She didn’t, naturally, but I kept after her, asking her every two minutes how long until we landed, and when we finally did get there, I know she wasn’t unhappy being rid of me.
As soon as we were on the ground, I grabbed my bag and ran. I tore through the airport out to where the cabs were. “Athens, Illinois,” I said, hopping in.
The driver looked at me awhile. “Forty bucks,” he said. “In advance.”
I checked my wallet, pulled out the five. “Here,” I said. “Give you the rest when we get there.”
“In advance,” he repeated.
“Please.”
“Look, buddy,” he said, staring at me in the mirror.
“You son of a bitch!” I yelled, getting out. “My father’s being buried this afternoon.” I slammed the door all I had, hoping it would snap off at the hinges. Then I tried another cab, but it was the same thing. So I stood there, not knowing what to do, thinking: “If only I could find Mr. Hardecker. He’d drive me home all right. Mr. Hardecker would never let me down.”
Then somebody honked at me and I jumped out of the road. Scared, alone, with only five dollars in my pocket and no train that made any time at all. I just wanted to sit down there by the cab stand and die. Because my father was being buried that afternoon, and it began to look as if I wasn’t going to make it.
Finally I got the idea of hitchhiking, so I ran to the main parking lot and stood at the exit, yelling, “Athens, Illinois” to all the cars going by. But nobody answered and nobody stopped, not for a long time. Then, maybe half an hour later, the law of averages came through. A car pulled up. “You want to go to Athens?” the driver asked.
“I sure do,” I answered. “Yes, sir. Please.”
“Well, get in,” he said. “I’m going by there. And I’m in a hurry.”
“So am I,” I told him, opening the front door. “You can’t get there fast enough for me. Because my father’s being buried there this afternoon.”
We took off.
I never found out his name, but whoever he was, he could drive. We tore down the highway hitting eighty miles an hour, never talking but staring instead at the road as it stretched on ahead or the telephone poles that blurred by on either side. “I got a chance,” I told myself over and over. “If only we don’t get a flat, I got a chance.”
When we reached the Athens turn-off, I spoke to him. “Let me out here,” I said.
“I’m not in that much of a hurry,” he answered, and he made the turn toward town. I directed him on how to get to my house and in a few minutes we were there. “Thanks,” I said, jumping out. He nodded and drove away. I ran inside.
They were all there in the dark living-room; my mother, Mrs. Janes, Mrs. Atkins, the wife of the college president, plus half a dozen more, sitting in a semicircle with my mother in the middle, talking softly, hushed. When I came in, they stopped.
I went up to her, staring because she looked so awful. Pale and tired and almost dead; not crying any more but puffy still around the eyes. My mother looked to be about one hundred years old that afternoon and I couldn’t watch her, so I glanced out the window, over toward Zock’s house.
“I came as fast as I could,” I said.
“You’re too late,” she told me. “We buried him this morning.”
“Oh,” I said. That was all. Then I turned and went up to my room.
I lay on my bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, not able to feel a thing, but thinking: “I didn’t have to hurry at all. I could have walked. I could have walked all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, because they buried him this morning.” I had been there about an hour when my mother knocked on the door. “Come in,” I said, not getting up but just lying flat, my hands behind my head, staring at those cracks in the ceiling.
It wasn’t my mother who came in, though. It was Mrs. Janes, with the cloudy smell of alcohol trailing behind her. I didn’t say a word.
“Your mother isn’t herself,” Mrs. Janes said. “She’s very upset. It was a terrible thing.”
“He was sixty years old, Mrs. Janes. You can’t ask for more than that.”
“A terrible thing,” she repeated.
“Hubris,” I said, for no good reason. But it stopped the conversation for a while, so we were quiet and just looked at each other. I began getting edgy, what with her standing over me. I turned away, but she didn’t move.
“What is it, Mrs. Janes?” I said finally.
She fidgeted awhile. “That girl’s back,” she told me.
I looked at her. “What girl?”
“You know.”
“What girl?” I said again, knowing who she meant but just wanting to hear her say it.
“Annabelle,” Mrs. Janes whispered.
I nodded, waiting. I knew she had a whole spiel worked up, but the way I was acting upset her. She got that way easily, from her drinking and all.
“I thought you’d like to know,” she said, heading for the door.
“Good-by,” I called. “Thanks.” But I really didn’t care.
I stayed in my room until seven that night, lying on my bed, thinking about how it would have been to walk all the way from Boston, and what might have happened to me on the way. Which was silly, I suppose, but I couldn’t help it. Then, at seven, I went downstairs. They were still there, a bunch of them, sitting around, talking quietly. Actually, they were different people than before. But they might as well have been the same, for they sat in the same chairs and said the same things in the same hushed voices.
“I’m taking the car,” I told my mother. “I’m going out awhile.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just for a drive,” was all I told her.
I headed straight for the cemetery, speeding past the campus and beyond, to the edge of town. Athens Cemetery is very small. Quiet and beautiful, it is set on a hill overlooking a stretch of woods owned by the college. I parked the car and began searching for my father’s grave.
