“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I bet I would.”
It was suddenly breathless there in the hall. And then on an impulse as she opened her arms and their heads bent together, muffled cries began to issue from the closet together with a tattoo on the door. Simultaneously Martha Robbie spoke from the stairs.
“You better kiss her, Terrence,” she said tartly. “I never saw anything so disgusting in all my life. I know what I’m going to do right now.”
The party swarmed back downstairs, Carpenter was liberated. And to the strains of Honey Boy from the piano the assault on Terrence was renewed. He had laid hands on a cripple or at least on a cripple’s chair and he was back at dodging around the room again, followed by the juggernaut, wheeled now by willing hands.
There was activity at the front door. Martha Robbie, on the tele, phone, had located her mother on a neighboring porch in conference with several other mothers. The burden of Martha’s message was that all the little boys were trying to embrace all the little girls by brute force, that there was no effective supervision and that the only boy who had acted like a gentleman had been brutally imprisoned in a closet. She added the realistic detail that Mrs. Schoonover was even then playing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on the piano, and she accounted for her remaining at such an orgy by implying that she herself was under duress.
Eight excited heels struck the porch, eight anxious eyes confronted Mrs. Schoonover, who had previously only encountered these ladies in church. Behind her the disturbance around Terrence reached its climax. Two boys were trying to hold him and he had grabbed Carpenter’s cane; attached by this to the wheelchair the struggle swayed back and forth wildly, then the chair rocked, rose startlingly on its side and tipped over, spilling Carpenter on the floor.
The mothers, Carpenter’s among them, stood transfixed. The girls cried out, the boys around the chair shrank back hurriedly. Then an amazing thing happened. Carpenter gave an extraordinary twist to his body, grasped at the chair and with his over-developed arms pulled himself up steadily until he was standing, his weight resting for the first time in five years upon his feet.
He did not realize this—at the moment he had no thought for himself. Even as he stood there with the whole room breathless, he roared, “I’ll fix you, confound it,” and hobbled a step and then another step in Terrence’s direction. As Mrs. Moore gave a little yelp and collapsed the room was suddenly full of wild exclamations:
“Carpenter Moore can walk! Carpenter Moore can walk!”
IV
Alleys and kitchens, kitchens and alleys—such had been Terrence’s via doloroso all day. It was by the back door that he left the Schoonovers’, knowing that he would be somehow blamed for Carpenter’s miraculous recovery; it was through the kitchen that he entered his own home ten minutes later, after a few hasty Our Father’s in the alley.
Helen, the cook, attired in her going-out dress, was in the kitchen.
“Carpenter Moore can walk,” he announced, stalling for time. And he added crypticly, “I don’t know what they’re going to do about it. Supper ready?”
“No supper tonight except for you, and it’s on the table. Your mother got called away to your aunt’s, Mrs. Lapham. She left a letter for you.”
This was a piece of luck surely and his heart began to beat again. It was odd that his aunt was sick on the day they had invented an illness for Joe’s aunt.
Dearest Boy—
I hate to leave you like this but Charlotte is ill and I’m catching the trolley to Lockport. She says it’s not very bad but when she sends a telegram it may mean anything. I worried when you didn’t come to lunch, but Aunt Georgie, who is going with me, says you stopped by and ate a raw egg so I know you’re all right.
He read no further as the knowledge of the awful truth came to him. The telegram had been delivered, but to the wrong door.
“And you’re to hurry and eat your supper so I can see you get to Moores’,” said Helen. “I’ve got to lock up after you.”
“Me go to the Moores?” he said incredulously.
The phone rang and his immediate instinct was to retreat out the door into the alley.
“It’s Dolly Bartlett,” Helen said.
“What does she want?”
“How should I know.”
Suspiciously he went to the phone.
“Terrence, can you come over to our house for supper?”
“What?”
“Mother wants you to come to supper.”
In return for a promise to Helen that he would never again call her a Kitchen Mechanic, the slight change of schedule was arranged. It was time things went better. In one day he had committed insolence and forgery and assaulted both the crippled and the blind. His punishment obviously was to be in this life. But for the moment it did not seem important—anything might happen in one blessed hour.
