Jiggs stood up in his one striped sock and shook hands. He was always a dignified child, even naked, and looked like a kindly little old man in his stodgy glasses. I was proud to show him off. But Amos gave him a puzzled stare and said, “Jiggs?”
Then Dr. Sisk rose too, jarring the table, and leaned across the scrambled eggs to offer one freckled, webby hand. “Arthur Sisk,” he said. “From the mourners’ bench.”
“Mourners’ bench,” said Amos, still waiting.
“I was contemplating suicide. Preacher up and offered me an alternative solution.”
“Have some more eggs,” I told Dr. Sisk.
“No thank you, darlin’, maybe later,” he said. He turned back to Amos. “Life was getting me down. Grinding on so. The tedium! I’m a G.P. All those infants with upper respiratory infections, Vicks VapoRub smeared on their chests. Stethoscope goes ‘Sppk!’ when you pull it away. I thought of suicide.”
“Is that so,” said Amos.
“Preacher talked me out of it. Recommended I give my life to Christ, instead. Well, I liked the way he put it. I mean, just to hand my life over. Isn’t that true, my dear,” he said to me.
“Well,” I said, “but you still have income tax and license renewals.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Still have bank statements and dental appointments and erroneous bills,” I said. “If it were all that easy, don’t you think I’d long ago have handed my life over?”
Dr. Sisk sat down and started pulling at his nose.
“Help yourself to some eggs,” I told Amos.
“What?” Amos said. “Oh … no, really I …”
“Saul is paying a hospital visit, he ought to be back before long.”
“Well, do … I mean, funny, I thought it was a daughter you had,” Amos said. He took a handful of his hair. “Didn’t you send me a birth announcement? Daughter named Catherine.”
“Oh yes, that would be Selinda,” I said. “She’s already left for school.”
“Selinda.”
“This is Jiggs.”
“I see. Jiggs,” said Amos. He let go of his hair but continued looking confused.
Then Jiggs seemed to feel he had to stand up all over again, flashing white moons off his fingerprinted spectacles. “Jiggs, please,” I said. “In fifteen minutes you have to be ready to leave. Would you like some coffee, Amos?”
“No, thanks, I stopped for breakfast in Holgate.”
“Well, come and sit in the living room,” I said, and I led him down the hall, untying my apron as I went. “I hope you don’t mind the mess. It’s still a little early in the day.”
There was a mess, but nothing that would clear up as the day went on. Some guests can make you see these things. I had never realized, for instance, how very much dollhouse furniture Linus had produced in the last few years. People kept offering to buy it from him for fabulous amounts, but he wouldn’t sell. It was all for me, he said. Now on every tabletop there were other tables, two inches high. Also breakfronts, cupboards, and bureaus, as well as couches upholstered in velvet and dining room chairs with needlepoint seats. And each tiny surface bore its own accessories: lamps with toothpaste-cap shades, books made from snippets of magazine bindings, and single wooden beads containing arrangements of dried baby’s breath. Entire roomfuls were grouped beneath the desk and under the piano. I could see that Amos was startled. “They’re Linus’s,” I told him. “He makes them.”
“Oh, yes,” said Amos. He sat down on the couch, letting his moccasins sprawl out across the rug. “How is Linus these days?”
“He’s fine.”
“No more of his … trouble?”
“Oh no, he seems very steady. Right now he’s over at the laundromat with Mama.”
“And is Julian in these parts?”
“He’s down at the shop already,” I said.
“What shop?”
“The radio shop.”
“Dad’s radio shop?”
“Well, where have you been?” I asked. “Doesn’t Saul keep in touch?”
“At Christmas he just sends this card from the church,” said Amos, “telling me to bear in mind the true meaning.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “Well, Julian works at the radio shop. It’s TV now, mostly, but we still call it the radio shop. He’s doing just fine. I really believe his lapses are going to get fewer.”
“Is that right,” said Amos. He drummed his fingers on his knapsack.
“Pretty soon we’ll start trusting him with money again, but meanwhile the customers just come by here and pay Miss Feather instead.”
