The Stand Read online

  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 her shadow nodding. 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 like that at all. He didn't think he would be as bored as Harlan Enders or as shamefully poor as the Carons--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. What he did tell her was that she had never been a burden to them, in good times or in bad, and he was proud to tell his friends he had sent her through school. What his money and her brains hadn't been able to take care of, he told them, she had done the old-fashioned way: by bending her back and shucking her buns. Working, and working hard, if you wanted to cut through the country bullshit. Her mother didn't always understand that. Changes had come for women, whether the women always liked them or not, and it was hard for Carla to get it through her head that Fran wasn't down there at UNH husband-hunting.

  "She sees Amy Lauder getting married," Peter said, "and she thinks, 'That should be my Fran. Amy's pretty, but when you put my Fran beside her, Amy Lauder looks like an old dish with a crack in it.' Your mother has been using the old yardsticks all her life, and she can't change now. So if you 'n her scrape together a bit and make some sparks from time to time, like steel against flint, that's why. No one is to blame. But you have to remember, Fran, she's too old to change, but you are getting old enough to understand that."

  From this he rambled back to his job again, telling her about how one of his co-workers had almost lost his thumb in a small press because his mind was down at the pool-hall while his damn thumb was under the stamp. Good thing Lester Crowley had pulled him away in time. But, he added, someday Lester Crowley wouldn't be there. He sighed, as if remembering he wouldn't be either, then brightened and began telling her about an idea he'd had for a car antenna concealed in the hood ornament.

  His voice switched from topic to topic, mellow and soothing. Their shadows grew longer, moving up the rows before them. She was lulled by it, as she always had been. She had come here to tell something, but since earliest childhood she had often come to tell and stayed to listen. He didn't bore her. So far as she knew, he didn't bore anyone, except possibly her mother. He was a storyteller, and a good one.

  She became aware that he had stopped talking. He was sitting on a rock at the end of his row, tamping his pipe and looking at her.

  "What's on your mind, Frannie?"

  She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn't sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn't stand. She jumped.

  "I'm pregnant," she said simply.

  He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. "Pregnant," he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: "Oh, Frannie ... is it a joke? Or a game?"

  "No, Daddy."

  "You better come over here and sit with me."

  Ob
ediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.

  "For sure?" he asked her.

  "For sure," she said, and then--there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn't help it--she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.

  "Daddy, do you still like me?"

  "What?" He looked at her, puzzled. "Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie. "

  That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.

  "Are you disappointed?" she asked.

  "I don't know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?"

  She nodded.

  "You told him?"

  She nodded again.

  "What did he say?"

  "He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion."

  "Marriage or abortion," Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. "He's a regular two-gun Sam."

  She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady's hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I'll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady's hands--

  Her father said: "I don't want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn't he ... or you ... being careful?"

  "I had birth control pills," she said. "They didn't work."

  "Then I can't put any blame, unless it's on both of you," he said, looking at her closely. "And I can't do that, Frannie. I can't lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won't talk about blame."

  She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.

  "Your mother will have plenty to say about blame," he said, "and I won't stop her, but I won't be with her. Do you understand that?"

  She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen the latter--but on his own terms.

  She asked quietly: "Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?"

  "You asking me to take your part?"

  "I don't know."

  "What are you going to do about it?"

  "With Mom?"

  "No. With you, Frannie."

  "I don't know."

  "Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that's what they say, anyway."

  "I don't think I can do that. I think I've fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in."

  "The baby?" His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden's hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.

  "No, the baby isn't the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jesse is ..." She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jesse, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her, the rush to decide and get out from under the threatening shadow of her mother, who was now at a shopping mall buying gloves for the wedding of Fran's childhood friend. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother's favorite sayings.

  "He's weak," she said. "I can't explain better than that."

  "You don't really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?"

  "No," she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn't trust Jesse, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts. "Jesse means well. He wants to do the right thing; he really does. But ... we went to a poetry reading two semesters ago. It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly ... very carefully ... so as not to miss a word. And me ... you know me ..."

