Walking Dunes (28 page)

28.

He saw his father with the young woman again. They were going into Woolworth's, where there were booths in the back and a snack bar. He waited on the sidewalk for them to come out. His father went back to the clothing store. The woman walked down the block in the other direction. As soon as Saul was inside, David ran to catch up with the woman. She pranced along snappily on her high heels, giving the illusion of speed, but in fact not moving so quickly. A lot of her motion was side to side. She was wearing a big full skirt and a crinoline that made it stick out stiffly. He came up behind her and called, “Miss, Miss.” He knew it sounded stupid, but what could he say? He came up beside her. “Excuse me,” he said, just about out of breath. “Could I talk to you a minute?”

She stopped so abruptly he almost lost his balance, stopping too. “Who are you?” she asked, calmly; she knew a person would have a reason to want to talk to her. When he told her he was Saul Stolboff's son, she did not look the least upset. If anything, she had a concerned look, like a nurse. She was not as young as he had thought at first, she was maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine. “My car's right here—” she pointed. “Why don't we sit in there and talk.” She had a pleasant voice, almost free of twang; she had to have come to Basin from some other part of the country. He climbed into the car, relieved that it was so much easier than he expected. Then, when he realized she was waiting for him to speak, he could hardly breathe for the anxiety he felt. She had that same patient, almost worried expression, but she wasn't exactly helping. Why did he have to say anything? How could she not know what he was thinking?
That's my father you were with
.

“Your father is a serious man,” she said.

He thought of Saul reading
War and Peace
.

“A sensitive, special man.”

He could only stare.

“I know this must be confusing for you, but you must see, it's not your business. It's nothing for you to think about.”

It was as if she had pulled a cord that opened him up. “Of course it's my business!” he said. “My father left us once. He could do it again.”

“Do you think that would be up to me? That I could make it happen or not happen?”

He thought about that for a long moment. If you were stuck in your life, you might not see another way, unless a person came along to show you. “My mother—” he began, and faltered.

“Your father is a philosophical man. He sees the way life hands you your cup of pain. Of course there's all that history, with your mother.”

“Nineteen years.”

“But when you've drunk it, you don't have to sit there holding the cup, waiting for more. Life isn't a sentence handed down to you.”

“I think he thinks it is.”

She smiled, a little smugly, thought David. “Another person can make you rethink your convictions. That's a benefit of dialogue.”

“And is that what this is about—you and my father? An affair, about philosophy?”

She said sharply, “Love is based on respect. I think your father is a very intelligent, very sad, very good man.” She did not say,
sexy
, but the word was in the air.

“It is an affair?”

She took her keys out of her purse and put them in the ignition. She had wonderful legs. “I need to go. David, isn't it? David, you can't stop things that are in motion. You just don't have that kind of authority in your father's life. This doesn't have anything to do with you. It doesn't even have to do with your mother. It's all about Saul.”

“And you.” His voice croaked, embarrassing him.

She started the car. “Do you want a ride somewhere?”

He opened the door. “How long—” he stumbled, finding his nerve. “How long has this been going on?”

She smiled at him. “I met your father in the library, over a year ago. David—?”

“Yes?”

“It won't help to tell your mother. Really, it will only hurt.”

“Listen, one thing. Did he ever talk to you about Florida?”

She had a merry look. “Oh heavens, we're always talking about the ocean! Isn't there some place you'd like to see?” She pulled away.

He ran toward home, his heart banging in his chest. Damn! he thought, as he arrived at his door. What the
hell
is her
name?
”

He was afraid the woman would tell his father that he had approached her, and either his father would attack him—maybe even physically—or David's effrontery would somehow precipitate a decision, an action, which might be worse. If you made someone choose sides, there was always the possibility you would be sorry. But Saul said nothing, a week went by, it was clear the woman had not told him.

