“I thought the Smith boy was years older.”
“He is, but of course they’re thrown together.”
Of course?
Three children returned from the woods—four, counting little Nancy Hanema, who hung back near the birdbath and, thumb in mouth, fanned her fingers as if to hide her face from Foxy’s gaze.
Ruth was a solid tall round-faced girl. Her body jerked and stamped with indignant energy. “Mother, he says he saw it first but he didn’t see it at all until I picked it up. Then he said it was his because he saw it first.”
The taller boy, with a clever flickering expression, said, “That’s the truth, Mrs. Hanema. Old Franklin Fink here grabs everything.”
Young Appleby, without preamble, broke into sobs. “I don’t,” he said, and would have said more, but his throat stuck shut.
“Boo hoo, Finkie,” the Smith boy said.
“Mother,” Ruth said, stamping her foot on the gravel to retrieve Angela’s attention. “Last summer we found a bird’s nest and Frankie said it was his for a collection and grabbed it out of my hand and it all came apart and fell into nothing, all because of him!” She flounced so hard her straight hair fanned in space.
Jonathan little-Smith said, “Lookie, Finkie’s crying again. Boo hoo, oh dear, goodness gracious me oh my oh.”
With a guttural whimper the younger boy attacked his friend with rotating fists. Jonathan laughed; his arm snaked out and flipped the frantic red face aside; he contemptuously pushed. Angela rose and parted them, and Foxy thought how graceful yet solid she looked, and imagined her as a hockey player standing abstracted yet impenetrable in the center of the limed field, in blue bloomers. Her body in turning showed a trace of the process that makes middle-aged women, with their thickened torsos and thinned legs, appear to be engaged in a balancing act.
“Now Jonathan,” Angela said, holding each boy’s hand equally, “Frankie wants to start a collection. Do you want to have a collection too?”
“No I don’t give a fart about some old bird’s throw-up. It’s Ruthie he stole from.”
“Ruthie is here all the time and I know she can find another in the woods. I want you all to help her. There’s an owl hoots every night in that woods and if you find his tree I bet you’ll find lots more coughballs. You help too, Nancy.”
The child had approached closer. “Mouse died,” she said, not removing her thumb.
“Yes,” Ruth said, wheeling, her hair lifting winglike, “and if you don’t watch out this enormous owl will come and eat you and your thumb will be sticking out from an enormous coughball with eyes on it!”
“Ruth!” Angela called, too late. Ruth had run back to the woods, her long legs flinging beneath her flying skirt. The boys, united by need for pursuit, followed. Nancy came to her mother’s lap and was absent-mindedly caressed. “You have all this,” Angela said to Foxy, “to look forward to.”
Her pregnancy, then, was common knowledge. She discovered she didn’t mind. She said, “I’ll be glad when it’s at that stage. I feel horrible half the time, and useless the rest.”
“Later,” Angela said, “it’s splendid. You’re so right with the world. Then this little package arrives, and it’s utterly dependent, with these very clear sharp needs that you can satisfy! You have everything it wants. I loved having babies. But then you have to raise them.” The eyes of the child half lying in her lap listened wide open. Her lips around her thumb made a secret, moist noise.
“You’re very good with children,” Foxy told her.
“I like to teach,” Angela said. “It’s easier than learning.”
With a splashing sound of gravel, a yellow convertible, top down, came into the driveway and stopped not a yard from their bench. The Thorne man was driving; his pink head poked from the metal shell like the flesh of a mollusc. Standing in the back seat were a sickly-looking boy who resembled him and a younger girl, six or so, whose green eyes slightly bulged. Foxy was jarred by the readiness with which Angela rose to greet them. After an hour of sharing a bench and the sun with her, she was jealous. Angela introduced the children: “Whitney and Martha Thorne, say hello to Mrs. Whitman.”
“I know you,” the boy told her. “You moved in down the road from us into the spook house.” His face was pale and his nostrils and ears seemed inflamed. Possibly he had a fever. His sister was definitely fat. She found herself touched by these children and, lifting her eyes to their father, even by him.
“Is it a spook house?” she asked.
“He means,” Angela intervened, “because it stood empty so long. The children can see it from the beach.”
