A Good and Happy Child (3 page)

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roommate at Calhoun College, the tiny but distinguished men’s institution atop Wilder’s Mountain in South Carolina. My father was a relative sophisticate from Greenville (one of the town’s two
aesthetes,
he had told me, drily), but Tom Harris was from a hill town near Calhoun itself, called Hogback—
the kind they don’t put on the map,
my father had told me,
with real dirt-eating mountain folk
—and by the time he entered Calhoun, he had never left Wilder’s Mountain. The admissions officer handling Tom Harris’s file had made the journey personally to the Harris house to determine whether these grades and admissions essays could really have been authored by a high school boy from Hogback; and he found there a dirty, cramped cabin that had nonetheless been populated with nearly every volume from the public library. (
Tom
Harris found he was the only one checking them out,
my father said,
so he
decided to keep them.
) Tom Harris arrived at Calhoun with a single suitcase, wearing trousers too small for his six-foot-three frame, and an oversized flannel shirt,
which stank,
my father attested. Even now, a Harvard doctorate, a full professorship, and many published monographs later, there were signs of the mountain on him. His face was craggy, his cheeks sunken, his hair was greasy and looked as though it had been cut and combed by three angry barbers at once. He wore droopy and mismatched clothes: mustard-colored slacks that bagged between his legs, and a mud-colored sweater. I thought of Tom Harris as an ironic old tree. He stood at a lopsided angle, leaning so far over on one leg or another you expected to hear a creak. While he seldom laughed, the corners of his mouth would often tug down in a suppressed smile. My mother used to say he needed a wife to clean him up, to which my father replied Tom Harris would need to clean up first, because no woman could stand that smell.

But it had been some months now since Tom Harris came, arguing good-naturedly and praising our dinner fare and pretending to steal my dessert. My mother said he missed my father. But I felt a strange hostility just then, seeing him there in our hall. It was his first visit since the funeral.

I just stared.

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J u s t i n E v a n s

“I could hear the music downstairs, so I came in,” he offered, seeing my expression. Then, joking: “But now that you’re here, maybe I should step outside and knock again?” He took a theatrical step toward the door.

“That’s okay.”

He gave a mocking little bow. “You’re very kind.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was invited for supper,” he said. “What are you cooking?”

“I’m not cooking.”

“You’re not cooking! Well. I guess we’ll just have to eat what your mother makes. Blegh,” he made a sound of disgust. Ordinarily, I would have giggled at this.

“What do you care?” I said, glaring. “You’re eating for free.”

“No, no. I insist on paying.” When this garnered no reaction, he gave up. “I’ll see myself in,” he said. He threw his coat on a chair and went down into the basement, releasing a burst of Vivaldi when he opened the door.

r r r

“So Tom, tell us this
story
!”

My mother stirred a pan of red spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon. Steam whirled from a great aluminum pasta pot. I glowered at Tom Harris across the kitchen table; he had been holding forth for a half hour.

“Ah yes,” he said. “Last weekend, Gary Bannister—you know him? Asian languages . . .”

“Of course.”

“Gary persuaded me to go to a Pentecostal meeting.”

“Tom! You’re joking!” Mom’s voice rang with interest, but her expression—visible only to the stove, and to me—seemed wary.

“Oh, you see signs for these revival meetings up and down Route 11. Gary’s from Boston. He thought they might detect a Yankee, so he dragged me along for protection. There was no need—they expect a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

15

visitors and you sit in special bleachers. The preacher whooped into a microphone, they sang along with electric guitars, then finally came the speaking in tongues.”

“Mom, can I stir the spaghetti?” I said, stamping over to the stove with theatrical boredom.

“Members of the congregation came forward, starting swooning, going into trances,” continued Tom Harris, kicking out his long legs, folding his arms behind his head. “Average folk in jeans and sneakers. But there they are on their knees, eyes rolling back in their heads, speaking in tongues—which, by the way, sounds just like baby talk. Gary was thrilled. Then, before I know it,” Tom Harris paused, “Gary is grabbing my arm. I look at him, and he’s white as a sheet. ‘Let’s go,’ he says—and he bolts!”

