“Do you know what you do sometimes?” Sarah asked him. “You let your own rhetoric run away with you until you don’t even know what you’re saying. It’s like when you try to tell me about Adlai Stevenson and end up making him sound like the crucified Jesus. I certainly hope you have better control than that in your teaching, or you may have a lot of very bewildered students on your hands.”
After a little while – however long it took him to decide not to be angry with her – he said “I think we’d better let the teaching and the students be my business, don’t you?”
Then he went away to hide in his workroom, fairly confident that he’d delivered his last sentence with the right kind of quiet dignity.
She had overstepped the line a little that time, impugning his “control” as a teacher. For once, in these small but increasingly frequent quarrels, she had been ever so slightly in the wrong, and she would probably acknowledge it. Oh, she wouldn’t apologize right away; more likely she would wait until all the difficulties of the day and the evening were gone, until they could lie down together at last, dappled in the pale light and shadow of the rising Kansas moon; then, in his arms, she might say she was sorry. Or maybe, by that time, it would no longer be necessary.
“Hey, Laura?” he asked his daughter one day. “How come you never make your bed in the morning?”
“I don’t know. What’s the point of making it when I’ll just be getting back into it?”
“Well, I guess that’s reasonable, in a way,” he said. “So what’s the point of combing your hair when it’ll just get tangled up again? What’s the point of taking a shower when you’ll just get dirty again? And maybe we could all agree not to flush the toilet more than once a month – does that sound like a good idea?”
He moved in close then and wagged one forefinger at her cringing, wincing face. “Look, baby. It seems to me you’ve got a choice here. Either you’re going to live like a civilized girl or you’re going to live like a rat. You think it over and decide, okay? And I’d like to have your decision sometime during the next thirty seconds.”
There would probably have been more scenes like that, worse and worse, if it hadn’t been for Sarah’s steadying influence. It was Sarah, as he tried to tell her many times, who made these months endurable. She was scarcely five years older than her stepdaughter, but she was always quietly in charge. She would go about the daily housework never seeming to notice whether Laura helped her with the cleaning and cooking or not; she would drive Laura into town to keep her appointments with Dr. McHale; several times, while waiting for the psychiatric hour to be over, she shopped around and bought a few tasteful, stylish clothes for her.
At school, in his classrooms or his office, Michael began to allow himself a comfortable sense that things would be all right when he got home, and they usually were. On their best days, during the time of peace and measured alcohol in the late afternoon, the three of them could sometimes sit conversing as pleasantly as if Laura were a child of the people next door – an “interesting” girl, too young to offer much in the way of originality, but deferential and well-mannered as she sipped at her can of Coca-Cola. Still, none of them were fooled: they all knew it would take a great deal more than this before she was well.
Once he came home and found her in the big easy chair, wearing a fresh new dress and absorbed in the Modern Library edition of The Scarlet Letter.
“Good,” he told her. “I’m glad you’re reading again, dear. That’s a great book, too.”
“I know,” she said, and as he passed the chair he looked down to see what page she was on: 98. He went into his workroom then and hunched over many student papers and student poems – the whole trick of teaching was to get this part of it out of the way in a day or two, if you could – and it must have been two hours later when he walked back past Laura’s chair and saw she was still on page 98.
Well, shit, what was the matter with this kid? Hadn’t that asshole psychiatrist done anything at all for her? What the hell could she be thinking about behind those big, blue, heartbreaking eyes?
Sarah was there in the kitchen, opening a tray of ice cubes to fix a drink for him because it was five o’clock, and all he could say was “Oh, Jesus, you’re wonderful.”
He had to wait until they were in bed that night, with two closed doors and a stretch of hallway to muffle the soft-spoken words, before he told her about Laura and the book.
“Oh,” she said. “And you’re sure it was the same page?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why would I tell you as creepy a thing as that about my own child if I wasn’t sure?”
After a thoughtful pause she said “Well, I suppose I see what you mean by ‘creepy,’ though it might be better if we could find a more useful word. Still, it’s very – distressing, isn’t it. Because I thought she was getting so much better, didn’t you?”
Early in the winter, when they’d decided it was time for Laura to take up some constructive activity, a new commercial typewriting school was opened for business in town. Sarah’s own typing was “rusty,” she said, and Laura had never really learned to type at all; it would be helpful for both of them to sign up for the course together.
So they went off to their typing class nearly every day, on a schedule carefully arranged to leave time for Laura’s psychiatric sessions, and Michael hesitantly assumed it would be a good thing. Typing was a mindless kind of work that could sometimes take your thoughts away from your troubles – unless, of course, you were trying to type up your own poems. And he remembered days and nights long ago, in New York and Larchmont and Tonapac, when he would flinch and curse the machine for all the dumb fucking mistakes it made in his lines, when he would rip out the paper and roll in new paper and make still other and worse mistakes, until it was time for Lucy to take over. She had always been able to type the poems for him quickly and perfectly at one sitting, like the most desirable kind of secretary.
One afternoon a few weeks after the typing course began, Laura came blundering into the house to confront him while Sarah was putting the car away in the garage.
