Secrets and Surprises Part 22

"No," Francie said. "We won't."

"We won't call," Perry said, his voice overlaying hers.

"Do you think you'll get a bolt for your door, Francie?" the boy said.

Francie was looking at the sofa cushion.

"She learns fast," the boy said to Perry. "She learned the game and she knows what to do now. I've actually performed quite a service for you, Francie."

The boy's T-shirt said NATIONAL HOTEL, BLOCK ISLAND, R.I. When he got up to cross the room, the fly fell off his temple. Under the smeared glue Perry could see blood-the fly had been glued there to cover a sore.

"Of course, I could stay much longer," the boy said. He paused dramatically. "But I hate to drive in rush hour," he said.

Then he was gone. Neither of them moved toward the door. All the time he had been pulling knives out of his pocket, Perry had seen the b.u.t.t of a gun sticking out of his pants pocket. Except for coming together, neither of them moved again until they heard the car screeching out of the driveway. Then Francie exhaled and he put his arm around her. He noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling. When he locked his fingers together, he could feel the joints vibrating against each other.

"It's the first time I ever wanted to be old," Francie said. "I thought I was going to die."

They went to the kitchen to call the police, but the boy had cut the phone cord. The receiver, with a stub of cord, was placed on the top of the refrigerator, in a basket of apples. He had also slashed through one of Francie's self-portraits, the one that had been propped in the kitchen for months. He had slashed her head until it was unrecognizable, but the body was untouched. Francie put her hand over her mouth when she saw that. And since there was no way to call the police, Perry went back to her.

"What if Meagan had been there?" she whispered. "And what was he saying about Freed-was there any sense to that?"

Perry snapped off the radio. For the first time since coming down the stairs and seeing the boy, Francie was crying. She was crying as hard as she had been the night before, when she got to the top of the stairs.

"All right, let's take it from the top," T.W. said, banging a Bic pen instead of a baton on Perry's table instead of on a conductor's podium.

The band started up, perfectly together, until suddenly Roger, swaying back and forth, wearing his Harvard letter sweater and a pair of cut-offs, lifted his trumpet and blared out the first bars of "Young At Heart."

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," Borka said. She cupped her hand and pretended to be speaking into a microphone. "And now I'd like to do an old favorite of mine: *As Time Goes By.' " Borka leaned into her hand again.

Everybody in the band was convulsed except T.W., who said, "All right, you p.i.s.s-holes, we get the song down right or we practice all night."

Borka stepped back behind the ba.s.s. Roger put down his trumpet.

"Here we go," T.W. said, tapping the pen.

The band started playing, perfectly together. Less than ten seconds into the song, Roger picked up his trumpet and loudly blew the beginning of "Young At Heart" again.

"Oh f.u.c.k," T.W. said, shouting above everyone's laughter. "Somebody take his pipe away from him."

Borka leaned her ba.s.s against the wall and lifted the ashtray with the pipe of gra.s.s burning in it from the floor and put it on the table by T.W. Roger glared at her.

"If you screw us up again, I'm going to stab your eyes out," T.W. said, holding out the Bic pen to Roger. Roger looked humble. T.W. was in a bad mood because he had agreed to play for a bar mitzvah, on Long Island, and he hated things like that. n.o.body in the band wanted to do it either, except that they all needed the money. Halfway through the next song, there was more activity. d.i.c.kie was wrestling with Roger. They all turned and saw Roger's horn lifted in the air. d.i.c.kie had gotten it away from him and was handing it to Borka.

"You're all a bunch of f.u.c.king imbeciles," T.W. said and threw the pen into the center of the group and slammed out of the house.

"I got his horn! He's going to sit this song out!" d.i.c.kie called after T.W., but it was no use. The door slammed before d.i.c.kie had finished speaking. d.i.c.kie sighed and handed Roger his horn back.

"What's going on?" Perry said, coming downstairs. Everybody looked at him gloomily, and no one answered. "What?" Perry said.

"Roger made T.W. mad," Borka said.

