“It doesn’t matter at all,” he repeated. Again, he scanned the crowd for Mr. Avery’s face.
When Beryl woke, having dozed, she took a moment to gather herself. The light from the lamp beside the sofa was faint; the embers had begun to die down in the grate. She did not know how long she had been sleeping, only that she’d dreamed of rollicking things.
She rose and spent a moment stoking the fire. It leaped to, bringing a flush to her cheeks. In the kitchen, she opened a tin of sardines. The sun, through the windows, had peaked. The wash fluttered lightly where it hung on the line.
In her book, the farmer had proved to be good, but the heroine’s father didn’t approve. He wanted her to marry a county solicitor, but the girl’s youthful passion would not be denied. The farmer knew about the body in a primitive way, in touch as he was with the heavens and earth. It was a ridiculous, sentimental idea, but Beryl indulged it nevertheless. The novel was called He Worked the Land. On the cover, a man was holding a peach.
It had crossed her mind to give Townes a ring, to call him up, just out of the blue. That would come as a shock, and he’d say so: “Now this is a pleasant surprise.”
She had been the one to break off their relations, seeing the clear direction of things. All the love had gone out of his marriage; increasingly, he talked about that. It might have been a lie, or it might have been true, but in either case she shrunk from what it portended.
If she’d called him today, he’d have come to the house, able to only because he’d been summoned. Of all the afternoons and evenings they’d shared, none had ever been spent at her place. He’d have looked around, sizing it up. The obelisks would have been on the mantel.
“Been thinking about me?” he would have said, lifting his eyebrows with playful suggestion.
How they’d laughed in later days at that odd, phallic gift! “I had designs on you; that I confess,” he had said. “But I didn’t mean anything by it.” They had been side by side on the starched hotel bedding; it was after the first time. In the heat, she looked over his body and, gently taking him up in her hand, said, “I had a scare when I opened the box, what with there being the two of them there. I didn’t know what you were on to!”
If he’d come today, she might have repeated that joke. Ribaldry was something each of them liked.
In the end, of course, she hadn’t called because of the boy. With Joe, things were bound to go wrong at the circus: his car might break down; he might lose the tickets; he might make the boy sick by feeding him sweets. She laughed as she pictured the scene there’d have been then: Townes in the bedroom when they returned, his white rump exposed as he turned to the wall. A part of her would enjoy such a thing.
When she said it was over, he’d looked at the ground. He’d taken his woolen hat in his hands. She knew he was only pretending to suffer, or was anyway exaggerating his pain. His large head fell from heavy, stooped shoulders. It was a kindness, or he meant it as one.
“From the first day, you were something different,” he’d said. “‘A force to be reckoned with,’ I said to myself.”
She smashed the sardines onto pieces of toast, picking away the pebbly bones. They might equally have gone to the Cavalry Inn. That would have been one for old times. She’d have ordered a sherry and a whiskey for him, remembering the type he preferred.
“Still queen of the parish offices, then?” he’d have asked, hanging his hat on the rack. He’d have taken her coat and hung that as well. Then she’d have had to tell him the truth.
Everybody was standing around. They were watching Tony as he talked to the man.
“Well it’s not even been the whole of an hour. Could be he can’t remember your seat. Could be he dropped his ticket someplace.”
It was the man who had torn the ticket outside. The top of his head was shiny and damp; wispy gray hairs clung to his scalp.
“All the same,” said Eugenia’s mother, “you could page him.”
Tony was aware of people closing around him. The trick where you held your fists to your cheeks had stopped working after a while, and he felt the tears where they’d run on his face. It was all spoiled: people would pity him now.
“Oh, we’ll do that. Just before the start of the next act. Let’s give him a few minutes more.”
Eugenia came and stood next to Tony. “You mustn’t be worried,” she said.
“I don’t like people looking at me.”
“Oh,” she said, “I know what you mean. My mother is always making a show.”
Her brother came and stood next to them, too.
“We could go looking, Ma,” the boy said, but just then Tony saw Mr. Avery.