It wasn’t hard to find, what with all the flowers banked around it. I stepped over the flowers and stood on the grave, staring down.
Like Mrs. Janes, I had a whole spiel in mind, made up on the drive out. But I’d forgotten most of it. I didn’t know what to say. It had turned into a beautiful night, Indian summer, with just that hint of autumn in the air, sneaking up on you whenever a gust of wind blew by. It was the same kind of night as when Zock died and I couldn’t believe he was less than six months gone. I glanced around, trying to locate his grave. I couldn’t right off, so I dropped my head again and looked at my father.
“Old man,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But that wasn’t what I meant; not at all. “I guess you knew a lot about Euripides.” And then I muttered: “Indeed,” by way of finishing it off.
That was it. I took my time walking back to the car, looking around every few feet at my father’s grave, covered with all those flowers. How he would have hated them, the smell and all. A pot of tea would have been better. With a pipe set alongside. But of course, when you got right down to it, it didn’t really matter what they put there. Because he was dead. That was the hard thing to realize. I wasn’t shaken and I never once came close to crying. It was just the realization that was hard. I suppose I had him figured as being too smart ever to die. But there he was, dead, lying under all those smelly flowers.
By that time I was at the car. And she was there, standing, waiting beside it, waiting for me.
“Hello, Annabelle,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your father,” she said. I nodded, not saying a word. She began to fidget. “I called your house. They said you’d gone for a drive. I thought you might come here.” She stopped then, waiting for me to say something, anything at all, I suppose, so she could lead into whatever it was she had come to tell me. But I wasn’t talking. She got worse and worse as the quiet stretched on, fidgeting more, staring out past me to the woods beyond, where her third man was, biting her lips, hands clenched, pale. I waited.
Finally
, she cracked, everything pouring out at once. “I’m in trouble. Ray, I’m in trouble. I’m going to have a baby. His baby. I need help. Money. Three hundred dollars. I’ve got to have it. You’ve got to give it to me. You’ve got to give me three hundred dollars.” I let her go on until she’d been all through it a couple of times. Then I stopped her.
“Your folks have money. Get it from them.”
“I can’t,” she said, as if it was an explanation.
“Get it from Janes.”
She shook her head. “His wife would find out.”
I had to laugh. “His wife knows. She knows all about it.”
“She’d divorce him.”
Which was funnier still. “Not a chance,” I said. “Not if he’d knocked up half a dozen girls.”
“I love him,” she whispered, shivering. “If that makes any difference.”
“Well now,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so? Sure. That makes all the difference. Love does. I mean, I loved you once. Of course, being as I’m shy, I never told you. But now I can. I loved you, Annabelle. What do you think of that?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About what happened.”
“No need, Annabelle. It probably did me a lot of good.”
She believed me. “I’m glad. That you feel that way.”
“So you need money. Well, it’s sure in a worthy cause. You might even start a fund. “Abortions for Annabelle.’ ” I think she was about to scream when I put my arm around her. “Hey now,” I said. “Hey now, Annabelle. Take it easy.” But feeling her body warm against me threw me for a little, and I didn’t know if I could go through with it. Finally, I started to move.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“For a walk,” I told her. “Just for a stroll.”
We began moving silently among the graves, going up one row and down the next. We did that about ten minutes with never a word spoken. Then I found it.
“Zachary Crowe,” it said. “1934-1954. R.I.P.”
“Here’s a nice place,” I said, pushing her down on the grass. “Here’s a swell place. It’s beautiful here.” I knelt beside her and my hands shook as I started to undo the buttons of her blouse.
At first she didn’t stop me. Then she tried pushing my hands away. But I went right on, finally pulling her blouse off, slipping it over her tanned arms, throwing it aside. “Relax,” I whispered, blowing softly on her neck. “Relax, Annabelle.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do this to me.”
I went right on. “An exchange,” I whispered. “For services rendered. Now that makes sense, doesn’t it, Annabelle? You want three hundred dollars. Isn’t that right? Well, guess what I want.”
But I didn’t want it. Because all the time I kept thinking to myself: “This is for you, Zock.”
Even as I listened to her groaning underneath me, I kept on thinking it. “This is for you, Zock. This is for you.” Over and over and over.
And then it was done.
I looked down at her. She was almost smiling. But when I jumped up, she stopped. And when I started walking away, she got afraid, kneeling there naked in the cemetery, on Zock’s grave, trying as best she could to cover herself with her long black hair.
About twenty feet away, I turned and called to her.
“If it’s a boy, name it after me.” Then I ran.
When I got back to the house, everyone had gone except Mrs. Atkins, who was to spend the night. I paid my respects, excused myself, headed for my room. Even though I wasn’t tired, I went to bed. I was still wide awake when my mother came in, sitting down close beside me, staring.
“That Mrs. Atkins is very nice,” I began. My mother nodded. “How long is she going to stay?”
