October Light (32 page)

He looked alarmed but at once put down the scraper and came to help.

5

James Page stared out his kitchen window in a fury of indignation. “What the
hell?”
he said. He rolled the October
Saturday Evening Post
in his hands as if making it a weapon, his spectacles hanging cockeyed down his nose.

“Company's coming,” Dickey called excitedly from the living room.

It was a quarter past eight. James Page's front yard was lit like the parking lot at Mammoth Mart, and pretty near as filled with cars, or so it looked to James.

“Good heavens, I'd better put cocoa on,” Virginia said, bursting into the kitchen, cigarette in hand. She'd puffed up her hair and put lipstick on and powder on her cheeks to try to hide the dark circles. Halfway to the pots and pans she stopped. “No,” she said, and the cigarette in her hand began wobbling violently, “I'd better see them in.” She was thinking, in fact, of the lilac bushes, thinking perhaps she could steer the company off the path and away from them so no one would know.

“I'd like to know what in tunkit's goin on here,” her father said.

“Oh, Dad, for heaven's sakes calm down!” she said. She had the door open now, waving and carrying on, yelling “Hi there! Hi there! Over this way!”

Lewis appeared at the foot of the stairway, paint-chips all over him. “Looks like somebody's drove up,” he said. He looked guilty as sin.

Estelle Parks said, leaning on both canes, peeking out from the living room—she'd taken her coat and hat off now—“Why, who in the world can that be?”

“You ought to know, you meddlin old buzzard,” James Page said, white with anger. “You called 'em youahself, in there on the telephone.”

“Why, James!” she said, and then quickly, as if just remembering, “That's true, so I did.”

“If that just don't beat hell,” he said. He raised the rolled-up
Saturday Evening Post
as if to hit something, found nothing to hit, and lowered it again. A loud crack came from his pipestem. He'd bit clear through it. He spit and put the pipe in his shirt pocket.

“This way! Yoo hoo! This way!” Virginia was calling. She was off the porch now, herding them away from the lilacs. The car lights were off and the yard was full of happy voices and the sound of feet. He recognized Ed Thomas's hefty Welsh laugh.

James leaned his head toward Estelle, his wide mouth twitching. “Just what in the world you think you're doin?” he said.

“Now easy there, Dad,” Lewis said mildly, looking not at his father-in-law but at the painted cap where the stovepipe had once gone. “It's a dahn good idea and you'd ought to go along with it. We'll just have a few people in, that's ah, have a little singin and story-tellin—little ahguin, mebby, about politics“—he grinned, “—little sweet smellin food. Ye never know, Aunt Sally might just decide ‘Shoot!' and come on down and join us.”

“It's an Indian remedy,” Estelle said, and smiled. It was a pretty smile, apologetic and kindly, and James was for a moment disconcerted. “When an Iroquois Indian had a tapeworm in him, the medicine doctor would starve the man and then brace the man's jaws open and put out some broth. Pretty soon, out popped the tapeworm.”

James' eyes widened. “Great Peter,” he barked, and slammed the
Saturday Evening Post
against his leg,
“Sally's
no tapeworm! She does a thing, she's got
reasons
for it.” His hands were shaking at the indignity of it all—or so it seemed to Estelle and Lewis, who were suddenly filled with remorse over what they'd done. But the matter was a little more complex than they understood. He was indeed indignant at their treating his sister—however outrageous her behavior might be—as some mindless creature that could be coaxed through fire with a graham cracker. But the thing that had mainly gotten into James Page was Estelle's smile. Old fool that he was—so he put it to himself—for an instant James had felt powerfully attracted to her, emotion rising in his chest as sharp and disturbing as it would in any schoolboy. Even now he was upset and surprised by it. Metaphysically upset, in point of fact, though the word was not one James Page would have used. They were old and ugly, both of them, and the body's harboring of such emotions so long past their time was a cruel affront, a kind of mockery from heaven.

“I'm sorry, James,” Estelle said—and damned if the thing didn't leap in him again. But he didn't have long to think about it, or endure it, rather, for now the company was sailing through the door, little Dickey standing there holding it open, grinning like a duck, as if he thought it had suddenly turned Christmas.

