Pay the Piper (31 page)

Laurel knew if she did not believe her son then she would never believe him again. “I'm glad,” she said. They sat talking about Matagorda, its good times and bad. She told him about Daddy's dying. He died in Delton, and people assumed she and Hal had gone up there directly, to Pris's. Pris thought they ought to stay on the plantation. Carrie wore her best uniform, Pepper had on a white starched jacket. The big house was lit up and ready for the company they expected, bringing platters of food as people did when Mama died. No one arrived. The corridor of driveway through the orchard seemed more than ever empty. They got up from the living room finally and took off their best clothes. Hal wore a fine English-tailored suit, which made him look like a small boy in his daddy's clothes, or somehow a rube. “And that,” Laurel finished telling, “is how we gave a funeral and no one came.”

Then it was snowing; the cottage was locked in tightly around them. The back door opened, and they stood up. Buff ran toward it on clicking toenails, not even barking. Hal came around a corner, looking sheepish and with two months' growth of beard, the length of time he had been gone. As soon as she saw him returned early, she knew that whatever expectations she had had about him taking hold of anything were over. But what could she do but run toward him, crying out a warm and wifely welcome?

14

It must be eight o'clock because Hal's routine never varied. If only something different would happen. If only he would die, Laurel thought. She opened her eyes astonished by morning; only a moment ago she went to bed thinking, I'm sleeping, and watching her own dark descent. She heard him in his bedroom across the hall. Fir trees stood at the windows. Who would have imagined she would end up back in Soundport, Connecticut, with Hal MacDonald or at all?

In her mirrored bathroom door, blue morning glories reflected from caramel-colored wallpaper. Serene. She remembered thinking that word when she bought the wallpaper six years ago. To think back over ten years with Hal, she wondered what truly serene, happy moment she had had. At least they had been stationary for six years: after the rented cottage and then another rental till they bought this house, the move at Matagorda, the move there. Why look back to that now?

Laurel liked this house, though it was run-down. More and more, Hal was reluctant about spending money. That was why now she waited. She waited! Listening to what her husband was doing across the hall. At the right moment every morning, she darted across it to rifle his wallet. Hal had refused for the past six years to raise her grocery allowance.

Laurel threw back the sheet, anticipatory, fearful about her journey across the hall. Nothing would happen at the moment if she was caught, not in the morning when Hal was sober. He waited too; things mulled. Some evening in his drunken nighttime behavior, he would retaliate; she thought, glancing toward the bathroom, of the night not so long ago when he had held her, hard, to the toilet bowl. Something was happening, increasingly so, that she could not see, feel, or touch. But Hal seemed in the ascendancy, to be going past, while she was slipping.

Across the hallway, Bud's dog tags rattled. Hal opened his closet. She paid little attention anymore to his drunken, derogatory remarks; sometimes they were funny. “Laurel, the reason you have an inferiority complex is because you are inferior.” She flew to the telephone that night, repeating his words to Rick cross-country, in Colorado. Though the time she reported what he said about her work, Rick was incredulous: “All you do is mess up paper.”

“Hal said that? What the hell does he do except blow up a pig's bladder all day or take sunbaths in the yard, turning himself over like a hot dog?”

“You're funny,” she had said. “As funny as Dad.” She remembered those words on a blue autumn day eleven years ago when she and Rick were raking leaves.

Across town now William would be leaving for the station, and she imagined him calling goodbye to the other members of his household, his young wife and their baby. Since Rick's half-brother was twenty-five years his junior, how could she not but think of William's baby as if it were her grandchild? Who'd want to start over raising a child in their fifties? she had sniffed. Goddamn it.

She wondered when she would have a grandchild, ever? She was afraid by the time Rick finished his Ph.D. he might not come back east to live. He spent so much time roaming about, seeing the world, working in oil fields, with groups of youthful delinquents, here, there, that she worried about his inheriting his mother's wanderlust, her curiosity about the lives of people unlike herself. Though when he becomes a psychologist, he will help other people the way he said he wanted to do eight years ago in the rented cottage. Always, they thought of that time as if they were together again in the cabin in Mississippi. She wondered if Rick would have gotten his degree closer to home if all that had happened had not happened.

