The Evening Star (17 page)

“Oh, fuck you,” Jane said. “Do you think I’m going to sit
here and practice the Socratic method with a two-year-old? Anyway, I’m sick of the Socratic method, and the reason I’m sick of it is because it’s the only method you know.”

“I don’t think I practice the Socratic method, particularly,” Teddy said. “I just don’t believe in spanking kids. Do you really think swatting him on the behind is going to make him respect our Sanskrit grammar?”

Jane didn’t say anything. She was wishing, just for a moment, that she had a different mate. She always thought of Teddy as a mate, not a husband. A mate was easier to get rid of, but harder to replace. She thought again of the Cajun, who, for all his obtuseness, had an attractive smile. There would have been no problem about the Socratic method with him—he had clearly been a disciple of the Warren Beatty method.

“What’s wrong with you?” Teddy asked. “You came in looking annoyed, and now you’ve spanked our child.”

“I’m tired of your concern, Teddy,” Jane said. “Mind your own business.”

“Well, but Bump
is
part of my business,” Teddy pointed out.

“Look, I was spanked, and I didn’t turn into a murderer,” Jane said. “How many Sanskrit grammars do you propose to let him ruin before you put a stop to it? You know perfectly well he just does it because he doesn’t want us to study. He wants all our attention, and he can’t have it.

“When I want to study Sanskrit, my child is not going to stop me,” she added. “I don’t want him to be one of those children who has total control of his parents.”

“I still don’t think it’s a good idea for parents to hit children,” Teddy said, feeling a little sad. He wasn’t going to win the argument, and for an old reason: Jane might not have more conviction than he did, but she had more emotional energy to put behind whatever conviction she was pressing at a given moment. He could hear Bump in the closet, beating a shoe against the floor. He hadn’t really been hurt, or even particularly scared, and the two splats Jane had given him on his bottom probably hadn’t even registered with him
—they bore no comparison to the stinging spankings Teddy’s father had given him when he had been five or six. His father had spanked him as if he had been responsible for everything bad: his mother’s death, the Vietnam war, you name it; and, if anything, the spankings Tommy got were even worse. Teddy remembered the spankings as a vague but ominous turning point, though, in talking to many shrinks, he had never been able to define the nature of the turning to his own satisfaction. Mainly, it was at that point that life became frightening, and it had continued to be frightening ever since.

“I just don’t want him to be scared of us,” Teddy said, seeing that Jane was still looking at him angrily. “Besides, I’m the one who caught him red-handed.”

“Right, and you should have spanked him on the spot, only you didn’t,” Jane said. “You left the dirty work to me.”

“Do you think he knows you spanked him because of the book?” Teddy asked.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Jane said. “Are you ever going to learn just to let things happen and be over?”

“Not when it involves justice,” Teddy said. “I’d like for Bump to know he’s been treated justly, that’s all.”

At that moment the doorbell rang. Bump crawled out of the closet and ran to the door—he loved to answer the doorbell. He peered through the bamboo screen that hung on the door and saw his Big Granny and Rosie standing on the steps.

“Oh, gosh,” Teddy said. “I forgot that Granny said she and Rosie might drop by.”

Jane went to the door and let the two women in. Aurora swooped Bump up and gave him many kisses before passing him to Rosie, who did the same. Aurora noticed tear tracks on the little boy’s face.

“Has he been laughing so hard he cried, or is it the other way around?” Aurora asked.

“I spanked him,” Jane said. “Teddy doesn’t approve. You two look experienced—what do you think?”

“What was the crime?” Aurora inquired, fanning herself—the
air conditioner on her old car had chosen a bad moment to stop cooling. She noticed that Teddy looked somewhat on the defensive. It was her instinct to side with her own whenever possible, and Teddy was her own, but common sense had not exactly been his strong point; frequently, in matters of domestic judgment, she found that she was more likely to agree with Jane.

“He drowned our Sanskrit grammar for the second time in a month,” Jane reported. “He hates for us to study.”

Bump, noticing that his mother was no longer breathing like a beast, reached out his arms to her and was taken back.

Teddy felt relieved and a little silly.

