“You’re drunk,” she said, and—certain he had been seen for the first time in ages—he tearfully agreed. He remembered Roy saying the same thing to him, decades before. Maybe he was only truly visible when drunk.
He’d been good for so long! Four months! Not so long for most things but a world record for him and good behavior. The only way to make four months seem less like forever was to continue to be good for even longer and that was impossible, he couldn’t do it, not all by himself like this. There was booze somewhere in the apartment, he had realized, even though Cracker had hauled away most of the debauchery in her seven-hour tenancy: when he’d moved in it had smelled of piney soap; she even seemed to have had sunlight installed, which had never been a feature of his childhood. He’d let the apartment get so foul so quickly the place might have generated booze—or, more likely, she only cleared out the bottles where a nondrinker might look. At the very back of the under-the-sink cupboards in the kitchen, he found a half-filled bottle of gin. He sniffed to make sure it wasn’t cleaning fluid. Then he tasted it.
Once he’d loved gin, but then at fourteen a bottle had bit him pretty hard, and thereafter the smell reminded him of his torment, a vomitous night, how he and his friend Trevor Peters had to try to hose the puke out of each other’s hair at two in the morning, and how they woke up in the bathroom, Trevor in the tub, Arch flat out on the towel next to it. That’s what gin tasted like to him, complicated bare-bottomed humiliation. This gin was particularly foul, body-temperature, old-lady scented. It took the paint right off his soul. He kept drinking it. He ran his tongue around the lip of the bottle.
Gin was the soup of the day. He drank it. He had been so good.
Now he said it to his mother, weeping. “I’ve been so good.”
She answered bitterly, “Well, it surely doesn’t seem like you enjoy it.”
What good was goodness if you did it miserably, they both thought, but in different ways.
Margaret called Cracker. “You better come get your husband,” she said.
Cracker had scarcely spoken to Arch since he’d left. His mother had brought back reports, said he was not drinking, he was making amends, once she got him to go to church she was sure he could return to the marriage.
“I don’t care if he goes to church,” said Cracker, not sure she wanted him to return to her, either, but maybe, maybe. As for church—he hadn’t gone to church since he was ten.
“Darling, he has to go to church. Any day now.”
When Margaret called and said, Come down to the alley, she figured that was it. Arch had gone to church. Just like Arch to go to church on a Tuesday morning, with all the little old ladies at morning mass. But here he was, and she could tell: that man had not gone to church, not unless he’d already drunk the bars and package stores of Salford dry and had broken in to steal the sacramental wine.
He watched her come in, her dear peculiar gait. He tried to pat himself together, as though he were clay: pat pat on his shirt, his pants pockets, his hair, pat pat the tears away. Oh, she would never forgive him, he could see that. Or she would but he’d need to die.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cracker Truitt asked her husband.
“Nothing death won’t fix.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“I’ll die of this place,” he said. “I gotta go.”
“Where will you go?”
He shrugged. Then he said, “Roy. Roy’ll take me in for a while. Roy’ll make me walk the straight and narrow.”
Roy would make him give up drinking; Roy would get him walking around Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, would pound his chest and suggest deep breathing. Roy owned a female dog named Leslie who barked in the background of their occasional phone calls, and when Roy said Sit. Stay. No . . . no . . . Good girl, the dog fell silent. Arch was rooting for the dog. He had no intention of going there.
“Who gets custody of me?” asked Margaret.
“You have custody of yourself, Mother,” said Cracker. “You’re seventy-two years old.”
She was weeping. Her handkerchief was small and lavender and paper thin, like her eyelids. “But where will I go? To the home!”
“Of course not. Of course not. Here—”
They put their arms around her in an intricate knot, so they didn’t touch each other. How like her, to make the end of everything seem like the end of her.
“No, you’ll stay at the house, of course,” said Arch. “You live there. For heaven’s sake!”
Margaret had imagined leaving with her son, and she had thought that wouldn’t be so bad, in a way. They’d stay in motels in twin beds. Or if the room had one bed she’d sleep at the foot of his. She’d liked it, these weeks of taking care of him—he was the younger kid, the hobnobber, always talking to somebody else. For a few months she’d been the first person he spoke to in the morning and the last person at night. Why not hit the road together? She’d keep him from straying the way he had. Buy a hot plate to hot up soup. Breakfast in doughnut shops. See New England and its candlepin houses. It was what she should have done years before with Nahum—in her old age, she’d forgotten that he’d invited her and she’d said no, now she could see him walk away from her, she should have hailed him, Me, too, I’ll go!
“We’d miss you, Mother,” said Cracker. “The girls would.”
“Oh, thank the Lord,” said Margaret. “What about you, Arch darling? Will I see you?”
“I’ll try.”
“Trying’s enough,” declared Margaret.
Arch laughed, smeary tears still on his cheeks. “Then I’m a saint. I’m a champion. I’m the best who ever was.”
Later, as she left, he said to Cracker, “Will we get divorced.”
“What for?”
“In case you want to get married to somebody else.”
“Baby,” she said, “rest assured. You ruined me for that.” Her way of being nice, not saying, that for me.
They made Roy come pick him up. Once Arch had been loaded into the car, an absurd Renault 15 he’d brought back from Paris, Roy stood with Cracker on the front porch. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. He wore a green jacket the same color as the car, one shade grassier than pool-table green. “I really am.”
“You don’t seem sorry.”
“Of course I am,” he said. Then, “I mean, I should have apologized years ago. For my lack of gumption. I sometimes wonder—”
“Oh no,” said Cracker. “No, for Pete’s sake. You would have hated me soon enough.”
“I doubt that,” said Roy. When he had seen Cracker Graham’s mouth was as wide as ever, her lipstick as red, her long limbs as tan, he did not feel a flutter in his heart, but a snapped cable. If Arch had destroyed her looks he would have been happier. He’d only smudged the outlines.
“I would have been terrible to you,” she said again. “I just don’t have a sympathetic heart.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? What have you done with your life! You’re a professional sympathizer! You think I would have been more work to sympathize with than Arch?”
They looked to the Renault. Arch had passed out in the passenger’s seat, his cheek smashed up against the window. He looked peaceful and plastic.
“A lot more,” she said. “I mean, you deserve it, but tons.”
What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.
Arch did not abandon his family. He visited the girls, and sent postcards whenever he traveled, all the places candlepin bowling took him: Springfield, Massachusetts; Providence; Sacco, Maine.
Dearest girlies, I have been to the beach. A seagull took my roast beef sandwich! I think I may join the draft dodgers and go to Canada, not that I have a draft to dodge but because I would, if I had to, I wish I had when it had come to me. I didn’t even know it was possible. Love, Daddy.
“He didn’t even see combat,” said Cracker, reading it. “His big excitement is he stole a bunch of silver lids.”
“Lids?” said Amy.