on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.
He went down to what Vera liked to call “the phone nook. “It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two hundred and forty pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader's Digests, and Fate magazines.
Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.
A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you'd be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.
Hoping for the middle choice, Herb lifted up the phone. “Hello?”
A crisp male voice said: “Is this the Herbert Smith residence?”
“Yes?”
“To whom am I speaking, please?”
“I'm Herb Smith. What…”
“Will you hold for a moment?”
“Yes, but who. -
Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone-bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions-the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modern life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, “Hold the phone, willya?” and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn't they just say, “Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?”
He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.
“Herbert?”
He turned round, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.
“Who is it?”
“I don't know yet. They've got me on hold.”
“On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“It's not Johnny, is it? Nothing's happened to Johnny?”
“I don't know,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about how these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension…
Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, “Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet. “That would earn him Vera Smith's Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o'clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn't think he could take that particular smile.
The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, “Hello, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.”
“Is it my boy? Something about my boy?”
Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.
Sergeant Meggs said, “Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?”
“Is he all right? Is he okay?”
Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. “What is it? What's happened to my Johnny?”
Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, “I am handling this.”
She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.
“Mr. Smith, are you there?”
Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb's mouth. “I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He's a teacher at the high school there.”
“He's been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I'm very sorry to have to give you this news. “The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.
“Oh, my God,” Herb. said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. “Oh, my God,” he said again.
“He's dead?” Vera asked. “He's dead? Johnny's dead?”
He covered the mouthpiece. “No,” he said. “Not dead.”
“Not dead! Not dead!” she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. “0 God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and…
“Vera shut up!”
For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face: Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes. I… I apologize for the ruckus.”
“Quite understandable,” Meggs said.
“My boy… Johnny… was he driving his Volkswagen?”
“Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are death-traps,” Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.
“He was in a Bangor amp; Orono Yellow Cab,” Meggs said. “I'll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved, two of them driven by kids from Cleaves Mills. They were dragging. They came up over what's known as Carson's Hill on Route 6, headed east. Your son was in the cab, headed west, toward Cleaves. The cab and the car on the wrong side of the road collided headon. The cab driver was killed, and so was the boy driving the other car. Your son and a passenger in that other car are at Eastern Maine Med. I understand both of them are listed as critical.”
“Critical,” Herb said.
“Critical! Critical! “Vera moaned.
Oh, Christ, we sound like one of those weird off Broadway shows, Herb thought. He felt embarrassed for Vera, and for Sergeant Meggs, who must surely be hearing Vera, like some nutty Greek chorus in the back-ground. He wondered how many conversations like this Sergeant Meggs had held in the course of his job. He decided he must have had a good many. Possibly he had already called the cab driver's wife and the dead boy's mother to pass the news. How had they reacted? And what did it matter? Wasn't it Vera's right to weep for her son? And why did a person have to think such crazy things at a time like this?
“Eastern Maine,” Herb said. He jotted it on a pad. The drawing on top of the pad showed a smiling telephone handset. The phone cord spelled out the words PHONE PAL. “How is he hurt?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Smith?”
“Where did he get it? Head? Belly? What? Is he burned?”
Vera shrieked.
“Vera can you please shut UP!”
“You'd have to call the hospital for that information,” Meggs said carefully. “I'm a couple of hours from having a complete report.”
“All right. All right.”
“Mr. Smith, I'm sorry to have to call you in the middle of the night with such bad news…
“It's bad, all right,” he said. “I've got to call the hospital, Sergeant Meggs. Good-bye.”
“Good night, Mr. Smith.”
Herb hung up and stared stupidly at the phone. Just like that it happens, he thought. How “bout that. Johnny.
Vera uttered another shriek, and he saw with some alarm that she had grabbed her hair, rollers and all, and was pulling it. “It's a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on sin, on something! Herb, get down on your knees with me…”
“Vera, I have to call the hospital. I don't want to do it on my knees.”
“We'll pray for him… promise to do better… if you'd only come to church more often with me I know… may be it's your cigars, drinking beer with those men after work… cursing… taking the name of the Lord God in vain… a judgment… it's a judgment…”
He put his hands on her face to stop its wild, uneasy whipping back and forth. The feel of the night cream was unpleasant, but he didn't take his hands away. He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania. Five years after Johnny was born, the doctor had found a number of benign tumors in her uterus and vaginal canal. Their removal had made it impossible for her to have another baby. Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of “pure Christians” who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.
“Vera,” he said.
“We'll do better,” she whispered, her eyes pleading with him. “We'll do better and he'll live. You'll see. You'll…”
“Vera.”
She fell silent, looking at him.
“Let's call the hospital and see just how bad it really is,” he said gently.
“A-All right. Yes.”
