We Are What We Pretend to Be (8 page)

The General did not look up when Haley walked into his presence. He was wearing an oily undershirt and khaki trousers and was swabbing the cavernous bore of a single-barreled duck gun. Haley looked about the room and saw that every surface was cluttered with firearms and ammunition. “Sir,” Haley began, “I guess we’ve both been pretty childish, and I, for one, am willing to—”

The General looked up from his shotgun as though he were surprised to see Haley standing before him. “Well, sir,” he interrupted, “and what sunshine are you going to bring into our lives today? Shall we poison the well or burn the house down?”

Haley swallowed hard, turned, and shuffled upstairs to his room, past the darkened, closed door of Kitty’s room, where Kitty was mumbling in her sleep, and the open door of the room of the beloved Hope. He paused for a moment to listen to her breathing.

Pinned to his bedsheet was a typewritten note signed by Annie. There was a certain sweetness in his slumber, for before he closed his eyes, he concluded that insofar as disciplinary measures went, the General must have reached the limits of his imagination. He even managed a soft chuckle as he bunched his shirt under his head. “No pillow for three months,” the note had said.

Haley’s conclusion was an accurate one, apparently, for nothing new in the way of punishments was forthcoming during the next two weeks. True, Haley was reminded again that his defections
had killed his opportunities in the world of music; Hope was ordered to fill out application papers for a Miss Dingman’s School for Ladies, located on an inaccessible ridge in the White Mountains; and Haley’s, Hope’s, and Kitty’s pillows remained under padlock in the basement fruit locker—but no more devastation seemed likely.

Kitty flounced and pined about the house, but without conviction. She hadn’t the wit to camouflage the fact that her twenty hours with Roy and his motorcycle had been something less than a string of pearls. This was disturbing to Hope and Haley, for the General took it as a demonstration of his infallible judgment. “Whatever became of that nice Flemming boy and his gasoline bicycle?” he would chortle at mealtimes. “Never seems to show his intelligent face around here anymore.” Kitty offered no rebuttal.

As the time for Hope’s incarceration in the New Hampshire highlands drew near, she abandoned her stoicism to plead with the General to relent. It was after dinner one night, and Haley listened with excitement, for if Hope could win leniency, then so might he.

The General gave her his thoughtful attention, nodding now and then at her more salient arguments. “Are you through?” he asked.

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Uh huh, very moving,” he said. He looked seriously from Hope to Haley and back again. “I once knew a man, grew up with him, in fact,” said the General. “When he was a boy, his parents would threaten to take away his bicycle if he did something bad.
Well, sir, he’d go right ahead and do whatever bad thing it was, and they’d let him keep his bicycle anyway. They didn’t have the heart to take it away. Instead, they’d tell him if he did it again, they wouldn’t let him have any ice cream for a year. He’d do it again, and they wouldn’t have the heart to keep him from eating ice cream. And so it went; his parents would make terrible threats, but they never carried them out, not one.”

“So what happened to him finally?” asked the indispensable Annie.

“He was shot while robbing a bank,” said the General. “And I’ll always say it was his parents who killed him.”

“I don’t believe it really happened,” Hope objected.

“Makes no difference whether it really did or not,” said the General, “just as long as it’s logical. So . . .”

Haley’s hopes for a reprieve twitched and died. The omens had seemed good. The menace of Mr. Banghart had made the General almost genial at times. Hope had suggested that it was the only type of problem that permitted him to use to the fullest his stock solution to every problem. “Worships firepower,” she said.

However, weeks had passed, and Mr. Banghart had not sailed into the General’s sights like a clay pigeon. Neither was he apprehended by the police. Law-enforcement officers in the town near Ardennes Farm took to crediting him with unsolved purse-snatchings and burglaries, but his face was seen in police circulars and nowhere else. The situation spelled moments of depression for the General, who would surmise gloomily that Banghart had fled the country or had been among the dozens
of unidentified bums killed every month while hopping freight trains.