“How long are you going to stay?” my mother whispered then. I didn’t answer. “When you left,” she went on. “When you left, you weren’t coming back. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Mother,” I said. “That’s right.”
She started to cry softly. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me again. Raymond, don’t leave me now.”
I looked at her for a second, then away, out the window at the night. I thought for a long time, finally turning, holding out my hands to her. “All right, Mother,” I said. “I’ll stay home.”
And I did.
I stayed home, inside the house, mostly in my own room, for the next ten months. Sometimes, at night, I’d slip out and drive to Crystal City for a visit with Terry Clark, but that never took long, seeing as Terry was a pretty busy girl. Otherwise, I never left the house.
My mother resumed her club work, worse than ever. She’d get up at the crack of dawn, zip through breakfast, and then off she’d go to the Red Cross, or some place else, crammed full of energy. But that energy drained as the day went on, so that when she’d come home, there wasn’t much left. We’d have dinner together, the two of us, and then talk or watch television until it was time for her to go to bed. She was looking better, but it was a long process, a slow one, getting back to normal. And nothing either of us could do could hurry it along.
Still, things happened in those ten months.
Sadie Griffin left town in November, heading for New York. Two weeks later Mr. Crowe sold his house and everything in it. He came over to say good-by and we chatted some, mumbling about this and that, both of us smiling. Then he drove away, picked up his wife, and went to live in California. I got a postcard from him later, from Los Angeles, in which he said that he was fine and his wife was fine and they had a fine apartment and he was working in a clothing store in the downtown area, and good luck, Euripides. Mrs. Janes was sent away for the cure. My mother told me that, and also how proud she was of me for having a friend who was also a friend of hers. Because I was the last person Mrs. Janes asked about before she went.
So life went on. People kept busy. And I kept busy too.
By reading.
Just as soon as I was awake in the morning I started, and I read all day long. I began with the Greeks, working forward, from Homer and Sophocles to that bloody Roman, Seneca. After him a jump to Shakespeare. All his plays, even Hamlet again, which improves, I guess, as you get older.
Then I took up poetry. First Shakespeare and his sonnets, then Milton, who is worse than the Chinese Water Torture, no matter what anyone says, and Tennyson, and Browning, together with his phony wife. Then Chaucer, who is worse than Milton, and Spenser, who is worst of all. And the Romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Then Donne with his ladies and Herrick with his broads. Then Eliot and Housman and Yeats and, naturally, Kipling.
I read everything, anything I could get my hands on, understanding some, but not all, which is par. I read most of the books in my father’s study, the English ones anyway, and when I began running low, my mother got more out of the library for me. I read for ten months solid, one day slipping easily into the next without a hitch of any kind.
Then one night, late in April, my mother came into my room, smiling but nervous, standing over me.
“Raymond,” she said. I looked up. “Raymond.” And she paused, walking around to the other side of my desk. “Raymond.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s someone downstairs I’d like you to meet,” she answered, blurting it out. I nodded. “Be polite,” she whispered as we headed for the door. “Please, Raymond. Please. Remember your manners.”
“I shall endeavor to try,” I said, following her down.
“Adrian,” my mother said, when we got there. “This is my son, Raymond. Raymond. This is Adrian Baugh.”
“Jolly glad to meet you,” he said.
“Jolly glad myself,” I answered.
“Adrian’s from England,” my mother said.
We shook hands.
Adrian Baugh stood nine feet tall. Actually, that’s not true. Actually, he only stood six foot six, but he looked nine feet tall, he was that skinny. And English. He said “chaps” all the time. I was a good chap; the stu
dents were good chaps; even my mother was a good chap. And I’m sure that no one has really used that word, except in movies, since the dear, days of old Victoria. But Adrian Baugh did. He was so English you almost couldn’t stand it, never wearing anything but tweeds and never smoking anything, naturally, but a pipe. Aside from that, though, he wasn’t a bad guy at all.
“Adrian has taken over your father’s position at the college,” my mother said. “As head of the department.” We walked into the living-room and sat down. My mother smiled at Adrian; he smiled at her; they both smiled at me. But nobody said anything.
Finally, my mother broke the ice. “Would either of you care for anything?” she asked.
“Tea,” Adrian replied. “If you have it.”
“I’ll make some,” she said, standing up. “You two stay here and get acquainted. I want you to get to be pals.” She left us.
“So you’re from England,” I said, after a minute or two more of silence.
“Righto,” Adrian said.
“Well,” I asked. “How are things over there?”
And believe it or not, he told me. Starting with Churchill and working down. I sat there, nodding every so often while he chattered nervously on, lighting his pipe, letting it sit, then knocking the ashes into the fireplace.
We were in the middle of the House of Commons when my mother came back. “How are we getting on?” she asked.
“Fine,” Adrian answered. “He has a genuine interest in England.”
They sat across from each other, balancing teacups on their knees, smiling. I watched them. The silence dragged on and on, with nothing to break it up but the sound of their sipping.
“Adrian loves sports,” my mother said then. “He played cricket in college.”
He nodded. “I don’t believe you play it much over here.”