Friend of My Youth (19 page)

“Look at this,” Barbara says as she comes up to him. She reads from a card attached to the string of the balloon. “ ‘Anthony Burler. Twelve years old. Joliet Elementary School. Crompton, Illinois. October 15th.’ That’s three days ago. Could it have flown over here in just three days?

“I’m O.K.,” she says then. “It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t anything bad. There isn’t anything to worry about.”

“No,” says Murray. He holds her arms, he breathes the leafy, kitchen smell of her black-and-white hair.

“Are you shaking?” she says.

He doesn’t think that he is.

Easily, without guilt, in the long-married way, he cancels out the message that flashed out when he saw her at the top of the steps:
Don’t disappoint me again
.

He looks at the card in her hand and says, “There’s more. ‘Favorite book—
The Last of the Mohicans
.’ ”

“Oh, that’s for the teacher,” Barbara says, with the familiar little snort of laughter in her voice, dismissing and promising. “That’s a lie.”

Three weeks before he died—drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention—Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford’s Men’s Wear, in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press.

“Listen to me,” Jerry Crawford said to him. “With the darker shirt and the lighter pants you can’t go wrong. It’s youthful.”

Austin cackled. “Did you ever hear that expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’?”

“Referred to ladies,” Jerry said. “Anyway, it’s all changed now. There’s no old men’s clothes, no old ladies’ clothes anymore. Style applies to everybody.”

When Austin got used to what he had on, Jerry was going to talk him into a neck scarf of complementary colors and a cream pullover. Austin needed all the cover-up he could get. Since his wife died, about a year ago, and they finally got a new minister at the United Church (Austin, who was over seventy, was officially retired but had been hanging on and filling in while they haggled over hiring a new man and what they would pay him), he had lost weight, his muscles had shrunk, he was getting
the potbellied caved-in shape of an old man. His neck was corded and his nose lengthened and his cheeks drooping. He was a stringy old rooster—stringy but tough, and game enough to gear up for a second marriage.

“The pants are going to have to be taken in,” Jerry said. “You can give us time for that, can’t you? When’s the happy happy day?”

Austin was going to be married in Hawaii, where his wife, his wife-to-be, lived. He named a date a couple of weeks ahead.

Phil Stadelman from the Toronto Dominion Bank came in then and did not recognize Austin from the back, though Austin was his own former minister. He’d never seen him in clothes like that.

Phil told his AIDS joke—Jerry couldn’t stop him.

Why did the Newfie put condoms on his ears?

Because he didn’t want to get hearing aids.

Then Austin turned around, and instead of saying, “Well, I don’t know about you fellows, but I find it hard to think of AIDS as a laughing matter,” or “I wonder what kind of jokes they tell in Newfoundland about the folks from Huron County,” he said, “That’s rich.” He laughed.

That’s rich
. Then he asked Phil’s opinion of his clothes.

“Do you think they’re going to laugh when they see me coming in Hawaii?”

Karin heard about this when she went into the doughnut place to drink a cup of coffee after finishing her afternoon stint as a crossing guard. She sat at the counter and heard the men talking at a table behind her. She swung around on the stool and said, “Listen, I could have told you, he’s changed. I see him every day and I could have told you.”

Karin is a tall, thin woman with a rough skin and a hoarse voice and long blond hair dark for a couple of inches at the roots. She’s letting it grow out dark and it’s got to where she could cut it short, but she doesn’t. She used to be a lanky blond girl, shy
and pretty, riding around on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. She has gone a little strange—not too much or she wouldn’t be a crossing guard, even with Austin Cobbett’s recommendation. She interrupts conversations. She never seems to wear anything but her jeans and an old navy-blue duffel coat. She has a hard and suspicious expression and she has a public grudge against her ex-husband. She will write things on his car, with her finger:
Fake Christian. Kiss arse Phony. Brent Duprey is a snake
. Nobody knows that she wrote
Lazarus Sucks
, because she went back (she does this at night) and rubbed it off with her sleeve. Why? It seemed dangerous, something that might get her into trouble—the trouble being of a vaguely supernatural kind, not a talk with the Chief of Police—and she has nothing against Lazarus in the Bible, only against Lazarus House, which is the place Brent runs, and where he lives now.

