Earthly Possessions (18 page)

At dinner I could look down a straight row of Emory boys (skipping Dr. Sisk, who poked in everywhere) and see four variations on a single theme—all those large, sober faces, Saul in black, Julian in a flashy turtleneck, Linus wearing something limp and unnoticeable and Amos in tatters of denim, like an easygoing, good-natured hitch-hiker. Well, he was easygoing. He was good-natured. Then why did he get on my nerves so?

He was always asking me questions. What I thought of Holy Basis; why we had so much furniture; how I could stand so many strangers coming through. “What strangers?” I said.

“Oh, Miss Feather, Dr. Sisk …”

“Miss Feather’s been with us near as long as Selinda. I wouldn’t really call her a stranger.”

“And what causes Saul to look the way he does?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“He’s got so … shadowed, he’s got this haunted look. Is everything all right?”

“Of course it’s all right, don’t be silly,” I said.

He studied the ceiling a while. “I don’t suppose it’s easy, being a preacher’s wife,” he said.

“Why would you think that?”

“Well, having him so, well, saintly. Right?”

I stared straight through him.

“Or for him, either; it wouldn’t be easy married to
you
. Selinda says you aren’t religious. Doesn’t that scare him?”

“Scare him? It makes him angry,” I said.

“It scares him. Of course it does, the way you coast along, no faith, all capability, your … 
sparseness
, and you’re the one that makes the soup while he just brings home the sinners to eat it. Isn’t that so? He forever has to keep wrestling with the thoughts that you put in his mind.”

“I don’t! I never
touch
his mind! I deliberately keep back from it,” I said.

“He wrestles anyway,” said Amos. He grinned. “His private devil.” Then he grew serious. He said, “I don’t understand married people.”

“Evidently not,” I told him, stiffly.

“How they can keep on keeping together. Though it’s admirable, of course.”

What he meant was, it might be admirable but
he
didn’t admire it. Well, I didn’t admire him, either. I disliked the careless way he moved around the room, examining various cabinets no bigger than matchboxes. Faced with Amos’s scorn, I underwent some subtle change; I grew loyal, stubborn. I forgot the plans for my trip, I reflected that it would be pointless: no matter where I went, Saul would be striding forever down the alleys of my mind, slapping his Bible against his thigh. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” I told Amos.

But Amos just said, “No, probably I don’t,” and went on easily to something new. “Whose dog is that?”

“Selinda’s.”

“Peculiar
kind of animal.”

Well, it’s true that Ernest wasn’t worth much. He was a mongrel—a huge black beast, going gray, with long tangled hair and a mop-shaped head. When Ernest wagged his tail, everything at his end of the room fell and broke. Some form of hearing loss led him to believe that we were calling him whenever we called Amos or Linus, and he always arrived drooling and panting, withering us with his fish-market breath, skidding and crashing into things and scraping the floor with his toenails. Also, he’d become unduly attached to me and any time I left him alone he lost control of his bladder. Oh, I admit he wasn’t perfect.

Still, I didn’t see what business it was of Amos’s. “Tell me,” I said, “is there one single thing here you approve of? Shall we throw the whole place out and start over?”

Then Amos held up one hand, backing off, and said, “All right, all right, don’t take it wrong.” He was smiling his shy, sweet, hitch-hiker’s smile, lowering his head, looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. Instantly I felt sorry for him. He was just new here, that was all. He had left home longer ago than his brothers, traveled farther, forgotten more. Forgotten that in every family there are certain ways you shrink and stretch to accommodate other people. Why, Linus for instance could remember back to his nursing days (Alberta’s nipple like a mouthful of crumpled seersucker, he claimed) but Amos couldn’t stand to remember and told me so, outright. He hadn’t liked being a child, he said. Their mother had been pushy, clamorous, violent, taking over their lives, meddling in their brains, demanding a constant torrent of admiration and gaiety. Her sons had winced when she burst into their rooms. She breathed her hot breath on them, she laughed her harsh laugh.
She called for parties! dancing! let’s show a little
life
here! Given anything less than what she needed, he said (and she was always given less, she could never get enough), she turned mocking and contemptuous. She had a tongue like a knife. The sharp, insistent colors of her clothes and even of her skin, her hair, were painful to her children’s eyes. They had hated her. They had wished her dead.

Alberta?