“Miss …?”
“But what about you?” I asked. “Do you think you’ll get this job?”
“Oh, sure, the principal wrote and told me it’s mine if I want it. And I guess I do want it. I’ve been in one place too long; it’s time for a change. And I’d just broken off with this girl, felt ready to … though I’m not so certain that I could take Clarion again. I wish this offer had turned up someplace else.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Clarion,” I said. (I don’t know why.)
“No, of course not, it’s fine,” said Amos. “I didn’t mean it wasn’t.”
He hooked his thumbs in his belt and tipped his head back against the couch, closing the conversation. I remembered that Amos used to be the Emory who ran away. Maybe he still was. Weaknesses came one to a person in that family, and could be conquered but not destroyed; they merely moved on to someone else. To Julian. Julian was collecting weaknesses like so many coins or postage stamps. Saul’s old trouble with girls was Julian’s now and so was Linus’s tendency to break down. We all loved Julian a lot, and no wonder. We were fond of his smudgy, weary eyes and exhausted good looks, and if he took on Amos’s habit of running away then we would be in trouble. I said, “Amos, do you still run away?”
He seemed to have been caught off-guard. “What?” he said. “Well, no, for heaven’s sake, why would you ask a thing like that? Of course not.”
“Where did it go?” I asked him.
“What?”
But before I could explain, in came Saul, stooping automatically in the doorway. He stopped. “Amos?” he said.
Amos stood up and said, “Hello, Saul.”
“We’ve waited a long time for you,” Saul told him, and set a hand on his shoulder. I was smiling as I watched, but what I wondered was: why did Amos look so much younger, when he was the oldest of the Emory boys?
Now they were complete, the four of them under one roof again. Amos’s job didn’t start till fall, so meanwhile he helped at the radio shop. Also, he got our old piano tuned and practiced every day. It never failed to amaze me that Amos had become a musician. Having barely scraped through school, he’d fallen into music like a duck finally hitting water and worked his way gladly through the Peabody Institute. Amos Emory! He sat hunched at the yellow-toothed piano playing Chopin, his moccasins set gingerly among the dollhouse furniture, elbows close to his sides as if he feared to damage the keys with his huge square hands. A rag of black hair fell over his forehead. “This has got to be the worst piano I’ve ever come across,” he told me, but he continued pulling in its faded, tinny, long-ago notes.
Unfortunately, I don’t like piano. Something about it has always irritated me. But Mama loved to hear him; she’d been musical herself once, she said. And Selinda often paused on her way to someplace else and listened from the door. She was thirteen that summer and had suddenly turned beautiful. Her hair was blonder from the sun and she had these burnished, threadlike eyebrows and dusty freckles. And close behind her you’d generally find Jiggs, who came running from anywhere as soon as he heard music. He coaxed lessons from Amos and then practiced what he learned for hours at a time—plodding about on the keys, breathing through his mouth, fogging up his spectacles. Whenever I passed through the living room, I would smile at the back of his soft fair head and make my eternal, evil wish: Please let his mother drop dead somewhere, I’ll never hope for an
ything else in my life.
At dinner I could look down a straight row of Emory boys (skipping Dr. Sisk, who poked in everywhere) and see four variations on a single theme—all those large, sober faces, Saul in black, Julian in a flashy turtleneck, Linus wearing something limp and unnoticeable and Amos in tatters of denim, like an easygoing, good-natured hitch-hiker. Well, he was easygoing. He was good-natured. Then why did he get on my nerves so?
He was always asking me questions. What I thought of Holy Basis; why we had so much furniture; how I could stand so many strangers coming through. “What strangers?” I said.
“Oh, Miss Feather, Dr. Sisk …”
“Miss Feather’s been with us near as long as Selinda. I wouldn’t really call her a stranger.”
“And what causes Saul to look the way he does?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“He’s got so … shadowed, he’s got this haunted look. Is everything all right?”
“Of course it’s all right, don’t be silly,” I said.
