My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.
“I don’t want you not to have anything for Christmas while I’m away in the Army,” he said. “Virginia, please look at it. It comes with this fancy dustpan. It hangs off a stick. Look at it, will you? Are you blind or cross-eyed?”
“Thanks, chum,” I said. I had always wanted a dustpan hooked up that way. It was a good one. My husband doesn’t shop in bargain basements or January sales.
Still and all, in spite of the quality, it was a mean present to give a woman you planned on never seeing again, a person you had children with and got onto all the time, drunk or sober, even when everybody had to get up early in the morning.
I asked him if he could wait and join the Army in a half hour, as I had to get the groceries. I don’t like to leave kids alone in a three-room apartment full of gas and electricity. Fire may break out from a nasty remark. Or the oldest decides to get even with the youngest.
“Just this once,” he said. “But you better figure out how to get along without me.”
“You’re a handicapped person mentally,” I said. “You should’ve been institutionalized years ago.” I slammed the door. I didn’t want to see him pack his underwear and ironed shirts.
I never got farther than the front stoop, though, because there was Mrs. Raftery, wringing her hands, tears in her eyes as though she had a monopoly on all the good news.
“Mrs. Raftery!” I said, putting my arm around her. “Don’t cry.” She leaned on me because I am such a horsey build. “Don’t cry, Mrs. Raftery, please!” I said.
“That’s like you, Virginia. Always looking at the ugly side of things. ‘Take in the wash. It’s rainin’!’ That’s you. You’re the first one knows it when the dumbwaiter breaks.”
“Oh, come on now, that’s not so. It just isn’t so,” I said. “I’m the exact opposite.”
“Did you see Mrs. Cullen yet?” she asked, paying no attention.
“Where?”
“Virginia!” she said, shocked. “She’s passed away. The whole house knows it. They’ve got her in white like a bride and you never saw a beautiful creature like that. She must be eighty. Her husband’s proud.”
“She was never more than an acquaintance; she didn’t have any children,” I said.
“Well, I don’t care about that. Now, Virginia, you do what I say now, you go downstairs and you say like this— listen to me—say, ‘I hear, Mr. Cullen, your wife’s passed away. I’m sorry.’ Then ask him how he is. Then you ought to go around the corner and see her. She’s in Witson & Wayde. Then you ought to go over to the church when they carry her over.”
“It’s not my church,” I said.
“That’s no reason, Virginia. You go up like this,” she said, parting from me to do a prancy dance. “Up the big front steps, into the church you go. It’s beautiful in there. You can’t help kneeling only for a minute. Then round to the right. Then up the other stairway. Then you come to a great oak door that’s arched above you, then,” she said, seizing a deep, deep breath, for all the good it would do her, “and then turn the knob slo-owly and open the door and see for yourself: Our Blessed Mother is in charge. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”
I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age.
“You are a groaner,” Mrs. Raftery said, gawking into my mouth.
“I am not,” I said. I got a whiff of her, a terrible cheap wine lush.
My husband threw a penny at the door from the inside to take my notice from Mrs. Raftery. He rattled the glass door to make sure I looked at him. He had a fat duffel bag on each shoulder. Where did he acquire so much worldly possession? What was in them? My grandma’s goose feathers from across the ocean? Or all the diaper-service diapers? To this day the truth is shrouded in mystery.
“What the hell are you doing, Virginia?” he said, dumping them at my feet. “Standing out here on your hind legs telling everybody your business? The Army gives you a certain time, for godsakes, they’re not kidding.” Then he said, “I beg your pardon,” to Mrs. Raftery. He took hold of me with his two arms as though in love and pressed his body hard against mine so that I could feel him for the last time and suffer my loss. Then he kissed me in a mean way to nearly split my lip. Then he winked and said, “That’s all for now,” and skipped off into the future, duffel bags full of rags.
He left me in an embarrassing situation, nearly fainting, in front of that old widow, who can’t even remember the half of it. “He’s a crock,” said Mrs. Raftery. “Is he leaving for good or just temporarily, Virginia?”
“Oh, he’s probably deserting me,” I said, and sat down on the stoop, pulling my big knees up to my chin.
“If that’s the case, tell the Welfare right away,” she said. “He’s a bum, leaving you just before Christmas. Tell the cops,” she said. “They’ll provide the toys for the little kids gladly. And don’t forget to let the grocer in on it. He won’t be so hard on you expecting payment.”
