Are You in the House Alone?

by Richard Peck

  It rang then. And I let it. Thirty times after I started counting. A long fifteen minutes later it started again and wouldn’t stop. I’ve already heard all the words. What does it matter? I lifted the receiver and heard music in the background.

  When I didn’t say hello, Mrs. Montgomery said, “Gail, my heavens, are you all right? Surely you heard the phone! I’m sitting in this booth in an absolute panic. What’s wrong?”

  I owed her an explanation. My mind searched for excuses instead. “The television, it was blaring.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I’d just call to check, and then when—”

  “Everything’s fine and the kids are sound asleep. Are you having a good time?” I could hear the Previously Marrieds dance band in the background playing “That Old Black Magic.”

  “I’m having the usual time,” Mrs. Montgomery said. “Actually my feet are killing me, and I’m sitting this set out. Anyway, Bob Foster has dumped me and gone off to the card room to play poker, or somewhere. It’s not one of our cozier nights.”

  “Who’s Bob Foster?”

  “You have to ask? He’s the coach at the high school.”

  “Coach Foster? You mean that you and he—”

  “I told you this town still had some secrets. Who do you think I dance with at this club—Tony Orlando?” I’d thought I’d convinced her nothing was wrong at my end, but she mentioned that she’d be home early, before midnight. After she hung up, I forgot to ask if she’d tried to call before. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  She was home in half an hour. I heard her voice and Coach Foster’s all the way up the front walk. Opening the front door, I tried to look responsible. Mrs. Montgomery had that look on her face that nice people get when they’re concerned about you. “Gail, you know Coach Foster, don’t you?”

  The coach loomed over her shoulder. I’d never seen him in long pants before, let alone a suit and clip-on bow tie. He grunted something at this introduction.

  “We haven’t exactly met before,” I said. “They haven’t let a girls’ team on the squash court yet.”

  Coach Foster grunted again at that. He looked sickened at the idea of girls on his squash court. I think he was the only man I’d ever seen who still had crew-cut hair. It was sparse and gray.

  They came into the hall, and Mrs. Montgomery said, “Oh, Bob, go on out to the kitchen. In the pantry there’s a bottle of White Label with a couple of fingers of Scotch left in it. Fix one for me with a splash of soda. And there’s Gatorade in the refrigerator for you.”

  When he lumbered off, she led me straight into the living room. She made a long business of digging my money out of her evening bag. I sat there facing her and feeling guilty about not answering the phone. It seemed I was beginning to feel guilty about a lot of things that weren’t my fault.

  “If there’s anything that’s worrying you, Gail,” she said, not looking up from her open purse, “anything at all, you can tell me. After all, as long as you’re sitting with the kids, your problems are mine. If you have any, I mean. You know, we single ladies have to stick together.” She looked up and smiled, a little too brightly.

  Whatever I might have said was cut off by Coach Foster, who came into the living room drinking his Gatorade from the bottle. When he handed Mrs. Montgomery her drink, he shot me an irritated look. He wasn’t happy to find me still there.

  He was less happy when she said, “Oh, Bob, you wouldn’t mind driving Gail home, would you.” He started to say something, but she didn’t let him. “You can come back afterwards and . . . ah . . . finish your Gatorade.”

  It was a moonless, inky-black night. When we drove off into it, I fought the urge to plaster myself up against the car door. Keeping my distance from Coach Foster. He didn’t help matters by driving along in silence. With any other teacher, I’d have thought I should make some conversation. But then I didn’t think of him as a teacher. He was more like a sulky kid. A very big one.

  Something was gnawing at me. Something Mrs. Montgomery had said on the phone about how the coach had wandered off somewhere during the dance. He could have slipped into a phone booth and . . . and I had to stop thinking things like that.

  All I wanted was to get home. Then I saw we were almost there, and he’d made all the right turns without asking me where I lived. It was a small thing, but it panicked me. He knew where I lived. Lots of people did, of course. But that was the problem.

  When he pulled into our drive, I jerked at the door handle. “Not so fast!” I froze. “Don’t open a door till a car comes to a stop.” He growled that out in his squash-court voice. But the car was stopped by then, and in the next second I was swinging my feet out. Somehow, though, I knew he was reaching across toward me. I whirled around to see his big paw bang the door shut and push the lock button down.

  “Thanks,” I yelled, too late. “Thanks for the ride!” He nodded, I think, and the car backed down the drive. It swung around and peeled off in the direction of Mrs. Montgomery’s house.

  Instead of running for the front door, I stood beside the drive, watching the car out of sight. I just kept standing there in the middle of the night, tempting fate. Wanting something to happen and then be over. I knew I couldn’t go on much longer being afraid of everybody.

  There was a word for that. A psychiatric kind of word. I could end up in a room with bolts on the door and bars on the window and no phone. I was beginning to yearn for that room. And maybe, I thought, maybe that yearning was what I really had to fear.

  It was the middle of the next week when I got the second note. And it was the last one.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  You’d think broad daylight and a school full of kids would be better than sitting alone in a house at night. But it wasn’t. I guess I began to lose some of my perceptions and sharpen others. I was always looking over my shoulder, but I couldn’t concentrate on the regular routine.

