Cheat and Charmer (61 page)

She took him by the hand and led him, again shielding his eyes, into the bedroom, where he got into Veevi’s bed as his mother sat beside him and tucked him in.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Do you think I’m brave?”

“I think you’re very br-br-br-brave. It took a lot of guts to go and get help.”

“Mom, I
was
brave. Before, I was so scared of lizards and snakes. But I went anyway. I thought they were out there, and I went anyway. And it didn’t bother me. Do you think that was brave?”

“It’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Mom? I’m not scared of them anymore.”

“That’s really something, honey.”

“Scratch my back?”

She made a circular roll-over gesture with her fingers, and he flopped happily onto his stomach. Then he felt her long hard nails lightly tracking his shoulder blades, the top of his neck, the length of his spine.

“Scratch to the left. Up a little. Down. More down. Right
there
.”

His mother knew exactly where he meant. Lulled, soothed, he drooled a little onto the pillow. Then the pill hit him and everything went black.

It was almost noon when he woke up. His mother was sitting beside him on the edge of the bed. He had never slept so deeply in his life, and the sensation of thick, headachy grogginess was new and unpleasant. His mother put her hand behind his neck and helped him sit up. She handed him a glass of orange juice, which he drank slowly, as if he had forgotten how.

“Honey,” Dinah said. “Come into the living room. Your f-f-f-father wants to talk to you.”

“Is Veevi here?”

He dreaded having to see her.

“She’s still in the hospital, but she’s okay. She had to have a couple of stitches where she cut her head. Daddy’s driving her home this evening. I’m taking you guys home this afternoon. That way, she can have some time to take it easy and you guys can swim today. She told me to tell you she’s sorry about what happened. I think she’s pretty embarrassed.”

“Are we going to have an Easter egg hunt?”

“Not today. We’ll do it next Sunday, at home.”

“After Easter? Why?”

“The eggs didn’t get dyed last night.”

Dinah waited for him to get out of bed; then she followed him into the living room. Lorna had been instructed to take Coco out to play in the front yard, by the palm trees. Jake was sitting in a corner of the sofa. Peter sat down in the other corner, across from his father, and Dinah perched herself on the arm of the sofa, next to Peter.

After asking his son whether he’d slept well, Jake asked him to give a full account of what had happened the night before. This Peter did. His father listened, pursing his lips. And then he spoke. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t call us. From here.”

Peter tried to explain: when he heard the thud, and realized that Veevi must have fallen down in the bathroom, he knew that the piece of paper with George Joy’s phone number was in her shirt pocket, but he’d been too scared to go in and get it.

“What were you scared of?”

He was scared, he said, that she might be badly hurt and he wouldn’t know what to do. And he was just scared—scared she might do something to him.

“What kind of thing? What would a woman who has passed out and fallen and perhaps given herself a brain injury have done to you?” Jake asked.

He didn’t know what. Just something. Also, he remembered that there was something funny about the number—it was “unlisted” and he wasn’t sure what that meant, and he thought the best thing to do was go for help.

“But why didn’t you first go into the bathroom to see what had happened?” Jake pressed him. “She could have been badly injured—she could have been bleeding to death.”

His father’s words stunned him. Expecting praise, so certain that he had done something good and right, he couldn’t fathom his father’s harshness. He looked at his mother, trying to find an answer there. But all he saw was that she was chewing the inside of her cheek and had folded her arms tightly across her chest, her worried eyes glancing rapidly back and forth between him and his father. Again, he explained: “I was scared, Dad. I wanted to call you. I knew she might be hurt. But I didn’t think I could take care of her by myself. Dad! She
peed
all over me.”

“So she peed on you! So what! It’s pathetic, and embarrassing for her, but it’s no reason to be
afraid
of her.”

“Let up, Jake,” Dinah said sharply. “He did what he thought best, and I’m pr-pr-proud as hell of him.”

“Hold it right there, darling,” Jake said, his voice loud and sharp. “I don’t see anything to be proud of. In fact, I don’t mind saying that I’m very disturbed by what he did.”

Peter went perfectly still, sitting there on the sofa. “Peter,” his father continued, his legs crossed comfortably. “What I still don’t understand—what I absolutely
do not understand
is, number one”—he held up his little finger, bending the others—“how you could leave your little sister and your baby cousin
all alone
in this house with your aunt while she was drunk and possibly smoking cigarettes, and, number two”—and he held up the fourth finger on his hand—“how you could leave the house at all with Veevi lying in the bathroom, where she might well have been bleeding to death. She could have died; she could have set the house on fire and your sister and cousin could all have been
killed
. Burned to death!”

“Jake! Enough!” Dinah shouted.

Tears fell one by one from Peter’s eyes, though he sat erect. He tried to wipe them away with the back of his hand. He wanted to speak, but instead he blinked and clenched the muscles of his mouth, because he knew that if he tried to explain further he would begin to sob. The tears kept coming.

“If you were that frightened, why didn’t you simply go to the phone in the kitchen and call the police? They could have found George’s number in a second. Why this production number with strangers down the street? What if
they
had turned out to be drunk themselves, or criminals, or God knows what? What the hell possessed you to
leave this house
?” His father’s voice had risen to an enraged roar. “You’re almost ten years old!” he bellowed. “You left your family! You ran away! You failed them! And us! And yourself! And, frankly, I’m
very
concerned. Very concerned about what this means for your future. What this says about your
character
. You’re a goddamn coward.”

“How
dare
you speak to him that way!” Dinah shouted. “How
dare
you call our son a c-c-c-coward. He did the b-b-b-best he could, Jake! He used his judgment. He thought about what to do. He went to get other adults.”

“Horseshit! He jumped ship. Thought only of himself.”

