by Sue Miller
Eleanor didn’t come home at the Easter break, I remember, and Jacey seemed to have no trouble finding other women to hang around with. This shocked me, his betrayal of her, in a way that her earlier presumed betrayal of him did not. It seemed, as hers had not, cynical. Hers I had romanticized as wildness, pure appetite.
Sometime in early May I was sitting at the dining room table doing homework, when the phone rang. My mother was in the kitchen, and she called, “I’ll get it.” She came out to the telephone stand in the hall. Her voice, after the initial hello, was cool and polite, so I assumed it was some social acquaintance of hers and went back to my chemistry. She was silent on the phone a long time, and then she said, sharply and angrily, “No, that’s impossible.” Her tone made me look up. She had turned her back to me, as though to shield me from whatever was going on. After another, shorter silence, she said, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. If you have something to say to my son, you’d better talk to him yourself.” I started to stand, my heart thudding, thinking of the various misdeeds of the last weeks, the last months. I ran around at the time with a small gang of misfits, and we specialized in anonymous and, we thought, harmless acts of vandalism—like setting a car upside down on its owner’s front lawn, or breaking into the school cafeteria and urinating into the little cartons of orange juice.
“That’s right,” my mother said stiffly. “I’m very sorry.” And she hung up.
After a moment she turned and saw me still standing there, looking, I’m sure, terrified and puzzled. Her worried face relaxed. She laughed. “Sit down, darling,” she said. “You look as though you’re about to meet your maker.”
She came into the dining room and put her hands along the back of the chair opposite me. “That wasn’t even about you. It was Joan Abbott, about John.” The vertical line between her eyebrows returned. “I’m going to ask you one question, Doug, and if you have no idea, or don’t want to answer, just tell me.”
I nodded.
She looked down at her hands, as if she was ashamed to be doing what she was about to do. “Is there any sense, do you think, in which John has … oh, I don’t know, it sounds ridiculous … corrupted Eleanor Abbott? Led her astray?”
My mind was working in several directions at once, trying to reconstruct the phone call, trying to figure out what the answer to the question might really be, trying to figure out how much I wanted to tell her, and if I told her anything, how to put it.
“Well, I know he’s made love to her,” I blurted finally. She looked startled only for a second. I could feel a deep flush rise to my face. “But not because he’s talked about it.” She nodded, I think, approvingly. “But … I would have said that Eleanor was pretty much in charge of her own life. I mean, she had lots of boyfriends. That she slept with, I think. Even in high school.” By now I was talking down to my chemistry book. “I mean, I think he liked her more than she liked him. Not that she didn’t like him. I mean, I don’t know,” I said.
“I see,” my mother said. I looked up at her. Suddenly she grinned at me and I felt the pinch of love for her that came only occasionally at this stage of my life. “Well, that was clear as a bell, Doug.”
That June, Pamela Abbott, who was in my class, had a tent party to celebrate our graduation. I had been eagerly anticipating seeing Eleanor there, telling her I was going to Harvard in the fall, trying, as I see now, the appeal of my conventional success where the romance of my rebel stance had failed. My brother had been home for a week but he hadn’t mentioned her, and some secret, competitive part of me hoped she was done with him, that she would turn to me for the intensity she hadn’t found in him.
There was no sign of Eleanor. I danced with her sister once and asked about her; she simply said that Eleanor couldn’t make it. But what I heard from others in the course of the evening, in little knotted whispers, was that Eleanor had in some sense broken with her family. Run away somehow. She’d flunked or dropped out of school (something no boy in our world, much less a girl, would ever do), and had taken a job as a waitress or a dancer or an airline stewardess, depending on who told the story.
When I got home that night, I saw the light on in my brother’s room. I went and stood awkwardly in his doorway. He was reading in bed, the lower part of his body covered with a sheet, the upper part naked. I remember looking at the filled-in, grownup shape of his upper body and momentarily hating him.
“Thought I’d report on the Abbott party,” I said.
He set his book down. “I’ve been to the Abbott party,” he said, and smiled.
“Well, everyone was there, except you.”
“I’m surprised you still go,” he said.
“I’m surprised you don’t,” I said.
“I wasn’t asked.”
“Oh,” I said, with, I hoped, a question in my voice.
“I’m persona non grata there,” he said flatly.
After a pause, I said, “Eleanor wasn’t there, either.”
“M-mm,” he said. “Well, I’m not surprised.”
“I heard she’d left school,” I said.
“I heard that too,” he answered.
“What’s she doing now?” I asked.
“She hasn’t told me,” he said.
“So you’re not in touch with her,” I asked.
“No, I’ve outlived my usefulness to Eleanor.” I was surprised to hear the bitterness in his voice.
“How were you useful to her?”
“I should imagine that would be easy enough to figure out.” I didn’t know what to say.
“I mean,” he said, “even aside from the little scene in the basement.”
I shook my head, confused and embarrassed.
“Look,” he said. “Eleanor was looking for a way not to be an Abbott, to get away from that whole world. And it turns out that it takes a lot to get away. It’s not enough that you sleep around with boys from your world. But when you start fucking boys from across the tracks …” he said. He was agitated. He sat up, throwing back the covers, and got out of bed. He walked to the dresser and lit a cigarette.
