A Special Providence Read online

  “All right. I’ll give up sculpture, then. I’ll move to the Bronx and get some wretched little job in a department store. Is that what you want?”

  “No, of course that’s not what I want. I’m simply asking for a little co-operation, a little consideration – damn it, Alice, a little sense of responsibility.”

  “Responsibility! Oh, don’t talk to me about responsibility …”

  “Alice, will you please keep your voice down? Before you wake the boy?”

  Life in the suburbs came abruptly to an end with a frightening lawsuits for unpayable debts when he was nearly thirteen; and it was three years later, after a series of increasingly cheap city apartments, that Alice made a final plea to her former husband. She would never be a burden on him again, she promised, if he would only agree to finance Bobby’s enrollment in what she called a Good New-England Prep School.

  “A boarding school? Alice, do you have any idea how much those places cost? Look: let’s try to be reasonable. How do you think I’m going to be able to put him through college if I—”

  “Oh, you know perfectly well the whole question of college is three years away. Anything can happen in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a fortune in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a fortune six months from now. Oh, I know you’ve never had any faith in me, but it happens that a good many other people do.”

  “Well, but Alice, listen. Try to control yourself.”

  “Ha! Control myself. Control myself …”

  The school she chose was not exactly a good one, but it was the only one that offered to take him at half tuition, and the victory of his acceptance filled her with pride.

  His first year there – the year of Pearl Harbor – was almost unalloyed in its misery. Missing his mother and ashamed of missing her, wholly out of place with his ineptness at sports, his cheap, mismatched clothes and his total lack of spending money, he felt he could survive only by becoming a minor campus clown. The second year was better – he gained a certain prestige as a campus eccentric and was even beginning to win recognition as a kind of campus intellectual – but in the middle of that second year George Prentice dropped dead in his office.

  It was a stunning event. Riding home on the train for the funeral, he couldn’t get over the surprise of hearing his mother weep uncontrollably into the telephone. She had sounded as bereaved as a real widow, and he’d almost wanted to say, “What the hell, Mother – you mean we’re supposed to cry when he dies?”

  And he was appalled at her behavior in the funeral parlor. Moaning, she collapsed into the heaped flowers and planted a long and passionate kiss on the dead man’s waxen face. Recorded organ music was droning somewhere in the background, and there was a long solemn line of men from Amalgamated Tool and Die waiting to pay their respects (he had an awful suspicion that her histrionics were being conducted for their benefit). And although his first impulse was to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, he lingered at the coffin for a little while after the conclusion of her scene. He stared down into the plain, still face of George Prentice and tried to study every detail of it, to atone for all the times he had never quite looked the man in the eye. He dredged his memory for the slightest trace of real affection for this man (birthday presents? trips to the circus?), and for the faintest glimmer of a time when the man might have known anything but uneasiness and disappointment in the presence of his only child; but it was no use. Turning away from the corpse at last and taking her arm, he looked down at her weeping head with revulsion. It was her fault. She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.

  But he began to wonder, darkly, if it mightn’t be his own fault too, even more than hers. He almost felt as if he’d killed the man himself with his terrible inhuman indifference all these years. All he wanted then was to get away from this sobbing, shuddering old woman and get back to school, where he could think things out.

  And his father’s death brought another, more practical kind of loss: there was no more money. This was something he wasn’t fully aware of until he came home the following summer, not long after he’d turned seventeen, to find her living in a cheap hotel room for which the rent was already in arrears. She had put all her sculpture and what was left of her furniture into storage, and the storage payments were in arrears too. For months, with a total lack of success, she had been trying to re-establish herself as a fashion illustrator after a twenty-year absence from the field. Even he could see how stiff and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained that it was all a question of making the right contacts; and he’d been with her for less than a day before discovering that she didn’t have enough to eat. She had been living for weeks on canned soup and sardines.

  “Look,” he said, only dimly aware of sounding like a ghost of George Prentice. “This isn’t very sensible. Hell, I’ll get some kind of a job.”

  And he went to work in an automobile-parts warehouse. On the strength of that they moved into the furnished apartment in the West Fifties, and the “wonderful companionship” entered a strange new phase.

  Feeling manly and pleasurably proletarian as he clumped home every night in his work clothes, he saw himself as the hero of some inspiring movie about the struggles of the poor. “Hell, I started out as a warehouseman,” he would be able to say for the rest of his life. “Had to quit school and support my mother, after my dad died. Those were pretty tough times.”

  The trouble was that his mother refused to play her role in the movie. It couldn’t be denied that he was supporting her – she sometimes had to meet him outside the warehouse at noon on payday, in fact, in order to buy her lunch – but nobody would ever have guessed it. He kept hoping to come home and find her acting the way he thought she ought to act: a humble widow, gratefully cooking meat and potatoes for her tired son, sitting down with a sewing basket as soon as she’d washed the dishes, darning his socks in the lamplight and perhaps looking up to inquire, shyly, if he wouldn’t like to call up some nice girl.

