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He finished his drink slowly, in no hurry for the scene ahead of him. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, went down the hallway, and knocked on the door. His mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor so that she wouldn’t have to manage the stairs. Although, now, since the two operations, one for phlebitis, the second for cataracts, she got around fairly well. Complainingly, but well.
“Who is it?” The voice was sharp behind the closed door.
“It’s me, Mom,” Rudolph said. “You asleep?”
“Not any more,” she said.
He pushed the door open.
“Not with people tramping up and down like elephants all over the house,” she said from the bed. She was propped up against lacy pillows, wearing a pink bed jacket that was trimmed with what seemed to be some kind of pinkish fur. She was wearing the thick glasses that the doctor had prescribed for her after the operation. They permitted her to read, watch television, and go to the movies, but they gave a wild, blank, soulless stare to her hugely magnified eyes.
Doctors had done wonders for her since they had moved to the new house. Before that, when they were still living over the store, although Rudolph had pleaded with his mother to undergo the various operations he was sure she needed, she had adamantly refused. “I will be nobody’s charity patient,” she had said, “being experimented on by interns who shouldn’t be allowed to put a knife to a dog.” Rudolph’s protestations had fallen then on deaf ears. While they lived in the poor apartment nothing could convince her that she was not poor and doomed to suffer the fate of the poor once confided to the cold care of an institution. But once they made the move and Martha read the write-ups in the newspapers about Rudy’s successes to her and she had ridden in the new car that Rudy had bought, she went boldly into surgery, after ascertaining that the men who treated her were the best and most expensive available.
She had been literally rejuvenated, resuscitated, brought back from the lip of the grave, by her belief in money. Rudy had thought that decent medical care would make his mother’s last years a little more comfortable. Instead, they had almost made her young. With Martha glooming at the wheel, she now went out in Rudy’s car whenever it was free; she frequented beauty parlors (her hair was almost blue and waved); patronized the town’s movie houses; called for taxis; attended Mass; played bridge with newly found church acquaintances twice a week; fed priests on nights when Rudy was not at home; had bought a new copy of Gone With the Wind, as well as all the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes.
A wide variety of clothes and hats for all occasions were stored in the wardrobe in her room, which was as full of furniture as a small antique shop, gilt desks, a chaise longue, a dressing table with ten different flasks of French perfume on it. For the first time in her life her lips were heavily rouged. She looked ghastly, Rudolph thought, with her painted face and gaudy dresses, but she was infinitely more alive than before. If this was the way she was making up for the dreadful years of her childhood and the long agony of her marriage, it was not up to him to deprive her of her toys.
He had played with the idea of moving her to an apartment of her own in town, with Martha to tend her, but he could not bear the thought of the expression on her face at the moment when he would take her through the door of the house for the last time, stricken by the ingratitude of a son whom she had loved above all things in her life, a son whose shirts she had ironed at midnight after twelve hours on her feet in the store, a son for whom she had sacrificed youth, husband, friends, her other two children.
So she stayed on. Rudolph was not one to miss payment on his debts.
“Who is it upstairs? You’ve brought a woman into the house,” she said accusingly.
“I’ve never brought a woman into the house, as you put it, Mom,” Rudolph said, “although if I wanted to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
“Your father’s blood,” his mother said. Dreadful charge.
“It’s your grandson. I brought him home from school.”
“That was no six-year-old boy going up the staircase,” she said. “I have ears.”
“It isn’t Thomas’s son,” Rudolph said. “It’s Gretchen’s son.”
“I will not hear that name,” she said. She put her hands to her ears. Television-watching had left its mark on her gestures.
Rudolph sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and gently took her hands down, holding them. I have been lax, he thought. This conversation should have been held years ago.
“Now listen to me, Mom,” he said. “He’s a very good boy and he’s in trouble and …”
“I won’t have that whore’s brat in my house,” she said.
“Gretchen is not a whore,” Rudolph said. “Her son is not a brat. And this is not your house.”
“I was waiting for the day you would finally say those words,” she said.
Rudolph ignored the invitation to melodrama. “He’s going to stay only a few days,” he said, “and he needs kindness and attention and I’m going to give it to him and Martha’s going to give it to him and you’re going to give it to him.”
“What will I ever tell Father McDo
“You’re going to tell Father McDo
“Ah,” she said, “you’re a fine one to talk about Christian charity. Have you ever seen the inside of a church?”
“I haven’t got time to argue,” Rudolph said. “Calderwood is expecting me any minute now. I’m telling you how you’re going to behave with the boy.”
“I will not allow him in my presence,” she said, quoting from some portion of her favorite reading. “I will close my door and Martha will serve my meals on a tray.”
“You can do that if you want, Mom,” Rudolph said quietly. “But if you do, I’m cutting you off. No more car, no more bridge parties, no more charge accounts, no more beauty parlors, no more di
Tears as he closed his mother’s bedroom door. What a cheap way to threaten an old lady, he thought. Why didn’t she just die? Gracefully, unwaved, unrinsed, unrouged.
There was a grandfather’s clock in the hallway and he saw that he had time to phone Gretchen if he made an immediate co
The phone rang and it was Gretchen. He explained the afternoon as quickly as he could and said that Billy was safely with him and that if she thought best he would put Billy on a plane to Los Angeles in two or three days, unless, of course, she wanted to come East.
“No,” she said. “Put him on a plane.”
A tricky little sense of pleasure. An excuse to get to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday. Jean.
“I don’t have to tell you how grateful I am, Rudy,” Gretchen said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “When I have a son I will expect you to take cafe of him. I’ll let you know what plane he’s on. And maybe one day soon, I’ll come out and visit you.”