People Who Knock on the Door (13 page)

“Do you know, I asked her this very day, and she declined? Said she was tired or something. She could try going to bed earlier.” Lois smiled, as if glad to have something to smile at. “I believe she’s been here just three or four times in the years we’ve lived here, Mama. She’s very friendly, and we can drop in or call her up and go over any time, but if we invite her, she’s always not feeling too strong, or there’s a TV program she wants to watch.”

“She had cancer,” Arthur said. “Cheerfullest cancer victim I ever saw. We need more like her.”

Here Richard deigned to give him a glance.

Fifteen minutes later, with his coffee cup beside him, Arthur was writing a letter to the head of the Admission Department of Columbia University.

Dear Mr. Xarrip:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I shall not be able to enter Columbia University in September as I had hoped. The expense of $10,450 is more than my parents and I can meet even with the grant, for which I was and am grateful.

Here Arthur chewed his lip and debated writing a second paragraph about the grant being possibly applicable to another college, but thought this wasn’t Mr. Xarrip’s concern. He added “Yours sincerely” and signed it. He would read it over tomorrow morning, maybe add something and retype it, but tonight he had to get it off his mind.

He hoped his grandmother would knock on his door. But she didn’t knock that evening.

15

B
y Thursday morning, the atmosphere in the house had again changed. His mother made seemingly endless trips from bedroom and kitchen to car, storing the First Aid kit in the glove compartment, sticking a bathing cap into a suitcase already in the back of his father’s large and stronger car, which was the one they were taking. One of Robbie’s pals had picked him up before 10. His father hadn’t gone to work and still wasn’t speaking to Arthur, and Arthur felt that his father had tried, and had succeeded, in looking at him without seeing him, which didn’t bother Arthur. He was supposed to feel outcast, shunned and wretched, Arthur supposed, but whenever he felt the slightest bit down, he remembered Maggie. He was the lucky one, he thought, with Maggie in his life! By the others, he felt abandoned, meaning his mother and grandmother. Even his mother had barely had a minute to say something to him in regard to college in September, about what he was supposed to do with himself.

“You can find a place somewhere, I know, Arthur, with your good grades. We’ll talk about that when we get back, and that won’t be long, toward the end of July.”

She had reminded him about locking all doors when he went out and had given him a couple of checks signed and made out to the newspaper deliverer and for the electricity bill which was due.

Friday morning, Arthur awakened to the sounds of voices and bumpings. It was just after 6 and already light. He didn’t get out of bed to say good-bye even to his grandmother, because he had said that the night before. Arthur lay with open eyes, listening to the laden car rolling down the driveway, hearing Robbie’s “Bye-bye!” to them from outside. Arthur was thinking, there’s Maggie, there’s Norma, and there’s Gus. People you could count on.

And he had to make up his mind about trying for Chicago University or C.U., the latter being cheaper, because he might not get a penny from his parents, though his grandmother’s generosity might return in a few weeks, once she was relieved of his father’s pressure.

He put on a bathrobe and house-slippers and went into the kitchen, where he found Robbie leaning against the sink, barefoot in pajamas, drinking from a Coke can. Arthur shook his head. “Starting early, this corruption.”

Robbie laughed a little, his gray eyes merry, perhaps with the prospect of their running the house alone now.

Arthur made coffee. “What’re you up to today, Robbie?”

“Goin’ fishin’.”

“Again?” Robbie liked the phrase “going fishin’,” Arthur had noticed. “Is that all you do—just sit there all day with a pole in your hands? In a boat?”

Robbie nodded and winced from a belch. “No, we talk—sometimes.”

Though he slumped against the sink, Robbie looked as tall as himself. The morning sun touched his uncombed hair, making it golden on top, and the sun put a metallic glint in his left eye. His eyes were fixed on Arthur.

“Friends coming for you this morning?”

“Yeah. Round ten,” Robbie said.

“Because—” Arthur said, adjusting the fire under the coffee, “after I make this, I’m going back to bed without any coffee. I want a couple of hours’ sleep. Can you get your own breakfast?”

“Sure. You think I’m a child?”

“Can you turn this off in five or six minutes?”

“Sure!”

Arthur went back to bed, feeling as sleepy as if he had taken a drug. He fell blissfully asleep at once and woke up to a faint and pleasant sound of music. It came from a cassette in Robbie’s room. Arthur got up and re-read his letter to Columbia, and decided he would send it as it was. He had thought last night of writing a note to Professor Thatcher in the biology department of Columbia. More than a year ago, Arthur had written the professor, whose name he had found in the Columbia catalog, to ask a question about the cold light phenomenon of underwater life, and the professor had replied in some detail, with a couple of xeroxed pages from a scientific quarterly. Arthur had written again to thank him and had said that he hoped to go to Columbia and major in biology. Had Professor Thatcher possibly put in a good word for him at Columbia? But Arthur decided not to write again to Professor Thatcher, because the letter could only be a sad one.

