12

Peter Barnes entered his parents' bedroom and sat on the bed, watching his mother brush her hair. She was in her distant, abstracted mood: for months now, she had alternated between this glacial coldness-cooking TV dinners and taking long walks by herself-and an intrusive maternalism. In that mood she gave him new sweaters, cooed over him at dinner and pestered him about his homework. In her maternal periods he often sensed that she was almost on the verge of crying: the weight of unshed tears hung in her voice and charged her gestures.

"What's for dinner tonight, mom?"

She tilted her head and looked at his reflection in the mirror for approximately a second. "Hot dogs and sauerkraut."

"Oh." Hot dogs were fine with Peter, but his father detested them.

"Is that what you wanted to ask, Peter?" She did not look at him this time, but kept her eyes on the reflection of her hand pulling the brush through her hair.

Peter had always been conscious that his mother was an exceptionally attractive woman-maybe not a fabulous beauty like Stella Hawthorne, but more than merely pretty all the same. She had a high, youthful blond attractiveness; she had always had an unencumbered look, like a sailboat one sees far out in a bay, nipping into the breeze. Men desired her, he knew, though he did not wish to think about that; on the night of the party for the actress, he had seen Lewis Benedikt caress his mother's knees. Until then he had blindly (he now thought) imagined that adulthood and marriage meant release from the passionate confusions of youth. But his mother and Lewis Benedikt could have been Jim Hardie and Penny Draeger; they looked a more natural couple than she and his father. And not long after the party he had felt his parents' marriage begin to unravel.

"No, not really," he said. "I like to watch you brushing your hair."

Christina Barnes froze, her hand lifted to the crown of her head; then brought it down in a smooth heavy stroke. She found his eyes again, then looked quickly, almost guiltily away.

"Who's going to come to your party tomorrow night?" he asked.

"Oh, just the usual people. Your father's friends. Ed and Sonny Venuti. A few other people. Ricky Hawthorne and his wife. Sears James."

"Will Mr. Benedikt be here?"

This time she deliberately met his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe. Why? Don't you like Lewis?"

"Sometimes I guess I do. I don't see him all that much."

"Nobody sees him all that much, darling," she said, lifting his mood a little. "Lewis is a recluse, unless you're a twenty-five-year-old girl."

"Wasn't he married once?"

She looked at him again, this time more sharply. "What's the point of all this, Peter? I'm trying to brush my hair."

"I know. I'm sorry." Peter nervously smoothed the counterpane with his hand.

"Well?"

"I guess I was just wondering if you were happy."

She laid down the brush on her dressing table, making its ivory back click against the wood. "Happy? Of course I am, sweetie. Now go downstairs and tell your father to get ready for dinner."

Peter left the bedroom and went downstairs to the small side room where his father was undoubtedly watching television. That was another sign that things were going wrong: Peter could not remember his father ever choosing to watch television at night before, but for months he had taken his briefcase into the television room, saying that he wanted to work on a few papers; minutes later the theme music of "Starsky and Hutch" or "Charlie's Angels" would come faintly through the closed door.

He peeked into the room, saw the Eames chair pulled up in front of the flickering screen-"The Brady Bunch"-the salted nuts on the bowl on the table, a pack of cigarettes and lighter beside them, but his father was not there. His briefcase, unopened, lay on the floor beside the Eames chair.

Out of the television room, then, with its images of lonely comfort, and down the hall to the kitchen. When Peter walked in, Walter Barnes, dressed in a brown suit and worn brown wingtip shoes, was just dropping two olives into a martini. "Peter, old scout," he said.

"Hi, dad. Mom says dinner's going to be ready soon."

"I wonder what that means. An hour-an hour and a half? What did she make anyhow, do you know?"

"It's going to be hot dogs."

"Whoof. Ugh. Christ. I guess I'll need a few of these, hey, Pete?" He raised his glass, smiled at Peter, and sipped.

"Oh, dad…"

"Yes?"

Peter stepped sideways, shoved his hands in his pockets, suddenly inarticulate. "Are you looking forward to your parry?"

"Sure," his father said. "It'll be a good time, Pete, you'll see. Everything's going to work out fine."

Walter Barnes began to walk out of the kitchen toward the television room, but some instinct made him look back at his son, who was spinning from side to side, hands still in his pockets, his face snagged with emotion. "Hey there, scout. Having trouble at school?"

"No," Peter said, shifting miserably: side to side, side to side.

"Come on with me."

They went down the hall, Peter hanging back. At the door to the television room, his father said, "Your friend Jim Hardie still hasn't come back, I hear."

"No." Peter started to sweat.

His father placed the martini on a mat and put himself heavily into the Eames chair. They both glanced at the screen. Most of the Brady children and their father were crawling around the furniture of their living room-a living room much like the Barnes's own-looking for a lost pet, a turtle or a kitten (or perhaps, since those Brady kids were cute little rascals, a rodent).

"His mother's worried sick," his father said, and popped a handful of macadamia nuts into his mouth. When those had gone down his throat, he said, "Eleanor's a nice woman. But she never understood that boy. You have any idea where he might have gone?"

"No," Peter said, looking to the rodent hunt as if for clues to the conduct of family life.

"Just took off in his car."

Peter nodded. He had walked over toward Montgomery Street on his way to school the day after his escape from the house and from halfway down the block had seen that the car was gone.

"Rollie Draeger's a bit relieved, is my guess," said his father. "Probably just good luck his daughter's not pregnant."

"Um hum."

"You wouldn't have any idea where Jim went?" His father glanced at him.

"No," Peter said, and risked a look in return.

"He didn't confide in you during one of your beer-drinking sessions?"

"No," Peter said unhappily.

"You must miss him," his father said. "Maybe you're even worried about him. Are you?"

"Yeah," Peter said, by now as close to tears as he sometimes thought his mother was.

"Well, don't be. A kid like that will always cause more trouble than he'll ever be in himself. And I'll tell you something-I know where he is."

Peter looked up at his father.

"He's in New York. Sure he is. He's on the run for some reason or other. And I wonder if he might not have had something to do with what happened to old Rea Dedham after all. Looks funny that he ran out, don't you think?"

"He didn't," Peter said. "He just didn't. He couldn't."

"Still, you're better off with a couple of old farts like us than with him, don't you think?" When Peter did not give him the agreement he expected, Walter Barnes reached out toward his son and touched his arm. "One thing you have to learn in this world, Pete. The troublemakers might look glamorous as hell, but you're better off steering clear of them. You stay with people like our friends, like the ones you'll be talking to at our party, and you'll be on your way. This is a hard enough world to get through without asking for trouble." He released Peter's arm. "Say, why don't you pull up a chair and watch TV a little while with me? Let's spend a little time together."

Peter sat down and pretended to watch the television. From time to time he heard the grinding of the snowplow, gradually working past their house and then continuing on in the direction of the square.