Saint Maybe (21 page)

“Where was our father?”

“Maybe he was taking the picture.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”

“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”

“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid off the bed, not forgetting to be careful of the picture. “Then,
Agatha!” he said. “Listen! Maybe that’s how we could find where we used to live.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could ask for the trailer with the rainbow.”

She gave him a look. He could see he’d walked into something, but he didn’t know what.

“Well, they must have maps of things like that,” he said. “Don’t they? Maps that show where the really big, really famous rainbows are?”

“Thomas,” Agatha said. She rolled her eyes. Clearly it was almost more than she could manage to go on dealing with him. “For gosh sake, Thomas,” she said, “rainbows don’t just sit around forever. What do you think, it’s still there waiting for us? Get yourself a brain someday, Thomas.”

Then she took hold of the picture—with her fingers right on the colored part!—and pulled it out of his hands and carried it back to the closet.

“Thomas?” Ian called from the second floor. “Are you cleaned up?”

“Just about.”

He would never know as much as Agatha did, Thomas thought while he was clomping down the stairs. He would always be left out of things. People would forever be using words he’d never heard of, or sharing jokes he didn’t get the point of, or driving him places they hadn’t bothered to tell him about; or maybe (as they claimed) they
had
told him, and he had just forgotten or been too little to understand.

“Last night I dreamed a terrible dream,” Aunt Claudia said at dinner. “I think it had something to do with my turning thirty-eight.”

She was twisted around in her seat, feeding baked potato to Georgie in his high chair. Over her shoulder she said, “I opened the door to the broom cupboard
and this burglar jumped out at me. I kept trying to call for help but all I managed was this pathetic little whimper and then I woke up.”

“How does that relate to turning thirty-eight?” her husband asked her.

“Well, it’s scary, Macy. Thirty-eight sounds so much like forty. Forty! That’s middle-aged.”

She didn’t look middle-aged. She didn’t have gray hair or anything. Her hair was brown like Ian’s, cut almost as short, and her face was smooth and tanned. Her clothes weren’t middle-aged, either: jeans and a floppy plaid shirt. Whenever Georgie got hungry she would tuck him right under her shirt without unbuttoning it and fiddle with some kind of snaps or hooks inside and then let him nurse. Thomas thought that was fascinating. He hoped it would happen this evening.

“You know what I believe?” she asked now, wiping Georgie’s mouth with a corner of her napkin. “I believe what I was trying to do was, teach myself how to scream.”

Grandpa said, “Why, hon, I would think you’d already know how.”

“I was speaking figuratively, Dad. Here I am, thirty-eight years old and I’ve never, I don’t know, never
said
anything. Everything’s so sort of level all the time. Tonight, for instance: here we sit. Nice cheerful chitchat, baseball standings, weather forecast, difficult ages eating in the kitchen …”

By “difficult ages,” she meant the older children—ten to fifteen, Agatha to Abbie. The “biggies,” Grandma called them. The people with exciting things to say. Thomas could hear them even from the dining room. Cindy was telling a story and the others were laughing and Barney was saying, “Wait, you left out the most important part!”

Here in the dining room, there
were
no important parts. Just dull, dull conversation among the grownups while the “littlies” secretly fed their suppers to Beastie under the table. Cicely was holding up a pinwheel biscuit and carefully unwinding it. Ian kept glancing over at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, Claudia,” Grandma said, “would you prefer it if we moaned and groaned and carried on?”

“No, no,” Claudia said, “I don’t mean that exactly; I mean … oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m just going through the middle-aged blues.”

“Nonsense, you’re nowhere near middle-aged,” Grandma told her. “What an idea! You’re just a slip of a girl still. You still have your youth and your wonderful life and everything to look forward to.” She raised her wineglass. Thomas could tell her arthritis was bad tonight because she used both hands. “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said.

Macy and Grandpa raised their glasses, too, and Cicely set aside the biscuit to raise hers. Ian, who didn’t drink, held up his water tumbler. “Happy birthday,” they all said.

“Well, thanks,” Claudia told them.

She thought a moment, and then she said, “Thank you very much,” and smiled around the table and took a sip from her own glass.

The cake was served in the living room, so they could all sing “Happy Birthday” together. But really just the grownups and the little ones sang. The difficult ages seemed to think singing was beneath them, so after the first line Thomas didn’t sing either. Then just as Claudia was blowing out the candles, Mrs. Jordan arrived from across the street along with two of the foreigners. The foreigners brought a third foreigner named Bob who apparently used to live with them. Bob greeted Thomas by name but Thomas didn’t remember him.
“You were only so much high,” Bob told him, setting his palm about six inches above the floor. “You wore little, little sneakers and your mother was very nice lady.”

“My mother?” Thomas asked. “Did you know her?”

“Of course I knew her. She was very pretty, very kind lady.”

Thomas was hoping to hear more, but Mrs. Jordan came over then and started filling Bob in on all the neighborhood news: how Mr. Webb had finally gone to be dried out and the newlyweds had had a baby and Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin daughters were making life a living hell for his girlfriend. Thomas wandered off finally.

His grandma was passing the cake around on her big tole tray. She served the grownups first. She said, “Macy, cake? Jim, cake?” She offered some to Ian, too, but of course he said no. (At church they didn’t approve of sugar, as Grandma surely knew by now.) She thinned her lips and passed on. “Jessie?
You’ll
have cake.”

Ian asked Cicely, “What do you say to a movie after this?”

“Well, I kind of like made plans with some friends from school,” Cicely told him.

“Oh.”

“Melanie and them from school.”

