He would go along, not thinking, getting people—including himself—into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture… even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did—as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change.Shehad; hewould .
But this was no boy in front of her; this was a grown-up man, and she feared that his days of change—the deep and fundamental sort her minister called a change of soul rather than one of heart—were behind him. There was something in Larry that gave you the bitter zing of hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart. But she loved him.
She also thought there was good in Larry, great good. It was there, but this late on it would take nothing short of a catastrophe to bring it out. There was no catastrophe here; only her weeping son.
“You’re tired,” she said. “Clean up. I’ll move the boxes, then you can sleep. I guess I’ll go in today after all.”
She went down the short hall to the back room, his old bedroom, and Larry heard her grunting and moving boxes. He wiped his eyes slowly. The sound of traffic came in the window. He tried to remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother. He thought of the dead cat. She was right. He was tired. He had never been so tired. He went to bed and slept for nearly eighteen hours.
Chapter 6
It was late afternoon when Frannie went out back to where her father was patiently weeding the peas and beans. She had been a late child and he was in his sixties now, his white hair coming out from under the baseball cap he always wore. Her mother was in Portland, shopping for white gloves. Fran’s best childhood friend, Amy Lauder, was getting married early next month.
She looked down at her dad’s back for a peaceful moment, just loving him. At this time of day the light took on a special quality that she loved, a timeless quality that belonged only to that most fleeting Maine genus, early summer. She could think of that particular tone of light in the middle of January and—it would make her heart ache fiercely. The light of an early summer afternoon as it slipped toward dark had so many good things wrapped up in it: baseball at the Little League park, where Fred had always played third and batted clean-up; watermelon; first corn; iced tea in chilled glasses; childhood.
Frannie cleared her throat a little. “Need a hand?”
He turned and grinned. “Hello, Fran. Caught me diggin, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did.”
“Is your mother back yet?” He frowned vaguely, and then his face cleared. “No, that’s right, she just went, didn’t she. Sure, pitch a hand if you want to. Just don’t forget to wash up afterward.”
“A lady’s hands proclaim her habits,” Fran mocked lightly and snorted. Peter tried to look disapproving and did a poor job of it.
She got down in the row next to him and began to weed. Sparrows were twittering and there was a constant hum of traffic on US 1, less than a block from here. It hadn’t reached the volume it would in July, when there would be a fatal accident nearly every day between here and Kittery, but it was building.
Peter told her about his day and she responded with the right questions, nodding in places. Intent on his work, he wouldn’t see her nods, but the corner of his eye would catch hershadownodding. He was a machinist in a large Sanford auto parts firm, the largest auto firm north of Boston. He was sixty-four and about to start on his last year of work before retirement. A short year at that, because he had four weeks’ vacation time stockpiled, which he planned to take in September, after the “ijits” went home. The retirement was much on his mind. He was trying not to look at it as a never-ending vacation, he told her; he had enough friends in retirement now who had brought back the news that it wasn’t likethatat all. He didn’t think he would be as bored as Harlan Enders or as shamefully poor as the Carom—there was poor Paul, hardly ever missed a day at the shop in his life, and yet he and his wife had been forced to sell their house and move in with their daughter and her husband.
Peter Goldsmith hadn’t been content with Social Security; he had never trusted it, even in the days before the system began to break down under recession, inflation, and the steadily increasing number of people on the books. There hadn’t been many Democrats in Maine during the thirties and forties, he told his listening daughter, but her grandfather had been one, and her grandfather had by-God made one out of her father. In Ogunquit’s palmiest days, that had made the Goldsmiths pariahs of a kind. But his father had had one saying as rock-ribbed as the stoniest Maine Republican’s philosophy: Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.
Frannie laughed. She loved it when her dad talked this way. It wasn’t a way he talked often, because the woman that was his wife and her mother would (and had) all but cut the tongue out of his head with the acid which could flow so quickly and freely from her own.
You had to trust yourself, he continued, and let the princes of this world get along as best they could with the people who had elected them. Most times that wasn’t very well, but that was okay; they deserved each other.
“Hard cash is the answer,” he told Frannie. “Will Rogers said it was land, because that’s the only thing they’re not making any more of, but the same goes for gold and silver. A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.”
Fran wondered if he was thinking of poor Paul Caron, who had been his friend since before Fran herself was born, and decided not to ask.
At any rate, she didn’t need him to tell her that he had socked away enough in the good years to keep them rolling.