He was making his way through the crowd, just a head bobbing up between others at first. He moved quickly, perhaps sensing he’d been a long time; he bumped into people, excusing himself. Tony jumped up and down when he saw him. He was holding a pink cloud of candy aloft.
“That’s him,” Tony shouted. “I said he would come.”
“All’s well that ends well,” the ticket man said.
Mr. Avery smiled as he approached, a sheepish grin, too big for his face. His eyes scanned the seats where people had gathered, flitting from Tony to Eugenia’s mother.
“Ah, I’ve made it. Gosh, what a crowd.” He put an arm around Tony’s shoulders and squeezed.
The space around them remained very close.
“What’s this?” Mr. Avery said. “Tears? Were you very upset? Only it took a longer time than I thought.”
He offered the candy and Tony accepted. When you held it, it weighed almost nothing at all.
“Come on, then. What did I miss?”
With his free hand, Tony wiped the tears from his face. “The acrobats. And a bit with the clowns.”
People were still looking at them.
“Was it very good?” Mr. Avery said. “Acrobats are amazing, I think.”
Eugenia’s mother was shaking her head.
“They swung on ropes,” Tony replied.
“Ah, that would be the trapeze. I must say I’m sorry to have missed the trapeze.”
They sat down. On the stage, the lights had grown dim. Tony turned the candy floss in his hand. It was pink. He hadn’t thought he wanted a sweet, but now he took as large a bite as he could. It was sticky, and it vanished on the end of his tongue exactly as he had been told it would do.
“Is it good, Tony?”
He said that it was.
On Mr. Avery’s neck drops of sweat could be seen. His hair was matted as the ticket man’s had been. He ran a finger along the inside of his collar.
When the music began for the high-wire act, Mr. Avery turned and smiled again. He patted Tony twice on the knee.
Beside him, Eugenia’s mother was frowning. In his mind he said a curse about her. She hadn’t been as kind as Eugenia had; it had been she who’d started the fuss. It was because of that that he forgave Mr. Avery, to show that everything was all right. Without speaking, he handed some candy to Eugenia, who took it and put it into her mouth. Her brother reached a hand over her lap, and Tony gave him a little bit, too. They were at the circus with only that woman. Nobody asked whether she was their mother. Nobody asked where their father had gone.
Around seven, Beryl poured a small glass of sherry. At the table she ran a hand through her hair. For a man, there was Joe Avery, of course. She thought about that with mild distaste. He would not have the strength of Rutherford Townes, or the bawdy, lighthearted way with her after, but she knew that if she resigned herself to him, he’d resign himself in a similar way. This evening he might, or any time in the future. She had only to make up her mind. Such a thing wouldn’t offer either one of them joy, but the knowledge of its being to hand was a comfort: it made it so that solitude was something you chose.
One afternoon, some eight or ten years ago, she had run into her sister in Glass. She’d stopped in for coffee and a bite after work and saw Pearl seated in a booth by the window, laughing with another
one of her men. Her youth was like a fine silk or fur she might wear without any notion of what it had cost. For some moments, at first, she didn’t see Beryl; she was perfectly unaffected and calm. And for those moments Beryl loved her sister, more than ever before or after. She didn’t begrudge Pearl the fun she was having: being taken out, called late at night on the phone. Joe Avery was hopeless for Pearl in those days, buying flowers, stopping for tea unannounced—an old-fashioned courtship to which Pearl condescended—but just then any hopes of his seemed absurd.
When she looked up and saw Beryl, Pearl said, “You must join us.”
The young man she sat with was shiftless and thin. He turned an unlit cigarette in his fingers; from time to time he glanced at the window. Pearl said his name was Hubert, giving it a French pronunciation: Ooh-bear.
“I really can’t stay very long,” Beryl said.
“Rushing off, are you? A date, is it, Beryl?”
Pearl laughed, and Beryl only smiled a bit, because in fact she was going to the Cavalry Inn. Such a strange child, Pearl—unimaginable—to be at once so naive and so tarty.
