The Early Stories (140 page)

Joan talked to him, reasoning—a fountain of reason, unintelligible. “Talked about it for years … our children must help us … Daddy and I both want …” As the boy listened, he wadded a paper napkin into the leaves of his salad, fashioned a ball of paper and lettuce, and popped it into his mouth, looking around the table for the expected laughter. None came. Judith said, “Be mature,” and dismissed a plume of smoke.

Richard got up from this stifling table and led the boy outside. Though the house was in twilight, the outdoors still brimmed with light, the lovely waste light of high summer. Both laughing, he supervised John's spitting out the lettuce and paper and tobacco into the pachysandra. He took him by the hand—a square gritty hand, despite its softness a man's. Yet it held on. They ran together up into the field, past the tennis court. The raw banking left by the bulldozers was dotted with daisies. Past the court and a flat stretch where they used to play family baseball stood a soft green rise glorious in the sun, each weed and species of grass as distinct as illumination on parchment. “I'm sorry, so sorry,” Richard cried. “You were the only one who ever tried to help me with all the goddamn jobs around this place.”

Sobbing, safe within his tears and the champagne, John explained, “It's not just the separation, it's the whole crummy year, I
hate
that school, you can't make any friends, the history teacher's a scud.”

They sat on the crest of the rise, shaking and warm from their tears but easier in their voices, and Richard tried to focus on the child's sad year—the weekdays long with homework, the weekends spent in his room with model airplanes, while his parents murmured down below, nursing their separation. How selfish, how blind, Richard thought; his eyes felt scoured. He told his son, “We'll think about getting you transferred. Life's too short to be miserable.”

They had said what they could, but did not want the moment to heal shut, and talked on, about the school, about the tennis court, whether it would ever again be as good as it had been that first summer. They walked to inspect it and pressed a few more tapes more firmly down. A little stiltedly, perhaps trying now to make too much of the moment, Richard led the boy to the spot in the field where the view was best, of the metallic blue river, the emerald marsh, the scattered islands velvety with
shadow in the low light, the white bits of beach far away. “See,” he said. “It goes on being beautiful. It'll be here tomorrow.”

“I know,” John answered, impatiently. The moment had closed.

Back in the house, the others had opened some white wine, the champagne being drunk, and still sat at the table, the three females, gossiping. Where Joan sat had become the head. She turned, showing him a tearless face, and asked, “All right?”

“We're fine,” he said, resenting it, though relieved, that the party went on without him.

In bed she explained, “I couldn't cry I guess because I cried so much all spring. It really wasn't fair. It's your idea, and you made it look as though I was kicking you out.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I couldn't stop. I wanted to but couldn't.”

“You
didn't
want to. You loved it. You were having your way, making a general announcement.”

“I love having it over,” he admitted. “God, those kids were great. So brave and funny.” John, returned to the house, had settled to a model airplane in his room, and kept shouting down to them, “I'm O.K. No sweat.”

“And the way,” Richard went on, cozy in his relief, “they never questioned the reasons we gave. No thought of a third person. Not even Judith.”

“That
was
touching,” Joan said.

He gave her a hug. “You were great too. Very reassuring to everybody. Thank you.” Guiltily, he realized he did not feel separated.

“You still have Dickie to do,” she told him. These words set before him a black mountain in the darkness; its cold breath, its near weight affected his chest. Of the four children, his elder son was closest to his conscience. Joan did not need to add, “That's one piece of your dirty work I won't do for you.”

“I know. I'll do it. You go to sleep.”

Within minutes, her breathing slowed, became oblivious and deep. It was quarter to midnight. Dickie's train from the concert would come in at one-fourteen. Richard set the alarm for one. He had slept atrociously for weeks. But whenever he closed his lids some glimpse of the last hours scorched them—Judith exhaling toward the ceiling in a kind of aversion, Bean's mute staring, the sunstruck growth in the field where he and John had rested. The mountain before him moved closer, moved within him;
he was huge, momentous. The ache at the back of his throat felt stale. His wife slept as if slain beside him. When, exasperated by his hot lids, his crowded heart, he rose from bed and dressed, she awoke enough to turn over. He told her then, “Joan, if I could undo it all, I would.”

“Where would you begin?” she asked. There was no place. Giving him courage, she was always giving him courage. He put on shoes without socks in the dark. The children were breathing in their rooms, the downstairs was hollow. In their confusion they had left lights burning. He turned off all but one, the kitchen overhead. The car started. He had hoped it wouldn't. He met only moonlight on the road; it seemed a diaphanous companion, flickering in the leaves along the roadside, haunting his rearview mirror like a pursuer, melting under his headlights. The center of town, not quite deserted, was eerie at this hour. A young cop in uniform kept company with a gang of T-shirted kids on the steps of the bank. Across from the railroad station, several bars kept open. Customers, mostly young, passed in and out of the warm night, savoring summer's novelty. Voices shouted from cars as they passed; an immense conversation seemed in progress. Richard parked and in his weariness put his head on the passenger seat, out of the commotion and wheeling lights. It was as when, in the movies, an assassin grimly carries his mission through the jostle of a carnival—except the movies cannot show the precipitous, palpable slope you cling to within. You cannot climb back down; you can only fall. The synthetic fabric of the car seat, warmed by his cheek, confided to him an ancient, distant scent of vanilla.

