That Night (12 page)

Upon her return from what seemed to us the enchanted, mist-shrouded heights—the upstairs part of the Carpenters’ house—my mother threatened to break my brother’s arm if he didn’t learn to hang up his coat, and she told me that the state of my dresser drawers constituted the biggest disappointment of her life. She claimed our house, too, had once been lovely and seemed to indicate that its decline began only with our birth. At dinner, she threw a boiled potato at my father’s head when he said he much preferred the lived-in look.

While the men gathered at the foot of our driveway that evening of the same day the police car pulled into Sheryl’s drive, Mrs. Carpenter surveyed her kitchen, perhaps hoping the sight of it—the perfect gossamer curtains, the bright pans hanging on the wall, the teapot filled with silk flowers-would cool her curiosity, expand her patience. She may have briefly considered calling my mother again, or Mrs. Rossi, just to see if they’d heard anything, but the husbands were home by now and it would be difficult to talk. And they had already talked all afternoon.

She walked through her kitchen and into her dining room. Even in the fading summer light, the waxed rectangular table shone like a black lake and the two gold candlesticks were reflected in it like tapers in a dark room. In one shadowy corner was the china cabinet, and behind the glass, looking a little ghostly, the floral patterned plates she had taken downstairs and washed carefully every other month since her wedding fifteen years before but had never, according to neighborhood legend, actually used. On the back of each plate, she knew, it said in small red letters: Made in Occupied Japan, but she couldn’t remember when the phrase had begun to seem quaint, something from a time surprisingly long past. Her youth, perhaps.

Mrs. Carpenter was not, could not have been, a naturally melancholy person or else she surely would have recognized long before this that her lovely rooms would wear and grow old despite her, but the silence that seemed to have been left in the wake of his cry, that night, made her more aware than usual of the weight of each hour. Like nearly all our mothers, Mrs. Carpenter had set her life on her marriage and her home and her children—if they go well, all goes well—and so she sometimes, especially in the early evening or late in the afternoon when no work presented itself, had the bored, distracted air of someone simply waiting to see how things turn out.

Something Sheryl’s mother had already seen, she knew. For surely the premature conclusion that her husband’s death and her daughter’s pregnancy had brought to Sheryl’s mother’s career as a housewife was for Mrs. Carpenter and all the other mothers a glimpse into the future, a report from the uncharted frontier that their daily lives were slowly but inexorably moving them toward.

Mrs. Carpenter walked into her living room, the thick pale carpeting soft under her feet, even cool. Through the open front door (and if nothing else, air was allowed to circulate freely through this house) came the men’s laughter. It had become a familiar sound during those days that followed the fight, as common as the crickets and passing cars. She stood at the door and watched them. Mr. Rossi was just crossing to join them. Little Jake, hunched over his bicycle, his large head rolling, turned up our driveway. She saw my mother on our porch and considered going over to speak with her, but the clutch of men made her hesitate.

She turned again into the room. The television was on downstairs and the running and stopping rhythm of its voice reached her through the carpet. Her curiosity was like a thirst. She sat down in a small chair that even in this house, where everything above the ground was ornamental, seemed ridiculous in its impracticality. Its delicate cherry legs were tapered to the width of dimes and its small seat and back, the size of hand mirrors were pure white, threaded with a touch of gold. Even in the store where she had bought it, she refused to sit in it, telling the salesman, “Oh, it’s not for sitting,” as if she were the type of woman who could squander chairs, couches, whole rooms of her house.

A bead of perspiration ran down her spine and she arched her back a little more to keep the print of her shift (it was what we then called a muumuu) from touching the fine material.

She was not a tragic figure. She had been fortunate most of her life, healthy and well liked. She loved her husband (although no longer in a way that merited a sultan’s palace of deep green and pink and silver—a square serviceable room would have done, a dark plaid, well worn), and she will only occasionally be disappointed by her children: by Billy’s sloppy wife and Wayne’s brief years as an underground (it’s in the blood) city poet, by Little Alice’s half-hearted ambition to “do hair.”

She was not foolish, either. Her pride in her small rooms, her rigorous house rules that no shoes should touch her carpet, no child spend more than ten waking minutes in his bedroom, no guest go unescorted, were merely part of a brave and determined effort to preserve what she knew of Beauty from the ravages of drink-spilling and ash-dropping Time. More artist than eccentric, then. But at this moment, sitting as she is in her tiny chair, her back arched, her ankles crossed, her light brown hair, which she wears above her ears, puffed out and turned under like a buttermilk biscuit, she does seem somewhat pathetic. And it might merely have been the hand of some benevolent being, as concerned with order and perfection as she, that set the telephone ringing then.

It was Sheryl’s mother. Her voice was both shy and determined. She was calling, she said, because she was going to be leaving town in the morning, but she would like Billy Carpenter to continue cutting her lawn—what was left of it—while she was away. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone. She would mail him his check from Ohio.

Mrs. Carpenter nodded like a professional. She said of course Billy would do it. Of course she would tell him. And then she added, her curiosity indistinguishable from what was, to her credit, true concern. “Ann”—a pause that said, I don’t know if I should be asking this, I certainly don’t want to pry—“is everything all right?”

If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prairie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to one another, “There’s someone at the door,” in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment—that they have spent their lives being stalked.

The doorbell rings at midnight and the household stops short in its nightly primordial ritual of curling into itself, reverses it. Knows the news can’t be good. It lines up according to size and age and sex, as if for some final reckoning, and heads down the stairs. The patriarch, the matriarch, the strongest and biggest and first to marry, raises a trembling hand and, with the very courage needed to be born, unlocks the door.

