“Can I get a bath?”
“I’ll be out of here in just a minute,” said Adam.
When Aron walked through the living room and said good night and went out, Cal and Adam looked after him. “He got into my cologne,” said Cal. “I can still smell him.”
“It must be quite a party,” Adam said.
“I don’t blame him for wanting to celebrate. That was a hard job.”
“Celebrate?”
“The exams. Didn’t he tell you? He passed them.”
“Oh, yes—the exams,” said Adam. “Yes, he told me. A fine job. I’m proud of him. I think I’ll get him a gold watch.”
Cal said sharply, “He didn’t tell you!”
“Oh, yes—yes, he did. He told me this morning.”
“He didn’t know this morning,” said Cal, and he got up and went out.
He walked very fast in the gathering darkness, out Central Avenue, past the park and past Stonewall Jackson Smart’s house clear to the place beyond the streetlights where the street became a county road and angled to avoid Tollot’s farm house.
At ten o’clock Lee, going out to mail a letter, found Cal sitting on the lowest step of the front porch. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“I went for a walk.”
“What’s the matter with Aron?”
“I don’t know.”
“He seems to have some kind of grudge. Want to walk to the post office with me?”
“No.”
“What are you sitting out here for?”
“I’m going to beat the hell out of him.”
“Don’t do it,” said Lee.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think you can. He’d slaughter you.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Cal. “The son of a bitch!”
“Watch your language.”
Cal laughed. “I guess I’ll walk along with you.”
“Did you ever read von Clausewitz?”
“I never even heard of him.”
When Aron came home it was Lee who was waiting for him on the lowest step of the front porch. “I saved you from a licking,” Lee said. “Sit down.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Sit down! I want to talk to you. Why didn’t you tell your father you passed the tests?”
“He wouldn’t understand.”
“You’ve got a bug up your ass.”
“I don’t like that kind of language.”
“Why do you think I used it? I am not profane by accident. Aron, your father has been living for this.”
“How did he know about it?”
“You should have told him yourself.”
“This is none of your business.”
“I want you to go in and wake him up if he’s asleep, but I don’t think he’ll be asleep. I want you to tell him.”
“I won’t do it.”
Lee said softly, “Aron, did you ever have to fight a little man, a man half your size?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s one of the most embarrassing things in the world. He won’t stop and pretty soon you have to hit him and that’s worse. Then you’re really in trouble all around.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you don’t do as I tell you, Aron, I’m going to fight you. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
Aron tried to pass. Lee stood up in front of him, his tiny fists doubled ineffectually, his stance and position so silly that he began to laugh. “I don’t know how to do it, but I’m going to try,” he said.
Aron nervously backed away from him. And when finally he sat down on the steps Lee sighed deeply. “Thank heaven that’s over,” he said. “It would have been awful. Look, Aron, can’t you tell me what’s the matter with you? You always used to tell me.”
Suddenly Aron broke down. “I want to go away. It’s a dirty town.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s just the same as other places.”
“I don’t belong here. I wish we hadn’t ever come here. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I want to go away.” His voice rose to a wail.
Lee put his arm around the broad shoulders to comfort him. “You’re growing up. Maybe that’s it,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that’s not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white. Aron, it will be over. Wait only a little while and it will be over. That’s not much relief to you because you don’t believe it, but it’s the best I can do for you. Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now. Yes, I can help you. Go to bed now, and in the morning get up early and tell your father about the tests. Make it exciting. He’s lonelier than you are because he has no lovely future to dream about. Go through the motions. Sam Hamilton said that. Pretend it’s true and maybe it will be. Go through the motions. Do that. And go to bed. I’ve got to bake a cake—for breakfast. And, Aron—your father left a present on your pillow.”
Chapter 44
1
It was only after Aron went away to college that Abra really got to know his family. Aron and Abra had fenced themselves in with themselves. With Aron gone, she attached herself to the other Trasks. She found that she trusted Adam more, and loved Lee more, than her own father.
About Cal she couldn’t decide. He disturbed her sometimes with anger, sometimes with pain, and sometimes with curiosity. He seemed to be in a perpetual contest with her. She didn’t know whether he liked her or not, and so she didn’t like him. She was relieved when, calling at the Trask house, Cal was not there, to look secretly at her, judge, appraise, consider, and look away when she caught him at it.
Abra was a straight, strong, fine-breasted woman, developed and ready and waiting to take her sacrament—but waiting. She took to going to the Trask house after school, sitting with Lee, reading him parts of Aron’s daily letter.
Aron was lonely at Stanford. His letters were drenched with lonesome longing for his girl. Together they were matter of fact, but from the university, ninety miles away, he made passionate love to her, shut himself off from the life around him. He studied, ate, slept, and wrote to Abra, and this was his whole life.
In the afternoons she sat in the kitchen with Lee and helped him to string beans or slip peas from their pods. Sometimes she made fudge and very often she stayed to dinner rather than go home to her parents. There was no subject she could not discuss with Lee. And the few things she could talk about to her father and mother were thin and pale and tired and mostly not even true. There Lee was different also. Abra wanted to tell Lee only true things even when she wasn’t quite sure what was true.
Lee would sit smiling a little, and his quick fragile hands flew about their work as though they had independent lives. Abra wasn’t aware that she spoke exclusively of herself. And sometimes while she talked Lee’s mind wandered out and came back and went out again like a ranging dog, and Lee would nod at intervals and make a quiet humming sound.
He liked Abra and he felt strength and goodness in her, and warmth too. Her features had the bold muscular strength which could result finally either in ugliness or in great beauty. Lee, musing through her talk, thought of the round smooth faces of the Cantonese, his own breed. Even thin they were moon-faced. Lee should have liked that kind best since beauty must be somewhat like ourselves, but he didn’t. When he thought of Chinese beauty the iron predatory faces of the Manchus came to his mind, arrogant and unyielding faces of a people who had authority by unquestioned inheritance.
She said, “Maybe it was there all along. I don’t know. He never talked much about his father. It was after Mr. Trask had the—you know—the lettuce. Aron was angry then.”
“Why?” Lee asked.
“People were laughing at him.”
Lee’s whole mind popped back. “Laughing at Aron? Why at him? He didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, that’s the way he felt. Do you want to know what I think?”
“Of course,” said Lee.
“I figured this out and I’m not quite finished figuring. I thought he always felt—well, kind of crippled—maybe unfinished, because he didn’t have a mother.”
Lee’s eyes opened wide and then drooped again. He nodded. “I see. Do you figure Cal is that way too?”
“No.”
“Then why Aron?”
“Well, I haven’t got that yet. Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. Well, one time my mother was—well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese on top and got it all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don’t think he ever forgave her.”