by Anne Tyler
His eyes moved over to the bulletin-board part. In the old days it had been crowded with the children’s drawings, ranging from kindergarten-level pictures of houses with smoking chimneys up to the tiny complicated landscapes Ben Joe had done in upper grade school. Now only one of them was left—a drawing done by Jenny, when she was six, of a circle superimposed on a furry cylinder, which she had said was the Lone Ranger and Silver seen from above. Other than that, there were only two yellowed scraps of paper. The first was one of the few reminders of his father that had been allowed to remain; it was a note written by Susannah, back when her writing was as uncertain as Tessie’s, saying:
Mama, the last five times that Gram has gone to a church supper and you’ve gone to a Legal Women Voters’ supper both at the same time Daddy has fed us as follows: (1) popcorn (2) grilled cheese sandwiches (3) fudge (4) popcorn (5) ice cream, please talk to him.
Ben Joe frowned again, considered changing the comma to a semicolon, but eventually let it go for some reason and turned to the next piece of paper. This was his own, in crooked, preschool capitals, and he could not remember when or for what reason he had written it. It said:
Song By
Benjamin Josiah Hawkes
What shall we do with the trunk-ed sailor
Is a matter worth disgusting.
Everybody’s pinto is agoing to heaven
Heaven, in the morning.
It had a tune, his mother had told him, something like the scissors-mender’s chant, all on one note, except that the last word in each line was several notes lower. They said he used to sing it at the beach, but he had no memory of it now.
He looked down at his tomato. There was a bite in it, although he hadn’t noticed he had taken one. He considered storming into the den and accusing Tessie of spit-backing, which was a habit she had developed after biting into chocolates that turned out to be caramel-filled; but on second thought he decided he might have taken a bite after all. There was no telling. He had been confused and absent-minded all day; he attributed it to the visit at the home for the aged, but just knowing the reason didn’t help him any. All he could think of that might help was to isolate himself in the kitchen for a while after supper and stare at the bulletin board, where years arranged themselves one on top of the other in layers before his eyes. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t, too. He sighed, took another bite from his tomato, and began rereading the blackboard.
Eggs
Lavoris …
“What are you doing here?” Jenny asked.
“Why?”
“I thought you were just going out to get a snack. You missed the last half of the program.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He moved aside to let her get into the refrigerator.
“Ben Joe …”
“What,” he said. Every time she interrupted him he had to go back to the very top of the blackboard and begin reading all over again.
“Never mind,” she said.
“Well, go on, now that you’ve interrupted me.”
“I just wanted to know where the ice water is. I’m getting some for Gram. What’s the matter with you tonight?”
“I don’t know. I went with Gram to the old folks’ home.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and with the toe of his sneaker he began tracing patterns in the linoleum. There was no sense in going back to reading the blackboard until Jenny was out of the room again.
She had found the ice water. She poured it into an orange-juice glass and put the jar back in the refrigerator.
“Hey, I wonder …” she said suddenly.
But Ben Joe, off on another track now, interrupted her. “Who in this family wears contact lenses?” he asked.
“Contact—Oh, you’re talking about the list. Susannah does.”
“How come I didn’t know?”
“You weren’t here,” Jenny said.
“Oh.”
“She got them with her first pay check from the library, after she switched jobs.”
“I never heard about it.”
“You weren’t here, I said.” She picked up the glass of water and started out again. At the door she stopped. “What I was just wondering,” she said, “was it this morning you went to the home? With Gram?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why don’t you come out into the living room? Gram just heard an old friend of hers died. She says she only saw him this morning, so that must be who it is. That Mr. Dower.”
“He’s dead?”
“That’s what she said.”
“But he can’t be. We only saw him this morning.”
“Doesn’t stop him from being dead, does it? Why do people always—”
“Ah, no,” said Ben Joe. He shook his head gently and turned his back to the bulletin board. (What good would it do him now?) There was no reason for him to feel so sad, but he did, anyway, and he just kept staring at a corner of the kitchen cabinet while Jenny watched him curiously.
“Why don’t you come talk to Gram?” she asked him.
“Well …”
“Come on.”
She backed against the door to open it and let Ben Joe pass through ahead of her. “All I ever know to do is get people water,” she said, “I know when I’m sad I don’t want water, and I don’t guess others do, either, but it’s all I know to do.”
“Well, I’m sure she’d like it,” Ben Joe said.
“Maybe so.”
In the living room he found his grandmother upright on the couch, sitting very stiffly with her hands in her lap and her eyes dry. Around her was clustered most of the family, some sitting next to her and some on chairs around the room.
“Only this morning,” she was saying. “Only this morning.” She caught sight of Ben Joe and called out, “Wasn’t it, Ben Joe? Wasn’t it only this morning?”
“Yes,” said Ben Joe.
“There. Ben Joe can tell you.” She turned to nod at the others and then, realizing that Ben Joe hadn’t yet heard the whole story, she looked his way again. “I called the home,” she said. “I wanted to tell him about something I’d forgotten. This evening I was just hunting under the bed for Carol’s hair brush and suddenly it came to me, so clear: Jamie’s mustache cup.”
