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Her younger son, Thomas, and her daughter are inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood. When she looks at him she sees the image of her ghostly father.
She has no hopes for Thomas. With his blond, sly, derisive face. He is a ruffian, always brawling, always in trouble at school, insolent, mocking, going his own way, without standards, sliding in and out of the house on his own secret schedule, impervious to punishment. On some calendar, somewhere, disgrace is printed in blood red, like a dreadful holiday, for her son Thomas. There is nothing to be done about it. She does not love him and she ca
So, the mother, standing on swollen legs at the window, surrounded by her family in the sleeping house. Insomniac, unfastidious, overworked, ailing, shapeless, avoiding mirrors, a writer of suicide notes, graying at the age of forty-two, her bathrobe dusted with ash from her cigarette.
A train hoots far away, troops piled into the rattling coaches, on their way to distant ports, on their way to the sound of the guns. Thank God Rudolph is not yet seventeen. She would die if they took him for a soldier.
She lights a last cigarette, takes off her robe, the cigarette hanging carelessly from her lower lip, and gets into bed. She lies there smoking. She will sleep a few hours. But she knows she will wake when she hears her husband coming heavily up the steps, rank with the sweat of his night’s work and the whiskey he has drunk.
Chapter 2
The office clock stood at five to twelve. Gretchen kept typing. Since it was Saturday, the other girls had already stopped working and were making up, ready to depart. Two of them, Luella Devlin and Pat Hauser, had invited her to go out and have a pizza with them, but she was in no mood for their brainless gabble this afternoon. When she was in high school she had had three good friends, Bertha Sorel, Sue Jackson, Felicity Turner. They were the brightest girls in the school and they had made a small, superior, isolated clique. She wished all three of them or any one of them were in town today. But they all came from well-off families and had gone to college and she had found no one else to take their place in her life.
Gretchen wished that there were enough work to give her an excuse to remain at her desk the whole afternoon, but she was typing out the final items of the last bill of lading Mr. Hutchens had put on her desk and there was no way of dragging it out.
She hadn’t gone to the hospital the last two nights. She had phoned in and said she was sick and had gone home directly after work and stayed there. She had been too restless to read and had fussed over her entire wardrobe, washing blouses that were already spotlessly clean, pressing dresses that didn’t have a crease in them, washing her hair and setting it, manicuring her nails, insisting on giving Rudy a manicure, although she had given him one just the week before.
Late on Friday night, unable to sleep, she had gone down into the cellar where her father was working. He looked up at her in surprise as she came down the steps, but didn’t say anything, even when she sat down on a chair and said, “Here, pussy, pussy,” to the cat. The cat backed away. The human race, the cat knew, was the enemy.
“Pa,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Jordache didn’t say anything.
“I’m not getting anywhere in this job I have,” Gretchen said. “There’s no chance of more money and no place to go. And once the war is over, they’ll be cutting down and I’ll be lucky if I can hang on.”
“The war’s not over yet,” Jordache said. “There’s still a lot of idiots waiting that have to be killed.”
“I thought I ought to go down to New York and look for a real job there. I’m a good secretary now and I see ads for all sorts of jobs with twice the pay I’m getting now.”
“You talk to your mother about this?” Jordache began to shape the dough into rolls, with quick little flips of his hand, like a magician.
“No,” Gretchen said. “She’s not feeling so well and I didn’t want to disturb her.”
“Everyone’s so damn thoughtful in this family,” Jordache said. “Warms the cockles.”
“Pa,” Gretchen said, “be serious.”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I said so. Be careful, you’re going to get flour all over that fancy gown.”
“Pa, I’ll be able to send back a lot more money …”
“No,” Jordache said. “When you’re twenty-one, you can fly off anyplace you want. But you’re not twenty-one. You’re nineteen. You have to bear up under the hospitality of the ancestral home for two years. Grin and bear it.” He took the cork out of the bottle and took a long swig of whiskey. With deliberate coarseness, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smudge of flour across his face.
“I’ve got to get out of this town,” Gretchen said.
“There are worse towns,” Jordache said. “I’ll see you in two years.”
Five minutes past twelve, the clock read. She put the neatly typed papers in the drawer of her desk. All the other clerks were gone. She put the cover on her typewriter and went into the washroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked feverish. She dabbed some cold water on her forehead, then took out a vial of perfume from her bag and put a little on under each ear.
She went out of the building and through the main gate, under the big sign, “Boylan’s Brick and Tile Works.” The plant and the sign, with its ornate lettering that looked as though it advertised something splendid and amusing, had been there since 1890.
She looked around to see if Rudy was by any chance waiting for her. Sometimes he came by the Works and walked her home. He was the only one in the family she could talk to. If Rudy had been there, they could have had lunch in a restaurant and then perhaps splurged on a movie. But then she remembered that Rudy had gone with the high-school track team to a neighboring town for a meet.
She found herself walking toward the bus terminal. She walked slowly, stopping often to look into shop windows. Of course, she told herself, she was not going to take the bus. It was daytime now and the fantasies of night were safely behind her. Although it would be refreshing to drive along the river and get out somewhere and breathe a little country air. The weather had changed and spring was a
Before leaving the house in the morning, she had told her mother she was going to work in the hospital that afternoon to make up for the time she had lost. She didn’t know why she had suddenly invented the story. She rarely lied to her parents. There was no need. But by saying she had to be on duty at the hospital, she avoided being asked to come and work in the store to help her mother handle the Saturday afternoon rush. It had been a su
A block from the terminal she saw her brother Thomas. He was pitching pe
Gretchen told Tom that she knew about the fight. She had heard similar stories before. “You’re a hideous boy,” she said to Tom. He had just gri
If Tom had seen her she would have turned back. She wouldn’t have dared to go into the bus terminal with him watching. But he didn’t see her. He was too busy pitching a pe