NOONAN WAS NOT in love with Nan Beverly and didn’t see any reason why he should be, though his was a distinctly minority view. Almost all the other boys in the school were openly envious of his good fortune. After all, Nan had been going out with him for over six months, much longer than she’d dated anyone else. They couldn’t understand why either, because he didn’t seem to be working that hard to keep her. He didn’t even buy her presents. And when she flirted with other boys in the hopes of making him jealous, a tactic that had never failed her, he didn’t seem to care, and it was always the would-be rival who ended up slinking off. Lucy wasn’t jealous—he had Sarah, after all—but he did subscribe to the consensus view that his friend had no idea how lucky he was.
“You shouldn’t lead her on,” Sarah told him one day when they were walking home from school and Lucy was home sick with a cold. They’d not been alone much since the night he’d given her a ride on the Indian. It was winter now, too cold for her to paint in his unheated “studio” above the Rexall and too cold for the motorcycle, which meant he couldn’t offer her a lift at the end of their foursome evenings. Unless he was mistaken, she was relieved that there were so few opportunities for them to be alone, as if their conversation that night had been too intimate, that they’d come dangerously close to…what?
“How am I leading her on?” he said. He hadn’t told Nan he loved her, nor even implied it, so far as he remembered. Of course he hadn’t come right out and told her he didn’t, but was he obliged to make such a declaration? Sarah seemed to think so.
“It’s just that she really likes you,” she said.
“Well—”
“And you don’t like her nearly so much.”
“You know this?”
“I do.”
“So…what? You’re saying I should break up with her?”
“No, I’m saying she’s vulnerable. If you were honest with her, she could move on to somebody else.”
“That would leave me without a girlfriend,” he couldn’t help pointing out. And it would also be the end of their comfortable foursome.
“I’m your friend.”
“But you’re Lucy’s girlfriend.”
“So tell Nan you just want to be friends.”
Unfortunately, that simply wasn’t true. Though he wasn’t in love with her, he was still looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant future when she’d give herself to him. She probably would’ve done so already, if he’d pressed. He was tempted to point this out to Sarah and maybe get a little credit for gentlemanly restraint. Anyway, in his view, if Nan was vulnerable to anything it was her own vanity. And if Sarah was also worried about protecting her innocence, she was mistaken there as well. In the time they’d been going out, Nan had become increasingly obsessed with sex, or at least the idea of it. “Do you think they’ve done it yet?” she often asked him of this or that couple. To Noonan these constant speculations were as tiresome as the name-the-kids game she was always playing with Lucy.
In the beginning he thought Nan found sex talk exciting, a kind of verbal foreplay, but he gradually came to suspect that she was deeply anxious and even more deeply conflicted. On the one hand, she didn’t want to have sex before her friends did, but neither did she want them to precede her into that promised land. She’d been among the last to get her driver’s license, which had been embarrassing enough. She refused to visit Noonan’s squalid flat above the Rexall, though on nights when her father let her have the Caddy she liked to drive him out to the old Whitcombe Estate and park in the trees near the entrance. Most nights there’d be two or three other cars in the vicinity, cars they’d sometimes recognize as belonging to friends. At first they’d just necked in the front seat, but lately things had gotten more interesting in the back. Nan now let Noonan put his hands up under her sweater and bra, which was nice, and sometimes they left the car running and the heater on, and she’d take the sweater and bra off, which was nicer still. It was a big backseat, yet Nan wouldn’t recline all the way, claiming that they might be tempted to go too far. He suspected the real reason was that she liked to keep an eye on the other cars. Whenever they’d done as much as they were going to do in the backseat and crawled back into the front, she’d wipe the foggy windshield clear and wonder out loud exactly what people parked nearby were doing. She hated to think it might be more interesting and exciting than necking and groping, but she was also distressed, he could tell, by the possibility that she was the only girl out here with her shirt off and her breasts exposed. What she really would’ve liked was to sneak a peek through those other fogged-up windows, not to actually watch anybody making out, but simply to see if they were ahead or behind her on the passion curve. Nan wanted to be somewhere in the safe middle. Her problem was that the middle, when it came to sex, was hard to locate. Worse, it changed week to week.
Of all the couples she was curious about, none occupied her thoughts more frequently than Lucy and Sarah. “How far do you think they’ve gone?” she asked at least once a week. He told her he had no idea, though in truth he’d wondered the same thing. Lucy, he’d bet, was terrified of sex. Sarah, he imagined, was not. He supposed Lucy’s fear was trump, but who knew?
“They haven’t yet,” Nan told him triumphantly one night in the backseat as she hooked her bra in back and adjusted her breasts in it. Noonan had some painful adjustments of his own to make. “I asked Sarah this afternoon, and she said they hadn’t.”
“There,” he said. “Now you know.”
Then she was visited by an unwelcome thought. “She could be lying.”
“I doubt it,” Noonan said, and it was true; he did. Though wishful thinking might have been part of it.
“Everybody lies sometimes,” Nan said, suddenly serious, her eyes glistening.
