Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (36 page)

“Angelo,” Celeste said softly, “my brother-in-law has an inn in Maine. It's very nice there, on the ocean, and there would be work for you — a free place to stay. In the winter it's quiet, just clean snow to be shoveled and things to be fixed. In the summer the tourists come to swim and sail; there's boats and beaches, and you'd like my family.”

“No,” Minna said. “It's too far. How could he get there?”

“I'll take him myself,” Celeste told her. “I'll drive him there tonight. I'd only miss one day, just tomorrow.”

“He's never been out of Boston,” Minna said. “He wouldn't like it.”

“Of course he'd like it!” Flynn shouted. “It'll be perfect.”

“Celeste?” Angelo asked. “Will you be there?”

“On weekends, in the summer,” she said. “And all my vacations.”

“What's it called?” Angelo asked her. He sat up, back against the counter cabinet, and he touched her hair with his hand. His wondering, adoring eyes passed over her thick, black hair, her strong-boned face and wide mouth.

“It's called Heron's Neck,” Celeste told him. “Everybody's very friendly. You'd get to know them all, right away.”

“I'll bet you'd like it just fine, Angelo,” Flynn said.

“We'll go tonight,” Celeste prompted. “We'll go as soon as we put your things in my car.”

“You can't do it,” Minna said. “You can't take him there.”

“She'll only miss one day!” Flynn shouted. “Christ, Minna, what's one day?”

Minna passed her hand over her face, the powder wet and clotted at the corners of her eyes. She looked at Celeste.

“You can't have the day off,” Minna told her. “It's a busy time of year.”

“Christ!” Flynn hollered. “Speak to Mrs. Elwood about it!”

“I'm in charge of this kitchen!” Minna cried. “I saw to getting her hired, and I'll see to this.” Flynn evaded Minna's eyes. It was very quiet in the kitchen.

“What if I just left with Angelo tonight?” Celeste asked.

“Then you just leave for good,” Minna said.

“Put Angelo on a bus!” Flynn bellowed.

“I don't want to go there alone!” Angelo cried. “I don't know anybody,” he added meekly.

It was quiet again, and this time Flynn evaded Celeste's eyes. Celeste looked down at her knees, then she touched Angelo's damp head.

“I'll take you right now,” Celeste told him slowly.

“We'll be there together,” Angelo said, rapidly nodding his head. “You can show me around.”

“It'll be nicer that way,” Celeste told him. “We'll just do that.”

“I should say good-bye to Mrs. Elwood,” Angelo said.

“Why don't we just send her a postcard when we get there?” Celeste suggested.

“Yeah,” Angelo said. “And we can send one to Flynn and to Minna. What kind of postcard do you want, Flynn?”

“Maybe one of the water and cliffs,” he answered gently.

“Cliffs, huh?” Angelo asked Celeste. “Sure,” she said.

“What kind do you want, Minna?” Angelo asked, but she had turned away from them. She was stooping to pick up the flowers from the floor.

“Anything you'd like to send,” she told him.

“Then let's get ready,” Celeste said.

“Do you want to go out the other door?” Flynn asked. “To get some air.” He opened the door which led to the campus yard. It had stopped raining. The grass was shiny and smelled very lush.

When they were gone, when Flynn had shut the door behind them, Minna said, “Well, it's going to be busy with just the two of us, but I guess we'll get on.”

“Sure we'll get on,” Flynn told her. Then he added, “I think that was a pretty stinking thing to do.”

“I
am
sorry, Flynn,” she said — a thin, breaking voice — and then she saw the tureens of soup, the trays of potato salad. God, she thought, have they been waiting out there all this time? But when she peeked into the dining hall, gingerly leaning on the door, she saw that everyone was gone. Mrs. Elwood must have shooed them all away.

“There's no one out there,” she told Flynn.

“Just look at all this food,” he said.

