The Clock Winder (37 page)

Andrew said, “There, Jenny, there, Jenny,” although Jenny was happily gnawing his shirt collar without a care in the world.

“I will
never
get used to these creatures, never,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I haven’t stepped out of the house since they arrived. Gillespie? Why are you just standing there?”

“I’m waiting for him to come down,” Gillespie said.

“Down? Where
is
he? Oh, on my damask curtains, I’m sure of it.” She stepped back and sank into one of the dining room chairs. From the table behind her she took a bottle of vitamin C, uncapped it and gulped two pills, like a man downing
a glass of whiskey. Her hands were shaking. “They’re everywhere,” she said. “Chattering all day, bombing into people, and at night it’s no better. They’re silent then but it’s a
planning
silence, they hang from all the leaves plotting how to get me in the morning.”

“It’s the oak trees,” Gillespie said. “They favor oaks.”

Her voice was calm and unemphatic, reducing monsters to mere scientific fact. But then the locust whirred up from the curtains and lit on the lampshade, and when George swung at it with the poker all he did was knock the lamp over. “Damn,” said Gillespie.

“We’re like in jail,” Andrew said. “Matthew and Gillespie and George are the trusties, they get to go out for mail and food. Mother and I stay inside.”

“I spend a summer in the house every seventeen years,” said Mrs. Emerson. She thought that over a minute. Then she said, “The next time they come, I’ll be dead.”

“Oh, Mrs.
Emerson!”
P.J. said.

But Mrs. Emerson only looked at her as if she wondered where P.J. had come from. She said, “Peter, do you remember when they were here before? You were, oh, twelve, I suppose. You were
hopeless
. You made a necklace out of the shells and wore it everywhere. You had bottles in your closet packed full of locusts.
Black
with them.”

“I did?” Peter said.

“You kept one on a string and took it for walks down Cold Spring Lane.”

He still couldn’t picture it. Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct recollection of Melissa’s running away from home with a peanut butter sandwich and a pomegranate,
two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.

There was another whir. George leaped straight up in the air, as if he were catching a fly ball, and came to earth with his hands cupped tightly around a rattling black shape. “Ha!” he said.

“Now, when I open the door,” Gillespie told him, “throw him outside.
Far
out, Georgie. Don’t let him fly back in or Grandma will have a fit.”

They all went to the hallway—even Mrs. Emerson, hanging back a little. Gillespie opened the door and stood ready with the magazine. When George tossed the locust up it seemed to hang in mid-air a minute, and then Gillespie reached out and batted it on its way so violently that she lost her balance. It was Matthew who caught her. He was just crossing the porch with a folded newspaper.

“Not
another
one,” he said, setting her on her feet.

“She says we’ll have to stop up the chimney. Look who’s come for a visit.”

Matthew looked over Gillespie’s head and said, “Peter! I wondered whose car that was.”

“I was just driving through,” Peter said.

“He brought a girlfriend, and we’re going to get him to stay a good long time.”

Peter said, “Oh, well, I don’t—”

“Come on, we’ve got plenty of room,” Matthew said. “Well! Looks like the Army’s changed you a little.”

But Matthew hadn’t changed. He was still black-haired and stooped and skinny, still continually readjusting his glasses on the bridge of his long narrow nose. Gillespie, sheltered under his arm, smiled up at him and said, “You look tired.”

“I am. Old Smodgett was drunk again.”

He kissed his mother, who had come to the doorway but
not an inch beyond it. He clapped Andrew on the shoulder and ran a finger down the curve of the baby’s cheek. P.J. stood waiting, next in line. “Oh,” said Gillespie, “this is P.J. P.J.—what’s your last name, anyway?”

“What?” said P.J. “Emerson.”

“Oh, isn’t that funny.”

“What’s funny about it?”

Peter cleared his throat.

“It’s
customary
to have your husband’s last name,” P.J. said.

“Husband?” said Mrs. Emerson.

P.J. spun around and stared at Peter.

“Guess I forgot to mention it,” Peter said.

“Mention what?” asked Mrs. Emerson. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, P.J. and I got married last month.”

