“Daddy’s picture—”
“Go wash your knee!”
Cynthia threw the paper to the floor and, crestfallen, went hobbling off to the bathroom; if the knee was going to use her, she would use the knee. “Christ!” she howled, limping down the hallway. “Christ and Jesus!”
With Cynthia gone, it was easier to take a look; she had not wanted a child around to witness whatever shock there might be. She picked up the paper from the floor and sat down with it at the kitchen table. Her heart slowly resumed its normal beat, though it was true, as Cynthia said, that a painting of her father’s was actually printed in the Times. She recognized it immediately; only the title had been changed. What had once been “Ripe Wife” was now labeled “Mexico.” The bastard. She allowed herself the pleasure of a few spiteful moments. Juvenilia. A steal from de Staël. Punk. Derivative. Corny. Literal. Indulgent. She repeated to herself all the words she would like to repeat to him, but all the incantation served to do was to bring back so vividly all that had been: all the awful quarrels, all the breakfasts he had thrown against the kitchen wall, all the times he had walked out, all the times he had come back, the times he had smacked her, the times he had wept, saying he was really a good and decent man … All of it lived at the unanesthetized edge of her memory. Mexico! Couldn’t he have changed it to Yugoslavia? Bowl of Fruit? Anything but rotten Mexico!
Her eye ran up and down the column; she was unable to read it in any orderly way. It was captioned, Tenth St. Show Uninspired; Reganhart Exception.
… except for Richard Reganhart. A resident of Arizona and Mexico, Reganhart, in his four paintings, reveals a talent …
… manages a rigidity of space, a kind of compulsion to order, that makes one think of a fretful housekeeper …
… especially “Mexico.” The dull gold rectangles are played off against a lust and violence of savage purples, blacks, and scarlets that continually break in through the rigid …
… will alone emerge of the seven young people
Crap! Fretful housekeeper, crap! Housebreaker! Weakling! Selfish! Destroyer of her life! She hated him — she would never forgive him. Some day when it suited her purpose, she would get that son of a bitch. It was nearly three years since he had sent a penny to support their children. Three very long years.
She read the article over again from beginning to end.
When Cynthia came out of the bathroom, a bandage over half her leg, the child asked, “Remember when we were in Mexico?”
“Yes,” Martha said.
“Can I remember it?”
“I think you were too small.”
“I think I can remember it,” Cynthia said. “Wasn’t it very warm there?”
“Cyn, you know it’s warm there. You learned that in school.”
Cynthia reached out and Martha handed her back the paper. “See Daddy’s name?” Cynthia asked.
“Uh-huh. I didn’t mean to take it away from you, sweetie. I only wanted you to wash your knee—”
“I like that picture, don’t you?” Cynthia asked.
“I think it’s terrific,” Martha said. “I think it’s very beautiful.”
“Can I cut it out and keep it?”
“Sure.”
“Can I hang it up?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh boy! Hey Markie — look what Mommy gave me!”
“Oh Cynthia, don’t start that, will you? Cynthia—” But the little girl was skipping off toward the living room; she met her brother halfway.
“Look what Mommy gave me. I’m going to hang it up!”
“I want it!” he shouted. “What is it?”
“Daddy’s picture. Here. Don’t touch. Don’t touch.”
“I want it. Where — where’s Daddy’s picture?”
“Here, dope. Can’t you see?”
“Cynthia—” Martha said, from the doorway to the living room. “Cynthia …” But she found herself unable to attach a command, an instruction, a warning, to her child’s name. Cynthia, Cynthia, born of sin.
“Who—?” Markie was asking.
“This—” Cynthia said. “It’s Daddy’s picture!”
Mark didn’t get it; his jaw only hung lower and lower. Would he ever learn to read? Lately she had begun to wonder if he might not be retarded. Should she take him in for tests?
“And it’s mine. I’m hanging it over my bed!” Cynthia cried.
“My bed—” howled Mark, but his sister had already fled on one bare, one bandaged leg — both willowy, both more perfect every day — carrying her prize to some private corner of the house.
It might have been Christmas, and Sid, Saint Nick. He arrived with bottles of Pouilly Fuissé, Beefeater’s, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, and a fifth of Courvoisier. “That’s for the kids,” he said, placing a row of liquor cartons at Markie’s feet. “And now for you,” and he unwrapped a doll almost three feet tall and a portable basketball set, both of which he deposited in Martha’s arms.
“What’s for us?” Cynthia demanded.
The sandpapery voice in which Cynthia had addressed him nearly flattened the man on the spot, but, hanging on courageously to what he had doubtless been planning for the last half hour, he said, “Whiskey.”
“It’s sour!” Markie cried. “It’s beer!”
“Oh Mommy,” cried Cynthia, “Mommy we didn’t get anything—”
And then, just as Sid’s good intentions and his bad judgment threatened to plunge all present into despair, Martha swooped into the center of the room, gathered her children in with the armful of presents, and went spinning around in a circle. “Dummies, dummies, this is for you!” Spinning, they fell onto the rug, and the two children came up clutching their rightful gifts to their chests. And Sid was down on the floor with them too, clutching Martha’s wrist with his hand — and all the laughter and noise seemed to her only a mockery of a real and natural domesticity. Nevertheless, propelled by a seething desire to make the afternoon work, she kissed the faces of her two children and the brow of her gentleman caller. The skirt of her purple suit — an extravagance of her first winter back in Chicago — was above her knees. Sid Jaffe’s weighty brown eyes, those pleading, generous orbs, turned liquidy and hot; he tried to engage her in a significant glance, but she quickly began to explain to Markie the rules of basketball, as she understood them.
There had been a scene with Sid the last time, which neither of them could have forgotten. Martha had rushed away from the sofa, trembling, but acting tough: “Stop persevering, will you! What are you — a schoolboy?” “Just the opposite, Martha!” he had said. “I want to sleep with you!” “I don’t care what you want—stop trying to cop feels!” And he had left, she knew, feeling more abusive than abused, an unfair state to have produced in a man forty-one years old. But then Sid could never think of himself as having been in the right for very long anyway. Forceful as he may have been in court, out of it he defended himself with only the rawness of his needs — he seemed so baldly willing to protect others and not himself. Much as this willingness of his sometimes discomfited her, in the end it was for sexual reasons that Martha had sworn she would let him drift out of her life, just as five or six men had had to drift out previously.
It was almost immediately after Sid had left last time that she had called Gabe Wallach and asked him—whom she hardly knew — to join her and hers for Thanksgiving dinner. He was a smoothy, though, and had given some excuse about a party for his father in New York. She, whose parents were of an entirely different chapter of her life, had accepted his refusal graciously, if disbelievingly. Since she suspected Wallach of a kind of polished lechery anway, she almost felt relieved afterward — she might only have been throwing herself back into the struggle from which she had been trying to extricate herself. Yet she knew that Thanksgiving alone with the kids would be a hollow day. You might as well spend Thanksgiving in China if there wasn’t a man around to carve. So some days later she had called Sid’s office. And the first thing he said to her was that he was sorry, which only re-enforced a belief she had in her ability to emasculate when she put her mind to it. He said he had missed her; he said he had thought about her; he said he had thought about the kids; he said of course that he would come.