Read The Clock Winder Page 27


  The rush hour was beginning. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and the flashes of sunlight off chrome stung his eyes. “Where are we now?” P.J. asked.

  “Close to—just past Washington.”

  “Close to Baltimore.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “How much longer to your mother’s?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking,” Peter said.

  “Oh, Petey, don’t say we can’t go. After all this time that I’ve been counting on it?”

  “If we drove straight through, we could be home by bedtime,” Peter said. “Besides, she might not even be there.”

  “Didn’t you tell her we were coming?”

  “I meant to drop a postcard, but then I forgot.”

  “You’re ashamed to show me to her.”

  “No, Lord,” he said. “I’ve kept away long before you were around.”

  “That’s just not natural, Petey. Not and you living so close.”

  “But I wasn’t always close, I was in the Army.”

  “When Barney Winters went overseas, down home,” P.J. said, “they let him have some time with his folks after basic training. Then when he came back he spent a month there, just filling up on that good home cooking he said. Fat? In that one month he must have gained thirty pounds. You never would’ve known him.”

  “I went to New York after basic training,” Peter said.

  “Gunther Jones, too, he visited home before he left. And would have after, I reckon, if he hadn’t gone and got killed.”

  “Well, we all do our own thing,” Peter said. “I went and saw a lot of art galleries.”

  “Before, you mean. I don’t know how much you enjoyed it but afterward I know, you told me yourself. Up until the new semester opened you didn’t do a thing but lay around a old rented room reading the beginnings of books. Call that a rest? Call that a recuperation? When you could have been home all that time eating your mother’s good home cooking?”

  “I can cook better than my mother does,” Peter said.

  “Petey, do you have some reason not to want to go there?”

  “None at all,” said Peter. Which was true, but he should have made something up—some feud or family quarrel that would have satisfied her. As it was, she thought he was putting her off. She considered the subject still open for discussion. “Barney Winters’ mother met him when he landed,” she said. “Bringing a whole chess pie that he ate right there by the plane.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Peter.

  “Myself, I’m a family-type person. Just made that way, I don’t know why. We always were close-knit. Now I want to meet your family too, but if you think I wouldn’t match up to them—”

  “No, P.J. We’ll go, if you’re so set on it. But just for one night, is that understood? No hanging around. No getting caught up in anything.”

  “Whatever you like, Petey,” P.J. said.

  By the time they reached Baltimore, Peter had a long ache of tiredness running down his spine. He drove irritably, one hand always ready at the horn. Row houses slipped past him in endless chains, with clusters of women slumped on all the stoops, fans turning lazily behind lace curtains, parlor windows full of madonnas and globe lamps and plastic flowers alternating with windows boarded up and CONDEMNED signs on the doors. Children were drinking grape Nehis. Men scuttled out from package stores with brown paper bags clutched to their chests. “Are you still sure you want to stop in Baltimore?” Peter asked.

  P.J. didn’t bother answering. She was neatening the edges of her lipstick with the tip of a little finger. “Should I put my hair up?” she said.

  “You look okay.”

  “My wig is right handy.”

  “No, P.J.”

  P.J. dumped her pocketbook on the seat and riffled through ticket stubs and loose change and wadded-up hair ribbons until she found the little plastic case containing her eyelashes. They were cut in a style called “Innocence”—spiky black lashes widely spaced, so that when she had put them on she looked as if she had just finished crying over some brief, childish tragedy. She blinked and turned to him. “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Very nice.”

  “Is it far to go?”

  “Another fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Well, is there something I should know first. I mean, subjects not to bring up? People not to mention? You never tell me things, Petey. I want to do this right, now.”

  “Oh, just be yourself,” Peter said. Which were her exact words on the way to Georgia, but she missed that. If he were to list forbidden subjects it would take him all night.