“Well, I was a jealous child myself,” Aurora said. “I didn’t like for my mother to play the piano, although she played it beautifully. Still, I suppose I felt I was even more beautiful. I used to stick pencils between the keys. So I’m afraid Jonathan comes by his jealousies honestly. It’s this business of genes.”

“Shoot, if I hadn’t spanked mine, they’d have been in jail before they started kindergarten,” Rosie said. “I spanked and I spanked. I doubt I’d ever spank this little boy here, though. He’s too full of sugar.”

“Maybe I overreacted,” Teddy admitted. He was glad his grandmother and Rosie had arrived when they did. Jane had stopped being angry.

Aurora watched Jonathan making up with his tall, beautiful mother in the middle of the small apartment that always seemed to be a trifle too orderly. She wondered if the bedroom was too orderly too—perhaps one reason the door to it was always shut when she came was that it was a total mess. She rather hoped it was a total mess, as her own bedroom often was. She never felt quite comfortable in Jane’s and Teddy’s apartment because some element of orderliness put her slightly off balance.

The decor was simple—just an old couch she had given them, a plain table they had bought at a garage sale, a good if well-worn rug they had brought back from a trip to Afghanistan, and bookshelves filled with books—and she could
never quite figure out why the place put her off balance. Perhaps it was because in the simplicity there was too much of a suggestion of restraint—and restraint was a quality she had never been drawn to, although she was brought up around Yale, where there was plenty of it.

“How about some iced tea?” Jane asked. “You two look a little overheated.”

“We accept, or at least I do,” Aurora said. “My car has betrayed me again, just as Rosie predicted it would.”

“I’m still trying to talk her into a Datsun pickup, but I ain’t making no headway,” Rosie said.

It disturbed Aurora to note that Teddy had a slight case of tremors. He appeared to be calm, but if one looked closely one could see that his hands were shaking just the slightest bit. She noticed it when Jane brought the iced tea and Teddy reached for his glass.

Bump, more curious about his Big Granny than he was about Rosie, walked over and showed her a block he had with four Greek letters on it. Rosie he felt no hesitation with—he was sure of Rosie’s approval—but Big Granny was not someone he felt he could be quite sure of. He offered her the block with some diffidence—if she wasn’t interested, she didn’t have to take it.

“You should be talking, young man,” Aurora said, accepting the block and pretending to study it closely. “Carrying around a block with Greek letters on it is all very well for a one-year-old, but you are no longer a one-year old. I do think it’s time you faced up to your conversational responsibilities.”

Bump looked to his mother for guidance. His Big Granny was a lot of fun and could blow amazing bubbles out of a magic jar she kept in her bathroom, but there were times when he didn’t know quite what to make of her. She always talked to him as if he were a Big himself, when it was obvious that he wasn’t. He was just a Little. Sometimes his father also talked to him as if he were a Big, but his father never kept it up for long. His father would soon drop back into tones the Bigs customarily used when they talked to little people—tones
Bump preferred. His mother spoke to him in those tones too, except when she was angry and became a beast.

But Big Granny had old eyes, and old eyes were different from the eyes of his parents. Big Granny’s eyes seemed to look all inside him, even when she was being playful. Often when she looked at him, Bump felt like hiding in the closet, and sometimes he did hide in the closet, although he liked Big Granny, mostly. He particularly enjoyed visits to her bedroom, when she would bring out the magic bubble jar, and also let him bounce on her bed. The old Big that lived in Big Granny’s bedroom didn’t approve of Bump’s bouncing, but Big Granny ignored him and went on blowing bubbles or talking on the phone. Bump was allowed to bounce until he wore himself out.

“It will serve you right if this child starts speaking Greek,” Aurora said, handing Bump back his block.

“You never gave us your views on spanking,” Jane pointed out. “Do you think it will ruin Jonathan if I whop him on the butt once in a while?”

“Of course not,” Aurora said. “Hasty spankings have little effect on the child, but they often make parents feel better. There’s nothing wrong with it—parents often need
some
way to feel better.”