" *You must remember this,' " Roger boomed, a capella.

" *A kiss is just a kiss,' " Borka sang, in an unnaturally high voice.

Roger picked up his trumpet. He thrust out his hips and raised his horn high, over his head, playing "As Time Goes By."

"I think he's getting not very funny," d.i.c.kie said, brushing past Perry to get a beer in the kitchen. "I think Roger's acting like a moron."

The rest of the band sat slumped on the floor, enduring Roger's song.

"All right!" T.W. screamed, rushing back into the house. "On your feet. Roger, you put your horn away and go sit across the room. We're going to do this practice so we can do the job and get it over with."

"Why do we have to play at a circ.u.mcision?" Roger said.

"Shut up, Roger," T.W. said.

"I'm going to play *As Time Goes By' at the circ.u.mcision."

"Go sit in that chair, Roger," T.W. said, pointing to Perry's Morris chair. "If we have to tie you into it and stuff your sweater into your mouth, we're going to do that."

Roger skulked off to the chair. Everybody stared at him, and n.o.body smiled.

"Now let's play this f.u.c.king song," T.W. said.

Perry sighed and wandered into the kitchen to see if there was any meatloaf left over from dinner the night before. There was a small end slice, and he picked it up in his fingers and ate it. He thought about taking part of it to Francie but ate it all himself. For the past several days, not at all distracted by the band, she had been making a sketch for a huge painting she wanted to do of all her friends. They were going to be standing on the canvas holding hands, like paper dolls. It was a realistic painting except that Francie had sketched a horn in place of Roger's arm, and she had put a fox's head on T.W.'s body and a chicken head on Borka's body. T.W. and Borka were sleeping together.

It was August, and hot in the house. Several of the screens were ripped, and there were a lot of flies buzzing around. At dawn the flies would dive-bomb everybody. The last several nights, Perry had bought the newspaper so he could roll it up and hunt flies.

Francie had put her house up for sale. n.o.body had made a good offer yet, and she was getting anxious for it to be sold: she didn't feel right about taking Perry's money, and all the money she had now was what she had made from the sales at the gallery in New York where her show had opened. The show had been a success, and Francie was getting what she wanted-she was going to be famous, all of them were sure. That afternoon a man who was writing about contemporary women artists was coming to Vermont to interview her. She had gone upstairs to sketch because all of them had been teasing her. Roger had said that when the man came, he was going to open the door naked. Perry worried that Roger might really do it now that he was so stoned, but he didn't say that to Francie. He just listened carefully for the car so he could be the one who opened the door. He figured that if Roger started to throw off his clothes, the band would tackle him.

On the calendar in the kitchen was penciled: "Miner-Village Voice." It was hard to believe that someone was coming to interview Francie-that Francie was living in his house, in the first place, and that someone was coming here to interview her. He wanted to stay with her when the interview took place, but she had already told him that she didn't want him there; she didn't want any protection and, it was true, she didn't need any.

He was very proud of her. Some days he thought that his importance in life was to take care of other people-that he would be remembered as the person who housed them and looked after them: T.W.'s band was going to be famous, he was sure, and when Miner's piece came out in the Voice, Francie was going to be interviewed much more, and have more shows. It made him slightly sorry for himself that there was nothing he excelled at. He had done a good job finishing the inside of his house, but there were a lot of people who did good carpentry work.

He wanted to ask her to marry him now, before she was famous, but he didn't dare. She had had nothing but withering things to say about marriage since her own marriage had gone bad, and although she liked Nick and Anita, she also thought their togetherness was a little ridiculous. He was embarra.s.sed at what he wanted lately: to have T.W. and the band go away, to have the house to him and Francie, to marry her.

He went upstairs. She was where he had left her, painting.

"What are you doing?" he said.

