A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  “This is the time of day when Owen and I just relax,” Eva said. “We just sit out here and watch the sun go down, and we’re grateful for all our blessings. Would you like iced tea, dear, or will you join Owen in a drink?”

  “I think I’d like a drink, thanks.” The first swallow of whiskey and water warmed her at once, and soon she was able to recapture the feeling of adventure that had sustained her on the long Pullman journey. There was no telling what the future might hold. Alice Prentice the sculptor might be temporarily out of commission, but Alice Prentice the free spirit, the exceptional person, was still functioning. Anything was possible.

  The view from the house was beautiful, or at least it was remarkably spacious: miles of flat, gently rolling land led away to a shimmering horizon beneath a sky emblazoned with red and gold. Vague sculptural yearnings were awakened in her as she gazed into the distance and sipped her whiskey, and she almost said, “Oh, what wonderful work I’ll be able to do here,” before she remembered that she wouldn’t be able to work here at all. Instead she said, “Oh, I wish I had some water colors; that’s such a lovely sunset.”

  “I could get you some paints in town, if you’d like,” Eva said.

  “No; I’m not really much of a painter. What I’d really like is some clay, but of course I’d need a studio for sculpture. I don’t really mind, though; I’m looking forward to taking a real vacation.” She wasn’t at all sure what she meant by this – what was she going to do with her time here? – but it sounded like the right thing to say.

  “And what’ve you been up to since I saw you last?” Owen demanded of Bobby. “Playing much ball?”

  “Not too much, no,” he answered. “I’m not very good at it.”

  “You’re not? How come? You don’t enjoy it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not very well coordinated, I guess.”

  Owen stared at him briefly in evident disappointment, and Bobby shifted bashfully in his chair, rattling the cubes in his glass of iced tea.

  Owen had aged a good deal in the past five years: she had scarcely recognized him at the railroad station. His hair was white, he had developed a heavy paunch, and there was something haggard about his eyes. Now she tried to draw him out by asking about his book – she dimly remembered Eva’s telling her it was something about the World War – and he said it was going slowly. It was a big job; might not be done for years.

  “It does sound very interesting,” she said.

  “Interesting for anybody who likes to read about wholesale slaughter,” he said. “Way the world’s going now it won’t be long before we’re in the middle of another one.”

  “Another war? Oh, don’t say that.”

  “Not saying it won’t keep it away. Probably happen in time for this young fella to see a little action.”

  “Oh, dear, no. You don’t really think so, do you?”

  “Owen’s very disturbed about the situation in Europe,” Eva said.

  “So’s everybody else who’s in his right mind,” Owen said, and poured himself another drink. He made it a stiff one, and Alice began to suspect he’d been drinking all afternoon, since before meeting the train. This was odd, because she was almost sure she remembered that he’d made a point of turning down drinks that time in Scarsdale.

  “There’ll be no stopping it and no staying out of it,” he was saying, “and it’s going to be worse than the last one.” Then he turned on Bobby again. “How do you think you’d like that?” he asked. “Think you’d enjoy being a soldier? You know, they’ll take you in the Army whether you’re well coordinated or not. Stand up. Let’s have a look at you.”

  And Bobby got shyly to his feet, smiling, holding his iced tea.

  “Put the glass down. Heels together; toes at an angle of forty-five degrees; knees as close together as the nature of the man will permit. Thumbs along the trouser seams. Shoulders back. No, throw ’em back. That’s better. Suck that gut in. Wipe that smile off your face.”

  “Oh, Owen, please,” Alice said, trying to laugh. “He’s only twelve.”

  “I’m almost thirteen,” Bobby said.

  “They’re training ’em at that age in Germany right now. Maybe we ought be doing it too. All right, at ease, soldier. I said ‘At ease.’ That means you can relax.” And when Bobby slumped he reached out one heavy hand and cuffed him on the upper arm. “God bless you, boy,” he said. “I hope it never happens to you. Probably will, though.”

