The Angel on the Roof

Queen for a Day

The elder of the two boys, Earl, turns from the dimly lit worktable, a door on sawhorses, where he is writing. He pauses a second and says to his brother, “Cut that out, willya? Getcha feet off the walls.”

The other boy says, “You’re not the boss of this family, you know.” He is dark-haired with large brown eyes, a moody ten-year-old lying bored on his cot with sneakered feet slapped against the faded green, floral print wallpaper.

Earl crosses his arms over his narrow chest and stares down at his brother from a considerable height. The room is cluttered with model airplanes, schoolbooks, papers, clothing, hockey sticks and skates, a set of barbells. Earl says, “We’re supposed to be doing homework, you know. If she hears you tramping your feet on the walls, she’ll come screaming in here.”

“She can’t hear me. Besides, you’re not doing homework. And I’m reading,” he says, waving a geography book at him.

The older boy sucks his breath through his front teeth and glares. “You really piss me off, George. With you doing that, rubbing your feet all over the wallpaper like you’re doing, it makes me all distracted.” He turns back to his writing, scribbling with a ballpoint pen on lined paper in a schoolboy’s three-ring binder. Earl has sandy blond hair and pale blue eyes that turn downward at the corners and a full red mouth. He’s more scrawny than skinny, hard and flat-muscled, and suddenly tall for his age, making him a head taller than his brother, taller even than his mother now, and able to pat their sister’s head as if he were a full-grown adult already.

He turned twelve eight months ago, in March, and in May their father left. Their father is a union carpenter who works on projects in distant corners of the state — schools, hospitals, post offices — and for a whole year the man came home only on weekends. Then, for a while, every other weekend. Finally, he was gone for a month, and when he came home the last time, it was to say good-bye to Earl, George, and their sister, Louise, and to their mother, too, of course, she who had been saying (for what seemed to the children years) that she never wanted to see the man again anyhow, ever, under any circumstances, because he just causes trouble when he’s home and more trouble when he doesn’t come home, so he might as well stay away for good. They can all get along better without him, she insisted, which was true, Earl was sure, but that was before the man left for good and stopped sending them money, so that now, six months later, Earl is not so sure anymore that they can get along better without their father than with him.

It happened on a Saturday morning, a day washed with new sunshine and dry air, with the whole family standing somberly in the kitchen, summoned there from their rooms by their mother’s taut, high-pitched voice, a voice that had an awful point to prove. “Come out here! Your father has something important to say to you!”

They obeyed, one by one, and gathered in a line before their father, who, dressed in pressed khakis and shined work shoes and cap, sat at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside him, and in front of him a cup of coffee, which he stirred slowly with a spoon. His eyes were filled with dense water, the way they almost always were on Sunday mornings, from his drinking the night before, the children knew, and he had trouble looking them in the face, because of the sorts of things he and their mother were heard saying to one another when they were at home together late Saturday nights. This Sunday morning it was only a little worse than usual — his hands shook some, and he could barely hold his cigarette; he let it smolder in the ashtray and kept on stirring his coffee while he talked. “Your mother and me,” he said in his low, roughened voice, “we’ve decided on some things you kids should know about.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother, she thinks you oughta hear it from me, though I don’t quite know so much about that as she does, seeing as how it’s not completely my idea alone.” He studied his coffee cup for a few seconds.

“They should hear it from you because it’s what you want!” their mother finally said. She stood by the sink, her hands wringing each other dry, and stared at the man. Her face was swollen from crying, which, for the children, was not an unusual thing on a Sunday morning when their father was home. They still did not know what was coming.

“Adele, it’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s what’s got to be, that’s all. Kids,” he said, “I got to leave you folks, for a while. A long while. And I won’t be comin’ back, I guess.” He grabbed his cigarette with thumb and forefinger and inhaled the smoke fiercely, then placed the butt back into the ashtray and went on talking, as if to the table: “I don’t want to do this, I hate it, but I got to. It’s too hard to explain, and I’m hoping that someday you’ll understand it all, but I just… I just got to live someplace else now.”

Louise, the girl, barely six years old, was the only one of the three children who could speak. She said, “Where are you going, Daddy?”

“Upstate,” he said. “Back up to Holderness. I got me an apartment up there, small place.”

“That’s not all he’s got up there!” their mother said.

“Adele, I can walk outa here right this second,” he said smoothly. “I don’t have to explain a goddamned thing, if you keep that kinda stuff up. We had an agreement.”

“Yup, yup. Sorry,” she said, pursing her lips, locking them with an invisible key, throwing the key away.

Finally, Earl could speak. “Will … will you come and see us? Or can we maybe come visit you, on weekends and like that?”

“Sure, son, you can visit me, anytime you want. It’ll take a while for me to get the place set up right, but soon’s I get it all set up for kids, I’ll call you, and we’ll work out some nice visits. I shouldn’t come here, though, not for a while. You understand.”

Earl shook his head somberly up and down, as if his one anxiety concerning the event had been put satisfactorily to rest.

George, however, had turned his back on his father, and now he was taking tiny, mincing half-steps across the linoleum-covered kitchen floor toward the outside door. He stopped a second, opened the door, and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, and no one tried to stop him, because he was doing what they wanted to do themselves, and then they heard him running pell-mell, as if falling, down the darkened stairs, two flights, to the front door of the building, heard it slam behind him, and knew he was gone, up Perley Street, between parked cars, down alleys, to a hiding place where they knew he’d stop, sit, and bawl, knew it because it was what they wanted to do themselves, especially Earl, who was too old, too scared, too confused, and too angry. Earl said, “I hope everyone can be more happy now.”

