He tried to help with the children as much as possible. He played endless games of Parcheesi; he read and reread The Sad Little Bunny. And he rose at least once each night to rock Daphne back to sleep, sometimes nodding off himself in the process. Often he had the feeling that she was rocking him. He would wake to find her coolly studying his face in the dark, or even prying up one of his lids with her chubby, sticky fingers.
Ironically, it was during this vacation that Cicely told him she might be pregnant. In the middle of a movie called Georgy Girl, which concerned a young woman who was tiresomely, tediously fond of infants, she clutched a handful of his sleeve and whispered that she was two weeks late. “Late for what?” he asked, which for some reason made her start crying. Then he understood.
They walked out on the movie and drove around the city. Ian kept inventing other possibilities. She was tense about her exams, maybe, or it was all that traveling back and forth on the train, or—“I don’t know! How would I know? Some damn reason!” he said, and she said, “You don’t have to shout! It was your fault as much as it was mine! Or more, even; way more. You’re the one who talked me into it.”
This wasn’t entirely accurate. Still, on some deeper level it seemed he deserved every word she hurled at him. He saw himself as a plotter and a predator, sex-obsessed; Lord, there were days when thoughts of sex with anyone—it didn’t have to be Cicely—never left his mind for a moment. And now look: here was his rightful penance, marriage at eighteen and a job bagging groceries in the A&P. He drew a breath. He said, “Don’t worry, Ciss. I’ll take care of you.”
They were supposed to stop by Andrew’s after the movie, but instead he drove her home. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and then he went on to his own house and climbed the stairs to his room, where he found Daphne sitting upright and holding out her arms.
By the time he returned to school on Sunday evening, he had almost persuaded Cicely to see a doctor. What he hoped for (although he didn’t say it) was a doctor who could offer her a magic pill or something. There must be such a pill. Surely there was. Maybe it was some common cold remedy or headache tablet, available on open shelves, with NOT TO BE TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY imprinted on the label—a message in code for those who needed it. But if he mentioned this to Cicely she might think he didn’t want to marry her or something, when of course he did want to and had always planned to. Just not yet, please, God. Not when he’d never even slept with a dark-haired girl yet.
He flinched at the wickedness of this thought, which had glided so smoothly into his mind that it might have been there all along.
In Biology 101 on Tuesday, his lab partner said she’d noticed him on the church bus. She wondered if he’d like to attend the Wednesday Night Youth Group at her place of worship. “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said instantly. “I’ve got a paper due.”
“Well, maybe another time, then,” she said. “We always have such fun! Usually they show a movie, something nice and clean with no language.”
“It does sound like fun,” he said.
He meant that sincerely. He ached, all at once, for a blameless life. He decided that if Cicely turned out not to be pregnant, they would start living like that. Their outings would become as wholesome as those pictures in the cigarette ads: healthy young people laughing toothily in large, impersonal groups, popping popcorn, taking sleigh rides.
But on Thursday, when Cicely phoned to tell him she’d got her period, what did he do? He said, “Listen. You have to go on the pill now. You know that.” And she said, “Yes, I’ve already made an appointment.” And that weekend they picked up where they had left off, although Cicely still had her period and really it was sort of complicated. He had to rinse all the bedclothes the following morning, and as he stood barefoot in the dormitory bathroom watching the basin fill with pink water, he felt weary and jaded and disgusted with himself, a hopeless sinner.
* * *
Christmas fell on a Sunday that year. Ian didn’t get home till Friday evening; so Saturday was a hectic rush of shopping for gifts. Only on Christmas Eve did he have a chance to look around and realize the state of the household. He saw that although a good-sized tree had been erected in the living room, no one had trimmed it; the box of decorations sat unopened on the piano. The swags of evergreen were missing from the banister, the front door bore no wreath, and the house had a general air of neglect. It wasn’t just relaxed, or folksy, or happy-go-lucky; it was dirty. The kitchen smelled of garbage and cat box. The last two remaining goldfish floated dead in their scummy bowl. None of the gifts had been wrapped yet, and when the children asked to hang their stockings it emerged that all the socks were in the laundry.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Bee said, “but one person or another has been sick the last two weeks running and I just haven’t had a minute. So I’m sorry. Hang something else, instead. Hang grocery bags. Hang pillowcases.”