  He put a comfortable arm around her and said, "Frannie got the giggles."

  "Yeah. That's right. I guess you know me pretty well."

  "I know a little," he said.

  "They--the giggles, I mean--just came out of nowhere. I kept thinking, 'The scruffy man, the scruffy man, we all came to listen to the scruffy man.' It had a beat, like a song you might hear on the radio. And I got the giggles. I didn't mean to. It really didn't have anything to do with Mr. Enslin's poetry, it was pretty good, or even with the way he looked. It was the way they were looking at him."

  She glanced at her father to see how he was taking this. He simply nodded for her to go on.

  "Anyway, I had to get out of there. I mean I really had to. And Jesse was furious with me. I'm sure he had a right to be mad ... it was a childish thing to do, a childish way to feel, I'm sure ... but that's the way I often am. Not always. I can get a job done--"

  "Yes, you can."

  "But sometimes--"

  "Sometimes King Laugh knocks and you're one of those people who can't keep him out," Peter said.

  "I guess I must be. Anyway, Jess isn't one of those people. And if we were married ... he'd keep coming home to that unwanted guest that I had let in. Not every day, but often enough to make him mad. Then I'd try, and ... and I guess ..."

  "I guess you'd be unhappy," Peter said, hugging her tighter against his side.

  "I guess I would," she said.

  "Don't let your mother change your mind, then."

  She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.

  "What do you think of me getting an abortion?" she asked after a while.

  "My guess is that's really what you wanted to talk about."

  She looked at him, startled.

  He looked back, half-quizzical, half-smiling, one bushy eyebrow--the left--cocked. Yet the overall impression she took from him was one of great gravity.

  "Maybe that's true," she said slowly.

  "Listen," he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

  She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.

  "Frannie, you've no business having such an old man for a father, but I can't help it. I never married until 1956."

  He looked at her thoughtfully in the dusklight.

  "Carla was different in those days. She was ... oh, hellfire, she was young herself, for one thing. She didn't change until your brother Freddy died. Until then, she was young. She stopped growing after Freddy died. That ... you mustn't think I'm talking against your mother, Frannie, even if it sounds a little like I am. But it seems to me that Carla stopped ... growing ... after Freddy died. She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick-dry cement on her way of looking at things and called it good. Now she's like a guard in a museum, and if she sees anyone tampering with the ideas on display there, she gives them a lot of lookout-below. But she wasn't always like that. You'll just have to take my word for it, but she wasn't."

  "What was she like, Daddy?"

  "Why ..." He looked vaguely out across the garden. "She was a lot like you, Frannie. She got the giggles. We used to go down to Boston to see the Red Sox play and during the seventh-inning stretch she'd go out with me to the concessio
n and have a beer."

  "Mamma ... drank beer?"

  "Yes, she did. And she'd spend most of the ninth in the ladies' and come out cussing me for making her miss the best part of the game when all the time it was she tellin me to go on down to the concession stand and get em."

  Frannie tried to imagine her mother with a cup of Narragansett beer in one hand, looking up at her father and laughing, like a girl on a date. She simply couldn't do it.

  "She never kindled," he said, bemused. "We went to a doctor, she and I, to see which of us was wrong. The doctor said neither one. Then, in '60, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. Fred was her father's name, you know. She had a miscarriage in '65, and we both figured that was the end of it. Then you came along in '69, a month early but just fine. And I just about loved you to death. We each had one of our own. But she lost hers."

  He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1973. He had been thirteen, Frannie four. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.

  "I think abortion's too clean a name for it," Peter Goldsmith said. His lips moved slowly over each word, as if they pained him. "I think it's infanticide, pure and simple. I'm sorry to say so, to be so ... inflexible, set, whatever it is I'm being ... about something which you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it. I told you I was an old man."

  "You're not old, Daddy," she murmured.

  "I am, I am!" he said roughly. He looked suddenly distraught. "I'm an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it's like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son's life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I've always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she'd say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I've read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader's Digest, but it's me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think ... those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can't get over that. It's like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I'm not making much sense, am I?"