Don't Worry About the Kids (16 page)

It a mystery to me, but his words they get me up. He don't look sorry at all. He just takes hold on my jacket and shakes me. “Do you?—And don't say it: just nod your head.”

I nod my head. I know where Ed Robinson lives.

“Okay. Let's go.” I fix my hat on the back of my head and go with him into the car, I see we heading back for Lucius's house, I try not to think on what's coming.

“Tell me something, Homer,” he says, half-way there, just talking like nothing been happening. “You like it in the Army?”

“Oh yes—” I say, stop the rest of that sentence. “I like the Army. Would of stayed in it, not for what happened. It's good in the Army.”

“What happened?” he asks. I slide toward the door, look out the window, it the first time he ask me this, and I know it ain't no use, so I tell him how this cook, I in the kitchen always making jokes to keep everybody laughing, but I go too far this one time—say something about his girl, a joke about a guy going in a camera store, gets asked what size camera he got. Only I so nervous now, I get all the funny parts about the Brownie and the box messed up, and the Sheriff don't get it. But I tell him that was how it happened, this guy got so mad he throw this chopper at me, right there in the kitchen, lay me out flat, I never even known what did it till they tell me at the hospital. I tell most people it happen while we killing Japs with tanks.

The Sheriff nods like he filing my story away, some of his anger gone, but we get to the house, he stride right up to the porch, I got to hustle to get inside with him.

“You can bury James when you want,” he tells Lucius's mother. “We won't need an autopsy.” She looks at him and the Sheriff lets out some breath, then speaks quick. “Okay, okay. There won't be any trial, either,” and he turns direct and I hurry out after him. Aunt Emma, she still singing.

Outside the Sheriff looks at me and I look back at him. “It's the only way, Homer,” he says. “You get Lucius, say I need him to do some packing down by the office—they'll be glad to get him off their hands. I'll drive you out a ways, you do the rest by yourself.” He don't look right at me no more. “Can you do the job, Homer?”

I don't got to think. “Yes sir,” I say. “Me and Lucius, we put our sense together this time, we do the job for you.”

“You'll explain to Lucius—about not talking?”

“Don't you worry none, Sheriff,” I say. “You done lots for us. You a good friend to the colored people.”

“Sure,” he says, but you can tell he don't believe it. “Sure.” He shakes his head. There ain't no anger in him now. He just seem tired and old. I forget how old he is sometimes, he so big and quick. “God help us all,” he says.

“Ed Robinson ain't no good,” I say to him. “Lucius get him anyway somehow, Sheriff.”

“Goddamn him,” the Sheriff says, I ain't sure if he means Lucius or Ed Robinson. “Just goddamn him.” Then he looks at me strange. “Am I doing the right thing, Homer?” he asks. My cap, it pressing on my head, his face sways some in front of me. He starts to grab my jacket but stops. “Am I? It's important. Do you think I'm doing the right thing?”

“Yes sir,” I say. “Yes sir, cap'n.”

He don't seem to mind me saying that again, it's something else don't satisfy him this time. “The truth—” he says, grabs me and looks like he gonna get mad all over again. “Goddamn you—give me a straight answer. It's important, damn it. Do you think I'm doing the right thing, Homer?”

“Yes sir,” I say, answering the best I know how. “Yes sir, cap'n. You doing the best you can.”

“Oh goddamn you,” he says, shoves me away. “Just goddamn you.” I wishing I could tell him other things now, but it only upset him, I figure. The Sheriff, he real good to me. My head still turning some, thinking on what gonna be, but I don't got to look, and like the Sheriff says, it's the only way. The Sheriff, he knows Ed Robinson ain't the guy to keep shut on a thing like this. That's for sure. Maybe he don't trust me neither. He let Ed Robinson get off free, we all gonna be in for worse troubles, how he ever gonna keep order? Like I say, I wishing I could tell him other things now. What I like to do is tell him how if he die before I do, I go out to his grave all the time, make sure they tend to it right, but I don't figure he wants to know about this none. I thinking about it, though. “Go on,” he says to me. “Go on.”