She saw that sadness was stretched worldwide across my face. Mrs. Raftery isn’t the worst person. She said, “Look around for comfort, dear.” With a nervous finger she pointed to the truckers eating lunch on their haunches across the street, leaning on the loading platforms. She waved her hand to include in all the men marching up and down in search of a decent luncheonette. She didn’t leave out the six longshoremen loafing under the fish-market marquee. “If their lungs and stomachs ain’t crushed by overwork, they disappear somewhere in the world. Don’t be disappointed, Virginia. I don’t know a man living’d last you a lifetime.”
Ten days later Girard asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” I didn’t want the children to know the facts. Present or past, a child should have a father.
“Where is Daddy?” Girard asked the week after that.
“He joined the Army,” I said.
“He made my bunk bed,” said Philip.
“The truth shall make ye free,” I said.
Then I sat down with pencil and pad to get in control of my resources. The facts, when I added and subtracted them, were that my husband had left me with fourteen dollars, and the rent unpaid, in an emergency state. He’d claimed he was sorry to do this, but my opinion is, out of sight, out of mind. “The city won’t let you starve,” he’d said. “After all, you’re half the population. You’re keeping up the good work. Without you the race would die out. Who’d pay the taxes? Who’d keep the streets clean? There wouldn’t be no Army. A man like me wouldn’t have no place to go.”
I sent Girard right down to Mrs. Raftery with a request about the whereabouts of Welfare. She responded R.S.V.P. with an extra comment in left-handed script: “Poor Girard … he’s never the boy my John was!”
Who asked her?
I called on Welfare right after the new year. In no time I discovered that they’re rigged up to deal with liars, and if you’re truthful it’s disappointing to them. They may even refuse to handle your case if you’re too truthful.
They asked sensible questions at first. They asked where my husband had enlisted. I didn’t know. They put some letter writers and agents after him. “He’s not in the United States Army,” they said. “Try the Brazilian Army,” I suggested.
They have no sense of kidding around. They’re not the least bit lighthearted and they tried. “Oh no,” they said. “That was incorrect. He is not in the Brazilian Army.”
“No?” I said. “How strange! He must be in the Mexican Navy.”
By law, they had to hound his brothers. They wrote to his brother who has a first-class card in the Teamsters and owns an apartment house in California. They asked his two brothers in Jersey to help me. They have large families. Rightfully they laughed. Then they wrote to Thomas, the oldest, the smart one (the one they all worked so hard for years to keep him in college until his brains could pay off). He was the one who sent ten dollars immediately, saying, “What a bastard! I’ll send something from time to time, Ginny, but whatever you do, don’t tell the authorities.” Of course I never did. Soon they began to guess they were better people than me, that I was in trouble because I deserved it, and then they liked me better.
But they never fixed my refrigerator. Every time I called I said patiently, “The milk is sour…” I said, “Corn beef went bad.” Sitting in that beer-stinking phone booth in Felan’s for the sixth time (sixty cents) with the baby on my lap and Barbie tapping at the glass door with an American flag, I cried into the secretary’s hardhearted ear, “I bought real butter for the holiday, and it’s rancid…” They said, “You’ll have to get a better bid on the repair job.”
While I waited indoors for a man to bid, Girard took to swinging back and forth on top of the bathroom door, just to soothe himself, giving me the laugh, dreamy, nibbling calcimine off the ceiling. On first sight Mrs. Raftery said, “Whack the monkey, he’d be better off on arsenic.”
But Girard is my son and I’m the judge. It means a terrible thing for the future, though I don’t know what to call it.
It was constantly thinking of my foreknowledge on this and other subjects, it was from observing when I put my lipstick on daily, how my face was just curling up to die, that John Raftery came from Jersey to rescue me.
On Thursdays, anyway, John Raftery took the tubes in to visit his mother. The whole house knew it. She was cheerful even before breakfast. She sang out loud in a girlish brogue that only came to tongue for grand occasions. Hanging out the wash, she blushed to recall what a remarkable boy her John had been. “Ask the sisters around the corner,” she said to the open kitchen windows. “They’ll never forget John.”
That particular night after supper Mrs. Raftery said to her son, “John, how come you don’t say hello to your old friend Virginia? She’s had hard luck and she’s gloomy.”
“Is that so, Mother?” he said, and immediately climbed two flights to knock at my door.
“Oh John,” I said at the sight of him, hat in hand in a white shirt and blue-striped tie, spick-and-span, a Sunday-school man. “Hello.”
“Welcome, John!” I said. “Sit down. Come right in. How are you? You look awfully good. You do. Tell me, how’ve you been all this time, John?”
