“Why not? Why shouldn’t I?” Vera could see he was fighting back tears. She could only guess at their meaning. Anger?
“Don’t trot that tone of voice out with me, young man. Understand?” Mother and son stared challengingly into one another’s eyes. Daniel was the first to look away. His yielding allowed her to speak more softly to him. “I think it’s time we both had a break from your grandfather, and the company he keeps. He and his cronies are having a bad effect on you – I see it more and more every day. Those old men aren’t company for a boy your age. It’s unhealthy, you ask me.”
“If that’s what it is – he already said you don’t want them coming around he’ll keep them away. He already promised you that -I heard him!”
“When you get to be as old as I am, maybe then you’ll have learned what your grandfather’s promises are worth.”
“Well, so what? Those guys won’t be coming around again anyway. Not after what you did. So who’s going to corrupt me?”
“You’re wasting your breath,” she said grimly. “It’s decided.”
Yet saying it was decided didn’t make it so. That was the sudden lurch of hot anger speaking, not really her. Vera knew better than to bank on anything ever being decided.
Snow had begun to fall. Vera felt flakes tickling and melting on her hot face. Pushing a wheelbarrow was hard, awkward work. She halted, set down the wheelbarrow, and took a breather, lifting her eyes to the blue corona of the streetlight. It resembled a fish-bowl, the flying snow tiny darting creatures which flashed briefly and brightly before settling, extinguished, dead-white and numb on roofs and roads, empty yards, and stripped gardens. It settled on Vera, too, on her coat, her scarf, the moon of her uplifted face. She was looking back in the midst of flight, back to that night so many years ago, the night of the snow, the night of the recital, the night of their unspoken understanding.
She started, wiped the moisture from her face, coming back to Daniel. There he was, far ahead of her, at the very end of the street. The snow was falling thicker and faster with every passing minute, but still not so thick as to rub out the distinctive stoop to his shoulders and the peculiar toed-out walk he had been bequeathed by his father. At this distance, and in the midst of a blizzard, one could easily have been mistaken for the other.
15
The day after Christmas, temperatures plummeted to ?40°F, and every chimney in Connaught ran a plumb-line of smoke against the windless, blue sky. These columns of white smoke shone in the intense sunshine, temporary pillars of marble erected by stoves and furnaces all over the town. Around two o’clock when Vera discovered the woodbox was getting dangerously low she sent Daniel out to split some wood. The clumsy thunking of his axe outside kept her company as she sat at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking coffee, and pondering her future. When a knock came at the door she supposed it was Daniel, kicking at it with his arms filled with wood, summoning her to open it and let him in. Instead, she found Mr. Stutz, red-faced, nostrils steaming in the bitter cold, and his broad chest stacked with parcels done up in Christmas paper.
“Come in, come in,” Vera urged, and Stutz did, ricocheting through the door-frame, stamping his feet noisily to shed the snow from his heavy, felt-lined boots. Once across the threshold he stalled, searching for a mat on which to remove his overshoes. There was none. As he looked around him, the bareness of the place impressed itself upon him. There were no curtains on the windows of the cramped kitchen, and Mr. Stutz could gaze out onto the outskirts of Connaught, a glacial sweep of frozen prairie broken only by a line of telephone poles rambling west. The austerity, the vacancy of the house, was extreme. However, compared to what he could see of the rest of the rooms, the kitchen verged on clutter. It held a table and two chairs, and the cast-iron range filled one wall with its squat solidity and stove-pipe angles. Stutz wondered when the pipes had last been cleaned. There were brown scorch marks on the beaverboard indicating they were given to overheating. To his left he could look through a narrow door that gave onto an equally narrow living room, empty except for one of the cots that made up the dead lady’s estate and a forlorn display of Christmas presents set out in the middle of the scuffed linoleum floor – a bottle of perfume, a boy’s sweater, a box of Black Magic chocolates, a number of books. Gifts that Vera and Daniel had exchanged. Beyond this, another door stood open on Vera’s bedroom and Stutz could make out a cardboard box filled with clothes and the corner of another cot, twin to the first. There was nothing more to be seen.
“Just kick them off where you stand,” said Vera, noting Mr. Stutz’s indecision as to what to do with his boots, “and come and take a seat by the stove.”
Mr. Stutz carefully placed the presents on the table. “We’re late with these,” he apologized, “but the old gentleman thought that yesterday being Christmas you might have dropped by with the boy. When you didn’t, he asked me to deliver them.”
Vera was clearly annoyed at the presumption. “He had no reason to expect any visits from us. You can tell him I said as much. And you can take these back where they came from,” she said, indicating the parcels.
“They’re not all from him,” said Mr. Stutz quietly. “I put one or two in myself.”
This news embarrassed Vera. “I never,” she said. “What am I going to do? I – Daniel and I – never thought to get you a thing.”
“What’s to get the man who’s got everything?” He laughed artificially to signal he was making a joke. There was an awkwardness in his manner that Vera hadn’t seen before. As a way of offering him some relief she began to sort through the presents.
“This is from you then?” she said, smiling and holding up a package.
“What does it say?” Mr. Stutz wanted to hear her read the tag aloud.
“ ‘To Mrs. Vera Miller from H. Stutz.’ ”
“That’s me all right.”
“H. Stutz,” said Vera, trying to peel away the Scotch tape with her fingernail so as not to rip the paper. “Isn’t that strange? I don’t know your first name. What’s the H stand for?”
“Herman. Herman is my Christian name.”
Wouldn’t you suspect? thought Vera. What she said was, “A sensible name. It suits you, Mr. Stutz, Herman does. Take a chair, Herman, and as soon as I’ve got this present unwrapped we’ll have us a cup of coffee.”
When the paper decorated with jolly Santa Clauses was finally removed, a carton of cigarettes was disclosed. “Isn’t this nice,” said Vera. “My brand, too. Millbank. Thank you, Mr. Stutz.”
“I made a point of watching what you smoked,” said Mr. Stutz.
“I appreciate it,” Vera assured him, pouring coffee. “I just feel awful we didn’t shop for you.”
The topic of presents and purchases exhausted, conversation lapsed. In the silence, Daniel’s axe could be heard ringing in the frozen air. Looking ill at ease, Mr. Stutz blew energetically into his coffee mug. Vera noticed that in the warmth of the kitchen his nose had begun to run, a drop hung trembling on its tip, prompting her to turn her eyes away. When she did, Mr. Stutz cleared his throat and launched into what he had come to say. “You know, Mrs. Miller, your father can’t understand what all this is about – this packing up and leaving him.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Vera, struggling to appear calm, reasonable. “I must say that doesn’t surprise me in the least. The only thing my father’s ever been able to understand is what matters to him. Did you ever notice that about him, Mr. Stutz? Nothing exists unless it’s of some use to him. Do you know when I figured that out? I must have been sixteen, just after my mother died. He seemed to think that my brother and I were there just to make him feel better about the situation. One servant and one pet, you might say. He couldn’t think of anyone but himself. My father’s a very selfish man, Mr. Stutz.”
“He’s always treated me fair,” observed Mr. Stutz.
“And why should he have any trouble treating you fair?” challenged Vera. “When were the two of you ever at cross purposes? Never.”
Mr. Stutz frowned. “I wouldn’t know about that. I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I would,” said Vera, breaking open her carton of Millbanks and lighting herself a cigarette. “I know all about my father and cross purposes. We wrote the book on that. It was because he always assumed the choices were his to make. Back then, when I was sixteen, I wanted to be somebody. Maybe it’s true I wasn’t exactly sure what – what
