Her Father's House (34 page)

Something Adam feared to hear and yet needed to hear was coming. He waited.

“She seemed like such a child, not much older than you are now. Well, five years. But then, you have always been a whole lot older than your years.”

Now it was coming, the thing Pa really wanted to tell him. At the same time, he seemed uncertain about whether he ought to tell it.

“One evening when she was there, her father came raging into the store. His rage was out of control. He called his daughter a dirty name. He threatened me with his fist. I tried to protect Eileen and managed fairly well, although he did land one blow on her cheek before I was able to shove him out onto the street and into his buggy.

“My heart ached for her. She was a proper young lady, and he had shamed her before all of the people in the store. Well, I did what anyone would do to comfort her. I washed her face and put some salve on the bruise. I gave her my bed upstairs and put a cot in the hall for myself. Her father came again the next day as I had suspected he would, but she stayed upstairs out of sight. I had a few friends in the police force, and I guess they had plenty to say to him, because after a few days he stopped coming. I heard that the farm where he worked had been sold, and he was no longer needed. So the next thing I heard was that he had left town and perhaps left the state, God knows where to. . . .”

He's sorry he's told me this much, thought Adam. As in a puzzle, the pieces were beginning to join together in his head.

“We fell in love, Adam. It will happen to you, too, someday. Maybe when you least expect it, or even want it. It's nature, a beautiful thing.”

“But you never got married, did you? And that's why I'm a bastard.”

“Don't use that word! Whatever we did or didn't do has nothing to do with you. Remember that. You are as good as any human being in the whole wide world, and better than most.”

Still, that was no answer.

“You weren't married, and you lied to me, didn't you?”

“I did, and I'm sorry. It was wrong, but I wanted to protect you.”

“Then why didn't you marry her? You married Rachel in the synagogue.”

“It wasn't possible. I asked, but they wouldn't have Eileen.”

“What about the church? The one on Main Street, or the one on Seaside Avenue.”

“Neither.
They
didn't want
me.
Besides, her father had gone to all of them and told them terrible things about me.” Pa looked down at the floor. “Well, some of it was true. She was his daughter, and I had done to her what I should not have done. In my heart, I have never stopped apologizing.”

“Weren't there any other places where you could have gone?”

“To a justice of the peace somewhere, I guess. But we were confused. It's no excuse. . . . It just seemed as if we had been turned down everywhere, as if nobody wanted us. We
weren't thinking. . . . I don't know.”

Whenever his father said “I don't know,” it meant that he had no more to say, or that he did not want to say any more. Still, there was one thing that Adam needed to ask.

“Are you ever sorry that I was born? You can tell me the truth, Pa. As you said, I'm thirteen. I'm a man.”

“Sorry? My God, Adam, you're my right hand. You're my heart. If I could talk better English, I would say”—Pa's voice shook in his throat—“I would say everything I want for you. The whole world! Oh, people can be so stupid, so cruel. May nobody ever hurt you, Adam, as I did. But I have to tell you the truth now, before I die.”

   

Pa went downstairs, silence swept across the space, and even the wind died down. Adam put out the lamp and lay still. Mixed feelings, he thought. The teacher had used the expression yesterday while reading aloud, and it was a good one: You could be terribly angry and terribly sad at the same time. He wondered how many boys had a story like this to think about. Of course he couldn't be the only one in the world, but he was sure he was the only one in his school, and probably the only one in this town. If there had been others, he would have heard about them just as Leo had heard about him.

So now he knew that he was
different.
His father had said that the world could be stupid and cruel, but so far he hadn't felt any cruelty. No doubt the time would come. It came back to him that Rachel had told him a few days before about her cousin who had not been allowed to go walking with a young man from a “bad family.” What, then, he wondered, was Adam Arnring's family? Except for those people asleep downstairs, he had none. Who was he, then?

Oh, come on, Adam, he scolded himself. You're at the head of the class. You're the best pitcher in the whole school.

And didn't Pa just call you his right hand?

On the floor between the bed and the window, Arthur, dreaming about a squirrel who had outrun him, whimpers in his sleep. Light from the white sky falls on his skinny old flanks. Fourteen, he is, and hasn't got much longer. He's ending, while I'm beginning. But we started out the same way, Arthur. Both of us were unwanted.

HER FATHER
'
S HOUSE
A Dell Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Delacorte hardcover edition published August 2002
Dell international edition published September 2002
Dell mass market edition / December 2003

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002 by Bar-Nan Creations, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002023781

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Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN: 978-0-440-33462-0

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