The Evening Star
Watching Teddy cross the parking lot, Aurora felt an old sadness. Teddy seemed so slight—so mere. He was not going to be the writer she had once hoped he would be, nor was he likely even to be the classical scholar he himself had once hoped to become. He was only going to be a nice, lost man, with perhaps enough strength and clarity of purpose to guide and raise his son. It had started, probably, with Emma’s death. Teddy had once told her, as a heartbroken little boy, that if he had known how to love his mother better maybe she wouldn’t have died.
“Teddy, that’s wrong,” she said. “Of all of us, you loved her best.”
“But she died—I didn’t know what to do,” Teddy said. The conversation had taken place on one of her visits to Nebraska when the children were still living with their father.
Somehow the orderly, careful way Teddy moved between the rows of parked cars stirred her in her depths. Now and then he paused so that the sad mother or aunt or girlfriend of some other incarcerated boy could squeeze through ahead of him—the prison authorities had not been generous with parking space. It seemed to Aurora that his very kindness and consideration were a measure of his lostness—she was glad when he was out of sight. Selfish as it might seem, keeping her mind on her own dilemma was better, in a way, than thinking about Teddy and his problems.
She had brought the morning paper with her, meaning to study her horoscope and see if anything good could be expected to happen anytime soon. After that, she could devote whatever time was left to doing the crossword puzzle. Fortunately the horoscopes and the crossword puzzle were on the same page.
As she was about to fold the paper, she noticed an item—not a long one—at the top of the page opposite the weather map and the horoscope. The headline said: “Writer’s Daughter Killed By Convict Husband.”
Aurora glanced at the brief item—just two paragraphs—and discovered to her shock that the murdered girl had been the daughter of Danny Deck, the famous television producer, who had been for a time her own dead daughter’s best friend—her lover, even, for one night: the very night, in fact, in which the girl named T.R., who was now dead, had been born.
Painful memories flooded Aurora—she had to put her face in her hands for a moment, to hide her shock. She remembered the very quarrel she and Emma had had—always snoopy about her daughter’s life, she had happened to drive by and see Danny Deck’s rattly old car parked at the curb in front of Emma’s apartment in the early morning. Flap, Emma’s husband, the very man who had just ignored Melanie in her distress, had been off on a fishing trip with his father at the time. He had often been off on fishing trips with his father. These absences hadn’t suited Emma, but they suited Aurora fine—she even entertained the hope that Danny Deck, who showed at least some promise and might someday be an interesting and successful man, would step on the gas and take Emma away from Flap before it was too late.
But it had already been too late: Emma was pregnant with Tommy, though Aurora had yet to find that out. Emma was stuck with Flap for life, and her failure to escape was one reason Aurora herself was now sitting in a prison parking lot in Huntsville. Danny Deck, after a slow start, had made a great name for himself in television, creating one of her own favorite shows, Al and Sal. The show had been off the air for quite some time, but she and Rosie still occasionally watched it on reruns—it was a family comedy, and both she and Rosie identified strongly with Sal, the sex-starved wife, a lovely woman but married to Al, a slug of a man who would rather mow his lawn than make love to Sal.
Now tragedy had struck the comedy master. The girl had been shot down at a filling station, with two other people, by her convict husband, who, through a clerical error, had been released from the very prison whose parking lot she now sat in—and less than a week ago.
It was too much—life was too wretched. Danny Deck had been a rather soft boy. In the quarrel she had had with Emma about Danny and their night of illicit love, Emma had been so defensive that she had missed the point. Aurora had only been trying to encourage her to escape to a better man, but Emma, furious that her mother had spied on her, would talk of nothing but Danny’s sorrow and heartbreak. His wife, it seemed, had kicked him out on the very day that their child was born—he had gone to the hospital to try to see the baby, only to be beaten off by his wife’s dreadful parents.