“Yes sir, cap'n,” I say and go in the house, say what I have to and get Lucius. The Sheriff gonna drive us partway, wait to drive us back after. “Let's go, Lucius,” I whisper upstairs, he must of got some needles from the doctor, he sitting on his bed pretty calm and big, humming to hisself the song Aunt Emma singing about his brother. “C'mon, Lucius,” I say. “You got to dig up your knife.”

The Year Between

W
HEN
THE
IDEA
first occurred to Mark Goldman—that he and his wife should live apart for a year, and that, afterward, they should never reveal to anyone, not even to each other, what they did during that year—he was certain he was borrowing it from an early short story by Henry James. The story he recalled seemed to him a typical Jamesian ghost story in which, at the end, after the husband and wife are reunited, the husband is slowly driven mad by his desire to know, and not knowing, to create, in painful detail, each hour and day, in his wife's life, of the missing year.

Mark mentioned the story to several colleagues in the English Department at Amherst College; he went through the complete New York edition of James's stories and short novels, and then through the periodicals in which the stories had originally appeared. He found nothing.

“Then you must have made it up yourself,” Janet said to him one evening, before dinner. He noticed that her cheeks, usually pale, were flushed. “And I think it's wonderful that you did—haven't I always said you had a marvelous imagination, if only you'd give it a chance?”

“I suppose so,” he replied. “But listen. Give me your opinion. I've been thinking that maybe—maybe I should write the story myself—”

“Or maybe—” she said then, her eyes shining “—maybe we should live it.”

He leaned toward her, his mouth half-open in astonishment—she had, he knew, spoken for his own silent thoughts—and when she laughed, he found that he was laughing with her. “Do you really think so?” he asked.

“Yes.” She seemed surprised by her own reply. “Yes. I suppose I do,” she said, setting down her glass of sherry. She came to him and sat on his lap. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and slid her hand inside. She rubbed his chest gently, and he could feel the warmth of her thighs through the thin cloth of her spring dress. “We're free,” she said. “Don't you see? We can do whatever we want.”

“1 suppose so,” he said. “But you're not really serious, are you? I mean, for a story it might be a terrific idea—a couple renewing themselves by inventing a ghost, by infusing their lives with the mystery it lacks, but to actually live out…”

She rested her head against his chest. “Oh Mark, why not?” she pleaded, softly. “Why not? It's just the thing we need, don't you see? It would be—” she laughed at the Jamesian phrase “—the great thing in our lives.”

The next evening, after dinner, they sat in their living room and talked again. She had never seemed more beautiful to him. It was as if, he thought, his idea had somehow melted that cool New England reserve of hers that had, through the years, often infuriated him. He told her so and she smiled, allowing for the truth of what he said. Hadn't she always believed in his imagination? His mind, he admitted, did take flights at times, as it had been doing all day, and sometimes those flights brought with them painful questions. Would she mind if he asked her a simple question—would she answer him honestly? In all their years in Amherst, he wanted to know, had she ever been in love with anyone else?

“No.”

He nodded, swallowed hard. “Even when we were first married,” he confessed, “I used to fear that I wasn't enough for you, that I could never satisfy you. Did you know that?” He sighed. “I used to watch the way your eyes would flicker sideways sometimes when you were smiling at others—at faculty parties, or concerts. Sometimes when you were gone in the afternoon with your women friends, I'd sneak out and drive around town, afraid—wishing, I suppose you'd say—that I'd find you with another man.”

She made circles on his chest with her fingertip. “You're sweet,” she said. “You're very sweet, Mark. But no, despite the phantoms of your imagination, I've never been with another man. But tell me what you discovered today. Please? Don't let me-” she smiled “—hang fire forever—”

He told her that he had continued his researches in the Frost Library during the afternoon, but had discovered nothing. The story was, he concluded—like the missing year—a ghost. “I like ghosts,” she said. Then she shuddered, and gestured to the darkened room. “What, really, do we have to lose?” she asked. “Sometimes I just get so scared for the emptiness of our life, Mark. Living here year after year, without children, without—please let's try it. Please?”

