Moving On (32 page)

Emma was happily munching her brown cone, and Tommy had licked his down to the rim and was licking inside the rim as far as his tongue could reach, and Teddy had grown tired of hopping and of his cone too and had abandoned it in a chair. He was walking in rapid circles around a penny gum machine, giggling at himself. Emma got up and found some napkins, gave one to Tommy, and caught Teddy by the suspenders of his overalls. She swabbed his face more or less clean as he spun his wheels and giggled and tried to continue circling the gum machine. Emma had heavy calves and rather heavy ankles and her old blue sneakers were very ragged. Her mop of hair came down again while she was wiping Teddy’s face. Watching her handle the boys made Patsy feel strangely envious. She was twice as pretty as Emma, and at least as bright, but still she envied her friend her general know-how. Without meaning to, Emma made her feel that she was behind in some way—behind in life.

Once he was released Teddy trailed over to Patsy clucking his tongue. He stopped in front of her and held out his hand. “Um,” he said, nodding brightly toward the banana split.

“Moocher,” Patsy said. “Wait a minute.” She was spooning up the sweet brown and pink syrup from the bottom of her split dish.

“Um,” Teddy said again, peering approvingly at the syrup and opening his mouth.

“Moocher!” Patsy said again, giving him a spoonful.

“Of course you have to give me a taste now,” Tommy said, popping up and smiling politely.

“Of course,” Patsy said.

“I also get a penny if he gets a penny,” Tommy reminded her. It was her custom to give them pennies when they saw a gum machine.

Patsy wiped her mouth and dug in her purse. She presented them with pennies and they raced to the gum machine, Tommy winning. “Yellow,” he said with a satisfied air and popped his into his mouth.

Teddy’s was black and rolled through his hand and bounced across the floor. He followed, set himself to pounce on it, missed, set himself again, missed again, and finally captured it when it rolled into one of the sticky puddles his dripping ice cream cone had made. “Urn,” he said, holding it up for inspection before he popped it into his mouth.

Emma had been watching the whole business studiously. “You boys are shameless,” she said. “Let’s be going.”

They got in the Ford and Teddy crawled up behind the back seat to capture an old flashbulb that Jim had overlooked.

“Well, gee, I feel like crying,” Emma said and actually sniffed. “You’re pregnant and I’m not. You’ll probably make a better mother than me too. I’m really a wretched mother. The other day I whopped Teddy twice as hard as I meant to because he wouldn’t use the potty when I wanted him to. I was awful.”

Patsy was amazed. She couldn’t imagine Emma hitting Teddy too hard. “Maybe you were just overwrought,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

“Of course I was overwrought,” Emma said. “I’m always getting overwrought.” She turned in the seat to see how the boys were taking the conversation. They weren’t. Tommy was laboring to tie his sneaker and Teddy was gazing placidly out the window.

Patsy suddenly noticed that a driver in a blue Cadillac was zooming backward up the street in her direction. She swerved to the side and tried to honk, but she could never hit the horn when she wanted to. “Stupid woman,” she said, not realizing until the Cadillac backed past her that the woman driving was her Aunt Dixie. “Hey,” she said and tried to wave. But her aunt was apparently backing toward a restaurant, almost a block behind them, and did not notice Patsy. The cars coming down the street hung steady for a moment, as if incredulous, and then swerved to the left or the right. The Cadillac backed between them, never slowing down.

“That’s my aunt that you’ve never met,” Patsy said. “If we had had a wreck I could have introduced you.”

Emma had turned to watch the Cadillac. “She’s not even looking out the window,” she said. “She’s just using her mirror. That’s very against the law.”

Tommy and Teddy perked up. “Why does your aunt break the law?” Tommy asked.

“She doesn’t know there are laws, I don’t think.”

“Does she break God’s laws or people’s laws?”

“Both,” Patsy said, but Emma was exasperated by the question.

“People’s laws, for god’s sakes,” she said. “You’re too bright for your age, young man. Your daddy’s been talking to you again.”

“No he hasn’t,” Tommy said. “Gina talks to me. She says if you break people’s laws the cops get you but if you break God’s laws the devil gets you. The devil lives a few feet under the ground. There’s such a thing as the devil’s dodo too.”