So now, for the second time, Danny Deck had lost his daughter—and this time he had lost her forever. Carefully she tore the little story out of the paper and tucked it in her purse. Rosie and the General would be interested. Also, the piece mentioned the name of the town where the killings had taken place. She thought she might just write Danny—in the old days she had called him Daniel, to irritate Emma. She might write him and try to say something comforting. Perhaps he would want to visit sometime. They could all sit around and tell stories about Emma. It might be nice, though of course it would probably have to wait until the first rawness of his grief had passed—if it did pass. T.R. had only been a few months older than Tommy, who might even have known the man who killed her, since until a few days earlier they had both been inmates of the same prison.
Lonely all of a sudden, wondering how she would go about recovering if one of her grandchildren were brutally slain, she looked around the parking lot to see if there were any humans available—a dope-addict guard like Willie, a distraught mother or sister, anyone she might talk to in order to distract herself from the dreadful scene in her head in which one of her grandchildren, rather than Danny Deck’s daughter, was lying dead on the greasy concrete at a filling station.
But there was no one—she could only sit and suffer the scene until Teddy came back to the hot car.
“We talked about baseball,” he said cheerfully, starting the Cadillac. He saw at once that his grandmother looked even less happy than she had looked when he went in to see Tommy. It didn’t seem to him that Dr. Bruckner could be worth quite so much agony, if he was what her agony was about. But he didn’t say it. In fact, he and Tommy had had a pleasant visit. They both kept up with baseball, and it made a good meeting ground. Coming to the prison was really no problem during baseball season. He and Tommy both had total recall of all the recent games; they could forget about the prison and the family and everything else and just analyze ball games. It was very pleasant; he and his brother still talked baseball just as avidly as they had all through their childhood and adolescence. They still had that, and that was sort of enough—at least, when he left the prison, he felt that he still had a brother, and he hoped that when he was back in his cell, Tommy felt the same.
“Did you get really hot, or what?” he asked, looking at his grandmother again. She looked sad—and, for almost the first time ever, she looked old, really old, which was a shock. Teddy almost backed into a passing pickup, so startled was he by the realization that his grandmother had finally aged. She had always been so attractive and sassy and full of beans that “old” was just not a term he would have applied to her. Jane wouldn’t have applied it either, he was pretty sure.
Even when they got rolling and it was cooler in the car his granny didn’t look much better. He didn’t know what to make of it, except that it was disturbing. It was as if she had lost it suddenly, just in the space of time that it had taken him to go into the prison and talk a little baseball with Tommy. She had always been such a zestful woman that you just weren’t inclined to attach an age to her at all—he realized with surprise that he didn’t even know how old his grandmother was. Earlier in the day she could have passed for fifty-five or sixty; now she could almost pass for eighty. It was very startling.
“Don’t look at me that way, Teddy,” Aurora said. “I’ll be all right in a bit.”
She started to reach for her old ally, the rearview mirror, but then decided that in this instance she had better let be. The damage she had suffered was internal—fixing up the exterior wasn’t going to help, not this time. She could see that Teddy was shocked by her depression, but there was not much she could do about it. At the momen
t she lacked the energy to explain about Danny Deck and Emma and all that had happened in those years before he was born, when his mother was just a young bride—only a girl, really.
“Maybe you’ll feel better when I get you home,” Teddy said.
“Yes,” Aurora said. “I’m sure I’ll feel better when I get home.”
19
“Listen to me, please!” Aurora said that same evening, near midnight. “Stop raving and listen.”
“I ain’t gonna stop raving,” Rosie said, though she was not so much raving as pacing in her distress. Occasionally she paced out of the kitchen into the garage—the latter was reachable through a small laundry room. There she could be heard kicking garbage cans or pounding on the Cadillac or the wall or whatever she could find to pound on, before returning to the kitchen to pace some more.
“May I remind you that I was at that very prison, this very day!” Aurora said, raising her voice. “I was not happy, I can tell you. I opened the paper to read my horoscope and discovered yet another tragedy.”
