For a moment, holding a hot washcloth across his face, he contemplated the patterns inside his eyes against the dark. But like everything in this house, they seemed of calculated inconsequence.
From the kitchen: “Bobby, please come in and set the table. Now!”
Kidd went into the living room. “Bet you’d hardly recognize me,” he said to Madame Brown.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Mrs. Richards said. “Kidd, you and Bobby sit back there. Edna, you sit here with June.”
Madame Brown went over and pulled out her chair. “Muriel, stay down there and be good, hear me?”
He squeezed between the wall and the table—and took some tablecloth with him.
“Oh, dear!” Madame Brown lunged to grab a tottering brass candlestick. (In suddenly bared mahogany, the reflected flame steadied.) By candlelight her face had again taken on that bruised-eyed tawdriness she had last night in the bar.
“Jesus,” Kidd said. “I’m sorry.” He pulled the cloth back down across the table and began to straighten silverware. Mrs. Richards had put out a profusion of forks, spoons, and side plates. He wasn’t sure if he got all of them in the right place or which were his or Bobby’s; when he finally sat, two fingers lingered on the ornate handle of a knife; he watched them rubbing, thick with enlarged knuckles and gnawed nails, but translucently clean. After baths, he reflected, when you’re still alone in the john, is the time for all those things you don’t want people around for: jerking off, picking your nose and eating it, serious nail biting. Was it some misguided sense of good manners that had kept him from any of these here? His thoughts drifted to various places he’d indulged such habits not so privately: seated at the far end of lunch counters, standing at public urinals, in comparatively empty subway cars at night, in city parks at dawn. He smiled; he rubbed.
“Those were my mother’s,” Mrs. Richards said, on the other side of the table. She set down two bowls of soup for Arthur and Madame Brown, then went back to the kitchen. “I think old silver is lovely—” her voice came in—“but keeping it polished is awfully difficult.” She came out again with two more bowls. “I wonder if it’s that—what do they call it? That sulfur dioxide in the air, the stuff eating away all the paintings and statues in Venice.” She set one in front of Kidd and one in front of Bobby, who was just squeezing into place—more plates and silverware slid on the wrinkling cloth; Bobby pulled it straight again.
Kidd took his fingers from the tarnished handle and put his hand in his lap.
“We’ve never been to Europe,” Mrs. Richards said, returning from the kitchen with bowls for her and June. “But Arthur’s parents went—oh, years ago. The plates are Arthur’s mother’s—from Europe. I suppose I shouldn’t use the good ones; but I do whenever we have company. They’re so festive—Oh, don’t wait for me. Just dig in.”
Kidd’s soup was in a yellow melmac bowl. The china plate beneath bore an intricate design around its fluted lip, crossed by more intricate scratches that might have come from cleanser or steel wool.
He looked around to see if he should start, caught both Bobby and June looking around for the same purpose; Madame Brown had a china bowl but every one else’s was pastel plastic. He wondered if he, or Madame Brown alone, would have merited the spread.
Mr. Richards picked up his spoon, skimmed up some soup.
So he did too.
With the oversized spoon-bowl still in his mouth, he noticed Bobby, June, and Madame Brown had all waited for Mrs. Richards, who was only now lifting hers.
From where he sat, he could see into the kitchen: Other candles burned on the counter. Beside a paper bag of garbage, its lip neatly turned down, stood two open Campbell’s cans. He took another spoonful. Mrs. Richards has mixed, he decided, two, or even three kinds; he could recognize no specific flavor.
Under the tablecloth edge, his other hand had moved to his knee—the edge of his little finger scraped the table leg. First with two fingers, then with three, then with his thumb, then with his fore-knuckle, he explored the circular lathing, the upper block, the under-rim, the wing bolts, the joints and rounded excrescences of glue, the hairline cracks where piece was joined to piece—and ate more soup.
Over a full spoon, Mr. Richards smiled and said, “Where’s your family from, Kidd?”
“New York—” he bent over his bowl—“State.” He wondered where he had learned to recognize this as the milder version of the blunt What-nationality-are-you? which, here and there about the country, could create unpleasantnesses.
“My people are from Milwaukee,” Mrs. Richards said. “Arthur’s family is all from right around the Bellona area. Actually my sister lived down here too—well, she did. She’s left now. And so has all of Arthur’s family. It’s quite strange to think of Marianne and June—we named our June after Arthur’s mother—and Howard and your Uncle Al not here anymore.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Richards said; Kidd saw him preparing to ask how long he’d been here, when Madame Brown asked: “Are you a student, Kidd?”
“No, ma’am,” realizing it was a question whose answer she probably knew; but liked her for asking. “I haven’t been a student for a while.”
“Where were you in school, then?” Mr. Richards asked.
“Lots of places. Columbia. And a community college in Delaware.”
“Columbia University?” Mrs. Richards asked. “In New York?”
“Only for a year.”
“Did you like it? I’ve spent a lot of time—Arthur and I have both spent a lot of time—thinking about whether the children should go away to school. I’d like for Bobby to go to some place like Columbia. Though State, right here, is very good.”
“Especially the poli-sci department,” Kidd said. Mr. Richards and Madame Brown spooned their soup away from them. Mrs. Richards, June, and Bobby spooned theirs toward them. One, he remembered, was more correct; but not which. He looked at the ornate silverware handles, diminishing in size either side of his plate, and finally simply sank his spoon straight down in the soup’s center.
“And of course it’s a lot less expensive.” Mrs. Richards sat back, with a constrained laugh. “Expense is always something you have to think about. Especially today. Here at State—” (Four more spoonfuls, he figured, and the soup would be too low for his compromise technique.) Mrs. Richards sat forward again. “You say, the poli-sci department?” She tipped her soup bowl toward her.
“That’s what someone told me,” Kidd said. “Where’s June going to go?”
Mr. Richards tipped his away. “I don’t know whether June has thought too much about that.”
Mrs. Richards said: “It would be very nice if June wanted to go to college.”
“June isn’t too, what you’d call, well, academic. June’s sort of my old-fashioned girl.” Mr. Richards, tipping his bowl, apparently couldn’t get enough; he picked it up, poured the last drops into his spoon, and set it down. “Aren’t you, honey?”
“Arthur, really…!” Mrs. Richards said.
“It’s very good, dear,” Mr. Richards said. “Very good.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kidd said. “It is,” and put his spoon on his plate. It wasn’t.
“I’d like to go to college—” June smiled at her lap—“if I could go someplace like New York.”
“That’s silly!” Mr. Richards made a disparaging gesture with his soup spoon. “It was all we could do to keep her in high school!”
“It just wasn’t very interesting.” June’s bowl—pink melmac—moved, under her spoon, to the plate’s rim. She centered it again. “That’s all.”
“You wouldn’t like New York,” Mr. Richards said. “You’re too much of a sunshine girl. June likes the sun, swimming, outdoor things. You’d wither away in New York or Los Angeles, with all that smog and pollution.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“I think June ought to apply to the Junior College next term—” Mrs. Richards turned in mid-sentence from husband to daughter—“to get some idea if you liked it or not. Your marks weren’t that bad. I don’t think it would be such a terrible idea to try it out, at the Junior College.”