“How’ve I been?” he asked thoughtfully. To answer within reason, he described his life with Margaret, marriage, work, and children up to the present day.
I had nothing good to report. Now that he had put the subject around before my very eyes, every burnt-up day of my life smoked in shame, and I couldn’t even get a clear view of the good half hours.
“Of course,” he said, “you do have lovely children. Noticeable-looking, Virginia. Good looks is always something to be thankful for.”
“Thankful?” I said. “I don’t have to thank anything but my own foolishness for four children when I’m twenty-six years old, deserted, and poverty-struck, regardless of looks. A man can’t help it, but I could have behaved better.”
“Don’t be so cruel on yourself, Ginny,” he said. “Children come from God.”
“You’re still great on holy subjects, aren’t you? You know damn well where children come from.”
He did know. His red face reddened further. John Raftery has had that color coming out on him boy and man from keeping his rages so inward.
Still he made more sense in his conversation after that, and I poured fresh tea to tell him how my husband used to like me because I was a passionate person. That was until he took a look around and saw how in the long run this life only meant more of the same thing. He tried to turn away from me once he came to this understanding, and make me hate him. His face changed. He gave up his brand of cigarettes, which we had in common. He threw out the two pairs of socks I knitted by hand. “If there’s anything I hate in this world, it’s navy blue,” he said. Oh, I could have dyed them. I would have done anything for him, if he were only not too sorry to ask me.
“You were a nice kid in those days,” said John, referring to certain Saturday nights. “A wild, nice kid.”
“Aaah,” I said, disgusted. Whatever I was then was on the way to where I am now. “I was fresh. If I had a kid like me, I’d slap her cross-eyed.”
The very next Thursday John gave me a beautiful radio with a record player. “Enjoy yourself,” he said. That really made Welfare speechless. We didn’t own any records, but the investigator saw my burden was lightened and he scribbled a dozen pages about it in his notebook.
On the third Thursday he brought a walking doll (twenty-four inches) for Linda and Barbie with a card inscribed, “A baby doll for a couple of dolls.” He had also had a couple of drinks at his mother’s, and this made him want to dance. “La-la-la,” he sang, a ramrod swaying in my kitchen chair. “La-la-la, let yourself go…”
“You gotta give a little,” he sang, “live a little…” He said, “Virginia, may I have this dance?”
“Sssh, we finally got them asleep. Please, turn the radio down. Quiet. Deathly silence, John Raftery.”
“Let me do your dishes, Virginia.”
“Don’t be silly, you’re a guest in my house,” I said. “I still regard you as a guest.”
“I want to do something for you, Virginia.”
“Tell me I’m the most gorgeous thing,” I said, dipping my arm to the funny bone in dish soup.
He didn’t answer. “I’m having a lot of trouble at work” was all he said. Then I heard him push the chair back. He came up behind me, put his arm around my waistline, and kissed my cheek. He whirled me around and took my hands. He said, “An old friend is better than rubies.” He looked me in the eye. He held my attention by trying to be honest. And he kissed me a short sweet kiss on my mouth.
“Please sit down, Virginia,” he said. He kneeled before me and put his head in my lap. I was stirred by so much activity. Then he looked up at me and, as though proposing marriage for life, he offered—because he was drunk—to place his immortal soul in peril to comfort me.
First I said, “Thank you.” Then I said, “No.”
I was sorry for him, but he’s devout, a leader of the Fathers’ Club at his church, active in all the lay groups for charities, orphans, etc. I knew that if he stayed late to love with me, he would not do it lightly but would in the end pay terrible penance and ruin his long life. The responsibility would be on me.
So I said no.
And Barbie is such a light sleeper. All she has to do, I thought, is wake up and wander in and see her mother and her new friend John with his pants around his knees, wrestling on the kitchen table. A vision like that could affect a kid for life.
I said no.
Everyone in this building is so goddamn nosy. That evening I had to say no.
But John came to visit, anyway, on the fourth Thursday. This time he brought the discarded dresses of Margaret’s daughters, organdy party dresses and glazed cotton for every day. He gently admired Barbara and Linda, his blue eyes rolling to back up a couple of dozen oohs and ahs.
Even Philip, who thinks God gave him just a certain number of hellos and he better save them for the final judgment, Philip leaned on John and said, “Why don’t you bring your boy to play with me? I don’t have nobody who to play with.” (Philip’s a liar. There must be at least seventy-one children in this house, pale pink to medium brown, English-talking and gibbering in Spanish, rough-and-tough boys, the Lone Ranger’s bloody pals, or the exact picture of Supermouse. If a boy wanted a friend, he could pick the very one out of his neighbors.)