“I don’t care. Who cares?” Rosie said. She suddenly grabbed the sugar bowl and threw it through the open door, across the laundry room and into the garage.
“Uh-oh,” Willie said, as they heard the sugar bowl smash. “The ants will be into that sugar.” He was painfully aware that he was the sole cause of the fit Rosie was having. His addiction had been discovered and he had been fired from the prison, where he had worked for more than twenty years. It seemed, in a way, like the end of the world, and now it had been the end of Mrs. Greenway’s sugar bowl as well.
“Rosie, I would have taken any drug this afternoon,” Aurora insisted. “If a pusher or whatever they’re called had walked up to me with a sack of heroin or opium or cocaine or anything I would have taken it.”
Now that she had thrown the sugar bowl, Rosie didn’t feel quite so violent.
“Baloney!” she said, in response to Aurora’s assertion, but she didn’t say it with much force.
“Beg your pardon, it is not baloney, it’s the truth,” Aurora insisted. “Given the opportunity, I would have become an addict, just like poor Willie. In fact, I’d start becoming one right now, if I had the drugs.”
“I got some, you’re welcome,” Willie said quickly, before he thought. After all, Mrs. Greenway had come to his defense at a moment when Rosie was about to kill him, or at least to run him off.
“You shut up, Willie!” Rosie said, her anger flaring anew. “The last thing we need in this house is another dope addict.”
“Who are you to criticize us for our weakness?” Aurora said, pointing her finger at Rosie. “You’ve scarcely set foot in that prison yourself. You’ve cowered in the car for two years, while I went in. You don’t know how sad it is in there. What happened to Danny Deck’s daughter yesterday is only one tragedy in thousands. What happened to Tommy is only one tragedy in thousands. We had to deal with our one, but people who have to work there have to deal with them all. No wonder Willie’s an addict; I say, more power to him!”
“Now what will we do for a sugar bowl?” the General asked. In a way, he was enjoying the crisis. It was rather like a council of war. He would have enjoyed more crises, actually—it was only when there were fights that he was allowed to be part of the family any more; at least it was only during fights that he felt like part of the family. Mostly, when things were calm, he was just left to himself, to putter around until he died. The problem with that was that nothing he was able to putter at was very much fun.
“Hector, it’s not the last sugar bowl in the universe, we’ll buy another one, so mind your own business!” Aurora said. The man was looking alive, for once, but for some reason, in the mood she was in, that annoyed her. If he still had the capacity to look alive, then he ought to look it more often and make himself really useful, it seemed to her.
Rosie gave up, sat down at the table, and began to cry loudly. She hated to cry, in public or otherwise—her way of crying involved emitting a kind of sucking sound as she attempted to suck the tears back into herself as rapidly as they fell. The sucking sound, rather than the tears themselves or the fact that she was distressed, put a very great strain on the nerves of anyone who had to listen to it—in this case, everyone at the table.
Rosie was crying because Aurora had hit her exactly where it hurt: that is, on the dark bruise of guilt she felt for cowering in the car during all those prison visits. Aurora was right about the sadness of the prison, too. Even on a bright sunny day, the prison was sad, as if an invisible cloud of sadness had settled over it. Even watching people come and go in the parking lot made Rosie miserable—all those ground-down people, suffering for the sins of their loved ones, their husbands or fathers.
Aurora was right—she herself was the coward, and what was the use? Willie had worked in that awful place for more than twenty years; why wouldn’t he take dope? The fact that she had worked up her courage and made the big break with C.C. didn’t alter the fact that Willie had an awful job. After all, Willie was just a plain man from East Texas, with an eighth-grade education, who had taken the one job he could get at the time, a job he had now lost. So what if she was involved with a dope addict? Her husband Royce had been a beer drunk most of his life, and C.C. Granby had been weird about sex. At least Willie wasn’t weird about sex.