Under the General’s urging, the State Police withdrew their sentinel. A visiting neighbor laughed himself hoarse over the jungle of weapons in the sunroom, and on the following morning the bulletin board informed Haley that he was to put a light coat of oil on all of the guns and return them, save two, to their racks. The General kept out the single-shot duck gun, which he leaned against the frame of the back door, and he carried a .45-caliber service revolver slung on his belt whenever he left the farmhouse.

“You people keep away from this shotgun unless you absolutely have to use it,” he ordered. “Leave Banghart to me. I’d feel safer locked in a phone booth with him than I would knowing one of you was on the prowl with this cannon. Guns and women can make an atom bombing look like an ice-cream social,” he declared. “Only this morning I read a story in the paper about a woman who shot her husband, the cat, and the water-softener because she thought she heard suspicious noises downstairs.” Haley searched the paper for this fascinating item, but he was unable to find anything like it.

On the afternoon of the same day, Haley came upon the General unexpectedly to find him standing before the closed door of the corncrib. He had his pistol in hand, cocked and pointed at the door. “All right, Banghart,” he was saying, “I’ll give you three to come out. One—”

“I’ll get the shotgun,” cried Haley.

The General looked at him quickly, with a trifle of embarrassment, Haley thought. With a gesture that seemed perfectly
reasonable at the time, the General motioned for Haley to be deathly still. “All right, Banghart, come out or it’s curtains,” he said. “Two.” He paused a long while. Haley covered his ears. The General kicked open the crib door and stood poised, ready to shoot.

Haley inched closer to the General until he was by his side. Sunlight streaming in through the barn door illuminated the crib, which he saw, with a sigh, was vacant.

“Did you hear something, sir?” Haley asked respectfully.

The General slipped his pistol back into its holster and grinned foolishly. “Don’t go telling the girls about this, will you now?” he said confidentially. “It wouldn’t do to frighten them.”

“Nossir.”

“It’s just that I want to make sure he isn’t hiding on the farm. He might be, you know—a very remote chance, of course. Just checking to be on the safe side.”

“I see.”

“Last night, about 3, I thought I saw a cigarette burning out here. Now I find this on the barn floor.” He held up an empty packet of cigarette papers. “This is the kind he used.”

“He could have dropped them there anytime since he came to work for you. They’re all over the place,” suggested Haley.

“Maybe so. One thing’s for sure: He isn’t in this barn. I’ve checked every nook and cranny.”

Haley was not at all dismayed by the menace of Mr. Banghart. For one thing, he felt a personal immunity to that threat, since Mr. Banghart avowedly considered him one of his few friends in all humanity. For another, he was confident that the General
would blow the poor devil to bits if he dared appear. But certainly most distracting was the exotic mixture of despondency and elation that simmered in his young soul. He was despondent over his smashed dreams of a musical career, but elation was born of Hope’s subtle but unmistakably affectionate mien. He found himself in the emotional dilemma of a hurt child who has been presented with an ice-cream cone.

He was realist enough to know that the ice-cream cone was a small one, but hungry enough to make a great deal of it in his fancy. Honing his scythe in the cool dampness of the tool shed, he savored again the moments when Hope had seemed to look at him warmly. His expedition to Chicago had made him more of a man in her melodrama-loving eyes, he thought. If he had made a mess of his flight, it had at least been an adventuresome mess, not in a boy’s world but in a man’s. With the clean music of the blade against the stone mingling with his thoughts, Haley promised himself that he was indeed man enough to win the love of Hope.

During supper, Annie monopolized the conversation with a new complaint. “If you don’t get enough to eat, for Heaven’s sake say so,” she said. “But don’t let me catch anybody nosing around the icebox between meals. It’s getting so bad that I never know when I’m going to have enough on hand for a meal, with everybody helping himself or herself whenever he or she feels like it.” She shrugged disconsolately. “These potatoes were supposed to have cheese on top of them, but somebody walked off with all the cheese last night, and some leftover wieners, too.”

“Well, which one of you did it?” asked the General, looking from Kitty to Hope to Haley, all of whom shook their heads and
showed the long countenances of hurt innocence. “The trouble with you is that you all eat like farmhands, but not one of you’ll work like one.”

“You certainly hit the nail on the head that time,” said Annie.

