Friend of My Youth (20 page)

Brent came home the next afternoon and was amazed, or
pretended to be. “What happened to the
steps?
” he yelled. He stomped around the hall, his lined, exhausted, excited face working, his blue eyes snapping, his smile innocent and conniving. “God damn that Morris! God-damn steps caved in. I’m going to sue the shit out of him. God damn
fuck
!” Karin was upstairs with nothing to eat but half a package of Rice Krispies with no milk, and a can of yellow beans. She had thought of phoning somebody to come with a ladder, but she was too mad and stubborn. If Brent wanted to starve her, she would show him. She would starve.

That time was really the beginning of the end, the change. Brent went around to see Morris Fordyce to beat him up and tell him about how he was going to have the shit sued out of him, and Morris talked to him in a reasonable, sobering way until Brent decided not to sue or beat up Morris but to commit suicide instead. Morris called Austin Cobbett then, because Austin had a reputation for knowing how to deal with people who were in a desperate way. Austin didn’t talk Brent out of drinking then, or into the church, but he talked him out of suicide. Then, a couple of years later when the baby died, Austin was the only minister they knew to call. By the time he came to see them, to talk about the funeral, Brent had drunk everything in the house and gone out looking for more. Austin went after him and spent the next five days—with a brief time out for burying the baby—just staying with him on a bender. Then he spent the next week nursing him out of it, and the next month talking to him or sitting with him until Brent decided he would not drink anymore, he had been put in touch with God. Austin said that Brent meant by that that he had been put in touch with the fullness of his own life and the power of his innermost self. Brent said it was not for one minute himself; it was God.

Karin went to Austin’s church with Brent for a while; she didn’t mind that. She could see, though, that it wasn’t going to be enough to hold Brent. She saw him bouncing up to sing the hymns, swinging his arms and clenching his fists, his whole body
primed up. It was the same as he was after three or four beers when there was no way he could stop himself going for more. He was bursting. And soon enough he burst out of Austin’s hold and took a good part of the church with him. A lot of people had wanted that loosening, more noise and praying and singing and not so much quiet persuading talking; they’d been wanting it for a long while.

None of it surprised her. It didn’t surprise her that Brent learned to fill out papers and make the right impression and get government money; that he took over Turnaround House, which Austin had got him into, and kicked Austin out. He’d always been full of possibilities. It didn’t really surprise her that he got as mad at her now for drinking one beer and smoking one cigarette as he used to do when she wanted to stop partying and go to bed at two o’clock. He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking, no more smoking, Christ as her Saviour. One week. Karin said don’t bother with the week. After Brent was gone, she quit smoking, she almost quit drinking, she also quit going to Austin’s church. She gave up on nearly everything but a slow, smoldering grudge against Brent, which grew and grew. One day Austin stopped her on the street and she thought he was going to say some gentle, personal, condemning thing to her, for her grudge or her quitting church, but all he did was ask her to come and help him look after his wife, who was getting home from the hospital that week.

Austin is talking on the phone to his daughter in Montreal. Her name is Megan. She is around thirty, unmarried, a television producer.

“Life has a lot of surprises up its sleeve,” Austin says. “You know this has nothing to do with your mother. This is a new life entirely. But I regret … No, no. I just mean there’s more than one way to love God, and taking pleasure in the world is surely one of them. That’s a revelation that’s come on me rather late.
Too late to be of any use to your mother.… No. Guilt is a sin and a seduction. I’ve said that to many a poor soul that liked to wallow in it. Regret’s another matter. How could you get through a long life and escape it?”

I was right, Karin is thinking; Megan does want something. But after a little more talk—Austin says that he might take up golf, don’t laugh, and that Sheila belongs to a play-reading club, he expects he’ll be a star at that, after all his pulpit haranguing—the conversation comes to an end. Austin comes out to the kitchen—the phone is in the front hall; this is an old-fashioned house—and looks up at Karin, who is cleaning out the high cupboards.

“Parents and children, Karin,” he says, sighing, sighing, looking humorous. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we—have children. Then they always want us to be the same, they want us to be parents—it shakes them up dreadfully if we should do anything they didn’t think we’d do. Dreadfully.”