“What are you jumping on me for?” the General inquired. Aurora had been annoyed with him for months, and he was getting in the mood to get annoyed back. “Why can’t I even make an innocent remark about the sugar bowl without being slapped down?”
“Hector, do I resemble a philosopher?” Aurora asked brusquely. “All you do is question my motives nowadays. I’ve never enjoyed having my motives questioned, as you ought to know, and I still don’t.”
“That’s right, you’ve never given two seconds’ thought to your goddamn motives,” the General said. “You never have, and you still don’t.”
“So?” Aurora said, lifting her chin. “They are my motives, may I remind you? I guess I can ignore them if I want to.”
Rosie finished sobbing; the sucking noises subsided. They all fell silent. All four were wondering briefly how it had happened that they had become trapped in a life with the other three. The fact that they had meant that each was stuck in a kitchen at midnight with three insane, unpleasant strangers. Why them, why then, why there, and why the other humans scattered around the table, with whom, for the moment, relations seemed pointless, if not impossible?
“My boss was real nice about it,” Willie commented—he had reached a point where he found the silence unbearable. Though usually he was so intimidated by Aurora and the General that he rarely said anything in their presence, the novel experience of being fired made him suddenly eager to talk. In fact, he had scarcely stopped talking since it happened.
“That’s good, Willie—I’m glad your boss was nice,” Aurora said.
“Well, I doubt you’re the first dope addict they ever seen at that prison, and I bet you ain’t the last, either,” Rosie said, wiping her eyes on the corner of the tablecloth.
“Don’t wipe your eyes on my tablecloth—get a napkin,” Aurora ordered.
“They gave me a list of these rehab places,” Willie said. “I guess I oughta be thinking about rehab now that I got all this time on my hands.”
“You better be thinking about getting another job if you expect to keep eating,” Rosie said.
“Rosie, what makes you so harsh?” Aurora asked. “Willie is perfectly right. Addiction is a sickness—obviously he needs to get well before he starts looking for a job.”
“I just mean I ain’t supporting nobody while they sit around sticking needles in themselves,” Rosie said. “Rehab’s fine if you can afford it, but it ain’t no substitute for a paycheck.”
“No, rehab isn’t fine,” the General said loudly. “It’s just a goddamn rip-off, if you ask me. Those drug clinics are no better than the nut houses we sent the children to. The nut houses didn’t help the childr
en much and the drug clinics won’t help Willie much, either.”
“What do you think will help him, Hector, since you seem to know so much?” Aurora asked. “The reason there are hospitals, if I’m not mistaken, is because the sick are not always able to cure themselves—sometimes not even if they’re getting nice paychecks, as Rosie insists that they should.”
“A healthy sport like golf that will keep the man out in the fresh air is what I recommend,” the General said. “If he doesn’t care for golf he could start playing racquetball.”
The thought of Willie playing racquetball stunned them all for a moment, and the General mistook their silence for assent.
“Vigorous exercise and lots of it is what I recommend,” he said. “It would be a lot better for Willie than sitting around in a clinic with a lot of drug addicts.”
“Hector, I hope you don’t expect us to treat what you just said as a serious comment,” Aurora said.
The General was somewhat startled to find that yet again Aurora didn’t appear to agree with him.
“Why can’t I expect you to treat it as a serious comment?” he asked, a little defensively.
“Because it’s absurd,” Aurora said. “Willie has a chemical dependency. He’s addicted to heroin. Do you seriously expect us to believe that heroin addicts can cure themselves by playing racquetball?”
“I only meant as a first step,” the General said, retreating. “You always twist my words.”
“Willie grew up in an orphanage,” Rosie revealed. “They whipped him black and blue, Then, getting that job in the prison was probably the last straw.”
She yawned; Willie yawned. Rosie suddenly got up and disappeared into the laundry room. She reappeared in a moment with a broom and a dustpan.