“No,” said John, “it’s got these snap rolls to get rid of the stalks and the leaves. Then the ears go through the cylinder, and out come the kernels. You got good bins, you can let the kernels dry out right on the farm.”
“What would we do all winter, then?” said Joe.
Before John could answer, Gary said, “Fix the combine.”
They kicked off their boots, took off their jackets, stomped around, and brushed themselves down. Even though not much in the way of dust was rubbed away, they were only going into the kitchen. Lois wouldn’t complain about that. As soon as they were inside and pulling out their chairs, she started taking dishes out of the oven. First came the green beans, then the roast potatoes and carrots, then the rib roast. This extremely appetizing piece of beef was from one of John’s steers—he still kept five or six head in the hillside pasture he had up there, not a slope he wanted to plow, up, down, or sideways.
Joe said, “Where’re the kids?”
“Jesse’s napping, and Minnie took Annie into Usherton for the afternoon. I think she is taking her to a matinee of some movie about a squirrel.”
Joe said, “I hope it doesn’t scare her to death.”
But, really, what was the use of talking, when there was all this food to eat? He, John, and Gary dove in.
Joe said, “Granny Mary loves Burt Lancaster. She says he reminds her of a boy she once knew.”
Gary stared at him. Joe shrugged. Gary was twenty now. He was the only one of John’s three to stay on the farm—and why wouldn’t he? With John, they all farmed seven hundred acres between them, and no other relative—not Frank or Henry or Buddy or Jimmy or Kurt—had the slightest interest. Even Gary was iffy—he talked sometimes about joining the army. But someday he could have this, if he wanted it.
Lois sat in her chair with her elbow on the table and a smile on her face. In the summer, she’d won the pie contest at the county fair for the second year in a row. Dave Crest found some old variety of apples called Spitzenbergs, and she made a pie layering thin slices of those with blueberries. But when she was trying out her recipe (ten pies altogether), she ate just a sliver of each. Joe knew Lois didn’t love him anymore, and probably his love of her had flowered and faded, too, something not deeply rooted or lasting, like his old love of Minnie, but they all got along; on a farm, practicality ruled.
Love was for the children—Lois was especially good at that. She was responsible and affectionate, and she had a remarkable way of teaching them things. When she had to tell them something, she squatted down, took hold of a little hand, and looked the child in the eye. Then she explained, and they nodded, and they really did understand. How many times when he was a kid had Joe himself sworn up and down that he understood, just to get Walter or Rosanna to go away and leave him alone? How many times had he seen Frank nod agreement, flash his brilliant smile, and then go right back to making trouble once Walter was out of hearing? Joe let the kids crawl all over him, and he carried them on his shoulders, and he bounced Jesse on his knee. He mimicked animal sounds and bird sounds for them. When he told Lois how Lillian had once read books to Claire while Joe made the animal noises in the background, Lois loved that anecdote, so they tried it, and their kids loved it, too. He wasn’t a good disciplinarian, but Minnie’s expressed opinion was that strict fathers were too scary for small children. If there was spanking to be done, well, Aunt Minnie could do it, and Joe could stand in the background, frowning and shaking his head, and then Mommy Lois could hand out a cookie afterward and sit with the child, petting Poppy. Minnie had lots of opinions about kids and their families, as well she should, given the parade of kids through her office every school year.
Between them, Joe, John, and Gary ate almost everything on the table, and then John pretended to need Gary to pull him out of his chair. Joe said, “Say, John, what did you feed that steer? Meat’s delicious!”
“Clover all up and down that slope.”
Nat and Poppy were sitting on the back porch when they came out, and full of burrs. Joe would have some brushing to do that evening, and probably there were ticks on the dogs, too, if they’d been in the burrs. In front of him, John said something that floated away in the wind. Joe smiled. Yes, he was. He was a happy man.
