These words stayed in his mind, in spite of the fat lady’s sniffing. “Fire burns and does its duty.”
What he would like, Jules thought suddenly, was not to be a saint exactly but to live a secular life parallel to a sacred life—a modern life, at all costs—to expand Jules out to the limits of his skin and the range of his eyesight. He could do it. He needed only time and some space to move around in. Fire burns and does its duty…He could believe in fire and in himself. He too would do his duty. He believed in himself. He did not trust anyone else. Expelled from the nuns’ school for beating up some little Italian bastard, he’d also been kicked out of the routine of helping to serve Mass during the week. All that was ended. Anyway, he liked the public school better. The teachers did not cry. They got angry but they did not cry. He missed only the long dark skirts and sleeves and nervous rosaries of the nuns, those sexless but very female females, dour and goodhearted but easily stirred to white-eyed violence…every one of them a mother to him, ready to be adored like the Virgin Mary, no matter if her breath was a little sour and some dark hairs jutted out of her jaw, no matter. He did miss them. But he did not miss the church, the early Mass, the pictures of Jesus as an adult and as a baby, glorified, bleeding, dying, dead, or risen again, in an ecstasy of power. He had not liked Jesus. He had resented the nuns’ interest in Him. He, Jules, would be a better man; or at least a cleverer man—why not all the kingdoms of the earth? Why not? The kingdoms of the earth would only go to someone else; that was history.
Another hour passed. His grandmother was still gone. New people had come in, standing back against the wall; they did not even think to unbutton their coats. Jules tried not to think of his grandmother struggling in some back room, fighting a losing battle with some nurse. What terror in the grime of his grandmother’s underclothing and the secrets of her once-female life! Every time she came to the clinic there was a battle. They lost her records, or couldn’t find them; her doctor was out having coffee; there was a draft from a window; an impatient nurse snapped that most patients washed themselves before coming to the clinic…The old woman would come out swearing. Too loud, bustling and clumsy and loud in the waiting-room, letting everyone know that she, she was not going to stand for this treatment.
After another long hour she appeared. A nurse was beside her, helping her along. Jules went to her at once and extracted the prescription slips from her fingers. He saw by her face that the news was bad. He helped her on with her coat, got her outside and down to the corner and waiting for another bus. Another bus. Detroit. Afternoon. He was spending too much of his life, Jules thought, waiting for buses. His grandmother was silent. Her big, doughy, ugly face was turned away.
Jules said lightly, “They sure make you wait in that goddam place!”
His grandmother nodded.
“Which doctor did you get this time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know? Was it the same one, the guy with the glasses?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I thought you liked him. Don’t you know who took care of you?”
“How do I know?” she snapped. “I should know, me? I should know anything that goes on? I’m an old woman, the world is shit to me, shut up about it! You with your pointed shoes and tight pants, shut up!”
Suddenly he wanted to cry.
It was late afternoon by the time he got her back home again. They lived in a two-family house on a sleazy, comfortable little street, with a lot of dogs and children in the neighborhood. Mexicans lived not three blocks away, but they were not like Negroes. No one was home but Loretta, who was taking pins out of her hair at the kitchen table. She looked guiltily and cheerfully at Grandma Wendall.
She said, “Well?”
“Well what?” said Grandma Wendall. She took off her ugly hat and stood with it in her hand.
“How are you? What did they say?”
“He’s got the thing for the pills.”
“What did they say?”
“Who knows what they said?”
“Did you tell them about the blood?”
The old woman smiled at Loretta contemptuously. “You don’t need to ask what I tell them, what I don’t tell them. Whose business? I tell them what comes to mind. I talk to the doctor face to face. Who else’s business is it?”
Loretta rubbed her hands across her face. “All right. When do you have to go back?”
“Four days.”
“Four days!”
Grandma Wendall went into her room. Loretta took her hands away from her eyes like a little girl and looked at Jules. Jules tried to smile, then smiled.
“She passes blood,” Loretta said. “I bet she didn’t tell them. She always keeps something back. She has secrets nobody gives a damn about.”
“Why wouldn’t she tell them?” said Jules. “She wants to get well.”
“Dying people don’t want to get well,” Loretta said.
Jules got away from her. He went to the bathroom and slicked his hair back and went out to his job, which was at a liquor store. He helped load up the delivery truck and rode along in it; he was aching for the day when he could drive the truck himself. Today he kept thinking of his grandmother bleeding, bleeding into the toilet bowl, her face shut up with secrets and pain, and he kept thinking of that Indian, whose name he could not quite remember. We are all members of a single human family. He wondered if that was true. His mind kept turning and turning upon it, fascinated.
The liquor store was down on Fort Street. Deliveries were made all the way out to Grosse Pointe, and though he wasn’t paid much he liked the expensive look of the bottles and their fancy titles; he liked being around success; he liked riding in the truck and unloading liquor at the service entrances of big houses. He tried to put the thought of his grandmother out of his mind—that old woman with seeping, leaking insides and a heart spiced with poison—but it was no better to think of the next day, school the next day, homework due he wouldn’t have time for. Instead he thought of an older Jules, a successful Jules. Grown out of this boy and into a successful man. He wondered about the form in which success would come to him—nothing as obvious as liquor, owning a liquor store, nothing so common.
