“Yes,” his mother agreed. “Well, do we get to see her?”
Bruce said, “She’s older than I am.”
“How much older?” his mother said.
“That doesn’t matter,” his father said. “If Bruce married her that’s what you better concern yourself with. It’s not up to you to decide.”
“Ten years,” Bruce said. “She’s thirty-four.”
His mother began to cry.
“Ten years is a lot,” his father said, with gravity.
“Now I’ve told you,” Bruce said.
They both sat unhappily, collecting their emotions.
“What did you want to discuss with us first?” his father asked.
Bruce said, “I want to see what financial shape you’re in these days. Look,” he said. “You sent Frank to college but I had to go to work right after high school; in fact I worked while I was in high school. What about a wedding present?”
“We’ll give you a wedding present,” his father said.
“I don’t mean a ten-dollar bill,” Bruce said. “We need thousands of dollars, six or seven thousand.”
His father nodded, as if that seemed perfectly natural to him.
“I wanted to ask you first before I brought her in,” Bruce said. “It’s for me, so it has nothing to do with her. It’s so I can get started in business.” He told them a little about the store. They both listened, but he doubted that they understood. They were too numbed. Too taken by surprise. “I can’t fool around about it,” he said. “I can’t take time to be polite; we have to have it right away. I want to get it now, before I bring her in.” His voice had risen until he was shouting at them; they sat driven back against their chairs, not interrupting him… He had successfully intimidated them, which was the only way he could hope to get it. He talked on and on and they listened; he explained the whole thing to them and then he pounced on them demanding, “You sent Frank to college; it’s time you did something for me, and this is the time I really need it.” He ignored the fact that Frank had won one scholarship after another. “What do you say?” he said.
His father said, “We always intended to help you when you made up your mind what line you wanted to go into.” He spoke with dignity.
“Good,” Bruce said, delighted; he had beaten them. By the sheer weight of his voice he had made them accept what he said; he had gotten past their natural frugality and common sense. “Now, what can you do for me?” he said. “Look, I want to bring her inside; she’s getting cold out there and I told her I’d be back in a couple of seconds.” He leaped up and paced about urgently, forcing his impatience onto them.
His parents dithered in their desire to fix things up. His father sat down in the dining room and began searching ponderously for his check book; his mother ran upstairs for a fountain pen. A moment later he had his father’s check for one thousand dollars, and his parents were telling him that they wished they could give them more. His mother, weeping again, wanted only to see Susan; she had no interest in the money. His father muttered apologetically that maybe later on, when he had a chance to take a look at the bonds he had downtown in his bank deposit box, he might be able to add something to it.
“I’ll go get her,” Bruce said, as if he had now been released. He strode out onto the porch; his parents accompanied him as far as the steps and stood fearfully as he opened the car door.
Susan said, “I feel better. Are those your parents?” She could see them on the porch. “I wish I didn’t have to go in, but I guess I have to.” Carefully holding her skirt down, she slid across the car seat; he held the door open and she stood up beside him, holding her purse and gloves, preparing herself.
“We won’t stay long,” he said to her as together they climbed the steps to the porch.
“It leans,” she said.
“It always did. It won’t collapse.” He took her arm. The porchlight had been turned on, and in the uneven glare Susan’s face took on a mottled cast. His parents, on the porch above them, peered down in a state of near hysteria; he had never seen anyone so deeply affected by the sight of anyone else. As soon as Susan reached the porch—she moved as slowly and regularly as possible—his mother seized her and propelled her inside. That was the last he saw of them for some time, but their voices, from different parts of the house, remained audible.
His father, accompanying him indoors, said, “Nobody would have any idea that she’s older than you.”
That was not true, but he felt it to be well-meant. “Her name’s Susan,” he said. And then, for the first time, it struck him that possibly one or both of his parents might have met her back when she had been his teacher; there had been PTA meetings—I wish I had thought of it before, he thought, because now it was too late. “We can’t stay long,” he said.
“How did you happen to meet her?” his father asked.
He gave him a meager account.
“Then she’s from Boise,” his father said, pleased. “Not Reno.”
If they find out that she was my fifth grade teacher, he thought, they’ll probably want the thousand dollars back. At that, he laughed.
In the kitchen his mother was showing Susan a set of hideous ornate dishes that a friend had sent her from Europe, and Susan was exclaiming at their beauty. He began to feel a little more relaxed.
On the drive back home he stopped in downtown Boise at a drugstore, telling Susan that he wanted to pick up cigarettes. What he actually bought was a box of envelopes and some three-cent stamps. He put the check into an envelope and addressed it to himself and Susan, stuck a stamp on it, and gave it to the clerk to mail for him.
“What was your parents’ reaction to me?” Susan asked several times on the trip.
“We’ll see,” he said. He had not told her about the check.
“How do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?”
“If they liked you,” he said, “they’ll express it concretely. With people like that, old-fashioned rural people, there’s nothing to interpret. They’ll give you their reaction; you’ll know.”
“I wondered,” she said. “Because I couldn’t tell a thing. Your mother was sweet and upset and he was polite, but I couldn’t tell how much they meant it.”
The next day the envelope with his father’s check arrived at the store. He opened it and showed it to Susan.
“See?” he said. “They approve.”
Transfixed, she said, “Bruce, it saves our lives. Look what you can get at dealer’s cost with that.” It brought about a genuine change in her morale; for the rest of the day she planned and schemed and considered an infinite number of future solutions. “What grand people they are,” she said to him. “We should write to them or even go back out there and thank them personally. I feel so odd—but I guess it’s all right to accept it.”
“Sure it is,” he said.
“Why don’t I call them on the phone and thank them?”
He said, “Let me do it.”
With the thousand dollars cash he was able to assure the loan from the bank. It came through at the end of the month; now he had twenty-five hundred dollars with which to buy goods to sell. But he still did not know what to buy. He put the money into an account that would draw four percent interest, and the interest on the total was not much less than the interest due on the fifteen-hundred dollar bank loan.
But I have to find a warehouse full of something soon, he realized. Or borrowing and begging this money will have been a mistake. As of now we’re making nothing; we’ll have to start dipping into the account to pay our monthly bills.
Maybe I’ll wind up using the money to meet the monthly payments due on the loan. That would be a novel way of doing business.