Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [131]
Cadence was lighter than a book of political theory, her entire bottom resting in my palm. She held her hands out from her sides but had a hard time holding her head up, so I fanned my fingers against the back of her tiny skull, smelled mashed pear and clean cotton and something I couldn’t name. She was looking directly into my eyes, hers the color of a blue planet, her mouth open slightly, and how was it possible to be so young and small and utterly dependent on the love of the people you were born into, their constant care, their good judgment, for years and years?
I made patronizing baby sounds to make her smile, but she just kept looking into my eyes. It was as if she had me all figured out and wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be held anymore by this man twenty-three years older than she was, her brother.
I was sitting with her at the dining room table when Pop came home. She’d fallen asleep against my shoulder. The sun shone across the floor and up the stairs where her mother was writing.
I heard Pop greet Luke downstairs, then he was walking up to where we were. He smiled right away. He was wearing the same corduroy shirt from the night before, that and a pair of jeans and black leather boots he’d ordered from a boot maker in Montreal. He’d gone to church to talk to Jesus. That’s how he usually described prayer, as a personal conversation with Jesus Christ. This was something I had never done or even considered doing. Nor, as far as I knew, had my brother or sisters.
When Suzanne turned sixteen, she informed Pop she wasn’t going to church anymore and it was like a sandbag fell away, and soon Jeb and Nicole and I were caught up in this lucky current that eventually meant we got to sleep late on Sundays too. But Pop kept going to Mass six or seven days a week, and now he was smiling at his second and fifth children. His beard was newly trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He stopped smiling and started scratching Luke behind the ears.
“That was wrong last night.”
“What was?”
“Bringing the gun. That was bad.”
I nodded, my hand pressed to the warm spine of his sleeping daughter. Peggy came downstairs for more coffee then. She held an empty mug, a big one from which she drank café au lait, a habit she’d picked up during a semester in Paris, and there was a far-off look in her eyes that reminded me of Jeb whenever he used to come downstairs after hours of practicing his guitar. Pop glanced at her as she passed. “Writing?”
“Yeah.” She filled her cup with coffee and warm milk from a pan, said to me quietly, “You can give her to your dad. He’ll lay her in her crib.”
She walked back up the stairs to her desk, and I stood and Pop came over. With my palm against the back of his baby’s head, I handed him my sleeping sister. I could smell his hair, the sweet wafer of the Eucharist on his breath, this thing he believed in so strongly and which got him to say things like he’d just did. It was good he had something like that. Maybe people needed something like that. Men in particular.
13
LIZ HAD A crush on a guy named Joe Hurka. He was in my father’s fiction writing class with her, and whenever she talked about him, which was quite a lot, her eyes had more light in them, her skin more color, her hair more shine. She talked about how sensitive he was, how beautiful his writing, and that he even wrote songs and played the guitar. One day in class Pop asked him to sing them all something, and Joe did, and now Liz’s crush looked like outright love to me. I hated Joe.
And I didn’t. All the weeks she pined for him, I never met him. Whenever she talked about something new he’d written or sung, the jealousy I felt was a hot stone in my abdomen, but it was of two parts: the obvious, and that it was possible to be a young man and know what you were