She laughed at him; they both knew he was being petulant, that he was more nervous about the interview than she was. He was standing and admiring the work she had done that day when they heard the car in the driveway. Francie pretended indifference and went on painting. He looked out the window and saw the old Saab pull into the drive, and the man, the interviewer, get out of the car. He had a backpack that he put on, nudging away Perry's neighbor's puppy with his foot. The puppy kept yapping, so finally the man bent and patted it. He stood outside his car a minute, stroking the puppy's ear, not realizing that anyone was watching. He stood there, sizing everything up: the rainbow Borka had painted on the front door, the cars in the drive, the puppy running in circles, the loud music from T.W.'s band. Then he came toward the house, one hand smoothing down his hair in the back, amused-Perry was suddenly sure, from the slight smile on his that he was about to interview someone in a commune.

Perry turned away from the window to answer the door; the phone rang.

A.

Clever-Kids Story.

T.

he two clever kids are Jane and Joseph. The names alliterate. Our parents planned that-two cute kids with alliterating names, born two and a half years apart.

The summer that I was five and Joseph was seven and a half he began to tell me the clever-kids stories when we were put to bed. We lived in what had been our grandparents' house in New Hampshire-a huge barn of a house with high ceilings and rose-splotched wallpaper. My parents moved there when Joseph was four and a half and I was two. He claimed to remember New York City. It was one of the many things I envied him for: he had been born in a hospital as high as a skysc.r.a.per; I had been born in a bed in the house in New Hampshire. When my grandfather died, my parents sold their furniture and my father quit his job, and they moved to the woods of New Hampshire, into the house where our family had spent the summer. My grandmother, after my grandfather's death, moved to the warmer weather in Georgia and was able to live with a cousin whose husband had died a few years before. My grandmother came to New Hampshire in June and stayed until the first of September.

The first clever-kids story I remember was about her: the grandmother was chewing gum, and she blew a bubble so big that you could see things in it, like a mirror. The clever kids looked into the bubble and saw a robber coming in the door, and as the grandmother began to breathe in and retract the bubble they saw the robber getting smaller and smaller, but coming closer. The grandmother didn't see anything because she was squinting, concentrating on making the bubble disappear. Just as the bubble was about to disappear, the clever kids whirled around and overpowered the robber. They took out their guns and shot him dead.

Nothing about the stories seemed odd to me. That we would have real guns seemed perfectly possible. Anything Joseph said seemed reasonable and likely. He told me that he could fly, and I believed him. Partly it was because when he told me the stories late at night-when he crept into my bed and awed or scared me and then ended the stories in some satisfactory way-he seemed so authoritative that I couldn't help but believe him. His whispering made the stories more emphatic. The secret ritual of climbing into my bed made them something we shared privately, and things privately shared must be important-and therefore true. When he told me he could fly I didn't challenge him. I had never heard of Peter Pan, and had never even been to a circus to see the trapeze performers, but I could believe that a person, particularly my brother Joseph, could fly. "Where do you fly?" I whispered. He thought about it. "I fly by the lake," he said. "I've flown on the main beach. One Sunday when it rained and there was n.o.body around."

I remembered the day he was talking about. It was a Sunday in springtime and it had rained for three days, but the rain was really pouring down that Sunday. And Joseph put on his black rubber boots and his raincoat and said he was going to the beach. My mother grabbed him by the arm and said he was not. My father told Joseph to go ahead, then turned to my mother and said he admired his son's spirit. Sebastian was visiting, and she started to argue but backed down when Sebastian asked them please not to fight. In many ways Sebastian was like one of us: he put his hands over his ears if someone said something harsh. Once when he hit his finger with a hammer, I saw him cry. Sebastian had left New York the same year my parents did; my father worked as a carpenter with two other men, and Sebastian kept the books.

