Raising Demons (11 page)

Half an hour later I stopped my car, battered and limping, in my own driveway, with the bacon in the pan in the house ready to fry and the coffee by now probably boiled dry, and my husband peacefully asleep. For a minute we all sat in the car, breathing deeply, and then I asked shyly, “Laurie, was any of that true?”

“Any of what?”

“About the moonshiners and the dynamite and the false bottom on that car?”

“What about it?”

“Is it true? Did you really find a false bottom in that car?”

“We're not
allowed
to play in somebody else's car,” Laurie said, shocked. “What would Dad say? Hey,” he added suddenly, “I'm going to tell Dad right now.”

“
I
'm going to tell Daddy,” Jannie said. They struggled, pushing, out of the car, and raced for the house, with Sally following and shrieking, “Daddy, Daddy, Mommy hit another car and smashed it all up and the police came and I found a penny and Mommy—”

“Maybe I'll just stay out here,” I said to Mr. Beekman, and he nodded.

“Cookie,” he said sympathetically.

Verge's wife telephoned me about a week later and told me with enormous satisfaction that she had not had a concussion after all, but a deviated septum, and she had the doctor's word to prove it, and they were going to sue me for plenty for her deviated septum and Junior's many injuries. I think Verge forgot about it, though, because there was an item in the paper a few days after that saying that Verge had miraculously escaped injury when his car went through a guard rail along a back road and rolled down the hill into the river. Sole witness to the accident was his cousin Carmen, who had been driving along behind him. They were going to bring suit against the township for criminal neglect.

 • • • 

The children were changing in the new house. They belonged in the town now. Laurie could go over to the gym in the evenings to see the basketball games, and Jannie walked to the library after school. I took movies of Sally riding her tricycle up and down the back walk, and of Barry being pulled in a wagon and walking unsteadily across the porch. The gatepost continued crooked. When the sap was definitely running that spring we thought we would tap our maple trees, and my husband consulted the
Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences
for directions, while I drove down to the grocery to get mason jars. Laurie drilled holes in four maples, just as the encyclopaedia said to, and we hung the jars on pegs under the holes. I set up a wash tub on the back of the stove. Some friends from New York called to ask if we were free for the weekend because they thought they might drive up and we said we were sorry but we were sugaring off, and could they make it the weekend after? Laurie and his father kept emptying the jars full of sap into the washtub on the back of the stove, and we kept it boiling day and night. After nearly five days we had boiled down about a pint and a half of syrup, and we put it into tiny medicine bottles, about enough for one pancake each, and sent it to all our friends, with a label saying it came from our own sugarbush. We estimated that what with the electricity and the repairs to the stove and the mason jars and the pots and the laundry bill and the wallpaper in the dining room peeling off from the steam our maple syrup had cost us about seventy-five dollars a gallon. I took movies of Laurie tapping the maple trees. Someone told us later that you were supposed to strain the sap before you boiled it.

I went down one morning to get the mail, and there was a magazine from the Junior Natural History Society for Laurie, a letter from my mother, six bills which I passed on unopened to my husband, and a birthday card for me. I opened it, looked at it, thought for a minute, and then leaned around to look at my husband past the coffeepot. “When is my birthday?” I asked him.

“Good heavens,” he said, staring.

“For the past eleven years, I believe,” I said icily, “I have had to remind you regularly once a year that my birthday is on . . .” I hesitated. “Oh,” I said. I held out the card. “Then why do I get a birthday card today?”

He looked at it with a kind of relieved smile. “Mistake, probably,” he said. “Someone must have made a mistake. They thought,” he explained more fully, “that today was your birthday. You're sure it's not?” he asked anxiously.

“I could telephone my mother,” I said, “or look up my birth certificate. And I've written it down for you a hundred times.”

“Then why,” he asked, putting his finger on the vital point, “send you a birthday card? You suppose someone thought it
was
your birthday?”

