“That’s a lot of hate,” Bob Marks said.
“That isn’t the point. Her hating him, or whether he was bad enough for her to have a right to hate him. Not likely he was. That isn’t the point.”
“Money,” he said. “Money’s always the point.”
“No. My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love.”
“Some people would consider it lunacy.”
I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.
I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.
“It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,” I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?” I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.
Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”
That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigtails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.
I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the other walls — a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.
“I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened, sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.
I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came too, and a little shower of dried plaster.
“Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words
IN THE CAR, on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before — the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodies pressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bush we passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crepe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.
“A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”
“I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”
“Speaking of money,” said Beryl — though nobody actually had been — “do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California — you can’t lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”
All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.
“That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I get?”
“And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.
But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”
My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”
“From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”
“We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”
Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and put it in the stove and burned it.
My father turned around and faced the road ahead.
I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress.At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.
“So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”
My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”
“You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”
“The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”
“That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”
“He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”
My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”
“Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”
“Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.
Gratitude not felt by all.
“Don’t you pretend this isn’t the craziest thing you ever heard of,” Beryl shouted into the front seat. “Don’t you pretend you don’t think so! Because it is, and you do. You think just the same as me!”
MY FATHER DID not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn’t appear so. He did not know about it — it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence’s Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others — he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room — the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top — and there is the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene,but not crazy. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.
How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it. But I have stopped telling that story. I never told it to anyone again after telling it to Bob Marks. I don’t think so. I didn’t stop just because it wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. I stopped because I saw that I had to give up expecting people to see it the way I did. I had to give up expecting them to approve of any part of what was done. How could I even say that I approved of it myself? If I had been the sort of person who approved of that, who could do it, I wouldn’t have done all I have done — run away from home to work in a restaurant in town when I was fifteen, gone to night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into the real-estate office, and finally become a licensed agent. I wouldn’t be divorced. My father wouldn’t have died in