David seldom saw his father. Since Joyce Ellen had moved back in the house, Saul had withdrawn, or disappeared, avoiding the company of his swollen daughter. David had anticipated scenes in which Saul railed at his daughter for her stupidity, her fecundity, while Joyce Ellen snuffled and lowed like a farm animal. But Saul was absorbed and indifferent, less quarrelsome than ever. There were small exchanges, skirmishes that revealed a thread of his contempt, but he had moved beyond this bothersome household, David now knew. He floated in some intoxication brought on by talk and sex and fresh dreams. He was easier to live with. He bought a second television and installed it in his bedroom, where he sometimes took his supper and did not come out again. He seemed to be drinking less often, though when he did drink, he did not stop until he was stuporous. Many nights he simply left the house without a word, coming back within minutes of his wife. He seldom took the car, for which David was grateful, but confused. Where could you go in Basin, carless, especially a grown man? After David met the woman, it occurred to him that she must live nearby, within walking distance. There was a newer apartment complex half a dozen blocks away. David drove by slowly a couple of times, thinking that a new apartment would be a nice change from an old house. One night, coming home from rehearsal, he drove around and around, looking for her car, a white Studebaker. He thought he saw it in one of the parking spaces, but someone drove into a nearby slot and David drove away. He had noticed nothing about the car's interior. There would be no way to confirm that it was hers. And what would it matter? He already knew it was.

He wanted to talk to his mother. He wanted to warn her. He had the idea that if he could
say
the right thing, Marge could
do
the right thing, and this threat, embodied in a younger woman (embodied, indeed, very attractively), could be brushed away. But there was no right thing to say. And it was hard to find a moment alone with his mother. Joyce Ellen was like a big sausage, lying about the house, sleeping much of the time her mother was gone, waiting for her mother's company, and when Marge was home David was in school. On Sunday, when everyone's time off overlapped, they crowded one another in the small house. David went off to play tennis or to spend time at Leland's. He seldom spoke to his sister, though he pitied her, and wished her life were different, arranged in a way that would please her and please their mother and take up, somehow, less space.

He managed to catch his mother for a few moments one Monday evening before supper. Saul was in his workshop. Joyce Ellen was beached on the bottom bunk in her bedroom. Marge was seated at the kitchen table, looking through the baby section of a Sears catalog. David sat down across from her. There was no good way to say what he had in mind. Instead, he said, “Do you think Kelton will ever come around on this? Won't he want to see his kid? Is he sending money?” Marge looked up almost dreamily; she had not been paying attention to the catalog pages at all.

“He was adopted, you know,” she told him. “He never knew anything about his mother. He has terrible thoughts about her, an awful woman who did this bad thing, and then gave him away out of shame. He told Joyce Ellen about it. It made her love him, a man with a mysterious past, a lost mother. But it's a sickness with him, this bitterness. When Joyce Ellen told him she was pregnant, he turned her into his mother. He said it wasn't his, she would have to give it away.”

“Why, he's nuts!”

“Oh, precisely. Nuts. We have a lawyer now, but of course Joyce Ellen doesn't want to be divorced before the baby is born. We are advised to wait, but then it will be settled, he will have to give her something.” She sniffed. “It's cost me two hundred dollars so far.”

“It's awful!” David exclaimed, truly sorry for his sister, amazed at this dramatic story, which he would not have thought to invent. He felt almost pleased.

Marge sighed and closed the catalog. “A young girl with a baby. She isn't going to have an easy time.”

“She should get her diploma,” David said. “She could study now, while she's waiting. She could work on her equivalency.”

Marge smiled. “She's very lazy now.”

“Mom? Would it be easier someplace new? If we all moved, she could say she was divorced—she will be divorced—or even that she was widowed. She could say anything she wanted, in a new town.”

“She can't go away! She's seventeen!”

“No, I didn't mean her, you weren't listening. Us. All of us.”

Marge was perplexed. “Go where, son?”

“Anywhere. California! Galveston, maybe.” He was thinking of the ocean.

Marge laughed mirthlessly. “You can't move away from your troubles.”

