The Young in One Another's Arms Read online

  “Your dog already,” Ruth said.

  “Well …” Tom said, kneeling to fondle it. “Always did like dogs.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s housebroken.”

  “Of course not,” Gladys answered, standing in the hallway laughing. “I hope you and Boy know how to teach him because the rest of us go back to work tomorrow.”

  “We can keep him in the basement,” Tom said, “with newspapers.”

  “We’re making sure,” Mavis said from the living room, “that by the time you move, you’ll be glad to.”

  “Mavis and me are going to get us a little white pussy,” Boy said.

  The puppy made a dash in to Boy and began to attack his boots.

  “This here dog, Tom, is a coon dog, did you know that?”

  “Coon Dog,” Tom said, and the puppy had a name.

  “If you really are going to get a kitten, you’d better get it now, too,” Ruth said, “so that they get used to each other. We might as well help the city tear the house down.”

  “How about that?” Boy said, turning to Mavis. “Just how about that?”

  Children, that’s what they were, sometimes earnestly playing house, sometimes quarreling among themselves, calling playground names at each other, “Pig,” “Crook,” “Nigger,” and now they needed puppies and kittens to play with but to leave to Ruth for housebreaking, just as they began to leave the cooking to her again. And they were not children precisely because they were free to require this last indulgence. I will not be glad to go, Mavis, no matter what shits on my shoulders, no matter what I have to bury in the garden.

  The kitten, a white one, arrived the next day, wrapped in Boy’s vast scarf, and, though Ruth was momentarily murderous when it shat in a half-packed box of china, she had to laugh at Boy.

  “Look at that. Scared shitless, just like Gladdy.”

  He cleaned up the mess and repacked the box, all the while keeping the kitten tucked into his shirt, a white burst of fluff just below his dark throat. And he saved a pair of Willard’s shoes from Coon Dog. They found instead an old pair of Hal’s boots.

  “Now, if you didn’t have no dog, what could you do with an old pair of boots?” Boy asked, chuckling.

  He worked all day, cheerfully, playfully, and his energy never flagged in the evening when the others came home, sometimes too tired to appreciate his energy, combined with the dog’s and cat’s. So, after dinner, he’d put on his hat and say, “I’m going to get laid,” and off he’d go, usually not for more than a couple of hours.

  “I wish it were as simple as that for me,” Mavis said. “If it is simple for him.”

  “Do you want to come with me to see Clara?” Ruth offered.

  Mavis laughed and shook her head. “You two need your own gossip. I’m going tomorrow night with Boy. He wants to watch her color TV.”

  “His own particular ethnic right?”

  “He could put it that way, couldn’t he? We did have a real argument about his book cooking the other night. He said he’d think about it, but he wasn’t entirely convinced he should live in terms of peer-group values since, as far as he could see, none of us agreed anyway. Tom’s toned Gladdy down a lot. Still, legality in her vocabulary is a dirty word.”

  “Don’t mother them all, Mavis. They’ve had enough of that.”

  “Given the rate I’m being turned down for jobs, it may be the only opening,” Mavis said.

  The months of time suspended became days of hard, baffling work, quickly over. Without Boy, Ruth would have been defeated time and time again. Boy had quickly established four categories: You, Us, Salvation Army, and Fire, which proved adequate until she got to the boxes of Claire’s belongings. Boy found her sitting on the floor in the attic, a photograph album in her lap, an open box of toys to one side, a trunk of clothes to the other. Discarding things for the living was one thing, for the dead quite another.

  “What are you doing up here?” he demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  He took the album from her and looked at the page she held open.

  “A pretty man and a pretty child,” he said.

  “She was pretty,” Ruth said, smiling.

  “So you can take this with you,” Boy decided. “The rest of this stuff goes to the Salvation Army. Can’t see you and Willard playing dolls over there in your fancy apartment, and these,” he said, holding up a skirt, “are even too small for me to play with.”

