Crossroads Page 28

  She seemed innocently surprised, innocently hurt. An instinct to protect her welled up in Russ so strongly, he thought he might really be in love with her.

  Theo wasn’t similarly moved. “I was given to understand,” he said, “that you and Ronnie’s mother had some words.”

  “It’s a gift,” Frances said.

  “I already asked you once to leave that boy be. Now I’m asking you again, politely.”

  Frances’s hurt was turning to anger. It was an emotion Russ had never seen in her, and the sight of it turned him on. He imagined her angry at him, the full womanly range of her emotions bared to him, in the kind of spat that lovers sometimes had.

  “Why?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  Theo rolled his eyes toward Russ, as if she were his woman to control.

  “Frances,” Russ said, moving toward her. “Maybe we should trust Theo on this. We don’t know the situation.”

  “What is the situation?”

  “The situation,” Theo said, “is that Clarice, the boy’s mother, doesn’t want you talking to him. She came and complained to me about that.”

  Frances laughed. “Because why? Because she’s such a perfect mother?”

  Her derision, too, was sexually exciting to Russ, but morally it was unattractive. He placed a hand on her shoulder and tried to turn her away. “You and I can talk about this later,” he said.

  She shrugged off his hand. “I’m sorry, but how is it right for a boy who should be in a special school, getting special attention—how is it okay for him to be wandering around the neighborhood during school hours, cadging quarters?”

  “Frances,” Russ said.

  “I appreciate your concern,” Theo said evenly. “But I suggest you head home. It’s a long drive in the snow.”

  “We really should be going,” Russ agreed.

  Frances now did direct her anger at him. “Does this seem right to you? Why isn’t someone calling social services? Isn’t this something the state should know about?”

  “The state?” Theo smiled at Russ as if they were in on a joke. “You think the State of Illinois has a functioning child-protection system?”

  “What are you smiling at?” Frances said to Russ. “Did I say something funny?”

  He erased his smile. “Not at all. Theo is just saying it’s not a perfect system. It’s understaffed and overwhelmed. We can talk about it in the car.”

  Again he tried to steer her toward the door, and again she shed his hand. “I want to know,” she said, “why I can’t give a needy boy one tiny little Christmas present.”

  The time on the community center’s wall clock was 5:18. Each passing minute deepened the trouble Russ would be in with Marion, and he knew he should insist that they leave. But again his lady was asking him to perform a difficult task—to side with her against an urban minister with whom he’d painstakingly cultivated a relationship.

  “I take your point about the gift,” he said to Theo. “But I’m kind of with Frances here. It doesn’t seem right that Ronnie’s on the street by himself.”

  Theo threw him a disappointed look and turned to Frances. “You want to take charge of that boy? You want to take that on? Retarded South Side nine-year-old? You ready for that?”

  “No,” she said. “That would be a lot for me to take on. But I can’t help—”

  “He’s already been in foster care once. Are you familiar with that system?”

  “Not—no. Not really.”

  “We’re here to learn,” Russ said—managing, in one breath, to patronize Frances and sound idiotic to Theo.

  “You got to go pretty far down the list,” Theo said, “to find the family that will take a boy like Ronnie. That’s going to be a family collecting checks for half a dozen kids—to see any profit, you need volume. And how do you handle half a dozen kids?”

  “You lock them in a room,” Russ said, to sound less stupid.

  “You lock them all up in a room. You don’t spare the rod.”

  “That’s a bad system, I agree,” Frances said.

  “Then work on changing it, if you want to try to help. Clarice isn’t all bad, she was just too young when she had Ronnie. When she gets herself together, she takes him to the school in Washington Park. That’s on a good day. On bad days he falls through the cracks. He knows to come here when she’s strung out, and sooner or later she always comes to find him. The problem is the men who give her drugs. She gets lost in that, and the only thing that gets her out of it is mother’s pride. If she didn’t have Ronnie, I reckon she’d be dead by now.”

  “I can understand that,” Frances said. “I just want to give him something he might like.”

  “That’s right. That’s what you want. What I want is for Clarice not to up and tell Ronnie to keep away from a church where he’s safe.”

