People Who Knock on the Door (4 page)

4

A
rthur ran smack into his father in the front hall. His father, in pajamas and bathrobe, had evidently just come from the living room, where the only light in the house showed, and Arthur was so startled he almost fell back against the door.

“You’re out late—for exam week,” said his father, who had stopped, hands in robe pockets, so that Arthur had to turn sideways to get past him in the hall.

Arthur put on the kitchen light. “I hope you weren’t waiting up for me.” Arthur opened the fridge. “As if I were a girl.”

“You’ve been drinking, too?”

Arthur felt quite sober enough to hold his own. “Yes. I had a drink with Norma just now.”

“And before that?”

“Two beers, I think. Big evening.” Arthur poured a glass of milk to the rim and sipped without spilling a drop.

“And you want to go to Columbia.”

What was his father getting at now? That he wasn’t worthy, that he was having a good time, that he was silly?

“Before Norma, you were out with your latest girlfriend, I gather.”

“Latest? Since when do I have a harem?”

“Fine time to be drunk,” said his father, nodding his big head. His straight brown hair was graying. Some strands of hair bobbed over his heavy, creased forehead.

Arthur kept Maggie in his mind, her beautiful cool, and he faced his father with equanimity.

“Nothing to say for yourself?”

Arthur took a couple of seconds to answer. “No.” His father wore his sandal house-slippers with crossing leather straps, which Arthur knew his father didn’t like. A present from Arthur’s mother. Was his father wearing them now because they looked sort of biblical? Arthur repressed a smile, but saw that his father had noticed the start of it.

“You’d better change your ways, Arthur. Or you can put yourself through college.” His father nodded, then relaxed a little, having fired his guns.

Big news! Very hostile. “I don’t see what I’ve done to—”

“In the time that you waste,” his father interrupted, “you could be doing something for your own good. Studying or working at a job to bring in a little money. That’s my point.”

Arthur had supposed that that was his father’s point.

“I shall speak to your mother about this.”

About what? Arthur nodded, with a brisk but polite air, and watched his father enter the living room and put out the light. Then his father disappeared into the bedroom on the left in the hall.

Arthur was awakened the next morning by a gentle rap at his door. He had left a note on the floor outside his room last night: “I can sleep till 10,” and this was service, his mother arriving with a mug of coffee!

His mother came in quietly and shut the door. “I’m making Robbie stay in bed, because the doctor’s coming at noon to look at him and I don’t want him to run up a temperature.” She was whispering. “I hear you and your father had a row last night.”

Arthur sipped the coffee. “Not a row. He said I was out late. Hardly midnight.”

“He’s still a bit wrought up, Arthur. You know, about Robbie.”

“Sit down, Mom.” Arthur removed a shirt from the seat of his straight chair.

His mother sat. “You saw Maggie last evening?”

“Yes. But don’t mention her name again to Dad, would you?”

“Why?” His mother smiled.

“Because I have the feeling Dad’s against her. Against my seeing anybody in the evenings now.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense.” Already she looked about to get up from the chair. “Richard sees the world in a different way now. I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Maybe not long.”

The English exam that afternoon lasted two hours. Maggie was taking the same exam, and Arthur glanced at her a couple of times across the room. She sat far to his right, so he saw her in profile, her head bent, her lips slightly parted. Arthur chose a four-line poem of Byron’s of which to complete the last two lines, and as “a poem you have memorized” one of Robert Frost’s. He supplied one title each for James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Theodore Dreiser, a writer whom he rather liked, and completed the title of Willa Cather’s “O,—!” Then a one-page “essay” on the influence of the media on American speech. Grammar: multiple choice, and one was supposed to check the right one. At the end of the exam, when those who hadn’t already departed stood up, stiff, grinning with relief, frowning with dread, Arthur headed straight for where Maggie had been sitting and could not find her, not in the corridor either, or when he ran down the stairs to the main hall.

Had she deliberately tried to avoid him? Maybe. But why?

Arthur rode home on his bike. Robbie was walking around in the backyard in pajamas and bathrobe, which was probably against his mother’s wishes. He drank a glass of water, then went to the telephone and dialed Maggie’s number. She lived nearer the school than he, and had a car besides. The telephone rang seven or eight times, and finally Maggie answered.

“Me,” Arthur said. “Looked for you just now.”

“I wanted to get home.”

