Safe Passage (25 page)

    
If there had been nothing more to this argument than words and logic, Alfred might have sided with Patrick. But Alfred was ten at the time, and the music spoke of the forces of good and evil in a tongue more compelling than speech. Listening to the wild orchestra, to Mephistopheles whistling across the stage (there was a picture of this on the album cover) in his fury at possibly losing Faust's soul, hearing the chorus of angels come in, singing "Ave Signor" in a sweet melody he hummed sometimes even now—at ten Alfred had been a believer. Years later, when he read Goethe in sophomore world literature—in a poor translation, he supposed—it seemed pale, thin stuff compared to
Boito's
music.

    
"I never thought it was nonsense, exactly,"
Mag
said. "I suppose I should have told you that. I would have liked you to have some religion, I guess. So you wouldn't end up—so bloodless."

    
"I never thought of myself as bloodless," Alfred said.

    
"I should have taken all of you to church,"
Mag
told him. "I never did because I didn't have the energy. I don't mean just fighting Dad about it—I mean the idea of getting up on Sunday morning and going anywhere."

    
"You did other things for us."

    
"I did a lot of laundry."

    
"You took me to piano lessons."

    
"Oh…that."

    
"I liked the piano lessons." He had listened to
Mag's
records and wanted to imitate them, so he had practiced diligently.
It
 
always
distressed him that his fingers would not do what his mind commanded, but he certainly tried. Then Mrs. Wellman retired and they couldn't settle on another piano teacher, so that phase of his education ended. Afterward, he missed it for years.

    
Unwilling to let his mother's mood plunge again, he searched for some way to keep the conversation on piano lessons going just a little longer. "I liked having you take me and pick me up from piano," he said. "It was the only time we were together, just the two of us. I liked the way we used to talk in English accents when you dropped me off."

    
"We did?"

    
"I'd get out of the car and you'd say, 'Well, see you in
hawf
an hour, then,' in your accent, and I'd say, 'Jolly good, then…

hawf
an hour.' "

    
"We talked in English accents?" She seemed a little disoriented. "Oh yes…when you were little. That's what you remember about piano lessons?"

    
"Well…one of the things."

    
His mother looked no happier than she had when he'd offered to watch her house for the winter.

    
His father had come downstairs. It was clear that he had not been napping but showering, because his hair was still wet. His irises were beginning to be visible, so his sight must be returning. He looked as if he were in pain. Alfred did not know what he could do. Then Cynthia walked in, smiling and getting ready to speak, and Alfred felt—truly—as if he had been rescued.

    
Mag
watched Cynthia and Patrick come through the archway between the hall and the living room. Cynthia was smiling and Patrick was squinting, and they both looked false.

    
"It's coming back, finally," Patrick said. Sure enough, his pupils were
reappearing,
a cold light was glittering from his eyes. Percival was dead, and on Patrick's face was the frank relief of returning sight, the same as yesterday.

    
"I'll get you some aspirin," Alfred said.

    
"I already took a couple."

    
Oh, yes: aspirin to soothe him, everything to soothe him. How, at a time like this, could he be soothed? There was aspirin in the kitchen cabinet, aspirin in each bathroom, in his night table by the bed. Even if he was blind, he would be able to find it. But if he went blind, she'd have to help him anyway, subtly—the way she'd once helped Alfred cook French toast at the age of five, pretending she was doing other things, behaving as if he were perfectly capable of operating the stove. They would have raised seven sons and perhaps buried one, but instead of freedom they would return to those days when all her time was occupied by performing small personal services—
chauffering
Patrick to doctor's appointments the way she'd once taken the children to lessons and scouts, selecting his clothes. And he would pretend it was nothing, just as he was pretending today that Tim O'Neal's safety did not foretell
Percival's
death. She would do it because she was well trained. All her energies sucked up into his demands…and the possibility of a career, deferred for twenty-five years, snuffed out entirely. Watching his swimming-pool blue eyes open up, and his pretense that his son was still alive, she didn't love him, didn't care if he went forever blind, didn't care at all.

    
"When we finally get some news," she said coldly, "it's going to come just like that reporter showing up on the doorstep before. All of a sudden there'll be a khaki uniform instead of newspaper people or the neighbors. That's how it's going to happen. It's not going to be…" She thought of something. "Or do they wear blues for a death?"

    
"How many times are you going to say that? Or some version of it?" Patrick asked. "Don't have him dead and buried before you have to."
 

    
Oh, he was very noble.
Very independent.
Capable of grand thoughts but not of finding his shoes, blind, in the closet.
Cynthia, beside him, smiled more brightly. What was there to smile about? Was Cynthia trying to soothe her, or were school psychologists just taught to smile when marital tension surfaced among the parents of their students? "What you two need," she told them, "is a drink. I didn't want to tell you this, but one of my great skills is bartending."

    
It was not yet evening, but the idea of a drink appealed to her. Patrick had not been able to drink for almost ten years because alcohol made him sneeze. But she could get smashing drunk if she felt like it, wipe herself out. Maybe she would. She had always thought Patrick's allergy to liquor was poetic justice—a penalty for the drunken nights he had spent during the years when she was cooped up with small children. And it seemed fitting that alcohol should offer him no escape today, when again he was pretending there was nothing important to attend to at home, even though Tim O'Neal had been found and Percival had not.

