She saw that Cody had a sprinkling of gray in his sideburns, a more leathery look to his cheeks; but that Ruth was still a scrappy little thing in too-short hair and unbecoming dresses. She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening. In the evenings, when Cody came home from work, Ruth clattered around the kitchen cooking great quantities of country food that Cody would hardly touch; and Cody had a gin and tonic and watched the news. The two of them asked each other, “How was your day?” and “Everything fine?” but they didn’t seem to listen to the answers. Pearl could believe that in the morning, waking in their king-sized bed, they asked politely, “Did you sleep all right?” She felt oppressed and uncomfortable, but instead of averting her gaze she was for some reason compelled to delve deeper into their lives; she sent them out one night to a movie, promising to watch Luke, and then ransacked all the desk drawers but found only tax receipts, and bank statements, and a photo album belonging to the people who really lived here. Anyway, she couldn’t have said what it was she was looking for.
Coming home, jouncing on the train amid another group of soldiers, she felt weary and hopeless. She arrived in Baltimore seven hours late, with a racking headache. Then as she entered the station, she saw Ezra walking toward her in his plodding way and she felt such a stab of … well, recognition. It was Luke’s walk, solemn little Luke. Life was so sad, she thought, that she almost couldn’t bear it. But kissing Ezra, she felt her sorrow overtaken by something very like annoyance. She wondered why he put up with this, why he let things go on this way. Could it be that he took some satisfaction in his grief? (As if he were paying for something, she thought. But what would he be paying for?) In the car, he asked, “How’d you like Luke?” and she said, “Don’t you ever think of just going there and trying to get her back?”
“I couldn’t,” he said, unsurprised, and he maneuvered the car laboriously from its parking slot.
“Well, I don’t see why not,” she told him.
“It’s not right. It’s wrong.”
She wasn’t given to philosophy, but during the drive home she stared at the grimy Baltimore scenery and considered the question of right and wrong: of theoretical virtue, existing in a vacuum; of whether there was any point to it at all. When they reached home, she got out of the car and entered the house without a word, and climbed the stairs to her room.
Ezra scoops the dead bird onto a piece of cardboard and slides it into the trash bag. Then he tapes the cardboard to the broken windowpane where the bird must have entered. Pearl, meanwhile, sweeps up the shards of glass. She leaves them in a pyramid and goes downstairs for the dustpan. Already, she sees, the house has a bit more life to it—the sunny pattern of leaves shimmering on the parlor floor in front of the open door, the smell of hot grass wafting through the rooms. “It was never all that practical,” Cody said on the phone just recently, referring to the farm. “It was only a half-baked idea that I had when I was young.” But if he really meant that, why doesn’t he go on and sell? No, he couldn’t possibly; she has spent so much time sweeping this place, preparing it for him, opening and shutting bureau drawers as if she’d find his secrets there. She can imagine Ruth in this kitchen, Cody out surveying fence lines or whatever it is men do on farms. She can picture Luke running through the yard in denim overalls. He is old enough to go fishing now, to swim in the creek beyond the pasture, maybe even to tend the animals. In August, he’ll be eight. Is it eight? Or nine. She’s lost track. She hardly ever sees him, and must conquer his shyness all over again whenever he and his parents pass through Baltimore. Each visit, his interests have changed: from popguns to marbles to stamp collecting. Last time he was here, some two or three years back, she got out her husband’s stamp album—its maroon, fake-leather cover gone gray with mildew—only to find that Luke had switched to model airplanes. He was assembling a balsa wood jet, he told her, that would actually fly. And he was planning to be an astronaut. “By the time I’m grown,” he said, “astronauts will be ordinary. People will be taking rockets like you would take a bus. They’ll spend their summers on Venus. They won’t go to Ocean City; they’ll go to beaches on the moon.” “Ah,” she said, “isn’t that wonderful!” But she was too old for such things. She couldn’t keep up, and the very thought of traveling to the moon made her feel desolate.
