by Andre Dubus
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind her moving in with us? After we’re married?”
“No. I like her.”
“There must be something.”
“Larry.”
“Yes.”
“Am I going to visit him, like I do Mom?”
His father had not thought about that, Richie saw it in his face, the way it changed as abruptly as when he had stood so still with the spatula and half-raised cigarette, but more completely, deeply: the color rushed out of it, and the lips opened, and he stood staring at Richie’s eyes, his mouth, his eyes. Then in two strides his father came to him, was hugging him, so his right cheek and eye were pressed against his father’s hard round stomach, his arms held against his ribs by the biceps squeezing his own, the forearms pulling his back toward his father.
“You poor kid,” his father said. “Jesus Christ, you poor, poor kid.”
Still his father held him, and vaguely he wondered if the cigarette were burning toward the fingers that caressed his back, and he understood that his father had not yet thought about him seeing Larry because there had been so much else, and he would have got around to that too, he always got around, finally, to everything; but there had not been time yet (then he understood too it was not time but relief, peace; there had not been those yet); then against his cheek his father’s stomach moved: a soft yet jerking motion, and he knew that above him his father was crying. He had never seen his father cry. Nor did he now. In a while, in his father’s embrace, the motion ceased and his father said, in almost his voice, but Richie could hear in it the octave of spent tears: “He’s got to come through. Larry. You pray for that, hear? He will. He’ll come through, he’ll come see us.”
Richie nodded against the shirt, the taut flesh; then with a final hug his father squeezed breath out of him and turned back to the stove. Richie waited for him to wipe his tears, but his hands were lifting out bacon and holding a plate covered with paper towel. When he took the batter from the counter, his cheeks and eyes were dry, so maybe as he held Richie he had somehow wiped them; but Richie, already forming the embrace and tears into a memory he knew he would have always, had no memory of his father’s hands leaving his back where they petted and pulled. He slid open the screen, stepped onto the sundeck, leaned against its low wall, and watched a grey squirrel climb a maple. The tree was so close that Richie could see the squirrel’s eyes and claws as it spiraled up the trunk, in and out of his vision. Near the top it ran outward on a long thick limb, then sat among green leaves, while Richie imagined the tears in his father’s eyes, and going down his cheeks, then stopping; then disappearing as though drawn back up his face, into his eyes, lest they be seen.
Saint Peter cried after the cock crowed three times (and still was not under the cross; only Saint John and the women were there, and many times Richie wondered if he would have had the courage to go to the cross), and Christ cried, looking down at Jerusalem, and there must have been other times in the Gospels but he could not remember them now. Four summers ago when he was eight he had come home from the athletic field, bleeding and crying, unable to stop the tears and not caring to anyway, for the boys who had hurt him were teenagers, and the salt taste of blood dripped from his nose to his mouth. It was a Sunday, the family was home, and his father picked him up, listened to his story, blurted, and broken by breaths and sobs, then handed him to Carol and his mother, one holding his torso, the other his legs, and Brenda in front of him, touching a wet cloth to his nose, his lips, and his father and Larry ran out of the house. He twisted out of the arms holding him, away from the three faces he loved and their sweet voices that made him surrender utterly to his pain and humiliation and cry harder; he struck the floor in motion, out of the house, onto his bicycle. His father and Larry were faster than he imagined, but he reached the field in time to see them: each held a bully by the shirt and slapped his face, back and forth, with the palm, the back of the hand, the palm, and the cracks of flesh were so loud that he was frightened yet exultant, standing beside his bicycle, on the periphery of watching children. Then his father and Larry stopped slapping, pushed the boys backward, and they fell and crawled away in the dirt, crying, then stood, holding their bowed heads, and walked away. His father and Larry came toward him, out of the small boys and girls standing still and silent. With a bandanna his father wiped blood from Richie’s nose and lips, and with a hand under Richie’s chin turned his face upward, studied his nose, touched its bone. Then his father and Larry stood on either side of him, their hands on his shoulders, and he walked his bicycle between them, back to the house.
