He went into the kitchen with Billy. Martha was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and there was a smell of something cooking coming from the oven. Martha was not fat, as his mother spitefully described her, but in fact was an angular, virginal, gaunt woman of fifty, sure of the world’s displeasure, anxious to give back as good as she got.
“Martha,” he said, “this is my nephew, Billy. He’s going to stay with us for a few days. He’s tired and he needs a bath and some hot food. Do you think you can give him a hand? He’ll sleep in the guest room, next to mine.”
Martha smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table. “Your mother said you weren’t going to be in for dinner.”
“I’m not. I’m going out again.”
“Then there’ll be enough for him,” Martha said. “She—” with a savage gesture of the head toward the part of the house inhabited by his mother—“she didn’t say nothing about no nephews.”
“She doesn’t know yet,” Rudolph said, trying to make his voice sound cheery, for Billy’s sake.
“That’ll make her day,” Martha said. “Finding out about nephews.”
Billy stood quietly to one side, testing the atmosphere, not liking it.
Martha stood up, her face no more disapproving, really, than usual, but how could Billy know that? “Come on, young man,” Martha said. “I guess we can make room for a skinny little thing like you.”
Rudolph was surprised at what was, in Martha’s vocabulary, practically a tender invitation.
“Go ahead, Billy,” he said. “I’ll be up to see you in a little while.”
Billy followed Martha out of the kitchen, hesitantly. Attached now to his uncle, any separation was full of risk.
Rudolph heard their footsteps going up the stairs. His mother would be alerted that someone strange was in the house. She recognized his tread and invariably called out to him when he was on his way to his room.
He got some ice out of the refrigerator. He needed a drink after the almost teetotaling day and before the meeting with his mother. He carried the ice out into the living room and was pleased to find that the living room was warm. Brad must have sent over an engineer yesterday for the furnace. His mother’s tongue would at least not be honed by cold.
He made himself a bourbon and water, with plenty of ice, sank into a chair, put his feet up, and sipped at his drink, enjoying it. He was pleased with the room, not too heavily furnished, with modern, leather chairs, globular glass lamps, Danish wood tables and simple, neutral-colored curtains, all of it making a carefully thought-out contrast with the low-beamed ceiling and the small eighteenth-century, square-paned windows. His mother complained that it looked like a dentist’s waiting room.
He finished his drink slowly, in no hurry for the scene ahead of him. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, went down the hallway, and knocked on the door. His mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor so that she wouldn’t have to manage the stairs. Although, now, since the two operations, one for phlebitis, the second for cataracts, she got around fairly well. Complainingly, but well.
“Who is it?” The voice was sharp behind the closed door.
“It’s me, Mom,” Rudolph said. “You asleep?”
“Not any more,” she said.
He pushed the door open.
“Not with people tramping up and down like elephants all over the house,” she said from the bed. She was propped up against lacy pillows, wearing a pink bed jacket that was trimmed with what seemed to be some kind of pinkish fur. She was wearing the thick glasses that the doctor had prescribed for her after the operation. They permitted her to read, watch television, and go to the movies, but they gave a wild, blank, soulless stare to her hugely magnified eyes.
Doctors had done wonders for her since they had moved to the new house. Before that, when they were still living over the store, although Rudolph had pleaded with his mother to undergo the various operations he was sure she needed, she had adamantly refused. “I will be nobody’s charity patient,” she had said, “being experimented on by interns who shouldn’t be allowed to put a knife to a dog.” Rudolph’s protestations had fallen then on deaf ears. While they lived in the poor apartment nothing could convince her that she was not poor and doomed to suffer the fate of the poor once confided to the cold care of an institution. But once they made the move and Martha read the write-ups in the newspapers about Rudy’s successes to her and she had ridden in the new car that Rudy had bought, she went boldly into surgery, after ascertaining that the men who treated her were the best and most expensive available.
She had been literally rejuvenated, resuscitated, brought back from the lip of the grave, by her belief in money. Rudy had thought that decent medical care would make his mother’s last years a little more comfortable. Instead, they had almost made her young. With Martha glooming at the wheel, she now went out in Rudy’s car whenever it was free; she frequented beauty parlors (her hair was almost blue and waved); patronized the town’s movie houses; called for taxis; attended Mass; played bridge with newly found church acquaintances twice a week; fed priests on nights when Rudy was not at home; had bought a new copy of Gone With the Wind, as well as all the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes.
A wide variety of clothes and hats for all occasions were stored in the wardrobe in her room, which was as full of furniture as a small antique shop, gilt desks, a chaise longue, a dressing table with ten different flasks of French perfume on it. For the first time in her life her lips were heavily rouged. She looked ghastly, Rudolph thought, with her painted face and gaudy dresses, but she was infinitely more alive than before. If this was the way she was making up for the dreadful years of her childhood and the long agony of her marriage, it was not up to him to deprive her of her toys.
He had played with the idea of moving her to an apartment of her own in town, with Martha to tend her, but he could not bear the thought of the expression on her face at the moment when he would take her through the door of the house for the last time, stricken by the ingratitude of a son whom she had loved above all things in her life, a son whose shirts she had ironed at midnight after twelve hours on her feet in the store, a son for whom she had sacrificed youth, husband, friends, her other two children.
So she stayed on. Rudolph was not one to miss payment on his debts.
“Who is it upstairs? You’ve brought a woman into the house,” she said accusingly.
“I’ve never brought a woman into the house, as you put it, Mom,” Rudolph said, “although if I wanted to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
“Your father’s blood,” his mother said. Dreadful charge.
“It’s your grandson. I brought him home from school.”
“That was no six-year-old boy going up the staircase,” she said. “I have ears.”
“It isn’t Thomas’s son,” Rudolph said. “It’s Gretchen’s son.”
“I will not hear that name,” she said. She put her hands to her ears. Television-watching had left its mark on her gestures.
Rudolph sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and gently took her hands down, holding them. I have been lax, he thought. This conversation should have been held years ago.
“Now listen to me, Mom,” he said. “He’s a very good boy and he’s in trouble and …”
“I won’t have that whore’s brat in my house,” she said.