“Look, Dad, it’s a thing I just can’t do, okay?” she said, and her face and neck were red with the need for tears. “You know how some people can never learn a foreign language or a musical instrument and stuff like that? Well, I can’t type, that’s all. I’ve been using two fingers for so long I don’t even understand the fucking keyboard, and they all make me feel so dumb in that class. They make me feel so dumb I want to puke.” At the word “puke” her welling eyes spilled over, and she wiped them with her hand as she went quickly down the hall to her room. It was the first time in years that he’d seen her cry.
Sarah had come in from the garage in time to witness the last of Laura’s outburst, and now she tried to explain to him: “It wasn’t a very good day. The teacher kept getting impatient with her, and a few of the other kids laughed.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “I don’t want anybody laughing at her in the shape she’s in. I don’t want anybody laughing at her ever, for that matter. I’ve always thought ridicule is about the most hateful thing in the world.”
Sarah gave him a brief, testy look. “Then why do you ridicule her all the time?”
And he might have said “That’s different,” if he hadn’t caught himself. Instead he said “Well, okay, you’re right. I do, and it’s a thing I’ll have to watch. Even so, I must say it was kind of a relief to see her cry. After all this zombie behavior, I mean.”
“Well, now you’ve lost me completely,” Sarah said. “Ridicule is the most hateful thing in the world, but crying is good for you? Crying is ‘therapy’ or something? Isn’t that the kind of thinking we’re all expected to outgrow by the time we’re about sixteen years old?”
She walked firmly away into the kitchen then, though it was much too early for dinner preparations, and he knew better than to follow her. He stood slumped at one of the storm windows, looking out over flat fields mottled white and gray from ye
sterday’s light snowfall, and his heart contracted with foreboding. If Sarah ever did decide to leave him (“Well, now you’ve lost me completely”) he believed he knew how it would feel.
Things seemed to improve at the typing school. The two girls would often come home laughing together, and at the end of the course they displayed for him, with mock pride and ill-concealed pleasure, their two corny little certificates of graduation.
“Well, but I mean how did she manage to graduate?” Michael asked as soon as Laura was out of earshot.
“Oh, she caught on to the knack of it eventually,” Sarah said. “It’s only a knack, after all; that’s what I tried to tell her from the beginning, and what the teacher told her too. And I think she’ll be much better prepared for college now, don’t you?”
There were other preparations. Sarah had found the shopping facilities “skimpy” here in the college town, so she began taking Laura into the nearest neighboring city, where the airport was and where any girl could find whole streets of fashionable shops and stores; that was how Laura acquired a plentiful, good-looking new wardrobe for winter and spring. She would surely be among the best-dressed girls in all of Billings State, and nobody would ever guess how she’d looked as a vagabond.
It was just after he saw their car return from one of those shopping trips, on an unseasonably warm afternoon at the end of January, that Laura opened the front door, thrust her bright, pretty head inside and called “Dad? Okay if I borrow your bike?”
“Sure, baby,” he called back. “Take it away.”
And he went to the front windows to watch them go. Laura might have done everything she could to wreck her health in the past few years, but she was as strong as Sarah when they pedaled swiftly up the road together and into the distance, with their hair streaming. He couldn’t have said which was the more light or fleet or graceful of those lovely, fast-disappearing girls.
On the day they took Laura to her four-girl suite in a sophomore residence hall, with all her clothes, there were hugs and kisses but no prolonged goodbyes. They would be living only a few miles apart; they’d be seeing one another from time to time, and so there was nothing to say now but good luck – oh, good luck, dear – and so long.
The house was suddenly ample again. It had resumed the look and feel of the house they’d been so pleased to find on first coming to Kansas: the best house either of them had ever known, the surprisingly well-designed, modern house where everything worked.
“Well, baby,” he said, “I could never have gotten through these months without you, and neither could she.”
They were standing in the living room like visitors who haven’t yet been asked to sit down, and he reached out to clasp both of her hands so that she’d look up at him. What he wanted now was to take her down the hall to their bedroom, where they could have each other all afternoon and long past nightfall, never caring what sounds their gasps and cries might make in a house that was once again, and finally, their own.
“I think you’re glorious,” he told her.
“Well,” she said, “you’re not so bad yourself.”
She was allowing him to steer her easily out of the living room into the hall, and he took that as a heartening testament of faith. However cool and crisp this girl might sometimes seem, she was still the girl who had first suggested, in the restaurant down the road from her prim little guidance-counselor’s office, that there was a motel not far away. Oh, Lord God; oh, thank Christ Almighty, Sarah would always be a girl who wanted to get laid.
And he had her. He had her all to himself on that Kansas prairie for a year and a half and more before the time came to fulfill the promise he’d made.
“How does year after next strike you?” she had asked him the year before last – time gets away from everybody – and so there was nothing to feel but pleasure and pride at Christmastime, in 1971, when she told him she was pregnant.
Chapter Six
During the months of Sarah’s pregnancy they took a number of automobile trips around the Middle West – discovering the fucking country, as Michael explained it – and once, when they found themselves in central Illinois, he decided to look up Paul Maitland.
