In a single murmurous voice the boys said, “Okay, Daddy.”
Lee Roy Sears was marveling at the pond, in such simple terms—“real nice”—“real pretty”—he was sounding a bit simple-minded.
Was the man simple-minded?—had drugs, or alcohol, or his traumatic past, taken their toll?
Michael stood on the bank of the pond, his pond, and cast his eye about his property, back up to the house, his house—and felt again that surge of powerful emotion, part gratitude, part guilt. For how had he come to be here, and not, for instance, Lee Roy Sears?—whose mother had abandoned him as an infant and who had no family at all?
It was late afternoon and the sky was rapidly fading. The pond’s surface had become a perfect mirror, dark, and opaque; you could not see beyond it. Michael had years ago stocked the pond with ornamental carp, gold, gold-spangled, black, pale orange, but they had bred in such a way that black took precedence: only a few specimens of lighter colors remained, amid a quick-darting school of bladelike black fish, rarely visible except in the most intense sunlight. At the moment, there was not the slightest hint of life below the surface of the water. The weedy bottom might have inches below, or many feet.
Michael was standing on the bank beside a willow tree, grasping a limb, leaning over the water, musing at his reflection. He wore his weekday clothes: a suit, a necktie, a good shirt. But his head looked round and foolish in the water, his face ruddy as a pumpkin. The water trembled, rippled, his reflection seemed about to dissolve. Lee Roy Sears limped over to stand beside him, and there appeared suddenly his reflection too, bobbing beside Michael’s. His head was not so round as Michael’s and his face not so ruddy, in fact a lurid waxy white, his eyes black as mere holes. Yet he was smiling—grinning. “How deep is it, Mr. O’Meara?—you-all swim in it?”
Michael said, “It isn’t a pond for swimming, it’s too shallow at shore, and weedy. See those cattails?”
This inspired Gina to tell the story (already it had become a comical anecdote, of the kind relayed at Mount Orion parties) of how poor Michael had tried to clear the pond himself and had nearly broken his back. “Can you imagine!” Gina laughed, stroking Michael’s arm. Her manner was an invitation for Lee Roy Sears to laugh with her, but Sears was only puzzled, looking from Gina to Michael. He quite touched Michael’s heart by saying, naively, “You want me to help you dredge it, Mr. O’Meara?—just say when.”
Michael said, “That’s very generous of you, Lee Roy, but—”
“Nah, it’s nothing,” Lee Roy said vehemently, “c’pared to what you did for me.”
“—I’ve already arranged for a professional crew to do it, next week.”
As if he had not heard this, or hadn’t absorbed its meaning, Lee Roy Sears announced importantly, for Gina to overhear as well as for Michael to hear, “Yah, I’m pretty good with my hands, doing jobs like this. Maybe I don’t look it, I guess I look sorta runty right now—but I am!”
Of the remainder of that initial visit of Lee Roy Sears to his house, Michael O’Meara would afterward remember only isolated moments.
For instance: the twins were to eat their dinner in the kitchen, overseen by Marita, and as they were about to leave the company of the adults Gina hugged them, and coaxed them prettily, “Okay, fellas, say goodnight to Mr. Sears,” and shyly the boys murmured, in near-unison, “G’night, Mr. Sears,” each peering up at Sears through his eyelashes, as Sears, smiling lopsidedly, said, “Yah, g’night, great to meet ya!” It would have ended at that, but suddenly Joel—unless it was Kenny: Michael wasn’t sure—piped up shrilly, “Mr. Sears, how come you were in jail?” and his twin giggled wildly, and Gina exclaimed, “Joel! Kenny! Boys! For shame!”
Marita appeared and led the boys off. Gina and Michael apologized, both quite profoundly embarrassed, but Lee Roy Sears shrugged and said, “Hell, it’s a good question, wish I knew the answer.”
Then, as Gina finished preparations for the meal, and Michael and Lee Roy moved about the living room with fresh drinks (they were too restless to sit down), Lee Roy’s attention leapt to the O’Mearas’ art, which he had not noticed previously. There were several oil paintings, some pastel drawings, a half-dozen lithographs, two small but striking bronze heads on the mantel. Lee Roy plied Michael with questions that were both naive and shrewd: who were the artists? were they famous? were they alive, or dead? how much did the works cost? Michael was bemused at his companion’s tight-jawed intensity and answered as best he could.