And nowadays—well, who can guess? Luke must be involved in something entirely different. It’s so long since he was here, and she’s not sure he’ll ever be back. During that last visit, Ezra got his old pearwood recorder from the closet and showed Luke how to play a tune. Pearl knows very little about recorders, but evidently something happens—the wood dries up, or warps, or something—when they’re not played enough; and this one hadn’t been played in a decade, at least. Its voice had gone splintery and cracked. How startled she’d been, hearing three ancient notes tumble forth after such a silence! Ezra and Luke walked south on Calvert Street to buy some linseed oil. Not two minutes after they left, Cody asked where they’d got to. “Why, off to buy oil for Ezra’s recorder,” Pearl told him. “Didn’t you see them go?” Cody excused himself and went outside to pace in front of the house. Ruth stayed in the living room, discussing schools. Pearl hardly listened. She could look through the window and see Cody pacing, turning, pacing, his suit coat whipping out behind him. She could tell when Ezra and Luke returned, even before she saw them, by the way that Cody stiffened. “Where have you been?” she heard him ask. “What have you two been doing?”
Luke never did learn how to play the recorder. Cody said they had to go. “Oh, but Cody!” Pearl said. “I thought you were spending the night!”
“Wrong,” he told her. “Wrong again. I can’t stay here; this place is not safe. Don’t you see what Ezra’s up to?”
“What, Cody? What is he up to?”
“Don’t you see he’s out to steal my son?” he asked. “The same way he always stole everybody? Don’t you see?”
In the end, they left. Ezra wanted to give Luke the recorder for keeps, but Cody told Luke to leave it; he’d get him a newer one, fancier, finer. One that wasn’t all dried up, he said.
Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy, and her daughter can’t seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself, who raised these children single-handed and did make mistakes, oh, a bushel of mistakes. Still, she sometimes has the feeling that it’s simply fate, and not a matter for blame at all. She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role. Certainly she never intended to foster one of those good son/bad son arrangements, but what can you do when one son is consistently good and the other consistently bad? What can the sons do, even? “Don’t you see?” Cody had cried, and she had imagined, for an instant, that he was inviting her to look at his whole existence—his years of hurt and bafflement.
Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else’s party, she gazes wistfully at other families and wonders what their secret is. They seem so close. Is it that they’re more religious? Or stricter, or more lenient? Could it be the fact that they participate in sports? Read books together? Have some common hobby? Recently, she overheard a neighbor woman discussing her plans for Independence Day: her family was having a picnic. Every member—child or grownup—was cooking his or her specialty. Those who were too little to cook were in charge of the paper plates.
Pearl felt such a wave of longing that her knees went weak.
Ezra has finished taping the glass. Pearl drifts through the other bedrooms, checking the other windows. In the smallest bedroom, a nursery, a little old lady in a hat approaches. It’s Pearl, in the speckled mirror above a bureau. She leans closer and traces the lines around her eyes. Her age does not surprise her. She’s grown used to it by now. You’re old for so much longer than you’re young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair. And then she thinks, for no earthly reas
on, of a girl she went to school with, Linda Lou something-or-other—such a pretty, flighty girl, someone she’d always envied. In the middle of their senior year, Linda Lou disappeared. There were rumors, later confirmed—an affair with the school’s only male teacher, a married man; and a baby on the way. How horrified her classmates had been! It had thrilled them: that they actually knew such a person, had borrowed her history notes, helped her retie a loose sash, perhaps even brushed her hand accidentally—that hand that may have touched … well, who knew what. It occurs to Pearl, peering into the glass, that the baby born of that scandal must be sixty years old by now. He would have gray hair and liver spots, perhaps false teeth, bifocals, a tedious burden of a life. Yet Linda Lou, wearing white, still dances in Pearl’s mind, the prettiest girl at the senior social.
“Don’t you see?” Cody has asked, and Pearl had said, “Honey, I just can’t understand you.”
Then he shrugged, and his normal, amused expression returned to his face. “Ah, well,” he said, “I can’t either, I guess. After all, what do I care, now I’m grown? Why should it matter any more?”
