Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [90]
Sometimes he saw it that way, but other times he would try to remember his own reaction. It was a hurt, yes, but children get over hurts. It was not as if they were alone with it. And for that matter, they probably would not hear it from a white kid at all, but from their own playmates. As he must have. They are alive, he thought; they have to put up with misery, like every living human. That’s the only way you ever learn anything. So it might have just been self-pity, like when you lie there and torment yourself by seeing them killed by a car or turning out idiots. Self-pity and the night-dread of losing his money.
Because the roll was the secret—with it he could cushion his children’s pain. Not prevent it; that was impossible; but take away some of the hardest edges. Money could make the difference; he had always believed it. He hadn’t really known what money was for until he had children. It is for them. Good skirts and sweaters for the girl, a fine mitt and shoes for the boy. College; it had failed for Billy but it would not fail for them, because he had gone to college to find something and they would go to get something; the personal right to jobs where you dressed nicely and met nice people who would have you over for cocktails before dinner on the patio. What difference did it make if all your friends were colored, as long as you did not have to live through the black agonies of poverty or the humiliations of government aid? The roll could do that. It was not his to play with. It belonged in the bank. Yet it was only a thousand dollars. It was pitiful. It was nothing. A little frantically, Billy felt the need for hundreds of thousands of dollars; he felt trapped and cornered without thick wads of money to save him, save his children.
And again, he would think about leaving them. Maybe that was the best way, after all. Teach his children the first hard lesson himself. “You can’t trust nobody.” And flee from all that burden, his children already tempered against injustice. Billy often thought of leaving his wife. He loved her, yes, but that was not enough. Maybe love is enough for a woman, he would think, but it’s not enough for a man. A man has got to have his life. He and his wife were constantly picking at each other. She knew, and of course he knew, that he did not have to spend all those long hours at the bowling alley. He was a man of some importance (isn’t that a joke? he thought) and he had assistants who could run things. She wanted some family life, some evenings out among friends, and Billy did not have a single real friend in the Negro community. She, of course, had dropped all her friends from college when she married Billy. She had to make do with the neighbors, and they were a poor lot. None but she among the women had been to college, and all they ever found to talk about was children, clothes, food, prices, television. When she was not busy with the children she was horribly bored, and she would not watch television, even though they had a set. The neighbors thought she was too sensitive about television, but to her it was just the white man’s world shoved rudely into her living room, and she would not have it. She let Billy know several times how dull things were.
That was a woman’s place, he would think angrily, to stay home and keep house and mind the children. If that bored her, tough shit. Nobody said life had to be one thrill after another. But inside himself he knew what a stupid lie that