by Jane Smiley
Mr. Sloan had little to say about his reasons for squatting in the house, except that he found the view restful and the situation a pleasant one. According to Ms. King, the Realtor, the Horner estate, which owns the house, will not press charges. She went on to say, “I understand the Sloans contemplated purchasing the house at one point, which I certainly believe, since it is a unique and historical house and very reasonable in price.”
There was no mention of the upside-down roof.
What do you know? I thought.
My problem about Felicity had several aspects, which I had organized in my mind. One was that we had gone too far. The trip to New York had been too much fun and too intimate. If I hadn’t experienced that, I might not now be ruminating obsessively about some way into the future for us both, in a manner that allowed not just sex but conversation, companionship, long hours together. The aspect that sat right next to that first one was that we could go no further now that we had gone too far. You didn’t have to think about it more than a few seconds to understand the whirlwind we would get into—I would get myself into—if Betty got to know, or Gordon, or my parents, or even Marcus—even Crosbie and Bart, for that matter. Imagine a group of friends and family sitting around an outdoor table, eating peacefully. Imagine the umbrella shading them. Imagine the pole of the umbrella going through the circular hole in the table and then into the patio. Imagine a stick of dynamite inside the pole. Imagine them laughing, and then imagine a trusted member of the family lighting the dynamite. I wanted to be that guy I had been in the fall, ready for anything, equally ready for nothing. If I could be that guy again, Felicity and I could go on as before, keeping our perfect balance between frustration and delight. She didn’t call and she didn’t call, and then she did. Bobby was sitting at his desk. The phone had a long tangle of a cord, and I took it into the storeroom and closed the door. Then I sat down on a box and stared at the way the black coil was pressed against the doorjamb. She said, “What are you wearing?”
“A big hard-on.”
She giggled.
“How about you?”
“Jeans. No underwear. No bra.”
“When are you coming over?”
“I don’t know. On holidays everyone is around.”
“Your brother is in the next room. He’s listening outside the storeroom door, for all I know.”
“Then you shouldn’t refer to him as my brother.”
“Do you have any nude pictures of yourself?” This was my solution. I had asked for them before.
She didn’t say anything.
“Just to get me through the winter.”
“If I say yes, you’ll think I’m a wanton hussy, and if I say no—”
“You are wanton, Felicity. But—”
“I am with you. Anyway, no. And it’s very sordid and exciting for you to ask. Thank you.”
“I’ll take some. Come over. I’ve got a Polaroid for taking pictures of houses.”
“No, I want to present you with them.” She giggled again; then the receiver went dead, the cord tightened against the doorjamb, and I heard “Shit!” from the office. I stood up and opened the door. Bobby was sitting on the floor. He exclaimed, “What the fuck are you doing with the phone, man? I nearly killed myself!” But it turned out that he just jammed a couple of fingers against the bookcase and bruised his forehead.
On Christmas Eve, 1982, I was almost forty-one years old. I could not see anything wrong with my life. I felt good: old enough but not too old and better than I had felt at thirty, still married then and, it seemed in retrospect, inured to keeping my head down and trying not to cause, or at least get into, trouble. In the past ten years my parents had given up on me, which was more or less a good thing. Though I didn’t share their beliefs and I hadn’t produced grandchildren, I was gainfully employed and we got along amicably. On Christmas Eve I took them a present, a plum pudding of just the sort my father recalled from his youth, wrapped in a cheesecloth soaked in brandy and accompanied by a jar of hard sauce. When I went into the dining room and set it on the table, we stood back for a moment, and then my mother put her arms around my waist and gave me a squeeze. She said, “You are always a thoughtful boy, Joey. Don’t think I ever forget that.”
I returned her squeeze. I knew that my thoughtfulness was not exactly cold comfort compensation for the other things, but maybe cool comfort. I was a disappointment but at least likable, and that was not unimportant to them. How many times had I listened to them deplore the way some of the children of their friends treated their parents—disrespectful, or inattentive, or argumentative. At least I was none of those things.
My father came in from the kitchen with a box of kitchen matches, which he set down on the table. Then he relieved the heavy dark pudding of its brandy-soaked wrappings, my mother lifted it carefully out of its box and placed it in the center of her Royal Doulton cake stand, and my father set it afire. After it was well lighted, and burning with a steady but almost invisible blue flame, he stepped back and took my mother under his arm, and they watched it with happy smiles on their faces. He gave her a little squeeze and kissed her on the forehead when it was all burned down and, supposedly, all the alcohol in the brandy had been dissipated. Then my father lifted his voice and exclaimed, “Thank You, Almighty Father, for this delicious and traditional treat, which reminds us simultaneously of Your bounty, of our son’s kindness, of the abundant year just ending, and of the abundant year yet to come. It reminds us also, O Lord, of our loved ones who taught us of Your love and have gone before us into Your mansion, where they await our coming with the same eagerness that we await seeing them again. Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of Your Son, for whose coming we thank You, Father. Amen.” He spoke without self-consciousness, because giving thanks was something he always did, as normal for him as asking a customer how he could help her or ordering a shipment of laundry soap and toilet paper. We said “Amen” and my mother brought out three leaf-shaped dessert plates. She said, “I didn’t look for a celebration until tomorrow, but one found me anyway.”
