Pay the Piper (11 page)

The blond woman stood up. Laurel moved her knees for her to pass. She had the blond giant in tow, like a big shaggy dog. Laurel looked again at the grim old-woman face, though her arms were smooth; she had seen that as the woman passed. Her husband looked so much younger, a man who could appeal to women anywhere. She felt again fear of the future, as a woman growing older while William would have the appeal of an older man to a young woman. A successful man, an executive.

The man stood on the platform beside his wife with his same air of obedience. She continued to have her grim look of satisfaction, nodding to him to begin. He held up a bandaged arm. “Last night I was burned so bad the doctor said I wouldn't get out of bed for a week. But my wife sent for Brother Roundtree, and he and my wife and me prayed. In a while I got up and eat supper. Thirty-six years I lived for the devil and four for God. Pray for us while we sing a song.”

“Ever' time I do a deed I shouldn't do, I just steal away and I pray,” they sang, in their twanging, nasal way.

“Y'all pray for me, and I'll do a lot better than I been doing.”

His wife came away ahead of him, her smile fixed, her hands resting on the protrusion of stomach. He wouldn't leave her because she looked like that, Laurel thought. An old man ran forward and knelt on the piece of rug below the platform. “I tithed,” he testified. “And I bought some property. I stopped tithing and I lost it. I sold a lot of cows and didn't tithe and I come out owing the gover'ment.”

Another old man took his place. “Back yonder when I got married I didn't really mean it. But that was fifty years ago. When I got the Holy Ghost they didn't think it would last. But if I can make fifteen more days, it'll be forty years since I took a dose of medicine or had a habit. You got to take a stand.”

People cried and shouted. “Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.”

Brother Roundtree sent the tambourine down into the congregation for collection. “Amurricuh has turned into a slipping place,” he called. “People are slipping around into cafes and beer joints and into the arms of other people's husbands and wives. Niggers are following anti-Christ. They hate the whites. We got to pray.”

“Remember me in this prayer.” A fat boy ran forward and knelt on the rug. “I been sick in body.” He began to shake and sob. Brother Roundtree started speaking in an unintelligible tongue that sounded like gibberish. People rose in a quiet manner and went forward to lay their hands on the boy's shaking back. “God touched my body,” he said, raising his head. “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God.”

“Oh, if you are with me,” Brother Roundtree said, “reach up your hand and wave. Wave to Jesus, people. I love things of this world. I'm a servant of sin, I told him. Don't leave me the way I am, I cried. Oh, don't you love him. Your heart has only one doorknob and it's on the inside. Jesus said, I stand and I knock. Open. And you're borned again. I said, Will you ta-ake me as a potter takes clay?”

People waved their hands in the congregation. She felt the fluttering, a small breeze. It was better than the inadequate cardboard fans that had been going all evening. Sweat ran everywhere all over her. Oh, won't he take me too? Laurel thought. It would be so much easier to be molded, shaped, and formed by someone else, to have decisions taken from her hands. Not to make her own. I surrender, she wanted to say. I believe. She wanted to run forward, too, before the people, and restrained herself. You had to behave properly. You had to go by rules and behave politely according to the society to which you belonged. Yet here she sat with her hand waving high toward the tent top, waving to Jesus. Signaling with all her might, as if to be known one out of so many people. She felt Rick stiffen beside her. She caught from the side of her eye a glimpse of him as he had turned first to laugh, thinking she jested, and realized his mother sat waving to Jesus in some seriousness of her own. She saw his face staring ahead; she saw a white line appear at his mouth.

“Let the Holy Ghost take holt of the reins,” Brother Roundtree cried. The tambourine rang. The musicians bent forward to their instruments, between their knees, their heads low. Brother Roundtree flew around again in his spinning circle, ending with one leg stretched out with the flat of his foot toward them. “God don't have any problems. But he's got the solution to yours.”

“I'm satis-fied with my Master. But is he satis-fied with me?” people sang.

He cried above them, “If nobody loves you, God does.”

“Yes, glory to come,” said a cracked voice behind Laurel, which she thought only she heard.