“Ick,” Patsy said. “What will I ever tell mine about things like that? I used to have strict beliefs but something’s happened to them. I don’t know what I believe. My morals will probably be the next to go.”

“Atheistic professors,” Emma said. “The devil is not a few feet under the ground, Tommy.”

“Uum,” Teddy put in, very negatively, shaking his head. The concept of the devil was clearly not to his liking.

“How deep then?” Tommy asked.

“Who knows?”

“At least four thousand miles,” Patsy said. “It’s eight thousand miles through the earth and if he lives anywhere it’s at the center of the earth, which would be four thousand miles. You boys are safe.”

“Um,” Teddy said affirmatively. He was glad to hear it.

“How can I be sure?” Tommy asked.

“Believe Patsy,” Emma said. “She knows more about the devil than Gina does. She’s read a great many books.”

The Hortons lived in a large rather rickety unpainted garage apartment on West Main. When Patsy stopped in front Tommy tried to crawl out the back window, but the glass wasn’t rolled down all the way and he had trouble. Emma yanked him out and he and Teddy ran up the driveway, past the family’s old white Nash Rambler.

“Let’s go somewhere without them,” Emma said. “We never really get to talk. If I had any money we could go shopping.”

“We could go looking,” Patsy said. The Hortons’ brokeness always discomfited her a little.

“The new graduate students have come in,” Emma said. “If there are any lively ones Flap will bring them home. Maybe we can all go eat Mexican food or something. We might even get drunk. I need a party.”

Patsy waved at Flap, who was standing in the garage in Levi’s and a white tee shirt fixing his bicycle. “Okay,” she said, willing but not enthusiastic. Emma trudged off after the boys, still trying to knot her hair, and Patsy drove away, relieved to be alone. An hour with the Horton boys always made her appreciate solitude. Jim was away when she got home. The apartment was cooler than the outdoors but still warm and humid. She took off her sweaty shirt and stood in the bathroom in her bra and shorts looking at herself in the shaving mirror and musing on how she would look when she was large. It was hard to imagine. That evening when it got cool she meant to walk to the library and bring home some books on it all.

2

“Y
OU COULD HAVE BEEN
a little more polite,” Patsy said, coming out of the bedroom. She was still in her bra and shorts.

“I was polite,” Jim said. “What was I supposed to do, ask him in for a drink?”

“You could have asked him if he wanted a drink of water. He walked all the way up those stairs. Who’s the package for?”

“For you, of course,” Jim said, handing it to her. “It’s from Miri. For a minute I had hopes it would be my
Cambridge Bib
.”

Miri was her younger sister, in school at Stanford. Patsy tore into the package and discovered that it contained a sort of psychedelic shift, very bright and long and rather fetching. She shook it to see if there was a note from Miri but there wasn’t, and she put it on.

“It’ll be great when I’m bigger,” she said. “Hippie maternity clothes. I wonder if Miri’s become a hippie?”

“Undoubtedly,” Jim said. He was dressing to go to an indoctrination meeting for graduate students and felt generally sulky. Patsy’s frivolity clashed with his mood. “I wish those books had come,” he said, selecting a dark tie.

Patsy struck a few poses in the doorway, hoping he would tell her she looked nice in the shift, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry I bitched at you,” she said. “You weren’t really rude to the postman.”

But Jim’s mind was on the books that hadn’t come, and when she looked into the living room she felt a sinking of the heart. On the floor by the red couch were sixty dollars’ worth of quality paperbacks, almost all of them criticism or scholarship. Jim had bought them the night before at a paperback store downtown. He had got in a conversation with several graduate students and a famous newly arrived professor and had bought every book that he could remember having heard mentioned. She had been with him and had wandered about the bookstore, feeling more and more frivolous and small-time, and had finally bought a copy of
Bonjour Tristesse
, which she had never read. When they were home she read it in half an hour, sitting on the bed in her nightgown while Jim sat at their desk carefully writing his name and the date in each of the new paperbacks. He read a few sentences from each one before putting it on a pile on the other side of the desk. She had felt a sinking of the heart then too, for it reminded her of the night in Phoenix when he had rearranged his photographic files, all of which were presently in a closet, forgotten. He had taken to ordering every book Flap Horton mentioned, it seemed to Patsy. Even Flap was taken aback when he found out that Jim had ordered a set of
The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
.

