by Packer, Vin
Miss Ella was the mother of the slim, solemn nineteen-year-old boy, but no one in the whole of Auburn or its surrounding county would think of calling her Mrs. Ella, nor even Mrs. Whittier. Who could, and who would want to remember back to the year when big, coarse, whiskey-ridden Theobald Bruce had seduced this fragile lady and put a life in her? He had married her and given her son a name, under the duress of the townspeoples’ angry threats, and for the same reason he had run off to Canada, never to be heard from since. Miss Ella did not bother to use the Bruce name, nor to allow her son to use it, but proudly called him by Whittier, called him by Reginald, the name of her father.
She was Miss Ella to everyone, a dear sickly soul whose courage in remaining there in Auburn, despite the chance of gossip and criticism, was remembered long after the incident with Theobald Bruce was. People in Auburn remembered what they wanted to, forgot the unpleasant and mean, went about their business and prayed in church for things to stay the same.
On the wall of Whittier’s Wheel, right above Reggie Whittier’s head, was one of his mother’s samplers, with the words stitched in lavender against a yellow background:
“If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill,
Be a scrub in the valley—but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill;
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.”
It would have come as a near-fatal shock to Miss Ella to know that it was this sampler which had ignited the spark responsible for the few moments of sudden fire between her son and a maid from Red Clover Junior College. The truth was that Reginald Whittier II did not want to be the best of whatever he was. He was, in fact, bent on being better than what he was. His experience with Laura Lee had not helped, but his determination in the matter was unique.
“I don’t know whether I was ovulating or not,” said Laura Lee, “You can’t really tell unless you take your temperature for a whole year.”
There it was—more mystery. Reggie Whittier decided there would never be an end to the mystery of woman; no matter how much he had read and been told, he would never know everything. He was, at the same time he realized this, vaguely uncertain that he wanted to know everything, and he pictured a thermometer in his mind, and thought of the way his mother always had one sitting in a glass of water beside her bed.
Reggie had been told the facts of life when he was sixteen years old. His mother had asked Mr. Danker, the town jeweler, to explain everything to him, and Reggie had sat in hot discomfort, listening, while his mother did her needlework across the room. Mr. Danker described everything in his precise, pontifical tone, and Reggie was torn between not wanting his mother present at this time and not wanting to be alone with Miles Danker while he discussed the subject.
It was not that he disliked the paunchy, balding jeweler. There was no one in the whole of Auburn who knew as much as Mr. Danker knew about everything, nor was there anyone as kind to Reginald Whittier as Danker was. But whenever the boy was alone with him, Reggie felt extremely nervous and at a loss for words. Reggie supposed it was because he was not accustomed to the company of men. Women were much easier for him to communicate with. Not girls—except for Laura Lee, who was both a fluke and a godsend—but older women like his mother, the kind of women who came to Whittier’s Wheel to look at antiques. Reggie could talk to them for hours on end about nothing at all.
• • •
Yet for all Miles Danker had told Reggie, and despite the fact that Reggie had read up on women in a book Laura had lent him, he felt that the female sex was the most mysterious thing in the whole world—felt that even now, after he had been with Laura Lee. Laura lived in a trailer on the outskirts of Auburn with her mother and father, who also worked at Red Clover. Miss Ella called them itinerant workers, because in the summer the Lees went to Florida to work in a hotel. They were no different than migrant workers, said Miss Ella, and she referred to the trailer camp as “Tobacco Road.”
“It isn’t that I object to you keeping company with a lady, Reginald,” she told him, “but that girl is not a lady. No doubt she has diseases. Ask Mr. Danker what kind.”
Reggie had no intention of asking Mr. Danker about it. Every time he remembered that session with Danker when he was sixteen, Reggie felt immensely guilty and depressed. There was really no reason for him to have that reaction, but there it was, and Reggie suspected his mother felt exactly as he did.
She once said, “I would not have put us through that horrible experience, Reginald, if I had not felt that it was absolutely necessary. There are certain sordid things in life one just has to face.”
Laura Lee had told Reginald Whittier something similar, only she had put it this way: “It’s never easy, Reg. Life don’t make it easy, but God made men and women different for a purpose. We’re supposed to.”
She had said that immediately after their sudden experience in the Lee trailer, that night Mr. and Mrs. Lee were down at the Green Mountain Movie House. Laura was trying to make him feel better about what had happened between them. It was the first time for both of them, and both of them had wanted it to happen. But afterward, neither one felt the least bit glad or wise.
“I suppose,” said Laura, “it’s because we weren’t really in love.”
“I never knew a girl like you,” Reggie said. “I could never talk to a girl before you.”
“Yes, but it’s not like love. We’re supposed to be thrilled or something.”
“I know it,” said Reggie.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Reggie Whittier. You’re the only boy I’ve ever wanted to do it with. You were never fresh and you never tried to maul me. You’re the nicest boy I know.”
“I really have a feeling for you,” said Reggie.
