Dolores Claiborne

him to tuck in his shirt, to comb his hair, to quit slouchin, to grow up, stop actin like a goddam sissy with his nose always stuck in a book, to be a man. When Joe Junior didn’t make the Little League All-Star team the summer before I found out what was wrong with Selena, you would have thought, listenin to his father, that he’d been kicked off the Olympic track team for takin pep-pills. Add to that whatever he’d seen his father gettin up to with his big sister, and you got a real mess on your hands, Sunny Jim. I’d sometimes look at Joe Junior lookin at his father and see real hate in that boy’s face—hate, pure n simple. And durin the week or two before I went across to the mainland with those passbooks in my pocket, I realized that, when it came to his father, Joe Junior had his own inside eye.

Then there was Little Pete. By the time he was four, he’d go swaggerin around right behind Joe, with the waist of his pants pulled up like Joe wore his, and he’d pull at the end of his nose and his ears, just like Joe did. Little Pete didn’t have any hairs there to pull, accourse, so he’d just pretend. On his first day at first grade, he come home snivellin, with dirt on the seat of his pants and a scratch on his cheek. I sat down beside him on the porch step, put my arm around his shoulders, and asked him what happened. He said that goddam little sheeny Dicky O’Hara pushed him down. I told him goddam was swearin and he shouldn’t say it, then asked him if he knew what a sheeny was. I was pretty curious to hear what might pop out of his mouth, to tell you the truth.

“Sure I do,” he says. “A sheeny’s a stupid jerk like Dicky O’Hara.” I told him no, he was wrong, and he asked me what it did mean, then. I told him to never mind, it wasn’t a nice word and I didn’t want him sayin it anymore. He just sat there glarin at me with his lip pooched out. He looked just like his old man. Selena was scared of her father, Joe Junior hated him, but in some ways it was Little Pete who scared me the most, because Little Pete wanted to grow up to be just like him.

So I got their passbooks from the bottom drawer of my little jewelry box (I kep em there because it was the only thing I had in those days with a lock on it; I wore the key around my neck on a chain) and walked into the Coastal Northern Bank in Jonesport at about half-past noon. When I got to the front of the line, I pushed the passbooks across to the teller, said I meant to close all three accounts out, and explained how I wanted the money.

“That’ll be just a moment, Mrs. St. George,” she says, and goes to the back of the tellers’ area to pull the accounts. This was long before computers, accourse, and they had to do a lot more fiddlin and diddlin.

She got em—I saw her pull all three—and then she opened em up and looked at em. A little line showed up down the middle of her brow, and she said somethin to one of the other women. Then they both looked for awhile, with me standin out there on the other side of the counter, watchin em and tellin myself there wasn’t a reason in the world to feel nervous and feelin pretty goddam nervous just the same.

Then, instead of comin back to me, the teller went into one of those jumped-up little cubbyholes they called offices. It had glass sides, and I could see her talkin to a little bald man in a gray suit and a black tie. When she came back to the counter, she didn’t have the account files anymore. She’d left them on the bald fella’s desk.

“I think you’d better discuss your children’s savings accounts with Mr. Pease, Mrs. St. George,” she says, and pushes the passbooks back to me. She did it with the side of her hand, like they were germy and she might get infected if she touched em too much or too long.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong with em?” By then I’d given up the notion that I didn’t have anythin to feel nervous about. My heart was rappin away double-time in my chest and my mouth had gone all dry.

“Really, I couldn’t say, but I’m sure that if there’s a misunderstanding, Mr. Pease will straighten it right out,” she says, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye and I could tell she didn’t think any such thing.

I walked to that office like I had a twenty-pound cake of cement on each foot. I already had a pretty good idear of what must have happened, but I didn’t see how in the world it could have happened. Gorry, I had the passbooks, didn’t I? Joe hadn’t got em outta my jewelry box and then put em back, either, because the lock woulda been busted and it wasn’t.

Even if he’d picked it somehow (which is a laugh; that man couldn’t get a forkful of lima beans from his plate to his mouth without droppin half of em in his lap), the passbooks would either show the withdrawals or be stamped ACCOUNT CLOSED in the red ink the bank uses… and they didn’t show neither one.

