The Vagabonds (19 page)

“Well, here we are,” she said. “Hungry?”

No, what mattered in this merry month was lastingness, renewal,
another time, another place,
and therefore he described to his daughter the light on the lake that late September afternoon in—where was it? Bolton Landing? Huletts Landing?—the long day’s paddling done and the canoe made fast to the dock, the way her mother seemed a farm girl again, girlish and lithe in her red flannel shirt, at ease with knots, at ease with the lake-weed and small scuttling creatures that rendered him uneasy, at home in the blazon and flare of the trees. So
she
was the one who gathered the kindling and built the fire and gutted the trout,
she
the one who knelt uncomplainingly to tend it on uneven ground, while he busied himself with his papers and pipe.

And on that day in—what would it have been, 1931?—the week before he lost his job and she told him they would have a child, he marveled as so often before at how she chose to suffer
him
(“Aaron,” joked Jimmy Wallison, “you have a good head for figures!” and winked and nodded at Elizabeth), how she with all her silent skill yet acquiesced in this his loud ineptitude. And he had been encouraged to play the city dweller while she resumed her childhood chores (“Do you know the one,” asked winking Jimmy, “about the traveling salesman and the farmer’s redheaded daughter?”), so perhaps it was his own fault finally that he himself had permitted the joke, had joined in the laughter and derision,
derisiveness,
yes, that was it; he had been derisive and wanted to apologize and to make amends. I had a temper, he wanted to tell her, I lost it often at inefficient tellers or grocery clerks or traffic policemen. I saw the way things ought to work and if they failed to work that way then this—or so I told myself—was a failure in others, not me: the sudden flush, the heat in the head, the red encumbrance in one eye, all these were familiar,
familiars,
but I had kept them from your mother, maintaining her inviolate and on a pedestal; she was not subject to such inquiry or enraged correction until that birthday dinner the year my wife turned forty and the night I returned from the bank.

And have I told you how on that particular and fateful Friday morning I bought her a sweater, a pink cardigan I knew she’d like, a perfume she was partial to? Or so I hoped and had been assured by the salesgirl at Lonergan’s, the one with penciled eyebrow lines and bee-stung lips like Clara Bow’s, which was the fashion then, I think, or perhaps it had been earlier, because who can date precisely or be bothered to remember if the fashion then was bee-stung lips or the flaming red of Rita Hayworth or, possibly, Jane Russell. At any rate the girl assured me your mother would be gratified, would wear this particular perfume with pride, and so I made the purchases at lunchtime and returned to the office and was searching, I remember, for a file of the Dantley Family Trust and came upon Dancey adjacent, and nothing could have been or seemed more natural than to peruse it also, feeling that small flare of satisfaction engendered by the luck I’d had, the excellent fortune of marriage, until
hey presto,
everything changed.

“OK, let’s go,” said Alice.

“Not high-tops,” said David. “Anything but high-tops, Mom.”

“Alley-oop,” said Aaron, and they stood.

Except he was not standing, had fallen to the kitchen floor, had bloodied his cheek on the wineglass she dropped, and now strong hands were lifting him; “Are you all right?” his daughter asked, repeated, and he could not answer “No,” because when Elizabeth died—not on that particular evening, of course, but six months later, her face to the wall, having endured what the doctor declared was an inoperable cancer, fast-growing, undetectable or at least by them in those years undetected, but
this
explained her loss of balance,
this
explained her listlessness—a part of him departed also, not having cursed the not-God in his heaven, since if He existed it was in the willow, the pattern of leaves, but resolute in his refusal nonetheless to affirm; why
should
he, Aaron attempted to say, who had received not a blessing but curse, who had made of a legacy fury and dust, who leapt from the running board into her arms and would remain there thereafter (in Sarasota, in the nursing home in Saratoga, in the rocking chair, the parking lot where Alice tried and failed to make him stand, to make him breathe) guilt-trammeled, responsible, dead.

XI

1976

A
lice was searing the bacon and doing so on purpose; she liked it best burned to a crisp. She kept a coffee can for drippings, and a pound of bacon yielded half an inch of fat; she was very careful with the cast-iron skillet, pouring off the liquid, because she had a friend, Marie, whose left forearm and leg had been burned when she toppled a pan from the stove, reaching for it heedlessly, and the hot grease geysered down and scarred Marie for life. Behind her, at the kitchen table, the children fussed and chattered, and in some part of her consciousness Alice was protecting them, standing between her daughters and son and the cauldron of delight they were about to eat. She herself was drinking coffee, watching the light on the maple outside and how the leaves were yellowing and had begun to fall. When there was enough to pour, she poured off bubbling fat.