But nothing either one could say that night at the end of April could change the fact that both were sorry the thing had happened. Reggie always thought of it that way—as “the thing.” He had expected it to be so different. He had thought he would feel like a conquerer, feel the way he had seen the men in the movies behave. He remembered one movie in particular. The scene had faded on a man and a woman as they embraced, and then in the next scene, after time had elapsed, the man was dressing, tying his necktie and slicking back his hair with military brushes, grinning and whistling as though he had just inherited a hundred million dollars.
Reggie had felt like two cents.
“Well, what if I am pregnant?” said Laura Lee that afternoon in May as she faced him in Whittier’s Wheel.
“Shhh, Laur, please. Don’t shout.”
“I don’t want to shout, Reg.”
“I know you don’t. I’m sorry.”
“But what if I am?” she whispered.
“I’ll—I’ll marry you,” he said.
“Oh, Reg, you know we can’t get married. How can we get married? My father’d kill me!”
“So would my mother,” said Reggie. Then he changed his mind. “No,” he said, “It’d kill her.”
“Why did we do it?”
“It was a dumb thing,” Reggie said.
“I don’t hold it against you, Reg. You know that.”
“Sure, Laur. It was my fault.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and that’s the truth,” she said, and then, “Do you think I’m pregnant?”
“Listen, Laura,” said Reggie, looking over his shoulder, back toward the stairs in the shop which led up to the apartment where he lived with his mother. “It makes me nervous to talk about it here. I’ll get the car tonight. Can you get off early?”
“At ten-thirty.”
“I’ll pick you up,” he said.
“What about your mother?”
“It’ll be all right.”
That was a lie, and Reginald Whittier knew it. Every Sunday his mother clipped out the television section from the Times and circled in red all the evening programs they were to watch together.
“It isn’t that I mind your going out,” she would tell him, “but I did buy the
television for you, after all. Don’t you remember our decision, Reginald? We decided that it would be less embarrassing for you if you were to enjoy entertainment in your own home. You know how it used to embarrass you to go to the movies alone? I don’t blame you one bit, either. I’ve always hated going anywhere alone, but I’m an old woman, and I’m content to stay home now. I bought the set for you, dear.”
His mother had bought the television before he met Laura. In most ways, his mother understood him very well. Reggie was shy around anyone his own age, except for Laura—shy and slow and clumsy, but the worst part of all was that he stuttered. He was never sorry that he had not gone on to college, nor that he was declared unfit for military service, and that was the reason. In high school, he was a nonentity. You read novels and see television shows and hear all the time that stutterers are poked fun at, and mocked, and mimicked, but in Auburn High, Reggie was simply ignored. He was Miss Ella’s son. He helped her out in the Wheel. He was a jerk. That was all there was to it, and sometimes Reggie was not even sure he was thought to be a jerk, because most of the time he believed he simply wasn’t thought about at all by anyone.
• • •
When Laura came into his life last September, there was a radical change.
She had come up to him in Stoker’s Drugs on the corner, where he went for malts during one of the afternoon “breaks” which his mother allowed.
The girls from Auburn barely nodded to him, and the girls who went to Red Clover never looked at him. He never minded the fact that the Red Clover girls payed no attention to him, but he had gone to school with most of the Auburn girls. When they slighted him, Reggie felt more and more determined not to show his face anywhere.
“It’s only because you stutter,” his mother would tell him. “You’re a perfectly nice boy, but if they spoke to you, you’d have to answer back, wouldn’t you, Reginald? And you’d stutter. They’re only trying to save you embarrassment.”
Laura Lee was different. She had come up to him in Stoker’s and handed him her shoe. The heel was broken, she explained, and would he run across to the repair shop with it while she waited for him? She told him her name and smiled at him. It was something that could have happened to anyone, without the moment meaning anything at all, but it had happened to Reginald Whittier.
He had never known a warmer feeling than the one he had as he crossed Lowell Street with her shoe. He felt as though he had taken some sort of dreamy dope, or as though he were slightly intoxicated. He stood before Mr. Canzetti with his shoulders squared and a broad smile on his face, and he told an utterly preposterous lie. “Mr. Canzetti, my girl friend broke her heel. Can you fix it up?”
“Well now,” said the old man, “you got yourself a girl friend, huh, Reginald?”
“Why not?” Reggie answered.
He stood whistling and waiting while Mr. Canzetti banged on the shoe, and it was peculiar that he remembered again the man in the movie, tying his necktie and slicking back his hair with the military brushes.
When he walked back to Stoker’s and handed her the shoe with its heel repaired, she said: “Want to have a coke with me, or are you busy?”
“I wh-wh-wh—“
“You want to,” she said.
“Yes.”
She said, “My brother stutters. He’s a mechanic down in Sarasota.”
To Reggie, it was just as though she were saying: “My brother has brown eyes.”
He could almost feel tears start. That was another embarrassing thing. Reggie Whittier’s eyes always filled with tears over the least little thing. He seemed always to be on the verge of crying. But never because of anything sad—only because of things that were simple and happy. Once a week he cried when he watched This Is Your Life on television. Whenever they brought someone out of the subject’s past for an unexpected reunion, Reggie would sit with his eyes full. He cried at movies, and he cried if it was a sunny day and his mother said: “Aren’t we happy, though? Aren’t we lucky we’ve got all our limbs and our senses, Reginald?” He cried when Perry Como sang “The Lord’s Prayer”; and sometimes when one of the boys or girls he had gone to high school with did wave at him, he felt like crying.
