Baker Towers (31 page)

Lucy considered this. She was happy at school, and happy at home; what pained her was the transition between the two. She could not imagine so much leaving: every Sunday, more good-byes.

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.”

He gave her a searching look. “Don’t you miss anybody? Dorothy? Joyce?”

The waitress arrived with their sandwiches.

“Sure,” Lucy said. “I miss them all.”

They ate fast and silently. She was hungrier than she’d imagined. Outside, a boy and girl crossed the street, their hands joined. Someone had put money in the jukebox: Brenda Lee singing “Break It to Me Gently.” Lucy ate half her hamburger, then lit a cigarette.

“You’re
smoking
?” Leonard said.

At that moment the door opened and the young couple came in, stamping snow from their shoes. In the distance the fire whistle squealed, as though someone were in danger. Lucy’s heart quickened. She would have known them anywhere: Steven Fleck and Connie Kukla.

“Oh, brother,” she said in a low voice, sliding down in her seat. “Don’t look now.”

He turned his head toward the door.

“Leonard!” she whispered. But it was too late: Connie had already spotted them.

“Lucy?” she called in a high, clear voice. “Is that you?” She wore fuzzy earmuffs. Her blond hair was flocked with snow.

“Hi, Connie,” she said miserably. The fire whistle rose in pitch. She
felt Steven Fleck’s eyes rest on her a moment. She smiled uncertainly, her cheeks heating. His eyes darted away.

“There’s an open table in the back,” he mumbled, his hand at Connie’s waist. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“It’s nice to see you,” Connie called, giving Lucy a little finger wave. “Merry Christmas.”

Lucy watched them go. Steven sat first, his back to Lucy. His broad shoulders were dusted with snow.

“What gives?” said Leonard. “Aren’t they friends of yours?”

“Sort of.” After the night under the bleachers, Steven had never spoken to her again. She’d passed him often in the school corridors, hand in hand with Connie. When the two girls exchanged hellos, he’d kept his eyes on the floor.

“Not really,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

Later that evening, she would remember the fire whistle. At the time it had barely registered, so distracting was the noise of her heart.

T
he music on the radio had changed. It was the first difference George noticed that year, the Christmas he brought Arthur home to visit. Driving over Saxon Mountain, he dialed through the usual riot of AM stations: polkas, Christmas carols, a cowboy singer’s crackling baritone. In the valley they faded into static. On the local station, the DJ played the most requested tune of the week, a sweet ballad called “My Blue Heaven.” George hummed along softly—a strolling rhythm, the breathy moan of a tenor sax. He broke into a smile. Negro music in Bakerton! A town that had never seen a black face, now clamoring for Fats Domino.

He reached to turn up the volume, then stopped himself. Arthur was slumped down in the backseat, eyes closed, hands hidden in the sleeves of the winter jacket he hadn’t quite grown into. His dungarees looked stiff and new; he would outgrow them before they could fade in the wash. He had little need for casual clothes. At the Wollaston School he wore white shirts and crested blazers, a maroon cardigan after hours in the dorms.

He was thirteen but small for his age. At Parents’ Weekend, George had been stunned by the maturity of the other eighth graders: the broad shoulders, the deep voices. Next to them Arthur still looked like a child. Undersized, with Marion’s long thin face, blue-veined at the temples; her intelligent gray eyes, alert, a little alarmed. He resembled George in invisible ways: the delicate constitution, the measles and ear infections, the periodic bouts with the flu. His sickness was nearly a year-round affair. In spring and fall, allergies aggravated his asthma. Every winter, from infancy on, he’d developed a stubborn chest cold and a resounding cough, a remarkable imitation of a coal miner’s guttural hack. Night after night, his coughing shook the house awake.
For God’s sake, can’t we give him something?
Marion had whispered to George in the dark—in those days, long ago, when they still shared a bed. She was a steadfast believer in
somethings.
But Arthur’s colds were impervious to treatment. He coughed for weeks on end.