“We’re half sisters,” she explained to Hubert.
Later, Beryl had thought of that day—the man’s disinterested, indolent manner; the slant of his forehead; the flick of his eyes. She had looked for those things in the face of the boy but never found them; it might have been anyone else.
When she was leaving, having had her coffee and food, Beryl heard Pearl say, “Poor old Sissy,” and laugh.
The superiority, the pity one feels toward the dying: in her extreme youth, Pearl had felt these toward the world. You couldn’t be angry. Not really. Not, at least, so long as you had your own life. The trouble was how, in death, Pearl had made of Beryl precisely what she’d assumed her to be.
The floor, unswept, was mockingly there. The high spirits of the morning had sunk. She poured herself another small glass of the wine.
Pride, too, made a strike against Avery: she didn’t want any more of Pearl’s leavings. You made your own way, as best as you could, hoarding memories like lost teeth or old gowns, a space saved inside for the person you’d been: unafraid, unrepentant in a bed by the sea, the body ecstatic, celebrating itself.
In the car on the way home from the circus, Mr. Avery talked about what they had seen.
“How do you think the man fit in that box?” he said. “Could you credit that, Tony?”
Outside the window the sky had grown dark. Tony was feeling sick from his sweets and from the sausage roll he’d eaten after the circus. They didn’t speak about the fact that he’d cried, both feeling embarrassed about it.
Along the side of the road there were lights in the distance: villages, maybe, or the edge of the sea. In the mirror you could tell where the big top had been, a glowing bit of sky surrounded by blackness. For a while Tony stopped paying attention, simply letting the texture of the night hurry past, the air from the window, the hum of the road. In his ears, the carnival music played on. The long day presented itself, and he watched it unfold as if from afar. He was thinking of the clown with a handkerchief and a stick when he heard what Mr. Avery said: “If I could go back and be a child, I would. In a second. No question about it. I would.”
The older man gripped the wheel and stared intently ahead, making small corrections when he drifted or turned.
“Your mother was a lovely woman, you know. A girl, really. Hardly more than a girl. Have you ever wondered what she was like?”
Tony’s heart began to feel low. Sometimes, without any warning at all, the image of her would appear in his dreams. He had never been told how it was that she’d died, but in his vision she was drowned in the sea. He knew from pictures that she had fair hair and eyes, and it was that hair, suspended like gauze in the water, that always woke him with a shuddering start.
“She had a sweet nature. Wonderfully so. Even though she didn’t want me to court her, she let me come and have a chat now and then. It never changed things, the troubles she had. I was never any different with her. Only think if she could look at us now. Only think. She might even be pleased.”
Tony closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, his head near to Mr. Avery’s arm.
By the time they reached home there was a chill in the air. Aunt Beryl had left the porch light on. She met them in the front room when they entered, the door not having been locked.
“Did you boys have fun at the circus?”
You could see at once that she was feeling suspicious. She examined Mr. Avery’s face.
“We saw the trapeze and a man in a box,” Tony said, rushing into the house. “And I made friends with a boy and a girl, and I ate sweets and sausage and a Buddy Boy Biscuit.”
He shouted when he told Aunt Beryl those things, wanting her to feel he had liked them.
“And come home with vim and vigor to spare,” she said. “Not planning on sleeping, I guess?”
Mr. Avery still hadn’t said anything. He stood in the doorway, regarding his feet. At length, he said, “He’s a very good boy.”
Tony paused by the door to the kitchen. The room smelled of ginger and woodsmoke and ash.
“I will go to sleep, Auntie Beryl,” he said. “I’m tired as a matter of fact.”
He brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas himself. If he was good, she might let Mr. Avery stay. It might help his spirits to stay for a while.
He could hear them in the living room while he dressed, talking, perhaps companionably. He heard the kettle go on, and that made him happy; he smiled as he climbed into bed. Again the men swung down on their ropes; again Eugenia’s voice said your dad. Hidden in his closet, in a small paper sack, were the last few sticky pieces of candy. Mr. Avery had found the sack in his car so that Tony could save a little to share. He would bring it to school Monday morning. Everyone would be jealous of him.
