by Ward, Robert
I looked out the windows at the elm trees. My thoughts gave me a sense of fear and foreboding. I knew where these feelings came from, my own Methodist background. Practically the first church lesson I had ever learned as a child was that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. My father had never shown the slightest material ambition and heaped disdain and mockery on the “power merchants” and “phony ad men who made a sham of American democracy.” My mother’s favorite stories were the ones she read in the women’s magazines about miserable movie stars and unhappy rich folks in New York and Hollywood. Indeed, as I sat there in my comfortable room on that bright afternoon, it occurred to me that Raines challenged all the moral lessons I had learned as a child. Maybe the Methodist church only preached genteel poverty, because most of its parishioners were poor and moral superiority was their only balm.
And it seemed obvious to me—now that Raines and company had shaken me up enough to think about it at all—that in spite of their highly touted problems, the rich were infinitely happier than we were. A simple enough fact and obvious you might think, but not so obvious to me. Though I had mocked both my parents’ pieties, I had never really questioned them deeply before. Somehow Raines had not only seen through all this pious sham, but he was actively fighting to change it on the business front, where he was about to parlay a simple idea into a fortune, and on the consciousness level as well. He wanted to reach Billy McConnell I was sure, not just for the hell of it, but because he had a message of consciousness to impart to the lost boy—”You’re not alone, and with your friends, the world can be pure joy.”
I stopped and wiped off my sweating brow.
I was coming very close to bald hero worship and I knew it, and I stopped and sucked in my breath. I told myself that Raines was no great hero. He was interested most of all in his own comfort and success. Witness his card business, in which he wouldn’t hesitate to lie or hustle someone in order to get over. “Keep a critical perspective,” I said out loud to myself, but when I shut my eyes, I kept seeing him dancing around Billy McConnell, trying to connect with him with every cell in his body. When I fell off into a dream, I thought of someone else, too, a child who kept banging on a bathroom door, trying to reach a father who couldn’t hear him because of the sound of a shower blasting out scalding steam or a toilet that never stopped flushing.
Of course, it is so easy to see it now. Raines was becoming the brother I never had, the father I never knew, but how could I know that then? No, I only knew that I was fascinated, entranced by him. He was part con, part idealist, but one-hundred-percent magician and I felt as if he’d hypnotized me after all.
I left the house around six and headed out to my parents’ for dinner. I had scarcely seen them since I had moved into the house on Chateau, and I figured that I owed them a visit if for no other reason than to explain myself and assure them that things were fine.
But when I arrived, I found them both in a foul mood. My mother had overcooked the hamburgers even more than usual, until they were as black as lumps of coal. As my father and I tensely waited, she dropped one each on our plates. In both cases the burgers bounced on the cheap porcelain, sending my father into one of his familiar tirades: “Same old thing again,” he said. “Burned to a crisp, Ruth.”
“They aren’t burned,” my mother said. “They’re only well done. Would you want to eat meat with worms in it?”
“I’d risk it rather than eat pure charcoal,” he said.
“Tastes good to me, Mom,” I said, trying to push the hard, juiceless black meat down my throat without gagging.
“Bet you don’t get homecooking like this where you’re living now,” she said. “Wherever that is. I think it’s awful that you moved out of the house and didn’t even tell us where you’re going. Nobody should do a thing like that to people they love.”
“It’s not that far, Ma,” I said. “It’s only down on Chateau Avenue. I’m living with some really interesting people, too.”
I was about to tell them all about Jeremy, but my mother just shook her head and did her “despair eyes” at me.
“You remember Mr. and Mrs. Hargrove from Northwood Appold church, hon?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, though I barely did recall them.
“Well, all their lives they wanted to go to Africa, though I don’t know why,” my mother said.
“Probably because Mr. Hargrove was such a great liberal,” my father said.
“Don’t start that now,” my mother said. “Besides, you’re a liberal yourself, so you don’t have to pretend you’re a racist just to annoy me.”
I smiled at that one. My mother was easily as complex a person as my father. She saw through his childish, attention-getting ploys beautifully, though she had similar ones herself. He would pretend to be a Baltimore racist (like many of the real racists on the block). It made him feel somehow less alienated from the rest of the neighborhood, and she would pretend to be folksy and “simple,” though nothing could have been farther from the truth.
“So what happened to the Hargroves in Africa?” I said.
“Oh, they had a wonderful time at first, hon,” my mother said. “They went out in the bushes with the natives and saw ceremonial native dances, and Mrs. Hargrove said they drank some kind of guava juice out of a native gourd, and they sat by the fire and they took an airplane ride over the veld and saw great herds of lions.”
“That’s prides of lions,” my father said in an exasperated tone. “Not herds, for Godssake.”
“Well, excuse me, Mr. National Geographic,” my mother said. “And then they went out on a safari. Can you imagine the Hargroves on a safari? I mean Mr. Hargrove who works repairing washing machines over at Bendix out on the Joppa Road wearing a pith helmet? Have you ever heard of anything like that before?”
“Pass the peas,” my father said, shooting us his I Can Barely Stand Anymore of This Ignorance expression.