“Pillowcases!” Thomas said dolefully.
“Don’t worry,” Ian told him. “I’ll do a wash tonight. You go on to bed and I’ll hang your stockings later.”
So that evening was spent in the basement, more or less. Ian found the hampers so overstuffed and moldy that he guessed the laundry had not been seen to in some time, and he decided to take care of the whole lot. Also he put himself in charge of gift wrapping. While his mother sat at the dining room table sipping the sherry he’d poured her, he swaddled everything ineptly in plain tissue. (She had not thought to buy Christmas paper.) He wrapped even the gifts meant for him—a couple of shirts, a ski jacket—pretending to pay them no heed. Periodically he left his work to run downstairs to the basement and start another load of laundry. The scent of detergent and fresh linens gradually filled the house. It wasn’t such a bad Christmas Eve after all.
“Remember Christmas in the old days?” his mother asked. “When we got everything ready so far ahead? Presents sat under the tree for weeks! Homemade, most of them. Lord, you children made enough clay ashtrays to cover every surface, and none of us even smokes. But this year I just couldn’t get up the spirit. Seems like ever since this happened with your brother I’ve been so … unenthusiastic.”
Ian didn’t know what to say to that. He made a big business of tying a bow on a package.
“And remember all the hors d’oeuvres at Christmas dinner?” she asked. “This year I’ll be doing well to throw a piece of meat in the oven.”
“Maybe we should go to a restaurant,” Ian said.
“A restaurant!”
“Why not?”
“Let’s hope we haven’t come to that,” his mother said.
In the living room they heard a sharp grunt—his father, asleep in his recliner chair.
But as it turned out, Christmas Day was not so different that year from any other. Mrs. Jordan came, along with the foreigners. The children contributed their share of excitement (Claudia’s six and Lucy’s three, combined), and Doug’s Polaroid Land camera flashed, and the cat made choking sounds behind the couch. It was disconcerting, in a way. Last Christmas Daphne hadn’t been born yet; nor had Franny. Now here sat Daphne chewing a wad of blue tissue while Franny stirred her fists through Agatha’s jigsaw puzzle. They both seemed so accustomed to being here. And Danny and Lucy had completely vanished. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
The day after Christmas, Sid at the movers’ phoned to see if Ian could help out over vacation. Their man Brewster had left them in the lurch, he said. Ian told him he’d be glad to help. School would not reopen till mid-January and he could use the extra cash. So Tuesday morning, he reported to the garage on Greenmount.
LeDon was delighted to see him. That Brewster fellow, he said, had just up and walked away in the middle of a job. “He say, ‘See you round, LeDon.’ I say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t ditching me.’ He say, ‘All day long I’m ditching you,’ and off he go. Well, he weren’t never what you call real friendly.”
They were moving an old lady from a house to
an apartment—lots of old-lady belongings, bowlegged furniture and mothballed dresses and more than enough china to stock a good-sized restaurant. Her son, who was overseeing the move, had some kind of fixation about the china. “Careful, now! That’s Spode,” he would say as they lifted a crate. And, “Watch out for the Haviland!” LeDon rolled his eyes at Ian.
Then at the new place, they found out the kitchen was being remodeled and they had to set the china crates in the living room. “What the hell?” the son said. “This was supposed to be finished three days ago.” He was talking to the cabinetmaker—the deaf man Ian had come across last summer, as it happened. “How much longer?” the son asked him. Any fool could see it would be way longer; the kitchen was nothing but a shell. The cabinetmaker, not looking around, measured the depth of a counter with a steel measuring tape. The son laid a hand on the man’s forearm. The man turned slowly, gazed a moment at the son’s hand, and then lifted his eyes to his face. “HOW … LONG!” the son shouted, exaggerating his lip movements.