1958
WHEN HIS DAD and his mom were going back and forth all winter about whether to move out of D.C. and if so where to go, Tim was against it. He had a group of friends, and he was the boss of those six guys, who ran with him on the playground and roamed with him in the neighborhood. Three streets in any direction, there were stores, parks, playgrounds, anything you wanted. But it was also true that, if he was going to get rid of Dean and all his crap, then they needed a bigger house. Somehow, no one was in favor of Tim’s preferred plan, putting Dean and his stuff in the cellar, or his alternate plan, taking over the cellar himself. You got out of the cellar by going up a few steps and pushing open a metal door, and there you were in the side yard. That was a possibility until he and Brad Widger laid some boards around the floor of the cellar and then ran a line of DuPont Cement along the boards to a cherry bomb inside a tin can (he had poked a hole in the side of the can for the fuse to stick out of). When the bomb exploded, the bang was pretty loud. Debbie, who was reading on the couch, said that she was lifted into the air, and Mom almost fainted, because she knew that Tim and Brad were in the cellar, and she thought the furnace had exploded. The tin can had gone up the stairs, bounced against the door, and unraveled along its seams. Mr. Widger whipped Brad with his belt, and Dad had made Tim clean the walls of the cellar with a scrub brush.
All of a sudden they found the perfect place—open house on Sunday, purchase agreement on Monday, then moving in two weeks later, March 1. It was expensive—forty thousand dollars (though Mom and Dad didn’t know that he leafed through the papers on Dad’s desk one day and discovered that). He also knew, from listening to them whispering in the kitchen, that Colonel Grandfather Manning Sir had left just about that amount in his will. The new house was on five acres, all on one floor, and had six doors to the outside, any of which Tim could get out of anytime, day or night, that he cared to.
He remained grumpy. There were only twenty kids in his new sixth-grade class, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the junior high was small, too—forty kids in that class. He felt stuck in the middle of nowhere. Until he met the Sloans.
Steve and Stanley were the oldest of eight. Steve was three months older than Tim, and Stanley was ten months younger. The Sloans knew the entire area like the back of their hand (or hands). Their dad was an electrician. Electricity was interesting, and by smiling at Mr. Sloan and paying attention, Tim got himself taken along when the Sloan boys had to work Saturdays, which was fine with everyone at home—Dad thought he was learning something practical, Mom thought he was making new friends, Debbie thought he was not pestering her, Dean thought he was not tormenting him, and who knew what Tina thought; she was always staring at him with her thumb in her mouth, even when it was painted red with iodine.
The Sloan boys were not exactly troublemakers, but that was because the Sloan parents’ definition of trouble was a narrow one. Roaming far and wide, catching a fish or two, stealing strawberries or raspberries, swimming in the creek, swinging on branches back and forth across the creek—none of these activities were considered troublemaking. If there was a surplus of something, you could have some even if it didn’t quite belong to you.
On their bikes, it took Tim, Steve, and Stanley about fifteen minutes to get to the new development, a string of one-acre lots where some contractors were building big houses. The house and the barn were way up a hill behind these lots; Steve said the people in that house sold the land because they were old and running out of money. All the lots fronted on Quantock Road, formerly dirt, now paved. A street went up the hill between the fifth lot and the sixth lot. This was a new street, called “Harkaway Street.” There was a pond up by the old house, and a little creek ran from it down Harkaway Street and in
to a big pipe, carrying the water past Quantock Road, where it went back into the regular creek bed and down the valley. The pipe was fun to play in. Steve said that if you were in the pipe and there was a sudden flash flood, it would carry you out of the pipe in less than ten seconds, so it would be fun and not dangerous. Stanley said that this had never actually happened.
The other interesting thing about Harkaway Street was that big kids in cars parked there with their girlfriends and made out—sometimes, according to Steve, all night.