“What are
you
doing up, you little whippersnapper?” Ruth Thomas
—née
Jerome—said, tousling Dickey's hair and making her eyes cross. Then, pivoting her three hundred pounds like a dancer, she threw out her arms and embraced the room. “Happy October one and all!” she cried. Her puffy, spotted hands came, graceful as the hands of an actress, to her lips and she blew them all a kiss. From the elbows to the shoulders, her arms were exceedingly fat. Ruth Thomas was, in the old sense, mad. She had a voice like music, for all her years—as remarkable a voice as this world has ever heard, a study in contradictions. It was a clear, ringing voice—or so nature had intended it—a voice built for sweetness and volume, the voice of a singer. For years, indeed, she'd lent her rich, somewhat breathy alto to the Congregational Church Choir in North Bennington, and she'd given more recitals at the McCullough Mansion than anyone now living could remember, including Ruth Thomas. At the same time, her many years as head librarian in the John G. McCullough Free Library—or possibly some other cause—had given her voice a not-quite dulcet, artificial throatiness that seemed at once studiously cultured and seductive, or at any rate intended to have that effect, unless it was mockery, or self-mockery, or something else. She spoke, or sang, or did both at once, like an unsubmergeably strong piano with the soft pedal pressed to the carpet. She enjoyed good talk—she talked constantly—and had a powerful laugh.

Her body, even now that she was seventy-six, was a creation as curious as her voice. Her walk was no longer spry—she'd limped badly ever since she'd slipped on a shag-rug and broken her hip, six years ago (she had a pin in it now), and her thick gray-stockinged legs were bent just slightly the wrong way at her knees, so that she looked, standing up, like a large deer balanced on its hind legs in an orchard, reaching up for apples. Aside from her walk, her every gesture was the soul of natural grace. For all her weight, she might have been the model of elegance if she'd liked—might, that is, have been a graceful and elegant fat woman—but Ruth was too much the clown for that (for which some people liked her and others did not), delighting in mimickry and buffoonery of every sort, from parody of Queen Victoria to the low bumps and grinds of burlesque halls. This too her years as librarian had tended to modify and inhibit, as was perhaps just as well. She'd learned to limit herself for hours at a time to nothing more outlandish than a clever, perhaps slightly overstated mimickry of primness. Her native impishness showed only, for the most part, as a wicked sparkle in her bright blue eyes and a tendency to make faces. “This book,” a visitor to the library might say in high dudgeon, as though it were Ruth Thomas's fault, “is stupid.” “Stupid?” Ruth Thomas would exclaim, as if distressed. Before she could stop herself, assuming she wanted to, her upper teeth, or rather dentures, would protrude and her bright blue eyes would cross. With children—or at any rate with most children—it had made her, for years and years, the Queen of North Bennington. On other occasions her curious ability with gestures would slip out—a Jewish shrug, an Italian's flip of the hand for
“eh paesan,”
the silly go-get-em-boys jab and cross of a dim-witted highschool coach.

There was no denying that she could be, at times, an embarrassment. “Ruth, you should be on the stage!” Estelle had told her once. “Or somewhere,” Ferris had added dryly. Yet she was, for all that, a tender-hearted, gentle and well-meaning woman, a lover of books, though her taste was odd. She loved “Chaucer,” though she had not read him in a while, and she read in modern English; the name “William Shakespeare” she always pronounced in full, with some sort of vaguely British accent; and she would have to think twice, she often said, before choosing between Milton and the gas chamber.

“James,” she called out now, bending toward him—she was very tall—“you look like a dog who's eaten fence-nails!”

He shrank back a little. Her breath smelled powerfully of Ovaltine.

The kitchen was now bursting. Behind Ruth Thomas, his hand around her waist, helping to support her, was Ruth's husband Ed Thomas, red-faced, white-haired, cigar-smoking, eighty-year-old Welshman. He looked considerably older than Ruth, partly because of her dyed hair. He was a farmer, a rich one, as large as his wife around the waist and about two-thirds as tall. “Evenin James,” he said, “evenin Estelle! Hi there, Lewis, Dickey! Evenin! Evenin!” He swept the unlighted cigar from his mouth and with the same hand took his hat off. Behind him stood his eighteen-year-old grandson DeWitt, carrying a guitar, and behind DeWitt came Roger, close to Dickey's age. Both of the Thomas boys had freckles and dark red hair. “Brought the boys along, 'Stelle,” Ed Thomas said. His l's had a kind of click to them, his tongue hitting the teeth on either side. “Witt's in from college for the weekend.” He turned to the tall boy: “You remember 'Stelle?” The boy with the guitar bowed formally, shyly. “Roger,” Ed Thomas said, “take off yer hat and say How.”