He was ten when Marion proposed sending him to Wollaston—her father’s school, and Kip’s; the
alma mater
of all the Quigley men.
Arthur’s not a Quigley,
George had pointed out, but Marion had merely shrugged. Wollaston was the best of the best, she informed him; no local school could offer a comparable education. Arthur would come home for summers and holidays, and George could drive up to Connecticut to visit him.
Whenever you have time,
she said pointedly. He worked at the store six or seven days a week. Even when Arthur had lived at home, George had scarcely seen him at all.

The song ended and another began, a lively dance tune George recognized. Unconsciously his fingers found the notes, lightly pressing the steering wheel. He hadn’t played in years, but the impulse had never left him; whenever he heard music, he hammered out the notes with his fingers. Early in their courtship Marion had found this fascinating, him tapping
on the small of her back as they danced. Now it drove her crazy. She had not danced with him in years.

He wondered if Ev and Gene still danced together. George thought of her often lately. Redheads reminded him, and pregnant women and the fall weather. Her birthday was in September; on her sixteenth they’d had their first date. Before that her father hadn’t allowed it, so George had waited. He’d been patient then, sure in his devotion. A better man at sixteen than he’d been since.

The fire whistle squealed in the distance, a sound George hadn’t heard in years. The noise sent a chill up his spine. In the backseat Arthur stirred.

“That’s the fire whistle,” said George. “We’re almost there.”

Arthur sat up. “What’s that smell?”

“Over there.” George pointed. “They’re called the Towers. They’re bony piles.”

“Why do they smell like that?” His voice nasal, as though he were holding his breath.

“Sulfur gases. From the scrap coal.”

Arthur considered this. “But why do they leave it there? Why don’t they throw it in the garbage?”

“They’re landmarks.” George peered through the windshield. “When the wind blows they turn sort of orange. It’s something to see.”

“They stink, though.”

“I know,” said George.

Abruptly the whistle stopped. Arthur settled back into his seat. Again his eyes closed. He’d spent the previous day on a train from Connecticut; now he seemed perfectly content to be driven into this town he’d never seen before, for reasons George had found difficult to articulate.

Marion, for her part, had been dumbfounded.
You’re taking him to Bakerton? For heaven’s sake, whatever for?

Later, alone, George had pondered the question. Bakerton had been calling to him lately. Rose’s death, he supposed, though it was his father’s that haunted him—the funeral he’d missed nearly twenty years ago, a young soldier at sea.

I grew up there,
he said simply.
I want my son to see it.

In the end they compromised: he and Arthur would spend Christmas Eve in Bakerton, then drive back early the next morning. They would arrive in Haverford in time to eat Christmas dinner at the Quigleys’. At one time a battle would have ensued, but the years had drained the struggle out of his marriage. They had both stopped caring long ago.

T
HE PORCH FURNITURE
was shrouded in plastic, the floor covered with artificial turf. A wooden sign hung above the door:
THE STUSICKS
, fancy script burned into a flat pine board. In the front yard stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, up to her knees in snow.

Ev’s eyes widened when she came to the door. “Georgie! This is a surprise.”

“Merry Christmas.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Ev, this is my son, Arthur.”

“How do you do.” Arthur stood up straight, removed his hat, and offered his hand. The Wollaston manners. For once they seemed worth the thousand dollars a year.

“What a gentleman,” Ev said, beaming. “My son will be home in a little while. Can you teach him that?” She gave Arthur’s shoulder a squeeze. “It’s freezing out there. Come on in.”

She led them through the living room. A new pope hung on the wall; beside him, a portrait of the dead president. In the center was still John L.
Lewis. “My girls are down in the rec room,” she told Arthur. “Go say hello, like you did just now. They won’t believe it.”

At the kitchen table she poured coffee. “Well, this is a first. Having you home at Christmas.” She sat. “How’s Dorothy?”

