First Light

  Hugh brings Laurie home for the first time in the fall of Dorsey’s senior year, when Dorsey’s upstairs room is cluttered with piles of application forms to colleges and universities, the booklets and letters and catalogues lined up along the wall from the typewriter to the bed and from there to the door. She’d like to show these forms to her brother, but she doesn’t see him often, and she doesn’t think he’d enjoy looking at them anyway, after what happened to him at Holbein College. Usually Hugh comes home for Sunday night dinner by himself, but this time in October he has called ahead on Thursday and warned his mother that he’ll be bringing a girl on Saturday. Dorsey’s mother takes this news circumspectly and prepares one of her usual roasts. “I don’t see the point,” she tells Dorsey, “in getting all gussied up for one of Hugh’s little sweethearts. That boy isn’t going to get married for another seven years, I’ll take book on it. This isn’t serious. Young men aren’t serious, and Hugh isn’t serious. You just watch.”

  “Six years.” Dorsey is in the kitchen, writing her autobiography for the University of Pennsylvania entrance form on the dinette table and occasionally looking up to watch her mother organize the meal. Her father is sitting outside on the front stoop by himself, wearing his maize-and-blue University of Michigan cap, smoking one of his Saturday cigars, and listening to the end of the football game on the radio.

  “Take your pick,” Dorsey’s mother says. “I know that kid. He’s in no hurry. Why should he be?” She allows herself a smile. “The boy is too handsome. He’s wasting the gifts your father and I gave him if he doesn’t play the cock of the walk.”

  They hear Hugh’s Buick pull into the driveway exactly at six o’clock. Dorsey and her parents gather at the doorway to welcome Hugh and his girlfriend in, and in the general commotion of greetings and handshakes and the removing of coats, Dorsey sees a startled and almost frightened look on her mother’s face just beneath the visible line of sociability. Something’s wrong, and what’s wrong is the girl, and the careful way Hugh is treating her. He’s watching out for her, husbanding her. It’s odd, because she’s not pretty in the cheap and flashy style Hugh likes best. It’s as if he’s trying to prove that he’s a serious person by taking out a plain woman who can appeal only to a man who thinks. Dorsey sees her mother exchange a glance with her father: watch yourself. This is serious.

  Before dinner, Mr. Welch offers Laurie a beer. She says that ice water is fine. He shrugs and gets her what she wants. At the dinner table Hugh and Laurie sit across from Dorsey, not saying much. Dorsey talks instead about the mechanics of grinding mirrors for telescopes, and as she does, she tries to imagine whom Laurie reminds her of. Some actress. Somebody like Paula Prentiss. Not with the smile, but similar. The comparison makes her nervous, and she hears herself chattering about colleges, the trip the Physics Club is going to take to a nuclear reactor, and she’s just started to talk about atomic fission when her father interrupts her.

  “Dorsey, you’re hogging the show. Our poor guest hasn’t been able to get a word in any which old way. Miss Boyd, tell us a little about yourself.”

  “Laurie.”

  “Laurie. Tell us a little about yourself, before my wife here gets into the act and does it herself.”

  Laurie looks at Mrs. Welch. “Excuse me?”

  “My wife,” Mr. Welch says, “engages in what she calls ‘human speculation.’ It’s just a parlor trick in poor taste and of course I do my best to discourage it, but sometimes, when conversation flags, I can’t stop her from launching into her show. So you should jump in here and tell us all about the Boyds.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Laurie says. Dorsey is gazing at her face. It’s not Paula Prentiss. It’s somebody else.

  “My husband,” Mrs. Welch says, “likes to let very black cats out of very dirty bags. As he says, it’s a parlor trick, a little game we sometimes play in private.” She throws her husband a mock frown. “I keep telling him not to bring it up in front of guests, but, as you will discover once you are married, no wife can successfully muzzle her husband entirely, and it’s not always wise to try.”

  “What do you mean? What do you do?”

  Mrs. Welch smiles. “I … guess about people,” she says.

  “It’s like a carnival midway,” Mr. Welch says. “You give her a dollar, and if she can’t guess your weight, you win a free dinner.”

  “You guess about people,” Laurie says, the statement almost sounding like a question.

