Love and Sleep (3 page)
Opal hadn't liked Long Island; she thought maybe it was the salt fogs that brought on her headaches. Sam believed, though he didn't say, that she brought on her headaches herself: and though he knew himself to be a good doctor, and knew also not to charge himself with failure if he'd done all that his knowledge and skill could do, he was sorry ever after that he had thought so. They had just set up house in Bondieu—in the largest house in town, the old Hazelton place, bought for them by the hospital—when Opal's tumor was discovered.
Pierce, who had been eight years old that year, always remembered—perhaps because it was the first time he had ever seen her weeping openly—coming upon his mother, Sam's sister, with Sam's letter crushed in her hand, in the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment. Ailanthus grew so close to the windows of that kitchen that sometimes it came right in, as though to look. “Poor Sam,” his mother was saying, her eyes squeezed shut and fist pressed against her brow. “Poor Sam. Poor, poor children.” And even after long acquaintance with Sam and with his children, all tough nuts and not always friends of his, the memory of Winnie's tears for them could raise a lump of awful pity in Pierce's throat.
One year later, Winnie put Pierce aboard a bus and took him with her to Pikeville, Kentucky, the town nearest to Bondieu for which she could get a ticket. There Sam picked them up in his huge Nash bought not long before for the big trip South, and brought them to Bondieu, and Winnie settled in to be his housekeeper and stepmother to his four children. She had always loved, even worshipped, her older brother, and she did deeply grieve for the children: but those weren't her reasons for leaving her husband in Brooklyn forever. And despite the abiding antipathy she felt for Bondieu, her never-shaken sense of the unlikelihood of her being there for good, she had not regretted her decision: she had had nowhere else to go.
"It wasn't like now, then,” Winnie said to Pierce in Florida. Pierce sat with his feet up on the rail of the deck, a can of soda warming in his hands. “Now you'd have so many ways to proceed, ways to feel about it. So many. Then you only had a few. So you picked among the ones you had, and were glad for the safety. I couldn't get a divorce, and couldn't have made a living by myself—anyway I didn't think I could. I guess I'm trying to explain. I won't apologize.
"It's hard to imagine now, how shocked you could be, now when it seems so ordinary a thing. I mean look at Key West for heaven's sake. But it wasn't ordinary then; it was like—well it was like finding a breach in nature. I couldn't share a bed with him then, could I? And I had to get
you
away from him; that just seemed self-evident, like snatching you away from a fire.
"But you know, the sad thing,” Winnie said. She laughed, chagrined. “He really was such a good father, in his way. I'm sorry, Pierce."
It had been fall when Pierce came to Bondieu to live. It happened that about the time he and Winnie settled in, the storm windows were taken out of the garage and piled on the porch to be put up; nobody finished the chore, though, and for a long time the storm windows lay there on the porch in two long rows. For a reason he could not afterward remember (he could only occasionally remember the interesting sensation of it, which was perhaps itself the only reason), Pierce had carefully and deliberately stepped in every pane of these windows, each of which bore his weight for a moment before crashing like thin ice over a dried puddle. When what he had done was discovered, he denied having done it, though it was obvious enough to Sam that it had been he. There was no real proof, though, and Pierce didn't feel he needed to confess without it. He was made to anyway.
And hadn't he always been a denier of what he had done, a denier too of what had become of him; a liar in fact? Had his mother actually been a denier too, only with the handy quality of actually forgetting the things she had done, and being left only with the reasons, the good reasons, she had done them?
He thought that what had made it so hard for him to admit what he had done was that Sam's next question would have been Why, as in many later instances it was;
Why
, not unkindly meant, but leaving Pierce no recourse at all, because he didn't know why. He had no reason. When later on he carried Sam's tools into the woods and left them there to rust, unable to remember that he'd borrowed them; when one winter afternoon he cut the telephone line into Sam's bedroom with his knife; when he took from Sam's bureau drawer his dead wife's engagement ring: he had known (at the time, anyway) why he had done so—crises faced by the Invisible College had demanded it. But his lies in those instances had the same logic as the first instance, the storm windows, that if he confessed to what he'd done he'd be asked why. And he couldn't answer. So he denied he'd done it.