I plunged a spoon into the roiling water, sour with self-pity. Wasn’t anyone going to ask what had happened to me today?

“I followed him to the parking lot,” continued our guest. “
Tom, you
saw the woman near us?
he asked. I had—a dark-haired woman, quite pretty.
She was speaking a dialect of Cantonese that I happen to know,
Gary tells me.
And she was cursing the name of God up and down.
”

“What?” my mother exclaimed. “How could a county woman from Preston speak Chinese? And even if she could . . . why would she curse God in church?”

“That, my dear, is the point of the story,” Tom Harris pronounced. He paused. “It was a demon.”

My mother’s hand, stirring the sauce, stopped momentarily in its clockwise path. “Really,” she said.

These sorts of pronouncements had once been common in our house. With my mother and me as the audience, often at the dinner table by candlelight, my father and Tom Harris competed with tales of religious mysteries. The bishop in Dark Age Britain who chopped down a grove of trees sacred to the druids and built a chapel out of them to harness their power for the church. The 1960s housewife in Tennessee who miraculously appeared in two places at once, washing
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J u s t i n E v a n s

dinner dishes at home and feeding the poor in a soup kitchen across town. My mother playing foil—
How could they prove that?
or a teasing
Come on!
—Tom Harris’s eyes twinkling; my father caught up in the momentum of his own diatribes, the evening ending only when he would at last stop speaking and stare down at the table, spent and glassy-eyed from wine. The subject was always church lore, history, and ritual, and it was fed by a contrarian streak—
the twentieth century
has been culturally bleached by Marxism, and TV!
The stories left my mother bemused and maybe a little lonely; but me, wide-eyed.

“Certainly!” said Tom Harris, in response to my mother. “Ecstatics like these actively seek to put themselves in the hands of another power. But there’s the problem. If you open the door,” he said, “you never know what will come through.”

“Spaghetti’s ready,” I called out, interrupting.

“You have to taste it,” said my mother.

“
Taste
it?”

She crossed to the stove and reached for the wooden spoon.

“No, I want to do it,” I protested, tugging it back from her.

“Let me—” said my mother, but it was too late. I had pulled her arm against the hot rim of the pot. She cried out. In an instant, Tom Harris was on his feet with his arms wrapped around my mother, shepherding her to the sink, running cold water, gingerly placing her forearm under the stream.

Soon we were seated around the table; Tom Harris sat off to the side, his bent knees splayed like butterflies’ wings.

“Something’s bothering young George today,” he declared.

“Why, what’s the matter?” said my mother quickly.

“We’ll have to ask him,” he said. “He’s very mysterious.”

My mother turned to me.

“Is something wrong, George?”

“No,” I said, staring at my placemat. But my mother’s voice, kind, a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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inquiring, brought all the frustration and pain of the Dean incident back. “The kids at school hate me,” I choked.

My mother reached over to embrace me, and coaxed the story out of me, all under the hawk eye of Tom Harris, whom I chose to ignore.

“That Dean,” she said angrily. “Why does he have to do that? If he doesn’t like you, why can’t he just leave you alone?”

“And then I come home and find
him
here,” I said.

“Now George,” my mother said, her tone changing from sympathy to warning. “Tom Harris is our guest. Bad day or no bad day, if you don’t behave you can eat your supper in your room.”

“FINE!” I screamed, and ran upstairs.

r r r

I sat at the top of the stairs, listening. In our house, the tall ceilings and planked floors echoed.

“How is it out there, by yourself?” my mother asked. “It must get lonely.”

“The wind howls and the stairs creak,” Tom Harris joked. “But for company I have my neighbors, Farmer Mutispaw and his charming sheep.” He chuckled. “What about you?”

Mom sighed a deep, sad sigh. “Oh, Tom. It gets very hard.” She sighed again. “It would have been so much better if I could have spoken with him one more time. He was so verbal . . .”

“I feel the same way,” he said somberly. “It’s been, what—?”