  Once out of the downtown areas they drove faster, through streets that grew steadily greener and cooler. Then they entered Roland Park, and Peter suddenly felt eager to be home. He forgot all the misgivings he had had. There was the old locked water tower, which he had once tried to break into. There was the Women’s Club where his mother went for luncheons, always in a hat and gloves. And now the wooded road that led to the house, dark and cool and dappled with sunshine. He hid his eagerness from P.J. as carefully as if she might mock him for it, although he knew she wouldn’t. “We’re almost there,” he told her, keeping his face blank. P.J. nodded and sat up straighter and wet her lips.

  In this neighborhood, people stayed out of sight more. All he saw was one lone maid with a shopping bag, heading toward the bus stop. And his mother’s house, when he drew up in front of it, was closed and silent. The curtains hung still, the veranda chairs were empty. A water sprinkler spun dreamily in the right side yard.

  “Well,” said Peter. He let his hands drop from the wheel. P.J. said nothing. She was looking at the house, taking in the rows of gleaming windows and the wide expanse of grass, the multitude of chimneys rising from the slate roof.

  “You never told me it was a big house,” she said finally.

  “Shall we go in?”

  P.J. began gathering up her possessions. She had a purse, sandals, a scarf, a sack of licorice shoestrings which had already lined her lips with black although Peter didn’t tell her so. When she had climbed out of the car she tugged at her shorts and slid into her sandals—leather soles with yards of straps which would have twined all the way to her knees if she had tied them. She shuffled up the front walk, curling her toes to keep the sandals on. She looked like a seal on dry land. Peter stayed where he was, watching her. He didn’t even open his door until she turned to look for him. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  He had expected his mother to burst out of the house the moment he cut the engine, ending a three-year vigil at the front window.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway up the walk that he became aware of the noise. A clattering sound, like millions of enormous metal zippers stickily opening and shutting. It rose from every bush. It was so steady and monotonous that it could pass unnoticed, like a clock’s ticking. “What is it?” he asked, and P.J. only looked at him blankly. “That noise,” he said.

  “Crickets? Locusts?”

  A buzzing black lump zoomed into his face, and then veered and swooped away. He ducked, seconds after it had gone.

  “Seventeen-year locusts,” he said.

  “Never heard of them,” said P.J.

  “Cicadas, in point of actual fact.”

  The words were Timothy’s, dredged up from a long-ago summer, and so was the tone—dry and scientific, so unlike Peter that even P.J. noticed and looked surprised. The last time the locusts had been here, Peter was twelve. He remembered the fact of their presence, and Timothy’s lecture on them, but not what they were really like—not these viciously buzzing objects which, he saw now, swung through the air on invisible strings and hung like glittering fruit from all the bushes. P.J. had one on her shoulder; it rattled menacingly when he brushed it away. When he stepped on the sidewalk, he crunched countless pupa shells which lay curled and hollow, small beige shrimps with all their legs folded tightly inward.

  They crossed the shiny gray floorboards of the veran
da. P.J. knocked at the door. “Knock, knock!” she called out gaily. She always did that, but today Peter found it irritating. “There is a doorbell,” he said, and reached around her to press it. P.J. looked up at him, her eyes like round, rayed suns in her Innocence eyelashes.

  It was a child who opened the door for them. A squat little blond boy with a solemn face, wearing miniature Levis.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi there,” said Peter, too heartily. “I’m your Uncle Peter. Remember me?”

  “No.”

  “So there, Peter Emerson,” P.J. said. She laughed and bent down to the little boy’s level. “I’m P.J. What’s your name?”

  He studied her. Peter cleared his throat. “This is George, I believe,” he said. “Matthew’s boy. Is your grandma home, George?”

  “Yup.”

  “Could we see her?”

  “She’s in the kitchen,” George said.

  He turned back in the direction he had come from. The cuffs of his Levis dragged on the floor. “Well,” said Peter “Shall we go in?”

  They followed George across the hallway—Peter leading P.J. as if she were another child, clutching her by the arm while she looked all around her. They went through the butler’s pantry, windowless and stale, and then into the sudden brightness of the kitchen.

