by Belva Plain
After a while, he got up, quietly unlocked the back door, and as quietly crept up to his room. There again he sat some more and tried to think. But no thoughts came other than that he most certainly would not, could not go back to college. He could not see himself passing her in a corridor or existing within sight or sound or cognizance of her, ever again.
On the table next to the bed where he was half sitting, half lying, stood the photograph. There she was, smiling at him, showing her perfect teeth and her lavish windblown hair. Happy, she had been. Happy! And hard, hard, without mercy.
He seized the picture, to shatter the glass on the floor. Then he ripped it in half, into quarters, eighths, and scraps.
So much for you, Robbie. May someone someday do to you what you did to me.
The vague, dreamy music that had been filtering up the stairs now stopped. He turned off the light and closed his door. The morning would be time enough to let Mom find out that he had come home.
She knocked and called, “Tom, I heard you. You can’t be asleep yet. May I come in?”
“I’m falling asleep,” he lied.
She opened the door and switched on the light. Now she would see the debris on the floor, and he would have to explain. In her nice way, she would force him to.
But she made no mention of it, although it was right in front of her. Instead she expressed a mild surprise. “I thought from your note that you’d be gone for a few days at least.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. It wasn’t the most decent thing to do, running out like that. I only hoped you’d understand why I had to do it.”
“I understood.”
Her patience made him more sorry for her, more guilty for causing her so much pain.
“You didn’t have to creep in like this. Didn’t you want to talk to me? Did you think I’d be too angry?”
“That wasn’t it. I didn’t want to wake Timmy.”
She smiled. “You never fool me, Tom. Any more than I can fool you. Just because I don’t say anything, it doesn’t mean I don’t see things.”
He gave her a weak smile in return. “The mess on the floor? Well, I’m through with my girlfriend. We had a big blowup and it’s all over.”
“I’m sorry. Was she a wonderful person?”
“No, as I found out. It hurts all the same. To be rejected,” he said, hearing his own bitterness, “to have somebody just turn about and walk away from you. It hurts like hell.”
“Yes, it feels as if the world has come to an end.”
“How can you know? You never—”
“People your age forget that everybody was your age once.”
“You’re a good mother,” he cried out suddenly, astonishing himself with the outburst. “And to think that you’re not really, not really—” He could say no more.
“But I am your mother. I am and I always will be,” she said. Her eyes filled. She gave a rueful laugh and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Too many tears around here lately, don’t you think?” She looked down at the floor. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“It’s too long a story. She found out, or I told her, about myself, the Crawfields and all that business.”
“I see. Found out that you were born a Jew.”
“Don’t say that, please, Mom.”
“I guess she doesn’t think that you belong on the staff of The Independent Voice anymore. Well, I don’t think you do, either. It’s a vicious, dirty rag, fit for the KICK and nobody else.”
He gave a long, tired sigh. “I guess it is. But Dad—”
“When someone in my family is or has been wrong I have to say so.”
“I wish Dad had been—been different. I wish he hadn’t been in the KKK. I loved him so.”
“It would have been better for you if he hadn’t, to say nothing of being better for himself. He threw away so much that was good in him.”
He wanted to silence her, to silence the buzzing in his confused, exhausted brain.
“The door’s open. You’ll wake Timmy,” he said.
“He’s not here. He’ll be away till next Sunday.”
“Away? Where’s he gone?”
“The Crawfields took him along with them to the lake.”
He was astounded. It seemed to him that nothing was too absurd to be possible.
“Yes, we had a very nice lunch. Holly was really sweet to Timmy. She’s a lovely girl. Ralph—Mr. Mackenzie—joined us later, and since he knows them so well and he seemed to approve, I let Timmy go.”
“Did he want to go?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have sent him otherwise, would I? He obviously liked the family. It’ll do him good.”
Liked the family. They’re moving in on us. Taking my brother. It’s like lying in the arms of an octopus. There’s no escape.
“So it seems that you’re all on their side now, you and Timmy both.”
“Don’t be silly, there are no ‘sides’ here.”
“I hate them,” he said, through clenched teeth. “If you knew how I hate them. And I’m never going to see them. Never.”
“Well, we can talk about that another time if you want to. It’s late, and the subject’s too deep for the hour. Good night, dear Tom.”
He would become a recluse. He’d stay here for a while, he told himself, do Bud’s work around the house and Mom’s garden, take Bud’s place, a father’s place with Timmy, read, study astronomy, and maybe when he felt ready for it, find some kind of job, probably a simple one, in an observatory; he’d find the most remote location that there was, away from people.
Yes, he knew very well that worse things could befall a human being than had just now befallen him. Take cystic fibrosis, for one. An innocent like Timmy, to be so threatened! Still, if your leg was broken, you felt the pain, and it didn’t ease the pain to be told that somebody else had two broken legs.
