He saw Mary crawling through her mother’s attic and the image blended with one of himself sitting bewildered in a pile of Charlie’s clothes. He shut it out.
“Bart? Are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m glad being single again is going to fulfill you so nicely.”
“Bart,” she said reproachfully.
But there was no need to snap at her now, to tease her or make her feel bad.
Things had gone beyond that. Mr. Piazzi’s dog, having bitten, moves on. That struck him funny and he giggled.
“Bart, are you crying?” She sounded tender. Phony, but tender.
“No,” he said bravely.
“Bart, is there anything I can do? If there is, I want to.”
“No. I think I’m going to be fine. And I’m glad you’re going back to school. Listen, this divorce-who gets it? You or me?”
“I think it would look better if I did,” she said timidly.
“Okay. Fine.”
There was a pause between them and suddenly she blurted into it, as if the words had escaped without her knowledge or approvaclass="underline" “Have you slept with anyone since I left?”
He thought the question over, and ways of answering: the truth, a lie, an evasion that might keep her awake tonight.
“No,” he said carefully, and added: “Have you?”
“Of course not,” she said, managing to sound shocked and pleased at the same time. “I wouldn’t.”
“You will eventually.”
“Bart, let’s not talk about sex.”
“All right,” he said placidly enough, although it was she who had brought the subject up. He kept searching for something nice to say to her, something that she would remember. He couldn’t think of a thing, and furthermore didn’t know why he would want her to remember him at all, at least at this stage of things. They had had good years before. He was sure they must have been good because he couldn’t remember much of what had happened in them, except maybe the crazy TV bet.
He heard himself say: “Do you remember when we took Charlie to nursery school the first time?”
“Yes. He cried and you wanted to take him back with us. You didn’t want to let him go, Bart.”
“And you did.”
She was saying something disclaiming in a slightly wounded tone, but he was remembering the scene. The lady who kept the nursery school was Mrs. Ricker. She had a certificate from the state, and she gave all the children a nice hot lunch before sending them home at one o’clock. School was kept downstairs in a madeover basement and as they led Charlie down between them, he felt like a traitor; like a farmer petting a cow and saying Soo, Bess on the way to the slaughterhouse. He had been a beautiful boy, his Charlie. Blond hair that had darkened later, blue, watchful eyes, hands that had been clever even as a toddler. And he had stood between them at the bottom of the stairs, stock-still, watching the other children who were whooping and running and coloring and cutting colored paper with bluntnosed scissors, so many of them, and Charlie had never looked so vulnerable as he did in that instant, just watching the other children. There was no joy or fear in his eyes, only the watchfulness, a kind of outsiderness, and he had never felt so much his son’s father as then, never so close to the actual run of his thoughts. And Mrs. Ricker came over, smiling like a barracuda and she said: We’ll have such fun, Chuck, making him want to cry out: That’s not his name! And when she put out her hand Charlie did not take it but only watched it so she stole his hand and began to pull him a little toward the others, and he went willingly two steps and then stopped, looked back at them, and Mrs. Young said very quietly: Go right along, he’ll be fine. And Mary finally had to poke him and say Come ON, Bart because he was frozen looking at his son, his son’s eyes saying, Are you going to let them do this to me, George? and his own eyes saying back, Yes, I guess I am, Freddy and he and Mary started up the stairs, showing Charlie their backs, the most dreadful thing a little child can see, and Charlie began to wail. But Mary’s footsteps never faltered because a woman’s love is strange and cruel and nearly always clear-sighted, love that sees is always horrible love, and she knew walking away was right and so she walked, dismissing the cries as only another part of the boy’s development, like smiles from gas or scraped knees. And he had felt a pain in his chest so sharp, so physical, that he had wondered if he was having a heart attack, and then the pain had just passed, leaving him shaken and unable to interpret it, but now he thought that the pain had been plain old prosaic good-bye. Parents’ backs aren’t the most dreadful thing. The most dreadful thing of all is the speed with which children dismiss those same backs and turn to their own affairs-to the game, the puzzle, the new friend, and eventually to death. Those were the awful things he had come to know now. Charlie had begun dying long before he got sick, and there was no putting a stop to it.
“Bart?” she was saying. “Are you still there, Bart?”
“I’m here.”
“What good are you doing yourself thinking about Charlie all the time? It’s eating you up. You’re his prisoner.”
“But you’re free,” he said. “Yes.”
“Shall I see the lawyer next week?”
“Okay. Fine.”
“It doesn’t have to be nasty, does it, Bart?”
“No. It will be very civilized.”
“You won’t change your mind and contest it?”
“No.”
“I’ll… I’ll be talking to you, then.”
“You knew it was time to leave him and so you did. I wish to God I could be that instinctive.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Good-bye, Mary. I love you.” He realized he had said it after he hung up. He had said it automatically, with no feeling-verbal punctuation. But it wasn’t such a bad ending. Not at all.
January 18, 1974
The secretary’s voice said: “Who shall I say is calling?”
“Bart Dawes.”
“Will you hold for a moment?”
“Sure.”
She put him in limbo and he held the blank receiver to his ear, tapping his foot and looking out the window at the ghost town of Crestallen Street West. It was a bright day but very cold, temperature about 10 above with a chill factor making it 10 below. The wind blew skirls of snow across the street to where the Hobarts’ house stood broodingly silent, just a shell waiting for the wrecking ball. They had even taken their shutters.
There was a click and Steve Ordner’s voice said: “Bart, how are you?”
“Fine.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I called about the laundry,” he said. “I wondered what the corporation had decided to do about relocation.”
Ordner sighed and then said with good-humored reserve: “A little late for that, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t call to be beaten with it, Steve.”
“Why not? You’ve surely beaten everyone else with it. Well, never mind. The board has decided to get out of the industrial laundry business, Bart. The Laundromats will stay; they’re all doing well. We’re going to change the chain name, though. To Handi-Wash. How does that sound?”
“Terrible,” he said remotely. “Why don’t you sack Vinnie Mason?”
“Vinnie?” Ordner sounded surprised. “Vinnie’s doing a great job for us. Turning into quite the mogul. I must say I didn’t expect such bitterness-”
“Come on, Steve. That job’s got no more future than a tenement airshaft. Give him something worthwhile or let him out.”
“I handy think that’s your business, Bart.”
“You’ve got a dead chicken tied around his neck and he doesn’t know it yet because it hasn’t started to rot. He still thinks it’s dinner.”
“I understand he punched you up a little before Christmas.”