Not that she and I hadn’t had unpleasant weeks or even months in our marriage. Not that there weren’t times she’d bitch unmercifully. I’d dig my fists in my pockets and get busy. There were whole seasons when she was harried, when everything irritated her. You’d want to stay out of her way. Ours was not an easy life and carrying her nursing jobs, as well as the household and the chores, was a strain. Still, I refused to believe that she wasn’t made of strong stuff, that she would buckle under what was our chosen path. The two or so times we actually fought she smashed a plate and stormed out into the night. I have always disliked an argument. When I tried to be the voice of reason, when I pointed out that it might be wiser to continue what I mildly referred to as, “the discussion,” she flew off the handle again. Later, in jest, she accused me of being more even and mature than any reasonable person could tolerate.
I met her in Ann Arbor, when I was growing vegetables down by the old railroad tracks. I used to take my goods to the market once a week and set up two sawhorses and a board. I’d put out my broccoli, pea pods, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers. Anyone would have admired the enormous purple cabbages that I’d picked at dawn, with dew on the outer leaves. I had always wanted to be a farmer, although my father was determined I be a businessman. I studied History at first, and after he died I took up Dairy Science. I was an undergraduate for an embarrassing number of years. Alice walked by my table one morning when I was in my last semester. I remember how she stood staring at the eggplants. They were beautiful, as shiny as patent leather. Her blond hair was in a braid, coiled and pinned to the back of her head. She was carrying a basket filled with leeks over her arm. She was the most statuesque person I’d ever seen. She was wearing a strange thing, a quilt, a bed cover that had been cut up and made into a wrap. I wasn’t in the habit of making remarks to women I didn’t know. All the same I heard myself saying, “You must be hungry after the long trip on the
Mayflower.”
She continued to study the eggplants, and when she’d had enough she looked directly at me. “I am,” she said, without blinking.
I was distracted then by the Oriental men surrounding my produce. I didn’t have time to watch her back away. “How much? How much?” They were all asking at once, holding up their vegetable of choice. I was tossing bags at them, telling them to help themselves, racing between the
scale and the change drawer. I bumped into her because she was somehow right next to me, in her bedclothes, trying to read the price sign upside down on the other side, on the customer side of the table. She was on my side now. She was frowning, counting on her fingers, trying to work out the sum of two-and-a-half pounds of broccoli at forty cents a pound. She had gone over the holy invisible line between vendor and buyer. She’d walked straight over to my side and without instruction began to determine weight and count out change.
I had been with enough other women through the years who were appealing at first because they were so eager to please. I used to fall for the long-brown-haired girls with big white teeth who tried so hard to be interested in the world and life. I finally figured out that they were only after the drama of romance. There was a particular way they’d sit at my feet and turn their bright faces to look up at me. They’d switch their political allegiance if I said so, want the same breed of dog, become vegetarian. I guess I understood that adoration is short-lived, and that really what they were giving me was the temporary power to crush them. I’d have to tell them that I was unwilling to commit myself as yet, that it was nothing personal. I didn’t like how they’d cling to me, begging for the right to remain.
That day I first met Alice I asked her if she could come back the next week, to help. She said she didn’t know. When I mentioned that it was busy as early as 6
A.M
., that I had to unload and sell simultaneously, she said, “I’m not up that early.”
I thought of thanking her for her help and leaving it at that. She had a basket filled with leeks. I didn’t think that single people bought leeks. A person bought leeks to make soup for a household. I knew that if I let her go I might not see her again. I got her to sit on the back of my pickup truck. “You’ll get your farm,” she declared, after I’d quickly outlined my idea for the rest of my life. It wasn’t that she was clairvoyant. She said that of course she didn’t really know what was going to happen, but that if a person was quiet and observant the way she’d been for twenty-odd years, you got a feel for the patterns and the personalities. She said that all she’d done through her long school career was sit at her desk with her arms folded across her chest and watch the teachers, the students, and the administrators. She dreamed about their lives, and imagined them in
various predicaments, to save herself from dying of boredom. She advocated public schools and the rigors of monotony, in fact, because she said it forced a person to cultivate an inner life.
Some Saturdays, over the course of that autumn, she came to help, and others she didn’t. I lost sleep when she didn’t come. I thought about her all the time when I was awake. Once I knew her address I worried that she would move without telling me. I worried that she’d change her phone number or that she’d walk by my table hand in hand with someone else.
The first time she took a shower in my apartment she came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head in a turban. She was wearing my tartan bathrobe, a flannel thing my mother had given me and I had never worn. She stooped to put on her shoes. There was one blond strand of hair down her back, that hadn’t been caught up in the towel. She’d come with her clean knapsack and taken from it things which intrigued me. They turned out to be everyday products in exotic packaging. She’d brought a toothbrush made from boar’s bristles and toothpaste in a black tube, a birth-control device and accompanying gel, and a wooden soap box which she said was impractical. I was still young enough to hope that having, living with, the right hard-headed woman, was the key to happiness. She was self-contained, I thought, didn’t need anyone to show her the way. As she stooped in her turban, it seemed to me that if every man had a woman who looked like Alice in my bathrobe the world would be an untroubled place.
At Christmas, when I took her to visit my mother, Emma was conceived. My father had always threatened to disinherit me if I got a girl pregnant outside of wedlock. Even in high school I had been scrupulous. They say that some women know when conception has occurred, that their sixth sense tells them. My mother had shown us to our separate bedrooms. When I thought she was asleep I crept down the hall like a teenager to Alice’s bed. At the moment of penetration Nellie crashed into the bathroom. She began brushing her teeth and then tapping her toothbrush on the porcelain sink. I clapped my hand over Alice’s mouth. I wasn’t sure my mother was ever going to get the water out of the bristles. It was a persistent, demanding sound, like the racket people make on champagne glasses with their forks at a wedding. I remember thinking
that that is probably the noise sperm and egg make as they collide and burst into one.