“Okay.”

“I’d ask you along except it’s, you know, like all just college talk about people you never heard of.”

“That’s okay,” Ian said.

Thomas hooked his fingers into one of Ian’s rear pockets. He slid his thumb back and forth across the puckery seam at the top. What did this remind him of? Daphne sucking her thumb, that was it. Curling
her index finger across her upper lip. He leaned his head against Ian’s side, and Ian put his arm around him. “I should get to bed early anyhow,” he was telling Cicely. “Rumor has it tomorrow’s another workday.”

Now Grandma was offering her tray to the children. She said, “Thomas? Cake?”

“No, thanks.”

“No birthday cake?” she asked. She put on a look of surprise.

“Sugar is an artificial stimulant,” he reminded her.

He expected her to argue like always, but he didn’t expect she’d get angry. Ian was the one she seemed angry with, though. She turned toward Ian sharply and said, “Really, Ian! He’s just a little boy!”

“Sure. He’s free to make up his own mind,” Ian said.

“Free, indeed! It’s that church of yours again.”

“Excuse me. Mrs. Bedloe?” Cicely said. “Maybe Thomas is just listening to his body. Processed sugar is a poison, after all. No telling what it does to your body chemistry.”

“Well, everybody in this room eats sugar and I don’t exactly notice them keeling over,” Grandma said.

“Me, now,” Cicely said, “I’ve started using non-pasteurized honey whenever possible and I feel like a whole new person.”

“But honey is a stimulant, too,” Thomas told her.

Ian said, “Thomas. Hey, sport. Maybe if we just—”

“Do you hear that?” Grandma asked Ian. “Do you hear how he’s been brainwashed?”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“It’s not enough that you should fall for it yourself!
That you’d obey their half-wit rules and support their maniac minister and scandalize the whole neighborhood by trying to convert the Cahns.”

“I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”

“A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s been a nation! Oh, I will never understand. Why, Ian? Why have you turned out this way? Why do you keep doing penance for something that never happened? I
know
it never happened; I
promise
it never happened. Why do you persist in believing all that foolishness?”

“Bee, dear heart,” Grandpa said.

Now Thomas noticed how still the room had grown. Maybe Grandma noticed too, because she stopped talking and two pink spots started blooming in her cheeks.

“Bee,” Grandpa said, “we’ve got a crew of hungry kids here wondering if you plan on coming their way.”

The others made murmury laughing sounds, although Thomas didn’t see anything so funny. Then Grandma quirked the corners of her mouth and raised her chin. “Why! I certainly doo-oo!” she said musically, and off she sailed with her cake.

The frosting was caramel. Thomas had checked earlier. His grandma made the best caramel frosting in Baltimore—rich and deep and golden, as smooth as butter when it slid across your tongue.

Daphne went off at nine, kicking up a fuss in Ian’s arms because the cousins were still there, but Thomas and Agatha got to stay awake till the last of the guests had said good night—almost ten-thirty, which was way past their normal bedtime.

“Don’t forget your baths!” Ian called after them as they climbed the stairs, but Thomas was too sleepy for
a bath and he fell into bed in his underwear, leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes and saw turquoise blue, the color of Sister Myra’s swimming pool. He heard the clatter of china downstairs, and the rattle of silver, and the slow, dancy radio songs his grandma liked to listen to while she did the dishes. (She would be washing and Ian would be clearing away and drying; she always said the hot water felt so good on her finger joints.) “Where do you want these place mats?” Ian called. Loud announcers’ voices interrupted each other in the living room; Grandpa was hunting baseball scores on TV. “… never saw Jessie Jordan so gossipy,” Grandma said, and someone shouted, “BEEN IN A BATTING SLUMP SINCE MID-JUNE—”

“Could you turn that down?” Grandma called.

Then Thomas must have slept, because the next thing he knew the house was silent and he had a feeling the silence had been going on a long time. There wasn’t even a cricket chirping. There wasn’t even a faraway truck or a train whistle. The only sounds were those scraps of past voices that float across your mind sometimes when there’s nothing else to listen to. “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” Reverend Emmett said, and Grandma said, “Why, Ian? Why?”

Thomas should have told her why. He knew the answer, after all. Or, at least, he thought he did. The answer is, you get to meet in heaven. They’ll be waiting for you there if you’ve been careful to do things right. His mother would be waiting in her frilly pink dress. She would drive her station wagon to the gate and she’d sit there with the motor idling, her elbow resting on the window ledge, and when she caught sight of him her face would light up all happy and she would wave. “Thomas! Over here!” she would call, and if
he didn’t spot her right away she would honk, and then he would catch sight of her and start running in her direction.

5

A
fter Doug Bedloe retired, he had a little trouble thinking up things to do with himself. This took him by surprise, because he was accustomed to the schoolteacher’s lengthy summer vacations and he’d never found it hard to fill them. But retirement, it seemed, was another matter. There wasn’t any end to it. Also it was given more significance. Loaf around in summer, Bee would say he deserved his rest. Loaf in winter, she read it as pure laziness. “Don’t you have someplace to go?” she asked him. “Lots of men join clubs or something. Couldn’t you do Meals on Wheels? Volunteer at the hospital?”

Well, he tried. He approached a group at his church that worked with disadvantaged youths. Told them he had forty years’ experience coaching baseball. They were delighted. First he was supposed to get some training, though—spend three Saturdays learning about the emotional ups and downs of adolescents. The second Saturday, it occurred to him he was tired of adolescents. He’d been dealing with their ups and downs for forty years now, and the fact was, they were shallow.