“Why are you surprised?” Amos asked me. “Do we look like four normal, happy men? Hasn’t it occurred to you? The other three can’t even seem to leave Clarion; and I’m not much better, hopping around like something in a skillet, running before the school year’s even finished half the time and breaking with whoever gets close to me. Three of us have never married; the fourth chose somebody guaranteed to let him keep his doors shut.”

I stared at him.

“Isn’t it true? You don’t know a thought in his head, never asked. If you had, none of this would come as any surprise to you. Saul hates Alberta worse than any of us.”

“But … no, that’s only because of …”

I didn’t want to come right out and say it.

“Because of Grandpa?” Amos asked. “Face it: single events don’t cause that kind of effect. It took Saul years and years to get as bitter as he is. He’s come away from her in shreds; all of us have. He and the others just sit here in Clarion circling her grave and picking at her bones, trying to sort it through, but not me. I gave up. I don’t remember. I’ve forgotten.”

And he did, in fact, smile at me with the clear, blank eyes of a man without a past. I could tell he had truly forgotten. He had twisted every bit of it, muddled his facts hopelessly. There was no point in trying to set him straight.

I took him with us to church. He sat beside me, dressed in
a borrowed suit, scrubbed and subdued. But even here, he seemed to be asking his questions. The moment Saul announced his text—Matthew 12:30, “He that is not with me is against me”—Amos shifted his feet, as if about to lean forward and shoot up a hand and shout, “Objection!” But he didn’t, of course. It was all in my mind. He sat there as quiet as anyone, with his fingers laced. I don’t know how he managed to annoy me so.

That night I dreamed that Saul and I had found ourselves a bedroom of a watery green color, like an aquarium. We were making love under flickering shadows, and for once there was no tiny knock on our door, no sad little voice: “I’m lonesome,” no church members phoning with deaths and diseases. Saul looked down at my face with a peculiarly focused, thoughtful look, as if he had some plan in mind for me. I decided the new bedroom was a wonderful idea. Then Linus stretched out alongside me and covered me with soft, bearded kisses, and Julian arrived in his gambling clothes which he slowly took off, one by one, smiling at me all the while. I was circled by love, protected on every side. The only Emory who wasn’t there was Amos, and he was who they were protecting me from.

The sign said:
PERTH MANOR MOTEL. $8 NITELY. ANTIQUES. ATTIC TREASURES. NOTARY PUBLIC. PUREBRED DALMATIONS
. We paused on the sidewalk to read it. Twilight had slipped in more suddenly than usual, it seemed to me. We’d been taken by surprise, had our eyes clapped over by some cool-handed stranger coming up behind us. But this sign was written in movable white letters such as you see in cafeterias where the menu often changes, and we could easily make it out. Behind it was a small plain building, mostly porch, with
OFFICE
glowing on one pillar. Further back we saw a string of cottages no bigger then henhouses, the faded color of something chalked up and then rubbed away.

“Now first,” said Jake, “we check that Oliver’s mom is not around.”

“What for?” Mindy asked.

“Oliver’s mom don’t think too highly of me.”

“Then why are we coming here, Jake?”

“Well, I have some hopes of Oliver,” he said.

My loafers gritted on the sidewalk; so did Mindy’s sandals. Jake gave us an exasperated look and motioned for us to stop. He went on up the walk alone in his sneakers. We stayed where we were, eerily still in the gathering dusk, Mindy like a weightless, glowing balloon. I was either tired or hungry (too numb to know which) and had reached that state where nothing seems real. Mindy’s pale hand pressed to her backache could have been my own. I held my breath along with Jake when he crept up the steps to peer through the screen.

“He is going to get himself caught,” Mindy said.

Jake swatted an arm backwards in her direction, warning her to be still.

“Sometimes he just
tempts
people to catch him. Watch,” she said.

But no, here he came, shaking his head, extra bouncy on his heels from having had to hold still so long. “It’s Mrs. Jamison, sure enough,” he told us. “Potato on toothpicks, standing at the counter, hoping for someone to look down on.”

“Maybe she won’t know who you are,” Mindy said.

“Are you kidding? Every night she prays I fall out of a window,” said Jake. “We’ll just sit here a while.”

He was talking about a slatted bench that stood at the edge of the yard, facing the street. We sat down on it, Mindy in the middle. It was one of those lukewarm, breezy evenings that make you feel you’re expecting something. We sat like people in a movie house, but all we had to watch was a dingy men’s store across the way and a few passing cars. Periodically Jake would crane around toward the office door—a narrow rectangle full of light.

