If Morning Ever Comes

5

By evening Ben Joe was beginning to feel the weight of home settling back on him, making him feel heavy and old and tired. He had eaten too much for supper; his stomach ached and he didn’t want to admit it to anyone, or to show it by lying down, for fear that his mother and his grandmother would be hurt after all that special cooking. So he wandered aimlessly through the house, searching out something to do or think about. In the den Tessie and Jenny watched television, scowling intently at the screen and not looking up when he came to stand in the doorway. The twins, dressed in different colors now that they were older but still looking exactly the same in every other way, were popping popcorn with their dates in the kitchen, and Susannah and Gram were playing honeymoon bridge. None of them took any notice of him. He went upstairs, hoping to find someone up there who would talk to him, but his mother was using the sewing machine, her mouth full of pins and her eyes narrowed at the sleeve of a dress for Tessie. Joanne was giving Carol a bath. He could hear them even with the door half shut — Carol squealing and splashing, Joanne calming her with low, soothing noises and then occasionally laughing along with her.

“Can I come in?” Ben Joe called.

“Carol, you mind if a man comes to watch your bath?”

Carol made a louder splash, probably with the flat of her hand, and giggled.

“Well, she didn’t say no,” said Joanne.

Ben Joe pushed the door open and stepped inside. The room was warm and steamy, and cluttered with towels and cast-off clothes. Beside the bathtub knelt Joanne, wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, with her hair hanging wet and stringy down her neck and her face shiny from her own bath. She had rolled the sleeves of the robe up to her elbows so that she could bathe Carol, who sat in a heap of rubber toys that blocked out almost all sight of bathwater and laughed at Ben Joe.

“Can’t be a true Hawkes,” said Ben Joe. “No bubble bath.”

“Oh, that’ll start soon enough.”

Ben Joe leaned back against the sink with one foot on a tiny old step stool that read: “For doing some job that’s bigger than me.” He tested his full weight on the edge of the sink, decided not to risk it, and stood up again.

“I meant to tell you,” Joanne said. “Don’t feel bad.”

“What?”

“Don’t you feel bad about what Gram said. About your mind being a mish-mash. It’s been in the back of my mind all day to tell you, she didn’t meant it. She just said it for the sake of argument.”

“I don’t feel bad.”

“Okay.”

She started soaping Carol’s hair, expertly, turning the pinkish-red hair dark auburn with her quick, firm fingers. For the first time he noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. What had she done with it? He pictured her throwing it in Gary’s face, but it sounded improbable. Even in her ficklest days, Joanne had never done things that way. No, it would be more like her not even to tell Gary she was going. Or maybe it had been Gary who had left her, who knew?

“Where’s your wedding ring?” he asked.

“In my jewelry box.”

“What on earth for?”

“Well, I don’t know. I thought maybe I should wear it so I wouldn’t look like an unwed mother, but when I got here Mama said there was no point. She never wears hers, she said. It would just keep reminding her.”

She took Carol by the chin and the back of the neck and ducked her back into the water swiftly. Before Carol could utter more than one sharp squeak she was upright again, with her hair rinsed and streaming.

“Mom’s advice is the last I would take,” Ben Joe said.

“Now, don’t go being mean.”

“I’m not. She wants you to say, ‘Oh, who cares about him?’ and then your whole problem is solved. You saw what that did for her.”

“Mom’s not as coldhearted as Gram keeps telling you, Ben Joe. You know that.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Besides, this isn’t the same kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing is it?” Ben Joe asked.

Joanne picked out a rubber duck and pushed it toward Carol, who ignored it. Carol was raising and lowering one round knee, watching it emerge sleek and gleaming and then lowering it again when the water had drained off to mere drops on her skin. Joanne watched too, thoughtfully, and Ben Joe watched Joanne.

“I always did like first dates,” she said after a minute. “I was good at those. I knew what to wear — not so dressy it made them shy and not so sloppy they thought I didn’t give a hoot — and how to act and what to say, and by the time I was ready to come in I’d have them all the way in love with me or know the reason why. But the dates after that are different. Once they loved me, what was I supposed to do then? Once I’ve accomplished that, where else is there to go? So I ended up confining myself to first dates. I got so good at them that I could first-date anyone — I mean even the people that were on seventh dates with me, or even people that weren’t dates at all. I could first-date my own family, even — just figure out what would make them love me at a certain moment and then do it, easy as that.”

