“Honey, how would I know?” Rita said. “Didn’t they ask you to sign a paper or anything? I thought you had to sign a paper.”
Loretta felt panicked, confused. She pretended to be looking at dress material. Great bundles of cloth lay on the counters, all kinds of colors and patterns. She kept unwinding and rewinding some cotton cloth with bluebells on it; Rita chattered. It seemed to Loretta, half listening, that all the girls she knew, all the women, had rivers of words to deliver into her, and she too felt buoyed up by a great pressure of words, language, talk, excited gestures, like a gigantic heartbeat somehow drawing them all closer together—all the women; the men were forever silent.
Rita said, “It’s a damn shame about your father, but maybe it’s better that way. Maybe he got in trouble.”
“He sort of liked to fight,” Loretta said. She thought of him as dead.
“It’s funny that Howard doesn’t know anything about it.”
Loretta wound the cloth back onto its big heavy roll. She appeared to be thinking about this. Her mind dropped back from her father at the State Hospital for the Insane to her father coming up the stairs, drunk and dirty, or waking in a nightmare, yelling, and all the trouble she’d had with him after her mother’s death. What was it worth, all that? Having a father or being a daughter? What did it mean? She woke slowly to the present, to Rita’s question. “Oh, if it’s a boy we’re going to call it Jules. Howard’s grandfather was named that. If it’s a girl we’re going to call it Antoinette.”
“They’re both nice names,” Rita said.
Loretta couldn’t stand around the store any longer, so she drifted away, wondering what to do, a little ashamed of having a father who was put away and wondering if everyone knew about it. Did being crazy run in the family? Her mother had gone crazy too. She felt shaky. For a while she stood on the sidewalk, letting people pass by her, blank and silent. Then she had an idea: she would go up to see her aunt, her mother’s sister, whose oldest boy was a policeman and so the family always knew what was going on. The aunt greeted her without much enthusiasm. Loretta came in, sat down in the parlor, stared at a smart brown-tinted photograph of this cousin-cop in his uniform, uncomfortable at the resemblance to Howard. She let her eyes wander to the big ivory crucifix hanging over the sofa. She said, “I guess you heard they took my pa away to Danby?”
“Well, I heard something about it,” her aunt said.
There was a mustardy odor in this house. Loretta plunged ahead. “How bad is he, do you know?”
“No.”
“Did Billy say anything about it?”
“A little.”
“I feel bad that they took him away. I mean, he wasn’t a bad guy but just drank too much. He was sort of mixed up sometimes but not crazy. Did Billy see him? I mean, was he arrested or what?”
“Billy didn’t actually see him,” her aunt said a little coldly, “but he heard about it. Howard probably heard about it too. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I don’t think Howard knows anything about it.”
Loretta’s aunt said nothing but her mouth moved primly.
“Was he arrested in a fight or something? Did he break some windows? Hit somebody?”
“I don’t know really.”
“They wouldn’t just take him away without him doing something?”
“I’m afraid I just don’t know.”
“How long do they keep them locked up?”
“How long? Until they get well, I guess.”
She was surprised at her aunt saying this, at her saying it so generously. The woman’s hands lay limp in her lap; she’d always been so cold, distant.
“He didn’t go crazy, did he?” Loretta said, sweating.
“Go up and see him,” said her aunt.
“I don’t want to go see him! I’m afraid to see him,” Loretta said.
On the trolley going home she sat with her hands resting on her stomach, her thoughts turned in a panic inward and down to her stomach, wondering if the baby was decided yet—a boy or a girl. She hoped it would be a boy, Jules. She thought about having a baby. She thought about a baby of her own. But, getting off the trolley, she started to cry suddenly because it was not fair that her father had been arrested and taken off to that place, like a crazy man, just to be put out of the way. She imagined him in a straitjacket. She imagined someone coming into his room and knocking over that cigar box full of papers, kicking the papers around…
When Howard came home that night she was sitting in the bedroom with the shades drawn. “You home?” he called out. She answered faintly. This must have been enough for him because he said nothing further. He went into the bathroom. She heard him in there, hearing the sounds without any special distaste, because she’d been hearing them all her life and at least Howard closed the door after himself. Then he came into the bedroom and stripped off his dark shirt. “There was something I heard today, real crazy, about Eleanor Roosevelt and a nigger, but I don’t remember how it went. You heard it?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I feel bad about my father.”
He was silent, undressing. He tossed his clothes onto the bed. When he came back from working Howard seemed to age, his beard pushing out with the energy of his worries, and it took many hours of deep sleep to renew the fat health of his face. He glanced at Loretta sideways.
“You know about it, don’t you?” Loretta said.
“He’s sent up for thirty days’ observation.”
“What’s that?”
“Thirty days’ observation.”
“But why?”
“He was acting funny.”
“Acting funny how?” Loretta cried.
“Like he was crazy.”
“Who tells who’s crazy? Why didn’t you say anything about it to me?”
“He’s better off up there.”
“Why is he better off?”
“Look, he almost got run over by a car. He’s drunk all the time. He said in the station they might as well shoot him, he didn’t want to live. He’s always been a little crazy and he’s better off up at Danby, so forget about it.”
