All the Little Live Things (25 page)

Marian turned. Her smile for the moment was as bright as the wink of the ice cubes, but as we started in toward the crowd I saw her back, splashed with the mixed sun and shade under the desolated trees. Her shoulders drooped, her green dress was wrinkled in back where she had sat on it. However much I might want a cold drink with a touch of company,
she
looked as if someone should in kindness lead her off to a darkened room and put her to bed.

The other day, between rains, Ruth and I waded through the mud to the LoPresti place, carrying a little Christmas present with the notion of patching up our relations, sadly out of whack since the Fourth of July. We found no one at home but the sculptures, on whom I suppose I might have put some of the blame for Fran’s sense of grievance. And the whole vast patio in which they sat or stood or hung had been tiled, bordered, grouted, polished, planted, cleaned up, finished. Cement mixer, bench saw, generator and tank and torch, piles of sand and tile, were all gone. And not a muddy footprint besides our own, no sign that since the wind left them there the leaves in the comers had been stirred by anything bigger than an earwig, nothing busy about the place except a stream of ants that poured up and down the grout lines between the tiles. I got, somehow, the feeling of a bleak and tidy desolation; the
aim
had gone out of that once-busy yard, it was like an unhappy woman with a tight mouth. And for that I was partly responsible.

They say that more people are alive today than have lived in all previous human history. I find that hard to believe. It is so long a history, and so laborious, and it sits so heavy on the mind. Alive for what? I wanted to ask, up to my ankles in ants that I could have melted to goo with one blast of an insect bomb. Busy for what? But I knew well enough. We move because we move, we build because we build, we reproduce because our loins thirst for the profound touch, and then we divert upon our children, who have their own sort and do not want ours, the hopes that for ourselves are no longer mentionable without a grimace. Standing in Lucio’s courtyard before Fran’s ill-omened sculpture, I had a quick, comical impulse to get out of there and go home and do something useful—lay some stones, say, in the retaining wall I was building along the drive.

This job was too aridly closed up, and there was no sign of a new beginning. Yet Lucio had walked a treadmill of incessant new beginnings. The cement mixer, his heraldic emblem, was always rampant somewhere above a cone of spilled sand. Lumber piles and litter got incorporated into the living routines as people use the stumps and outcrops of a picnic site. I have seen Fran in her abstracted way flatten down the top of a two-ton pile of sand and throw a cloth over it and use it as a coffee table, and it was standard practice for Lucio, on party days, to fill the cement mixer with ice for the cooling of beer. Even worn-out tools never disappeared. With her torch, a real antique, one of those that generates its own acetylene gas out of calcium carbide and water, Fran welded them into art.

We were looking her major creation right in the eye, or would have been if it had had an eye, and I found myself actively disliking the thing. Troublemaker, pretender, parody of something sad and unattractive—in its maker? in its viewer? both, probably—it brooded back at us, its exposed torso shiny with welds like scars. Most of Fran’s art was either ragged messes of junk (she talked a good deal about learning to think in the medium) or mosaics of old teaspoons, safety pins, coins, and kinks of copper wire embedded in fused glass like the leavings of litterbugs in a Yellowstone hot spring. But this thing was frankly, even darkly, female. Back on the Fourth I had indulged my alcoholic humor at her expense, but now I thought she leered at me with a knowledge that was sinister, sad, and accusing.

A woman, of a sort, nearly life-size. She wore for skirt a cut-off galvanized boiler with rivets running like a row of buttons from belt to hem. Rising out of the rounding top of this skirt like a jutting pelvis was an old shovel whose handle made a spinal column linking pelvis and thorax, as in a wired skeleton. Midway in the spine, moved by some whimsy that I never did understand, but that I would investigate if I were her psychiatrist, Fran had drilled a hole in which she had set a lens from a pair of eyeglasses. For some reason, it was inescapably obscene to look right through that thing’s bifocal navel. Filthy X-rays.

Bracketed to the spine in place of a rib cage was a portable typewriter rescued from the dump. Its movable parts were fused with rust, its keyboard made a panel of gangrenous guts, its necklace of rusty type hung down between ribbon spools like round rudimentary breasts. To enhance the resemblance, Fran, thinking in anything but the medium, had touched each spool with a bright nipple of solder.