Before the news, before the movie. Minna sits in her room, waiting for it to be finally dark. A soft, gray light falls over the driveway and over the elms, and Minna listens for sounds from Celeste's room — she watches for Celeste's car in the driveway. They must have gone by now, she thinks. They probably loaded the car somewhere else; Celeste would think of that. It is dusky in Minna's room; the faint light of early evening touches what few bright articles are placed on Minna's desk and bedside table, on the chest of drawers and television, on the coffee table. Most striking are the uneaten, unopened cans of foreign food. The hors d'oeuvre fork throws a dull reflection of the evening light back to Minna at the window. Poor Molly, Minna thinks. How awful that she has to go on
being
here, in front of everyone. And suddenly she feels the same sympathy for herself. It is a more ephemeral pity, though, and she soon feels thankful that school is so nearly over.

The street lights go on, whole rows of them lining the campus, giving the same luster to the elms and lawn that Minna noticed a night ago — a watery landscape, with canal, missing only Celeste. Minna moves from the window, turns on her desk lamp, mechanically hunts for a book. Then she sits deeply in the plush of her leather chair. She just sits, listening for nothing now, not reading, not even thinking. The toys of her weary mind seem lost.

A moth catches her eye. It has come from somewhere, somewhere safe, come to flutter wildly about the single light in the room. What on earth can it be that lures a moth out of the safety of darkness and into the peril of light? Its wings flap excitedly, it beats against the hot bulb of the lamp — it surely must scorch itself. Clumsily, carelessly, it bangs into things in an aimless frenzy. Minna thinks for a moment of getting up and turning off the light, but she doesn't feel like sitting in the dark — she doesn't feel like finding a newspaper to swat the moth. She sits, it grows darker, the buzz of the moth becomes soothing and pleasant. Minna dozes peacefully, briefly.

She wakes, startled, and thinks she is not awake — only dreaming. Then she sees the persistent moth and she knows she is really awake. It is completely dark outside now and she hears the familiar, restless growl of a motorcycle. She gets up from her chair and from the window she sees it, the same one, fire-engine red. The cycle waits at the beginning of the driveway. Minna thinks, If he is coming for Molly he'll come into the dormitory. The cyclist glances around him, turns the throttle up and down, looks at his watch, jounces lightly on the seat. He has come for Celeste, Minna knows, and she watches him, aware that other windows around her are open, other eyes watching him. No one comes out of the dormitory; Minna hears whispers pass from window screen to window screen, like a bird looking for a place to get in or out. The motorcyclist turns the throttle up again, holds the throttle there a moment, then lets the engine fall to its wary idle. Nothing happens, the cyclist jounces more heavily on the seat, looks again at his watch. Minna wonders, Do the girls know that Celeste is gone? Of course, the girls know everything; some of them probably knew that the motorcyclist would be back tonight — and not for Molly. But the cyclist is impatient now — sensing, perhaps, that Celeste isn't coming. Minna wishes she could see his face, but it is too dark. Only the pale blond hair flashes at her window, the lustrous red gas tank of the motorcycle shimmers like water; and then the throttle turns up again, the rear wheel skids sideways in the gravel, squeaks on the street. The whispering window screens are now silent, listening for the first three gears. Each gear seems to reach a little further than the night before.

Now Minna is alone with the moth. She wonders whether the girls will come for the news, wonders what time it is. And if the girls come, will Molly come with them? Oh, Minna hopes not, at least not tonight. The moth soothes her again, she dozes or half-dozes to the drone. She has a final, alarming thought before she falls to a deeper sleep. What will she ever say to Mrs. Elwood? But the moth manages to calm even this. The happy, smudge-mouthed faces of her brother's children flood Minna's tiny room, and Angelo is somewhere among them. The motorcycle comes by once more, stops, snarls, goes madly on, ushered away to its dark journey by the titters at the window screens. But Minna doesn't hear it this time. She sleeps—lulled by the whirring, furry music of the moth.