The General rose, walked over to the kitchen window, and peered out at the barn, which was receding into nightfall. He picked up the shotgun from its place by the doorframe. “Attaboy, Haley,” he said at last. “Keep her spotless. Get Annie to give you a toothpick sometime, so you can clean up some of the fancy work around the trigger guard.” He rested the gun against the doorframe once more and left the kitchen.

“He’s telephoning somebody,” said Kitty. “Who do you suppose it is?”

“Can’t tell,” said Hope. “He’s talking softly for the first time in his life.”

“It’s none of our business, or he would have seen fit to tell us about it,” said Annie primly.

“Whoever it is,” said Hope, straining her ears, “he told them not to hurry.”

Haley heard the click of the receiver, and the General called from the hall, “Remember, the rules are still in force. Nobody leaves the house after sunset under any condition.”

After supper, Haley invited Hope to play checkers with him. They set up the board in the sewing room, a small chamber that opened onto the hallway in the rear of the house, next to the kitchen. Haley closed the door of the room, insulating it from the noise of the General’s favorite news commentator, and of Annie stacking the dishes in the sink.

As they played, their conversation centered upon the game, which Haley was winning. He adored Hope’s every word and gesture; and Hope, apparently aware of his loving stare, and unprotesting, smiled whenever their eyes met.

“Goody!” she exclaimed. “Now I’ve got a king at last. I’ll give you a hard time now.” She reached across the board to cap the piece that had made its way to the last row on Haley’s side. Haley dropped his hand over hers and gave it a fervent squeeze.

Hope’s eyes widened, more with a look of surprise than with the ecstasy Haley had daydreamed himself into expecting. “How nice,” she said vaguely. “How very nice. Now can I have my hand back?”

“I love you, Hope,” said Haley, his face hot beneath his sunburn.

Hope looked alarmed and tugged to free her hand, but Haley only clasped it more tightly. “I love you, too,” she said finally. Haley rose in response, but Hope’s hand was limp and unresponsive. “Just as I love Annie and Kitty and the General,” she added quickly. “You’re just like one of the family.”

“Not
that
kind of love,” he said weakly. He freed her hand.

“I guess I knew what you meant,” she said, giving him a look of pity. “And I feel very flattered and honored that you should feel that way. I’m fond of you, too, Haley. But we’re awfully young to be thinking about being in love, aren’t we?”

“We’re older than Romeo and Juliet,” said Haley peevishly.

“Well, then, we’re just not made for each other, that’s all. It’s no insult to say that. Some people are made for each other, some
aren’t.” She frowned, apparently at the profundity of this universal law. “We aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Who says we aren’t?”

“I can feel it,” she said solemnly.

Haley’s adoration turned to cool resentment. Hope’s platitudes came to him as cruel and senseless.

“If you don’t like me, say so,” he said.

“I do like you, I do,” she objected.

“Why can’t we be made for each other?” he complained, and he swept the men from the checkerboard with the back of his hand.

Hope jumped to her feet. “All right, you asked,” she said. “I could never look on you as anything but a baby because you act like one. Now pick up the checkers before you leave.”

Haley slouched, standing there, listening to the sound of her footsteps moving down the hall, through the parlor, and into the sunroom. He started to pick up a checker piece, but threw it down again and marched through the now-empty kitchen and into the night. Her words rang in his ears, but he did not consciously consider them. He felt only the urge to walk away, to lose himself in darkness, to cleanse himself in silence. The moon had risen, and it shone between the fringes of cloud skeins that moved overhead.

His feet carried him with a will of their own, over the hard earth of the barnyard, over the worn-slick planks of the barn floor, up a ladder, and into the cavern-like sanctuary of the loft. He felt his way through the narrow corridor that had been left between the stacked hay bales until he came at last to its end,
marked by the pale square of light from the small window overlooking the farmhouse. He sat beneath the window without first peering through it. He gathered his knees in his folded arms and rested his head against them. His eyes closed slowly, noting last of all a shred of white cloth tied to the wire of a nearby bale. A part of the jumbled, unpleasant past weeks, he shut it out with his heavy lids.