“I knew you didn’t have any plans, Mom.”
“Well, there was a service before supper this evening. We went to that, but the congregation is so small these days. When you were a boy, all us ladies were young, and there was more a sense of Let’s-do-it-for-the-children, but now the sense is, The last thing any of us need is another slice of pie.” She laughed.
“Frank should have a membership drive; that’s what I told him,” said my father.
I nodded. My parents’ congregation was part of a sect that was peculiar but, more important, small. All of evangelical America was growing up around them without any effect on their church. The whole sect, around the nation, didn’t number more than a few thousand, and most of the members, worldwide, were in Australia and the South Island of New Zealand. There were missionaries in South Africa, Kenya, India—everywhere in the British Empire—but as the empire shrank so did the sect. When I was a boy, we had missionaries to dinner all the time and success stories abounded: a small church built here, several souls saved there. The church was making headway against ignorance and self-indulgence. But even then, the stories got told, and the jubilation was expressed, and then conversation gave way to laments about what the larger churches could afford to do, especially the Catholic Church, the all-powerful, wealthy, strangling, popish, robot-creating, idolatrous octopus whose control of otherwise beautiful and populous places like Ireland and South America and Mexico would never be broken. The worst thing that could happen would be that our missionaries would soften some souls up for salvation, and then the priests would move in and win them away with the temptations of spectacle and secrecy and conspiracy and the easy alternation of sin and absolution. Not to mention the open promotion of sex and procreation for the express purpose of increasing the number of Catholics, who, of course, were then christened before they knew what hit them, and after that carefully robbed of free will through the rote learning of the catechism
. My father hated the sin, though he loved the sinner—he really detested Catholicism the way only Orangemen could do, but he was a very sociable man, who was welcoming and helpful to everyone he met, O’Houlihans and Ferraros and all. He had been the same with me—kindly and loving, on the whole, but quick to use the rod for my own good. I often thought that, but for the accident of a warm and almost jovial temperament, which most consistently expressed itself in affection toward my mother, my father would have made a sincere and effective tyrant.
They were interested in current events, more interested than I was, but, as they filtered every issue through tests of faith, sometimes they took unexpected positions. In the election the year before, my father had ended up abstaining from voting altogether for the first time in his life, because the candidate he preferred, Ronald Reagan, was unclear about his religious background. How could he be Irish and not have a lot of Catholic back there somewhere? And if he wasn’t or hadn’t been Catholic, how come he wasn’t more forthcoming about it? Didn’t he care? But it was impossible that he didn’t care; indifference to religion, as far as my father was concerned, was the greatest impossibility of all. However attractive he found the candidate, in the end he couldn’t pull that lever for fear that the mind-shaping effects of early Catholicism were latent in the man. I remember him saying with perfect seriousness as the election approached, “Well, I hate to say this, but I would just have to meet him and judge for myself before I could vote for him, so I can’t do it.” Somehow, something that bothered others, and that I expected to bother my parents, that he was a product of Hollywood (and my parents abjured movies and did not allow me to see one until I was fourteen) didn’t come up. Hollywood was something you could slough off; early Catholic influence was not. And my parents were suspicious of the Moral Majority and the other evangelical movements, too. “Baptists!”—my father would shake his head—or “If they really understood what John Wesley said, they wouldn’t be flocking to that church!”
My mother set out three prettily embroidered napkins, and we sat down in our places at the dining room table. Things were a bit awkward, then, because in spite of the fact that we got along well enough—or, perhaps, in order to get along well enough—we didn’t have much to say to one another. I heard the teakettle whistle and, with some relief, got up to make the tea. When I returned with the pot and the cups on a tray, my father was helping himself to another slice of the pudding, and my mother was well into hers. I set a cup of tea by each of our places and put the pitcher of milk in front of my father. I sat down again. My father asked me what I had been doing. I bragged a little about selling a lot of houses.
“I’ll tell you what happens around here.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen it more than once. Someone, or some group of people, suddenly gets a lot of money, the way people did in the twenties, say, and all of a sudden they discover this area, and it’s beautiful and unspoiled, and they build a legendary house, and everyone around here thinks, Well, it’s finally happened; we’ve finally been discovered, and it’s all gravy from now on. But what it’s really like is an extra-high tide. It floats things up onto the beach one time, but that’s the only time. The tideline hasn’t changed.”
My mother was nodding. She said, “There’s always a reason why some place is unspoiled.”
“Too far out of town,” agreed my father.
Since this directly contradicted our Salt Key Farm plan, I was tempted to argue, but I had yet to tell them much about the place, and anyway I had stopped arguing with them so long ago I didn’t know how to begin, so I just sat there uncomfortably, watching my father pour milk in his tea and drink it down. The fact was, I had always preferred Gordon and Betty to my own parents, just as, according to Felicity, Gordon had always preferred me to his own sons. Maybe the real tragedy was that Norton and Bobby didn’t prefer anyone to their own father.