    
Years before, when the boys were very little, Patrick had started getting drunk regularly with another man from work. She thought in part he did it as revenge against her for expecting him to
babysit
while she took her classes. He believed tending children was her role in life, not his, and he watched them sulkily, angrily…and even when he invented the disposable diapers, it was to keep her from complaining and not because he cared enough to spend his time supervising babies. So once a month or so (never on the night she had class; he was careful about that), he went off to drink with his friend from work—deliberately went off without calling, never on the same night twice, in no pattern.

    
She usually didn't realize he wasn't coming home until it was too late. She would look at her overcooked dinner and redden as understanding dawned on her, anger rose in her throat. It was then that she most wanted to walk out, claim her own freedom as he had claimed his—alone, without responsibilities, carrying all she needed in her backpack. At the same time, though, her sons were there; she could not have left them. She even felt obligated to feign some semblance of normality in front of the older ones.

    
"Where's Daddy?"

  
  
"He had to go somewhere with a friend. He'll have supper later; go ahead now. Eat your beans."

    
Then the fury would wash over her—not that Patrick was gone, but that he would leave her alone, with three or four young sons, helpless against the obligation, without a car, without a sitter, enslaved.

    
Ten o'clock came, and eleven, and after the children went to sleep she cleaned house with an energy born of rage, too angry to study or even watch the evening news. She vacuumed, mopped, folded laundry, showered—then dropped, exhausted finally, into bed. She never fell asleep. She lay there and imagined revenge: Patrick drunk and lying on the street, mugged by some teenager, hit by a taxi, rolled by a whore. Ha! He
better
be dead. Midnight came, a moonless dark, and the house made strange noises in the stillness. Patrick was with a woman—a woman quite different from
Mag
, with smooth tan skin, dark hair, slim hips that brushed Patrick's, not accidentally, as they talked and sipped drinks at the bar. A childless woman, single, free.
Mag
startled awake, not yet thirty, mother of however many babies (it varied from year to year), not even finished with school.

    
A sound outside, a car, perhaps.
She closed her eyes, hating him, biding her time until he should come in, take over, so that she could walk away from him, be done with wifehood and motherhood and enslavement, go out into the night with her backpack, free.
But the car passed…and it was one o'clock, two.
What if he was really dead? What if he had suffered?

Then, just as she was feeling a little sorry for him, he always showed up. She held her breath as he came up the stairs—always held her breath—because she believed that with air growing stale in her lungs and Patrick still on the other side of the bedroom door, she should still have the power to choose him. Or not.

    
"You bastard," she said when he tiptoed into the room.

    
He did not smoke, but the odor of cigarettes clung to his jacket, and the smell of liquor was on his breath and his skin. "
Mag
, honey, don't be mad at me. I'm too sick. I'll be hung over tomorrow all day." He draped the jacket over the chair and took off the shirt and got into bed with her, half-clothed.

    
"Get away from me, Patrick. I mean it." He was pulling up her nightgown. "What the hell are you doing?" She pulled the nightgown down.

    
"I'm sorry. Really. I should have called. I was going to, but then I got to drinking." He left the nightgown alone and concentrated on stroking her back, easing his hands around to her breasts. She took them away.

    
"You know how I lose all track of time when I drink. Do you hate your husband? Do you really?"

    
"Yes."

    
He sighed and got out of bed, pulled his pants off, dropped them on the floor. Back under the covers he began to rub her back again—" Don't hate me, Maggie"—and eased his hands forward until she pulled away. Undaunted, he edged his fingers toward her breasts, and she evaded him until she was at the very edge of the bed, feeling ridiculous, engaged in a tug-of-war over her bosom.

    
"For God's sake, Patrick, get off. Only a complete shit would leave me here with four"—six, three—"kids after I've been with them all day, and not call, just let me think you were lying dead somewhere. And then come home trying to play lovey-dovey." But he ignored her, abandoning her breasts and stroking her leg instead, higher, the soft part of her thigh, and she thought: Well, if he wants to do
this
, at least he probably hasn't been with a woman.

    
"I'm sorry,
Mag
, I really am." His fingers were inside her, gentle, stroking, and she was wet, she couldn't help it, what with the patient movement and his body pressed against her so she could feel his erection. She smelled the liquor and the smoke on him, exotic smells after talcum and diapers; smelled a life of cigars, three-piece suits, not her own drip-dry cotton life, not at all…and his lips and hands finally made her forget herself, because he always made love most skillfully when he was drunk.

    
Afterward, in the morning, baggy-eyed from lack of sleep, she was always furious. He had been free, and she had been trapped, and he had tricked her, once more, into accepting that. She came to see that he wasn't going to help her with the children—at least not then—but only participate in making more of them, and she hated his drinking and his friend from work. Then just before Simon had his tonsils out, he came home one night sneezing and miserable as if he'd contracted the flu. But it wasn't the
flu,
it was whatever he'd been drinking. After that, every time he had so much as half a glass of beer, he started sneezing again and again in rapid succession, like someone in the grip of violent
hayfever
, and he had to stop drinking for good. Whenever she was angry with him she conjured up the image of him helpless, sneezing, punished for his drinking and was always comforted by her conviction that it served him right.

    
Now Cynthia stood between them, looking from one to the other, and Patrick was still squinting, being the noble
blindman
—not blind at the moment, however.
Mag
almost accepted the drink before she decided she mustn't be drunk or even the least bit hazy when the Marines came; she owed Percival at least that. "I'd love something," she said, "but I guess I won't, not right now."