Karin lives where she and Brent lived together for the last few months—upstairs over the hardware store, at the back, a big room with an alcove (the baby’s) and a kitchen at one end. She spends a lot of her time over at Austin’s, cleaning out his house, getting everything ready for his departure to Hawaii. The house he lives in, still, is the old parsonage, on Pondicherry Street. The church has built the new minister a new house, quite nice, with a patio and a double garage—ministers’ wives often work now; it’s a big help if they can get jobs as nurses or teachers, and in that case you need two cars. The old parsonage is a grayish-white brick house with blue-painted trim on the veranda and the gables. It needs a lot of work. Insulating, sandblasting, new paint, new window frames, new tiles in the bathroom. Walking back to her own place at night, Karin sometimes occupies her mind thinking what she’d do to that place if it was hers and she had the money.

Austin shows her a picture of Sheila Brothers, the woman he is to marry. Actually, it’s a picture of the three of them—Austin, his wife, and Sheila Brothers, in front of a log building and some
pine trees. A Retreat, where he—they—first met Sheila. Austin has on his minister’s black shirt and turned collar; he looks shifty, with his apologetic, ministerial smile. His wife is looking away from him, but the big bow of her flowered scarf flutters against his neck. Fluffy white hair, trim figure. Chic. Sheila Brothers—Mrs. Brothers, a widow—is looking straight ahead, and she is the only one who seems really cheerful. Short fair hair combed around her face in a businesslike way, brown slacks, white sweatshirt, with the fairly large bumps of her breasts and stomach plain to see, she meets the camera head-on and doesn’t seem worried about what it will make of her.

“She looks happy,” Karin says.

“Well. She didn’t know she was going to marry me, at the time.”

He shows her a postcard picture of the town where Sheila lives. The town where he will live in Hawaii. Also a photograph of her house. The town’s main street has a row of palm trees down the middle, it has low white or pinkish buildings, lampposts with brimming flower baskets, and over all a sky of deep turquoise in which the town’s name—a Hawaiian name there is no hope of pronouncing or remembering—is written in flowing letters like silk ribbon. The name floating in the sky looked as possible as anything else about it. As for the house, you could hardly make it out at all—just a bit of balcony among the red and pink and gold flowering trees and bushes. But there was the beach in front of it, the sand pure as cream and the jewel-bright waves breaking. Where Austin Cobbett would walk with friendly Sheila. No wonder he needed all new clothes.

What Austin wants Karin to do is clear everything out. Even his books, his old typewriter, the pictures of his wife and children. His son lives in Denver, his daughter in Montreal. He has written to them, he has talked to them on the phone, he has asked them to claim anything they want. His son wants the dining-room
furniture, which a moving-truck will pick up next week. His daughter said she didn’t want anything. (Karin think she’s apt to reconsider; people always want
something
.) All the furniture, books, pictures, curtains, rugs, dishes, pots, and pans are to go to the Auction Barn. Austin’s car will be auctioned as well, and his power mower and the snowblower his son gave him last Christmas. These will be sold after Austin leaves for Hawaii, and the money is to go to Lazarus House. Austin started Lazarus House when he was a minister. Only he didn’t call it that; he called it Turnaround House. But now they have decided—Brent Duprey has decided—it would be better to have a name that is more religious, more Christian.

At first Austin was just going to give them all these things to use in or around the House. Then he thought that it would be showing more respect to give them the money, to let them spend it as they liked, buying things they liked, instead of using his wife’s dishes and sitting on his wife’s chintz sofa.

“What if they take the money and buy lottery tickets with it?” Karin asks him. “Don’t you think it’ll be a big temptation to them?”

