Three Short Novels (39 page)

“He knows it.”

“What did you tell him happened?” she asked, dartingly.

“I told him it was a heart attack.”

“That's what
I'll
say, then. Because I've got to talk about Hal, you just can't not talk about him. You can't come and meet the son of a man like Hal and not say something about his father. That's asking too much.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked. You don't have to tell me twice,” a friendly jabbing in her voice, a pretense at being offended.

At four, Guy came home. Naomi, rising, cried, “Look at that boy! It's Guy, I bet!” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. “Your Mom said you remember your Aunt Naomi,” holding his hands, swinging his arms from side to side.

“That's true,” he said, trying not to lower his eyes, trying not to shift his feet.

“You sure don't look like your Dad!” roaming her gaze over his broad face, like Isobel's, over the ugly haircut, shorn close, glancing down to the large feet in hiker's boots. Looks like any other teenager, she thought. “Don't get me wrong, you're a good-looking guy, but you don't look like your Dad.”

She dropped his hands, rattled by her own effusiveness. Slowed by her behavior, self-conscious, he took off his leather jacket and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. She helped set the table, laying out plates edged in blue and gold, lifting silverware from the wine velvet lining of the case, protesting that she wanted to eat on any old plate with just any old fork. The ornaments for the meal and the
meal itself, composedly created by Isobel, an apron across her little bulge of a stomach and a glimmer of sweat on her brow, all were declarations of this guest's imposition. While they ate, Naomi told old family jokes, even joggling Isobel's foot for emphasis, but all the while aware of Guy's sullen face, given grudgingly to a smile. Catch Hal with a face like that when he was a boy, and he'd change quick as a flash. But this one showed it off, as if he'd made it all by himself. Maybe it was the time of life to be sullen, maybe it was natural, she thought. Maybe I wanted to be sullen, too, but Mama wouldn't let me. “You got a girlfriend? I bet you got a girlfriend.”

“Up 'til yesterday,” he said.

Oh-ho, there's the reason! she thought, as Isobel said, “And tomorrow there'll be another. Guy never has to worry.”

“What're you talking about?” he demanded. “You said yourself that Alice was a prize, you said nobody, no other girl, measured up to her. Why do you make it sound so, oh, so damn, oh, like it doesn't matter?” Filling his mouth with peas, he deprived her of the chance to answer, as if it were her mouth he had stopped. His mother ate on neatly, implying that to observe pauses in conversation was an art.

Oh-ho! Naomi thought. His girl's thrown him over. That's why his eyes can't lift up, that's why he looks like a mean bear.

“Alice Ann is a nice girl, prettier than most, lots of personality,” Isobel explained to Naomi. “Her father is a physician and her mother comes from a wealthy family, and Alice Ann has been, well, she has that manner of having the advantages.”

What's she doing? Telling me that Guy deserves the best things in life?
Naomi saw Guy's hands breaking a biscuit and buttering it, callow hands that had petted around the girl's prize body. Like a handshake with a movie star, maybe he'd never wash his hands again to keep the feel of the girl on them, and when he was married to some other girl and had three kids, he'd tell the fellows in the bar about that one who got away.

“They were going to be married,” Isobel said. “Her parents like him so much. He was over there twice a week for supper. They were even going to help him with medical school. Then her brother comes back for the summer with this friend of his from Harvard, and the friend, well, he and Alice Ann, well, she fell in love with him. Yesterday she broke it off with Guy. She cried about it.”

“All right, tell it all,” he grumbled. “She cried. . . . ”

“That's what you said!”

There he was, trying not to be pleased with the fact that she'd cried. At least she'd cried, he'd always have that to remember. Naomi ate on, daintily, a guest appreciative of every morsel and their sharing of family matters.

“She cried,” he said. “So what?”

They ate on in silence. Naomi shifted in her chair, an involuntarily flirtatious move, flipped her napkin and spread it again over her lap, trying to quiet an odd triumph over his loss. “I guess I better not take seconds,” she said, “because I saw that cherry pie.”

“They're cherries from the tree in our yard,” Isobel said, exaggerating their pride in that bountiful tree.

“Oh, I saw it!” Naomi cried. “Aren't you the lucky ones!”

When the kitchen was tidied, Naomi followed Isobel into the small garden at the front of the house, and while Isobel troweled around the plants, Naomi, in a borrowed sweater, wandered up and down the concrete path, arms crossed to keep herself warm. “The air here sure is different,” she said. She gazed up into the branches of the cherry tree, every branch hung with a profusion of red and yellow cherries. The cherries were the colors of sunset, the colors of life and variety, the stems so springy, curving with the weight of the tiny fruit, the sky like large, pale blue leaves intermingling with the green leaves.

The trowel made a dry, rasping sound. She went over to Isobel's squatting figure, her shoes on the gravel between the flower beds
sending up a fiery sound. “You mean Guy goes all the way to those mountains just for the snow?” hugging herself, facing the range across the waters and beyond the city, mountains almost transparent, almost air.

The trowel rasped on, clods broke apart. “You know, I never mentioned it to Guy, but there's something about Alice Ann I didn't like. She's calculating. She saw possibilities in Guy. She was the one who made the first move, she invited Guy to go on a hiking trip with her parents. But all the time I kept thinking—If somebody comes along who's a little older than Guy, say, knows more about women . . . ”

Isobel unbent, rubbing her gravel-bitten knees on the way up, her trowel with its flakes of dirt held outward. “In a way, I'm glad it happened.”

Don't bother me with her hot and cold,
Naomi pleaded.
Because the only one I knew was Dan, and a couple more that were hotel-room romances. If I ever go up to a room again, I'll go up every night until I come into the courthouse some morning reeking with the smell of the man and me, and my stockings hanging down in baggy wrinkles, and after that I'll have to live in one of those rooms.
Cozily bowing her shoulders, she went ahead of Isobel to the door. “Say, this sure is a cute sweater. You knit this one yourself?”