“That must be it,” I said.

He took the card away from me and scowled at it. “Signed L or F or maybe even J,” he said. “Nothing but an initial. Wouldn't you think people—”

I took the card back again. “F,” I said. “I'm sure it's F. And the envelope is certainly addressed to me, right name, right address.”

“Then someone must have made a mistake,” he said with finality.

“But who?”

My husband was opening the bills. “Now
here
's a
real
mistake for you,” he said, nodding. “The dress shop. Thirty-seven—”

I took my birthday card and tiptoed away.

Although our life pursues a fairly even tenor, generally, it is very easy to upset our family equilibrium, and a minor unsolved mystery is surely a splendid way to do it. When my husband left the breakfast table he came into the kitchen where I was gathering myself together to defrost the refrigerator and said, “Any ideas?”

“No,” I said, “unless a kind of hash . . .”

“About that card, I mean,” he said. “Any idea who sent it?”

“Someone whose name begins with L or F,” I said. “Linda? Laura? Florence? Laurence?”

Laurie's name is Laurence, but he sends people birthday cards only under the most extreme persuasion, and only if I buy them first and then sit him down and hand him the pen to sign and address them, and, besides, he always signs them “Laurie,” with a flourish underneath, and “Anyway,” I said, finishing my train of thought aloud, “he would have given it to me to mail.”

“And why send a card to you? He never did before.”

“And Sally and Barry can't write, and if Jannie wanted to give me a birthday card she'd just
give
it to me, and besides Sally only believes in birthday cards if she gets invited to the parties and Barry—”

“Must be some kind of a mistake,” my husband said heartily, and went on into the study, still carrying the bill from the dress shop.

About half an hour later I stopped by the study and said, “You know, I've been thinking. About that birthday card—”

“Mistake, probably,” my husband said absently. He was putting a new ribbon into his typewriter, and had involved himself deeply.

“But I don't recognize the handwriting. It looks like a child's, almost. Look at the envelope.”

“I
can't
look at the envelope,” my husband said. “I need another hand as it is.”

“Well,” I said, “either by a child or maybe someone writing left-handed. As though they were trying to disguise their handwriting, you know. Almost illiterate.”

“Well, ask Laurie,” my husband said. “He's the only illiterate child
I
know.” He thought. “Except for the rest of your children, of course,” he finished generously.

I went and asked Laurie and Laurie said no, he had never seen the birthday card before. “Why?” he asked. “Your birthday or something?”

“My birthday is a hundred and forty-three days off and I want a plain silver necklace to go with my new black dress,” I said. “I was just curious about why someone sent me a birthday card.”

Jannie had never seen the card before, but thought it might have been meant for her. “I haven't had as many birthdays as
you
have,” she pointed out, “so people are more liable to make a mistake on
mine.
”

Sally was not expecting any birthday cards, either, but added shrewdly that although her birthday was quite a while off, there would be no harm in her taking the card and keeping it until it
was
her birthday. “Then they wouldn't have to send me another,” she explained.

Old Beekman did not recognize the card, but seemed to think that he would like to have it anyway. He offered me half a lollipop and a broken airplane in exchange, and was loudly indignant when I rejected what he must have regarded as a supremely fair offer.

“Cookie?” he suggested tearfully. “Candy, cookie?”

“Well,” I said, returning to my husband in the study, “about all I can think of now is to call everyone I know and ask
them.
Even though it seems kind of silly to send someone a birthday card and disguise your
hand
writing. I mean, why bother to send it at all?”

My husband, who was typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” over and over again, looked up briefly and said, “Also, they used a two-cent stamp. Didn't notice
that
, did you?”

I took up the envelope and looked at it again. “Most people only use two-cent stamps around Christmastime,” I said. “For Christmas cards, you know. Sometimes you come across them in a desk drawer or something but
most
people—”

“No,” my husband agreed. “You won't often find anyone who remembers to use a two-cent stamp the rest of the year.”

