them

  Jules felt a flash of satisfaction, almost of joy. No, he hadn’t killed his father. His own anger had been kept back for years, kept successfully back; he hadn’t hurt anyone. Money was an adventure. It was open to him. Anything could happen. He felt that his father’s essence, that muttering dark anger, had surrounded him and almost penetrated him, but had not quite penetrated him; he was free.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, on his way to school, he was thinking about this—his father, his father’s fury, his father’s money, his father’s death—when he saw something that jolted him. Then, a moment later, he realized that it was Edith. She was with two other girls. For an instant he could hardly move, staring at her, feeling the same sense of despair and wonder he’d felt at his father’s death rising in him now at the sight of this girl. She was going up the concrete steps to a viaduct overpass with her girl friends.

  Jules ran to catch up with them. “Hey,” he said, “where are you going so fast?”

  They looked around in surprise. One of the girls, the boldest one, grinned at him. She was the prettiest, but Jules was faithful to Edith; he lurched over to her side of the walk. In their presence he had become slightly swaggering. “You always walk this way?” he said.

  Edith shrugged her shoulders lightly.

  She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She had blond eyebrows and blond eyelashes, a chaste cold girl with no smile for him. Jules walked with his weight on his heels, his hands stuffed in his pockets, conferring his presence upon them as if it were an important gift; he felt a slight tugging between him and the girls, a nervous exhilaration. He glanced at Edith sideways. She looked very nervous. The other girls began to talk to him, teasing flatly, gaining courage, and Jules answered them in the same style: Yeah, is that so, you wouldn’t kid me?

  “Where is your girl friend, Jules?” they asked him. They stretched their mouths in a sweet accusatory way, and Jules made a face to show that he had no interest in this question. He did have a girl friend, his own girl, and so really had no need of Edith. His girl, Rose Ann, was no friend of girls like these; her friends were knowing and sly and very sure of themselves. They wore stockings to school. Their ears were pierced, and their secrets were razzing and exciting and sleazy, while these girls, anxious to imitate their sophistication but afraid of it, tried to talk in the same singsong, flat, melodic patter. Jules had a slightly contemptuous smile for all of them.

  They were halfway across the viaduct. The wind was quite strong. Edith’s frail bangs whipped about her forehead and she had to narrow her eyes against the flying dirt; Jules saw tiny lines appear at the corners of her eyes. She had pale blue eyes and very pale skin. She wore no lipstick. Her coat was a yellow-and-white-check and already a little soiled from Detroit’s air and buses; she carried a purse with a long strap that went over her shoulder. Jules thought she looked delightful. He did not know her at all. He took hold of the strap of her purse suddenly, thinking of the strap of her slip, and tugged at it. She pulled away from him, frightened. He could see the muscles move in her throat. He wanted to tell her not to be afraid of him, but instead he said, teasing, “What’s in here, ammunition? This is pretty heavy.”

  “Oh, it’s just…my purse…”

  The three girls seemed to be dancing about him in the wind, though their feet in standard brown loafers were really not very graceful; Jules smiled at all of them, at their shrill expectant faces. He did not let go of Edith’s purse. He said, “Hey, you got some pictures of yourself?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Do you have some? Can I see?”

  “Why? What do you care?” Edith said.

  She turned to face him. Her hair fluttered in the wind.

  “Give me a picture of yourself, huh? Will you?”

  It was the fashion that spring for high-school girls to have “portraits” taken of themselves, $3.99 for a number of prints, the portraits in brown tone with fake velvet props and single strands of pearls and heavy makeup. They all went to an Italian photographer near school. Jules ached suddenly to get a photograph of Edith. He tugged at her purse.

  “Oh, all right,” she said nervously. “I don’t know why you want one, probably just to be…” Either she ran out of courage or could not think of anything more to say. She took a blue plastic billfold out of her purse, and out of this, as Jules watched lovingly, she extracted a photograph and handed it to him. He was suddenly very excited. He wanted to take her hand, he wanted to kiss her, but she was already sidestepping as if she knew what was in his mind, and the other girls closed in upon her, as if protecting her.

  One of them said spitefully, “Don’t ask me for a picture because I wouldn’t give you one!”

