by Jones, Craig
“Of course.”
“And I want you to do a big favor for me. Frank made me promise never to let Vivian come here. I’m going to tell him I ran into her downtown on the street today. I want to say you were with me.”
“All right.” She grinned. “Looks as if Regina wasn’t the only one who was a bad girl.”
We sat quietly for a while, sipping our drinks. The voice I had used on the telephone kept ringing in my head, circling round and round one figure—Sylvia. It made me squirm to admit my jealousy; verbalizing it would make it easier.
I told Gloria about the night Sylvia had stayed over and how she impressed Frank and Regina. As I continued my description of her, Gloria’s face changed. She looked as if she was hearing about someone she already knew.
“I wish you could meet her sometime,” I said. “I’d love to hear your appraisal.”
“Frank’s quite fond of her?”
“He’s enamored of her social consciousness.”
“In California I’ve seen that kind of social consciousness shoplifting in stores.” She fell pensive, and I watched her.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” I grinned. “You’re thinking Sylvia’s the same type he used to see before he met me.”
“Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t like her being in Chicago with him?”
“I don’t like her being with him, period. Sometimes I can’t believe how naïve he is, and when I tell him he is, he just accuses me of being cynical. He has this attraction to underdogs just because they’re underdogs. That’s the way he sees Regina because of her illness.”
“You certainly don’t fit in that category.”
“Maybe I’d have more leverage if I did.”
The next morning, Frank called again.
“Is everything ironed out?” he asked almost shyly.
“She’s still mad. She’s not speaking to me. We had a quiet breakfast and she went out to play. What time are you getting here?”
“That’s what I called about. I’d like to stay a couple more days. I want to help straighten out this business with Tim.”
I asked myself whether Sylvia had talked him into this or whether he had considered what I had said the night before about giving in to Regina’s demands. I figured the least I could do was to give him the benefit of the doubt and encourage him to stay. With that settled, I still wanted to get away from the house and Regina to relax with Gloria. I called my mother and asked if I could bring Regina to Cedar Run to stay with them for a night or two. She conferred with my father and called me back to say they would come to our house because my father wanted to see an old college friend who had just been hired by the university. Regina was impassive when I announced that her grandparents would look after her for a day or two.
Gloria and I took Brian and drove eighty miles to Lake Hammond, where we got a room in a motel with a swimming pool. We had a day and a half and two nights of solid relaxation, but as we prepared to leave, a foggy depression settled over me. I knew I was going to miss her terribly and I began to resent our living so far apart.
We went directly from the motel to the airport in Detroit. We said practically nothing to each other all the way. But when we stopped for coffee in the terminal, it was Gloria who launched into resolutions for the future.
“Even hermits have telephones and stationery,” she said, grinning. “Since you and Frank both have vacations at Christmas, why don’t you come out and stay with us.”
“Maybe we will, or maybe next summer.”
When the announcement came for boarding, she gave me a firm hug and said, “Well, off to our separate lairs.” I kissed Brian good-bye and he gave my hair one last stroke. Impulsively, I took out my manicuring scissors and cut off a small chunk above my ear and wrapped it in a tissue.
“There,” I said. “He can have fire anytime he wants it. And before it goes gray.”
“We’re going to be seeing a lot of you before it goes gray.”
This final assurance of hers lifted my depression. Driving home, I told myself there was no reason why Frank and I couldn’t get to California once every year.
When I arrived, Regina burst out of the house, asking when her father was coming home. “Probably tomorrow,” I said, and she questioned the “probably.” When she asked me to call him, I realized he had forgotten to give me the number and I had forgotten to ask for it. Had he intentionally neglected to give it to me? I was too distracted by this thought to notice the coolness between Regina and my father. Then at one point, when I had answered her third demand that I call Frank, my father turned to her and said firmly: “Leave your mother alone.”
“I don’t have to,” she shot back. “She’s my mother.”
“What did I tell you about that back talk, young lady? Do you want more of what you got yesterday?”
“Kenneth.” My mother, warning him and soothing him, in the tone I knew so well.
“What did she get?” I asked.
“She got a swat on her butt.”
“What for?”
“Ask her. She knows what for.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she protested immediately. “He’s just mean.”
“Regina.”
“He is. He’s your dad, he’s not mine.”
“But if I were your dad, you’d be a changed little girl.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
We were saved by Susan, who appeared at the back door to ask if Regina could come out. Regina hesitated, so I promised them both ice cream when the truck came around. They went out to play on the tractor-tire swings.
“Buying her off,” muttered my father.
“Give me a break, will you? Now tell me what she did to get a spanking.”
“She refused to go to bed. She said I wasn’t her boss. Then when I picked her up, she tried to kick me. And when I swatted her, she said her daddy would beat me up when he got home.”
I shrugged. “She’s upset. It’s the first time Frank’s been away from her.”
“Maybe he should be away from her more often.”
“Kenneth!”
“What kind of a crack is that?”
