The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco Read Free Book Online Page B

soon or loud enough—break into her reverie. Then she would give a little shake and lift her shoulders visibly and turn to him: “Of course.”
    At other times the dream or memory or fear or whatever it was that had caused her to pause would seem impenetrable, and she did not hear. Then what were seconds and had felt to him like minutes would be minutes that felt hour-long, and she would neither turn nor smile nor sigh but wait it out, unmoving. “I get preoccupied,” she told him. “I get—what would you call it?—lost.”
    In school they studied outer space and the likelihood of flying saucers, and Mr. D’Amelio, their fifth-grade teacher, said it wasn’t likely but couldn’t be ruled out. He said the Pentagon and NASA investigate these things. Mr. D’Amelio wore a suit and matching vest and bow tie and had an artificial leg; he walked with a queer rolling gait and had been shot in Korea. So when his mother stood that way David wondered if a flying saucer or a group of extraterrestrials was visiting, their space stations visible to her but not to him, and he asked if she saw Martians out the window, on the lawn.
    “Of course not,” Alice told him. “It isn’t like that, darling.”
    “It’s what Mr. D’Amelio tells us,” he said. “It’s what everybody talks about—a bright light out the window and feeling peaceful, not scared.”
    “You’ve been watching too much TV. There’s no space capsule in Saratoga. Or not on our lawn, anyway. I’m just being quiet, David.”
    Then, later, when he attended Williams and took a course in abnormal psychology and learned about manic-depression he thought perhaps that
this
was what his mother suffered from. And when he read of epilepsy and narcolepsy and seizure disorders—petit and grand mal—he thought perhaps she had a case of narcolepsy or something neurological, some condition a doctor could fix. He wrote a paper about it—not being personal, of course, not naming names but remembering the way his mother would go blank, then shrug herself free like a dog from a dream—and got an A from the teacher and the handwritten comment: “Fine insights. Extremely GOOD work!”
    This afternoon in the funeral home he’d looked at her glazed stare again—the mortician had discovered it somehow, pasting it back on Alice’s face—and it reminded him of absence, how absent her presence had been. Staring unseeing at the sink or floor she went, as she put it, away.
    When his sisters came home for Thanksgiving, however, things changed; the house would grow noisy and busy, and the phone would ring. Then Alice made squash and creamed onions and corn and chestnut purée and baked three kinds of pie: apple, pumpkin, mince. There would be cider and wine. She would make yams and mashed potatoes, since Joanna preferred mashed potatoes, and there would be peas and cranberry relish and complicated stuffing and a turkey she had ordered from Pederson’s farm at the intersection of Route 372 and 29. The day before Thanksgiving, always, they drove together to the turkey farm, and David can remember standing in the barn mud while his mother chatted gaily with the farmer’s wife, not bothering to brush away flies but admiring the fresh-killed bird. Then Mrs. Pederson would weigh the turkey, bag it, and his mother—usually so fastidious, so prim in her pantsuit and heels—would pay and say, “Thanks a million. See you soon,” and get into the driver’s seat and not buckle up. “She’s a beaut,” Mrs. Pederson said.
    It was his job to carve. David would whet the knife edge carefully, then remove the legs and second joints, and then slice white meat and dark. This was his business, said Alice, because it’s a job for the man of the house; always put white meat on
this
platter, darling, and the dark meat and wings and the giblets on this. His sisters were part of the cooking team too, and everyone helped in the kitchen, but he had been responsible for knives and proud of how he