I raced off the porch to rescue Gloria’s roses, which had been a bit tough-stemmed for Duncan to damage much. He had pricked himself on a thorn, and his little square stubborn face, yellowish with a child’s unthinkingly acquired tan, creased and wrinkled as a wail of protest built up inside his chest. He squinted up at me dubiously and then, with one shaky suppressed sob, held up his pricked thumb to my face. It was sticky like an old penny candy against my lips; his face gave up on holding back tears. I lifted him into my arms and, though my knees threatened to buckle under the weight of his soul in that curious elderly reflex of mine, carried him into the shelter of the porch.
He showed his mother his wounded thumb. “Grandpa kiss,” he said.
“Thank you, Ben,” Beatrice said. “I can’t keep up with him.”
“Beatrice, who could?” Our first names leaked into the sunny air like rumors of an affair. Undressed, she must have as many white knobs as a thunderhead. “How’s, uh, Number One’s number-two problem?”
“Some days he seems to have the idea,” she allowed, passing the teacup and saucer around Quentin’s obtrusive curly head, “and then he loses it. When Al and I talk poo to him he looks at us as if we’re incredibly crazy and in very poor taste. I guess it is sort of disgusting if you think about it. Like a lot of things. But don’t normal children, if it feels good, forget about its being in bad taste?”
“I would think,” I said, as if I personally didn’t know. I shied my mind away from picturing my daughter-in-law settling her white bulk on the toilet seat and letting her ample fundament part to give nature its daily toll of fecal matter. Feels good, does it? Here on the veranda, as the westering sunlight advanced like a slow tide across the porch boards and lapped at our feet, the click of her cup and the sigh of her exhaled smoke seemed embarrassingly loud. The buggy heat held the muted smells of excrement, sex, death. The kousa dogwoods that Gloria had had the tree service plant, over toward the yew hedge that screened us from the Kellys, bloomed in their unsatisfactory way: white bracts strewn among the green leaves like pieces of paper sewn to the upper side of the boughs. I searched for a topic to fill our silence. “How’s Allan liking his work?”
Beatrice responded pouncingly. “He loves it,” she exclaimed with exasperation. “All that computerized buying and appraising. He can’t stop talking about the wonderful Asians, the ones that are left, their enterprise and diligence and so on. I think he thinks Westerners are relatively decadent, and overweight. Like me. I feel I should be Japanese or something to please him. One of those little Thai beauties he comes home raving about after one of his trips to Bangkok.”
Both boys had begun to wriggle in our arms at the mention of their father’s name. Duncan became a bundle of wiry muscle; as he and Quentin returned to the mallets and balls on the sunstruck lawn, the older boy’s movements were by comparison mincing, female, constipated. He had inherited, perhaps, my melancholia. I thought of it as coming upon me in old age, but in truth I had always moved on the edge of depression. The house in the Berkshires had step-worn floors and moldy wallpaper clinging to the plaster walls of the narrow stairwell. Oilcloth on the kitchen table, linoleum on the floor. Fields of sallow corn stubble outside, and the unheeding rush and swoosh of traffic along Route 8. Great headlong loads of cut logs, tree corpses, went by, from the pine plantations to the north, whose murky aisles of trunks showed a few splotches of sun and hid bear-shaped intimations of mortality. The doll’s house in the neglected basement. The marauding deer in a ruined world. The blurred corpse of the millipede. The laurel florets shrivelled to nothing. As a child I loved life so much the thought of its ever ending cancelled most of the joy I should have taken in it.
“Gloria’s not much here, is she?” Beatrice asked, showing me her profile as she gazed toward the boys, softening any malice in the question.
“Gloria,” I said loyally, “is astonishingly busy. She works like a dog on this place, and then rushes over to the gift shop. Her two partners, she says, are utter featherheads. And then there are appointments with her hairdresser, her manicurist, her aerobics instructor-I can’t keep track of how many people she has on her personal maintenance crew.”
“Gloria is very beautiful,” Beatrice said, but listlessly. “Maybe an aerobics class is what I need. That, or give up alcohol. They say you drop five to ten pounds right away. How do you find it, Ben, not drinking?”
“Like waking up in Kansas every morning. But at least you don’t have a headache or a lot of fuzz in your mouth.”
“I need the lift,” she confessed. “Allan says it’s all right, the Asians drink like fish. He says they never had their heads fucked over by the Judaeo-Christian God. The Japanese killed the missionaries, and the Chinese let them in here and there but never let them get an audience with the emperor. Just kept them waiting outside the palace for generations. Duncan, stop that!”
The smaller boy was tormenting the older, by gleefully pretending to pull down his pants. Young as Duncan was, he knew where his brother’s weak spot was. Quentin wheeled frantically, trying to fend him off. The mockingbird had set up a sympathetic screeching from within the big yew bush the deer had nibbled. In mating season the bird had amused us by perching on the top of the flagpole, leaping up with a complicated call and turning in mid-air and then settling on the top of the flagpole again. The boys’ agitated whirling was like that, only suffused with Quentin’s embarrassment and little Duncan’s ferocity. “Poo!” Duncan kept shouting with fierce glee. “Poo!”
Sunlight had crept up our ankles and bounced dazzlingly off the glass top of the wicker table and the china cups and saucers. When Beatrice bent forward to douse her cigarette in the remains of her tea, sunlight plunged down her coral-colored neckline into the socket of damp, warm space between her breasts. The kiss of the doused cigarette hung in the air. “They’re at each other like that all day,” she said. “I pray for first grade next year.” Her eyes stayed fixed on her plump hand, where it hovered with opened fingers above the cup of cooled tea. Her eyebrows had knit up a vertical wrinkle between them. How nice it would be, I thought, to be beneath her and feel her breasts sway, heavy and liquid, across my face, my open mouth, my closed eyelids.
In his desperation Quentin had seized a croquet mallet and I feared would do his savage little brother an injury; I raced out onto the lawn and took the weapon from him, while snapping, “Stop it! Enough is enough.” The boys, with their workaholic father, were so little used to masculine discipline that both made teary faces and ran to their mother, where she sat on the white wicker sofa in a kind of slumber, a non-intervening goddess. She took my intervention as a criticism, and bestirred herself to depart, replacing her cup on my tray, and attempting to stand. Quentin slouched against her so tuggingly that one strap of her frock slipped down a rounded brown shoulder and bared a milk-white strip of bulbous boob. The darker, areolar flesh around her nipple would be pimpled, I figured, with a delicious roughness. “That was darling, Ben,” she said, readjusting her strap without hurry. “Good tea. You must bring Gloria to Wellesley one of these days; I need all kinds of advice with the garden. It’s getting out of hand, just like the children. Allan works these beastly hours, but the fault is mostly mine. I’ve become such a slob; all I want to do is sleep all day and eat all night, and then throw up in the morning.” She stood, and yawned.