Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  Margie was unpredictable, though. Tommy was never sure what to expect from her. Sometimes she could be nicer and more fun than anybody, treating him like a friend and ally, and sometimes she could be very cold and refer to Tommy as if he weren’t there, when he clearly was, and meanly, too, describing him as a brat, as if he had no hearing and no feelings, either. Once, though, she met him after school—she was just standing there waiting for him when Tommy came out of the boys’ door—and she invited him to come home with her for a glass of milk and some cake that she had made that afternoon. It was not long after her father had died, and she was feeling very sad. As they were walking she took his hand, and she told Tommy how empty the house was without her father, but that she should stop talking about her troubles, that she knew when you were seven years old you had troubles, too, and they were just as important as older people’s troubles, even if older people didn’t think so. That brought tears to Tommy’s eyes—he hoped she wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t stop holding his hand—and he wanted to tell her that it was all right, but he didn’t know what “it” was so he said nothing. He squeezed her hand instead. No one had ever said anything quite like that to him before, treating his own feelings quite so seriously, telling him her own grown-up feelings as if he would understand them. He hoped she wouldn’t stop talking, and she didn’t.

  “All the Slades are mad at me,” she said. “They think I’m trying to get their money, but it’s my money. My father left it to me. He said right in his will, ‘To my beloved daughter, Margaret Louise Slade’—he said ‘beloved’; Bob Griswold showed me. And now Bob says we might have to sue them. But it was my father’s company as much as theirs, and Bob says we’ll win if we sue them and they’ll have to pay interest on everything, too. If they can hate me, I can hate them right back!”

  Tommy didn’t know much about money—they weren’t supposed to talk about it—and he knew less about wills. The only will he’d ever heard mentioned was his grandmother’s. She had left all of them something in her will, but it wasn’t any of Tommy’s concern now. When the time was right he’d be told about it. He asked his mother when the time would be right, and his mother told him to ask his father, and his father told him the time would be right when he told him so. “And when will that be?” Tommy persisted. “When I tell you,” his father said. He didn’t like Tommy’s asking the question, but then he changed. “When you’re twenty-one,” he said, “if you behave yourself.” Twenty-one! If he behaved himself? He didn’t know that he could behave himself for that long. He didn’t think he’d behaved himself a lot of the time so far, and he was only seven and a half, eight in the spring.

  But Margie wasn’t twenty-one, and she knew. She knew that her grandfather had left the dock and the land around it to the city, but he’d left the coal company and the use of the dock to his sons for the rest of their lives. He hadn’t thought what would happen when each of his sons died, Margie said, and her father was the first of them to go. Her Uncle Bert, who lived next door to Tommy, didn’t want to give her a cent because she was adopted, and her Uncle George was nice when he was sober but he was always drunk so Bob Griswold could never talk to him. Bob told her not to worry, though. There was enough money in the meantime, and there’d be plenty more when the whole thing was over. Her uncles had to give Margie her father’s share of what the company earned every year, and he was going to make them give her a lot more besides. “They’ll regret it,” Margie said. “They’ll be sorry they ever treated me like this, and if they want to hate me, I’ll give them something to hate me for.” She sounded as if she could, too. “And you know, Tommy,” she said, “they’re the only family I have?”

  Margie loved her father very much, more than her mother, who drank gin and hid the bottles in her blue chaise longue. The chaise longue still stood in her bedroom—she didn’t sleep in the same room with Margie’s father; it must have been a Slade family custom—but Margie hated it and she was giving it to Bob Griswold and his wife. “I took more bottles out of that thing than I can count,” she told Tommy. “I flushed a river of gin down that john. Your parents may be hard on you sometimes, Tommy, but you can be glad they don’t drink.” Well of course they did drink, Tommy thought, but he guessed they didn’t drink like that. His mother had never fallen down the stairs at his birthday party, anyway, and he’d never found any whisky bottles hidden in the house. The whisky was always right there in the cabinet, where anyone could find it. His father didn’t like people who couldn’t hold their liquor.

  Unlike Tommy’s grandmother, Margie’s father hadn’t gone to the funeral home after he’d died, nor had he been buried from the church. He had stayed right in Margie’s house where he’d died, and he was buried from it. The undertakers came and got him, and then brought him back in his coffin. He had lain there for three days, Margie told him, and his body was the first thing she saw when she came downstairs in the morning and the last thing she saw going upstairs at night. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” she said in a hushed voice, “going up to bed, looking down, him lying there, my lying in bed knowing he was there.” The undertakers had brought in special lights and they never turned them out, not even in the middle of the night. Sometimes Margie would go downstairs then, all alone, and look at her father’s dead body. There was no escaping the crying, and the banks and banks of flowers that filled the house with their thick cold scent, and the body. “I hope I never see another basket of flowers in that house in my whole life,” Margie told him. “The smell makes me throw up.” They put her father in the city vault on the hill until the cemetery thawed in the spring and he could be buried. That winter every time Tommy went by the granite building with the tiny barred slits for windows, he thought of Margie’s father waiting there for his proper burial.

  And then Margie was alone. There was the maid, who brought her black coffee every morning before she went to school. Margie was usually trying to lose weight, so she had nothing but black coffee with a cigarette and a small glass of orange juice for breakfast. And there was her guardian, Bob Griswold. Her father had sent him to law school, and now he gave her her allowance. And there were Bob Griswold’s parents, who were moving into Margie’s house to take care of her, though Tommy’s father said it was more likely the other way around. But still, Margie was alone and Tommy didn’t think she liked it very much, even though she could do whatever she wanted. Margie loved Bob Griswold. He took care of everything for her and paid all the bills at the stores where she had charge accounts. Margie wouldn’t listen to anybody’s criticizing him, and people talked about him quite a lot, though not when they thought Tommy was listening.

  Bob Griswold was married to a Jewish girl who came from New York. Her name was Laura. Phil Meyer, who was Jewish although he went to the Episcopal Church, was married to Daisy Addington, whose grandfather, the governor, liked Indians but not Jews. Tommy thought it was interesting that Bob Griswold was married to a Jewish girl—a Jewess, Mrs. Sedgwick called her—and Phil Meyer was married to Daisy. It made things balance somehow. When Tommy said this to his father one day, his father had merely grunted, and, when Tommy insisted, he looked at him and said, “What’s so interesting about it?” Tommy didn’t say anything. It was just interesting, that’s all, and wonderfully strange, like a lot of other things—the way they scored tennis, for instance: love-15, love-30, 15-30, 30 all; fault, double fault; game. David and Nick and Vint Steer, Daisy and Madge and sometimes Laura Griswold had all played tennis the previous summer, the summer before Tommy’s grandmother died, the summer David took Madge McGhee in her strapless dresses to the weekly dances at the country club and Margie a couple of times, too. Tommy liked to watch David and Daisy on the court behind the pro shop. Margie didn’t play tennis, and David wasn’t seeing her then, anyway. Sometimes David played with Madge, but Madge wasn’t very good. Daisy was good, though, and Tommy liked to watch her and David volley back and forth, running for the ball, lobbing it, missing it, calling out the score in the mysteriou
s language of tennis. Sometimes they played mixed doubles, and sometimes Phil Meyer and Bob Griswold played, too. But of all the women, Daisy was the best player, the one his brother liked to play with most. “Your brother!” Daisy exclaimed, pretending exasperation, as they all moved laughing toward the clubhouse where Ophelia waited with a root beer float for Tommy and iced tea and real beer for the rest of them. “I serve him love and then he makes me lose the game! He really spins those balls—don’t you, David?” She turned abruptly toward him, her voice rippling with laughter. “I’d rather play with him than against him,” she said to Tommy, shaking her hair in the sunlight.

  Tommy’s father didn’t like David’s playing tennis with Daisy—“she’s got one partner,” he told David, “and she doesn’t need you for a spare”—but then, he didn’t like David’s spending his birthday, which was in December, with Margie, either. Margie made him a cake and put twenty candles on it and had him to dinner all by himself. It was just a couple of days after Tommy had gone home with Margie after school and become so interested in what she was saying that he had forgotten to call Rose to tell her where he was, and there had been a great hullabaloo and now Tommy had to come straight home after school with no exceptions, not even if he called first.

  That Christmas, David decorated the house and Tommy thought it had never looked so festive. Outside he tied evergreen boughs to the pillars on the porch and laced them with strings of blue lights. David insisted that the lights be blue; he bought them himself. He tacked more boughs around the front door and tied pinecones on the knocker and put a new wreath on the storm door, not one of the holly wreaths his mother saved from year to year and hung in every window of the house, upstairs and down. David put a small tree on each corner of the porch roof and decorated them with blue lights, too, stringing the wires through Tommy’s bedroom window. After his mother had put him to bed and drawn the shades, Tommy would get up and raise them, pressing his nose against the window, watching his breath turn to steam on the cold pane of glass. It was strange how cold the glass could be, and how such cold could burn. When Tommy returned to his bed, leaving the blinds up, he would snuggle down and listen to the sounds of Kinderszenen—“‘Scenes from Childhood,’ Tommy,” and his mother’s favorite music—drifting in patches from the piano below. His mother often played in the evenings after dinner when she was home, and usually she played a part of Kinderszenen, sometimes all of it. By the time she got to “The Child in Slumberland”—Tommy loved to hear his mother say it in German: Kind im Einschlummern—he was supposed to be asleep, and usually he was, lulled by the music and bathed now in the glow from the blue lights twinkling on the dark trees dusted with snow, on the snow that covered the porch roof and the lawn below, reflecting in the crystals of ice on his window and casting its cool radiance against the wall beside his bed. When his mother noticed that the blinds were always raised in the morning, she began to leave them up at night. “So you won’t have to get out of bed, Tommy,” she said with a laugh. Tommy thought that was nice of her; she was breaking a rule for him. He continued to get out of bed, though, to put his nose against the glass and—very quickly, lest it stick—his tongue. It was sort of an experiment, to see how long he could hold his tongue to the glass without its sticking.

  His mother brought the boxes of decorations down from the attic, put the electric candelabrum with its own blue lights in the hall window, and hung the holly wreaths, tying a red bow on each one. The wreaths had faded from a rich true green into a kind of olive—they looked very tired and brittle from their year in a box in the attic—but the ribbons were always freshly ironed. It was David, though, who spread more evergreen boughs across the mantel in the living room and secured them to the archways downstairs, and David who hung the mistletoe from the chandelier in the hall—so he could kiss all the pretty girls who came in, he said. David worked very quickly, smiling, making little jokes. His mood, Tommy thought, was getting a lot better, in contrast to his father’s, which had been declining since Thanksgiving. Tommy’s father seemed scarcely to notice the decorating that was going on, and when he did it was to observe that the house was beginning to look like a Sicilian’s idea of Christmas in Norway, or to ask David if there were any branches left in the woods. Though he laughed when he said it, it still seemed to Tommy that his father never liked Christmas very much, which was strange and sad and not very nice, either. But David was not to be discouraged. Boughs were piled on boughs, and the smell of balsam filled the house. The little crèche figures were placed on the big table in the hall, the six porcelain angels arranged on the mantel, the other choir of angels—the ones who held tiny candles—on the piano. Nothing seemed to deter David in his desire to fill the house with greens, and Tommy was his willing helper. David and Margie even helped Tommy and Jimmy Randolph build a huge snowman in the circle inside the driveway, and Margie made a sign—“HEIGH-HO, MERRY XMAS”—that she attached to a stick and tucked in the crook of its arm. Tommy loved looking forward to Christmas, and this year, going in the doorway of his old familiar house, he felt as if he were passing into a magical, sweet-smelling forest of breathtaking beauty.

  The tree itself sat in a bucket of snow on the front porch until the afternoon of Christmas Eve, when David and John, home now for the holidays, brought it in and set it up in the holder in its accustomed place near the piano. They didn’t even argue much about how to do it and who was doing it wrong. When the tree was up and the branches had begun to relax in the warmth, David and John and Tommy and his mother began to decorate it. David, because he was the tallest, put the star on top, though even he had to stand on the stepladder to do it. The tree was very tall; its top almost brushed the ceiling. John and his mother arranged the strings of lights with David still on the stepladder, and his mother would step back occasionally to see the effect and to suggest filling in a little here or moving a light from there. When the lights were finally in place, Tommy took the ornaments very carefully from their boxes and laid them out on a table near the tree. He hung his special favorites on the branches he could reach while John and David and his mother decorated the higher branches. His mother even stood on one of the dining-room chairs to do it, which was breaking one of her own rules. Then, when all the ornaments and lights were in place, she straightened out the tattered, crumpled tinsel as usual, pressing it with her hand against the tabletop, and, because no one else would do it, draped it from the branches herself. The sight was touching to Tommy, and he moved to help her. He was filled with a happiness, and a welling sadness, too, there with his mother and her tinsel, his handsome brothers—even David looked handsome to him now—and he wished his father would take part. He made a comment occasionally from his chair, looking up from his business papers and columns of figures from the adding machines at the plant, but mostly he stuck to his work. He wasn’t very good at decorating, he said. Well, he couldn’t sing very well, either, Tommy thought, but at least he tried sometimes. And then when they were through with the tree, Tommy’s mother sat down at the piano to play a couple of carols. They were just singing “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” when there was a knock on the door, John said, “the Lord is come,” his mother told him not to be blasphemous, and, the notes still hanging in the air, she opened the door. It was Lucien Wolfe.

  “Lucien Wolfe!” Tommy’s mother gave a little cry of surprise. “Look at you! Is it really Lucien Wolfe?”

  Mr. Wolfe laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “In the flesh,” he said. “I mean, in the fur,” and indeed he was, in a great hairy coat that seemed to start at his hat brim and end a few inches above his ankles, and cradling in his arm a tall bulky object thickly wrapped in newspaper and green florist’s paper.

  “When did you get here?” his mother asked. “I’d no idea you’d be in town”—which was funny because Tommy remembered Mr. Hutchins’ telling his mother that he’d heard Mr. Wolfe was coming for Christmas. Tommy’s father had come to the door, too, and he was pumping Mr. Wolfe’s free hand.

/>   “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Tommy’s mother was still standing there with her hand on the doorknob. Nobody mentioned the package.

  “Well of course we’re going to ask you in, Luke! Come in, come in,” his father said, “and you’re going to stay for supper, too.”

  “You’re just in time,” his mother said, collecting herself. “We’ve just finished decorating the tree and Mac was about to pour us a little holiday drink.” Tommy didn’t know his father was about to pour them a drink, and he supposed because it was Christmas Eve that he might be able to have one, too, even though his mother said drinks spoiled his appetite. It was odd that drinks spoiled children’s appetites but made adults hungry.

  “Good timing,” Mr. Wolfe said, still laughing. “I’ll take that drink, but first, Emma, you take this,” and he handed Tommy’s mother the package, which she set down on the big table in the hall, tearing away part of the paper to reveal the crimson blooms of a giant poinsettia that to Tommy looked more like a bush than a plant, it was that big. “And just let me reach around the corner here”—Mr. Wolfe’s furry back bent over and he came up with a case of whisky in his arms—“and now we can all have a merry Christmas. Happy holidays, everybody,” he said.

  “A case of Crown Royal!” Tommy’s father exclaimed, taking it from him. “Too much, Luke, too much,” and he carried it off to the kitchen while his mother finished tearing the paper from the poinsettia, saying she had never seen such a splendid specimen. She moved it to the top of the piano, arranging the little choir of angels before it. “It’s lovely, Lucien, truly lovely.”