Seventh Heaven (29 page)

10

THE SOUTHERN STATE

I
T WAS TERRIBLY HOT ON GRADUATION
day; steam had begun to rise from the streets. Some of the graduates, who had to stand out in the sun for over two hours, fainted and others had to drink quarts of ice water after the ceremony was finally over, and still others put their arms around their classmates and cried salty tears that were hot enough to mark their cheeks with tiny red burns. Danny Shapiro gave the valedictorian's speech, just as everyone always knew he would, and Ace McCarthy graduated, as few would have guessed. The tradition of going to Tito's Steakhouse for graduation dinner begun by the very first graduating high-school class six years earlier continued, and Gloria Shapiro drove Rickie and Danny there in her new Ford Falcon. Phil had shown up late for the graduation and had left early, missing Danny's speech, because he hadn't wanted to run into Gloria.

“I could wring his neck,” Gloria said as their steaks were brought over. “I could watch him eat dirt.”

“Mom,” Rickie Shapiro said, “please.”

Rickie's eyes were red because she had broken up with Doug Linkhauser and she still didn't know why. Everyone said he wanted to marry her, they said he was already looking at rings, but the last time he had tried to kiss Rickie she had gotten all panicky. She started to avoid his calls, and finally she mailed him his I.D. bracelet, which was the coward's way out, but a way out all the same. Sometimes she'd look out her window at night. She'd watch the McCarthys' house and she'd try to wish Ace into coming to her window, but it never worked and she knew it wouldn't. Once, on a clear night, she'd opened her window and thought about climbing out, but then she'd seen Ace cutting across his front lawn, coming home from Nora Silk's house. She had leaned her elbows on her windowsill and some of the first of the season's fireflies caught in her hair, forcing her to brush her hair hard, so hard that her scalp hurt all through the night.

Danny sat across from his mother and sister, wearing a white shirt and a blue suit and a new silk tie. After his speech, several of the parents and teachers had come over to congratulate him, and he'd thanked them politely, but the truth of it was he couldn't even remember what his speech had been about. Hope, he thought. Belief in the future. He watched his mother call the waiter over to order a gin and tonic and he knew he'd have to drive them home from Tito's. He planned to work at the lab this summer, to earn extra money for whatever his scholarship at Cornell wouldn't cover. He was already registered for two advanced math classes, even though he didn't care much about math anymore. He wasn't certain if he cared much about anything other than getting to a place where there were green fields, and where, in the winter, the snowdrifts would be deep enough to cut him off from the rest of the world.

“Ace isn't here,” Rickie Shapiro announced after scanning the room.

“Why should he be?” Gloria said. “They passed him through his classes because they wanted to get rid of him.”

Danny looked around the restaurant. “Nope,” he agreed. “They couldn't drag him here.” He smiled. He looked at his sister across the table as their mother stirred the ice in her drink. What an idiot she was to have listened to his advice, but then she'd always been that way. He wished someone would slap her, just to wake her up.

“Miss him?” Danny asked Rickie meanly.

Rickie took an onion ring off her plate. She studied her brother and suddenly realized they were not as different as she'd always thought they were. The restaurant air conditioner was turned up so high that her fingertips were blue. “Not as much as you do,” she said, and instantly she regretted it because she could see it was true.

A
CE HAD REFUSED TO GO OUT TO DINNER
, although Marie had begged him. Instead he went to Nora's house, without bothering to get out of his suit and tie, and he didn't care who saw him. He went right up to the front door, even though Lynne Wineman was out in her front yard clipping back her hedges.

“You're not supposed to be here,” Nora said when she opened the door and it was so true, and had been so true all along, that they both laughed.

Nora brought him into the kitchen, where his present, not yet wrapped, was on the table. It was her grandfather's pocket watch. Ace picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

“I can't take this,” he said. “It's gold.”

“Plated,” Nora said, and then she closed his fingers over the watch.

For weeks she had been knitting him a sweater, before realizing it wasn't what she wanted to give him. She had found the watch in the bottom of her jewelry box, and she knew this was the right present as soon as she saw that it was ten minutes fast and always would be.

Billy came in and he whistled when he saw Ace. “You're supposed to be at Tito's. Your mom made reservations last week.”

“Yeah,” Ace said. “Well, I'm not hungry.”

But he managed to eat two servings of the macaroni and cheese Nora had made, and then two cupcakes and ice cream for dessert.

