People Who Knock on the Door (2 page)

“Hello, Arthur!”

They walked along. “How are you?” Arthur’s free hand—his other hand held books and notebooks—fumbled with the folded note in his pocket.

“Fine. And you?”

He had expected her to say something unusual. His eyes dropped past her breasts, held in a brassiere, he knew, under her white shirt, down her rust-colored corduroy slacks, then rose to her face again. “Brought you this.” He pushed the folded paper into the hand she extended. “Just a couple of words.”

“Thanks, I’ll—” A passing student bumped her shoulder. She put the note into the pocket of her shirt.

“Going to the drugstore at three?”

“Maybe. Yes, okay.”

It seemed to Arthur that her smile was merely polite, that her quick glance at him was shy. Was she ashamed of yesterday, regretting it? “See you at three then.”

Arthur could have spoken to her again at noon in the lunch hall, but by the time Arthur had his tray, he saw that Maggie was installed with at least four other girls at a back corner table. Arthur found an empty spot at one of the long tables in the center of the hall and sat down.

“Hiya, Art,” said Gus, suddenly standing by Arthur with a tray in his hands. “Move over, would you?” Gus said to a fellow on Arthur’s right. “You didn’t call me yesterday,” Gus said, sitting down.

“I got hung up. Sorry, Gus.”

“Still interested? Thirty bucks?”

“Sure!”

They agreed that Arthur would come that afternoon at 5 to Gus’s house to pick up the bike. Gus had to go directly from school to work for at least an hour at someone’s house. A repair job. Gus even did some housecleaning sometimes, Arthur knew. There were five children in Gus’s family, of whom Gus was the oldest, and those old enough had to do odd jobs to bring in some money. Arthur had a lurking admiration for that, even though it was just the thing his father would praise: old-fashioned hard work and knowing the value of a dollar. If Arthur had ever done odd jobs for neighbors, he had been allowed to pocket the money. Arthur envied Gus his height also, though otherwise Gus was plain enough: lank blond hair, an unremarkable face with a rather gentle expression, and he had to wear glasses all the time. Physically, Gus was strong, but Arthur knew that girls never looked at him twice. In that last respect, Arthur felt better off than Gus Warylsky. Impossible, really impossible, to imagine Gus with a girl!

Arthur was at the Red Apple, called the drugstore by everyone, just after 3. Maggie had not arrived as yet, but the other old standbys were here—certain dumb fellows like Toots O’Rourke, who was a football player, and of course Roxanne, flouncing around the counter stools, showing off a pink ruffled skirt that looked appropriate for
Carmen
. Fellows guffawed and pawed at her, and silly Roxanne laughed as if she were listening to some joke that never stopped. Neither Arthur nor Maggie, he was sure, came often to the drugstore. The ice-cream sodas cost a dollar, a slab of apple pie eight-five cents, though it was good and homemade. The coffee was weak. The Red Apple was shaped like a round apple, painted red outside and topped with a stem, in a painful effort to be cute, which was why everyone called it the drugstore. Finally Maggie came in, carrying a book bag, wearing a denim jacket.

“How about here,” Arthur said, indicating a corner table that he had been guarding. He took her order, a strawberry soda, and asked the counter boy to make it two, though he did not care much for strawberries. “You’re looking very pretty today,” he said to Maggie when he had sat down.

“Thanks for your note.”

Arthur shuffled his feet under the table. “Oh, that!—”

Maggie looked at him as if she were pondering something, as if she might be about to tell him that she wanted to break it off.

“Something happen?” Arthur asked. “With your parents?”

Maggie took the straw from her lips. “Oh, no!—Why?”

A girl’s shriek rose over the jukebox music. Arthur glanced over his shoulder. A boy was hauling Roxanne up from the floor, where she’d evidently fallen.

“That Roxanne!” said Maggie, laughing.

“She’s nuts.” Arthur felt a pang of shame. Several months ago, he had been quite hung up on Roxanne—for a couple of weeks. The town whore! Arthur cleared his throat and said, “Are you free Saturday night? There’s a film—maybe not so great. Or we could go to The Stomps.” That was a disco.

“No.—Thanks, anyway, Arthur. I need some time to—by myself to—”

Arthur took it as a rejection. “Maybe you just don’t want to see me anymore.”

“No, I don’t mean that. It’s just that yesterday—Nothing like that ever happened before. To me.”