His father smiled and looked at him for the first time and clapped him on the shoulder. “Right, son,” he said. “You, you’re the man of the house now. I know you can do it. You’re a good kid, and, listen, I’m proud of you. Your mother, your brother and sister, they’re all going to need you a hell of a lot more than they have before, but I know you’re up to it, son. I’m countin’ on you,” he said, and he stood up and rubbed out his cigarette. Then he reached beyond Earl with both hands and hugged Earl’s sister, lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tight, and when the man set her down, he wiped tears away from his eyes. “Tell Georgie … well, maybe I’ll see him downstairs or something. He’s upset, I guess…” He shook Earl’s hand, drew him close, quickly hugged him, and let go and stepped away. Grabbing up his suitcases in silence, without looking once at his wife or back at his children, he left the apartment.

For good. “And good riddance, too,” as their mother immediately started saying to anyone who would listen. Louise said she missed her daddy, but she seemed to be quickly forgetting that, since for most of her life he had worked away from home, and George, who stayed mad, went deep inside himself and said nothing about it at all, and Earl — who did not know how he felt about their father’s abandoning them, for he knew that in many ways it was the best their father could do for them and in many other ways it was the worst — spoke of the man as if he had died in an accident, as if their mother were a widow and they half orphaned. This freed him, though he did not know it then, to concentrate on survival, survival for them all, which he now understood to be his personal responsibility, for his mother seemed utterly incapable of guaranteeing it, and his brother and sister were still practically babies. Often, late at night, lying in his squeaky, narrow cot next to his brother’s, Earl would say to himself, “I’m the man of the house now,” and somehow just saying it, over and over, “I’m the man of the house now,” like a prayer, made his terror ease back from his face, and he could finally slip into sleep.

Now, with his father gone six months and their mother still fragile, still denouncing the man to everyone who listens, and even to those who don’t listen but merely show her their faces for a moment or two, it’s as if the man were still coming home weekends drunk and raging against her and the world, were still betraying her, were telling all her secrets to another woman in a motel room in the northern part of the state. It’s as if he were daily abandoning her and their three children over and over again, agreeing to send money, and then sending nothing, promising to call and write letters, and then going silent on them, planning visits and trips together on weekends and holidays, and then leaving them with not even a forwarding address, forbidding them, almost, from adjusting to a new life, a life in which the man who is their father and her husband does not betray them anymore.

Earl decides to solve their problems himself. He hatches and implements, as best he can, plans, schemes, designs, all intended to find a substitute for the lost father. He introduces his mother to his hockey coach, who turns out to be married and a new father; and he invites in for breakfast and to meet his ma the cigar-smoking vet with the metal plate in his skull who drops off the newspapers at dawn for Earl to deliver before school. But the man turns out to dislike women actively enough to tell Earl, right to his face: “No offense, kid, I’m sure your ma’s a nice lady, but I got no use for ’em is why I’m single, not ’cause I ain’t met the right one yet or something.” And to the guy who comes to read the electric meter one afternoon when Earl’s home from school with the flu and his mother’s at work down at the tannery, where they’ve taken her on as an assistant bookkeeper, Earl says that he can’t let the man into the basement because it’s locked, he’ll have to come back later when his mom’s home, so she can let him in herself. The man says, “Hey, no problem, I can use last month’s reading and make the correction next month,” and waves cheerfully good-bye, leaving Earl suddenly, utterly, shockingly aware of his foolishness, his pathetic, helpless longing for a man of the house.

For a moment, he blames his mother for his longing and hates her for his fantasies. But then quickly he forgives her and blames himself and commences to concoct what he thinks of as more realistic, more dignified plans, schemes, designs: sweepstakes tickets; lotteries; raffles — Earl buys tickets on the sly with his paper route money. And he enters contests: essay contests for junior high school students that provide the winner with a weeklong trip for him and a parent to Washington, D.C.; and the National Spelling Bee, which takes Earl only to the county level before he fails to spell alligator correctly. A prize, any kind of award from the world outside their tiny, besieged family, Earl believes, will make their mother happy at last. He believes that a prize will validate their new life somehow and will thus separate it, once and for all, from their father. It will be as if their father never existed.

“So what are you writing?” George demands from the bed. He walks his feet up the wall as high as he can reach, then retreats. “I know it ain’t homework, you don’t write that fast when you’re doing homework. What is it, a love letter?”

“No, asshole. Just take your damned feet off the wall, will you? Ma’s gonna be in here in a minute screaming at both of us.” Earl closes the notebook and pushes it away from him carefully, as if it is the Bible and he has just finished reading aloud from it.

“I want to see what you wrote,” George says, flipping around and setting his feet, at last, onto the floor. He reaches toward the notebook. “Lemme see it.”

“C’mon, willya? Cut the shit.”

“Naw, lemme see it.” He stands up and swipes the notebook from the table as Earl moves to protect it.

“You little sonofabitch!” Earl says, and he clamps onto the notebook with both hands and yanks, pulling George off his feet and forward onto Earl’s lap, and they both tumble to the floor, where they begin to fight, swing fists and knees, roll and grab, bumping against furniture in the tiny, crowded room, until a lamp falls over, books tumble to the floor, model airplanes crash. In seconds, George is getting the worst of it and scrambles across the floor to the door, with Earl crawling along behind, yanking his brother’s shirt with one hand and pounding at his head and back with the other, when suddenly the bedroom door swings open, and their mother stands over them. She grabs both boys by their collars and shrieks, “What’s the matter with you! What’re you doing! What’re you doing!” They stop and collapse into a bundle of legs and arms, but she goes on shrieking at them. “I can’t stand it when you fight! Don’t you know that? I can’t stand it!”