“You don’t get anywhere in life without temptations,” Austin says, with his maddening little smile. “What if they won the lottery?”

“Brent Duprey is a snake.”

Brent has taken over the whole control of Lazarus House, which Austin started. It was a place for people to stay who wanted to stop drinking or some other way of life they were in; now it’s a born-again sort of place, with nightlong sessions of praying and singing and groaning and confessing. That’s how Brent got hold of it—by becoming more religious than Austin. Austin got Brent to stop drinking; he pulled and pulled on Brent until he pulled him right out of the life he was leading and into a new life of running this House with money from the church, the government, and so on, and he made a big mistake, Austin did, in thinking he could hold Brent there. Brent
once started on the holy road went shooting on past; he got past Austin’s careful quiet kind of religion in no time and cut Austin out with the people in his own church who wanted a stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity. Austin was shifted out of Lazarus House and the church at about the same time, and Brent bossed the new minister around without difficulty. And in spite of this, or because of it, Austin wants to give Lazarus House the money.

“Who’s to say whether Brent’s way isn’t closer to God than mine is, after all?” he says.

Karin says just about anything to anybody now. She says to Austin, “Don’t make me puke.”

Austin says she must be sure to keep a record of her time, so she will be paid for all this work, and also, if there is anything here that she would particularly like, to tell him, so they can discuss it.

“Within reason,” he says. “If you said you’d like the car or the snowblower, I guess I’d be obliged to say no, because that would be cheating the folks over at Lazarus House. How about the vacuum cleaner?”

Is that how he sees her—as somebody who’s always thinking about cleaning houses? The vacuum cleaner is practically an antique, anyway.

“I bet I know what Brent said when you told him I was going to be in charge of all this,” she says. “I bet he said, ‘Are you going to get a lawyer to check up on her?’ He did! Didn’t he?”

Instead of answering that, Austin says, “Why would I trust a lawyer any more than I trust you?”

“Is that what you said to him?”

“I’m saying it to you. You either trust or you don’t trust, in my opinion. When you decide you’re going to trust, you have to start where you are.”

Austin rarely mentions God. Nevertheless you feel the mention of God hovering on the edge of sentences like these, and it
makes you so uneasy—Karin gets a crumbly feeling along her spine—that you wish he’d say it and get it over with.

Four years ago Karin and Brent were still married, and they hadn’t had the baby yet or moved to their place above the hardware store. They were living in the old slaughterhouse. That was a cheap apartment building belonging to Morris Fordyce, but it really had at one time been a slaughterhouse. In wet weather Karin could smell pig, and always she smelled another smell that she thought was blood. Brent sniffed around the walls and got down and sniffed the floor, but he couldn’t smell what she was smelling. How could he smell anything but the clouds of boozy breath that rose from his own gut? Brent was a drunk then, but not a sodden drunk. He played hockey on the O. T. (over thirty, old-timers) hockey team—he was quite a bit older than Karin—and he claimed that he had never played sober. He worked for Fordyce Construction for a while, and then he worked for the town, cutting up trees. He drank on the job when he could, and after work he drank at the Fish and Game Club or at the Green Haven Motel Bar, called the Greasy Heaven. One night he got a bulldozer going, which was sitting outside the Greasy Heaven, and he drove it across town to the Fish and Game Club. Of course he was caught, and charged with impaired driving of a bulldozer, a big joke all over town. Nobody who laughed at the joke came around to pay the fine. And Brent just kept getting wilder. Another night he took down the stairs that led to their apartment. He didn’t bash the steps out in a fit of temper; he removed them thoughtfully and methodically, steps and uprights one by one, backing downstairs as he did so and leaving Karin cursing at the top. First she was laughing at him—she had had a few beers herself by that time—then, when she realized he was in earnest, and she was being marooned there, she started cursing. Coward neighbors peeped out of the doors behind him.