The cabinetmaker considered, and then he said, “Two weeks.”
“Two weeks!” the son said. He dropped his hand. “What are you building here, Noah’s ark? All we need is a few lousy cupboards!”
The cabinetmaker went on about his business, measuring the counter’s length now and the height of the empty space above it. Surely he must have known the son was speaking to him, but he seemed totally absorbed in what he was doing. Once again, Ian envied the man his insular, impervious life.
On New Year’s Eve Pig Benson threw a big, rowdy party, but Ian didn’t go. Cicely was baby-sitting her brother and it was her last night home. (Her college worked on a different schedule from Ian’s.) So they set all the clocks an hour ahead and tricked Stevie into going to bed early, and then they snuck upstairs to her room, where Ian unintentionally dozed off. He was awakened by church bells ringing in the New Year, which meant her parents could be expected at any moment. As soon as he’d dressed, he slipped downstairs and into the frosty, bitter night. He walked home half asleep while bells pealed and firecrackers popped and rockets lit the sky. What optimism! he found himself thinking. Why did people have such high hopes for every New Year?
He practiced saying the date aloud: “Nineteen sixty-seven. January first, nineteen sixty-seven.” Monday was his birthday; he’d be nineteen years old. Daphne would be one. He shivered and pulled his collar up.
That night he dreamed Danny came driving down Waverly Street in Sumner College’s blue church bus. He stopped in front of home and told Ian, “They’ve given me a new route and now I get to go anywhere I like.”
“Can I ride along?” Ian asked from the sidewalk.
“You can ride along after you learn Chinese,” Danny told him.
“Oh,” Ian said. Then he said, “Chinese?”
“Well, I like to call it Chinese.”
“Call what Chinese?”
“You understand, Chinese is not what I really mean.”
“Then what do you mean?” Ian asked.
“Why, I’m talking about … let us say … Chinese,” Danny said, and he winked at Ian and laughed and drove away.
When Ian woke, Daphne was crying, and the room seemed moist as a greenhouse from her tears.
Agatha’s school reopened Tuesday, and Thomas’s nursery school Wednesday. This should have lightened Bee’s load, but still she looked exhausted every evening. She said she must have a touch of the flu. “Ordinarily I’m strong as a horse!” she said. “This is only temporary, I’m positive.”
Ian asked, “What’s the word on Tom Dean, Senior? Any sign of him?”
“Oh,” his mother said, “I guess we’ll have to give up on Tom Dean. It doesn’t seem he exists.”
“Then what’ll you do with the children?”
“Well, your father has some ideas. He’s pretty sure from something Lucy once mentioned that she came from Pennsylvania. Maybe her first marriage was recorded there, he says, in which case—”
“You’re stuck with them, aren’t you,” Ian said.
“Pardon?”
“You’re stuck with those children for good.”
“Oh, no,” she told him. “I’m certain we’ll find somebody sooner or later. We’ll just have to. We’ll have to!”
“But what if you don’t?” Ian asked her.
Her face took on a flown-apart, panicked look.
Two of the children weren’t even Bedloes, and he wondered if it occurred to his parents that those two could simply be made wards of the state, or whatever—popped into some kind of foster home or orphanage. But he suspected that with Daphne, they wouldn’t feel free to do that. Daphne was their dead son’s child, and an infant besides. She wasn’t already formed, as the other two were. She hadn’t yet reached the knobby-kneed, scabby stage that only a mother could love; she was still full of dimples, still tiny and beguiling.
Thomas, on the other hand, could cause a serious puncture wound if he accidentally poked you with his elbow. Holding him on your lap was like holding a bunch of coat hangers. Which didn’t prevent his trying to climb up there, heaven knows. He had the nuzzling, desperate manner of a small dog starved for attention, which unfortunately lessened his appeal; while Agatha, who managed to act both sullen and ingratiating, came across as sly. Ian had seen how grownups (even his mother, even his earth-mother sister) turned narrow-eyed in Agatha’s presence. It seemed that only Ian knew how these children felt: how scary they found every waking minute.