  “Oh, please,” Alice said. “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”

  Owen drained his glass and stood up. “Tell you what. You girls stay out here and find pleasant things to talk about. I’ll go read the paper till suppertime.”

  “Owen’s very tired,” Eva explained when he’d gone inside.

  He remained very tired through dinner – he hardly said a word while Alice and Eva talked of their sisters – and he went to bed soon afterwards.

  “We live very quietly, as you see,” Eva said when they were washing the dishes together. “I imagine it’ll be quite a change for you.”

  And it was quite a change indeed. All the next day, with Eva gone and Owen secluded in his study, she and Bobby were left with nothing to do. They went outside to inspect the chickens; then they took a long aimless walk across the fields; then they came back and sat around the house reading magazines. Owen emerged at lunchtime and Alice fixed sandwiches for the three of them, which they ate in near silence; then there was nothing to do but wait for Eva to come home. And that, more or less, was the way things went for nearly a week.

  The high point of the day – every day – was the hour when they congregated on the front porch to relax and be grateful for all their blessings. Alice tried again and again to lead the conversation along light, uncontroversial channels, but Owen repeatedly made that impossible. Once she remarked on how “different” Texas was from the East, meaning the landscape, and Owen said, “It’s different, all right. You’re in the United States of America now. This part of the country hasn’t been taken over yet, thank God.”

  “Taken over?”

  “By the Jews.”

  “Oh.”

  “New York’s not fit for a white man any more,” he said, and he held forth in that vein for what seemed an hour, until Eva managed to change the subject.

  The menacing rise of the American Negro was another of his favorite topics, as was the cancerous growth of communism in labor unions, and still another was the reckless irresponsibility of President Roosevelt in both domestic and foreign affairs. They heard him out on all of these matters in the course of several evenings, following days of almost unbearable idleness during which they could hear the frequent clink of bottle on glass through the closed door of his study.

  Then it was Saturday, with a welcome change in the day’s routine: Eva stayed home. It was as if Alice had never before had anyone to talk to. She talked and talked, following Eva around as she went about her housework, accepting small tasks of dusting and polishing, grateful to be given anything to do with her hands as long as it meant the talk could continue.

  Late in the afternoon Owen went out alone, taking the car, and stayed away. Eva prepared and served supper as if nothing were amiss; later she sat talking pleasantly with Alice and Bobby until bedtime, and it was well past midnight when Owen woke them all up by coming home – slamming the kitchen door, bumping into the table and cursing, stumbling and staggering through the house until he fell asleep.

  On Sunday morning, mostly because she wanted to get out of the house, Alice asked if Eva could drive Bobby and herself to the nearest Episcopal church.

  “Certainly,” Eva said, glancing uneasily at Owen. “That sounds like a very nice idea.”

  The church was disappointing – it was small and hot – and the sermon was a dull fund-raising appeal (“Be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only”). But Eva sat politely with them throughout the service, and afterwards said she had found it “very instructive.” Like Alice she had been ra
ised a Methodist, but she hadn’t been to a church of any kind for years.

  “It is a more interesting ceremony, isn’t it?” she said when they were home again. “I really enjoyed all the singing.” This caused Owen to look up sourly from the Sunday paper. “I mean,” she said, “assuming one does have a religious bent, I can see how the Episcopalian service would be more appealing.”

  “I thought it was a little dull,” Alice said, “but of course I’ve been spoiled by the wonderful service we had at Trinity, in Riverside. We had such a fine minister there, Dr. Hammond, and the church itself is so beautiful. Oh, and I wish you could have seen Bobby as the crucifer.”

  “As the what?” Owen inquired, squinting his eyes.

