Hearts In Atlantis

left a life insurance policy which lapsed the year before he died. Little did I know that until he was gone and everyone— including the undertaker—wanted their little piece of what I didn’t have. He also left a large stack of unpaid bills, which I have now pretty much taken care of—people have been very understanding of my sit-uation, Mr. Biderman in particular, and I’ll never say they haven’t been.”

All this was old stuff, as boring as it was bitter, but then she told Bobby something new. “Your father,” she said as they approached the apartment house which stood halfway up Broad Street Hill, “never met an inside straight he didn’t like.”

“What’s an inside straight, Mom?”

“Never mind. But I’ll tell you one thing, Bobby-O: you don’t ever want to let me catch you playing cards for money. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.”

Bobby wanted to enquire further, but knew better; more ques-tions were apt to set off a tirade. It occurred to him that perhaps the movie, which had been about unhappy husbands and wives, had upset her in some way he could not, as a mere kid, understand. He would ask his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was poker, but wasn’t completely sure.

“There are places in Bridgeport that take men’s money,” she said as they neared the apartment house where they lived. “Foolish men go to them. Foolish men make messes, and it’s usually the women of the world that have to clean them up later on. Well . . .”

Bobby knew what was coming next; it was his mother’s all-time favorite.

“Life isn’t fair,” said Liz Garfield as she took out her housekey and prepared to unlock the door of 149 Broad Street in the town of Har-wich, Connecticut. It was April of 1960, the night breathed spring perfume, and standing beside her was a skinny boy with his dead father’s risky red hair. She hardly ever touched his hair; on the infre- quent occasions when she caressed him, it was usually his arm or his cheek which she touched.

“Life isn’t fair,” she repeated. She opened the door and they went in.

It was true that his mother had not been treated like a princess, and it was certainly too bad that her husband had expired on a linoleum floor in an empty house at the age of thirty-six, but Bobby sometimes thought that things could have been worse. There might have been two kids instead of just one, for instance. Or three. Hell, even four.

Or suppose she had to work some really hard job to support the two of them? Sully’s mom worked at the Tip- Top Bakery downtown, and during the weeks when she had to light the ovens, Sully-John and his two older brothers hardly even saw her. Also Bobby had observed the women who came filing out of the Peerless Shoe Com-pany when the three o’clock whistle blew (he himself got out of school at two-thirty), women who all seemed way too skinny or way too fat, women with pale faces and fingers stained a dreadful old-blood color, women with downcast eyes who carried their work shoes and pants in Total Grocery shopping bags. Last fall he’d seen men and women picking apples outside of town when he went to a church fair with Mrs. Gerber and Carol and little Ian (who Carol always called Ian-the-Snot). When he asked about them Mrs. Gerber said they were migrants, just like some kinds of birds—always on the move, picking whatever crops had just come ripe. Bobby’s mother could have been one of those, but she wasn’t.

What she was was Mr. Donald Biderman’s secretary at Home Town Real Estate, the company Bobby’s dad had been working for when he had his heart attack. Bobby guessed she might first have gotten the job because Donald Biderman liked Randall and felt sorry for her—widowed with a son barely out of diapers—but she was good at it and worked hard. Quite often she worked late. Bobby had been with his mother and Mr. Biderman together on a couple of occasions—the company picnic was the one he remembered most clearly, but there had also been the time Mr. Biderman had driven them to the dentist’s in Bridgeport when Bobby had gotten a tooth knocked out during a recess game—and the two grownups had a way of looking at each other. Sometimes Mr. Biderman called her on the phone at night, and during those conversations she called him Don. But “Don” was old and Bobby didn’t think about him much.

Bobby wasn’t exactly sure what his mom did during her days (and her evenings) at the office, but he bet it beat making shoes or picking apples or lighting the Tip-Top Bakery ovens at four-thirty in the morning. Bobby bet it beat those jobs all to heck and gone. Also, when it came to his mom, if you asked about certain stuff you were asking for trouble. If you asked, for instance, how come she could afford three new dresses from Sears, one of them silk, but not three monthly payments of $11.50 on the Schwinn in the Western Auto window (it was red and silver, and just looking at it made Bobby’s gut cramp with longing). Ask about stuff like that and you were ask-ing for real trouble.

Bobby didn’t. He simply set out to earn the price of the bike him-self. It would take him until the fall, perhaps even until the winter, and that particular model might be gone from the Western Auto’s window by then, but he would keep at it. You had to keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. Life wasn’t easy, and life wasn’t fair.

When Bobby’s eleventh birthday rolled around on the last Tuesday of April, his mom gave him a small flat package wrapped in silver paper. Inside was an orange library card. An adult library card. Goodbye Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Don Winslow of the Navy. Hello to all the rest of it, stories as full of mysterious muddled passion as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Not to mention bloody daggers in tower rooms. (There were mysteries and tower rooms in the stories about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but precious little blood and never any passion.)

“Just remember that Mrs. Kelton on the desk is a friend of mine,” Mom said. She spoke in her accustomed dry tone of warning, but she was pleased by his pleasure—she could see it. “If you try to borrow anything racy like Peyton Place or Kings Row, I’ll find out.”

Bobby smiled. He knew she would.

“If it’s that other one, Miss Busybody, and she asks what you’re doing with an orange card, you tell her to turn it over. I’ve put writ-ten permission over my signature.”

“Thanks, Mom. This is swell.”

She smiled, bent, and put a quick dry swipe of the lips on his cheek, gone almost before it was there. “I’m glad you’re happy. If I get home early enough, we’ll go to the Colony for fried clams and ice cream. You’ll have to wait for the weekend for your cake; I don’t have time to bake until then. Now put on your coat and get moving, sonnyboy. You’ll be late for school.”

They went down the stairs and out onto the porch together. There was a Town Taxi at the curb. A man in a poplin jacket was leaning in the passenger window, paying the driver. Behind him was a little cluster of luggage and paper bags, the kind with handles.

“That must be the man who just rented the room on the third floor,” Liz said. Her mouth had done its shrinking trick again. She stood on the top step of the porch, appraising the man’s narrow fanny, which poked toward them as he finished his business with the taxi driver. “I don’t trust people who move their things in paper bags. To me a person’s things in a paper sack just looks slutty.”