“I haven’t seen her yet. She was upstairs taking a bath. You’re our first stop.”

She smiled. “Still no wife, Georgie? I’m starting to think you made her up.”

“She’s in New York for a few days.” Lately Marion spent most of her time there, buying clothes or art, seeing Dr. Gold in one capacity or another. Occasionally George wondered if they were lovers. He didn’t care enough to find out.

“I’ve always wanted to see New York,” Ev said.

“You’ve never been?”

She laughed. “Oh, Georgie. I’ve never been anywhere.”

“I’ll take you someday. You and Gene,” he added hastily.

“Oh, sure. Gene wouldn’t be caught dead in New York. He won’t even drive to Pittsburgh.” She rose and stirred something in a pot on the stove.

“What’s that? It smells familiar.”

“
Pasta e fagioli.
Your mother showed me how to make it. It’s not as good as hers, but the kids like it.” Ev wiped her hands on a tea towel. “I still miss her, Georgie. It was nice having her across the street.”

“I miss her, too.” He thought of Rose sitting on the front porch the last time he’d visited, her blind eyes seeing right through him.
Georgie, are you happy?

“She was crazy about you,” he said. “She couldn’t understand why we didn’t get married. Sometimes I wonder about that myself.” It was his memory of Rose that brought the words out in a rush. His loneliness, his
regrets; the recurrent, haunting dreams of his mother. His life with Marion, the life he had chosen for himself.

Ev flushed a deep red, nearly purple. She sat a long time without speaking.

“Why did you stop writing?” she asked finally.

“I was a kid,” said George. “I didn’t know what was good for me. I got cold feet.”

“You broke my heart.” She said it calmly, as though the injury were not emotional but anatomical: a working part damaged, then successfully replaced. “You stopped loving me. I didn’t know that was possible. I didn’t know anything then.”

“You knew more than I did. I was so anxious to get out of here, I couldn’t think straight.” He looked down into his cup. “I never stopped, Ev. I just—forgot.”

“You forgot.” She laughed, then stifled it, covering her mouth. For a moment he thought she might cry.

“Oh, this is silly,” she said, recovering herself. “Why even talk about it? We’re forty years old, Georgie. It’s all water under the bridge.”

“I guess so,” he said.

Ev cocked her head to one side. “Georgie, are you happy?”

“I married the wrong woman,” he said. “I made a terrible mistake.”

Then the telephone rang.

T
HEY DROVE TO THE TIPPLE
in George’s car. They had sent Arthur across the street to Dorothy’s, Ev’s daughters to their grandparents’
up the hill. A heavy snow coated the roads. Beneath it, a slick of ice.

“When did it happen?” George asked.

“Around lunchtime.” Ev stared straight ahead. “At least, that’s when the power went out. They think it was an explosion.” Her chin quivered violently. “Georgie, they’ve already been trapped down there half a day.”

George tried to imagine it: the cold, the damp. He knew little about mine work; he tried to remember what his father had told him. How the mine walls weren’t black but gray, from the crushed limestone the men spread there to keep the dust down. How he’d once seen a locust mine prop sprout green leaves underground.

They made their way through the town, past store windows bright with holiday shopping hours. The wind lifted snow from the rooftops. Under the street lamps, silver flurries fell like shards of metal, bright and industrial.

“I’m worried about Leonard,” Ev said. “He should have been back by now. I’d hate for him to hear it from somebody else.”

“He’s still at school?”

“He came home last night,” said Ev. “He went to the bus station to pick up Lucy.”

Up ahead, the traffic light turned from yellow to red. The car ahead of him slammed on its brakes. A moment later it went into a spin.

“Hang on,” said George, pumping the brakes. The Cadillac slid, then recovered. “Whoops.” He reached out a hand to brace her. She stiffened at his touch.

“Sorry,” he said. “I do that when Arthur rides with me.”

“That’s okay,” she said.