  Simple.

  “Thank you,” Ruth said.

  “You don’t need no truck to haul around the past. You just got to share it out among the family.”

  Boy had adopted Tom’s vocabulary. Was it their shared nationality and their being deprived of it that made them sentimental about its discredited institutions? The sense of family would not last long, or at any rate would not include Ruth in it after the move was made. Concern was a matter of domestic geography except for a very willful few.

  The new domestic geography of the apartment could be made comfortable only in terms of Willard’s needs, his familiar chair by the television. Even Boy’s noisy good humor, so useful in enlivening the dead spaces of the past, could not invade the dead space of this future.

  “It’s a terrible place, isn’t it?” Ruth asked matter-of-factly as she looked around at their finished work.

  “Takes a little living in, that’s all,” was all Boy could offer.

  Glad not to be any higher off the ground than she was, Ruth could still begin to feel the weight of all those floors above her like a hibernating headache.

  “No,” she said to the suggestion of a final dinner. She did accept Mavis’ offer to drive them over to the apartment, but Willard at the last minute vetoed that.

  “We’ll take the bus,” he said, “the way we always do.”

  Just as if they were on their way to the movies. The snow was gone. There were lights on in only one or two other houses in the block. The signs of scavengers and vandals were everywhere: broken windows, half-ripped-away fences, a broken toilet in one front yard, laundry tubs in another. Ruth tried not to think of the uses to which her house would now be put. Instead, she held the image of them all standing there in the front hall where she could go home to find them after this particular movie was over. It worked until they arrived at the apartment house and Ruth got out the keys she and Willard would have to use for any coming or going. He was reluctant to take his, to be taught how to use them, but Ruth was firm with him, a new needful authority in her voice unlike the accustomed nagging. Again she saw a threatening looseness in his face.

  “It’s all right, Willard,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  The movie had just begun, and it would go on and on for them both without ever setting them free or letting them go home.

  “I don’t like it here,” Willard said, looking around the living room of the apartment.

  “It needs a little living in,” Ruth said. A very little living was all they could do. “Try your chair.”

  He sat down, still in his overcoat and turned on the television. Ruth went to her bedroom, stretched out on the bed, and let the weight of the day and the place descend.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I suppose he’s always been morose,” Ruth said, “only I had other people to pay attention to.”

  She was sitting with Clara, who was in her own chair now, developing a habit of being upright against the assault of young people who would not tolerate her withdrawal from their lives.

  “If he doesn’t like it, couldn’t you get him a room somewhere? He’d probably be better off.”

  “I’ve suggested it. He pays no attention.”

  “Is he eating properly?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ruth sighed, “and carries on with his whole routine as if nothing had changed, and it hasn’t, really.”

  “It’s you who needs to get used to it,” Clara said.

  “I wonder if I will.”

  “Tom and the others wish you wouldn’t.”

 
; “They have a marvelous sense of choice, don’t they?”

  “It’s not a bad thing to have,” Clara said.

  “Neither is a million dollars or two arms …” Ruth winced at the sound of self-pity in her voice. “The fact is, I’m bored. It’s not as if Willard were hanging around my neck all day. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever had any choice about what to do with myself, and I don’t know what to do. I read. I walk in the park. I take up as much of your time as I dare. The only real complaint I have about Willard is that he doesn’t take up enough of my time. Isn’t it silly?”

  “Have you met any of the other people in the building?”

  “Of course, and we all say good morning. Maybe people who use the elevator get better acquainted. But I don’t really want acquaintances.”

  “You want something useful to do.”

  “Yes, but a job seems silly, even if I could get one.”

  “Mavis says you keep refusing invitations to the farmhouse.”

  “Well, I’ve seen it. They seem to think I should go out there once a week. I don’t really want a routine like Willard’s.”

