It (90 page)

“Hope you are doing well and being good,” the card read. “Hope you will send me something if you can, as I don't have much. I love you Bevvie. Dad.”

He
had
loved her, and in some ways she supposed that had everything to do with why she had fallen so desperately in love with Bill Denbrough that long summer of 1958—because of all the boys, Bill was the one who projected the sense of authority she associated with her father . . . but it was a different sort of authority, somehow—it was authority that listened. She saw no assumption in either his eyes or his actions that he believed her father's kind of
worrying
to be the only reason authority needed to exist . . . as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined.

Whatever the reasons, by the end of their first meeting as a complete group in July of that year, that meeting of which Bill had taken such complete and effortless charge, she had been madly, head-over-heels in love with him. Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.

It was natural enough, she supposed, for her to want to believe it had been Bill who sent her the love-poem . . . although she had
never gotten so far gone as to actually convince herself it was so. No, she had known who wrote the poem. And later on—at some point—hadn't its author admitted this to her? Yes, Ben had told her so (although she could not now remember, not for the life of her, just when or under what circumstances he had actually said it out loud), and although his love for her had been almost as well hidden as the love she had felt for Bill

(but you told him Bevvie you did you told him you loved)

it was obvious to anyone who really looked (and who was kind)—it was in the way he was always careful to keep some space between them, in the draw of his breath when she touched his arm or his hand, in the way he dressed when he knew he was going to see her. Dear, sweet, fat Ben.

It had ended somehow, that difficult pre-adolescent triangle, but just
how
it had ended was one of the things she still couldn't remember. She thought that Ben had confessed authoring and sending the little love-poem. She thought she had told Bill she loved him, that she would love him forever. And somehow, those two tellings had helped save all of their lives . . . or had they? She couldn't remember. These memories (or memories of memories: that was really closer to what they were) were like islands that were not really islands at all but only knobs of a single coral spine which happened to poke up above the waterline, not separate at all but one piece. Yet whenever she tried to dive deep and see the rest, a maddening image intervened: the grackles which came back each spring to New England, crowding the telephone lines, trees and rooftops, jostling for places and filling the thawing late-March air with their raucous gossip. This image came to her again and again, foreign and disturbing, like a heavy radio beam that blankets the signal you really want to pick up.

She realized with sudden shock that she was standing outside of the Kleen-Kloze Washateria, where she and Stan Uris and Ben and Eddie had taken the rags that day in late June—rags stained with blood which only they could see. The windows were now soaped opaque and there was a hand-lettered
FOR SALE BY OWNER
sign taped to the door. Peering between the swashes of soap, she could see an empty room with lighter squares on the dirty yellow walls where the washers had stood.

I'm going home,
she thought dismally, but walked on anyway.

This neighborhood hadn't changed much. A few more of the trees were gone, probably elms felled by disease. The houses looked a little tackier; broken windows seemed slightly more common than they had been when she was a girl. Some of the broken panes had been replaced with cardboard. Some hadn't.

And here she stood in front of the apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street. Still here. The peeling white she remembered had become a peeling chocolate brown at some point during the years between, but it was still unmistakable. There was the window which looked in on what had been their kitchen; there was the window of her bedroom.

(Jim Doyon, you come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed?)

She shivered, hugging her arms across her breasts in an X, cupping her elbows in her palms.

Daddy could still be living here; oh yes he could. He wouldn't move unless he had to. Just walk on up there, Beverly. Look at the mailboxes. Three boxes for three apartments, just like in the old days. And if there's one which says
MARSH
, you can ring the bell and pretty soon there'll be the shuffle of slippers down the hall and the door will open and you can look at him, the man whose sperm made you redheaded and lefthanded and gave you the ability to draw . . . remember how he used to draw? He could draw anything he wanted. If he felt like it, that is. He didn't feel like it often. I guess he had too many things to worry about. But when he did, you used to sit for hours and watch while he drew cats and dogs and horses and cows with
MOO
coming out of their mouths in balloons. You'd laugh and he'd laugh and then he'd say
Now you, Bevvie,
and when you held the pen he'd guide your hand and you'd see the cow or the cat or the smiling man unspooling beneath your own fingers while you smelled his Mennen Skin Bracer and the warmth of his skin. Go on up, Beverly. Ring the bell. He'll come and he'll be old, the lines will be drawn deep in his face and his teeth—those that are left—will be yellow, and he'll look at you, and he'll say Why it's Bevvie, Bevvie's come home to see her old dad, come on in Bevvie, I'm so glad to see you, I'm glad because I worry about you Bevvie, I worry a
LOT
.

She walked slowly up the path, and the weeds growing up between the cracked concrete sections brushed at the legs of her jeans. She looked closely at the first-floor windows, but they were curtained
off. She looked at the mailboxes. Third floor,
STARKWEATHER
. Second floor,
BURKE
. First floor—her breath caught—
MARSH
.

But I won't ring. I don't want to see him. I won't ring the bell.

This was a firm decision, at last! The decision that opened the gate to a full and useful lifetime of firm decisions! She walked down the path! Back to downtown! Up to the Derry Town House! Packed! Cabbed! Flew! Told Tom to bug out! Lived successfully! Died happily!

Rang the bell.

She heard the familiar chimes from the living room—chimes that had always sounded to her like a Chinese name:
Ching-Chong!
Silence. No answer. She shifted on the porch from one foot to the other, suddenly needing to pee.

No one home,
she thought, relieved.
I can go now.

Instead she rang again:
Ching-Chong!
No answer. She thought of Ben's lovely little poem and tried to remember exactly when and how he had confessed its authorship, and why, for a brief second, it called up an association with having her first menstrual period. Had she begun menstruating at eleven? Surely not, although her breasts had begun their first achy growth around mid-winter. Why . . . ? Then, intervening, a mental picture of thousands of grackles on phone lines and rooftops, all babbling at a white spring sky.