As sleep overtook him, he heard a voice, faintly. “Goodnight, boyo,” it said. “That was grand.”
Beryl stood on one side of the threshold; Joe Avery stood on the other. The glare from the porch light was harsh on his features, shadowed when moths flitted over the bulb.
“It’s good of you, Joe,” she said. “Despite everything.”
“Do you think he had a good time?”
On the sofa, while he finished his tea, she had watched him, the teacup small in his hands. He was shaven and washed and not terribly drunk: he’d made that effort today. She was grateful for it, admiring even, but still she didn’t want him to stay.
“Maybe you can fix yourself up,” she said now. “This dirt on your collar, these stains. Bring your wash over. I’ve got a machine.”
Slowly, he made his way to the car, his bent and ponderous figure. At the driver’s side door, he paused to light a cigarette, exhaling the smoke in the air. It had been he who’d found Pearl’s body that day, draped loosely, at an angle, over the bedspread. At first he had thought it was only a dress, a mere twist of fabric, carelessly thrown.
His headlights cast a pale glow on the drive; his tires noisily crunched over gravel. Loving the mother, he loved the son, too. It was natural to him that he should. A painful thing, calling him back to the past, but there was the restoration of something as well.
In the house, Beryl stirred up the last of the embers. Her book had been locked away in a drawer.
They were all three of them orphans. That thought occurred now, as it hadn’t before. Each one bereft of a different love in one common stroke of youthful caprice. Sharing that was something for her. It was something for Joe Avery, too. In their lives they had that much, at least. Later, for the boy, there would be other things, but for now you knew enough to take what there was.
Virginia’s Birthday
Sunday nights along the boardwalk are slow: locals retired, weekenders gone. By midnight, the Blue Parrot has emptied. Tables lie unoccupied in front of the stage upon which May Valentine sings with the band. Where guests dined, candles flicker and die, a highball has here or there been
abandoned. Above the piano, catching the light, turns the pale, bluish smoke from Ham’s cigarette. A number ends, “The Nearness of You,” and from his place, sitting at the rear of the club, Walter Chapman applauds, alone in the shadows.
It is a painful evening for Walter. Every week Sunday evening is painful. The club is not open on Monday or Tuesday, and the knowledge that he will not see May in that time makes it so. He watches her now, draped in a shimmering fabric like water: here pooling, here running over hipbone or breast. Her skin is deep brown, pearls iridescent beside it. He has loved her since the day in 1954 when she answered his first-ever call for auditions. “Stardust.” Another Hoagy Carmichael tune. Not thirty, already she sang with a wisdom; her references told of an itinerant past (London, Amsterdam, Montreal). Mr. Chapman is what she called him that day, and has continued to call him the better part of two decades since.
The band starts again, “You Go to My Head.” The arrangement, like all their arrangements, is sparse. Once soft-textured and warm, May’s voice has begun to grow brittle of late. Sometimes, summoned for a bend or a pickup, it strains and then cracks like a bird’s hollow bone. Walter doesn’t mind. The fragility suits her. She always had a gift for turning a phrase as if it took all the strength in her body to do it. The suggestion was of privacy, solitude; you couldn’t help but fall in love when you heard it, and now, even knowing she does not love him back, it is a comfort and consolation to him. The band plays, Walter has caught himself thinking, with the frail, haunted beauty of a burned-out home: the rhythm section—discordant and lurching—like high ruined rafters and walls, through the cracks in which Posey’s trumpet emerges, a shaft of light, the mere suggestion of a note in his breath, and around which May’s voice has twisted itself, like the bright, tattered silk of a scarf—not undamaged but somehow, miraculously, spared—lifted on an updraft of fiery air.
After the set, he finds her alone in her dressing room. He knocks, though he knows she will not be indecent. She never changes her clothes in the club.
Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Page 4