She scowled at me, as though I had betrayed her. But I had done nothing other than sit there, waiting for it to end.
“He might have choked to death on his food,” she offered weakly.
“Come on,” my father said with a nervous chuckle. “There was never any chance of that.”
My mother leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, and I watched as her anger and fear gave way to exhaustion. She let out a long breath. The battle was over; she had lost.
But Professor Stiles did not return to his seat. Instead, he apologized to my mother. “Mrs. Loesch, I’m sorry. I never dreamed that this demonstration would have such an effect on you. Of course you’re right; it was rude of me. I’ll leave you to finish your meal in peace.” My mother opened her eyes to stare at him, and for a moment I thought that she would actually insist that he stay — would get up, take him by the arm, and lead him back to his chair. But she could not capitulate so completely. She stayed where she was. Perhaps she was just too tired.
Professor Stiles patted me on the head, then walked around behind me to shake my father’s hand. My father rose and accompanied him to the door. A few moments later, he returned to the table.
There was no question of finishing our meal. No one had any appetite anymore. We sat in silence as we listened to Professor Stiles’s car start up and drive away.
During this interval, I watched my father change. He had sat down a defeated and humiliated man, the architect of a crashing failure. But he crossed his arms over his chest, as if gathering together the parts of himself, and began to concentrate. His brow furrowed, his lower lip stuck out, and his jaw first twitched, then trembled, and finally settled into a slow grind. As the minutes went by, his eyes regained their luster, and the angles came back into his face, and I could see that he was to emerge from his trance in a state of righteous indignation.
The transformation filled me with both pride and unease. I did not like to see my father defeated, and it pleased me to watch the life return to him. But I understood that it was my mother who would be forced to bear the brunt of this new vitality. It had only taken perhaps ninety seconds — he began to shift his body and to emit small, outraged grunts. My mother, hearing them, stiffened in her chair, sat up a bit straighter, stared with greater intensity at a meaningless spot on the tablecloth.
“A professor,” was the first thing my father said.
“A distinguished professor of psychology,” he elaborated a few seconds later. “Run out of our home.”
He waited a long half minute to speak again, this time to the ceiling, his head tipped far back, the tendons on his neck sticking out in sharp relief. “That’s who she decided she was smarter than, Doctor Avery Stiles. She decided she knew better than Doctor Avery Stiles. Because, after all, she is a brilliant professor with many advanced degrees, isn’t she? Isn’t she?
“Oh, that’s right,” he went on. “No. No, she’s not. She’s a plain old regular housewife who didn’t even finish high school. But of course she knows better anyway.
“Maybe she’s just embarrassed that she didn’t catch on? Maybe she’s upset because Professor Avery Stiles proved how stupid she is? Maybe that’s why she threw him out of her house. Because he told her a truth that she didn’t want to hear.
“Well, Doctor Stiles is used to that. Perhaps that’s why he was so polite, even after being told to leave our humble home. Because he’s used to telling people things they don’t want to hear. That’s why his colleagues have abandoned him. With their communist ideas. They don’t like being told they’re weak. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to admit that the enemy is them.”
My father was shaking his head slowly, his face compressed, as though he were crushing his teeth together inside his closed mouth. My mother, for her part, was highly alert, her eyes wide, her body very still.
“I want to tell you something,” he said now, speaking to her directly. He stood up, and his chair slid back and rattled against the breakfront. My mother flinched. “I want to tell you something about that man you kicked out. The man you threw out of our home — who you just expelled from our family. That man has no family, Cybele. You know why? They died. His daughter, his wife — they got sick and they died. He has been alone for five years. What kind of man is that, who can bear the death of his whole family? If it was me, I know what I would do — I would put an end to it all right then and there. I would just put an end to it. And don’t think I haven’t considered it anyway, Cybele, because I barely even have a family as it is. I have a daughter who’s never home, and a wife who doesn’t care, and doesn’t respect me. And I have a son who just sits there”—his arm was thrust out now, pointing at me, and he had raised his voice nearly to a shout—“doing nothing, saying nothing, like some kind of goddam zombie. And whose fault is that, Cybele? Who does he get that from? Who just sits and says nothing, and does nothing, and never shows any sign of life?”
He walked around the far end of the table, past Professor Stiles’s abandoned meal, and stood beside her, his hands on his hips. He was shouting at her hung head.
“It’s you, Cybele! It’s you! And what do you have to say to that, hah? What do you have to say!”
My mother was frozen now, silent, her eyes squeezed shut.
“That’s what I thought,” my father spat. “Eric, go outside.”
I didn’t hear at first — or, rather, I heard, but it was unclear that he was talking to me. I remained in my seat through several seconds of silence.
His head snapped up, the face red and folded over itself like a pug’s. “Go outside!” he screamed, and I jumped down from my chair and ran out the door.
It was a lovely evening in early spring, a bit cold to be out without a jacket, but I intended to keep moving, and would likely feel no particular discomfort. The sun had set, but there was still light in the near-cloudless sky, enough to see by until I reached the streetlights. I walked the three blocks down Jefferson, turned onto Main, and strolled into town; the closer I came to the park, the busier were the streets — there was Pernice’s; there was Old Gerry’s Diner. The marquee above the movie theater entrance was illuminated, and high school boys and girls were lined up there for tickets, the boys pushing one another and laughing, the girls huddled into little clusters, whispering to one another. Some kids a little older than I were playing touch football in the park, and I went to a bench and sat down to watch them. On the sidewalk in front of me, a crow was eating a dropped piece of bread.
I woke up shivering to the sound of a man’s voice. “Son,” the man said, but it wasn’t my father. It was a policeman.
“Shouldn’t you be going to bed about now? Where do you live?”
I blinked. There was a bit of drool on my face, which I wiped with my sleeve. “Jefferson Street, sir,” I said.
“Well, what are you doing here?”
“Going for a walk, sir.”
The policeman was short and heavy, and the gray hair underneath his hat was cut close, in the military style. He leveled a skeptical look and said, “You’re not walking, son, you’re sleeping.”
“I just … I fell asleep.”
“Your parents know you’re here?”
“Yes, sir.”
The policeman sighed. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”