Adultery & Other Choices (2 page)

The first hole had a long dogleg going to the left around a field of short brown weeds. His father shot first, driving two-thirds of the way down the first leg; he came over and gave Paul the driver and stood between him and the caddies, closing the distance. ‘You'll be on in two, Mr. Clement,' Tujack said.

‘You could, Tujack. Not me.'

They were quiet while the others shot, and then Paul walked beside his father, pulling the cart behind him. It seemed badly balanced, and he watched the ground ahead of him for those small rises that might tip the cart over on its side with a shamefaced clanking of clubs. After the first nine, they stopped at the clubhouse for a drink, and his father asked him how he was holding up. ‘Fine,' Paul said. He was. He didn't tire on the second nine, either. It was a hot afternoon, but he liked to sweat, and there was not much need for talking. (‘Good shot.' ‘Well, let's see what I can do with the brassie.') Usually, between shots, he walked a little to the rear, and his father talked to one of the men.

When they finished playing, his father gave him a dollar and a quarter and told him he was a good caddie, then asked if he was tired or too hot and what did he want to drink, and took him into the clubhouse and up to the counter. ‘Give this boy a Grapette and some cheese crackers,' his father said, his hand coming down on Paul's shoulder, staying there.

‘That your boy?' the man behind the counter said.

‘That's him,' the hand on Paul's shoulder squeezing now, rocking him back and forth. Paul lowered his eyes and smiled and blushed, just as he did each time his father said, ‘I'd like you to meet my boy,' his father smiling, mussing his hair, Paul shaking the large extended hand, squeezing it (‘Always squeeze,' his mother told him. ‘Don't give someone a dead fish'). ‘He's got a good grip,' one man had said, and for a moment Paul had been proud.

Now his father was drinking beer with his friends—what Paul's mother called the nineteenth hole. Paul liked watching him have fun, pouring the good summer-smelling beer in his glass, laughing, talking about the game they just played and other games they had played. They talked about baseball, too; a team called the Dodgers was going to have a colored boy playing this year. Betsy Robichaux and another woman came to their table, and the four men and Paul stood up; Mr. Peck got two chairs from the next table. Paul squeezed the women's hands, too, but not quite as hard.

‘He's got his daddy's looks,' Betsy Robichaux said.

His father grinned and his blue eyes twinkled. She was not really pretty but she was nice-looking, Paul thought. She sat opposite him with her back to the window that ran the length of the clubhouse, so he watched her, caught himself staring at her now and then, but most of the time he remembered to pretend he was looking past her at the eighteenth green, where long-shadowed men leaned on putters. She was deeply tanned and slender. Her voice was husky, she laughed a lot, she said hell and damn, and she was always smoking a Pall Mall, gesturing with it in her ringless left hand. Paul knew she was not a lady like his mother, but he liked watching women smoke, for a cigarette made them somehow different, like women in movies instead of mothers. She sat there talking golf with the men, and Paul knew his father liked talking golf with her better than with his mother, who only pretended she was interested (Paul could tell by her voice). But thinking about his mother made him feel guilty, as though he were betraying his father, as though he were his mother's spy, recording every time his father said ‘Betsy.' He decided to count the beers his father drank, so if his mother said something Paul could defend him.

His father drank five beers (Paul had two Grapettes and two packages of cheese crackers with peanut butter), and then it was dusk and they drove home, his father talking all the way in his drinking voice, relaxed, its tone without edges now, rounded by some quality that was almost tenderness, almost affection. He talked golf. Sometimes, when he paused, Paul said yes. As they approached the corner of their street, his father reached over and lightly slapped Paul's leg, then gave it a squeeze.

‘Well,' he said. ‘It's not so bad to spend an afternoon with the old man, is it?'

‘Nope,' Paul said, and knew at once how that sounded, how his father must have heard only their failure in that one little word, because how could his father possibly know, ever forever know, that even that one word had released so much that tears came to his eyes, and it was as if his soul wanted to talk and hug his father but his body could not, and all he could do was in silence love his father as though he were a memory, as the afternoon already was a memory.