It would be chancy but worth the risk. Michael had been nagged for a long time by the dismaying memory of that night at the Nelsons’, and now a jovial afternoon in Paul Maitland’s company might easily set things right.
Sweating in a roadside phone booth, dropping dimes into the coinbox while enormous trailer trucks came roaring up and moaned away beyond the glass, he got through at last to Paul Maitland’s voice.
“Mike! Good to hear from you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I what?”
“I said are you sure it’s – you know – good to hear from me, is all. I thought I might be on your shit list.”
“Ah, don’t be silly, man. We were both smashed, we traded punches, and yours was the better punch.”
“Well, shit, buddy, yours was all right too,” Michael said, and he was breathing more easily now. “I could feel that punch of yours for about a week.”
Paul asked him where he was calling from; then there came long and explicit directions for how to get to the Maitlands’ place. Leaving the phone booth, Michael was so pleased that he held up one hand to make a triumphant circle of thumb and forefinger in the sunshine, and Sarah smiled at him behind the windshield of the parked car.
“… Well, we’re a long way from Delancey Street, old timer,” Michael was saying an hour later as they sat around the Maitlands’ living room. “Long way from the White Horse, too.” He didn’t like the bogus heartiness in his own voice but couldn’t seem to suppress it – couldn’t even manage, in fact, to stop being the only talker in the room.
Paul acknowledged his nostalgia with pleasant little mumbles and a melancholy smile or two; Peggy remained silent – but then, Peggy had been known to remain silent for hours – and Sarah hadn’t yet been able to contribute anything beyond small courtesies.
The Maitlands had two blond little girls now, both born during the years since Michael had left Putnam County: they came shyly in from another room to be introduced, then got away again as soon as politeness would permit. And their mother rose and followed them to wherever they’d gone, staying long enough to suggest she preferred their company to that of the visitors.
In the silence Michael noticed for the first time that Paul was wearing a white shirt and well-pressed khaki pants instead of the old denim outfit; then he sat back and looked around to inspect what little could be seen of the house. He knew there would no longer be a toolbox at the front door with muddy work shoes ranked beside it; even so, he could never have pictured Paul Maitland enclosed in as tidy and prim, as middle-class a living room as this, and he wondered if Diana would think he was “dying” here.
“So how do you like teaching, Paul?” he asked, because it seemed once again that somebody ought to say something.
“Well, it’s difficult if you’ve never done it before, but it can be satisfying, too, in some ways. I imagine you’ve found the same thing.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, it’s about the same for me. You getting enough time for your own work?”
“Oh, not as much as I’d like,” Paul said. “I’ve found I have to do an awful lot of reading just to keep ahead of my lectures. I came out here knowing almost nothing about African art, for example, and that’s what a great many of the kids want to learn.”
Only now, with a puckering of the palate and throat, did Michael fully comprehend what was the matter with this visit: There hadn’t yet been any offer of a drink, or even of a beer. What’s the deal? he wanted to say. You off the sauce, Paul? But he kept his aching mouth shut. He knew what being off the sauce meant, and he guessed he’d better not inquire into Paul’s case. That kind of thing was a man’s own business.
Then Peggy came back into the room wheeling a little cart that carried a coffee service and a plate of big raisin cookies on its
top tray, with four cups and saucers and spoons tinkling on the tray beneath.
“Those look wonderful,” Sarah said of the cookies. “Did you make them yourself?”
And Peggy modestly divulged that she did all her own baking, even her own bread.
“Really?” Sarah said. “Well, that’s very – enterprising.”
Michael declined a cookie – it looked like a meal in itself – and waited until most of his unwanted coffee was down before he opened a new topic with his host:
“I see where your brother-in-law’s made quite a name for himself.”
“Oh, that, yes,” Paul said. “Well, it’s remarkable how a play can sometimes catch fire commercially that way. It’s made enormous changes in their lives – mostly changes for the better, of course, because they’ve got more money coming in than they’ll ever need, but possibly a few for the worse, as well.”
And to expand on what he meant by changes for the worse, he told of a few days that he and Peggy had spent with the Morins in New York last year. Diana had looked “lost” in the luxurious high-rise apartment that was now her home – he couldn’t remember ever having seen her look that way before, even as a child – and the boys had seemed bewildered, too. Ralph Morin had been almost constantly on the phone, talking business, or else on the run: there were urgent meetings every day about the show, or about other, future shows.
“It was all a little – uncomfortable,” Paul concluded. “Still, I imagine it’ll settle out in time.”
Michael replaced his empty cup in its faintly chattering saucer.
“You ever hear from Tom Nelson, Paul?”
“Oh, we’ve exchanged a few letters. He writes terrifically funny letters, as I’m sure you know.”
“Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’ve never had a letter from Tom. He used to send me little cartoons once in a while, with captions, but no letters.” And even that was an exaggeration: there had been only one cartoon, a caricature of Michael frowning sternly in an academic cap and gown, with the caption: ARCHITECT OF YOUNG MINDS.