“Anyway, they’re having a great old time but Mrs. Hargrove was very, very nervous, you know out there in the bushes.”
“Jesus God, Ruth,” my father said. “Bush, not bushes.”
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain in this house in front of your only son,” my mother said.
My father sighed and stared down at his plate. Tension leaked from him like radioactivity from a hot canister.
“Anyway,” my mother said, “Finally, finally just when Mrs. Hargrove is starting to relax and enjoy herself, they go out to shoot the lions, which I think is awful and wrong, but they go out there with guides and they get near this clump of bushes and the guide goes into the clump and Mr. Hargrove has his gun and follows him in, and they tell Mrs. Hargrove to wait by the jeep, and suddenly she hears a terrible, ominous growl, and then all of a sudden a couple of shots and a scream, and she walks toward the bush and somebody tries to pull her back, and the lion comes falling from the bush dead. But in his mouth is Mr. Hargrove’s arm.”
“Ah, Jesus,” my father said. “Rather eat Hargrove’s arm than this goddamned charburger.”
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” my mother said again.
“Not his arm?” I said, astonished. “You’re kidding?”
“I only wish I was, hon,” my mother said. “I only wish I was. It was his arm all right, cause the wrist had his Timex on it.”
“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” my father said.
I laughed at that, but my mother was holding her head and shaking it sorrowfully.
“He died right there, hon. Mr. Hargrove, who I have known for thirty years, from bake sales uppa church, eaten up by a lion on safari. You see the terrible things that can happen to a person when they leave their home and go off traipsing around the world.”
“Ahhhh,” I said, giving up on the hideous black burger, “now I see the moral of this sad tale. I go off and get a new home and I end up eaten by lions. Is that it?”
“Well, I don’t know
why you have to leave anyway,” my mother said. “You have a perfectly good room right here.”
“Mom,” I said, “for God’s sake, I just need a little room to breathe. Besides, I’m not that far away. Just down in the old neighborhood on Chateau Avenue. And I’m living with really good people, especially this one guy, Jeremy Raines. He works with mental patients over at Larson-Payne.”
“That’s a rich person’s private hospital,” my father said, obsessively stirring his iced tea. “People like us don’t have time for nervous breakdowns.”
I felt my throat tighten. My father had many voices, many selves, and this one was one of the most familiar to me, the bitter populist.
“I was over there just today with Jeremy, Dad. I saw people with really bad problems, and Jeremy is trying to help them.”
“A lot of rich people end up in asylums, hon,” my mother said as she passed me the stewed tomatoes. “Just proves that money doesn’t make a person happy. I remember when Mamie Eisenhower was in that place. That was when Ike was still president and she got to drinking something awful.”
“Gee, poor Mamie,” my father said sarcastically as he looked with distaste down at his burned meat and mayonnaise-drenched cole slaw.
“Well, I think she was a nice lady,” my mother said. “She just didn’t want to be a first lady. Sitting around and waiting for her husband to give speeches all a time. No wonder she took to drink.”
“Ruth, you kill me,” my father said. “She loved being first lady, doing her brave little Mamie routine while he played the great general. Meanwhile, the two of them together had the combined I.Q. of a flatworm.”
“Always say something nasty if you can’t think of anything original to say, hon. That’s his motto,” my mother said, looking down at her plate.
“Yes,” said my father, “and you should certainly know, master of invective and sarcasm that you are.”
“Oh, well,” my mother said. “Why don’t you just go into the bathroom and spend the whole night washing your pathetic little body?”
She stood up and threw down her apron on the chair and, to my surprise, walked out of the kitchen. My father’s mouth dropped at this. This kind of self-righteous exit was usually his meat.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he said.
My mother popped her head back in the dining room. She had a scarf on her head.
“I am getting dressed, and then I’m going to wood-carving class,” she said. “You have fun sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself.”
With that said, she disappeared and I heard her clomp across the living room floor and slam the door to her bedroom.
My father sighed heavily.
“I’m going to have a sign put over the door of this house,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “and it’s going to read ‘House of Pain.’ “
That was his favorite expression; he’d gotten it from an old H. G. Wells story, The Island of Dr. Moreau. And though he said it now with obvious bitterness, just hearing the words sent a small shiver of tenderness to my heart. There had been a time, a time that seemed part of another century now, when he had read the old ghost and horror stories to me. I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed; when he read to me he became another person entirely—not the neurotic, obsessive ranter who lived in the bathroom, but calm, focused, whole. His favorite writer was H. G. Wells, and he had often read The Island of Dr. Moreau to me, the story about a mad doctor who hides on his own lost island and turns animals into humans. His laboratory was called the House of Pain, and it was there that the revolting animals killed him in an orgy of revenge at the story’s end. For a long time, when we were happy, my father had made a joke about his bathroom being the House of Pain. Indeed, it was our own little private joke, for he would often go into the “House” and then, when I was nearly asleep in my bedroom next door, he would emerge, a towel wrapped around his head, and push my door open, which made me scream in terror. Then he would walk stiff armed toward my bed, reciting in a brutish monotone Claude Raines’s soliloquy from the movie version of his other favorite Well’s story, The Invisible Man. “All right you fools,” he would say, as he came ever closer, walking stiff and zombielike toward the bed, “you’re dying to know who I am, aren’t you? Never giving me any rest, prying and peeking into keyholes …” “No, Dad,” I would scream, half-afraid and half-ecstatic, “don’t … no!” But that only encouraged him further. “You want to know who I am, do you?” he would say, unwrapping the towel. “Well, I’ll show you who I am!!!” With that he would give a wild and cruel laugh—a perfect imitation of old Claude himself—and then grab me, tickling me wildly, causing me to scream in fear and joy. Oh, Lord, how I looked forward to those attacks, the one strange way we were like father and son. But that was long ago, before he had become a bureaucratic drone, pissed off at the world and especially his ball and chain, Mother and myself. Now our home really was the House of Pain. It was no joke at all, and I suddenly felt such a stab of loss and such a blazing fury of anger toward him for throwing me away that I had to push myself away from the table before I went into my own bitter tirade.