“All shuttered up,” Whitney said, “with smoke coming out of the chimneys.”
“The kid hallucinates,” his father said. “He chews peyote for breakfast.”
Whitney defended himself. “Iggy Kappiotis said he and some guys snuck up on the porch one time and heard voices inside.”
“Just a little innocent teen-age fucking,” Freddy Thorne said, squinting at the sallow spring sun. By daylight his amorphous softness was less menacing, more pitiable. He wore a fuzzy claret sports shirt with an acid-green foulard and high-top all-weather boots such as children with weak ankles wear.
“Hey, big Freddy,” Harold little-Smith called from the basketball court. The thumping and huffing had suspended.
“It’s Bob Cousy!” Hanema called from the porch.
“Looks more like Goose Tatum to me,” said Gallagher. “You can always tell by de whites ob dare eyes.”
“What whites?” Hanema asked. He hurried over and, taking Thorne by the elbow, announced, “This man is living gin.”
“Those are not official sneakers,” Ben Saltz protested.
“Those are Frankenstein shoes,” Eddie Constantine said. He went mock-rigid and tottered the few steps needed to bump into Thorne’s chest. He sniffed Thorne’s breath, clutched his own throat, and screamed, “Aagh! The fumes! The fumes!”
Thorne smiled and wiped his mouth. “I’ll just watch,” he said. “You don’t need me, you got plenty of people. Why did you call?”
“We do need you,” Hanema insisted, handling the man’s elbow again and seeming to exult in his relative shortness. “Four on a side. You guard me. You belong to Matt, Eddie, and Ben.”
“Thanks a holy arse-licking bunch,” Constantine said.
“How many points are you spotting us?” Gallagher asked.
“None,” Hanema said. “Freddy will be all right. He’s an asset. He’s loose. Take a practice shot, Freddy.” He slammed the ball off the asphalt into Thorne’s stomach. “See how loose he is?”
From the stiff-fingered way Thorne handled the ball Foxy saw he was nothing of an athlete; he was so waddly, so flat-footed, she averted her eyes from the sight.
Beside her, Angela said, “I suppose the house may have been broken into by a few young couples. They have so few places to go.”
“What were the people like who owned it before?”
“The Robinsons. We hardly knew them. They only used it summers and weekends. A middle-aged couple with pots of children who suddenly got divorced. I used to see her downtown with binoculars around her neck. Quite a handsome woman with hair in a bun and windburn in tweeds. He was an ugly little man with a huge voice, always threatening to sue the town if they widened the road to the beach. But Bernadette Ong, who knew them, says it was he who wanted the divorce. Evidently he played the cello and she the violin and they got into a string quartet with some people from Duxbury. They never did a thing for the house.”
Foxy blurted, “Would your husband be willing to look at the house for us? And give us an estimate or some notion as to where to begin?”
Angela gazed toward the woods, a linear maze where children’s bodies were concealed. “Matt,” she said carefully, “wants Piet to concentrate on building new houses.”
“Perhaps he could recommend another contractor then. We must make a beginning. Ken seems to like the house as it is but when winter c
omes it will be impossible.”
“Of course it will.” The curtness startled Foxy. Gazing toward the trees, Angela went on hesitatingly, as if her choice of words were distracted by a flowering of things unseen. “Your husband—perhaps he and Piet could talk. Not today after basketball. Everybody stays for beer.”
“No, fine. We must hurry back, we have some friends coming from Cambridge.”
Thus a gentle rift was established between them. The two faced differently, Angela toward the woods full of children and Foxy toward the men’s game. Four on a side was too many. The court, now deep in the shadow of the barn, was crowded and Thorne, with his protrusive rear and confused motions, was in everyone’s way. Hanema had the ball. Persistently bumped by Thorne in his attempts to dribble amid a clamor of shouts, he passed the ball on the bounce to the Constantines’ neighbor’s boy; in the same stride he hooked one foot around Thorne’s ankle and by a backwards stab of his weight caused the bigger man to fall down. Thorne fell in stages, thrusting out an arm, then rolling face down on the muddy asphalt, his hand under him.