George cries, “I didn’t do anything! I just wanted to see his homework!”

“Yeah, sure,” Earl says. “Innocent as a baby.”

“Shut up! Both of you!” their mother screams. She is wild-eyed, glaring at them, and, as he has done so many times, Earl looks at her face as if he’s outside his body, and he sees that she’s not angry at them at all, she’s frightened and in pain, as if her sons are little animals, rats or ferrets, with tiny, razor-sharp teeth biting at her ankles and feet.

Quickly, he gets to his feet and says, “I’m sorry, Ma. I guess I’m just a little tired or something lately.” He pats his mother on her shoulder and offers a small smile. George crawls on hands and knees to his bed and lies on it, while Earl gently turns their mother around and steers her out the door to the living room, where the television set drones on, Les Paul and Mary Ford, playing their guitars and singing bland harmonies. “We’ll be out in a few minutes for Dobie Gillis, Ma. Don’t worry,” Earl says.

“Jeez,” George says. “How can she stand that Les Paul and Mary Ford stuff? Even Louise goes to bed when it comes on, and it’s only what, six-thirty?”

“Shut up.”

“Up yours.”

Earl leans down and scoops up the fallen dictionary, pens, airplanes, and lamps and places them back on the worktable. The black binder he opens squarely in front of him, and he says to his brother, “You want to see what I was writing? Go ahead and read it. I don’t care.”

“I don’t care, either. Unless it’s a love letter.”

“No, it’s not a love letter.”

“What is it, then?”

“Nothing,” Earl says, closing the notebook. “Homework.”

“Oh,” George says, and he marches his feet up the wall and back again.

Nov. 7, 1953

Dear Jack Bailey,

I think my mother should be queen for a day because she has suffered a lot more than most mothers in this life and she has come out of it very cheerful and loving. The most important fact is that my father left her alone with three children, myself (age 12 ½), my brother George (age 10), and my sister Louise (age 6). He left her for another woman though that’s not the important thing, because my mother has risen above all that. But he refuses to send her any child support money. He’s been gone over six months and we still haven’t seen one red cent. My mother went to a lawyer but the lawyer wants $50 in advance to help her take my father to court. She has a job as assistant bookkeeper down at Belvedere’s Tannery downtown and the pay is bad, barely enough for our rent and food costs in fact, so where is she going to get $50 for a lawyer?

Also my father was a very cruel man who drinks too much and many times when he was living with us when he came home from work he was drunk and he would yell at her and even hit her. This has caused her and us kids a lot of nervous suffering and now she sometimes has spells which the doctor says are serious, though he doesn’t know exactly what they are.

We used to have a car and my father left it with us when he left (a big favor) because he had a pickup truck. But he owed over $450 on the car to the bank so the bank came and repossessed the car. Now my mother has to walk everywhere she goes which is hard and causes her varicose veins and takes a lot of valuable time from her day.

My sister Louise needs glasses the school nurse said but “Who can pay for them?” my mother says. My paper route gets a little money but it’s barely enough for school lunches for the three of us kids which is what we use it for.

My mother’s two sisters and her brother haven’t been too helpful because they are Catholic, as she is and the rest of us, and they don’t believe in divorce and think that she should not have let my father leave her anyhow. She needs to get a divorce but no one except me and my brother George think it is a good idea. Therefore my mother cries a lot at night because she feels so abandoned in this time of her greatest need.

The rest of the time though she is cheerful and loving in spite of her troubles and nervousness. That is why I believe that this courageous long-suffering woman, my mother, should be Queen for a Day.

Sincerely yours,

Earl Painter

Several weeks slide by, November gets cold and gray, and a New Hampshire winter starts to feel inevitable again, and Earl does not receive the letter he expects. He has told no one, especially his mother, that he has written to Jack Bailey, the smiling, mustachioed host of the Queen for a Day television show, which Earl happened to see that time he was home for several days with the flu, bored and watching television all afternoon. Afterwards, delivering papers in the predawn gloom, in school all day, at the hockey rink, doing homework at night, he could not forget the television show, the sad stories told by the contestants about their illness, poverty, neglect, victimization, and, always, their bad luck, luck so bad that you felt it was somehow deserved. The studio audience seemed genuinely saddened, moved to tears, even, by Jack Bailey’s recitation of these narratives, and then elated afterwards, when the winning victims, all of them middle-aged women, were rewarded with refrigerators, living room suites, vacation trips, washing machines, china, fur coats, and, if they needed them, wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, twenty-four-hour nursing care. As these women wept for joy, the audience applauded, and Earl almost applauded, too, alone there in the dim living room of the small, cold, and threadbare apartment in a mill town in central New Hampshire.

Earl knows that those women’s lives surely aren’t much different than his mother’s life, and in fact, if he has told it right, if somehow he has got into the letter what he has intuited is basically wrong with his mother’s life, it will be obvious to everyone in the audience that his mother’s life is actually much worse than those of many or perhaps even most of the women who win the prizes. Earl knows that, although his mother enjoys good health (except for “spells”) and holds down a job and is able to feed, house, and clothe her children, there is still a deep, essential sadness in her life that, in his eyes, none of the contestants on Queen for a Day has. He believes that if he can just get his description of her life right, other people — Jack Bailey, the studio audience, millions of people all over America watching it on television—everyone will share in her sadness, so that when she is rewarded with appliances, furniture, and clothing, maybe even a trip to Las Vegas, then everyone will share in her elation, too. Even he will share in it.

