Loretta turned to her son, and then to Atwater again. “All right,” she said doubtfully, moving away.
Atwater smiled. “Talk to me,” he said to Marshall.
“Why don’t you get your own ice?” the young man said.
“Now stop that,” Loretta protested from the kitchen. “I’m getting it.”
“So,” Mr. Atwater said. “Say something to me, boy.”
Marshall said, “What do you want me to say?”
“Well, tell me about getting married.” The eyes were like saucers, staring. The little, feminine mouth twisted back in another smile.
Loretta hurried into the room with the ice tray from the freezer. “I told Clark about it,” she said quickly. “I was—excited for you, Walter—”
“You were worried. Come on, L’retta—you can tell the truth to the boy. The truth won’t hurt him. The truth never hurt anybody. The truth shall set you free, remember? Besides, the boy’ll do what he wants to do anyway, won’t he?” Atwater leaned across his tray toward Walter. “She was worried. Which anyone can understand, of course.”
“Maybe a little worried,” Loretta said, settling into her chair. There was a helpless look of apology on her face. She fussed with her napkin, then poured more tea for herself, watching her son with obvious apprehension.
“Actually, you know, your mother and I have been talking about getting married, too,” Mr. Atwater said.
Marshall stopped eating.
“Isn’t that right, L’retta?” said Atwater.
“I’m not sure this is the time,” Loretta said, looking from one to the other of them.
“What better time than now? Here we are, the three of us together.”
She spoke under her breath. “…said if I would, yet,” Marshall heard.
Atwater was staring at him. “What would you think about that, son?”
“That’s between you-all.”
Loretta gave him another sorrowing, apologetic look.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell your mother.”
“Please, Clark.”
“Just the facts, ma’am,” Atwater said. It was one of his traits to quote the TV shows he liked, and he was a Dragnet fan. “The indication seems to be that young Walter, here, is a stumbling block of sorts, and so I just thought I’d see if I couldn’t clear the air a little. Ma’am.”
“I’m not a stumbling block to anybody,” Marshall said.
Mr. Atwater wasn’t listening. He was concentrating on Loretta now, with that sidelong smile. “The thing is, you know, it seems quite strange that at this time you’d be going off to some party with a lot of bigwigs without me. That just seems to me to be the strange thing, here, ma’am.”
“I explained it to you,” Loretta said.
“I know you explained it. I just don’t get the explanation. That’s the thing.”
“You don’t owe anybody any explanations,” Marshall said to his mother.
“Stop it,” Loretta said. She made a fluttering motion with her hands. “Both of you. My goodness, don’t make a federal case out of it.”
Mr. Atwater leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, gazing at her out of the glassy exaggeration of those impassive eyes.
Loretta seemed about to cry. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” she said to her son. “I was a little worried. Alice is older than you are.”
“I told your mother to look who the girl’s related to,” Atwater said. “There’s no sense turning your nose up at a good thing. I just wondered why no effort was made to include me.”
“I explained it to you,” Loretta said. “Please drop it and let’s eat.”
“You obviously haven’t kept Walter, here, very well informed,” said Atwater. Then he shook his head. “Women.”
They were quiet for a few moments. On the television was a special report about South Vietnam, the failing civilian government. Mr. Atwater watched this, chewing. Then there was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer, a little animated stick figure dancing and singing about relief. “I’m going to get a color television set,” Mr. Atwater said. “I think I’ll give it to myself for Christmas.”
No one answered him.
“Imagine getting the Sunday night movie in living color. Be like sitting in the theater.”
Loretta poured more tea and Galliano.
“Baseball, too,” Mr. Atwater said, regarding her.
“Did you want some?” she said.
“Sure do.” His tone was expansive and generous.
“Well.” She poured him some, then sipped her own, and seemed not to know what to look at, where to let her gaze fall.
“Good?” he said. “Like it?”
She said, “Yes.”
“I do, too. Very good, very good.”
They drank.
“I like to see you happy.” He reached over and touched her arm.
“I guess we’re going out to a movie,” she said to her son.
“He can come along if he wants to,” Atwater said.
“Do you want to?” she asked, almost hopefully.
“No, thank you.”
“It’s really all right,” she said.
“L’retta, he said no. Didn’t you hear him?” Mr. Atwater delivered these words with a kind of cheeriness, like a joke. “This is a wonderful meal, L’retta. You’ve outdone yourself.”
“Thank you,” she said, staring at her son as if to explain.
Their life had been suffused with a tenderness born of the fact that they had been abandoned. They never voiced this, never used the word in connection with the fact; they simply lived in it, and went on in their peculiarly considerate, and nearly shy way. To others, they might have seemed to be guarding some mutually shared infirmity: There were times when they seemed a little too protective of each other, a shade more solicitous than normal. During the missile crisis, they had walked together the mile and a half to Saint John’s Church to go to confession. There was a line all the way around the inside of the church, perhaps a hundred people. Marshall and his mother waited an hour, then gave up and walked back home.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “If it’s the end of the world, I’m ready.”
