Stolen Pleasures (11 page)

Presently Arnold was aware that the talk had stopped. He knew without looking up that the men were watching him.

“Not a tear in his eye,” said Andy, and Arnold knew that his uncle had gestured the men to attention.

“He don't give a hoot, is that how it goes?” asked Sullivan.

“He's a reasonable fellow,” Andy explained. “That's what the sheriff said. It's us who ain't reasonable. If we'd've shot our brother, we'd've come runnin' back to the house, cryin' like a baby. Well, we'd've been unreasonable. What would of been the use of actin' like that? If your brother is shot dead, he's shot dead. What's the use of gettin' emotional about it? The thing to do is go down to the garden and pick peas. Am I right?”

The men around the room shifted their heavy, satisfying weight of unreasonableness.

Matthews's son Orion said, “If I'd of done what he done, Pa would've hung my pelt by the side of that big coyote's in the barn.”

Arnold sat in the rocker until the last man filed out. While his family was out in the kitchen bidding the callers good night and the cars were driving away down the dirt lane to the highway, he picked up one of the kerosene lamps and slipped quickly up the stairs. In
his room he undressed by lamplight, although he and Eugie had always undressed in the dark, and not until he was lying in his bed did he blow out the flame. He felt nothing, not any grief. There was only the same immense silence and crawling inside of him, the way the house and fields must feel under a merciless sun.

 

HE AWOKE SUDDENLY. The sound that had waked him was the step of his father as he got up from the rocker and went down the back steps, and he knew that his father was out in the yard, closing the doors of the chicken houses, and he knew that his mother was awake in their bed.

Throwing off the covers, he rose swiftly and went down the stairs and across the dark parlor to his parents' room. He rapped on the door.

“Mother?”

From the closed room her voice rose to him, a seeking and retreating voice. “Yes?”

“Mother?” he asked insistently. He had expected her to realize that he wanted to go down on his knees by her bed and tell her that Eugie was dead. She did not know it yet, nobody knew it, and yet she was sitting up in bed, waiting to be told. He had expected her to tell him to come in and allow him to dig his head into her blankets and tell her about the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother. He had come to clasp her in his arms and pommel her breasts with his head, grieving with her for Eugene. He put his hand on the knob.

“Go back to bed, Arnold,” she called sharply.

But he waited.

“Go back! Is night when you get afraid?”

At first he did not understand. Then, silently, he left the door and for a stricken moment stood by the rocker. Outside everything was still. The fences, the shocks of wheat seen through the window before him were so still it was as if they moved and breathed in the daytime and had fallen silent with the lateness of the hour. It was a silence that seemed to observe his father, a figure moving alone around the yard, his lantern casting a circle of light by his feet. In a few minutes his father would enter the dark house, the lantern still lighting his way.

Arnold was aware suddenly that he was naked. He had thrown off his blankets and come down the stairs to tell his mother how he felt about Eugie, but she had refused to listen to him and his nakedness had become unpardonable. At once he went back up the stairs, fleeing from his father's lantern.

 

AT BREAKFAST HE kept his eyelids lowered to deny the night. Nora, sitting at his left, did not pass the pitcher of milk to him and he did not ask for it. He would never again, he vowed, ask them for anything, and he ate his fried eggs and potatoes only because everybody ate meals—the cattle ate, and the dogs and cats. It was natural for everybody to eat.

“Nora, you gonna keep that pitcher for yourself?” his father asked.

Nora lowered her head unsurely.

“Pass it on to Arnold,” his father said.

Nora put her hands in her lap.

His father picked up the metal pitcher and set it down at Arnold's plate.

Arnold, pretending to be deaf to the discord, did not glance up, but relief rained over his shoulders at the thought that his parents recognized him again. They must have lain awake after his father had come in from the yard: had they realized together why he had come down the stairs and knocked at their door?

“Bessie's missin' this morning,” his father called out to his mother, who had gone into the kitchen. “She went up the mountain last night and had her calf, most likely. Somebody's got to go up and find her 'fore the coyotes get the calf.”

That had been Eugie's job, Arnold thought. Eugie would climb the cattle trails in search of a newborn calf and come down the mountain carrying the calf across his back, with the cow running behind him, mooing with alarm.

Arnold ate a few more forkfuls of his breakfast, put his hands on the edge of the table and pushed back his chair. If he went for the calf he'd be away from the farm all morning. He could switch the cow down the mountain slowly, and the calf would run along at its mother's side.

When he passed through the kitchen, his mother was setting a kettle of water on the stove. “Where you going?” she asked awkwardly.

“Up to get the calf,” he replied, averting his face.

“Arnold?”

At the door he paused reluctantly, his back to her, knowing that she was seeking him out, as his father was doing.

“Was you knocking at my door last night?”

He looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes narrow.

“What'd you want?” she asked humbly.

“I didn't want nothing,” he said flatly.

Then he went out the door and down the back steps, frightened by his answer.