I'll leave now. I've rung twice; that's enough.

But she rang again.

Ching-Chong!

Now she heard someone approaching, and the sound was just as she had imagined: the tired whisper of old slippers. She looked around wildly and came very, very close to just taking to her heels. Could she make it down the cement walk and around the corner, leaving her father to think it had been nothing but kids playing pranks?
Hey mister, you got Prince Albert in a can . . . ?

She let out a sudden sharp breath and had to tighten her throat because what wanted to come out was a laugh of relief. It wasn't her father at all. Standing in the doorway and looking out at her was a tall woman in her late seventies. Her hair was long and gorgeous, mostly white but shot through with lodes of purest gold. Behind her rimless spectacles were eyes as blue as the water in the fjords her
ancestors had perhaps hailed from. She wore a purple dress of watered silk. It was shabby but still dignified. Her wrinkled face was kind.

“Yes, miss?”

“I'm sorry,” Beverly said. The urge to laugh had passed as swiftly as it had come. She noticed that the old woman wore a cameo at her throat. It was almost certainly real ivory, surrounded by a band of gold so thin it was nearly invisible. “I must have rung the wrong bell.”
Or rang the wrong bell on purpose,
her mind whispered. “I meant to ring for Marsh.”

“Marsh?” Her forehead wrinkled delicately.

“Yes, you see—”

“There's no Marsh
here,”
the old woman said.

“But—”

“Unless . . . you don't mean
Alvin
Marsh, do you?”

“Yes!” Beverly said. “My father!”

The old woman's hand rose to the cameo and touched it. She peered more closely at Beverly, making her feel ridiculously young, as if she should perhaps have a box of Girl Scout cookies in her hands, or maybe some tags—support the Derry High School Tigers. Then the old woman smiled . . . a kind smile that was nonetheless sad.

“Why you
have
fallen out of touch, miss. I don't want to be the one who tells you this, a stranger, but your father has been dead these last five years.”

“But . . . on the bell . . .” She looked again and uttered a small, bewildered sound that was not quite a laugh. In her agitation, in her subconscious but rock-solid certainty that her old man would still be here, she had read
KERSH
as
MARSH
.

“You're Mrs. Kersh?” she asked. She was staggered by this news of her father, but she also felt stupid about the mistake—the lady would think her little more than illiterate.

“Mrs. Kersh,” she agreed.

“You . . . did you know my dad?”

“Very little did I know him,” Mrs. Kersh said. She sounded a little like Yoda in
The Empire Strikes Back,
and Beverly felt like laughing again. When had her emotions gone whipsawing so violently back and forth? The truth was she couldn't remember a time . . . but she was dismally afraid she would before much longer. “He rented the ground-floor apartment before me. We saw each other, me coming
and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Roward Lane. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” Beverly said. Roward Lane branched off from Lower Main Street four blocks farther down, where the apartment buildings were smaller and even more desperately shabby.

“I used to see him at the Costello Avenue Market sometimes,” Mrs. Kersh said, “and at the Washateria before they closed it. We passed a word from time to time. We—girl, you're pale. I'm sorry. Come in and let me give you tea.”

“No, I couldn't,” Beverly said weakly, but in fact she actually felt pale, like clouded glass that you could nearly look through. She could use tea, and a chair in which to sit and drink it.

“You could and you will,” Mrs. Kersh said warmly. “It's the least I can do for having told you such unpleasant news.”

Before she could protest, Beverly found herself being led up the gloomy hall and into her old apartment, which now seemed much smaller but safe enough—safe, she supposed, because almost everything was different. Instead of the pink-topped Formica table with its three chairs, there was a small round table, really not much bigger than an endtable, with silk flowers in a pottery vase. Instead of the old Kelvinator refrigerator with the round drum on top (her father tinkered with it constantly to keep it going), there was a copper-colored Frigidaire. The stove was small but efficient-looking. There was an Amana RadarRange above it. Bright blue curtains hung in the windows, and she could see flowerboxes outside them. The floor, linoleum when she was a girl here, had been stripped to its original wood. Many applications of oil made it glow mellowly.

Mrs. Kersh looked around from the stove, where she was placing a teapot. “You grew up here?”

“Yes,” Beverly said. “But it's very different now . . . so trim and tidy . . . wonderful!”

“How kind you are,” Mrs. Kersh said, and her smile made her younger. It was radiant. “I have a little money, you see. Not much, but with my Social Security I am comfortable. Once I was a girl in Sweden. I came to this country in 1920, a girl of fourteen with no money—which is the best way to learn the value of money, would you agree?”

“Yes,” Bev sad.

“At the hospital I worked,” Mrs. Kersh said. “Many years—from
1925 I worked there. I rose to the position of head housekeeper. All the keys I had. My husband invested our money quite well. Now I have reached a little harbor. Look around, miss, while the water boils!”

“No, I couldn't—”

“Please . . . still I feel guilty. Look, if you like!”

And so she did look. Her parents' bedroom was now Mrs. Kersh's bedroom, and the difference was profound. The room seemed brighter and airier now. A large cedar chest, the initials R.G. inlaid into it, breathed its gentle aroma into the air. A gigantic surprise-quilt lay on the bed. On it she could see women drawing water, boys driving cattle, men building haystacks. A wonderful quilt.

Her room had become a sewing room. A black Singer machine stood on a wrought-iron table under a pair of starkly efficient Tensor lamps. A picture of Jesus hung on one wall, a picture of John F. Kennedy on another. A beautiful breakfront stood below the picture of JFK—it was filled with books instead of china, but seemed none the worse for that.