It had gotten too quiet in the neighborhood. There used to be a roar of roller skates on the sidewalk. The small garage next to the house was empty. It had once held his Uncle Smitty’s Ford, a car he called his “foreign car.” “It’s foreign to me,” Smitty explained. Many years ago, Smitty came home from the war. He never left after that.
Joe walked around to the side entrance of the house, the only one anyone had ever used. The front door opened onto a hallway and then into a large sitting room that was reserved for the high ceremonies of the day. He remembered how the furniture was kept covered, dreadful shapes, the drapes drawn until life could resume on a special occasion. Children, who were allowed every liberty in the other rooms, including the right to bay down the laundry chute, build matchstick rockets, and even play in the avalanche of coal in the cellar, were frightened in this room. Joe’s grandmother sat for weeks here after her husband died as though the dream of respectability they had shared was alive in its sad furnishings, its curio cabinet, its damask-covered love seat and its solitary volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When the silence of his grandmother’s mourning overpowered the rest of the family, Joe was sent to see her. She sat with her hands in her lap and her feet crossed under her chair. He moved to her side and she didn’t respond. He knew he had to say something but he could smell new rain on the sidewalk and know that already things were going on that consigned his grandfather to the past. His mind moved to that miracle. “I was wondering,” he mused, in his little-old-man style, “if Grandpa happened to leave me any gold.” Joe’s grandmother stared, and began to laugh. She laughed for minutes while he examined the postcards, fossils and pressed flowers in the curio cabinet, ignoring her laugh and thinking about the curiosities and the miracle of rain, of opportunities beyond the funereal door. There was a ring of keys fused together by fire that he held in awe. His grandmother got up and looked around as though recovering from a spell. She walked straight back into her life, revitalized by the cold musing of a child.
Joe knocked. In a moment the door opened and there stood his Aunt Lureen in a blue flowered dress and white coat sweater. She held her face, compressed her cheeks, and cried, “He’s back!” A cloud crossed her face. The sight of Joe seemed to produce a hundred contradictory thoughts.
“Yes,” Joe said. “I’m back, all right!” For some reason, he whistled. A maladroit quality of enthusiasm seemed to penetrate the air and the sharp whistling brought it up to pitch.
Joe hugged Lureen — she was small and strong — and followed her self-effacing step into the house with its wooden smells, its smells of generations of work clothes and vagaries of weather, of sporting uniforms and overcoats, straight into the vast kitchen which more than anything recalled the thriving days when they had watched game shows from behind TV trays. Joe’s oldest memory was of his Uncle Smitty standing up in his army uniform and announcing, “I for one am proud to be an American.” Joe had a photograph of Smitty from his army days, a hard young face that seemed to belong to the ’40s, the collar of his officer’s tunic sunk into his neck, Joe’s grandparents beaming at him. There was nothing in that picture to hint that little would go right for Smitty.
Aunt Lureen carried the tea tray into the dining room. You could see the drop of the street to the trestle for a train that used to cancel talk in its roaring traverse. She had never married, never even had a beau. She had radiated duty from the beginning, a duty which lay basically elsewhere, a broad, sexless commitment to vagary, that is, to others.
“Weren’t you an angel to come see us,” said Lureen, staring with admiration. Joe poured the tea, thinking, That’s just a pleasant formality and of course there is no need for me to reply specifically. Around them the halls and rooms seemed to express a detailed emptiness. “What have you been doing, Joe?” The words of these questions fell like stones dropped into a deep well. Joe thought if he could just get some conversational rhythm going, this wouldn’t be such a strain. He had long since lost his nerve to ask about the lease.
“I’ve been on the road. That’s about all I’ve got to say for myself.”
“Doing what?”
“Little deal going there with the space program.” What a childish lie! The space program was all he could think of about Florida. That and coconuts. If he had been doing anything there, he wouldn’t be here. He had struck a void but he could scarcely tell her he no longer knew what he was doing.
“How did you enjoy working in the space program?”
“Well, I got out in one piece,” said Joe. He thought this peculiar reference to himself in an atmosphere which included the explosion of a space shuttle would add solemnity to this occasion. In the world of coconuts, there would be no real parallel. But Lureen missed the gravity of his remark. She bent over in laughter. It was as if he had picked coconuts after all. How painful it was!
Everything was magnified. Lureen’s chaste little paintings were on the wall. It had been her escape during decades of school teaching; the bouquets, the curled-up kittens, the worn-out slippers next to the pipe and pouch, the waterfall, all made a kind of calendar of her days. Her pictures reflected her tidy view of a family life she hadn’t had.
Smitty could be heard coming in through the kitchen, a lurching, arhythmic tread on the old wooden floor, whistling “Peg o’ My Heart.” Then he roared; but this was from afar, a great and bitterly insincere braying. His appearance was anticlimactic, his carefully combed auburn hair, his ironic face, his handsomely tailored but not so clean blue suit, making one wonder as he appeared in the parlor, who did roar in the next room, surely not this person whose face swam with indecision. Smitty had spent many years now in what he called “study” and his shabby-genteel presence was entirely invented. What had become of the hard-faced soldier of the ’40s?
“Joe, my God it’s you.”
“Home at last.”
“A good tan, I see.”
“Pretty hot.”
“Your late lamented father could have used a trip or two to the Sun Belt. He might have lived longer.”
Joe didn’t say anything in reply.
“But when you’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, palm trees seem to be thin stuff. Will you join me for a drink?”
“Not right now. Lureen and I are having a visit.”
“Ah,” said Smitty. “Then this must be my stop.”
Smitty suggested by sheer choreography that an appointment awaited him. When he’d gone, Joe said, “Smitty hasn’t changed.”
“No, we can count on Smitty.”
“Has he gone out for a drink?”
“It won’t amount to much. No money.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Joe, making the remark as minimal as possible. A quick look of annoyance crossed Lureen’s face. There was something here Joe couldn’t quite follow. He felt like a parasite. He might as well have said, “Smitty is drinking the lease.”
Lureen said, “We’ve done the best we could.”
Smitty stuck his red face in the doorway. “Joe, may I see you a moment?” The face hung there until it was confirmed Joe would come.