The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie Read Free Book Online

one, they’ll let you keep it.” What a stupid thing for a grown-up to do, she thought a few years later; how dumb he must have looked, that tall rumpled awkward man, running after a pigeon through the dry fallen leaves and waving his long arms around, and Polly-O stumbling after him, probably looking really dumb, too. Nobody can catch a bird. So why did he shout for everyone to hear, “That’s it, Polly-O! You almost had him that time!”
    But then he praised whatever she did, no matter how silly it was. At Rye Beach, when she bit off the end of her waffle-pattern cone and started sucking the strawberry ice cream out through the hole, the way her mother couldn’t stand, and made as awful a noise as she could on purpose, her father didn’t mind. He just said, “Hey, that looks like fun. How do you do it?” And then he proved such a slow learner, so uproariously inept and messy, that Polly had to burst out laughing. It was years before it occurred to her that he must have been playing dumb on purpose to amuse her.
    Her father took her to all kinds of weird places, often on jobs he was working at the moment. He wrote detective stories, and someday, he explained to Polly, he was going to be rich and famous, but right now he had to get by the best he could, and do whatever he could to keep body and soul together. Would they separate otherwise? Polly couldn’t help asking. “Well, sure; they might.” Polly knew he was kidding, but she couldn’t help imagining the soul part of her father drifting up into the air over Westchester and floating off sideways. It would look just like him, she imagined, with the same lumpy face and big brown eyes and untidy black hair, only sort of smoky and transparent like the ghosts in Saturday-morning movies.
    Carl Alter took Polly to a junior high school where he was a substitute teacher, and to the offices of a magazine in Mount Vernon that printed pictures of naked ladies, and to the back part of the New Rochelle library, where worn books were rebound and there was a smell of glue and dust. When he was driving a taxi in White Plains he let her ride in the front seat with him. For a while he was working for the Fuller Brush Company, and drove around back streets selling brooms and mops and hairbrushes to ladies in three-decker wooden houses with pictures of Jesus over the sofa. Her father talked to them in an eager, grateful voice, not like his real one. They called him “young man,” and gave Polly things to eat and drink she wasn’t allowed at home: sticky fig newtons, and powdery pastel Nabisco wafers, and iced tea with wet gray sugar in the bottom of the glass. Carl Alter didn’t have Mommie’s rules about nourishing food, or about not talking to strangers or telling them personal things. (“Yep, ma’am, this big girl is my daughter, would you believe it? She just won a prize for the best Memorial Day poster in her class.”)
    By the end of the afternoon Polly would be wholly lost. She would climb back into The Yellow Peril, slide across the broken straw stubble, and lean against her father as he drove back along Mamaroneck Avenue, feeling how large and solid and warm he was underneath the old cord jacket with the shiny leather patches on the elbows. When he spoke, she would turn up to him a face lit with the wide amazed smile that had always been her — and his — best feature.
    But as they sat in their favorite booth in the coffee shop on Main Street, with a cherry Coke for Polly and a beer for Carl Alter, he would begin to shift about on the bench, to turn and look around the room. If he saw people he knew he would call and wave at them to come over. And even if he didn’t, he’d stop hearing what Polly was telling him. Soon, too soon, he would scoop his change from the wet wooden tabletop and tell her to drink up; he would say that her mother would be wondering where the hell she’d got to.
    On the ride home her father would be almost silent, or whistling in a thin,