“Me, too.”
“I hope it isn’t, though.”
It was a clear, starry night, with a bright moon providing a glow above the houses along the street. The stars seemed connected by strands of pure, white energy, out there across the unthinkable distances.
“Imagine, talking about such a thing,” she said. “The end of the world.”
In the yard of one of the houses, a boy was handing boxes into the lighted space of the entrance to what looked like a storm shelter.
“Look,” Marshall’s mother said.
They paused, and watched for a time. The boy kept disappearing into the house, and then coming back with another box, which he handed into the shelter. Finally, a man looked out from the entrance. “Move along, folks. We don’t have any room.”
“Is that a fallout shelter?” Loretta asked him. “I’ve never actually seen one.”
“Just move along.”
The two of them went on down to the end of the block, and across the street, before she spoke again. “Do you suppose we ought to find someplace like that?”
“I don’t know,” Marshall told her.
The shelter had affected her, as though the sight of it had convinced her of the magnitude of their peril. In the apartment, under the light of her reading lamp, they knelt and said a rosary, and then they simply waited together for the sunrise. He thought about all the drills at school, filing out into the hallways and getting down next to the lockers, hands clasped behind the head, in the giggling and talking, no one believing it was actually possible, and the words of the adults, describing how there would be a white flash and then the shock. The adults talked about surviving the attack, and kids passed around a little yellow card,
What to do in the event of a nuclear attack: 1. Remove all sharp objects from your pockets;
2. Remove all jewelry and all eyeglasses; 3. Seat yourself in a chair away from windows; 4. Bend over and put your head between your legs; 5. Kiss your ass good-bye.
“They say at school there’ll be a blinding flash first,” he said to her. “I know,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it.” But she didn’t want them to go to bed. She would hate to be surprised in her sleep, she told him. “I used to think I wanted to be surprised, Walter. I don’t. It turns out I really don’t.”
Neither of them said very much, after this. They both dozed a little. But she would say, “Awake?” And, startled, he would say, “Yes.” And she would apologize. He would say, “It’s okay.” Then silence, and the whole process of waiting, and drifting off, would start again. When the sun began to redden the sky to the east, she turned on the television. The news was hopeful for the first time in days. There had been a release of tension, the newscaster said, and negotiations were continuing. She turned it off with a quick motion, as if she were afraid to give the newsman the time to recant, and then she started cleaning the house—running the vacuum, dusting the furniture, waxing the tabletops, getting rid of the week’s accumulated clutter.
“I guess we’re going to be all right,” she said after an interval of rather furious work. “Either that or they had their war and we didn’t hear it.”
“I don’t think they had it,” Marshall said, lying down on the sofa.
She was standing on the other side of the living room, a stack of old newspapers in her arms, when she suddenly dropped them at her feet, crossed to where he was, knelt, and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said, crying. “I love you, my dear boy.”
“I love you, too,” Marshall said. “I love you, too, Mom.”
Then she was backing away, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I guess I was more worried than I realized,” she said. “Lord, I’m a mess, aren’t I?”
He said, “You’re perfect.”
She walked over and began to pick up the fallen newspapers. “You know—I kept thinking all night that I wished I could’ve been better than I was, somehow. I feel like—well, like starting over. Don’t you?”
He did not feel this. Indeed, he didn’t quite know what he felt. He was numb. It was hard to imagine what the rest of life might hold.
Several times, during the course of his growing up, Loretta had come close to marrying again. There had been Mr. Raymond Sykes, the hi-fi and TV salesman, who wore a black toupee and looked, Loretta said, like someone who might wear a black toupee. He was a big, apple-shaped man with dark, Mediterranean skin and large, bulbous brown eyes, whose speech, when it was not incomprehensible and weirdly self-referential, was overly elaborate and stagy, as if he were bending his spoken sentences in order to use words he had just culled from a dictionary. But he seemed like a nice man. He made a friendly presence. He had showered gifts on them, and though the gifts were always too practical and in some cases too personal to be quite acceptable, they were also clearly the result of his innocent affection; he gave everything with an almost childlike timidness and hope. He bought a pair of special hosiery for Loretta, designed to be used by women with varicose veins, thinking that because it was expensive, it must be the best, and he wanted, he said, nothing but the best for her. He bought Marshall a car coat, with big barrel buttons on it, and a hat with earflaps; it was the style among men his age. He had the tires changed on the car, and paid for a tune-up. He bought Loretta a hair dryer, and a vacuum cleaner, and an iron. He wanted her to have every convenience. When Loretta gently refused his offer of marriage, using the excuse that he wasn’t Catholic, he immediately began taking instruction in the faith, and she had to tell him finally that this would not change her mind. “You mean,” he said, “all this that I’ve been putting myself through is going to be unavailing?”
Loretta said, “I’m afraid so.”
He looked stricken. And kept on taking the instruction anyway. They started seeing him at Mass on Sundays. And he kept calling, kept doing favors for them. “In the name of our disinterested friendship,” he told Loretta. “And because it’s a do unto.”
