Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [48]
As she turned to the door of the attic where his bed was squeezed between storage boxes and empty suitcases, she added, to herself, ‘and help us, too, please God.’
‘Amen,’ came Joey’s voice, from beneath the bed cover. Nancy looked startled. Had she spoken aloud? The boy must have sharp ears.
Joey, in the not-quite-darkness of the attic heard her go down the stairs, move around the room below, each sound conjuring up an action: the soft thud of a closing door, the click of a switch, the muffled sound of the radio, a reassuring, unemphatic voice: Nancy was listening to the President.
Once, there would have been a blur of conversation, husband and wife exchanging comments. Once there would have been a father with peppermint breath looking in to say goodnight and ruffle his head. Crying was not something Joey did, but he felt a familiar, lurching emptiness as though a part of him had been wrenched away, leaving a hollow place too raw to touch.
The resonance of the calm, measured tones from the radio filtered through the floorboards, up the metal legs of the bed and through the pillow into his head. Not the words, but a deep, soft buzzing sound that lulled him towards sleep.
He thought of Nancy as his mother, what else could she be? Waiting for her to collect him from school one day years before, he had caught sight of her at the gates across the playground as she spread her arms to attract his attention. Without thinking he had run towards her and leapt into those open arms, leapt up, flinging his own arms around her neck, squeezing tight. He recalled that one of the other parents, passing, had given him an amused look and he had yelled, over Nancy’s shoulder, ‘This is my mom!’
‘Well, sure she is,’ the woman had replied with a shrug, passing on.
No ‘sure she is’ about it. Other kids had mothers they didn’t need to think about. Joey had felt Nancy’s body, warm against his, and her arms tighten, holding him close, and he knew this was different.
‘And you’re my boy, Joey,’ she had said, laughing, though her voice had sounded wobbly. That moment a pact was formed; a corner turned. That was when he stopped calling her Nancy; she became Mom.
His father had been pleased, but Joey thought that to Ben too it had probably seemed something of a ‘sure she is’ situation: Mom was what kids called their mother, no big deal. And a new order established itself, a family unit. But still Joey had nightmares, he was in a room with a floor made of matting, running towards a woman in white, collapsed on the floor like a crumpled flower, and then running on the spot, like a character in a cartoon movie, getting nowhere. He would wake to find his hands pressed against his ears to try and cut out the sound of someone screaming.
Through his pillow he heard the soft, comforting drone of the President’s voice.
Not everyone was happy with the election.
A long time afterwards, when she had learned to hate her hero, Nancy could barely recall her shocked reaction, her outrage when she read the newspaper revelations of Fascist conspiracies, secret enclaves of financiers, the machinations of Wall Street elders to bring down the bleeding-heart President. Assassination plots scribbled on boardroom notepads.
With no more election leaflets to deliver, no front porch campaigning, her hours at the local Democrat offices moved on from envelope-filling to taking messages; listening to frantic people, hearing how poverty brought despair. There was nothing to be learned from hard times apart from the acceptance of helplessness. Mostly Nancy talked to women desperate for understanding.
‘What about the doctor’s bill, shoes for the kids?’
But guilt insinuated, and often it was the men who cracked.
‘What does a man do?’ Nancy asked her father, ‘when he’s got no work, and can’t buy food or pay the rent?’
One man took a belt to his wife, because she was there; another scraped a few cents together to get a rosier view of the world through the bottom of a bottle; one jumped off a bridge, another off a kitchen