He started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; she jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it had seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. She could bide her time and she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering.
"So you came back," Alice said, taking a used Brill from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. "What brought you?"
Well, Ma, this friend of mine clued me in to the facts of life-the assholes travel in packs and this time they were after me. I don't know if friend is the right word for him. He respects me musically about as much as I respect The 1910 Fruitgum Company. But he got me to put on my traveling shoes and wasn't it Robert Frost who said home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in?
Aloud he said, "I guess I got to missing you, Mom."
She snorted. "That's why you wrote me often?"
"I'm not much of a letter-writer." He pumped his cigarette slowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off.
"You can say that again."
Smiling, he said: "I'm not much of a letter-writer."
"But you're still smart to your mother. That hasn't changed."
"I'm sorry," he said. "How have you been, Mom?"
She put the skillet in the drainer, pulled the sink stopper, and wiped the lace of soapsuds from her reddened hands. "Not so bad," she said, coming over to the table and sitting down. "My back pains me some, but I got my pills. I make out all right."
"You haven't thrown it out of whack since I left?"
"Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it."
"Mom, those Chiropractors are-" just frauds. He bit his tongue.
"Are what?"
He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile. "You're free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine."
She sighed and took a roll of wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. "I'm a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?" He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead.
"You're just a girl yet," he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it brought only a ghost of a smile to her lips. "Any new men in your life?"
"Several," she said. "How bout you?"
"No," he said seriously. "No new men. Some girls, but no new men."
He had hoped for laughter, but got only the ghost smile again. I'm troubling her, he thought. That's what it is. She doesn't know what I want here. She hasn't been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost.
"Same old Larry," she said. "Never serious. You're not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?"
"I play the field, Mom."
"You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you'd got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I'll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite."
He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.
"Anyway, you're gonna learn," Alice said. "They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He's got that sidewalk-level apartment and he's always standing there, in the window, hoping for a strong breeze."
Larry grunted.
"I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that's my son. That's Larry. Most of them don't believe it."
"You've heard it?" He wondered why she hadn't mentioned that first, instead of going into all this piddling shit.
"Sure, all the time on that rock and roll station the young girls listen to. WROK."
"Do you like it?"
"As well as I like any of that music." She looked at him firmly. "I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd."
He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. "It's just supposed to sound … passionate, Mom. That's all." His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother's kitchen, discussing passion.
"The place for passion's the bedroom," she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. "Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger."
"Now?" he asked, amused.
"No, on the radio."
"That brown soun, she sho do get aroun," Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling.
"Just like that," she nodded. "When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this rap. Rap, they call it. Screaming, I call it." She looked at him grudgingly. "At least there's no screaming on your record."
"I get a royalty," he said. "A certain percent of every record sold. It breaks down to-"
"Oh, go on," she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. "I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?"
"They haven't paid me much," he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. "I made a down payment on the car. I'm financing the rest."
"Easy credit terms," she said balefully. "That's how your father ended up bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn't that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to his grave on easy credit terms."
This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. At the wake, when her sister tried to comfort a woman who looked absolutely without need of comfort, Alice Underwood said it could have been worse. It could, she said, looking past her sister's shoulder and directly at her brother-in-law, have been drink.
Alice brought Larry the rest of the way up on her own, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy's old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that's my mamma.
"Do you want to stay here, Larry?" she asked softly.
Startled, he countered, "Do you mind?"
"There's room. The rollaway's still in the back bedroom. I've been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around."
"All right," he said slowly. "If you're sure you don't mind. I'm only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I'd look up some of the old guys. Mark … Galen … David … Chris … those guys."
She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.
"You're welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I'm not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I'm glad to see you. We didn't say goodbye very well. There were harsh words." She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. "For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways."
"That's all right," he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. "Listen, I'll chip in for stuff."
"You can if you want. If you don't want to, you don't have to. I'm working. Thousands aren't. You're still my son."
He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his-nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother.
She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. She could have taxed him with it, but to what end? His father had been a softie, and in her heart of hearts she knew it was that which had really sent him to the grave; Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame?
His tears couldn't change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness-she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children-but Larry hadn't found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people-including himself-into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture … even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did-as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would.