“How does it feel?” Billy said, while Nora was clearing the plates.

“Like lead in my stomach,” Ace joked, and Nora turned around from the sink and made a face at him.

“To be free,” Billy said. “Just think. You never, ever have to go to school again.”

James came over and climbed onto Ace's lap, and Ace bounced his leg up and down without thinking, to give the baby a horsey ride.

“It doesn't feel the way you'd think it would,” he said finally.

Nora sat down at the table. “Your mother made a cake,” she said.

Ace looked at her, angry. The nerve along his jaw twitched. “Yeah?” he said. “How come everybody knows so much about my goddamned life?”

“It's vanilla fudge,” Nora said.

Ace grinned in spite of himself. “Oh, really?”

“Listen, go home,” Nora said. “She worked on it all day yesterday. She had the oven on even though it was ninety-six. She put it in the cabinet over the refrigerator so you wouldn't see it.”

Ace put the baby down on the floor and stared at Nora. “Are you kicking me out?” he asked.

“Do I have to?” Nora said.

“Does she?” Ace asked Billy.

Billy looked at his mother and tried to hear what she was thinking. He strained to pick something up over the sound of James rattling pots and pans and the dog barking in the backyard, but nothing came through. His mother looked calm as glass; she had her hands around a tumbler of cold lemonade and she was staring at Ace.

“She won't kick you out,” Billy said, hoping it was true.

“That just goes to show how much you know, buddy,” Nora told Billy. She thought about the Laundromat on Eighth Avenue and the wild lilies from her grandfather's yard that had refused to grow on her windowsill, she thought about her children asleep in their beds when the stars came out, and then she realized that she no longer heard the drone of the Southern State, it had become the sound of a river, smooth and constant and blue. She closed her eyes when Ace got up from the table, and after the first few steps he took across the kitchen floor, she couldn't even hear him anymore.

It was dark now, but the temperature was still just as high as it had been at noon. Ace noticed the car as soon as he stepped out of Nora's house, and he stood there on her stoop, wondering why it was parked in his driveway. He saw that his father was leaning up against the front grille. The light of the Saint's cigarette looked like a firefly. The car was a blue Ford with whitewall tires. Ace loosened his tie. He'd put Nora's grandfather's watch in his pocket and it was heavy, like a stone. He cut across the lawn and grass stuck to the soles of his shoes.

“Your mother's been waiting,” the Saint said when Ace walked to the driveway. “She made a cake.”

“So I hear,” Ace said.

He went to the driver's side and ran his hand over the paint.

“Four on the floor,” the Saint said to him as he smoked his cigarette.

Ace nodded and looked inside the open driver's window. “Eight-cylinder,” the Saint said. “I rebuilt it.”

Leaning against the car, the Saint looked smaller than usual, more clenched up, as though you could see his muscles working under his skin.

“Pop,” Ace said.

“I know you wanted a Chevy, but believe me, you'll get better mileage on this,” the Saint said.

Ace wanted to put his arms around his father, but instead he came to stand beside him and leaned on the car's grille. They could see the lights inside the house; the globes of the pole lamp in the living room formed three perfect white moons.

“I always thought you'd be the one to work with me; that's what I wanted, but that's not the way it turned out,” the Saint said.

Ace could hear that his father's breathing was strained.

“Look, Pop,” he said. “I've been saving up for a car. I've got enough money.”

The Saint threw his cigarette on the ground and stomped on it. “It's the one thing I can give you!” he said.

“All right,” Ace said, frightened.

“Jesus Christ!” the Saint said, turning to look at him, and looking at him so deeply that Ace took a step backward. “God damn it,” the Saint said, wounded. “Can't you just take the damn car!”

Ace put his arms around his father and noticed what he would have known long before if he had only looked; after all this time he was now taller than the Saint.

S
OMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT
J
AMES WOKE UP
. H
E
opened his eyes, but he didn't make a peep. His stuffed bear was with him in the crib, and he stroked the bear's face and his glass eyes. Through the screen window he could hear the first cicadas; he could see a few bright stars. He closed his eyes and the stars disappeared; he opened them and there they were again, set into a black bowl above his house.

