Darling? (20 page)

That afternoon he took the yellow phosphorus out of the freezer. It ignites at room temperature, Big Steve had said; they’d wait to use it until he could learn more about it himself. Stevie set a small lump out in an ashtray and after an hour of warming, it burst obligingly, quite safely, into flame.

He packed some in ice with a strip of caps from his cap pistol, took it to the Saturday matinee and left it under the back row of seats. The ice had melted by the end of
Rocky and Bullwinkle
—there was a hissing sound, then the caps shot off and smoke filled the mezzanine. “Get out, fire!” a man shouted. People began to file out of their rows, orderly at first, but fear hardened their faces; when a woman with a little girl pushed at the man in front of her saying, “I have a baby,” he put up his shoulder to block her. Now a terror shot through Stevie, too, seeing the adults confused and afraid. It was the awful underlayer of life that he’d glimpsed in his father’s face as Big Steve folded the newspaper and set it high out of his reach, the chill that crept over the grownups when they spoke of the war. There was something he hadn’t known about life; his father had shielded him. Now he was going to be alone with it.

He ran home. He had to confess and be punished, get free. Just to push open the heavy front door with its leaded window, see the afternoon sun spilling into the dining room, was to know that the safety and order of his father’s kingdom was still in place. It was Sunday, so a chicken was roasting; the smell rose reassuringly from the kitchen. His father would banish Stevie’s terrors back to the world of nightmare, put the laboratory off limits, draw a lesson from his son’s misbehavior, set everything right. Stevie ran up the stairs, cupping his palm over the head of the marble elephant on the landing, a habit that had become a superstition so that if he forgot, he’d turn back to correct the oversight lest he accidentally set off some disaster. At the bedroom door he hesitated for a second, but took himself in hand, ready to admit his transgressions and face the consequences, and tapped. The shades were drawn, the room smelled of illness and medicaments, and his father was gone to the hospital, where no children were allowed.

Steve saw his father next at his wake. Big Steve lay emaciated on his bier, his skin fallen in webs, cheeks rouged like a music hall dancer’s over the gray cast beneath. It was the first anniversary of Hiroshima. For the rest of Stevie’s life he’d recall the day suddenly at moments of happiness or pride, and feel his joy sour as he thought of what lay in store. A weakness his father would have despised: he fought it with all his strength, keeping up an indomitable good cheer, an absolute outward refusal of despair. He
would
be happy, in memory of his father. His brother followed the more conventional path, studying medicine, then oncology.

Next summer the butterfly bushes bloomed in profusion, making up for the lost year. Swallowtails floated over the lavender arches whose beauty seemed a rebuke, as if Big Steve’s longing to see the flowers of his childhood again had been a weakness that led to his death. How vital he had been, taking the helm of a tugboat some days so his men could know and trust him! How carefully he’d packed the roots of the butterfly bushes with sopping peat, to nourish them for a long life. The life
he
should have had. But nothing is just. Steve never crossed the laboratory threshold again—he had promised never to go there without his father. He began to avoid the flowery path, too, and his studies, and almost everything.

He’d also promised to “take care” of his mother, though it was hard to know what this could mean. Edith was less grief-stricken than bewildered. Her parents had chosen Stephen as her husband and so, of course, she’d married him. She counted love among childish fancies, with magic potions and royal toads. When, on their wedding night, Stephen had explained to her what was expected of a wife, she’d been appalled. He said it was natural; she said that if it was natural she would surely have heard of it before. But as she didn’t have the courage, let alone the language, to speak of it to anyone else, she allowed him into her bed at night and did her best to forget in the morning. She was “a new soul,” on her first visit to earth—this fact had been divined by a carnival palm reader, who had then folded Edith’s sister Lucy’s hand silently back into itself and bowed her head. Lucy’s dress caught fire at a dance that winter and she lived only a few days more. So Edith took her own ignorance as fate, and a lucky fate at that. She obeyed her parents, then her husband … now …

It was frightening to see her, to realize all she didn’t know. She deeded the household management over to Lottie and sat down once a week with Big Steve’s office manager to sign the checks. She played bridge. When she didn’t have a task she became agitated, but as long as she was counting stitches or pennies her fears let her alone. It became Stevie’s duty to protect her from the world’s confusions. He ate his dinner, smelts and all, never took things apart anymore, kept his room neat and his grades reasonable, and checked every night to be sure all the windows were locked, the way his father had used to banish the monsters from his closet when he was six years old.

