A Special Providence (2 page)

Her voice by now had become a rich and tireless monologue: “… Oh, and guess who I ran into on the bus the other day! Harriet Baker! Remember the year we lived on Charles Street? And you used to play with the Baker boys? They’re both in the Navy now, and Bill’s in the Pacific; just imagine. Remember the winter we were so horribly broke, and Harriet and I had those awful quarrels about money? Anyway, that’s all forgotten now. We had dinner together and had the nicest talk; she wanted to hear all about you. Oh, and
guess
what she told me about the Engstroms! Remember? Paul and Mary Engstrom, that were such good friends of mine that year? And they came out to see us in Scarsdale, too, remember? And in Riverside? Remember the year we all spent Christmas together and had such a good time? …”

It went on and on, while he crumbled his chicken croquettes with the side of his fork and made whatever answers she seemed to want, or to need. After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say “Oh yes,” or “Of course,” in all the right places.

The subjects of her talk didn’t matter; he knew what she was really saying. Helpless and gentle, small and tired and anxious to please, she was asking him to agree that her life was not a failure. Did he remember the good times? Did he remember all the nice people they’d known and all the interestingly different places they’d lived in? And whatever mistakes she might have made,
however rudely the world might have treated her, did he know how hard she’d always tried? Did he know how terribly much she loved him? And did he realize – in spite of everything – did he realize how remarkable and how gifted and how brave a woman his mother was?

Oh yes; oh yes; of course he did – that was the message of his nods and smiles and mumbled replies. It was the message he’d been giving her as long as he could remember, and for most of that time he had wholly believed it.

Because she
was
remarkable and gifted and brave. How else could anyone explain the story of her life? At the turn of the century, when all the sleeping little towns of Indiana had lain locked in provincial ignorance, and when in that environment a simple dry-goods merchant named Amos Grumbauer had raised six ordinary daughters, wasn’t it remarkable that his seventh had somehow developed a passion for art, and for elegance, and for the great and distant world of New York? Without finishing high school she had become one of the first female students ever enrolled in the Cincinnati Art Academy; and not very many years after that, all alone, she had made her way to the city of her dreams and found employment as a fashion illustrator, with only occasional help from home. Didn’t that prove she was gifted, and didn’t it prove she was brave?

Her first great mistake, and she often said afterwards that she would never understand what had possessed her, was to marry a man as ordinary as her Indiana father. Oh, George Prentice might have been handsome in a quiet way; he might even have been a little dashing, with his fine amateur singing voice, his good clothes, and the salesman’s expense account that made him welcome at some of the better speakeasies in town. It was undeniable too that a girl pressing thirty-four wasn’t apt to get many serious proposals; and besides, he was so steady, so
devoted, so eager to protect her and provide for her. But how could she have been so blind to the dullness of the man? How could she have failed to see that he thought of her talent as a charming little hobby and nothing more, that he could get tears in his eyes over the poetry of Edgar A. Guest, and that his own highest ambition in life, incessantly discussed, was to be promoted to the job of assistant divisional sales manager in some monstrous and wholly unintelligible organization called Amalgamated Tool and Die?

And on top of all that, as if that weren’t enough, how could she have foreseen that as a married man he would disappear for three and four days at a time and come home reeking of gin, with lipstick all over his shirt?

She divorced him three years after the birth of their only child, when she was thirty-eight, and set out to become an artist of distinction – a sculptor. She took her son to Paris for a year of study; but that particular year turned out to be 1929, and the shock of economic necessity brought her home in a little more than six months. From then on, her artistic career became a desperate and ever-thwarted effort played out against the background of the Great Depression, a hysterical odyssey that she always said was made bearable only by the “wonderful companionship” of her little boy. On the slender combination of alimony and child support that was the most George Prentice could spare, they lived at first in rural Connecticut, then in Greenwich Village, and then in the Westchester suburbs, where they were always in trouble with the landlord and the grocer and the coal dealer, never at ease among the oppressively neat families that surrounded them.

“We’re different, Bobby,” she would explain, but the explanation was never needed. Wherever they lived he seemed always to be the only new boy and the only poor boy, the only
boy whose home smelled of mildew and cat droppings and plastilene, with statuary instead of a car in its garage; the only boy who didn’t have a father.

But he had loved her romantically, with an almost religious belief in her gallantry and goodness. If the landlord and the grocer and the coal dealer and George Prentice were all against her, they would have to be his enemies too: he would serve as her ally and defender against the crass and bullying materialism of the world. He would gladly have thrown down his life for her in any number of ways; the trouble was that other, less dramatic kinds of help were needed, and none came. Pieces of her sculpture were sometimes shown in group exhibitions and very occasionally sold, for small sums, but these isolated triumphs were all but lost under the mounting pressure of hardship.

“Look, Alice,” George Prentice would say on the rare and dreaded occasions of his visitation rights, plainly forcing his voice to sound calm and reasonable. “Look: I know it’s important to make sacrifices for the boy – I agree with you there – but this just isn’t realistic. You simply have no business living in a place like this, running up all these bills. The point is, people have to live within their
means
, Alice.”

“All right. I’ll give up sculpture, then. I’ll move to the
Bronx
and get some wretched little job in a
department
store. Is that what you want?”

“No, of course that’s not what I want. I’m simply asking for a little co-operation, a little consideration – damn it, Alice, a little sense of responsibility.”

“Responsibility! Oh, don’t talk to
me
about responsibility …”

“Alice, will you please keep your voice down? Before you wake the boy?”