She leaned forward suddenly, resting her elbows on the rim of the bathtub and staring into the water at Carol’s gleeful face.

“Then I got married,” she said.

Ben Joe waited, not pushing her. Joanne stood up and reached for a towel and then just stayed there, holding the towel forgotten in her hands.

“The trouble is,” she said, “you have to stop clinking your bracelets and dancing like a maniac after a while. You have to rest now and then. Which may have been okay with Gary, but not with me. I didn’t know what to do once I had sat down to rest, and so I started being just terrible. Following him around telling him what a awful wife I was. Waking him up in the middle of the night to accuse him of not believing I loved him. He was all sleepy and didn’t know what was coming off. He’d say sure he believed me and go back to sleep leaving me to lie awake counting the dust specks that floated around in the dark, and making all kinds of plans to get my hair done and have him take me dancing.” She frowned at the towel. “Got so I couldn’t bear my own self,” she said. “I left.”

She wrapped the towel around Carol and lifted her out onto the bath mat.

“What’d you come back here for?” Ben Joe asked.

She dried Carol silently for a minute. Then she said, “Well, I want Carol to be with some kind of people that know her if I am going to get a job. That’s why.”

She had finished scrubbing Carol with the towel and now she pulled a white flannel nightgown over the baby’s head, saying, “Where’s Carol? Oh, I can’t find Carol. Where’s Carol?” until Carol’s face poked through the neck of the nightgown, small and round and grinning.

“Besides,” Joanne said, tying the ribbon under Carol’s chin, “it’s not the same place I’m coming back to, really. Not even if I wanted it to be.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben Joe.

“What’s wrong?”

“You and Mama. You and the girls. And Mr. Dower, even. Of course it’s the same place. What would it have gone and changed into? Always pulling up the same silly argument to fool yourselves with—”

“Now, now,” said Joanne soothingly. She picked Carol up. “It’s not the same place really, is it?”

He gave up, helplessly, and followed her out of the bathroom. There was no argument he could give that would convince her; she was too blindly cheerful, giving Carol little pecks on the cheek and talking to her happily as she crossed the hallway. At her mother’s door she stopped and looked in. “Gone downstairs,” she said. “Come on, Ben Joe. I want to ask you something.”

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“Come on.”

He followed her to her own room. It was cluttered with Joanne’s odds and ends, and the old white crib had been moved down from the attic to a spot beside Joanne’s bed. Other than that, it was almost the same as when she had left it. Huge stuffed animals, won by long-ago boy-friends at state fairs, littered the window seat; perfume bottles and hair ribbons and bobby pins lay scattered on the bureau. She laid Carol carefully in the crib and said, “Where were you when Dad died?”

“Where — Oh, no,” Ben Joe said. “No, don’t you start that.”

“Why not?” She straightened up from kissing Carol good night and turned to face him. “That’s not fair, Ben Joe. Nobody’ll tell me anything about it. I even wrote a letter asking them to tell me. Nobody ever answered.”

“Well, you were away,” Ben Joe said.

“That doesn’t change anything.” She spread a blanket over Carol and began tying it down at the corners. “It happened just after Jenny began writing all the family’s letters,” she said. “Only Jenny didn’t write this particular one, I remember. She went through a stage when she wouldn’t write or speak the fact that Dad was dead. Susannah told me that. So the twins had to take over the letter writing. Jane and Lisa, they handled everything, although neither one of them will touch a pen ordinarily and you can tell it from their letters. But it was just as well, I guess — their writing the letters, I mean — because I suppose Jenny would just have sent a list of the funeral costs. Or would she, that far back? When did Jenny learn to be so practical? Anyway, there was this note from Lisa saying, ‘Dad just passed away last night but felt no pain’—as if anyone could know what he felt — and that’s all I ever heard. What happened, Ben Joe?”

“What difference does it make?” he asked.

“It makes a lot of difference. Who won makes a lot of difference.”

“What?”

“Who won. Mama or that other woman.”

“Well, that’s the—”

“I know.” She turned the lamp around so that it wouldn’t shine in Carol’s eyes and sat down on the foot of the bed. “It’s an awful thing to wonder. And none of my business, anyway. But it’s important to know, for all kinds of reasons.”

