The Laments, page 28
AT THE THURSDAY MEETING, Frieda Grecco showed up with her daughter, Minna.
“I’m leaving,” she explained. “I’ve been offered a job at a new restaurant in Tatumville, and Stevie doesn’t know about it. Minna’s coming with me. We just need to find a place to stay while I save for a rental deposit.”
“There’s plenty of room in our house,” offered Julia.
“Oh, Julia,” said Frieda, “that’s so kind of you, but what about Howard? Shouldn’t you check with him first?”
“No need,” Julia replied. “I know exactly what he’ll say.”
“GUESTS? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, GUESTS?”
In a matter of hours, Julia had cleared the toys, books, and clothing stored in the upstairs study. Howard stood behind her in protest, his fists clenched in his khaki pants.
“I don’t want strangers in the house,” he said.
“Howard, I’ve known Frieda for years. She’s a friend and she needs my help. Besides, she’s a fabulous cook.”
“You’re forgetting about the kitchen; it’s hardly equipped for seven people!” said Howard.
“Darling, you’ll come up with a solution.”
Julia watched her husband’s expression change as his territorial hostility was replaced by the appeal of a practical challenge.
Under Howard’s supervision, a plumber repaired the bathroom faucets while Julia offered silent thanks to Frieda. A new fridge and stove were purchased in preparation for the houseguests. The boys examined the two spotless appliances with bewilderment and suspicion; the former because their parents had settled a war simply because visitors were coming, and the latter because the visitors appeared to wield more influence than the heirs to the Lament name.
ON THE WINDY SATURDAY when Frieda arrived with her daughter, the driveway to the Laments’ gray Georgian was carpeted with red maple leaves; the autumn sun bathed the weary house in a soft light that forgave its peeling paint and warped clapboard.
Will and the twins peered out with barely concealed resentment as two outsiders stepped from an old Gremlin. The little woman with wire rims, an aquiline nose, and a face framed in ringlets handed her daughter a bag to carry. Minna’s hair was short and covered by a woolen cap, but her eyes were enormous; they overpowered her delicate features and gave her the appearance of a hatchling. Sensing the boys’ scrutiny, she looked up at the window, but they ducked together, like troops in a foxhole.
“Welcome!” cried Julia, giving Frieda a hug.
“Where’s Howard?” asked Frieda nervously.
“Oh, God knows,” said Julia. “Don’t worry about him.”
Minna pulled her suitcase out of the car, knocking a box of books to the ground. Julia bent down to help pick them up.
“Minna is a reader,” murmured Frieda.
“Excellent!” said Julia. “I’m sure Will can help you carry them inside. . . .”
But Minna started alone toward the house, dragging her belongings behind her.
From the second story, the boys observed the trench left in the gravel by Minna’s load of books. “Is that a girl? She’s got no boobs and no hair!” exclaimed Julius, whose libido had come a long way since he’d stashed the saucy magazine beneath his mattress. He now possessed an extensive collection of Playboys, Penthouses, and National Geographics to augment his fantasies. Cursed with unpredictable erections, Julius walked in a permanent slouch and kept his fists balled in his coat pockets to cover his crotch. In his dreams he debauched all the females on TV, from I Dream of Jeannie to I Love Lucy. He lusted after the Coppertone lady, the Indian woman on the Land O’ Lakes butter package, and the maiden on the Sunmaid raisin box, and he imagined all his female teachers naked, even Mrs. Finger, who had a potbelly and liver spots and was planning her retirement in a year. But these fantasies were never satisfying. In the mornings, he burst out of his bedroom and masturbated in the shower, or, as the twins called it, snuffed his wick, and emerged with angry satisfaction. “Well, so much for the trouble I went to,” sighed Julius.
“What trouble?” asked Will.
“The hole. I poked a peephole through my wall into the bathroom. It comes out in Norfolk, right under the toothpaste holder. But it was obviously a waste of time.” With one last glance at the pitiful specimen walking toward the house, Julius returned to his room and his magazines, to remind himself of what a real girl looked like.