He studied the ceiling a while. “I don’t suppose it’s easy, being a preacher’s wife,” he said.
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, having him so, well, saintly. Right?”
I stared straight through him.
“Or for him, either; it wouldn’t be easy married to you. Selinda says you aren’t religious. Doesn’t that scare him?”
“Scare him? It makes him angry,” I said.
“It scares him. Of course it does, the way you coast along, no faith, all capability, your … sparseness, and you’re the one that makes the soup while he just brings home the sinners to eat it. Isn’t that so? He forever has to keep wrestling with the thoughts that you put in his mind.”
“I don’t! I never touch his mind! I deliberately keep back from it,” I said.
“He wrestles anyway,” said Amos. He grinned. “His private devil.” Then he grew serious. He said, “I don’t understand married people.”
“Evidently not,” I told him, stiffly.
“How they can keep on keeping together. Though it’s admirable, of course.”
What he meant was, it might be admirable but he didn’t admire it. Well, I didn’t admire him, either. I disliked the careless way he moved around the room, examining various cabinets no bigger than matchboxes. Faced with Amos’s scorn, I underwent some subtle change; I grew loyal, stubborn. I forgot the plans for my trip, I reflected that it would be pointless: no matter where I went, Saul would be striding forever down the alleys of my mind, slapping his Bible against his thigh. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” I told Amos.
But Amos just said, “No, probably I don’t,” and went on easily to something new. “Whose dog is that?”
“Selinda’s.”
“Peculiar kind of animal.”
Well, it’s true that Ernest wasn’t worth much. He was a mongrel—a huge black beast, going gray, with long tangled hair and a mop-shaped head. When Ernest wagged his tail, everything at his end of the room fell and broke. Some form of hearing loss led him to believe that we were calling him whenever we called Amos or Linus, and he always arrived drooling and panting, withering us with his fish-market breath, skidding and crashing into things and scraping the floor with his toenails. Also, he’d become unduly attached to me and any time I left him alone he lost control of his bladder. Oh, I admit he wasn’t perfect.
Still, I didn’t see what business it was of Amos’s. “Tell me,” I said, “is there one single thing here you approve of? Shall we throw the whole place out and start over?”
Then Amos held up one hand, backing off, and said, “All right, all right, don’t take it wrong.” He was smiling his shy, sweet, hitch-hiker’s smile, lowering his head, looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. Instantly I felt sorry for him. He was just new here, that was all. He had left home longer ago than his brothers, traveled farther, forgotten more. Forgotten that in every family there are certain ways you shrink and stretch to accommodate other people. Why, Linus for instance could remember back to his nursing days (Alberta’s nipple like a mouthful of crumpled seersucker, he claimed) but Amos couldn’t stand to remember and told me so, outright. He hadn’t liked being a child, he said. Their mother had been pushy, clamorous, violent, taking over their lives, meddling in their brains, demanding a constant torrent of admiration and gaiety. Her sons had winced when she burst into their rooms. She breathed her hot breath on them, she laughed her harsh laugh. She called for parties! dancing! let’s show a little life here! Given anything less than what she needed, he said (and she was always given less, she could never get enough), she turned mocking and contemptuous. She had a tongue like a knife. The sharp, insistent colors of her clothes and even of her skin, her hair, were painful to her children’s eyes. They had hated her. They had wished her dead.
Alberta?
“Why are you surprised?” Amos asked me. “Do we look like four normal, happy men? Hasn’t it occurred to you? The other three can’t even seem to leave Clarion; and I’m not much better, hopping around like something in a skillet, running before the school year’s even finished half the time and breaking with whoever gets close to me. Three of us have never married; the fourth chose somebody guaranteed to let him keep his doors shut.”
I stared at him.
“Isn’t it true? You don’t know a thought in his head, never asked. If you had, none of this would come as any surprise to you. Saul hates Alberta worse than any of us.”
“But … no, that’s only because of …”
I didn’t want to come right out and say it.