  “The crucifer. He carried the cross and led the whole procession, at the beginning and the end of each service. And he did it with such feeling. When he’d come to a stop in front of the altar, to let the choir file past him into the choir loft, he’d raise the cross way, way up high and just stand there—” she pantomimed the raising of a shaft high over her head – “Oh, it was so impressive; and then he’d lower the cross and turn around, and there’d be the most wonderfully dedicated, ethereal expression on his face – I wish you could have seen it.”

  Owen looked at her for a moment, and then at Bobby, who ducked his head in discomfort. Then he made a little snorting sound in his nose, gathered up his newspaper, and went into his study and shut the door.

  Owen stayed away from them for the rest of the day. He went out again that night, after dinner, and again they were awakened by his homecoming. He lurched against the kitchen table and knocked over one of the chairs, and then they heard his voice.

  “Jabber, jabber, jabber,” he was saying as he moved toward bed. “Jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber …”

  By the end of the third week Alice had decided that the situation was impossible. She and Bobby couldn’t stay here: the whole idea of coming here had been a mistake. Her next check from George would give them enough to get back to New York, which now rose in her mind’s eye as a city of magical promise, and once there they would find a way to survive. She would make a desperate appeal to George for enough money to tide them over until they were settled, and if that didn’t work she guessed she could get some kind of a job. In any case, they would find a way.

  “I think we’d better go home,” she told Eva as they washed the dishes together one evening. She tried to keep the tone of her voice neutral. “We can leave as soon as I get my next check from George; that ought to be in about a week.”

  “Well, but where will you go, dear? What will you do?”

  “We’ll manage somehow. Perhaps I’ll take a job or something; anyway, we’ll get by.”

  “But I thought you were planning to stay here for some time, until your savings built up.” Eva sounded a little hurt.

  “I was, but it really isn’t at all practical for us to live here. I think it would be better for all of us.”

  And whether Eva’s feelings had been slightly hurt or not, she was clearly relieved by the news.

  So was Bobby; and so, apparently, was Owen: he stayed relatively sober and polite for several evenings in a row.

  Now that she was soon to be gone from here, Alice was filled with impatience. The days seemed even longer, and being deprived of sculpture was worse than ever. She knew she might soon be able to work again, but in the meantime she would have given anything for some clay and tools and a studio.

  Then one afternoon as she and Bobby sat reading in the living room, she had a wonderful idea.

  “Dear,” she said. “Could you turn your head a little this way? No, wait; the light isn’t quite right. Could you move over to that chair? Near the window? There. That’s fine. Now, look up a little – there. Oh, that’s wonderful. Do you know the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to New York? I’m going to do a portrait of you. I know just exactly how I’m going to do it. I can see it.”

  And she could. It would be the best thing she had ever done. She would call it “Young Boy,” or “My Son” – or, better still, “A Portrait of the Artist’s Son.” She could picture it exhibited in next year’s Whitney Annual, and perhaps even photographed in The New York Times.

  “You really do have a wonderfully sculptural head, dear,” she said. “I can’t imagine why this never occurred to me before.”

  She asked Eva to bring her a sketch pad and some drawing pencils from town the next day, and she began sketching Bobby’s head from every conceivable angle.

  On the morning she expected to receive her check there was something else for her in the mail instead: a densely worded letter from George’s lawyer. She had to read it through several times before she understood it, and then it was sickeningly clear. She had violated the terms of the divorce agreement by taking Bobby out of New York State without George’s consent; accordingly, all payments would be suspended as long as she stayed away.

  “Well, that is unfortunate,” Eva said when Alice showed her the letter. “Still, I imagine you can write to George and explain. I imagine he’ll send you the money if he knows you’ll use it for going back.”

  But Alice wasn’t so sure. How could she explain what she planned to do when she got back? She spent all of one day and part of another writing and rewriting her letter to George: she was trying to make him feel guilty for his action and at the same time trying to persuade him that one month’s payment was all she would need to re-establish herself in New York. But she knew, even as she mailed the final draft, that it probably wouldn’t do any good.

  “Are we just going to stay here forever, then, or what?” Bobby asked her.