“Most of these works are Gina’s acquisitions,” he said. “She knows people in art—in Manhattan and Philadelphia. I trust to her judgment. I only know what I think I like.”
“D’you like this?” Lee Roy asked derisively, of a large abstract canvas of dense, swirling, muted colors on a white background. The oil painting was by a prestigious American, only recently deceased; Michael had always suspected that Gina had paid its considerable price because others in Mount Orion collected the artist, and because this particular canvas harmonized so well with the living room furniture. “—too fucking soft,” Lee Roy muttered.
This was the first time Michael had heard Lee Roy Sears speak in quite that tone. He was glad that Gina was out of earshot.
“I like it well enough,” Michael said, an edge of irony in his voice. “You’ll find, I’m not hard to please.”
And then there was dinner.
A swift, tattered meal, as it turned out, for though Gina had bought a delicious beef bourguignon, Lee Roy Sears ate nervously and compulsively, turning his head to one side as he chewed, like a voracious animal. He seemed to know that he was being offensive, for he several times murmured, “Sorry!—forgot my table manners!” and “Sorry!—so hungry!” The O’Mearas glanced at each other, with neutral expressions—had their guest not had a decent meal in thirteen years?—or longer?
Gina, with her usually infallible hostess’s instinct, tried to draw Lee Roy out in conversation, asking him questions of a kind that might not embarrass—how did he like his fellow tenants in the halfway house, for instance?—but Lee Roy merely mumbled or grunted answers. An oily film coated his forehead, his eyes shone with moisture. He panted as he ate. He paused mid-meal to swallow down a large white capsule with a mouthful of water. (Medication? Michael wondered. An antipsychotic, or merely a tranquilizer?) When he wasn’t avidly eating, Lee Roy compulsively adjusted his plate, his water goblet, his cutlery, the tiny silver salt and pepper shakers before him; even, though they were scarcely out of alignment, the silver candleholders Gina had placed in the center of the table.
“Sorry!—sorry!” Lee Roy muttered.
Gina, whose appetite was fickle at the best of times, seemed to have lost all desire to continue eating, in the presence of Lee Roy Sears’s appetite, yet, nonetheless, as if out of a female martyrdom, politely offered her guest more: more beef, more rice, more vegetables, more bread. “Thanks, Mrs. O’Meara!” Lee Roy panted. He seemed incapable of stopping himself from heaping his plate with a trembling hand, and from beginning to eat anew. But a minute later, in the midst of vigorous chewing, he paused, with a stricken expression, hunched toward the table, and softly moaned; and again the O’Mearas exchanged a glance—Michael pained and apologetic, his face reddening; Gina quite inscrutable.
Lee Roy gasped, “Oh!—God!—excuse me!”
He had eaten too much, and too fast; his shrunken stomach could not accommodate such a quantity of rich food; he staggered from the table like a dying man, bent nearly double, a hand to his mouth, face deathly white. Michael tossed down his napkin and dealt with the emergency by hauling Lee Roy to the guest bathroom in the hall—not a moment too soon.
When Michael returned to the dining room, fighting down a pang of nausea himself, he saw Gina sitting with her hand over her eyes, utterly still.
He said, “Gina, my God, I’m so sorry! I’ll get rid of him as soon as he’s well enough to leave.”
Gina looked up at Michael, startled. Her lovely forehead creased in worry. “Bu
t, poor Lee Roy! He’s so sweet, and he’s so helpless! He isn’t our age at all, he’s just a child! What will become of him?”
Now it was Michael O’Meara’s turn to stare in amazement at his wife. Of all the remarks he might have expected from her, these were the least likely.
Thoroughly exhausted, though it was not yet nine o’clock in the evening, Michael drove Lee Roy Sears to his residence in Putnam, New Jersey: since Sears had no idea of his surroundings, and could give Michael only the street address of the house, Michael got lost several times and had to ask directions. Beside him, limp, giving off a breathy stench of vomit, the parolee moaned, “—sorry, oh God!—” but was of little aid otherwise.
A child. What will become of him.
Finally, Michael located the halfway house, which was of shabby yellow brick, in appearance rather like a flophouse, and in a district of taverns, pool halls, all-night diners, pawnshops.
He helped Lee Roy Sears out of his car and walked him up the rickety steps of the house and into the dim-lit foyer. Sears swayed like a drunken man. He was sick, but not too sick to fix his benefactor with damp doggy pleading eyes and to seize his hands in both his hands. “Thank you, Mr. O’Meara! Oh God! Jeez! From the bottom of my heart!”