Long pause. Arthur didn’t want to talk about the exam. “Well—I’ll see you tomorrow night?” They had made a date for Saturday night.

“I don’t think so—after all. Because I’m going away tomorrow morning for the weekend. With my family.—I’m sorry, Arthur.”

Arthur was baffled when they hung up. Maggie had sounded distant. Had he done something wrong last night? Nothing that he could remember or imagine.

He resolved not to telephone Maggie on Saturday or Sunday, in case she hadn’t gone away with her family, because it would look as if he were checking on her. If she stayed in town over the weekend, it was easy enough for her to call him.

On Saturday afternoon, Robbie was up and dressed, still in a sunny mood, and maybe he’d been born again too? Their mother made Robbie sit bundled up in a blanket in the sun every afternoon, and the sun had put roses in his cheeks and bleached the cowlick over his forehead. Robbie had missed his final exams neatly, which didn’t bother him.

“Why’re
you
so down in the dumps?” Robbie asked Arthur.

Arthur was sharpening the spade. The telephone had just rung; his mother had summoned him, and it hadn’t been Maggie but a girl acquaintance called Ruthie. She had asked him to a party tonight, one of the “grad parties” that were taking place all over town in the next days. Chalmerston’s Main Street was bedecked with orange and white streamers saying “Congrats Grads!” Arthur had thanked Ruthie and said he would come. But he was not sure whether he would or not.

“I’m not down in the dumps,” Arthur said.

“You’re sorry because I got well,” Robbie said like a flat statement of truth.

Arthur leaned on the spade handle. “Wha-at? Are you nuts, little brother?” Had their father been feeding Robbie some kind of crap, Arthur wondered, some kind of anti-Arthur propaganda? Arthur got to work on the spade again. “What’s Dad been telling you?”

“He just said—God touched me.”

“I see. Wa-al, you just keep that in mind,” Arthur drawled like a Westerner. “You be a good boy from now on.”

Arthur went to the party at Ruthie’s at half past 10. It was good to get out of his house’s atmosphere. Rock music pulsed half a block away from Ruthie’s. Three or four bikes lay on the grass near the front door, and several cars were at the road edge and in the driveway. Arthur walked in the front door, which was open.

People were dancing in the living room. At a glance, Arthur recognized a lot of faces from school, and there were a few older boys whom he didn’t know, probably students from C.U.

“Hi, Arthur,” said a girl named Lucy, in blue jeans and T-shirt, barefoot. “By yourself? Where’s Maggie?”

He was surprised that Lucy knew about Maggie, but at the same time pleased. “Away. She’s—”

Roxanne danced in, snapping her fingers over her head, twisting. “Hi there, Art!”

“Out of town this weekend!” Arthur shouted to Lucy over the music.

“Right, she is,” said Roxanne, still dancing, and winked at Arthur.

“She told you?” Arthur didn’t think Maggie and Roxanne were at all chummy.

“Ye-es,” said Roxanne, and with a sweep of her dark eyes past Arthur to Lucy, she twirled into the thick of the dancers.

“Get yourself a Coke or something in the back!” Lucy said, drifting off.

Arthur tossed his jacket on a sofa which already held a heap of outer garments. He didn’t feel like dancing. He looked around for Gus and didn’t see him. A fellow and a girl were smooching on another sofa. Dull as all hell, Arthur thought, without Maggie! Might as well be another classroom, except for the booming music and the shrieks of the girls and the big laughs from the fellows. Arthur made his way to the kitchen at the back.

A husky fellow in a white sweater was trying to persuade a girl—Sandra Boone, an idiot in Arthur’s English class—to take off with him, probably to his C.U. dorm room.

“—nobody there
this minute!
My roommate’s out and won’t be back till four; I know him.”

Sandra giggled, plucked at the boy’s sleeve, and seemed unable to make up her mind.

Lout
, Arthur thought about the husky guy, who looked maybe twenty-one and hadn’t bothered to shave, probably because he thought stubble made him look older.

Then a little while later, Arthur was dancing, because the music was good and someone had said, “Aren’t you gonna dance tonight?” and Arthur didn’t want to look sour, because that reminded him of his father.

Then he was riding home on his bike, having drifted out when the serious eating started in the kitchen. Ruthie had boiled a couple of cauldrons of frankfurters.