  “Yes,” Clara said, smiling, “that’s what they do to me, and I resented it, but now, you know, if Boy doesn’t stop in a couple of times a week to watch television, I miss him, and I get impatient for Mavis to come back to read another chapter. I’m just as involved in Gladdy’s students as I ever was. As for Tom, well, Tom’s Tom. Even Stew and Joanie have been by.”

  “They always did visit you. With me, they learned to talk to my back, and they don’t really know what to do with me as a guest in their living room, even if I did know what to do with them, which I don’t.”

  “What are you going to do with the money?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a funny thing. I can’t seem to think about that until the house is gone, as if it weren’t really theirs and the money weren’t really mine until they tear it down. It’s like collecting life insurance before somebody’s dead.”

  “How soon is that going to be?”

  “Not long, sometime this week. Oh, I’m not going to go watch them pull it down, but I just need to know it’s gone.”

  “Maybe you should invest in a business,” Clara said.

  “Clara …”

  “I don’t mean a café for pensioners in the Gulf Islands, but Tom’s not going to be happy at that country club, and Boy meets too many likely propositions at the steam baths not to get involved in something unpleasant before long unless there’s something legitimate for him to do. Even Mavis is discouraged about finding a job.”

  “So you think I ought to figure out a business to employ a fry cook, an accountant, and a Ph.D. in Dickens, along with a shoe clerk and a teacher of handicapped children? There wasn’t much more than fifty thousand dollars after I paid off the rest of the mortgage, and bank loans for the likes of us … forget it.”

  “Hal might be able to get one.”

  Ruth snorted.

  “If I asked him.”

  “I wouldn’t invest in a chocolate bar with Hal, and you know it.”

  “Not even for the children?”

  “They’re not children, Clara, and they don’t need me. I just have to get over needing them, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know why you think that. Claire would have gone on needing you and you would have gone on needing her, and you wouldn’t have denied it. We need each other, after all.”

  “We were a family,” Ruth said quietly.

  “What family have any of these got but us?”

  “Gladdy’s got an enormous family.”

  “In the East. What about Tom? What about Boy? Mavis hasn’t seen her family for five years. They threw her out because they discovered she had a crush on one of her famale teachers and wouldn’t go to a psychiatrist about it. What kind of a family is that?”

  “When did she tell you that?”

  “The other night. Boy had gone off to his steam baths. She admires his openness about it and is trying to be more open about herself, though she doesn’t really know what that self is. She’s half in love with Tom and half in love with Gladdy and glad they love each other so that she doesn’t have to sort it out at all. She said maybe she was neuter, and that would solve more problems than it posed.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “So do I, and I think we should be around to doubt, don’t you?”

  Ruth looked at Clara, no less physically frail than she’d been two months ago when she came here to die, but the appetite for death had gone out of her face. There was instead that gentle alertness and concern that had drawn Ruth to Clara all those years ago. Last month Ruth had been conspiring with the others to see that Clara did not turn into a vegetable. Now it was obvious that Clara was conspiring with them to keep Ruth from disappearing into her dead-ended life.

  “If it weren’t for you …” Ruth said, with no intention of finishing her sentence.

  “Go to see them next time they invite you.”

  “If I can.”

  Ruth tried to be more cheerful and gentle with Willard that night at dinner, and he rose to the occasion as well as he could, but having to respond in the simplest ways was a strain for him. His hands shook a little as he managed his knife and fork, and his face grew tighter and tighter until Ruth suggested that they watch television while they had their dessert. She wondered in how many apartments all over the West End people sat over their meals staring at the screen simply to avoid confronting the boredom and impossibility of the relationships they were caught in. At least it wasn’t painful for her as it would have been if she had been with Hal. As she turned to pour Willard his coffee, she realized he had been looking at her instead of the screen. Ruth couldn’t read his face. The mask of self-protectiveness had grown over the years like a cataract. Even if there was anything he wanted to communicate, he had no way of doing it. What feelings he had remained entirely his own.

  “Chinatown tonight?”