  Jules paid no attention. He was staring at the photograph. It was brown-toned, and Edith sat rigid against a background of what looked like a starry night. Around her thin shoulders was a dark velvet cloth, a V in front, moderately daring. It was supposed to look like an evening gown. She wore a single strand of pearls and her lips had been outlined too heavily; her eyes looked pale, faded, overpowered by the heavy lines of her mouth. Jules thought that he could not help loving this girl, though he had no idea who she was.

  She was moving away, embarrassed and hurried. The other two girls looked back at him.

  “Thanks a lot! I mean it, thanks!” he called after them.

  Jules lagged behind. He stared at the photograph. Edith. Edith Kamensky. Having the photograph, he felt that he could afford to let the girl get away; what could he say to her anyhow? She had cool, cold, uncertain eyes. The lashes were scanty. There was a mole near the left side of her mouth. Wisps of hair lay about her temples, passing down high on her forehead. Jules wondered if she ever laughed. What was she like when she laughed? He felt lust rise in him, a desire to get her alone, to get her to himself, though he really did not want to approach her again in the next few days. He could not imagine approaching her again at all.

  He stopped to put the picture in his pocket, but somehow it got loose. The wind snatched it away. Jules lunged for it but it was blown over the railing. “Jesus. Shit,” he said in surprise. He watched it being blown rather languidly down and across the street, above the tops of trucks and cars. He ran to the stairs and slid down the embankment to the street and right down through the mud, and only a few feet away a police car sped past him. It passed him at maybe eighty miles an hour. Good luck. They must be after someone. Jules looked around for the picture—it was just coming to rest. There was an opening in the traffic; he calculated and began edging out. Someone honked angrily at him. He jumped back onto the curb, which was not exactly a curb but only a raised narrow ledge. No one was supposed to be down here on foot; it was against the law. Jules waited. The wind made his eyes burn. His face too was burning, with shame and exasperation, but still he would not give up, he’d set his vision now upon a small white piece of paper that was fluttering on the other side of the street, lifting and falling violently as cars passed. He edged over again, waited until a car sped by, then ran blindly across the street. Someone put on his brakes and a terrible honking began. Jules waved them away and jumped to the other curb. He snatched up the piece of paper but it was not the photograph. “What?” he said aloud. He threw it back over his shoulder in disgust. Then he saw another piece of paper. This had landed in the near lane a few yards away and was already crumpled. He ran over and picked it up.

  Edith Kamensky with her pale, pale lashes…

  For a while he stood there on the curb, at the foot of the muddy embankment, staring at the photograph. It was dirty, it had been badly bent. Weariness rose in him, a sense of wonder.

  Now that he had retrieved it, he thought, he had to be faithful to it.

  12

  She was fourteen. She sat in the kitchen at the table while her mother’s friend Ethel combed out her wet hair and rubbed hair-set lotion on it. The lotion was green and had a peppe
rmint smell; Maureen liked that smell.

  Loretta sat across from them, her chair turned outward, her legs crossed. The two women were smoking. Loretta said, “The boss isn’t so bad. I like that car of hers—that red car, you seen it?”

  Ethel was putting one strand of Maureen’s hair onto a big pink plastic roller. She said with a preoccupied air, “She took me for a ride in it one day. No, she ain’t so bad, but she gets every penny out of the place. I’d rather have a man boss. And Dora May, that little suck, she runs and tells her if anyone leaves early. The other day I got finished with my customer at four-thirty, so why the hell not leave? So I left, and the next morning…”

  It was summer now and Maureen’s father had been dead for months. She did not miss her father. Sometimes she began to cry when she was alone, crying for no reason; but she did not think this had anything to do with her father. It had to do with Ford Hospital and all the corridors and all the people, every one of them helpless as her father. It had to do with the cemetery. It had to do with her brother, who stayed away from home most of the time now. All these changes, this geography of change, she could not keep up with. So she sometimes cried when she was alone. In front of other people she was learning not to cry.

  “Mrs. Foster is a nice lady,” Loretta said. “She came back specially to me to give me a quarter. Wasn’t that nice of her?”

