Pay the Piper (2 page)

“Mom, I'm not really hungry. When Dad's not here, I wouldn't mind having cold cereal.”

“OK. Eat what you can. I wish you'd told me.”

“He's coming back tonight?”

“Yup.”

Rick glanced at a paper magnetized to the refrigerator. “I haven't done the list of things he left for me.”

Her gaze went there too. “I haven't done all of mine either. But I swept the basement.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“I was down there doing laundry, so why not. Just don't tell.”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said, setting his bowl on the floor and apologizing about her wasted time cooking—William would have taught him that, and what would she have become if she hadn't known William?

The older dog, Buff, licked daintily, while a recent acquisition, a bloodhound named Jubal, sat back with reddened eyes waiting his turn. Buff, the matriarch, had let him know this was her territory long before he ever showed up here. Good for you, Buff, Laurel told her silently. “Jubal, you smell terrible.”

“The bus!” Rick cried. His chair's legs scraped backward, and the alerted dogs rushed for the door. In the distance air brakes soughed and groaned, though otherwise in the upper-class neighborhood there was no noise for miles, only silence. The yellow school bus had readied itself to climb a hill down the road, and Rick knew how many minutes before it would pass apple trees and arrive almost at his front door. He rushed upstairs to brush his teeth.

Laurel had his jacket, books, and homework, neatly laid out the night before, and handed them over after he clobbered downstairs.

“Thanks.”

“That's what mothers are for,” she said.

“There's a pickup ball game this afternoon.”

“You've got to go.” Leaning into a cotton picker's basket she'd brought back from Mississippi one summer, she extracted his catcher's mitt.

“I won't get everything on the list done.”

Not wishing to be disloyal to William, but thinking there were limits to things, she said, “We'll just have to do our best.”

He reached out and lightly flicked her on the arm. “Touch last!” he cried, and bounded into the driveway, laughing back. She shooed him off with a wave that recognized his child's game from the past, when she and William were going out, and Rick dashed about the car windows to see who could touch each other last. As if he never wanted to part, Laurel thought suddenly, near tears. From behind the door's glass panes, she watched till Rick's light jacket bobbed aboard the bus and then, obedient to their day's ritual, Jubal and Buff returned home, having accompanied him.

She looked at the refrigerator and clicked off mentally what she'd accomplished since William left on his business trip to Washington. She'd taken her new skirt to be shortened to the length he'd suggested, and she'd called the fuel company about a leak in the basement and bought an extension cord. But she had not followed his regimen for working out. He had posted how many sit-ups to do daily, keeping her toes attached to something, and a schedule with barbells, their weights increasingly difficult as time went by. She would tell him, for once, she was not going to do what he said; and that's that, she added to herself in her mother's definitive phrase. Jogging was enough for her.

You, William once said, did all right for a little girl from Delton. Marrying into his prestigious family, he had meant, more or less kindly. She certainly agreed, after the background she came from. She carried about her own
epithet: the little girl from Tennessee. Yet she had stacked up a few Brownie points before meeting him and was neither a country tack nor stupid. She'd published two short stories in reputable literary quarterlies; this fact kept William's patrician, stalwart, and productive Bostonian female relatives from relegating her to the dust pile where they cast most Southern women, among the flirty, flighty, and mundane.

