A Special Providence (3 page)

“Well, sure, but I’m not talking about ‘soon.’ I’m talking about now. How are you going to pay the rent? How the hell are you going to eat?”

“Oh, I’ll always manage; that’s not important. I’ll
borrow
some money if I have to. That’s nothing to—”

“Who from? And anyway, you can’t go on borrowing forever, can you?”

She looked at him incredulously, slowly shaking her head with a world-weary smile, and then she said it: “You sound just like your father.”

The argument went on for hours, in ever-rising spirals of unreasoning shrillness, until at last, after hearing one more time and at great length about the invaluable contacts that were certain to be hers, he turned on her and said, “Oh, bullshit!”

And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor, splitting an armpit seam of the dress that was supposed to be her means of advancement in the fashion world. She lay face down, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.

It was a thing he had often seen her do before. The first time, long ago, had been when one of their landlords in Westchester had threatened to evict them, after she had called George Prentice to plead for whatever sum it was they needed to settle the debt. “All right!” she had cried into the telephone. “All right! But I’m warning you, I’ll kill myself tonight!” And rising from the slammed-down phone she had grabbed her breast and fallen to the carpet, and her little boy had tried to put both fists in his mouth to stifle his panic until she roused herself at last and took him sobbing into her arms. It had happened often enough since then, in various crises, that he knew she wasn’t really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there. Before long she turned over and pulled herself up into a tragic sitting position in the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands.

“Oh, God,” she said with a convulsive shudder. “Oh, God. My
son
calls me ‘Bull Shit.’ ”

“No, now wait a minute. I didn’t ‘call’ you – you don’t ‘call’ people – look, it’s just an expression. Don’t you see? I just said – look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, oh, oh, God,” she said, rocking from side to side in her chair. “My
son
calls me ‘Bull Shit.’ ”

“No, look. Wait a minute. Please …”

In the end, a week before school started, she took a job – not the “wretched little job in a department store” she had so often threatened George Prentice with, but something more wretched even than that: she went to work in a factory that made department-store mannequins.

The surprising thing was that his senior year turned out to be a kind of success. Through whatever subtle process it is that turns school outcasts into offbeat school leaders, he became one; not until the triumphant year was nearly over did he come to grips with the knowledge that his tuition had gone unpaid for a year and a half.

There were many telephone calls between his mother and the headmaster, during which she probably wept and pleaded and promised, and there were sober talks between the headmaster and himself (“It’s a very difficult situation for all of us, Bob”) until at last, on the very eve of Commencement Day, the headmaster explained tactfully and with some embarrassment that his diploma would have to be withheld until the account was paid.

By that time his mother had been laid off from the mannequin factory and gone to work in a small, nonunion defense plant that made precision lenses. She described it solemnly, to everyone she knew, as “War work.”

A month later he was in the Army, with his mother listed as a
Class “A” dependent; and now, sitting across from her in the ample cleanliness of Childs, he was letting her words flow past his hearing. With a grim, tender patience, he had begun to watch for the first signs of her drunkenness to show: the thickening and slurring of her speech, the tendency of her upper lip to loosen and bloat, the slowing clumsiness of her gesturing hands.

“… and then suddenly,” she was saying, corning to the climax of a long story about some people she’d recently met, “suddenly his eyes went very big and he said, ‘You mean you’re Alice Prentice? Alice Prentice the
sculptor?’
” She had always taken a child’s delight in telling anecdotes that allowed her to speak her own name, and those that allowed her to add “the sculptor” were much the best. “And it turned out they’d been admirers of mine for years. So they asked me in for coffee and we had – oh, we just had the most wonderful time.”

He knew he was supposed to join in her pleasure at this, but he abruptly decided he wasn’t up to it tonight. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Well, that’s interesting. Where’d they heard of you?” And he was fully aware that the question was cruel, but aware too that he had to ask it just that way.

“What? Oh—” Hurt feelings flickered in her face, but she recovered. “Oh, well, friends of theirs had bought a garden piece from one of my exhibitions years ago, or something of the kind. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, they—”

“Your exhibitions?” He couldn’t let it go; he was bearing down on her like a prosecuting attorney. He knew damned well that for all her lifelong talk about one-man shows she’d never had one. (And did they really call it a “one-man show” when the artist was a woman? What kind of nonsense was that?) He knew too that the number of pieces she’d sold from group exhibitions could be counted on pitifully few fingers; most of her sales had been made through a garden-sculpture gallery that carried her
work on consignment, and even at that they had nearly always been bought by friends, or by friends of friends.

“Well, I
think
they said an exhibition,” she said impatiently. “It may have been a gallery sale; anyway that’s not important.”

He conceded the point, but only to draw back to a new line of attack: “And how did you say you’d met these people?”

“Through the
Stewarts
, dear; I explained all that.”

“Oh, I see. And the Stewarts were probably friends of the other people too, the people who bought the sculpture. Right?”

“Well, I suppose so, yes. I suppose that must’ve been the way it happened.” She fell silent for a little while, looking daunted, poking her fork around in the ruins of her chicken croquettes. Then, bravely, her voice went to work again and brought the story around to what had evidently been its point from the start. “Anyway, they’re awfully nice, and of course I’ve told them all about you. They’re dying to meet you. I told them we might drop by tomorrow after church, if you feel like it. Would you mind doing that, dear? Just to please me? I know you’ll like them, and they’ll be terribly disappointed if we don’t come.”

It was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but he said yes. And by implication he’d said yes to church, too, which he would also much rather have avoided. He was ready to say yes to anything she wanted now, to atone for the harshness of his questioning. Why had he grilled her like that? She was fifty-three years old and lonely and oppressed; why couldn’t he let her have her illusions? That was what her wounded, half-drunken eyes had seemed to be saying throughout his interrogation: Why can’t I have my illusions?

