People Who Knock on the Door (5 page)

The telephone rang, and Arthur got up.

“Hello, Arthur.” It was Maggie’s voice, with a smile in it.

“You’re back?”

“This afternoon. Mom said you phoned.”

“Nice weekend?”

“Ye-es,” she drawled, sounding oddly shy, as she often did.

“Well—when can I see you?”

“Tonight? At seven?”

By 6:30 Arthur had showered, scrubbed his nails with care, scraped at his jaws with his razor, and put on white poplin trousers.

“Maggie again,” said his mother as he strolled into the kitchen.

His father was in the living room with the newspaper. “Don’t tell Dad I’ve got a date with her, would you, Mom?” Arthur whispered, frowning.

“He’s got nothing against her! Bring her for dinner sometime.”

Arthur got on his bike.

Maggie looked prettier than ever in a pink and white shirt and blue slacks with a crease in them. Arthur found plump girls in sloppy slacks repellent. Maggie looked like a fashion model. She gave him a rum and Coke.

“My dad’s home tonight,” Maggie said. “You probably won’t meet him, because he’s sleeping till dinner.”

They had just returned to the living room, when Arthur saw a man coming down the stairs in a bathrobe and slippers.

“Oh, sorry, Mag,” he said, stopping at the foot of the stairs. “Evening,” he said to Arthur. “Just looking for Sunday’s paper. Is it anywhere around?” He was tall and broad-shouldered, with blondish hair now tousled as if he had just woken up.

“Kitchen. I’ll get it.—Dad, this is Arthur Alderman. My dad.”

“How do you do?” said Arthur.

“Hello, Arthur,” said her father, politely enough, but looking asleep on his feet.

Maggie came back with the bulky
Herald
Sunday edition.

“Have a nice evening. I’m going to fall asleep again with this.” He waved a hand and climbed the stairs.

“He’s often like this—the day he gets home,” Maggie said.

Arthur nodded. Her father looked less forbidding than he had feared.

An hour later, when they were at Hamburger Harry’s, Arthur asked, “Why’d you say you were with your folks last weekend?”

“Oh—I dunno. Just to be secretive, maybe. We didn’t do anything interesting. I just wanted to get away for a couple of days after exams.”

“Three nights at somebody’s
aunt’s
?”

“Her aunt’s got a swimming pool.—We took walks—and talked.”

With a girl, Arthur thought. “Why can’t we do that some weekend? How about the Log Cabins Motel on Westside? Nice woods around there for walking.”

Maggie laughed. “Not sure what my family would say to that!”

Arthur wasn’t sure how to go on from there. But what did it matter if Maggie was in a happy mood, which she was?

“I’ll know about Radcliffe in a month,” Maggie said. “It depends on the math course that I start this week. There’s an exam on that at the end—natch.”

Arthur’s heart dipped as if this were the first time he had heard about Radcliffe. Maggie wouldn’t be coming back to Chalmerston often, if she went to Radcliffe—four times a year, maybe. And he wouldn’t be able to afford a lot of trips back either.

“You don’t look very pleased,” Maggie said. She gave a laugh, a bit shrill and unlike her. “My father just donated a thousand dollars to Radcliffe—as a Harvard man, but he mentioned that his daughter expected to go to Radcliffe. Isn’t that shameful? Almost like bribery.”

“No. I’ve heard of it.” But Arthur felt bitter, because his father certainly wasn’t giving a thousand dollars to Columbia. “Know what I wish,” said Arthur, as a beer he had signalled for arrived in record time. “That I had an apartment in the university dorms right now and I could invite you and—”

“You’re always talking about the same thing!” Maggie’s cheeks were pink.

“No! I was about to say we’d sit on the sofa and watch TV—the way hundreds of students must be doing
this minute
—over on Northside.” He had not been thinking specifically about going to bed with Maggie, but he was suddenly inspired to say, “By the way, I can take precautions—next time.” He had prepared this phrase at home and thought it more polite than to suggest that Maggie take the pill. He meant condoms, and he had acquired some.

Maggie glanced down at the table.

“Did I say something wrong? Sorry if I did.” The jukebox was playing now, and no one could possibly have overheard.

“No, but—I don’t want to talk about that now.”

Change the subject, Arthur thought. He thought of Mrs. DeWitt and laughed. “Shall I tell you how I spent Sunday afternoon? Oh, and Saturday night a rotten party. Not rotten, just boring without you. Couple of people asked why you weren’t with me, in fact.”

“Whose party?”

“Ruthie’s. Very ordinary batch. Roxanne—I didn’t stay long. Don’t know why I went.”

