let’s think about that.”
On Monday morning, after the Salvation Army’s coming and going, Arthur and his mother went to a department store in town and chose a sturdy carpet material of a color called simply “light oak.” A couple of men arrived Tuesday morning to lay the carpet, and on Lois’s instructions they set the desk in a different place, against the inside wall. This would cause pictures to be rehung, which inspired Lois to think of new wallpaper. New wallpaper was obligatory in Arthur’s opinion, because of the shotgun pellet marks in one wall, which his mother oddly seemed not to see, though Arthur was always aware of them.
“White!” Lois said. “I want this room to be light and cheerful. And I’m sure I can tidy up that desk and make it useful.” She was smiling.
Arthur nodded. He could certainly clean up the desk one afternoon when his mother was at the Home and give her a nice surprise. The desk was oak and needed some hand-sanding and then furniture polish. Arthur wanted every piece of paper that had belonged to his father out of the desk, so that the desk could start to belong to his mother. He began this job after his mother left for the Home that day. He put the curling tablets, the old folders of probably useless and obsolete business papers (otherwise the woman from the office would have taken them) into a big plastic shopping bag, and stuck it in the garage. What a mess when people die, Arthur thought.
And later that afternoon, Arthur met his grandmother at Indi Airport and found her in much better spirits than last week. She asked questions, mainly about his mother, as they drove homeward.
“Any more news from what’s-her-name? Irene?”
“No, thank God.” Arthur had a vision of her, more pregnant than ever, swinging coffee mugs at the Silver Arrow.
“And when is that offspring due?”
“September?” Arthur said hesitantly. “Who knows exactly?”
“And what about your exams? Have you had the results yet?”
“Friday,” Arthur said. “I go in Friday and take a look at the bulletin boards.”
At home, dinner was under way and his mother had put on pale blue slacks and a whi
te shirt. His grandmother had been in the house hardly two minutes when his mother said:
“Oh, the new carpet, Mama! Come and look!” Lois led her mother to the study.
The new light-oak-colored carpet, clean as if no one had as yet set foot on it, stretched into the four corners of the room. The desk now sat on the left, with a space between it and the wall for a chair, so that someone at the desk would face the backyard wall with its big glass door. The boring gray metal files Arthur had wanted to chuck, but his mother meant to use them, once Arthur painted them white. Arthur’s eyes as usual were drawn to the spatter of little holes in the wall to his right.
“Wallpaper comes next,” said his mother as they went out of the room. “We might do that this week, Mama.”
After dinner, during coffee, his grandmother said, “Now about this infant-to-be—Thank you, Arthur,” she interrupted, because Arthur had sprung to light her after-dinner cigarette. “What’s your attitude going to be, Loey? That’s important.” She pulled a pillow behind her in a corner of the sofa.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s—you know, what that woman’s saying,” Lois replied.
“Yes, Loey,” Joan said with a glance at Arthur, “but if she asks you for total or partial support—”
Arthur hadn’t thought of that.
“I’d say no, I swear,” said his mother.
“And if she wants to put the child in the Home? Not when it’s tiny, but when it’s about two—or less?” his grandmother asked.
His mother sighed. “She’d be allowed to do that. Yes.—Don’t forget Bob Cole said the church was going to give her some money.”
No one spoke for a few seconds.
“And if the baby turns out to be very much like Richard, what’s your attitude going to be, Loey?—Best to be prepared.”
His mother reflected. “I’m going to ignore it.”
There was another silence, but a better one, Arthur felt. The baby would be his father’s; the resemblance might be beyond any doubt. But at least his mother had begun to form “an attitude.” But where would ignoring the child get her in Chalmerston? The church people, and his mother’s friends, they would all be interested in that baby and what it looked like.
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