  “Come on, Ma,” Hugh says. “Don’t.”

  “Oh, just small things.”

  “Don’t.”

  “What small things.” Laurie’s questions leave off the rising final inflection.

  “Histories. Parents. Origins. That sort of thing. Nothing special. Nothing anyone couldn’t do. Everyone does it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Laurie says, raising her napkin delicately to her chin.

  “Well, I do. We all interpret, Laurie. And this has been a little hobby of mine for quite a spell of time, but I don’t do it unless someone asks me.”

  Dorsey, Hugh, and Mr. Welch all speak at the same time, interrupting, changing the subject, making a familial commotion. Mrs. Welch holds up her hand and says, “You see how nervous I make these people? Isn’t it awful? Here I am, the hostess, wife, and mother, and no one trusts me. It’s quite deplorable.”

  “With strangers,” Mr. Welch says. “We don’t trust you with strangers, sweetie.”

  “Do you think I am about to terrorize this poor young woman, our guest? You know I don’t do that. I don’t terrorize.”

  “Go ahead,” Laurie says, putting down her fork and reaching for her glass of water. She looks at Hugh’s mother, her face set. “Tell me something about myself. I’m not terrorizable.”

  Hugh tries to protest but Laurie shushes him, something Dorsey has never seen any woman his age do to Hugh. Meanwhile, Mrs. Welch has started to stare at her son’s girlfriend, and after a few moments she says, “You’re a practical woman. You can fix things. You’re good at sorting—”

  “—She’s going to be a librarian, Ma,” Hugh says. “She—”

  “—Let me finish!” Mrs. Welch resumes her smile. “You’re good at sorting and gardening. You’re very good at drawing, but you don’t like to cook very much. Your greatest emotional talent is for tenderness.”

  “What about my parents,” Laurie says.

  “I don’t do parents,” Mrs. Welch says.

  “You said you do parents.”

  “Did I? What a good listener you are. I don’t do parents on the first time out. I don’t do parents at the dinner table. That would be improper.” She waits. “Well, did I get anything right?”

  Laurie smiles back, when she sees that Mrs. Welch is finished with her. “No, I’m afraid not. You’re not right. I’m not very practical. I can’t fix things. So far, I haven’t been much of a gardener, and I’m afraid I can’t draw anything more complicated than a dog. What was the other thing? Cooking. Yes, that’s true, that I don’t like to cook very much.”

  Dorsey is about to ask Laurie if she is tender—Just for laughs, just as a joke—but one glance from her father silences her.

  “Too bad,” Mrs. Welch says, laughing like someone in an opera. “My little parlor trick has failed me again.”

  “Now we’ll have to shut down the cabaret,” her husband says. “Dismantle the stage and send the musicians home.”

  “Anyone for dessert?” Mrs. Welch asks, eyebrows raised, looking around quickly. “Banana cake, baked entirely by myself, though not from scratch, thank goodness. Dorsey, would you help us clear? Laurie, you and Hugh sit there and luxuriate in the service. Hugh doesn’t get this kind of attention very often, do you, kiddo?”

  She doesn’t wait for him to answer; she picks up her plate and two of the serving dishes and carries them out to the kitchen. After taking Laurie’s and her brother’s plates—Hugh winks at her as she does—Dorsey follows her mother out to the kitchen, where her fat
her is muttering in an agitated manner to himself, while Mrs. Welch scrubs dishes in the sink, creating a violent circular spray of soapy water. “Dorsey,” she says, “would you get the cake out? It’s over there, by the refrigerator, under the tin foil.”

  “You were sure wrong about Hugh’s girlfriend, Mom,” Dorsey tells her, taking the plates over to the sink.

  “I wasn’t wrong.”

  “She said you were. She said you—”

  “—Your mother was misrepresenting. Weren’t you, dear?” Dorsey’s father still has not looked up.

  “Yes. That’s a good word. That’s exactly what I was doing.” She turns around, her hands dripping soap onto the kitchen floor, and looks at her husband. “I certainly hope that girl learns tenderness,” she says in a dispirited monotone. “It does no harm to make her think she might have a talent for it.”

  “Why?” Dorsey asks. “What’s the big deal about tenderness?”