Michael gagged at Sears’s breath and discreetly extricated himself from his grip. “Goodnight, Lee Roy!”
Out on the sidewalk, eager to escape, he heard, from inside the house, the other’s faint, apologetic cry, “—I mean ‘Michael.’”
3
“Oh!—it’s so sad. Those eyes.”
Gina O’Meara was staring at the gnomish little humanoid figure Lee Roy Sears had given her, a bit reluctantly, to examine; and, to be truthful, Gina did not know what to make of it. She prided herself upon having a natural eye for art, and she had many times been complimented on her exquisite taste, by gallery owners who had sold her overpriced works, but—this? This misshapen little thing with the pop eyes?
It was meant to be a man, about eight inches long, twisted as if in agony, with a crude, distorted face, gaping mouth, arms and legs spread, a shallow cavity where his insides should have been; fortunately, there was no groin at all. Made of still-damp, funky-smelling clay, it was oddly heavy, and nasty somehow. But Gina continued to smile.
Lee Roy Sears stood close by, breathing nasally, flexing his clay-covered fingers, eager and expectant. Gina had come to fetch him for their afternoon of shopping and errands, but he’d seemed at first to have forgotten she was coming, so absorbed had he been in his work—this “sculpting.”
(The ugly little figure, so inexpertly fashioned, was, Gina saw, one of a dozen similar figures, lying about like discarded fetuses on Sears’s workbench. Variations on a theme, but what clumsy variations, and what an unpromising theme!)
“—yes, those eyes. Remarkable!”
Lee Roy Sears, face mottled as if in extreme embarrassment, took the figure from Gina’s hands and set it with exaggerated care among the others. He mumbled something Gina could not decipher—she hoped it wasn’t that tiresome refrain of his, “Sorry—!”
“Well!” Gina said briskly, smiling her dazzling smile generally about the room—why on earth hadn’t Clyde given this poor man one of the upstairs workspaces, with some decent light and a view of the sky? “We’d better go, Lee Roy, it’s getting late. I have to pick Joel and Kenny up at three-thirty, you know, at their school—”
Washing up at a tiny sink in a corner, Lee Roy Sears said, not for the first time, “I sure don’t want to trouble you, ma’am—”
Gina laughed, “—‘Ma’am’?—what?”
“—Mrs. O’Meara—”
“I told you, Lee Roy, ‘Mrs. O’Meara’ is my mother-in-law, and she lives, not very happily I’m afraid, in Palm Beach, Florida.”
Lee Roy made an effort to laugh at this remark, but it sounded more like coughing.
“I told you too, Lee Roy, that it isn’t any ‘trouble.’ I’m happy to do what I can, to help you”—she paused discreetly—“adjust.”
She added, “And it’s ‘Gina’—!”
Running water at the faucets, Lee Roy Sears probably didn’t hear, so Gina let it pass. There was something elevating and even dramatic about the parolee calling her “Mrs. O’Meara” with that look in his eyes of helpless adoration, respect, awe.
Which, of course, Gina tactfully pretended not to see. Or, in any case, did not acknowledge.
Disdainfully, Gina wiped her hands on a damp paper towel, hoping the funky smell wouldn’t accrue. She was eager to get out of this depressing basement and into the bright clear spring air; she was eager to get into those Mount Orion stores where she felt so much at home.
Amateur efforts at art embarrassed her, in any case. She had gone through a brief phase when Joel and Kenny were small and she’d been hungry for independence, self-expression, a “creative” outlet for her pent-up emotions, during which time she had signed up for the popular ceramics course at the Dumont Center. For a while it had been delightful, and challenging, yes and fun (“Art should be fun!” their bearded instructor claimed)—Gina and the other novices had not fashioned pots out of clay, of course, but had merely busied themselves applying colored glazes to factory-made greenware, which their instructor then fired, dramatically, in a kiln. He’d assured Gina that she had genuine talent for ceramics, he’d seemed truly impressed with her work, but, unfortunately, Gina’s busy social life intruded, and an intense romantic friendship with a Mount Orion physician, and she’d had to drop out of the course.
Her three or four efforts, all bowls, were prominently displayed in the house. Visitors frequently complimented Gina on them, especially if they were told that Gina had done them.