Ruth was already plunged deep in conversation with Virginia, who'd just come in.

“Can I see your guitar?” Dickey said.

DeWitt Thomas winked at him, edging away toward the living room, and Dickey followed, glancing apprehensively at his father. Roger moved tentatively after Dickey.

“Well I be damned,” James said, whether in anger or in pleasure it was hard to tell.

“Is that you, Ruth?” Sally Abbott's voice called down the stairs.

Reverend Lane Walker was next into the room, his hand on the arm of a stranger, a wicked looking Mexican with a moustache like a cat's. He was fat, with what seemed—to James Page at least—unnaturally and offensively short legs. He wore a brownish green suit that made him look like a frog and had highly polished shoes, the kind of wide-winged shoes you'd expect to be worn, in James' opinion, by an abortionist. Lane Walker was young, maybe thirty, thirty-five. He was Sally's minister in North Bennington, a shy, intellectual sort of man with a horsey wife—wore jodhpurs and carried a ridingwhip even in the grocery store—and three adopted children, Vietnamese. The hair on the top of Rev. Walker's head was cut off like a prisoner's, and under his chin
—under
it, not on it—he had a scraggle of hair like a billygoat's beard or the beard on some Irish elf.

“I asked Lane to come over,” Ruth told Estelle. She swept her arm back toward the Mexican, as if to draw him farther in. “Father—” she began, then made a quick face. “Now isn't that silly! I've forgotten your name!” She threw a girlish look at him. He drew back slightly, smiling.

Lane Walker said, bowing and smiling, edging toward James with his hand on the elbow of the Mexican, “Mr. Page, let me introduce an old friend of mine, Father Rafe Hernandez.”

“Father, is it,” James said unsociably, making no attempt to hide his dislike of foreigners. He had no intention of shaking the man's hand. The Mexican, to James' intense annoyance, did not offer it.

“Rafe will be sufficient,” the Mexican said. His voice was oily, soft as a cat's voice, full of insinuation. He slid his black eyes toward the kitchen window as if thinking of stealing it. “Thees is a beautiful setting for a farm,” he said.

“S'prised you can see it so well in the dahk,” James said.

“Now James,” Estelle said.

James smiled acidly, pleased to see that someone had noticed his inhospitality. “You must be one of them new-style priests,” he said. He pointed toward his own throat, moving the finger from left to right in a gesture meant to indicate the absence of a clerical collar, but suggesting a throat-cutting.

“Sometimes I wear it, sometimes not,” the priest said, impossible to offend.

Lane Walker said, “We were marchers together, Rafe and I.” He grinned at the Mexican.

The Mexican nodded. “Selma.”

“Is that you, Ruth?” Sally Abbott called down the stairs.

Virginia was over at the stove now, putting on milk, preparing to fix cocoa. In the doorway old Dr. Phelps was calling, leaning on his cane, “Anybody home?”

“Come in, come in and shut the door!” Ruth Thomas bellowed.

“Lo, Doctor!” Ed called grandly waving his cigar. “'Sthat Margie with you?”

Dr. Phelps' granddaughter was peeking shyly past the door-jamb. She had long blonde hair and timid, faded looking eyes. Dr. Phelps had a face even redder than the Welshman's, and tightly curled white hair. When his granddaughter was in—she seemed to float in her long gray coat like a stick on a stream—Dr. Phelps reached behind him to close the door.

“Don't close it yet!” the Mexican called out, then giggled like a Japanese.

Estelle's grand-nephew Terence was in the doorway, smiling sheepishly, blue with cold.

“Terence!” Estelle cried. “Heavens to Betsy! Come in, child, come in!” She looked at Ruth, smiling and horrified. “He's been out there all this time. I forgot all about him!”

“I was listening to the concert,” Terence said, smiling at the floor. “WAMC.”

“That's right,” Ruth Thomas said, towering near the doorway to the living room. “The Boston Symphony was on. Who won?”

Estelle explained to Rev. Walker, “Terence is a French horn player. He's very good.”