Guy was on the hassock, watching television. When they entered the darkening room, he straightened up from his slump.

Naomi collapsed in the center of the sofa, stretching out her legs. “Say, it gets chizzly around here, doesn't it? What we could use right now is a little bitty rum or something.”

Isobel knelt to light the oil stove. “We've got a bottle of brandy somewhere. Got it for Christmas a few years ago.”

Naomi wiggled the toes of her red shoes to catch the boy's eye. “Excuse me if I'm interrupting.”

“Why don't we just turn it off,” Isobel said, and did it herself on her way to the kitchen.

In the quiet, the boy was left without a voice, without an excuse for his lack of a voice. Naomi felt for her cigarettes in her purse on the sofa, the small rustling, the scratch of the match loud in the silence. “What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

He shifted on the hassock.

“Want a cigarette?” She lifted her arm to aim the package at him.

“Don't smoke,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Maybe you ought to. Want me to teach you?” A tremor crossed her belly, and she felt again the excitement of the cocktail bar, the anonymous man on the stool beside her, just because the room was dim and he was humped in silence. A young lout over there, denied the facts of life by his mama.

Guy sniggered his appreciation of her humor, unsuspecting of the innuendo because he was unaware of her as a woman whom other men took down into their beds.

“No, you sure ain't your father,” she mused, defiantly ungrammatical. “He was smaller than you, for one thing. Wiry, nervous, real nice smile. He kept that boy's smile right to the end. I'm not saying you don't have a nice smile yourself, you just don't use it very often. I was telling Guy here,” she said to Isobel, returning, “that there wasn't anybody had a nicer smile than Hal. What'd they call it in high school? A winning smile. Yeah, he was always winning.”

Isobel settled down with her knitting. “It wasn't just a matter of being lucky,” she said. “He worked hard.”

Naomi waved it back at her. “Sure, I know he worked hard, but he had a winning streak going all the time. When you get those two things together,” holding up two fingers, “you've got dynamite.” She winked at Guy. “There was one time he didn't work hard for something he wanted. When he fell in love with your mother, there, she fell right into his arms. Am I right, over there?”

Isobel crossed her ankles. “I guess you're right.”

“I remember when you two got together, you and Hal, just kids
in college. He brought you home one day to introduce you around. Say, I thought you were mighty cute, with all that nice curly hair. I remember Mama asking you in that just-asking way, asking you what your father did and you said, a grocery store, and Mama said, a market, and you said, no, a grocery store, and Mama said, oh, a little one, and you said, but he's dead now.” Naomi laughed, twenty years late an encouraging laugh for the girl.

Guy scratched his back, trapped in the evening that belonged to the visitor.

“You got someplace else you want to go?” she asked him.

“He wants to visit with you,” Isobel said.

The sky in the window was dark, the lamplight brighter, the oil heater purring. “Yeah, I remember I thought to myself—Well, here comes that cute girl to Hal's crummy house, old cheap furniture, rag rugs from Woolworth's, his skinny sister with a frizzy cheap permanent in her hair, smiling like a jack-o'-lantern, like a happy loony, everybody living on her file-clerk salary, and Mama asking
her
what kind of people
she
comes from. You remember that, Izzybell?”

Isobel rocked once, and, almost with fear, Naomi saw that the chair was one of those upholstered rockers for matrons. “She was right, you know,” Isobel said, her gaze down on her ticking needles and the dragging sock in her lap. “She didn't want him to ruin his chances.”

“You know what I said to myself? I said, that little gal's going to be good for him. And I was right.”

“I don't know if I was good for him,” Isobel said. “But he acted as if I were. He loved his little family, he was a good father and husband, so maybe I
was
good for him. I can't say he was easy to live with, but that's the way it is with ambitious men.”

Naomi got up hastily and elbowed her way around the room in search of an ashtray.
Oh, God, what's she doing? Telling a story to a kindergarten class? Who's she talking about? Storybook animals?
“Just because nobody smokes around here . . . ”

Isobel was up at once, and came back apologizing, offering the tiny, flowered bowl the guest had used at the kitchen table, and Naomi went on elbowing the room, bowl in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Tell you what,” she said, just as Isobel settled into her rocker again. “You go get that brandy. Just a teensy weensy bit, that's all I'll have, I promise. Just to celebrate me being here, how's that?”

Guy brought the brandy, and she took the bottle from him, and the glasses. “Oh, say, this is great! You're sweet.” Perched on the sofa arm, she poured the brandy, her wrist perky. “Just a little bitty bit for each. Am I the only one around here who knows how to pour a drink?”
One for the overgrown kid and one for his mother who keeps him a kid.
“Say, this will hit the spot!”

Guy, on the hassock again, held up his glass to catch the lamplight in the amber brandy, and Naomi watched him focus on the wobbling light, transfixed, herself, by his seeking look, a look she had always observed in young faces and that seemed the essence of their beauty. Maybe she'd had that look herself when she was young, but nobody had ever told her.

“They serve all kinds of great stuff over at Alice Ann's,” Guy said. “Her father's got a real wine cellar.”

“Take me over there sometime!” she whooped, her humor separating her from the boy just as their antennae were touching. “Hey, listen, you mark my words. Someday you're going to have your own wine cellar and you'll be pulling corks for better men than Mr. Doctor-What's-His-Name. Listen, you don't need a doctor's daughter to get ahead, you've got all you need in yourself. The same way with your father. And maybe your luck'll bring you a wife like Hal's, like your Mom over there. You should've seen them, living in a little house in somebody's backyard, both of them studying away hard as they could. Made me want to cry.”