A Special Providence (23 page)

“… Well, but the point is, Doctor, I was rather hoping – that is, I wondered if we might discuss the possibility of his receiving a full scholarship next year.”

“Mm. I see. Suppose we take a look at his – at his—”

Dr. Cool fingered through a drawer in a filing cabinet and produced a manila folder, which he opened and spread before him as he fixed his tortoise-shell glasses into position. The record disclosed that Robert Prentice’s Intelligence Quotient had been assessed at slightly above average, and that he had done reasonably well in the fields of Social Adjustment and Personality Growth. But his Capacity for Self-Discipline had received the rating of Poor, and of the six Units of Study assigned to him during the academic year he had failed two, had received the grade of Incomplete in one and the passing grade of C in the other three. There was also a brief note by one of his teachers under the heading of Remarks, which Dr. Cool chose to real aloud: “Robert may eventually turn out to be as precocious as he seems to think he is, but if he expects to prove it to me he will have to buckle down.”

“So you see, Mrs. Prentice,” he said, closing the folder and removing his glasses, “under the circumstances, any question of extending his scholarship is really quite out of the – quite out of the question.”

Both interviews were upsetting, and she went to the Larkins’ house for cocktails and sympathy, dimly hoping that the Larkins might help her find a way out of the problem. But she found them both surprised to learn how bad things were: Maude had apparently assumed that the sculpture classes were paying for everything, and Jim, having, warned her against Riverside in the first place, had apparently given it no further thought.

“Well, but even so,” Maude said. “It does seem outrageous that they should be
dunning
you. Don’t you think so, Jim?”

Jim Larkin was laboriously lighting a cigar. He had explained when Alice came in that he was “feeling lousy” because he’d been “up working all night,” and now, unshaven and wearing a sweatshirt, he looked irritable. “I don’t see what’s so outrageous about it,” he said. “She does owe the money, after all.”

“But Jim, it isn’t fair. Alice is an
asset
to this place, and they ought to realize it. They ought to be
proud
to have her here.”

“Oh, I agree,” he said. “I agree one hundred per cent. Trouble is, the bills still have to be paid, here the same as anywhere else. Guess I can’t expect you to see that because you never earned a dollar in your life, but if you had my headaches you’d see it fast enough. You’ll have to excuse my wife, Alice; I guess I’ve spoiled her. She doesn’t quite understand the facts of life.” And he reached over to pour a martini into Alice’s glass. “So they’re kind of ganging up on you, are they? Isn’t there some way you can raise a little dough?”

Staring down into her bright drink, Alice mulled over a thought that had often occurred to her before. Why couldn’t Jim Larkin himself, with his embarrassment of riches from radio – why couldn’t
he
lend her money?

“Alice, there
is a
way,” Maude said, and Alice hoped she would say,
We’ll
help you. But instead she said, “By selling some of your work. Oh, I don’t mean the things you’re doing now – those are museum pieces – but some of your garden things. The Faun, the Pan, the Goose Girl – all those things are lovely in their way. And is there any reason why the Vander Meers shouldn’t be prime customers? Have you ever noticed how many little dells and glades in Boxwood are crying
out
for garden sculpture?”

“Sounds great,” Jim said. “Personally, though, if I were old Walter Junior I don’t think I’d really be in the market for any Pans or goose girls right now.”

And Alice knew he was probably right. This was clearly the time to come right out and ask him for a loan – she would never have a better opportunity – but if words existed for the making of such a request they had eluded her. All she could do was sit here and drink the Larkins’ gin, beginning to dislike them both.

In the end, as usual, she got the money from George – enough to settle the rent bill and the fuel oil bill and to make a token payment on the tuition. But he warned her that this was “absolutely the last time” he could so exceed the divorce agreement. “Alice, I just don’t see where this is going to end. My only advice to you now is that you’d better get out of that place before they throw you out.”

“No one’s going to throw me out, George.”

“Why not? You go on running up these impossible debts and they’ll sue you. They can do that, you know. They can sue you and attach your income.”

