Empire Falls (53 page)

Miles had received his first communion the year before, so of course he knew that to conceal one mortal sin was to commit yet another. Since returning from Martha’s Vineyard he’d grown certain that he, not just his mother, had somehow sinned there, though he wasn’t sure what sort of sin it was or how to explain it to the man on the other side of the lattice. He knew he’d betrayed his father by promising to keep his mother’s secret, just as he was certain that if he broke that promise he would be betraying her. In either case it was a sin to try to keep a secret from God, who already knew. Why exactly it was necessary to confess what God already knew had been explained in religious instruction by the very man who now sat on the other side of the lattice, but the delicate logic of it was confusing to Miles at the time and eluded him entirely now. He had come to confession armed with a list of sins he hadn’t committed, sins he hoped were equal in magnitude to whatever he was concealing, and he further hoped God would understand that his reticence about coming clean didn’t stem from any desire to make himself look good. Father Tom listened to his litany of substitute sins and offered penance with the air of a man who is convinced not so much of the truth of what he’s just heard as of the general human depravity in which such behavior has its origins. At the altar railing Miles knelt and said his Our Fathers and Hail Marys and was about to leave when he heard the confessional door open and saw his mother following Father Tom into the sacristy
.

He sat on the steps outside for half an hour, and when his mother finally appeared her face was ashen. He guided her home as you might lead a blind woman, and when they arrived she went directly into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The next morning, Sunday, they went to Mass, but during the sermon Grace became ill and after instructing Miles to stay where he was, she stumbled down the side aisle, one hand over her mouth, and out the side door. Perhaps anticipating this, she had wanted to sit nearer the rear of the church than was their custom, but even so, people turned to watch her stagger out, and it seemed to Miles that Father Tom made matters worse by pausing in his sermon until the church door swung shut behind her. There was an Esso station a block up the street, and Miles suspected his mother had
gone there to be sick, but when communion began she still had not returned. Miles waited, then joined the very end of the line, though painfully aware that he should not receive the host. He’d lied in confession yesterday, and knew better than to invite God into his impure body. On the other hand, since he had gone to confession, it would seem strange if he didn’t take communion, so he received the wafer on a tongue so dry with guilt and shame that instead of dissolving, it remained there like a scrap of thin cotton cloth. He was still trying to swallow the host when he felt his mother slide back into the pew next to him, looking pale and weak. When she took his hand and squeezed hard, it seemed that what she was trying to convey to him was exactly what he feared most, that she was going to die as a result of what she’d done on Martha’s Vineyard. She’d caught something there and brought the illness home with her. Going to confession yesterday hadn’t made her better, so Miles wondered if she, too, had lied to the priest, if at the moment she’d realized it was Father Tom, who knew her, instead of the younger priest, she decided to keep her secret. Father Tom must have suspected as much and made her go with him into the sacristy, but even there she must have refused to tell him about Charlie Mayne
.

Miles was aware that this scenario was problematic. For one thing, his mother had gotten sick days before Charlie Mayne showed up; but he reasoned that maybe she’d made up her mind in advance to do whatever they’d done, and that was where the sin had begun, in the wickedness of a thought, as he’d learned in religious instruction. Maybe getting sick had been a warning from God that she’d chosen to ignore. This, then, was the price of her short-lived happiness
.

When they returned home from Mass, Miles half expected his mother to retire to the bedroom, but instead she told him she had to go out. When he asked her where she was going, she said only that there was something she had to do
.

Miles knew it was wrong, but he followed her. Since on Sunday there were few people on the street, Miles was careful lest she turn around suddenly and catch him, but it soon became clear that she was too preoccupied to notice anything. When she got to the shirt factory, Miles thought for a moment that this was her destination, and that she intended to go inside, but after pausing there for a minute, she continued on. At the Iron Bridge, to his surprise, she turned left onto the pedestrian walkway, and there was no way he could follow without making his presence known. When Grace was halfway across, the truth came to him. She intended to jump. He was so sure of it that when she didn’t, when she walked right past the place where you’d jump if you were going to, Miles still couldn’t banish the idea
.

Because what other explanation could there be? After all, there was little on the other side of the river but the country club and two or three houses owned by rich people. On the sloping lawn of one of these, the nearest, was a gazebo where a solitary woman sat staring out across the falls. She was too far away for Miles to be sure, of course, but she seemed to be tracking his mother’s progress across the bridge. Perhaps seeing her sitting there had prevented Grace from jumping. Maybe she now intended to jump on the way back
.

Miles waited a few minutes to see if his mother, once she reached the far side, would turn back, but she didn’t. And by the time he finally left his post at the town side of the bridge, it seemed that the woman in the gazebo was staring at him
.

O
N
L
ABOR
D
AY
,
without warning, Max returned. Miles, out enjoying the last day of his summer vacation, came home at noon for lunch and found the Dodge parked outside and Max, shirtless and berry-brown from a summer’s worth of painting people’s windows shut, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the
Empire Gazette
as if hoping to find in it news of what Miles and his mother had been up to during his absence. When Miles walked in, his father finished the paragraph he was reading, then looked up and, seeing his son, grinned
.

Miles could see that he was missing a couple teeth. “What happened?” he asked, immediately frightened
.

“What, this?” Max said, sticking his tongue through the new gap. “It’s nothing. I just had a little difference of opinion with a guy, is all. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to pay me about five hundred bucks per tooth.”

