“Well, anyway, I never did get to ask how you were doing up north, since your mama and grandma were in a hurry. But I know it can be a lonely place. I went up there once to work for the Presbyterian church and stayed for a month, rooming with a girl I’d met who turned out to be a bit touched in the head. Went around in a chiffon gown with a candle in her hand at four a.m. and talked about craning her swanlike neck in the rain. I went home again. I always have been a homebody. I don’t know what I’ll do without my family. Even Phoebe, and her so mischievous. The last night that Phoebe was … was living, the last night I ever saw her, she was in the kitchen with her boy-friend and when—”
“Phoebe had a boy-friend?” Ben Joe asked.
“Well, yes, and when I walked in, they were robbing this loose-change bank of my mama’s, shaped like an Indian with a slot in the top of his head where she puts the money in, for odds and ends-like that she wants to buy — they were robbing this bank so they could go to the movies. The boy-friend had just got out his pocketknife to put through the slot and Phoebe was holding out her hand and saying, ‘scalpel,’ and that’s the last I ever saw of her. I’m awful glad to meet up with you again, Ben Joe. All these years I been missing you.”
“I’m glad to see you,” said Ben Joe. He smiled at her in silence for a minute and then looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got to go. I was on the train all last night. Need to catch up on my sleep.”
“Oh, don’t you hurry.”
“I’ve got to.”
He picked up his jacket from the couch and put it on as he followed Shelley to the door. Outside it was raining; the sight surprised them both and they stood there looking at it.
“Don’t come out with me,” Ben Joe said.
“I won’t melt.”
“No, stay inside.”
“I want to see you safely to the street,” Shelley said.
Her face was serious, and she looked worried about him. Without knowing why, Ben Joe said, “Urn, this Jack Horner—”
“John Horner.”
“John Horner. Do you think he’d mind if I came back again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t — You come see me anyway, Ben Joe. You come anyway.”
She was smiling now, looking up at him with the porch light shining clear through those sky-blue eyes of hers. Her face was so close he could bend down and kiss her. He had never kissed her on her doorstep before, despite all Phoebe’s hopes; he had kissed her in his mother’s old Buick, parked somewhere in the darkness, with that pink smell of her perfume circling him and her arms thin and warm around his neck. Her face hovered under his, still close; she looked up at him. But as he was about to bend toward her he thought that maybe this might commit him again; maybe everything would begin all over again, and time would get even more jumbled up in his head than it was already. So he drew back from the pale oblong of her face and said, “Is Sunday evening all right? About nine?”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
He stood looking at her for a minute longer, and then straightened his shoulders.
“I’ll see you then,” he said.
“Good night, Ben Joe.”
“Good night.”
He turned and started down the long steps, being careful not to slip on the soggy layers of leaves beneath his feet. The rain was no more than an unsteady dripping sound now, with an occasional cool drop landing on his face. Once on the street again, he shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets and walked very slowly, frowning, sorting his thoughts out. But his thoughts wouldn’t sort; he felt as if he was never again going to know the reason for anything he did. The puddles on the sidewalk began soaking into his shoes, and he started running toward home.
7
The next day was Saturday. Ben Joe awoke with a hollow, bored feeling; he dawdled over his breakfast until it was cold and then went back to his room to read a detective novel upside-down on an unmade bed. Halfway through the morning one of the girls knocked on his door and said, “Ben Joe?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“It’s me. Lisa. Can I come in?”
“I guess so.”
She stuck her head in the door and smiled. She was much calmer than her twin; it was the way Ben Joe had first learned to tell them apart. She was wearing a neat blue suit and high heels. “We’re going downtown,” she said. “Want to come?”
“You have to dress up that much just to go downtown?”
“Never can tell who you’ll meet.” She grinned, and crossed to his bed to hand him a postcard. “Mail,” she said. “Who’s Jeremy?”
“My roommate. Do you have to read all my mail?”
He looked at the picture on it — the Guggenheim Museum, in an unreal shade of yellowish-white — and then turned the card over and began reading the large, rounded handwriting: Dear Ben J.,Hope you are thawing out down there. I borrowed your dinner jacket. That frizzly-haired girl keeps calling wanting to know when you’ll be back, and I said Monday or so, right? Pack one of those sisters of yours in a suitcase and bring her along.
Jeremy.
“Which one are you going to pack up?” Lisa asked.
“What?”
“Which sister?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Why — you feel like leaving home?”
“I surely do,” Lisa said. She sat down with a little bounce on the foot of the bed and looked at her shoes. “I’ve used up all the boys in this town, that’s what.”
“What about those two you and Jane were with last night?”
“I’m getting tired of them. I keep thinking maybe I could start new someplace else, in another town.”
“Well, I know the feeling,” said Ben Joe. He turned the card over again and looked at it, frowning. “I wonder if I’ve missed any quizzes. Jeremy’s right — I’ve got to get started back there pretty quick.”
“Well, do you want to come to town or don’t you?”
“No. I guess not.”
Lisa stood up and left, and Ben Joe looked after her thoughtfully. “Don’t you worry,” he said when she reached the door. “New boys’re always showing up.”
“I know. Yell if you change your mind about coming downtown, Ben Joe.”
“Okay.”
He stared at the closed door for a few minutes and then got up and padded over to his bureau in his stocking feet. The top drawer looked like Jeremy’s had in New York — stuffed with postcards and envelopes and canceled checks. He threw the postcard on top of the heap and then idly leafed through what was underneath. At the bottom was a stack of Shelley’s letters from Savannah, neatly rubber-banded together. And a few postcards from the times his father had gone to medical conventions. They were dry and formal; his father had trouble saying things in writing. He stacked everything carelessly together again and was about to close the drawer when he saw something pink lying in the right-hand corner. It was a unique shade of pink — a deep rose that was almost magenta and never should have been used in writing paper — and it was one that had stuck in his mind for some six years now. Even when he saw something nearly that color in a dress or a magazine ad, even now, it made him wince. He pulled the envelope up and made himself examine it. Large, slanted pencil writing ran in a straight line across it, addressed to his father at his office on Main Street. Only his father had never seen it; Ben Joe had taken it from the box when he had gone to bring his father home for supper one day. He had seen the “L.B.M.” on the upper left-hand corner and quietly stuffed it in his pocket. Now he stood staring at it without opening it, letting it lie flat in the palm of his hand. When he had stared at it so long that he could see it with his eyes shut, he suddenly slapped it into his shirt pocket, grabbed up his sneakers from the floor in front of the bureau, and slammed out of his room.