His mother met them on the screen porch. ‘Did my two men have fun together?'

‘Sure we did. He's a good caddie.'

‘Did you have fun?' she asked Paul.

He took a quick deep breath, closed his mouth tightly, pressed a finger under his nose, and pretended to hold back a sneeze as he walked past her.

Now in his bed he grew sleepy to the sound of the fan. He wondered if they would have a new car when he was a big boy. He saw the car as a blue one, and it smelled new inside. Now Marshall came out in her white dress and kissed him in the evening sun right there on her front steps; she had the line of sweat over her lips and smelled of perfume. Holding hands, they walked to the car. Her head came to about his shoulder; just before he opened the car door, she put her hand on his bicep and squeezed it. Her face was lovely and sad for him. ‘I'm glad you're taking me,' she said.

In the car, she slid close to him. Her arms were dark against the lap of her dress. He offered his pack of Luckies, and they lit them from the dashboard lighter. They drove out of town, then on a long road through woods. The road started climbing and they came out above the woods at trimmed bright grass and spreading live oaks, and in their shade old tombstones and crosses. They left the car and very quietly, holding hands, they walked in the oak shade to his father's grave. He made the sign of the cross, bowed his head, and prayed for his father's soul. When Marshall saw the tears in his eyes, she put her arm around his waist and hugged him tightly while he prayed.

Contrition

A
FTER SCHOOL
Paul and Eddie walked fast; it was a cold January day, the sky had been growing darker all afternoon, and they could feel rain coming on the wind. They crossed themselves as they passed the Cathedral; then they were walking by the Bishop's huge house, with its iron fence; on his lawn pines and live oaks thrashed in the wind.

‘I'm going to learn an instrument,' Eddie said.

Paul looked up at him, and then at the cars driving with their lights on. The whole town seemed to be hurrying home before the winter rain. He thought of Eddie going to a woman's house and taking piano lessons and at the end of the year playing in a recital, taking his turn among girls in velveteen dresses with barrettes in their hair.

‘I talked to Brother Eugene yesterday.'

‘You didn't tell me.'

‘I thought about it during vacation, and I talked to my folks about it.'

‘You'd take lessons at school? And be in the band?'

‘I couldn't be in the band for a while. It's mostly just high school boys. But maybe by the eighth grade.'

Eddie was walking faster, looking up at the sky and the trees blowing above the rooftops. In the third grade, when they had both entered Cathedral, Paul had chosen Eddie as his friend. Paul was short and thin and often pressed a handkerchief to his sniffling hayfevered nose. Eddie was taller, but like Paul he moved with caution among the other boys, his voice seemed bent on silencing itself, and his gestures were close to his body as though apologizing for the space he occupied. At recess he and Eddie drank Cokes together, and on the athletic field they watched each other's failures. Paul believed they could endure grammar school together and by the time they reached high school they would change or the world would change. He did not know precisely how. At Cathedral the boys started in the third grade and went through the twelfth and sometimes when he thought of that he saw himself and Eddie unchanged and outcast until finally they crossed the stage wearing caps and gowns. But most of the time he believed when they reached high school the days would no longer cost so much of fear and patience and hope.

‘We better hurry,' Eddie said, and started to run. They were a block from his house when the rain fell hard and cold, and their faces dripped and they shivered as they stomped into the kitchen where Mrs. Kirkpatrick was moving toward the door, wearing an overcoat and scarf.

‘I was just going to get you,' she said, and kissed Eddie. Susan was sitting at the table, and she was smoking. ‘Paul, you'd better call your mother and tell her I'll take you home. We'll have hot chocolate.' She hugged Eddie. Paul hung his jacket on a hook by the door and, rubbing his hair with his handkerchief, he secretly watched Susan who was sixteen and pretty, with hair that was light brown, almost blonde, the color of Eddie's, and bright red lips and fingernails. He watched her inhaling, and he tingled with guilt and delightful fascination for the secret and forbidden. One Saturday afternoon as Paul and Eddie were walking home after a Red Ryder movie Eddie said he had gone upstairs yesterday and found Susan and his mother smoking in Susan's room and they had told him not to tell his father because he would be hurt. Eddie told this with the worried, conspiratorial tone of someone confiding a sin. Now here was Susan, and he looked at her brown Philip Morris pack on the table and the cigarette in her hands, then he moved through the kitchen, into the hall, toward the phone.