My grandmother did not like Sebastian. My father liked him very much, and my mother tolerated him. Joseph and I had mixed emotions: he was always kind to us, but when he was with adults he seemed childish, so we didn't respect him as we'd respect an adult, but when he played with us he seemed reserved-the way an adult would. When I was seven, when I saw him cry after he hit his thumb, my father took me aside and told me that sometimes Sebastian's reactions were a little out of whack because in New York he had had a breakdown. He explained to me what a breakdown was. I was fascinated and wanted to tell Joseph, but somehow I knew that he was the storyteller. In fact, I started to tell him, but he interrupted with his own Sebastian story: in the Bible they shot him full of arrows, for being evil, but a beautiful lady pulled out all the arrows, without causing him any pain. "What happened to the holes?" I said. "All the arrows were shot into his face. She pulled them out so carefully that they just left little holes. Whiskers grew out of them."

As Joseph was fabricating stories that spring, strange things were happening that we didn't know about. We knew things were going on, but we were involved in collecting seash.e.l.ls from the main beach, playing hide and seek in the woods with Billy LaPierre, whose family had the camp next to ours, and the secret nighttime stories. We knew our mother was irritable and our father silent. We knew that Sebastian didn't come around very often. We did not know that our mother had had an abortion, and that Sebastian had driven her to Montreal, where she had it performed illegally, and against my father's wishes. I overheard her, one night, saying to him, "Where would we get the money for another baby? You won't commit yourself to anything. You could have worked for a prosperous business, but you hooked up with Frankie and Phil Renshaw. I'm already surrounded by babies: Sebastian in tears every time I turn around, you b.u.mming around, your mother coming every summer and expecting me to do everything but wipe her chin."

I don't think that my mother loved Sebastian-just that after the abortion, when he felt she and Sebastian had both turned against him, they began to spend more time with each other, discussing it. Then my father became jealous, and my mother laughed at him for thinking anything so stupid, and her taunting made my father bitter, and finally silent. Things were so bad that my grandmother came in June and left before the month was over, pretending that she felt guilty for having left her cousin.

Sebastian and Joseph and I drove her to Boston to get a plane. Everyone knew that it was strange my parents didn't go. My father said that he had to work, and my mother offered to go along for the ride, looking very ashamed, but my grandmother said no-she wanted some time alone with her two favorite children. As I recall, she hardly talked to us, but she gave us both money. On the way back, Sebastian bought us large vanilla ice cream cones. We sat on the gra.s.s beside the ice cream stand, bees swarming around the trash can, Joseph more interested in watching them than in licking his cone. He got ice cream all down his shirt, and when we got home my mother complained about that instead of thanking Sebastian for what he had done. We ran outside as soon as we could and hid our five-dollar bills in an old tackle box and buried the box in the nook of a tree, because Joseph said we should.

At dinner my mother asked if Grandma had given us a treat before she left. It was all she said about her having left. Joseph tried to evade the question.

"Because your father has stopped speaking doesn't mean that you should stop, Joseph," she said. She laid down her fork and Sebastain laid his down too.

"I think she gave them both some money," Sebastian said, looking at me because he knew I'd never have the courage to avoid a direct question.

"Yes," I said.

My mother smiled. "She said she was going to give you money to buy a treat when she and I had breakfast this morning."

Sebastian picked up his fork and began to eat his salad.

"Did you put it somewhere safe?" she said.

Joseph looked at me-a warning look.

"What's the big secret?" my mother said.

"Look," my father said, "it isn't necessary to fill us in on little details. We don't need to know everything. They should just do whatever they feel like doing."

My mother frowned. "That's unfair," she said, "to challenge me in the guise of protecting the children."

"I was aiming it at you. I love children. I wouldn't put the children on the spot."

"Stop it," she said, "or I'm going to leave the table."

"Take Sebastian with you. There's nearly a full moon tonight-good night for a walk."

"Why don't you two make up?" Sebastian said.

"Why don't I get a direct answer from my children before the conversation veers off again?" she said. She turned to me. Everybody knew I was the easiest mark.

"We pretended, we-played pirates, and we buried the ten dollars in a box in the hole of a tree."

Joseph had not said we were pirates, and I thought I had been very clever.

My mother looked at me. "All right," she said. "I don't see why there had to be such a secret."

That night, in bed, Joseph didn't tell a story. Instead, we talked about how something had been wrong at dinner. Finally, proud of my invented story, I mentioned the buried money.

