Are You in the House Alone? (7 page)

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?

They were a blur of crushed-velvet wrap-around coats, shades, and platform shoes. One of the guys, no bigger than I was, stepped out in front of me, cupped his hand, wiggling a finger. “Hey, momma, whatcher hurry? Want a little action? Wanna get it on? Wanna—”

I walked around him in the flow of pedestrians. He should have scared me out of my wits. But I nearly went blind with hatred instead. If he had something to prove about himself, what made him think he could use me? Did I owe him something because I was female and he was male?

It was the first time I’d thought anything like that. I wished I’d had something very sharp and very lethal in my hand. I was ready to use it, on anybody. Then suddenly I was starved. I stopped at a Chock full o’Nuts and had two cream cheese sandwiches and an orange drink.

*   *   *

I don’t know why I half expected my mother to be meeting all the trains, but I did. She wasn’t the first person I saw when I got off at the station though. The first familiar face was Valerie Cathcart’s. She was heading home down Meeting Street with an armload of books. School was just out.

Valerie’s father’s a doctor. That should put her in the middle of the best group in school, but it didn’t work that way for her. She was only half in a gang whose every other phrase was “How gross!” and even they could take her or leave her. So she worked in the school office during her free period and built a small empire as the school busybody.

When she spotted me, she broke into a gallop. It was too late to cross the street to avoid a head-on with her. “Jeez,”
Valerie said, puffing up to me, “where you been all day, Gail? Miss Roseberry in the office called your mom third period and I listened on the extension. Your mom was really grossed out. When she found out you weren’t in school, she didn’t know what to say. Then she called back in about five minutes and asked if Steve Pastorini was in school. But he was. Jeez, where’ve you been?”

I opened my mouth to tell her. But something else came blurting out. “What business is it of yours? Do I owe you an explanation for everything I do? I’m sick of living in this fishbowl, and I’m sick of rejects like you who get their kicks from listening in on extensions because you don’t have a life of your own.” We were both breathless when I could stop talking. I seemed to have a lot to say all of a sudden to pathetic Valerie, for all the good it would do.

“How gross,” she said, staring at me with her little pig eyes. “How rank. Excuse me for being alive.” Her big soft face began to crumple up, and I felt disgusted with myself only because I’d have to apologize to her. But later, not now.

For nearly a half hour after I got home, I thought I wasn’t going to get into it with my mother. I’d never skipped school in my life, and I thought the first time ought to be the occasion for some fireworks. But when I came in, only her gaze followed me up the stairs.

It was nearly time for Dad to come home before she cracked my door and actually asked if she could come in. “Want to talk about it?” she said in a neutral voice.

“I went in to New York to see Dad.”

“Oh.” She hesitated in the doorway for a moment, digesting that. “I suppose we should have told you before. But your dad didn’t want you to worry. You know how he always thinks you’re still a little girl.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I just wish you were, sometimes.”

“So do I, sometimes. Maybe that’s why I went.”

She came all the way into the room then, walking carefully to show we were going to have a conversation, not a confrontation. “It’s very hard for him—your dad.”

“Yes, I know. I understand.”

“And that’s why I’m taking this awful real-estate sales course, though I don’t suppose it’ll do much—”

“Yes, I understand that too. I wish I could say something to Dad. I don’t know what, but—”

“Oh no, honey. I wouldn’t if I were you. It would just be another burden to him if he thought you knew.”

“That’s the way we are, isn’t it? All three of us. We keep everything locked up tight inside us because . . . because one little leak might cause an explosion, and we’d all go flying apart.”

“That’s melodramatic,” Mother said, “and I don’t know what good talking would do. It wouldn’t get Neal—your dad—a job, would it? I, for one, would probably get hysterical. I’m near enough that point anyway.”

So am I
, I thought, trying to reject the idea that I was so much like my mother. “It’ll just help your dad if he thinks you’re not worrying,” she was saying. “You shouldn’t be having problems at your age.”

“Didn’t you have problems at my age?”

It was nearly dark, and she looked young, sitting on my bed with her knees pulled up under her and the crow’s feet around her eyes invisible. Usually I hated it when she came in and flopped down on my bed. But this time we were both making allowances. “Oh, I don’t know what I was like then. It seems so long ago. It
was
so long ago.”

“Mother, I’m going to go out with Steve tomorrow night,
if he’s free. You’ll be at your class, and Dad will be at his board meeting. I don’t feel like staying home alone. I don’t want to.”

She didn’t hear those last words. “Oh, Gail, not on a school night. You know how your dad feels about—”

“You’re the one who doesn’t want me going out with Steve, Mother. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

She’d wrinkled my bedspread up into a little fan of pleats, running the edge of her thumbnail down the folds. “All right, we won’t kid ourselves about that. I almost wish— I do wish we’d never moved up here. I thought it would be—an ideal environment for you. That we wouldn’t have the worry people do, raising a daughter in the city, facing all those problems.”

“Why does Steve seem like such a problem to you, Mother? He’s not a poor boy from a slum. If anybody’s poor, it’s us.”

“I hope you know how that sounded. Now maybe you can understand why I don’t want you telling your dad you know he’s out of work.”

“Is it because Steve’s from an Italian family?”

“I’m not a bigot. And I’m not—Lydia Lawver.”

“Then what is it?”

“You take the pill, don’t you, Gail.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Since last spring. Right after my birthday. I wasn’t sure I could get a prescription if I was under sixteen.”

“And you got them from Dr. Cathcart! And he didn’t inform me! I think that’s . . . unethical.”

“No, I didn’t get them from him. But I got them in a perfectly safe, legal way.”

Mother tried to smooth out the mess she’d made of the
bedspread. “I wish you wouldn’t take those pills. You know about the side effects. They’re really not sure if there aren’t links with blood clots and strokes and heart attacks and—”

“But you take them, Mother. The only difference is yours are in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and I keep mine under my scrapbook in that drawer over there where you must have found them.”

She looked away then but went on talking as if I hadn’t said anything. “Well, then if you really didn’t get them from Dr. Cathcart, who on earth did you go to?”

“The Planned Parenthood Organization. Down on Meeting Street.”

“Where? You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“But that place is for—for
married
people.”

“Not entirely. They have a youth counseling division. Mrs. Raymond who works there says it’s the biggest part of the program.”

“Now don’t start telling me
all
the girls at school are on the pill,” she snapped. “Don’t tell me since
everybody’s
on the pill,
you
have to be too. It’s not a
driver’s license
or—or—”