The kitchen smelled of sausages; the skillet had grease in it, and Robbie’s egg-smeared plate lay in the sink. Inspired by the aroma, Arthur fried a couple of sausages and an egg and was eating, looking at yesterday’s newspaper, when Robbie came in wearing cut-off blue jeans and an old shirt.

“How about if I take a look at your fishing place this morning?” Arthur asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Just take a look for two minutes. Think I’m going to spend all day there?”

Robbie seemed oddly resistant, as if the fishermen were a closed club with private grounds, but it was a public park, Arthur knew, and Arthur said he was riding over.

Arthur set out a few minutes before 10, pedaling slowly, because the sun was already starting to broil down. If Robbie and his older friends passed him in a car, he wasn’t aware of it. He was lost in his own thoughts or dreams. And they were pretty vague, he realized. How would the summer turn out? At what college would he be in September? Would his mother get from under his father’s thumb long enough to channel some money, somehow, towards college? They had a joint checking account, Arthur knew. He had to find out how things stood, very soon, and act accordingly.

Suddenly he was at the park that surrounded Delmar Lake. Long picnic tables and wooden benches stood here and there, and half a dozen rowboats lay moored at two piers that projected from boathouses. Arthur pedaled along a dirt path toward the first pier, the longer. Three or four rather beat-up cars were parked near the boathouse, and from a distance Arthur recognized his brother, the skinniest figure among a group of five men. Arthur propped his bike against a tree and walked on. Robbie had seen him, but gave no sign of greeting.

“Hi,” Arthur said to one of the men who looked at him. “I’m Robbie’s brother. Arthur.”

“Oh, yeah. We know,” said another man of about fifty, who wore old khaki trousers and a straw hat with holes in it. “Figurin’ on fishin’ today?”

Arthur shook his head and smiled a little. “No, just thought I’d look at your setup here. Pretty neat.” It was anything but neat. The boathouse was falling apart in places.

One of the other men had barely said, “Hi,” to Arthur, and the two others might not have seen him. Robbie bent over a long wooden box of fishing gear. Arthur saw a couple of six-packs of beer, another of Pepsi, and a couple of baskets containing what he supposed were sandwiches. The youngest of the men was about thirty.

“Robbie, git my good hooks there!” called a paunchy old guy on the pier. “And the rod with the green on it.”

“You’re the fellow we heard about?” asked the first man Arthur had spoken to. “Ain’t got no older brothers, have you?”

“No.” Arthur’s cheeks began to sting in a funny way. He was suddenly on guard.

The man nodded and smiled knowingly under the old straw hat and spat to one side.

At least he hadn’t spat tobacco juice, Arthur noticed.

The second man came up, hatless, unshaven, wearing dirty green corduroys. “You figurin’ on joinin’
us
?” he asked, as if their club was pretty exclusive.

“No, no. Got a job to go to,” Arthur replied. “Just wanted to see how my little brother spends his time.” Arthur got no reply. “Catch any good eatin’ fish there? My brother brought a bass home the other day.”

“You got an unusual brother,” said the second man.

“Keeps quiet,” said the first man. “Got respect.—Nothin’ so unusual about you, eh?” He went off into a wheezy guffaw, turned his back on Arthur and motioned to the other man to come with him. Both started talking to the other men who were now unmooring, with Robbie’s nimble help, two of the rowboats tied up at the pier. The lake stretched broad and smooth beyond and to the left.

Arthur hated the lot of them. What had Robbie told them about him? And Maggie? Had he mentioned her name? Arthur didn’t want to leave as if he had been shooed off, so he shouted, “Hey, Robbie!”

Robbie straightened up, feet apart. “What?”

“Have yourself a nice day!” Arthur waved and went back to his bike.

Sinister atmosphere there. Maybe in their sloppy way these men were holier-than-thou types, too? Weren’t these old guys married? Or maybe they were transients, wanderers, with cars but no jobs? He might ask Robbie about that.

That evening, Friday, Arthur had a date with Maggie, but not until 9 o’clock or a little after, she had said, because her parents had a woman houseguest and Maggie had to have dinner at home. So Arthur made something for himself and Robbie to eat. Robbie looked sunburned to the point of pain and was still in the same clothes and barefoot, though he claimed to have taken a shower.

“Those old guys,” Arthur said during their meal. “Don’t you find it sort of depressing, spending the whole day with them?”

“No.—Why should I? They tell jokes—sometimes.”

Arthur recalled the fellow in the straw hat breaking up over something that wasn’t particularly funny. “What’ve you been telling them about me—for instance?”

“About you?” Robbie looked straight at his brother with his cool gray eyes, and oddly it was his head and his hand with the lifted fork that wavered a little. “’Bout what?”

“You know about what.”

“You mean—the girl.”

“Maggie—if you don’t mind. I don’t mind and she doesn’t mind.”

“Yeah, well.” Robbie looked at the table, then back at Arthur.

“They knew about it anyway. What do you mean, what did I tell them?”

Arthur didn’t believe that. “And who told them?”

“Well, a couple of ’em go to the church—Christ Gospel.”

“No kidding?”

“Jeff goes. Sometimes. He’s the one you were talking to this morning.”

“The one in the straw hat?—You mean they hear news at the church and then spread it around?”

“No-o, silly!” Robbie squirmed, though squirming was habitual with him, and he looked not at all embarrassed. “Whole town knows about it, anyway.”

“That is not true,” Arthur said, but suddenly he was unsure himself, and furious at the thought that a handful of gossips, maybe starting with Roxanne, might have created the impression that the whole town knew. Tom Robertson didn’t know, or he would have said something, Arthur was pretty sure. Norma Keer didn’t know, and she saw a lot of people at her teller’s window, and a lot of chatting went on there. “Come on, Robbie. What did you say to your friends?”

“They knew it! What d’y’mean I had to
say
anything?”

Arthur thought Robbie was lying, and that he wasn’t going to get anywhere. He had lost his appetite.

However, when they were tidying up the kitchen, Arthur felt compelled to say, “You really shouldn’t, Robbie—at your age—talk with grown-ups about things like—what we were talking about. You shouldn’t spread the yacking. If you were a good brother, you wouldn’t do that.”

Robbie was standing in the kitchen, spooning up the last of the walnut crunch ice cream from its plastic container. “You’re not a good brother,” Robbie said. “Dad says that. He says you’re not a good brother to me.”

“Oh.” Arthur shook the suds off his hands and turned around. “It just could happen to you—someday.”

“Oh, no!” Robbie shook his head slowly.

“If you’d think for a minute, Robbie—nothing awful has happened, if just you and a lot of other people would shut up about it.”

“Your girlfriend had an abortion,” Robbie said.

“And some people have a tonsillectomy—like you.”

“Oh-h—you’re tellin’ me it’s the same?”

“Wait’ll it happens to you.” Arthur turned back to the sink.

“It’ll never happen to me. I’ll get married first. That’s the right way to—to do, Dad says.”

Arthur squeezed the sponge and tossed it by the water taps.

Robbie went into the living room and turned the TV up more loudly.

Then the telephone rang.

Robbie got up from the floor and leapt for it. “That’s Mom. She said she’d phone at eight,” he said to Arthur, who was standing in the living room doorway. “. . . Oh, okay, Mom . . . Yep . . . Nope . . . Nope.” Robbie laughed. “No, he’s here . . . Okay.” He handed the telephone to Arthur.

“Hello, Arthur. Just wanted to know if everything is all right there.”

“Yes, fine. Had a good trip?”

“Ah-h—a little exhausting in the heat. But the apartment here is air-conditioned, and we’ve all just had showers.” She laughed. “More heat waves due, we heard. We’re going on to San Francisco Wednesday morning. I gave you the name of our hotel, didn’t I?”

“It’s right here by the phone.”

“How’s that cut on Robbie’s thigh?”

“He didn’t say anything about it. Hey, Robbie, how’s that cut on your thigh?”

Engrossed in TV, Robbie had to have the question repeated; then over his shoulder he said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Arthur reported.

“Mama’s out with her partner Blanche now, or I’d have her talk with you. . . . Well, take care, Arthur, and call us if anything goes wrong, will you?”

When they had hung up, Arthur glanced at his watch. In half an hour he’d set off for Maggie’s on his bike. And in a little more than two months he would be eighteen and could drive the car—his mother’s—now sitting in the garage, thereby complying with his father’s law. He was going into his room when he heard a knock at the door.

“Expecting somebody?” he asked Robbie.

Robbie turned over. “Nope.”

Arthur half opened the door.

A blond woman stood on the doorstep in a pale summer dress and with a big white pocketbook in her hand. “Good evening. You’re—Is Richard—Mr. Alderman—” She looked worried.

“If you mean my father, he’s not here.” She was one of the young churchgoers his father talked to, Arthur supposed, though this one looked about thirty. “My parents took off this morning.”

“No, I—” Her brown eyes glanced nervously sideways and back to Arthur; then she advanced. “I wanted to see him. Richard. I don’t mean to be intruding.”

Arthur stepped back. He left the door open. “My parents went to Kansas. Won’t be back for another two or three weeks.”