The Stand (Original Edition) (8 page)

“I play the field, Mom.”

“You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you’d got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I’ll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite.”

He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.

“Anyway, you’re gonna learn,” Alice said. “They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He’s got that sidewalk-level apartment and he’s always standing there in the window, hoping for a strong breeze.”

Larry grunted.

“I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that’s my son. That’s Larry. Most of them don’t believe it.”

“You’ve heard it?” He wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it first. “Sure, all the time on that rock n roll station the young girls listen to. WABC.”

“Do you like it?”

“As well as I like any of that music.” She looked at him firmly. “I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd.”

He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. “It’s just supposed to sound . . . passionate, Mom. That’s all.” His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother’s kitchen, discussing passion.

“The place for passion’s the bedroom,” she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. “Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger.”

“Now?” he asked, amused.

“No, on the radio.”

“That brown sound, it sho do get aroun,” Larry said, smiling. “Just like that,” she said, nodding. “When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this
disco.
Disco, they call it. Screaming, I call it.” She looked at him grudgingly. “At least there’s no screaming on your record.”

“I get a royalty,” he said. “A certain per cent of every record sold. It breaks down to—”

“Oh, go on,” she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. “I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?”

“They haven’t paid me much,” he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. “I made a down payment on the car. I’m financing the rest.”

“Easy credit terms,” she said balefully. “That’s how your father ended up a bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn’t that. It was a
broken
heart. Your dad went to the poor-house on easy credit terms.”

This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. Then

Alice brought Larry up, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy’s old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that’s my mamma.

“Do you want to stay here, Larry?” she asked softly.

Startled, he countered, “Do you mind?”

“There’s room. The rollaway’s still in the back bedroom. I’ve been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around.”

“All right,” he said slowly. “If you’re sure you don’t mind. I’m only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark . . . Galen . . . David . . . Chris . . . those guys.”

She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I’m not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I’m glad to see you. We didn’t say goodbye very well. There were harsh words.” She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. “For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways.”

“That’s all right,” he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. “Listen, I’ll chip in for stuff.”

“You can if you want. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. I’m working. Thousands aren’t. You’re still my son.”

He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his—nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother.

She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. These tears couldn’t change that any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There was something that gave you the bitter zing of biting on tinfoil or hearing chalk scree on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart But she loved him.

She also thought there was good in Larry, great good. It was there, but this late on it would take a catastrophe to bring it out. There was no catastrophe here; only her weeping son.

“You’re tired,” she said. “Clean up. I’ll move the boxes, then you can sleep. I guess I’ll go in today after all.”

She went down the short hall to the back room, his old bedroom, and Larry heard her grunting and moving boxes. He wiped his eyes slowly. The sound of traffic came in the window. He tried to remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother. He thought of the dead cat. She was right. He was tired. He had never been so tired. He went to bed and slept for nearly eighteen hours.

It was late afternoon when Frannie went out back to where her father was patiently weeding the peas and beans. She had been a late child and he was in his sixties now, his white hair coming out from under the baseball cap he always wore. Her mother was in Portland, shopping for white gloves. Fran’s best childhood friend, Amy Lauder, was getting married early next month.

She looked down at her dad’s back for a peaceful moment, just loving him. At this time of day the light took on a special quality that she loved, a timeless quality that belonged only to that most fleeting Maine genus, early summer. She could think of that particular tone of light in the middle of January and it would make her heart ache fiercely. The light of an early summer afternoon as it slipped toward dark had so many good things wrapped up in it: baseball at the Little League park, where Fred had always played third and batted clean-up; watermelon; first corn; iced tea in chilled glasses; childhood.

Frannie cleared her throat a little. “Need a hand?”

He turned and grinned. “Caught me diggin, didn’t you?”

“I guess I did.”

“Is your mother back yet?” He frowned vaguely, and then his face cleared. “No, that’s right, she just went, didn’t she? Sure, pitch a hand if you want to. Just don’t forget to wash up afterward.”

“A lady’s hands proclaim her habits,” Fran mocked lightly, and snorted. Peter tried to look disapproving and did a poor job of it.

She got down in the row next to him and began to weed. Sparrows were twittering and there was a constant hum of traffic on US 1, less than a block from here. It hadn’t reached the volume it would in July, when there would be a fatal accident nearly every day between here and Kittery, but it was building.

Peter told her about his day and she responded with the right questions. He was a machinist in a large Sanford auto parts firm, the largest auto parts firm north of Boston. He was sixty-four and about to start on his last year of work before retirement. A short year at that, because he had four weeks’ vacation time stockpiled, which he planned to take in September, after the “ijits” went home.

His voice switched from topic to topic, mellow and soothing. Their shadows grew longer, moving up the rows before them. She was lulled by it, as she always had been. She had come here to tell him something, but since earliest childhood she had often come to tell and stayed to listen. He didn’t bore her. So far as she knew, he didn’t bore anyone, except possibly her mother. He was a storyteller, and a good one.

She became aware that he had stopped talking. He was sitting on a rock at the end of his row, tamping his pipe and looking at her.

“What’s on your mind, Frannie?”

She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn’t sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn’t stand. She jumped.

“I’m pregnant,” she said simply.

He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. “Pregnant,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: “Oh, Frannie . . . is it a joke? Or a game?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Come over here.”

Obediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.

“For sure?” he asked her.

“For sure,” she said, and then—there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn’t help it—she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.

“Daddy, do you still like me?”

“What?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie.”

That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?”

She nodded.

“You told him?”

She nodded again.

“What did he say?”

“He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion.”

“Marriage or abortion,” Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. “He’s a regular two-gun Sam.”

She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady’s hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I’ll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady’s hands—

Her father said: “I don’t want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn’t he ... or you . . . being careful?”

“I had birth control pills,” she said. “They didn’t work.”

“Then I can’t put any blame, unless it’s on both of you,” he said, looking at her closely. “And I can’t do that, Frannie. I can’t lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won’t talk about blame.”

She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.

“Your mother will have plenty to say about blame,” he said, “and I won’t stop her, but I won’t be with her. Do you understand that?” She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. She had a sharp tongue and when she was opposed it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen surrender—but on his own terms.

She asked quietly: “Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?”

“You asking me to take your part, Fran?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“With Mom?”

“No. With you, Frannie.”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that’s what they say, anyway.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I think I’ve fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in.”

“The baby?” His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden’s hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.

“No, the baby isn’t the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jessie is . . She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jessie, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother’s favorite sayings. “He’s weak,” she said. “I can’t explain better than that.”

“You don’t really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?” “No,” she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn’t trust Jessie, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts.

“Don’t let your mother change your mind, then.”

She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.

“What do you think of me getting an abortion?” she asked after a while.

“Listen,” he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.

“Frannie, you’ve no business having such an old man for a father, but I can’t help it. I never married until 1941
,
just before I went into the war. I was a little older than some of the others that went after Pearl Harbor. Some of them called me Pop. Your mother and I didn’t get much chance for baby-making before I was shipped away. I got a two-day pass in October of 1942 and didn’t see her again until the war was over. When it was all over I got my good job over in Sanford and we . . . well, we settled down.”