Watching the squirrel (he could see only the bush of its tail, and a spot of grey between green leaves) he could connect none of this with the mystery of his father’s tears: not the actual shedding of them, but the fact that they had to be gone before his father faced him, and gone so absolutely that there was no trace of them, no reddened eyes, or limp mouth, as he had seen on the faces of Carol and his mother. All his instinct told him was that seeing your father cry was somehow like seeing your mother naked, and he had done that once years ago when he had to piss so badly that his legs and back were shivering, and without knocking he had flung open the bathroom door as she stepped out of the shower; as though drawn by it, his eyes had moved to her black-haired vagina, then up to her breasts, and then to her face as she exclaimed his name and grabbed a towel from a rack. He felt the same now as he had felt then: not guilt, as when he had committed an actual sin (using God’s name in vain, or impure talk with his friends, yet frightening for him because he knew that soon it would be not words but the flesh that tempted him, and already his penis had urges that made him struggle); so not guilt, but a fearful sense that he had crossed an unexplained and invisible boundary, and whatever lay beyond that boundary was forbidden to him, not by God, but by the breath and blood of being alive.
When his father called him in, he ate heartily, and with relief, and saw that his father did too. And that relief was in his voice, and his father’s, when they did speak: of the Red Sox, of Richie’s plans for the day—softball in the morning, riding in the afternoon—and what they’d like for dinner. Their voices sounded like happiness. His father asked him if he were jumping or riding on the flat; he said jump, and his father said that’ll be ten then, and peeled a bill from a folded stack he drew from his pocket, and Richie, bringing a fork of balanced egg and speared pancake to his mouth, took it with his left hand, and nodded his thanks, then mumbled it through his food. While his father smoked, he cleared the table; his father said I’ll wash today, but he said he would, and his father said No, you go on and play ball. By then he had cleaned both iron skillets, the way his father had taught him, without soap, only water and a sponge, and they were drying on the heating burners. He sponged the egg yolk and syrup from the two plates, put them and the flatware in the dishwasher, told his father it wasn’t full yet and he’d turn it on tonight when the dinner dishes were in it. He poured the last of the coffee into his father’s cup, brought him the cream, and said he was going. He was at the door to his room when his father called: “Brush your teeth, son.”
The taste of toothpaste was fading, and he could taste the bacon and syrup again as he rode onto the athletic field and realized that among the faces he scanned, he was looking only for Melissa. She was not there. For the rest of the morning, playing softball with nineteen girls and boys, he watched the trees, where he had stood with her after Mass, watched for her, in the next moment, to emerge in her cut-offs and blue denim shirt. And he watched the road that began at the field and went back to his house and then hers. He watched secretly, while waiting to bat, talking to friends behind the backstop; or standing in left field (because it was Jim Rice’s position), he watched between pitches and after plays. When he looked from the outfield to the road, most of it hidden by trees along its sides, or looked at the stand of trees behind the first base line, the grass and earth he stood on seemed never touched before, in this way, by
anyone; and that earth seemed part of him, or him part of it, and its cover of soft grass.
He remembered her scents and the taste of her mouth; he no longer tasted the syrup and bacon, save once in the third inning when he belched. He tried to taste her, and inhale her, and he smelled grass and his leather glove, the sweat dripping down his naked chest and sides, the summer air that was somehow redolent of freedom: a warm stillness, a green and blue smell of leaves and grass and pines and the sky itself, though he knew that was not truly part of it, but he did believe he could faintly smell something alive: squirrels that moved in the brush and climbed trunks, and the crows and blackbirds and sparrows that surrounded the softball game in trees, and left it on wings, flying across the outfield to the woods where he cross-country skied, or beyond it to the fields where now the corn was tall.