Earl knows that it is not easy to become a contestant on Queen for a Day. Somehow, your letter describing the candidate has first to move Jack Bailey, and then your candidate has to be able to communicate her sufferings over television in a clear and dramatic way. Earl noticed that some of the contestants, to their own apparent disadvantage, downplayed the effect on them of certain tragedies — a child with a birth defect, say, or an embarrassing kind of operation or a humiliating dismissal by an employer — while playing up other, seemingly less disastrous events, such as being cheated out of a small inheritance by a phony siding contractor or having to drop out of hairdressing school because of a parent’s illness, and when the studio audience was asked to show the extent and depth of its compassion by having its applause measured on a meter, it was always the woman who managed to present the most convincing mixture of courage and complaint who won.

Earl supposes that Jack Bailey telephones the writer of the letter nominating a particular woman for Queen for a Day and offers him and his nominee the opportunity to come to New York City’s Radio City Music Hall to tell her story in person, and then, based on how she does in the audition, Jack Bailey chooses her and two other nominees for a particular show, maybe next week, when they all come back to New York City to tell their stories live on television. Thus, daily, when Earl arrives home, he asks Louise and George, who normally get home from school an hour or so earlier than he, if there’s been any calls for him. You’re sure? No mail, either, no letters?

“Who’re you expectin’ to hear from, lover boy, your girlfriend?” George grins, teeth spotted with peanut butter and gobs of white bread.

“Up yours,” Earl says, and heads into his bedroom, where he dumps his coat, books, hockey gear. It’s becoming clear to him that, if there’s such a thing as a success, he’s evidently a failure. If there’s such a thing as a winner, he’s a loser. I oughta go on that goddamned show myself, he thinks. Flopping onto his bed face-first, he wishes he could keep on falling, as if down a bottomless well or mine shaft, into darkness and warmth, lost, and finally blameless, gone, gone, gone. And soon he is asleep, dreaming of a hockey game, and he’s carrying the puck, dragging it all the way up along the right, digging in close to the boards, skate blades flashing as he cuts around behind the net, ice chips spraying in white fantails, and when he comes out on the other side, he looks down in front of him and can’t find the puck, it’s gone, dropped off behind him, lost in his sweeping turn, the spray, the slash of the skates, and the long sweeping arc of the stick in front of him. He brakes, turns, and heads back, searching for the small black disc.

At the sound of the front door closing, a quiet click, as if someone is deliberately trying to enter the apartment silently, Earl wakes from his dream, and he hears voices from the kitchen, George and Louise and his mother:

“Hi, Mom. We’re just makin’ a snack, peanut butter sandwiches.”

“Mommy, George won’t give me—”

“Don’t eat it directly off the knife like that!”

“Sorry, I was jus’—”

“You heard me, mister, don’t answer back!”

“Jeez, I was jus’—”

“I don’t care what you were doing!” Her voice is trembling and quickly rising in pitch and timbre, and Earl moves off his bed and comes into the kitchen, smiling, drawing everyone’s attention to him, the largest person in the room, the only one with a smile on his face, a relaxed, easy, sociable face and manner, normalcy itself, as he gives his brother’s shoulder a fraternal squeeze, tousles his sister’s brown hair, nods hello to his mother, and says, “Hey, you’re home early, Ma. What happened, they give you guys the rest of the day off?”

Then he sees her face, white, tight, drawn back in a cadaverous grimace, her pale blue eyes wild, unfocused, rolling back, and he says, “Jeez, Ma, what’s the matter, you okay?”

Her face breaks into pieces, goes from dry to wet, white to red, and she is weeping loudly, blubbering, wringing her hands in front of her like a maddened knitter. “Aw-w-w-w!” she wails, and Louise and George, too, start to cry. They run to her and wrap her in their arms, crying and begging her not to cry, as Earl, aghast, sits back in his chair and watches the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another’s coils.

“Stop!” he screams at last. “Stop it! All of you!” He pounds his fist on the table. “Stop crying, all of you!”

They obey him. George first, then their mother, then Louise, who goes on staring into her mother’s face. George looks at his feet, ashamed, and their mother looks pleadingly into Earl’s face, expectant, hopeful, knowing that he will organize everything.

In a calm voice, Earl says, “Ma, tell me what happened. Just say it slowly, and it’ll come out okay, and then we can all talk about it, okay?”

She nods, and George unravels his arms from around her neck and steps away from her, moving to the far wall of the room, where he stands and looks out the window and down to the bare yard below. Louise snuggles her face in close to her mother and sniffles.

“I… I lost my job. I got fired today,” their mother says. “And it wasn’t my fault.” She starts to weep again, and Louise joins her, bawling now, and George at the window starts to sob, his small shoulders heaving.

Earl shouts, “Wait! Wait a minute, Ma, just tell me about it. Don’t cry!” he commands her, and she shudders, draws herself together again, and continues.

“I… I had some problems this morning, a bunch of files I was supposed to put away last week got lost. And everybody was running around like crazy looking for them, because they had all these figures from last year’s sales in them or something, I don’t know. Anyhow, they were important, and I was the one who was accused of losing them. Which I didn’t. But no one could find them, until finally they turned up on Robbie’s desk, down in shipping, which I couldn’t’ve done, since I never go to shipping anyhow. But Rose blamed me, because she’s the head bookkeeper, and she was the last person to use the files, and she was getting it because they needed them upstairs, and … well, you know, I was just getting yelled at and yelled at, and it went on after lunch … and, I don’t know, I just started feeling dizzy and all, like I was going to black out again. And I guess I got scared and started talking real fast, so Rose took me down to the nurse, and I did black out then. Only for a few seconds, though, and when I felt a little better, Rose said maybe I should go home for the rest of the day, which is what I wanted to do, anyhow. But when I went back upstairs to get my pocketbook and coat and my lunch, because I hadn’t been able to eat my sandwich, I was so nervous and all, and then Mr. Shandy called me into his office…” She makes a twisted, little smile, helpless and confused, and quickly continues. “Mr. Shandy said I should maybe take a lot of time off. Two weeks sick leave with pay, he said, even though I was only working there six months. He said that would give me time to look for another job, one that wouldn’t cause me so much worry, he said. So I asked him, ‘Are you firing me?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am,’ just like that. ‘But it would be better for you all around,’ he said, ‘if you left for medical reasons or something.’”