The explosive elements, cobwebbed now in the garden shed, must be got rid of, and one day he gathered them up and took them down to the harbor, meaning to pour them in. Kneeling on the bank where the waves lapped under a crust of foam, he felt suddenly as if he were trying to rid himself of a terrible secret, and with it must give up his father’s memory, too. He turned back up Victory Boulevard hugging the stoppered tubes to his chest, as if they contained a precious essence, and thought of people turned back from suicide to life, with all its dangers and disappointments. That night he dreamed Big Steve was showing him how to steer a boat: he heard his father’s voice, felt his presence as if he were standing right beside him again. Awakened, he cried in gulps like a child, which so shamed him—he was in his last year of high school, played varsity basketball, almost a man himself—that he forgot all of it, even his father’s qualities that he’d been so grateful to see again in the dream.

When he went away to school (a two-year business course, inexpensive and, as his mother said, “appropriate”—she’d been afraid his fiddling, as she called it, would lead him into the trades, nor did she care to throw good money and time away on a university education), he took the mercury and the phosphorus with him, reasoning that this was the best way to protect his mother. He was a poor student—he’d always learned through his hands, or by studying how one part fit another, and he shrank from abstractions like price/earnings ratios. And his father had ridden so magnificently astride the world of business that the son hardly dared imagine such a mount for himself. Sealed in plastic, immersed in the dormitory toilet tank, the phosphorus lived as a secret energy source in Stevie’s mind. He always checked it before an exam and the little surge of confidence he felt, just knowing it was there, would sometimes dispel the inner fog so he’d discover as he ticked down the rows of questions that he knew more answers than he’d dreamed.

Smoldering in the darkened doorway of the cafeteria, surrounded by the pert girls from St. Elizabeth’s who’d been bussed in for a dance, stood one Theresa Lester. Would Steve light her cigarette? A funny question, as clearly she could ignite anything with a glance. He struck the match and felt something in himself catch, too; from that instant his life was refocused, on her. Could she really long for him as she seemed to, or was he the butt of some terrible joke? If he gave in and admitted his feelings, would she taunt him, who was so gullible he’d imagined she could love such a timid boy? He could never really own the man’s broad-shouldered body he saw in the mirror—it bore no relation to the quavering heart inside.

But Theresa was desperate—thank God! She had no choice but to love him. Her father had walked out, and poverty, or loneliness, had driven her mother into an alcoholic daze. It was easy for Steve to forgive Theresa’s tempests, when he knew their origins—she screamed, she threw whatever came to hand, because she guessed he was about to be cruel to her. Cruelty was all she knew—of course it was what she expected. When he forgave her she threw herself against him and sighed as if she could sigh a life’s unhappiness out now she was safe in his arms, and made love to him ravenously, without a qualm. This while his friends were exultant over getting a finger under a date’s brassiere strap—but Theresa wasn’t like the others; she belonged to nature, to the genuine heart of the world. Her narrow cat’s eyes—even golden like a cat’s—looked out of the wilderness at him, begging him to take her in.

Sex itself upset him: the pitch of his own feeling, the way she lay back and flowered around him while he rose over her as if she were prey. He wanted to apologize for his rude intrusion into her body, make amends to her somehow. So, he would marry her, take care of her. His father had left enough money so that really Steve had no need to work, though his mother would have gasped at this idea. But this life reduced to figures—inventories held, sales expected—with no meaning, no purpose but money, numbed him, and he was determined to escape.
She,
Theresa, held the meaning. When he was deep inside her it seemed he had almost touched it.