  “Yeah, she’s nice. And Mrs. Abrahams is nice. But that Mrs. Freer or whatever her name is, she’s a bitch—she thinks she’s so glamorous but I got a surprise for her, if she ever asks my opinion.”

  Ethel was a lanky, energetic woman in her forties. She had taken a course at a local beauty school and worked at the La Marvel Beauty Salon on Vernor. Loretta, who had no training, worked there also but could only wash hair and help clean up the place. She had worked there since the beginning of June. Suddenly her looks had changed; she came home with her hair tinted a light airy blond, puffed out about her face, her eyebrows were arched in a new and important way, her nails were expertly done, without the half-moons showing; she had a new workingwoman’s way of smoking, with the cigarette held urgently between the thumb and forefinger, poised, always ready to be brought to her mouth. Maureen noticed that Ethel smoked the same way. Ethel had hair that was tinted red, set into heavy waves about her face, and she always wore certain colors that she thought went with red—brown, green, dark blue. She and Loretta leafed through magazines when they sat in the kitchen having coffee—Hair Design, Vogue, Salon & Boutique. They brought these magazines home from the La Marvel Beauty Salon and forgot to return them. Maureen had gone down to the salon one day just to see what it was like and had been a little depressed at the unclean front windows, but it was a job, it was something. Her mother seemed to like it.

  “I wish I could get myself to go take some course, some lessons,” Loretta said. She was watching the way Ethel did Maureen’s hair. “I’d like to cut hair and all that. I think I could do it real well, don’t you? I wouldn’t have any trouble setting it, it’s just cutting it that would scare me.”

  “Nothing to it,” Ethel said.

  “Next month I’m going to get myself downtown to that place, what’s-the-name, and see how fast I can get through.”

  Maureen touched her head. There were four large rollers set across the very top of her head, pulling her hair tight, but she did not want to complain. Ethel was working on the sides now. This had been Loretta’s idea: she’d said, looking critically at Maureen a few days before, “You’d better let Ethel fix you up. Them bangs don’t do much for you, kid. It looks like you bought them from the Fuller Brush man.”

  And now, on newspaper laid on the floor around her chair, lay snippings of her dark brown hair. The damp clipping scissors, brought home from the La Marvel, lay on the table with clots of hair stuck to it. The setting lotion and the hair spray and the rollers themselves had been smuggled home from the La Marvel.

  “How’s your mother-in-law?” Ethel said.

  “You saw her. I don’t ask.”

  Grandma Wendall, though no better, had taken over the living-room. Maureen did not know how this had come about. Gradually the old lady had taken over the sofa, half lying there with a quilt over her knees, watching television. She woke up every morning at six. They heard her in the kitchen, making herself breakfast, and when they got up, her breakfast dishes were all in the sink, soaking, and Grandma Wendall herself was in the living-room with the television set turned on rather loudly, watching the “Today” show. The blinds were drawn down so that there was no glare on the screen. When she wanted to go to the bathroom she called Loretta, if Loretta was home, or Maureen, if Maureen was home, or Betty, and, leaning heavily upon their shoulders, walked to the back of the house. She seemed heavier than before, though she was not well. She ate a lot of ice cream. Her hair was frizzled and white, very thin, and her face was a mass of wrinkles. Still, there was a certain youthful antagonism about her. Right now, at nine-thirty in the evening, she was on the sofa with the room darkened, watching a television program; Maureen could hear the artificial applause and laughter roaring out of the darkened front room. In the kitchen the two women were strangely silent.

  “Well,” Ethel said slowly, “it was like that with my ma too—I mean she had her mother-in-law with her. For thirty years. How’d you like that, kid?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Loretta said.

  “That old lady was batty all her life. I swear, her brains were scrambled or something. She come over from Czechoslovakia when she was seventeen years old and never bothered to learn English. Said it was too much trouble, it was too late for her. She lived to be eighty and never knew anything, I mean not one thing; she never knew about the Second World War or Hitler or anything, it was just crazy. She wasn’t a bad old dame, but how’d you like that, Loretta?”

  “Jesus Christ, no.”

  “We lived over on Lycaste then.”

  Maureen sat obediently, bending her head. Ethel finished another row of rollers. She fixed them with steel clips. Then she lifted the can of hair spray and sprayed Maureen’s head all around for quite a while.

