Town Burning (13 page)

“You’re being kind of cruel,” his father said in a low voice.

Cruel?

“You don’t want those kids to come, do you?” he whispered to his father. No answer. “You’ve got to help me, for once. You’ve got to do something, too. We can’t take a bunch of kids around here now. You know that!” His mother had gone out to the kitchen.

“Haven’t I ever helped you?” his father asked.

“I don’t know,” John said, angry at both of them. He sat down in a deep wingchair, out of sight in the darkening room.

“Maybe you’re right,” William Cotter said. He turned, carrying his cup, and went slowly out of the room and up the front stairs. One step, two steps, crunch, creak. John counted seventeen stairs, balcony and two more. The bedroom door shut, and above him the bed moved.

His mother came in and stood in the light from the dining room.

“Johnny…” she said.

“For Christ’s sake I don’t want a
conference!”
he said, and then he was ashamed. He went past her, almost running, out the back door to Bruce’s car. He had to back onto the lawn to get by his father’s Buick, and as he left the driveway one rear wheel thumped over the curb.

He drove down Maple Street to the square and turned down Water Street, stopping in front of a store with a sign in red neon over the front window:
Teach Your Dollars More Cents.
He had ten dollars he had borrowed from his father, and he went in and bought from Anna, the old Polish woman, a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. This left him five dollars and sixty cents—to last until he asked for more money from his mother or his father. Anna, sleepy and squat, with her blond-gray hair mussed up, didn’t recognize him. She grudgingly gave him a bottle opener.

He drove toward Northlee until he remembered that Bruce lay unconscious there, then turned to take the wooden bridge across the river into Vermont. He opened a bottle of beer with one hand, pressing the bottle against the seat of the car for leverage and steering with the other. He followed an old asphalt road through the low hills, going slowly through the banked turns as he climbed, sipping his beer and watching the road in front of his headlights.

Now at home his mother would be doing the dishes, her face composed, almost frozen. His father would probably have come back downstairs, and would be sitting in the living room. The house, standing still and brittle over this mess, would be the same.
Home.

And yet the word
home
did not mean, at least did not mean completely, the place of tension his own home had always been to him. He seemed to have another home, another family, God knew where. Perhaps the idea came from every legend about such a place—a place where love could be taken for granted and affection could be expressed without shame, where pride was not always afraid of wounds.

Bruce could not win in an exchange of sarcasm, and yet like a compulsive gambler played at it until John, forgetting, said the stupid, unanswerable words, “Don’t get your water hot, Brucie.” Bruce—“DON’T GET
YOUR
WATER HOT!” The mother trembled. The shrinking father, wary of stray shots, doused his coffee with bourbon.

“Now, you boys,” Gladys Cotter would say.

“SHUT UP!”—one of the boys. And William Cotter rarely dared to chide.

He threw his empty bottle out of the window of the car, heard it bounce on the shoulder of the road and whick into the underbrush. In Vermont the fine for doing this was fifty dollars, but all along the road the bright bottoms of beer bottles and cans winked at him, like the eyes of animals.

He knew of real families who were not like his. The Paquettes, for instance, were not continually in crisis. They had their moments, and he had seen some quarrels among the Paquettes, but beneath the quarreling, even the violence, there seemed to run a calm stream of family. It did not matter. It was not deadly.

He thought of
Peter Pan,
or
The Wind in the Willows,
of
A Child’s
Garden of Verses,
or even of such things as
Mary Poppins
and
Winnie the Pooh.
Did his vision of love arise from such stuff? In his language group at the Sorbonne he had known an English girl, Muriel, who seemed to be the final product of softness and wonder. She was seventeen, a large girl, and called her mother “Mummy.” She was very sweet, very talky, and had lost her left hand when a very small child in the blitz. Her brother was killed by the same bomb. But in most ways it was as if this horror had never happened, as if she had just come fresh from the nursery, with her Teddy bear somewhere nearby, her rocking horse waiting with her dolls in that cozy place. She wanted to
live;
to go to the dark cave of his room with him and find out about things, and he took her there. One night on his bed that was always damp with the moisture of the stone walls he took off most of her clothes and found that her underpants were white knit cotton with a little blue ribbon woven around each leg and finished in a bow. Christopher Robin’s wide blue eyes watched, Mary Poppins glared, Mummy wouldn’t like it—though Muriel would—and that was that. He took her home to her respectable pension feeling quite noble and defeated; Muriel, he was sure, quite surprised.