How was he to take that? She was sorry? Shocked somehow? Nothing like that had happened before to him either, but he wasn’t going to say
that
. “So—well—doesn’t matter when I see you, but it’d be nice to know I can see you again. I mean, to go out.”

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you.”

That sounded even more ominous to Arthur. “Okay.”

2

O
n Tuesday of the following week, Robbie came down with (of course) the most flaming case of tonsillitis that Dr. Swithers had seen in his many years of practice, and he had to go to Chalmerston’s United Memorial Hospital. Arthur took his brother extra ice cream, riding to the hospital on his newly acquired secondhand bike. Arthur glanced at Maggie in the school corridors, not wanting his glances to be noticed by her lest she be annoyed, but his eyes seemed to find her in a crowd against his will. Then on Friday afternoon, he met her almost face to face in a corridor, was about to murmur “Hi” and walk on, when Maggie said:

“I will go out with you, if you want to. I’m sorry I was so—”

“Never mind. You mean—maybe Saturday? Tomorrow night?”

She agreed. He would call for her at 7, and they would go out to eat somewhere.

Arthur’s spirits rose again as high as they had been on that afternoon ten days ago. The memory of Maggie’s pretty room with its blue and beige curtains, its blue-covered bed, took on renewed life.

“Never saw you so chipper with exams coming up,” his mother remarked on Friday evening.

Arthur was sure his mother thought he was happy because of a girl. His eyes met his mother’s across the dinner table, but she smiled and looked away.

Robbie was coming home tomorrow. He had had to stay an extra day so that the doctor could be sure he was out of danger.

“Robbie reminds me so much of the little Sweeney boy at the Home. You know, Richard?” Lois said.

“No,” said Richard, jolted from his food as if from a news-paper.

“Jerry Sweeney. I’ve told you about him. Five years old and always worried about
nothing
. He’s a dear little fellow, scared of the dark just like Robbie used to be. And Jerry’s parents fuss over him like wet hens.
They
get therapy sessions with Dr. Blockman and poor little Jerry gets the tranquilizers! Imagine, at his age!” Lois blinked her eyes. “Really, there’s quite a similarity.”

“Lois, you take those kids too personally,” said Richard, pushing his plate back. “You said you were going to stop that.”

“No, I—” His mother shrugged. “Arthur, you don’t tease Robbie too much, do you? When I’m not around to hear you?”

“No, Mom.—Why should I waste my time doing that?”

“I’m only asking,” said his mother pacifically. “Because Robbie’s nearly fifteen—and insecure enough as it is. I don’t know if that’s the right word for him.”

“These terms!” Richard said. “Who isn’t insecure? Robbie hasn’t found his set of values yet. Few people can, at fifteen.” By way of hastening the appearance of dessert, he got up and removed his dinner plate and also Lois’s.

Set of values
. Just what did his father mean? Selling insurance to scared-of-the-future clients, putting in an appearance at church a couple of times a month, mainly so that people of the town could see him there? It was still bound up with money, Arthur felt, his father’s set of values. And his father wasn’t the type who would ever make a big pot of money, in Arthur’s opinion, because he hadn’t the flair or the push. His father had had to quit college and go to work, as many a successful man had, but there was something ordinary about his father. Even his not very tall figure looked ordinary, and Arthur hoped that when he became forty-two or forty-three, he would be able to stave off the paunch his father was acquiring.

His mother worked four or five afternoons a week at the Beverley Home for Children. It was half a hospital, half a clinic and day nursery for out-patients, and a lot of the babies and children were retarded or mentally upset, or they were being parked there because of family uproar. Lois did voluntary work, as she had no degree in pediatrics, but she was given some money for car expenses and she could eat her midday meal there, but Arthur knew she seldom did. As soon as she entered the Beverley Home, her attention was taken by one of the small children who might be walking around the downstairs hall on his own, or might be with a nurse. Arthur had seen the Beverley Home several times. One might think the children were his mother’s own, or related to her. His father called it “highly commendable work,” and Arthur wondered if his father had urged his mother to do it? She’d been working there about four years, and Arthur couldn’t remember how it had begun. Was his mother too easily pushed around? Sometimes she could be independent and high-spirited, in contrast to his father who never seemed happy, and she’d hold her head up and say, “I want to have some fun in life before it’s too late!” and she would persuade his father to take a vacation to Canada or California for a week or so.