  “Well, so, let me write her a note. Is there a piece of paper I can write on?”

  “Frances,” Russ said.

  “She needs to know I’m not trying to take Ronnie away from her. Theo can give her the note with the present.”

  Theo made his eyes very wide, suggesting a limit to his patience.

  “Look,” Russ said. “This is silly. If you want Ronnie to have colored pens, Theo can take off the wrapping paper and give them to him. I don’t think writing a note is a good idea.”

  “I wanted him to have a present to unwrap on Christmas.”

  Theo, his limit reached, shook his head and walked away. Russ snatched the gift from Frances and hurried after him, into the sanctuary.

  “Do me a favor and take this,” he said, pressing the gift on Theo. “She means well. She really does care about Ronnie. She’s just…”

  “I was surprised to see her,” Theo said. “I assumed you were coming with Kitty.”

  “Yeah, ah. Change of plan.”

  The single fluorescent light burning above the altar, behind an old upright piano and a freestanding organ, seemed to intensify the sanctuary’s chill.

  “Your private affairs are none of my business,” Theo said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d take the log out of your eye and tell her to keep clear of that boy. If she won’t do it, she needs to find someplace else to go with her good intentions. I don’t need that kind of thing here.”

  Two years of bridge-building with Theo were in jeopardy. Russ knew exactly why Theo was impatient with Frances. He himself had been impatient with other First Reformed ladies who’d joined the circle, Juanita Fuller, Wilma St. John, June Goya. They’d spoken to people in the neighborhood, including Theo, with a treacly sort of maternal condescension, partly a product of fear, partly racism repackaged in self-flattering form. He’d had to ask each of them to leave the circle, and if Theo had now been complaining about anyone but Frances, Russ would have deferred to him and kicked her out. He did believe that the flavor of Frances’s offense was different, more a matter of high spirits and irreverence. But it was possible that he only believed this because he was falling in love with her.

  “I’ll speak to her,” he said.

  “All righty,” Theo said. “You get yourself home safe.”

  An inch of fresh snow had fallen on the Fury’s windshield. The lightening of its rear load made its handling even more floaty as Russ steered it homeward. Frances was now sitting in normal passenger posture, her feet on the floor, and seemed coldly aggrieved with him.

  “I don’t suppose I can ask,” she said, “what the two men had to say about me behind my back.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” Russ said. “Theo can be stubborn. Sometimes you just have to defer to how he wants things done.”

  “I’m sure the two of you think I’m a dunce, but it wouldn’t have killed him to give Ronnie my present.”

  “Your gesture was lovely. I’m all for it.”

  “But apparently there’s just something about me that makes black people hate me.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I don’t hate them.”

  “Of cou
rse not. It’s just…” He took a deep breath, for courage. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said, “to step back and think about how you’re coming across. It’s one thing to be in New Prospect, in your own milieu, with people like yourself. You can be as outspoken as you want. You can openly disagree with people, and they’ll take it as a sign of respect. But that kind of spirit comes across differently when you’re a visitor in a Black community.”

  “I’m not allowed to disagree with them?”

  “No, that’s—”

  “Because it’s not like every black person is so perfect. I’m sure they do plenty of disagreeing among themselves.”

  “I’m not saying you can’t disagree with Theo Crenshaw. I disagreed with him myself today.”

  “I didn’t see much sign of that.”

  “I’m talking about an inner attitude. The first thing I do, when I feel myself disagreeing, is acknowledge my own ignorance. Maybe there’s something in Theo’s experience that leads him to think the way he does, something I can’t immediately see. Instead of just shooting from the hip, I stop and ask myself, ‘Why does he feel differently about this than I do?’ And then I listen to his answer. He and I may still disagree, but at least I’ve acknowledged that a Black man’s experience in this country is profoundly different than mine.”

  Frances offered no rejoinder, and Russ dared to hope that he was getting through to her. He had selfish reasons to keep her in the Tuesday circle, but they didn’t make his message less sincere.

  “You have a good heart, Frances. A wonderful heart. But you can’t really blame Theo for not immediately seeing that. If you want him to trust you, you need to try to cultivate a different attitude. Begin with the assumption that you don’t know anything about being Black. If you make that adjustment, I guarantee he’ll notice the difference.”