His mother understood. “It’s not because you’re a sissy or anything at all like that, though most people would be the first to say it was. It’s just that you’re an extremely sensitive boy. That’s another reason I bought the television. You have a right to feel the way you do.”
After that initial meeting with Laura Lee, he saw her three or four times before she came to Whittier’s Wheel to seek him out. He saw her in Stoker’s, and on the corner of Clover Hill in her denim uniform, waiting for the bus to take her up to college, and he saw her once in McGovern’s Department Store. He would wave at her and smile, but not until she came to the antique shop did he have his second conversation with her.
Laura had picked a bad time to come. His mother was downstairs, on one of the few occasions when she checked over the stock and dusted off rockers, spinning wheels, and antiquated hundred-year-old clocks. When Reggie introduced Laura to her, he saw his mother’s lips purse, saw her eyes travel the full distance of Laura’s young and—suddenly in the light of his mother’s scrutiny—too ripe body.
Miss Ella said, “Are you interested in antiques?”
It sounded as though she meant, “Are you interested in antiques?”
“Oh, no,” said Laura Lee, “I don’t know beans about them. I came to see Reggie.”
Miss Ella’s face turned visibly pale. She turned abruptly and went upstairs.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Mother doesn’t feel well,” Reggie said.
They had their first date that night. It was the only time Reginald Whittier had ever gone anywhere without telling his mother where he was going.
When he returned, the apartment was dark. She had not waited up for him. Momentarily, he believed he had been absolutely silly to imagine that his mother would have raised any objections to his going for a drive with Laura Lee, but when he tiptoed across to the bathroom, beside her bedroom, he heard her voice.
The words were loud and clear, said slowly and emphatically. “They go to and fro in the evening. They grin like a dog and run through the city!”
It was something from Psalms.
It was Miss Ella’s way of telling him what she thought about the matter. She had done it before, whenever she disapproved of anything Reggie did, and he knew that if he were to mention it the following day, she would claim she had been sound asleep. She would say: “Maybe I was talking in my sleep. Folks do!”
• • •
That afternoon in May, at precisely the point when Brock Brown was talking to his headache, and Charles Berrey’s father was suggesting that they all try to talk in words of one syllable, Miss Ella, in the apartment above Whittier’s Wheel, was putting a worn, seventy-eight-speed record on the phonograph.
Below, her son was asking Laura Lee again: “Then it’s all right? You’ll be there waiting at ten-thirty in front of the college?”
“If you’re sure you can get out,” she said.
“I will, don’t worry.”
Suddenly, the militant sounds of “Onward Christian Soldiers” came from above.
“Oh, oh!” Reggie said.
“I don’t see why she has to call you that way,” said Laura.
“Mother doesn’t like to shout at me, that’s all. It’s easier this way.”
“Why can’t she pick something else as a signal, some other song?”
But both knew it was a question for which no answer was necessary. Miss Ella’s ways were her ways. Reggie Whittier waited until Laura was outside and passing by the window. He gave her a two-fingered salute of so long, and she winked back. Then he went upstairs to see what his mother wanted this time.
PART TWO
Chapter Four
BROCK BROWN
Everything could have gone nicely that evening between Brock Brown and
his stepmother if only Clara had not made that remark while she was draining the asparagus. Brock had looked forward to spending the evening with her. For one thing, when his father had to take the night shift at the garage, Clara never nagged at Brock. She never asked him why he didn’t call up some friends, or go off to Murray’s or drive by and see Carrie Bates. Clara hated to be alone.
For another thing, Brock wanted to make it up to Clara for using her money when he stole the green Mercury that afternoon. He wanted to be nice to her, laugh at her asinine jokes and pretend that he thought she was a very interesting person. He felt he owed it to her, just as he felt he owed it to the owner of the Mercury to leave money to make up for any inconvenience he had caused. That way, it was more like renting the car. Brock always left money behind whenever he took anything that was not his, and he never kept what he took, whether it was a car (which it usually was) or a lawn mower (once) or a string of outside Christmas tree lights (last winter).
Brock supposed Dr. Mannerheim could explain why he took things he did not really want. On the other hand, how serious was it? It wasn’t very serious at all, Brock believed. There was no need to run to some head-shrinker for advice. He would grow out of it before long, and meanwhile, he was still a better person than most guys his own age—guys like Derby Wylie, who didn’t care how he looked and did dirty things to girls all the time.
Clara’s remark irritated him more than anything else because it simply wasn’t true. That was one reason he had not said any more than “Oh?” in answer. Just oh.
She was standing there by the sink with a strainer in one hand, and the pot of asparagus in the other, and suddenly out of the blue she said: “When your father and I have a baby, we’ll get a girl in to help.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve never minded cooking. It’s fun to cook. But housework gets me down.”