“How soon?” asked Claire.

“How
soon
?” David asked.

“There’s orange juice,” Joanna said. “I squeezed it, Mom.”

“How many pieces?” David asked.

“Three,” Claire told him. “I get four.”

“Not
fair,
it isn’t
fair
!”

“Here, darling.” Alice offered a first piece of bacon from the newspaper she’d drained it on; Claire was supposed to be buttering toast and Joanna producing the jam. Her eight-year-old—his sense of equity confirmed, the share-and-share-alike arithmetic of bacon strips established to his satisfaction—smacked his lips loudly and chewed.
The last shall be first,
Alice thought. She loved these weekend mornings—the three children gathered at the table, jostling, bickering over the size of their portions but not really meaning it, not awake enough quite yet to declare their separate agendas or go their separate ways. They were starting to do so, of course; they would be leaving soon. Her pretty ones, her daughters, and this boy who looked so much like George she was astonished, sometimes: the way he sat and spread his hands and tossed the hair out of his eyes. They were growing up so quickly she couldn’t bear it, sometimes, how time both crawled and flew.

David licked his fingers. Alice drank. She was spoiling him, she knew, and would correct his manners later, but a child should be allowed to eat one piece of bacon with his fingers this one breakfast of the week. The coffee was lukewarm and sweet. In the distance a siren rose, fell. In a minute she would deal with eggs: eight brown eggs cracked and beaten, with salt and pepper added and milk already in the mixing bowl, and while the pound of bacon leached into the newsprint, darkening, she drained the fat again but left a little in the frying pan for flavor and added butter and, as soon as the butter had melted, poured in the bowlful of eggs. Then she adjusted the heat.

“What time is it?” asked David.

“The bacon’s done, these eggs look hunky-dory. Ten-fifteen.”

“Ten-seventeen,” said Claire. The girls wore pajama bottoms and a pair of matching sweatshirts that said YALE.

“Ten-twenty,” said Joanna. “Time to eat.”

“I’m
starving,
” David said.

It was their ritual on Sundays; no matter how late Joanna had been out the night before, no matter with whom, she always came down to the kitchen by ten and sleepily permitted her mother to kiss her and took out a dozen oranges and cut them in half by the sink. Next she set up the juicer and commenced to squeeze. Claire would descend to the kitchen also; it was her job to set the table, laying out glasses and napkins and toast. She would watch her sister carefully, waiting for the juice to spurt or a section of cut fruit to fall to the floor. They each had roles; they all played parts, and these were designated early on and could not be changed. It was the family pattern: Joanna exuberant, feckless, slicing oranges in two and squeezing them, and Claire her younger sister with the orthodonture and the list of grievances, closed in on herself like a fist.

“What did you do last night?” Alice asked. “Where did you two go?”

“We went to the movies,” Joanna announced.

“Oh?”

“
Picnic.
A rerun. Did you ever see it, Mom?”

She smiled. “That William Holden. Wasn’t he a heartbreaker, though?”

“And Kim Novak. Va-va-voom.”

“Va-va-voom,” repeated Claire. She rubbed at what she persisted in calling a zit. “Is it like
mucha muchacha
?”

“Sort of. Only different.” Joanna started humming “Moonglow”; she raised and kissed her spoon.

“Can I have more orange juice?”

“More orange juice
please,
” Alice said to her son. He held out his glass and she poured. “You sound just like your father. May I
please.
”

George was not with them, however; George had gone away. He was, he said, on a business trip and when she asked him what sort of business got conducted on Saturday morning he said it was a party in the Adirondacks, up by Long Lake where the fishing was good; she would be welcome to join him and meet his business friends. These were contacts, professional contacts, and conversation on the lake was twice as important as talk in the office and when he got back from the Lodge at Long Lake he promised he’d bring back fresh bass or a pike. Why don’t you join me, darling, why not come along.