He had startled everyone, but P.J. most of all. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “Didn’t you
tell
them?”

Then his mother’s voice rose over hers to say, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t. Could this be happening to me
again?”

“I thought they knew,” P.J. said.

“Peter, I assumed she was a
friend
. Someone you had picked up along the way somehow. Is it just a joke? Are you making this up just to tease me?”

“Well, why? What would be funny about it?” P.J. said. She looked ready to run, but there was nowhere she knew of to run to. Mrs. Emerson ignored her.

“Is she pregnant?” she asked.

“Well!” said P.J.

“Now, Mother,” Matthew said, “I believe the best thing might be to sit down and—”

But it was Gillespie who rescued P.J. “Well, that’s one problem solved,” she said cheerfully. “I didn’t have two extra
beds made up anyway. Do you want to see your room, P.J.?”

“Yes, please,” said P.J. Her voice was thin and muffled. She followed Gillespie up the stairs without a backward glance at Peter.

“I never expected this of you, Peter,” his mother said.

“Now, let’s sit down,” Matthew told her. “What’s that on the coffee-table? Iced tea? We can all have a—”

“I have five married children now. Five. And six weddings between them. Do you know how many I was invited to? One, just one. Mary’s. Not Melissa’s, not Matthew’s, not Margaret’s two. Just secrets! Scandals! Elopements! I can’t understand it. Don’t girls dream of big church weddings any more?”

“Sit down, Mother,” Matthew said. “Do you want lemon?”

They grouped themselves around her on the edges of chairs, all uneasily aware of the footsteps over their heads. Matthew poured tea and passed out the glasses. Each time he crossed the rug he had to step over his mother’s soggy cigarette, afloat in a puddle of tea, but he didn’t seem to find it odd. “Well, now,” he said, and he settled himself on the couch and began chafing his bony wrists. “What have you been up to, Peter?”

“We were just discussing that,” said his mother.

“I meant—”

“I believe I’m going to be sick,” Andrew said.

“Oh, Andrew. Pass me the baby.”

But he only clutched her tighter, and Jenny squirmed in his arms and screwed her face up. She started crying, beginning with a little protesting sound and working toward a wail. Gillespie entered the room, scooped her up, and passed on through. “Supper will be ready in a minute,” she called back.

“None for me,” Andrew said.

She didn’t answer him.

Peter rose and went upstairs, with the feeling that everyone’s eyes were on his back. He found P.J. in Melissa’s old room. She was in front of a skirted vanity table. Tears were running down her cheeks in straight, fine lines.

“P.J., I was
going
to tell them,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You know how seldom I write them. I just hadn’t got around to—”

“You wouldn’t have told them. You’d have let them give us separate rooms, never said a word. Or asked to
share
a room, that’s more like you. Let them think we were living in sin. That’s your idea of a joke. And me just going on not realizing, thinking you had told them. Oh, I feel like such a
fool!
Here I was trying so hard, asking for baby pictures—they must have thought I was the pushiest girlfriend you ever had. I wondered why they kept mixing my name up. Did you even tell them I existed?”

“I might have. I forget,” Peter said.

“You didn’t, did you?”

He put his hands in his pockets and circled the room. It had the musty, dead feeling of a guest room—furniture bare and polished but thinly filmed with dust, bedspread perfectly smooth, all traces of Melissa gone except for perfume stains on the vanity table. When he reached the window he pulled it open and leaned out into the twilight. “Hot in here,” he said.

“You never even told them you were dating me,” P.J. said. “You kept us so separate you never even told
me
about
them
, not hardly enough to count. Not even their names, just sets of words—the Nervous Case, the Sister that Elopes, the Handyman’s Husband. Like you’d met them only once or twice, and had to think up labels to keep them straight. And if you’ll pardon me for saying so I get the feeling they do you
the same way. Which will you be, now? The Georgia Cracker’s Husband? And not a word about we wish you a happy life together, or we hope you’ll be like one of us—”

Peter watched her lips, which were puffy from crying. The paint was flaking off her ear-bangles. All he seemed able to think of was her grammatical mistakes, which chalked themselves up in his mind like a grocery list.