She went out between the crowd, and people put out their hands to greet her. “Come again,” they said. “Welcome.” She was out by the road then, where the cows had hushed into silence, or slept because it was that late hour of the night. Suddenly she realized Rick was not with her. When she turned to a hand gripping her hard by the elbow, it was not him. She saw the red flowers. “Where your boy gone?” Mister Zack said.

“I don't know,” she said.

“You been gone from your husband a long time. You must be about ready.” Laurel thought of the summers before when Mister Zack had spoken of William as “the husband you're trying to lose.” She had wanted to laugh at that too, thinking herself and William as superior to country people who did not take separate vacations. “You ever do anything out of the family way?” he said.

Laurel felt quite alone on the shoulder of the road, abandoned to the night and the strange setting. She had a premonition about being a woman alone in the world, a woman without a man protectorate. A husband; it gave you identity, attachment, safety. It was something she needed. It was not Mister Zack's audacity that surprised her as much as his acceptance of the fact she'd go to bed with him, that there was no reason for her to object to him personally. She was not able to speak before he said, “I could give you ten dollars.”

“No, I'm sorry,” she said.

“Twenty-five?”

She shook her head.

“Fifty? Well, I can't go no higher than that,” he said sadly when she again shook her head. He went off into the darkness. Fifty dollars? she had considered for a moment. There were actually things she could use that much money for. She was startled that such a thought crossed her mind. You got to take a stand, Laurel told herself abruptly. She turned in the darkness, feeling deserted on the road. Cars and trucks drove away. Only the stars seemed settled.

“Rick, where were you?” She felt dependent on this boy coming along the road toward her.

“I went to see who was out there on a bank toward the end, watching.”

“Who?”

“Some black guys.”

“What were they doing?”

“Laughing.”

“It's their turn,” Laurel said.

They drove back toward the cabin, pine trees whispering in the nightside. She said, “Well, people have a right to their own ideas about religion. Last Easter at our church in Soundport we had a trumpet solo and some of the older people objected. They weren't used to that instrument in church.” She thought back to that sound and began to sing, “Christ is risen. Is ri-sen toda-a-ay.”

“Mom,” Rick said.

“Sorry about that. Shucks, I been borned again and I still can't carry a tune.”

“Why did you act like that?” he said.

“What,” she said, “waving to Jesus? I felt it. I believed.”

She turned off the main road, toward their road home. Only it was not home. Home was more than a thousand miles away. She wondered if she had been right to bring him here these summers, to let him see a way people lived that had nothing to do with his life at all. What right had she to change his existence? At what moment could she possibly shatter his world and tell him of her decision? She went up to the cabin with a sense of foreboding about its emptiness. She opened the door without a key, because it had no lock. Out in the country there was not yet fear of strangers, coming to rob you in the night and take away what you possessed.

5

Rick might have been a refugee child shipped off somewhere, he had so few possessions. Maybe a sack would have been all right, Laurel thought. When he threw his sea bag to his shoulder, it half collapsed. At the Delton airport's magazine stand, he inquired how many boxing magazines he could buy. “As many as you want,” she told him. While she watched Rick, she thought of a visit they made here when he was five, before it became a regular trip with them. William had insisted she could not research a novel with a child to take care of, and insisted Rick be sent back to him when he had his vacation. She set Rick out at the terminal with his luggage and told him she was parking, a few feet away. But misunderstanding, he said, “'Bye, Mommy.”

“Rick,” she had called then, stopping the car. And so long ago, she'd already thought he was taught too much independence. She well imagined the child, at five, going inside and departing. William was admirable in wanting her to succeed, in agreeing to take care of the child by himself. She had worried that other mothers she knew were not making research trips. But when the plane took off, she had a surge of relief about being alone, a startling new sense of freedom about being responsible to no one but herself. That time, when she turned Rick over to the stewardess for safekeeping, she had said, “His father's meeting him in New York,” and had been teary at the thought of Rick flying away alone. The young woman with her perfectly painted face gave her a quick look and Laurel read her thought: divorce. She had tried to imagine parents regularly shipping a child back and forth between themselves, like air freight.

“See you in Connecticut, Rick.”

“Mom, don't drive so fast the rest of the summer. And I'm sorry about that hat.”