“His what?” Ben Joe asked.
“Mustache cup. Mustache cup. You know, Jamie Dower was the only man I ever knew who really did use a mustache cup. That was something wonderful, when I was twelve. He got it just the last year he was home, on account of this lovely mustache he was growing. He was kind of a dandy, Jamie Dower. Always was. But it was a beautiful mustache, I have to say. Ben Joe knows. You tell them, Ben Joe.”
“Well …” Ben Joe said. The picture of Jamie’s face was before him, small and white and clean-shaven.
“Ben Joe knows,” Gram said to the rest of them. She smiled down at her hands. “I know it’s a small thing, but I suddenly thought of that mustache cup, white with pink rosebuds, it was, and I just had to tell him about it. So I called the home, and after a right long spell of hemming and hawing they told me. They said he had passed on just an hour ago. I didn’t let on how it hit me. I just said I hoped he’d had a peaceful passing, and hung up.” Her mouth shook for a minute, and the first tear slid down the dry paper of her cheek. “But it was only this morning …” she said.
A glass of water was poked suddenly under her chin. Gram drew back and blinked at it through her tears. Her eyes traveled slowly from the glass itself to the poker-stiff arm that held it and above that to Jenny’s face, sober and embarrassed.
“Why, thank you,” she said. She took the glass, looked at it a minute, and then smiled at Jenny and drank until the glass was empty. “There is nothing like clear water,” she told Jenny formally.
Ben Joe looked around at the rest of the family. His mother was in the easy chair, looking worried; Tessie was on the arm of the chair, and the twin
s and Susannah were sitting around their grandmother on the couch. All of them were unusually quiet. When the silence had gone unbroken for at least a full minute, his mother cleared her throat and said, “We’ll have to send a nice wreath of flowers, Gram.”
“He wouldn’t like it,” Gram said. “Used to get angry when I brought him my dessert.”
“Your—Well, anyway. It’d be a nice gesture to send a small wreath, just to show—”
“I will not send him flowers!” Gram said.
Ellen Hawkes was quiet a moment, figuring this out. Finally she said, “Well, some people prefer the money to go to a worthy cause instead. Maybe to the missionary league of his church, if he has one—”
“I tell you, no, Ellen. He never could accept a gift graciously. My mother said accepting gifts graciously is the true test of a gentleman, but I don’t go along with that. Jamie Dower was a gentleman all the way through. He just didn’t like gifts, is all.”
“But that was some seventy years ago, Gram—”
“No point discussing it,” said Ben Joe. “We don’t send flowers.”
Gram began crying again. The girls fluttered and crowded in around her and Jenny backed toward the door, in case she had to get more ice water. Ellen Hawkes clicked her tongue.
“What’s going on?” Joanne said.
She was standing in the doorway dressed to go out and carrying a coat over her arm. Everyone looked up except Gram, who had just been handed Ben Joe’s handkerchief and was now blowing her nose in it.
“Gram’s lost an old friend,” Susannah said.
“Oh, no.” She came quickly over to the couch and knelt down in front of her grandmother. “Who was it?”
“Jamie Dower,” said Gram, “and I can’t send him flowers.”
“Well, of course you can. What’s the matter with this family? Mom, since when have we got so poor we can’t send—”
“My God,” her mother said. She stood up and left the room, not sharply but with a slow kind of weariness.
“It’s not the money,” Ben Joe said. “It’s that Jamie never could accept a gift graciously.”
“Oh, I see.” She nodded and began gently stroking Gram’s shoulder.
“If you see,” her mother said from the doorway, “will you please explain it to me?”
“Well, it makes sense.”
“Not to me it doesn’t. Does it to you, Ben Joe?”
“Well, yes,” said Ben Joe.
His mother vanished into the hallway.
“What doesn’t make sense,” Ben Joe said, “is why it makes you unhappy not sending him flowers. If you know he’d be happier not getting them.”
“Because I want to send them, that’s why,” his grandmother said. “I always did want to give him flowers.”
She began crying into her handkerchief, and the other girls moved over so that Joanne could sit beside her and hug her. “I know, I know,” she said soothingly. “Now, I tell you what do, Gram. You just buy some flowers and give them to someone you like. Prettiest flowers you can find. And then you tell yourself you wouldn’t have done it if Jamie Dower hadn’t died. That way you solve the whole thing, right?”
“Well, maybe,” Gram said.
The doorbell rang. Joanne gave Gram a brisk pat on the shoulder and stood up. “Don’t bother,” she told Ben Joe. “I’ll get it. It’s my date.”
“What?”
But she didn’t answer; she was already out of the room. Gram refolded the handkerchief to a dry place and then suddenly, in the middle of the process, stopped and looked up at Ben Joe. “What’d she say?” she asked.
“She said it was her date.”
“Did she mean her appointment? Or did she mean her date?”
“Her date, is what she said.”
All of them fell silent, listening. A young man laughed in the front hallway. Ben Joe could read in Gram’s face the slow transition from grief to indignation.
“Why, she can’t do that!” she said. “Joanne?”