By the eighth inning, and nearing lunchtime, Melissa had not come. He imagined her pausing with vacuum cleaner, or sponge mop, or dust cloth, to wipe her brow with the back of her sun-browned forearm. He tried to imagine her mind: whether in it she saw him, or softball, or lunch and something cold to drink, and it struck him, and the sole-shaped spots of earth and grass beneath him, that he did not know what she liked to eat and drink. He thought of chili-dogs, hamburgers, grilled cheese with tomato, Coca-Cola, chocolate milk, then realized he was thinking of his own lunches, so he thought of Brenda, of tunafish salad, egg salad, and iced tea; but he could not put those into Melissa’s mind. Then, picking up a bat and moving to the on-deck circle (there was no circle, and no one kneeled, waiting to hit; but to him there was a white circle around him), he saw what her mind saw. The image made him smile, yet what he felt was more loving and sorrowful than amused: she wanted a Marlboro. Her mother was in the house, working with her, and more than anything in her life now, Melissa wanted to smoke a cigarette.
IV
IT WAS FITTING, Larry thought, that he should be seeing Brenda in daylight, whose hours had so often haunted him with remorse. As he drove slowly on Main Street, the hands of the old clock outside the clothing store joined at noon, and the whistle at the box factory blew. It blew at seven in the morning, at noon, at twelve-thirty and one, and at five in the afternoon; and sometimes he wondered, with sorrow and anger whose colliding left him finally weary and embittered—a static emotion he believed he should never feel, at twenty-five—whether the timing of the whistle had once ordered every worker in town to factories, and to two shifts for lunch, and then to their homes. That was long ago, when people called the town the Queen Slipper City because the workers made women’s shoes; but that market was lost now, to Italian shoes, and the few remaining factories did not need a whistle you could hear wherever you stood inside the town. If you wanted to see factory workers, you had to be parked on one of the old brick streets, outside the old brick factory, when the men and women entered in the morning, left in the afternoon. He imagined those streets in the old days: thousands of men and women carrying lunchboxes, speaking to each other in English, Italian and Greek, Armenian and French, Polish and Lithuanian, walking toward the factories, disappearing into them at seven o’clock, as if the whistle roared at their backs.
Yet he was the son of an entrepreneur, and worked for him too. His father had worked at a shoe factory as a young boy, long enough to vow that someday he would never again work for another man. Now he made a lot of money selling a frozen tantalizer of people’s craving for sweets. It was good ice cream, made by another man who owned and worked his own business in the Merrimack Valley, and Larry’s father, by charming him and paying him well, was his only distributor. Ice cream. It seemed to Larry the only delightful food of childhood that adults so loved: they never spoke of, or indulged in, candy and cookies and popsicles, even malts and milkshakes, as they did ice cream. The faces of both men and women became delighted, even mischievous, as they said: Let’s go get some ice cream. So his father sold it. He was good to his workers, he did not keep them working so few hours a week that he could pay them under the minimum wage, and the young people who worked his counters started at minimum wage, no matter how few their hours were, and his father raised their salaries as soon as he approved of their work. Since he was at the stores every day, working with them, they were soon either gone or making more money. Now his father was planning a way for all workers, above their salaries, to share in the profits, and was working on a four-day week for his daily and nightly managers, because he believed they should be with their young families, and he said there ought to be a way of allowing that and still selling fucking ice cream. This was as deeply as Larry had talked with his father about the philosophy of work in society; but Larry thought of him, a man who seldom read a book, as a good-spirited, money-making, gun-carrying anarchist. And a man now who had violated the lines and distances between them: lines they had drawn and distances created through the years, so they could sit in the same room, in the comfort of acknowledged respect and love.
He crossed the bridge on Main Street, turned right and followed the Merrimack River, glimpsed a sparkle of sun on its moving surface, this river that law and people were allowing to live again as a river ought to, so that now instead of receiving waste along its upriver banks, it was hosting salmon at its mouth. He turned left, passing an old cemetery where once he had walked, reading grave-stones, but there were too many dead children and babies there, and he left, his head lowered by images of what were now nuisance illnesses or complications of birth taking the suffering breath from children, and breaking forever the hearts of mothers and fathers. His car climbed under trees and past large old houses and he reached the one where Brenda lived, in an apartment at the rear, on the first floor, and in the lawn behind her kitchen was a birdbath in the middle of a fountain that looked as old as the eighteenth-century tombstones in the cemetery. But he drove on.
