What ’salem’s Lot knew of wars and burnings and crises in government it got mostly from Walter Cronkite on TV. Oh, the Potter boy got killed in Vietnam and Claude Bowie’s son came back with a mechanical foot—stepped on a land mine—but he got a job with the post office helping Kenny Danles and so thatwas all right. The kids were wearing their hair longer and not combing it neatly like their fathers, but nobody really noticed anymore. When they threw the dress code out at the Consolidated High School, Aggie Corliss wrote a letter to the Cumberland Ledger, but Aggie had been writing to the Ledgerevery week for years, mostly about the evils of liquor and the wonder of accepting Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior.
Some of the kids took dope. Horace Kilby’s boy Frank went up before Judge Hooker in August and got fined fifty dollars (the judge agreed to let him pay the fine with profits from his paper route), but alcohol was a bigger problem. Lots of kids hung out at Dell’s since the liquor age went down to eighteen. They went rip-assing home as if they wanted to resurface the road with rubber, and every now and then someone would get killed. Like when Billy Smith ran into a tree on the Deep Cut Road at ninety and killed both himself and his girlfriend, LaVerne Dube.
But except for these things, the Lot’s knowledge of the country’s torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.
FIVE
Ann Norton was ironing when her daughter burst in with a bag of groceries, thrust a book with a rather thin-faced young man on the back jacket in her face, and began to babble.
“Slow down,” she said. “Turn down the TV and tell me.”
Susan choked off Peter Marshall, who was giving away thousands of dollars on “The Hollywood Squares,” and told her mother about meeting Ben Mears. Mrs Norton made herself nod with calm and sympathetic understanding as the story spilled out, despite the yellow warning lights that always flashed when Susan mentioned a new boy—men now, she supposed, although it was hard to think Susie could be old enough for men. But the lights were a little brighter today.
“Sounds exciting,” she said, and put another one of her husband’s shirts on the ironing board.
“He was really nice,” Susan said. “Very natural.”
“Hoo, my feet,” Mrs Norton said. She set the iron on its fanny, making it hiss balefully, and eased into the Boston rocker by the picture window. She reached a Parliament out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it. “Are you sure he’s all right, Susie?”
Susan smiled a little defensively. “Sure, I’m sure. He looks like…oh, I don’t know—a college instructor or something.”
“They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener,” Mrs Norton said reflectively.
“Moose shit,” Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother.
“Let me see the book.” She held a hand out for it.
Susan gave it to her, suddenly remembering the homosexual rape scene in the prison section.
“ Air Dance,” Ann Norton said meditatively, and began to thumb pages at random. Susan waited, resigned. Her mother would bird-dog it. She always did.
The windows were up, and a lazy forenoon breeze ruffled the yellow curtains in the kitchen—which Mom insisted on calling the pantry, as if they lived in the lap of class. It was a nice house, solid brick, a little hard to heat in the winter but cool as a grotto in the summer. They were on a gentle rise of land on outer Brock Street, and from the picture window where Mrs Norton sat you could see all the way into town. The view was a pleasant one, and in the winter it could be spectacular with long, twinkling vistas of unbroken snow and distance-dwindled buildings casting yellow oblongs of light on the snow fields.
“Seems I read a review of this in the Portland paper. It wasn’t very good.”
“I like it,” Susan said steadily. “And I like him.”
“Perhaps Floyd would like him, too,” Mrs Norton said idly. “You ought to introduce them.”
Susan felt a real stab of anger and was dismayed by it. She thought that she and her mother had weathered the last of the adolescent storms and even the aftersqualls, but here it all was. They took up the ancient arguments of her identity versus her mother’s experience and beliefs like an old piece of knitting.
“We’ve talked about Floyd, Mom. You know there’s nothing firm there.”
“The paper said there were some pretty lurid prison scenes, too. Boys getting together with boys.”
“Oh, Mother, for Christ’s sake.” She helped herself to one of her mother’s cigarettes.
“No need to curse,” Mrs Norton said, unperturbed. She handed the book back and tapped the long ash on her cigarette into a ceramic ashtray in the shape of a fish. It had been given to her by one of her Ladies’ Auxiliary friends, and it had always irritated Susan in a formless sort of way. There was something obscene about tapping your ashes into a perch’s mouth.
“I’ll put the groceries away,” Susan said, getting up.
Mrs Norton said quietly, “I only meant that if you and Floyd Tibbits are going to be married—”
The irritation boiled over into the old, goaded anger. “What in the name of Godever gave you that idea? Have I ever told you that?”
“I assumed—”
“You assumed wrong,” she said hotly and not entirely truthfully. But she had been cooling toward Floyd by slow degrees over a period of weeks.
“I assumed that when you date the same boy for a year and a half,” her mother continued softly and implacably, “that it must mean things have gone beyond the hand-holding stage.”
“Floyd and I are more than friends,” Susan agreed evenly. Let her make something of that.
An unspoken conversation hung suspended between them.
Have you been sleeping with Floyd?
None of your business.
What does this Ben Mears mean to you?
None of your business.
Are you going to fall for him and do something foolish?
None of your business.
I love you, Susie. Your dad and I both love you.
And to that no answer. And no answer. And no answer. And that was why New York—or someplace—was imperative. In the end you always crashed against the unspoken barricades of their love, like the walls of a padded cell. The truth of their love rendered further meaningful discussion impossible and made what had gone before empty of meaning.
“Well,” Mrs Norton said softly. She stubbed her cigarette out on the perch’s lip and dropped it into his belly.
“I’m going upstairs,” Susan said.
“Sure. Can I read the book when you’re finished?”
“If you want to.”
“I’d like to meet him,” she said.
Susan spread her hands and shrugged.
“Will you be late tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“What shall I tell Floyd Tibbits if he calls?”
The anger flashed over her again. “Tell him what you want.” She paused. “You will anyway.”
“Susan!”
She went upstairs without looking back.
Mrs Norton remained where she was, staring out the window and at the town without seeing it. Overhead she could hear Susan’s footsteps and then the clatter of her easel being pulled out.
She got up and began to iron again. When she thought Susan might be fully immersed in her work (although she didn’t allow that idea to do more than flitter through a corner of her conscious mind), she went to the telephone in the pantry and called up Mabel Werts. In the course of the conversation she happened to mention that Susie had told her there was a famous author in their midst and Mabel sniffed and said well you must mean that man who wrote Conway’s Daughterand Mrs Norton said yes and Mabel said that wasn’t writing but just a sex book, pure and simple. Mrs Norton asked if he was staying at a motel or—