She doesn’t recall if she managed any reply to that.
She steps away from the mirror. Ezra comes in, bearing the trash bag. “All finished, Mother,” he says.
“It looks a lot better, doesn’t it?”
“It looks just fine,” he tells her.
They descend the stairs, and close the door, and carry their supplies to the car. As they drive away Pearl glances back, like any good housewife checking what she’s cleaned, and it seems to her that even that buckling front porch is straighter and more solid. She has a feeling of accomplishment. Others might have given up and let the trespassers take the place over, but never Pearl. Next season she will come again, and the season after, and the season after that, and Ezra will go on bringing her—the two of them bumping down the driveway, loyal and responsible, together forever.
7
Dr. Tull Is Not a Toy
“Whoever’s the first to mention divorce has to take the children,” Jenny said. “This has kept us together more times than I can count.”
She was joking, but the priest didn’t laugh. He may have been too young to catch it. All he did was shift uncomfortably in his chair. Meanwhile the children milled around him like something bubbling, like something churning, and the baby dribbled on his shoes. He withdrew his feet imperceptibly, as if trying not to hurt the baby’s feelings.
“Yet I believe,” he said, appearing to choose his words, “that you yourself have been divorced, have you not?”
“Twice,” said Jenny. She giggled, but he only looked worried. “And once for Joe here,” she added.
Her husband smiled at her from the sofa.
“If I hadn’t had the foresight to keep my maiden name,” Jenny said, “my medical diploma would read like one of those address books where people have moved a lot. Names crossed out and added, crossed out and added—a mess! Dr. Jenny Marie Tull Baines Wiley St. Ambrose.”
The priest was one of those very blond men with glasslike hair, and his color was so high that Jenny wondered about his blood pressure. Or maybe he was just embarrassed. “Well,” he said. “Mrs., um—or Dr.—”
“Tull.”
“Dr. Tull, I only thought that the … instability, the lack of stability, might be causing Slevin’s problems. The turnover in fathers, you might say.”
“In fathers? What are you talking about?” Jenny asked. “Slevin’s not my son. He’s Joe’s.”
“Ah?”
“Joe is his father and always has been.”
“Oh, excuse me,” said the priest.
He grew even pinker—as well he ought, Jenny felt; for slow, plump Slevin with his ashy hair was obviously Joe’s. Jenny was small and dark; Joe a massive, blond, bearded bear of a man with Slevin’s slanted blue eyes. (She had often felt drawn to overweight men. They made her feel tidy.) “Slevin,” she told the priest, “is Joe’s by Greta, his previous wife, and so are most of the others you see here. All except for Becky; Becky’s mine. The other six are his.” She bent to take the dog’s bone from the baby. “Anyway … but Joe’s wife, Greta: she left.”
“Left,” said the priest.
“Left me flat,” Joe said cheerfully. “Cleared clean out of Baltimore. Parked the kids with a neighbor one day, while I was off at work. Hired an Allied van and departed with all we owned, everything but the children’s clothes in neat little piles on the floor.”
“Oh, my stars,” said the priest.
“Even took their beds. Can you explain that? Took the crib and the changing table. Only thing I can figure, she was so used to life with children that she really couldn’t imagine; really assumed she would need a crib no matter where she went. First thing I had to do when I got home that night was go out and buy a fleet of beds from Sears. They must’ve thought I was opening a motel.”
“Picture it,” Jenny said. “Joe in an apron. Joe mixing Similac. Well, he was lost, of course. Utterly lost. The way we met: he called me at home in the dead of night when his baby got roseola. That’s how out of touch he was; it’s been twenty years at least since pediatricians made house calls. But I came, I don’t know why. Well, he lived only two blocks away. And he was so desperate—answered the door in striped pajamas, jiggling the baby—”
“I fell in love with her the moment she walked in,” said Joe. He stroked his beard; golden frizz flew up around his stubby fingers.