She considered her middle-class Southern background, where materialism was success. If only she'd had the nerve, at some point, to tell William's relatives she could at least cook. They pridefully announced they could not boil water for tea. There was fine art on the walls of William's relatives' houses, and fine furniture in them, but still their houses had a sparer, plainer, and more austere look than comparable Southern houses she had known. When his relatives' rugs and upholstering wore out, these things were often left that way, as if from respect; books sat on shelves, with tattered jackets, because someone was always pulling them out to read them. In Delton, one of her friends had her Book-of-the-Month Club books covered in forest-green felt to match the color of her slipcovers; another old friend as he grew successful bought the whole of the Modern Library, though as she gazed at his lined wall, he confessed the only novel he'd read since college was “The Man in the Long Gray Underwear.” “Gray Flannel Suit”? she timidly suggested. William's mother and the aunt who helped raise him wore conservative clothes whose hemlines stayed mid-calf no matter what fashion predicted. When Aunt Grace once looked surprised, saying, “You don't speak French?” Laurel replied, “La plume de ma tante,” and cringed. For years, she longed for some snappy or devastating reply, but none had yet come. William, when they married, pointed out the difference between baking powder and baking soda, because, coming from the South, she not only had never cooked but had never washed out a pair of underpants for herself until she went to college.

Jubal and Buff could not understand this morning why there were no egg, toast, or bacon scraps. Laurel opened the dishwasher to put in Rick's dish, seeing there dishes from William's last meal, and thought how she had said, “I don't mind cooking your breakfast every morning, but it seems silly since you throw it up.”

He had stood there with his briefcase, broad-shouldered in the old tweed jacket he went on wearing generously year after year and watery-eyed from tossing his cookies. “Maybe it's the grease,” he had said.

“You're the one who wants your eggs fried in bacon grease,” she had reminded him. “But you threw them up scrambled and soft-boiled, too.”

Then William had left, and there had seemed some incongruity in a man's going to Washington, D.C., on a business trip for his high-powered company and yet throwing up his breakfast first, day after day, because his new job and his new boss made him nervous. While knowing how dependent she was on William, she believed she had a different strength; she knew she had more guts, because she'd hardly ever thrown up in her life, and then usually for the reason her mother taught her, which was when she'd drunk too much alcohol. Stick your finger down your throat, her mother advised. Recently, William had thrown up one night more terribly than anyone she had ever heard, after being invited by a stepmother he'd never seen to come for dinner in New York and collect some personal effects of his late father's. These things turned out to be quite useless—an engraved, flat, silver cigarette case and diamond cuff links—causing Laurel to wonder at her austere mother-in-law once married to someone as debonair as William Powell. They came home, and William shut himself in the bathroom.

All the time he was being sick, she prayed he might also vomit up all the mystery, pain, and loss, all the guilt, about never seeing again the father who left when William was four. She had determined, early on, she'd never take Rick away when he was small. How could she do it, even now, when William cared almost inordinately about his son? Whenever she thought how awful her parents had been, she was glad at least to have known where she came from.

William had a last faceless memory of his father. Awakened in dampish Dr. Denton's and brought into a room with subdued lamplight, he stood rubbing his eyes, with the rear flap of his sleepers hanging open. Privately, Laurel thought William had projected himself into a Norman Rockwell cover for
The Saturday Evening Post
, but she had never said so and went on sharing with him that image of himself. William had been taught to say Ma-
Ma
and Pa-
Pa
in the French manner, with accent on the final
a
. She never mentioned that was a long way from Southern pronunciation: which was Momma and Poppa even when similarly spelled; most commonly people said Daddy, even into adulthood. She did not know any Southerners who called their parents Mom and Dad.

“Dear,” his mother had said that evening, “your father and I are divorcing. That means we're not going to live in the same house any longer. Please tell me now which of us you'd rather live with.”

Understanding only that he wanted to go back to bed, he put his head into his mother's lap, and the die was cast. For a child that age, it was a strange question. But Mrs. Perry was an artist in the grand sense of the word. “My mother the painting machine,” William called her. “It's only by accident that she's a person.” She was the only woman Laurel had ever known whose career was more important than anything else. But then, she had known few women who did anything besides keep house.

