Safe Passage (2 page)

    
"Listen," Alfred continued. "If you really want to go down there, go ahead and go. Cynthia and I will move into your house. Simon can stay with us to finish school." But
Mag
would no more have left Simon to Cynthia's care-sweet Simon, her baby, her love-than cut her own throat.

    
"Then, if you change your mind and come back, nothing is lost." Coming from Alfred, the offer sounded generous and sensible.

    
Mag
said, "We've had money exactly twice in our life, Alfred, and not all that much, either time."

    
"Of course we would pay you rent," Alfred said. He meant:
not
veiy
much
rent. He was a teacher and Cynthia was a psychologist, with salaries that barely paid for their little apartment. They would never be able to afford a house of any size this close to Washington.

     
"The Keys are something to think about," Patrick said. The idea of wintering in the tropics intrigued him. He had once been a Hemingway fan and saw himself in a thatched-roof bar, drinking lime juice and mineral water, being Papa Patrick Singer. But what did Patrick know?

    
Mag
squinted out the sliding glass door to the rain coming down on the deck in the dark. She had insisted on a house with lots of windows-an excellent decision, though right now she could see only bubbles of water on the glass and blackness beyond. When the boys were little, she'd been able to watch them play in the yard while she cleaned. She'd been able to supervise the babies in the family room and still catch the news on TV while she cooked in the kitchen. Later, after she went to work, she'd been able to get away with vacuuming the mottled carpets only once a week. It was a perfect house.

    
"I moved here from a chicken coop," she'd said to Alfred, trying to explain her attachment. "You don't remember, you were too little, but we moved here from a chicken coop."

    
Alfred never believed her, never understood her need for the place, but it was true. She was twenty-three at the time and they had no money. Alfred was three,
Izzy
was a baby,
she
was pregnant with Percival. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment on what had once been a farm, in a long single-story building, with a laundry room at the far end and a row of clothes lines outside in the back.
Mag's
life consisted of traveling from the apartment to the laundry room, from laundry room to clothes lines, then back to the apartment. She cooked meals, fed children, put them down for naps, cleaned up. She listened to classical music on the stereo in order to remain sane. She never watched TV. She got out twice a week-on Saturdays when she took the car to the grocery store, and on Tuesday nights when she went to her English literature class at the college.

    
After she got pregnant with Percival, she began to notice the odor of poultry in the apartment on cold mornings before the heat came up-a dank, raw smell like the meat case in the supermarket. Usually she felt all right when she was pregnant, but the chicken smell made her queasy. All day the odor rose and fell with the uneven heat from the radiators, as if chickens were running through the rooms at various times, pecking at the linoleum floors for feed-the ghosts of a thousand chickens.

    
"You're losing it, baby," Patrick had said. Patrick couldn't smell a thing. In those days he had nothing to do but go to work at the electrical supply company he was with at the time and then invent things, whatever pleased
him.
Her classroom on Tuesday evenings smelled of chalk, floor polish,
cologne
. "You can't tell me I don't know the difference between perfume and poultry," she said when she got home. Patrick laughed and wanted to make love. Even if
Mag
was not in the mood, she always acquiesced. What harm could it do? She was already pregnant. "I can't help it if my nose gets sensitive at these times," she said afterward, expecting sympathy in the mellow afterglow of orgasm. "Maybe you're under too much pressure, Patrick told her
. "
Maybe you should quit going to school." She said she'd keep taking classes even if she did go crazy; she'd get her degree pregnant or barefoot or both.

    
She continued to hate the smell of chickens and therefore began to envision herself leaving her family behind. She saw herself fleeing, alone, with a backpack on her shoulders, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, knee-high socks, and sneakers. Maybe she was going crazy. She was young, she'd never wanted babies in the first place, never even wanted Patrick. One day at the clothes line she said to her neighbor, "Somebody must have had a freezer full of chickens in our apartment before we moved in-the place smells like they're still there, it really does."

    
And her neighbor said, "Well, it's no wonder, with this place being a chicken coop for twenty years."

    
The neighbor told her the whole
story.The
developer who'd bought the farm had decided it would be cheaper to turn the chicken coops into apartments than tear them down. That was in the days before stringent zoning regulations. The old farmhouse was rented out, too-a ramshackle white building down the street. The barn, being unconvertible, had been torn down.

    
Mag
felt as if she'd been slapped. She whisked Alfred and
Izzy
back to the apartment, put them in the playpen, and turned
Gaiete
Parisienne
on the stereo so loud it drowned out both her thoughts and the boys' cries. When Patrick came home
Mag
was still in the chair, the music playing for the sixth or seventh time, and Alfred and
Izzy
were both still in the playpen, asleep. "God, what a racket!" Patrick screamed over the stereo. "Do you want to get us kicked out of here?"

 
   
"I won't live in a chicken coop!" she yelled back. "I mean it, Patrick. I'm not raising babies in a chicken coop. You've got to get us a house."

    
After that
Mag
focused all of her energy on houses. She focused on houses the way years later her son Gideon would focus on running, the kind of narrow focus that stubs everything else out and makes failure impossible. By the time Percival started thrashing around in her stomach like a windmill, Patrick had sold his disposable-diaper patent to a manufacturing company. Commercial disposable diapers didn't become popular until years later, and even then it was someone else's design-not Patrick's-on which they were modeled, but the patent brought them enough to build a house.
Mag
insisted on big rooms, two stories, lots of windows, plenty of yard. Outside she planted anything she could buy cheaply at K Mart-azaleas, wisteria, willows and
euonymous
and maples. They moved here less than a month before Percival was born-a good thing, considering there were four more babies to come but no more money until last year, when Patrick sold the patent for the Velcro
sweatsuit
he'd invented when the middle boys were in high school. For twenty years she'd hated being confined to housewifery when she wasn't at work, but she'd always loved the house-the space, the multicolored rugs, the yard where her plants grew in wild disarray (she did not learn until later about pruning), where carpets and even grass survived years of trampling, shouting, chaos…where even the overgrown forsythia gave her pleasure, hanging on in the shade of the maples, with its sparse yellow freckles of bloom.