“It's OK. If I die of a heat stroke playing tennis today, don't worry about it.”

“Some black guys are giving you the once-over. I don't like it.”

“I shouldn't have worn my tennis dress to the airport. It's not Delton etiquette. Most women I know here put on heels and stockings when they get up in the morning. Rick, you've got to change your underw—”

“
Basta.
” He put a hand to her mouth.

“Other mothers get to say things like that.”

“You don't want to be other mothers.”

“Yes, I do. You and Dad are always trying to make me different.”

She passed the young black men waiting in a ticket line, who gave her another once-over; she had to smile at their joviality and would like to set straight any Yankee who tried to say the South had not changed. She wondered what it would be like to sleep with a black man. She believed old Southern legends were crap—that black men were more sexually powerful, that white maidens secretly coveted them, and vice versa. She was amused by a small plot of ground outside the terminal, with a few green plants and a sign: Y
ES
, I
T
'
S
C
OTTON
. Tired attendants must answer a lot of questions from people like Soundporters, who stepped off planes looking for cotton fields and put-upon bedraggled darkies; but who from Soundport would even come to Delton?

Confronting the maze of parking lots with cars shimmering in the heat, unable to remember where she had parked, Laurel searched until she was ready to cry out to anyone who passed, “Have you seen a car with a Connecticut license plate?” Then she found it by mistake.

This time, too, she had a sense of elation about having no one to see about but herself; Buff was pretty self-sufficient. She would not like freedom as a permanent condition, Laurel thought. She still worried about the time she spent at the typewriter when Rick was a baby, the hours he was told to stay out of her office. Once when he was two, he passed her at her desk and looked at himself in a full-length mirror in an adjoining room. “Get away, Rick. I'm working,” she heard him say to himself. Up she flew from the typewriter to ask William whether Rick would some day be complaining to a psychiatrist about her. Calling her a machine, she thought, the way William spoke of his own mother.

It was William who had set her office hours and said nothing must interrupt them. And because of that, the time William broke his own rule her first thought had been annoyance. She remembered his sitting down in her office saying, “Laurel, we need to talk about what's wrong,” and she left her fingertips poised on the keys, waiting for him to leave: thinking then, William, you made the rules; you could have talked to me later. Anyway, then she did not see all that much wrong with the marriage; they never argued. What she believed was that William had a disgruntlement in his personality and would have been disgruntled in any marriage. She only waited there to listen; to this day, she couldn't remember anything that was said. She had the idea that William got up finally and walked out. Only in her mind's eye she saw him twirling a brown hat with a darker band in his hands, and she could not recall William's ever owning such a hat. So how much is memory worth?

Laurel pulled into the Delton Country Club, no longer as it was in the past; now the charming old place, wicker rockers on its wide porches, had been replaced by a yellow brick building low to the ground that could be anywhere in the country.

At least today she did not have to worry about older ladies saying, But who are your parents, dear? Where did they come from? as had happened to her in another time. Laurel went toward tennis courts reflecting sunlight as brightly as mirrors; eventually she complimented the other players on their stamina. Along with the ball crossing the net, she saw pink and green stars. Catherine laughed. “You know if we didn't play in heat, we wouldn't have many weeks to play.” In Soundport, anyone playing tennis in such weather would have been considered crazy.

The club today made her think about Sallie MacDonald, née Parker, who had made a famous debut there when her clothes, flowers, decorations, and food had been pink; she had worn a little silver tiara. What had happened to Sallie and Hal that two people born with everything had their lives come to tragedy? Having known Sallie at Miss Poindexter's, she could imagine she had continued to be a debutante since then. Probably she still wore Vaseline on her eyelids and stuck cotton balls soaked in perfume into her cleavage as girls did in those days. But she had a different concept of Hal after his article and his letter. She thought of him as deep, sincere, smoking a pipe, his hand resting on the head of a trusty hunting dog. At Catherine's house after tennis, she had her first drink since leaving Soundport. “Some refinements of city living are nice.” She raised her vodka and tonic. When she left, Catherine's husband insisted on walking her to her car. It was irritating to have him take her elbow as if she could not walk down steps by herself. “I can go alone, Henry,” she said.