A Special Providence Read Free Page B

would ever have guessed it. He kept hoping to come home and find her acting the way he thought she ought to act: a humble widow, gratefully cooking meat and potatoes for her tired son, sittingdown with a sewing basket as soon as she’d washed the dishes, darning his socks in the lamplight and perhaps looking up to inquire, shyly, if he wouldn’t like to call up some nice girl.
    And he was always disappointed. Night after night was given over to her talk about the contacts she was certain to establish soon in the fashion world, and about the fortunes still to be made out of one-man shows if only she could get her sculpture out of storage, while the canned food burned on the stove.
    Once he found her posing for his admiration in a stylish new dress, for which she’d spent more than half the week’s grocery money, and when he failed to be enthusiastic about it she explained, as if she were talking to a retarded child, that no one could possibly expect to get ahead in the fashion world wearing last year’s clothes.
    “Oh, yes, Bobby’s fine,” he heard her telling someone on the telephone, another time. “He’s taken a summer job. Oh, just a little laboring job, in some dreadful warehouse –
you
know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime – but he seems to enjoy it, and I think the experience will do him a world of good …”
    He had assumed, with mixed emotions, that he wouldn’t be going back to school for his senior year; but when September came around she told him not to be ridiculous. He
had
to graduate; it would break her heart if he didn’t.
    “Well, but look: what’re you going to do?”
    “Dear, I’ve explained all that. Something’s bound to happen soon with this fashion work; you know how hard I’m trying. And then just as
soon
as I can get my sculpture out of storage there’s no telling what good things are going to come our way. Don’t you see?”
    “Well, sure, but I’m not talking about ‘soon.’ I’m talking about now. How are you going to pay the rent? How the hell are you going to eat?”
    “Oh, I’ll always manage; that’s not important. I’ll
borrow
some money if I have to. That’s nothing to—”
    “Who from? And anyway, you can’t go on borrowing forever, can you?”
    She looked at him incredulously, slowly shaking her head with a world-weary smile, and then she said it: “You sound just like your father.”
    The argument went on for hours, in ever-rising spirals of unreasoning shrillness, until at last, after hearing one more time and at great length about the invaluable contacts that were certain to be hers, he turned on her and said, “Oh, bullshit!”
    And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor, splitting an armpit seam of the dress that was supposed to be her means of advancement in the fashion world. She lay face down, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.
    It was a thing he had often seen her do before. The first time, long ago, had been when one of their landlords in Westchester had threatened to evict them, after she had called George Prentice to plead for whatever sum it was they needed to settle the debt. “All right!” she had cried into the telephone. “All right! But I’m warning you, I’ll kill myself tonight!” And rising from the slammed-down phone she had grabbed her breast and fallen to the carpet, and her little boy had tried to put both fists in his mouth to stifle his panic until she roused herself at last and took him sobbing into her arms. It had happened often enough since then, in various crises, that he knew she wasn’t really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there. Before long she turned over and pulled herself up into a tragic sitting position in the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands.
    “Oh, God,” she said with a convulsive shudder. “Oh,