“My god,” he whispered to Patsy. “A beginning graduate student with the
Cambridge Bib
. The professors here don’t even own the
Cambridge Bib
”

“It’s your fault,” Patsy said fiercely, though it wasn’t. “Just quit mentioning books to him. He even wants to order the OED and that costs three hundred dollars. If he asks you, tell him he won’t need it. I don’t want this apartment buried in unread books.”

“The OED?” Flap said, staggered. “His first week in graduate school? He’s either a genius or a fool.”

“I don’t care to vote,” Patsy said.

When Jim had come to bed and noticed
Bonjour Tristesse
he asked her how it was, but he asked a little condescendingly, as if he already knew. The condescension irked her. She had just told him that afternoon about being pregnant and had hoped they could talk about it once they got to bed. She wanted to be made over. But Jim wanted to talk about William Duffin, a prize modernist that Rice had managed to hire away from Ohio State. All the graduate students were in a dither about him. Patsy was in a mood to think a baby more important than a modernist, even one who had written eight books, and she was glad when Jim went to sleep so she could at least think about the baby and be glad about it herself.

“Listen,” she said, watching Jim knot his tie. “Emma needs to get away from those kids. Let’s take them for Mexican food tonight. Maybe there’ll be some interesting new graduate students to bring along.”

“Maybe,” Jim said, but he was too nervous about the meeting to really listen, and he kissed her as he departed without really looking at her. He would have been surprised to know that after he left she went out into the hot back yard and sat in a lawn chair crying for twenty minutes. Though it was early September, the heavy air and the moist earth seemed to hold all the fecundity of spring or early summer. Patsy remembered Emma and the boys going up to the garage where Flap was fixing his bicycle, and how glad he had looked to see them; in her breast she felt a bitter loneliness, as if she would be left to do everything she did alone. She had heard that pregnancy might make her draw apart from her husband, but instead she felt the reverse. She had wanted him to hold her and hug her before he left, and she felt very hurt that he had not noticed, or had not wanted to. When she had finished crying she went in to write her sister, thanking her for the lovely shift.

Jim need not have worried about the graduate meeting. It was pointless but not unpleasant and was in no way threatening. Outside the room where it was held he could see the formal hedges and bright green lawns of Rice University. Mexican gardeners worked at the hedges with long electric hedge clippers. The gardeners wore khakis and straw hats and looked very out of place in the quiet academic quadrangle. They looked as if they belonged on some remote hacienda shearing sheep.

Jim sat with Flap Horton and listened as Flap genially dissected the new batch of graduate students. Various more or less meaningless sheets of paper were passed out and studied with deep earnestness by all the budding scholars. Jim felt a little overdressed and mentioned as much to Flap, who wore a blue tee shirt and old slacks.

“No, rookies have to dress up,” Flap said. “I have to hang loose myself—otherwise I feel like a suck-ass. Next year you can just wear slacks. Two years from now you’ll probably wear Levi’s. Three years from now you’ll have to come naked, to show you’ve still got your self-respect. Four years from now you either won’t be here or you’ll be a member of the establishment and self-respect will be a moot question.”

A very good-looking redheaded girl was sitting in the front row. She wore white net stockings. “She won’t last,” Flap said, “but it’ll be fun while she does. The guy in Bermuda shorts, with the beard, he won’t last either. His name’s Kenny Cambridge. I kinda like him.”

“Why won’t he last?”

“He had never heard of Northrop Frye,” Flap said. “Or Maynard Mack. Or F. R. Leavis. Or anybody I mentioned, come to think of it.”

“Neither have I,” Jim said, a little apprehensive.

“No, but you will,” Flap said with a reassuring grin. “You’re just illiterate. Kenny seems to be anti-literate, or at least anti-scholarly. You have to be really brilliant to get away with that.”

Jim was depressed and remained so throughout the meeting. Nothing at all happened. A few polite questions were asked, and politely answered. William Duffin, the new modernist, came in for a few minutes but said nothing. He was a tall heavy man, very sure of himself, and there was a slightly devilish cast to his countenance. His black hair was a little longer than the professorial norm.