8 Plus 1 Page 7

  The only other title change in this collection concerns the story that appeared in McCall’s as “Another of Mike’s Girls.” Here again, I learned about the change when I turned to the index on the day the magazine arrived. The original title was “Except When You’re Shaving, Don’t Look into Mirrors. “Frankly, I didn’t expect McCall’s to keep the original, but how I loved it—and still do.

  “A Bad Time for Fathers” was written when I was feeling sentimental about the imminent departure of our oldest daughter, Bobbie, to college. The trick was to write the story with feeling but without sentimentality. The party in the story never occurred, and the character of the boy friend, Sam, is a complete fabrication, although I myself have been Sam in a thousand manifestations.

  A Bad Time for Fathers

  Probably the party had been a mistake, after all, because it provided a focus for the farewells, a time and place to say goodbye, the kind of thing “The Imp” disliked intensely. (She wasn’t “The Imp” anymore, either, but simply Jane, startlingly formal, almost regal at unexpected moments.) Anyway, it had started out as a small gathering of girls, all of them leaving for college or jobs out of town, an informal get-together at summer’s end, with hamburgers and hot dogs, and probably some activity in the backyard—horseshoes (“So square, Dad”), or croquet, which she didn’t consider square at all because she was expert at the game. But it turned into a party simply because Ellen loves to get her hands on a menu and an invitation list and all the rest of it. What we didn’t realize, Ellen and I, was that the party emphasized Jane’s departure. If we had avoided an official event and merely driven her to college on Sunday, then her entrance into another way of life wouldn’t have been so marked, so jagged in our hearts.

  All of which, of course, was much too dramatic for her. And corny.

  “Look, guys,” she said, “I’m only going to college. In Boston. I’ll only be a hundred miles away, for crying out loud.” She called everybody guys. Even girls.

  “A hundred twelve,” I said.

  But she finally relented and allowed Ellen to proceed with plans for a big affair with all the trimmings. And that brought up a sudden problem.

  “That means Sam,” she said.

  “Why not Sam?” I asked, surprised.

  She paused. She’d started pausing dramatically, lately. “He’s an epilogue, Dad.”

  “Epilogue? The only epilogues I know about are in books.”

  She blew air out of the corner of her mouth, which meant that she was being very patient with me.

  “I mean,” she said, “an epilogue is something that happens after the end of the story.”

  I should have sighed with relief, I suppose. After she’d met Sam at the Senior Class Christmas Dance and began to spend most of her time with him—her homework suffering dangerously for a while—Ellen and I had been concerned. Jane seemed so young and vulnerable; Sam was tall and energetic and, although he was polite, he seemed aloof and remote, removed from our world. He was only a teenage boy, I reassured Ellen. They’re all remote. He also was accident-prone, a potential demolisher of houses. Probably cities. During his first visit, he politely admired one of Ellen’s bone-china cups and saucers and somehow dropped the cup, which shattered, of course, beyond repair. “Oh, that’s nothing,” Jane had said, blithely dismissing the incident as Ellen turned away, stricken. Jane had also worn a crazy ring Sam had won at a carnival. It turned her finger green at first, then purple. But she continued to wear it long after I had envisioned an amputation to save her life.

  Now, suddenly, Sam was an epilogue. But she invited him anyway, and he arrived late, as usual.

  The party coincided with one of those leaf-toasted afternoons when late summer conspires with early autumn to produce an in-between period of grace and loveliness. The fellows and girls spread themselves around the house and across the lawn. Ellen had arranged a buffet, setting out tables beneath the old maple in the backyard. In the days when Jane was still “The Imp,” one branch of that tree had held her first rope swing. She had planted her first radishes in a patch of land near her Tom Sawyer fence. It turned out later that she couldn’t stand the taste of radishes. Her Tom Sawyer fence had been a disaster, too. She’d offered to paint the fence for me for five dollars, figuring she would inveigle her friends into doing the work. But the plan had backfired. I had watched her painting for a while; she always curled her tongue around the corner of her lips when she concentrated fiercely. The fence seemed suddenly endless in its length and I went out to help her. “No,” she said with ten-year-old determination, “a bargain’s a bargain, Dad.” Abandoned by her friends (who, as it turned out, had naturally read Tom Sawyer, too), she completed the job alone. And I had felt sad watching her, not knowing exactly why.

  Now she leaned against that fence, serene and secure among her friends, laughing and smiling and tossing her head. Croquet balls clicked against each other, sounding like giant dice, and badminton corks sailed like captive birds across the net. Ellen was busy dispensing food and drink with the aid of some neighborhood mothers. People nodded absently at me, as if they weren’t sure whether I’d wandered into the party by mistake. I went into the house, finding my way through the clusters of fellows and girls and mixed my own drink, definitely not for teenagers, inviting its chilling dryness to mellow my mood.

