Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  He works in the drugstore after school. He serves sodas to the high-schoolers in automobiles and wears a white apron and a white fatigue cap on the side of his head. One afternoon he sees, through the drugstore window, a tall, thin woman approaching the store. It is a familiar figure, yet he can’t identify it as his mother for several seconds. She rarely leaves their street now that the automobile is shut up in the garage without any license, and she has lost even more weight in the past months. He thinks, I have a right to resent her coming to the store if it is not on business. He steps away from the window and waits.

  When she doesn’t come through the door, he looks out again; and it is just in time to see her step up into the trolley car that rumbles off toward town.

  And yet it is not many days after this that he hears her tell his father over the telephone that she won’t meet him in town for dinner because she dislikes to ride the trolley.

  The little girl’s mother and his father stay in town to work two, sometimes three, nights a week, and they never come out on Saturday afternoons now. They usually call and try to get his mother to meet them somewhere. When they come to dinner on Saturday nights his father invariably smells of whisky, and the boy sometimes feels certain that a part of the odor comes from the little girl’s mother. His father will say at the dinner table, “I’ll tell you this selling game is different. Sociability counts for everything.”

  Again and again he sees his mother take the trolley for town in the afternoons. He suspects her of going in the mornings some days, for twice he has found her making the beds when he comes by home to leave his books after school. He wonders, sitting in the glare of the many-windowed schoolroom, if his mother is this very minute on one of her mysterious missions and if his father and the little girl’s mother are drinking with someone over a sale downtown. If so, his house, a few blocks away, is empty. Not even the white pointer runs in the yard, for his father never hunts any more and has said that he’s not mean enough to keep a dog and not hunt him. It pleases the boy to think of the house totally empty and to reflect that under the paint the marks that the vine-baskets made are actually still there.

  At home he listens. He pretends to sleep on the couch after dinner at night. Spring comes, and he sits on the porch—under the window. He never closes the door to his room. He listens, and at last he hears.

  He stands in the upstairs hall one night, poised, ready to move to the bathroom if the parents’ door opens. His mother has made some sort of confession, and his father is saying, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Those are the only audible words. But in a few days his father tells him that his mother is going to the hospital. She is going to have a mighty serious operation.

  And she packs a little Gladstone bag at bedtime one night. He watches her from the hall, putting in the pink silk nightgowns, the quilted bathrobe, and her hair brush. In the morning his father and the little girl’s mother and his mother go into town on the trolley together.

  He is called to the principal’s office from his geometry class. The principal, Miss Cartright, is an unpredictable, white-haired woman behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The expression on her face is an absolutely new one this time.

  “My child . . .”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Cartright.”

  “You are a young man now. Do you understand?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “I feel that you are unprepared for what I have to tell you, but you must accept it bravely.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “You are aware that your mother has not been well?”

  “She’s in the hospital. She’s not dead, is she?”

  “She died this morning . . . under the knife.”

  “May I get my books?”

  “Yes, but wait a moment, child.”

  “Hadn’t I better hurry home?”

  “Wait, child. We must be sure that you know what this means.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll not see your mother alive again. You’ll not have her careful, guiding hand to help you.”

  “Yes’m, I know, Miss Cartright.”

  “There will be hours of loneliness. And your father’s not your mother. He can’t take her place, however hard he try. . . . There, there. None of this in a big boy like you. Come to me. I want to be some comfort to you, not just a teacher.”

  The funeral is held in the undertaker’s parlor, and the boy looks in the coffin at his mother’s powdered face. At the cemetery, when they are arranging the flowers over the grave, he recalls how the wicker baskets blew about the porch after his grandmother’s funeral and how his mother went to the window and looked out.

  For several weeks he waits to hear of his father’s plans to sell the house. The other two argued with his mother over that the night before she went to the hospital, and he heard his father say after the funeral that it would have added ten years to her life if she had sold the house. “This house,” he said, “was the biggest tumor she had.” But nothing was said of a sale after that.

  All that summer the boy keeps the yard as though his mother were alive and nagging him about it. The girl does the housekeeping with the help of a Negro woman named Jessie. Their parents take them to a downtown picture show at least one night a week now. Coming back one night on the trolley he says to the little girl’s mother, “Why doesn’t Daddy sell the place and move to town?” But she changes to another topic for conversation as though she had not heard him.

  When he and the girl are at the top of the stairs that night, she whispers, “Don’t you know, Foolish, that you own the house and can’t sell it till you’re twenty-one?”

  This year the girl has begun at the high school; so she has to take the trolley into town with her mother and his father. She wears silk stockings all of the time and she fixes her black hair in a knot on the back of her fat, white neck. She has a friend named Susie who uses quantities of lipstick and cheek rouge and who comes home with her many afternoons. The boy pays little attention to them until one night Susie stays for dinner, a night when the grown people don’t come home. During dinner the girls tell long stories with elements in them which he thinks are very funny but which he thinks they don’t understand, being girls. After this he likes to talk with them and to try to find out how much they do understand. He will sit sometimes and just watch them file their fingernails. But when Susie offers him her picture once, he says he doesn’t want it.