“I guess she’ll get used to it,” Karin says, without much sympathy.

“Oh, she will, she will. Poor Megan.”

Then he says he’s going uptown to have his hair cut. He doesn’t want to leave it any longer, because he always looks and feels so foolish with a fresh haircut. His mouth turns down as he smiles—first up, then down. That downward slide is what’s noticeable on him everywhere—face slipping down into neck wattles, chest emptied out and mounded into that abrupt, queer little belly. The flow has left dry channels, deep lines. Yet Austin speaks—it’s his perversity to speak—as if out of a body that is light and ready and a pleasure to carry around.

In a short time the phone rings again and Karin has to climb down and answer it.

“Karin? Is that you, Karin? It’s Megan!”

“Your father’s just gone up to get a haircut.”

“Good. Good. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to talk to you. I’ve been hoping I’d get a chance to talk to you.”

“Oh,” says Karin.

“Karin. Now, listen. I know I’m behaving just the way adult children are supposed to behave in this situation. I don’t like it. I don’t like that in myself. But I can’t help it. I’m suspicious. I wonder what’s going on. Is he all right? What do you think of it? What do you think of this woman he’s going to marry?”

“All I ever saw of her is her picture,” Karin says.

“I am terribly busy right now and I can’t just drop everything and come home and have a real heart-to-heart with him. Anyway, he’s very difficult to talk to. He makes all the right noises, he seems so open, but in reality he’s very closed. He’s never been at all a personal kind of person, do you know what I mean? He’s never done anything before for a
personal
kind of reason. He always did things
for
somebody. He always liked to find people who
needed
things done for them, a lot. Well, you know that. Even bringing you into the house, you know, to look after Mother—it wasn’t exactly for Mother’s sake or his sake he did that.”

Karin can picture Megan—the long, dark, smooth hair, parted in the middle and combed over her shoulders, the heavily made-up eyes and tanned skin and pale-pink lipsticked mouth, the handsomely clothed plump body. Wouldn’t her voice bring such looks to mind even if you’d never seen her? Such smoothness, such rich sincerity. A fine gloss on every word and little appreciative spaces in between. She talks as if listening to herself. A little too much that way, really. Could she be drunk?

“Let’s face it, Karin. Mother was a snob.” (Yes, she is drunk.) “Well, she had to have something. Dragged around from one dump to another, always doing good. Doing good wasn’t her thing at all. So now,
now
, he gives it all up, he’s off to the easy life. In Hawaii! Isn’t it bizarre?”

“Bizarre.” Karin has heard that word on television and heard people, mostly teen-agers, say it, and she knows it is not the church bazaar Megan’s talking about. Nevertheless that’s what the word makes her think of—the church bazaars that Megan’s
mother used to organize, always trying to give them some style and make things different. Striped umbrellas and a sidewalk café one year, Devonshire teas and a rose arbor the next. Then she thinks of Megan’s mother on the chintz-covered sofa in the living room, weak and yellow after her chemotherapy, one of those padded, perky kerchiefs around her nearly bald head. Still, she could look up at Karin with a faint, formal surprise when Karin came into the room. “Was there something you wanted, Karin?” The thing that Karin was supposed to ask her, she would ask Karin.

Bizarre. Bazaar. Snob
. When Megan got in that dig, Karin should have said, at least, “I know that.” All she can think to say is “Megan. This is costing you money.”

“Money, Karin! We’re talking about my
father
. We’re talking about whether my father is sane or whether he has flipped his
wig
, Karin!”

A day later a call from Denver. Don, Austin’s son, is calling to tell his father that they better forget about the dining-room furniture, the cost of shipping it is too high. Austin agrees with him. The money could be better spent, he says. What’s furniture? Then Austin is called upon to explain about the Auction Barn and what Karin is doing.

“Of course, of course, no trouble,” Austin says. “They’ll list everything they get and what it sold for. They can easily send a copy. They’ve got a computer, I understand. No longer the Dark Ages up here.…

“Yes,” Austin says. “I hoped you’d see it that way about the money. It’s a project close to my heart. And you and your sister are providing well for yourselves. I’m very fortunate in my children.…

“The Old Age Pension and my minister’s pension,” he says. “Whatever more could I want? And this lady, this lady, I can tell you, Sheila—she is not short of money, if I can put it that way.…” He laughs rather mischievously at something his son says.