Only once, and not again until my brother and I were teenagers with our own Standard Time, had our doorbell rung so late, and that was the night Mr. Murphy’s wife died. He was a distant neighbor, barely known to us, although my mother occasionally talked with his wife when they met at the mailbox. He appeared at our door with a little girl, his daughter, one cold night just as my parents were getting ready for bed and told them when they invited him into the kitchen, “Helen passed away at eight o’clock,” as if he regretted the pain this news would cause them. Before my father could ask, “Who’s Helen?” Mr. Murphy turned to my mother, “You were a friend of hers,” his voice more certain than questioning.

Both my parents were in a modest state of undress, belt less, half-buttoned, their faces freshly washed, and there was still some remnant of fear and confusion in my mother’s eyes. “I knew her,” she said. But then she added, perhaps because she saw something pass over the man’s florid face, “She was from Massachusetts.”

“Quincy,” he said. He raised the little girl’s hand, bare in his gloved one. “She told me you knew her.” He glanced at my brother and me as we stood together in the kitchen doorway. He seemed pleased to discover my parents had children as well. Then he turned to my father. “You know how it is,” he said. “You’re at work all day. You never really know who’s who in the neighborhood. I knew Helen had plenty of girlfriends. She was always telling me this one said that and that one said this.” He shrugged. “You know how it is. You don’t really listen.”

He touched his free hand to his forehead and paused for a moment, as if he were about to begin a lengthy explanation. “When I got home tonight,” he said, “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next.” He indicated the child again. She was a homely little thing with those dark, weary circles under her eyes that can make even a four-year-old look like a dissipated, hung-over adult. “So I take her outside and I ask her, “Where do Mommy’s girlfriends live?”” He pointed to our refrigerator. “I say to her, “Over there?” and she says, “Yeah.”” He pointed to our kitchen sink. “I say, “How about that house over there?” She says yeah again.” He smiled in amazement. He had filled our kitchen with a musty, unwashed smell. “The little girl tells me yeah at every house,” he said. “Every single block, she tells me yeah. That’s how many friends Helen has.”

And then he began to cry, a thick, stocky stranger with short arms. The child hid herself behind his thigh as if she had known this was coming (and, indeed, we later learned that he had done exactly the same in each house he visited). My parents, still looking innocent and fuzzy in the bright colorful kitchen, reached out to touch him briefly here and there, on the shoulder and the arm. They made odd, soothing, inarticulate sounds, sounds that might have been made before language, when our dumb and curious ancestors tried to coax into their hands whatever night creature had found its way to their fire and their light.

“Here now,” my mother said. “Now, now.”

The man drew in long, painful breaths. In the weeks that followed, we would see him wandering with the child, drifting in and out of the butcher shop and the candy store, the supermarket where our mothers shopped, until the sight of him became so familiar we hardly noticed when he no longer appeared. “And now I can’t tell her,” he sobbed. “I can’t tell her I’ve met all her girlfriends.” When Mrs. Carpenter rang our bell, the night of the same day the police car had pulled into Sheryl’s drive, my mother had just filled the tub, preparing for their nightly ritual. My father was waiting for her in their room. Sitting up in my bed, I heard her open the bathroom door and run lightly across the hall. “There’s someone at the door,” she called in a loud, panicked whisper. I looked toward my open window, where the trees were silent and thick with humidity. I heard my father stepping back into his pants.

Mrs. Carpenter was still in her Hawaiian print muumuu, although she had one curler in her hair, just above her forehead. She seemed startled to see all four of us.

“Oh,” she said. “I saw your light.” She looked beyond my father to meet my mother’s eye. “I thought you were still up.”

“Is anything wrong?” my mother asked, but already I could see some other communication passing between them. Mrs. Carpenter’s eyes were full of meaning. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said.

My father stepped back to let her in, his every movement showing controlled impatience. “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow,” he said. “Nor dark of night.” He shooed my brother and me back up the stairs and then turned to tell the women, “We’ll leave you to your discussions.”

My mother said she’d be up in a little while. Mrs. Carpenter said, “Good night.” I could tell they were both glad to be rid of us.

From my bed, I heard the tea kettle whistle briefly. I heard the two women’s voices, soft and indistinguishable. Not so much conspirators’ voices as the hushed, amazed and nervous voices of two who had managed to drag something frightful and extraordinary, some part of the dark and populated night, into our ordinary kitchen light.

They stayed up very late. I heard the kettle whistle once again, and I fell asleep listening to the wordless rush of their voices.

In the morning, my mother at first refused to get out of bed and then came into the kitchen looking unhappy and exhausted. She sighed as she made her coffee and sighed again as she lit her first cigarette. I asked her what Mrs. Carpenter had wanted. She looked at me through half closed eyes, deciding something, and then said, “None of your business.” She went to the window, which looked only into our backyard. I heard her say a disgusted and indifferent “Teh” as she gazed out. Once or twice she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

At Diane Rossi’s house, I put my hands to the screen door and saw Mrs. Carpenter sitting with Mrs. Rossi at the kitchen table. I heard Mrs. Rossi say something odd and poetic, or at least something overblown and incomprehensible, something like “Tragedy completes all romance,” before I interrupted her by ringing the bell. She and Mrs. Carpenter looked at me, and at Diane when she had joined me, much the same way my mother had: not with the proprietary air of the men the night before, but with a sad, cautious assessment, as if they had learned overnight that one of us was a traitor or an alien spy. As if, it occurs to me now, they had only begun to learn that while their love had been sufficient to form us, it would not necessarily keep us alive.

Outside, the sun was bright and hot on the sidewalk and the leaves. I sniffed the air, as if to catch some scent of whatever it was that had happened. Half expecting to smell some trace of Mr. Murphy’s fleshy, death-touched odor. Wordlessly, Diane and I strolled past Sheryl’s house. The shades were drawn and the tire marks still fresh and violent. I turned just in time to see my mother stepping through Mrs. Evers’s side door.