Affliction (25 page)

LILLIAN WANTED TO SEE Wade's face, but he kept as much of it as he could out of sight: he wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled down low, and as he drove he kept glancing out the window on his left and talked to her without looking at her. They were on the way to the Riverside Cemetery, their regular Sunday afternoon visit to her father's grave, and Wade had picked her up at her aunt Alma's, as usual, right after lunch. It was a bright sunny day with a cloudless blue sky and high dry air, and in spite of the somber occasion, Lillian had come out of her aunt's house whistling a song from
South Pacific.

She stopped whistling as soon as she got into the car, Wade's ten-year-old Ford sedan, which he had salvaged from the parts of three different Fords. They had all been wrecks, bought from Chub Merritt last fall when Wade was fifteen for a hundred bucks apiece and worked on at home throughout the winter and spring in what remained of the old barn behind the house. He had got his license in May but did not drive the car until late June, not until he had it running smoothly and had painted it cherry red, with his initials, WW, pin-striped
onto the front doors just below the window frame, a gold monogram slanted to the right and made to look like lightning bolts.

“Wade, what's the matter with your face?” she asked, and tried to see.

He turned his face to his left and said, “Nothing's the matter.”

She saw, however, that his cheeks were swollen and discolored; she instantly knew that behind the dark glasses his eyes were blackened. “Oh, Wade!” she cried. “You got into a fight!”

He denied it, but she persisted. He had promised he would not drink or fight. He had promised. Many times they had decided together that these were stupid activities, drinking and fighting, fine for their stupid insensitive friends to indulge in, perhaps, but not for Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, who were superior to all that, who were finer, nobler, more intelligent than their friends. Because they had each other, they did not need anyone else; they believed that. They did not need their parents, though she did wish her father were still alive—he would have understood and admired Wade; and not their friends; and not any of their teachers at school, who were dull and hopelessly out of touch with what was important and moving to teenagers; and not her aunt Alma or Gordon LaRiviere, Wade's new boss, or anyone else in town, either. They needed only each other, exclusively and totally, and they had each other, more or less, so they were free to ignore everyone else, which meant, among other things, that Wade did not have to drive around at night with the other boys his age drinking beer and getting into brawls in Catamount or at the Moonlight Club down in Sunapee or with summer kids from Massachusetts at the Weirs in Laconia. He had promised. He hated that stuff, he had told her, just as much as she did. It was stupid. It was brutal. It was humiliating.

It was also dangerous and, if they were fighting over a girl, as they often were, sexual; consequently Lillian and Wade kept track of who had fought whom over the weekend. They listened to Monday morning hallway gossip as eagerly as their classmates did, and sometimes Lillian secretly imagined Wade getting into a fight with, say, Jimmy Dame, who had told her once in the hallway that she had great tits, why didn't she show them off more? And when she told him what Jimmy had said
to her, Wade had secretly imagined slamming him up against the lockers and punching him once, twice, three times, quick hard hits to the chin that snapped Jimmy's head back against the lockers, making a loud metallic clang every time Wade hit him.

Lillian reached across the seat to Wade and brushed his cheek with her fingertips.

He pulled away and said,
“Don't!”

At the bend in the Minuit River, where the land rises gradually from the eastern bank to a high meadow, Wade turned off the road and drove along the rutted lane that leads uphill to the cemetery. The light fell in planes tinged with pink, great broad sheets of it that reflected off the dry mintgreen leaves of maples and oaks and the meadow grass shuddering in the breeze. Where the meadow bellies and the rise eases somewhat, the lane passes through a cut-stone gate into the cemetery, and Wade pulled the old Ford off to the right and parked it.

Lillian got quickly out, taking her bouquet of daisies and Indian paintbrush with her, and strode away from the car. Wade watched her cross in front of him again, fifty feet farther into the rows of graves, and pass between the Emerson and Locke family plots, graves that went back a hundred and fifty years. Lillian did not cross the graves; she always walked along the proper paths laid between them, taking sharp rights and lefts, until she had zigzagged her way to the far corner of the cemetery and stood at last at the foot of her father's grave. A small red-granite stone marked it:
Samuel Laurence Pittman 1924-1964.

