younger girls waited. Mrs. Painter was not a clear figure to us. She sat behind the steering wheel in dark glasses—heavy, we could see that, with thick black hair, and pale—but she had turned, and stared at her estranged husband, her cheeks sagging somewhat, accusatory in her determination not to be his advocate in the matter of Maureen.
Finally the reluctant Maureen did emerge. All the girls had red hair, but Maureen’s was the reddest. She made a dramatic figure there on the street, with her long hair and her size—at twelve, she was nearly as tall as Bob—along with her extreme paleness and the air of resistance even a stranger might have been able to read. Bob did not touch her, but he said some words. She did not nod her head, but seemed to have made some kind of agreement—temporary, conditional—nonetheless. Bob dipped his head back inside the passenger window, reached a final agreement with his wife. She drove off. With the little girls close by his body, and Maureen dragging slightly behind, Bob approached the house.
We moved from the window and took on our postures of waiting.
“Here they are!” Bob announced, as soon as he was through the door. “Aren’t they wonderful?”
My first notion was that, in presenting them to my father, Bob was showing off some previously undisclosed part of himself. The little girls were shy and stuck close by him. Bob placed his hands on the sides of their heads. “Girls, this is my friend Lou Carcera. Lou, these are my girls. This one here’s Patricia. And the little one’s Jane.”
My father stepped forward, the polite and formerly competent man who had smashed their lives. He shook both their hands.
“Maureen, come on inside,” Bob insisted.
Maureen hovered in the doorway, taller it seemed, paler and more mature than she had appeared from the window.
“And this is Maureen.”
Andrew was still on the floor in his sleeping bag. This was where she chose to look.
“That there,” Bob said, “is Luca’s friend Andy, Maureen. You’ll like him. He’s smart as you, almost. This here is Lou, and Lou’s son, Luca, who’s just a year older than you, Maureen. He might be almost as smart, too. But we’re not sure. He doesn’t say too much.”
It was the first indication I’d received that Bob expected—even wanted—something more than I’d given. Maureen remained in the doorway.
“I’ve been telling him all about you,” Bob said.
She was too good for us; that was what I thought. Andrew and I could be in this room, it matched us in enough ways, but not her, she was above it. Bob stared at her, waiting for her to make the transition, and when it seemed she wouldn’t, he smiled apologetically at my father. “What do you think of this one’s hair?” he asked, placing his hand on Jane’s springy curls.
“That’s curly hair,” my father said.
“We don’t know where she got it,” Bob said. “We suspect the milkman.”
He smiled hard, as if pushing the joke toward my father. Andrew had begun to stir on the floor.
“Get up, Andy, we’ve got a day planned.” Only Bob called Andrew “Andy.” “It’s Luca’s birthday, by the way, Maureen,” Bob said.
She lifted her eyes toward me then, for the first time.
“Yesterday,” I announced, in apology.
That was all. Her eyes went from me to Andrew, who rose halfway and moved his hair away from his face. She took him in, then stared at me again briefly, as if now she knew something about me. Still, the mask of absence remained on her.
“You’ll all be great friends,” Bob Painter said.
The plan was to ride in two cabs to a large wooded park on the Belmont line. We stopped at a grocery to get cold cuts and rolls. My father sat with Andrew and me in one cab. Bob Painter and his daughters were in the other.
I sensed a stiffness in my father that day. There had been no birthday present, but that was understandable, I knew he was experiencing financial troubles, and I thought I knew something else as well. His distracted state felt familiar to me, the state he went into when he was close to action. It was the way he had been in the days before his departure from home—wearing a faraway look, clearly no longer with us. Now that same state might lead to the opposite action. At least, that was what I hoped. We rode, and he had his hand on my knee, massaging gently, as though maybe he wasn’t even aware he was doing that, and I remember feeling happy, certain about what was about to happen. I didn’t know the rules of houses, but I suspected even after you sold one you could get it back if you changed your mind. Andrew was on the other side of my body, like a thing that had attached to me, so that when my father looked at me now, I knew he had to see two things, and I knew, also, that this made it difficult for him, a goad to return to a place from which he could guide me away from the undesirable.
We met up on the curb and Bob led us into the woods. Somewhere there were picnic tables, he thought he knew where. “I remember a beautiful spot in here,” Bob said, but he seemed uncertain, and kept checking on my father, as if he, too, had picked up on the detachment I had noticed in the cab.
“I guess this’ll have to do,” Bob said finally, giving up when we were in the middle of the woods, in a sunny clearing, with no picnic tables in sight. “We can spread ourselves out on the ground. Otherwise we’d have to go back. I guess I’m lost. You girls mind that?”
Of course the little ones didn’t, and of course Maureen did. She stood at a distance from us and accepted nothing from her father.
“You have to eat, Maureen,” Bob called.
“I’m not hungry,” she said finally. Her voice was low, deeper than that of any twelve-year-old I knew.
Bob went on eating then, with his gaze turned inward, rising out of this every once in a while only to look at my father, and then at Maureen, like two polarities he could not, for the life of him, bring together.
We dispersed after lunch. Andrew and I were sent to push the little ones on a set of swings we’d passed on the way there. Maureen followed, walking ten or so feet behind us. While we pushed the little girls, Maureen sat on a bench, staring at the ground, playing with her hair.
“Miss Superior,” Andrew had begun to call her, under his breath.
I stared at her a long time.
“Miss Superior won’t speak to us.”
In the afternoon it got warm, and it was hot for us, pushing the little girls.
“Don’t you girls want to spend some time with your father?” Andrew asked.
They stared at us like we were curiosities.
“Give us a higher push,” the smaller one, Jane, said.
Finally, though, even they got tired and went and sat with Maureen. When they were all huddled together, I could see maybe how things were in Woburn, in Bob Painter’s absence, a little world closing in on itself, female and long-cheeked and with its own rules and intonations, complete enough so that I wondered how Bob Painter had ever fit in at all.
Конец
