Ten Thousand Saints (35 page)

Her lips were pressed to the tube like so, the bulb swelling like a soap bubble on the end of a child’s wand, when she heard the door slam shut. Harriet turned her head, and her hands followed, and her left pinky, alert, trailed through the flame. The pipe bounced once on the edge of the table, not breaking, and then broke on the floor.

A man and a woman stood by the door. Harriet could see, through her UV lenses, as she jogged to the sink and held her hand in the cold stream, that they were as startled as she was. But she felt her heart slow: for an instant, as she heard the crash of the glass, she had expected boys with baseball bats.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the woman, not coming closer. Her British accent had a cooling effect, like a salve. “We heard the music. We knocked.” She turned to the man, who was wearing the sleek uniform of a chauffeur. “Could you wait in the car, Dwayne? We’ll be a while.”

D
o you take milk, or . . . ?”

“Lemon, if you have it.”

In the crisper, Harriet found a quarter of something that resembled a lemon, its tissue eaten gray by mold. She served tea because she’d imagined serving tea, but a lemon had not figured into the picture. Harriet was a coffee drinker; she was one of those Vermonters with the liter-size mug, drowned with sugar and cream. Of course Diane Urbanski took lemon with her tea.

“I’m sorry,” Harriet said, the tea spilling a little on the coffee table as she set the mugs down, “I don’t.” Would this be, in Di’s mind, Harriet’s first act of hostility? Or would she just read her as a bumpkin, the lemonless bumpkin ex?

Di waved her ringed fingers. Not to worry. Despite the fact that the couch was sculpted from a bathtub six inches off the ground, she appeared to have found a comfortable position. She was dressed for an interview: black pants and black heels and a white blouse winged open to reveal a sturdy rope of pearls. She was pretty, but not as pretty as Harriet had feared. Hers was the kind of makeup you could see from across a coffee table, dusting each of her perfect pores as pale as chalk.

“It was the ponytailed man, wasn’t it,” said Harriet, feeling foolish. “Gray hair? Glasses?” He’d been awfully friendly.

“Bob,” Di confirmed, her eyes hard. “I would have been here earlier,” she said, “if Bob hadn’t taken so long to locate his backbone.” He’d succeeded in convincing Di that there was no sign of any of the kids in Lintonburg, as Les had paid him handsomely to do, but after taking care of his mother’s medical bills, he’d had second thoughts, sleepless nights. He couldn’t, after all, keep a child from its mother.

“I know you wouldn’t want to do that, either,” Di went on, reaching for her mug.

Would Harriet want to keep a child from its mother? She studied her tea. An old friend of hers had once told fortunes by reading tea leaves. She’d had a little tea booth on Ash Street, a gypsy kerchief, gold hoops in her ears. Where was she now? Was Harriet the only grown-up stuck in the sixties, hawking her juvenile wares? Who was she fooling, playing this game of hide-and-seek with a woman she didn’t know, pleading to be on the kids’ team?

“She was here, yes,” Harriet said into her mug. “But now she’s gone. They just ran off, and that’s the truth. They’re on tour. They’re on tour with the boys’ band. I don’t know how that happens, exactly.” She was turning chatty again; she couldn’t stop herself. “How can a bunch of boys just decide to start a band and go on tour? But that’s the way they do it, I understand.”

Di lowered and raised her tea bag. Lowered, raised. Harriet tried to decide whether she hated her. Did she resent her? Was she insulted by her? “I’d hate to resort to Les’s level,” said Di, looking truly repulsed. “But I’m willing to pay you whatever it takes.”

Harriet, in the director’s chair, cradled her tea in her hands. The liquid through the cup was hot, threatening to scald the bandaged finger she’d already burned. “Money?” she said stupidly.

“I won’t press any charges,” Di promised. Lowered, raised, plodding as a backhoe. “I’ll forget she was ever here.”

Harriet could not bring herself to feel sorry for Les, who had been duped out of his own bribe. But now this woman, too, thought she could buy her way into anything? What a match! Harriet put down her mug, rattling it against the table. “Do you think I’m holding the girl for ransom? Do you think I have her bound and gagged in the basement? Christ, I
wish
money could fix this.” Yes, she hated her, she resented her, she was insulted by her, but she hated herself, too. “I let the kids stay here, and I probably shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry. And I let them leave, and I even gave them a little money. Yes, I have a little money, too! But when I look back at these months, and I try to identify what I could have done differently, to keep my son from backing me into this corner, I honestly don’t know what it is.” She reached for her cigarettes and stabbed one in her mouth. “Do you think I don’t want to know where my son is? Ever since your daughter rode that
goddamn
train into town, he has vanished. Do you know that? He might reappear every now and then, he might leave me his
cats
to look after”—she shoved the tiger-striped one off the arm of her chair—“but he’s gone. He’s gone, too.”