In the Kirkpatrick house there seemed to be only the one secret, and it was kept from Eddie's father in a lovingly collusive way, like a gift. Eddie had said he told his father about everything that bothered him: how unhappy he was at school when they had to play football and then basketball and then softball. In Paul's house everyone was a secret. One Saturday evening last summer his parents had gone out; it was twilight when they left and Paul was in the back yard; he was lying under the fig tree, pretending he was the last Marine alive on Wake Island, when he heard the car doors slam and the engine start. He crawled out from under the tree and ran around to the front yard, to the driveway, but they were gone, they were at the end of the block, and he watched the tail lights as his father braked and then drove on. His sisters were inside the house but he did not go in. He went back to the fig tree and lay under it, in the darkness and sadness under the wide leaves. Always before his parents went out they kissed him and his sisters. Now he lay unkissed, and thinking of the back of the car as it drove away he began to cry. In the sweet luxury of tears he pressed his face into the grass until he heard the back door close. He lay quietly. In the pale dying light Barbara came across the lawn; she approached him and walked past the tree and stood with her back to him. She was looking up at the sky. Then he saw that she was crying. At first she cried quietly, but then she began to moan and sob. Finally she wiped her face with her hands and went sniffing past him and into the house. He waited a while then left his tree, his tears, his foxhole; from the top of the tree a mockingbird screamed at him.

The memory of Barbara that summer night was pleasurably mysterious, and often when he thought of her he saw her weeping at the sky. There were other memories he kept in his heart like old photographs. His father rarely talked at home, but when friends came for drinks Paul lay on his bed and listened to the drone of the women at one end of the room and the loud talk of the men at the other and, above it all, his father. He heard his father tell stories about when he was first married and he was a surveyor for the utilities company he still worked for; now he was a district manager. His father had worn a holstered .22 Colt Woodsman and shot cottonmouths in the rice fields. Once one of the crew caught a king snake and carried it in a paper bag until they found a cottonmouth; he threw the king snake on it and the crew watched the fight; listening to his father's voice through the wall he could see the twining snakes and the cottonmouth's slow death. A man who owned the land they were surveying told his father to get off and said his company was nothing but a bunch of crooked sons of bitches anyway and his father knocked him down. Once they had to deal with a Negro and when the talking was done the Negro offered his hand and his father took it. In the car one of the crew said: You shook his hand. His father said: And if I hadn't,
then
who would have been the gentleman?

His father often said children should be seen and not heard and at times it seemed that Paul's silence made him invisible too and he could listen like a spy. On an afternoon last summer he sat petting his yellow dog Mike. He sat on the bottom step of the back porch and his father and mother sat on the top step. His father had finished mowing the lawn and Paul smelled his sweat and the beer he was drinking and the smell of clean dog and freshly cut grass; Mike turned on his back and grinned while Paul scratched his belly. Above Paul his parents were murmuring, and with his fingers on Mike's ribs he concentrated all of himself into one ear, and the muted sound of their voices became words.

‘I'm afraid to,' his mother said.

‘We can use rubbers.'

‘Don't talk that way.'

He heard his father's Zippo, then smelled the smoke. It was all he smelled in the air now. His father and mother sat quietly behind him.

When he returned to the kitchen from calling his mother, Mrs. Kirkpatrick was stirring chocolate on the stove. They were drinking it when the front door opened; Susan put her cigarettes in her purse and Mr. Kirkpatrick came in; he was a slender, gentle man whose posture was slightly stooped. He greeted them all and spoke of the rain and tousled Eddie's hair, then made himself a drink and joined them at the table.