“Looks kind of . . . well . . . cheap, doesn't it?” I said. “Sending me a birthday card and then going out to get a two-cent stamp to mail it with. Imagine!”

“Might just as well not have gone to any trouble about it at all,” my husband said.

“Naturally,” I said reasonably, “it's nice of them to want to send me a birthday card and of course I appreciate the thought and all, but it
does
seem that if you're going to disguise your handwriting and go buy a two-cent stamp you're a very strange sort of person, is all.”

“What's another penny, anyway?” my husband asked. “The way things cost these days, a three-cent stamp is
nothing.
They probably just had the two-cent stamp left over from Christmas.”

“Imagine!” I said again. “Keeping an old two-cent stamp from a Christmas card. I wouldn't be surprised if they
steamed
it off.”

“Fine lot of friends
you
've got,” my husband said indignantly. “Probably an old leftover birthday card too. See if another name's been erased.”

“
I
wouldn't be surprised,” I said. “Naturally, I don't expect a gift from every casual acquaintance, naturally, but I
do
like to think that if anyone is going to send me a card, well, after all, I get enough birthday cards so's I don't have to take any old—”

The phone rang, and I went to answer it. It was my husband's Aunt Lydia, and after I had asked how she was and how Uncle George was, and she had asked after me and my husband and the children I said how nice it was of her to call, because we hadn't heard from her in so long, and she said oh, she just thought she'd call, and she was surprised that
we
hadn't called
her
, and I said, well, I had been meaning to. Then she said well, she really wouldn't have called at all, actually, only she was going out for the day and of course today
was
her birthday and she thought we might have been planning to call
her
and she wanted us to know she wouldn't be there, because of course she usually expected to hear from us on her birthday, even if it was nothing but a card. “But I
sent
 . . .” I said, and was suddenly silent.

She was saying oh, really, because then wasn't it funny that it hadn't arrived, because really she wouldn't have bothered to call at all except she was going out for the day and it being her birthday of course . . . I handed the phone silently to my husband and went and looked at my birthday card. “Happy birthday, Aunt Lydia,” my husband said into the phone, and I stood there looking at the card and wondering at the way my handwriting had deteriorated since college.

My husband said goodbye to Aunt Lydia and hung up and came back into the study. “Funny thing,” he said, going toward his desk, “here Aunt Lydia didn't get a card on her birthday, and you got a birthday card but it wasn't your birthday. Funny.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I thought I'd write that place a letter about their bill,” my husband went on, “tell them they can't get away with
that
kind of thing.”

“Some days,” I said, dropping my birthday card into the wastebasket, “
every
thing just seems to go wrong, doesn't it?”

 • • • 

Laurie and I entered that spring into a most complex and subtle series of strategies. I would sigh deeply and wistfully at the dinner table, staring mournfully into space and refusing dessert, and when my husband asked me what was wrong Laurie would move in with a direct frontal attack. Or Laurie would come home from school with his face artistically smeared with mud and the look of a cowed and fearful wild creature; he would fling himself drearily into a study chair and when his father asked what on earth he had been fighting about
now
, I would cry indignantly that it wasn't fair to blame the poor child for something he couldn't help, he was the laughingstock of the neighborhood and it was our fault. Jannie came in with us after a while; she would sit on her father's lap and say, “Poor poor Mommy,” and, “
Why
, Daddy?” in a particularly piercing nasal tone. After about a month—four days short, actually, of the time Laurie and I had originally figured it would take—my husband gave in. Laurie and Jannie and I chose a brown and cream station wagon, with gold and cream inside, and we gave the man the old car with its nose smashed in and one headlight hanging crooked, and when my husband went for a ride in the new station wagon he said that of course since we were in debt for the rest of our lives anyway with the house payments we might as well buy a car too and go bankrupt in style and didn't I think the gold oil gauge and speedometer were perhaps a little gaudy?