And suddenly her face, Margaret Crawfield’s face, appeared before him again, bright and clear in the darkness of his room. Why did her face persist in such exact detail, as if he had actually wanted to memorize it, which, God knew, he hadn’t? Her gold earrings were shaped like little shells, one of them partly hidden because of the way her hair fell over it. Her cheeks were round, her eyes bewildered, her lipstick faintly russet …
Damn to hell the morons in that hospital who put me where I am today! And yet don’t damn them, because I’d a thousand times rather be where I am than where I would have been if they had not done what they did.…
On the next day the doorbell rang while Tom and Laura were having a silent breakfast. Tom answered it. Two men stood before him.
“Thomas Rice?” inquired one.
“Yes, what is it?” he answered, wondering; then, seeing the camera slung around the other man’s neck, he suddenly knew and was struck by panic. Nevertheless, he asked, “What do you want?”
At that moment, the camera caught him, openmouthed and fearful. The first man handed him a newspaper.
“Your paper. I guess you haven’t seen it yet.”
Tom glanced. It was folded in half, but what the left-hand column disjointedly revealed was enough to justify his terrified, racing heart.
Local family … hospital mix-up … two infants …
“We’d like an interview,” the man said, pleasantly enough.
“No!” he cried, so despairingly that Laura came running.
She saw at once what the matter was. “Tom, go inside,” she commanded.
She must have expected this, he thought, retreating into the shadows of the hall.
She was quite calm. “No interviews,” she said as the camera caught her, too.
“It’s news, ma’am. Unusual news.”
“That may be, but it’s human suffering besides.”
He took out his notebook and began to write.
“You were here a while ago when my husband was killed. I remember you. Don’t you think this family has had enough for a while?” she asked quietly.
“It�
��s my job. For me, it’s just a job, and I do it.”
“I understand. And it’s my job to protect my son, you see.”
“He’s not really your son though, anymore, is he? How does it feel to find that out after nineteen years?”
“A whole lot better than your face will feel, because if you don’t get it out of the way, I’m going to slam this door on it. And you may print that.”
She slammed the door. Tom ran to the window and watched the men drive away.
“I was afraid they might stay and peer in at the windows,” he said, trembling.
“They’ll be back, Tom, and there’ll be more of them, here and at the Crawfields’ house. Be sure of it.”
“If it’s in the papers already, what more do they want from us?”
“ ‘Human interest story,’ ” she said shortly. “That’s what it’s called. I wonder how—I’m going to call Mr. Fordyce.”
In the library, Tom sat with his head in his hands, listening to his subsiding heartbeat. When he raised his head, he found himself looking into the eyes of the “black Irishman,” supposedly his ancestor.
Human interest, he thought. Yes, very. It probably is very interesting unless you happen to be the object of the interest.
From the kitchen across the hall, Laura’s telephone conversation was audible.
“I thought you had it all fixed, Mr. Fordyce … Yes, yes, I understand there can be no guarantees … I know, but it’s so awful for Tom. And such a short time after the other horror … Yes, I’m thankful, too, that Lillian and Cecile aren’t here in the thick of it. The Paiges have always been so private … Die down? In time, of course. Nothing is forever, is it?”
Tom heard the telephone click and waited for Laura’s report. It was several minutes before she came back, and when she spoke, he sensed reluctance.
“The story came from the wire service. That means it goes all over the country, and no paper will hold it back. The editor here feels bad about it, Mr. Fordyce said. He had concealed it so nicely up till yesterday. Fordyce knew yesterday that this was coming, investigated, and did his best to stave it off. But there’s no help for it now.”
“Do they know who reported it?” he asked.
“A woman. They don’t know her name. She sounded young. She was apparently informed of every detail, the time and place of the births, the names, the DNA tests, everything. And the hospital confirmed what she said.”
Tom winced. “She betrayed me, didn’t she?” he cried.
Laura laid her hand on his shoulder and began softly, “She betrayed more than you alone, Tom. She was untrue to basic human decency. What made her think”—and now Laura’s voice rose almost passionately—“that she was so much better than other people, that she dared judge and condemn? Betty Lee, for instance, or the Crawfield family, or—or you, Tom? What?”
He said miserably, “She was so intelligent, a scholar, worked her own way, so energetic, so unusual—”
“Yes, some of Hitler’s most powerful Nazis had their Ph.D.’s. But they had no morals, no human heart.”
The phone rang, and Laura went to it, saying, “Don’t you answer it. I’m going to take charge of it today.”
He heard her speak. “Yes, this is Mrs. Rice. No, I’ll take the message for him.”
When she put the phone down, it rang immediately again.
“Who was it?” he asked.
Laura was grim. “Pigs. Filth. Boys’—men’s—voices. From college.”
Yes, he could imagine the guys on The Independent Voice. They’d be mocking him, laughing, whooping it up. Jeez, Tom Rice! Jeez, can you beat it?
Again the phone rang. Was the whole world, with all that was happening both here and abroad, going to focus on Tom Rice?
“This horrible girl, this Nazi,” Laura was saying. “And he doesn’t want to go back to college—”
He got up and started to walk out of the house. Then it occurred to him that more newspaper people might be lurking there, so he went up to his room instead and sat staring out the window at the heap of stones on Earl’s grave.
