Her eyebrows arched. Did she pluck them? Seeing them close, I doubted it. They were naturally fine. “I think it’s good; don’t you?”
“Oh, it’s good, sure. I mean, after all the horrors he must have seen.”
“Well-they say there’s some fighting even in the Bible.”
Not knowing what she wanted, I laughed nevertheless. It seemed to please her. She asked me playfully, “How much attention did you pay to the game? Didn’t I see you sitting with the little Fogleman girl?”
I shrugged. “I had to sit next to somebody.”
“Now, Peter, you watch out. She has the look in her eye.”
“Ha. I doubt if I’m much of a catch.”
She held up a finger, gay-making in the county fashion. “Ahhh. You have the possibilities.”
The interposed “the” was so like my grandfather’s manner of speech that I blushed as if blessed. I spread the bright jelly on my toast and she continued about the business of the house.
The next two hours were unlike any previous in my life. I shared a house with a woman, a woman tall in time, so tall I could not estimate her height in years, which at the least was twice mine. A woman of overarching fame; legends concerning her lovelife circulated like dirty coins in the student underworld. A woman fully grown and extended in terms of property and authority; her presence branched into every corner of the house. Her touch on the thermostat stirred the furnace under me. Her footsteps above me tripped the vacuum cleaner into a throaty, swarming hum. Here and there in the house she laughed to herself, or made a piece of furniture cry as she moved it; sounds of her flitted across the upstairs floor as a bird flits unseen and sporadic through the high reaches of a forest. Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.
I heavily sat in the dark front parlor reading from a little varnished rack Reader’s Digests one after another. I read until I felt sick from reading. I eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: “Miracle Cure For Cancer?” and “Ten Proofs That There Is a God.” I read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed-for the pang of hope roused fears that had been lulled. The demons of dread injected their iron into my blood. It was clear, clear for all the smart rattle of the prose and the encyclopedic pretense of the trim double columns, that there were no proofs, there was no miracle cure. In my terror of words I experienced a panicked hunger for things and I took up, from the center of the lace doily on the small table by my elbow, and squeezed in my hand a painted china figurine of a smiling elf with chunky polka-dot wings. The quick blue slippers sounded on the carpeted stairs and Mrs. Hummel made lunch for the two of us. In the brightness of the kitchen I was embarrassed for my complexion. I wondered if it would be manners to offer to leave, but I had no strength to leave this house, felt unable even to look out the window; and if I did leave, where would I look, and for what? My father’s mysterious absence from me seemed permanent. I was lost. The woman talked to me; her words were trivial but they served to make horror habitable. Into the shining plane of the table-top between our faces I surfaced; I made her laugh. She had taken off her bandana and clipped her hair into a horsetail. As I helped her clear the table and took the dishes to the sink, our bodies once or twice brushed. And so, half-sunk in fear and half alive and alight with love, I passed the two hours of time.
My father returned a little after one. Mrs. Hummel and I were still in the kitchen. We had been talking about a wing, an L with a screened porch, which she wanted to have built onto the back of her house; here in the summers she could sit overlooking her yard away from the traffic and noise of the pike. It would be a bower and I believed I would share it with her.
My father looked in his bullet-head cap and snow-drenched overcoat like a man just shot from a cannon. “Boy,” he told us, “Old Man Winter made up for lost time.”
“Where have you been?” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.
He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were beginning to look drawn as hell. Did my snoring keep you awake?”
“No.” The snow on his coat and pants and shoes, testimony of adventure, made me jealous. Mrs. Hummel’s attention had shifted all to him; she was laughing without his even saying anything. His bumpy face was ruddy. He whipped his cap off like a boy and stamped his feet on the cocoa mat inside the door. I yearned to torment him; I became shrill. “What did you do at the school? How could you be so long?”
“Jesus, I love that building when there aren’t any kids in it.” He was speaking not to me but to Mrs. Hummel. “What they ought to do with that brick barn, Vera, is turn the kids out on the street and let us teachers live there alone; it’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life where I didn’t feel like somebody was sitting on the back of my neck all the time.”
She laughed and said, “They’d have to put in beds.”
“An old Army cot is all I’d need,” he told her. “Two feet wide and six feet long; whenever I get in bed with somebody they take all the covers. I don’t mean you, Peter. Tired as I was last night I probably took ‘em from you. In answer to your question, what was I doing over there, I brought all my books up to date. For the first time since last marking period everything is apple pie; I feel like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly. If I don’t show up tomorrow, the new teacher can step right in and take over, poor devil. Biff, bang; move over, buddy, next stop, the dump.”
I had to laugh.
Mrs. Hummel moved to her refrigerator asking, “George, have you had lunch? Can I give you a roast beef sandwich?”
“Vera, that’s kind as hell of you. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t chew a roast beef sandwich, I had a back tooth pulled last night. I feel a hundred per cent better but it’s like the lost Atlantis in there. I had a bowl of oyster stew up at Mohnie’s. To be perfectly honest with you though, if you and the kid were having coffee, I’d take a cup. I forget if the kid drinks coffee.”
“How can you forget it?” I asked. “I try to drink it every morning at home but there’s never any time.”
“Jesus, that reminds me. I tried to get through to your mother but the lines are out. She doesn’t have a scrap of food in the house and if I know Pop Kramer he’ll be trying to eat the dog. Provided he hasn’t fallen down the stairs. That would be just my luck; no doctor can get in there.”
“Well when are we going to get there?”
“Any minute, kid, any minute. Time and tide for no man wait.” He called to Mrs. Hummel, “Never take a boy away from his mother.” Then he pinched his lips in; I knew he was wondering if this had been tactless because she, for reasons that were dark to me, had no children herself. With the pointed quiet of a servant she set the smoking coffee on the counter near him. A coil of hair came loose and trailed across her cheek like a comment. He tried to subdue the excitement in his voice and told her, “I saw Al over by Spruce Street and he’s on his way home. He and that truck have been performing miracles out there; this borough does a bang-up job when the chips are down. Traffic’s moving on everything but the alleys and the section around Shale Hill. Boy, if I was running this town we’d all be on snowshoes for a month.” He clenched and unclenched his hands happily as he gazed into this vision of confusion. “They say a trolley was derailed over in West Alton late last night.”