He began searching through his crumpled cigarette pack for the last cigarette, not looking at her.

“Here, take mine,” she said.

“Not menthol.”

“They won’t kill you.”

She threw the pack at him; it fell on the floor in front of him and he picked it up and leaned back against the bureau.

“Two weeks before he died,” Joanne said, “he was at home. I know he was. Jenny put it just beautifully, in this letter she wrote me. She said, ‘You’ll be happy to know Daddy has got back from his trip’—‘trip’; that’s an interesting choice of words—‘and he’s living at home now.’ Now, where was he when he died? Still at home?”

“At Lili Belle’s,” Ben Joe said.

“At — Oh.” She shook her head. “Lately I’ve stopped thinking about her by her name,” she said. “What with Gram calling her ‘Another’s House’ all the time.”

“Well, he didn’t mean to go and die there,” said Ben Joe. “He’d just been drinking a little, is all. Went out to get ice cubes and then forgot which home he was supposed to be going back to. Mom explained that to Lili Belle.”

“Mom explained it to Lili Belle?”

“Well, yes. It was her that Lili Belle called soon as he died. He got to Lili Belle’s with a pain in his chest and died a little after. So Lili Belle called Mom, and Mom came to explain how it was our house he’d really intended going back to and not hers; just a mistake. And Lili Belle hadn’t really won after all.”

“Looks like to me she had.”

“But it was by mistake he went there.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Joanne said. She turned to see how Carol was and then faced Ben Joe again. “What about their little boy, his and Lili Belle’s? That was named after Daddy? That’s more’n you were named for. I don’t see that your name is Phillip. Do you think he would have walked off and left a baby named Phillip for good?”

“That’s beside the point. You know, Joanne, sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”

She smiled and ground out her cigarette and stood up. “Don’t you lose sleep on it,” she said. “Come on, we’re keeping Carol awake. I’m going to do my nails and I reckon you have people you’ll want to visit.”

“I don’t know who.”

But he straightened up anyway and followed Joanne out of the room. In the hall she gave him a little pat on the arm and then turned toward the bathroom, and he started for the stairs. He stopped at the hall landing, which looked down over the long stairway, and put one hand on the railing.

“You know where the emery boards are?” Joanne called from the bathroom.

He didn’t answer; he leaned both elbows on the railing and stared downward, thinking.

“Oh, never mind. I found them.”

He was remembering one night six years ago; this spot always reminded him of it. He had been studying in his room and at about ten o’clock he had decided to go downstairs for a beer. With his mind still foggy with facts and dates, he had wandered out into the hallway, had put one hand on the railing and was about to take the first step down, when the noise began. He could hear that noise still, although he always did his best to forget it.

First he thought it sounded like an angry bull wheezing and bellowing in a circle around the house. But it was too reedy and penetrating to be that; he thought then that it must be an auto horn. Kerry Jamison had an auto horn like that. Only Kerry Jamison was a well-bred boy and didn’t honk for Ben Joe when he came visiting him. And he certainly didn’t drive on the Hawkes’s carefully tended lawn.

All over the house the girls had come swarming out of the various rooms, asking what the racket was. Tessie, who was scarcely more than a baby then and should have been asleep for hours, inched her bedroom door open and peeked out to ask Ben Joe if she could come downstairs with the others, because there was a trumpet blowing outside that wouldn’t hush for her. She spoke in a whisper; their mother was reading in bed in the room next to Tessie’s and would surely say no if she heard what Tessie was asking. But what neither Ben Joe nor Tessie realized at the time was that their mother was answering the telephone in her room, listening to Lili Belle Mosely tell her her husband was dead. Right then she wouldn’t have cared if Tessie never went to bed again, but Tessie couldn’t know that and she went on in her whispery voice: “Can I, Ben Joe? Say yes. Cani?”

“No, “ said Ben Joe. “I’ll go down and shut it up, whatever it is. Get back in bed, Tessie.”

“But it’s so scary, Ben—”

Their mother’s door opened. Tessie popped back into her room just as Ellen Hawkes flew out of hers; they were like the two figures in a weather house. Ellen had on a pair of blue cotton pajamas and her hair was rumpled and she was struggling into a khaki raincoat of her husband’s as she ran.

“Your father’s dead,” she said, and rushed down the stairs.