So Gina held in reserve, as in a secret compartment of her handsome Gucci purse, the promise of “art”—someday, when the twins were older, she might very well try again. Not glazing greenware, but real art, like Georgia O’Keeffe, or Helen Frankenthaler, or, what was that sculptress’s name, the one with the turban and the false eyelashes?—Louise Nevelson.
For the moment, however, Gina O’Meara would content herself with making the rounds of the Mount Orion stores.
First, Gina took the parolee to The Village Beauty Salon, where she asked Nikki, the unisex hair stylist who did Gina’s own hair, if something could be done with Lee Roy’s—“Just look, his hair is so sort of chopped-looking, and shaved-up-the-back,” Gina said, “like a Marine recruit from the Ozarks!” As Lee Roy Sears, stony-faced, flushed, sat in the stylist’s chair, staring at himself in a three-way mirror flecked with gold, Nikki fussed, and frowned, and made dramatic swipes with his steel comb, but came to the conclusion, more disappointing to Gina than to Lee Roy, that, until his hair grew out a bit, nothing much could be done—“Bring him back, Mrs. O’Meara, in maybe three weeks.”
It was a measure of Nikki’s extreme sophistication—he’d come to Mount Orion from a West Broadway salon—that, though he stared at Lee Roy Sears with clearly repelled fascination, he did not inquire of Gina who he was.
Only once did the men’s eyes chance to lock, in the gold-flecked mirror, and, seeing something in Lee Roy Sears’s eyes that must have impressed him, Nikki looked quickly away.
As Lee Roy Sears limped out to the street, Gina pressed a twenty-dollar bill into Nikki’s palm. “We’ll be back in three weeks,” she said.
With a strained smile, Nikki returned the bill to Gina. “Until then, thank you, Mrs. O’Meara.”
Next, The Boulevard Men’s Shoes.
In this plush-carpeted gentlemen’s store, amid numerous mirrors and displays of highly polished, beautifully designed shoes, Gina oversaw the purchase of a new pair of shoes for Lee Roy Sears, black-leather, Italian-made, expensive—despite Sears’s faint protest that he could not afford new shoes right now, let alone shoes that cost $95.98. Gina seemed not to hear, giving instructions to the youngish salesman: “Very good, we’ll take these, they seem to fit perfectly. And—would you dispose of the old ones, please?�
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Lee Roy Sears opened his mouth to protest further, but the salesman had already tossed his old brown shoes into a shoebox and was carrying them off.
Warmly, Gina said, “Now we’re on our way!”
Outside, Lee Roy Sears limped along beside her, self-conscious in his gleaming new shoes, which contrasted so dramatically with his baggy work pants and plaid jacket; he tried to tell Gina that, with his low-paying part-time work at the Putnam Municipal Garage, and so many unexpected expenses, he didn’t know when he would be able to repay her. Gina said quickly, as if embarrassed, that there was no hurry—“Whenever you can, Lee Roy. The important thing is that you feel comfortable in the world. That, you know, you look as if you belong in the world.” She paused. She was hoping that Lee Roy Sears would understand that he need never repay the O’Mearas, but she hesitated to say so. She supposed that the parolee, for all his humility, had his pride. He might not want outright charity.
There followed then in quick succession The English Shop, Carlisle’s Clothiers, and The Esquire, where Michael O’Meara, under Gina’s expert guidance, bought most of his clothes; then they went to Henle’s, Mount Orion’s opulent department store, where virtually every salesclerk knew Gina O’Meara; then, since it was on their way to the car, The village Art & Photographics Supplies Company. Then, suddenly inspired, Gina said, “We should make appointments for you to have check-ups too—with a doctor, a dentist, maybe an optician?” and Lee Roy Sears said, “They take care of that kinda stuff in prison, Mrs. O’Meara, that’s one thing they do do,” and Gina said, skeptically, “But public health practitioners can’t be trusted, can they?”
Fortunately, it was time for lunch.
A fashionably late lunch, at two—in Mount Orion, only working men and women ate at noon, and few of these could afford typical restaurant prices. “You’ll love The Café,” Gina said, “—I go there all the time.” When Gina entered, with Lee Roy Sears in tow, quizzical glances flew in their direction from numerous tables, but, though Gina O’Meara happily acknowledged her friends and acquaintances, she made no effort to introduce her odd-looking companion to them. She asked for a table in an alcove, with a tinted glass wall and potted ferns, from which vantage point she could sip a glass of white wine and gaze into the interior of the restaurant, or out into the street, and not be seen. What bliss!
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