  “You explain,” her father says, going back into the dining room.

  “Well, I think we’re going to see more of her.” Mrs. Welch dries her hands on a dish towel and starts to cut up the banana cake, passing the knife through it carefully in long parallel lines. “That woman is very serious about Hughie. I just want her to be nice to him. Here, take this out to her.” She hands Dorsey a plate, a huge slice of cake, which Dorsey takes in to Laurie.

  As soon as Dorsey has served the cake, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Standing in front of the sink to wash her hands, she gazes into the mirror to check her hair and face. She feels a low chemical itch of recognition that alters itself quickly and subtly into a wave of discomfort. The soap falls out of her hands and slides down toward the drain plug. It isn’t Paula Prentiss, she thinks; it’s me. We could be sisters. She feels like family to him. He’ll keep coming back. It can’t be me he wants, she thinks. That’s impossible. She dries her hands and goes back out to the dining room, remembering to smile, to make a social effort.

  16

  On Sundays Hugh drives out to the house in the early afternoon to visit his sister and his parents, but after Dorsey’s senior year has started, she’s so often hidden away upstairs studying that Hugh feels like a boor interrupting her, so he hangs around his father for company instead. His mother does not socialize on Sunday morning or early in the afternoon. She reads the Sunday papers, the Detroit Free-Press and the Detroit News, with scholarly concentrated attention, satisfying her scandalized curiosity about the world, a pair of scissors and an X-acto knife close by in case she has the urge to clip anything out. She puts the clippings into a box, and then the box is carried down to the basement and filed with the other boxes of clippings stacked against the south wall.

  Throughout the summer Hugh has asked his father if he’d like to go fishing, and each time the old man has said no, not this time. This continual lack of interest is new and disturbing. In the third week of September Hugh asks him if he’d like just to go out onto the lake and sit there in the rowboat while Hugh pulls the oars for a spell, and this time his father says yes.

  It’s a cool Sunday, the leaves just starting to turn, the sky a luminous, silvery blue. Riding in the car down to the Hasselbachers’ dock, where Mr. Welch’s rowboat is tied up, Hugh’s father smokes quietly and makes small throat-clearing sounds of pleasure whenever he sees a color he likes on a sumac bush or a sugar maple. They park their car on County Road E and walk down the Hasselbachers’ driveway to the dock, Hugh slowing his pace so as not to draw too far ahead of his father, who is walking with short steps. He bends down and picks up a rock. “Jasper,” he says, throwing it off into the woods. He is still looking down. He points at the undergrowth. “Do you know what that is?” he asks. Hugh shakes his head. “Walking fern,” he says. “The tips of the leaves touch ground, root themselves, and then sprout new plants. It’s very rare.” Hugh nods. His father has bored him for years lecturing him about ferns and other stupefying forms of plant life.

  A few minutes later the old man—old! Hugh thinks, he’s only fifty-four—eases himself down into the rowboat, and Hugh pulls them out into the lake. In the bay the tentative waves, three fingers high, slap against the boat. Hugh faces his father and rows with short forward arcs. Mr. Welch settles himself, a cushion at his back, and lights up a cigarette. He gazes north toward town, at the dilapidated Five Oaks Amusement Park, the town’s only claim for tourist dollars, and then he looks down again at the lake. He lowers his hands to the water, and a wave splashes into his hand and douses his cigarette.

  “What the hell. I didn’t want it anyway,” he says, flinging it with a wrist flick into the water. He leans back and smiles at Hugh. “So, kiddo. How’s business in the dealership?”

  “It’s okay. I like sales. How’re things at the agency?”

  “Fine,” Mr. Welch says. “Mrs. Wieland had a fire in her kitchen last week, six hundred dollars at least of smoke damage. The damn fool was pouring brandy all over the main course, she’d been reading Julia Child or some other arsonist, and the curtains caught. It’s lucky she didn’t burn down the house. And Mr. Forster, you remember him—”

  “—The manager at the I.G.A.”

