“Well, it’s more like tailing husbands to motel rooms. But that’s the Lord’s business too! Believe me.”
“If you say so,” Ian told him.
“What do you do, brother?”
“I’m a carpenter,” Ian said.
“Our Savior was a carpenter.”
“Well, yes.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who said I was ashamed?”
“Those your kids you came with?”
“Yes.”
“You look kind of young to have kids that old.”
“Really I’m just their uncle,” Ian said. “My parents and I take care of them.”
“I would’ve thought you were nothing but a college boy.”
“No, no.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“A bachelor.”
“Well, yes. A … bachelor,” Ian said.
Eli bent over a hinge again. Ian watched for a minute and then turned back to his ladder.
But the next time he brought down a shutter, he said, “So you’ve never found a missing person, or anything like that.”
“Depends on what you call missing,” Eli said. “Sure, I’ve found a few husbands here and there. Usually they’re just staying with a girlfriend, though, that everybody except their wives knows the name and address of.”
“I see,” Ian said.
He leaned the shutter against a sawhorse. He studied it. Not looking at Eli, he said, “Say a person had been missing a long time. Five or six years, say. Maybe seven or eight. Would the trail be too cold for you to follow?”
“What? Naw,” Eli said. “Bound to be something he left behind. People are so messy. That’s been my experience. People leave so much litter wherever they go to.”
He rotated one forearm and examined the inside of his wrist. A dribble of dusty blood ran downward from his palm. “Somebody special you had in mind?” he asked.
“Not really,” Ian said.
He brushed a dead leaf from a louver. He cleared his throat. He said, “Those kids I’m taking care of: their father is missing, I guess you could say. The father of the older two.”
“Is that so,” Eli said. “Ducking his child support, huh?”
“Child support? Oh. Right,” Ian said.
“Boy, I hate those child-support guys,” Eli said. “Or, no, not hate. Forget hate. The Bible cautions us not to hate. But I … pity them, yes, I surely do pity those child-support guys. You’d never get me to raise one of them’s kids.”
“Oh, they’re really like my own now,” Ian said.
“Even so! Here you are sitting home with three young ones and he’s off enjoying his self.”
“I don’t mind,” Ian said.
He didn’t want to go into the whole story. In fact, he couldn’t remember now why he’d brought it up in the first place.
He was supervising the children’s homework at the kitchen table when he heard a wailing sound outdoors. He said, “Was that a baby?”
No one answered. They were too busy arguing. Thomas was telling Daphne that when he was in third grade, a plain old wooden pencil had been good enough for him. Daphne had no business, he said, swiping his personal ballpoint pen. Daphne said, “Maybe what you wrote in third grade wasn’t worth a pen.” Then Agatha complained they’d made her lose her train of thought. Thanks to them, she would have to start this whole equation over again.
“Was that a baby crying?” Ian asked.
They barely paused.
“Hey,” Thomas said to the others. “Want to hear something disgusting?”
“No, what?”
Ian crossed the kitchen and opened the screen door. It was light enough still so he could make out the clothesline poles and the azalea bushes, and the stockade fence that separated the backyard from the alley.
“In science class, my teacher? Mr. Pratt?” Thomas said. “He stands at the blackboard, he tells us, ‘By the time I’ve finished teaching this lesson, microscopic portions of my mouth will be all over this room.’ ”
“Eeuw!” Daphne and Agatha said.
Just inside the gate, which had not been completely closed in years, sat a minuscule patch of darkness, a denser black than the fence posts. This patch stirred and glinted in some way and uttered another thin wail.
“Kitty-kitty?” Ian called.
He stepped outside, shutting the screen door behind him. Yes, it was definitely a cat. When he approached, it teetered on the brink of leaving but finally stood its ground. He bent to pat its head. He could feel the narrow skull beneath fur so soft that it made almost no impression on his fingertips.
“Where’s your owner, little cat?” he asked.