"What on earth were you thinking of?” Sam asked, holding Pierce's shoulder, pointing his nephew's head down at the shatter and ruin.
"I didn't."
"You
did
! Don't insult my intelligence. I just want to know
why
."
"I didn't."
Sam always insisted (and Pierce doubted) that Pierce's offenses bothered him less than Pierce's willingness to outface him. He devised mild but ingenious punishments for Pierce designed to impress on him the unreasonableness of his lying, punishments that Pierce took, though deeply aggrieved that Sam thought he had the right to inflict them. But they didn't change him.
Had he really thought he could get away with the outrageous lies he told? It was as though he thought he really was invisible, that he left no trail others could follow, that nothing could be pinned on him because he wasn't really there at all.
"Lives in a world of his own,” Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all.
The house built on a rise above the town of Bondieu by old man Hazelton (himself a doctor around the time of the First World War, then a politician, then a speculator in coal leases, then a bankrupt, then a suicide) had two distinct parts: a big, square two-story place of dingy clapboard with a pillared front porch, and a low bungalow of four rooms in a row, connected to the big house by a trellised breezeway. Bird told Pierce that the little house had been built as a gift for the Hazeltons’ only daughter and her husband, so that she wouldn't leave home, a motive that Pierce could not then credit. Bird had the first of the four rooms for herself, and Hildy the second; the third was the daughter's kitchen, and the fourth a tiny windowed sitting-room or sun-porch where an old couch moldered.
Upstairs in the big house Sam and Opal Boyd had had their bedroom, and a small connecting room was Warren's. Joe Boyd had another to himself, and a fourth was empty. That was the one Winnie took. Into it went her marble-topped dresser, and atop the dresser the silver-backed brushes and mirror she never actually used, and the silver-framed photographs of her parents; into it too, borne in somehow on these things, went an odor of Brooklyn and his infancy that Pierce could detect there even years later.
Where was Pierce to go? The first plan was that he would share with Joe Boyd, but Joe Boyd set himself so adamantly against this that no one, not Sam, not Winnie, not Pierce certainly, wanted to try converting him. So Hildy moved in with Bird, and Pierce took her room next to the kitchen of the bungalow. (When Joe Boyd at length left home, Pierce was offered his room in the big house next to Sam's; but he preferred his room in the girls’ wing. Hildy took it instead.)
Sam had supposed that one thing he was providing for Pierce under his roof was a sort of older brother, someone who might counteract any bent that being his father's son might have left him with—no, that was too strongly put, Sam knew, but still he thought that Joe Boyd could be mentor, guide, friend for Pierce, all that Sam's own older brothers had been for him. Sam was sure enough of this that he paid less careful attention to Pierce than he might have. To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam's wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn.
That spring Joe Boyd had organized his sisters and his brother into a club, with passwords and offices and swearings-in. Joe Boyd's club was called the Retrievers, in imitation of the animal lodges he had known of back North, Elks, Moose, Lions; his was named in honor of the breed of dog he most admired and would never own. The Retrievers had their headquarters in a long-disused chicken house up the steep hillside from the big house; its chief activity was the impossible job of cleaning this place of its accumulation of guano and pinfeathers and crushed eggshell: the job being done by the younger members at Joe Boyd's direction.
Pierce, hands in his jacket pockets, stood at the door watching the distasteful work go on, never having seen or smelled such a place before. He hadn't been invited to be a Retriever by the only Retriever able to issue the invitation, Joe Boyd, and he couldn't bring himself to ask for admission either. He had come to realize, though, that he wouldn't be able to spend the rest of his childhood in his room, as he had opined to his mother he might; he'd have to come to accommodation.
"Whatcha doing?"
"What's it look like?"
Shrug. He asked what anyway the place was, with its boxes of whitened screening and strawdusty air. Joe Boyd took exception to his superior tone, which Pierce hadn't intended.