  She sighed so heavily that the windshield fogged. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I.”

  “Not at all.”

  “No, I did. I can see that now. I was trying to be Mrs. Fix-It.”

  Russ glowed with pride. He, not Theo, had been right about her true nature.

  “You didn’t do anything so wrong,” he said. “But the next time you see Theo, it wouldn’t hurt to tell him you’re sorry. A simple heartfelt apology goes a long way. Theo’s a good man, a good Christian. If you change your inner attitude, he’ll know it. It is so important to me, Frances, so very important, that you keep coming on our Tuesdays.”

  This was the mildest of allusions to his pride in her, his hopes for a deepening of their intimacy, but he worried that it was still too much; and, indeed, the allusion wasn’t lost on her.

  “Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said. “The things you do say.”

  Desire surged in him so powerfully, it felt like a premonition of its fulfillment. He thought of the blues recordings he’d left in his office, the excuse they would give him to bring Frances inside the church, the course that events might take in the dark of his office, if he kept up his nerve and didn’t get them back too late. Feeling one with the Fury, he urged it across Fifty-ninth Street, where the snow was heavily furrowed.

  The furrows were deeper than he’d judged. They absorbed his momentum and deflected him into a sideways skid. For a very bad moment, neither steering nor braking had any effect. He clutched the wheel helplessly while Frances cried out and the Fury slid backward through the intersection. There was a bump and a bang and a crunch of metal on metal.

  Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

  Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?

  Returning to his room, where Judson was kneeling over the homemade Stratego board, Perry weighed the benefits and costs of taking his sister’s place at the Haefles’ reception. On the credit side were the goodness of this action, the satisfaction of adhering to his new resolution, the unprecedented look of gratitude with which Becky had accepted his offer, and the advancement of his self-interested campaign to secure her silence regarding his earlier bad actions. On the debit side, he now had to attend a reception for clergymen, with Judson.

  “Listen, kiddo,” Perry said, sitting down across the board from him. “I need to ask you a favor. How would you feel about going to a party where there aren’t any kids your age?”

  “When.”

  “As soon as Mom and Dad get home. We’ll go with them.”

  Judson’s brow creased. “I thought we were playing the game.”

  “We can slide it under my bed. It’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Why do I have to go?”

  “Because I have to go. You don’t want to be home alone, do you?”

  A brief silence.

  “I don’t mind,” Judson said.

  “Really? You kind of freaked out, that time in the fall. It wasn’t even at night.”

  Judson stared at the game board with an odd little smile, as if the boy who’d freaked out about some noises in the basement, though undeniably him, were an object of faint amusement; as if the shame of that time in the fall, when he’d been left home alone for too long, might pass over him and land somewhere else.

  “The snacks will be good,” Perry said. “You can bring your book and find a place to read.”

  “Why do you have to go?”

  “It’s something I’m doing for Becky.”

  Perry waited for the obvious question: Why do a good thing for Becky and not for his little brother? But this wasn’t the way a superior human being’s mind worked.

  “Can we finish the game first?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You promised we’d play tonight.”

  “We started it tonight. We’ll finish it tomorrow.”

  Absorbing this sophistry, Judson stared at the board. “It’s your move,” he said.

  Each player had forty pieces whose identities were concealed to his opponent. The object was to capture your opponent’s flag, via the slaughter of lesser pieces by pieces of greater rank, while avoiding deadly collisions with your opponent’s bombs, which were immotile and removable only by your very low-ranking miners. In classical strategy, you planted your flag at the rear of your forces and surrounded it with bombs, but Judson had apparently now grasped the weakness of this strategy: as soon as your opponent could advance a miner, unscathed, to the protecting bombs, your flag was helpless and the game was over. Observing Judson’s guileless excitement about his new idea, Perry could have pretended to be surprised by it and let him win the game. Instead, anticipating Judson’s more freewheeling placement of bombs, he’d deployed his own miners in more forward positions. It was plausibly good to beat Judson again and again, teaching him to not betray his strategy, forcing him to develop his skills, until he was able to win fair and square. Wouldn’t Judson’s happiness then be all the greater for being hard earned? Or was this merely the rationalization of an intelligent person who selfishly hated losing, even to his little brother?