  “That’s the one. He got himself into another auto wreck. This earth has not seen in its history a worse driver than Harold Forster. He makes Ben-Hur look like a Sunday driver. He drove into the ditch and united his car with a tree. Walked away from it, as usual. God loves that man and will protect him in perpetuity, I have no doubt. How I’d love to cancel him, and that pyromaniac Mrs. LaMonte, out there every summer with her shed full of illegal class-B fireworks. She burned the roof off her shed last year and of course won’t tell me how.” He looks again toward the town, getting smaller as Hugh continues to row. “Well, they’re all good people,” Mr. Welch says, shrugging.

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Maybe not. It’s true: I know personally a dozen couples having affairs, several men who beat their wives, and one woman who beats her children black and blue where it won’t show, and I know a man, actually a friend, who is altering the books on his business with ghost payrolling and plans to leave town with the money he’s gouged from the company. I know quite a number of fools and stuffed shirts and would-be members of the criminal class, and I talk to these people every day. This town is full of villains. I should know. I deal hourly with Elks and Moose, warlike men, who think that Richard M. Nixon is a fine upstanding fellow and who supported the late calamity in Vietnam with every cell in their bodies. I have the requisite shame all Americans should feel. My own father worked the land, broke his health doing it to get me an education, and here I am wearing white shirts at a desk, selling policies for fire. But I don’t change people, Hugh. I insure them. I send them checks when fate plays them dirty tricks. Financially, I am God’s apologist.”

  Hugh nods, still rowing.

  “Aren’t you going to argue with me? Aren’t you going to tell me I should revise people in this town, make alterations in them?” His son shakes his head. “Too bad,” his father says. “I could have used a lecture. My moral standards need elevating. You were never much of a moralist, were you?”

  “Too interested in cars and girls,” Hugh says. “I love sex.”

  His father’s face turns red quickly. “Don’t talk like that in front of me. I can’t stand to hear it. I’m not one of your friends; I’m your father.” Mr. Welch frowns at his son’s hands.

  “All right, all right.”

  “Think you’ll ever go back to college?”

  “Not a chance,” Hugh says. “I don’t have the brains for it. Dorsey got all those.”

  “You got them. You just don’t believe you got them. At least you didn’t come out ugly,” Mr. Welch says. “You just remember what I’ve always told you. You watch out for Dorsey.”

  “She won’t need watching out for. She’s too smart.”

  “Everyone needs watching out for,” Mr. Welch says. “And that includes your sister. She’s got a sweet streak. People ar
e going to take advantage of her, this is America, after all. Stop rowing. We’re in the middle of the lake.”

  Hugh brings the oars into the rowboat. The two of them sit quietly for a few minutes, drifting toward the east side of the bay. The breeze from the west ruffles Hugh’s hair; he can feel the sun’s light on his face, but it is without warmth, a cold light. Looking toward the small white wooden struts and beams of the Five Oaks Amusement Park roller coaster, he asks, “How come you didn’t want to go fishing? I saw all your rods and reels cleaned in the basement.”

  “Too much trouble,” his father says. “Tires me out to fish when there aren’t any fish. Besides, this river has started to fill up with chemical whoopee. It even has a touch of radioactivity in it. People’ve been catching fish with weird growths. Harry Gertler caught a bass last week with a tumor in its side that looked like a fireplug. It’s the power plant upstream, but they deny it, of course. Where the radioactivity comes from is anybody’s guess.”

  They drift for another fifteen minutes. Every so often Hugh’s father grunts with pleasure. Occasionally he shuts his eyes and breathes in the lake air, a heavy water and weed scent. Hugh looks at the lines on his father’s face and watches him breathing in and out, and for a moment he has a sudden fear: that his father is going to wave good-bye, first to Five Oaks, and then to him. He stares at his father’s right hand, afraid that it is going to elevate itself into the air and start waving back and forth, and the only preventive measure Hugh can think of to keep that hand from waving is to tell his father how much he loves him. If his father starts to raise his hand, Hugh has already decided, he’ll blurt it out. He’ll say, “I love you, Pop,” and the hand will go down again, he’s sure. But in fact Mr. Welch doesn’t wave to anyone. He lets the sun shine its chilly September light on his face, and when he opens his eyes, he gazes at Hugh and says, “What’re you looking at? When did I become so interesting?” The old man laughs. “I never could manage heart-to-heart talks, could I? Come on, let’s go back.”