Why, being a child at all was scary! Wasn’t that what grownups’ nightmares so often reflected—the nightmare of running but getting nowhere, the nightmare of the test you hadn’t studied for or the play you hadn’t rehearsed? Powerlessness, outsiderness. Murmurs over your head about something everyone knows but you.
• • •
He finished moving a family into a row house on York Road and went home from there on foot, passing a series of shabby stores. The job had run unusually late. It was after seven on a dismal January evening, and most places had closed. One window, though, glowed yellow—a wide expanse of plate glass with CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE arching across it in block letters. Ian couldn’t see inside because the paper shade was lowered. He walked on by. Behind him a hymn began. “Something something something lead us …” He missed most of the words, but the voices were strong and joyful, overlaid by a single tenor that rose above the rest.
He paused at the intersection, the arches of his sneakers teetering on the curb. He peered at the DON’T WALK sign for a moment. Then he turned and headed back to the church.
A shopkeeper’s bell jingled when he opened the door. The singers looked around—some fifteen or twenty people, standing in rows with their backs to him—and smiled before they looked away again. They were facing a tall, black-haired man in a tieless white shirt and black trousers. The pulpit was an ordinary store counter. The floor was green linoleum. The lights overhead were long fluorescent tubes and one tube flickered rapidly, giving Ian the impression that he had a twitch in his eyelid.
“Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus!” the congregation sang. It was a tender, affectionate cry that sounded personally welcoming. Ian found his way to an empty spot beside a woman in a white uniform, a nurse or a waitress. Although she didn’t look at him, she moved closer and angled her hymnal so he could follow the words. The hymnal was one of those pocket-sized pamphlets handed out free at public sing-alongs. There wasn’t any accompaniment, not even a piano. And the pews—as Ian realized when the hymn came to an end and everyone sat down—were plain gray metal folding chairs, the kind you’d see at a bridge game.
“Friends,” the minister said, in a sensible, almost conversational tone. “And guests,” he added, nodding at Ian. All over again, the others turned and smiled. Ian smiled back, maybe a little too broadly. He had the feeling he was their first and only visitor.
“We have reached that point in the service,” the minister said, “when any person here is invited to step forward and ask for o
ur prayers. No request is too great, no request is trivial in the eyes of God our Father.”
Ian thought of the plasterer who’d repaired his parents’ bathroom ceiling, NO JOB TOO LARGE OR TOO SMALL, his panel truck had read. He brushed the thought away. He watched a very fat young woman heave herself to her feet just in front of him. The width of her sprigged, summer-weight skirt, when she finally reached a standing position, completely blocked his view of the minister. “Well, Clarice as you may have heard is down real bad with her blood,” she said breathily. “We had thought that was all behind her but now it’s come on back, and I asked what I could do for her and she says, ‘Lynn,’ says, ‘take it to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Lynn, and ask them for their prayers.’ So that’s just what I’m doing.”
There was a silence, during which she sat down. As soon as she left Ian’s line of vision, he realized the silence was part of the program. The minister stood with both palms raised, his face tipped skyward and his eyelids closed and gleaming. In his shirtsleeves, he seemed amateurish. His cuffs had slipped down his forearms, and his collar, Ian saw, was buttoned all the way to the neck, in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts. He wasn’t so very old, either. His frame was lanky as a marionette’s and his wrist bones boyishly knobby.
Ian was the only one sitting erect. He bowed his head and squinted at the billow of sprigged skirt puffing out the back of the fat woman’s chair.
“For our sister Clarice,” the minister said finally.
“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and they straightened.
“Any other prayers, any other prayers,” the minister said. “No request is beyond Him.”
On the other side of Ian’s neighbor, a gray-haired woman rose and placed her purse on her seat. Then she faced forward, gripping the chair in front of her. “You all know my son Chuckie was fighting in Vietnam,” she said.