THE TWINS EMERGED from their rooms only when the pungent smell of sautéed garlic and freshly chopped basil wafted under the door cracks. The house had never smelled so good. Frieda had blackened a few peppers and extracted their insides, slicing the roasted skin for the pasta primavera. Salty mozzarella, sliced and drizzled with olive oil and slivers of basil leaves, was laid out with a fresh loaf of ciabatta.
The mothers chatted to fill the void left by their silent children, for it was one thing to bring two families together, but another to expect such a complex assortment of personalities to mesh. Minna took a seat in a corner of the kitchen, arms crossed, foot tapping, a copy of Tender Is the Night clutched in one hand. Will took the other corner. Julia had made the mistake of noting that they would have “lots to talk about,” a presumption he vowed to disprove. The twins ate in the middle of this arrangement, casting furtive glances at the two strangers. Meanwhile, Julia put on a brave smile, hoping that Howard would pull himself together and show up. But there had been no sign of him since the Greccos arrived.
In a valiant attempt to unite the teenagers, Frieda said, “Will, Minna has always wanted to travel the way you have.” Her daughter’s eyes suddenly sharpened at her mother.
“I hate traveling,” Will replied.
“Oh,” sighed Julia in desperation, “where can Howard be?”
Then a bedroom door opened and Howard emerged, wearing slacks, shirt, and a tweed jacket Will had seen only in old photos. Clean-shaven, his silvery red hair neatly combed back, Howard greeted Frieda with a warm smile.
“Welcome to our home.”
The Laments stared.
“You look so tidy, Dad,” remarked Julius.
“Yeah,” added Marcus. “What happened?”
Ignoring these comments, Howard extended his hand to Minna.
Julia’s surprise was quickly channeled into relief that her plan had worked: her husband had been resurrected by the instinctive need to pull himself together for strangers.
“How fine you look,” she whispered in Howard’s ear as he took the seat beside her.
“Wouldn’t want to embarrass you again, dear,” he replied.
Julia froze at his reference to the Roper Christmas party. Then she patched her expression with a smile and passed along the platters. But Will noticed his mother’s dismay.
“BOYS? MORE PROSCIUTTO?” urged Frieda. “We’ll make Italians out of you yet! Howard, don’t scrape the pepper and basil from the mozzarella! It’s all supposed to go together!”
“I don’t like pepper or basil,” replied Howard.
“Surrender, Howard!” said Frieda. “Dressed mozzarella is like an oyster—you take the whole delicious ensemble and swallow!”
After a taste, Howard nodded. “Fabulous,” he conceded.
Everybody applauded except Julia, who realized that in eighteen years of marriage, Howard had never called anything she did fabulous.
“Now I’d like to thank the Laments,” said Frieda, raising her wineglass, “for their generous hospitality. I just hope we don’t drive you all crazy!”
Julius cast an eye at his father and murmured, “Too late for that.”
All this time, Will observed that Minna said nothing. When she rose to collect the plates, he took them from her.
“I’ll finish up,” he said.
“No. It’s my pleasure,” said Minna, her tone suggesting it was no pleasure at all.
“But it’s my job,” insisted Will. Minna sat back down at the table, but Will now found himself watching his family through Minna’s eyes: his parents seemed impossibly isolated from each other, while the twins pawed the pasta bowl like urchins in a Dickens workhouse.
After a dessert of biscotti and ice cream, when it was obvious that everyone loved the meal, Frieda burst into tears. “I promise we’ll be out of your way soon,” she said. “I’m determined to get back on my feet!”
“There’s no hurry,” Julia assured her.
“But you have to make dinner tomorrow,” demanded Julius.
Frieda hugged Julia, while Minna stood against the wall, mortified by her mother’s emotional outburst. Will imagined that she was counting the minutes before she could slip away.
MINNA ATE BREAKFAST—white bread with peanut butter—on the porch by herself. In the afternoons, she did her homework in the room she shared with her mother, and she emerged only to help at dinner. In the rare moments when she passed through the common part of the house, there was always a book propped in front of her face. When Will found a soaked copy of The Nick Adams Stories beside the bathtub one evening, he read it cover to cover, hoping to discover something about her, and then knocked on her door to return it.