Because they’re lies, he told her silently in his mind as he champed his jaws and swallowed the cheap food. Everything you say is a lie. You’re not Alice Prentice the Sculptor and you never
were, any more than I’m Robert Prentice the Prep-School Graduate. You’re a liar and a fake, that’s what you are.

He was shocked by the force of his own secret invective but carried helplessly along with it, holding his mouth shut tight and allowing his fingers to twist and tear a raddled paper napkin in his lap.

You’re Alice Grumbauer, his soundless voice went on. You’re Alice Grumbauer from Plainville, Indiana, and you’re ignorant and foolish in spite of all the “art” crap you’ve been spouting all these years, while my poor slob of a father was breaking his back for us. And maybe he
was
“dull” and “insensitive” and all that, but I wish to Christ I’d had a chance to know him because whatever kind of a fool he was I know damn well he didn’t live by lies. And you do. Everything you live by is a lie, and do you want to know what the truth is?

He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.

Do you want to know what the truth is? The truth is that your fingernails are all broken and black because you’re working as a laborer and God knows how we’re ever going to get you out of that lens-grinding shop. The truth is that I’m a private in the infantry and I’m probably going to get my
head
blown off. The truth is, I don’t really want to be sitting here at all, eating this goddam ice cream and letting you talk yourself drunk while all my time runs out. The truth is, I wish I’d taken my pass to Lynchburg today and gone to a whorehouse.
That’s
the truth.

But it wasn’t, exactly. He knew it wasn’t, even while taking deep breaths to fight back the words that, wanted so urgently to burst from him. The real, the whole truth was something far more complicated. Because it couldn’t be denied that he’d come to New York of his own free will, and even with a certain
heartfelt eagerness. He had come for sanctuary in the very comfort of her “lies” – her groundless optimism, her insistent belief that a special providence would always shine on brave Alice Prentice and her Bobby, her conviction, held against all possible odds, that both of them were somehow unique and important and could never die. He had
wanted
to be with her tonight: he hadn’t even minded her calling him her “big, wonderful soldier.” And as for the whorehouse in Lynchburg, he knew deep down that he couldn’t blame his mother for his own lack of guts.

“Isn’t this good?” said Alice Prentice of her ice cream.

“Mm,” said her son, and they finished their meal in silence.

On their way back to the apartment she kept swaying against him – her grip on his arm at each street crossing was a little spasm of terror – and as soon as they were upstairs she poured herself a hefty drink from the bottle of whiskey she had probably been working on all afternoon.

“Would you like a drink, dear?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Your bed’s all made up, whenever you’re ready. I’m so – tired” – she brushed a loose strand of hair away from her brow – “so tired, I think I’ll just go to bed now, if you don’t mind. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“No, of course not. You go ahead.”

“All right. And tomorrow we’ll have a lovely long Sunday together.” She came up close, smelling of food and whiskey, and raised her arms to give him a kiss. “
Oh
, it’s so good to have you here.” She clung to him for a moment, and then, swaying, steadying herself against the wall, she blundered into her bedroom and closed the door, which had to be closed several times before it clicked shut in its warped frame.

Strolling alone with his hands in his pockets, he went over to
the black window and looked out. Far down the block, where the lights of a bar and grill spilled out across the sidewalk, a couple of soldiers were standing with their arms around a couple of girls. One of the girls was laughing, making high, lewd little sounds that floated up the street. Then one of the soldiers shouted something that made them all join in her laughter, and they walked away and were lost in the darkness.

He loosened his collar and tie and sat heavily on his bed, which also served as the living-room couch and which exhaled a fine cloud of dust. From the cluttered coffee table he picked up the only thing in the room that looked expensive and new: his school yearbook. Leafing through its heavy, creamy pages, he found a pleasurable little shock in discovering one familiar face after another, slicked-up and posing for the school photographer, each looking very young and vulnerable compared to Army faces. And there were the autographs: “Good luck in the service, Bob. It’s been great knowing you – Dave.”

“Bob, I know you’ll go far in whatever you do. I’ll always value your friendship – Ken.”

By the time he’d finished with the yearbook it was hard to remember that he’d waked before dawn this morning to scrub his cartridge belt for inspection, jostled in the stinking latrine by men who told him to get the lead out of his ass. It was hard to remember his nine hours on the bus and the train, and he was only dimly and guiltily aware of the cruel silent rage that had poisoned his dinner at Childs. The deep, slow, sibilant rhythm of his mother’s snoring came in from the bedroom now, and he listened to it with a sense of great tenderness as he undressed and carefully arranged his uniform on a wire hanger. Getting into bed he found that the sheets were surprisingly fresh and clean: he could picture her scurrying to the laundry with them during her lunch hour, in preparation
for his coming – or possibly even going to Macy’s and buying new ones.

Tomorrow she would wake him late and gently. They would have some kind of messy, inadequate breakfast together, and then they would go to church. The Episcopal service, which she’d discovered only a few years ago after a lifetime of paganism, would make her weep (“I always cry in church, dear; I can’t help it. I don’t mean to embarrass you”), and then, spiritually restored, they would take a subway or a bus somewhere to visit the people who were supposed to be dying to meet him – the people who’d said “Alice Prentice the
sculptor?
” and who would probably turn out to be as mild and bewildered and pathetically pleasant as she herself.

The deadly realities would be there to reclaim them both soon enough, on Monday morning – the infantry and the lens-grinding shop – but in the meantime …

In the meantime he could drift off to sleep feeling privileged and safe, cradled in peace. He was home.

“Com-mence – fire
!”

The blast of rifles shocked his ears, right and left; he squeezed the trigger and felt the stock of his own rifle drive hard into his shoulder and cheek, and then he fired again.