He worked until after six, then cut off for home through back alleys. He was exhausted. But a kind of rapture came to him in the darkening, wet, foggy air that concealed him so well and gave to him only vaguely the forms of automobiles and trucks and other people. At such times it occurred to him that he might pass unseen through the city, knowing its back alleys and knowing how to turn invisible; he thought of himself as a character in a book being written by himself, a fictional fifteen-year-old with the capacity to become anything, because he was fiction. What couldn’t he make out of himself? Every night his mother whined about money, every night his father sat silent and smoldering, a man without money, every night Grandma Wendall spoke in sour jabs about someone with brains who had made it to the top—that is, someone who had money. His friend Ramie Malone talked constantly about money, making money, doing somebody out of money; he talked about his brother who had a used-car lot and sold junkers to people who didn’t know any better and who couldn’t read at all, let alone read about interest rates—Polacks, niggers, spics, Mexicans, all of them there for the taking, to be taken. Again and again, taken. But Jules could not keep his mind fixed on money. If he was a character in a book of his own making, why should money hold him back? He would get it and would float upon it. First he would buoy up his family and slide out from under them, agile and shrewd, and float out and away upon the ocean of America, all the way across the Midwestern prairies and the Rockies to the West Coast, where the future of America lay, waiting for people like him. He could change his name. He could change his looks in five minutes. He could change himself to fit into anything.
The day had exhausted him. He gave in to such fantasies as if physical weakness opened doors in his min
d, and in the drab, dangerous minutes after his father came home and before supper was put on the table he sat loafing by the radio, lost in a dream, pale and slouching. Wasn’t he Alan Ladd in Shane, wasn’t he Marlon Brando in The Wild One? But he mixed up with the people in the clinic, the fat lady and the man with the trembling head and the noisy kids. He’d been there. He was one of them. He heard the news about Korea—“hope for truce.” Well, good. Doors kept opening and closing in his mind. He got the second section of the newspaper and skimmed through it. One item caught his attention: a nineteen-year-old Texan who had been given $19,000 by a rancher. Given $19,000. The two of them had become friends in a Texas jail, where the rancher was serving a life sentence for killing his wife. He’d given the boy $19,000 to go straight. The boy had married a ninth-grade girl and bought an expensive car and was on his way, going straight…
He didn’t want $19,000, Jules thought bitterly. He wanted a wilderness, a clearing in the wilderness, something like that old farm of his childhood where another Grandma Wendall had lived.
Nearby, his father sat drinking ale from the bottle. His father’s blue shirt was stained with perspiration. His hair had become thin, but irregularly thin; his forehead was lined; he seemed to be turning into a version of his own mother. This man shut every door in Jules’s mind. He could remember nothing, not even the newspaper story.
Seeing Jules look at him, his father said suddenly, “You still hang around with that Malone kid?”
“Why?”
“What about that other one, what’s his name, that little bastard with the pop-eyes, that little bastard?” his father said.
Jules pretended to be thinking.
“You mean Roszak. He’s in jail,” Betty said, coming into the parlor from the kitchen. She sat down on the arm of the sofa, wriggling her dirty toes, leaning over toward Jules.
“In jail where?” said Jules, though he knew this was true.
“A wonder you’re not in with him,” Betty said.
“I’m no friend of his,” said Jules. He felt his scalp prickle, knowing he was close to trouble, but for some reason his father let this pass.
Betty grinned at Jules. “Ramie Malone is going to be busted too. That smart-ass!”
“What do you know about it?” Jules said.
“I know plenty.”
She was a dumpy little girl, eleven years old. There was something toughly precocious about her as if she were really not eleven but twenty, or thirty, or forty, stunted but pleased with herself. Jules frequently saw such people in Detroit—usually men, with small quick steps, a darting manner, self-conscious, shrewd. Loretta’s looks were half submerged in Betty’s face, features that should have been pretty but were blunted, the lips too thick, the nose too thick, as if Loretta and Howard had gotten together in drunken fun and fashioned a face out of clay, each fighting to get his own looks represented. Betty led a gang of kids, girls her own age and a few younger boys, who loitered on the street and made trouble in a small way.