Life in the suburbs came abruptly to an end with a frightening lawsuits for unpayable debts when he was nearly thirteen; and it
was three years later, after a series of increasingly cheap city apartments, that Alice made a final plea to her former husband. She would never be a burden on him again, she promised, if he would only agree to finance Bobby’s enrollment in what she called a Good New-England Prep School.

“A
boarding
school? Alice, do you have any idea how much those places cost? Look: let’s try to be reasonable. How do you think I’m going to be able to put him through college if I—”

“Oh, you know perfectly well the whole question of college is three years away. Anything can happen in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a
fortune
in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a fortune six
months
from now. Oh, I know you’ve never had any faith in me, but it happens that a good many other people do.”

“Well, but Alice, listen. Try to control yourself.”

“Ha! Control myself. Con
trol
myself …”

The school she chose was not exactly a good one, but it was the only one that offered to take him at half tuition, and the victory of his acceptance filled her with pride.

His first year there – the year of Pearl Harbor – was almost unalloyed in its misery. Missing his mother and ashamed of missing her, wholly out of place with his ineptness at sports, his cheap, mismatched clothes and his total lack of spending money, he felt he could survive only by becoming a minor campus clown. The second year was better – he gained a certain prestige as a campus eccentric and was even beginning to win recognition as a kind of campus intellectual – but in the middle of that second year George Prentice dropped dead in his office.

It was a stunning event. Riding home on the train for the funeral, he couldn’t get over the surprise of hearing his mother weep uncontrollably into the telephone. She had sounded as bereaved as a real widow, and he’d almost wanted to say,
“What the hell, Mother – you mean we’re supposed to
cry
when he dies?”

And he was appalled at her behavior in the funeral parlor. Moaning, she collapsed into the heaped flowers and planted a long and passionate kiss on the dead man’s waxen face. Recorded organ music was droning somewhere in the background, and there was a long solemn line of men from Amalgamated Tool and Die waiting to pay their respects (he had an awful suspicion that her histrionics were being conducted for
their
benefit). And although his first impulse was to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, he lingered at the coffin for a little while after the conclusion of her scene. He stared down into the plain, still face of George Prentice and tried to study every detail of it, to atone for all the times he had never quite looked the man in the eye. He dredged his memory for the slightest trace of real affection for this man (birthday presents? trips to the circus?), and for the faintest glimmer of a time when the man might have known anything but uneasiness and disappointment in the presence of his only child; but it was no use. Turning away from the corpse at last and taking her arm, he looked down at her weeping head with revulsion. It was
her
fault. She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.

But he began to wonder, darkly, if it mightn’t be his own fault too, even more than hers. He almost felt as if he’d killed the man himself with his terrible inhuman indifference all these years. All he wanted then was to get away from this sobbing, shuddering old woman and get back to school, where he could think things out.

And his father’s death brought another, more practical kind of loss: there was no more money. This was something he wasn’t fully aware of until he came home the following summer, not
long after he’d turned seventeen, to find her living in a cheap hotel room for which the rent was already in arrears. She had put all her sculpture and what was left of her furniture into storage, and the storage payments were in arrears too. For months, with a total lack of success, she had been trying to re-establish herself as a fashion illustrator after a twenty-year absence from the field. Even he could see how stiff and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained that it was all a question of making the right contacts; and he’d been with her for less than a day before discovering that she didn’t have enough to eat. She had been living for weeks on canned soup and sardines.

“Look,” he said, only dimly aware of sounding like a ghost of George Prentice. “This isn’t very sensible. Hell,
I’ll
get some kind of a job.”

And he went to work in an automobile-parts warehouse. On the strength of that they moved into the furnished apartment in the West Fifties, and the “wonderful companionship” entered a strange new phase.

Feeling manly and pleasurably proletarian as he clumped home every night in his work clothes, he saw himself as the hero of some inspiring movie about the struggles of the poor. “Hell, I started out as a warehouseman,” he would be able to say for the rest of his life. “Had to quit school and support my mother, after my dad died. Those were pretty tough times.”

The trouble was that his mother refused to play her role in the movie. It couldn’t be denied that he was supporting her – she sometimes had to meet him outside the warehouse at noon on payday, in fact, in order to buy her lunch – but nobody would ever have guessed it. He kept hoping to come home and find her acting the way he thought she ought to act: a humble widow, gratefully cooking meat and potatoes for her tired son, sitting
down with a sewing basket as soon as she’d washed the dishes, darning his socks in the lamplight and perhaps looking up to inquire, shyly, if he wouldn’t like to call up some nice girl.

And he was always disappointed. Night after night was given over to her talk about the contacts she was certain to establish soon in the fashion world, and about the fortunes still to be made out of one-man shows if only she could get her sculpture out of storage, while the canned food burned on the stove.

Once he found her posing for his admiration in a stylish new dress, for which she’d spent more than half the week’s grocery money, and when he failed to be enthusiastic about it she explained, as if she were talking to a retarded child, that no one could possibly expect to get ahead in the fashion world wearing last year’s clothes.

“Oh, yes, Bobby’s fine,” he heard her telling someone on the telephone, another time. “He’s taken a summer job. Oh, just a little laboring job, in some dreadful warehouse –
you
know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime – but he seems to enjoy it, and I think the experience will do him a world of good …”

He had assumed, with mixed emotions, that he wouldn’t be going back to school for his senior year; but when September came around she told him not to be ridiculous. He
had
to graduate; it would break her heart if he didn’t.

“Well, but look: what’re you going to do?”

“Dear, I’ve explained all that. Something’s bound to happen soon with this fashion work; you know how hard I’m trying. And then just as
soon
as I can get my sculpture out of storage there’s no telling what good things are going to come our way. Don’t you see?”