Wade sat in the car and let the sun beat down on his face and chest, let it warm and soothe him, while through his sunglasses he watched Lillian remove the old dead stems and leaves from the plastic vase next to the gravestone and replace them with the new. She walked quickly to a spigot in the ground a short distance away and returned with the flowers in water and gently set the vase down to the right of the marker, adjusting it carefully, as if making it easier for her father to admire them. Then she stood, clasping her hands together at her waist, like a woman in prayer, and looked steadily at the gravestone, as if it were her favorite portrait of her father.

Wade thought, I wish my father was dead. Dead and buried. He savored the image: he drives out here on Sundays, just
like his girlfriend, Lillian, dutiful and loving, and he stands at the foot of his father's grave for hours at a time, contemplating the man's confinement down there, locked inside a heavy wooden coffin, buried under six feet of dirt with a three-hundred-pound headstone on top, just to make sure.

Wade was still young, and Elbourne and Charlie had not died yet, so he imagined death as either absence or confinement or, in some cases, both, which was what he wanted for our father, both. He wanted the furious redheaded man gone to someplace else, and he wanted him imprisoned there, locked up, manacled, bound so that he could not ball those hard fists of his and could not lash out with them, could not swing his arms, kick his feet, grab and push and toss and kick a person. The man would have to lie in his box flat on his back, arms crossed over his chest and wrapped tightly, legs bound at the ankles, and then the cover is thumped down and padlocked, and maybe a chain is wrapped around the coffin and padlocked, like Houdini's. Then the coffin is lowered by a backhoe into the grave, which has been dug extra deep, so that you cannot see the bottom without shining a flashlight directly into it, even during the day. And then dirt gets shoved into the grave, rocks and all, and afterwards the backhoe is driven back and forth over the filled-in grave, flattening and smoothing and tamping down the dirt with the weight of the machine. Sod is placed over the raw dirt, and soon it has woven its roots into the roots of the grass surrounding the grave, making a tough green quilt to cover it. And finally Wade lowers the gravestone from the backhoe, a huge boulder dug out of the woods up behind the cemetery, a gray boulder as big as a car.

Wade shuts off the engine of the backhoe and clambers down from his seat and comes and stands at the side of the boulder, places a hand on it as if it is the shoulder of an old friend, and he listens for the sound of movement, any kind of movement, from below, almost hoping to hear something, a crumbling of clods of dirt, the scrape of a rock against another. He hears his father squirm. The sound stops, and now all he can hear is the breeze off the valley below sweeping over the grassy meadow to the trees. A pair of blue jays call raucously in the distance to one another. A dog from the village barks, once. Then silence. Delicious silence.

Lillian had returned to the car and sat next to him, staring straight ahead, clearly ready to leave the cemetery. She shifted
restlessly in the seat but said nothing. Then Wade turned to her and pulled off the sunglasses, and in a voice that was almost a whisper, he said, “I didn't get into any fight. It was my father. My father did this to me.”

His legs felt like sand, and his hands were trembling. Quickly, he replaced the sunglasses; he looked through them and out over the hood of the car and held on to the steering wheel with both hands, as if he were driving at great speed. Outside the open window, the soft wind blew, and the sun was shining; the meadow grass glowed green and gold, and from the pine trees at the far side of the cemetery, the same pair of jays called.

Lillian reached both hands toward Wade's face, and when, without looking at her, he pulled away, she dropped her hands back to her lap and studied them for a second. She said, “I don't … I don't understand.” She looked at his face again. “You mean, he
hit
you?” She could not picture it, could not visualize any scene in which Wade, who seemed so large and male to her, so impregnable, like a stone wall, could be struck and hurt by his father, who was actually smaller than Wade and seemed old and fragile compared to him.

Wade said, “Yes. He hit me.”

“How could he … do that? I don't understand, Wade.”

“Simple. He just hit me. He does that.”

“What … what about your mother?”

“She doesn't hit me.”

“I mean, doesn't she … stop him? Can't she
say
something?”