“You mean she was sleeping with guys … like Prohaska or something?” I tried not to look at his nakedness.
He stood leaning on the dresser. He inhaled sharply on the cigarette and then smiled at me. “No, I mean she was sleeping with me. And she made sure her parents found out about it.”
I was silent for a moment, unable to understand. “But we’re not from across the tracks,” I said,
He cocked his head. “No?” he asked. “Well, maybe I’m not talking about literal tracks.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said after a pause. “I don’t believe in what you’re talking about.”
He shrugged. “So don’t believe in it,” he said. He carried the cigarette and an ashtray back to bed with him, covered himself again.
I persisted. “I mean, we’re just the same as them. We’re just as good as they are.”
He smiled. “Ask the Abbotts about that.”
“The Abbotts,” I said, with what I hoped was grand contempt in my voice, forgetting for the moment my eagerness to attend Pamela’s party.
“Okay. Ask Mom. Ask her about how well she’s lived in Haley all these years. Ask her whether she’s as good as anyone else around here.” Then, as though something in my face stopped him, his expression changed. He shrugged. “Maybe I’m all wet,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He tapped an ash into the ashtray. “I mean, this is America after all, right?”
I stood in the doorway a minute more. “So what do you think Eleanor is doing?” I finally asked.
“Look, I don’t care what she’s doing,” he said. He picked up his book, and after a few minutes I left.
I went to Harvard in the fall, as did Pamela Abbott—though in those days we still called her part of it Radcliffe. The year after that my brother moved to Cambridge to study architecture at Harvard. Gingerly we began to draw closer together. We still occupied entirely different worlds
, mine sloppy and disorganized, his orderly and productive. I thought it emblematic of this that I was so utterly unattracted to the women he preferred. They were neat, wealthy, Waspy and, to me, asexual. I was drawn to ethnic types, women with dark skin, liquid black eyes, wild hair. But I had none. My wild women were abstracts, whereas Jacey had a regular string of real women in and out of his apartment; and I could never look at them, with their tiny pained smiles, without thinking of Eleanor perched on top of my brother in the damp basement the day I wanted ice cream.
We both continued to go home each summer to be with my mother, and it was the summer following his first year in Cambridge, the summer before my junior year, that Jacey fell in love with the oldest Abbott sister, Alice.
Alice had been a year ahead of him in high school, had gone to a two-year college somewhere, and then married. She was arguably the prettiest of the sisters, the most conventional, and if she hadn’t been older than he was at a time when that constituted a major barrier, she was probably the one my brother would have been attracted to in the first place. If he had fallen in love with her back in high school, I think their courtship might have proceeded at a pace slow enough, tender enough, so that her parents might ultimately have been reconciled to it; the issue of our marginal social status might have been overcome if it hadn’t been combined with Eleanor’s sexual precocity; if Alice had come first.
But Alice had married someone else, someone acceptable, and had two children. And now she was back home, something having happened to her marriage. The children were preschoolers; and I was startled once that summer to walk past the Abbotts’ house and see a tent set up in the backyard with balloons and streamers floating in the protected air beneath it. I heard children’s shouts, someone crying loudly, and I realized that the cycle had begun again for the Abbotts. That if Alice stayed at home, their house, their largesse, would dominate the social world of another generation of Haley children.
I don’t know where Jacey met Alice—there certainly were enough people in whose homes they might have bumped into one another—and I can’t imagine how he explained himself to her in the context of what her family thought had gone on between him and Eleanor, but he began to see her secretly that summer, arranging to go to the same parties, to meet accidentally. I went out with Pamela every now and then without having any romantic interest in her; we mostly commiserated on how dull Haley was, talked about places around Boston we missed; and she told me about Jacey and Alice.
I said I didn’t believe her.
“Alice told me,” she said.
“But secretly?” I asked.
“She’s afraid of my parents,” Pamela said.
“But she’s a grown woman, with children. I mean, she’s been married, for God’s sake.”
“Oh, that,” Pamela said contemptuously.
“What do you mean, ‘Oh, that’?” I asked.
“That was practically an arranged marriage,” she said. “They think that Alice has peanut shells for brains or something, so they sort of suggested after she graduated that maybe it was time to tie the old knot, and they sort of suggested that Peter was the one she ought to do it with. Or they just waxed so enthusiastic about him or something that she just did it.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. I thought of my own mother—how conscientiously she had left Jacey and me free to make our own choices and decisions in life. “No one could be that malleable.”
She shrugged. “Look, Alice is the good one, and Eleanor was the bad one, and I’m the one who sort of gets off the hook. I don’t know how it got set up that way, but that’s the way it works.”
We sat in silence for a minute. “What do you hear from Eleanor?” I asked.
She looked at me sternly. “I don’t,” she said.