  He nodded and looked away, perhaps shamed in his way as Ruth was in hers of the inadequacy between them.

  After he had gone out, Ruth sat looking at the album of pictures Boy had decided she should save. She was not as much interested in the landmarks—the birthdays, the graduations—as she was in finding Claire’s face among the clusters of other young people on the front porch, in the back yard, on the beach, sometimes among her own school friends, often among the members of the household, never the center of the group except in Ruth’s eyes. She did not want to think of the others like that, which was what Clara seemed to be asking of her. The most painful boredom was preferable to that kind of vulnerability.

  The buzzer sounded. It was Gladys.

  “Come along up,” Ruth said into the hole in the wall, still self-conscious about it since she didn’t have to use it often.

  “Tom had to work tonight, and Mavis more or less ordered me out of the house,” Gladys confessed. “She’s so fucking cranky these days.”

  “Work going badly?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s right on schedule with the thesis. It should be done in another few weeks. The job situation irks her, but, Jesus, if she’d opened her eyes a year ago, she would have known how it was going to be. We’ve got a friend with a Ph.D. in physics who’s building log cabins, and he feels lucky.”

  “Don’t you think she’s going to get a job?”

  Gladys shook her head. “Once she has her degree, she’s not cheap labor any longer.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Lovely. Your real coffee. You know, I don’t think any of us were really old enough to leave home. Don’t put that album away. I’d like to look at it.”

  It was easier to have Gladdy here, curled up on the couch enjoying coffee, than to go to see them all at the farmhouse, perhaps because there they were trying so eagerly to show Ruth how well they got along on their own. It was not that Ruth didn’t want to see them but that she still didn’t know how except on her own terms.

  “What did Cl
aire do?” Gladdy asked.

  “Design. Things with her hands. She hadn’t really decided. She was a good potter. She made all the plates and mugs you have.”

  “And you gave them to us?” Gladys asked.

  “And she designed a couple of stage sets. She liked the theater, but she was a little afraid of it, too. She used to say she was looking for the real world.”

  “Oh, I know how that feels,” Gladys said, sighing. “Sometimes there isn’t a thing I do that doesn’t feel unreal. I mean, what am I really doing living in a farmhouse with Tom and Mavis and Boy? I get so mad at them all, and then I think, what the fuck am I doing that’s different?”

  “The world’s always seemed real to me,” Ruth said, as if making an admission.

  “Even now?” Gladys asked.

  “Willard’s bone-real, Gladdy.”

  “Oh, I know. My kids are, too, but I sometimes think, what’s the point, you know? Sometimes ‘bone-real’ just doesn’t seem good enough. And then I think, my God, I’m sounding like Joanie. It’s just that, if we can’t do something to change things, I mean fundamentally, what’s living about? I don’t admit it, but I can feel as cynical about politics as Tom. Still …”

  Gladys’ eyes drifted back to the album.

  “She looks so … hopeful in this one.”

  “She mostly was,” Ruth said, smiling.

  “A car accident,” Gladys said.

  “She was hitchhiking,” Ruth said.

  “I have to go for an abortion next week,” Gladys said, still looking at Claire.

  “How did that happen?”

  “Oh, I kept getting suspicious pap smears; so the doctor took me off the pill. Those doctors make me so fucking mad. They’re all the same, sitting in their offices with a picture of the wife and kiddies, telling you if you screw around, you’ll probably get cancer and deserve it. This one asked me how many men I went to bed with, and were any of them black. How do you like that? And Tom’s driving me up the wall. Sometimes he sounds like the original ‘voice for the unborn.’”

  “He wants the baby?”

  “He doesn’t even imagine that. He’s onto the wonder and mystery of it all, the chance out of millions that one particular life is conceived. By the time any kid was born, Tom would have such a heavy trip to lay on it, it would smother in its crib: the first lungfish born on dry land, Jesus H. Christ Petross! What man ever knows that a baby’s chief contribution for a hell of a long time is shit and vomit?”