Earl slowly exhales. He’s been holding his breath throughout, though from her very first sentence he has known what the outcome would be. Reaching forward, he takes his mother’s hands in his, stroking them as if they were an injured bird. He doesn’t know what will happen now, but he is not afraid. Not really. Yet he knows that he should be terrified, and when he says this to himself, I should be terrified, he answers by observing simply that this is not the worst thing. The worst thing that can happen to them is that one or all of them will die. And because he is still a child, or at least enough of a child not to believe in death, he knows that no one in his family is going to die. He cannot share this secret comfort with anyone in the family, however. His brother and sister, children completely, cannot yet know that death is the worst thing that can happen to them; they think this is, that their mother has been fired from her job, which is why they are crying. And his mother, no longer a child at all, cannot believe with Earl that the worst thing will not happen, for this is too much like death and may somehow lead directly to it, which is why she is crying. Only Earl can refuse to cry. Which he does.

Later, in the room she shares with her daughter, their mother lies fully clothed on the double bed and sleeps, and it grows dark, and while George and Louise watch television in the gloom of the living room, Earl writes:

Nov. 21, 1953

Dear Jack Bailey,

Maybe my first letter to you about why my mother should be queen for a day did not reach you or else I just didn’t write it good enough for you to want her on your show. But I thought I would write again anyhow, if that’s okay, and mention to you a few things that I left out of that first letter and also mention again some of the things in that letter, in case you did not get it at all for some reason (you know the Post Office). I also want to mention a few new developments that have made things even worse for my poor mother than they already were.

First, even though it’s only a few days until Thanksgiving my father who left us last May, as you know, has not contacted us about the holidays or offered to help in any way. This makes us mad though we don’t talk about it much since the little kids tend to cry about it a lot when they think about it, and me and my mother think it’s best not to think about it. We don’t even know how to write a letter to my father, though we know the name of the company that he works for up in Holderness (a town pretty far from here) and his sisters could tell us his address if we asked, but we won’t. A person has to have some pride, as my mother says. Which she has a lot of.

We will get through Thanksgiving all right because of St. Joseph’s Church, which is where we go sometimes and where I was confirmed and my brother George (age 10) took his first communion last year and where my sister Louise (age 6) goes to catechism class. St. Joe’s (as we call it) has turkeys and other kinds of food for people who can’t afford to buy one so we’ll do okay if my mother goes down there and says she can’t afford to buy a turkey for her family on Thanksgiving. This brings me to the new developments.

My mother just got fired from her job as assistant bookkeeper at the tannery. It wasn’t her fault or anything she did. They just fired her because she has these nervous spells sometimes when there’s a lot of pressure on her, which is something that happens a lot these days because of my father and all and us kids and the rest of it. She got two weeks pay but that’s the only money we have until she gets another job. Tomorrow she plans to go downtown to all the stores and try to get a job as a saleslady now that Christmas is coming and the stores hire a lot of extras. But right now we don’t have any money for anything like Thanksgiving turkey or pies, and we can’t go down to Massachusetts to my mother’s family, Aunt Dot’s and Aunt Leona’s and Uncle Jerry’s house, like we used to because (as you know) the bank repossessed the car. And my father’s sisters and all, who used to have Thanksgiving with us, sometimes, have taken our father’s side in this because of his lies about us and now they won’t talk to us anymore.

I know that lots and lots of people are poor as us and many of them are sick too, or crippled from polio and other bad diseases. But I still think that my mother should be Queen for a Day because of other things.

Because even though she’s poor and got fired and has dizzy spells and sometimes blacks out, she’s a proud woman. And even though my father walked off and left all his responsibilities behind, she stayed here with us. And in spite of all her troubles and worries, she really does take good care of his children. One look in her eyes and you know it.

Thank you very much for listening to me and considering my mother for the Queen for a Day television show.

Sincerely,

Earl Painter

The day before Thanksgiving their mother is hired to start work the day after Thanksgiving in gift wrapping at Grover Cronin’s on Moody Street, and consequently she does not feel ashamed for accepting a turkey and a bag of groceries from St. Joe’s. “Since I’m working, I don’t think of it as charity. I think of it as a kind of loan,” she explains to Earl as they walk the four blocks to the church.

It’s dark, though still late afternoon, and cold, almost cold enough to snow, Earl thinks, which makes him think of Christmas, which in turn makes him cringe and tremble inside and turn quickly back to now, to this very moment, to walking with his tiny, brittle-bodied mother down the quiet street, past houses like their own — triple-decker wood-frame tenements, each with a wide front porch like a bosom facing the narrow street below, lights on in kitchens in back, where mothers make boiled supper for kids cross-legged on the living room floor watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie, while dads trudge up from the mills by the river or drive in from one of the plants on the Heights or maybe walk home from one of the stores downtown, the A&P, J.C. Penney’s, Sears: the homes of ordinary families, people just like them. But with one crucial difference, for a piece is missing from the Painter family, a keystone, making all other families, in Earl’s eyes, wholly different from his, and for an anxious moment he envies them. He wants to turn up a walkway to a strange house, step up to the door, open it, and walk down the long, dark, sweet-smelling hallway to the kitchen in back, say hi and toss his coat over a chair and sit down for supper, have his father growl at him to hang his coat up and wash his hands first, have his mother ask about school today, how did hockey practice go, have his sister interrupt to show her broken dolly to their father, beg him to fix it, which he does at the table next to his son, waiting for supper to be put on the table, all of them relaxed, happy, relieved that tomorrow is a holiday, a day at home with the family, no work, no school, no hockey practice. Tomorrow, he and his father and brother will go to the high school football game at noon and will be home by two to help set the table.

