A Special Providence Read Free

made bearable only by the “wonderful companionship” of her little boy. On the slender combination of alimony and child support that was the most George Prentice could spare, they lived at first in rural Connecticut, then in Greenwich Village, and then in the Westchester suburbs, where they were always in trouble with the landlord and the grocer and the coal dealer, never at ease among the oppressively neat families that surrounded them.
    “We’re different, Bobby,” she would explain, but the explanation was never needed. Wherever they lived he seemed always to be the only new boy and the only poor boy, the onlyboy whose home smelled of mildew and cat droppings and plastilene, with statuary instead of a car in its garage; the only boy who didn’t have a father.
    But he had loved her romantically, with an almost religious belief in her gallantry and goodness. If the landlord and the grocer and the coal dealer and George Prentice were all against her, they would have to be his enemies too: he would serve as her ally and defender against the crass and bullying materialism of the world. He would gladly have thrown down his life for her in any number of ways; the trouble was that other, less dramatic kinds of help were needed, and none came. Pieces of her sculpture were sometimes shown in group exhibitions and very occasionally sold, for small sums, but these isolated triumphs were all but lost under the mounting pressure of hardship.
    “Look, Alice,” George Prentice would say on the rare and dreaded occasions of his visitation rights, plainly forcing his voice to sound calm and reasonable. “Look: I know it’s important to make sacrifices for the boy – I agree with you there – but this just isn’t realistic. You simply have no business living in a place like this, running up all these bills. The point is, people have to live within their
means
, Alice.”
    “All right. I’ll give up sculpture, then. I’ll move to the
Bronx
and get some wretched little job in a
department
store. Is that what you want?”
    “No, of course that’s not what I want. I’m simply asking for a little co-operation, a little consideration – damn it, Alice, a little sense of responsibility.”
    “Responsibility! Oh, don’t talk to
me
about responsibility …”
    “Alice, will you please keep your voice down? Before you wake the boy?”
    Life in the suburbs came abruptly to an end with a frightening lawsuits for unpayable debts when he was nearly thirteen; and itwas three years later, after a series of increasingly cheap city apartments, that Alice made a final plea to her former husband. She would never be a burden on him again, she promised, if he would only agree to finance Bobby’s enrollment in what she called a Good New-England Prep School.
    “A
boarding
school? Alice, do you have any idea how much those places cost? Look: let’s try to be reasonable. How do you think I’m going to be able to put him through college if I—”
    “Oh, you know perfectly well the whole question of college is three years away. Anything can happen in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a
fortune
in three years. I could have a one-man show and make a fortune six
months
from now. Oh, I know you’ve never had any faith in me, but it happens that a good many other people do.”
    “Well, but Alice, listen. Try to control yourself.”
    “Ha! Control myself. Con
trol
myself …”
    The school she chose was not exactly a good one, but it was the only one that offered to take him at half tuition, and the victory of his acceptance filled her with pride.
    His first year there – the year of Pearl Harbor – was almost unalloyed in its misery. Missing his mother and ashamed of missing her, wholly out of place with his ineptness at sports, his cheap, mismatched clothes and his total lack of spending money, he felt he could survive only by becoming a minor campus clown. The second year was better – he gained a certain prestige as a