The next day, Saturday, Robbie was worse instead of better. When the hospital telephoned during the morning, Arthur was the only person in the house, as his mother was out shopping and his father was visiting a client in town. The female voice informed Arthur that Robbie could not go home today and maybe not until Monday.

“Oh? Well, how serious is it?”

“He has a fever. Your parents can call back if they want to.”

Arthur went back to his bike in the garage. He was cleaning a bit of rust off, but the bike was in fine condition, because Gus was a good mechanic. Gus had no doubt earned by the sweat of his brow enough money to buy a better secondhand bike, though Gus’s father let him use the family car now and then, Arthur recalled with a twinge of envy. Arthur knew how to drive, and driving was allowed at seventeen with a test and a permit, but his father wanted him to wait until he was eighteen in September. Arthur recognized the sound of the Chrysler at a distance. His mother was back. Arthur stood by the open garage door as his mother drove in.

“Hospital called,” said Arthur, opening the hatch where the groceries were. “They said Robbie can’t come home today, maybe not till Monday.”

“What?” Alarm was all over his mother’s face.

“They said he has a fever and that we could call back.”

His mother went into the house to telephone, and Arthur began unloading the groceries. Robbie’s condition probably wasn’t serious, Arthur thought, but Robbie was the type who resisted every pill and tied himself in knots at the approach of a needle for an injection.

His mother came back from the living room. “They say it’s an unusually high fever and they’re giving him antibiotics. We can visit after four.”

His father came home at noon. When they telephoned again at 2, the hospital reported no change.

His parents were still not back from the hospital at a quarter to 7, when Arthur set out on his bike for Maggie’s house about a mile away. The Brewsters’ house was finer than his family’s with a bigger lawn and a tall blue spruce to one side in front, a couple of burning-bushes of a lovely red color, and a handsome front door painted white with a short roof over it. He set his bike at the side of the front steps.

Maggie opened the door. “Hello, Arthur! Come in.—It’s cooler, isn’t it? Raining a little?”

Arthur hadn’t noticed.

“Mother—Mom. Arthur Alderman.”

“
How
do you do, Arthur?” said her mother, who was kneeling in front of a record shelf in a corner of the living room. She had light brown hair like Maggie’s, but with a wave in it. “I’m not going to play anything, just looking for a record I’m sure is here somewhere.”

“Cold drink, Arthur?” Maggie asked.

Arthur followed Maggie across a dining room with a large oval table and into a vast white kitchen. “Your father’s here, too?” Arthur somehow feared meeting him.

“No, he’s away now.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a pilot. Sigma Airlines. He has odd hours.” She was opening a can of beer.

Maybe Maggie’s father was over Mexico now, Arthur thought. “You can leave it in the can. Stays colder.”

A few minutes later, they were in the car, Maggie driving, heading for the Hoosier Inn, Maggie’s idea. Arthur considered the Hoosier a rather stuffy place for older people, but the food was good and abundant. Maggie wanted to split the bill with him, but Arthur wouldn’t let her. And she didn’t want to go to The Stomps or even to a movie.

“I feel like going up to the quarry,” she said.

“Great!” Maggie could have proposed anything, and he would have thought it was great.

Maggie drove as if she knew the way very well. They passed some of the long, two-story dorm buildings of Chalmerston University, their U-shaped courts lined now with students’ parked cars. Cozy lights shone in several windows. Arthur wished he were eighteen, with a car, with a dorm apartment of his own such as these people had, except that it was not his ambition to attend Chalmerston U.

They stopped beside a quarry which Arthur knew was abandoned. All was dark here. Maggie cut the car lights, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, and they got out on a rise of gritty land. The breeze blew harder. A couple of hundred yards away, a rectangle of white dots of light outlined the form of a quarry that was in use. A half-moon sailed in the sky, giving not much light. Arthur knew this quarry. Standing near the edge, he could feel the emptiness, the black pit below. Great slabs of limestone, neatly cut by machines, lay in disorder around the quarry’s edge. Maggie climbed up onto a slab and focused the flashlight downward.

“See any water?” Arthur scrambled up beside her.

“No. The light doesn’t reach the bottom.”