A train whistle caused him to lift his head. It was on time; he had hoped it would be late. The slender drawgates descended. The bell of approach tingled happily. The great metal body, horizontally fluted, rocked to a stop, and sleepy teen-agers disembarked, his son among them. Dickie did not show surprise that his father was meeting him at this terrible hour. He sauntered to the car with two friends, both taller than he. He said “Hi” to his father and took the passenger's seat with an exhausted promptness that expressed gratitude. The friends got in the back, and Richard was grateful; a few more minutes' postponement would be won by driving them home.

He asked, “How was the concert?”

“Groovy,” one boy said from the back seat.

“It bit,” the other said.

“It was O.K.,” Dickie said, moderate by nature, so reasonable that in his childhood the unreason of the world had given him headaches, stomach
aches, nausea. When the second friend had been dropped off at his dark house, the boy blurted, “Dad, my eyes are killing me with hay fever! I'm out there cutting that mothering grass all day!”

“Do we still have those drops?”

“They didn't do any good last summer.”

“They might this.” Richard swung a U-turn on the empty street. The drive home took a few minutes. The mountain was here, in his throat. “Richard,” he said, and felt the boy, slumped and rubbing his eyes, go tense at his tone, “I didn't come to meet you just to make your life easier. I came because your mother and I have some news for you, and you're a hard man to get a hold of these days. It's sad news.”

“That's O.K.” The reassurance came out soft, but quick, as if released from the tip of a spring.

Richard had feared that his tears would return and choke him, but the boy's manliness set an example, and his voice issued forth steady and dry. “It's sad news, but it needn't be tragic news, at least for you. It should have no practical effect on your life, though it's bound to have an emotional effect. You'll work at your job, and go back to school in September. Your mother and I are really proud of what you're making of your life; we don't want that to change at all.”

“Yeah,” the boy said lightly, on the intake of his breath, holding himself up. They turned the corner; the church they erratically attended loomed like a gutted fort. The home of the woman Richard hoped to marry stood across the green. Her bedroom light burned.

“Your mother and I,” he said, “have decided to separate. For the summer. Nothing legal, no divorce yet. We want to see how it feels. For some years now, we haven't been doing enough for each other, making each other as happy as we should be. Have you sensed that?”

“No,” the boy said. It was an honest, unemotional answer: true or false in a quiz.

Glad for the factual basis, Richard pursued, even garrulously, the details. His apartment across town, his utter accessibility, the split vacation arrangements, the advantages to the children, the added mobility and variety of the summer. Dickie listened, absorbing. “Do the others know?”

“Yes.”

“How did they take it?”

“The girls pretty calmly. John flipped out; he shouted and ate a cigarette and made a salad out of his napkin and told us how much he hated school.”

His brother chuckled. “He did?”

“Yeah. The school issue was more upsetting for him than Mom and me. He seemed to feel better for having exploded.”

“He did?” The repetition was the first sign that he was stunned.

“Yes. Dickie, I want to tell you something. This last hour, waiting for your train to get in, has been about the worst of my life. I hate this.
Hate
it. My father would have died before doing it to me.” He felt immensely lighter, saying this. He had dumped the mountain on the boy. They were home. Moving swiftly as a shadow, Dickie was out of the car, through the bright kitchen. Richard called after him, “Want a glass of milk or anything?”

“No thanks.”

“Want us to call the course tomorrow and say you're too sick to work?”

“No, that's all right.” The answer was faint, delivered at the door to his room; Richard listened for the slam that went with a tantrum. The door closed normally, gently. The sound was sickening.

Joan had sunk into that first deep trough of sleep and was slow to awake. Richard had to repeat, “I told him.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing much. Could you go say good night to him? Please.”

She left their room, without putting on a bathrobe. He sluggishly changed back into his pajamas and walked down the hall. Dickie was already in bed, Joan was sitting beside him, and the boy's bedside clock radio was murmuring music. When she stood to go, an inexplicable light—the moon?—outlined her body through the nightie. Richard sat on the warm place she had indented on the boy's narrow mattress. He asked him, “Do you want the radio on like that?”

“It always is.”

“Doesn't it keep you awake? It would me.”

“No.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Sure you want to get up and go to work? You've had a big night.”

“I want to. They expect me.”

Away at school this winter he had learned for the first time that you can go short of sleep and live. As an infant he had slept with an immobile, sweating intensity that had alarmed his baby-sitters. In adolescence he had often been the first of the four children to go to bed. Even now, he
would go slack in the middle of a television show, his sprawled legs hairy and brown. “O.K. Good boy. Dickie, listen. I love you so much, I never knew how much until now. No matter how this works out, I'll always be with you. Really.”

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks embraced him and gave him a kiss, on the lips, passionate as a woman's. In his father's ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word:
“Why?”

Why
. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.

Gesturing