But he thought he knew the answer to that. There wasn’t any tag or collar, and when he ran a hand down its body he could count the ribs. It staggered weakly beneath his touch, then braced itself and started purring in a rusty, unpracticed way, pressing its small face into the cup of his palm.
As it happened, the Bedloes had no pets at that particular moment. They had never replaced Beastie, and the latest of their cats had disappeared a few months ago. So this new little cat had come to the right people. Ian let it spend a few minutes getting used to him, and then he picked it up and carried it back inside the house. It clung to him with needle claws, tense but still conscientiously purring. “See what I found in the alley,” he told the children.
“Oh, look!” Daphne cried, slipping out of her chair. “Can I hold it, Ian? Can I keep it?”
“If no one comes to claim it,” Ian said, handing it over.
In the light he saw that the cat was black from head to foot, and not much more than half grown. Its eyes had changed to green already but its face was still the triangular, top-heavy face of a kitten. Thomas was lifting its spindly tail to see what sex it was, but the cat objected to that and climbed higher on Daphne’s shoulder. “Ouch!” Daphne squawked. “Thomas, quit! See what you made it do?”
“It’s a girl, I think,” Thomas announced.
“Leave her alone, Thomas!”
“She’s not just yours, Daphne,” Agatha said. She had risen too and was scratching the cat behind its ears.
“She is so mine! Ian said so! You’re mine, mine, mine, you little sweetums,” Daphne said, nuzzling the cat’s nose with her own. “Oh, what kind of monstrous, mean person would just ditch you and drive off?”
All of a sudden Ian had an image of Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne huddled in a ditch by the side of a road. They were hanging onto each other and their eyes were wide and fearful. And far in the distance, almost out of sight, Ian’s car was vanishing around a curve.
But then immediately afterward, he felt such a deep sense of loss that it made his breath catch.
His mother was truly disabled now. Oh, she still hobbled from room to room, she still insisted on standing over the stove and creeping behind the dust mop, but the arthritis had seized up her hands and the finer motions of day-to-day life were beyond her. Folding the laundry, driving the car, buttoning Daphne’s dress down the back—all that was left to Ian and his father. And Ian’s father was not much help. Any task he began seemed to end in, “How the dickens …?” and “Ian, can you come here a minute?” In the old days Claudia had stopped by once or twice a week to see what needed doing, but she had moved to Pittsburgh when Macy found a better job; and first they’d returned for holidays but now they didn’t even do that very often.
Meanwhile, these children were a full-time occupation. They were good children, bright children; they did well in school and never got in serious trouble. But even nonserious trouble could consume a great deal of energy, Ian had learned. Agatha, for instance, was suffering all the miseries of adolescence. Every morning she set off for school alone and friendless—the earnest, pale, studious kind of girl Ian had ignored when he himself was her age, but now he cursed those callow high-school kids who couldn’t see how special she was, how intelligent and witty and perceptive. Thomas, on the
other hand, had too many friends. Tall and graceful, his voice already cracking and a shadow darkening his upper lip, he was more interested in socializing than in school-work, and one or another of the Bedloes was always having to attend parent-teacher conferences—most often Ian, it seemed.
As for Daphne, she wound through life sparkling at everyone and lowering her long black lashes over stunning blue-black eyes; but any time you crossed her there was hell to pay. She was fierce, that Daphne. “I think she had a difficult infancy,” Ian was always explaining. “She’s really a good kid, believe me. She just feels she’s got to fend for herself,” he told a teacher. Yet another teacher. At yet another parent-teacher conference. (His second of the year, and school had been in session only ten days.)
Cicely was living out in California now with a folk guitarist. Pig Benson’s family had moved away while he was in the army. Andrew was in graduate school at Tulane. And anyhow, the last time Andrew came home it turned out he and Ian didn’t have much to talk about. At one point Andrew had referred to the “goddamned holiday traffic,” and then reddened and said, “Sorry,” so Ian knew he’d heard about Second Chance from someone. And then Ian had to take Daphne for her booster shots, and that was that. Andrew had not suggested getting together again.