The two voices ran on, ignoring her.
“Joanne!” Gram said.
Joanne reappeared, still carrying her coat over her arm.
“Who’s that you got with you?” Gram asked.
“John Horner, Gram. Come on in, John.”
John Horner appeared next to her, soundlessly. He still had his broad, open smile and he didn’t seem to think it strange to be greeted by a whole silent, staring family grouped around a weeping old woman. He nodded to all of them in general and lifted a hand toward Ben Joe, whom he recognized.
“This is my grandmother,” said Joanne. “And Ben Joe, and Susannah, and Jane, Lisa, Jenny, and Tessie. This is John Horner.”
“How do you do?” John Horner said. He was addressing mainly Gram, as the oldest member of the family, but Gram just sat up straighter and stared narrowly at him.
“I wish I’d of married Jamie Dower,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Gram has just heard that a friend passed away,” Joanne began. Her voice was the old high-school Joanne’s, soft and bubbling. She stood very close to John Horner while she talked to him. Under cover of Joanne’s voice Gram went on muttering to the others.
“If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family. On account of different genes mingling. They wouldn’t all have gone and done queer things, or acted so—”
“Hush, Gram,” Susannah said.
“Ben Joe?” Joanne called.
“What.”
“John was asking you something.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was just asking,” said John, “aren’t you the one that’s at Columbia?”
“That’s right.”
“I was there for a while. Took a business course. Mrs. Hawkes, ma’am, I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s passing.”
Gram frowned. “Well,” she said ungraciously. She thought a minute and then added, “Troubles always descend lots at a time, seems like.”
“They do,” said John. He came further into the room to sit on the arm of the rocker, and Joanne moved over to stand beside him. “My old man had a saying. My old man used to say, ‘It never rains but it—’ ”
“Who is your daddy?” Gram asked suddenly.
“Jacob Hart Horner, ma’am.”
“Jacob Hart Horner. That so.”
“Yes’m.”
“Oh. I know him.”
“Do you really?” He smiled politely.
“Yes, I know him.”
“Ah.”
Gram nodded a while, considering.
“What you think he’d say if he saw you here?” she asked.
The silence before her question had been long enough so that John was just beginning to consider the conversation over. He froze now, in the act of turning toward Joanne, and looked back at Gram blankly.
“Ma’am?” he said. “What’s that?”
“If he saw you here. If Jacob Hart Horner saw you here. What you think he’d say?”
“If he saw me here?”
“Yes, here.”
“I don’t—”
“Saw you taking Joanne out. Joanne Hawkes Bentley out. What you think he’d say?”
“Well, nothing, I don’t guess.”
“Nothing.” She nodded again, with her eyes fixed veiled and thoughtful upon the floor. “No, I don’t guess he would,” she said finally. “I remember Jacob Hart Horner. Remember him well. Came here in his teens, he did, and took up with my boy Phillip. He was supposed to be working, but he didn’t do much of that. Lived off little Sylvester Grant and my boy Phillip. I never will forget, one time he called his folks long distance from this very house and me sitting in the same room listening to him. I reckon they wanted to know had he got a steady job and he said yes, he was working in the chicken cannery. There was a chicken cannery then, down by the river
near the blue-denim factory, but I never saw him near it. And I reckon they wanted to know what he did there, because he started talking about carrying grain—said that was his job. Now, I don’t know what his folks were like and I don’t want to know, but let me just ask you this: what kind of intelligence do you suppose they had, to believe a body could get a job carrying grain in a factory that deals with dead chickens?”
“Well, now, I don’t know,” John Horner said. He was laughing, and didn’t seem to be insulted.
“There’s bad blood there,” Gram said. She looked at him a while, at the friendly face with the dark eyes made slits by laughter, and then she blew her nose and looked down into her lap. “I am getting old,” she said.
The room grew silent. John looked over at Joanne soberly, and she clutched her coat more tightly to her and started toward the door.
“Gram,” she said, “I hope you feel better.”
“Well. New things come up. A minute ago Jamie Dower slipped from my mind altogether for a second.”
“Sure. It’s always that way. You’ll—”
“What I was meaning to bring up a minute ago,” Gram began, “what I wanted to say …”
She stopped and looked over at Ben Joe.
“Um,” he said. He took his hands out of his pockets and walked over to where John was standing beside Joanne.
“What’s the matter?” Joanne asked.
“Well, I was just wondering.” He looked at her face, with its blank brown eyes, and then changed his mind and directed the question toward John. “What I think Gram was trying to say,” he said, “… well, hell with it, what I’m trying to say is, it doesn’t look to me like a good idea for you to be going out, Joanne.” But he was still facing John; it was to John’s more open eyes that he said it.
“Why not,” John said, turning it into a challenge instead of a question.
“Well, it’s a small town. That’s one reason.”
“Small town, what’s that got to do with it? Listen, boy, you and your family got to stop hanging on to your sister this way. Got to start—”
“But she’s still married, damn it!”
His mother, coming in on the tail end of the sentence, stopped in the doorway and looked at Ben Joe.