David rushed in with his thesis. “Maybe Dad would be—happier—if—.” It was too hard to say, he had not thought it through. “Maybe it would be better if you started over, in a new place.”

“Such a strange idea.”

“I mean it, Ma! Like plowing under last year's stubble, planting a new crop—”

His mother set her mouth. “What ideas has he been
planting
in your head?”

“It's not like that! It's my idea. I thought—if you changed your lives—”

Marge got up and took lids off the pots on the stove, peered in, banged them back down. “Nonsense.”

“Think about it.”

She turned and glared at him, a hard look in her eyes. “This is what he married. Right here, this is what.”

“Not
what
, Ma!
Who! You!
”

“
What
,” his mother said again. “This is it.”

Later, with Beth Ann, he remembered the whole conversation. Of course he could not bring it up with Beth; he could not think aloud. He thought: It is what, and not who. He looked at Beth Ann. In Texas, you can work very hard and make a lot of money, if you are smart and lucky and not afraid to be mean, but you can join the world of her family, the world of the Kimbroughs, if you have not been born to it, only one way, and Beth Ann is the way.

He felt a thrilling chill along his spine. It was possible. Something in him, something he did not understand but other people saw, made it possible.

And his dreams changed. He stopped thinking about the city, about little offices looking out on green campus lawns, about his name on the spines of books stacked in the windows of bookstores. He thought of himself in a house with a flagstone entryway and a greenhouse, where he might grow orchids, or bright peppers and cherry tomatoes in February. He thought of himself in suits you had to buy in Dallas, of coming home at night and changing to go out again to dinner with friends. He felt himself catapulted by the surprise of his father's dreams: a woman who talked like a book, thoughts of life on a coast, things David had not guessed. He was thrown headlong into his own fantasy, and it was not impossible, it was not foolish, it was the first thing that had made sense. Hayden Kimbrough would advise him; he was a man without a son. Hayden wanted the best for his daughter. Maybe David could rise to that. It was worth a try.

He caught his father one night on the front steps. “Wait up!” he called out. Saul was impatient in his old-fashioned short wool jacket. It was already almost too warm for wool.

“Yes, what is it?” Saul pinched his nose, squinted. “What?”

David had practiced what he would say. Very evenly, in a voice as neutral as he could make it. “What's her name, Dad?”

Saul's gaze was thick, like something sticky, heavy with hate. David steeled himself for a blow, his father's curses, but he had to let him know he knew.

His father gave him a false, condescending smile. “Hope,” he said, and spun on his heel and was away.

29.

“Watch!” Ellis said as they started the last set. It was the finals. They had made it. “Watch!” he said, he always said that. All around them, people were watching
them
. His father was there, his sister looking like Dumbo's mother beside him. The Kimbroughs were there. But Ellis meant
watch what they do. Watch me
. Because in tennis, as in chess, you had to have a plan. You had to be ahead of the other players. You had to think: I'll do this so he'll do that, and then wham! he'll be sorry. But David thought, at that fraction of a moment before Ellis watched the first serve across the net: I have to watch Ellis, he always gives me the cues. I need him.

They were like an instrument, playing together. All the parts fit. Yet there was something different in Ellis' play this year, a greater aggressiveness, a tendency to take a little more of the credit, with shots that made the crowd go
Ahh!
, the way they sometimes did for David, who was showier, if he had the right set-up. Ellis was stronger, this year, with a look of joy and determination. He had become ambitious.

David asked the coach, when all the yelling was over, when there had been hugs and handshakes: “Who was watching?” He wanted to know about coaches and scouts. The coach named three schools, disappointingly small. “There's a lot ahead, still,” he said, catching the expression in David's eyes. “And it's not football,” he added, ruefully. David tasted a bitterness in his mouth, which was still gritty with sand. The real tennis was played on club courts, he knew. This high school shit—who was he kidding? There were boys his age headed for the US Open. He was already behind.