“George, I know you’ve never understood this, but I know what I’m doing. Next year’s going to be entirely different. My classes are bound to expand, for one thing, and I happen to be doing a great deal of very good, very important work that’s bound to be profitable. I know these problems won’t go on much longer.”

“They’d better not. They can’t.”

For the rest of the summer she managed to pay the rent, which gave her an illusion of solvency until the beginning of the school year. After that the illusion was harder to sustain, but she hoped the tuition question wouldn’t come to a crisis until February, and that seemed comfortably far away.

She gained no new students in the fall, but her own work was going so well as to promise great things: she had visions of a one-man show in the spring that might rescue her financially and make her famous at the same time. Even on bad days she was
comforted by faith: God, as invoked by Dr. Hammond’s rich voice every Sunday, would not fail to provide for her.

Maude’s enthusiasm was waning – “I don’t know
what
to suggest, dear; I honestly don’t know
what
I’d do if I were you” – and Jim was by now openly advocating that she leave town. “You can’t fight arithmetic, Alice,” he said. “I feel Maude and I more or less got you into this mess, and I’m sorry for that, but it does seem only sensible for you to get out while the getting is good.” By saying that, he made it harder than ever for her to ask him for money; and she hated him for it.

The only person who seemed to understand her, however distantly, was Eva, and she began to draw strength from the phrasing of Eva’s letters:

“If you believe that what you are doing is right, then stick to it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained – that’s always been your way, and the way of all brave and forthright people. And please remember, dear, that Owen and I stand ready to offer you whatever help we can. Financial help is impossible, I’m afraid, but in a real emergency we can always offer you and Bobby a temporary home …”

By December she was three months in arrears with the rent again, and she owed a terrible amount of money to the oil dealer. “Let’s not answer the doorbell, Bobby,” she would say when they saw Mr. Garrett’s car in the driveway, or the car of the man who collected for the oil company, and they would hide like thieves until the car went away. Bobby was a willing accomplice: he was doing as badly in school as she was in her financial affairs, and with a twelve-year-old’s sense of justice he seemed to feel it appropriate that they should both be fugitives from authority, threatened with expulsion.

“I don’t care if we have to leave,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, “we don’t have to leave yet.”

Shortly before Christmas there was another, more unpleasant interview in Walter Junior’s office. “We have to expect you to fulfill your agreements, Mrs. Prentice,” he said. “This kind of thing really can’t go on. I feel it’s only fair to warn you that we may be obliged to take legal action.”

And he evidently told his mother how matters stood, for the old lady became noticeably cool toward Alice at church, and did not invite her – this was a terrible blow – to the annual Christmas party.

In January she imposed on one of the Larkins’ friends, a photographer, to take dramatically lighted pictures of some of her best new work, and she took the photographs to New York to make the rounds of the 57th Street galleries. It was a project that consumed four days and yielded no tangible results – one gallery manager asked her to leave her name, but that was all.

Then one sleeting afternoon, after she and Bobby had managed to avoid a visit from Mr. Garrett, a desperate final measure occurred to her: they could sell some of Sterling Nelson’s things. From the Manhattan telephone book she found an antique dealer and an art appraiser, and she arranged for them to come out to Riverside on two successive days.

The antique dealer came first, a heavy young, man with a simpering manner. He pronounced some of the furniture “interesting, but not in good enough condition. If we were in town I’d offer you a hundred dollars for the lot and take my chances, but out here it’s impractical: I’d spend very nearly that much just to move it.”

And what about the purdah?

“I don’t know what I’d do with something like that. It’s an unusual curio, but I don’t know where I’d find a market for it.”

And the art appraiser was even worse. An old man, blotting his leaking nose with a dirty handkerchief, he scrutinized the
Murillo and the Poussin and all the other dark, heavy paintings and said they were “fakes. Not even very skillful fakes.” And so Sterling Nelson had come back over the years to deceive and desert her again.