“It’s not a crack. It’s advice.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“I don’t expect you to, but you’d better listen to it. He’s spoiling her rotten and you’re helping him do it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“You know, it’s usually the parents who discipline the child and the grandparents who spoil it. Not the other way around.”
“Then don’t discipline her.”
“Someone has to. Maybe you don’t mind her talking that way to you, but she’s not going to do it with me.”
“Kenneth, leave her alone.”
“Thank you, Mother.” I turned back to him. “Now let’s drop it. If you have nothing to say that’s pleasant—”
“That’s right, something you’d like to hear.”
“—then you can leave. You seem to forget this is my house, not yours.”
“ ‘He’s your dad, not mine,’ ” he said, mimicking Regina.
“Kenneth, what is the matter with you?”
“You know what it is, Mother? It’s that damned male pride that can’t stand a little girl talking up to it. Thank God Frank doesn’t have that handicap.”
“You’re right, he doesn’t have any pride. Maybe that’s why you married him.”
It was well below the belt, and I was more stunned than angry. But I quickly realized how I could zero in. “You can think that if you want. But just remember he’s got one thing you don’t have. He’s got hi
s Ph.D. Now go peddle your sour grapes elsewhere.”
He stood up. “Maybe Regina is more like you than I thought. But at least you waited until you grew up to kick me.”
My mother’s consolation at the door—while my father raced the car engine in the driveway as a signal for her to hurry up—was that he and I would make up after we had had a few days to cool off.
“Do you think I’m a bad mother?” I asked.
“Of course not. And neither does he. He’s just mad at Regina, so he’s taking it out on you and Frank.”
“Do you think she’s spoiled?”
She hesitated. “Not really spoiled, but a little high-strung. You’re going to have to be both patient and firm with her and that’s a hard balance to maintain.” My father honked the horn. She squeezed my hand and kissed me. “Don’t worry about your father. He’ll brood for a few days and then he’ll be ready to apologize. Give Frank our love when you talk to him.”
Frank came home the next afternoon, sunburned but haggard.
“I suppose you heard about the confrontation,” he said.
“What confrontation?”
“At the convention. Haven’t you seen the news?”
“No.”
He went into elaborate detail about the hecklings and the beatings and the arrests. They had managed to raise the bail for Tim’s release and were laying plans for his lawsuit against the Chicago police. My interest and attention were half-hearted, but I managed to hear him out to the end.
“Where’s Regina?”
“She’s outside. Frank, there’s something I want to talk to you about. And I want to discuss it calmly.”
“What is it?”
“A couple of days ago Gloria and I ran into Vivian downtown.”
“Vivian!”
“Yes. I didn’t recognize her at first, but she recognized me.” Already his eyes were blazing. “We had just a short conversation and . . . Frank, why didn’t you tell me about your sister?”
“Tell you what?” His voice nearly cracked. “I told you a long time ago she was a troublemaker.”
“I’m not talking about Vivian. I’m talking about Regina.”
His head jerked up. “Regina?”
“Your sister Regina.”
“What—what did Vivian tell you?”
“More than you’ve told me. I’d like to hear something from you. I’d like to know why you’ve kept this from me.”
“She died.” He looked away at the window and said it again, whispering. “She died.”
“I know that. She killed herself in that horrible way. But I want to know why you didn’t tell me.”
“It’s an ugly story. I didn’t see the need.”
“You didn’t see the need? She was retarded, for one thing. And you named our daughter after her without my knowing it. Now I want to know why!”
“I . . . owed it to her. She was too young to die, and that way.”
“Why did she do it?”
“She was retarded—not severely, not so you could tell it at a first or second glance. I think it was worse for her that way. And she was pretty too, except for that empty look in her eyes.”
That empty look in her eyes. As soon as he said it, it hit me: the photograph I had found in his desk drawer the day I was packing everything to be moved to the trailer. His sister Regina must have been the girl in the picture—and the reason it had so conveniently disappeared in the moving.
“But,” he continued, “the kids at school were no worse to her than her own brothers and sisters. They tormented her, and the older she got, the more they piled it on. I looked after her but it didn’t do much good, because as soon as my back was turned, they were after her again.”
“Where were your parents all this time?”
His voice turned venomous. “Have you ever watched parents quietly disown a child? I saw it happen. Regina had no protection except my promise to run away with her. Finally, that was all she talked about and I kept promising and promising. Then I got that scholarship, so I told her she’d have to wait a year or two. We were sitting under the dead oak in the backyard when I tried to explain it to her, but she stood up and backed away from me. . . .”
Backed away. Like Wanda Hoople.
“There was nothing more I could say to her, so I let her go. That afternoon she took the lye from under the sink and carried it into the woods where no one would hear her scream.”
“Oh, God!”
He was staring at the window and I followed his gaze. We saw Regina at the edge of our vacant lot, saw her look up at Frank’s car in the driveway and break into a run for the house.
“Frank, you could have told me this before. Why do you feel you have to carry something like this alone?”
