Falling to Earth (25 page)

She looks around cautiously at the people going past them as they leave the church, but there's no mistaking the looks she sees. Some people meet her eyes only long enough for her to see their outrage at having been made an example of, a few give her contrite smiles, but then look away. Lavinia pushes her way into the aisle, sickened by the passing parade. She reaches Pastor Aufrecht and his outstretched hand, wanting nothing so much as to slap his smiling face.

“Pastor,” she says, looking at him hard and refusing his hand. She catches Pastor Ollery's eye before she turns on her heel. Paul hurries after her and catches her by the arm.

“Mother, what are you doing?” he whispers.

“Me?” she says, walking faster, listening to her heels strike a ringing sound on the sidewalk. “I'm thinking of becoming a Baptist.”

P
aul pushes the gooseneck lamp up some, away from the clock, and squints at a detail in the wood.
“Pass me those toothpicks, will you?” he says to Lon, and Lon looks up from his mirror frame long enough to push the toothpick holder across the table.

“I wish I knew what possessed my father to paint this clock,” Paul says. “Every time he painted the kitchen, the clock got a lick, too.”

Paul pushes a line of softened paint along a groove on the clock's base with a toothpick. If Little Homer were there to see, he'd tell him it looked to him like a giant's hand, skimming dirty snow with a shovel.

“It'll be real handsome when you're done,” Lon says and Paul nods. “I'm almost finished here. I could give you a hand and work on the other side.”

“Might have to if I'm going to get this carving clean before I'm old.”

Paul looks up at Lon rubbing his mirror frame with sandpaper and then stroking it with his palm, looking at it with his head drawn back, turning his face this way and that as if it's a drawing he's executing in charcoal.

“That frame's looking real good,” Paul says.

“I guess it did turn out all right. We only saved it to save something. There wasn't much left, just some pots and pans and this. I wanted to chuck it on the burn pile when I found it lying in the wet, but Essie wouldn't let me.”

“Things keep up like this much longer, maybe we could open an antique store,” Paul says with a wry smile. “Course we'd have to open it somewhere else and use your name on the sign if we wanted any customers. Maybe even keep me hidden in the back so I wouldn't scare folks off.”

“Boss, I . . . ” Lon falters and Paul looks up at him.

“What is it?”

“Maybe we oughta get Clarence in here.”

“All right,” Paul says slowly and folds his hands to wait while Lon goes out to call Clarence from the back. It's finally happened, Paul thinks. It's all over, and they're having to end it for me. He watches Clarence follow Lon back into the room. They give Paul quick glances, sheepish as a pair of boys caught chucking rocks.

“Sit down,” Paul says. “No, hang on a minute.” He goes quickly to the door and hollers, “Irene!” and sits down again. “You can all quit together,” he says, pressing his hands together under the table to stop their shaking.

“Boss . . . ”

“No,” Paul says. “Wait for Irene. She should be here for this.”

“She doesn't know anything about it.”

Irene is there, suddenly, frowning at them from the doorway. “Doesn't know about what?”

“Quitting,” Paul says.

“No one's quitting,” Lon says. “We don't want Irene to quit and we don't want you to let her go, either.”

Paul looks at Lon, then Clarence, and shakes his head, baffled. Lon sits down and says, “Clarence and me have been talking, and we want you to stop paying us.”

“What?” Paul looks between Lon and Clarence at their worried, earnest faces. “What do you mean?”

“We both had the same idea when we figured how you'd been making payroll,” Lon says.

Clarence speaks finally, in a quiet voice. “When that last shipment came in and there weren't any orders, we figured you had to be paying us out of your own savings.”

Paul clears his throat and takes out his handkerchief to blow his nose. Everything moves slowly for him as he takes in their faces, shocked that things have come to such a pass that he's surprised by kindness.

“I can't stop paying you,” he says finally.

“You'll have to stop soon, one way or another,” Lon says. “We figured we could buy you some time, so to speak, to try to turn things around.”

“Mother and I have our savings,” Irene says. She's standing there in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest and the same look she gives him when she's tired of telling him to go home for the night.

“This is more than I deserve,” Paul says, shaking his head. “I've let you all down, over and over again. I've let this place fall apart.”