  “God, that stuff stinks,” Loretta said.

  “This stuff is nothing. At work we got a real strong mixture, not like this,” Ethel said. “It comes out of a gun like, you seen it? God, is that strong! I got a coating of it in my lungs, I bet. It makes me want to puke. For four years I been using it, and what you want to bet my lungs are coated with it, huh?”

  “Oh, I bet they aren’t.”

  Now Ethel combed Maureen’s bangs down flat on her forehead and fixed them there with a strip of Scotch tape.

  “Bring the hair drier in and get that hair all dry. You don’t go to bed with wet hair,” Loretta said.

  They hooked the hair drier up, and Maureen sat holding it in her hand; it was a hand model, bought for under ten dollars. She liked the warm air blowing against her head. The kind of tears it brought to her eyes were innocent tears, without pain. It was like when she yawned. It was not like the bitter tears that surprised her, coming upon her with such power; sometimes in the library, back in the stacks of books, she found herself beginning to cry in a passion of shame, not understanding. Her mother rarely cried now and her sister never cried. And Jules, who had cried only a few times in her memory, was never around now and so she knew nothing about him.

  He had flunked his sophomore year of high school and had said he wasn’t going back.

  The two women drank coffee and talked now, evasively and quietly, of someone Maureen didn’t know. She gathered that she was not supposed to listen. A woman who’d gotten in trouble and her husband kicked her out, and…Maureen thought about Jules. She felt safe between these two women, her mother and her mother’s friend, oddly safe in their intimate, gossipy warmth; let them talk about anything, anything! At such times she could think about her father or about Jules or about nightmare things that would ordinarily frighten her—for instance, a girl
dragged into a car not two blocks away and raped and pushed out the door, ending up half dead, and the girl was someone Maureen knew. Jules had started to stay out overnight back in April. He told Loretta he was staying at a friend’s house, spending the night. He gave them a name. Loretta had wept but hadn’t looked up the name or made a telephone call, and gradually Jules began staying away two or three nights a week. Maureen heard from other kids that he was cutting school. But what he did during the day, whether he had another job or spent his time roaming around, whether he was getting in trouble, no one knew. He told Maureen, “Those kids at school get next to me, they’re so goddam dumb. They’re little people. I can’t stand them.” The boys he had hung around with for years seemed to him contemptible now and he avoided them. If he had new friends, Maureen did not know who they were.

  One night when Maureen asked him what was wrong, didn’t he like her and Ma and Betty any more, he had said impatiently, “It’s this house I can’t stand. I can’t stand this dump. I come in the front door and keep thinking I’m going to see him there….Instead it’s always the old lady. I keep thinking I’m going to hear him drive into the driveway. Or hear him get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom. There’s too much left over of him here, I can’t stand it.”

  “She had it done three times, I bet you. There was three separate times,” Ethel said.

  “Wouldn’t you think she’d learn? Jesus!” Loretta laughed.

  “How’s that what’s-her-name, Connie? She still come around here?”

  “She’s got a place in Highland Park. She got a job doing something, don’t ask me what, you’d think it was some big secret or something the way she talks. Actually, Maureen and I think she’s a waitress. What else could that cow do? Yeah, she comes around sometimes. Her and the old lady sit in the front room and if you walk in they give you the fish eye, like it was their goddam house. Connie must weigh two hundred pounds—what a cow! She comes over here from Mass and has the goddammest lace thing, black lace, draped over her head like some Spanish bull or cow or something. The two of them keep whispering in the living-room, gabbing their heads off. I know they’re talking about me but I don’t give a goddam. Let them. If I didn’t have a job I’d go crazy with that old bag’s stink and her crap and that television set on all the time, but look, I figure it this way: when the television breaks down next time I’m not going to bother fixing it, but until then she might as well watch it. Why not? She wouldn’t be a bad person if she’d just let up once in a while. I mean, I can remember when we were all out on that god-awful farm, in the country, and she was a lot younger and did all kinds of things—oh, she made bread and noodles and did a lot of canning, she worked like hell, she was real nice to Jules and just was a different person. Now her face is always set the same way. Like a bomb. She looks like a bomb. But I don’t like to speak bad of her because…”