After he hangs up, he says to Karin, “Well, my son is worried about my finances and my daughter is worried about my mental state. My mental-emotional state. The male and female way of looking at things. The male and female way of expressing their anxiety. Underneath it’s the same thing. The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”

Don wouldn’t remember everything that was in the house, anyway. How could he? He was here the day of the funeral and his wife wasn’t with him; she was too pregnant to come. He wouldn’t have her to rely on. Men don’t remember that sort of thing well. He just asked for the list so that it would look as if he were keeping track of everything and nobody’d better try to hoodwink him. Or hoodwink his father.

There were things Karin was going to get, and nobody need know where she had got them. Nobody came up to her place. A willow-pattern plate. The blue-and-gray flowered curtains. A little, fat jug of ruby-colored glass with a silver lid. A white damask cloth, a tablecloth, that she had ironed till it shone like a frosted snowfield, and the enormous napkins that went with it. The tablecloth alone weighed as much as a child, and the napkins would flop out of wineglasses like lilies—if you had wineglasses. Just as a start, she has already taken home six silver spoons in her coat pocket. She knows enough not to disturb the silver tea service or the good dishes. But some pink glass dishes for dessert, with long stems, have taken her eye. She can see her place transformed, with these things in it. More than that, she can feel the quiet and content they would extend to her. Sitting in a room so furnished, she wouldn’t need to go out. She would never need to think of Brent, and ways to torment him. A person sitting in such a room could turn and floor anybody trying to intrude.

Was there something you wanted?

On Monday of Austin’s last week—he was supposed to fly to Hawaii on Saturday—the first big storm of the winter began.
The wind came in from the west, over the lake; there was driving snow all day and night. Monday and Tuesday the schools were closed, so Karin didn’t have to work as a guard. But she couldn’t stand staying indoors; she put on her duffel coat and wrapped her head and half her face in a wool scarf and plowed through the snow-filled streets to the parsonage.

The house is cold, the wind is coming in around the doors and windows. In the kitchen cupboard along the west wall, the dishes feel like ice. Austin is dressed but lying down on the living-room sofa, wrapped in various quilts and blankets. He is not reading or watching television or dozing, as far as she can tell—just staring. She makes him a cup of instant coffee.

“Do you think this’ll stop by Saturday?” she says. She has the feeling that if he doesn’t go Saturday, he just may not go at all. The whole thing could be called off, all plans could falter.

“It’ll stop in due time,” he says. “I’m not worried.”

Karin’s baby died in a snowstorm. In the afternoon, when Brent was drinking with his friend Rob and watching television, Karin said that the baby was sick and she needed money for a taxi to take him to the hospital. Brent told her to fuck off. He thought she was just trying to bother him. And partly she was—the baby had just thrown up once, and whimpered, and he didn’t seem very hot. Then about suppertime, with Rob gone, Brent went to pick up the baby and play with him, forgetting that he was sick. “This baby’s like a hot coal!” he yelled at Karin, and wanted to know why she hadn’t got the doctor, why she hadn’t taken the baby to the hospital. “You tell me why,” said Karin, and they started to fight. “You said he didn’t need to go,” said Karin. “O.K., so he doesn’t need to go.” Brent called the taxi company, and the taxis weren’t going out because of the storm, which up to then neither he nor Karin had noticed. He called the hospital and asked them what to do, and they said to get the fever down by wrapping the baby in wet towels. So they did that, and by midnight the storm had quieted down and the snowplows were out on the streets and they got the baby to the hospital. But
he died. He probably would have died no matter what they’d done; he had meningitis. Even if he’d been a fussed-over precious little baby in a home where the father didn’t get drunk and the mother and father didn’t have fights, he might have died; he probably would have died, anyway.

Brent wanted it to be his fault, though. Sometimes he wanted it to be their fault. It was like sucking candy to him, that confession. Karin told him to shut up, she told him to
shut up
.