“Because of Grandpa?” Amos asked. “Face it: single events don’t cause that kind of effect. It took Saul years and years to get as bitter as he is. He’s come away from her in shreds; all of us have. He and the others just sit here in Clarion circling her grave and picking at her bones, trying to sort it through, but not me. I gave up. I don’t remember. I’ve forgotten.”
And he did, in fact, smile at me with the clear, blank eyes of a man without a past. I could tell he had truly forgotten. He had twisted every bit of it, muddled his facts hopelessly. There was no point in trying to set him straight.
I took him with us to church. He sat beside me, dressed in a borrowed suit, scrubbed and subdued. But even here, he seemed to be asking his questions. The moment Saul announced his text—Matthew 12:30, “He that is not with me is against me”—Amos shifted his feet, as if about to lean forward and shoot up a hand and shout, “Objection!” But he didn’t, of course. It was all in my mind. He sat there as quiet as anyone, with his fingers laced. I don’t know how he managed to annoy me so.
That night I dreamed that Saul and I had found ourselves a bedroom of a watery green color, like an aquarium. We were making love under flickering shadows, and for once there was no tiny knock on our door, no sad little voice: “I’m lonesome,” no church members phoning with deaths and diseases. Saul looked down at my face with a peculiarly focused, thoughtful look, as if he had some plan in mind for me. I decided the new bedroom was a wonderful idea. Then Linus stretched out alongside me and covered me with soft, bearded kisses, and Julian arrived in his gambling clothes which he slowly took off, one by one, smiling at me all the while. I was circled by love, protected on every side. The only Emory who wasn’t there was Amos, and he was who they were protecting me from.
13
The sign said: PERTH MANOR MOTEL. $8 NITELY. ANTIQUES. ATTIC TREASURES. NOTARY PUBLIC. PUREBRED DALMATIONS. We paused on the sidewalk to read it. Twilight had slipped in more suddenly than usual, it seemed to me. We’d been taken by surprise, had our eyes clapped over by some cool-handed stranger coming up behind us. But this sign was written in movable white letters such as you see in cafeterias where the menu often changes, and we could easily make it out. Behind it was a small plain building, mostly porch, with OFFICE glowing on one pillar. Further back we saw a string of cottages no bigger then henhouses, the faded color of
something chalked up and then rubbed away.
“Now first,” said Jake, “we check that Oliver’s mom is not around.”
“What for?” Mindy asked.
“Oliver’s mom don’t think too highly of me.”
“Then why are we coming here, Jake?”
“Well, I have some hopes of Oliver,” he said.
My loafers gritted on the sidewalk; so did Mindy’s sandals. Jake gave us an exasperated look and motioned for us to stop. He went on up the walk alone in his sneakers. We stayed where we were, eerily still in the gathering dusk, Mindy like a weightless, glowing balloon. I was either tired or hungry (too numb to know which) and had reached that state where nothing seems real. Mindy’s pale hand pressed to her backache could have been my own. I held my breath along with Jake when he crept up the steps to peer through the screen.
“He is going to get himself caught,” Mindy said.
Jake swatted an arm backwards in her direction, warning her to be still.
“Sometimes he just tempts people to catch him. Watch,” she said.
But no, here he came, shaking his head, extra bouncy on his heels from having had to hold still so long. “It’s Mrs. Jamison, sure enough,” he told us. “Potato on toothpicks, standing at the counter, hoping for someone to look down on.”
“Maybe she won’t know who you are,” Mindy said.
“Are you kidding? Every night she prays I fall out of a window,” said Jake. “We’ll just sit here a while.”
He was talking about a slatted bench that stood at the edge of the yard, facing the street. We sat down on it, Mindy in the middle. It was one of those lukewarm, breezy evenings that make you feel you’re expecting something. We sat like people in a movie house, but all we had to watch was a dingy men’s store across the way and a few passing cars. Periodically Jake would crane around toward the office door—a narrow rectangle full of light.
“What if she’s there for the evening?” Mindy asked him.
“We stay somewheres else and come back the next day. Rent us a room with Charlotte’s traveler’s check.”