Moving On (118 page)

They departed, Eric and Miri walking slowly, the boys running ahead across the green park. Patsy from her perch and Emma from her table watched them run. They were never quite sure the boys would stop when they got to the street. They did though. It was always a relief. Patsy was tired of sitting on the cross bar of the jungle gym and climbed down. It was necessary, anyway. Davey had not been asked to go to the drugstore but had decided to go on his own and was proceeding past the sand-pile, far in the rear of Eric and Miri. Patsy was about to run after him when he tripped and fell. He didn’t rise, apparently because he realized the hopelessness of overtaking the party. Emma had opened a book of Updike stories. Being pregnant always made her feel like reading short stories.

“Ever try eating pickles?” Patsy asked as she walked by.

Emma was engrossed and didn’t answer. She only had to read two sentences of any story to become engrossed. Patsy skirted the sand pile and went on to where Davey was. He was still lying on his stomach but had raised his head. He had grass on his lip. Patsy sat down by him and he put a hand on her knee. She dragged him into her lap and rocked him back and forth in her arms for a bit. Then she brushed the grass off his lip. “Well, they just abandoned you, old chum,” she said. “How could anybody abandon a big boy like you?”

Davey was not interested in her motherly mouthings. He wiggled out of her lap and got up, using her shoulder for support. Behind them, on a court, some boys were playing basketball. Davey was watching them and Patsy turned so she could watch them too. They were in their early teens, very energetic but not very good. They played with much yelling, and were quick to reproach one another for any error or inexpertness. Davey was fascinated. From time to time the boys stopped to catch their breath and get their hair out of their eyes. All but one or two had long hair that swung wildly as they played.

Davey turned loose of Patsy’s shoulder and walked toward the court to get a closer look. “Not too close,” she said, but he was as engrossed in the basketball as Emma was in the short stories and paid her no mind. Patsy had become used to being ignored at will, even by her own son, and she got off the grass and followed in case she had to rush in and keep him from being trampled.

As it happened, there was no danger. He got to the court just as the boys were taking a breather. They were talking about cars. The basketball had been temporarily abandoned and Davey walked over and took possession of it. The boys glanced at him but didn’t seem to mind. He couldn’t lift it, but it seemed to give him just as much satisfaction just to bend over and encircle it with his arms. He pushed it, followed it, and bent over it again, grunting a little, full of self-confidence and self-importance and delighted to be playing ball. From time to time he looked at Patsy to make sure she was noticing.

Then the boys all stood up. Davey looked at them cheerfully, equal to equals, as if he expected some new phase of the game to begin. But the boys took the ball as if he didn’t exist and began to dribble it and throw it to one another.

Patsy walked onto the court to lead Davey out of the way. “Come on, before you get brained,” she said. She reached down and got his hand; but Davey was in a state of shock. He had realized that the boys didn’t mean for him to play with them. For a few minutes while he was playing with the ball he had had the illusion that he and they were the same. He had felt himself a big boy. Then they took the ball and he realized it was not so—realized it in a way that he never had before. His mother and his aunt and his maid treated him like a big boy and it was a terrible disappointment to find out that real boys didn’t. He tried to pull away from Patsy. She didn’t have a good grip on his hand and had to ease him down to the concrete for a minute, for fear he would slip free and really fall. He was crushed; his face took on a look of complete disappointment. His lower lip came out and he began to cry. Patsy was embarrassed, for at the first wail the boys all looked at them with slight disgust. She stooped to pick him up, but when she did, his first dawning disappointment turned to indignation and then wild rage at the unfair state of things. He was a little boy, but he was a little boy in all his fury, and she picked up a wiggling, kicking, screaming bundle.

Emma, halfway across the park, looked up from Updike at the sound of Davey’s wails. Patsy had picked him up by the arms but in doing so had not calculated on his being quite so mad. He was kicking her thighs and hips with all his might and she had to set him down again briefly; he was by then incoherent and utterly unsoothable. She tucked him under one arm, held on grimly, and carried him shrieking and kicking across the park. A few of the mothers looked around, but it was not an uncommon sight. Patsy was half amused and half sad about it all—sad because Davey had had such an awful disappointed look on his face when he realized he did not yet have a place in the world of big people.