Ben Joe put both hands on the railing and leaned down. His mother had passed the little landing at the curve of the stairs and now she was directly below him, still running down; he could see the top of her head, and the curls lifting a little as she came down hard on each step. “Your father’s dead,” she repeated to the girls downstairs. Above her voice came the eerie sound from outside, wheezing and bellowing its way around to the front of the house.

Ben Joe let go of the railing and tore down the stairs after his mother. His shirt was open, and the tails of it flew out behind him as he ran. He had no shoes on. On one of the steps his stockinged foot slipped and he almost fell, but he caught himself and kept on going. The girls were waiting for him at the bottom, with stunned white faces. Tessie had come out to stand on the landing where Ben Joe had stood a minute ago and now she looked down at the others and began to cry without knowing why. She had poked her head through the bars because she was not yet tall enough to see over the railing. Her mother, holding on to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs while she struggled into a pair of Susannah’s loafers, looked up at Tessie briefly and said, “She’ll have got her head caught in those bars again. Better get her out, somebody.”

Tessie’s head was a tiny yellow circle on the second floor, outlined against the dark cupola that rose above the stairwell. The house seemed enormous, suddenly. The whole world seemed enormous.

“Where are you going?” Ben Joe asked his mother.

“To your father’s friend’s house,” she said, without expression. “I’ll be back. Gram’s asleep now. Don’t wake her. And try and figure some way of getting Tessie’s head free without sawing the bars down again, will you?”

Ben Joe nodded. None of it made sense. Everything was harried and nightmarish and yet the same small practical things were going on at the same time. His mother patted his shoulder and then, abruptly, she was off, out the front door and into the darkness of the moonless, early-autumn night. As she crossed the front porch the eerie, wailing sound from outside became louder; as she descended the steps down to the front walk a soldier came into view playing a bagpipe. He was small and serious, with his eyes fixed only on his instrument, and he walked in a straight line across their front lawn and then around to the other side of the house. He and Ellen crossed paths with only inches between them; neither one of them paused or looked toward the other one.

Jenny, standing with the rest of them on the front porch, said, “It’s a bagpipe.”

From out in the back of the house came the sound of their mother’s car starting, rising above the piercing sound of the bagpipes. A minute later the yellow, dust-filled beams of two headlights backed past them out into the street and then swung sharply around and disappeared.

Susannah stopped staring after the car and turned to Jenny, frowning, trying to sort her thoughts and figure what should be done.

“It’s no bagpipe I ever heard,” she said finally. “Bagpipes make tunes. This is only making one note.”

“Maybe he can’t play,” Jenny said. She was only twelve then, a thin, nervous little girl, and she was shivering and seemed to be trying desperately to get a grasp on herself. “I’m sure that’s it,” she said. “He’ll practice this note for a while and then go to the next, and then go—”

“Not in our yard he won’t,” Susannah said. “Run around the back and stop him, Ben Joe.”

But there was no need to; the soldier had come around the front again. Apparently he liked having an audience. He emerged from the side of the house at a scurrying little run, with his short legs pumping as fast as they could go, and then as soon as he came into the light from the front porch he slowed to a leisurely stroll in order to parade before them for as long as possible. His chest heaved up and down from the running he had done, and the horrible wailing sound was jerky and breathless now.

“Um …” Ben Joe said. He stepped down from the porch and the little soldier stopped. “You think you could do that somewhere else?”

The soldier grinned. He had a small, bony face, with the skin stretched tight and shining across it when he smiled. “No sir,” he said. “No sir. Man said no.”

“What?”

“Your daddy. ‘No,’ he says. No.”

“I don’t—”

“Saw me hitchhiking, your dad did. Told me could I play that thing, I allowed yes I could but not this way, with all but one reed gone so there wasn’t but one sound. He said anyway, anyway, he said, to play it round his house for a joke and not give up till he come back. When he comes he’ll give me a bottle. A free bottle.”

He grinned again and put the mouthpiece to his lips, but Ben Joe reached out and took a gentle hold on his arm. “He won’t be back,” he said. He turned toward Susannah. “Get a bottle of bourbon, Susannah. Bourbon all right with you, friend?”

“Oh yes, oh yes—”

Jenny suddenly came to life. She raced down the front steps and yanked Ben Joe’s hand from the soldier’s arm. “Leave him be,” she said. “You leave him. Let him play.” Her face was white and pinched-looking; Ben Joe thought if she shook any harder she would fall down.

