Other Plans (9 page)

All right for him. After Christmas dinner, they went home and Ceil oiled and scented herself and put on her teddy. Henry, in the meantime, went out for an evening stroll. She waited for the sound of his key. When it came, she threw open the apartment door and stood with her fingers laced behind her head.

“For God's sake, Ceil!” Henry slammed the door as if something fierce had followed him home and was even now snapping at his heels. “She might see you!” “She” was Mrs. Romero, their plump and affable neighbor across the hall. Mrs. Romero borrowed sugar and gin indiscriminately and liked to keep her finger on their pulse.

“How do you like it?” Ceil turned this way and that, a perfect lingerie model. “Don't I look terrific?” She meant to say “Doesn't it look terrific?” complimenting both herself and Henry's taste. A Freudian slip; the best, the only kind.

“You l-l-look fine,” Henry said, stuttering a bit, as he'd done as a child. “Better put something on over that or you'll take cold.”

Ceil stomped to the bedroom, gritting her teeth, talking to herself. “What did he give it to me for?” she muttered in a loud voice. “What the heck did he pay all that money for if he didn't want me to wear the damned thing?” She went to the closet and put on her old sneakers and a long gray sweater of Henry's riddled with moth holes over her teddy.

“Okay, mister,” she said, coming back to him, “my price is five for a half hour, ten for ten minutes. What'll it be?”

Henry patted his pockets, came up with two ones. “It's all I have,” he said. “What will that get me?” He smiled his lovely quiet smile and the shivering started up.

“The works,” she said.

Nobody ever really levels with you as to what the first baby really looks like. Fresh from the womb, Leslie was a shock. She had a full head of wild black hair and a high and raging voice that scared them both. “She's an anarchist,” Henry said, trying to smile. “A beautiful anarchist.”

“She's pretty ugly,” Ceil said. “If I'd known she was going to look like that, I never would've had her.” She burst into tears at this unaccountable sentiment, and Henry patted her shoulder to comfort her, though he felt in need of comforting himself. “She's not ugly,” he said. “Don't say that, Ceil. She's beautiful.”

Leslie's livid umbilical cord refused to heal properly and fall off. It was still dangling there, staring up from her tiny middle like an angry eye when they brought her home from the hospital. Leslie would never have a pretty belly button, Ceil mourned. Never be able to wear a bikini. Oh, take her back, please. Bring me a pretty one.

She decided she was an unnatural mother. Deeply ashamed of herself, she never told anyone. Not even Henry.

That first year, the croup kettle kept the apartment as moist and warm as a tropical paradise. The darling wallpaper they'd hung in the nursery began peeling away from the walls. Leslie didn't need much sleep. The dark hair fell out and was replaced by a strawberry blonde fuzz. Orange, Henry called it. He said he'd always wanted a daughter with orange hair and now he had one. Leslie smiled a lot when things pleased her, and the high, raging voice turned to quite presentable imitations of human speech.

When John arrived, Henry's aunt arrived to inspect the male heir. She brought a silver porringer, and after a good look at the new baby, she said, “Give that one a good cigar and a good book and he'll be all set.” John was a proper baby, all right. He looked as if he belonged. John also had colic and scowled a lot. “So would you,” Ceil's mother said, “if you had a constant tummy ache.” She had a point.

Ceil was astounded, after a while, at her own competence. So was Henry, with hers as well as his own. He got so he could diaper a baby so tightly its eyes bulged, his diapers like tourniquets, while hers sagged perilously low, skimming the ground at times. She got into the habit of tucking her babies under her arm like an oversized football, and trotting about the house with them that way, their little faces hanging down, laughing at her shoes, while she, the ball carrier, was certain, at least for the time being, of having the upper hand.

But it seemed, sometimes, as if they would never again have any time to call their own. Three years, it turned out, wasn't enough time between babies. Even she, who had wanted a crowd of babies, admitted that. No sooner was one toilet-trained than another was standing there, soggy, petulant, fists digging into eyes, smelling higher than a kite. The old ammonia kid, Henry called each in turn.