She was such a creature as his mother could not imagine. “Sweetie, no…,” Edith said, smiling in puzzlement: surely he couldn’t be serious? A poor Catholic girl from a broken family, a girl who glowed less with beauty than ambition? Anyone who saw them together would know her son a fool. “We don’t want to disappoint Evelyn,” she said quietly. Evelyn’s father was also in shipping, and for the last few years his mother had lost no opportunity of mentioning Evelyn’s travels in Europe, her excellence as a golfer, her efforts with the Junior League.… Steve looked at his mother more with pity than defiance; the poor woman had been sheltered until she was nearly blind.

“I don’t think it will come as a big disappointment to Evelyn, Mom,” he said.

Though the tilt of Theresa’s chin, as she walked down the aisle toward him, gave him a momentary chill. She looked more proud than happy, as if she’d made a brilliant acquisition and was planning her next move. Her mother, a dithery creature in a feathery hat, did not look capable of unkindness, and having downed several vodka martinis at the reception recited “The Owl and the Pussycat” so tenderly Steve’s eyes filled with tears.

They were moving upstate, into the country. He’d found a house that fit them; it had begun as someone’s folly, a pile of fieldstones mortared together, used as a hunting lodge with only the fireplaces for heat. It lay in a hollow—a brook wove along beside it and a long meadow spread out in front with a big old sugar maple blazing in the middle. It was a place such as a child might draw in crayon, the yellow rays of the sun touching the blue water and green grass—happiness on a page. And soon there were children, four in quick succession: Katherine; Stephen III and Michael, the twins; and finally Stella, who was somehow most clearly his own. He stood on the porch watching them catch fireflies in a June dusk, trying to take pleasure though he felt only foreboding: if he died, like his father, at fifty, he had only twenty years to go.

Not to mention the nuclear clock on the cover of
Harper’s:
four minutes to Armageddon now. Seize the day, there may not come another. Steve had his real estate license, worked—when he could make himself—out of an office in Tiverton Center beside the feed store. He loved the old farmhouses, the torn curtains at broken windows, overgrown orchards, root cellars opening out of grassy hills, rusty harrows abandoned in the fields. Whole lives billowed inside those houses, like the willow growing through the floor and out the windows at the old Atwater place. Once he found a shelf of spiced peaches in mason jars, glowing in the basement of a ruined cottage, fresh and delicious though their maker had long ago died.

The few souls who might bother to look at such places quickly lost heart, and sales were rare, but he accepted this with peculiar good cheer, as a chance to affirm again that money was a small thing to him. Was success more important, after all, than family? He’d leave the office early, go home and build the kids a dollhouse or a child-size dory with a red sail. Once he saw a ragtag circus in a parking lot and convinced the manager to sell him a pony foal that was tied up at ringside while its mother gave rides. He got it halfway into the back of the Buick by piling sugar cubes on the seat, then held its back legs to keep it from kicking him and pushed it the rest of the way. It nipped at his shoulder all the way home, but that was nothing next to the looks on the kids’ faces.

Scarecrow as they named him, for his manginess, fit Steve’s two major purposes: he astonished the children and infuriated Theresa at once. She was disappointed, bitterly, in marriage, in life, in him. Whatever it was she had wanted he had not been able to provide it, and now she turned her anger on him. The more she tore at him, though, the stonier he became. “A
pony,
” she said, disgusted. “
I’ll
have to take care of it, of course.” Little Stella rested her head against the pony’s shoulder, with a shy, cozy smile. “It’s not enough the sheep and the chickens and the dogs, we have to have a
pony!
The kids don’t give a damn about ponies—they want a
father,
that’s what!”

But what father had ever loved his children more? It was intoxicating to see his own reflection in their eyes: the conjurer of Tootsie Pops and ponies, the master of this world. And the phosphorus waited in the basement freezer for the moment when Steve could pass along his knowledge of the earthly miracles. Though the children were growing impatient with his tricks and games. He found himself posturing, trying to act the part of father, talking with put-on sophistication about things he didn’t understand. Stella and the boys played along, listening with earnest interest, trying to respond as he would want, but there was always a shadow of suspicion on Katherine’s wary face, as if she were keeping watch on the false thread that ran between them and would pull it out one day. Stella had nightmares—a monster came, Daddy couldn’t save her. The kind of dream Steve used to have after his father died.