“Why, there I was with a wedding ring on!” P.J. said. “Did they think to notice? No. They were too busy chasing bugs around. That crazy old lady locking herself away from the bugs.”

“Well, wait, P.J.,” Peter said. “This is my
family
you’re talking about.”

“What do I care?”

“This afternoon you were going to be their long-lost sister.”

“Me? Not now, boy. Not for a million dollars. That little closed-up family of yours is closed around
nothing
, thin air, all huddled up together scared to go out. Depending on someone that is like the old-maid failure poor relation you find some places, mending their screens and cooking their supper and fixing their chimneys and making peace—oh, she ended up worse off than
them
. I wouldn’t move into this family for anything you paid me. You can just go on down to them and leave me be.”

“P.J.—”

“Will you go?”

He made a grab for her—a mistake. He felt a cool smoothness slipping through his fingers and then she was gone, flashing white through the doorway and clattering down the stairs with her sandals flapping. The front door slammed. “Peter?” his mother called. “Is that you? Was that him?” The door spring twanged and hummed, and then fell silent.

Peter didn’t go after her. He had been through this too many times—not the quarrels, she had never quarreled before, but the running away whenever his moods grew too much for her. She would stay gone for two or three hours before she wandered in, cheerful again. “What do you do when you’re gone?” he had once asked her, and she had laughed and looked down at her hands. “Oh, walk around,” she said. “Sit on park benches. Check the time every now and then to see if I’ve been away long enough to worry you.” She should never have told him. Now he could afford to stay home and wait for her. Before, he had run after her in a panic at the thought of being left with no company but his own forever more.

He descended the stairs slowly, and found his family still sitting in the living room. There was no sign of supper yet, not even any silver on the dining room table, but they didn’t seem concerned. In the kitchen, Gillespie whistled a tune; they waited, confident that food would arrive somehow, sometime.

“Where’s P.J.?” Matthew asked him.

“She’s taking a walk.”

“I didn’t warm to her,” said Andrew.

“You don’t warm to anyone.”

“When I was married,” Mrs. Emerson said, “my family disapproved very strongly. They said, ‘Oh, certainly he’s nice enough, and we have no doubt he can support you. But don’t you want more than that? Pamela, he’s not your
type,’
they said. ‘He doesn’t have, he has a different—’ Well, I didn’t listen. I will say this, though: I told them to their faces. I never snuck around. We had a perfectly beautiful church wedding with all my family in attendance, acting very civilized. Then later I thought, Well, now I know what they meant. I know what my parents meant. They had my best interests at heart, after all. But I only thought that later.”

Andrew looked up from the asterisk he was drawing in a tea-ring. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you telling us that you and Dad didn’t get along?”

“Oh, we got
along,”
said his mother. “But there was so much—we were so far apart. Never understood each other. And I thought you children would take after my side. Even Billy wanted that. Why, it was he who named you—Matthew Carter Emerson, Peter Carter Emerson, every last one of you had my maiden name in the middle. ‘It gives them something to be proud of,’ Billy said. ‘The whole world knows who the Carters are.’ Oh, I had such
expectations
of you all! How did things turn out so differently? You’re pure Emerson. You’re all like Billy’s brothers, separate and silent and with failure just built into you, and now looking back I can’t even pinpoint the time when you shifted sides. Why did it work out this way?”

As if she were discussing some abstract problem, something that had nothing to do with them, her three sons sat looking detached and interested. Then Matthew said, “Oh, I don’t know. I kind of liked Dad’s brothers.”

“You would,” said his mother. “You most of all.”

“They
were
sort of rednecks, Matthew,” Andrew said.

“Well, wait a minute—”

Before it became an argument, Peter escaped. He went out to the kitchen, where he found George playing with a locust on the floor and Gillespie nursing the baby, sitting peacefully with her blouse unbuttoned like a broad golden madonna. The roast was cooling on the counter, but she didn’t seem in any hurry. “Where’s P.J.?” she asked.

“Gone out.”

“Well, I wish you’d go get her. Supper will be on as soon as I’m through here.”