  His mother was standing just as he had imagined her—wearing soft colors, her hair a clear gold, surrounded by her family. The only thing wrong was that she and all the others had their backs turned. They were facing squarely away from him, watching something out the rear door. “It’s the screens, they will have to be mended in the morning,” his mother said. “Look at those holes! Anything could get through them.”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  She turned, but even when she looked directly at him she seemed distracted. “What?” she said. “What—Peter!”

  Everyone turned. Their faces were momentarily surprised and unguarded.

  “Peter, what are you doing here?”

  “Oh, just passing through. Mother, this is P.J. P.J., this is my brother Andrew, my brother Matthew’s wife Gillespie—where’s Matthew?”

  “He’s still at work,” his mother said. “Are you staying long? Why didn’t you tell us? Have you eaten supper?”

  “We were heading back from Georgia—” Peter said. His mother stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her cheek felt withered and too soft, but she still wore the same light, powdery perfume, and she held her back as beautifully straight as ever. Her speech was slower now than her children’s—as slow as Gillespie’s southern drawl, and hesitating over consonants. “Georgia?” she said. “What would you go to Georgia for?”

  “You look older,” said Andrew. He looked older himself, but happy. His hair was thinning, and below his concave chest a paunch had started. Someone’s apron was tied around his middle. “If I’d known you were coming—” he said, and then P.J. stuck her hand out to him. He looked at it a moment before accepting it.

  “I’m very glad to meet you all,” said P.J.

  Andrew frowned. He was nervous with strangers—something Peter had forgotten to warn her about. But before the silence grew noticeable, his sister-in-law stepped in. “We’re glad to meet you,” she said. “Good to see you again,” she told Peter, and she shifted the diapered baby who rode her hip and held out her hand. Peter took it with relief; her cool, hard palm seemed to steady him.

  “We were just on this trip, you see,” he told her. “Passing through Baltimore. Thought we’d stop in. I wasn’t sure you’d—are we interrupting something?”

  “Oh, of course not!” his mother said gaily.

  “But with everyone at the back door there, I didn’t know—”

  “It was a locust. Gillespie was shooing it out of the house for us. Oh, these locusts, Peter, you can’t imagine. We keep the house just sealed, and still they get in. Will this screen be seen to, now?”

  “I’ll mend it in the morning,” Gillespie said.

  “Mother is scared of locusts,” Andrew said.

  “You’re none too fond of them yourself, Andrew dear,” his mother told him.

  “Well, no.”

  And meanwhile P.J. stood smiling hopefully, with her belongings still clutched to her chest, looking from one face to another and settling finally on the baby, who was playing with a long strand of hair that had straggled from Gillespie’s bun. “Oh, isn’t it darling,” she said. “What’s its name?”

  “She isn’t an it, she’s a she,” Andrew said stiffly.

  “Well, how could anyone tell?” Gillespie asked him. “All she’s got on is a diaper.”

  “Her face is a girl’s face. No one should mistake it.”

  “Oh, hush, Andrew, I never heard of such a thing.”

  Peter waited for Andrew to get insulted, to collapse in a kitchen chair or turn on his heel and leave, but he didn’t. He had changed—a fact that Peter forgot all over again each time he left home. He was the only person in this house who had changed. His mother remained a gilded pink and white and Gillespie continued shuffling around in dungarees, her face a little broader and more settled-looking but her fingers still nicked by whittling knives and her manner with babies still as offhand as if she were carrying a load of firewood. But Andrew had mellowed; he had calmed and softened. (“Andrew is in such a state,” Mrs. Emerson had written last winter. “You know how he gets when Gillespie’s expecting, I believe he’d go through the labor pains for her if only he could.” Only Peter seemed to remember the day after Timothy’s funeral, when Andrew had paced the living room saying, “Where is that girl? Where? I’ll get her for this.”) Now instead of taking offense Andrew smiled, first at Gillespie and then at the baby, whose cheek he lightly touched. “Her name is Jenny,” he told P.J.

  “Oh,” said P.J. She looked bewildered, but after a moment she smiled too.

  “Now then,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Shall we go into the living room where it’s cool?”

