Cursed Be the Child (4 page)

Fine ideas? He was sure that if she ever had even one idea it would be a first.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she kept saying as he showed her out.

“Jesus,” he said, after he’d shut the door. What was he doing here at North Central U, anyway? (Why, Warren, you’re doing your time on the cross, pal, and paying those dues. You know every great American writer has to suffer!)

Hell, he was being self-pityingly melodramatic, and he knew it. To tell the truth, he was doing all right. Okay, NCU wasn’t Oxford, but he had a job, and there were plenty of Liberal Arts PhDs who couldn’t make that claim. And Missy—he loved that kid, his child. And Vicki—well, she’d stuck with him through the bad times.

All right, there’d been rough waters, and, he had to admit, he bore much of the responsibility for setting them churning, but his life was on an even keel at last, and there was
A Civilized Man.
The novel was going well. It would do for him what
The World According to Garp
had done for John Irving. It would be his new start.

And as long as he was balancing his personal books, you could add the house to the “Credit” side of the ledger, that old house on Main Street in Grove Corner. Years ago he had read a poem called “Coming Home To A Place You’ve Never Been,” but it had taken that house to teach him just what that title meant.

Warren took off his glasses, put them in the case and checked his watch. It was nearly noon, and his next class was at two. Time for lunch.

He’d made the mistake of eating in NCU’s cafeteria once. He didn’t care for eggshell salad sandwiches or coffee that tasted like Mazola oil. He’d go to Milly’s Family Restaurant in Grove Corner—Grove Corner, his home, he thought with a smile—only five miles away. Milly’s had good food, and he liked that he was getting known as a regular. “Hello, Professor, and how are you today? Coffee? Or would you like something from the bar?”

“Coffee,” was what he always said though he always would have liked something from the bar. But that was a problem that was no longer a problem; he was in control. At night, a drink or two after he’d finished working on the book, when he really needed to unwind, and that was it.

To get to the faculty parking lot, he had to pass the art gallery on the main floor. First he saw the posters: Photographs by David Greenfield, and then he saw the black and white photographs on the walls, and then he saw David Greenfield.

You sonofabitch, Warren Barringer thought. There was a heavy weight in his stomach like a boulder. How had he missed hearing that Greenfield would be exhibiting at NCU?

Encircled by a dozen or so students, a number of which had cameras dangling from their necks, David Greenfield, in blue jeans and a black, short-sleeved knit shirt, stood at the far end of the gallery. Just under six foot tall, he was a lean, dark man with curly black hair; there were deep squint crinkles at the corners of his intense, anthracite eyes.

He looked like a blow-dried Clark Gable, Warren Barringer thought, Mr. Rhett Butler himself, ready to sweep Scarlett off her feet, up the stairs, and into bed—Scarlett or any other woman. Warren saw Greenfield smile at a young lady who’d apparently asked him a question, a Marlboro man smile without any discoloring tobacco stains on those straight, white teeth to shatter the image.

Show him what you’re made of, Warren thought.

He knows what you’re made of—chickenshit, through and through.

Warren Barringer walked to the far end of the gallery. “Excuse me,” he said, and a young man, interrupted in the middle of a question about backlighting, stepped aside.

“Warren,” David Greenfield said.

“Hello, David,” Warren said, and then he held out his hand.

(And why are you greeting this sonofabitch? Because you’ve got to do the right thing, that’s why. Because if you don’t, because if you do what you want to do, do what you really honest to God feel, that lets the monster out, and then, oh brother, you are really fucked. And so you shake hands and you turn the other cheek and bygones are bygones and the world keeps on spinning.)

David said, “Are you teaching here?”

Warren nodded. “First year,” he said. “Assistant professor.”

“I see,” David said.

“I read about you over the years,” Warren said. “You seem to be doing well.”

There had been two full pages in Time magazine’s “Art section” a few years ago. Warren had seen that—two pages in Time, for Christ’s sake! “The mature work of a photographer whose stark simplicity provides memorable insights into all the aspects of the human condition blah-blah-blah.” David Greenfield was likely to attain the prominence of an Ansel Adams or a Diane Arbus.

David shrugged. “I’m doing all right. I like my work.”

“Good,” Warren said. There was a long pause. For a moment, Warren was afraid David would say, “And how’s Vicki?” or something like that.

He didn’t.

“Well,” Warren said, “you’ve got people who want to talk with you. I have to be on my way.” And then, once more, he held out his hand.

When he got to Milly’s Family Restaurant, Warren was shown to his usual corner booth. “How are you doing today, Professor?” the waitress asked. He said all right. She asked if he wanted coffee or something from the bar.

He ordered a Bloody Mary.

— | — | —

Two

In its typically facile style, the People magazine story related the problems and pressures of the author of a first novel that had zoomed onto the bestseller charts. In the accompanying pictures, one showing him aboard his newly purchased cabin cruiser, another relaxing in the Jacuzzi with his live-in lover, an aspiring actress and certified acupuncturist, he looked neither pressured nor problem plagued.

And why, Vicki Barringer wondered, did People never print articles on the authors of smash flops—authors like her husband.