Also, Girard is a cold fish. He was in a lonesome despair. Sometimes he looked in the mirror and said, “How come I have such an ugly face? My nose is funny. Mostly people don’t like me.” He was a liar too. Girard had a face like his father’s. His eyes are the color of those little blue plums in August. He looks like an advertisement in a magazine. He could be a child model and make a lot of money. He is my first child, and if he thinks he is ugly, I think I am ugly.
John said, “I can’t stand to see a boy mope like that … What do the Sisters say in school?”
“He doesn’t pay attention is all they say. You can’t get much out of them.”
“My middle boy was like that,” said John. “Couldn’t take an interest. Aaah, I wish I didn’t have all that headache on the job. I’d grab Girard by the collar and make him take notice of the world. I wish I could ask him out to Jersey to play in all that space.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Why, Virginia, I’m surprised you don’t know why not. You know I can’t take your children out to meet my children.”
I felt a lot of strong arthritis in my ribs.
“My mother’s the funny one, Virginia.” He felt he had to continue with the subject matter. “I don’t know. I guess she likes the idea of bugging Margaret. She says, ‘You goin’ up, John?’ ‘Yes, Mother,’ I say. ‘Behave yourself, John,’ she says. ‘That husband might come home and hacksaw you into hell. You’re a Catholic man, John,’ she says. But I figured it out. She likes to know I’m in the building. I swear, Virginia, she wishes me the best of luck.”
“I do too, John,” I said. We drank a last glass of beer to make sure of a peaceful sleep. “Good night, Virginia,” he said, looping his muffler neatly under his chin. “Don’t worry. I’ll be thinking of what to do about Girard.”
I got into the big bed that I share with the girls in the little room. For once I had no trouble falling asleep. I only had to worry about Linda and Barbara and Philip. It was a great relief to me that John had taken over the thinking about Girard.
John was sincere. That’s true. He paid a lot of attention to Girard, smoking out all his sneaky sorrows. He registered him into a wild pack of Cub Scouts that went up to the Bronx once a week to let off steam. He gave him a Junior Erector Set. And sometimes when his family wasn’t listening he prayed at great length for him.
One Sunday, Sister Veronica said in her sweet voice from another life, “He’s not worse. He might even be a little better. How are you, Virginia?” putting her hand on mine. Everybody around here acts like they know everything.
“Just fine,” I said.
“We ought to start on Philip,” John said, “if it’s true Girard’s improving.”
“You should’ve been a social worker, John.”
“A lot of people have noticed that about me,” said John.
“Your mother was always acting so crazy about you, how come she didn’t knock herself out a little to see you in college? Like we did for Thomas?”
“Now, Virginia, be fair. She’s a poor old woman. My father was a weak earner. She had to have my wages, and I’ll tell you, Virginia, I’m not sorry. Look at Thomas. He’s still in school. Drop him in this jungle and he’d be devoured. He hasn’t had a touch of real life. And here I am with a good chunk of a family, a home of my own, a name in the building trades. One thing I have to tell you, the poor old woman is sorry. I said one day (oh, in passing—years ago) that I might marry you. She stuck a knife in herself. It’s a fact. Not more than an eighth of an inch. You never saw such a gory Sunday. One thing—you would have been a better daughter-in-law to her than Margaret.”
“Marry me?” I said.
“Well, yes … Aaah—I always liked you, then … Why do you think I’d sit in the shade of this kitchen every Thursday night? For godsakes, the only warm thing around here is this teacup. Yes sir, I did want to marry you, Virginia.”
“No kidding, John? Really?” It was nice to know. Better late than never, to learn you were desired in youth.
I didn’t tell John, but the truth is, I would never have married him. Once I met my husband with his winking looks, he was my only interest. Wild as I had been with John and others, I turned all my wildness over to him and then there was no question in my mind.
Still, face facts, if my husband didn’t budge on in life, it was my fault. On me, as they say, be it. I greeted the morn with a song. I had a hello for everyone but the landlord. Ask the people on the block, come or go—even the Spanish ones, with their sad dark faces—they have to smile when they see me.
But for his own comfort, he should have done better lifewise and moneywise. I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn’t so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has to look up to them from the cellar stairs.
A woman counts her children and acts snotty, like she invented life, but men must do well in the world. I know that men are not fooled by being happy.