It was a Friday, after supper, not even very dark. Tim had eaten and then eased out the back door and found Steve and Stanley, who were on their own because their parents had taken all the other kids to see Old Yeller. Steve and Stanley had noticed a Thunderbird up there, facing into the valley, top down, lights off. Tim didn’t know what they were going to do, but Steve and Stanley did. They rode their bikes past Harkaway Road to where the house was almost finished being built on the eighth lot. They left their bikes behind the house, then walked back to the corner of Quantock and Harkaway, went down the bank, and into the pipe. The pipe was dark, but Steve had a flashlight. They followed the pipe almost to the end, and when they got to the iron ladder built into the pipe, Stanley climbed it. He was so far above them that Tim couldn’t see his feet, but Steve then climbed up three rungs. He braced himself against the rungs; way at the top, Tim could see a sliver of light where Stanley had pushed open the manhole cover.
Now there was a flash of a match when Steve lit a cherry bomb, which he passed carefully to Stanley, who tossed it or rolled it under the Thunderbird. Then he let down the manhole cover and he and Steve climbed down the ladder. Tim heard the bang of the cherry bomb going off. Then there was a faint scream, and after a few minutes, the Thunderbird roared away. Steve, Stanley, and Tim could not stop laughing. “We did it at midnight a few weeks ago,” said Steve. “Those guys were really surprised.”
“Why doesn’t it blow the car up?” said Tim.
Steve said, “Just doesn’t. A blockbuster might. We got a couple of those, but we just use cherry bombs for this, because they roll.”
When he sneaked back in the house later, his dad was in the kitchen. He spun around when Tim came in from the back, and said, “What are you doing? I thought you were in your room!”
Tim said, “I was getting a Coke in the garage,” and Dad said, “So where is it?” and Tim realized that he should actually have a Coke in his hand if that was his excuse, but he said, “I changed my mind.”
Dad stared at him, but let it pass.
Then Debbie came into the kitchen and said, “He was out on his bike. He’s been out on his bike for an hour.”
Dad said, “Were you lying to me?”
And Tim said, “No, because you didn’t ask me if I was out on my bike, you asked me what I was doing.”
And then Dad did the thing he always did, which was to laugh, and Debbie said, “He goes out on his bike at night a lot.”
And Dad said, “Maybe that’s my business rather than yours, young lady.”
Debbie set her bowl, which had greasy unpopped popcorn kernels in the bottom, in the kitchen sink, then turned on the water, elaborately washed and dried it, and wiped down the sink. Tim knew she was doing this to him, showing off. She often informed Mom that things were out of control, and Mom always said, “Goodness, you are just like your grandmother, right down to the ground.”
Tim said, “Hey, Dad. Did you hear the one about the two morons who were building a house?”
His dad smiled.
Tim said, “So—the one moron, he would take a nail out of his pocket and look at it, then sometimes he would nail it to the house, and sometimes he would throw it away. So the other moron says, ‘Hey, you moron! Why are you throwing away all those nails?’
“ ‘Because, you moron, they point the wrong direction!’
“And the second moron starts laughing and laughing, and says, ‘What a moron you are! The ones that point the wrong direction go on the other side of the house!’ ”
His dad laughed and ruffled his hair. They walked toward the TV room, and his dad said, “Stay in at night, Tim, okay?”
But Tim knew that he didn’t really mean it.
—
LILLIAN FELT THAT she had the place pretty well organized. What had it taken, two months? The living room, which was off limits for the kids, had beige wall-to-wall, pale-green armchairs, a pinkish sofa, and their Chinese prints from the old house. The family room had sturdy rattan furniture, and sort of an oceanic air—it faced right onto the swimming pool; since it was May and hot, the sliding glass door was always open, and towels and face masks and snorkels dribbled in, along with trails of pool water. Tina had spent three months—from the first day they knew they would be moving here—learning to swim at the Y. Lillian had been so nervous that she checked the gates to the pool area twenty times a day, but now Tina was swimming—well, dog-paddling—all the way across the width of the pool, and Lillian was no longer waking up nightly (in their own pale-gold bedroom with pale-olive drapes) listening for tiny splashes.