“He thought I was Lady Bountiful,” Jenny said, “bearing a medical bag instead of a basket of food. It’s hard to resist a man who needs you.”
“Need had nothing to do with it,” Joe told her.
“Well, who admires you, then. He asked if I had children of my own, and how I managed while I worked. And when I said I mostly played it by ear, with teen-aged sitters one minute and elderly ladies the next, my mother filling in when she could or my brother or a neighbor, or Becky sometimes just camping in my waiting room with her math assignment—”
“I could see she wasn’t a skimpy woman,” Joe told the priest. “Not rigid. Not constricted. Not that super-serious kind.”
“No,” said the priest, glancing around him. (It hadn’t been a day when Jenny could get to the housework.)
Jenny said, “He said he liked the way I let his children crawl all over me. He said his wife had found them irritating, the last few years. Well, you see how it began. I had promised myself I’d never remarry, Becky and I would rather manage on our own, that’s what I was best at; but I don’t know, there Joe was, and his children. And his baby was so little and so recently abandoned that she turned her head and opened her mouth when I held her horizontal; you could tell she still remembered. Anyway,” she said, and she smiled at the priest, who really was shockingly young—a wide-eyed boy, was all. “How did we get on this subject?”
“Uh, Slevin,” said the priest. “We were discussing Slevin.”
“Oh, yes, Slevin.”
It was a rainy, blowy April afternoon, with the trees turning inside out and beating against the windowpanes, and the living room had reached just that shade of dusk where no one had realized, quite yet, that it was time to switch on the lights. The air seemed thick and grainy. The children were winding down like little clocks and fussing for their suppers; but the priest, lacking children of his own, failed to notice this. He leaned forward, setting his fingertips together. “I’ve been concerned,” he said, “by Slevin’s behavior at C.Y.O. meetings. He’s not sociable at all, has no friends, seems moody, withdrawn. Of course it could be his age, but … he’s fourteen, is he?”
“Thirteen,” said Joe, after thinking it over.
“Thirteen years old, naturally a difficult … I wouldn’t even mention it, except that when I suggested we have a talk he just wrenched away and ran out, and never returned. Now we notice that you, Mr. St. Ambrose, that you drop him off for mass every Sunday, but in fact he’s stopped coming inside and simply sits out front on the steps and wat
ches the traffic. He’s, you might say, playing hooky, but—”
“Shoot,” said Joe. “I get up specially on a Sunday morning to drive him there and he plays hooky?”
“But my point is—”
“I don’t know why he wants to go anyhow. He’s the only one of them that does.”
“But it’s his withdrawn behavior that worries me,” the priest said, “more than his church attendance. Though it might not be a bad idea if, perhaps, you accompanied him to mass sometime.”
“Me? Hell, I’m not even Catholic.”
“Or I don’t suppose you, Dr. Tull …”
Both men seemed to be waiting for her. Jenny was wondering about the baby’s diaper, which bulged suspiciously, but she gathered her thoughts and said, “Oh, no, goodness, I really wouldn’t have the faintest—” She laughed, covering her mouth—a gesture she had. “Besides,” she said, “it was Greta who was the Catholic. Slevin’s mother.”
“I see. Well, the important thing—”
“I don’t know why Slevin goes to church. And to Greta’s church, her old one, clear across town.”
“Does he communicate with his mother now?”
“Oh, no, she’s never been back. Got a quickie divorce in Idaho and that’s the last we heard.”
“Are there any, ah, step-family problems?”
“Step-family?” Jenny said. “Well, no. Or yes. I don’t know. There would be, probably; of course these things are never easy … only life is so rushed around here, there really isn’t time.”
“Slevin is very fond of Jenny,” Joe told the priest.
“Why, thank you, honey,” Jenny said.
“She won him right over; she’s got him trailing after her anyplace she goes. She’s so cool and jokey with kids, you know.”
“Well, I try,” Jenny said. “I do make an effort. But you never can be sure. That age is very secretive.”
“Perhaps I’ll suggest that he stop by and visit me,” the priest said.