Maggie said nothing. Then she wanted to leave.

Maggie was already outside. Then, to his surprise, she took his hand and smiled at him, and Arthur felt easier. He had thought she was annoyed by what he had said about taking precautions, but it was wiser to be definite about it, Arthur had read in quite a few books on the subject. However, Maggie wasn’t cooling toward him, or she wouldn’t be holding his hand, walking along in a happy way, looking up at the June bugs that circled the street lamps. His optimism lasted the rest of the evening, which was short, because Maggie said she wanted to get some sleep.

Arthur walked to her front door with her, and suddenly they were embracing, kissing each other under the little roof there. Arthur went down the steps weak-kneed and nearly fell.

“Arthur!” Maggie whispered. “See you tomorrow?”

“Sure! What time?”

“Phone me after ten tomorrow morning?”

6

A
rthur did the shopping at the supermarket the next morning. His mother was clearing the spare room chest and the closet for his grandmother, who was not coming till the end of June, but his mother liked to start early on a task, drop it, then at the last minute finish it.

The Chalmerston supermarket stayed open day and night, even on weekends. Arthur rather enjoyed its Aladdin’s cave atmosphere. Suddenly he saw Gloria Farber beside him, pushing her cart in the opposite direction.

“Well, Arthur!—And how are
you
?” She looked him up and down with a smile that Arthur felt was cool, even unfriendly.

“Okay, thanks.” He might have said, “Hope you had a nice weekend,” but Gloria had passed him. Slightly snooty type, Arthur had always thought.

Arthur cycled home with groceries in the front basket of his bike and in sacks on either side of his back wheel.

Mrs. DeWitt had telephoned, his mother came into the kitchen to tell him, and asked if he could come over this afternoon around 3 to work for an hour or so. “I told her you probably could, and if she didn’t hear from you, you’d be there.”

“I could, sure. But I was going to look around town this afternoon for a job.” Arthur knew his mother was thinking of Richard, of how virtuous his father thought it, that Arthur worked at such low pay and at such a low labor, too. Arthur shook his head nervously. “I’ll go. That job is definite and what I’m looking for isn’t.”

His mother said softly, “It’d please your father if you went once more.”

He nodded and started to leave the kitchen, when he noticed a new copy of
Plain Truth
with its glossy cover plus a black plastic leather-covered Bible at the end of the bench by the dining table. Had his father been quoting at breakfast? Arthur hadn’t been up for breakfast. There was even more stuff in his parents’ bedroom, Arthur knew. His father had pushed some magazines on him, just like the people who knocked on the door, giving you something free at first, then you were supposed to subscribe. His mother had said they had started to turn up at the door, just as Maggie had said they had at her house. Robbie actually enjoyed the stuff, Arthur knew, but Robbie had only recently stopped being afraid of the dark and being able to sleep with his light out, and he had devoutly believed in ghosts at the age of twelve. Arthur glanced at his wristwatch, saw it was not yet 10, then saw his mother standing in the doorway of the living room, watching him.

Arthur felt suddenly angry, annoyed by his own thoughts, and he said in a level tone, “I wish Dad would keep this stuff out of the kitchen, at least. It’s already all over the living room.”

“You mean the Bible?” his mother asked, and laughed.

“The other stuff.—These magazines are even anti-evolution. You must’ve noticed, Mom. Can’t even call them anti, because they don’t even bother to argue about it.” How could his mother not have noticed that his father had decided to be “anti,” because that had been the subject at dinner one night. His father had been maddeningly vague, not exactly denying the evidence provided by fossils, just hanging on in a fuzzy way to the possibility that God had created Adam and Eve instantly one day about six thousand years ago, because the Bible said so. At repeated signs from his mother, Arthur had shut up that evening.

“Don’t worry so much about it, Arthur. Richard’ll cool down. We both should keep calm and act like grown-ups, don’t you think so?”

His mother wasn’t swallowing hook, line and sinker all the stuff his father was spouting, Arthur knew. She simply wanted to keep the peace, “to compromise” as she had once put it, but to Arthur there could be no compromise, no ground-yielding, about such an obvious fact as the age of certain forms of life.

That morning, Arthur tackled the clothesline pole in the backyard. His anger or unease had not left him, even though his telephone conversation with Maggie at half past 10 had been entirely positive. He was invited for dinner at Maggie’s, and her father would be there. “Just a family dinner. My dad has to leave at ten for Indi, so can you come at a quarter of seven?”