His paternal grandmother had wanted William, and urgently, eagerly, Mrs. Perry would have turned him over at any time. But his father, having lost, refused ever to see William again. “What kind of man could he have been,” Laurel said once, “not to see his son. He must have been crazy.” Though he tried to agree, William was convinced there had been something wrong with him to have been so abandoned. As a father he invented the relationship between himself and Rick he'd dreamed of as a fatherless child. It was sometimes a little hard on Rick. Once Mrs. Perry confided to Laurel that after divorcing she realized she should never have married at all, and for a moment put her hands over her face. Laurel had wondered what she was thinking. She had been surprised to realize just how locked into convention and its pressures women always had been, for no one could be more intelligent, motivated, strong-willed than Mrs. Perry. Yet she had felt she had to marry and have a child.

They had lived with his Aunt Grace, who spoke fluent French, and always, too, William had the feeling of living in someone else's house, not his own. When she and William bought this second, larger house in the suburbs, where they planned to stay forever, he walked about, a little teary, saying at last he was home. Laurel's eyes had prickled in sympathy, though his insecurity was essentially foreign to her, as she had always lived in her own true house. To think of an emotional man as a sissy was a stereotyped idea, she kept telling herself. But she had to go on fighting her feeling that most highly educated Eastern men she knew were somehow effeminate.

That evening as William came from the bathroom, he blamed his being sick on his stepmother's dinner. She said flatly, “Roast beef, boiled potatoes, and string beans? It wasn't the dinner, it was seeing somebody connected to your father.” Then she added, “I'm not sick,” which meant nothing since her emotions did not affect her stomach but made her face break out. Once, after Rick's birth, William confided he'd always been sorry she never had morning sickness. She asked, “Why, so you could have it vicariously?” and all he did was nod without shame.

Last night she had made a gelatin salad and this morning, lifting waxed paper, she shook the mold tentatively. The salad seemed jelled, a success; she had only to dread the moment of turning it out onto a platter, praying it stayed whole. She had started the dishwasher, and its sounds made her temples ache. When she asked herself, What is wrong with me, a sinus headache? she knew she was lying. She had a hangover.

Years ago, at the height of her own alcoholism, newly widowed, her mother had said, “If you get past the first drink in the morning, you're all right for the day.” But Laurel never got up thinking of a hair of the dog. She had heard secondhand about things that happened in those years her mother lived as a widow in Delton, drinking, before she moved east. She knew how fractured her life had been because of her parents' behavior, the years when so little attention was paid to children growing up.

Laurel considered what she had read on the subject. Was alcoholism inherited? Or had her own liking to drink come from her initiation in Delton—in the days of brown bagging? Confronting her own tendency, Laurel gave her mother credit. She came once to babysit with Rick when she had been drinking, and William announced, “Kate, we love you. But if you come around Rick anymore when you've been drinking, you'll never see your grandson again.” She admired William, but admired her mother more. Hers was the harder part. Her mother quit drinking cold turkey, those years ago.

Married to William, Laurel felt that her hardest times were living in a New York brownstone until Rick was two years old. Nothing in her life as a Southerner had prepared her for such an existence. All day, she was alone with a baby in a fourth-floor walk-up; she looked from a bay window to a sliver of Hudson River, her one contact with nature except for treks to the park along Riverside Drive, where she sat among strangers. Mostly, these other mothers were native New Yorkers with whom she had nothing in common, whom she understood no better than shopkeepers on upper Broadway, rude in a way no one in the South was ever rude. She began realizing what she had left behind, a circle of girlfriends having their babies together and ever-present black help even on a young married's low income. She had well understood ghetto mothers throwing their babies off rooftops and down air shafts. Despairing, she once dosed Rick with paregoric to make him sleep, needing respite. Then, panicked, she threw the bottle away, not to be tempted again.

It was back then she began talking so affectionately about the South, this place she eagerly left, until William was forced to say, “I didn't bring you east, Sister. I found you here.” She could only accept his words in silence while considering two things—that “Sister” was not a particularly endearing way to address one's wife, and couldn't he have said, instead, Here is where I fell in love with you? All right, Buster, she had always wanted to reply. But she did not want Rick to hear the anger and arguments she grew up knowing, so Laurel was silent.