I’m not sure that Jacey even slept with Alice that first summer. From what little he said about her, and from what I knew via Pamela, Alice was feeling fragile since the end of her marriage and tentative about getting involved with someone supposedly as dangerous as Jacey. But it was striking to me back in Cambridge that year that he stopped seeing other women. The seemingly endless parade in and out of his apartment stopped; and I was the one, finally, who had women.
I only had two, but it was enough to perplex me thoroughly. I was very involved with theater groups at Harvard; I’d been in one production or another practically nonstop since midway through my freshman year. Now, as a junior, I was getting lead roles; and the exotic women I’d dreamed of having, theatrical women who ringed their eyes with black pencil, were interested in me. But somehow both my romances fell flat, didn’t seem as gripping as the roles I played or even as the tense, delicate relationship Jacey was now maintaining by mail with Alice. Though he wouldn’t really talk about Alice with me, about what she was like or what they did together, I knew he was determined to have her, to rescue her the following summer, and I watched it all impatiently.
The summer started and then progressed somewhat as the first one had. There were the frequent phone calls, the arranged meetings. But then Jacey brought Alice to our house.
I suppose they had problems finding places to go together privately, and they finally decided they had no alternative. At first it was when my mother was away, off on her annual trip to a college classmate’s in Chicago. I was sitting in the living room, watching television, and I heard them come in. I looked up to see Alice, then Jacey, going upstairs. I could hear the murmur of their voices off and on through the night after I went to bed, and the sounds of their lovemaking, but it didn’t bother me as it might have if it had been Eleanor. They left sometime in the dead of the night.
He brought her to the house every night my mother was gone, and we never spoke of it. I don’t know what they did in the weeks after my mother’s return, but in mid-August, he brought Alice to the house when my mother was home. She didn’t hear them come in. She was in the backyard watering the plants; and then for a while I could hear her moving around the kitchen. At about ten o’clock, though, she crossed to the bottom of the stairs and stopped, hearing their voices. Then she came into the dining room, where I was.
“Who’s upstairs with John?” she asked.
“I think it’s Alice Abbott,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “How long is she likely to stay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wouldn’t stay up and wait for her to leave.”
The next morning I didn’t have breakfast at home. From the time I woke I could hear Jacey and my mother talking in the kitchen, their voices floating out the open windows in the still summer air, hers steady, kind, and his impassioned, occasionally quite clearly audible. From what he said, I could tell she felt he needed to make his courtship of Alice open. It even seemed she was trying to get him to move out if he wanted to sleep with Alice, perhaps rent a room somewhere. As I left the house, he was saying, “But it’s because I do love her, Mother. It couldn’t be more different from Eleanor. Eleanor was just an idea I had.”
I went to the new shopping mall just outside of town and had six honey-dipped doughnuts. I sat next to Evan Lederer—I’d known him in high school—and we talked about summer jobs. Evan was doing construction with a crew working on the interstate, and he had an even, bronze tan to show for it. As we stood together at the cash register, he said, “I hear your brother’s taking out Alice Abbott.”
“Is that right?” I said.
He grinned and punched my arm.
I don’t know what my brother and mother agreed on, but he didn’t move out and he didn’t, to my knowledge, ever bring Alice to the house again. And then, just before he was to go back to Cambridge and reclaim his apartment from a subletter who was leaving early, it was over. Her parents had found out and simply said no, and apparently Alice didn’t have the strength or the financial independence to defy them.
There were several days of phone calls, when my mother and I sat shut in the kitchen or our respective rooms, trying not to listen to Jacey’s desperate voice risin
g and falling, attempting to persuade Alice that it could work if she would just make the break.
And then even the calls stopped, and he just stayed in his room until his job ended and he could leave. And that’s literally how he did it. He came home from his last day of work, took a shower, and started loading up his car. My mother tried to persuade him to stay overnight and start the trip the following morning, but he argued that he’d have to drive through at least part of one night anyway, and it might as well be at the beginning of the trip. “Besides,” he told her, “the sooner I get out of this fucking town the better.”
It shocked me to hear my brother swear in front of my mother, mostly because I took it as an indicator of how deeply lost he was in his own misery; we simply never used that kind of language when she was around. She seemed to put the same construction on it I did, though. Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, of course you feel that way. Would you like me to make you some snacks for the road?”
When he left, she stood looking after his car for a long time. I went up onto the front porch, but she didn’t follow. Finally I called to her, “Are you coming in, Mom?” And she turned and began to climb the stairs. I had a sudden revelation then of my mother’s age. She had always looked the same age to me—simply older—but in that moment she looked as tired as Grandma Vetter had when she told us that she was just going to lie down for a bit.
We had a fairly silent dinner, and afterward, over coffee, she said to me, “Do you think your brother will be all right?”
“Well, he’s not going to do anything stupid to himself, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, her quickly raised hand dismissing even the possibility of that.
“I know,” I said. I felt ashamed. Then, impulsively, I said, “I just wish he’d never met the Abbott family.”
She sighed. “If John hadn’t met the Abbotts, he’d have had to invent them, one way or another. There is no end of Abbotts in the world, if that’s what you need. And he just needs that somehow.” She picked up the chipped yellow cup and sipped her coffee. “Well, really, I know how.”