James was now twenty months old, and he loved to dance. Whenever his mother put on her Elvis records James clapped his hands and lifted first one foot and then the other; when he was very daring, he would pick up both feet at the same time and hop like a bunny and then his mother would scoop him up and kiss his neck and tell him he was wonderful. He had a passion for lime-flavored Jell-O and graham crackers and hiding behind doors, especially when he heard his mother calling to him and he could see her in a crack in the door as she looked worriedly for him. He liked to get the deck of cards when he went to Marie's house to be baby-sat and let all the cards fall to the floor in a storm, then carefully pick them up, one by one. He liked to sit on Marie's lap and have her sing “Clap hands, clap hands till Daddy comes home” in her smoky voice that sounded like a friendly frog. He could now understand everything that was said to him, even when he made a mess in Billy's room and Billy said, “Bug off, buster!” He understood “sweetie pie” and “Bring me your shoes.” He could speak, but aside from a few words—
Mama, Marie, doggy, Twinkle, nose, hi, butter, one two three
—everything he knew refused to come out as words, and whenever that happened he stamped his feet and lay down on the floor clutching Googa, and then he would feel much better.

He loved to look around his room, especially through the wooden slats of his crib. When he woke early, or in the middle of the night, he always made sure that everything was still the same. Still the lamp on the dresser, the toy box in the corner, the red-and-white rug in the center of the floor, the fringes of which he liked to chew on sometimes, when no one was looking. Tonight, while everyone else was asleep, his room was exactly as it had been when he'd gone to bed. Because it was still dark, he knew that if he called out his mother wouldn't give him a bottle, he was too old for that. She would only come to the doorway and say
Ssh
, but he experimented by banging his hand against the crib. He banged harder, then began to kick with his feet. He heard someone get up, and then footsteps in the hallway, and he knew from the sound of nails clicking on the wood that it was the dog.

Rudy stood outside the door, breathing hard and listening, so James kicked harder against his crib, and finally Rudy pushed open the bedroom door with his nose. The dog's nose was wet and black and his fur was black and wheat-colored. James sat up in his crib, holding onto Googa and his blankie, and when the dog came over he stuck his fingers through the slats. Rudy let himself be prodded, then stuck his nose between the slats and pushed the baby's hand away. James took his blankie and threw it over his own head.

Rudy stood on his back legs and leaned into the crib to pull the blanket off with his teeth, then he dropped the blanket onto the mattress. The dog sat down beside the crib and let the baby touch his big, black nose.

“Nose,” James said.

They stared at each other in the darkened room. The sound of the Southern State was faint, almost watery. Rudy nudged the baby until he lay back down. James reached for his blankie and hugged it, still staring into the dog's eyes. James smelled good, like milk, and the dog licked his face through the slats.

Cool night air came in through the window, and the grass smelled sweet. When the neighborhood was a potato farm, rabbits used to appear between the raised rows at dusk, and they stayed until long past midnight, digging in the soft earth for their supper. Now there were only stuffed bunnies in toy boxes, although sometimes when Rudy went into Nora's backyard he dug deeper and deeper until he found a potato that had grown in spite of the lawn above it.

Rudy sat by the crib until the baby moved his thumb into his mouth and closed his eyes. Then he got up and went to the rug and circled until he found the exact right spot and he lay down, his head on his paws. He kept his eyes open and listened to the sound of human breathing, a sound so helpless it could make even a dog shed tears. Beneath the sound of breathing was the rustle of moths hitting against the window screen, the creak of the floorboards settling, the sound of a window shade in another room flapping against a wooden sill. Sometimes, on nights when there was a full moon and the whole world turned silver, or on black nights, when he could have slipped through the shadows and in between the parked cars more quickly than any human feet, the dog felt something in his blood that urged him to run. He could have scooped up those bunnies between the rows of potatoes with one snap of his jaws and eaten them whole. He could have outrun any car on the Southern State and if anyone had tried to hold him back he could have cracked a femur in two, so that pieces of bone flew into the air. If he'd wanted to, he could have leapt up and knocked out the screen window with one push of his huge head and the fences in the backyards could never have held him back. But the sound of human breathing made him stay on the red-and-white rag rug. It didn't matter that he could run faster than any man, or if somewhere there were still rabbits who put down their ears and trembled in the dark. Even when he was asleep he was ready for the whistle or the clap of human hands that might wake him. He longed for the call; in his dreams when he was running only inches away from the moon, a full moon, white enough to blind a man in seconds, he was ready to be claimed by the person he belonged to.