Miles nodded, not so much reassured by his father’s explanation as by his presence. Having dreaded Max’s return, he immediately felt how good it was to have him home. His father had only a couple of speeds, which made him predictable, and Miles was ready for things to be predictable again, even if they were predictably odd. Max might not be like other men, but he was always like himself. Other men, for instance, might get upset over minor car accidents, whereas Max saw fender benders as opportunities. If somebody backed into him in a parking lot, which people did with such regularity as to raise suspicions that Max purposely put himself in harm’s way, Max took his damaged car to a mechanic he depended upon for an inflated estimate, then he’d offer to settle the matter for half the estimate in cash, in return for which consideration, nobody’s insurance company needed to be involved. Meaning the other driver’s, since Max himself was never insured. Once the money was in his pocket, he was disinclined to squander it by fixing up the
car. Oh, he might replace a broken headlight, since state law required it, and if a side panel was badly dented, he’d pound it out himself, though the results were generally more grotesque than the original dent. The Dodge had been “repaired” so many times that it resembled something built from scrap on a junk heap
.

Miles had little doubt that his father would realize his dental windfall, just as he knew no dentist was likely to see a penny. What Miles couldn’t know, of course, was that he was witnessing the first stage in the systematic demolition of his father’s body, that by the time Max Roby turned seventy he’d look like a
’65
Dodge Dart that had been totaled on several different occasions
.

At the moment, he had to admit, his father looked the picture of health, his body lean and tanned, and he couldn’t help comparing his sturdy appearance with that of Charlie Mayne, who’d looked so pale and concave on the beach. And he couldn’t help speculating about what would’ve happened if Max had gotten out of jail in time to track them down on Martha’s Vineyard and found them eating caviar out of a picnic basket on the beach. He tried to imagine a fight between his father and Charlie Mayne, but no picture would form. Charlie Mayne was older and clearly no pugilist. Max was tough and durable, but his specialty, Miles was beginning to understand, was not in punching people but in getting them to punch him, which he was pretty certain Charlie Mayne would never do. More likely, Max would simply have just invited himself to join them, saying, “I like caviar too, you know.” In this dramatic scenario, if anybody ended up throwing a punch, it probably would’ve been Grace
.

“Where’s Mom?” it occurred to him to ask, since the house didn’t feel like she was in it
.

“Over at church, she said,” Max told him. “She left you a sandwich in the fridge.”

“She goes every morning now,” Miles said, which was true. Since returning from her journey across the river, she’d been to Mass every day and, moreover, she’d signed Miles up to be an altar boy once school started
.

Max grunted. “She must be feeling guilty about something,” he ventured, studying his son
.

To avoid being stared at, Miles went over to the refrigerator and pretended to look for the sandwich, to put a door between his father and his burning cheeks. Slowly, he went about pouring himself a glass of milk and finally brought it to the table with his sandwich
.

“I heard you made a good catch,” his father said, causing Miles to wonder whether he’d been told by Grace or by Coach LaSalle. For his father to allude
to the incident now, so long after it had happened, felt weird. It had been a month since he’d put his mitt in the way of that line drive, and it seemed even longer, almost as if it had happened to some other boy
.

“Mom’s been real sick,” he heard himself announce
.

His father had gone back to reading the paper and didn’t look up. Miles was about to tell him again when he said, “They always are at this stage.”

Miles considered whether to ask, Who did he mean by “they”? At what stage?

Noticing this silence, Max lowered the paper again, grinning, his gap-tooth smile no less disconcerting this time, though Miles was more prepared for it. “She didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’re going to have a baby brother, is what.”

When his father lifted the newspaper again, Miles ate the entire sandwich and drained the glass of milk without speaking. It took that long for the world to rearrange itself, for the facts to realign, for them to convey a new understanding of the way of things. The world, he now understood, was a physical, not a moral order. Nobody got sick and died as a consequence of sinning. He’d been suspecting as much, but now saw it clearly and realized that part of him had known it all along. People got sick because of viruses and bacteria and children—things like that—not as a result of islands or men like Charlie Mayne. What Miles took from this knowledge was mostly relief, and when he spoke he was aware of something new either in or behind his voice, a new attitude, sort of. “You don’t know that,” he told his father
.

“I don’t, huh?” Max said, trading sports for the funnies
.

“It could be a baby sister.”

His father chuckled, probably at
Peanuts.
“Mostly boys in our family.”

“Then we’re due for a girl,” Miles said
.

“That’s not how it works. It’s not like flipping a coin.”

“What’s it like, then?” It seemed to Miles that it was exactly like flipping a coin, and he didn’t see any reason to let his father skate on such dubious logic just because he was a grown-up
.

Max studied him, grinning again, though Miles wished he wouldn’t. “It’s more like rolling dice,” he explained. “Except they don’t have numbers. There’s six sides to a cube, right? In our family ‘boy’ is written on about five sides of the cube. ‘Girl’ is only written on one. So, if you had to bet with your own money, which would you bet on?”

Miles did some calculations. After a minute he said, “How many kids does Uncle Pete have?” His father’s older brother had moved out west—to Phoenix, Arizona—two decades earlier
.

“Four,” said his father. “All boys.”

Miles nodded. “And you’ve got me.”

“You’re a boy too, last time I looked.”

“That’s five in a row,” Miles pointed out
.

Outside, footsteps sounded on the back porch: Grace, returning from church. Both Miles and his father glanced up at the kitchen window when she passed. This week her bouts of morning sickness had been less severe, and while she wasn’t looking as radiantly beautiful as she had on Martha’s Vineyard, neither did she appear as frightened and despairing as when they’d first returned
.

“Girl was on the sixth side, right?”

Max considered this while Grace, who’d taken an umbrella with her just to be safe, hung it up in the outside hall. “You’re becoming a regular pain in the ass, you know that?”