One day, pushing John in his stroller, watching Leslie on one of the park swings, a woman she'd spoken to—a former nanny, the woman had told her, indicating Buckingham Palace was a decided possibility—said to her, “Oh my, I don't envy you bedtime. Two suppers, two baths, all that lot.”

And Ceil had laughed and said, “I wouldn't dream of giving them separate baths. Just throw them both in the tub. They love it. They have a marvelous time playing together.”

“A boy and a girl together in the tub?” The woman pulled up her coat collar and rose to leave. Depravity was everywhere.

Their bow legs straightened, their cheeks grew round and rosy. They were so trusting. “Sometimes they look at me,” Henry said, “and I can tell from their eyes that they think I can do anything. It scares the hell out of me.”

If they were going to have any more children, Ceil said, they should have them now. John was two, Leslie five. It was time to think of having another baby.

“We can't afford any more,” Henry said. “Not with the cost of college. And shoes. And everything else. Let's stick with the two we've got.”

Leslie developed a talent for playing second base and for boys. Leslie soon grew famous for falling in love. Usually with someone unsuitable. A large, looming football player, going through the motions of repeating his senior year in high school, became the apple of her eye. “He's so darling!” Leslie would say. Even when the boy was arrested for drug possession and assaulting a policeman, Leslie was unmovable. Leslie knew it all. When Ceil tried to instruct her in the vagaries of sex, Leslie kept saying, “I know, Mother. I know,” with an attitude of boredom that alarmed Ceil.

At nine, John had been bounced off the school bus so often they called him Bouncer. The bus driver back then, a stout woman in her forties, buttonholed Ceil in the produce department of the A & P one day and held her captive for a full twenty minutes while she recounted John's proclivity for taking center stage. “He makes 'em laugh, see,” the bus driver kept saying. “That's his trouble, he likes the attention so he makes 'em laugh.”

And still did.

Never marry a man who's a good dancer. Another of Ceil's mother's truisms. Good dancers are liable to be bad husbands.

Well, Henry liked to dance, all right, but not with her. With himself. Sometimes, after a party, they'd come home and he'd turn on the stereo, put both hands in his pockets, and cruise around the living room, eyes at half-mast, smiling foolishly, as if he were at his junior prom, dressed in a frilled shirt and a rented tux, sporting a red carnation in his buttonhole. Later, when the children came, he'd take them for a spin, cradling them against his chest as he led them in an intricate pattern of mad swirls and whirls and dips he'd never have essayed with a full-size partner. Their little faces, looking at her over his shoulder, were wreathed in gummy smiles and their tiny heads bobbed in time to Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw.

Just look at him, she'd think pridefully. What does my mother know.

8

Henry was already in bed, lying with his hands behind his head, when Ceil came into their room. He watched her as she undressed and went to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She slipped under the covers, thinking about what her life might have been if she hadn't married, hadn't had children.

“Who else but Marge would liken a gallbladder attack to labor pains?” Henry said.

Ceil made noncommital noises from her side of the bed. She and Marge were oil and water. Always had been. Lucky they lived so far apart.

“I'm glad I called Dad. It's been too long. I should call him more often.” I can't afford to let that slide, he thought. Dad's getting on. I must remember to check in with him once a week.

“What did he have to say?” Ceil was already half asleep.

“He sounded old, Ceil. His voice sounded old. At first, anyway. After we started talking, he pepped up and sounded like his old self. Like his young self, I should say.” He smiled over at her. She'd burrowed under the covers so that only the top of her head showed. He folded back her side of the blanket neatly so she'd have plenty of air. He liked doing things for her, taking care of her. He loved her profile, the clarity of her features, the quiet way she slept. Even in sleep she was composed. It was her profile, in fact, that had decided him. There's always some one thing. In his case, she'd told him, it had been the nape of his neck. He'd never thought of the nape of the neck as a sexual thing, as the Japanese were said to do. But from there on, he'd seen to it the barber trimmed his hair very carefully.

He envied Ceil the ease with which she fell asleep. It sometimes took him as much as a couple of hours to drop off. He wouldn't take sleeping pills, pills of any kind. They were anathema to him. Good health ran in his family. Except for his mother. She'd died in her sleep, without warning. Of a coronary occlusion. She hadn't been ill. The family, his father especially, had been devastated, inconsolable. They'd had letters of condolence from total strangers. His father had answered each one by hand; the only glee in his life became the adding up of the vast numbers of letters that had poured in. He'd kept a notebook filled with the names and addresses of the people who'd cared enough to write, and he kept up a correspondence with some of them even after they moved away.