She sat down at the concrete table across from Emma and tried to soothe him. But he was having a fit, and his fit took a while to wear off. “What’s the matter with him?” Emma asked. Patsy shook her head. She was trying to hang on to him and he was growing red in the face from trying to squirm out of her lap. Finally she let him up. He sat down in the dirt and the deafening wails diminished and became the intermittent jerky sobs of a small boy whose fit had almost run its course.

“He’s crying because he’s not big enough to play basketball,” she said. “They let him hold the ball a minute and it gave him delusions of grandeur. Poor thing. It’s no fun finding out you’re little and helpless. Do you suppose I’ve spoiled him by treating him like he was older than he is?”

She looked to see what Emma thought, for when it came to matters pertaining to the well-being of children Emma was the person she put the most trust in. But Emma wasn’t listening. She hadn’t heard the question. Her own question had been a purely rhetorical response to Davey’s wails. Emma had looked up from her book and was staring across the park, but it was not the park that she was seeing. Her eyes were vacant. They did not take in the mothers and the children, the slides and playground horses, the streets and the green spring grass. Her eyes were fixed on some country of her own, and her mouth was set in a strange way. Patsy, who knew her friend’s looks, knew that Emma was about to cry. Unlike herself, Emma did not cry easily. She fought herself, and her face became swollen with pain before she cried. At one time the sight of Emma about to cry had panicked Patsy. She would always try desperately to keep her from actually crying. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Tell me,” she would say, and Emma would say, “Nothing, nothing, I’m all right,” and then cry, anyway. But Patsy had learned. She looked discreetly away and waited, straightening Davey’s hair with her fingertips. In a minute or two she heard the strange sniffing sounds that Emma made when she was crying. Emma was oddly ashamed of tears. They seemed to her immoral, and if she failed to gulp them back she wiped each one away the minute it touched her cheek. When Patsy looked up she was wiping them away, but for once she was weeping faster than she could wipe. Patsy reached in her baby bag and handed her friend a Kleenex.

“My god,” she said gently. “A beautiful spring day and everyone’s bawling. You’re big enough to play basketball. What’s the matter with you?”

“Oooh,” Emma said, not looking at her. She sniffed some more. Then her face cleared a little and she sighed and shut the book of short stories.

“A story I read reminded me of someone,” she said. The remote and inward look was still in her eyes; the tears had not really brought her back to the table. But she sniffed again and looked at her friend.

“My goodness,” Patsy said. “I shouldn’t have teased you. He’s not the sort of writer who usually brings on tears, though.”

“No,” Emma said. She looked wistful. “Something in a story made me think of Danny Deck,” she said.

“Oh. I wish I’d got to know that guy better.

“He didn’t write much like Updike,” she added.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Emma said. She looked sad and turned her eyes on Patsy solemnly, as if she knew a secret and was trying to decide whether to tell it. Patsy was surprised. She did not think of Emma as having secrets.

“What is it?” she asked, but Emma turned away for a moment.

“It’s just not fair that he’s dead,” she said. “It makes me sad, that’s all. Everybody else our age is still alive and Danny’s dead. I know he is. Sometimes I just miss him. I wish he were alive.”

Danny Deck had written one book, had one child, broken up with his wife, and disappeared. His car had been found in Del Rio, Texas, near a bridge that crossed the Rio Grande. Patsy didn’t know what to say. She had known before that Emma had had a soft spot for him, but from the look on her face she began to suspect that perhaps the soft spot was of a different nature from what she had supposed. Emma had told her that Flap had deflowered her, and Patsy had always supposed he had been her one and only. But the look on Emma’s face made her think differently.

“It was his wife’s fault,” Emma said. “I never liked her—she was never any good for him. If it hadn’t been for her he never would have run away. He loved her.”

“Maybe she was just a bitch like me,” Patsy said. “I guess poor Jim loved me. Maybe he still does. Was Danny sweet on you” She asked it lightly, for Emma’s face had loosened and she was talking more easily.