“He’s getting tired of playing,” he told her.

“You leave him.”

Susannah came out of the house again, slamming the screen door behind her. “Here,” she said.

“Why, thank you, ma’am. I am much—”

“You play, you,” said Jenny to the soldier.

Susannah reached over Jenny’s head with the bottle; the soldier held out his hand and Jenny made a grab for the bottle but missed.

“Wait,” she said.

“Wouldn’t change a thing, making him keep playing,” Ben Joe told her gently. “If he played till you had grandchildren, it wouldn’t bring back—”

“You wait, you wait!”

She was rigid now, not shaking any more but with her hands folded into tense fists and her face wet with tears. When Ben Joe put one hand on her shoulder she spun toward him, not actually fighting him but letting her arm stay rigid, so that her fist swung hard into his stomach and knocked all the wind from him. The soldier clicked his tongue, his eyes round. Ben Joe started coughing and bent over, but he kept hold of Jenny, pinning her arms down at her sides and holding her tight while he and Susannah guided her toward the stairs.

“I told you and told you!” she was screaming. “Now you’ve sent him away and he’ll never come back—”

The soldier, mistaking her meaning, smiled cheerfully and waved his bottle at her. “Sure I’ll be back,” he called comfortingly. “Don’t you worry ma’am!”

He set off toward the street, whistling. On the porch, Jane and Lisa took Jenny from Ben Joe while he leaned over the railing and coughed himself hoarse, trying to get his wind again. Susannah whacked him steadily on the back.

“You’ll be all right,” she said over and over. “You’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”

She did her best, but she couldn’t say it the way Joanne did. And right then he wished for Joanne more than anyone in the world. He thought probably they all did. If she came walking up the steps right now she would fold every single person up close to her and cry, and pat them softly; and they could start crying too and telling her all the secret fears swamping their minds at this minute and then they would realize everything that had happened. If they could only realize something, things could start getting better again.

But Joanne didn’t come up the steps, and when his coughing fit was through, Ben Joe straightened up and followed Susannah into the house again. Up on the second floor, Tessie was crying.

“You get the twins to give Jenny one of Dad’s sleeping pills,” Ben Joe told Susannah. “I’ll try and get Tessie out of the railings.”

Now, six years later, he thought he could still name the two posts where Tessie’s head had been caught. All seven children, from Joanne to Tessie, had been stuck in this railing at least once in their lives. But he thought he knew which posts Tessie had been between that night, because it was still so clear in his mind. He had soothed Tessie, who had been through this before and was not very frightened, and while he was trying to pull her out he thought about the same thing he always thought when he did this: he must put some screening here, to stop all these ridiculous goings-on. Even if Gram did say it would ruin the looks of the railing. Under his hands was the feel of Tessie’s head — the thin, soft hair, the tight little bones of her skull. He had turned her face gently, holding her small ears flat against her head, and worked her out from between the bars and scooped her up to carry her back to bed. It was then, standing there with the weight of her against his shoulder, that the first sorrow hit him — just one deep bruise inside that made him catch his breath. He could remember it still. That, and the little flannel nightgown Tessie wore, and the soft sounds of Jenny crying in the room she shared with Tessie …

It was so clear still that he could have told Joanne, and by telling her proved that Lili Belle hadn’t won. For if his father had meant to go to Lili Belle’s, he wouldn’t have played that bagpipe joke on them. He loved every one of his children; he wouldn’t have left them with any unkind tricks. But even though he had thought about telling her, Ben Joe had stopped himself. It was one of those things that wasn’t mentioned in this house. Not even he and his other sisters mentioned it.

What else didn’t they mention? He looked down the stairs and frowned, wondering what went on behind their cool, bright smiles. What did they think about before they went to sleep at night? He leaned further down, listening. The twins were chattering away in the kitchen; in the living room, someone laughed and Tessie gave a small squeal. He began to feel a sort of admiration for them. It was like watching a man who has been to Africa drink tea in the parlor and make small talk, with all those things known and done behind him that he is not even thinking about. Behind him, Joanne padded back to her bedroom with a pack of emery boards in her hand, but Ben Joe didn’t look around. He remained in his own thoughts, with his hand resting absently on the stair railing.