  She led the way, calming her skirt with her hands as if it were a long and stately gown. If the kitchen had become Gillespie’s, with its wood chips across the table and its scatter of tools beside the breadbox, the living room was still Mrs. Emerson’s. The same vases marched across the mantel; the same dusty gray smell rose from the upholstery. The red tin locomotive under the coffee-table could have been Peter’s own, back in the days when he was a child here anxiously studying the grownups’ faces.

  His mother settled in her wing chair, across from Andrew, and Gillespie sat in the high-backed rocker with both children nestled against her. Peter chose the couch, beside P.J. He felt she needed some support. She was nervously twisting her purse strap, and the licorice bag rustled on her knees like something alive. “I just love old houses,” she said.

  “How long can you stay?” his mother asked Peter. “And don’t say you’re just passing through. I want you to plan on a nice long visit this time.”

  “I have a lot of work to get back to,” Peter said.

  “In the summer? What kind of work would you do in the summer?”

  But then, remembering her social duties, her face became all upward lines and she turned to P.J. “I hope you’re not tired from the trip, J.C.,” she said.

  “P.J.,” said P.J. “No ma’am, I’m not a bit tired. I’m just so happy to finally meet you all. I feel like I know you already, Petey’s told me so much about you.”

  A lie. Peter had told her next to nothing. And he hadn’t even mentioned her to his family, but Mrs. Emerson continued wearing her bright hostess look and leaning forward in that hovering posture she always assumed to show an open mind. “Where are you from, dear?” she asked.

  “Well, New Jersey now. Before it was Georgia.”

  “Isn’t that nice?”

  P.J. shifted in her seat, deftly smoothing the backs of her thighs as if she wore a dress. “You look just like I thought you would,” she said—oh, always trying to get down to the personal, but she was no match for Mrs. Emerson.

  ?
??I suppose this heat is no trouble to you at all then,” Mrs. Emerson said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Coming from Georgia.”

  “Oh. No ma’am.”

  “Peter darling,” Mrs. Emerson said, “I want you to tell me everything. What have you been up to, now?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Where are my cigarettes?” She slid her fingers between the arm of the chair and the cushion. Peter, who hadn’t been going to tell her anything anyway, felt irritated at being cut off. He kept a pointed silence, with his arms folded tightly across his chest. He thought his mother was like a hunter who set traps and coaxed and baited until the animal was safely caught, and then she forgot she had wanted him and went off to some new project. “Nothing is where it should be in this house,” she said. “Gillespie, I think we could do with some iced tea to drink.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Gillespie handed the baby to Andrew and went to the kitchen, with George tailing her. P.J. sat back and smiled around the room. The only sound to be heard was the clatter of locusts. Finally P.J. said, “Mrs. Emerson, have you got a family album?”

  “Album?”

  “I’d like to see pictures of Peter when he was a baby.”

  “Oh, there are hundreds,” Mrs. Emerson said. She had filled more albums than any coffee-table could hold—rows upon rows of snapshots precisely dated—but she didn’t offer to bring them out. “Somewhere around,” she said vaguely, and she turned to stare out a window. What connection did this girl have with Emersons?

  What connection did Peter have? He sat plucking the knees of his slacks, as empty of things to say as he had been in Georgia, as hopeful of acceptance as P.J. From the kitchen came the smells of supper cooking, roast beef and baked potatoes. There was nothing like cooking smells to make you feel out of place in someone else’s house. While he was on the open highway life here had been going on in a pattern he could only guess at—meat basted, knife sharpened, bustling hunts for misplaced spoons, systems and rituals and habits they never had to think about. Mrs. Emerson lit her cigarette and reached without looking for an ashtray, which was exactly where she had known it would be. A silvery strand of baby-spit spun down onto Andrew’s hand, and out of nowhere Andrew produced a folded diaper and neatly wiped Jenny’s chin. P.J. was telling Mrs. Emerson how she just loved this section of Baltimore. (She just loved everything. What was the matter with her?) At her first pause, Andrew turned to Peter. “How’s the job going?” he asked. Mrs. Emerson said, “Do you like New Jersey?” To counterbalance P.J., he was blunter than he should have been. “I hate it,” he said.