The neck was a hammer handle wrapped with leather like the neck of one of those African women stretched with circle after circle of copper wire. The face was composed only of the hammer’s down-hooking claws. Curving up over this tooth-face as halo or sunbonnet was a bamboo lawn rake with some broken rays. Both hammer and rake were tilted slightly on the stiffly upright body, so that the faceless teeth under the sunbonnet wore an indescribable look of coquetry. You expected her to sidle up and say in a voice like Mortimer Snerd’s, “How’d you like to look through my navel, a-huh, a-huh, a-huh?”

“What in hell do you suppose Fran had in mind?” I said, when we had stood looking for three or four minutes. “She couldn’t have arrived at that thing by accident. And she takes it seriously or I wouldn’t have hurt her feelings so on the Fourth.”

“She’s a pretty vague woman. I imagine it’s just an iron doodle that turned out gruesome.”

“You know what I think? I think it’s a portrait of Julie.”

“Julie, or Fran’s feelings about Julie?”

“Well, isn’t every portrait a self-portrait?”

“Fran wouldn’t like the idea,” Ruth said. Then she said a strange, bitter thing. “If you did a portrait of Curtis, would it resemble you?”

We stared at one another almost with hatred. Her eyes ducked away, her lips moved in a deprecatory slight smile, as if she begged me to take her remark as a joke, and she went back to studying the caricature standing above us on its pedestal. “Isn’t it just that hammer that makes you think it’s hostile?” she said. “After all, she didn’t make that, she just found it lying around.”

I found it easiest to adopt her casual and speculative tone. “If she’d been making it out of affection she’d have found something else lying around to use, a saucepan with dimples, maybe. And why those white-hot titties? To emphasize femaleness in a dangerous, unpleasant way? Or those half-formed breasts that are like the scary outcrops on your adolescent child? And all those corrupt guts, and that window navel. Doesn’t that say, in the voice of a furious and suspicious mother, ‘I can see right through you?’”

“You’re free-associating,” Ruth said mildly. “After all, she started this a long time before.”

“Then it was prophecy.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth said almost impatiently. “She wasn’t afraid of Julie as a
girl.
She was afraid she’d grow up beat, or a lady vet like Annie Williamson. She wanted a nice sweet feminine domestic girl in nicely pressed dresses who would be on the honor roll and play the piano and make little art things.”

“But virginal.”

“Oh yes. Maybe a little Pre-Raphaelite in a nice way.”

“And got this stormy creature she could neither understand nor approve.”

“Yes.”

“And that neither understood nor approved her, nor granted her authority.”

“Yes.”

“Like a lot of other parents,” I said. It was the point we had been circling for minutes, as her oblique look acknowledged.

“Why don’t you say all parents?”

“Because I don’t believe it,” I said. “There has to be an occasional parent-child relationship that works. When it doesn’t work, one side or the other is to blame.”

“And you think it’s usually the child.”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t even imply it. If I implied anything, it’s that people are too ready to assume that it’s the parent.”

A drift of wind moved in the empty, chilly patio. The air was soggy with unshed rain. The expanse of tiles gleamed like an abandoned Roman bath. It would have made a splendid place to open your veins.

I said, “Did you read about that fifteen-year-old who killed his parents the other night? The one that had taken the family car and wrecked it so they had his learner’s license pulled? So that night he went into their room and brained them both with an ax. Who’s to blame in that one?”

“A boy like that is obviously a psychopath.”

“And therefore all the more in need of control, isn’t he? They were doing the only possible thing when they grounded him. But there are millions of people who will sympathize with that murderous slob. He was frustrated in his normal desires. All his friends had cars. His society taught him to equate the driver’s license with the passage into manhood. And anyway we must feel sorry for wrongdoers, they’re unhappy people. Well the
hell
with it! I’m going to save my sympathy for that tormented pair trying to instill a sense of human responsibility into their brat, and getting their brains knocked out for their pains.”

“Oh,
well,
Julie didn’t murder Fran and Lucio, after all.”