Earl’s mother says, “That job down at Grover Cronin’s? It’s only … it’s a temporary job, you know.” She says it as if uttering a slightly shameful secret. “After Christmas I get let go.”

Earl jams his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and draws his chin down inside his collar. “Yeah, I figured.”

“And the money, well, the money’s not much. It’s almost nothing. I added it up, for a week and for a month, and it comes out to quite a lot less than what you and me figured out in that budget, for the rent and food and all. What we need. It’s less than what we need. Never mind Christmas, even. Just regular.”

Earl and his mother stop a second at a curb, wait for a car to pass, then cross the street and turn right. Elm trees loom in black columns overhead; leafless branches spread in high arcs and cast intricate shadows on the sidewalk below. Earl can hear footsteps click against the pavement, his own off-beat, long stride and her short, quick one combining in a stuttered rhythm. He says, “You gotta take the job, though, don’t you? I mean, there isn’t anything else, is there? Not now, anyhow. Maybe soon, though, Ma, in a few days, maybe, if something at the store opens up in one of the other departments, dresses or something. Bookkeeping, maybe. You never know, Ma.”

“No, you’re right. Things surprise you. Still…” She sighs, pushing a cloud of breath out in front of her. “But I am glad for the turkey and the groceries. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving, anyhow,” she chirps.

“Yeah.”

They are silent for a few seconds, still walking, and then she says, “I’ve been talking to Father LaCoy, Earl. You know, about … about our problems. I’ve been asking his advice. He’s a nice man, not just a priest, you know, but a kind man, too. He knows your father, he knew him years and years ago, when they were in high school together. He said he was a terrible drinker even then. And he said … other things. He said some other things the other morning, that I’ve been thinking about since.”

“What morning?”

“Day before yesterday. Early. When you were delivering your papers. I felt I just had to talk to someone, I was all nervous and worried, and I needed to talk to someone here at St. Joe’s anyhow, because I wanted to know about how to get the turkey and all, so I came over, and he was saying the early mass, so I stayed and talked with him awhile afterwards. He’s a nice priest, I like him. I always liked Father LaCoy.”

“Yeah. What’d he say?” Earl knows already what the priest said, and he pulls himself further down inside his jacket, where his insides have hardened like an ingot, cold and dense, at the exact center of his body.

Up ahead, at the end of the block, is St. Joseph’s, a large, squat parish church with a short, broad steeple, built late in the last century of pale yellow stone cut from a quarry up on the Heights and hauled across the river in winter on sledges. “Father LaCoy says that your father and me, we should try to get back together. That we should start over, so to speak.”

“And you think he’s right,” Earl adds.

“Well, not exactly. Not just like that. I mean, he knows what happened. He knows all about your father and all, I told him, but he knew anyhow. I told him how it was, but he told me that it’s not right for us to be going on like this, without a father and all. So he said, he told me, he’d like to arrange to have a meeting in his office at the church, a meeting between me and your father, so we could maybe talk some of our problems out. And make some compromises, he said.”

Earl is nearly a full head taller than his mother, but suddenly, for the first time since before his father left, he feels small, a child again, helpless, dependent, pulled this way or that by the obscure needs and desires of adults. “Yeah, but how come … how come Father LaCoy thinks Daddy’ll even listen? He doesn’t want us!”

“I know, I know,” his mother murmurs. “But what can I do? What else can I do?”

Earl has stopped walking, and he shouts at his mother, like a dog barking at the end of a leash: “He can’t even get in touch with Daddy! He doesn’t even know where Daddy is!”

She stops and speaks in a steady voice. “Yes, he can find him all right. I told him where Daddy was working and gave him the name of McGrath and Company, and also Aunt Ellie’s number. So he can get in touch with him, if he wants to. He’s a priest.”

“A priest can get in touch with him, but his own wife and kids can’t?”

His mother has pulled up now, and she looks at her son with a hardness in her face that he can’t remember having seen before. She tells him, “You don’t understand. I know how tough it’s been for you, Earl, all this year, from way back, even, with all the fighting, and then when your father went away. But you have got to understand a little bit how it’s been for me, too. I can’t … do this all alone like this.”

“Do you love Daddy?” he demands. “Do you? After … after everything he’s done? After hitting you like he did those times, and the yelling and all, and the drinking, and then, then the worst, after leaving us like he did! Leaving us and running off with that girlfriend or whatever of his! And not sending any money! Making you have to go to work, with us kids coming home after school and nobody at home. Ma, he left us! Don’t you know that? He left us!” Earl is weeping now. His skinny arms wrapped around his own chest, tears streaming over his cheeks, the boy stands straight-legged and stiff on the sidewalk in the golden glow of the streetlight, his wet face crossed with shadows from the elm trees, and he shouts, “I hate him! I hate him, and I never want him to come back again! If you let him come back, I swear it, I’m gonna run away! I’ll leave!”

His mother says, “Oh, no, Earl, you don’t mean that,” and she reaches forward to hold him, but he backs fiercely away.

“No! I do mean it! If you let him back into our house, I’m leaving.”

“Earl. Where will you go? You’re just a boy.”