    
Alfred was twenty-four now, older than
Mag
had been when she'd been overrun by children and ached with need for this place. Watching him, his finely chiseled features hiding what might have been pain,
Mag
usually felt a wrenching in the back of her throat. She decided it must be Cynthia, not Alfred, who really wanted her leafy backyard and rooms with space, and that Cynthia had bewitched Alfred into asking for it …so she managed to choke her sympathies back. Her sons were her own flesh and she'd had no choice but to find a place to raise them. Alfred, on the other hand, could still choose his freedom until a childless woman came along.

     
Didn't he see? But of course she never mentioned this to him directly.

    
"Face it, Mother," he'd said. "Even the twins are grown now. You always said once the kids graduated from high school they were out of your hands."

     
"Yes, but Simon."

    
"He'll be better off here with us than if you tried to drag him to Florida to switch schools for half a year.

    
"We couldn't leave you with the responsibility."

    
"Even if anything happens, you're only a two-hour flight away. Listen, Mother-nothing is going to happen." But that wasn't the point. She'd needed the house then to raise her children.
And now for a different reason.
If Patrick went blind in Key West, in unfamiliar surroundings, how would either of them survive?

    
Someone was watching her. When she turned around, Patrick was standing at the far end of the family room, wrapped in his old blue terrycloth robe. He tied it tighter and then tighter again, as if he hoped to find a twenty-inch waist in the middle. His hair did not seem so gray ruffled up like this, before he combed it. His face was unlined-or maybe just puffy from sleep. "I'm closer to fifty than forty," he often said, but he looked all right. "The father of champions should stay fit," he sometimes told her. He liked to bemoan the fact that he couldn't run with Gideon anymore. Then she would say, "No father is required to keep up with champions," and they would smile at each other. They didn't talk in detail about Gideon's winning a running scholarship to Weber State in Utah, but they were both proud. "I never thought I'd get left so far behind so quickly," Patrick would say. "And I was such a good miler." "So eat more
Wheaties
,"
Mag
would tell him. And Patrick would pretend to worry about his running and not to worry about his eyes.

    
"God, I hate when you sneak up on me," she said, though for once his sudden appearance hadn't made her jump. He had been moving stealthily ever since his eyes had started acting up, developing his
blindman
mode. When he thought no one was looking, he went around the house with his eyes closed, touching the furniture and the walls. He wanted to be self-sufficient no matter what. He looked like a maniac, waving his arms in front of him, sniffing like an animal at a world he couldn't see. He experimented with his manner the way he had once experimented with their toaster when it wouldn't produce enough toast for all the boys at once, trying to turn it into a model that would brown ten slices at a time. The result had been an unrecognizable wire contraption that took up half the kitchen counter, with makeshift metal grooves for extra slices of bread and insulated tape over exposed wires that stuck out in odd directions. The contraption worked, but
Mag
had always thought it a miracle that it didn't electrocute anybody, and eventually she threw it in the trash. Now Patrick was transforming himself from sighted inventor to eccentric
blindman
in the same dogged way-and she feared the final, transformed version would be as grotesque as the toaster. Lucifer rubbed against Patrick's hairy ankles, and
Mag
shuddered, getting a rerun in her mind of Patrick tripped by the animal and sprawled blind on the floor. Patrick gave her a curious look and leaned down to pet the cat. "What's the matter?" he asked.

    
"Why should anything be the matter? You were groaning in your sleep. I was trying to imagine Simon's ear. I was having visions of Percival shooting Arabs with a gun." She sighed. Patrick did not believe in premonitions, so it was no use telling him. Better to steer conversation in a more productive channel.

    
"Alfred's trying to con you," she said.

    
"Number one, I don't believe that. Number two, even if it were true, it wouldn't be the first time somebody tried to con me. I wouldn't mind living in Florida."

     
"I wouldn't trust him, Patrick,"
Mag
said.

    
"Why not? He's always been trustworthy."

     
"He wants the house because his bimbo needs more room to raise her kids."

     
"Alfred? Honorable Alfred?"

    
"Even Adam ate the apple."

    
"Yes, and a year from now you'll deny this whole conversation when you find out he was just trying to do us a favor."

    
"It'll be you doing the denying, after Alfred suggests we retire to Florida so he and Cynthia can live here permanently."

    
Patrick smiled. "We're too young to retire. Anyway, after they get married I'm sure they'll want a place of their own." It was true that a summer wedding had been mentioned, but no date had been set, and
Mag
did not regard the matter as settled.

    
Then Patrick tied his bathrobe again, and it was such a sad gesture that her anger disappeared. He had lost weight, no question about it. He could play at being a
blindman
, but the truth was he was getting desperate in his effort to find out what was wrong with his eyes, now that the doctors obviously couldn't. Disappearing pupils were not as easy to invent solutions for as the wet bottoms and later the sweaty legs of his sons. And in spite of his cheerful pose, it was obvious to everyone that, for the first time perhaps, Patrick was afraid.