The road led northward, up the river between hills, and after he had climbed the low mountains above Wentworth Junction, he turned around and started back. He nearly threw his cigarette out the window, then remembered in time the tindery brush. He put the butt in his empty bottle, held it to his ear to hear the hiss, then threw bottle and all out.

Then there was the Russian who always came to the Bar Vert—at least he was there whenever John went there—a well dressed, dark man with a thin face. He always smiled, joked, and eventually got the guitar player to play Russian songs. Then he sang. His voice was deep, resonant but out of control, and he sang with a painful, weepy smile on his face. His eyes filled and he cried as he sang, and his homesickness was so great even the French stopped talking and listened to him. John would find his own eyes burning for this stranger’s grief, even though homesickness was one disease he thought he never had. Not for his own home; but didn’t he have a Russian counterpart to his legend? Natasha’s family, the Rostovs, in
War
and Peace;
and he remembered, as if he had been there, one Christmas when they went visiting in sleighs over brittle, noisy snow, everybody warm and snug under fur robes, the horses farting sweet steam into the icy night, everybody loving each other and sleighing over the long plains toward other people they loved. The Russian’s strange syllables, his breaking voice, meant this scene to John.

But he was no exile, like the Russian. Strange, that the memory of Leah contained so little nostalgia! If he remembered any period of his life with nostalgia it was not Leah, where he was always the little boy who dirtied either the playground slide or his own conscience, but the time when he first got away, when he was a young soldier.

And after the war there was the pleasant business of being a veteran, that easy crutch of the times, and the G.I. bill, another one: hippity hop from one university to another—Vermont, Chicago, Iowa, Paris—all of them far enough from Leah. He did catch certain enthusiasms in those years; became voluble and sometimes violent. He joined the American Veterans’ Committee, stood frightened and aggressive before large groups of people. The Communists had wooed him for a time, until his inaccessibility enraged them and drove them to acts of complete alienation. He still believed in the importance of the issues that had so excited him, but somehow the energy of his beliefs had seeped away.

He drove back across the covered bridge into New Hampshire, avoided the Town Square and took the back road toward Cascom; a narrow, curving asphalt road similar to the one he’d taken in Vermont. As soon as he left Leah town proper, he opened another bottle of beer.

He knew the back road to Cascom well, having taken it often in the past to visit the Randolfs—Howard, Phoebe and their rather exotic daughter, Minetta. When, in high school, the romantic ideas of Miss Colchester began to lose their power—when Shelley and Byron no longer meant to him glorious freedom and rebellion, the Randolfs’ more contemporary oddness fascinated him. They had migrated farther north than most of the returning exiles of the twenties, and somehow stuck. He suspected that the Randolfs stuck more because of lack of money than for the depth of their philosophy of old houses and the virtues of the soil. Howard Randolf had written two best-sellers in the early thirties, but it had been a long time since the early thirties. He had written many novels since, and John made it a point to read them. “Howard Randolf,” one critic wrote, “is
one
bloodshot-eye boy who keeps up with the times. His heroes used to be either unbuttoning their flies or buttoning them up, but now they are either unzipping them or zipping them up.”

The Randolfs owed Cotter & Son quite a sum of money for coal and roofing—or at least they had two years ago. Bruce had been fond of mentioning this. Though they had lived in Leah for twenty-five years or so, they were still “summer people”—but they did owe a lot of money here and there, and to many of the townspeople this fact seemed to entwine them sufficiently within the fortunes and history of Leah. A few more debts and they might be natives.

Suddenly the Randolfs’ mailbox flew by, white with the lettering washed out, but he knew it well enough because of the huge maple stump it sat on. He let the car slow down, not putting on the brake but letting the motor slow it, his foot off the accelerator. No, he didn’t want to see anybody. He wanted to drive around slowly and drink beer by himself. But the Randolfs would sure like it if he brought them a case of beer—what was left, anyway. He felt around in the case and decided he’d only had four. That left twenty, which was enough. Enough for what? His ambition had always been to get Randolf and the old lady drunk enough so that they would go to bed and leave him alone with Minetta, but the trouble was that nobody ever came to see them except Minetta’s admirers and the Randolfs were starved for talk. They might go to bed and leave Bob Paquette, all right, but when John came they always wanted to talk. He’d gone nearly a mile when he decided to turn around and see the Randolfs anyway.