The end came early in March – not with a final visit from Mr. Garrett or an ultimatum from Dr. Cool or harsh words in Walter Junior’s office, but with the dizzying suddenness of matters gone wholly out of control. A man appeared at the door one day, identified himself as a deputy sheriff, and handed her a document with the heading: “Original Notice of Action Pending Against You in the Supreme Court of Westchester County.”

She had never been sued before and had no idea of what to do. Her first impulse was to call George, but instead she fled to the Larkins’ house.

The Larkins’ daughter answered the door, eating an apple.

“Is your father home?”

“Well, yes, Mrs. Prentice, but he’s working.”

“Is your mother home?”

“Yes, but she’s resting.”

“Oh,
please
!”

The girl looked startled and backed away, apple juice shining on her lips.

“I’m sorry, but this is
terribly
important,” Alice said.
I’ve got
to see them.
Please.
”

“Well, I – I don’t know what to—”

But then Jim Larkin emerged blinking from his study, wearing his sweatshirt.

And she turned on him. “You!” She hadn’t planned this burst of anger, but she couldn’t control herself. “You could have helped me! You could have helped me months and
months
ago, and now it’s too late!
Look
at this!
Look
at this!”

He took the document, put on his glasses, and frowned over it.

“It’s too late!” she cried. “Oh, it’s too late, it’s too late.”

Maude came hurrying downstairs in a housecoat, with her hair in curlers. “Alice,” she said, “what’s the—”

“And
you
! My
friend! Ha
! Oh, you’ve been a fine friend to me, haven’t you?”

In the silence that followed, while Jim handed the paper to Maude, there was a crisp, moist chomping sound: the girl had taken another bite of her apple.

Alice sat down on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh God.”

“Alice,” Jim Larkin said. “I really don’t see why you’re attacking us about this. Frankly, I think you’re way out of line.”

“Oh, oh, oh God.”

“Well, but what can she
do
, Jim?” Maude inquired.

“Looks to me like the best thing to do is disappear,” Jim said. “I imagine that’s all the Vander Meers really want anyway – they must know they can’t collect. Isn’t there somewhere you can go, Alice? Somewhere out of the state? Somewhere good and far away?”

And the only place she could think of, in all the world, was Austin, Texas.

Mr. and Mrs. Owen Forbes lived in a brown, one-story house on a highway five miles west of Austin. The house was set well back from the road and there were no close neighbors – there was, in fact, nothing at all nearby except parched fields, a small abandoned barn, and a chicken yard in which a dozen hens and two roosters pecked and cackled in the sun.

It might have been a comfortable home if Owen had held a job: with him gone all day, Eva could have done enough housework to make the place cool, inviting, and pleasurable when he came back in the evening. As it was, their roles were reversed: Eva went out to work, at the hospital, while Owen stayed home to work on his book. And the house simply wasn’t big enough for that: it couldn’t accommodate the intensity of his brooding and his restless pacing all day, and at night the rooms seemed to reverberate with his pent-up energy as much as they smelled of his cigarette smoke.

It was technically true that they had enough space to take in two guests – there was a spare room for Alice and a couch in Owen’s study that could be made into a bed for Bobby – but it was far from practical. When Eva suggested it – “We can always offer you and Bobby a temporary home” – she had no idea that Alice would accept the offer; then when Alice telephoned from
New York there was nothing to say but yes, and when she and Bobby arrived in Austin they all four had to make the best of a difficult situation.

Alice knew the house was too small the moment she saw it, though she tried to cover her disappointment by chattering brightly with Eva and Owen – “Oh, I think it’s a charming little house” – as they made the turn into the driveway. They were pressed three abreast in Owen’s eight-year-old coupe, with Bobby riding in the rumble seat with the luggage, and Alice hadn’t stopped talking for a minute since getting off the train: it was as if the awkwardness of her position – a homeless, penniless refugee, wholly dependent on their charity – could be eased only by the sound of her own voice. “And what a beautiful
view
you have,” she said, getting out of the car. “The sky seems so much bigger out here – I suppose that’s what they mean by wide-open spaces.”