  Miss Gernreich held me up to public ridicule in geometry when I couldn’t do last night’s easiest problem on the board. Then later, when she took my homework out of my hand and found I’d done every problem practically right, she gave me a strange look.

  But boys. Men. I was looking at them all the time. Trying to see into them. Which was the rotten one? Or were they all rotten? If I didn’t know which one to fear, how could I keep from fearing them all? And hating them? And where did that get me?

  I stood at the drinking fountain so long that I was late for English just because I noticed Buddy McEvoy hanging around with his usual gang. I strained to hear what they were talking about. I couldn’t take my eyes off his spidery hand holding a notebook the way he held a squash racket.

  Then I dropped him and thought about all the guys I didn’t even know. There was a whole subculture of townie creeps with boots and Hondas and no place to go. We called them sweathogs. And I was just snobbish enough not even to know their names.

  English was taught by the meekest, mildest man on the faculty, Mr. Bauman. He always wore a black tie, and even when he was around, you thought you were in the room alone. And now that was the very thing that worried me about him. How could I know what his frustrations were? And when I tried to imagine them, I couldn’t think about anything else.

  We were doing nineteenth-century English poetry from purple mimeographed sheets. Mr. Bauman always came out of himself a little when he read poetry aloud. The poem for that day was Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known.” I guess I went a little batty during the second stanza.

  When she I loved looked every day

  Fresh as a rose in June,

  I to her cottage bent my way,

  Beneath an evening-moon.

  I knew it was a regular love poem of the soulful kind. We’d done them before. But in those four lines I could only see someone creeping toward a girl alone in a big old house, out on the moors, someone getting closer and closer as he bent his way. Be careful, I said to the girl in the poem. Bar the door. Protect
yourself. Get help.

  Mr. Bauman had stopped reciting. Everybody in the room had turned to look at me, everybody but Alison. Whatever I’d just thought, I’d said out loud. I looked down, pretending to read the poem, but it was all crumpled up in my hand and the purple ink looked like webs.

  “Gail Osburne?” Mr. Bauman said in his soft voice. “Do you have a comment to contribute?”

  I shook my head fast and never looked up. Mr. Bauman’s voice droned on through the poem.

  My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

  He raised, and never stopped:

  When down behind the cottage roof,

  At once, the bright moon dropped.

  But he got all the way to the end of the poem before people stopped giving me sidelong glances.

  What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

  Into a Lover’s head!

  “Oh, mercy!” to myself I cried,

  “If Lucy should be dead.”

  Finally the day was over. And four more to go. While I was fumbling with my combination lock, somebody stepped up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. I jumped, banged my head on the door. Books spilled out of my arms and all over the floor. “Oh please, please leave me alone!” I turned to see Steve standing there.

  “What is it?” he said. And when I looked in his eyes, I could tell that somebody had told him I’d been acting strange in English class, of all places. “What’s the problem?”

  I started to tell him—everything. But Alison came up then, looking around at my books all over the floor. And while I couldn’t think why, I didn’t want her to hear me telling Steve. Either that or I didn’t want her to hear what he’d reply.

  Worried? Embarrassed? Scared? I couldn’t sort through everything I was feeling.

  “Look,” Steve said, frowning at me, trying to analyze me. “What about doing something after school tomorrow?” Tomorrow? Tomorrow would be a repeat of today, I knew. Unless I did something about it.

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” I told him.

  * * *

  The next morning, when everybody else was filing into Madam Malevich’s class, I was on the train to New York. I had enough baby-sitting money saved to get halfway to Florida, and that’s just where I wished I was going. But I was on the late commuters’ train for Grand Central. My dad had left the house at his usual time, and I figured I’d catch him at his office before he got too involved with his day.

  I’d spent an evening pretending that it was all over. No more calls or notes. And it hadn’t worked. It was time to tell somebody. Alison hadn’t been any help at all. Where are people when you need them?

  What I expected Dad to do, I don’t know now. Call the police? Keep me home? Watch me night and day? I was already being watched night and day. I knew how that felt. And why did I think that cutting school to see Dad would keep Mother from knowing? I just wasn’t thinking. I was running.

  It was a new experience—the train at rush hour. When I looked around, I saw I was the only female in the car. It was packed with Oldfield Village businessmen in trench coats and Brooks Brothers suits. All the faces were smooth as eggs, bent to folded copies of the Wall Street Journal. My faceless, unknowable neighbors.

  I barely knew or remembered New York well enough to find the right subway train to Dad’s office. The local roared in before the express or I’d have gone hopelessly astray.

  Lichtner, Purdy, & Osburne, A.I.A., was housed in a little barn-shaped building amid the high rises. By the time I got to the door, it was eleven thirty and I was at large in the middle of Manhattan. If I collapsed dead on the sidewalk, a thousand people would step neatly over me and keep moving. But I felt a thousand times safer there than in Oldfield Village.

  The reception room was empty, but I didn’t have the nerve to walk past the receptionist’s desk. In a moment she came out of a cubbyhole with a mug of tea in her hand. She was the real New York item. Wild black hair in a halo of ringlets. Steel-rimmed glasses on a face that had seen twenty-five years of disillusionment, starting at birth.

