He licked his lips. “Why Brunhardt wrote this. Good man.”
“Ha!” she said. The explosive little sound blasted across the porch and seemed to whip down the quiet, shady street, disturbing the leaves of the silent maples.
With great caution and a too innocent expression, Morgan Nestor stood up, taking one step toward the screen door.
“Sit down!” Sara said. He sat. “Something has got to be done, Morgan.”
“About what?” He knew very well what she meant.
“About getting your son a job, that’s what. Robert is a delicate and sensitive boy, and in the right department he’d be a credit to the faculty. Also, he would probably do a whole lot better in twenty-four years of it than you’ve managed to do.”
Morgan Nestor ran a hand through his hair. During the brief moment that his palm touched his forehead he wondered if he were feverish.
“Sara,” he said, “I’ve explained this a dozen times. We sent Robert to four colleges before we found one that would graduate him. One of the colleges he flunked out of was Lavery. Why it’s... I... it’s unthinkable that the faculty should take on as an instructor a person who could not make the grade here as an undergraduate. Besides, Robert isn’t the type for...”
“How do you know what type he is? Have you given him a chance? Have you? I certainly know he’s brighter than a lot of fools instructing over there on the hill. Haven’t you any influence? What good is it to teach about bugs for twenty-four years if you can’t even do a small favor for your own family? What do they have you doing? I thought you were a full professor. Apparently you’ve been deceiving me, Morgan. Apparently they have you cutting grass or rolling the tennis courts.”
“Sara, dear, I tell you that I can’t in all honesty...”
She suddenly stopped rocking and fixed him with a narrow gray eye, as penetrating as an insect pin. “You can and you will,” she said in a low voice, “Even if I have to go see the dean with you. Make no mistake about that.”
At that moment Robert appeared in the side yard with a seven iron and a cotton golf ball. He smiled up at the side porch. “Hello, soaks,” he said. A psychologist would label Robert as socially immature, with a low attention factor. He was blonde, with a stubble of beard on his ripe jaw, a band of fat around his middle.
He dropped the ball, swung heartily at it. The ball arched just a bit further than the divot he slashed out of the lawn.
Morgan shut his eyes. The lawn had become a sort of retreat. While encouraging and working on the velvety growth, it was sometimes possible to forget... many things.
“Robert,” he said hesitantly. “The lawn...”
“You want to deny him every pleasure,” Sara said. “You go right ahead, Robert.”
Robert came up onto the porch and collapsed onto the swing. It creaked under his weight. “Too hot, anyway.”
“Your father,” Sara said, “has promised to speak to the dean about taking you on as an instructor.”
Robert licked his thumb, moistened the palm of his left hand and hit the spot with a chubby fist. “Coeds, here comes Robert!” he said.
“It’s possible, my boy, that the dean may not see his way clear to...”
“Morgan,” Sara said crisply, “I am not going to give you the chance of speaking too mildly about Robert. I am going to see the dean with you.”
“When?” Morgan asked. His voice had a faintly strangled tone.
“Tomorrow after your ten o’clock class. I’ll meet you in front of the administration building.”
Morgan Nestor found himself wondering if there was any efficient way of guaranteeing a broken leg.
He looked at his son with his usual mild disbelief. Could this vast and amiable child be flesh of his flesh? Surely genetics should not play such a dastardly trick on the one man who had so carefully studied the science as it applied to fruit flies.
From within the house there was a scuffling sound, and the clink of a glass. Sara came to attention like a good bird dog. “Alice!” she shrilled. “What are you doing?”
“Getting a drink of water, Mom,” Alice answered sleepily. Alice had followed her usual schedule of arising at ten, eating lunch at noon and going back to bed until four-thirty.
Alice came scuffling out onto the porch carrying the glass. Ever since she had reached fourteen Morgan had seen her become more and more like the Sadie Thompson in a low budget production of Ram. No power on earth seemed to be able to keep Alice out of shiny black dresses, dangling earrings and a mouth painted to resemble a smashed strawberry.
He had long since decided that her faintly unclean look came from putting makeup on top of makeup ad infinitum.
She carried her glass as though it were the most precious thing in the world, but about which she was obligated to act negligent and casual.
Morgan Nestor swallowed hard and avoided looking at Sara. If she discovered Alice’s latest ruse, there would be a scene. And somehow, at the end of the scene, it would all turn out to be Morgan’s fault. Each day, when Alice got up the second time, she dipped into her secret store of gin, filled a water glass, put an ice cube in it and stayed far enough away from her mother to maintain the illusion that it was water.
Unless she actually caught Alice in the act, Mrs. Nestor blithely ignored any strong odor of alcohol that might hang around her only daughter. She also told friends and acquaintances that Charley Nesbitt, her son-in-law, had brought Alice back and had moved in on them because of the “housing shortage.”
Actually Charley and Alice had maintained a rather trim little white frame house on the other side of town, but Charley had grown weary of trying to sober up Alice after work each day.
Alice knew that her father knew that the glass held gin. She winked at him. Through long practice, she was able to drink it as though it were, in truth, water.
At dinner, Alice would be gay, flushed and jovial. The life of the party.
“Alice has such spirit!” Sara often said.
Morgan knew that his daughter should go to an institution, yet so long as Sara resolutely refused to admit the flaw, there was nothing he could do.
“Charley’s about due?” Alice asked.
Morgan glanced at his watch and nodded. Charley, boisterous and muscular manager of Willowville’s only supermarket, usually came home at five.
A distant brassy horn played the first few bars of “The Old Grey Mare.”
“Here comes Charley,” Alice said in a dull tone.
Charley whipped his coupe into the drive sliding to a stop on the gravel. He bounded out and came up onto the porch steps. He was a balding, florid young man with all his features bunched too closely in the middle of a wide face.
He struck a pose on the top step, slapped himself on the chest. “Promoted again, folks! Whadya know about that? Old Charley comes through, he does.”
“That’s great. That’s dandy,” Alice said in a flat monotone. Charley gave her an angry look.
But he beamed at Sara, because she clapped her hands together and said, “Oh, Charley! How wonderful!”
“Yep, from a hundred a week to a hundred and a quarter. New responsibilities. Got four stores under my wing now. They are sending in a new manager here. Have to travel a little, you know. They know they got a good man in Charles J. Nesbitt.”
Sara turned to Morgan and said, “Charley’s been in that business for five years and now he’s making, let me see, twelve hundred dollars a year more than you are. And you’ve been fooling with those dead bugs of yours for nearly thirty years.”