At 32, Vicki Barringer, slightly built and fair, her short hair a curling halo framing her oval face, looked her age, neither more nor less, and it was an age that suited her. She’d felt awkward throughout most of her 20s and knew that people thought of her as pleasant-looking and wholesome in an era in which chic and trendy were the style of youth. In one of his drunken outpourings of sarcastic bile, Warren had told her, “You look like you stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting of a PTA meeting. You’re the second assistant hospitality hostess, holding a paper cup of lukewarm punch and scared shitless that no one will like the chocolate chip cookies you baked.” At that time she’d been so hurt that, though she rarely swore, one of the few welcome remnants from the strict religious upbringing she’d tried to reject, she yelled at Warren, calling him a “drunken asshole dumb bastard fart.” That made him shake his head. “Jesus, you even swear like Betty Crocker.”

Vicki had come to a time in her life and a state of mind that made her comfortable with her pleasant-looking and wholesome self. And, she’d recently reflected, she was perfect for Grove Corner, a town that Norman Rockwell could have used as the inspiration for a thousand Saturday Evening Post covers.

She dropped the magazine to the floor at the side of the brown suede chair. It was only 9:30, but she was tired, though not unpleasantly so. It had been a good day, her first on the job at Blossom Time, the florist shop. Afterward she’d raced home to be there when Missy got out of school. Now Vicki felt too logy to take the three steps to bed or even to reach up and turn out the lamp.

She leaned back her head and closed her eyes. Her quilted housecoat felt snuggly warm, a grownup’s security blanket, and soon she was floating in the dusky limbo between sleep and wakefulness. Centering her attention on the beat of her heart, Vicki was contentedly at rest. It was even better than the heaviness of sleep, this airy sensation of well-being.

She could barely hear the distant tapping of the typewriter as, downstairs in his study, Warren worked on the book. Good. She’d been concerned about him today. He’d come home from the university at 6:00, with absolutely nothing to say, and had been just as uncommunicative all through a dinner which he hardly touched. Past experience had taught her that his heavy silences were too often a prelude to heavier rages, furies fueled by hard drinking. After supper, he’d gone straight to the study and closed the door, locking himself and his silence away from her and Missy.

But in the past hour, Vicki had heard first the tentative clicks and then the rhythmic tapping of his typewriter. Warren was writing, and that meant everything was okay.

The drinking and the hateful, hurtful arguments that were not disagreements but emotional demolition derbies were all in the past. She could wave goodbye to the past and thumb her nose at it, too! This house was good for Warren, good for the three of them. The old house on Main Street, oldest still standing in Grove Corner, with its sun parlor and a living room as big as a used car lot and the magnificent oak and silver poplar trees all around was their home.

As for the past, all right, she had not been blameless. She had been foolish—not just foolish but stupid. All right, stupid and bad and wicked. Unfaithful. Sinful. No! That word, the heavy, hissing weight of it, the guilt that went beyond guilt, belonged to her childhood, to another time and place, another world. That was her parents’ world, but her parents were dead, and it was still her sister’s world, her sister Carol Grace who’d married evangelist Evan Kyle Dean, but her sister was a stranger.

Goodbye to the past.

The past was over and finished and done.

On the swirling purple screen of her eyelids, a red rose appeared. It was a memory, the first sale she’d made on this first day at work. “One red rose, please.” The customer was an old man with a plaid cap and, as he explained, the need for a peace offering. “The wife and I had a spat, and this should put me back in her good graces.”

In her relaxed state, it was easy for Vicki to think of the single rose as an omen of the future. The future was a bright flower, open and inviting. No more trouble with
the
problem. “All writers drink too much, especially if they’re stuck with someone as insensitive as you.” No more trouble, not this time at this school. “Bastards denied me tenure. They don’t want you around if your mind isn’t as fossilized as theirs!”

Mama?

Vicki thought that without realizing it she had crossed the borderline and slipped into slumber and dream. It was a dream voice she was hearing.

Mama!

Blinking, hands on the arms of the chair, she sat up, listening.

Mama? Missy hadn’t called her that since playpen and pacifier days. “Mom.” Once in a while “Mommy,” if Missy craved an extra dose of TLC or was trying to wheedle an extra half-hour until bedtime.

All Vicki heard was Warren’s typewriter. No, it couldn’t have been “Mama” from that big girl of seven who wasn’t afraid of anything as long as the nightlight shone and she had Winnie-the-Pooh.

So it was a dream then.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check.

Vicki went down the hall, her steps sure even without a light in the house she already felt to be truly their home. She opened the door to Missy’s room.

In the outlet above the baseboard, between Missy’s table and chair set and the walk-in closet, the plastic face of Mickey Mouse glowed a cheerful pink greeting.

When Vicki stepped over the threshold, she felt the cold.

It had been a warm day, not even hinting at the approach of autumn, and so Missy must have left a window open and now, with a sudden change in the weather, so often the case in the midwest…

Both windows were shut.

It didn’t make sense, this penetrating chill. Even if the temperature had drastically dropped, the house had new insulation, less than two years old, the real estate agent had told them, a real energy saver, part of the extensive renovation done by the previous owners. “They didn’t have kids, you see, and so they kind of treated the place like their baby.” They had central air conditioning, a new furnace, modernized plumbing, new wiring, dropped ceilings, paneled basement family room and no-wax kitchen floors.