Aurora watched the beautiful little boy wandering around the room and wondered at her own lack of real interest in him. Somehow she felt she had failed to connect where Jonathan was concerned. Obviously he was a bright child; Aurora liked best the cunning looks he fixed on adults when he thought adults weren’t looking. He was trying to figure out what life involved—the task all children had set for them—and he seemed already to have concluded that his mother was stronger than his father. It was also clear that he had developed an act designed to soften his mother when he felt she needed softening.

What disturbed Aurora slightly, watching Jonathan wander around, was that she felt no urge to grab the child and bind him to her. She felt no need to tilt or choose in the little quarrels that arose between Teddy and Jane, over spanking
versus not spanking, toilet training, or any of the other issues young parents had to grapple with. For the first time in her life as a parent or a grandparent, she felt destined to be a spectator. Jonathan was the third generation—perhaps the third generation was simply beyond her. Maybe she had simply run out of gas, emotionally, in the way that her car had, two days previously, right on a freeway. Maybe she had no gas for Jonathan—but what did that
mean?
He was certainly a beautiful child, and she had never been immune to good looks, but in Jonathan’s case, she felt a little bit So what? So what? was not the attitude she was accustomed to feeling about members of her family.

“I doubt I shall be a distinguished great-grandmother,” she reflected a little later, as Rosie was driving her home.

“Who asked you to be?” Rosie asked. The sun was bright, the traffic fierce. With no air conditioner to cool her, she felt in no mood to listen to Aurora feel sorry for herself.

“No one asked me to be—are you going to be impolite?” Aurora said, pricked by the note of impatience in Rosie’s voice.

“Great-grandkids are a little too far down the ladder,” Rosie observed. She had three herself but rarely saw them.

“That is exactly as I would have put it, had you given me the opportunity,” Aurora said. “They’re a little too far down the ladder. Still, I never thought I’d be so indifferent to a direct descendant. Who do you suppose bosses in that household, Teddy or Jane?”

“Jane,” Rosie said. “Teddy wasn’t designed to be no boss.”

“Did you know I lost a son?” Aurora asked, holding her straw hat out the window and trying to direct some of the air flow onto her sweaty face and even sweatier bosom.

Rosie was inching up to the light at Buffalo Speedway and missed the question. She was considering a criticism her beau C.C. had leveled at her that morning, which was that she made too many suggestions. What she was wondering was whether he meant it generally or if he meant something more specific. Did he resent her telling him which muffler shop to use, or did he resent her making suggestions designed
to slow him down a bit when they made love, on the ever more rare occasions when they
did
make love?

Aurora saw that Rosie had not heard her. She sighed and decided not to repeat herself. She had been foolish to say it, anyway; if they discussed it, she’d cry, and what could be more pointless than a sweaty old woman sobbing at a stoplight, over a miscarriage that had occurred so many years before.

Rosie finally turned the corner, and soon they were shaded by the great trees of River Oaks. Five seconds later, as if in response to the shade, Rosie’s brain coughed up Aurora’s remark. Looking over, she saw that Aurora was straining in the way she strained when she was trying to hold back tears. Rosie immediately reached for her hand.

“I’m sorry, hon, I was thinking of my own problems,” she said. “Was it that miscarriage you had when you and Rud had the car wreck coming back from Galveston? Wasn’t you about five months?”

“Five months . . . a little boy,” Aurora gasped. “He would have been Emma’s brother. He might have looked rather like Jonathan. I suppose that’s what made me think of it. I dreamed about him for years. I even dreamed he graduated from Yale.”

With a great effort, she got control of herself; she didn’t cry. Soon they turned into her driveway and stopped. Rosie began the slow business of aligning the car with the garage.

“Perhaps I wouldn’t have lost him if they had had seat belts then,” Aurora said, quite illogically, since her seat belt, as usual, was unbuckled. Nonetheless, the thought held some slight comfort. She blew her nose.

“Hon, that was quite a while before seat belts got thought up,” Rosie said, as they slid into the deep shade of the garage.

“I know, but Rud would have made me wear one if they had been thought up,” Aurora said. “Rud was always careful that way.”

15

“Uh-oh, do you see what I see?” Rosie asked. They had just emerged from the garage. Aurora was putting on her dark glasses for the brief walk to the house, but Rosie didn’t need dark glasses to see what she saw.