Their father sat across from them, silent again. He must have been thinking of something else, not hearing them. What did their father think of? Of his job? Of his sick, troubled mother? Of her Social Security pension? Of the car breaking down again? Of the rent on the house? Of the niggers moving in a few blocks away? Of his wife’s sullen padding in bedroom slippers out in the kitchen? Of supper, pork chops frying in a pan? What did he think about? Jules was sure that he was not thinking about the hope for a truce in Korea, and if the UAW wanted more sick-pay benefits and retirement benefits he was not thinking about that, because why should he? Nor was he thinking of his daughter egging him on to give his son a good slap across the face, which the son deserved; nor was he thinking of the bell-bottomed green lamp on the table beside him, nor of the Detroit News half read on the floor, nor of the radiator with its fake wood top and its row of little glass birds, nor of the silhouette picture on the wall of a gracious lady with a superior nose, one of Loretta’s touches, nor of the grimy, ripped red slipcover on the sofa, nor of Jules’s rotting sneakers and Betty’s rotting teeth…Under the glass of the coffee table were snapshots of the family. Everyone was there. Jules was there as a baby, as a pouty young kid, as a skinny twelve-year-old; Betty and Maureen were there, Betty as a baby, Maureen as a skinny twelve-year-old; Loretta was there in one bright hectic color snapshot, dressed in yellow, a canary-colored hat on her head, holding a baby in her arms, maybe the one who had died; and Grandma Wendall was there, sure enough, looking like a self-righteous tank in a navy-blue dress, decked out for Sunday; even Howard was there, minus his paunch, in a dim photograph, in disguise as a soldier. Jules felt his mind mist over. What were all these people and things doing together, what were they doing to him?
A few weeks before, cruising around the neighborhood with Ramie and some other kids, Jules had seen his father and mother leaving a grill that had a bowling alley attached to it, and in the beery neon light the two of them had looked very…very married, very much together, deep in a conversation interrupted by Howard’s barking laugh and Loretta’s girlish wrist-shaking, a gesture that said, Hey, isn’t that something? It shocked Jules to think that his father and mother did get along at times. They themselves were not aware of it, and it was a shame he couldn’t draw Loretta aside and say to her, “Well, it must not be too bad, why the hell are you always complaining about him? I mean, I saw the two of you laughing together one night out on the street, the two of you…”
Maureen came to get them for supper.
He was hungry but he went out with dread. Anything might happen out here in the kitchen. What he must do is concentrate on getting through it and out to his night-time job. Right. He sat between Maureen and his father, his usual place. Shakily he thought of the future: that night, and the next day, and the real future. The future was important, not the present. These minutes spent around the supper table, these ten or fifteen minutes he had to get through, were not important except as they were part of a process leading to the future, a future that would be a good surprise, he felt sure. He began to dish out food for himself. His father leaned over his plate and cut a piece of meat with the edge of his fork. Betty jiggled the table. Maureen let one hand fall sadly on the edge of the table, just for a moment. Loretta leaned against the table so that her heavy breasts inside her dress were outlined.
It was irritating and painful for them to have to think of Grandma Wendall, because she hadn’t come out.
“Where’s the old lady?” said Howard.
“Laying down,” said Loretta.
“She sick again?”
“Oh, something hurts. Her gall bladder.”
Betty reached for a piece of bread. Her left arm was scarred faintly from the wrist to the elbow; some drunken mother of a friend of hers had thrown a hot iron at her, claiming that Betty was beating up her daughter, but Betty had claimed that they were all crazy there and that the old lady had been ironing clothes one minute and the next minute had thrown the iron right at her. Jules stopped thinking about Betty. He thought of the night-time streets, which excited him, and of the girl he loved in school, a daytime girl who had no eyes for him and was faintly embarrassed by his attention. He himself had a girl, a girl with thick black hair who tagged along with him in school…“Did you find that punchboard?” Maureen said to Betty.
“I lost it.”
“How’d you lose it?”
“At school.”
“Is that something I have to pay for?” Loretta said.
“I’m gonna tell Sister I lost it.”
“Maybe somebody stole it,” said Maureen.
“Sure somebody stole it.”
“You probably stole it yourself, you,” Loretta said knowingly but without interest.
The subject passed.
Maureen looked around the table with her hazy green eyes, a quiet girl with slender arms and a slender neck; there were melancholy shadows around her eyes. Sh
e was thirteen years old and in eighth grade at the nuns’ school. She looked back at Betty. “Did you steal it?” she said.
Betty made a face.
“How sick is Grandma?” Maureen said.
“She’s okay.”
“She gonna die?” said Betty.
“Shut up,” said Loretta.
“Yeah, you tell me to shut up, you tell me I stole that punchboard that cost forty cents,” Betty cried. “I’m spost to sit here and shut up?”
“Shut your mouth, I mean it,” Loretta said.
“Shut your own mouth!” Betty said.
They ate. Jules looked at the center of the table where the salt and pepper shakers were parted. His fingers ached to bring them side by side, together.
Was something going to happen? Would tonight be the night he’d grab the butcher knife and let his old man have it? Right in that fat gut?
But if he did that, Jules thought, his forehead lightly coated with sweat, if he did that, then he’d be ending everything too soon. Too soon. Fifteen years old, that was too soon to end it. Hadn’t the nuns and his mother and grandmother and even a few cops promised him he wouldn’t live past twenty, which meant he would live at least until he was twenty? Twenty years of age was a distant, monstrous goal; he’d never make it. A vast, wild, undesired desert, twenty years of age, and he would feel no grief at dying. But fifteen was young.
“Ethel is going to work in a beauty parlor,” Loretta said.
Howard said nothing.
“We went to a movie today. She won a free plate—she’s got all the luck. I got nothing.”