She didn’t even bother to refuse. He had known her answer, that she would say no. He was banking on the certainty she wouldn’t leave the children and was doing what she could to keep the family together, to carry on as though they
could
just carry on and time neither crawled nor flew. It was her habit to stay home and his to go to parties, her desire to be peaceful and his to raise the roof. So George had packed his duffel bag and flask and fishing gear, saying, next year I’ll take David; then he got in the car and tapped the horn twice, lightly, and drove off. The children waved. That had been yesterday morning, and tomorrow night with his business done he would be back home again, reeking of gin and tobacco and the fish-stink all over his body and daring her to make an issue of it, daring her to question him about the weekend party and who else had been at the Lodge.

Alice added coffee to her white porcelain cup. It steamed. In fact she did not miss him now, not with the children chattering and the smell of bacon in the room and the prospect, afterward, of the crossword puzzle and the
New York Times.
In fact he never had been part of Sunday breakfast, had never shared their eggs and toast, and she minded this part of the weekend much less than the rest, minded the mornings much less than the nights, and with the sunlight dappling the sugar maple behind her and the four of them sitting together she permitted herself the small pleasure of coffee and, later on, a cigarette. She parceled out the scrambled eggs and, smiling at them, raised her cup; she was their mother and it was a bright autumn day and soon they would be leaving home but not just yet, not now.

“So what’s on the schedule this morning?” she asked.

“Homework,” said Joanna. “There’s a Spanish test.”

“Tomorrow?”

“
Verdad. Mañana,
” said Claire—a pedant already, and better at Spanish.

“
Compuesta, no hay mujer fea,
” Joanna pronounced. “‘Made up, no woman is ugly.’ That’s what Mr. Hernandez told us. And he said it would be on the test.”

“I doubt it,” said Alice. “I can’t believe he meant any such thing. Was he joking?”

“No.”

“Not Mr. Hernandez,” said Claire, and for a moment the two girls smiled at each other, sharing knowledge, keeping secrets, and she wished she could speak to this Mr. Hernandez and tell him to behave himself or he’d be out on his ear. Her elder daughter was a knockout, a
mucha muchacha,
and her Spanish teacher better keep his witty sayings and his Latin Lover attitudes and plump beringed hands to himself.

“I heard another one,” Joanna said. “
A lo lejos, aun la barbuda es hermosa.
”

“What?”

“What’s
that
mean?” David asked. He had finished his portion of bacon and was staring at his mother’s plate; he was waiting to see if she’d offer him more before he began on his eggs. He liked to finish one flavor completely; he did everything in sequence and didn’t like, she knew, to mix the tastes.

“
Lo lejos—
is it
los
or
las
? Or just plain
lo
?” Joanna asked.

“‘In the distance,’” Claire translated for her brother, “‘even the bearded one is attractive. Pretty.’ That’s what it means.”

“It’s stupid,” he said. “Girls don’t have beards.”

“
He
doesn’t care,” said Joanna. She raised her arms and clapped her hands like castanets and sang, “Olé,
mucha muchacha.
”

Alice tried not to look shocked. Instead she swallowed a spoonful of plum jam and asked her son what time his tennis lesson had been scheduled for this afternoon and where they were playing tomorrow and when the game was. “Match,” he said, “it’s called a match,” and she felt, again, excluded by the three of them—the condescension of it all, the way her children
handled
her—even this eight-year-old, even her little boy-man of the house. “Well—game, set, match,” she said, and turned back to the window and stared at the tree. The plum jam tasted tart, not sweet, made from greengage plums and with ginger mixed in; yes, that was it, the tang of ginger, the taste on her puckering tongue. There were a blue jay and a cardinal—a
pair
of cardinals, she saw—and she watched them preen.

The telephone rang. Joanna answered. By the set of her shoulders and lilt in her voice, the breathy breathless “I’ll call you later,” it was clear to everyone that who was calling was a boy and not one she wanted to talk to in public, or not at least the public her family had become. Claire winked at David; he laughed. Whatever had been going on, whoever was calling her daughter, he was someone that the others knew and had been expecting to call. Joanna turned away from them, offering her back. The girl’s skin was flawless, her hair in the sunlight aflame. Deliberately, savoring it, Alice chewed her own final portion of bacon, deciding just this once to keep it for herself. For if she chose to
she
could shut
them
out; she too could keep a secret and not let them know her worries or her hopes and plans . . .