“Oh, thanks.” She frowned, snatching the book as if it were a lost item of underwear.
“I like the way he describes a cup of coffee,” said Will. “Makes you want one even if you hate the stuff.”
“Hemingway was in Paris,” Minna replied, as if this were significant. When Will failed to reply, she added, “Just like Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce, Eliot. All the great artists were wanderers.”
“They must have been miserable,” concluded Will, and Minna appeared troubled by this reply. “By the way,” he added, “you might want to stuff something in that hole over the sink, the one by Norfolk on the map. It goes through into my brother’s room.”
Beneath her cap, the tips of Minna’s ears glowed red.
“Now you tell me,” she said, and slammed her door.
ONE EVENING WHEN WILL RETURNED from his job at Dutch Oil, Minna was in the kitchen huddled beneath the fluorescent glow of the range hood. She was finishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Will poured himself a bowl of cereal and sat down.
“Have you made friends at school?” he asked.
Peering over the top of her book, she shook her head. Minna attended most of Will’s classes, and she spoke very little. Will guessed that she was shy by nature, as he was, and this interested him.
“Look,” he offered, “I hardly have any friends, but I’d introduce you around, if you want.”
He observed skepticism in her eyes, which were a pretty walnut brown—not as pretty as Dawn’s icy blue eyes, but pretty enough.
She lowered her book. “I don’t need to be introduced to Calvin, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t consider him one of my friends,” Will replied.
“Dawn Snedecker says he’s your friend.”
“Dawn was talking about me?” replied Will, suddenly full of hope.
Minna qualified her reply with a shrug. “I wouldn’t want to be talked about that way.”
Summertime
In the last days of school, Queenstown was thrown into a sweltering haze. Timbers in the old house groaned, their joints expanding from the humidity so that doors stopped closing properly and windows jammed in their grooves.
Minna’s hair grew quickly; by June she had given up her cap to reveal a head of silky brown hair. She was quite striking, and Julia made the mistake of pointing this out to Will.
“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?” she remarked. “Those eyes, and her mother’s cheekbones, and she has such a very nice figure! But she seems so lonely. I wish there was something more I could—”
“Oh, Mum, please,” Will replied, scowling. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Remember Scabby? Curing his pinkeye didn’t help our friendship. So please don’t try any of that with Minna.”
WILL WORKED EXTRA HOURS at Dutch Oil. In July he replaced his bicycle, and was thinking about saving for a secondhand car.
“Absolutely not!” cried Julia. “You may not have a car! Half a dozen of your schoolmates die on these roads every year.”
“But they drive drunk; they’re idiots. I wouldn’t let that happen!” argued Will.
“You’re safer without the car, Will. I want to see you graduate. After that is your own business!”
Julius grew three inches that summer, leaving Marcus behind. At thirteen, their faces burst with fiery pustules, and their profiles took on adult proportions. Julius became the spitting image of Howard: his nose lengthened to echo his father’s waxen droop, his shoulders broadened, and somewhere along the way he had picked up his mother’s opinionated manner. Marcus had a slighter frame, and hair that hung in a black sweep. His features were more delicate, his manner gentle and introspective. When he raved about reading Macbeth in school, Julia gave him a copy of Shakespeare’s collected works she’d found in a used-book store. Except for those rare moments when Julius enticed Marcus to swim with him at the quarry pool—a secret spot where, unobserved by prying eyes, Marcus could swim without his prosthesis—the boy passed his entire summer chain-smoking in the company of Juliet, Miranda, Ophelia, and Viola.
Howard disliked the summer because his solitude was interrupted. In spite of his resolution never to do repairs, he spent August fixing the insulation in the attic because nobody would bother him up there. When it became necessary to replace shingles on the roof, he was obliged to hire Julius as his assistant, and immediately regretted it. For most of the month, passersby could hear father and son bickering above the eaves.
