“Probably never.” The tone of Scrooge’s voice had become gentle, conversational, as though he’d known Abel a long time.
Had he more energy, Abel might then have told this strange and tortured man how, many years ago, he had worked as an usher at the theater in Rockford, just steps away from the Rock River, and that’s what he had smelled tonight when he’d entered the side door, that secret scent of theater. He had secured the job during high school. Sixteen years old. The very year that his little sister had been brought before her sixth-grade class, the stain on her dress pointed to, and told that no one was ever too poor to buy sanitary pads. Dottie had not wanted to return to school after that, and Abel had promised her something, he could not remember what. What he did remember was the power of those paychecks. At sixteen he had learned the astonishing power of money. The only thing money could not buy was a friend for Dottie (or for him, but that did not matter as much), but it bought a twinkling bracelet, that’s what she got! And that had made her smile. Most of all, money bought food.
And this made him think of Lucy Barton again, how terribly poor she had been as well, how when he went as a kid to stay with her family a few weeks each summer she would go with him to look for food in the dumpster behind Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe. (Oh, the look on Lucy’s face when she saw him last year in that bookstore, all that time having passed by! She held his hand with both of hers, and did not want to let it go.)
What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed. Because he could not honestly say anymore what he’d felt when he’d found food in a dumpster. Gladness, perhaps, when he discovered large parts of a steak that could be scraped clean. It gets terribly practical, he told his wife many years later. Then came the moment of her ill-concealed horror: Weren’t you ashamed? And the answer—the understanding—so immediate that it was coming to him even as she spoke: Well, then you’ve never been hungry, Elaine. He did not say it. But he did become ashamed, once his wife asked him that question. Then he surely became ashamed. She requested that he never tell their children how their father had been so poor as to eat from garbage cans.
—
“It has made me sick,” Scrooge said. “I believe it’s made me ill. I’ve been teaching these little devil-brats for twenty-eight years.”
“You don’t enjoy it?” Abel was aware of a sense of cognitive distance, and he hoped he had asked the right question.
“Oh, it’s the most perverse thing in the world.” Scrooge waved a hand in annoyance. “We take the students with money, you know. Unless there’s no rich crier. We always need a crier, of course, someone who can cry on demand. Criers always think they’re particularly sensitive, particularly talented, but criers are just particularly nuts, is what they are.” Scrooge appeared exhausted, and rested his head against the wall, looking up at the ceiling.
“Say, what I think—” Abel started, but it took him a moment to find the words. “I think you’re upset about that review—”
“Hey.” Scrooge was suddenly on his feet. He pointed a finger at Abel. “Don’t you even. Trust me on this, Mr. Fancy Pants. I’ve been coming to the end of my rope for a very long time.” He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He didn’t light it, just tapped it against his leg. “I told you at the start I felt like talking. And we were doing that. Talking. Okay? I want to talk. We were talking.”
Abel nodded. “We were.”
“So then,” Scrooge said, exhaling a big sigh and sliding his back down the wall slowly until he was seated on the floor again. “Where were we? You were getting ready to marry your way to the top.”
“For the love of God.” Abel forced himself to sit up straighter. “We are not going to discuss my wife.” He spoke in almost a whisper. His mind did not know where to put itself. Fatigue was like a piece of cloth covering him.
“Okay. We won’t discuss her.” Scrooge was quiet for a moment, and then— “But I’ve been lonely,” he said.
Abel looked at this man, whose face was looking up at him now, the scalp still with its gray streaks from where the wig had been. “I understand,” Abel said.
“You understand?” Scrooge asked.
Abel almost smiled, but he did not know why he had the impulse to smile. And then surprisingly—horribly!—he felt he would weep. Only barely did he prevent himself, but it affected his speech. “Because—I am too.” Scrooge nodded with what seemed to Abel to be a simplicity of understanding, and Abel said, “Say, I could be your crier.”
Scrooge said, “Not nutty enough. But you’re honest. Oh, thank the gods. I wanted to talk to a person, and here you are a real person, you have no idea how hard it is—to find a real person.”
They were both silent for a moment, as though such a thing needed to be absorbed. Then Scrooge said, “Did you like your mother?” His voice—to Abel’s ears—was almost childlike again.
“I liked her.” Abel heard himself saying this. “I loved her.”
“No daddy around?”
It was strange for Abel to hear this phrase, reminiscent of a schoolyard taunt, yet it was not a taunt now. Still, he felt flushed. No, his daddy had died when Abel was very young. Once, briefly—was it days only?—there had been a man, and Abel remembered it mostly because after the man left, Dottie had got a store-bought dress and Abel had been bought a new pair of pants. These pants became too short quickly, and stayed that way almost a year. But they were the pants that allowed him the job as an usher, after his mother’s cousin—Lucy Barton’s mother—who did sewing had managed to lengthen them when he’d gone to stay with them.
“Oh, I can see the question hurt your feelings,” Scrooge said. “I can be awfully insensitive. And then I get pissed off at people because I myself am sensitive. I don’t like sensitive people who only feel sensitive for themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Abel said, blinking his eyes, which seemed blurry. “You know—I’m not feeling very well. You see, I had a heart attack a year ago.”
Scrooge was on his feet again. “Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus. Let’s get you help.”
“No worries,” Abel said. “Do you think you could get the pony down for my granddaughter?”
Scrooge looked at him so searchingly that Abel looked away; he had not been looked at that closely—that intimately—in years. “?‘No worries’?” the man said in a voice almost tender. “Who are you?”
“A man who dresses well,” Abel answered, once more aware of the bizarre impulse to smile. “A man who doesn’t cheat on his taxes.” And again—the bizarre impulse to almost weep.
“You do dress well.” Scrooge opened the door and was gone from Abel’s sight. Abel heard him calling, “I’ve always known a tailor-made suit! Now I’m getting that pony and don’t you move. Stay calm, and stay right there!”
—