There were three different locks on his mother’s door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.
“Mom?”
That groan again.
The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.
“Mom, where are you?”
A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her. She was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.
“Mom! Jesus, Mom!”
She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stertorous and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to look at him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.
“Larry?”
“Going to put you on your bed, Mom.”
He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open, revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.
As if to prove this, she said querulously: “Larry, go get your father. He’s in the bar.”
“Be quiet,” he said, distraught. “Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom.”
“He’s in the bar with that photographer!” she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry’s body felt as if it was coated with slowly running slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom’s semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and quake. Her face was dry and sweatless.
“
He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.
The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he’d just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.
The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: “This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. Right now all of our circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call—”
“
“—call will be taken as soon as—”
He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement when your mother was dying? What was going on there?
Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they needed to know about them? Why didn’t they teach it in school?
In the bedroom his mother’s laborious breathing went on and on.
“I’ll be back,” he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like:
He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.
He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.
Chapter 20
The Harborside was the oldest hotel in Ogunquit. The view was not so good since they had built the new yacht club over on the other side, but on an afternoon like this, when the sky had been poxed with intermittent thunderstorms, the view was good enough.
Frannie had been sitting by the window for almost three hours, trying to write a letter to Grace Duggan, a high school chum who was now going to Smith. It wasn’t a confessional letter dealing with her pregnancy or the scene with her mother—writing about those things would do nothing but depress her, and she supposed Grace would hear soon enough from her own sources in town. She had only been trying to write a friendly letter. The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual acquaintance) new job as a Senate page. The impending marriage of Amy Lauder.
The letter just wouldn’t allow itself to be written. The interesting pyrotechnics of the day had played a part— how could you write while pocket thunderstorms kept coming and going over the water? More to the point, none of the news in the letter seemed precisely honest. It had twisted slightly, like a knife in the hand that gives you a superficial cut instead of peeling the potato as you had expected it to do. The bicycle trip had been jolly, but she and Jess were no longer on such jolly terms. She had indeed lucked out on her BY-7 final, but had not been lucky at all on the biology final that really counted. Neither she nor Grace had ever cared all that much for Peggy Tate, and Amy’s forthcoming nuptials, in Fran’s present state, seemed more like one of those ghastly sick jokes than an occasion of joy. Amy’s getting married but I’m having the baby, hah-hah-hah.
Feeling that the letter had to be finished if only so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with it anymore, she wrote:
I’ve got problems of my own, boy do I have problems, but I just don’t have the heart to write them all down. Bad enough just having to think about them! But I expect to see you by the Fourth, unless your plans have changed since your last letter. (One letter in six weeks? I was beginning to think someone had chopped your typing fingers off, kid!) When I see you I’ll tell you all. I could sure use your advice.
Believe in me and I’ll believe in you,
Fran
She signed her name with her customary flamboyant/comic scrawl, so it took up half of the remaining white space on the notesheet. Just doing that made her feel more like an imposter than ever. She folded it into the envelope and addressed it and put it against the mirror standing up. Finished business.
There. Now what?
The day was darkening again. She got up and walked restlessly around the room, thinking she ought to go out before it started to rain again, but where was there to go? A movie? She’d seen the only one in town. With Jesse. To Portland to look at clothes? No fun. The only clothes she could look at realistically these days were the ones with the elastic waistbands. Room for two.
She’d had three calls today, the first one good news, the second indifferent, the third bad. She wished they’d come in reverse order. Outside the rain had begun to fall, darkening the marina’s pier again. She decided she’d go out and walk and to hell with the impending rain. The fresh air, the summer damp, might make her feel better. She might even stop somewhere and have a glass of beer. Happiness in a bottle. Equilibrium, anyway.
The first call had been from Debbie Smith, in Somersworth. Fran was more than welcome, Debbie said warmly. In fact, she was needed. One of the three girls who had been sharing the apartment had moved out in