  And he was always disappointed. Night after night was given over to her talk about the contacts she was certain to establish soon in the fashion world, and about the fortunes still to be made out of one-man shows if only she could get her sculpture out of storage, while the canned food burned on the stove.

  Once he found her posing for his admiration in a stylish new dress, for which she’d spent more than half the week’s grocery money, and when he failed to be enthusiastic about it she explained, as if she were talking to a retarded child, that no one could possibly expect to get ahead in the fashion world wearing last year’s clothes.

  “Oh, yes, Bobby’s fine,” he heard her telling someone on the telephone, another time. “He’s taken a summer job. Oh, just a little laboring job, in some dreadful warehouse – you know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime – but he seems to enjoy it, and I think the experience will do him a world of good …”

  He had assumed, with mixed emotions, that he wouldn’t be going back to school for his senior year; but when September came around she told him not to be ridiculous. He had to graduate; it would break her heart if he didn’t.

  “Well, but look: what’re you going to do?”

  “Dear, I’ve explained all that. Something’s bound to happen soon with this fashion work; you know how hard I’m trying. And then just as soon as I can get my sculpture out of storage there’s no telling what good things are going to come our way. Don’t you see?”

  “Well, sure, but I’m not talking about ‘soon.’ I’m talking about now. How are you going to pay the rent? How the hell are you going to eat?”

  “Oh, I’ll always manage; that’s not important. I’ll borrow some money if I have to. That’s nothing to—”

  “Who from? And anyway, you can’t go on borrowing forever, can you?”

  She looked at him incredulously, slowly shaking her head with a world-weary smile, and then she said it: “You
sound just like your father.”

  The argument went on for hours, in ever-rising spirals of unreasoning shrillness, until at last, after hearing one more time and at great length about the invaluable contacts that were certain to be hers, he turned on her and said, “Oh, bullshit!”

  And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor, splitting an armpit seam of the dress that was supposed to be her means of advancement in the fashion world. She lay face down, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.

  It was a thing he had often seen her do before. The first time, long ago, had been when one of their landlords in Westchester had threatened to evict them, after she had called George Prentice to plead for whatever sum it was they needed to settle the debt. “All right!” she had cried into the telephone. “All right! But I’m warning you, I’ll kill myself tonight!” And rising from the slammed-down phone she had grabbed her breast and fallen to the carpet, and her little boy had tried to put both fists in his mouth to stifle his panic until she roused herself at last and took him sobbing into her arms. It had happened often enough since then, in various crises, that he knew she wasn’t really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there. Before long she turned over and pulled herself up into a tragic sitting position in the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands.

  “Oh, God,” she said with a convulsive shudder. “Oh, God. My son calls me ‘Bull Shit.’ ”

  “No, now wait a minute. I didn’t ‘call’ you – you don’t ‘call’ people – look, it’s just an expression. Don’t you see? I just said – look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, oh, oh, God,” she said, rocking from side to side in her chair. “My son calls me ‘Bull Shit.’ ”

  “No, look. Wait a minute. Please …”

  In the end, a week before school started, she took a job – not the “wretched little job in a department store” she had so often threatened George Prentice with, but something more wretched even than that: she went to work in a factory that made department-store mannequins.

  The surprising thing was that his senior year turned out to be a kind of success. Through whatever subtle process it is that turns school outcasts into offbeat school leaders, he became one; not until the triumphant year was nearly over did he come to grips with the knowledge that his tuition had gone unpaid for a year and a half.

  There were many telephone calls between his mother and the headmaster, during which she probably wept and pleaded and promised, and there were sober talks between the headmaster and himself (“It’s a very difficult situation for all of us, Bob”) until at last, on the very eve of Commencement Day, the headmaster explained tactfully and with some embarrassment that his diploma would have to be withheld until the account was paid.

  By that time his mother had been laid off from the mannequin factory and gone to work in a small, nonunion defense plant that made precision lenses. She described it solemnly, to everyone she knew, as “War work.”

  A month later he was in the Army, with his mother listed as a Class “A” dependent; and now, sitting across from her in the ample cleanliness of Childs, he was letting her words flow past his hearing. With a grim, tender patience, he had begun to watch for the first signs of her drunkenness to show: the thickening and slurring of her speech, the tendency of her upper lip to loosen and bloat, the slowing clumsiness of her gesturing hands.

  “… and then suddenly,” she was saying, corning to the climax of a long story about some people she’d recently met, “suddenly his eyes went very big and he said, ‘You mean you’re Alice Prentice? Alice Prentice the sculptor?’” She had always taken a child’s delight in telling anecdotes that allowed her to speak her own name, and those that allowed her to add “the sculptor” were much the best. “And it turned out they’d been admirers of mine for years. So they asked me in for coffee and we had – oh, we just had the most wonderful time.”