But finally I said, “What do you mean, there’s always a reason why some place is unspoiled?”
“Well, people do tend to spoil things, don’t they,” said my mother cheerfully. “They take the best places first, so what’s left is naturally second best for some reason.”
My father was nodding. They always agreed, so they had this habit of one nodding when the other one was talking. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “We can’t live in paradise, because man is fallen. He felled himself with his own hand. Redemption doesn’t take place in this world, Scripture says, so whatever looks like paradise can’t be, and so it isn’t. If we look for it to be, then we are deceived, and Satan is at work.”
“More than you know,” said my mother. Now they nodded together. I was having my usual feeling—whenever I found myself thinking that they lived in the same world I did, I was almost instantly disabused of that notion. I must have sighed a deep sigh, because my mother said, “That’s right. But the lessons are all around us, if we choose to pay attention to them. More tea, honey?”
As I went down the front steps to my car, I wondered for the umpteenth time what would happen if one of them died. I had been wondering about this in one way or another since childhood—which one could I live without, did they actually have any existence apart from each other, who could I live with, what in the world had they been like before they met (he was thirty at the time; she was thirty-one, not young), would the survivor feel any sense of relief, or would he (she) just die? They, of course, would have answered that it was the simplest possible thing for one to go on ahead and receive the well-deserved jeweled crown, and it would be as a moment in eternity until the other one appeared. But could you have such a thing in a marriage as too much agreement? Would either of them manifest less righteousness if he or she didn’t have the support of the other one once in a while? And, the oldest question of all: Would things be different, would I be different, if I were one of many, even of two or three? If there had been two or three to be holy and two or three to be prodigal, maybe I would have escaped notice altogether.
There was a late Christmas party at the Davids’ place that I was headed for. I had hardly seen Felicity, only briefly one Sunday evening at Gordon’s. The days went by. That was reassuring in a way, because it seemed like we were putting more distance between ourselves and that dynamite explosion, making more of an opportunity for a real solution to present itself. Driving from my parents’ house to Deacon reminded me of another feature of my childhood—the safety of doing nothing, of nothing happening. My parents were always on the alert for sin, always ready to root it out, especially out of me. Categories of misbehavior were clear-cut and rather numerous. I could get into trouble without really meaning to, and my father realized this but punished me anyway, to give me something to remember the next time. He thought that if a memory of the punishment cropped up right at the same time as the temptation to transgress, I would stop myself. It was all a manner of systematic training. For whatever reason, this did not work with me, so there was always a period after I realized I had transgressed but before my parents found out. It was like being under a spell, so quiet and still, my parents so like themselves and me so like myself, yet lit up with the expectation of what was to come. Any stray word or action could break the spell, tip them off to the transgression, tumble us into the endless effort to drive sin out of me as it had been driven out of them. Over the years, I suppose, I had gotten to be a careful person. The Baldwins had made me more exuberant, but they hadn’t really made me less careful.
But Felicity was at the Davids’. It was nearly midnight. She drew me into a corner and put her arm through mine and bent her head against mine and kissed me on the cheek and I was so happy to see her and feel her presence that I rang like a bell with the shock of good fortune. She whispered, “You know, I sent them skiing today. I said to Hank that the boys had been wanting to spend time with him, which was an absolute lie, and then I said to Jason and Clark that he missed them even though he doesn’t say much about it, and so they were on the slopes for seven hours, and everyone came home, very happy and tired, to t
he turkey I cooked, and they were sleeping by nine! I was a tremendously good mom today.” She kissed me right on the lips. The Davids’ house was dark and filled with people I had never seen before. David John came over and put his arm around Felicity. He said, “No secrets, darling.”
“I told you I drugged my whole family so I could come to this party.”
“You could have just told them you were going to Midnight Mass. That’s what Elena did.” He gestured across the room. “How’s Joey?”
I looked meaningfully at Felicity. “A little frustrated.”
“Oh, my goodness. Do tell.”
“He wants me to give him dirty pictures.”
“Of you?”
“Not dirty,” I said. “Just nude.”
“Oh, the dirt comes later. Absolutely. Yes.”
“But they’re impossible to take!” exclaimed Felicity. “Have you ever tried to take a picture of your whole body? I bought an inexpensive Polaroid, but I couldn’t get anything in. I mean, one shoulder that looks like a loaf of bread and a breast that looks like a mozzarella cheese. So I got my husband’s camera, one that has a shutter delay, but then it felt strange setting it up and then running over and arranging myself on the bed and even stranger setting it up and running over and arranging myself on the dining room table. And when I had a roll, I didn’t dare take it to be developed because I had forgotten and put my face in.” She was laughing.
“I want your face in. That’s what makes it not dirty pictures.” I was laughing too, mostly with delight at the thought of all her efforts.
“It’s a much harder assignment than I thought it would be.”
“I’ll take them,” I said.
“Oh, honey,” said David John.
“Come to my condo.”
She shook her head. “That’s a half hour from here and I have to be home in an hour.”