Suddenly she could laugh. Long ago, too, in the prison library, Hal said, “Honey, if I couldn't laugh, I couldn't stand the tension.” But they seldom used endearing words once he was home, and seldom talked. She blamed this on herself. Her thoughts often remained inward. Their letters; the letters were filled with outcryings they could not have cried to a thousand psychiatrists. In Hal's case, if she thought her husband was dumb, how could she tell him? And if he was dumb, then what could he do about it? Against stupidity the gods themselves contend helplessly. She remembered the thought from one of her graduate classes. Schiller, Laurel believed. She remembered what she was going to laugh about. For years she had believed she did not understand plotting, and that her novels lacked it. The King dies and the Queen dies of grief. But what else happened? By now, she understood perfectly: steps in their lives that have occurred because she made one move and married Hal MacDonald. Into the world, a new life has come because of it: a baby across town eating curds and whey or whatever babies in this different age ate.

Why be surprised to find Hal, last evening, wandering around in the basement crocked at midnight when she came in so late. She was mainly surprised because he was home that early on a Monday night from blowing up his pig's bladder—playing his bagpipes—with the bagpiping band of the Ancient Order of the Scarabees. Usually, he was never home before 2
A
.
M
. The old white house where the Scarabees met was near her mother's, a clubhouse also for other organizations, and whatever B.P.O.E. stood for; there was an emblematic sign out front. The kinds of meetings and people William used to sneer about when they passed, and that Hal sneered about when he was a snob in Mississippi. Back there, Daddy had wanted him to join Rotary, and Hal refused. “Daddy always wanted me to make a mark on the community,” he said.

“You did,” she told him.

Hal went to practice earlier and earlier on Monday nights and stayed later and later. When she asked where he stayed so long, he said, “In the bar.” That figured. Other Scarabees were not commuters, either, and not having to get up as early, they could stay in the bar with him, she supposed. But how were these men able to get to practice by five thirty on Monday evenings? Unlike Hal, they had jobs. Blue-collar workers: a janitor at a school, a carpenter, a groundskeeper for a cemetery.… It might be funny that his bosom bagpiping buddy thought when she mentioned the
Atlantic Monthly
she was talking about a fishing magazine. But in the long run it was wearisome. She had nothing in common with these people, and once Hal did not either. She did respect them, however, more than she did her husband, these men who had come from nothing and had worked themselves up into the world. She did speak up one time when he derided her background. “I'd rather have been like my father and started with nothing and made it, than to have started with everything and not have known what to do with it, like you and your father.”

Tremulously, Laurel now dreaded some moment when William or other people she formerly knew saw her going into or out of the tacky places she went with Hal, above stores and restaurants, where the Scarabees held their gatherings. Yes, she had stood on curbs in large towns like Bridgeport and Stamford where the band played in celebratory parades on holidays, waiting for him to come along, piping: to cry out, My husband! when he hove into view, cheeks extended. She could be moved; the skirling sound of the pipers and the deep beat of the drum were stirring. She envied Hal what he had, something like a small family with his band members, their ability to join in a circle, instruments to their mouths, and come out with one wedded sound. That was the trouble, Laurel thought, she had no life to offer as an alternative, no devoted friends, only her solitary profession. At the parades in those large towns, blacks swarmed out terrifyingly from the sidewalks and surrounded the band; often, members found afterward their little daggers, the skean dhus, were missing from the tops of their long socks. Oh, well, after the night he might have drowned her in the toilet, she planned on killing him. There had seemed one solution to her life. Hal had to die, and she would have the rental money for Matagorda from Savano for the rest of her life or until she remarried. Fat chance of that, she thought, according to statistics about women her age.

Laurel knew precisely what she was and made no bones about it: a woman of her age and her generation and her Southern past whose life revolved around a man; who was, because of one. That night of the toilet bowl incident, she acknowledged for the first time the slow, true disdain she had felt for Hal for so long. She knew the quality of the life she would be living if she were still living across town. Oh, pull yourself up; but I have. She had no idea how to recapture alone the kind of life she had with William. To think now, she could have slow tears and would not allow them. Sometimes there was a calm sense of despair. There was her feeling, too, she was required to stay married to Hal. Deserted by God, she believed He would find her if she believed, not particularly in religion but in hope. And hope she had.

