Don’t do this, she was thinking. At the side of the house, it was Hume, rising. When he saw her coming at him, he lost his footing and fell back against the side of the building.
She hesitated. She was going to arrest him! Where was Ned? She stood over the boy. “You,” she said. She pressed an open hand over her crotch, ridiculously, to protect herself there. Unhelpful rain blew into her face. She sensed that something was wrong with the boy. He’d surely had time to run. He was wearing the same odd leather ensemble as before and he was drenched. Ned arrived and pushed her aside. And then Ned was hauling the boy around to the porch. Hume wasn’t resisting.
“Don’t be rough with him,” Nina said. She resisted the impulse to take hold of Hume’s clothing somewhere.
Hume and Ned stood apart from each other, and Ned, almost courteously, made an ushering gesture to the boy. They entered the cabin. Hume seemed to be limping. He had strong body odor.
Nina thought, How can this be? He was handsome and solid. He had a cleft chin, cut to just the right slight depth. He was a rugged boy with fine shoulders. He should be beleaguered with girlfriends following him around. He was as tall as Ned.
Hume was being compliant. Everything remained to be seen. Apparently she was the only one he would make eye contact with, for now. He was something like a fine animal, a fine horse, which was a stupid thought. Whoever had cut his hair was a criminal. The two cropped dark ridges running back were like dorsal fins. There were scabs and scratches in the shaved areas of his scalp. He wasn’t taking care of himself. His eyes were maybe the best color for a man to have, a pale blue, which she thought of as a bitter color. He had accepted a seat on one of the kitchen chairs. Ned was sitting opposite him. There was no chair for her so she leaned against the wall.
How she could bring this into the discussion she had not the slightest idea, but she thought it might improve things for this kid if he could comprehend the bizarre image of a woman he’d stumbled in on, naked, upside down, legs stretched up the wall. She thought, This is the definition of hopeless.
Ned seemed uncertain. She knew what was happening — he had too much to say and he didn’t want to start off with clichés. And he was sitting too close to Hume. It made it inquisitorial. So what she could do was go over and pull on the back of his chair a little. He would get the point. She did it and it worked.
Ned said, “I’m Ned and this is my wife Nina and I am an old, old friend of your father. And I, I want to say something to you: I’m really sorry.”
Hume was rolling his right pant leg up, with difficulty because it was leather and it was wet. A grossly swollen ankle was emerging.
“Okay,” the boy shouted, stunning Ned with the violence of his delivery. Hume was picking bits of something off his flesh. Nina thought, You cannot run around over boulders in the rain in shoes like that. He was sockless, wearing what appeared to be espadrilles in the last stages of disintegration.
Ned stood up. “Why are you shouting at me? I mean God damn you anyway, Hume, you know what you did this afternoon, God damn you …”
Nina took Ned by the arm. Ned was shaking. Nina mouthed the word Stop.
Ned wouldn’t. “Now God damn it, you violated my wife’s privacy. Who are you? Why do you think you can do that? You can go to jail for that …”
Nina said, “Hume, nobody knows about it. We haven’t told anyone.”
“I’m sorry I looked at you,” Hume said, slowly, in a tone that seemed to deny what he was saying.
Ned detected slyness and couldn’t control himself. “Now God damn you again. Listen, what is going on with you? What are you doing besides running around in the woods, for Christ’s sake?”
She thought, I hate it here, the whole fucking area: it’s dank and I hate the boring trees and the towns are decrepit … and peculiar without being in any way picturesque … somebody said that about someplace. In Kingston she had seen the ghost of a nineteenth-century sign on the side of a brick building in white letters barely legible, CORSETERIA.
“What about your mother?” Ned asked Hume harshly.
“What about her?” Hume answered.
“Your mother was devastated — is, I mean. Why aren’t you helping her?”
“She wants me to leave,” Hume said.
“What does that mean?”
Hume said, “She does. You don’t know anything about my mother.”
“And that’s all you have to say about spying on my wife?”
“Sorry. Apologize.” The sly tint would not leave his voice.
Ned said, “What does your father mean to you, nothing? I want to know. Was he not a good father to you?”
“You don’t know anything. My mother is stupid.”
Nina bent over Hume and took him by the shoulders. She said, “If you want to be a monster, be one, but now you have to come up to the house and let somebody take care of your ankle. How did you do that?”
“Crossing the creek.”
“I knew it,” she said, looking meaningfully at Ned. “I told you it was dangerous.”
Nina wanted to give ibuprofen to Hume. She had some in her purse, which was atop the load of their belongings in the wheelbarrow parked on the corner of the porch. She went to get it.
Hume was following her movements and was already shaking his head. She brought a glass of water from the kitchen and tried to hand it to him along with two pills. He rolled his eyes. She rolled hers.
“Now we’ll go up the hill,” Ned said.
It was tense. Ned tried to support Hume, who said that no one should touch him. They let him go on ahead, limping.
“I was completely ineffective,” Ned said quietly to Nina.
“No you were not. But anyway, so was I.”
“It wasn’t up to you, it was up to me.”
She thought, Oh you poor man. He was concluding that he had failed as a father, that it had been a tryout, and he had failed to, what would you call it, improve on Douglas as a father, who had clearly been a dud and miserable at it.
“Now where is he going?” Ned asked. Hume had broken away, taking a path that would lead him around the back of the manse and presumably to some entrance not known to them. There had been no goodbye, unsurprisingly.
Nina said, “You know what you’re doing — you’re chain-sighing, a thing you accuse me of. You make me stop doing that, so you stop. It’s noticeable.”
Hume was gone and she was glad he was gone. She was going to relax now. They had said what they had to say. She was sorry for men. She pitied Hume. Puberty is torture, she thought, depending on where you are when it happens, and who’s around. Ned was sad.
27
“Where’s your better half?” Joris asked Ned.
“Interior decorating. Rearranging the deck chairs.” Ned looked around the bedroom assigned to Gruen and Joris. “Your digs are identical to ours.”
“Same nice big bed. We have to sleep together, like you guys. Head to toe because I don’t want his cold,” Joris said, pointing at Gruen, who said, “I don’t want it either.”
Ned sat down in an armchair at the foot of the bed. His two friends were lying on the bed a yard apart, under the spread, drinking, their heads on pillows propped directly against the glass of the great window looking into blackness. The rumbling brook below was a presence in the dull room. This wing of four rooms was cantilevered directly over it. There was no reading lamp, only an amber fixture in the ceiling shedding the sort of light he associated with hotel corridors.
Gruen said, “You know I bet those people who lived in what was it called, yeah, the Falling Waters House Frank Lloyd Wright built them moved out in about six months. It was just like this place. I can see the wife saying I’m going mad I tell you, mad.”