  Somehow I heard the doorbell above the buzz and chatter. It was Sam. He was perspiring. I had noticed from the beginning that he had a tendency to sweat in the mildest of weather or even while playing croquet, and that he always reeked of some sharply spiced and terrible deodorant or after-shave lotion. Jane hadn’t noticed things like that. She kept talking about his eyes, how soft and kind they were, how they sometimes crackled with excitement. Eyes crackling? Which sent her off to her room in a huff: “Oh, Dad, you’re making fun.” Now Sam arrived, late, a bit out of breath, still tall but somehow awkward now in his tallness. He stood tentatively at the door. I approached him warily, bracing myself for the assault of his aroma.

  “Hi, Mr. Croft,” he said, his eyes searching elsewhere. “Cripes, I know I’m late. I had trouble with the carburetor. And I had to work an hour overtime at the store.” Suddenly, he was heavy with woe. In other times, he could do no wrong, had been a glamorous figure, even though he hadn’t made the basketball team. Something about weak ankles that buckled at odd, unexpected moments.

  “But basketball is superfluous anyway,” Jane had said, “superfluous” having been her favorite word at the time. Now, he had bad luck with the car and Jane had other favorite words, “epilogue” among them.

  “You haven’t missed a thing, Sam,” I said. “She’s out back somewhere.” He smelled of lemon, which was an improvement over the banana aura that had surrounded him the last time he dropped around.

  Waving him off, I made my way to the stairs, carrying my glass, tired suddenly of the noise, and in particular the raucous record that was beginning its ten-thousandth orbit on the stereo. Jane’s room looked down on the backyard. Ordinarily I stayed out of the place because it presented a formidable landscape: a mess. Posters taped to the wall, everything helter-skelter, strewn shoes and books and other stuff that turned the floor into a relief map you had to step cautiously across. “Would you please, repeat, please clean up that room,” had been her mother’s cry through the years.

  “Right, Mom,” Jane would answer. But she never did.

  The view from the window was magnificent. The backyard trailed off into a long field that disappeared into Moosock Brook somewhere. In the distance, autumn hills looked like collapsed wigwams. When Jane was a child, we sat at this window and I’d tell her about the tribes who’d held their powwows on Mount Wachusum and then galloped their horses across the plains to attack the cabins of the early settlers. Late on a smoky afternoon you could almost see the dust of horse hooves rising in the distance.

  “Hey,” she said, “why not join the party?”

  Without waiting for my reply, she swept into the room, mi
raculously managing to avoid tripping on the floor’s accumulation. “They want more records,” she said, bypassing the empty record rack and rummaging under the bed.

  Arms embracing records, she halted in her departure. “What are you doing, Dad?”

  Indicating the horizon, I said: “Looking for some Indians.” The martini had something to do with the answer.

  “At this hour of the day?” Amused, indulgent, she said, “They attack at sunrise.”

  But she wasn’t playing the game, really. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes party-bright. I wanted to detain her anyway.

  “A few days from now, Jane, you’ll be on your own. Living in a dorm. Know how you like privacy? Well, you’ll be stuck in a dorm with—what?—three hundred other freshmen under one roof.” I glanced around the room, shuddering with simulated horror. “All those teenage girls living together. It’s like this place multiplied three hundred times.”

  “But you miss the point, Dad. The point is, this room isn’t really a mess. It’s comfortable. Parents think rooms are messes. So, at school, with no parents around—no messes.” She juggled the records in her arms.

  “No parents,” I mused. “That sounds chilling.”

  “Dad, Dad, know what you are? A character. I’m not going to Mars.”

  “Distance is a funny thing,” I said. “When you went to Girl Scout camp, you were only thirty miles away, but homesick. You sneaked out of the place and called us—collect, incidentally—pleading for rescue.”

  “I was twelve years old, for crying out loud.”

  “But that was only five or six years ago.”

  “Hey, Dad. Have you looked at me lately?”

  “That’s what hurts, baby,” I thought. “I’ve looked at you too much lately and can’t find the homesick Girl Scout whose uniform never seemed to fit right.”

  Turning to the window, I saw a wandering figure below. “There’s Sam.”

  She made an effort to peer into the backyard. “I know,” she sighed.

  We watched Sam trying to negotiate his way under a badminton net while balancing a paper plate that contained two hamburgers, a hot dog, a bottle of soda pop and a pile of potato chips.

  “The thing is,” she said, frowning as if puzzled about something, “that he’s such a good guy. Really great. He’s got this way about him that knocks me out: he always acts as if he’s protecting me. Like, he always holds my elbow when we cross the street.” She continued to look down at him, pensive, almost sad. Then, brightly: “We learned in school that man is the most adaptable of all species.”

  “What has that got to do with Sam?”

  That patient whistle of air again. “I mean, Sam will get used to it.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Of course. We talked. Do you think I’m such a rat? He’s going away, too, Dad. We’ve both got everything ahead of us. A new life, new people. We’ve both got to be free.”

  Smoke rose from a distant hill. Harry Arnold burning his leaves. “Look,” I said, touching her shoulder. “Indians. On the warpath.”

  “That’s Mr. Arnold burning his leaves,” she said. And, turning away, “I’ve got to go, Dad. They’re waiting.”

  After her departure, my eyes sought Sam across the lawn. He had found a quiet spot, and was preparing to sit on one of those wrought-iron garden chairs, white and decorative and stylish, but definitely fragile, definitely not for sitting. Not the way his luck had been running recently. I had assembled the chair myself in the spring, and I have always been lousy at tightening nuts and bolts. But he sat down, and nothing happened. One for Sam’s side.