  Then his father calls him into the living room one Sunday and tells him that the girl is a young lady now; and tells him that he must let her have his room and that he must move his belongings into his father’s room. The boy hangs his head in protest. Finally he looks up and says, “I don’t want to, Daddy.”

  The girl’s mother is sitting across the room, and she looks at him soberly and says nothing. He sees, as if for the first time, that she wears as much lipstick and cheek rouge as Susie, and that her hair, gray on top, is bobbed and combed close to her head like a man’s. His father stands up; he goes and sits on the arm of her chair. “You’ll move your things after dinner tonight,” he says. As the boy leaves the room, the father calls, “I’ll help you, old man.” And the girl’s mother says something in too hushed a tone for him to hear her words.

  But he likes rooming with his father. He is allowed to put his pennants on the walls of the big room and is told that he can arrange the furniture any way he likes. Often the two will go to bed at the same time and will lie in the dark talking of baseball. He sees the whole household with a different perspective. And now it is his father who is a different person.

  There are times when he hears his father come into the room long after he has been in bed. And when the heavy body slips under the cover beside him, he can smell the alcohol and feel and hear the heavy breathing. Then he dreams of a day, certainly not more than a year or two hence, when he will be able to ask his father for a cigarette.

  One night the boy and his father are in bed in their dark room when the clock thumps past ten.
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  “Are you awake still, son?”

  “Wide awake.”

  “Tell me how much you are saving of what you earn.”

  “All right, s’r. Half of it.”

  “You must learn just how much it means to save money. If you don’t save, then you will have to work when you are tired.”

  “When I’m old?”

  “You may get tired before you get old. And if you’re tired and know you’ll never be able to rest, you’ll get desperate.”

  “Oh, I suppose that would make you turn crooked.”

  “It might, if you could let yourself. If you can’t let yourself turn crooked, despair will make things bad in a hundred other ways, anyhow.”

  “How much money do you make, Daddy?”

  “In a good month?”

  “Yes, that’ll do.”

  “Enough to pay back what I borrow in a bad month.”

  “You aren’t mentioning figures, I guess?”

  “I didn’t press you, did I?—for how much you save.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  “No. No, don’t.”

  “It’s a good deal.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid of how much it might sound like to me.”

  One night the boy is awakened by the sound of heavy rain. “I must put down the window,” he thinks. But presently someone, barefooted, tiptoes through the bedroom door, across the room, toward the window. It is his father; and he removes the prop and lowers the window noiselessly but for the squeak of the sash, and he leaves the room again. Then quite distinctly his voice comes from the hallway: “Both of them.” And presently the door to Grandmother’s former bedroom scrapes the floor as it closes, and the boy tries to visualize the dark scene on his mother’s guest room bed.

  It is a day when the wind rustles the treetops, even the tops of slender poplars; and yet the wind is so soft, nearer to the earth, that it barely stirs the flaps of the boy’s shirt collar. The sky is turquoise, and the hurried clouds look pink in their centers. The boy stands in the middle of the circular flower bed, surveying his work. His shirt is khaki and his trousers are faded blue jeans. His height measures somewhat over five feet, and atop his head his straight, brown hair stirs gently with the flaps of his shirt collar. His shirt sleeves are rolled above the elbows of his long, thin, white arms. In his right hand he holds a rusty trowel.

  One third done, he says. From his feet, in the center of the flower bed, a section of broken earth, cleared of all the green spring shoots but the little zinnia and petunia plants, stretches out to the rock border. One hundred and twenty degrees, he says; and he turns to the other two thirds of the bed, which are green with clover and grass and dandelion. His long shadow falls across those two thirds to the border and divides them evenly. He points with the trowel to the section on his left and pronounces: “Four-thirty.” Then he points to that at his right hand and says: “Five o’clock.” He stoops, drives the trowel around the roots of a dandelion plant, and shaking the dirt from the root throws the weed beyond the stone border of the bed.

  Inside the house the telephone is ringing. It rings for so long a time that he stands up and looks over his shoulder toward the house. The ringing ceases, and he stoops again and digs. It is not long before the girl is walking along the wall of the white clapboard house. The boy is on his knees working carefully between two tiny zinnia shoots. He watches her approach from the corner of his eye. She wears high-heeled brown and white shoes and no stockings on her legs, which are fat and at the same time muscular. Her skirt, a plaid material with a predominance of green and orange, is stretched around her big hips. And her tan sweater fits too closely under the arms and is drawn across her matronly breasts too tight to be less than obscene.

  She stands close to him with her shaven legs far apart. He looks up at her; she is standing with her hands on her hips, and he thinks that her clothes fit her as the shrunken summer covers do the big living room chairs. Her brown, bobbed hair blows in the wind, and one strand plays over her unpowdered face.

  “Jim, darling,” she says, “they’re married.”

  “Who’s married?” he says as though to deny the possibility.

  “Mother and . . . Mommy and your father.”