Amazing that it was already nearly 2, and amazing that Norma’s living room light was still on behind her drawn curtains, but Arthur didn’t feel like calling on her tonight. He felt more like cruising by Maggie’s house, to see it silent and black—yet belonging to Maggie and familiar to her—but he didn’t do that either.

5

T
here was no school the following Monday or during that week. The exam results were due next Friday, and graduation, the ceremony which Arthur considered ducking out of, came on the Monday after.

Sunday had brought, of course, the churchgoing, with Robbie, though Robbie would have fitted in better at Sunday School, Arthur thought. In the past, when his parents had gone to church perhaps twice a month, Robbie had been parked in the Sunday School class in an adjoining room of the church. Arthur had wriggled out of Sunday School around the age of ten, and his parents had not been difficult about it, but now things were different. It crossed Arthur’s mind that his father was bringing Robbie to the adults’ service as if to say, “Behold my son, alive and well!” Robbie squirmed and twitched during the Reverend Cole’s sermon, which could last half an hour or more. Robbie glanced at his mother as if to ask when would it be over, twiddled the hymn books in the slot on the back of the pew in front of him, and that Sunday he dropped a book flat down on the floor with a loud bang just when the Reverend had paused for a few seconds. It sounded as if somebody in the congregation had had enough, and Arthur had to stifle a laugh.

Then after church, his mother worked with a little extra speed in the kitchen to prepare Sunday dinner, which was always more elaborate than their evening dinners. His father, inspired by just having been to church, brought a glossy magazine called
Plain Truth
from the living room and looked through it, searching for something to read aloud, Arthur feared. Arthur was in the kitchen to set the table, swing the lettuce, to keep the sink clear for his mother’s work. They hadn’t a dish-washing machine, as had Maggie’s family. Arthur imagined Maggie and her family at this minute installing themselves at a nice table in a hotel dining room after a morning of tennis or swimming.

“Listen to this,” said Richard, leaning against a sideboard from which Arthur just then had to get paper napkins from a drawer.

Arthur made a gesture with his finger, and his father stepped aside.

“A quote from Isaiah,” said Richard, “‘The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’ A simple thought, but a profound one, happy one,” Richard said, glancing at Lois who was lifting a roasted chicken from the oven. She had partially cooked it before church. Richard looked at the roasting pan, its edges garnished with browned potatoes and onions, and smiled his appreciation.

“Call Robbie, would you, Arthur?”

Arthur walked through his father’s study, and saw his brother running like a colt, whipping a long twig against a leg as if beating himself onward. “Hey, Robbie! Dinner!”

Heels down, Robbie jolted to a halt and tossed the switch aside. He had put on sneakers, but still wore his Sunday best suit.

When Arthur returned to the kitchen, his father was moving toward the table but had found another passage. “This is funny. They’re talking about the time when Christ returns. ‘Think—what will be one of the worst problems people will have in the millennium? It will probably be the tendency to gain weight! There will be such an abundance of food and drink that some people are very likely going to grow a little too fat. Of course one of the laws of health is that gluttony is wrong.’ Fine thing to be reading just as we’re sitting down, isn’t it?” Richard beamed at his wife.

They seated themselves on benches and chairs. Heads bowed.

“Father, we thank Thee for our bread and meat. God bless those who walk in Thy name. Let us be—thankful for yet one more day of Thy loving care for us. Amen.”

“Amen,” murmured Lois.

When the plates were served, Lois said, “Robbie, you shouldn’t be running around like a wild Indian, when just a couple of days ago you were in bed. You should see your face.”

Robbie’s face was pink. And his lips were already shiny with chicken fat, his mouth so full, he couldn’t reply.

Richard had laid
Plain Truth
aside on Arthur’s bench and was concentrating on his plate. Then he lifted his face and said to Lois, “No comment from you on our gluttony?”

Did he mean that as a joke, Arthur wondered. Nobody was plump in the family except his father.

“When they say, ‘when Christ comes again’ in that magazine, does the writer mean it literally or someone resembling Christ?” Lois asked. “I find it vague, phrases like ‘plenty to eat’. All over the world do they mean?”

Arthur felt like laughing, it was so ridiculous. Was Christ or somebody going to drop sacks of wheat or rice in the middle of a desert in Africa or wherever a million people were currently starving? Arthur had taken a look at
Plain Truth
, on his father’s orders, and found the articles so naive they might have been written for children younger than Robbie.

His father took a long time swallowing.