“Three months. Thirteen weeks,” my mother said. “You know, with sabbaticals or research trips, we’ve been apart for almost this long before. Sometimes, I putter around the house thinking he’ll be home any minute. Then I catch myself.”

“Maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t be alone.”

That sounded corny for Tom Harris—could he be courting my mother?

“I’m not sentimentalizing,” she said, a hardness in her voice.
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“Sometimes I get . . . just furious. Why would he
do
it? He wasn’t risking his life. He was risking
ours
!” She sighed. “I should have pushed harder. Asked more questions.” She moaned. “That’s the worst part. The regrets.”

“Paul wanted to do good,” said Tom Harris. “He had reasons to prove himself. For one thing, he was no longer able to publish.”

“He never got over that book,” said my mother.

I had heard about
that book.
In recent days it was referred to only occasionally in our house, but I had dim memories of arguments, my father shouting in the living room at night, after bedtime, and my mother crying; or the reverse: my father catatonic on a sofa, my mother stroking his shoulders in sympathy.
That book
had only been explained to me once; as with so many things at that age, I swallowed the explanation whole and never asked for more:
A book your father worked on a
long time was published and some people didn’t like it.
Did you like it?

I asked my mother.
Your father’s brilliant,
answered my mother. Then they’re mean, I said.
That’s what your father thinks, too,
nodded my mother.

“I miss him every day, Tom,” my mother sighed. “But he was hard to live with.”

The blood throbbed in my ears. How could she say that?

r r r

I undressed and stepped into the shower, cranking the hot water into a steamy roar. Pictures of my father flickered in my memory. Spankings, furious outbursts, my mother crying sometimes, me others. But then I would hear the words that made me leap like a puppy:
Let’s take a walk.
Around the corner and up Hill Avenue we would go in the springtime, past dogwood blooms, and alongside freshly rained-on lawns, with the odor of mud and grass and crisp wild air blown down from the mountains—
the Blue Ridge Mountains,
my father was the first to tell me (one fact among thousands)—fresh in our nostrils. He told me whole histories a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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as we tromped in Slopers Creek Park in autumn, through patches of green globulous hedge apples fallen from leafless trees. In winter we hiked past Revolution Hall, the old college destroyed by fire in the 1780s, now just a stone chimney and some hollow walls rising against the sky. We trudged up and down long slopes in the snow, and with the rhythm of our walking my father would talk . . . about baroque churches; how Byzantium fell to the Turks; the real Thomist meaning of transubstantiation; all the “oversophisticated” things my mother objected to, fought with him over (in discussions overheard from the top step), saying they made me strange for my age group and made me awkward. But it was these dialogues which made me feel, even for a brief time—scrambling beside him as he strode with his long paces; looking up at his somber, dark face—that I, above everyone else, more than his close friends like Tom Harris or his many fawning students, was his chosen apprentice, his favorite.

The bathroom was steaming up. Droplets ran down the transparent shower door, reminding me of rain on a car windshield. The tile glowed white and clean. It was in that sterile, safe cocoon, turning to soap my belly, that I saw it for the first time.

What is the reaction a person should have, seeing a strange face staring at them in the shower?

I might have screamed, like someone in the movies. But a scream, however instinctive it might seem, is in fact an act of logic: when confronted with an intruder a person should scream because screaming will bring help. But what if there is no opening and shutting of the door, no rustling movement of clothing, no indication of physical presence?

I knew what I was seeing was impossible. In retrospect I could say my brain went off the rails; I felt a sickening lurch as my senses heaved out of their tracks, and I trembled despite the fact that I was standing in a hot shower. I felt myself teeter. I turned and balanced myself on the cool tile. I closed my eyes and said to myself, “When you turn around, it will be gone.” I opened my eyes. The face continued to stare.
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My breath returned to my lungs. I let out a scream, and I fell. Next I saw Tom Harris standing in the doorway of the bathroom. He was tall and stern, sweeping the room with his eyes. He spotted me and bolted to the bathtub where I lay. He knelt down beside me. My mother appeared, her hand covering her mouth. Then I fainted. n o t e b o o k 2