And he thought about Bud. He thought about the Klan, their vile talk of bullets and blood. He remembered how, watching them that night, he had been afraid and curious, but how most of all, he had had an urge to laugh at their stupidity. It was only that Bud had been so proud—
He thought of the promise he had made to take Bud’s place, to avenge him. Now finally he knew it was a promise he would not keep. Whatever had happened to turn Bud in that direction it was too late to learn, and he regretted that with all his heart.
Whatever had turned Robbie, he thought perhaps he understood: anger at her life, a slatternly mother, the loved father who had put as much distance between himself and his quarreling family as he could—rage at them had turned into rage at the world.
The telephone and the doorbell rang intermittently all that day. More papers, dailies and weeklies, national magazines, and a talk show, all wanted the story.
“But you have the facts already, all there are,” Laura told them. “What you want is our reaction, an X ray of our hearts, and you’re not going to have it. And as to making a display of ourselves on television, you can forget it.”
At noon she called Tom to the kitchen to have lunch. He wasn’t hungry, he protested.
“Take half a sandwich, at least. You can’t let this situation break you down.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table when Betty Lee’s face appeared at the upper half of the door. From her expression they knew at once that she had read the paper. As it turned out, she had heard the local news on the radio.
The two women put their arms around each other and Betty Lee cried.
“I felt in my bones that there was trouble in this house even before Mr. Bud was killed. Then my head said no, I was imagining it. But you see, the bones were right. Oh Tom, I don’t care what any old science men or lawyers or anybody says, you are my Tom-baby. Your mother came home from the hospital and put you in my arms. You had on a blue sweater that your aunt Cecile crocheted, and you were the prettiest little boy baby, your daddy’s and your mother’s pet. And I’m coming back here again to stay. Yes, I am.”
Dear Betty Lee. She meant so well with her kind, tearful recollections. And he was thankful that the aunts were not here also, with more tears and recollections.
Tired as Laura was, her head stayed high all through that long day. He wished he was able to hold his own head as high, but he was not able and was back at his window looking out into the yellow afternoon when Laura came to him again.
“That was Ralph on the phone.” He noticed that she now omitted “Mr. Mackenzie.” “He just heard from Arthur Crawfield. Some reporters managed to find out that the family was at the lake and they’ve been there taking pictures, asking a thousand questions. They may come back earlier. At home it will be easier to avoid reporters.”
Tom was silent, and Laura continued, “But Ralph thinks we all might just as well give the reporters what they want, and they’ll go away. We’ve nothing to hide, he said. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and he’s right.” She paused a moment reflectively. “Ralph is usually right, I’ve found. I told him you don’t want to go to college, but of course, you know you must go somewhere. He has connections with Stevenson, a small college in New England, and he’s pretty sure they’ll take you in the circumstances and late as it is.”
In the circumstances. Because I’m some sort of freak, that’s why, with a father who isn’t my father, in the Ku Klux Klan.
“Will you go there if he can arrange it, Tom?” Laura asked. “It’s supposed to be a very fine place.”
Her eyes were anxious. He couldn’t let himself hurt her anymore.
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I’ll have to.”
Timmy was brought home on Saturday. Tom was in his room—he had spent most of the week in his room reading or sleeping—when he heard the car and the voices. From the sounds he ascertained that there were two wome
n and a man.
Then he heard Timmy’s shout, “Where’s Tom?” and a few seconds later, Timmy burst through his door.
“Look! Look!” he shouted.
A small, bedraggled dog came after him. Part terrier and part unknown quantity, it made the late Earl seem handsome.
“Isn’t he beautiful? I named him Earl the Third.”
Tom had to smile. “Why the Third? He’s only the Second.”
“I don’t know. It just sounded better. Isn’t he beautiful? He’s housebroken and comes when he’s called.”
The dog sat up and, with his whiskered head cocked to one side, regarded Tom as if he were a curiosity to be studied.
“We got him this morning at the shelter where Holly volunteers. Somebody had found him on the roadside, hungry and scared. The lady said probably he had been dumped there. People do that, can you believe it? Anyway, he’s had a week at the shelter to be washed and fed, and he’s in good shape. Right, Earl?”
Wise brown eyes turned toward Timmy. The scrap of a tail wagged.
“There was a purebred Airedale there that Uncle Arthur thought I should take, but I really wanted this one. Uncle Arthur gave them a nice contribution, too.”
“So it’s ‘Uncle Arthur.’ Who told you to call him that?”
“He said I might call them both ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunt,’ and I liked Uncle and Aunt, since we don’t have any of our own except Mom’s, and they’re our greats. And they’re really nice, Tom. I had an awesome time. We sailed around the lake and anchored on an island, we had a picnic there, then we even went back to their house yesterday and went to the shelter this morning. They’ve got a neat house, it has a barbecue in the kitchen—”
“I’ve seen their house.”
“I forgot. Anyway, I had a great time. They’re nice, Tom, they really are. Let me tell you what we—”
“Look, kid, I know you mean well, but I don’t want to talk about them.” He knew he was being brusque, but this net was drawing too tight. “Uncle and Aunt!” Tighter and tighter, as if he didn’t know they were trying to pull him in.