“It doesn’t
read
as if it’s symbolic, I mean,” Lois added. “I read that part about the danger of too much food and the need of experts to tell people how much rich food is good for them. Well”—she laughed a little—“some people patronize the experts now!—And how is Christ going to reach the people who aren’t Christians?”

Arthur could hardly have said it better himself. He glanced at Robbie, who was listening attentively.

“Oh, symbolic mainly,” said Richard. “And
yet
—with the right attitude and confidence in a superior God, all the fruits of life come, there’s no doubt about that. It’s just that the majority of people don’t give God’s laws a chance. Even many people who were in church today.” He looked at Arthur, then back to Lois. “Many trust entirely in material things—money—to bring in material goods.”

And so did his father, Arthur thought. Did this chicken on the table drop from heaven?

“What’re you doing with yourself this next week, Arthur?” asked his father during dessert.

Arthur had thought of taking some books to a secondhand place and selling them, of going to the public library to take out some books to read just for pleasure, and he had also thought of going to the Grove Park tennis courts in the middle of town, maybe with Maggie, to bang a ball around for a couple of hours.

“Done anything about finding a part-time job?” asked his father.

“Not yet.”

“Richard, he’s just had a whole week of exams,” said Lois.

“And he’s got a free week ahead and the whole summer free as far as I know,” said Richard.

And a few people Arthur knew were going away on vacations with their parents or by themselves. Burt Siegal and Harry Lambert were going to Europe together.

“There’s Mrs. DeWitt over on Northside,” Richard said to Arthur. “She’s always in need of yard work.”

Mrs. DeWitt was a widow who did nothing, as far as Arthur knew, except take in stray cats and bake cakes now and then for the church or the Red Cross. “All—right,” Arthur said quietly and grimly. “I can ask Mrs. DeWitt.”

So after dinner, Arthur telephoned Mrs. DeWitt and asked if he could do any work for her in her yard.

“Well, there’s always
something
to do.” She rambled on. When could he come? Today was a nice day. And how much would he want, because she wasn’t prepared to pay more than two dollars an hour, though some young fellows were demanding three or more.

Arthur so detested even her voice, he seized the job with a bitter enthusiasm. “Two is
fine
, Mrs. DeWitt. Today? Four hours of daylight left, at least.”

She demurred at four hours and suggested three.

Arthur took his bike and departed. The DeWitt house was past the college dorms on Northside. The houses here were more modest than those on his parents’ street. He saw two of Mrs. DeWitt’s cats on her front porch. Mrs. DeWitt herself was an eyesore, and when she answered the bell, Arthur literally avoided looking at her more than he had to, which maybe gave him an evasive air, but he couldn’t help that. She wore flat old house-slippers, no stockings, and even her loose blue dress was dirty and full of food spots. A minute later, Arthur was gazing at her backyard, which looked like a city dump.

“Oh, just stack some of the stuff to one side,” Mrs. DeWitt said, when Arthur asked her what she wanted him to do with the broken dog kennel, for instance. He was glad that she went back into the house and didn’t stand there watching him, though perhaps she was watching him from the kitchen window.

Arthur hauled a few pieces of old wood and metal, a lawn mower blade rusted beyond salvation, to one side against a fence, as Mrs. DeWitt had suggested, then did the same with a few rocks whose position seemed to have no purpose. After a quarter of an hour of this, he investigated the toolshed for a change of activity, and found a hand mower covered with dust and cobwebs, pruning clippers, hedge clippers, all in need of brushing and oiling. The grass needed cutting, but it wasn’t very high, indicating that whoever had cut it last must have brought his own mover, because Mrs. DeWitt’s hadn’t been used in many a month. There was a broom. Arthur swept. This led to the discovery of rags, 3-in-1 oil, a whetstone. He oiled and sharpened what he could, then took the pruning clippers to the rosebushes. Appalling, he thought, that any human being could let roses get into such a condition.

When Arthur looked at his wristwatch, it was after 6. He had trimmed the hedges, and he realized that they looked quite pretty now. He began putting tools away, knowing this job always took longer than he thought it would.

“Arthur?” Mrs. DeWitt called from her back porch. “Come in and have a Coke!”

He went into the kitchen. Mrs. DeWitt opened a bottle of Coca-Cola for him, but first Arthur took some cold water from the sink, drinking out of this hand. Even Mrs. DeWitt’s glasses on the drainboard looked slightly dirty.