  Seeking a refill for my glass, I encountered Ellen in the kitchen. She was doing something or other with a wild assortment of food.

  “Thank goodness I ordered this extra stuff,” she said. “Did you ever see anybody eat like this? But everything seems to be going fine, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She paused. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Kids getting on your nerves? All the racket? How can they stand that music—two stereos going at once! Are you feeling all right?” She could always keep several topics going in one conversation, like a verbal juggler.

  “Ellen,” I said, as we were jostled by an invasion of fellows and girls sweeping through the kitchen to the living room.

  “What?” she asked, preoccupied as she tested the dip she had just concocted.

  “Why should I be feeling sorry for Sam? Sam, of all people.”

  “Is that what’s the matter?” she asked, evidently satisfied with the taste of the dip.

  “Not too long ago I couldn’t stand the sight of him.”

  “You’re a compassionate man,” she said.

  “Not that compassionate. You ought to get a whiff of that after-shave he’s wearing today.”

  But she was carried away in a tide of guests. Holding the tray aloft, she cried: “Careful, it’ll spill.”

  I almost tripped over a croquet wicket as I crossed the backyard, heading for no place in particular. Eventually, I found my way to Sam.

  He leaped up with alacrity. Once he had walked across my living room as if he were making the mortgage payments. Now, he attempted a pathetic smile, his cheeks bulging with whatever terrible mixture he had crammed into his mouth. My nostrils made tentative inquiries: at least he had bypassed the onion.

  “Food good?” I asked.

  His throat rippled as he swallowed the gigantic mass. “Beautiful,” he said. “Actually, I haven’t been too hungry lately. But I rushed here straight from work and didn’t get a chance to eat. I mean, I actually haven’t eaten since seven o’clock this morning.”

  I wasn’t too interested in his eating habits and so the conversation languished. We watched them playing croquet. A few couples were dancing on the patio. I realized a silence had deepened between us despite all the racket that filled the air.

  “How do you feel about college?” I asked.

  He mumbled something that sounded like “swell.”

  “Let’s see. You’ll be up in New Hampshire, right?”

  “Right,” he said, exhaling.

  Maybe he’d had onions after all.

  I spotted Jane strolling along the side of the house, chatting and laughing with somebody or other. I had long since stopped trying to sort out the guests.

  Turning at a horseshoe’s clamor and the shout of “ringer,” I caught sight of Sam looking at her. There was such anguish, such longing in that face. We both watched her progress through the yard, sprightly in her loveliness, animated, filled with grace and good humor, at ease with the world. You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

  “Sam,” I said, turning back to him.

  “Yes, Mr. Croft?” The words came out as if they’d been printed on a slip of paper and memorized.

  “New Hampshire isn’t that far from Boston.”

  His reply was lost in a cry from the other side of the patio: “Let’s choose up sides.” We moved into the area of activity where a game was being organized, something that consisted mostly of wild giggles and laughter. I made my way toward the back door, slowly. The day suddenly looked tired. The leaves of the maple seemed limp, the colors subdued. I could imagine grass blades folding into each other. Ridiculous: I seemed to be the only one who was tired.

  In the kitchen, Ellen was attacking the dishes, helped by the neighborhood friends. Their talk was animated and meaningless. I found a quiet spot in the den and closed my eyes, allowing myself to float away.

  “Mr. Croft?”

  The voice came from a far distance. Pulling myself from sleep, I looked up at Sam.

  “I’m going,” he said. “I figured I’d say goodbye. I mean, I’ll be leaving for college myself on Monday, so probably I won’t be around for a while.”

  Rising to my feet, I realized that evening had become night while I slept. The c
hemistry of the party had changed. Departures echoed in the air. Subdued talk filtered in from outside.

  “Well, Sam, it’s been fine having you here,” I said, groping for words. I had not envisioned a farewell scene.

  “Thanks for everything,” he said, as I accompanied him through the dining room and the living room to the front door. Sprinkles of laughter reached us from outside, with quiet pauses now and then. I reached for a light switch but wasn’t quick enough. Sam had already tripped and as he pitched forward his hand lashed out and brought down a lamp base: base, shade and all crashing to the floor. The bulb burst as if an invisible photographer were taking our picture.

  Sam was profuse with apologies as we groped around on our knees in the dark. “Forget it, Sam,” I said, “it was an accident.”

  The overhead light went on, snapped into brilliance by Jane. I looked up at her, feeling silly.

  “You two,” she said, hands on hips, shaking her head, vastly amused by it all.

  “Look,” I began, rising to one knee. I was about to say: “Look, my dear, I am your father. I changed your diapers and signed your report cards. Don’t link me with this stumbling bumbling schoolboy.” You two. But I realized that Sam and I were more than conspirators over a broken lamp. I had been using him for camouflage.

  A horn blared outside.

  “Somebody’s leaving. I’ve got to say goodbye to them,” Jane said. And she was out the door.

  “Jeez, Mr. Croft,” Sam said, “how much did the lamp cost?”