Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis-delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose un even spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion-privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a fingernail must be experienced to be forgiven.. Only the medallions watched. I went to the bureau and found a pair of Jockey shorts that still had life in the elastic. I put on a T shirt backwards. “You’ll outlive me, Pop,” my father downstairs said loudly. “I’m carrying death in my bowels.” His saying this so bluntly affected my own innards, made them feel slippery and urgent.
“The boy’s up, George,” my mother said. “You can stop the performance any time.” Her voice had left the bottom of the stairs.
“Huh? You think I’ll upset the kid?”
My father had turned fifty just before Christmas; he had always said he would never live to be fifty. Breaking the barrier had unbridled his tongue, as if, being in mathematical fact dead, nothing he said mattered. His ghostly freedom at times did frighten me.
I stood before the closet deliberating. Perhaps I foresaw that I would be wearing for a long time the clothes I chose. Perhaps the weight of the coming ordeal made me slow. Scolding my hesitation, a sneeze gathered in the bridge of my nose and itched. My bladder ached sweetly. I took from their hanger the gray flannel slacks, though their crease was poor. I had three pairs of slacks; the brown were at the cleaners and the blue were disgraced by a faint pallor at the bottom of the fly. It was a mystery to me, and I always felt unfairly condemned when they came back from the cleaners with an insulting printed slip about No Responsibility For Ineradicable Spots.
As for shirts, today the red seemed the one. I rarely wore it because its bright shoulders pointed up the white specks that showered from my scalp like a snow of dandruff. It was not dandruff, I wanted to tell everybody, as if this exonerated me. But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed emblem of heat. Its wool sleeves felt grateful sliding onto my arms. It was an eight-dollar shirt; my mother couldn’t understand why I never wore it. She rarely seemed conscious of my “handicap,” and when she was, it was with a too-bold solicitude, as if it were a piece of her. Her own case, except for her fingernails and scalp, hardly existed in comparison with mine. I did not resent this; she suffered in other ways.
My father was saying, “No, Cassie, Pop should outlive me. He’s led a good life. Pop Kramer deserves to live forever.”
Without listening for her reply, I knew how my mother would take this-as a jab at her father for living so long, for continuing, year after year, to be a dependent burden. She believed that my father was deliberately trying to heckle the old man into his grave. Was she right? Though many things fitted her theories, I never believed them. They were too neat and too grim.
I knew from the noise at the sink below me that she had turned away without answering. I could picture her, her neck mottled with anger, the wings of her nose white and the skin above them pulsing. I seemed to ride the waves of emotion below me. As I sat on the edge of my bed to put on my socks, the old wooden floor lifted under my foot.
My grandfather said, “We never know when we will be called. The world never knows who is needed above.”
“Well I know sure as hell they don’t need me,” my father said. “If there’s anything God doesn’t need, it’s my ugly face to look at.”
“He knows how much we need you, George.”
“You don’t need me, Cassie. You’d be better off with me on the dump. My father died at forty-nine and it was the best thing he ever did for us.”
“Your father was a disappointed man” my mother told him. “Why should you be disappointed? You have a wonderful son, a beautiful farm, an adoring wife-”
“Once the old man was in his grave,” my father continued, “my mother really cut loose. Those were the happiest years of her life. She was a super-woman, Pop.”
“I think it’s so sad,” my mother said, “that they don’t al low men to marry their mothers.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Cassie. My mother made life a hell on earth for him. She ate that man raw.”
One sock had a hole which I tucked deep into the heel of the loafer. This was Monday, and in my sock drawer there was nothing but orphans and a heavy English wool pair my Aunt Alma had sent me this Christmas from Troy, New York. She was a children’s clothes buyer for a department store there. I guessed that these socks she had sent were ex pensive, but when I put them on they were so bulky they made my toenails feel ingrown, so I never wore them. It was a vanity of mine to have my loafers small, size 10 ½ instead of 11, which would have been proper. I hated to have big feet; I wanted to have a dancer’s quick and subtle hooves.
Tapping heel and toe, I left my room and passed through my parents’ room. The covers of their bed were tossed back savagely, exposing a doubly troughed mattress. The top of their scarred bureau was covered with combs, in all sizes and colors of plastic, that my father had scavenged from the high school Lost and Found department. He was always bringing junk like this home, as if he were burlesquing his role of provider.
The country staircase, descending between a plaster wall and a wood partition, was narrow and steep. At the bottom, the steps curved in narrow worn wedges; there should have been a railing. My father was sure that my grandfather with his clouded downward vision was going to fall some day; he kept vowing to put up a bannister. He had even bought the bannister, for a dollar in an Alton junk shop. But it leaned forgotten in the barn. Most of my father’s projects around this place were like that. Tripping in grace notes like Fred Astaire, I went downstairs, in my descent stroking the bare plaster on my right. So smooth-skinned, this wall shallowly undulated like the flank of a great calm creature alive with the chill communicated through stone from the outdoors. The walls of this house were thick sand stone uplifted by mythically strong masons a century ago.
“Close the stair door,” my mother said. We didn’t want heat to escape the downstairs.
I can still see everything. The downstairs was two long rooms, the kitchen and the living-room, connected by two doorways side by side. The kitchen floor was of broad old pine boards, recently sanded and waxed. A hot-air register cut into these boards at the foot of the stairs breathed warmly on my ankles. A newspaper, the Alton Sun, that had fallen to the floor kept lifting one corner in the draft, as if begging to be read. Our house was full of newspapers and magazines; they flooded the windowsills and spilled from the sofa. My father brought them home by the bale; they had some connection with the Boy Scout scrap-paper drive, but never seemed to get delivered. Instead they slithered around waiting to be read, and on an evening when he was caught in the house with nowhere to go, my father would disconsolately plough through a whole pile. He could read at terrific speed, and claimed never to learn or remember a thing.
“I hate to get you up, Peter,” he called to me. “If there’s anything a kid your age needs, it’s sleep.”
I couldn’t see him; he was in the living-room. Through the first doorway I glimpsed three chunks of cherry wood burning in the fireplace, though the new furnace in the basement was running as well. In the narrow space of kitchen wall between the two doorways hung a painting I had done of our back yard in Olingr. My mother’s shoulder eclipsed it. In the country she had taken to wearing a heavy-knit man’s sweater, though in her youth, and in Olinger, when she was slimmer, and when I first recognized her as my mother, she had been what they called in the county a “fancy dresser.” With a click like an unspoken scolding she set a tumbler of orange juice at my place at the table. Between the table and the wall was a kind of corridor she filled. Balked by her body, I stamped my foot. She moved away. I walked past her and past the second doorway, through which I glimpsed my grandfather slumped on the sofa beside a stack of magazines, his head bowed as if in prayer or sleep and his fastidious old hands daintily folded across the belly of his soft gray sweater. I walked past the high mantel where two clocks said 7:30 and 7:23 respectively. The faster clock was red and electric and plastic and had been purchased by my father at a discount. The slower was dark and wooden and ornamented and key-wound and had been inherited from my grandfather’s father, a man long dead when I was born. The older clock sat on the mantel; the electric was hung on a nail below. I went past the white slab of the new refrigerator’s side and out the doors. There were two; the door and the storm door, a wide sandstone sill compelling a space between them. From between the two, I heard my father saying, “Jesus Pop, when I was a kid, I never had any sleep at all. That’s why I’m in agony now.”