Bachelor. What a dashing word. Ian the bachelor. He would live in an apartment all his own. (A bachelor pad.) He’d have friends his own age dropping by to visit. Young women going out with him. And no one trailing behind to ask, “But how about us? Who will see to us? Who will find our socks for us and help with our history project?”
At work, he was putting the final touches on a drop-front desk. He was rubbing linseed oil into the wood, while Bert, one of the new men, worked on a bureau across the room.
Their kitchen-cabinet days were over, thank heaven. Now rich young couples from Bolton Hill showed up at Mr. Brant’s shop to commission one-of-a-kind furniture: bookcases custom-fitted to Bolton Hill’s high ceilings, stand-up desks made to measure, and Shaker-looking benches. Everything was built the old way, with splines and rabbets and lap joints, no nails, no stains or plastic finishes. Orders were backed up a year or more and they’d had to hire three new employees.
You’d think this would delight Mr. Brant, but he remained as morose as always. Or was that only his deafness? No, because whenever his wife dropped by—a much younger woman who’d been deaf from birth, unlike Mr. Brant—she would sign to him with flying fingers, her face lighting up and clouding over to go with what she said; and Ian could see she lived a life as full and talkative as any hearing person’s. Mr. Brant would watch her without altering his expression, and then he would make a few signs of his own—clumsy, blunt signs, stiff-thumbed. Ian wondered how on earth they had courted. What could Mr. Brant have said that would win such a woman’s heart? When Mrs. Brant watched his hands, her eyes grew very intent and focused and all the animation left her. Ian had the feeling her husband was somehow dampening her enthusiasm, but maybe it only seemed that way.
One of the new employees was Mrs. Brant’s niece, a rosy, bosomy girl named Jeannie who’d dropped out of college to do something more real. (They were seeing a lot of that nowadays.) Jeannie said Mrs. Brant was a regular social butterfly. She said Mrs. Brant had dozens of friends who’d gone to Gallaudet with her, and they would sit around her kitchen talking away a mile a minute, using their special sign language with lots of inside jokes and dirty words; but her husband had come late to sign and could barely manage such basics as “Serve supper” and “Mail letter” (like Tonto, Jeannie said), so of course he was left in the dust. He was neither fish nor fowl, Jeannie said. This made Ian feel fonder of the man. He had long ago given up all hope of befriending him, or of seeing any hint of emotion in that handsome, leathery face; but now he regretted dismissing him so easily. “He must be awfully lonesome,” he told Jeannie, “watching his wife enjoy herself with her friends.”
“Oh, he doesn’t care,” Jeannie said. “He just stomps off to his garden. None of us can figure why she married him. Maybe it was sex. I do think he’s kind of sexy, don’t you?”
Jeannie often talked that way. She made Ian feel uncomfortable. Several times she had suggested they go out together some evening, and although he did find her attractive, with her streaming hair and bouncy peasant blouses, he always gave some excuse.
This afternoon she was helping Bert with his bureau. (She didn’t know enough yet to be entrusted with a piece all her own.) Her job was to attach the drawer knobs—perfectly plain beechwood cylinders—but she kept leaving them to come over and talk to Ian. “Pretty,” she said of the desk. Then, without a pause, “You like nature, Ian?”
“Nature? Sure.”
“Me and some friends are taking a picnic lunch to Loch Raven this Sunday. Want to come?”
“Well, I have church on Sundays,” Ian told her.
“Church,” she said. She rocked back on the heels of her moccasins. “But how about after church?” she said. “We wouldn’t be leaving till one or so.”
“Oh, uh, there’s my nephew and nieces, too,” Ian said. “I sort of have to keep an eye on them on weekends.”
“Why can’t their parents do that?”
“Their parents are dead.”
“Their grandparents, then,” she said, instantly readjusting.
“My mother’s got arthritis and my dad is kind of tied up.”
“Or the other grandparents! Or other aunts and uncles! Or baby-sitters! Or can’t the older ones watch the younger ones? Or maybe you could call the mothers of some of their school friends and see if—”
“It’s kind of involved,” Ian said. He was surprised at the number of options that could be produced at such short notice. “I guess I’d just better say no,” he told her.