“Wiseguy,” my father said as I left the room. “Thinks he’s heard it all.”
I started to go into my old room, just to lie on the bed and try to calm my aching heart when my mother came out of her bedroom and signaled to me to come outside. She put her index finger over her mouth, and I followed her to the front porch, amazed that she had dressed up in her fancy Sunday clothes, a blue dress with pleats and a Peter Pan collar and her black leather pumps.
Once outside, she began whispering to me: “Can you give me a ride downtown, hon?”
“I guess …” I said. (I had borrowed Val’s Volkswagen, which sat in the driveway.) “But where are you going?”
“It’s a secret. I’ll tell you onna way. But I don’t want your father to find out. So you just pull out and I’ll start walking uppa street toward the bus stop, then you can pick me up.”
“That seems silly, Ma,” I said. “You can just get in the car here.”
“But what if he sees?”
She actually looked frightened, and under her makeup, she was blushing.
“Who the hell cares?” I said. “You’re a grown woman. You can do whatever the hell you want.”
“Okay, hon,” she said. “Let’s go then.”
She hurried off the porch, looking back furtively to see if he was watching, and I followed quickly behind her and opened the door for her, and a second later we were headed down Burke Avenue.
Okay,” I said, as we drove down Charles Street, under the beautiful oaks and elms, past the homes of the rich. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re up to?”
“Well, hon,” she said. “Remember the Miss Kissable Lips contest? Offa’ radio? Well, you won’t belief it but Johnny Apollo has chosen my lips as one of the finalists inna contest. And they’re gonna have the Big Kissoff tonight down the radio station.”
I scarcely knew what to say.
“That’s great,” I finally came out with, though I didn’t sound very convincing. “So that’s where I’m taking you, down to the radio station?”
“That’s right, hon, and the winner gets all kinds of prizes.”
She smiled at me with such innocence, such sweetness, that I reached across the seat and held her hand.
“Of course, I know you think I’m silly,” she said under her breath. “An old fat lady like me.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so at all. And don’t call yourself names like that.”
“But it’s true, hon,” she said. “Back when I met your father, I was real pretty though. At least all the boys at the dances used to think so. They all wanted to dance with me up at St. Ann’s, hon. We would go round and round … there was Herbert and there was Larry Johnson, and there was Edward … he became a missionary and went all over the world. You know he even asked me to marry him once.”
“Why didn’t you?” I said
, feeling choked up, almost unable to speak.
“Because I met your father,” my mother said, taking out her lipstick and applying it gingerly to her lips.
“He was so much brighter than the other boys and better looking, too. He seemed sophisticated, the way he talked about the world. He read books, and he understood politics. I was just a neighborhood girl. I didn’t know anyone who could talk like that. Of course he got it all from Gracie, your grandmother, and when I met her, I thought she was the most wonderful person in the world.”
“She was,” I said.
“There was only one difference between them. I mean they were both smart, but Gracie had love in her heart. I know you think it’s corny, Mr. College Boy, but it was true nonetheless. Your father uses his intelligence to lash out at the world, at everyone around him, but with your grandmother, she mixed it with love, so it was like everyone could share in her brains. She made us all feel smarter and happier just being around her.”
I nodded my head and tried to catch my breath. There was a pain so deep inside me that I wanted to take a knife and gouge it out.
“I don’t think it’s stupid, Mother,” I said. “I don’t think you’re stupid either. I want you to know that. I don’t care what he says, you understand. I don’t think you’re stupid at all.”
My mother shook her head and patted my hand.
“I’m not very bright,” she said. “Not like your father. But I know a few things they don’t teach you in books.”
She looked at me and smiled then. How to describe that smile? It was as though it came from beneath the skin, a smile that was filled with maturity, wisdom, as if her real self had burst from under the endless masks she felt she must wear, the dumb girl, the neighborhood girl, Miss Helpless.
And I thought, she really is smart. She really is a wonderful woman and what in God’s name is she doing going to the Miss Kissable Lips contest?
“Ma,” I said. “You sure you want to go through with this?”
“I know it’s stupid, hon,” she said, falling back into her helpless voice. “I know it’s silly, but I just wanta see if I have a chance.”