Wade barked a laugh. “Sure. She can say any damned thing she wants. So long as she doesn't mind getting belted for it herself.”

“I … I don't understand, Wade.”

“I know you don't,” he said.

She was silent for a second, and then suddenly she was weeping, tears running down her cheeks, and she felt so sorry for this boy that she thought she would break. “Oh, Wade, couldn't you stop him? Why? Why did he do that? It's awful,” she said, and she reached once again for him, and again he cringed and pulled away, but this time she persisted, placing one hand on his shoulder and with the fingertips of her other hand touching his cheek and then removing the sunglasses. She caught her breath at the sight of him, and said, “Oh-h!”

He let her examine him, as if he were a sideshow freak, and said nothing. He drew his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and with trembling hand lit one and inhaled deeply. See the freak smoke a cigarette. See his hand shake. See how his lips and mouth function normally, while the rest of his face is misshapen and discolored. Read this map of pain and humiliation.

He said quietly, “Bang, bang, bang,” and then he, too, was weeping, great wrenching sobs surging from his stomach and chest, and he brought his face forward and placed his forehead against the cool rim of the steering wheel.

Lillian wrapped her arms around his shoulders. How she hated that man Glenn Whitehouse, who had done this awful thing to a boy. Wade was a boy to her at this moment, a child injured by his parent and betrayed and abandoned at the deepest level imaginable. She knew, too, that Wade's pain went on and on, way beyond her imaginings, for she had never been beaten by her father or mother, and though her father may indeed have never drawn a sober breath, as everyone in town said, he had also never raised his hand, or even his voice, against anyone. Her father was weak and sweet, and he had not frightened a soul. The most alarming moments she had endured with her father came on those rare occasions when she realized that, if he was not drunk, he was thinking about getting drunk and so was not in fact present to her, did not actually see or hear her in the room. Those moments made her feel as if she did not exist and so lonely that she got dizzy and had to sit down and babble to him, make him lift his head and smile benignly at her, a big sleepy horse of a man, while she chattered on about school, about her sisters and her mother, making up events and whole conversations with neighbors, teachers, friends, madly filling with words the hole in the universe that he made with his presence, until, at last, her father rose from the kitchen table, patted her on the head and said, “I love you a whole lot, Lily, a whole lot,” and went out the door, leaving her alone in the kitchen, a speck of bright matter whirling through a dark turbulent sky. And now her father was dead, and she believed that she did not feel that pain anymore, because she missed him so.

They sat in Wade's car for a long time, while the sun moved across the summer sky and touched the topmost branches of the trees and the air began to cool. In a quiet
dispassionate voice, Wade tried telling it to her as if it had happened to someone else. It was the only way he could tell it without crying.

He had come home last night late, after having gone to the movies in Littleton with Lillian, where they had stopped by for a short visit with her mother and stepfather and her sisters, and when he got home and had walked into the kitchen, tired, sleepy, head still buzzing with memories of his and his girlfriend's hot good-night kisses, he had been greeted by the sight of his mother, hair wildly streaming, in her flannel nightdress, rushing across the room to him. She was terrified, eyes red from crying, arms extended, and she swiftly got behind Wade, between his bulky body and the closed door, and wrapped her arms around his middle and clung to him.

Pop sat at the kitchen table with a smile on his face that the boy found oddly calming: Nothing is wrong, it said. But Ma was sobbing hysterically, clutching him from behind, and suddenly Wade was afraid of his father's smile. Nothing is wrong, it continued saying. We men understand how women are: hysterical, weird. She will calm down in a minute, and you will see that she is all worked up over nothing again.

Wade turned his back on his father and held his mother to him, wrapping her in his arms and smothering her sob against his chest. “What happened?” Wade asked her. “What happened, Ma? What's the matter?”

He heard Pop growl, “
That
is none of your goddamned business, mis-ter.” He was drunk, mean drunk, dangerous as a trapped animal. Far more than the sight of his mother crazed, it was the way his father spoke, the way he emphasized the wrong words in his sentence—the first, “that,” and the last, “mis-ter,” hanging on to it, savoring its flavor—that set off Wade's alarms and made him stiffen with fear.