The new kitchen was big; Lillian bought a range and a new refrigerator. There were two windows in the kitchen that looked out onto the pool, so she could cook, talk on the phone, wash up, and still see everything. She had given up on supervising Timmy—he was out of the house and gone before breakfast. Debbie had a sixth sense of what trouble he was into and always reported, so she let herself rely on that. Deanie, for all his size and hockey ability, was just as happy reading a book (so like Arthur!)—she didn’t worry about him. And Tina was a cautious child; the kindergarten teacher reported that she watched the other children and did what they did, which was not surprising in a fourth-born.
If there was someone to be worried about, Lillian knew that it wasn’t herself—she was as pleased with the new house and the new neighborhood as she had thought she would be the first time they went through the place. But the new house was closer to Arthur’s office, and no matter how secretive he had been at first about the address, colleagues from the office had begun to stop by for a drink on their way home and keep on talking about business. Five acres in the country and a child-free overstuffed living room were perfect for quietly deploring this and that subversion, coup, mistake, and then falling silent if anyone (like Lillian herself) came into the room.
There were five of them, most of the time—Arthur, Larry, Burt, Jack, and Finn. They entered through the front door and went to the liquor cabinet and helped themselves. Lillian, who was the one who stocked the liquor cabinet, noted they they liked Grant’s Stand Fast the best, though the levels of the Gilbey’s and the Noilly Prat steadily diminished also. Arthur’s business was full of partiers; for one thing, most of them knew each other from Yale or St. Paul’s. Lillian had been to her share of parties, given her share of parties, and she got along with the Vassar girls well enough (though, while she was navigating this world, the ups and downs of North Usherton High School were never far from her mind). But these get-togethers were not parties. All through Spring Training they talked about baseball, and Arthur pretended to be a Braves fan, but when they were talking about the office, there were a lot of long faces and meditative sips. Lillian came to understand that the days they gathered in her living room were bad days. Arthur told her almost nothing about why they were bad days.
Arthur got everyone out by seven, and he was good about sitting at the dinner table and asking the kids what they had been doing all day, but on the bad days, he just pushed his food around on his plate, even if it was sirloin steak, his favorite. Then, after he had joked with Timmy, listened to Debbie tell him everything she had done (by the minute, it seemed), spoken some French with Dean, and asked Tina about words that started with “b” or “t” or “n,” he would get up, veer ever closer to his office, then, finally, close himself in there while she did the dishes and watched TV and put the kids to bed. He reserved his one hour’s worth of high spirits for the dinner table.
She went to a kaffeeklatsch on Thursdays, after dropping Tina at her three-day-per-week nursery school—seven women who lived in the area and who were friendly and sociable. Lillian said nothing about Arthur, but what they said about their own husbands made her ears burn: everything from how hairy they were to how one of them picked his teeth at the dinner table and then threw the toothpick over his shoulder for the wife to find. Black eyes were discussed, and grabbed wrists, and yelling in front of the children. The three women who seemed happily married preened a bit. They complained about opportunities they had missed to work for a newspaper, or sing on Broadway (Really? thought Lillian—Rosanna would have called this woman “about as attractive as a shoe, if you ask me”). One of them swore that Ann Landers said that if you walked by your husband’s trousers hanging over a chair, and you bumped into them and his wallet fell out, then you could pick it up and remove necessary funds if you had to. Another woman said that her husband never stooped to pick up his change—he just left it on the floor of the closet. Ten or twelve dollars a week, it came to.
The day after Arthur had seemed especially blue, one woman said that she suspected her husband of stepping out on her, because he “had to work late” three Fridays in a row. She plied him with drink until he passed out on the couch, prodded him into bed, and then, when he was sound asleep and comfortable, stroked his forehead and whispered questions into his ear. He had come up with several endearments, and a name, “Liza,” and then she had whispered over and over, “Liza who, Liza who?” Liza Rakoff! Lo and behold, there was a secretary at his office, Elizabeth Rakoff, and when confronted, he admitted that he had taken her out and was attracted to her, but he swore he hadn’t gone to bed with her. He was in the doghouse now.