“I told you once what I came from. I was raised in a cesspool and I want to keep you out of it. You and Regina.”
“But, darling, you’re not them.”
His voice broke. “I don’t know what I’d do if you ever left me.”
“Frank, there’s no reason to leave you.”
“Promise me.”
“Of course I promise.”
“And promise you’ll help me keep Vivian and the rest of them away from us.”
“They can’t hurt us.”
“Promise me: don’t ever let them in this house or near Regina.”
I nodded.
She came through the kitchen and dining room, squealing, “Daddy, Daddy,” and jumped into his lap. Her hands fisted against his chest, she scowled and said, “Don’t go away anymore!”
Gently, he pulled her head onto his shoulder and stroked her hair. “I won’t, pumpkin, not without you.”
But she was not reassured. Even as she clung to him and accepted his stroking, her scowl remained.
I think that if we could recall a nightmare in its entirety, we would find that the real horror of it lies somewhere in the middle, when you can’t remember the beginning, which got you to where you are, and you can’t foresee any logical end to it. Looking back now, I can only guess where our nightmare had its beginnings. I say this because it proceeded slowly and I had no feeling of momentum until very nearly the end. That momentum became apparent when Regina entered high school at fifteen and it continued to build for two years, growing into a monstrous inevitability which I would have to face with a gun in my hand.
For me, one of the beginnings was Hugh Lance’s heart attack in the school parking lot. The next day he was dead and within two years the school was in a shambles. His replacement, Jack Rand, who had connections at the board of education, neither liked nor understood kids and covered up the fact by running the school with a limp hand. Easily intimidated—I suspected he had been bullied as a child—he became a pushover for the troublemakers in the building. He never walked the halls as Lance had done, and instead of dealing with the increasingly rowdy behavior during assembly programs, he simply canceled them. When I sent a boy to his office because he had KISS MY BALLS embossed on his T-shirt (T-shirts, tank tops, shorts and halters were now standard dress in warm weather), Rand sent the boy back with a note which said that according to the constitutional dress code, the boy was allowed to wear what he pleased. My run-ins with Rand increased, as did several of the other teachers’. Fifteen students could fail your class and Rand couldn’t have cared less. But if just one failed and that one contested the grade and threw a fit in his office and brought in parents and made his life miserable, then you were sure to be “investigated for unfairness and incompetency.” Realizing he could not control the students, he turned his frustrated rage, blindly and arbitrarily, on the staff. Fortunately for me, two incidents occurred that made him keep his distance. One day during a free period, I rounded a corner in the hallway to find him just a few steps ahead, walking in the same d
irection. At the end of the hall, two boys obviously cutting class were loitering and preparing to light up cigarettes. Rand approached them and said timidly, “You boys had better get to class. A teacher might find you here.” He gave an involuntary little jump when, right behind him, I said, “A teacher has found them.” The boys shuffled off (no need to hurry, since tardiness was a negligible offense) and Rand squirmed under his smile before he slunk away. The second incident was even more to my advantage. At faculty meetings, we all complained about the graffiti in the halls. His response was that that was the result of faulty surveillance by the teachers. When I pointed out that there were almost no graffiti in the rooms, the teachers’ territory, and that we could not be in two places at once, he resorted to his usual out: he wasn’t responsible for the change in society’s values and if kids didn’t respect property, that wasn’t his fault. The next day after school, I went to the custodian and got a wire brush and cleanser and a bucket of water and took them out to the front of the building, where we had a five-foot-high, ten-foot-long stone slab with chrome letters that spelled out AARON PECK HIGH SCHOOL. For five months, we had had to look at the spray-painted insertion of two letters, so that the name read “Pecker.” I went to work with the steel brush and cleanser. A few minutes passed before a car stopped and a man got out with a camera. He was a reporter for the local paper and asked if I minded having my picture taken. His thrust-forward face and eager eyes had “muckraker” written all over them and I was more than willing to cooperate. He wanted to know how long the “er” had been there and why the custodians weren’t doing this job. I told him they had their hands full inside the building, and besides, it was up to the principal to give the order. He asked if the principal was in the building and I said I doubted it. He asked if there were any other teachers still in the building; I said three or four. Next, he asked if Rand always left before his teachers did. I decided not to overstep myself on that one: I simply answered that I didn’t keep tabs on him. Then he left me and went into the building. In the next evening’s paper, there was a front-page story about Peck, accompanied by my picture. The story was continued on a back page, with photographs of the obscenities in the hallways. Rand was furious and when he called me into his office, he accused me of setting him up with the reporter. I told him exactly how it had happened, but he threatened he would have my job. I replied that he couldn’t do my job and that if he threatened me any further or tried harassment, I would give the reporter a call. For a month after the story appeared, the whole building changed. The graffiti were eradicated; kids who were cutting classes and roaming the halls were rounded up and sent to the deans; and “inappropriate” clothing was prohibited. At the end of the month, the campaign dissolved. Rand went back to hiding out in his office and the casual chaos settled in once again.