“He’s sure a fine young man,” Dad says. “Wish I woulda been that responsible when I was his age. Wouldn’t be in here today if I’da been.”
Sis gets up and leaves the room. Says nothing. Doesn’t even look at anybody exactly. Just leaves. Mona directs her to the ladies room.
“I’m sorry she treats you this way hon,” Ma says. “She thinks she’s too good to come see her dad in prison.”
“It’s all right,” Dad says looking sad again. He watches Sis leave the visiting room.
“I’m gonna have a good talk with her when we leave here hon,” Ma says.
“Oh don’t be too hard on her. Tough for a proud girl her age to come up here.”
“Not too hard for Tom.”
“Tom’s different. Tom’s mature. Tom’s responsible. When Ellen gets Tom’s age I’m sure she’ll be mature and responsible too.”
Half hour goes by before Sis comes back. Almost time to leave. She walks over and sits down.
“You give your dad a hug now,” Ma says.
Sis looks at Dad. She stands up then and goes over and puts her arms out. Dad stands up grinning and takes her to him and hugs her tighter than I’ve ever seen him hug anybody. It’s funny because right then and there he starts crying. Just holding Sis so tight. Crying.
“I love you hon,” Dad says to her. “I love you hon and I’m sorry for all the mistakes I’ve made and I’ll never make them again I promise you.”
Ma starts crying, too.
Sis says nothing.
When Dad lets her go I look at her eyes. They’re the same as they were before. She’s staring right at him but she doesn’t seem to see him somehow.
Mona picks up the microphone that blasts through the speakers hung from the ceiling. She doesn’t need a speaker in a room this size but she obviously likes how loud it is and how it hurts your ears.
“Visiting hours are over. You’ve got fifteen seconds to say good-bye and then inmates have to start filing over to the door.”
“I miss you so much hon,” Ma says and throws her arms around Dad.
He hugs Ma but over his shoulder he’s looking at Sis. She is standing up. She has her head down again.
Dad looks so sad, so sad.
“I’d like to know just who the hell you think you are treatin’ your own father that way,” Ma says on the way back to town.
The rain and the fog are real bad now so I have to concentrate on my driving. On the opposite side of the road cars appear quickly in the fog and then vanish. It’s almost unreal.
The wipers are slapping loud and everything smells damp — the rubber of the car and the vinyl seat covers and the ashtray from Ma’s menthol cigarettes. Damp.
“You hear me young lady?” Ma says.
Sis is in the backseat again alone. Staring out the window. At the fog I guess.
“Come on Ma, she hugged him,” I say.
“Yeah when I practically had to twist her arm to do it.” Ma shakes her head. “Her own flesh and blood.”
Sometimes I want to get really mad and let it out but I know it would just hurt Ma to remind her what Dad was doing to Ellen those years after he came out of prison the first time. I know for a fact he was doing it because I walked in on them one day; little eleven-year-old Ellen was there on the bed underneath my naked dad, staring off as he grunted and moved around inside her, staring off just the way she does now.
Staring off.
Ma knew about it all along of course but she wouldn’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t admit it probably not even to herself. In psychology, which I took last year at the junior college, that’s called denial. I even brought it up a couple times but she just said I had a filthy mind and don’t ever say nothing like that again.
Which is why I broke into that store that night and left Dad’s billfold behind. Because I knew they’d arrest him and then he couldn’t force Ellen into the bed anymore. Not that I blame Dad entirely. Prison makes you crazy no doubt about it and he was in there four years the first time. But even so I love Sis too much.
“Own flesh and blood,” Ma says again lighting up one of her menthols and shaking her head.
I look into the rearview mirror at Sis’s eyes. “Wish I could make you smile,” I say to her. “Wish I could make you smile.”
But she just stares out the window.
She hasn’t smiled for a long time of course.
Not for a long time.
Render Unto Caesar
I never paid much attention to their arguments until the night he hit her.
The summer I was twenty-one I worked construction upstate. This was 1963. The money was good enough to float my final year and a half at college. If I didn’t blow it the way some of the other kids working construction did, that is, on too many nights at the tavern, and too many weekends trying to impress city girls.
The crew was three weeks in Cedar Rapids and so I looked for an inexpensive sleeping room. The one I found was in a neighborhood my middle-class parents wouldn’t have approved of but I wasn’t going to be here long enough for them to know exactly where I was living.
The house was a faded frail Victorian. Upstairs lived an old man named Murchison. He’d worked forty, years on the Crandic as a brakeman and was retired now to sunny days out at Ellis Park watching the softball games, and nights on the front porch with his quarts of cheap Canadian Ace beer and the high sweet smell of his Prince Albert pipe tobacco and his memories of WWII. Oh, yes, and his cat, Caesar. You never saw Murch without that hefty gray cat of his, usually sleeping in his lap when Murch sat in his front porch rocking chair.
And Murch’s fondness for cats didn’t stop there. But I’ll tell you about that later.
Downstairs lived the Brineys. Pete Briney was in his early twenties, handsome in a roughneck kind of way. He sold new Mercurys for a living. He came home in a different car nearly every night, just at dusk, just at the time you could smell the dinner his wife, Kelly, had set out for him.
According to Murch, who seemed to know everything about them, Kelly had just turned nineteen and had already suffered two miscarriages. She was pretty in a sweet, already tired way. She seemed to spend most of her time cleaning the apartment and taking out the garbage and walking up to Dlask’s grocery, two blocks away. One day a plump young woman came over to visit but this led to an argument later that night. Pete Briney did not want his wife to have friends. He seemed to feel that if Kelly had concentrated on her pregnancy, she would not have miscarried.
Briney did not look happy about me staying in the back room on the second floor. The usual tenants were retired men like Murch. I had a tan and was in good shape and while I wasn’t handsome girls didn’t find me repulsive, either. Murch laughed one day and said that Briney had come up and said, “How long is that guy going to be staying here, anyway?” Murch, who felt sorry for Kelly and liked Briney not at all, lied and said I’d probably be here a couple of years.
A few nights later Murch and I were on the front porch. All we had upstairs were two window fans that churned the ninety-three-degree air without cooling it at all. So, after walking up to Dlask’s for a couple of quarts of Canadian Ace and two packs of Pall Malls, I sat down on the front porch and prepared myself to be dazzled by Murch’s tales of WWII in the Pacific theater. (And Murch knew lots of good ones, at least a few of which I strongly suspected were true.)
Between stories we watched the street. Around nine, dusk dying, mothers called their children in. There’s something about the sound of working-class mothers gathering their children — their voices weary, almost melancholy, at the end of another grinding day, the girls they used to be still alive somewhere in their voices, all that early hope and vitality vanishing like the faint echoes of tender music.