Laurel in her bathroom thought about the night bagpiping began in such earnest; it had become an obsession the way hunting once was for Hal. In order to play with the Scarabees' bagpiping band, he had to join the organization. There she was in a room above a funeral parlor in Soundport smiling broadly as his wife, accommodating herself so he would be admitted. Only after that initial lookingover, the membership chairman came to their house, the great stone house they rented before buying this one, and asked Hal to step outside. She could still see them standing in the driveway talking. Hal came indoors. “He wanted to know what the felony was I checked yes to on the application.”

He was refused admission to the Soundport branch of the Scarabees when she had not known the organization existed in the town. People she knew would never have joined it. Snobs in Fairfield County! cried the blue-collar workers, who did not live in exclusive commuting towns but in inland ones, formerly vague names to her. They would take him into their branch, they said, and so it began, Laurel thought, sitting on the potty.

She pursued a life of her own. Politely, she refused to join the Female Order of the Scarabees, no matter what the members and their wives thought of her. Her Master's had dragged along because she changed divisions, to Communications, but soon she knew that was a world too progressive for her at her age, and she crept quietly back to Literature. She was teaching a black man to read through Literacy Volunteers. She took Latin one night a week at the local high school. “Of all pointless things,” Hal had said. I like to use my brain; she had spoken silently but wondered if Hal would have understood the implication if she had spoken aloud. She was working on her novel.

She wondered what would have happened had they moved back to Delton. Hal would not be a piper. She would not be a piper's wife. Drunken evenings, he said she made him sell the house at Matagorda, she made them move to Soundport. Laurel had lost interest in correcting him. The next day he never remembered, anyway, what he said the previous evening. When Hal came back from Africa, he went to Delton house-hunting, and had she gone with him she would have found a suitable house. But she had wanted those last days alone with Rick in the rented place. Chance played its part. Hal returned saying Pris drove him everywhere and there was not a house around Delton they'd like. “We might as well stay here,” he had said. She remembered being disappointed and thinking that after what she had been through, she was not supposed to return east. She had made no protest. It was easier for Rick not to have to shuffle back and forth between states to visit her and William. She would always wonder if Pris had convinced Hal it was his idea to move out of her sight.

They did not have a lot of money by Soundport's standards, which was another reason to stay married. To think of mischance, Laurel asked herself this morning, would I need to have a nine-year-old now? God had known what He was doing. In his cups Hal said she wanted to have a baby to hold onto him. “How?” she said. “Tina didn't keep you married to Sallie.” She had not told him she wanted to have a baby because she loved him so much.

What she could not overlook were Hal's indignities to Rick, a boy who remained so loyal. Though Hal did not seem to understand anything about loyalty. When Laurel had that thought, she felt a little fearful. It was unbelievable that Hal told Rick what she and William never meant their child to know. She supposed people in the first flush of love would go on and on telling each other everything, and living to regret it. Telling everything about a former spouse. She even knew so much about Carla's and Sallie's bathroom habits, they'd be astonished. She could not remember the exact conversation that prompted Hal to end it. “What the hell, your mother killed a baby.”

Rick had looked at her, wanting a denial she could not give him. She had to tell, instead, the story about her getting pregnant when he was a few months old. There hadn't been enough room in the brownstone apartment or enough money for another baby. William's announcement was put in a different way. “You can't have a writing career and babies that close together.” She had never in her life applied the word “career” to herself, she had only “tried to write.” Those were naïve days and innocent years all around. She did not know why, since they paid the doctor in cash, they gave him their real names. He was not some seedy abortionist on a back street the way she would have imagined, but a fashionable doctor on the Upper East Side in New York. Their GP had given them the name and she had wished since then he had refused. Now she could see herself weeks later on a subway barreling along to lower Manhattan to a cavernous courthouse where the grand jury convened. Waiting in jail to be sentenced, the doctor hanged himself. She had always felt partly responsible for his death. She had talked to another young woman also subpoenaed, from New Jersey. This woman heard about the doctor's arrest on a TV newsbreak while watching cartoons with her other kids. For all these years, Laurel had pictured herself and that woman riding back uptown on a subway, in roaring dimness, their faces solemn, their thought indrawn: yet known to one another. She would remember forever a young woman watching cartoons with her kids in New Jersey and remember those days for herself. When she wrote the experience to Hal, she had said,
Best not to think or talk about that, because I have waked up in the night all these years and cried sometimes thinking about it. I had to keep thoughts buried, as if nothing had happened
.