"Not good enough for you?"
"Well we don't exactly have chicken houses in Brooklyn."
"Yeah? Well."
Without knowing where he was headed, Pierce allowed himself to be drawn into a debate with Joe Boyd about the relative merits of New York and Kentucky. It was never in doubt who would win this debate; Joe Boyd, though loyal to his mother's state, the state where he had been conceived, could not himself name enough virtues in it to keep up.
"Name a hero who came from Kentucky."
"Daniel Boone."
"Name another.” Joe Boyd didn't name Abraham Lincoln, though Pierce had counterclaims if he had.
"Well name one from New York,” Joe Boyd said.
"Peter Minuit. He had a peg leg. Peter Stuyvesant. Alexander Hamilton. Joe DiMaggio. Thomas E. Dewey."
"Who?"
At length Joe Boyd chose another way to settle the matter. It wasn't so unfair a match as it seemed, as it seemed to Hildy who pointed out that Joe Boyd was two years older: for Pierce had already begun the weedlike, apelike (so he would one day think of it) burgeoning that would take him to a thick six feet, and Joe Boyd took after his light-boned and delicate mother. Joe Boyd still won handily, being less afraid of giving and getting pain than his cousin, and more willing to fight to conclusive victory. Pierce face down in the odorous dust of the floor was made to admit that Kentucky, the state where he now lived, was a better state of the United States than New York, the state where he had lived with his father and mother, but where he lived no more.
"Wanna go again? Two out of three."
"No."
"Say uncle."
"What?"
"Say uncle."
Pierce, not ever having been forced to this formula of surrender, made his own sense of it. “Uncle,” he said.
For a long time after he let Pierce rise, Joe Boyd sat with his arm around Pierce's shoulders, Pierce shy to shake him off; and after this meeting of the lodge was over, and supper eaten, Joe Boyd took Pierce up to his room to show him his treasures.
Unnerved by the sudden intensity of his comradeship, Pierce looked in silence at Joe Boyd's beautifully preserved comic books and his Long Island seashells. A branch on which real stuffed birds perched with real bird feet, jay, cardinal, robin. Snake's skin and deer's skull. His plated six-guns, which hung in their holsters over the bedposts, little worn these days. An engraving of Robert E. Lee, which Joe Boyd had begged as a souvenir from Arlington when the Oliphants had visited there on their way South: something in the sad-eyed noble-dog figure, gloved and sashed, had touched him.
Lastly he drew out from its box and opened to Pierce his latest project.
"It's a battle,” he said.
It was a tall roll of smooth white paper such as Pierce had never seen before, which Joe Boyd called “shelf paper.” He unrolled a foot of it, revealing pencil-drawn figures, tiny ones, many of them. They were in fact engaged in a struggle; each little stick man had a stick-gun which he fired, or aimed, or lay dead gripping. Dotted lines showed the trajectories of these guns’ bullets toward a facing crowd of armed figures, which Joe Boyd now revealed farther along the scroll.
"I can draw better people,” he said. “But this is the quick way to draw lots."
He'd said it was a battle, but it wasn't really; there were no massed formations maneuvering, no regiments or officers. The dozens on each side fought independently over the crudely drawn landscape, aimed from behind rocks and stumps, fired and died alone in dozens of carefully conceived attitudes. Some bled tiny penciled puddles.
"But look at this,” Joe Boyd said. He unrolled the shelf paper further, revealing that the opponents of the first bunch were themselves being attacked in the rear by a third group; some had already turned to face them. It was evident that this new band would be vulnerable too, though Joe Boyd hadn't got that far yet. There was no reason for it ever to stop.
"I'm going to do more,” Joe Boyd said, rolling it up. “Lots more."
No, Joe Boyd would never be his mentor, nor ever entirely his friend, whatever Sam hoped. And though Pierce would anyway show no trace of Axel's inclinations, would soon begin accumulating evidence that his nature contained none, still one among his secret heroes would always be Georgie Porgie, puddn and pie, who kissed the girls and made them cry:
But when the Boys came out to play