When Arthur turned the clothesline pole on its side, the bottom of the metal base reminded him of a girl’s sexual organs, the hole in the centre, the four supports splayed around like limbs. Why should an unattractive idea like that pop into his head? Aesthetically ugly! And he had thought of Roxanne at once. Well, she was the splayed type, all right, and what fellow hadn’t been to bed with her, except maybe Gus? Good for Gus, if he hadn’t been! If anything was a stupid “sin,” as his father would call it, it was his own brief roll in the hay with Roxanne, maybe fifteen minutes, or even ten, of silly grappling and fumbling, finally laughter, thank God. Roxanne had had gin and tonic that afternoon at her house, Arthur remembered. It had seemed very dangerous and sophisticated. Arthur tightened the bolts with all his strength and set the thing upright again, poured a bucket of water on the ground, wielded a fork for a minute, and finally hammered the circular base in as hard as he could.

After lunch, Arthur put on a clean shirt and trousers and rode his bike into town, down Main Street, which had a lot of small shops. He walked his bike along the sidewalk, finally leaned it against a lamppost visible from the inside of a haberdashery, and went in to inquire in regard to the SALES HELP WANTED sign in the front window. The manager told him that they had hired someone an hour ago and hadn’t yet removed the sign.

A shop called simply Shoe Repair, but which also sold shoes, had a sign in the window, and Arthur went in. This was a shop not much bigger than his family’s living room, with shoe bargains on two tables, shoe boxes against the walls all the way to the ceiling, and a tiny repair shop at the rear. Arthur spoke to the balding man in shirt sleeves and vest behind the cash register, whose face Arthur vaguely remembered, because the Aldermans had bought shoes here. Within two minutes, Arthur had an afternoon job: three dollars and fifty cents an hour, with a promise from Arthur to work at least four hours a day, five days a week, and he could work all day Saturdays at the same rate, if he chose. The balding man said:

“I remember you when you were a much smaller boy. Got a younger brother, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Finished high school now?”

“This summer, yes. I’ll be going to college in September.”

“My name’s Robertson. You can call me Tom. Makes things easier. See you tomorrow at one, Arthur.” He said the last words hastily, because a woman was asking him if he had a size smaller of a shoe she held in her hand.

Arthur felt cheered. What would it be like to have a father like that, a man who looked at you with some interest in his eyes when he talked? There was
his
father, looking on the fence now about whether to give in to middle age, which Tom Robertson had certainly given in to, or to try to stave it off by buying fancy striped shirts and remembering to hold his waistline in now and then.

The thought reminded Arthur that he wanted a new shirt for this evening. He had looked over his shirts after his phone call to Maggie, and none had seemed right or good enough for tonight. His eye fell on a conservative, good-looking navy blue with white buttons in the window of a men’s shop. Seventeen ninety-five, reduced price at that, and it was a Viyella. Arthur again placed his bike within view and entered the shop with deliberate cool, as if price were of no importance, though he had barely twenty dollars with him. And would his father stop his allowance, now that he had a part-time job? Very likely.

“I’ll take it,” said Arthur, looking at himself in the mirror in the square-tailed shirt.

When Arthur looked back on the evening at Maggie’s, he wondered why he had been so anxious. The atmosphere had been quite unsticky. Maggie’s mother Betty had put a gin and tonic in his hand, and then laughing, had excused herself, because she hadn’t asked him if he wanted it. Maggie had told her that he liked gin and tonics. Arthur kept it. Maggie’s father had come down at the last minute before dinner, in his uniform trousers and white shirt without tie or jacket, and he had paid little attention to Arthur, which in a way had been a relief. Warren had been expecting the telephone to ring (it did not) to inform him that he had to replace another pilot on a short late flight tonight. If not, he was going to sleep at the hotel owned by Sigma Airlines near the Indi airport, as he usually did before a flight in the morning. A happy element in the evening was Maggie’s attitude: She acted as if she wanted her parents, especially her father, to like him. After her father left at 10, Arthur even helped in the kitchen. Then he and Maggie had been alone in the living room for a while. “. . . Most boys are joking and pretending all the time. . . .” The words before that and after, Arthur couldn’t remember. But Maggie had said she liked him because he was serious.

On his bed that night, Arthur found one of his father’s little pamphlets whose title in bold black letters was FOR DISBELIEVERS. Well, not tonight. Tonight he believed in a lot of things, even in himself, in himself and Maggie, but not in this crap! And what had he done wrong today?

He carefully unbuttoned his new shirt. “All signals go,” he said softly, picked up the pamphlet with two fingers, and dropped it on the floor by his closed door. Tomorrow it could get lost among the other stuff in the living room.