The tears flowed steadily down Peter’s face. He sat on the edge of the sofa, his long, thin arms limp by his sides. Dinah sat beside him and put her arm around him, and the boy turned his face to his mother’s breast and sobbed.

“Now, you listen to me, you s-s-s-sadistic pr-pr-pr-prick,” she said, her
eyes flashing. “He wasn’t responsible for her.
We
were. We knew she’s a drunk. We went out and left our kids with a drunk. And she was responsible for him, not the other way around.”

“Sweetheart, you’re overreacting.”

“I’m overreacting? That’s a scream.”

“People sometimes get drunk when they’re sad and lonely, as we all know Veevi is, and Pete is old enough to cope with that. When I was ten, my parents left Evelyn and me alone in the apartment when they went out and we knew what to do in emergencies.”

“Well, b-b-b-bully for you, b-b-b-buster. Sitting in judgment on your k-k-kid and calling him a c-c-c-coward and throwing around your fancy Fr-Fr-Fr-Freudian words.”

Dinah released Peter, who sat, watchful and listening. “Now wait a minute, darling,” Jake countered sternly (Peter hated the way his father called everyone “darling” and “sweetheart” and “honey” when he was yelling at them). “Pete left your
sister
, a member of this
family
, who in a moment of frailty, or God knows what, slipped up, as all human beings do on one occasion or another, left her injured in this house, which she could easily have set on fire, when his sister and cousin were sound asleep and helpless, when all he had to do was go into the bathroom, reach down and pull the number out of Veevi’s pocket, and walk calmly into the kitchen and call us. Peter had a clear responsibility, and he didn’t meet it. And I mean it when I say I’m very concerned. He’s been running away from reality all his life, and this is just the most severe example of it.”

All the strength in Peter’s body suddenly drained away. He felt not simply small and weak but insubstantial, as if he had been changed by a powerful magician into something that wasn’t even human anymore, just smoke or air. Staring out the open screen door at the concrete patio and the empty blue sky, he no longer felt that he was himself, and his parents might as well have been two complete strangers. He hates me, he said to himself. He doesn’t care that I ran out for help and wasn’t afraid of snakes or lizards. He hates me. I hate him, too.

Meanwhile, his parents had begun to shout at each other.

“Does he have to think of
everything
an adult would?” his mother yelled. “Why aren’t you reserving one word of censure for Veevi? God help me, she’s my s-s-s-sister, but she’s the one who put all these kids in danger. Not Peter!”

“I’m not concerned about Veevi. I don’t even like her!” Jake said. “She
takes up all the oxygen in this family. I’m suffocating with her in our lives. We all are! It’s my son I’m worried about. Why can’t he follow the rules? And, for that matter, why do you always protect him from the demands of normal life? You refuse to make him compete with other kids in normal sports; you let him fence instead of taking him to Little League. You don’t force him to go to birthday parties. Did you ever hear of a kid who doesn’t like birthday parties?”

Peter looked at his father and thought, What a jerk.

“He ran away from his responsibility last night the way he runs away from team sports.”

“How can you say that? How can you call a kid who practices his instrum-m-m-ment two hours a day irresponsible? And how can you put this whole thing on him?”

“He won’t play baseball! Doesn’t that say something to you? He wants to fence—a violent, snobbish sport, for European aristocrats, not normal American boys! He won’t compete like a normal kid. He’s so afraid of his own competitive aggression that he runs away from it and seeks gratification in places where he won’t find any competition.”

“Speak English, Jake, not Freudish!”

“You don’t see it!” he shouted. “You’re blind where Peter’s concerned. It’s a moral question, too—a matter of principle. He should have known what to do.”

“Pr-Pr-Pr-Pr-Pr …” She absolutely could not get the word out, and her eyes opened so wide they looked like two round brown nuts. Finally, she took a deep breath that filled the sails of her lungs and blew out, “ ‘
PRINCIPLE
’?”

Her face registered bitter incredulity. But she could see that the silent connections she was making in her mind between his indictment of Peter and his desire for her to testify were nowhere near each other in his. She wouldn’t make them for him, because Peter was there. But she was boiling now, steaming, lathering, erupting, and she leaped up from the couch and went for Peter’s foil, grabbed it, and in a single movement strode across the living room and banged the handle over and over on Jake’s round balding head and shoulders. “You
prick
!” Her voice was at once hoarse and shrill. “You absolute
prick
! Pete’s our child! Do you want to d-d-d-destroy him?”

Peter sprang away from the sofa and stared as his mother hit his father over and over with the gleaming handle. She seemed possessed, a creature
none of them had ever seen before—not her son, her husband, or herself. His father shrank a little, protectively hunching his shoulders and ducking the blows, but then, laughing loudly, he reached up and seized the lower end of the blade, its tip swathed in thin white soiled bandage tape for Peter’s lessons, and wrestled the foil away from her. Dinah, with redoubled fury, began pounding Jake with her fists. He did little to fend off the blows, only shielding his face slightly and laughing again, as if Dinah’s fists were Ping-Pong balls. “I’m taking these kids back to L.A. now, and I don’t give a good goddamn if I ever see you or that pain-in-the-ass sister of mine again,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, you two deserve each other, and I’ve fucking had it with both of you! She’s never going to p-p-pee on our son or be cruel to Lorna again!”

“If you could hear yourself, you’d see how funny this is,” Jake said. “But suit yourself. No one can reason with you, Dinah. You always do just what you want to do.” He shrugged and folded his arms.

She collapsed at the other end of the sofa and glared, while Jake leaned back and looked at her in his imperturbable way. There was a long silence. And then, to Peter, it seemed as if Jake was about to break into a smile, as if he had been studying the whole scene and enjoying it very much. He rubbed his large hand over his balding head and looked at his fingers. “No blood,” he said. Then he laughed.