Which made Noonan wonder if Sarah was right and Nan was vulnerable to something other than her own vanity. It was possible, and he didn’t want to hurt her. He did want to have sex with her, though, and Sarah’s advising him to walk away struck him as monstrously unfair. Okay, it was true. He didn’t love Nan. But he needed a more compelling reason than that. That very compelling reason was Sarah’s to give, but so far she hadn’t, or even hinted at it, and he doubted she ever would. Though when he scrolled back over their recent conversation, one thing did stand out. When she’d said that she was his friend, and Noonan had said, yes, but you’re Lucy’s girlfriend, she hadn’t confirmed that as a fact. She’d just said he should suggest to Nan that they be good friends. Did she expect him to prove himself as good and decent and selfless as her present boyfriend before he could hope to replace him in her affections? He hoped not, because he wasn’t that good or decent or selfless. That much should’ve been obvious. After all, he was his father’s son.
THERE WAS no shower or bathtub in his flat above the Rexall, just a commode and a small sink from the days when the whole floor had been rented as office space. Back in the fall the lack of plumbing fixtures hadn’t mattered much because he showered every day after practice. On Saturday or Sunday he went home with a full bag of dirty laundry and used the washer and dryer. He promised his mother that when football season was over she’d see him more often because he’d need to shower there, though when the time came he joined the Y instead. It didn’t cost that much and was only a block away. He also discovered a Laundromat around the corner where one of the dryers, if you knew the trick, worked for free, so he actually went home less, not more. After the first snow he’d put Dec’s Indian up for the winter, and the Borough was just too far away to walk there, or so he told himself. But the real reason he seldom went home anymore was that he couldn’t bear to be around his mother, whose deepening serenity he found very unsettling. At Nell’s, his father reminded him from time to time that she missed him, that it had been a long time since he’d been to see her, and he always promised to visit, his father’s wry smile suggesting every time that he knew he wouldn’t.
But in late March his brother David found him at Ikey Lubin’s and
said that his mother wanted to see him, that she couldn’t understand why he’d stayed away so long, that she had something she needed to talk to him about. He’d promised to stop by on Saturday afternoon, and because he’d said this in front of the Lynches, he actually did, lugging along a big bag of dirty clothes. It was supposed to snow like hell that night, the last big storm of the winter, so it would be good to get that job over with. He could find out what his mother wanted, assuming she still remembered, while his clothes were tumbling. Once there, though, he decided he couldn’t face her yet and went directly into the laundry room and got a giant load going in the washer, then climbed up on the dryer, crossed his legs and read Ralph Ellison, whom they’d be discussing in honors the following week. He’d just transferred his stuff into the dryer when the door opened and there she stood.
“Mom,” he said. “Hi. I was just coming to find you.”
When they hugged, she felt feverish and smelled strongly of sleep and medicine. “Don’t you want to go into the living room?” he said when she pulled up a rickety plastic chair and sat down.
“No, I like it here,” she said dreamily, closing her eyes like a cat. “It’s peaceful.”
“You’re kidding, right?” he said, studying her closely. Peaceful? The dryer was old and noisy, and the washer, when the load got unbalanced, bounced off the wall like an epileptic.
“Sometimes, when I’m tired of watching TV or reading magazines, I come in here and just sit and think.”
If he’d been surprised back in the fall to realize how much his father had aged, he was equally surprised now to discover how young his mother looked. If anything, she looked younger than she had a decade ago. She’d put on weight, for one thing, which had smoothed out the anxiety wrinkles on her face and neck. Her frame had always been slender, almost fragile, and when pregnant she carried her babies right out in front of her. To Noonan, as a boy, her pregnancies always looked fake, like the ones you saw on television sitcoms. And when she delivered, the extra pounds fell off immediately. This new weight was permanent, and it made her look both soft and young. She exuded a baby-powder scent these days as well, which reminded him of his father’s unkind assessment: “Your mother’s a child.” According to David there was something she wanted to talk to him about, but now she seemed completely absorbed in watching his clothes tumble past the window of the dryer, as if he was in there with them and she was waiting patiently for the end of the cycle.
Finally she said, “Remember the day you went out and gathered up all my clothes and brought them home in that broken suitcase? I was out to here and your father was so angry at me. Remember? And he warned you to leave my things in the street, but you, little as you were, you marched right out and got my suitcase out of the stream and put everything back in the best you could and trudged home on your little legs. Most of the clothes were ruined and I had to throw them away later, but there you were, my little man. I can still see you tugging that suitcase up the front steps.”
She delivered this memory as if it were a fond one, worthy of nostalgia. Her own terrible unhappiness, her desperate attempt to escape his father’s bullying—these features of the story apparently weren’t worth mentioning. He understood, of course, that what she was really nostalgic about was his former devotion to her. Back then, he’d been her little man, whereas now, a couple nights a week, he climbed onto a barstool next to the man he’d once tried so valiantly to protect her from. Which could only mean that he was coming to see things as his father did.