  “No, dear. We’ll go home just as soon as we can find a way. And a way will come; I know it will. We mustn’t lose faith.”

  “Lose faith?”

  “Faith in God, dear. Have you forgotten what you learned in church?” And she was able to quote, from memory, her favorite Collect from the Book of Common Prayer: “ ‘Oh God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding; pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.’ ”

  “Well,” he said, “okay, but doesn’t that mean getting good things in Heaven? After you’re dead?”

  “Not necessarily. Besides, there’s another one that says ‘Grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually.’ And there’s another one – oh, how does it go? Something about God’s ordering all things both in Heaven and earth, and then it says, ‘We beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable to us.’ We can’t always know exactly what it is God wants for us, but we know He wants what’s right. We know He wants us to find a way. That’s what ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ means.”

  Even so, her own faith was sorely tested by the long, idle days.

  It was only May, but as hot as August. The heat rose in shimmering waves over the fields, and the house was like an oven. A few hundred yards away, on the way into town, the highway was under repair: men were cutting through the surface with jackhammers, the powerful noise of which clattered all day, and a heavy pall of white dust hung over the excavation, eclipsing the distance.

  “Hot!” Owen Forbes exclaimed, coming out of his study one afternoon. Alice and Bobby were in different parts of the living room, reading detective stories that Eva had brought home from a local lending library, and they looked up at him in apprehension.

  “Sweet Jesus, it’s hot,” he said. He tore off his soaked shirt, flapped it in the air, bunched it into a ball and used it to mop his armpits, one after the other. He threw the shirt into the laundry hamper in the hall; then they heard him banging at the refrigerator in the kitchen, and he reappeared with a cold bottle of beer in his hand. He went to stand near Bobby’s chair, in front of a small electric fan that slowly turned its buzzing head from side to side. “Damn thing doesn’
t do any good at all,” he said. “Doesn’t even stir up the air. What’re you reading, boy?”

  “Just a mystery,” Bobby said. “It’s by Erle Stanley Gardner.”

  “You enjoy books like that?”

  “I don’t know; I guess so.”

  “You ought to be in school,” Owen said. “You ought to be studying math and Latin and history. Pretty nice how you got out of half a year’s school by coming to Texas, isn’t it? What’re you going to do with him in the fall, Alice? Put him in school out here?”

  It was impossible for Alice to think that far ahead. “If we’re still here,” she said, “I suppose so, yes.”

  “What grade you in? Seventh?”

  “I’ll be starting the eighth.”

  “You mean you’ll be starting the eighth assuming they give you credit for the seventh. If you ask me, that isn’t a very safe assumption. And you’ll find they don’t just fool around in the school system here: it won’t be much like your fancy little private academy for young ladies back East.”

  He took a deep swig of beer and let all the air out of his lungs in a long, harsh sigh of satisfaction that ended in a belch. He wiped his mouth with his forearm, then let his hand fall to his hairy, protuberant belly and slowly scratched himself.

  Watching him, Alice decided she had never seen so gross and ugly a man. He was hideous in his massive half-nakedness, and she shuddered with the knowledge that she hated him. She hated his sour face; she hated his damp, pale, flabby-breasted torso; she hated his moving around this room with his cruel stare and his bottle of beer. Let him just say one more thing, she silently vowed; let him just say one more hurtful, bullying thing to Bobby and I’ll – I’ll—. She didn’t know what she would say, but it would be final. She wouldn’t stand for any more of this. She saw herself rising to confront him with a controlled, well-worded, withering remark – she wouldn’t lose her temper – and then quietly instructing Bobby to go and pack his suitcase. She would go unhurried to her room and pack her own belongings; then without another word they would simply walk out of the house and down the driveway. The trouble was that her fantasy took her only as far as the road. She had something less than a dollar in her purse – not enough for calling a taxi. Where would they go? How far would they get, walking with four suitcases in this dreadful heat?