“No, but how the blood flowed in fantasy! Why? Because her mother wouldn’t let her do everything her hormones and her teen-age rebellions suggested. Fran is a kind of fool, sure, but the kid is a monster. And don’t tell me consequences caught up with her. They caught up with a lot of other people too.”

“She isn’t that bad,” Ruth said, “and she may be one of the kind that never learns except by making mistakes.”

“So youth must be served,” I said. “They must be left free to work out their lives. You know what youth is? Youth is a pack of barbarians. That’s why I’ve resigned from the God-damned world, because it’s abdicated its authority, it’s
abject
before these underaged goons that think they know everything and know nothing at all, not one damned thing!”

Ruth’s lips were pursed, her eyebrows arched, rueful and dubious. I was aware of the sound of my voice dying out between the blank wings of the house. I had been shouting. Her hand came out and patted my forearm quickly, twice. “Yes,” she said on an indrawn breath like a sigh, and then, “It’s going to rain, we’d better get back. I wish they’d been home, it might have smoothed things out some if Lou could have shown off his finished patio.”

She stooped and laid our little offering between the screen and the massive homemade plank door. I have seen that thoughtful, relinquishing, regretful expression on people as they lay flowers on a grave. We had honestly liked the LoPrestis. It seemed to me, as I know it seemed to Ruth, that we would be better employed consoling one another than avoiding one another.

“I’ll bet you something,” I said. “I’ll bet you he liked it a hundred times better when it was a corporation yard as rough as a lava field, full of tools and people and noise.”

Which is the way it was when we looked into it on the Fourth from the lane of ragged oaks. We stood a minute under the last tree, two hundred feet from the bar. It was like looking in toward home plate from center field, with the crowd overflowing out of the stands into the infield. People saw us, heads turned, teeth glinted, hands waved. A police car with its radio turned on squawked out something from where it was parked off the comer of the eastern wing, and I thought perhaps we already had trouble until I saw the city manager of a town up the line, standing under the red umbrella with a big-time subdivider and builder, keeping his ear to the air, evidently combining pleasure with a proper Independence Day alertness. I saw Bill and Sue Casement, both brown with summer golf, and our resident All-American and his porcelain wife, who were by the bar with our resident dictator, the man in the white coat I had mistaken for a bartender. I should have known better. Lucio’s parties ran on a do-it-yourself basis.

Beyond the white coat I noted two incongruous dark ones, the only coats there besides the dictator’s. Strangers, and sticking together like nuns. Also I saw Annie Williamson, our lady vet, hunt-clubber, raiser of beagles and borzois and Tennessee walkers, judge at all the region horse shows and dog shows and gymkhanas, a woman with the wrists of a laborer, the shoulders of a bantamweight fighter, and a voice like the Hewgag of E Clampus Vitus.

Likewise college professors, gentleman-farmers, honest-to-god farmers (not Tom Weld, never Tom Weld in that patio, though he was represented by his Labrador’s by-blow), retired generals, airline pilots, advertising men, the widow of an internationally famous oil geologist, the wife (in the midst of divorce proceedings) of an internationally famous architect, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, and others unknown, a great swarm to the number I should say of three thousand six hundred and thirty-two, not counting the little children, who were all still up at the Casement pool.

Now here came Fran across the blazing patio to greet us. We waved her back, starting out of our own shade to prevent her exposing her susceptible skin, but she came on anyway, and we met by the cement mixer, which stood about where the shortstop would be playing with a man on first and a right-hander up. She was looking most Gretchen in a dirndl, and she had her fair hair in one thick braid that hung over her shoulder nearly to her waist. Her arms and neck were soft, white, palely freckled; her eyes were brown and moist like her cocker’s; her voice reached out like her hands to lay a caressing touch on us. For company she always put on what Ruth called her
haut blancmange
manner: you had the feeling that if a fly alighted on her it would sink and disappear without trace. And yet a warm sort of woman, almost tediously female, as affectionate as she was affected. She came lamenting the heat and hoping we were not simply
dying
of it, and she gave me a soft look of gratitude when I draped one of my stoles over her arms and shoulders. I meant it as a joke; she took it as a thoughtful acknowledgment of her actinic peril.