Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  So we sat without saying much.

  “Tell me what happened at work today,” I said.

  “What happened at work today? Once again, I didn’t make enough money.”

  “We’re doing all right,” I said gently. A small pain of helplessness took root in my stomach; the nervous, helpless ache of being a burden. “No kids to raise. The house in good shape. And paid for,” I said, running through the list I kept in my head. “We aren’t begging.”

  “I’d like to get to a point a little more comfortable than ‘not begging,’” he said. “At least before I die.”

  “You’ll outlive all of us,” I said, desperate to cheer him up. “Then you can live the carefree bachelor life. A room to yourself. You can smoke. Eat bad food, whatever you want. You won’t have to test someone’s pee every day.”

  He made the same financial complaint every day that we were together. He might have griped about the cost of the room on our wedding night, but I don’t remember. We had bought our house from Vincent. The transaction was awkward in that Rudy was ashamed to be getting the money from his lifelong friend and brother-in-law; and he was outraged that Vincent possessed that amount of money to lend.

  The purchase price of our house, which we had been renting for four years at $37.50 per month, was $15,500. My diabetes had been diagnosed our first summer there; I used glass syringes then. But my eyesight was crystalline. Amanda was just walking. I remember her cautious scaling of the steps up to Vincent and Ina’s house on the day we signed the papers. Annie was Amanda’s age, a source of competition between the moms. Ina was pregnant with Ray. When she came to the door she looked robust and lovely.

  Rudy wore a tie, though I assured him it wasn’t necessary. But Vincent also was wearing a tie and I was proud of my husband for having correctly read the ceremonial gravity of the event. Speaking primarily to Rudy, with an infrequent shift of his eyes toward me, Vincent explained that he had completed the purchase of our house earlier that day, and we would buy it from him over a period of time yet to be determined.

  “I think we agreed on five hundred for your down payment,” said Vincent.

  Rudy took a folded green check from his wallet. He had written it, complaining, just before we left the house.

  Vincent took the check without a glance and slid it under a paperweight, a balanced droplet of glass.

  “How much would you be comfortable paying each month?” Vincent asked, his tone implying that the amount was none of his business, but he had to ask.

  “I’m not sure,” Rudy said.

  “Would you be comfortable with seventy-five dollars per month?”

  “Seventy-five,” Rudy repeated.

  “Yes,” Vincent continued. He swiveled a sheet of paper toward Rudy that contained a precise column of typed numbers. “Seventy-five dollars per month . . . see? . . . for twelve months. That’s nine hundred dollars per year for thirty years. Standard mortgage length. You’d borrow fifteen thousand dollars and pay back twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

  “Twelve thousand more than I’m borrowing?” Rudy said incredulously.

  “Interest, Rudy,” Vincent said. “Scandalously low, too, I might add. No bank would ever write a mortgage on these terms.”

  On our way home, Rudy said, “It is beyond me how Vincent sleeps at night knowing he is charging twelve thousand dollars interest on a loan he made to his own family. His oldest friend! The woman he might have married!”

  “It’s only three in the afternoon, dear,” I said. “Maybe he’ll have trouble sleeping tonight.”

  “Why does he have to make money on everything?”

  “He sells real estate. It’s his business,” I said, though I too had been put off by the cool calculation of the deal, the way Vincent had all the figures typed and ready.

  Rudy did not speak to Vincent for more than a year. This made our frequent social calls almost impossible to bear. At first, Rudy used our visits to the Lockwood home to present—with great ostentation and embarrassment for everyone but himself—the month’s mortgage payment. Rudy took longer to write that check than he took to earn the money to cover it. When I complained about this petty ritual he began mailing the money to Vincent. But for a year he would not respond to any of Vincent’s questions, would not counter any of Vincent’s opinions, would not even pass the pepper if Vincent asked for it. Rudy let his silence sit over our gatherings like a condemnation. Inevitably Vincent stopped including Rudy in his sphere of conversation; he was not one to pursue a cold lead, someone in no mood to buy.