On the top shelf of the homemade bookcase, white built-ins that stretched up to the ceiling, a wooden owl perched. It was a crudely carved statue, and Di had never liked it. Les had an identical one in his apartment in New York. The pair of birds must have divorced, too, and now Harriet and Les each kept one.

“How
is
Jude?” asked Di, attempting to recover some civility. She hadn’t expected Harriet to be
angry,
angry at
her
. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel so shut down by Harriet’s anger, to feel her own anger drain before it had the chance to surface. She hadn’t expected tea. She’d expected pot, maybe. Over the years, she’d imagined getting stoned with Les’s ex-wife,
bonding,
trading demeaning stories about Les’s lack of ambition, the size of his anatomy, etc. But he was the last person she cared to talk about now. Les was an idiot. What else was there to say?

“I’m not sure,” Harriet answered.

“I really
like
Jude,” Di said pathetically. “He’s a good kid.” A series of expressions flickered across Harriet’s face: surprise, possessiveness, pride.

“I like Eliza.”

“She’s a good kid, too.”

“She is.”

“How is she?” asked Di.

In a photo album in her apartment in New York, nine pictures chronicled Di’s single pregnancy. In each picture, taken by Daniel, she held up an assortment of fingers: one for one month, two for two months. In the seven-month photo, she was posed in an arabesque, her leotard stretched tight over her expanding belly.

“I think she’s scared,” Harriet said.

“Of what?” Di demanded, her voice trembling. “Is she scared of
me
?”

Harriet put out her cigarette and lit another one, and when she offered the pack to Di, she was surprised that she accepted. “This may not be any of my business. But when you live in a house with four teenagers, you start to make observations.” She had not expected to offer Di any counsel. “You probably know that we”—she waved her cigarette vaguely—“adopted Jude.”
That
was when the problems began, Harriet thought. Not a few months ago, but on Jude’s ninth birthday, the day her husband told their son he was adopted. She’d been so angry at Les, but she knew they shouldn’t have waited so long to tell him. Even then, when Jude was a small child, she’d been so scared he wouldn’t forgive her, that he’d love her less. And now look what had happened! It was keeping the secret from him that had turned him away from her. “She was just sixteen,” said Harriet, “the girl who gave birth to Jude.”

Di balanced her cigarette while she sipped her tea. The mug said
DR. GERALD F. STEIN, D.D.S.: BRIGHTENING THE WORLD ONE SMILE AT A TIME
. It was strange to be here and yet strangely familiar; she felt as uncomfortable here as she had in Les’s apartment. The house even
smelled
a little like Les. It smelled lived-in, the air dense with dust motes and cigarette smoke and the gas from the stove. The cushions of the couch were slightly damp, as though they were sweating.

“I would hate to think,” Harriet went on, “that she had been forced to give him up. That I had stolen him from his rightful mother.”

Di smiled around her cigarette. She couldn’t help it. She brushed a tuft of cat hair from her pants. “What on earth is a ‘rightful mother’?” Were
they
rightful mothers? In Di’s mind, there was no such thing. No parent ever acted in her child’s “best interest”; no parent was a hero. A parent wrote her child’s story every day; the story was what the parent left behind. Teenage pregnancy had not been in Di’s script for Eliza. Di had the power to revise this scene; she could excuse Eliza from her own bleak future. She didn’t want her daughter to be trapped in telling someone else’s story before she’d had the chance to tell her own.

“I guess I have no idea,” Harriet admitted. She blew two tunnels of smoke from her nostrils. All these abandoned children, she was thinking. Jude, and poor Teddy, and she guessed Johnny and Eliza, too, and Prudence—lost, inscrutable Pru. All left by one parent or both, in one way or another.

Yet here they were, Di mused (snatching up the thought like a cigarette): Les’s two exes, trying to recover them, and now it was
they
—the mothers—who had been deserted by their children.

How odd! thought Harriet, that Les was the least they had in common. It was their children’s desertion that mattered to them, that left them alone. Jude and Eliza and Johnny had devoted themselves, fiercely and exclusively, to one another, but Harriet and Di weren’t capable of forging an alliance together, despite what they shared. The only people they’d ever felt that kind of loyalty toward—perhaps this was the mistake they both had made—were their children.

