Child

The remnants of a creative writing exercise that goes by "Ordeal by Cheque".

 

Lawrence Exeter felt like he had just waltzed into a cave of candyfloss. Pixie women in flowing robes to hide their bulging waists flittered around buggies and rattles in fluorescent assortments while their men huddled in their own private, little circles. Despite the warm colors, the atmosphere in Posie’s seemed to be touching zero so Lawrence steered away from the blue hues and the gang of men, and instead floated to the less crowded ‘white’ section; it’s purpose presumably solely only for those who were unsure what the sex would be. Sighing, he let his fingers rub against the ribbons of gift boxes, then again to the smooth wood of a hand-painted crib.

What he wouldn’t give for a bit of rest from all this havoc.

“Lawrence!” squealed the woman’s voice. “Oh, Lawrence! Just look at it!”

Slowly, he wheeled around, expecting a rocking horse to be shoved his way or perhaps a new set of powdered pink baptismal gowns. Instead, his plump wife dropped a weird little sewn figure into his hands. It wasn’t so much a doll. Its tawny, rough skin was taut over its belly and stitched into segments that were stretched with the cotton poking through. Its inky button eyes seemed to blink in the intense autumn light flooding in through the storefront window; they were glaring at him. He didn’t like it. It was one of those ugly little ‘Teddy bears’. Propaganda by the administration.

“Oh, isn’t it darling?” Marie cooed. “I think our little Lavender will love it, don’t you?”

Lawrence grunted.

“Come now,” she ordered, her expression now turned on its head. “It’s stuffy in here and I much rather go home. All these things will at least be fifty dollars and with your salary, dear…” She clucked her tongue. “We shall fall upon hard times indeed.”

She turned up her nose and stormed away, leaving behind the pram of infancy clothes and tiny superfluous trinkets. The Teddy bear was still in his hands and he flung it inside the baby carriage. He couldn’t wait for all this to be over. He traipsed over to the clerk, choosing to ignore his sardonic smile. As the man was ringing up his things, he glanced over to the entrance to check on his bulbous wife.

She was clutching on to the door frame with a pained expression pulled across her face and a huddle of women around her.

Now, that shouldn’t be happening…

Revelation struck him in the face as if it were something new. He abandoned the frivolous goods, pushing aside other men’s wives to rush to his own.

She looked up into his face, cringing.

“It’s about time, Lawrence,” she said curtly before nodding off onto the middle-aged woman struggling to keep her skirts from touching the dusty ground.

 

Lawrence Exeter rubbed his crinkled eyes exhaustedly, and wiped his fingers off onto his tattered black suit where it blended with the stains just like it. He was getting the feeling that he had seen too many funerals. But God-willing this one had been the last.

Larry. Little Larry Junior who had almost become Lavender and by good wit didn’t. Marie had been disappointed at first, but when they had almost lost little Larry Junior a month after he had been born, she had been dedicated. She had been absolutely ready to do anything for the child. Though she had been so ready for a girl, she went full-heartedly into receiving him as a boy, even replacing all of the pink trinkets for blue ones at the California Toyland. Lawrence sighed, because that had been a doozy on his waning bank account.

Marie constantly doted on the boy, making him a complete disaster. Mother and child were both horrified of the thought of Larry going away to Lawrence’s boyhood alum, Palisades School for Boys. Lawrence had felt edgy about bringing the subject up at all, but he knew that Larry had to become more of an adult. The sick child that his wife fretted over had to learn to take after himself. He was six after all.

And this is what Lawrence Exeter had told himself when he signed that check over for $1,250.00—that boy just needs to learn to take care of himself. But Larry didn’t like Palisades, so Lawrence, or Marie rather, bought him a bike to calm his nerves. He went along after that—what schoolboy wouldn’t?

Lawrence Exeter rumbled a sigh and looked down at the sun burnt patch of grass between his knobby knees. His hands trembling only with age as he picked at his tarnished cufflinks. He was beginning to feel the first haziness of a doze…

Then it was military school, he thought lazily. Then it was that damn car. He roughed up that Cadillac good and it had only been four days, do you remember? That boy never grew into a man.

He snorted in his dawn of sleep and he shuddered awake.

Then it had been college and Miss Daisy. Stanford University knew no better floozy. Marie had been in awe and Lawrence had damned them both in his mind. The woman was precarious with her full lips and bony hips—oh, but in Larry’s hands? She was a dangerous spectacle indeed. She would only mean one thing to that boy. The situation would be a disaster for both of them, but Lawrence found a perverse pleasure in blessing their affirmed relationship. Let the boy find out the hard way. And he did, but Lawrence Exeter found it out harder. Larry had had no money for himself—yet—so Marie made Lawrence pay all the bills that Daisy demanded.

Flowers.

A trip to France (though Lawrence had been elated that he would be rid of them for three months while Marie pined daily).

Flowers.

A house complete with décor.

Strings of diamonds.

Still more flowers.

Two weeks in Hawaii.

Lawrence leaned his aching bones farther into the tree, feeling the old pains resurface. The two ‘lovebirds’ coming together had been a debacle that Lawrence felt he could never recover from, but he had cracked under their torrential pressure at long last once Little Larry Junior found himself a stable job. Or what had seemed at the time like a reliable job—what ever it was that he had been doing, it was paying for Larry and Daisy’s $3,532 pre-wedding that Lawrence Senior wanted no part of.

That was around the time of Tony Spagoni, or who Larry called affectionately, just Spago. Spago was one of Larry’s charity cases that he had picked up on the Hollywood boulevard. He was a rumrunner and Lawrence wondered how he hadn’t figured out the connection earlier.

Or perhaps in time? He rubbed his tired eyes again, feeling the dull throb in his chest worsen with the July sun poking holes through the trees, making a checker board of the churchyard. There was still some wailing coming from where the diggers were filling the hole up again. Lawrence tried to keep that out of mind though.

But Daisy had been content. She had still been getting her flowers, her diamonds; Larry even ‘scrounged’ enough for a $50,000 estate from, presumably, another one of his floozies, a rich young woman undeniably named Flossie. Daisy never realized this though; she was often slow on the uptake.

Two days after Larry and Daisy moved into the half-grand estate, Spago was caught and Larry was rounded up with him. There was no tearful goodbye from Lawrence Exeter, but Marie was more distraught than ever. From within jail, Larry still found a way to write his checks and gave his wife $5,000. Lawrence still cringed at that because the damn floozy flew off with another ascending jailbird soon after.

Marie visited him everyday, denying his involvement, cursing the establishment, slapping the guards until she herself was thrown out. Larry gave her his remaining $75,000 for her trouble; a little dramatic for the time he would be spending in jail, but Lawrence figured that he only wanted to make sure his money was safe, the hapless child.

From within his jail cell, the debt piled up and Lawrence was forced to forge the signatures. Tony Spago’s friend Peter Ventizzi came to call the next summer and Lawrence paid the liquor bill once again.

All for nothing, he thought, feeling the wet spill over his cheeks. He sniffled weakly and watched his wife in her shroud hunkered down and heaving by the mound of dirt ten mounds over from where he, Lawrence Exeter, just Lawrence Exeter sat against an oak tree.

He turned over the Teddy bear that he had been wringing murderously in his one rheumatic paw and started picking out the stuffing cloud by cloud, imagining how they must have found his son strung up in his cell, all of his apologies spilling out in puddles onto the cement floor.

Yet with all the pain in his heart, Lawrence could not forgive that child.