Play stopped. Foxy and Angela ran to the men. Hanema had kneeled to Thorne. The others made a hushed circle around them. Smearily smiling, his claret shirt muddy, Thorne sat up and showed them a trembling hand whose whitened little finger stuck out askew. “Dislocated,” he said in a voice from which pain had squeezed all elasticity.
Hanema, kneeling, blurted, “Jesus Freddy, I’m sorry. This is terrible. Sue me.”
“It’s happened before,” Thorne said. He took the injured hand in his good one and grimaced and pulled. A snap softer than a twig breaking, more like a pod popping, shocked the silent circle. Freddy rose and held his hand, the little finger now aligned, before his chest as something tender and disgraced that must not be touched. He asked Angela, “Do you have surgical tape and anything for a splint—a tongue depressor, a popsicle stick? Even a spoon would do.”
Rising with him, Hanema asked, “Freddy, will you be able to work?”
Thorne smirked down at the other’s anxious face. He was feeling his edge enlarge, Foxy felt; she thought only women used their own pain as a weapon. “Oh,” he said, “after a month or so. I can’t go into somebody’s mouth wearing a plaster cast, can I?”
“Sue me,” Hanema said. His face was a strange stretched mixture of freckles and pallor, of the heat of battle and contrition. The other players had divided equally into two sympathizing rings. Freddy Thorne, holding his hand before him, led Angela and Constantine and the neighbor boy and Saltz into the house, in triumph. Yet Foxy’s impression remained that he had been, in the minute before exploitation set in, instinctively stoical.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” little-Smith told Hanema. Foxy wondered why he, Thorne’s friend, had stayed outdoors, with the guilty. The patterns of union were many.
“But I did,” Piet said. “I deliberately tripped the poor jerk. The way he bumps with his belly gets me mad.”
Gallagher said, “He doesn’t understand the game.” Gallagher would have been handsome but for something narrowed about the mouth, something predetermined and closed expressed by the bracketlike creases emphasizing the corners: prim tucks. Amid the whiskery Sunday chins his jaws were smooth-shaved; he had been to mass.
She said, “I think you’re all awfully rough with each other.”
“C’est la guerre,” little-Smith told her.
Ken, in the lull, was practicing shots, perfecting himself. Foxy felt herself submerged in shadows and cross-currents while he was on high, willfully ignorant, hollow and afloat. His dribbling and the quivering rattle of the rim irritated her like any monologue.
Hanema was beside her. Surprisingly, he said, “I hate being a shit and that’s how it keeps turning out. I beg him to come play and then I cripple him.”
It was part confession, part brag. Foxy was troubled that he would bring her this, as if laying his head in her lap. She shied, speechless, angered that, having felt from an unexpected angle his rumored force, his orphan’s needful openness, she had proved timid, like Angela.
The gravel driveway splashed again. An old maroon coupe pulled in, its windshield aswarm with reflected branches and patches of cloud. Janet Appleby got out on the driver’s side. She carried two sixpacks of beer. Georgene Thorne pushed from the other door holding in her arms a child of a cumbersome age, so wadded with clothes its legs were spread like the stalks of an H. By the scorched redness of its cheeks the child was an Appleby.
Little-Smith and Hanema quickly went to greet them. Gallagher joined Ken at shooting baskets. Not wishing to eavesdrop, yet believing her sex entitled her to join the women, Foxy walked slowly down the drive to them as little-Smith caperingly described Freddy’s unfortunate finger—“le doigt disloqué.”
Georgene said, “Well, I’ve told him not to try sports when he’s potted.” Her upper lids were pink, as if she had been lying in the sun.
Piet Hanema told her, “But I asked him especially to come, so we could have four on a side.” Such a sad broad face, growing old without wisdom, alert and strained.
“Oh, he would have come anyway. You don’t think he’d sit around all Sunday afternoon with just me.”
“Why not?” Piet said, and Foxy imagined hostility in his eyes as he gazed at her. “Don’t you want to go inside and see how he is?”
“He’s all right,” she said. “Isn’t Angela with him? Let them alone. He’s happy.”