“So help me, Ma, don’t treat me like this. I can go lots of places, don’t worry. I can go to Boston, I can go to Florida, I can go to lots of places. All I got to do is hitchhike. I’m not a little kid anymore,” he says, and he draws himself up and looks down at her.

“You don’t hate your father.”

“Yes, Ma. Yes, I do. And you should hate him, too. After all he did to you.”

They are silent for a moment, facing each other, looking into each other’s pale blue eyes. He is her son, his face is her face, not his father’s. Earl and his mother have the same sad, downward-turning eyes, like teardrops, the same full red mouth, the same clear voice, and now, at this moment, they share the same agony, a life-bleeding pain that can be stanched only with a lie, a denial.

She says, “All right, then. I’ll tell Father LaCoy. I’ll tell him that I don’t want to talk to your father, it’s gone too far now. I’ll tell him that I’m going to get a divorce.” She opens her arms, and her son steps into them. Above her head, his eyes jammed shut, he holds on to his tiny mother and sobs, as if he’s learned that his father has died.

His mother says, “I don’t know when I’ll get the divorce, Earl. But I’ll do it. Things’ll work out. They have to. Right?” she asks, as if asking a baby who can’t understand her words.

He nods. “Yeah … things’ll work out,” he says.

They let go of one another and walk slowly on toward the church.

Dec. 12, 1953

Dear Jack Bailey,

Yes, it’s me again and this is my third letter asking you to make my mother Adele Painter into queen for a day. Things are much worse now than last time I wrote to you. I had to quit the hockey team so I could take an extra paper route in the afternoons because my mother’s job at Grover Cronin’s is minimum wage and can’t pay our bills. But that’s okay, it’s only junior high so it doesn’t matter like it would if I was in high school. So I don’t really mind.

My mother hasn’t had any of her spells lately, but she’s still really nervous and cries a lot and yells a lot at the kids over little things because she’s so worried about money and everything. We had to get winter coats and boots this year from the church, St. Joe’s, and my mom cried a lot about that. Now that Christmas is so close everything reminds her of how poor we are now, even her job which is wrapping gifts. She has to stand on her feet six days and three nights a week so her varicose veins are a lot worse than before, so when she comes home she usually has to go right to bed.

My brother George comes home now after school and takes care of Louise until I get through delivering papers and can come home and make supper for us, because my mother’s usually at work then. We don’t feel too sad because we’ve got each other and we all love each other but it is hard to feel happy a lot of the time, especially at Christmas.

My mother paid out over half of one week’s pay as a down payment to get a lawyer to help her get a divorce from my father and get the court to make him pay her some child support, but the lawyer said it might take two months for any money to come and the divorce can’t be done until next June. The lawyer also wrote a letter to my father to try and scare him into paying us some money but so far it hasn’t worked. So it seems like she spent that money on the lawyer for nothing.

Everything just seems to be getting worse. If my father came back the money problems would be over.

Well, I should close now. This being the third time I wrote in to nominate my mother for Queen for a Day and so far not getting any answer, I guess it’s safe to say you don’t think her story is sad enough to let her go on your show. That’s okay because there are hundreds of women in America whose stories are much sadder than my mom’s and they deserve the chance to win some prizes on your show and be named queen for a day. But my mom deserves that chance too, just as much as that lady with the amputated legs I saw and the lady whose daughter had that rare blood disease and her husband died last year. My mom needs recognition just as much as those other ladies need what they need. That’s why I keep writing to you like this. I think this will be my last letter though. I get the picture, as they say.

Sincerely,

Earl Painter

The Friday before Christmas, Earl, George, Louise, and their mother are sitting in the darkened living room, George sprawled on the floor, the others on the sofa, all of them eating popcorn from a bowl held in Louise’s lap and watching The Jackie Gleason Show, when the phone rings.

“You get it, George,” Earl says.

Reggie Van Gleason III swirls his cape and cane across the tiny screen in front of them, and the phone goes on ringing. “Get it yourself,” says George. “I always get it, and it’s never for me.”

“Answer the phone, Louise,” their mother says, and she suddenly laughs at one of Gleason’s moves, a characteristic high-pitched peal that cuts off abruptly, half a cackle that causes her sons, as usual, to look at each other and roll their eyes in shared embarrassment. She’s wearing her flannel bathrobe and slippers, smoking a cigarette, and drinking from a glass of beer poured from a quart bottle on the floor beside her.

Crossing in front of them, Louise cuts to the corner table by the window and picks up the phone. Her face, serious most of the time anyhow, suddenly goes dark, then brightens, wide-eyed. Earl watches her, and he knows who she is listening to. She nods, as if the person on the other end can see her, and then she says, “Yes, yes,” but no one, except Earl, pays any attention to her.

After a moment, the child puts the receiver down gently and returns to the sofa. “It’s Daddy,” she announces. “He says he wants to talk to the boys.”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” George blurts, and stares straight ahead at the television.

Their mother blinks her eyes, opens and closes her mouth, looks from George to Louise to Earl and back to Louise again. “It’s Daddy?” she says. “On the telephone?”

“He says he wants to talk to the boys.”

Earl crosses his arms over his chest and shoves his body back into the sofa. Jackie Gleason dances delicately across the stage, a graceful fat man with a grin.

“Earl?” his mother asks, eyebrows raised.

“Nope.”

