That evening he arranged for a babysitter to take care of Taffy. He drove Susan out along the county road that brought them eventually to the farmhouse in which his parents lived. The bumpy drive made Susan a little carsick. When at last they parked, she said, “Could we sit for a while? Before we go in?”
He said, “I want to go in first anyhow.” He had not told his parents about his marriage.
“That’s fine with me,” she said. She had put on white gloves and a hat; very dressed-up, with much lipstick, she had the same dramatic aura that he had been so taken with, that first night. But her cheeks had a hollowness, and lines had formed under her eyes. Beyond any doubt she did need a rest.
“There’re a few things I want to discuss with them first,” he said. He kissed her, got out of the car, and walked up the gravel and dirt shoulder to the gate.
Here it was again, the tall gray ancient farmhouse, with dry soil around it, the weeds and geraniums growing out of the bare brown earth. No lawn. No green to speak of, except the ivy growing over me fence and around the gate. On the front porch a row of flower pots had in them indistinct clumps of growth. And he saw a wicker chair, and a plantstand on which lay a stack of Reader’s Digests.
Imagine having been born in a run-down building like this, he said to himself, as he opened the gate.
Off in the back a dog whooped noisily. He saw yellow light behind the window shades of the front room. And he could hear the boom of a TV set. Parked near me tumble-down garage was the same rusting, useless carcass of a 1930 Dodge; he had fooled around in it as a child.
I lived here while I attended Garret A. Hobart Grammar School.
The basement windows had cobwebs behind then; one showed a crack, which had been stuffed with a rag. So his father did not sleep down there any longer, now that both he and Frank had left. No doubt his father slept upstairs in one of their rooms.
His father had slept during the day, arising at ten o’clock at night, pushing up the trap door and appearing so that he could shave and eat and set off for his job. During the day he slept under their feet, beneath the floorboards. With the quart jars of apricots and the lumber and wiring.
In the morning, home from work, his father smacked off the white dust covering him; his job at the Snow White Bakery kept him buried elbow-deep in flour. Then, in the basement, he involved himself in another white dust: plaster dust, from his eternal puttering about with new partitions. He intended to make the basement into several rooms, to create a separate apartment with bath and bowl which he would rent out. The war had stopped his supply of materials. Outside the house, along the driveway, rolls of wire and heaps of beaverboard gathered bird excretion, rust, and rot. Sacks of cement became wet and sank into corruption that allowed tiny weeds to sprout within them. In the basement, before he retired at two in the afternoon, his father sawed away, filling his lungs with sawdust. He patiently breathed in wood dust, flour, plaster dust, and, in the summer, dust and weed-pollen from the fields.
Bruce, standing on the path, saw in the evening darkness that the apricot trees by the back door had died. Thank God, he thought. Nobody had ever used the apricots; the thousands of jars of them down in the basement would never be opened. As a kid he had lugged jars outdoors and hurled rocks at them, bursting them in showers of sticky juice and glass. That had brought the hornets. In summer, the pools of apricot juice had become a buzzing swamp, wriggling with the yellow backs of the hornets. Nobody had dared go within yards of them.
Up the steps, now, to rap on the front door. Under his feet the boards of the porch sagged; the entire porch leaned. At one time, years ago, the house and porch had been painted a battleship gray. Now the house had chipped and peeled until the boards themselves showed through, strips of yellowish brown beneath the gray.
He lifted back the metal knocker and let it bang.
The door opened and there stood Noel Stevens, his face smeared with day-old beard, in his suspenders, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He admitted Bruce without comment. His father, heavy and inert, lifted his hand and silently beckoned to Brace’s mother, who was in the kitchen. To Bruce, his father had always looked like a workman from the turn of the century, the massive honest not-too-bright Swedish hodcarrier or plumber who had arrived and gone directly to Minnesota and had never learned the language or visited any of the cities. The man’s face was wide, shiny except for the cheeks and chin, with a long nose bent or broken in the center, and fleshy. The skin, below his eyes, showed many craters that were faintly brown, almost like liver spots.
“Well … by golly,” his father said. His reddish hairless hand appeared, and Bruce took it.
From the kitchen his mother appeared. The tiny, tanned, clever, churchy face beaming at him, the bright eyes. Here, in her own house, she wore plain clean clothes that he identified with the rural people, the small-town Idaho people. She smiled up at him, and her grayish, transluscent false teeth, the color of a celluloid comb, caught the light and sparkled.
“Hi,” Bruce said, his hand still clasped in his father’s flat wet limp palm and fingers. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” his father said, letting go of his hand at last and reseating himself in his deep armchair; the springs twanged under him.
His mother caught hold of him and fastened her mouth to his cheek; it happened so fast that she had sprung back before he could stir. “How nice to see you!” she cried. “How’s Reno?”
“I’m not living in Reno any more,” he said. He seated himself, and she did so, too. They both watched him expectantly, his father’s face dull, his mother’s merry and kindly, catching every move he made, every word he said. “I’m living up in Boise. I got married.”
“Oh!” his mother gasped, wincing, shocked. His father remained unstirred.
“Just the other day,” he said.
His father still did not respond.
“I don’t believe it,” his mother wailed.
To her, his father said, “He wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t true.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t believe it. Who is she?” she demanded, to first one of them and then the other.
“I don’t know,” his father said, tapping her on the knee. “Just settle down.” To Bruce he said, “Is that her out in the car?”
“Is she out there?” his mother cried, springing up and running to the window. “How did you know she was out there?” she asked his father.
His father answered in his slow way, “I heard the car stop so I looked out to see who it was stopping.”
“Bring her in,” his mother said, starting toward the door. “What’s her name?”
“Don’t you go and get her,” his father ordered.
“Yes,” his mother said. Opening the door she started out onto the porch.
“Come and sit down!” his father said loudly.
She returned, flustered and red-faced. “Why did you leave her out in the car?” she asked Bruce.
“He’ll tell you,” his father said.
“She’s feeling carsick,” Bruce said.
“Tell her to come inside and lie down,” his mother said.
“I want to talk to you first,” Bruce said. “I’m not bringing her in her until you swear on the Bible not to say anything mean to her.”
“Nobody is going to say anything mean,” his father said.
“I’m not bringing her in here until you both make up your minds to do what you ought to do and not what you feel like doing,” he said. “If you say anything mean to her, I’ll leave and you won’t see either of us again. I’ve thought it over and I’m sorry but I don’t feel like having you give her a hard time.”
His father said, “He’s right.”