She walked him to the door, strolling with her hands deep in her skirt pockets. “I hope,” she said, “you haven’t got the wrong idea about us. I mean, Joe’s an excellent father, honestly he is; he’s always been good with Slevin.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, when I compare him with some others I could name!” Jenny said. She had a habit, with disapproving people, of talking a little too much, and she knew it. As they crossed the hall, she said, “Sam Wiley, for instance — my second husband. Becky’s father. You’d die if you ever saw Sam. He was a painter, one of those graceful compact
She opened the front door. A fine, fresh mist blew in and she took a deep breath. “Oh, lovely,” she said. “But isn’t that a hilarious name? For the longest time I kept trying to turn it around, thinking it must make more sense if I read it off backward. Goodbye, then, Father. Thanks for dropping in.”
She closed the door on him and went off to fix the children’s supper.
This would be a very nice house, Jenny was fond of saying, if only the third-floor bathtub didn’t drain through the dining room ceiling. It was a tall, trim Bolton Hill row house; she’d bought it back in ’64, when prices weren’t yet sky-high. In those days, it had seemed enormous; but seven years later, with six extra children, it didn’t feel so big any more. It was inconvenient, warrenlike, poorly arranged. There were so many doors and radiators, it was hard to find space for the furniture.
She cooked at a sticky, stilt-legged stove, rinsed greens at a yellowed sink skirted with chintz, set plates on a table that was carved with another family’s initials. “Here, children, everyone get his own silver, now—”
“You gave Jacob more peas than me.”
“She did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Take them! I don’t even like them.”
“Where’s Slevin?” Jenny asked.
“Who needs Slevin anyhow, the old grouch.”
The telephone rang and Joe came in with the baby. “That’s your answering service, they want to know —”
“I’m not on; it’s Dan’s night on. What are they calling
“That’s what I thought, but they said—”
He wandered off again, and returned a minute later to settle at the table with the baby in his lap. “Here’s her meat,” Jenny said, flying past. “Her spoon is on the …”
She left the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the second floor and called up to the third. “Slevin?” No answer. She climbed the rest of the way, quickly growing breathless. How out of shape she was! It was true, as her mother was forever telling her, that she had let herself go — a crime, her mother said, for anyone with Jenny’s good looks. It was true that she’d become a bit haggard, slackened somewhat, her skin turning sallow and her eyebrows shaggy and her wide, amused mouth a dry brownish color now that she wore no lipstick. “Your hair!” her mother mourned. “Your lovely hair!”—which wasn’t lovely at all: a thick, blunt, gray-threaded clump with boxy bangs. “You used to be such a beauty,” Pearl would say, and Jenny would laugh. A fat lot of good it had done her! She liked to think that she was wearing her beauty out — using it up, she liked to think. She took some satisfaction in it, like a housewife industriously making her way through a jar of something she did not enjoy, would not buy again, but couldn’t just discard, of course.
Panting, clutching a handful of denim skirt, she arrived on the third floor. It was the older children’s floor, not her territory, and it had a musty, atticky smell. “Slevin?” she called. She knocked at his door. “Supper, Slevin!”
She opened the door a crack and peered in. Slevin lay on his unmade bed with his forearm over his eyes. A wide strip of blubbery belly showed, as it nearly always did, between jeans and T-shirt. He had his earphones on; that was why he hadn’t heard. She crossed the room and lifted the earphones from his head. A miniature Janis Joplin song rang out tinnily: “Me and Bobby McGee.” He blinked and gave her a puzzled look, like someone just waking. “Suppertime,” she told him.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Not hungry! What kind of talk is that?”
“Jenny, honest, I just don’t want to get up.”
But she was already pulling him to his feet — a burly boy nearly Jenny’s height and considerably heavier but still babyish, creamy skinned. She propelled him to the door, pushing from behind with both palms flat on the small of his back. “You’re the only one of them that I have to carry bodily to meals,” she said. She sang him down the stairs:
“Seriously, Jenny,” Slevin said.
They entered the kitchen. Joe made a trumpet of his hands above the baby’s head and said, “Ta-ra! Ta-ra! He approaches!” Slevin groaned. The others didn’t look up from their meal.
Sitting in her place next to Joe, gazing around at the tableful of children, Jenny felt pleased. They were doing well, she decided — even the older ones, who’d acted so wary and hostile when she had first met them.
Then she had an unsettling thought: it occurred to her that this would have to be her permanent situation. Having taken on these children, straightened their upturned lives and slowly, steadily won their trust, she could not in good conscience let them down. Here she was, forever. “It’s lucky we get along,” she said to Joe.
“It’s extremely lucky,” he said, and he patted her hand and asked for the mustard.
“Isn’t it amazing how school always smells like school,” Jenny told Slevin’s teacher. “You can add all the modern conveniences you like — audiovisual things and computers — it still smells like book glue and that cheap gray paper they used to have for arithmetic and also … what’s that other smell? There’s another smell besides. I know it but I can’t quite name it.”
“Have a seat, Dr. Tull,” the teacher said.
“Radiator dust,” said Jenny.
“Pardon?”
“
“I called you in for a purpose,” said the teacher, opening the file that lay before her. She was a tiny thing, surely not out of her twenties, perky and freckled with horn-rimmed glasses dwarfing her pointed nose. Jenny wondered how she’d learned to be so intimidating so quickly. “I know you’re a busy woman, Dr. Tull, but I’m genuinely anxious about Slevin’s school performance and I thought you ought to be informed.”
“Oh, really?” Jenny said. She decided she would feel better if she too wore glasses, though hers were only needed for reading. She dug through her purse and a pink plastic pacifier fell out. She pretended it hadn’t happened.
“Slevin is very, very intelligent,” the teacher said. She glared at Jenny accusingly. “He goes straight off the top of the charts.”
“Yes, I figured that.”
“But his English average …” the teacher said, flipping through papers. “It’s F. Well, maybe D minus.”
Jenny clicked her tongue.
“Math: C. History: D. And science … and gym … He’s had so many absences, I finally asked if he’d been cutting school. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said — came right out with it. ‘What did you cut?’ I asked him. ‘February,’ he said.”
Jenny laughed. The teacher looked at her.