“It's not you that fell apart, boss. Everything is here, waiting to be sold and we're here, ready to sell it. We just need more time.”

They're looking at him expectantly now as if he's got a solution and they're only waiting to hear it, as if the telephone will ring any moment and the bell will start jingling as soon as he hangs it back up above the door. But those hopeful looks fall away quickly, and he sees the fear they're all trying to hide from him behind their staunchness.

Paul knows what they'll tell him if he lets them keep talking. That they've been together, all of them, since the beginning, since he and Johnny took their father's loan. That this is the first and only job Irene has ever had, and none of them can hope for better. That there's been something more than a paycheck making them walk through the front door every day.

“I did have an idea,” Paul says. “Something that might start to turn things around.”

They allow themselves hesitant smiles, and Irene lets her arms drop. Clarence and Lon rise from their seats to shake Paul's hand and Lon says, “That settles it, then.”

I
t had seemed so simple when she'd heard Paul say the words, but now that Mae has repeated them, now that she has reconfigured the words
sell, move, John
, and
California
as a question she realizes she has used her one and only opportunity to say them. She had known somehow before that there would be just one chance and had saved up the words, hoarding them, afraid all the while they would erupt out of her in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Now she sees that there was no right time because Paul is looking at her with an expression so bewildered she wonders if she said something else entirely and announced a truly impossible desire. His expression shifts and still he hasn't said a word. He looks at her as if he's injured, as if she's somehow betrayed him and then he looks down and walks away.

Mae goes back to her work as dazed as a reprimanded child, burying her shame in industry. She goes to the pantry and scrubs at the wooden countertop in the same pattern she wiped it earlier that morning. She lifts the canisters to get at the corners, wets the rag again with water so hot it hurts her hands when she wrings it out, and watches the dry streaks unfurling like the wake of a boat where she's just wiped the cool boards. Mae looks at the shelves above the counter, the floor, and the walls. She could clean it all. She could keep busy in here for an hour or more and no one could fault her. No one would dare disturb her, either, even knowing as well as she does herself that there isn't a speck of dirt or a crumb anywhere to be found.

She can't think how else she could have done it. She might have deserved that look if Lavinia or, worse, the children had been standing there with them. But she had been careful, she had been discrete. The children had left for school and Lavinia had been upstairs somewhere making one bed or another and Mae had simply asked in a lowered voice, “Can't we please sell up and leave here? Can't we move out to John in California?” She had not thought, she realizes now, to prepare herself for his response. She had not considered any response beyond grateful surprise. Mae had believed it was plain to everyone that they were beat, that there was no longer any use in shamming, no way to recover, and that this alone could save them all. She knows Paul has wondered what she's been thinking, all the long quiet evenings leading to this moment when she tried to brush off her desperation and pose a simple question. She had thought that the truth of it was clear: that, in its way, the storm had devoured them and the life they had led just as surely as if they'd been snatched up bodily into the cloud. They were lost, each of them, changed beyond recognition and, worst of all, they were lost in the very place they always had been.

Before the storm, it had seemed to Mae that Paul could do anything. Before the storm, he'd been a man who never met a stranger, never seemed to doubt himself. He could run faster than anyone; there had been joy in his movements, his world was full of possibilities, and he'd stood taller than he actually was. Like a house cat, Mae had once thought privately, who discounted the rumor of tigers. Now, with his defeated shoulders and wary eyes, he's as unrecognizable to Mae as he must certainly be to himself. He's aged a decade since the storm, and there's more pain in his face than any man of thirty-four should have to carry. He looks around, bewildered that he has been unable to halt the ruination of their lives, unable to see what Mae sees quite clearly: that the townsfolk have shunned them forever and mean to exact a price as surely as if they were gathered in a ring outside their house for the express purpose of burning it down; that she has taken hold of the lifeline he so casually mentioned and dismissed; and that she has it firmly in her hand and is holding it out to the rest of them.