“But if we actually did it—I mean, be realistic, Janet—how could we face each other afterward?” he asked. “Acts have consequences—isn't that the point? If James had written the story, wouldn't that have
been
the point? That we're never
really
free, not even in our imaginations.” He shrugged. “I know us too well. We're just too normal and moral—too possessive, too monogamous, too—”

“That's right,” she said, and he heard a familiar coldness enter her voice. “That's exactly right.”

He kissed her forehead, then recited the line he had often recited to her in their early years: “What do you think—can an intense Jewish boy from the streets of Brooklyn find contentment in the arms of the frail and beautiful daughter of a dying New England clergyman?”

“Can he?” she asked. Her body was very still now, against his own. “Tell me that, please. Can he, Mark?
Did
he?”

She took his face between her hands and kissed him. Her lips were warm. She flicked his tongue lightly with her own, and he felt himself harden at once. He closed his eyes and he saw her as she had been fifteen years before, in the sunlit bedroom of the parsonage, washing her father's gaunt face with a damp cloth. Such tenderness! He had, watching her from the doorway, held his breath. He had loved her most in that moment, he knew, when she had not been aware of his presence. He had longed to have her care for him with such single-minded and intense gentleness. And after the tenderness, he recalled, in her bedroom upstairs, such passion; and all the while their bodies were clasped together, her father was below them, dying and dreaming.

The next afternoon Mark cut his office hours short and surprised Janet by coming home at two o'clock. He took the papers he had prepared out of his briefcase, showed them to her, and told her that he had figured out the logistical details. All things were possible, he said. They would each choose one friend with whom, during the twelve months, they would be constantly in touch. Each friend would have the name of the other in a sealed envelope. If any emergency should arise, one friend would open the sealed envelope, notify the other friend, and that friend would notify one of them. He took out their bankbooks and checkbooks and explained to her how they would arrange their finances. They would each use a different travel agent. They would agree, from this point on, not to open or to read each other's mail, or to look upon each other's desks. In late May, when classes were out, he would go to New Haven for two weeks, to work at the Beinecke Library, and she could use that time to do whatever could not be done with him present. She would leave the house sometime before his return. He would then come home and would leave one week later. He would notify Amherst College about their plans to be abroad for his sabbatical; they lived in a college-owned house, and the college would take care of it in their absence. He spoke for more than an hour, working from notes, and when he was done speaking she burst into applause and declared him a genius, that rare man who could wed deep feeling and wild invention with practical realities.

Then, abruptly, she stopped smiling. “But Mark,” she said, her brow furrowed. “There's something else. I've been thinking—are you sure you're up to this? Are you sure you don't just want to forget the whole thing?” She looked down. “I wouldn't mind. Really. I've been thinking too, and I can see now that it might be hard on you afterward in a way it might not be on me. I wouldn't mind. It's been wonderful to play with the idea, but—”

He took her in his arms and told her that he would be doing it as much for himself as for her. Hadn't the idea been his? Hadn't he worked out all the details? If he did not now put his character to the test he had imagined for it, he would live out the rest of his life, he knew, with the feeling of failure, with the knowledge that he had proven himself inadequate to the demands of his real self, his true dreams. He spoke to her with great intensity and while he spoke she sat across from him on their bed, cross-legged, listening; and when he was done speaking she was kind to him in ways that gave him the courage she kept assuring him he had.

2

Now
THE
YEAR
WAS
over, and they were across the room from each other, at the first faculty party of the new academic year. While he talked with his colleagues and their wives, and parried their questions with noncommittal answers, he could not keep from grinning, he could not keep from searching out Janet's sparkling eyes, from thinking of their reunion the night before. She had seemed even younger to him than she had in the weeks preceding their separation. Her body was leaner, her skin smoother, and her hair—her lovely flaxen hair, which she had always worn just past her shoulders—now hung down almost to her waist. That had been her gift to him.