  Rudy was listening carefully to Vincent, however, and memorizing his responses, which he revealed to me as we walked home at evening’s end.

  “What the hell does he mean, ‘How’s every little thing at work?’? He’s just afraid he won’t get his seventy-five bucks every month if my job goes bust. He’s got an opinion about everything: Truman, Korea, the Cubs, the Sox, all the kids being born, the new cars. Nobody with any brains has so many goddamned opinions. He’s got to have them, though. It’s good for business. An opinion for every occasion. As many opinions as he needs to make a sale. And where does he get off turning his chair so his back’s to me? What a rude ass. Next time, you go alone. You want to visit your sister—do it when I’m at work. I’m tired of listening to that guy flap his jaws.”

  “If anyone is rude, it’s you,” I said. “As for going by myself—fine. You embarrass me. Stay home. It will save on a sitter.”

  I struck off smartly, leaving him behind. It was the end of us, I realized much later. My words had transported our marriage to a strange level it would not survive.

  Rudy did not move until I was a half-block ahead. Then he closed the gap between us almost at a run. His rage was something new, almost intriguing; an interesting twist in our life together. When he was upon me I ducked to the side to avoid the blow I sensed more than saw coming out of the darkness. His open hand caught me on the shoulder. I fell to one knee, cracking my other shoulder painfully against a white slat fence. Someone on the porch of the house stood up and shouted, “Hey! Stop that!”

  But Rudy didn’t hear and he slapped me rather ludicrously on the top of my head. Some of the blow was absorbed by my hair, but the weight of his wedding ring bore through this cushion and cracked against my skull. My eyes teared with pain. A door slammed. A light went on behind me. “We’re calling the police, you animal!” screamed a woman.

  I was prepared to sit there on the sidewalk, my back against the fence, until the police arrived. Rudy had moved into the shadows. It occurred to me then that I probably knew the woman on the porch. I got to my feet and moved sideways to keep my face hidden from my witness. “Don’t go with him, honey,” the woman called. “You can do better!”

  But I didn’t think I could. Or I didn’t have the energy to find out. I followed my husband home.

  The two blows remained our secret, a source of embarrassment and disbelief. Rudy was sweet for a long period of time. At Christmas he gave me a full-length lavender velvet robe lined with white silk; the luxurious feel of it against my skin was staggering. We made love in the afternoon while Amanda napped and I rode eagerly on him wearing only my robe, keeping both of us warm with his gift to me.

  Ina and Vincent visited in the evening, and after my dinner had been eaten I excused myself, then returned wearing the new robe over my clothes. The children, exhausted from the day’s expectations and realities, ignored me, but Ina and Vincent were enthusiastic in their appreciation.

  “It’s beautiful,” Vincent assured me.

  “Breathtaking,” Ina added.

  And Rudy, from his chair by the tree, a strand of fallen tinsel twinkling in his hair, said, “Vince, that robe cost me seventy-eight dollars. Seventy-eight dollars!”

  I was stunned by the price. (Vincent whistled appreciatively; Ina murmured, “My.”) Where had the money come from? What would
we do without down the line to pay for my robe?

  And something else: Rudy had spoken to Vincent.

  I excused myself again and hung the robe in my closet. The mystery of its richness was gone, and with that a part of its allure. I owned a seventy-eight-dollar robe. The expense was ludicrous, wasteful.

  At eleven o’clock I helped Amanda to bed and spent longer than necessary tucking her in, so that when I emerged from her dark bedroom into the hall light and from there into the shadowy hushed light of the front room, I recognized the sleepy silence that signaled the death of a party. Vincent and Ina left soon after, Annie draped over her father’s shoulder like an extra coat, baby Ray wrapped like a parcel of laundry against the cold.

  I hurried to gather up the plates, cups, and forks we’d used that night. I got down on my knees to work at a stain ground into the carpet. When Rudy appeared out of the corner of my vision, I got up and moved away. I was so tired, so anxious to sleep, but my brain was driven by a nervous desire to keep clear of my husband.

