Affliction by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Banks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780517064061
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

14

LILLIAN WANTED TO SEE Wade’s face, but he kept as much of it as he could out of sight: he wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled down low, and as he drove he kept glancing out the window on his left and talked to her without looking at her. They were on the way to the Riverside Cemetery, their regular Sunday afternoon visit to her father’s grave, and Wade had picked her up at her aunt Alma’s, as usual, right after lunch. It was a bright sunny day with a cloudless blue sky and high dry air, and in spite of the somber occasion, Lillian had come out of her aunt’s house whistling a song from South Pacific.

She stopped whistling as soon as she got into the car, Wade’s ten-year-old Ford sedan, which he had salvaged from the parts of three different Fords. They had all been wrecks, bought from Chub Merritt last fall when Wade was fifteen for a hundred bucks apiece and worked on at home throughout the winter and spring in what remained of the old barn behind the house. He had got his license in May but did not drive the car until late June, not until he had it running smoothly and had painted it cherry red, with his initials, WW, pin-striped onto the front doors just below the window frame, a gold monogram slanted to the right and made to look like lightning bolts.

“Wade, what’s the matter with your face?” she asked, and tried to see.

He turned his face to his left and said, “Nothing’s the matter.”

She saw, however, that his cheeks were swollen and discolored; she instantly knew that behind the dark glasses his eyes were blackened. “Oh, Wade!” she cried. “You got into a fight!”

He denied it, but she persisted. He had promised he would not drink or fight. He had promised. Many times they had decided together that these were stupid activities, drinking and fighting, fine for their stupid insensitive friends to indulge in, perhaps, but not for Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, who were superior to all that, who were finer, nobler, more intelligent than their friends. Because they had each other, they did not need anyone else; they believed that. They did not need their parents, though she did wish her father were still alive—he would have understood and admired Wade; and not their friends; and not any of their teachers at school, who were dull and hopelessly out of touch with what was important and moving to teenagers; and not her aunt Alma or Gordon LaRiviere, Wade’s new boss, or anyone else in town, either. They needed only each other, exclusively and totally, and they had each other, more or less, so they were free to ignore everyone else, which meant, among other things, that Wade did not have to drive around at night with the other boys his age drinking beer and getting into brawls in Catamount or at the Moonlight Club down in Sunapee or with summer kids from Massachusetts at the Weirs in Laconia.

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