“A funny guy,” said John, guessing where my thoughts had gone. “What stopped him up? He was nobody’s fool. He had a funny thing about him, Virginia, if you don’t mind my saying so. He wasn’t much distance up, but he was all set and ready to be looking down on us all.”
“He was very smart, John. You don’t realize that. His hobby was crossword puzzles, and I said to him real often, as did others around here, that he ought to go out on the ‘$64 Question.’ Why not? But he laughed. You know what he said? He said, ‘That proves how dumb you are if you think I’m smart.’”
“A funny guy,” said John. “Get it all off your chest,” he said. “Talk it out, Virginia; it’s the only way to kill the pain.”
By and large, I was happy to oblige. Still I could not carry through about certain cruel remarks. It was like trying to move back into the dry mouth of a nightmare to remember that the last day I was happy was the middle of a week in March, when I told my husband I was going to have Linda. Barbara was five months old to the hour. The boys were three and four. I had to tell him. It was the last day with anything happy about it.
Later on he said, “Oh, you make me so sick, you’re so goddamn big and fat, you look like a goddamn brownstone, the way you’re squared off in front.”
“Well, where are you going tonight?” I asked.
“How should I know?” he said. “Your big ass takes up the whole goddamn bed,” he said. “There’s no room for me.” He bought a sleeping bag and slept on the floor.
I couldn’t believe it. I would start every morning fresh. I couldn’t believe that he would turn against me so, while I was still young and even his friends still liked me.
But he did, he turned absolutely against me and became no friend of mine. “All you ever think about is making babies. This place stinks like the men’s room in the BMT. It’s a fucking pissoir.” He was strong on truth all through the year. “That kid eats more than the five of us put together,” he said. “Stop stuffing your face, you fat dumbbell,” he said to Philip.
Then he worked on the neighbors. “Get that nosy old bag out of here,” he said. “If she comes on once more with ‘my son in the building trades’ I’ll squash her for the cat.”
Then he turned on Spielvogel, the checker, his oldest friend, who only visited on holidays and never spoke to me (shy, the way some bachelors are). “That sonofabitch, don’t hand me that friendship crap, all he’s after is your ass. That’s what I need—a little shitmaker of his using up the air in this flat.”
And then there was no one else to dispose of. We were left alone fair and square, facing each other.
“Now, Virginia,” he said. “I come to the end of my rope. I see a black wall ahead of me. What the hell am I supposed to do? I only got one life. Should I lie down and die? I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ll give it to you straight, Virginia, if I stick around, you can’t help it, you’ll hate me…”
“I hate you right now,” I said. “So do whatever you like.”
“This place drives me nuts,” he mumbled. “I don’t know what to do around here. I want to get you a present. Something.”
“I told you, do whatever you like. Buy me a rat trap for rats.”
That’s when he went down to the House Appliance Store, and he brought back a new broom and a classy dustpan.
“A new broom sweeps clean,” he said. “I got to get out of here,” he said. “I’m going nuts.” Then he began to stuff the duffel bags, and I went to the grocery store but was stopped by Mrs. Raftery, who had to tell me what she considered so beautiful—death—then he kissed and went to join some army somewhere.
I didn’t tell John any of this, because I think it makes a woman look too bad to tell on how another man has treated her. He begins to see her through the other man’s eyes, a sitting duck, a skinful of flaws. After all, I had come to depend on John. All my husband’s friends were strangers now, though I had always said to them, “Feel welcome.”
And the family men in the building looked too cunning, as though they had all personally deserted me. If they met me on the stairs, they carried the heaviest groceries up and helped bring Linda’s stroller down, but they never asked me a question worth answering at all.
Besides that, Girard and Philip taught the girls the days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Johnday, Friday. They waited for him once a week, under the hallway lamp, half asleep like bugs in the sun, sitting in their little chairs with their names on in gold, a birth present from my mother-in-law. At fifteen after eight he punctually came, to read a story, pass out some kisses, and tuck them into bed.
But one night, after a long Johnday of them squealing my eardrum split, after a rainy afternoon with brother constantly raising up his hand against brother, with the girls near ready to go to court over the proper ownership of Melinda Lee, the twenty-four-inch walking doll, the doorbell rang three times. Not any of those times did John’s face greet me.
I was too ashamed to call down to Mrs. Raftery, and she was too mean to knock on my door and explain.
He didn’t come the following Thursday either. Girard said sadly, “He must’ve run away, John.”