  “And you’re glad?” he asks.

  She weighs the question for a moment. “I don’t think I care a snap, Jim.”

  He looks at his trowel and then inquires with indifference in his voice: “Did you know they would?”

  “Only by conjecture. But Mommy just called on the phone, and I talked to both of them.”

  With some deliberation he digs his trowel into the ground and pulls up a clod of dirt with grass on it; but she remains before him. Then he asks, “Will they be out to dinner tonight?”

  “No,” she says, brushing the strand of hair from her face with her pink hand, “they’ve gone to Chicago for the weekend. I think they’ll stay even longer. It’s a long way up to Chicago.”

  The girl has turned and is walking toward the house. She walks over the grass on the balls of her feet. And he gazes after her heavy figure.

  He is digging in the last green third. Of a sudden his breath seems to catch in his chest and his temples grow hot. He is squatted, resting his haunches on his heels. He raises his head in surprise at his own sensation, and he speaks out loud to himself: “I’m not sorry about them.” But he cannot say what it is.

  The light of the afternoon has a yellow tint in it. He looks at the sky. The whole western sky is a black mass, one that is advancing rapidly to meet the puffy gray clouds which clutter the eastern horizon and the sky overhead. He digs his trowel into the earth, uproots, tears, and digs again.

  The shrill whistles in the distance have blown for five o’clock, and he is working assiduously at the blades of grass that grow from between the rocks of the border. He has finished the last third of the bed, but he works on. He does not raise his head; his eyes follow his fingers plucking grass from between the rocks. Something has filled him with a dread of quitting. It isn’t, he tells himself, the thought that he must realize the marriage of his father to the mother of the girl, that he must go into the house with only that to occupy his mind. And yet he can’t assure himself that it is only a dread of the memories that the yellow light will bring when he looks up into it. He feels the first drop of water on the back of his neck at exactly the moment that he hears the voice of the girl:

  “Jim, darling, do come in out of the rain.”

  He stares up at the white clapboard house through the bilious light and discerns the figure of the girl at the window of her bedroom, the room which once was his own.

  He drops his trowel on the grass and walks, with his heart beating under his tongue. The electric light burns in the girl’s room, and he can see her in the window through the black screen. He walks with his arms hanging straight at his sides as though he carries two heavy pails of water in his hands. In that strange light his eyes meet the girl’s eyes through the fine mesh of the screen. Her eyes are darker than her hair.

  A clap of thunder jerks the eyes of both toward the sky, and the rain bursts upon him. He runs three steps and leaps over the shrubbery onto the end of the porch. There he turns his face toward the yard and stands rigid, and his pulse throbs in his wrists. He senses that the girl is still at the window.

  His hand turns the cold brass knob of the front door, and he flings open the door. The furniture of the hall is a group of strange objects to him. How weird are the roosters in the design of the floor rug, the crack on the table top mended with yellow plastic wood, and the crazy angle of the mirror. He is unbuttoning his wet shirt as he runs up the stair and he tears it off as he shoves open the door to the room in which he once used to sleep.

  The bed is between him and the girl, who is wearing a crepe de Chine negligee. She sits down on the other side of the bed, puts one hand softly on the pillow, and says, “What do you want, Jimmy?” He crosses the room. She twists her body and throws herself face downward on the bed. The
boy stands over her, his wet shirt in his hand, looking at the back of her head. The girl rolls over on her back and smiles up at him.

  He looks into her brown eyes under her heavy low brow and sees, he feels, the innocence of someone years younger than himself, the innocence of a very little girl. Her head is sunk in the fat, white pillow. She crooks her elbow behind her head and smiles up at him. She shifts the position of her body and rubs her bare feet together. Her eyes, he thinks, are like the brown eyes of a young dog. His temples are ablaze and presently he knows that his whole face and perhaps his whole bare chest is the color of the girl’s rouged cheeks. He quickly turns his back to her and finds himself looking out the window through falling rain at the rooftops of the suburb. While his eyes are fixed on the yellow tower of the Catholic church and he stands braced by his hands on the window sill, the sudden loud laughter of the girl on the bed slaps his ears.

  He doesn’t know how long the laughter lasts. The rain falls outside the open window, and now and again a raindrop splashes through the screen onto his face. At last it is almost night when the rain stops, and if there is any unnatural hue in the light, it is green. His heart has stopped pounding now, and all the heat has gone from his face. He has heard the hanging baskets beat against the house and felt the silence after their removal. He has heard the baseball smacking in the wet gloves of the men and seen the furniture auctioned on the lawn. The end of his grandmother, the defeat of his mother, the despair of his father, and the resignation of his new stepmother are all in his mind. The remarkable thing in the changed view from the window which had once been his lies in the tall apartment houses which punctuate the horizon and in the boxlike, flat-roofed ones in his own neighborhood. Through this window the girl too, he knows, must have beheld changes. He takes his hand from the sill and massages his taut face on which the raindrops have dried.

  When he faces her again, he says that they must prepare some sort of welcome, that they must get busy.