John Gardner - October Light

In her mind’s eye the old woman could see her niece Virginia as clear as day, all dolled up in rouge and lipstick, artificial black lashes, the stiff, half-dead looking dyed-blonde hair teased high over her head in a wide bouffant, cigarette between her fingers — she was a nervous wreck, and no wonder, growing up with that mad fool James and her poor troubled brother who had killed himself, and then marrying that Lewis! — nails dark red, same color as the lipstick not quite following her lips — there would be lipstick too, lined like a fingerprint, on the filter of her L&M. Virginia was pretty, for a woman of thirty-eight. She luckily hadn’t drawn that long, narrow Page head but, instead, the short, wide one her mother, Ariah, had — James’ wife — and that same double chin. Ginny was a good girl, always had been, just as her poor simple mother had been, one of the Blackmers. You could be certain James Page hadn’t told her yet that he’d gotten drunk on whiskey and chased his own eighty-year-old sister up the stairs with a fireplace log and locked her in the bedroom like a madwoman! Virginia’d have something to say, all right, when she heard about that. And no doubt he was working up to tell her, that old mule. Likely’s not he’d pretend to be proud of it — maybe would be proud of it, you never knew. Anything he did, he’d confess it right away; that was the way he’d been since he was old enough to talk. Thought it proved him honest. She pressed her ear to the door again. They were still blabbing on quietly. She pulled her head away and straightened up, lips compressed, annoyed, absentmindedly slapping the paperback book against the palm of her left hand, thinking again about revenge.

The room smelled of apples. He had twelve bushels of them upstairs in the attic, where in the winter it would be cold but not too cold. She didn’t give a hoot about the smell just now, but when her mood was better she liked it, sometimes even opened the attic door to let it float down the narrow wooden stairs and drift around her bed while she slept. It reminded her of her childhood, in this same house. This had been James’ room, in those days. She’d slept downstairs in the room off the pantry. Even then the floor — the wide, softwood boards — had been un-level, so that at night the furniture would incline to slide toward one corner. The same old drop-leaf oak desk with glassed-in books to the left of it had been here then, though the books had been different — heaven only knew where these had come from, perhaps James’ poor wife’s mother: Little Journeys into the Homes of the Great, Coe’s Cyclopaedia, The New Pharmacopeia, The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Training Vicious Dogs, and a dozen ragged hymnals. The grayish-black clock had been kept downstairs in those days, on the fireplace mantel, and the chimes, back then, still rang.

She noticed she had the paperback book in her hand and thought, How odd, and shook her head. She was half-inclined to read a little more in it. The grayish-black clock said twenty to one now, but strange to say she wasn’t sleepy at all. It must be she’d gotten her second wind; or perhaps the truth was she never really slept much anyway, anymore, just fooled herself, laid her head against the pillow, closed her eyes, let her mind drift, and passed it off for sleeping. Yes, she would read a page or two more, she decided. She wasn’t some child, going to be corrupted by a foolish book. Which was worse, come right down to it? — a book that made you smile from time to time, though it spoke about certain things better left unmentioned, such as bedroom things, and suicide, or a book full of gloomy opinions and terrible fore-warnings in memorable prose that was all hogwash anyway? “Show me, Horace Abbott,” she demanded sternly, “a book that’s got insights into human nature that an eighty-year-old woman hasn’t thought of!” The ghost kept mum. Yes, then: she’d tuck herself in and poor Horace could just look the other way.

But just as the old woman was taking the first step in the direction of the bed, the commotion broke out downstairs. With a look of what could only be described as manic glee, she darted back to the door and flattened her ear to it.

For once in her life, as it happened, the old woman was wrong in her prediction about her brother. The old man had fully intended, in point of fact, to tell his daughter just exactly what he’d done, and he’d repeatedly moved the conversation in that direction; but somehow or other he had never quite said it, had merely stood there like a Stoughton bottle, and when she’d got up and picked up her Dickey to carry him to the car, he’d decided to let the thing slide. It was thus his grandson Dickey who told Ginny what the old man had done. They were halfway to the car, Ginny carrying the boy in her arms, his long legs dangling, his pale eyelids closed, one elbow clamped on Snoopy. “How’s my good baby?” Ginny asked him, as she’d been asking every night since they’d got him from the adoption agency. “Mmm,” he said, as always, and brushed his cheek against her hair. Ahead of them in the darkness, just within range of the light falling over the leaf-covered lawn, the grayish Chevrolet with its smashed-in headlight was rumbling and clanking and sending out such thick brown clouds of exhaust one might have thought at first glance it had been parked near a pile of burning leaves. They were just out of range of the old man’s hearing when the little boy said, “Grampa chased Aunt Sally up the stairs with a stick.”

Virginia Hicks stopped walking, mouth opening, eyes widening, and with an expression more like sorrow and terrible weariness than anything else, turned her head, slightly drawing it back, to try to see her son’s face. She could only see his neck and ear. Not in disbelief — in despair, more like — she said, “With a stick?”

Dickey nodded his head. “It was a fireplace log. He locked her in the bedroom.”

Ginny turned, child and all, eyes swimming in tears, to face her father. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed. She saw his back straighten and his long jaw stiffen, prepared to be belligerently defensive as usual, and the same instant she felt Dickey tense up with alarm, realizing too late that now he was in for it from his grampa. Both Dickey and the old man spoke at once, her father barking, “She had it comin’! She stotted the whole thing!” and her son: “Mommy, I want to stay in the car.”

“You can’t stay in the car,” she snapped. “The damn fumes’ll kill you.” She started back with him toward the house.

“Now Ginny you mine your own business,” her father said, self-righteous and whining at the same time, standing his ground in the doorway though both of them knew he’d back off if she pressed him. “This is between yer aunt Sally and me, and nobody else’s got a pot in it.”

“Holy Christ,” she said, and moved straight on toward him, unconsciously using Dickey as a human shield, and the old man backed out of the doorway. She went straight to the living room, put down Dickey on the couch, mechanically stuck the red sateen pillow under his head and Snoopy in his arms, then went striding back to deal with her father. He was still standing in the kitchen, looking hawk-eyed and sullen and crazy as a loon, his hand on the white doorknob, holding the door open. She closed the door to the living room behind her. “Just what the hell,” she asked, “is going on here?”

“This is my house,” her father said, “and if Sally don’t like the way I live here, she can damn well move right on out of it.”

“It’s the family house,” Ginny said, throwing her head forward, fists on her hips. “She’s got as much right to it as you have.”

“That ain’t so!” His indignation was more confident now, for about this there could be no question. “It was left to me and I’ve lived here ah my life.”