“Yard looks marvelous, Arthur. I think you did wonders,” she said, smiling.

Arthur could almost bear to look at her as he lifted the Coke bottle. She was fishing for loose dollar bills in an old leather purse and asking him if he could come again soon. She gave him eight dollars.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Arthur, and promised to telephone her Tuesday when he knew how his week was shaping up. Her kitchen smelled of cat dung, and he was eager to leave it.

Now, he thought, he might try calling Maggie.

His mother was in the kitchen preparing supper, and Arthur saw her typewriter on the coffee table, where she had been doing work for the Beverley Home.

“You’ve got a streak of grease across your forehead,” his mother said. “Was it tough work? You look as if you’ve been at it.”

Arthur laughed. “Just a plain mess! Anybody phone?”

“No.”

Arthur took a quick shower, then went into the living room and dialled Maggie’s number. Maggie’s mother answered. Arthur identified himself and asked if Maggie was there.

“No, she’s away till tomorrow evening.”

“Oh.—I thought she was away with you and—”

“She said that?” Betty Brewster laughed. “No, she’s with Gloria Farber. Went to visit Gloria’s aunt in Indianapolis. Shall I tell her you’ll call her again tomorrow night?”

“Yes. Yes, thanks.” Arthur hung up, puzzled. Gloria Farber’s
aunt
. What a boring way to spend a weekend! And why should Maggie have told him she was going away with her folks? Was she lying to him and her parents, and was she away with some other fellow?

At supper, Richard asked Arthur about his work that afternoon, and his pay.

“Two dollars an hour. Gus Warylsky takes four, I think.”

“Put that aside toward your college,” said his father.

“Where’m
I
going to college?” Robbie asked, frowning.

“See how good your grades are,” said Lois gently. “What do you want to be, Robbie?”

Robbie wriggled and thought.

“Still want to be a fireman?” asked Richard.

“No. Maybe I’ll be—a
brain
surgeon.”

Arthur guffawed. “A brain surgeon! Where’d you get that idea?”

“I read it,” said Robbie, and his brows came down again in his old defensive-belligerent style as he looked at his brother.

Arthur kept a pleasant manner. “Well, you just might be one one day,” he said, and was pleased by the approving glance that his mother gave him. Then the telephone rang, and Arthur felt sure it was Maggie, Maggie back suddenly, and wanting to speak with him. Richard anwered in the living room, and Arthur listened from the hall, dish towel in hand.

“Ye-es—well, good. Glad to hear that.—Yes, he is, when he wants to be,” said his father, chuckling. “Not quite the same around our own house, I’m afraid. Ha-ha.”

It was old Vera DeWitt, Arthur realized, praising him to the skies so she could have a little more of his slave labor.

His father came into the kitchen smiling. “That was Mrs. DeWitt. She said you wrought a miracle in her yard, Arthur.”

T
HE AFTERNOON OF THE NEXT DAY
, Arthur rode his bike to the woods on the town’s Westside. His mother had left for the home at 12:30 without lunch, and Robbie was lolling on the floor of his room amid
Mad
magazines and religious pamphlets, the latter given to him by their father. Something called
The Waylighter
had arrived on Saturday, a drab black-and-white publication, and Arthur supposed the family had a subscription to that now, too.

He leaned his bike against a tree and walked on. Then ke kept his eyes on the ground. Sunday at Mrs. DeWitt’s, he had found a fossilized sea urchin the size of a golf ball and he had pocketed it. He had five or six such lined up on the table in his room behind his typewriter. When he had been younger than Robbie, he had found two ammonites, of which he was rather proud.

Arthur wondered what he would be doing one year from now, even six months from now? Walking on some sidewalk in Manhattan? Would Maggie still care anything about him? Even remember him? That was a yes-or-no question, with nothing in between. Four more years ahead for both of them, if they both finished college! And at least two more for him, if he made anything of himself! Would any girl in her right mind wait for that?

It was after 4 when Arthur got back home. He had a dead and dried out insect to look at under his microscope, a couple of mushrooms, too. Robbie’s cassette played
Peter and the Wolf
. Arthur closed his door, put his acquisitions from the woods on a corner of his table, and picked up a book by Jacques Monod, borrowed from the public library. He liked Monod’s combination of science and philosophy, even though he felt he did not understand it completely. It was interesting to imagine nothingness as
something
, as an entity, even though nothingness might never be proven to exist, except of course by theory.