I
T WAS NOT long after his arrival before he was introduced to her, but in that time she watched him from her vantage point that gave her a view of the long room filled with people, and, out the window, a view of the garden. She watched him because she knew at once, gazing down through the diamond panes, that he was the son of the man who had been her lover ten years ago, the son who had been six then. She knew, because the similarity was so striking she felt that she was gazing down upon the lover as he must have been at sixteen and at a moment when he had lifted his face to attempt an impassive scanning of the windows and found, in one, the face of a strange woman transfixed by him. She watched him enter the room, be kissed by the hostess, and thread his way between groups and couples, looking for no one in particular but only yearning, she suspected, to be halted, to be embraced, to be enclosed by some group and by the entire party. For several minutes he stood only a yard away from her, half-in and half-out of a group, holding his goblet of sherry and gazing
down as if waiting for the wine to be joggled from his glass to the rug. He was tall, he was almost a man, he was on the verge of composure—she saw it alternate with discomfort, and his presence among adults, most of whom were strangers to him, reminded her of the legend of Theseus entering as a stranger the kingdom he was to rule someday.

She watched him because he was completely absorbing, combining as he did the familiar figure of the father with the enticing strangeness of the boy himself. She was thirty-six, the number of her husbands was three—the present one had been unable to attend the afternoon party—and the number of her lovers who had meant something to her was firmly fixed in her memory at one and that one was the father of the boy whom she was now spying on. The elderly man beside her on the bench was so enamored of her, his old black eyes glancing out untiringly from far inside the folds of the eyelids at her crossed legs and bare, braceleted arms, that he was unaware of and therefore unhurt by her own glancing and gazing at someone else.

The boy was following the hostess as she went her rounds. Every joke, every anecdote being more amusing to her than to anybody else, she was constantly bending her knees to laugh, bending her body in the tight green dress, and for a time she used the boy as a partner in this dance of hers, grasping his arm and bending toward him until her forehead touched the pit of his stomach. But she was almost as small as an elf and whatever postures she adopted were not exaggerated, as they would be with a larger person, but simply made her presence known. Although he chatted eagerly enough with those she introduced him to, he always left them after
a time to find the hostess again, as if nobody but she could give him a reason for being there, and when, at last, the hostess brought him over to her in her window, she knew as they approached that the hostess regarded her as perhaps the only person who could restrain the boy from his trailing.

So here was the boy, at last, the resemblance to his father defined less by closeness than by distance; now he was himself altogether, there was nothing that was a replica of his father, there were only sharp clues, a continual reminding. The elderly man to her right, rather than appear to be pushed off into oblivion by the two younger persons, rose with a sprightly tugging at tie and coat and offered to bring her another gin and tonic. She refused the offer charmingly, relieved and also reluctant to see him go, for any man's attentiveness was appreciated. She had always felt the need to thank the admirer for admiring.

“She's a good friend of my mother,” he said, when they spoke of the hostess and her vivacity.

“Is your mother here?” she asked brightly, implying that if the son was so delightful a person to meet then the mother must also be met before the party was over.

He said that his mother was staying with her sister in another city, and she wondered if the woman was being cared for by the sister, remembering that at one time during her affair with the boy's father, the wife had left, after a wild scene with him, and gone to her sister's, taking the child, and had been ill there for several weeks.

“You father? Is he here?” she asked, knowing that he was in London and that he had transferred himself there four years ago, right after the divorce.

“He lives in London.” The boy fumbled out a packet of matches from his coat pocket and lit her cigarette with a steady flame that compensated for his clumsiness. “I spent last summer over there.”

“How is he?” she asked. “He was once a friend of mine.” That innocuous information, when told to the son, was like a revelation of the truth. When recalled to the son, the memory of the father was as fresh and pervasive to her as if the affair had begun or ended only the day before.

“Great, great,” the son said. “He's married again, and they've got a baby now, a little girl.” She felt, listening, that the son and herself were both attached to him by love, by resentment, by all the responses of the ones left in the past of somebody of prominence and promise and with a life of his own, and who had no time or inclination for memories of past loves. “I wouldn't like living there all the time,” he said. “London, that is,” laughing in case she might think he meant living in his father's house.

“How does he look now?” she asked.

“Look?”

“Fatter, skinnier, gray or bald?”

“Oh, thinner, I'd say.”

“Oh, yes, thinner,” she cried, laughing. “He's the fibrous kind. They get tough like dried fruit.” They let themselves go with laughing. Other guests glanced over at them, surprised by and disapproving of this sudden intrusion of laughter into the several conversations. “Gray yet?” she asked, arching her brows.

“No, no, not at all,” he said. “Got fewer gray hairs than I do.” A splash of sherry on her leg as he, clumsy with clowning, transferred the glass to riffle his hair with his right hand.

“Nothing,” she assured him. “It's nothing.” But the clumsiness reminded them of that insufficiency in the self, the manqué element that is felt by persons left in somebody else's past, persons who were not in step and who were dismayed by their falling behind. She saw that he was wondering about her—why she should laugh too eagerly over the present description of an old friend and why she could so easily compel him to join with her.

She rose, reaching down for his hand, all done in a moment as if he were doing the convincing and she was spontaneously amenable. “Come on, let's walk in the garden,” she said over her shoulder as he followed her through the crowd, their hands linked. She turned her profile to him as they stood delayed by a congestion of guests near the door and spoke into his ear as he complyingly bent his head down. “When the air gets thick with smoke and gossip, I can't breathe,” she whispered hoarsely, and, seeing him frown solicitously, baffled, as if she had named a rare disease, she patted his cheek to convey to him that her complaint wasn't serious. They each enjoyed the other's concern and, laughing about it, pushed out onto the wise arc of the brick steps.