Emma looked shy and a little guilty. “We always liked one another,” she said jerkily. “Of course I loved Flap and he loved his wife but it always made Danny feel good to come around and drink with us when things were rough. It made me feel good too—we just liked one another a lot. Like you must have liked that clown you used to talk about.”

Patsy felt strange, for she had forgotten that there had been a time when she had talked to Emma about Pete Tatum. The thought of his last visit made her sad. Clearly Emma had no such bad feeling in regard to Danny Deck.

“You were a little in love, huh?” she asked.

“Oh,” Emma said, and was never more specific.

She sighed. “He spent the night with me once,” she said softly. “Flap was off fishing with his father and I was pregnant with Tommy. I guess I was jealous of Flap’s father in those days. Everything Flap did seemed to hurt me, some way. Danny’s wife was giving him an awful time too. I guess we were both so unhappy we thought it couldn’t hurt.”

“Well, it didn’t, did it?”

“No,” Emma said, a little surprised, forgetting even to wipe a sliding tear. “It didn’t, you know. I felt guilty for a long time but I really did like Danny and we were both just unhappy kids when it happened. I think what I felt the guiltiest about was never telling Flap. I just couldn’t. He was so hipped on being everything to me in those days. I think he was always a little suspicious of Danny, though they did like one another. I guess he just knew I sort of turned Danny on. I don’t know. I just couldn’t tell him. I knew it would never happen again—even if Danny had lived, it wouldn’t have. I wanted to keep Flap from ever knowing.”

“Quit worrying about it,” Patsy said. “Flap is unscathed. I don’t believe in all this automatic honesty. I think you have to be frank but maybe you don’t always have to be full. I’m glad you told me, though. It makes me feel you’re not too much better than I am.”

“It could never have been anything long, like you and Hank had,” Emma said thoughtfully.

They were silent for a bit, thinking of their men. Patsy bristled a little at mention of Hank. Lately she had felt hostile whenever she thought of him. He himself was nice enough but she didn’t like to be reminded of all that he reminded her of. He was part of a past she didn’t like. More and more she wanted to be totally free of that past, of Hank, of Jim, and of all the distressing memories that they called to mind. At her feet, Davey picked himself up. He decided that, grim though it was, life must go on. He went over and climbed gingerly into the sandbox. He was oddly cautious about the sandbox and put his feet into it slowly, as if he were getting into a wading pool.

“Actually, Danny spent most of the night telling me about his second book,” Emma said, smiling at her memories. “It was going to be called
The Man Who Never Learned
. It was about a guy who had terrible troubles with women—I think he had himself in mind. It was structured around a baby bed—his little girl’s baby bed—and the point of it was that everybody’s apt to sleep with everybody they know, sooner or later.”

“In a baby bed? Come on.”

“Oh, no,” Emma said, trying again to straighten her hair. “It was just that the baby bed got handed from couple to couple and while it was being handed along the couples all got involved with one another in complicated ways. An amazing number of couples were involved.”

“I wish he’d written it,” Patsy said. “Here comes Flap.”

She got up and went to take a small stick away from Davey. Some kids were playing freeze tag near the sand-pile and a little boy named James, whose parents Patsy knew slightly, had just been tagged. He froze with one foot off ground. “Hi, James,” Patsy said. He had brown hair and large brown eyes. James was straining to keep his balance, and he only grinned. Patsy decided Davey had had enough sand and carried him back and plopped him on the top of the concrete table. Flap walked up, his coat over his shoulder, and smooched Emma behind the ear. He spread his arms to Patsy, inviting her to be hugged, but Patsy made a face at him. It was not a very unpleasant face. Flap seemed to be entering his prime, and it was hard not to be a little delighted by his general high spirits. He had his dissertation all but finished and even had a small article finished. It was on insect lore in Shelley and everyone but Emma kidded him about it. Emma held her peace. Flap was overjoyed with everything. He was glad his wife was pregnant, glad graduate school was over, glad to be leaving Houston. The world was his oyster, at least temporarily. He was wearing old corduroy pants and a green tie that Emma had been wanting to throw away for years. Also he had grown a bushy brown mustache and it suited him. He had washed his hair that morning and it was very unruly.