“What should I do about them?” Julia asked Will one evening.
“At least they’re talking to each other,” replied Will. “It’ll be the first job Dad’s completed in years. I’d say leave them alone.”
Julia followed this advice, realizing that she trusted no one more than Will when it came to matters of family harmony. No longer a boy, Will at eighteen was nearly but not quite a man.
The twins were growing up quickly, too. Julius was gregarious, an extrovert, but when he brought girls home it was Marcus they fell for. Often, a girl would come home with him just to meet Marcus, who (if he was in the mood) would start to read Shakespeare’s soliloquies out loud, then abruptly vanish into his bedroom. Julius would then show the girl his dirty-magazine collection, which, of course, would send her flying out the door, leaving Julius to jump into the shower to console himself in the usual way.
ONE THURSDAY EVENING, Will arrived home from work to find his mother pacing and worried. Howard had been away for many hours. Will set out with a flashlight and eventually found his father in a cul-de-sac half a mile from their house, struggling with the pieces of a tarnished brass bedstead he had found on a curb. Though the bed must have weighed three hundred pounds, Howard refused to leave unless Will helped him carry it home.
“People don’t realize,” panted Howard, “that this bed is a wonder of design.”
“You’re crazy, Dad,” Will gasped.
“You know, it’s easy to say that,” he muttered. “Anybody who feels strongly about anything is called crazy in this society.”
“Perhaps the crazies,” countered his son, “are the ones who feel passionately about things instead of people!”
Howard paused to shift the weight of the bedspring and the footboard. “Things?” he echoed.
“Yes, like beds! What about the people who care about you? Mum was worried sick when you didn’t come home.”
Will agreed to carry the headboard, and they staggered along with their load beneath the streetlights—scavengers, with only the rattle of the cicadas singing in the trees.
“I’m not crazy,” said his father after a while.
“You’re not yourself,” replied Will, before the sting of what he had said brought tears to his own eyes. “Why can’t you be yourself, Dad? Why?”
Howard gave his son a faint smile. “Don’t worry, Will. I’ll be all right.”
Nothing more was said until they had stashed the bedstead in the basement with Howard’s other rescued objects. As Will gazed at the odd assortment, he noted that his father had made a mission of defending unappreciated items, the discarded, the obsolete, and the out-of-style. No wonder the man felt comfortable down here.
Julia met them at the door, looking immensely relieved. “Everything all right?” she asked.
“He found a bed,” explained Will.
“And I’m not out of my mind!” said Howard, staring angrily at Julia before stamping off to bed.
MINNA FOUND WILL SITTING at the kitchen table, a look of anguish on his face.
“Find your father?”
He nodded.
“I know what’s wrong with my family,” he said.
“What’s that?” Minna replied.
“My mother is driven by a sense of purpose. But my father is lost. He spends all his time with things that have no purpose anymore.” Will fell silent for a moment. “What a mess.”
Minna listened as Will poured out his frustrations. Finally, she offered a solution.
“It’s simple,” she said. “You should go to Paris.”
“Paris? Why?” replied Will.
“Because Gertrude Stein said, ‘America is my country and Paris is my home town.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It just means that you don’t belong here,” Minna replied.
Minna and Dawn
The first days of school are always sweet with surprise; Julius looked around his new class at all the girls with their recently developed figures, scooped blouses, and carefully applied lipstick and eye shadow, and pronounced himself in heaven. Meanwhile, the girls observed Marcus’s delicate features, his dark hair down to his shoulders, the prosthesis hidden like some gothic sorrow, and declared themselves heartsick.
Will’s senior English class was taught by a small, bustling woman from Brooklyn named Mrs. Burbell. Calvin mocked her Canarsie accent, and the teacher demonstrated her amusement by sending him to the vice principal’s office four times in the first week. In spite of the verbal abuse she received, Mrs. Burbell was a caring soul who believed that her students needed to look further into their future than graduation. She demanded an oral presentation of every student; the subject: Who will you be when you are thirty?