“What if she’s there for the evening?” Mindy asked him.

“We stay somewheres else and come back the next day. Rent us a room with Charlotte’s traveler’s check.”

“Oh, Jake, I’m beat. Can’t we just go on in and pay no mind what she says to you?”

“I wouldn’t face that woman for nothing,” Jake said. “I’m scared to death of her.”

I thought that was funny. I started laughing, but stopped when he glared at me. “Why don’t you just shove a pistol in her ribs?” I said.

Oh, I was even tireder than I’d thought. Jake drew his head in sharply. Mindy said, “Pistol?”

“Lady’s crazy,” he told her. He had his arm along the back of the seat, and now he started stroking her shoulder like someone calming a cat. “Fact is, Oliver’s mom has always disliked me,” he said. “I believe she ties me up in her mind with things I never had no part in. Various misfortunes of Oliver’s. It wasn’t me put those bombs in no mailboxes, I didn’t even know him then. Didn’t know him till training school. But try and tell
her
that. She sees me, she thinks ‘Trouble’.”

“She’s not the only one,” Mindy said.

Their voices had taken on that clear, anonymous sound that comes at twilight. They might have been campers telling ghost stories, strollers talking under someone’s window, parents heard from far across a lawn.

“When the two of us got out of training school,” Jake said, “why, I would drop over to see him sometimes. He didn’t live all that much of a distance. He lived with his mom, who was a real estate lady. I would find him home reading, all he done was reading. We’d ride around, go out for a hamburger, you know how it is. I really had a good time with that Oliver. But only if his mom wasn’t there. His mom was so brisky and dry of voice. Never smiled unless she was saying something mean. Like she’d say, ‘Back so soon, Jack?’ She always called me Jack, which is definitely not my name. That can grate on a person. ‘Funny,’ she’d say, ‘I thought you were here just yesterday. No doubt I was mistaken.’ With this small sweet smile
curling up her mouth while she was talking. I hate a woman to do that.”

“That’s how
my
mother did you,” said Mindy. “You just have this knack, I believe.” She told me, “My mother used to be so rude to him! Now she pretends he’s not alive and never will mention his name. I ask in my letters if she’s seen him and all she’ll answer back is how many inches of rain they’ve had. He could fall down dead and
she
wouldn’t tell me. To her he’s dead already.”

“Well, that explains it,” Jake said.

“What’s it explain?”

“Anyway,” said Jake, “you may laugh that I’d let Mrs. Jamison get to me but I couldn’t help it. I mean I just couldn’t help it. See, at the time my own mom was right disappointed in me too though nowhere near as mean, of course. She would just act pale and slumpy and bow her head real low over her sewing. Know how they do? I went to Oliver’s to get away from her, but met up then with Oliver’s mom. Seems I had been characterized as someone no-account. Seems I couldn’t shake other people’s picture of me.”

I gave a sudden sigh. Mindy crossed her ankles, and her dress stirred and whispered.

“Well, I run off,” said Jake. “I heard of this guy that would pay you for driving a car to California. I just wanted to get gone and so I left with no goodbyes. Not that I kept it a secret on purpose, but my mom happened to be visiting a lady down the street when I received word and what I thought was, ‘I’ve got to get
free!
Got to go, can’t stay here no more.’ Only they arrested me in California for running a stolen automobile. Well, I didn’t draw a sentence or nothing. It was all cleared up. But things were a little complicated on account of past troubles I’d had, and time I got home it was some months later and Oliver’d gone to Florida. I asked his neighbors. ‘Why, him and his mother packed up some weeks ago and moved to Perth,
Florida, where it’s less crime she says and a better class of people, and the sun shines so steady there they give you your newspaper free on any day it rains.’ And sure enough, that Christmas and every Christmas after I would get a card from O.J., Florida-type, Santa Claus riding a surfboard, angels picking grapefruit. ‘Merry Christmas, Jake, I hope you’re well.’ And I would put some effort into answering, though let me tell you I’m not what you’d call a letter writer. Talk about all I was doing and all, spend quite some time on it. But the only thing
he
ever sent was those Christmas cards. Only Christmas cards. Made me feel like he was in jail, you know? Just that one card a year, maybe censored; surprised if she didn’t check my letters for hacksaws and razor blades. Well, I blame myself, really. I never should have left him with his mom like that. Why didn’t I drop around his house before I run, ask him to come on along? But I was just so anxious to get going, you see. Just so desperate to leave.”