The woman stands up slowly and walks to the phone. She speaks to their father; all three children watch carefully. She nods, listening, now and then opening her mouth to say something, closing it when she’s interrupted. “Yes, yes,” she says. And, “Yes, they’re both here.” She listens again, then says, “Yes, I know, but I should tell you, Nelson, the children … the boys, they feel funny about talking to you. Maybe … maybe you could write a letter first or something. It’s sort of … hard for them. They feel very upset, you see, especially now, with the holidays and all. We’re all very upset, and worried. And with me losing my job and having to work down at Grover Cronin’s and all…” She nods, listens, her face expressionless. “Well, Lord knows, that would be very nice. It would have been very nice a long time ago, but no matter. We surely need it, Nelson.” She listens again, longer this time, her face gaining energy and focus as she listens. “Well, I’ll see, I’ll ask them again. Wait a minute,” she says, and puts her hand over the receiver and says, “Earl, your father wants to talk to you.” She smiles wanly.

Earl squirms in his seat, crosses and uncrosses his legs, looks away from his mother to the wall opposite. “I got nothin’ to say to him.”

“Yes, but… I think he wants to say some things to you, though. Can’t hurt to let him say them.”

Silently, the boy gets up from the couch and crosses the room to the phone. As she hands him the receiver, his mother smiles with a satisfaction that bewilders and instantly angers him.

“H’lo,” he says.

“H’lo, son. How’re ya doin’, boy?”

“Okay.”

“Attaboy. Been a while, eh?”

“Yeah. A while.”

“Well, I sure am sorry for that. You know, that it’s been such a while and all. But I been going through some hard times myself. Got laid off, didn’t work for most of the summer because of that damned strike. You read about that in the papers?”

“No.”

“How’s the paper route?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, son, look, I know it’s been tough, believe me, I know. It’s been tough for everyone. So I know what you’ve been going through. No kidding. But it’s gonna get better, things’re gonna get better now. And I want to try and make it up to you guys a little, what you had to go through this last six months or so. I want to make it up to you guys a little, you and Georgie and Louise. Your ma, too. If you’ll let me. Whaddaya say?”

“What?”

“Whaddaya say you let me try to make it up a little to you?”

“Sure. Why not? Try.”

“Hey. Listen, Earl, that’s quite an attitude you got there. We got to do something about that, eh? Some kind of attitude, son. I guess things’ve done a little changing around there since the old man left, eh? Eh?”

“What’d you expect? That everything’d stay the same?” Earl hears his voice rising and breaking into a yodel, and his eyes fill with tears.

“No, of course not. I understand, son. I understand. I know I’ve made some big mistakes this year, lately. Especially with you kids, in dealing with you kids. I didn’t do it right, the leaving and all. It’s hard, Earl, to do things like that right. I’ve learned a lot. But, hey, listen, everybody deserves a second chance. Right? Even your old man?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“Sure. Damn right,” he says, and then he adds that he’d like to come by tomorrow afternoon and see them, all of them, and leave off some Christmas presents. “You guys got your tree yet?”

Earl can manage only a tiny, cracked voice: “No, not yet.”

“Well, that’s good, real good. ’Cause I already got one in the back of the truck, a eight-footer I cut this afternoon myself. There’s lots of trees out in the woods here in Holderness. Not many people and lots of trees. Anyhow, I got me a eight-footer, Scotch pine. The best. Whaddaya think?”

“Yeah. Sounds good.”

His father rattles on, while Earl feels his chest tighten into a knot and tears spill over his cheeks. The man repeats several times that he’s really sorry about the way he’s handled things these last few months. But it’s been hard for him, too, and it’s hard for him even to say this, he’s never been much of a talker, but he knows he’s not been much of a father lately, either. That’s all over now, though, over and done with, he assures Earl; it’s all a part of the past. He’s going to be a different man now, a new man. He’s turned over a new leaf, he says. And Christmas seems like the perfect time for a new beginning, which is why he called them tonight and why he wants to come by tomorrow afternoon with presents and a tree and help set up and decorate the tree with them, just like in the old days. “Would you go for that? How’d that be, son?”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, sure, son. What?”

“Daddy, are you gonna try to get back together with Mom?” Earl looks straight at his mother as he says this, and though she pretends to be watching Jackie Gleason, she is listening to his every word. As is George, and probably even Louise.

“Am I gonna try to get back together with your mom, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well … that’s a hard one, boy. You asked me a hard one.” He is silent for a few seconds, and Earl can hear him sipping from a glass and then taking a deep draw from his cigarette. “I’ll tell you, boy. The truth is, she doesn’t want me back. You oughta know that by now. I left because she wanted me to leave, son. I did some wrong things, sure, lots of ’em, but I did not want to leave you guys. No, right from the beginning, this thing’s been your mom’s show. Not mine.”

“Daddy, that’s a lie.”

“No, son. No. We fought a lot, your mom and me, like married people always do. But I didn’t want to leave her and you kids. She told me to. And now, look at this—she’s the one bringing these divorce charges and all, not me. You oughta see the things she’s charging me with.”

“What about … what about her having to protect herself? You know what I mean. I don’t want to go into any details, but you know what I mean. And what about your girlfriend?” he sneers.

His father is silent for a moment. Then he says, “You sure have got yourself an attitude since I been gone. Listen, kid, there’s lots you don’t know anything about, that nobody knows anything about, and there’s lots more that you shouldn’t know anything about. You might not believe this, Earl, but you’re still a kid. You’re a long ways from being a man. So don’t go butting into where you’re not wanted and getting into things between your mom and me that you can’t understand anyhow. Just butt out. You hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“Lemme speak to your brother.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Earl says, and he looks away from George’s face and down at his own feet.

“Put your mother on, Earl.”

“None of us wants to talk to you.”

“Earl!” his mother cries. “Let me have the phone,” she says, and she rises from the couch, her hand reaching toward him.

Earl places the receiver in its cradle. Then he stands there, looking into his mother’s blue eyes, and she looks into his.

She says, “He won’t call back.”

Earl says, “I know.”