The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [163]
All of the teenaged Jack’s silent movies were shots of his next-door neighbor Ruthie Nickerson. Close-ups of Ruthie’s eyes, of the angle of her cheek, tangle of her hair; long tracking shots of the quick rhythm of her walk. George Nickerson’s seventeen-year-old sister had been fearlessly intimate with the camera in those days, had known that she was beautiful, and in Jack’s movies had dared the viewer not to respond, just as in life she had forced everyone around her into an awkward acknowledgment of her effect on them.
One entire ten-minute film was a single shot of Ruthie standing by the dormer window in Jack’s room on a summer’s afternoon. She wore a long white thin linen shirt, slightly opened to the waist by an easy breeze. She wore nothing but the thin shirt and loose white shorts. Staring into the camera, she smiled a wonderful smile. And when she grew bored with smiling, she turned to look out the window.
Suddenly, in the last moment of the film, the camera jerked away from Ruthie and quickly panned to the doorway. There stood Sam and Jack’s mother Grandee, thin, waspish, unstrung, silently raving at the boy with the camera, at the girl by the window. The footage ended in a sudden blackout.
When watching this movie, years after the fact, Sam understood for the first time what had happened just before the family explosion she’d always called “That Psycho Night.”
Home after her sophomore year at college, Sam returned late one afternoon from playing tennis with her friend Clark Goode. That summer she taught tennis in the morning and practiced three hours a day, determined to keep up her game, for she depended on a sports scholarship for her tuition; her father had declined to pay her way to college (he thought she wasn’t smart) and her mother hadn’t cared whether she’d gone or not.
It had been a hard summer for Sam. In the spring she had fallen in love with a girl in her dorm, who not only had not loved her back but who had expressed horror upon learning of her feelings. Clark had enlisted in the Army and been sent to Vietnam; now home on leave, he had just announced that, despite his firsthand knowledge of the war’s hellish futility, he was heading back to Saigon in a week to begin a second tour of duty.
In that heavy, heated dusk, Sam was staring lethargically out her window when suddenly she heard her mother shrieking from Jack’s bedroom. She rushed into the hallway where she was almost knocked over as Ruthie ran past her, down the stairs.
Sam had to pull apart Jack and their mother by force. Jack, shirtless, a long-limbed knobbly teenager, hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house in pursuit of Ruthie.
Hours later, Sam found him stretched out on their front lawn, smoking marijuana and staring at the stars. His thin chest looked moon-white against the dark summer tan of his arms.
Jack told Sam with bitterness that Ruthie had no further use for him. He blamed their “crazy bitch of a mother” for ruining his chance for happiness. Sam tried a number of strategies to console him, from “you’ll win Ruthie back” to “time heals all.” She finally resorted to jokes about her being even more unhappily in love than he was. At least, cracked Sam, Jack had a girlfriend to lose.
But to her distress, her brother did not respond with his habitual flippancy. Instead he started to cry; something she hadn’t seen him do for years. He muttered that without Ruthie he didn’t want to live. Pushing Sam off, he vanished into the night. She heard him jumpstart their father’s car and drive it away.
Distraught, Sam called Clark, who came over at once. They spent the night driving around Emerald searching unsuccessfully for Jack. A friend of theirs, a rookie cop (who many years later would become Emerald’s chief of police), assured Sam that there were no reports of car accidents anywhere in the county and Jack would be fine.
At dawn, Clark dropped her