Just for a while, up the hill, and around the reservoir where the purple loosestrife was growing now, purple-flowered stalks standing in the marshy ground near the bank; Canada geese were on the water, and across it were tall woods. A long steep hill was there, but you could only see it in winter when the leaves had fallen, and now it was marked by the rising green curve of trees. He turned onto Route 495, three lanes going east to the sea, cutting through wooded hills. Just for a while, so he could breathe against the quickness of breath and coolness beneath his heart that were stage fright before a performance, when he needed it; but, going to see Brenda, it felt too much like the fear and shame he believed he deserved.
He did not know how it started: somewhere in his mind, his spirit, as though on what he called now—and then too, sometimes, then too—those Faustian nights of their marriage, he swayed in feigned drunkenness to a melody he had dreamed. Rose from the couch in pantomime of a tired and drunken husband, waved and sighed goodnight to Brenda and the man they had brought home with them from one of a succession of bars in neighboring towns. In these bars there was music, usually one man or woman with a guitar, and the bar stools had arms and were leather-cushioned, the bar had a padding of leather at its front, and a long mirror behind it, and men and women alone came to drink and hope, but few of them to both hope and believe they would get what he and Brenda trapped them into receiving. Ah, teamwork: he and Brenda, and Mephistopheles. Start talking to a man alone, Brenda sitting between him and Larry, the man at first cordial, guardedly friendly, drawn to Brenda (Larry could see that, over the rim of his glass, in the mirror), but for the first drink or two the man’s eyes still moved up and down the mirror, and to the door, for it was Friday night and time was running out and he was wasting it with a married couple. Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night. That was Marlowe’s Faustus speaking to time, as Mephistopheles approached on it. Yes. The line itself was from Ovid’s Amores. Yes.
The highway rose to his right while curving to his left and he was going up and around too fast, and he stopped breathing as he shifted down, into the curving descent, and headed north. He breathed again, and slowed for the exit to the New Hampshire beaches.
Easy enough, those nights. Lovely enough, was Brenda, so at the bar she had to say very little by way of promise; her eyes spoke to the man, and when Larry went so often to the men’s room, she touched the man’s hand, murmured to him, and always afterward she told Larry what she said, and always it was nothing, really, or almost nothing: something gentle, something flirtatious, that any woman might say to a man; because, Larry knew, she could no more say Come home and fuck me than she could sing an aria. She could dance one, though. Larry also knew, and she admitted it, that she feared risking the man’s startled No way, lady, and that, equally, or perhaps above all, she delighted in mystery, so long as she was the source of it. The men followed them home for a nightcap.
Only one refused her: a young businessman from Tennessee, on one of those trips to another state, to visit another company, to observe, to comment, to learn, to advise, and the way they spoke of it, you expected to see them wearing field uniforms of some sort, military or civilian, green and new and creased, and to have binoculars hanging from their necks, pistols from their belts. In their living room, the man from Tennessee had passionately kissed her—or returned her kiss—but said Back home a man can get shot doing this, and fled to his motel. But the others stayed. Larry had a drink, sitting beside Brenda on the couch; then pleading sudden drunkenness or fatigue or both, he would leave them, shutting the hall door behind him, going the few paces into the bathroom where he would shut that door too, loudly, and stand at the toilet, even at times sway there, because his performance did not stop the moment he left the living room. Whether he used it or not, he flushed the toilet so they would hear that further sound of his drunken decline of consciousness. At the lavatory he stood before the fluorescent-lighted mirror and ran the tap full force, then shut it off and brushed his hair and tossed the brush clattering to the counter that held what he called Brenda’s spices: save for his shaving cream and aftershave lotion and deodorant and razor and hairbrush, the surface was nearly covered with bottles and jars, their glass or plastic or perhaps their contents aqua and gold and amber and lilac and white, creams and fluids whose labels he had never read, nor contents sniffed in their containers, because he did not want to alter their effect when he breathed them from her flesh. In the first year of their marriage he had worked hard at cooking something more than broiled chops or fish and steamed vegetables, and had learned too much, so that now he enjoyed meals both a little more and a little less, because after a few bites he could name their seasonings.