  “Oh hi,” she said, “been waiting long?” Her tongue searched around in her cheek, found a wad of gum, and she began to chew. “Like you want to see somebody?”

  I cleared my throat, decided this had all been a wrong idea. “Mr. Osburne.”

  “Who? Mr. Osburne? You’re about a month late. Mr. Osburne isn’t with us any more. You want to see somebody else?”

  “I mean Mr. Neal Osburne. He’s a partner in the firm.”

  “Not any more,” she said. “Say listen, are you like . . . a relative of his?”

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Oi,” she said, and massaged her forehead with the back of her wrist. “This is heavy. I mean like you live with your dad, right? And . . . ah . . . he didn’t tell you he’s out on his . . . like he’s no longer employed?”

  She was getting through to me. It was mutually painful. “I thought—” And then I remembered seeing Dad at the Sunoco station the week before, when he should have been on the train. It began to make sense, the only thing that did.

  “—of tea or something?”

  “Excuse me? I wasn’t listening,” I said.

  “Would you like a cup of tea or something? The water’s like still hot.” Since I was at the end of the line, I sat down and took the cup of tea. Until then I hadn’t thought about the return trip. Somehow I expected to dump my problem on Dad and let him take it from there. Infantile.

  She fussed around a lot, getting the tea and then some cookies. Finally we were both just sitting there staring at each other across her desk. A sign on it said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” “Well, you know, business has really been off. Like way off. I mean, how many building starts are there these days, or even renovations, right? I mean where are people supposed to come up with mortgage money? Right? Look at the interest rates. So, you know, your dad, he’s—was like a junior partner, and there just aren’t enough commissions coming in for three architects. You know where I’m coming from? Like it’s a dollars-and-cents-type thing. He’s a good architect, really talented, but that’s the way it goes. Some firms have gone completely under just here lately.”

  She finally wound down. I could almost see myself through her square lenses: a sheltered, pampered little suburban type who didn’t even know where the food on her table came from, with a father so protective he didn’t dare tell her the facts of his life.

  “You live some place up in Connecticut, right? I was out in the suburbs once. I forget which one—in Jersey I think it was. It’s like . . . a whole different scene. You still in school? What is this, some kind of a holiday?” She checked her calendar, expecting a clue.

  “No. I cut school to see my dad.”

  “Oh wow! You mean he’s not home?”

  “He always leaves the house at the regular time.”

  “Then like your mother doesn’t know either?” And then I remembered that Mother was taking that real-estate salesmanship course—hoping she could bring in some money. We were a great little family for secrets.

  “I suppose she knows, now that I come to think of it,” I said. “I better go. I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

  “What work?” she said. “If there was work, your dad would still be here.”

  “I just wonder where he is. Maybe he’s out going to interviews. Maybe he’s already got another job . . .”

  She was shaking her head and looking at me over the rim of the mug. “Don’t get your hopes up. I mean like if he had another job, we’d have heard. He’d have taken his drafting board and like that, but everything’s still here. There just aren’t any jobs going now.”

  “But then why does he get dressed up every morning and—”

  “They all do it. Even if they don’t have interviews to go to. They like kind of try to keep in the rhythm. At first they have résumés printed up. Then they start going to flicks during the day. Some of them drink. They usually end up sitting in the
park, if it’s a nice day. It’s really rough, you know? Like men can’t afford to fail. It’s like bred into them.”

  “I wish I knew where he was. I don’t even want to say anything to him about . . . what I came to say. I just wish I knew where he was.”

  “There’s a little vest-pocket park down at the end of this block and to the left, uptown. He might be there. A lot of times they go to the nearest place to where they worked. Habit, I guess.”

  I started to go then, not remembering to say good-bye. But she called out after me, “Say, listen! I don’t even know your name.”

  “Gail.”

  “Well, listen, Gail, when you see your dad, tell him hi from Connie. I mean if you want him to know you were here. Tell him to hang in there and like that, you know where I’m coming from?”

  I found the vest-pocket park. Only a space where they’d torn down a building and tried to get a little grove of trees started. It was mostly pavement and pigeons and people. But only the pigeons were moving. The people were lined up along the park benches, subway-train close. I nearly missed seeing my dad.

  He was halfway along a bench, wedged in between two other strangers. If he’d looked up, he’d have seen me only a few yards away beside a clump of gray marigolds. But he was looking at the ground where the pigeons were bobbing around. There was a newspaper folded on his knee, but he wasn’t reading it. He wasn’t doing anything. I recognized the tie with the small gold stripe in it I’d given him for his birthday. It was like identifying a dead body in a way. This was the man who was going to make all my problems evaporate. I walked on then, hoping he wouldn’t look up. To keep his secret from me, he’d need my cooperation. Like Connie said, men can’t afford to fail.

  I knew if I kept walking uptown and stayed on the same street, I’d get back to Grand Central Station. There didn’t seem to be any great rush about it. On one corner there was a bunch of guys standing around the door of an Off-Track Betting place. Why weren’t they in school? Why wasn’t I?