The hollow darkness seemed to make a sound, like a chord of music. Arthur put an arm around Maggie’s waist, smelt her perfume, opened his eyes and regained his balance. He kissed her cheek, then her lips. She took his right hand and jumped down to the ground, and he with her. When she took her hand from his, Arthur leapt onto another slab, then onto a higher one that lay across it. He imagined dashing up it and leaping into space.

“Hey, watch it!” Maggie yelled, laughing, holding the flashlight so he could see to descend.

Arthur jumped off the higher slab to the ground. One foot hit something uneven, and he fell and rolled once. He was sliding downward, and he spread his arms. His hand found something, maybe a projecting piece of wire, and he checked his fall. He began scrambling upward, clinging to sharp rocks, toward the light Maggie was holding for him, but she was not able to shine it where he needed it. Face down, he reached the rim and stood up.

“My
gosh
, Arthur! Are you okay?”

“Sure.” He took a step inland, not wanting to look behind him at what he had escaped.

“What if that had been a sharp edge there!—You tore your pants. Did you cut your knee?”

“Na-ah,” Arthur said, but he felt a trickle of blood down his left shin. They were walking toward Maggie’s car. Arthur sucked a cut on the palm of his left hand. The taste reminded him of Robbie. “My kid brother’s in the hospital tonight.”

“The hospital! What happened to him?”

“Tonsils out. He was supposed to come home today, but he got a little worse.”

Maggie asked how old he was. Did he want to call his parents from her house? Arthur agreed to that. It was nearly 11.

His house did not answer.

Maggie brought a paper tissue soaked in surgical alcohol, she said, and a wide Band-Aid for the cut on his palm. “Want to phone the hospital?—Or were your folks going out tonight?”

“Don’t think so,” Arthur said. He looked up the hospital’s number and dialed it. After his inquiries, a female voice said:

“Yes, your parents are here. There’s no change.”

“Can I speak with my mother, please?”

“We cannot connect you with the rooms upstairs. . . . No more visitors are allowed tonight, I’m sorry.”

Maggie was standing near him.

“Maybe by the time I get home, my folks’ll be there. Or else they’re staying there all night.” Arthur was suddenly worried.

“Want me to drive you to the hospital?”

“They won’t let anybody in now.”

Just before midnight, Arthur got home to an empty house. The cat meowed hopefully in the kitchen. Arthur fed him.

During the night, Arthur woke up suddenly as if from a bad dream, but he hadn’t been dreaming. It was after 3 a.m. Arthur went barefoot into the hall, put on the hall light, and saw that his parents’ bedroom door was still slightly ajar, as it had been. He opened the door to the garage. His father’s car was not there. He went back to bed and lay awake a long while before he fell asleep.

The telephone awakened him in broad daylight, and he went to the living room to answer it. It was their next door neighbor, Norma Keer, calling to ask how Robbie was, because she had heard about the high fever.

“No change, the hospital said last night. My folks spent the night there, and they’re not back yet. What time is it, Norma? I just woke up.”

“Nine thirty-five. Let me try the hospital and I’ll call you back.”

Norma’s voice was comforting. She was about sixty, slow-moving, and nothing seemed to upset her, though she often said she was dying—of something awful like cancer. Cancer of what, Arthur had forgotten. She had no children, and her husband had died when Arthur was about ten.

Arthur put some water in the kettle for instant coffee. While he was pouring hot water into a cup, his father’s car approached the house. Arthur opened the door in the kitchen that gave on the garage.

His mother looked pink-eyed, his father grim.

“How’s Robbie?” Arthur asked. “Is he okay?”

She nodded, so slightly that Arthur hardly saw it. Her eyes looked shiny, as if she had been weeping. His father came into the house silent, his grey eyes dark with fatigue.

“Yes, Robbie pulled through. Pretty close thing, though, I think,” said his mother. She had drawn a glass of water at the sink.

“Really, Mom.—Hospital didn’t tell me anything—except ‘no change.’”

“And you were with a girl on a date,” said his father, sighing.

His father’s tone was reproachful, and Arthur ignored the remark. “What happened with Robbie, Mom?”

“Very dangerous fever and a strep throat,” said his mother. “The hospital said they’d never seen anything quite like it. They had him in intensive care; oxygen, everything. We had cots in a room down the hall. But he
will
be all right.” She sipped the glass of water and leaned tiredly against the sink. “The crisis was around five this morning, wasn’t it, Richard?”