“When can we go see him?”
“Not for thirty days.”
“That isn’t true!”
“Who told you it isn’t true?”
“But thirty days is a month. He’ll be all alone up there, and it might make him worse. I heard what that place is like.”
“Anyway we’re rid of him,” Howard said.
In his stubborn silence he stood apart from her, waiting. She saw that he had turned into a man, a man like her father or her friends’ fathers or any father anywhere, any man, silent and angry, hungry but impatient with food, pushing it around on a plate, stuck with a terrible burden of flesh and needing someone like Loretta to ease it. She cried for her father and for Howard, feeling her body turn bitter. “What if he dies up there? They kick them around, I know that! They beat them up!”
Howard made a grunting sound of contempt.
“And you, what if they get you up there sometime? You think you’re so smart it can’t happen to you?”
“It won’t happen to me,” Howard said.
“And did he really say he wanted to die? Did he really say that?”
Howard walked out of the room.
“Did he say they might as well shoot him?” Loretta cried.
Howard didn’t answer.
So much for Jules’s grandfather.
4
Jules was born in a mild month, bringing in a new season with his energy and fretfulness. Now Mama Wendall came over all the time, every day, and every day the staircase shuddered beneath her ponderous footsteps. But Loretta stared at the baby and everything else fell away from her, as in a movie the background will sometimes shift out of focus. She bumped into things. She left the radio on when the station had
shifted and there was only static, something that annoyed Mama Wendall, who had sharp ears and sharp eyes.
She was always bringing the baby things. One day she brought him a Dopey doll, in rubber.
Then on another day, when Jules was almost a year old, Howard came home early one afternoon, his legs wobbly, and told her in the doorway that he had been suspended from the force—words she had never heard spoken before, the kind of words that belonged in a newspaper. His drunken gravity by itself terrified her.
“Suspended—what does that mean?” she cried.
“Like on probation.”
“But what does it mean?”
He sat at the kitchen table and let his chin sag. In that instant he reminded Loretta of her brother, though Howard was not as smart as Brock: it was the posture of hopelessness. She put her hand over the baby’s soft warm skull, over his silky hair, and thought in terror, Then things are not settled in my life. Howard poked at the Dopey doll with his forefinger. His face had no expression.
After a while he said, “There are these guys that have something to do with restaurants. Cocktail lounges. Like in the Lenox Hotel, that place. The Lenox Hotel.”
He paused. Loretta stared at him.
“They have something to do with the union. I don’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There is some money being kicked back.”
“From who?”
“From the hotels.”
“Kicked back why? Did you take money?”
Howard shifted in his chair. He had a bearish, rumpled look, yet there was something strangely tender about him. In this defeat the very hairs of his sizable wrists and hands looked gentler; Loretta felt a jolting in her blood, wanting to comfort him. Her father, during his quiet, bad times, sitting like this at the kitchen table, had looked tender too. It was the only time men looked tender—in defeat.
“Did you take money?” Loretta said.
“No.”
“Then why are you fired?”
“I’m not fired exactly.”
“Then why…why did it happen?”
“Fifteen guys got it. I was one of them.”
“But if you’re innocent—”
“That isn’t so easy to prove,” Howard said, not looking at her.
After a while Loretta said, “Those sons of bitches are trying to drag you down! They’re not going to get away with it!”
Howard sighed with the sigh of Loretta’s lost father.
“We better go see your mother to tell her,” Loretta said.
They changed into good clothes as if for Sunday. Howard was morose and serene, Loretta was powdered, angry, in a flurry. She carried the baby and chattered about how they wouldn’t get away with it, those bastards, trying to put the blame on him when he hadn’t done anything. Her own cousin Billy had been busted also, Howard said. Good, said Loretta. Was Billy guilty? Howard thought he was, he didn’t know too much about the whole mess, he was on the outside and nobody ever told him anything….Good for Billy and Billy’s mother, Loretta thought, imagining her cousin in his fancy uniform brought low at last, hounded out of the squad car he was so proud of (Howard was only a patrolman) and forced to turn in his gun and his badge. Good, let them all be dragged down. And the people at the top? she asked. They were all crooks, Howard said sullenly but without enthusiasm. Loretta was fluent in her bitterness: the way the world was! How crazy!
“My father always got fired from his jobs,” she said angrily. “Somebody always came along to push him out! Somebody’s nephew or son-in-law, any old bastard popping out of the woodwork, and they’d kick my pa out and give the new guy the job. He kept falling off the bottom. Nobody ever gave him a chance. If he went crazy that was why.”
“Yeah, he never had a chance,” Howard said.
The Wendalls’ small frame house looked ominous to Loretta’s eye; she didn’t know exactly what was wrong. Then she figured it out—the shades were all drawn. Howard noticed it too. He showed the same sullen, caged satisfied look he had been showing all afternoon, as if the worst had finally caught up with him and it was finished; but his eyes were alert. His eyes with their queer centerlessness, in his large face, were jumpy though the rest of him was heavy, pulled down. His policeman’s tough walk, his drawing up of his shoulders, had been abandoned along with the uniform, and now he walked like any man out of a job—that posture of familiar failure, the stomach sagging, the chest shapeless, the shoulders hunched forward as if it were easier to walk that way, leaning forward into a future of pure gravity.