The road to the old farmhouse was still rutty from the spring thaw, and in the dry spell the ruts had dried hard and ridgy and had stayed that way all summer. The Randolfs had an old car, but they walked the half-mile to the mailbox and drove to Leah only once a week for supplies.

The old white house was surrounded by a grove of huge pines, and it looked under the roof of branches like a house within a house. Several brick chimneys, like tent poles, supported the tired roof. The house had been painted recently, and the old cedar shingles had been covered with modern mineral roofing. Across the road an old gray barn stood in a relaxed fashion, propped up here and there by the beams of another barn long since fallen into its foundation. One small window gleamed, high up under the purlins. It was there, warmed in winter by the heat of sheep and cows, that Howard Randolf worked. Rats chewed his manuscripts and sat beadily watching him as he wrote. Once he had introduced a rat to John, a long brown fellow with a white patch at his throat, as Aldridge H. Aldridge, a literary critic. “He feels,” Howard had said, “that my work is too naively optimistic, and has invited me to follow him beneath the old hencoop, where reality exists.”

John parked on the thick bed of pine needles that surrounded the house. The Randolfs did not have electricity, and the soft gleam of oil lamps shone in the downstairs windows.

Minetta and her mother had seen his headlights and were waiting for him on the side porch.

“John Cotter,” he said as he walked toward them on the slippery pine needles.

“Oh!” they both said at once, surprised and glad to see him. He came into the circle of lamplight.

“The world traveler!” Mrs. Randolf said, smiling, her mouth nervous and jerky. Her voice was low and ragged, and now it suddenly burst through into a higher note. “Well! John Cotter, come to see us!” Her gray hair was straggly, always seeming to be a little damp with sweat, and strands of it stuck out at right angles to her head. She had become even plumper and waddlier in the past two years, and she waddled into the house, holding her lamp on a level with her eyes.

Minetta hadn’t said anything after her first “Oh!” of surprise. The night was hot and she was barefoot, wearing only shorts and a halter that looked like the top of a two-piece bathing suit. As usual, she wore just a little too much lipstick, even out here where there were few visitors and no neighbors for three miles.

“What’s new?” he asked. With Minetta he always reconnoitered carefully.

“Nothing,” she said brightly, shaking her head. He thought he’d better try again.

“Bob Paquette told me you were here. He said you were going to stay the winter, too.”

She turned her blue eyes directly on him; black hair surrounded her face. For some reason she held her long hair together under her chin, as if she were looking out of a black hood. “I know it, God damn it! Howard’s got a loft in New York, but he sublet it for all year. Now we’ve got to hibernate.”

“Why don’t you take off?” he asked. They followed Mrs. Randolf into the living room.

“I did that last winter, but I ran out of money.” She walked away from him, then turned around and put her foot up on a chair, leaning her elbow on her knee. The lamplight shone through a delicate fuzz of reddish little hairs along her thigh. Mrs. Randolf, who had been bending over the fireplace, stood back to let the bright flame of burning newspapers flood the room.

“Good God, Phoebe, isn’t it hot enough?” Minetta said, moving away—always to a point directly across the room from John. He could never figure out whether she wanted to get away from him or wanted him to look at her, and this was another of her little inscrutabilities. He sat in an antique rocker, rather gingerly, and leaned slowly back to look at her some more. There was something a little too muscular and gross about her, but she made him think—or not think—thinking as such didn’t enter into it—about taking off her clothes. Bob Paquette said once that Minetta Randolf was the most popular girl in wet dreams in Leah. John tried to imagine, but couldn’t, a girl who was more sexy. There weren’t any. No movie star, no Egyptian belly dancer; nobody. In grade school and in high school, when sex began to dominate the minds of boys in Leah, Minetta Randolf was mentioned quite often. “She’s always turning up—I mean laying down, in the conversation,” Bob said. And yet the rumor was that she was a virgin: a persistent rumor, as persistent as the opposite kind of rumor about one chaste, old-maidish girl in town. Now she sat down and hooked her arms over the back of her chair, making her breasts stick out. What other rumor than this unseemly one of virginity could be worth repeating about lush Minetta? He would like to investigate the situation carefully. The nearest he had ever come to finding out was the time she invited him to a Bennington prom. But then for some reason he ended up with her blonde, skinny roommate, the only girl he had ever met who drove a Nash because of the reclining seats.