"She wasn't even mad," I said. "We can get the money tomorrow."

"She wasn't mad at you, but she was mad at me because I wouldn't answer."

"We can buy candy down at the store all month," I said.

There was a long silence. Then Joseph said, "The money's gone."

I didn't question it. He whispered, "The money's gone," and suddenly I knew that it was, that it was punishment for my having told the secret. Before we fell asleep he relented a little. "It might get put back somehow," he said. But when we whispered the next night it wasn't about the money, and we never dug for it or mentioned it again.

For years I forgot about it. I remembered it recently, riding the bus; I looked out the window and saw a squirrel run up a tree very much like the tree where we had buried the box. All at once I felt so sentimental I had to concentrate hard not to cry. I had remembered that there was something that was his and mine, that it was still there, and that I could go and get it. I got off the bus and walked to my room. It was a nice room with walls painted oyster-white, and the bare walls made me think of the rose-covered wallpaper all through the house in New Hampshire, and of what Sebastian had told me years before about the hospital he went to when he had his breakdown-how he would study the plain white walls and know that he had to get out of that place. The hairline cracks in them would appear in his dreams; imagined smudges would make him wake up, in a fit of anxiety. His obsession with the walls was only making him crazier.

In 1969 Joseph died in Vietnam. My mother received official notification, then a letter from a friend of his that was full of praise for his valor, his wonderful sense of humor, his skill with a rifle. It was an odd letter, one that the man probably would not have sent if he had thought it over. There was a paragraph near the end praising Joseph for having changed the man's taste in music, for Joseph's having explained what was really important musically. A list of several meaningful songs followed. The letter concluded mournfully, and he signed it "G.o.d bless." I read it over and over, all summer, and at the end, every time, I would hear Red Skelton's voice saying the "G.o.d bless." The man who had written the letter was obviously heartbroken, yet it just wasn't the kind of letter to send. He was alive and Joseph was not. He seemed to give equal weight to a sense of humor and rifle skills. What sort of person could he be?

Instead of going to the main beach, I went to the dock and sat at the end of it with my feet in the water and the letter beside me, carefully closed in a book so it wouldn't get wet.

He had a sense of humor, all right. He had such a fine sense of humor that he laughed when I told him to go to Canada.

Every day I sat on the dock, and when the sun went down I walked back to the house and had dinner.

For eight years my father has not lived in the house. He and my mother are not divorced, but the other day I saw an ad she had circled in the Village Voice about Haitian divorces. On and off, Curtis lives with her. Curtis is Phil Renshaw's younger brother, who works for Phil now that my father is gone.

One day at the end of the summer when my brother was killed, my mother walked down to the dock. I was smoking gra.s.s, as usual-staring out at the water. When she came to the dock I was thinking about how often my friends and I thought ironically, and how irony had been absent from my childhood. The memory of the conversation about how much my father liked children began to come back to me. I was wondering if children miss a lot of ironies, or whether that had been a different world and everything in it really hadn't been ironic.

My mother sat down. She didn't say anything about what I was doing. Finally she said, "Your father is totally irrational. He holds it against me. He thinks that G.o.d did this to curse us, to even the score for that abortion I had years and years ago." She took off her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was wet where she sat. She was sitting in a puddle on the dock. "Can you imagine your father being religious?" she said.

"No," I said. "I can't imagine him living in Mexico with a twenty-four-year-old girl either." I did not say that I found it hard to believe that she lived with Curtis Renshaw. He was plain-faced, less willing to work at anything than even my father. And he was vain-he always washed with a special soap. There was a plastic soap dish in the tub with a bar of putty-colored soap in it that was Curtis' soap.

"Your father loves you," she said. "He should pay more attention to you. When Joseph died he lost all perspective-he's forgotten what he's got."

I stared at our four feet, spooky and slender in the water.

"He should have sent the money for the plane ticket. He shouldn't have said he was going to and then not done it." She brushed the hair out of her eyes. "Is that part of why you're blue?"