Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [58]
“There’s nothing wrong with Clarion,” I said. (I don’t know why.)
“No, of course not, it’s fine,” said Amos. “I didn’t mean it wasn’t.”
He hooked his thumbs in his belt and tipped his head back against the couch, closing the conversation. I remembered that Amos used to be the Emory who ran away. Maybe he still was. Weaknesses came one to a person in that family, and could be conquered but not destroyed; they merely moved on to someone else. To Julian. Julian was collecting weaknesses like so many coins or postage stamps. Saul’s old trouble with girls was Julian’s now and so was Linus’s tendency to break down. We all loved Julian a lot, and no wonder. We were fond of his smudgy, weary eyes and exhausted good looks, and if he took on Amos’s habit of running away then we would be in trouble. I said, “Amos, do you still run away?”
He seemed to have been caught off-guard. “What?” he said. “Well, no, for heaven’s sake, why would you ask a thing like that? Of course not.”
“Where did it go?” I asked him.
“What?”
But before I could explain, in came Saul, stooping automatically in the doorway. He stopped. “Amos?” he said.
Amos stood up and said, “Hello, Saul.”
“We’ve waited a long time for you,” Saul told him, and set a hand on his shoulder. I was smiling as I watched, but what I wondered was: why did Amos look so much younger, when he was the oldest of the Emory boys?
Now they were complete, the four of them under one roof again. Amos’s job didn’t start till fall, so meanwhile he helped at the radio shop. Also, he got our old piano tuned and practiced every day. It never failed to amaze me that Amos had become a musician. Having barely scraped through school, he’d fallen into music like a duck finally hitting water and worked his way gladly through the Peabody Institute. Amos Emory! He sat hunched at the yellow-toothed piano playing Chopin, his moccasins set gingerly among the dollhouse furniture, elbows close to his sides as if he feared to damage the keys with his huge square hands. A rag of black hair fell over his forehead. “This has got to be the worst piano I’ve ever come across,” he told me, but he continued pulling in its faded, tinny, long-ago notes.
Unfortunately, I don’t like piano. Something about it has always irritated me. But Mama loved to hear him; she’d been musical herself once, she said. And Selinda often paused on her way to someplace else and listened from the door. She was thirteen that summer and had suddenly turned beautiful. Her hair was blonder from the sun and she had these burnished, threadlike eyebrows and dusty freckles. And close behind her you’d generally find Jiggs, who came running from anywhere as soon as he heard music. He coaxed lessons from Amos and then practiced what he learned for hours at a time—plodding about on the keys, breathing through his mouth, fogging up his spectacles. Whenever I passed through the living room, I would smile at the back of his soft fair head and make my eternal, evil wish: Please let his mother drop dead somewhere, I’ll never hope for anything else in my life.
At dinner I could look down a straight row of Emory boys (skipping Dr. Sisk, who poked in everywhere) and see four variations on a single theme—all those large, sober faces, Saul in black, Julian in a flashy turtleneck, Linus wearing something limp and unnoticeable and Amos in tatters of denim, like an easygoing, good-natured hitch-hiker. Well, he was easygoing. He was good-natured. Then why did he get on my nerves so?
He was always asking me questions. What I thought of Holy Basis; why we had so much furniture; how I could stand so many strangers coming through. “What strangers?” I said.
“Oh, Miss Feather, Dr. Sisk …”
“Miss Feather’s been with us near as long as Selinda. I wouldn’t really call her a stranger.”
“And what causes Saul to look the way he does?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,