I had to give him up after two weeks’ absence and no word. I didn’t know how to tell the children: something about right and wrong, goodness and meanness, men and women. I had it all at my fingertips, ready to hand over. But I didn’t think I ought to take mistakes and truth away from them. Who knows? They might make a truer friend in this world somewhere than I have ever made. So I just put them to bed and sat in the kitchen and cried.
In the middle of my third beer, searching in my mind for the next step, I found the decision to go on Strike It Rich. I scrounged some paper and pencil from the toy box and I listed all my troubles, which must be done in order to qualify. The list when complete could have brought tears to the eye of God if He had a minute. At the sight of it my bitterness began to improve. All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.
As always happens in these cases where you have begun to help yourself with plans, news comes from an opposite direction. The doorbell rang, two short and two long—meaning John.
My first thought was to wake the children and make them happy. “No! No!” he said. “Please don’t put yourself to that trouble. Virginia, I’m dog-tired,” he said. “Dog-tired. My job is a damn headache. It’s too much. It’s all day and it scuttles my mind at night, and in the end who does the credit go to?
“Virginia,” he said, “I don’t know if I can come anymore. I’ve been wanting to tell you. I just don’t know. What’s it all about? Could you answer me if I asked you? I can’t figure this whole thing out at all.”
I started the tea steeping because his fingers when I touched them were cold. I didn’t speak. I tried looking at it from his man point of view, and I thought he had to take a bus, the tubes, and a subway to see me; and then the subway, the tubes, and a bus to go back home at 1 a.m. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all for him to part with us forever. I thought about my life, and I gave strongest consideration to my children. If given the choice, I decided to choose not to live without him.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing out my careful list of troubles. “Writing a letter?”
“Oh no,” I said, “it’s for Strike It Rich. I hope to go on the program.”
“Virginia, for goodness’ sakes,” he said, giving it a glance, “you don’t have a ghost. They’d laugh you out of the studio. Those people really suffer.”
“Are you sure, John?” I asked.
“No question in my mind at all,” said John. “Have you ever seen that program? I mean, in addition to all of this—the little disturbances of man”—he waved a scornful hand at my list—“they suffer. They live in the forefront of tornadoes, their lives are washed off by floods—catastrophes of God. Oh, Virginia.”
“Are you sure, John?”
“For goodness’ sake…”
Sadly I put my list away. Still, if things got worse, I could always make use of it.
Once that was settled, I acted on an earlier decision. I pushed his cup of scalding tea aside. I wedged myself onto his lap between his hard belt buckle and the table. I put my arms around his neck and said, “How come you’re so cold, John?” He has a kind face and he knew how to look astonished. He said, “Why, Virginia, I’m getting warmer.” We laughed.
John became a lover to me that night.
* * *
Mrs. Raftery is sometimes silly and sick from her private source of cheap wine. She expects John often. “Honor your mother, what’s the matter with you, John?” she complains. “Honor. Honor.”
“Virginia dear,” she says. “You never would’ve taken John away to Jersey like Margaret. I wish he’d’ve married you.”
“You didn’t like me much in those days.”
“That’s a lie,” she says. I know she’s a hypocrite, but no more than the rest of the world.
What is remarkable to me is that it doesn’t seem to conscience John as I thought it might. It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning.
Of course we must be very careful not to wake the children or disturb the neighbors, who will enjoy another person’s excitement just so far, and then the pleasure enrages them. We must be very careful for ourselves too, for when my husband comes back, realizing the babies are in school and everything easier, he won’t forgive me if I’ve started it all up again—noisy signs of life that are so much trouble to a man.
We haven’t seen him in two and a half years. Although people have suggested it, I do not want the police or Intelligence or a private eye or anyone to go after him to bring him back. I know that if he expected to stay away forever he would have written and said so. As it is, I just don’t know what evening, any time, he may appear. Sometimes, stumbling over a blockbuster of a dream at midnight, I wake up to vision his soft arrival.
He comes in the door with his old key. He gives me a strict look and says, “Well, you look older, Virginia.” “So do you,” I say, although he hasn’t changed a bit.
He settles in the kitchen because the children are asleep all over the rest of the house. I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go.
“I didn’t like the Army much,” he says. “Next time I think I might go join the Merchant Marine.”
“What Army?” I say.
“It’s pretty much the same everywhere,” he says.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” I say.
“I lost my cuff link, goddamnit,” he says, and drops to the floor to look for it. I go down too on my knees, but I know he never had a cuff link in his life. Still I would do a lot for him.
“Got you off your feet that time,” he says, laughing. “Oh yes, I did.” And before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got onto me right where we were, and the truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions.