Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  His mother was thinking about redecorating the house, but so far all she was doing was thinking about it. Her heart wasn’t in it, she said, but she had to get her heart in it soon. The work had to be done before their anniversary party at the end of summer. That seemed a long way off. It wasn’t even spring yet. Every once in a while his mother would leaf through the wallpaper books that Mr. St. John had left her, and sometimes she would ask Tommy if he liked this one or that one. She wondered what he’d like for his room, but Tommy didn’t know; he said he liked his old wallpaper, he liked his room just the way it was. Then she’d close the big book and say she’d think about it another time. When Mr. Wolfe came by, as he sometimes did, she’d ask him what he liked, too, and Mr. Wolfe would look at the books with her but neither of them seemed very much interested. His mother said that Mr. Wolfe was helping her with the wallpaper just as she’d helped him with his party favors.

  One day when Tommy came home from school, Mr. Wolfe and his mother were sitting at the dining-room table. Lately Mr. Wolfe was there a lot. He had eaten a piece of cake—Tommy could see the crumbs on his plate—and he and his mother were drinking coffee. His cigarette lay in the ashtray, and the smoke drifted slowly in the currents of air and rose toward the animals on the plate rail. “Smoke gets in your eyes,” Tommy sang. It was one of his brothers’ songs. Mr. Wolfe looked at Tommy. “Smoke will get in their eyes,” Tommy said.

  “Smoke will get in their eyes?” Mr. Wolfe said it as a question.

  “The animals on the plates,” Tommy said. “They won’t be able to see.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” his mother said, “you have the strangest imagination for a little boy.” She laughed. “We were just looking at wallpaper,” she said. “Mr. Wolfe was trying to help me.” She got up and went into the living room. The books of wallpaper were lying on the floor in front of the comfortable couch. His mother picked up the top one, opened it, and asked, “How would you like this for your room?” She sat on the couch beside Tommy, spreading the book across her lap, and Mr. Wolfe sat down on the brown silk chair that Tommy liked to read in when the weather was warm because the chair was so cool. He thought of it as his chair.

  Tommy looked at the wallpaper. It was green like the sea—he liked that—with wavy brown lines in it. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like the brown lines.”

  “Tommy,” his mother said, “some days you don’t like anything.” That was true; some days he didn’t. “But maybe you’d like a piece of cake,” and she went to the kitchen to get him one. Rose hadn’t shown up today, she said. When she returned with the cake and a glass of milk, which she put on his own table in the corner of the dining room, Mr. Wolfe said he’d have to be going. His mother walked him to the door. “Mac will be home next week,” she said.

  “We’ll all have to get together,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Maybe I should have a dinner to welcome him back. Emma, call me,” he said, and Tommy’s mother closed the door and returned to the dining room to sit with him while he ate his cake and drank his milk.

  Tommy wondered why his mother liked that paper for his bedroom; it was ugly. He wanted his room painted. Mrs. Steer’s house was painted and he liked it, but he knew that his mother didn’t like painted walls. She thought paper was nicer, and easier, too. Mr. St. John could put it on right over the old paper. Mrs. Steer said there was a right way to do things, and a wrong way. The wrong way was to paint over wallpaper. When she had painted her house, she had stripped all the wallpaper off, and she’d replastered some of the walls, too. Mr. St. John did the plastering—Mrs. Steer couldn’t do everything, she said—but she did the stripping and the painting, and then it looked like new. Tommy told his mother that Mrs. Steer said it was always better to take the old wallpaper off. “Oh, you’ll never know the old paper was there,” his mother said. Tommy would, though. He knew that he could look at whatever new paper his mother put on the walls and see the old patterns underneath it, at least in his mind’s eye, and he knew that the animals on the plate rail could, too.

  David went to Chicago later that week. He had to see if Northwestern would let him back in the fall, and he was going to stay with John in their fraternity house. Tommy envied him. He wished he were going. His mother picked him up from school at noon—it was a Thursday—and together they drove David to the station. She had brought sandwiches, and they sat in the car and ate their lunch while they waited for the train. Tommy remembered his own train ride to Chicago, how the porter had shined his shoes, and how much fun he had had in John’s fraternity house that had the picture of the naked lady over the bar in the basement. Tommy hated to see David leave. His house would seem empty without him. Even though David spent most of his time at Margie’s, at least he came home to sleep. Tommy and his mother would be all alone. That would be nice, too. Tommy liked being alone with his mother, but still it made Tommy sad when the train arrived and David got on it. David waved at them from the window as the train pulled out, and Tommy kept on waving until the train went around the bend and out of sight. He hated goodbyes.

  He still felt sad when his mother dropped him off at school. To cheer him up, she told him that if he were very good for the next two days she might let him spend Saturday night at Jimmy Randolph’s. She had never let him do that before. That would be exciting—all the Cokes he wanted and Jimmy’s lead soldiers to make. Tommy resolved to be very good and try to be helpful by saying nice things about the wallpaper. He could get interested in the wallpaper, if he wanted to, and he did care what went on his bedroom walls, since something was sure to go on them. After school he told Jimmy that he might be able to stay with him Saturday night, and the next morning he got up when his mother called him instead of staying in his warm bed until she had to call him twice or even three times and finally be cross because his breakfast was getting cold and he would be late for school. He was downstairs before his mother had even finished making his cereal, and when she spooned it into his bowl—the bowl from the broken set his father had had when he was a little boy; it wasn’t broken then, though—he ate all of it, though he didn’t want to. He was never very hungry in the morning. His mother got him into his snowsuit—it was early March and still winter, she insisted—and he covered her cheek with kisses and gave her a feathery butterfly kiss with his eyelashes on her forehead—that was how butterflies kissed, with their eyelashes, and so softly you hardly felt it but you could tell—and he left by the kitchen door. Before he’d gotten down the steps he turned around and came back for another kiss and a hug. “There are never enough kisses,” Tommy’s father used to say, “but there are usually enough to go around.” Tommy pondered that: not enough, but enough.

  He walked to school through the alley—he sometimes did—and his mother waved from the window of the maid’s room. Tommy walked backwards, waving and blowing his mother kisses, until finally he passed out of sight of the house and had to run to school or else he’d be late. He would have liked nothing better than to stay home from school that day to be close to her, to watch over her. He loved his mother so much. He loved his mother more than anything, and he longed to be with her now. She would read to him, and make him happy. Maybe he should have said he was sick. Maybe he should go back now, though he was already approaching the schoolyard and the bell was ringing. He could still say that he was sick, that it had come on very suddenly. But no, his mother would never believe him. Maybe he wouldn’t go to Jimmy Randolph’s Saturday night after all. He would stay home to be with his mother, and she would make popcorn and then they would sit on the couch and she would read to him and they would talk just like old times. Tommy was never happier than when his mother read to him. He would feel warm and snug and safe. And so would his mother. He was the man of the house now. That’s what David had said when he got on the train: “Take good care of things, Tommy, and watch over our mother. You’re the man of the house now.”

  After school he stopped first at Jimmy’s and told him he couldn’t stay Saturday night after all. He had
to stay home to take care of his mother.

  “Oh, you’re going to New Orleans, are you?” Dr. Randolph said to him.

  “New Orleans? No,” Tommy replied, “I have to stay with my mother. David’s gone to Chicago and she’s all alone.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Dr. Randolph.

  “P.T.,” Mrs. Randolph called from the kitchen. “P.T.!”

  Jimmy said if Tommy wanted to be a mamma’s boy, that was all right with him, but Tommy didn’t care what Jimmy said. Right then he wanted nothing more than to be his mother’s boy, and he ran across the street to his big old house, eager to see her.

  Rose met him in the hall. She gave him a kiss, and said she had some cookies for him and a glass of milk. “Where’s my mother?” he asked.

  “She called to say that she’d be late. She was at the country club and she’s going out to dinner from there.”

  “I’m going to call her,” said Tommy, and he went to the phone and told the operator “Seven-four-oh.” Ophelia said his mother wasn’t there.

  “She’s not?”

  “No, sir,” Ophelia said. “I don’t see her.”

  “Well, if you do see her, would you ask her to come home. Tell her I’m sick.”

  “What’s the matter, Tommy?” Ophelia asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I have a headache.”

  “Would you like a chicken sandwich, honey? I’ll fix it the way you like it.” Ophelia had such a nice voice. “Mrs. Steer is here. I’ll send it home with her. Would that make you feel better?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said. He thought that would make him feel better.

  “I’ll do it right now,” Ophelia said. “I think a good chicken sandwich will make you feel a lot better.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Goodbye,” and he hung up and took the milk and cookies to his room. After a while Mrs. Steer arrived with the chicken sandwich but she couldn’t stay, and later he ate it for dinner, even though he was supposed to have a hot meal with vegetables. Rose didn’t mind, though; she ate his dinner and hers too. Later she put him to bed. Tommy woke up when his mother came into his room to see that he was tucked in and to kiss him good night. She almost always came into his room when she got home, no matter how late, to see that he was covered and to give him a kiss.

  The next day Tommy told her that he wasn’t going to Jimmy Randolph’s that night after all, that he was going to stay home and take care of her.

  “Oh, Tommy,” his mother said. “Oh, how sad. I’ve got plans for tonight. The Rodgers are giving a dinner at the club. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t think you told me. Is Mrs. Steer going?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” his mother said. “I doubt it. The Steers aren’t so friendly with the Rodgers these days. I suppose they got into an argument.”

  “Mr. Steer is always getting into arguments,” Tommy said. “But why are you going out? Do you have to?”

  “Tommy, I’m sorry,” his mother said. “Don’t be disappointed. Yes, I have to go. I said I would. They’re expecting me. They’ll have a place for me at the table, and you just can’t change your mind about something like that at the last minute. It would ruin their seating, and they’d be annoyed. So would I, if it happened to me.”

  “But you could be sick,” Tommy said.

  “Well, yes, of course, if you’re really sick you just couldn’t go. But I’m not sick. It wouldn’t be honest to say I was. Don’t be disappointed,” she said again, hugging him. “I’ll be home all day tomorrow, and tomorrow I won’t be going out at all. We can have one of our nice times then.”

  Sunday seemed like such a long time away. But at least his mother stayed in the house until she had to go out in the evening, and she read to him for a little while in the afternoon and she played the piano, and they had a good time. They played three games of rummy and Tommy won one. She seemed happy, and after Tommy had had his dinner and she had sat with him at his table to make sure that he ate his meat and all his vegetables, she went upstairs to get ready. “I must draw my bath,” she said, laughing. “I must draw my bath like a lady.” And she went off up the stairs while Tommy helped Rose clean up. His mother had asked her to spend the night because she expected to be quite late and she didn’t want to have to drive Rose home at the end of the evening. She didn’t like to go into that part of town by herself, and besides, the roads were terrible.

  Tommy went into her bedroom while she was finishing dressing. The curtains that Mrs. Matson had made for her a couple of years ago were closed, falling in soft silken folds to the floor, shining with the rosy light from the lamps on his mother’s dressing table. The whole room cast a soft pink glow, and in the center of it stood his mother in her slip, her arms raised, pulling her dress over her head, taking care not to disturb her hair. Tommy could not see her face; it was still hidden in her dress. “Will you and Daddy ever go to New Orleans?” Tommy asked.

  “We’ve been there, my funny darling,” his mother said, smoothing the dress down over her slip. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Well of course we might go again. Would you help me with this zipper? I can’t reach it.” Her dress zipped up the back. It was a new dress, a deeper shade of pink than the curtains, and she thought it was very stylish. “But it certainly is hard to get into,” she said.

  Tommy moved away from her dressing table to the big rocker in the corner, the one his mother used to rock him in when he was a baby and sometimes still did. He watched her intent face mirrored between the lamps in the glass while she put on her lipstick in that funny way she did, powdered her nose, and curled her eyelashes with a little implement from her drawer. She almost never curled her eyelashes. She touched a comb to her hair. Tommy thought of Mrs. Simpkin. His mother was much prettier than Mrs. Simpkin. If she were an invalid, Tommy would help her, too. She was examining now the jewelry spread out before her on the dressing table. She picked up the jeweled arrow from the mirrored tray and turned to Tommy. “Do you think it looks better here?”—she held it to the left side of her dress—“or here?”—she moved it across her breast—“or in the middle?”

  Tommy came to where she was sitting and stood behind her shoulder, watching in the mirror as she moved the arrow to its various positions. His mother’s face was reflected all around him, shining from the big center glass, from the two angled mirrors of her dressing table, in the tray next to her hand. “If I wear it in the middle, should I point the arrow up or down?”

  “Point it sideways,” Tommy said, but his mother didn’t think it looked best that way.

  “We’ll compromise,” she said. “I’ll put it here”—she held it to the V of her dress—“and wear it at an angle.” She fastened the brooch, but still she wasn’t sure that she liked it. “No, I don’t like it. It ought to point down,” so she unfastened it and fixed it the way she wanted. Then she stood up, dabbed herself with perfume, and said, “There. I’m ready—a little early, even.” She turned out the lamps in her room and together they went downstairs. Because she was a little early, she had time to sit on the couch with Tommy and read him part of Fingerfins, but she didn’t have time to finish it—Tommy knew the story anyway—before the doorbell rang. Mr. Wolfe was picking her up so she wouldn’t have to drive alone.