  Becky in her boots had clattered down the stairs, bound for the Crossroads concert, and Perry had defused the third of Judson’s bombs, at the nugatory sacrifice of a miner to a captain, when the telephone rang. He went and picked up on the extension in the parental
bedroom.

  “Yeah, ah—Perry?” his father said. His voice sounded strained and metallically distorted. There was street noise in the background. “Can I speak to your mother?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “She already went to the Haefles’?”

  “No. I haven’t seen her all day.”

  “Ah, okay, so. When you see her, can you tell her not to wait for me? There’s a problem with the car—I’m still in the city. Can you tell her she should just go on without me? It’s important that one of us be there.”

  “Sure. But what if she—”

  “Thanks, Perry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.”

  With notable haste, his father ended the call. Likewise notable had been the guilty look he’d given Perry some hours earlier, when Perry spotted him and Mrs. Cottrell in the family car.

  Perry placed the receiver in its cradle and pondered what to do. Mrs. Cottrell was, without question, a fox—not only in the salacious sense of the word but in her slyness. In his encounters with her since Larry Cottrell had made the dumb mistake of getting high while babysitting, Perry had detected a sharpening of her interest in him, a glint of mischief in her eyes. Larry had sworn to Perry that he hadn’t narked him out, but his mother obviously suspected who’d sold him the dime bag. And now Perry had discovered, by accident, at the corner of Pirsig and Maple, a dangerous liaison between Mrs. Cottrell and the Reverend Father. To be busted by the Reverend now, after forming his resolution and liquidating the asset, would be the height of irony.

  Impelled by worry, after watching his father speed away on Pirsig, he’d postponed the rest of his Christmas shopping and walked to the Cottrell residence for a word with Larry. If all Larry’s mother had was a suspicion, and if she happened to voice it to the Reverend, Perry could simply deny everything. The worry was that Larry was weak. If he’d fingered Perry by name, despite swearing that he hadn’t, denials would not avail.

  Larry could have been Exhibit A in Becky’s contention that Perry merely used people. For a while, Perry had dodged him at Crossroads meetings and inventively deflected his invitations to hang out. Larry was immature, a squeaker, a newcomer, and thus of scant utility to Perry in his quest to reach the center of Crossroads. But Perry couldn’t baldly reject him without running afoul of Crossroads precepts. One day, after school, Larry attached himself to Perry and Ansel Roder as they made their way to Roder’s house. Roder was in a magnanimous mood that day. Learning that Larry had never tried pot and very much wanted to, he included him in the passing of the bong, whereupon Larry embarrassed Perry. With ear-grating giggles, he offered a running play-by-play of his mind’s reaction to chemical insult, and when Roder finally told him to shut the fuck up he gigglingly explicated his insulted mind’s reaction to it. He giggled, too, when he bumped into Roder’s turntable and harmed the LP that was playing. Roder took Perry aside and said, “I don’t want that kid here again.” Perry was of similar opinion, but Larry, serenely unaware of how uncoolly he’d behaved, proceeded to pester him to be included in future festivities. He was a poignant figure, messed up by the recent death of his father. To sell him drugs would have been a pure kindness if it hadn’t also made rationally self-interested sense: here was a loyal customer, a known quantity, whose mother gave him a handsome allowance. To then smoke with him the pot he bought might likewise have been construable as charity, an act of friendship, if it hadn’t accorded with Perry’s strategic desire to be less dependent on Roder’s generosity, and with certain other benefits. It was proving pleasant to Perry to have an adoring acolyte in Crossroads, pleasant to see his foxy mother up close, in her den, pleasant to exercise his dexterity on the model airplanes that Larry could afford with his allowance, pleasant to dip brushes into the nifty square bottles of paint he’d long coveted at the hobby shop. Not until Larry got himself busted by his mother—semi-deliberately, as a self-destructive way of defying her, Perry suspected—did the costs of their friendship outweigh the benefits. Larry had promised his mother he wouldn’t buy more pot, and Perry, despite having lost him as a customer, was obliged to remain friends with him, lest he be hurt and nark him out.