  He knew he was supposed to join in her pleasure at this, but he abruptly decided he wasn’t up to it tonight. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Well, that’s interesting. Where’d they heard of you?” And he was fully aware that the question was cruel, but aware too that he had to ask it just that way.

  “What? Oh—” Hurt feelings flickered in her face, but she recovered. “Oh, well, friends of theirs had bought a garden piece from one of my exhibitions years ago, or something of the kind. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, they—”

  “Your exhibitions?” He couldn’t let it go; he was bearing down on her like a prosecuting attorney. He knew damned well that for all her lifelong talk about one-man shows she’d never had one. (And did they really call it a “one-man show” when the artist was a woman? What kind of nonsense was that?) He knew too that the number of pieces she’d sold from group exhibitions could be counted on pitifully few fingers; most of her sales had been made through a garden-sculpture gallery that carried her work on consignment, and even at that they had nearly always been bought by friends, or by friends of friends.

  “Well, I think they said an exhibition,” she said impatiently. “It may have been a gallery sale; anyway that’s not important.”

  He conceded the point, but only to draw back to a new line of attack: “And how did you say you’d met these people?”

  “Through the Stewarts, dear; I explained all that.”

  “Oh, I see. And the Stewarts were probably friends of the other people too, the people who bought the sculpture. Right?”

  “Well, I suppose so, yes. I suppose that must’ve been the way it happened.” She fell silent for a little while, looking daunted, poking her fork around in the ruins of her chicken croquettes. Then, bravely, her voice went to work again and brought the story around to what had evidently been its point from the start. “Anyway, they’re awfully nice, and of course I’ve told them all about you. They’re dying to meet you. I told them we might drop by tomorrow after church, if you feel like it. Would you mind doing that, dear? Just to please me? I know you’ll like them, and they’ll be terribly disappointed if we don’t come.”

  It was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but he said yes. And by implication he’d said yes to church, too, which he would also much rather have avoided. He was ready to say yes to anything she wanted now, to atone for the harshness of his questioning. Why had he grilled her like that? She was fifty-three years old and lonely and oppressed; why couldn’t he let her have her illusions? That was what her wounded, half-drunken eyes had seemed to be saying throughout his interrogation: Why can’t I have my illusions?

  Because they’re lies, he told her silently in his mind as he champed his jaws and swallowed the cheap food. Everything you say is a lie. You’re not Alice Prentice the Sculptor and you never were, any more than I’m Robert Prentice the Prep-School Graduate. You’re a liar and a fake, that’s what you are.

  He was shocked by the force of his own secret invective but carried helplessly along with it, holding his mouth shut tight and allowing his fingers to twist and tear a raddled paper napkin in his lap.

  You’re Alice Grumbauer, his soundless voice went on. You’re Alice Grumbauer from Plainville, Indiana, and you’re ignorant and foolish in spite of all the “art” crap you’ve been spouting all these years, while my poor slob of a father was breaking his back for us. And maybe he was “dull” and “insensitive” and all that, but I wish to Christ I’d had a chance to know him because whatever kind of a fool he was I know damn well he didn’t live by lies. And you do. Everything you live by is a lie, and do you want to know what the truth is?

  He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.

  Do you want to know what the truth is? The truth is that your fingernails are all broken and black because you’re working as a laborer and G
od knows how we’re ever going to get you out of that lens-grinding shop. The truth is that I’m a private in the infantry and I’m probably going to get my head blown off. The truth is, I don’t really want to be sitting here at all, eating this goddam ice cream and letting you talk yourself drunk while all my time runs out. The truth is, I wish I’d taken my pass to Lynchburg today and gone to a whorehouse. That’s the truth.

  But it wasn’t, exactly. He knew it wasn’t, even while taking deep breaths to fight back the words that, wanted so urgently to burst from him. The real, the whole truth was something far more complicated. Because it couldn’t be denied that he’d come to New York of his own free will, and even with a certain heartfelt eagerness. He had come for sanctuary in the very comfort of her “lies” – her groundless optimism, her insistent belief that a special providence would always shine on brave Alice Prentice and her Bobby, her conviction, held against all possible odds, that both of them were somehow unique and important and could never die. He had wanted to be with her tonight: he hadn’t even minded her calling him her “big, wonderful soldier.” And as for the whorehouse in Lynchburg, he knew deep down that he couldn’t blame his mother for his own lack of guts.

  “Isn’t this good?” said Alice Prentice of her ice cream.

  “Mm,” said her son, and they finished their meal in silence.

  On their way back to the apartment she kept swaying against him – her grip on his arm at each street crossing was a little spasm of terror – and as soon as they were upstairs she poured herself a hefty drink from the bottle of whiskey she had probably been working on all afternoon.

  “Would you like a drink, dear?”