Janet and Harold were conferring urgently, in whispers. Their conversation seemed logistical, involving schedules and placement of cars and children. When the Appleby infant seized a cat on the lawn and tried to lift it by its hindquarters, as if spilling a bag of candy out, it was little-Smith who went and pried it loose, while Janet held her face in this idle moment up to the sun. The cat, calico, with a mildewed eye, ran off and hid in the lilac hedge. Foxy asked Hanema, “Is that yours?”
“The cat or the child?” he asked, as if also aware that the child’s parentage seemed in flux.
“The calico cat. We have a cat called Cotton.”
“Do bring Cotton to the next basketball game,” Georgene Thorne said. She added, throwing an athletic arm toward the woods, “I can’t see the children for the trees,” as if this explained the rudeness of her first remark, with its implied indignation at Foxy’s being here at all.
Hanema explained, “She belongs to the dairy down the road but the children sometimes feed it. They let the damn thing into the house full of fleas and now I have them.”
Freddy Thorne came out of the house. His little finger was bandaged to a green plastic picnic spoon. The pad of his fingertip rested prettily in the bowl and the curve of the handle made a very dainty fit. That Angela had improvised this strengthened Foxy’s sense of illicit affection between these two. Freddy was plainly proud.
“Oh Freddy,” Janet said, “it’s just gorgeous.” She was wearing white slacks so snug they had horizontally wrinkled along her pelvis. The nap of her turquoise velour jersey changed tint as it rounded the curve of her breasts; as she moved her front was an electric shimmer of shadow. The neck was cut to reveal a slash of mauve skin. Her lips had been painted to be a valentine but her chalky face needed sleep. Like her son she was thin-skinned and still being formed.
Freddy said, “The kid did it.”
Constantine’s young neighbor explained, “At camp last summer we had to take First Aid.” His voice emerged reedy and shallow from manhood’s form: a mouse on a plinth.
Eddie Constantine said, “He comes over to the house and massages Carol’s back.”
Freddy asked, “Oh. She has a bad back?”
“Only when I’ve been home too long.”
Ken and Gallagher stopped playing and joined the grown-ups.
The sixpacks were broken open and beer cans were passed around. “I despise these new tabs,” little-Smith said, yanking. “Everybody I know has cut thumbs. It’s the new stigmata.” Foxy felt him grope for the French for “stigmata.”
br /> Janet said, “I can’t do it, I’m too weak and hung. Could you?” She handed her can to—Ken!
All eyes noticed. Harold little-Smith’s nose tipped up and his voice rose nervously. “Freddy Thorne,” he taunted. “Spoonfinger. The man with the plastic digit. Le doigt plastique.”
“Freddy, honestly, what a nuisance,” Georgene said, and Foxy felt hidden in this an attempt to commiserate.
“No kidding,” Constantine said, “how will you get in there? Those little crevices between their teeth?” He was frankly curious and his eyes, which Foxy for a moment saw full on, echoed, in the absence of intelligence, aluminum and the gray of wind and the pearly width low in the sky at high altitudes. He had been there, in the metallic vastness above the boiling clouds, and was curious how Freddy would get to where he had to go.
“With a laser beam,” Thorne said, and the green spoon became a death ray that he pointed, saying zizz between his teeth, at Constantine, at Hanema, at herself. “Zizz. Die. Zizz. You’re dead.”
The people nearest him laughed excessively. They were courtiers, and Freddy was a king, the king of chaos: though struck dead, Foxy refused to laugh. At her back, Georgene and Piet, ignoring Freddy, exchanged words puzzling in their grave simplicity:
“How are you?”
“So-so, dollink.”
“You’ve been on your sunporch.”
“Yes.”
“How was it? Lovely?”
“Lonely.”
Overhearing, Foxy was rapt, as when a child she listened to her parents bumbling and grunting behind a closed door, intimacy giving their common words an exalted magic.
Ben Saltz’s voice overenunciated; his moving lips had an air of isolation, as if they were powered by a battery concealed in his beard. He was saying, “All kidding aside, Freddy, they really can do great things now with nontactile dentistry.”
“Whoops,” Freddy Thorne said, “that lets tactile types like me out,” and he slapped the biform seat of Janet’s tense white pants. She whirled from cozying with Ken to give Freddy a look less of surprise than of warning, a warning, Foxy felt, that had to do less with the pat than with its being witnessed.