Weary Kingdom (1967)
AUTHOR'S NOTES

For me to publish “Weary Kingdom” in this collection requires either a little courage or a lot of sentimentality, or both. On many levels the story seems amateurish to me, and there is ample evidence of writing habits that I now deplore — lengthy passages in the present tense, which both begin and end the story; clumsy and inconsistent punctuation; overlong paragraphs, which were intended to convey the claustrophobic quality of Minna's mind but which mainly convey to me … uh, well, an intense feeling of overall claustrophobia. Furthermore, that Celeste complains about the “pee-like” condition of the water at Revere Beach is embarrassing. Molly Cabot might think of water as “pee-like”; for a woman like Celeste, the correct word is “piss.” But what makes me wince most about “Weary Kingdom” is that Minna Barrett is
only
55— she sounds and thinks like someone who is at least 115! Of course I was only 25 when I wrote this story — I was still a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop — and, at the time, I thought 55 was
old.
(Now that I'm only a couple of years away from my 55th birthday, 55 strikes me as entirely too youthful an age for such a dullness of body and mind as Minna's.)

I spent a year revising the story; at the same time I was finishing my first novel,
Setting Free the Bears
(1969). “Weary Kingdom” was published before the novel — in
The Boston Review
(Spring-Summer 1968) — and what endears it to me today, despite the many indications of its amateurism, is that it was from this story that I gained a little confidence concerning how to create a
minor
character in the third-person voice, which is an absolutely necessary ability for a writer of any novel of substance and length. Even in a first-person novel, there must be minor characters introduced
by
the narrator; essentially, these are also characters created in a third-person voice.

And minor characters are all the more essential to any story that entails plot; they are the often-hapless figures who move the story in unexpected ways — often because they are blind to the course of action the main character is following. Minna Barrett is simply a precursor to the lineup of supporting characters in
The World According to Garp;
to the lesser members of the Berry family (or the rapist, Chipper Dove) in
The Hotel New Hampshire;
to Wally Worthington (or the superstitious Stationmaster at St. Cloud's) in
The Cider House Rules;
to Hester (or Major Rawls or the Reverend Lewis Merrill) in
A Prayer for Owen Meany;
to Martin Mills (or Inspector Dhar or Nancy) in
A Son of the Circus.
They are
major-minor
characters, all, and to get inside their points of view is fundamental to storytelling.

With Minna Barrett, I can see that I was just learning how, albeit clumsily.

T
he driver relied on travel as a form of reflection, but the Volvo had never been out of Vermont. Usually, the driver was a sensible traveler; he kept his oil up and his windshield clean and he carried his own tire gauge in his left breast pocket next to a ballpoint pen. The pen was for making entries in the Grand Trip List, such things as gas mileage, toll fees and riding time.

The Volvo appreciated this carefulness of the driver; Route 9 across Vermont, Brattleboro to Bennington, was a trip without fear. When the first signs for the New York state line appeared, the driver said, “It's all right.” The Volvo believed him.

It was a dusty tomato-red two-door sedan, 1969, with all-black Semperit radial tires, standard four-speed transmission, four cylinders, two carburetors and 45,238 miles of experience without a radio. It was the driver's feeling that a radio would be distracting to them both.

They had started out at midnight from Vermont. “Dawn in Pennsylvania!” the driver told the worried Volvo.

In Troy, New York, the driver used steady downshifting and a caressing voice to reassure the Volvo that all this would soon pass. “Not much more of this,” he said. The Volvo took him at his word. Sometimes it is necessary to indulge illusions.

At the nearly abandoned entrance to the New York State Thruway, West, an innocent Volkswagen exhibited indecision concerning which lane to use. The driver eased up close behind the Volkswagen and allowed the Volvo's horn to blare; the Volkswagen, near panic, swerved right; the Volvo opened up on the left, passed, cut in with aggression, flashed taillights.