  “When I told them the price, you looked like you were disappointed,” Rudy said. “Seventy-eight bucks for a bathrobe isn’t enough for you?”

  “It’s too much,” I said. “And how much it costs isn’t any of their business, either.”

  “Vince tells me the price of everything he buys,” Rudy said. “His car. His clothes. His grocery bills. The beer Ina drinks. Only the best for the Lockwoods.”

  He would hit me soon, I understood; the realization came clearly to me, almost like a voice from the next room, the voice of one who could see into the future.

  I scraped the plates into a bag of garbage, and when I was finished I carried the bag outside. I felt certain Rudy was watching me cross the yard to the garage. But he was not in the window or the door when I turned back. I knew he was waiting for an answer, but I refused to say anything. Though I easily could have said: Vincent never mentions money. (Yet what if there was a secret vulgar side to Vincent, a way he had with vulgar men, anything for a sale?)

  My one concern was to keep moving. I bumped the back door locked with my hip, and passed him nearly at a run, saying, “Get the light, please.” Ducking clear of him, hurrying down the hall, I tried to move and listen for him at the same time. I unplugged the Christmas tree lights and when they were off I felt better, less inclined to think everything was bound to turn out badly.

  He was waiting for me in the hall. The kitchen light was still on. He now stood at the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the floor, the other on the second step, blocking my escape.

  “I thought the robe would make you happy,” he said.

  “It did.”

  “But not for long.”

  “I put it on to show them—without you asking me to,” I said. “I was proud of it. I was proud of you. And then you had to go and shout out the price.”

  “It was important that they knew.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “To me, it was,” he said, poking his chest.

  “Then you bought it for the wrong reason,” I said, and I tried to dart past him, catch him unawares. I went up two steps, nearly to the landing, and then I saw Amanda standing at the top of the stairs just as Rudy’s hand rang down against the side of my head.

  A fierce light accompanied the blow, like a flare in my skull. I was most concerned about getting to Amanda and explaining to her that this was not her father hitting me, but rather a stranger within her father whom with practice and careful maneuvering we could avoid encountering again.

  He hit me a second time, open-handed, across the back of my head and I rocked forward into the scratchy carpet covering the stairs. Amanda screamed above me. I heard Rudy suck in his breath and I knew he hadn’t seen her there.

  “Mandy,” he whispered.

  She screamed again. Blood ran from my nose in a watery thread. Only four blows over a span of months, and now blood had been drawn. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said to her. “I’ll be up to tuck you back in.”

  But Amanda didn’t budge. She was crying, but she also seemed to understand that her witnessing presence was in my best interests. I loved her so much then. In later years when I was a blind burden and her father was gone, when we were no longer close, I forgave Amanda for many small insensitivities out of gratitude for that saving moment on the stairs.

  WERE I LISTENING to a woman tell a story such as mine, I would have two questions for her: How often did he hit you, and did he hit you when you were blind?

  Rudy struck me many times, but the Christmas nosebleed was the only outwardly apparent wound I ever sustained. He was scrupulous in his use of the open hand, swinging it like a wide board. And his violence had a quick release, venting itself after only two or three blows. For all of these reasons I might have considered myself fortunate.

  I had been blind for nearly two months before he hit me when I was blind. The argument was of course about money, and we were alone in the kitchen on a summer evening. We had watched the news on TV and then come into the kitchen to make supper. Ina and Vincent were expected later and Rudy began to complain that we had had them over to our house three times in a row without our being invited there.

  “They’re our family,” I said. “You don’t keep track of that sort of thing with your family.”

  “I do,” he said. “It’s not cheap having them over. Your sister drinks our beer like it’s tap water.”

  “It’s easier for me here,” I said. “I know my way around.”

  “If you’d get out some, you’d be more confident in finding your way,” he said.

  “Little by little I’m getting out,” I said, wondering if I was looking directly at him, if my words were striking him in the face. “And no more remarks about my sister.”