She closed her eyes again and was quiet for so long that Noonan fell into a reverie of his own, until he felt her eyes on him and saw that she was studying him with terrible sadness, as well as an alert awareness that her medications usually prevented. “What’s she like?” she asked him.
He knew, of course, who she was talking about, but pretended not to. “Who?”
“That woman.”
“Max?” he said, and saw how it wounded her, that he’d called her Max rather than Maxine.
“Yes, her.”
“She’s not pretty like you,” he said, because he imagined that would please her, though it didn’t seem to. “Kind of tough looking, actually. I don’t know what the attraction is, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“The attraction is she’s not me,” she said. “Do you like her?”
This was the question Noonan dreaded most. “Mom. We don’t have to talk about this.”
“Do you like her?”
“She’s a hard worker,” he said. “She doesn’t take any shit from Dad.”
“Do you like her?”
“Well enough, I guess,” he admitted lamely, aware that even so weak an endorsement was a betrayal. “I don’t dislike her.”
“You used to like me.”
“I love you, Mom.”
She looked askance at him now, as if to acknowledge that, yes, sure he loved her, but love, as everyone knew, was no answer. “She has a son.”
“Willie,” Noonan told her. “He’s a sweet kid. He’s got Down’s syndrome.” Why was he telling her this? So she wouldn’t be jealous of the woman? “They say he probably won’t live to be thirty.”
The dryer stopped just then, silence filling the room.
After a moment his mother stood to leave. “Good,” she said.
BY THE TIME Noonan left his mother’s house it had begun to snow. It was late afternoon, and the sky was low and dark. As he crossed from the Borough into the East End, streetlamps began to click on, one by one, lighting his way, as if that were necessary. He thought about heading straight downtown so he could drop off his laundry bag. From there he supposed he might go out to Nell’s, if he could find a ride. If the restaurant was busy, he could help Max behind the bar or bus tables or give Willie a hand in back, in return for which he’d be fed. But if it continued to snow as predicted, business was likely to be slow and there’d be nothing to do but talk to his father, who’d want to know if he’d gone out to see his mother, and he wasn’t anxious to recount what had happened there. He’d have to lie, say she seemed fine, that they’d had a pleasant conversation about nothing much in particular. He’d never tell him what she’d said about Willie.
On a normal Saturday night, he and Nan and Lucy and Sarah would’ve gone to a movie and maybe from there to Angelo’s for pizza or back to Ikey’s, but Mrs. Beverly had flown in from Atlanta that afternoon, and so Nan was spending the evening with her parents. Noonan had always assumed that if there was one family in Thomaston insulated from strife, it was the Beverlys, though apparently this wasn’t the case. Last week, Nan had confided to Sarah that the story her family had told everyone—that Mrs. Beverly had gone on ahead to Atlanta to prepare their new home and lives, that she and her father would join her there after her graduation—wasn’t true. In fact, her parents had separated. At issue was the rapid decline in the family’s fortune, for which Nan’s mother blamed her father, whom she considered a pale imitation of his father and grandfather, real men of business who would never have allowed the tannery to fail, any more than they would’ve frittered away on bad investments the wealth amassed by previous generations of Beverlys. A real man would have gone on the offensive, unlike Mr. Beverly, who’d chosen a more timid course, and was contesting the myriad lawsuits directed against them on technical grounds, practically conceding that these outrageous charges—that the Beverly family had not only polluted the Cayoga Stream but also knowingly poisoned the entire community—had merit. What kind of strategy was that? As a result of his cowardice their fortune was gone, except for what she’d inherited from her own parents, and she was damned if he was going to get his hands on that. Nan loved her father and sided with him as, over the long winter months, this dispute escalated. She hadn’t wanted him to agree to the trial separation, but he was as passive in defending his marriage as he’d been about defending the business. He assured his daughter the separation was only temporary, that he still loved her mother and was hoping that absence might make her heart
grow fonder. This weekend, he said, would tell if there was any chance of that.
As much as Noonan didn’t want to spend Saturday night with his father at Nell’s, the idea of spending it alone in his unheated flat was even less appealing, so he decided to stop in at Ikey’s. If Lucy and Sarah had something planned, maybe they’d invite him to tag along. If not, they’d just hang out there all evening, as they so often did, and Mrs. Lynch could be counted on to feed him. He would later regard this decision to stop as his initial mistake in a night full of them, the first seemingly harmless domino to fall. On the threshold of Ikey Lubin’s, in fact, he paused for a moment, his hand outstretched, in the exact pose Sarah had drawn four years earlier, though he didn’t think about that at the time. But he would later realize he might’ve changed his mind. Mr. and Mrs. Lynch were there, but they hadn’t noticed him yet. Was it their concerned expressions that made him pause, their attention focused on the table at the rear of the store where Sarah and Lucy appeared to be in urgent conversation with someone who was partially obscured. He saw Sarah reach out and put a hand on this other person’s, and for a moment Noonan thought it had to be a child. In the next instant he was inside, his decision suddenly made.