Mae thinks it's odd in a bitter, funny way that she should be the one to see this. She understands now that, although she only meant to say they should begin again in a new place, Paul heard her ask him to flee a failure. Always one to go along, she's waited too long to ask for something monumental, and now she's botched the manner of asking. Perhaps she can correct this much, she thinks, and she's reassured suddenly that she can put it to him another way and say that it's his successes she means for them to take with them to California. That if Paul and John Graves once built a business together from nothing, and if John has truly been hoping all along that they'd follow him, there can be no shame in leaving.

She calls his name, “Paul?” drops her rag in the bucket and dries her hands on her apron. She finds him upstairs, standing in front of the linen closet in the hall with Lavinia. Mae can see in their faces that Paul has told Lavinia already, and that Lavinia has made up her mind. They're both disappointed, sorrowful somehow, in the way they're looking at her, like parents warning a guilty child against compounding her disgrace with denial. Mae's momentary assuredness unravels, as if she has wet herself publicly.

“I have no family left anywhere to take us in,” Mae says.

“We are your family,” Lavinia says.

“I know that. Don't you think I know that?”

“I'm not sure you do. Not if you're behaving like this, making decisions for all of us and not taking anyone else's feelings into consideration.”

“What do you mean? That I'm thinking only of myself?”

“I can hardly live here alone if the rest of you pack up and run away to California! You didn't ask me. I live here and I was born here. So were all of you, at that rate. You never asked me.”

“I asked Paul,” Mae says. It is a simple statement, only three words, and contains everything Mae must now leave unsaid. That Paul is the head of the family, that asking him first was only a beginning. She had thought they would ask Lavinia together. Mae had known her own mind at once when she'd heard Paul say that John had wanted them out there all along. Moving was a way of making their lives match up again with the picture of their lives, with the memory of it. Moving would mean reuniting their family with John's, and giving the children a fresh chance to be whoever they wanted to be, relieved of the burden of the storm. Of course she'd always intended to ask Lavinia, but she could hardly have asked her first. That must be obvious. How much worse would Paul have taken the news if he'd learned that his mother had approved of the move and they'd gone to him together, the females of the household, armed with a foregone conclusion?

Mae sees there's nothing left to be said, not now at any rate. The only thing left is for one of them to turn to leave the hall and go about the day's regular tasks. Mae realizes that they're both waiting for her to be the one to leave, not because they need to confer once her back is turned––they have nothing left to say to each other, either––but because leaving first will somehow serve as an admission of fault. Mae turns and, in the next moment, Lavinia closes the linen closet door as if to say, This closet contains this family's sheets, blankets, and quilts and it always will, as surely as closing this door is part of my work and always will be. Mae goes back down the stairs, aware that they are watching her go. It's not as if they've closed ranks on her, not as if their standing together like that was meant to remind her that they, mother and son, were related by blood. It's more that they intended to shame her, to remind her that by marrying Paul, she had committed herself, like Ruth to Naomi, entirely to them. But she doesn't feel shamed, and she no longer feels like a child. Something shifted in that last moment of unraveling when she turned away from them. She's sure of that, even if she has yet to discover what it was exactly that changed.

The three of them avoid each other for the rest of the day, Paul by leaving for the lumberyard, Lavinia and Mae by performing their work. There is little need for the two of them to talk; they operate around the house as if they are two halves of the same person, not so much doing the tasks they've assumed as their own as doing whatever work needs to be done and then looking about for the next undone thing. The marketing is done, today's supper was decided yesterday evening, and what remains is the execution of the mundane and the obvious. When they do speak to each other, it is with the heightened courtesy of acquaintances on a social call. Lavinia passes Mae in the hall upstairs, pulls the corners of her mouth into a sort of smile and says, “Is your bread out of the oven? It certainly smells good,” but then Lavinia's eyes dart away from Mae's, too soon. Mae wonders why Lavinia and Paul should be so disappointed in this, why her uttering a wish should so immediately upset things when the unreliability of her moods has not. When Lavinia tells her, “The children will be home soon,” she is not saying, “Look at the time!” she is reminding Mae of how to behave. Everything in Lavinia's manner now is intended to say that they can and will continue as before, but a basic trust between them has been broken, and that their former ease will be replaced for a time by civility. Mae does her part and is civil in return. She knows she is expected to understand.