“I’m sorry?” Loretta said.
“Do unto others,” he said, smiling. “I’m keeping to it.”
One Saturday morning they found him waxing the car. Another time he left a bag of groceries outside the apartment door. Finally, Loretta asked him to stop. None of it was going to be of any use, she told him. She just didn’t feel that way about him. She related the whole story to Marshall the day Mr. Sykes took the tires, all four of them, off the car.
“You’re quite adamant,” he’d said.
“I’m sorry,” said Loretta.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I told you these were do untos.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “It’s the most flattering thing in the world, but really I…” She halted.
“No,” he said. “Really. Do unto others as you would have them—you remember. I’m just making my mansion. Storing up my treasures.” He pointed at the sky.
They found the car on its four hubs. And when they made their way by bus across Arlington to the television and hi-fi store where he had worked, they were told that he had been fired from the job weeks earlier, for stealing from the cash register. They never saw Raymond Sykes again.
And before him there had been others, less vivid in the boy’s memory.
There had been Tim Dreen, who coached the junior college basketball team in Bethesda, and had two daughters by a first wife. He had a habit of mussing Marshall’s hair—the boy hated it—and he often talked about how Marshall could be the son he’d wanted, but hadn’t been fortunate enough to have. He thought he would make an athlete out of the boy, and began trying to teach him the necessary discipline. This involved several instances of rough treatment when Loretta wasn’t around, and once when he had grabbed Marshall by the upper arms and was shaking him for failing to understand some fine point of the pugilistic art, Loretta came in on them unexpectedly and ended the lesson by means of a sharp, short blow with an iron skillet across the back of Tim Dreen’s skull. When he came to, whimpering and wanting to know what he had done to be treated so badly, she used the threat of more of the same to send him on his way.
The kindest friend she had had over the years was Father Soberg, as far as her son was concerned. He had seemed the one man she was most comfortable with, including her present companion, Mr. Atwater, whose tendency to vacillate between irritable familiarity and jovial, yet faintly hostile, expansiveness left Marshall feeling confused and more than a little worried, since his mother seemed determined to tolerate it—and to require that Marshall do the same. There was a willingness on her part to do Atwater’s bidding, and this did not seem to arise out of particular affection for him.
When she returned from the movie, she told Marshall that it would be necessary for Atwater to accompany her to Alice’s party.
“She wants you to meet her father,” Marshall said.
“I can’t help that,” his mother said, moving away from him, into the kitchen, where she poured Galliano into a juice glass and drank it down.
“Mom,” the boy said.
“I told him he could come, and that’s that. If he can’t go, I can’t go.”
Marshall watched her pour more of the yellow liqueur.
“I can’t help it,” she said, not looking at him. She drank, slowly this time. Then she seemed to come to herself. “Is there any tea made?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “You have to understand, Walter. I work for him. He’s—he’s my boss. Do you understand? I can’t very well tell him to get himself lost, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
“But why don’t you?” Marshall said, to his own surprise. A torrent of ill-feeling toward Atwater went through him, and he stood straighter, bracing himself inwardly, wanting to hold back.
“You don’t know anything about him, really,” she said. “It’s not your business.”
“I know I
don’t like the way he talks to you.”
She drank, turning from him. “Go to bed, Walter. I’m telling you, you don’t know anything about it. Just—tell Alice we’ll have Clark with us.”
Chapter 9
Friday evening was cool, clear, and calm. Mr. Atwater arrived late at the Marshalls’ apartment house, and then insisted on driving. Marshall and his mother piled into the big car—the boy in the softness of the wide backseat, with a wrapped gift for Alice on his skinny lap, his mother in the bucket seat in front. The present was a pair of fluffy slippers that Loretta had helped him pick out, and now he wondered if they were the right gift for a fiancée. It was too late now to do anything about it, of course.
Atwater got in behind the wheel, and headed out in the wrong direction, saying he knew Arlington well and had spent time in the house of friends who lived near Alice. He drove with both hands tight on the wheel, sitting forward, shoulders hunched. He was heading toward McLean.
Marshall said, “It’s the other way, sir.”
“No. Sixteen hundred block—it’s got to be south.”
“It’s behind us,” Marshall told him.
Atwater drove on for a few more seconds, then slowed, and turned down a side street. “This’ll come out on Lee Highway.”
“It’s a dead end,” the boy told him.
“He’s been driving the Lark all over,” Loretta said. “You know.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Mr. Atwater said. “But I’ve been driving these streets since I was a kid fresh out of the army. 1946, Loretta.”
When they came to the dead end, he stopped the car. “Used to be a road through here,” he said. “I swear to God.”
No one spoke for a space. There was just the sound of the big car idling. Atwater backed up, looking beyond the young man. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe our putative presidential candidate will guide me.”
Marshall said nothing.
“Well?”
“Just—the other way from the way we went.”
“Wonderful.”
A moment later, Loretta said, “Aren’t you going a little fast?”
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea Page 18