Just the same, I knew that Mr. Pease was gonna tell me my husband had been up to fuckery, and once I got into his office, that was just what he did tell me. He said that Joe Junior’s and Little Pete’s accounts had been closed out two months ago and Selena’s less’n two weeks ago. Joe’d done it when he did because he knew I never put money in their accounts after Labor Day until I thought I had enough squirreled away in the big soup-kettle on the top kitchen shelf to take care of the Christmas bills.

Pease showed me those green sheets of ruled paper accountants use, and I saw Joe had scooped out the last big chunk—five hundred dollars from Selena’s account—the day after I told him I knew what he’d been up to with her and he sat there in his rocker and told me I didn’t know everything. He sure was right about that.

I went over the figures half a dozen times, and when I looked up, Mr. Pease was sittin acrost from me, rubbin his hands together and lookin worried. I could see little drops of sweat on his bald head. He knew what’d happened as well as I did.

“As you can see, Mrs. St. George, those accounts have been closed out by your husband, and—”

“How can that be?” I asks him. I threw the three passbooks down on his desk. They made a whacking noise and he kinda blinked his eyes and jerked back. “How can that be, when I got the Christly savings account books right here?”

“Well,” he says, lickin his lips and blinkin like a lizard sunnin itself on a hot rock, “you see, Mrs. St. George, those are—were—what we call ‘custodial savings accounts.’ That means the child in whose name the account is held can—could—draw from it with either you or your husband to countersign. It also means that either of you can, as parents, draw from any of these three accounts when and as you like. As you would have done today, if the money had still, ahem, been in the accounts. ”

“But these don’t show any goddam withdrawals!” I says, and I must have been shoutin, because people in the bank were lookin around at us. I could see em through the glass walls. Not that I cared. “How’d he get the money without the goddam passbooks?”

He was rubbin his hands together faster n faster. They made a sandpapery kind of sound, and if he’d had a dry stick between em, I b’lieve he coulda set fire to the gum-wrappers in his ashtray. “Mrs. St. George, if I could ask you to keep your voice down—”

“I’ll worry about my voice,” I says, louder’n ever. “You worry about the way this beshitted bank does business, chummy! The way it looks to me, you got a lot to worry about. ”

He took a sheet of paper off his desk and looked at it. “According to this, your husband stated the passbooks were lost,” he says finally. “He asked to be issued new ones. It’s a common enough—”

“Common-be-damned!” I yelled. “You never called me! No one from the bank called me! Those accounts were held between the two of us—that’s how it was explained to me when we opened Selena’s and Joe Junior’s back in ‘51, and it was still the same when we opened Peter’s in ’54. You want to tell me the rules have been changed since then?”

“Mrs. St. George—” he started, but he might as well have tried whistlin through a mouthful of crackers; I meant to have my say.

“He told you a fairy-story and you believed it—asked for new passbooks and you gave em to him. Gorry sakes! Who the hell do you think put that money in the bank to begin with? If you think it was Joe St. George, you’re a lot dumber’n you look!”

By then everybody in the bank’d quit even pretendin to be goin about their business. They just stood where they were, lookin at us. Most of em must have thought it was a pretty good show, too, judgin by the expressions on their faces, but I wonder if they would have been quite so entertained if it had been their kids’ college money that’d just flown away like a bigass bird. Mr. Pease had gone as red as the side of old dad’s barn. Even his sweaty old bald head had turned bright red.

“Please, Mrs. St. George,” he says. By then he was lookin like he might break down n cry. “I assure you that what we did was not only perfectly legal, but standard bank practice.”

I lowered my voice then. I could feel all the fight runnin outta me. Joe had fooled me, all right, fooled me good, and this time I didn’t have to wait for it to happen twice to say shame on me.

“Maybe it’s legal and maybe it ain‘t,” I says. “I’d have to haul you into court to find out one way or the other, wouldn’t I, and I ain’t got either the time or the money to do it. Besides, it ain’t the question what’s legal or what