  I moved my face to catch a breeze coming in over the kitchen sink. He won’t hit me when I’m blind, I thought. But I listened to the room at my back. I could picture every inch of the space, the high-ceilinged airiness, the pockets of appliance heat, and Rudy’s glowering presence at the table.

  “What can I say? She drinks beer to a serious extent. I love her,” Rudy said, “but facts are facts.”

  “Just leave her alone.”

  “If she’d leave a little to help pay her tab, I would.”

  I heard his chair scrape against the floor, heard him step close to me. I decided later that he must have for quite some time been weighing the question of hitting me now that I was blind. Perhaps he didn’t understand to what level he would sink if he beat his blind wife; was it a manageable level, a level that would allow him to view at least certain aspects of his life with some self-respect?

  “Leave her alone,” I said, nearly in a whisper, curious myself.

  He let me have it, tentatively the first time, then with increasing gusto on the two succeeding blows, so that the colorless room of my blindness began to spin, and Rudy helped me to my feet like a perfect gentleman.

  He was dead within a year.

  Part One

  Dangerous Boys

  INA AWOKE FOR the second time that morning with a slip of a headache and a certain scandalous fatigue. She had been up late the night before drinking Old Style and reading magazines, the papers, a book, maps, junk mail. Helene had telephoned at her customary early hour. The morning call required that Ina set her alarm so that she was awake and somewhat alert to whatever her sister wanted. Usually it was nothing. After Rudy died, Ina spent time helping Helene overcome her fear of cooking and taught her all over again how to use the stove. She turned on the burners and held her sister’s hand above them so she could feel the waves of heat pushing up at her. She put Helene’s fingers on all the knobs, and Helene informed her testily that she remembered quite clearly, thank you, the function of each control. She could give herself her shot and put together her meals. She knew what foods to avoid, how much she could eat of something she
wasn’t supposed to eat. She could take care of herself but preferred not to. So she telephoned Ina every morning to reestablish her connection with her sister, as if Ina might have taken some offense overnight and decided never to speak to her again. She wanted to be sure she wasn’t alone. Her sister’s sleepy voice placed her firmly back in the world. Helene thus reassured, they made a date for later in the day, to go to the Jewel.

  And having done what was required of her Ina was free for a time. So she went back to sleep for an hour. And when she awoke again she felt the desire to go fishing. This was Vincent prodding her memory. She had been aware lately of a tempering of her mourning. The intervals between moments of grieving had expanded so that she sometimes found herself in the morning being unable to recall the last time she had thought about him. She took this as a healthy sign, but a lonely one as well, for even after his death Vincent remained a companion of wrenching complexity and dimension. She consulted him as often as she had when he was alive: about matters of life, how to manage Helene, what to do with the time left to her. His answers came as clearly as if he were standing behind her, whispering in her ear.

  But awakening that morning with no recollection of thinking about him fresher than a half-day old, she felt too successful at putting him behind her, as if a certain forgetful loneliness were preferable to constant, memorable grieving.

  So she would go fishing.

  They lived across the street from the north branch of the Chicago River, and fishing was the only activity to interest Vincent that could be classified as a sport. And only then, Rudy claimed, because fishing produced something Vincent could sell.

  To reach the river she would have to go down concrete stairs built in the year she was born. These steps were rounded with wear, stones falling out of the mix, the pipe bannisters rusting where declarations of love had been gouged in the paint. She had run down the steps, tripped down them, paused on them to be kissed: by Vincent, by others. She was now almost seventy years old, with lovely blue eyes in a sagging face, and she could afford to lose a pound or two, but a long time ago she had been a beautiful girl. At the foot of the stairway was a small cement landing with a deliciously fragile privacy. The boldest lovers used the space to clutch at each other while listening for footsteps. Ina and Vincent had kissed there, and Vincent had pleaded to do more, and touched her breast as incentive. But she had refused, an absence of courage she now regretted.