Well, that was what loyalty did, didn’t it? It corroded. It collapsed on itself. Harriet thought of the songs Jude sang. About Loyalty. About Purity, Brotherhood, Trust.

O
riginally a cheery two-tone—the bottom half white, the top robin’s egg blue—the Dodge A100 van was first owned by a Canadian cannabis farmer, who had converted it into a camper by the time he sold it to Lester Keffy in 1970. Back then, with its split windshield, its bug-eye headlights, its overall grooviness, you could almost pretend it was a Volkswagen bus, which was the effect Les had been going for. Later, to mask the pockmarks of rust, Les painted the van lavender, baptizing it the Purple People Eater. Over the years, the elements had worn away the paint; behind the greasy prints of muted purple, streaks of rusty white and blue shone through.

Intent on renovation, back in Lintonburg, Jude had administered his own streaky coat of paint, this time with the nearly empty can of green Les had once used on the greenhouse, and to Jude’s satisfaction, the camper van now looked more like an army tank than a hippie bus. He’d taken down the flower-print curtains, and over the rust-eaten
IMPEACH NIXON—HE “BUGS” ME
, he’d affixed a newly pressed bumper sticker:
GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS
.

Inside the shining armor, however, the contents of the van were familiarly rank. The one row of seats that remained was seamed with duct tape; in other places, the corn dog stuffing spilled forth. The carpet was clumped and flaked with ancient contaminants—gum, potting soil, pot—and had over the years loosened itself from the floor, so that the edge of its layers—the mud-gray crust; the spongy, marbled mantle; the black, gelatinous core—now curled into a crisp tongue, and upon entry via the side door, was something to trip over. The headliner had also become unglued, so that sitting in the backseat was like sitting in a drooping tent. Jude had tried to thumbtack it back into place, but the tacks stuck fecklessly; every now and then one fell like the first startling drop of rain. Between the low-slung ceiling and the equipment piled high in the back half of the van, rearview visibility relied mostly on faith.

For the first time since Jude had transported the householders to Vermont, the three of them were alone in the van. Now they were leaving New York again, and he was in the backseat, sharing it with Eliza’s oversized suitcase. Johnny was at the wheel, and on the other side of the blusterous engine, sitting above the front axle, was Eliza, sunning her bare feet on the dash. The Kramaro, crammed with the rest of the crew, darted ahead of them; Delph hung his middle finger victoriously out the passenger window. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was summer, and these were the best years of their lives, and they were crossing the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson a spangled blue ribbon laced through it. On the boom box that served as car stereo was the new album by Side By Side, with whom they had just performed; behind Jude were one thousand copies of their own seven-inch record, which had just been pressed in Haworth, New Jersey, and released on Green Mountain Recordings, the label Delph had produced out of thin air.

On the front jacket was the logo Johnny had sketched—two pine boughs forming an
X
. In light of the band’s name, Jude had requested bayonets instead, preferably dripping with blood, but he’d acquiesced, and the logo now decorated their bass drum, their T-shirt, their sweatshirt, and their bumper sticker. On the reverse side of the album was a photo taken by Ben, the four of them posed in the band shell at Tompkins, where Mayor Koch was trying to enforce the 1:00
A.M.
curfew. Wasn’t going to happen.
Curfew?
said the look on the faces in the picture.
Fucking curfew?
Ben and Matthew and Delph had never been to the city before; Kram had once visited a Long Island aunt who’d said, “Manhattan? You got a death wish?” During the week that they’d crashed at Rooster’s place, Eliza and Jude and Johnny had done their best to show them around. They spent an entire day skating Washington Square Park, waited three hours for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, which Delph insisted on seeing. Went to shows at Wetlands, the Ritz, the Pyramid. Ran into guys. So many guys. On any given afternoon twenty of them could be found hanging out at Some Records on the Lower East Side, selling demos and T-shirts, posting flyers for the next show. It was there they ran into two guys from the show in Vermont; their poke-and-stick
X
s had healed thick and dark. Then they all found their way back to Rooster’s, whose apartment was as packed and disheveled as Tent City. Delph slept in a chair, and Ben slept in the bathroom, curled around the toilet like a cashew. And though they imagined once or twice that they saw Di walking out of a building, or thought they heard her calling their names, they never did. The city sheltered them.