• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 581 0

time he left home. He was the only person in this house who had changed. His mother remained a gilded pink and white and Gillespie continued shuffling around in dungarees, her face a little broader and more settled-looking but her fingers still nicked by whittling knives and her manner with babies still as offhand as if she were carrying a load of firewood. But Andrew had mellowed; he had calmed and softened. (“Andrew is in such a state,” Mrs. Emerson had written last winter. “You know how he gets when Gillespie’s expecting, I believe he’d go through the labor pains for her if only he could.” Only Peter seemed to remember the day after Timothy’s funeral, when Andrew had paced the living room saying, “Where is that girl? Where? I’ll get her for this.”) Now instead of taking offense Andrew smiled, first at Gillespie and then at the baby, whose cheek he lightly touched. “Her name is Jenny,” he told P.J.

“Oh,” said P.J. She looked bewildered, but after a moment she smiled too.

“Now then,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Shall we go into the living room where it’s cool?”

She led the way, calming her skirt with her hands as if it were a long and stately gown. If the kitchen had become Gillespie’s, with its wood chips across the table and its scatter of tools beside the breadbox, the living room was still Mrs. Emerson’s. The same vases marched across the mantel; the same dusty gray smell rose from the upholstery. The red tin locomotive under the coffee-table could have been Peter’s own, back in the days when he was a child here anxiously studying the grownups’ faces.

His mother settled in her wing chair, across from Andrew, and Gillespie sat in the high-backed rocker with both children nestled against her. Peter chose the couch, beside P.J. He felt she needed some support. She was nervously twisting her purse strap, and the licorice bag rustled on her knees like something alive. “I just love old houses,” she said.

“How long can you stay?” his mother asked Peter. “And don’t say you’re just passing through. I want you to plan on a nice long visit this time.”

“I have a lot of work to get back to,” Peter said.

“In the summer? What kind of work would you do in the summer?”

But then, remembering her social duties, her face became all upward lines and she turned to P.J. “I hope you’re not tired from the trip, J.C.,” she said.

“P.J.,” said P.J. “No ma’am, I’m not a bit tired. I’m just so happy to finally meet you all. I feel like I know you already, Petey’s told me so much about you.”

A lie. Peter had told her next to nothing. And he hadn’t even mentioned her to his family, but Mrs. Emerson continued wearing her bright hostess look and leaning forward in that hovering posture she always assumed to show an open mind. “Where are you from, dear?” she asked.

“Well, New Jersey now. Before it was Georgia.”

“Isn’t that nice?”

P.J. shifted in her seat, deftly smoothing the backs of her thighs as if she wore a dress. “You look just like I thought you would,” she said—oh, always trying to get down to the personal, but she was no match for Mrs. Emerson.

“I suppose this heat is no trouble to you at all then,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Ma’am?”

“Coming from Georgia.”

“Oh. No ma’am.”

“Peter darling,” Mrs. Emerson said, “I want you to tell me everything. What have you been up to, now?”

“Well, I—”

“Where are my cigarettes?” She slid her fingers between the arm of the chair and the cushion. Peter, who hadn’t been going to tell her anything anyway, felt irritated at being cut off. He kept a pointed silence, with his arms folded tightly across his chest. He thought his mother was like a hunter who set traps and coaxed and baited until the animal was safely caught, and then she forgot she had wanted him and went off to some new project. “Nothing is where it should be in this house,” she said. “Gillespie, I think we could do with some iced tea to drink.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Gillespie handed the baby to Andrew and went to the kitchen, with George tailing her. P.J. sat back and smiled around the room. The only sound to be heard was the clatter of locusts. Finally