Once, after a late party and a lot to drink, his father had confided to him that Helen, his new wife, had forced him into marriage. “I know you think it's ungentlemanly of me to say,” his father had said, “but it's true. I wouldn't be telling you this, of course, if I hadn't had too much gin. Just wanted you to know. For the record, that is. Helen said she'd never be able to hold up her head in her family if I didn't make an honest woman out of her. Maybe it's just as well. She's all right, Helen. I'm not entirely happy, but I'm better off than I'd be living alone. Helen tries hard. Cooks special things for me. She's not your mother, but then, who is?”

It was the most intimate conversation they'd ever had.

After his mother's death, his father had begun to drink rather heavily. Now he'd cut down. Helen was a Christian Scientist and didn't touch a drop. A good thing, too. God knows she didn't need any stimulants. She and her sisters were what he thought of as Southern California vivacious. Everything on them moved: hands, feet, eyes, lashes, mouths. They reminded him of battery-operated dolls. He was amazed at their fortitude. After all the energy they spent on golf, shopping, theatergoing, talking, it was a wonder to him they were still operating after five
P.M
. It boggled his mind to contemplate what they might've been up to if they'd been drinkers.

He got into bed and opened a library book, a tale of a disintegrating marriage, a dissatisfied thirty-three-year-old housewife, bored with her husband and children, her life, who decides to strike out and try life on her own. Have an affair. The affair, he'd discovered, was obligatory in these novels.

He put the book aside and looked over at Ceil. She'd thrown one arm outside the covers, her hand curved slightly, as if expecting something rare and beautiful to be placed in it. She had lovely arms, slender and rounded, her almost translucent skin golden even at this time of the year. Leslie had inherited her mother's skin, for which she could be grateful. He leaned over and touched one of his wife's fingers, the warmth of it reassuring. A running nightmare troubled him: that one day he would wake to find her cold beside him, rigor mortis having already set in. That was the way it had happened to his father.

After his mother's funeral, when everyone had gone and there was nothing left to do but open some windows to rid the room of the overpowering scent of death, to get on with whatever was left, his father told him how it had been.

“I was stunned,” he'd said. “I thought it was a bad joke, that I was being punished for something I hadn't done. She was gone, gone into the night, without warning. Something should have warned me. How can you love someone that long, share a bed, a life, and not know when the soul leaves the body? I should have known. We were like one being. How could I not know? Maybe I could have done something. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, anything. I lay next to her all night and I didn't know she'd stopped breathing.” And his father had put his head in his hands and cried; long, shuddering sobs that went out to the corners of the room, filled his ears long after his father had sunk into a restless sleep. No one could have done anything to prevent his mother's death. He eventually convinced his father of this, he and the doctor together. It happens this way sometimes, the doctor had said. And it was terrible beyond belief, for everyone except the person who has died. It was the way anyone would choose to die. Don't cry for the dead, Ceil's mother said. Cry for the living.

At last he turned off the light and stretched out full length, hands crossed on his chest. He thought, this is the way I will lie in my coffin. Not long ago, Ceil had surprised and amused him by saying, “I like the
idea
of cremation. It's just that I can't get over the thought that it might hurt.”

He turned on his side and thought of his children. I am too tough on John, he thought. Ceil's right. I'm not that way with Leslie. But she's different. Les will work things out to her satisfaction, make a success of her life, whatever she chooses to do. And make some man, men, maybe, very happy. He knew he had to fight smugness where Leslie was concerned. John was the one who troubled him. Tonight, when he'd called off their talk, John's face had been transfigured and joyful, so joyful it had cut to his heart and he'd thought, God, how he must hate me. How he must dread our encounters. I must let up on him. Then, immediately, he'd thought, no, I must not. He will be a man soon, and a man has a tough row to hoe. He was old-fashioned enough to think a man's lot was tougher than a woman's, even though he knew it made Ceil angry.