Mama Wendall was waiting in the doorway. Loretta felt Howard pull back a little, seeing her. But his mother shoved the door open and came out, a broom in her big hands. She began shouting, “You stupid fool! You, you dumbhead!” She swiped at Howard with the broom. He tried to push it away, whining, “Mama, watch out, that hurts,” but she paid no attention and rushed at him, bringing the broom down hard on his shoulders.
The baby began screaming. Loretta, terrified, backed into some junk by the steps—plywood crates—and into some mud.
Howard stood with his arms in front of his face while his mother struck him. “You disgraced us, you!” his mother yelled. “Stupid asshole, you great big dumb baby!” Her hair was in a gray mess, her wide face gleaming with a film of sweat. Now that Howard was cornered against the porch, she gave up in disgust and threw the broom at him. “Mixed up with whores! Taking money from whores! You want to break your mother’s heart? You want to kill your father? Huh? Want to give your father a stroke? Want to see him laying there in the coffin dead and have it all your fault, you little snot-nose, you smart-aleck! Taking dollar bills from those whores, those dirty bags, them with their diseases! Probably you brought home a disease too, huh, and come over to visit us and use our toilet, huh! Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“Mama, no!” Howard cried.
“Get inside, you dumbhead! You want all the neighbors to hear?”
She herded them both inside. Her heavy body seemed to be shuddering behind them, blocking the doorway, panting with outrage. Loretta bumped right into the kitchen table, feeling faint, and Mama Wendall snatched the baby out of her arms and began rocking it angrily. Big tears ran down her gray, rough face. “The baby of such a father! Such a father! My own son turned out such a stupid dumbhead!”
Papa Wendall sat in the darkened parlor, listening to a radio. They were herded into that room. Howard sat miserably on the end of the sofa and hid his face in his hands.
“Yes, cry, go on and cry now it’s too late, you big dumb cow!” his mother cried. She rocked the baby against her chest and glared from one face to the other.
Loretta stood in perfect silence. She felt she was a guest no one had noticed. She felt that a sudden movement of hers would turn all of Mama Wendall’s wrath onto her. Papa Wendall, a man with glasses and a slow, grunting manner, did not look at anyone. Behind his elbow, from a radio slunk partly into the darkness of the room and mixed up with the thick crocheted doily that covered it, came the news of the day’s sports.
“And there’s trouble back home too, back there too,” Mama Wendall said grimly, meaning the Old Country. Looming gigantic in the half-light, rocking the baby against her breasts, she seemed to be mooning over the world and over her grandson, considering him; with her big strong fingers she had seized this baby, and from such fingers no one could ever take him away. “You, poor baby, the son of such a father!” she crooned.
“But he didn’t do anything,” Loretta whispered.
Mama Wendall did not even look at her.
“He got blamed but he wasn’t one of them. It was something different, it was something to do with a hotel.”
After a long furious moment Mama Wendall said, “Like hell he didn’t do anything.”
She was larger than her husband, about Howard’s size, a slightly brute-nosed woman in her fifties, hefty and large-
boned, with a rather pleasant high color that was now grayish, a washerwoman’s coloring, enormous ears that looked as if they’d been tugged at all her life in frustration, and a heavy, corseted bottom. She was shrewd and calculating and never let herself get angry except to rush along the right track, never making a mistake. So Loretta knew in despair that Mama Wendall was right and that Howard was guilty and that he’d even been mixed up somehow with prostitutes. Yes, it all made sense. Mama Wendall never made a mistake.
“Now, what we are going to do is this,” Mama Wendall said angrily.
5
“Spring is a good time to move,” Mama Wendall said.
Howard was driving the truck, his mother was riding with him, and the rest of them were following in Papa Wendall’s car. They were on their way out to the country. They were going to move in with an uncle of Howard’s, an old man who had stayed back on the farm when everyone else had left. Howard already had a job at a gypsum mine—not as good as his police job, but good enough. Loretta sat in the back seat of the old Ford, crushed in between some boxes and her sister-in-law Connie, a fat girl of fourteen. Connie was always in a dense, sullen silence, her lips slightly parted. The baby was already wet, Loretta noticed, but it was too late to fix him; he lay miserably on her lap, twisting and whimpering. “This baby is just so lively,” Loretta complained brightly to the air.
Papa Wendall was driving, following the truck at a safe distance. His arms moved stiffly, and he rarely gave any indication of hearing Loretta. Still, Loretta fixed her concentration on the wrinkled back of his neck and tried to make talk; out of her husband’s family she had picked Papa to “like.” He was older than his wife by ten years.
The drive was long and bumpy, and along the way Howard had a flat, so they stood around in the dusk while he and his father toiled at fixing it. Mama Wendall fussed over the baby and cast her shrewd eyes to the horizon as if she might see there what was coming next. So tall, she seemed able to see farther than most people. “No rest for the wicked,” she said with a strange, pleased sigh, jiggling Jules in her arms.