“Christ,” she said, “what a drag. Why, even chain gangs get their Sundays off.”
Then Mr. Brant called, “Jeannie!” He towered over the bureau, glaring in her direction, and she said, “Oops! Gotta go.”
She skipped away, a juicy morsel of a girl, and Ian noticed how her long hair swung against the tight-packed seat of her jeans.
He had made it up about the children, of course. They were well past the stage when they needed sitters. But somehow he began to believe his own alibi, and as he watched her he thought, Right! Even chain gangs, he thought, are allowed a little time to themselves.
Well, no one had ever said this would be easy.
But then why didn’t he feel forgiven? Why didn’t he, after all these years of penance, feel that God had forgiven him?
* * *
The little black cat settled in immediately. She was very polite and clean, with a smell like new woolen yarn, and she tolerated any amount of petting. Daphne named her Honeybunch. Thomas named her Alexandra. Any time one would call her, the other would call louder. “Here, Honeybunch.” “No, Alexandra! Here, Alexandra, you know who you love best.” Agatha stayed out of it. She was abstracted all that weekend, moping because a classmate had thrown a party without inviting her. The reason Ian knew this was that Thomas announced it, cruelly, during Saturday night supper. Agatha had told Thomas he was piggish to chew with his mouth open, and Thomas said, “Well, at least I don’t have to buy my clothes in the Chubbette department. At least I’m not so fat that Missy Perkins wouldn’t ask me to her slumber party!” Then Agatha threw down her napkin and bolted from the table, and Daphne said, in a satisfied tone, “You’re a meanie, Thomas.”
“Am not.”
“Are so.”
“She started it.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
“Quit that,” Ian said. “Both of you may be excused.”
“Why do I have to go when he’s the one who—”
“You’re excused, I said.”
They left, grumbling under their breaths as they moved into the living room.
Supper was more or less finished, anyhow. Ian’s father had already pushed away his plate and tilted back in his
chair, and his mother was merely toying with her dessert. She hadn’t taken a bite in the last five minutes; she was deep in one of her blow-by-blow household sagas, and it seemed she would never get around to eating her last half-globe of canned peach.
“So there I was in the basement,” she said, “looking at all this water full of let’s-not-discuss-it, and the man pulled a kind of zippery tube from his machine and twined it down the …”
Ian started thinking about the comics. It was childish of him, he knew, but one thing he really enjoyed at the end of every day was reading “Peanuts” in the Evening Sun. It made a kind of oasis—that tiny, friendly world where everybody was so quaint and earnest and reflective. But what with Good Works, and the weekly grocery trip, and shopping for the kids’ new gym shoes, he hadn’t had a chance at the paper yet; and now he could hear the others mauling it in the living room. By the time he got hold of it all the pages would be disarranged and crumpled.
“The total bill came to sixty dollars,” his mother was saying. “I consider that cheap, in view of what the man had to deal with. When he was done he had me look down the floor drain. Big dark echoey floor drain. ‘Hear that?’ he said, and I said, ‘Hear what?’ He said, ‘All along the line, your neighbors flushing their toilets. First one here and then one far, far away over there,’ he said, ‘all connected by this network of pipes.’ ‘Well, fine,’ I said, ‘but left to my own devices I believe I could manage to live out my life not hearing, thank you very much.’ ”
In the living room, quarrelsome voices climbed over each other and Ian caught the sound of paper tearing. They were demolishing “Peanuts,” he was certain. He sighed.
Suppose, he thought suddenly, his boyhood self was to walk into the scene at this moment. Suppose he was offered a glimpse of how he had turned out: twenty-six years old and still living with his parents, tending someone else’s children, obsessed with the evening comics. Huh? he’d say. Why, what has happened here? What has become of me? How in heaven’s name did things ever get to this state?
“Give me one good reason I should have to go to church,” Agatha said on Sunday morning. “It’s hypocritical to go! I’m not a believer.”