Everything fell into place. Three weeks later Alice discovered that she was pregnant. A month later she turned twenty-five and came into the substantial sum her Aunt Kate had provided for her. My father was dead and could not disown us. We got married by the justice of the peace in Ann Arbor. With some help from my mother, along with Alice’s contribution and my meager savings, we bought the farm at Prairie Junction. Alice felt sure that my father, dead two short years, would overlook our one glaring indiscretion. She said that he would see that it had led us to the straight and narrow.
At first Alice wrote us several times a week. She wondered about common things, things which surprised me. She wondered if the church ladies were bringing casseroles and cakes and nut breads. I assumed she was joking. We were not churchgoers and yet I knew if ours had been different circumstances the ladies would have come to our aid. They would have brought the kind of food my mother can turn out with factory precision for the needy.
I guess it was both on the telephone with Nellie and in my letters to Alice, that I began to learn the fine art of dissembling. I labored over the words as I wrote. Without telling her the truthful details that were frightening, I wanted to provoke Alice to fight for herself. Each day I woke freshly shocked at what had seemed, in the few minutes I had seen her, like the strangest acceptance on her part of a flagrant obstruction of justice. She was remote from her own tragedy. It hadn’t seemed to affect her much more than an oil spill off the coast of Guam would have. If only she’d beat her wings inside her iron cage, I thought, she might have a chance of getting away. Sometimes I wanted to have her in my hands, to shake her. I wanted her to understand that everyone had turned us out. It had been impossible to talk with the vet about the white muscle disease running through the sheep flock. He had put me on hold and never come back. Because I meant to be kind and because I wanted to arouse her indignation, I never said much of anything in my letters.
When my mother finally got through again on that first Sunday, I did
not answer a single question honestly. “Howie,” she said, “I’ve had such trouble getting a hold of you. How are you? Are the girls all right?”
“We’re okay, Mom.”
“Did they clear up the problem?”
It was a fine question. My mother seemed to know not to ask about specifics. The “they” could stand for our collection of friends and enemies. “The problem” was so beautifully general either a yes or a no would suffice. Rafferty himself had said he’d found a simple way into the case. “It’s coming along,” I said. “I’m going to need some money for the lawyer’s fee. What I really need right now is bail money—to get Alice out. To pay her bond.”
“I don’t see why you should have to pay when it was a mistake. I’m very short on reserves right now, Howard.” She called me Howard whenever we talked about finances. “What do you need?”
I tried to come right out with it.
One hundred thousand
. “Ninety,” I said. “Ninety thousand.”
“How many thousands? Good land, did you say nineteen?” She sighed. I could hear that sigh across two continents and an ocean. She sighed again. It is remarkable that a sigh is substantive enough to get picked up by a receiver, beamed up as an electronic impulse to a satellite, and transmitted back down to earth. “Howard,” she said, “you know I’d do anything for you. I was perfectly happy to lend you money toward your farm. Not that that way of life doesn’t worry me. It’s not stable, doesn’t bring in enough to provide the things you ought to have. Your father and I worked hard all our lives and we saved a fair amount. I lent you a good portion of our nest egg. Maybe you don’t understand, honey, that—”
“I’ve got the girls in the tub, Mom. I need to check them, so I’ll sign off. We’re over the hump on this, so you don’t need to worry.”
It was eleven o’clock at night. The girls were asleep. If I stayed on the line my mother would continue on with the speech I knew from memory. She’d catalog the things she’d done for us. Alice had once made the harsh comment that Nellie was a testament to the fact that insipid people could do a great deal of good in this world. I had resented her saying what was so obvious on the surface. My mother had in the past acted like a pampered
housewife. In reality, however, she had always done thankless community service jobs as a nurse. She had been a volunteer for the Red Cross for several years, flying off to places where there was not basic sanitation much less four-star hotels. I know it is true that my mother, as mothers do, wanted what was best for us. Alice would debate that, saying that the evidence spoke for itself. Nellie, she maintained, was a passive-aggressive busybody who had never liked her daughter-in-law. Nellie, she said, tried, wittingly or unwittingly, to botch up our lives just to prove that I had made the wrong choice. Despite the old saw, it’s been my experience that good intentions can actually get a person a fair distance. I would never bet my life on anything, but if I did, if I had to, it would be on my mother. I would bet my life that she had always had the best of intentions and that we had benefited from them.
I didn’t mention to Alice that I’d talked with Nellie. I didn’t tell her that two days after she was taken we went to the grocery store in Blackwell. The waters parted for us as we came down the aisle. The few women in the dairy section peeled away, staring. At the end of the junk-food aisle an older gentleman with stubble and a sweat-stained green T-shirt tight across his chest and belly stood in wait. He spat on the linoleum at my feet. He breathed heavily and scowled in my face. We left our groceries in the cart by the magazine stand and walked quickly out of the store. Emma and Claire did not contain their distress. We drove twenty miles after that, to buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk.
I also didn’t tell Alice that the night before the preliminary hearing Rafferty stopped out for about forty-five minutes. We talked in the kitchen after the girls were in bed. He explained that he made it his business to leave no stone unturned in his cases. He’d had dinner at the restaurant Carol Mackessy managed, he’d said. Shrimp in pesto sauce. Not half-bad. We would talk in greater detail after the preliminary hearing, but he said that even now at this early date he liked to feel that he had stepped into the players’ skins. His eyes were too big for his sockets, which gave him an intensity he may or may not have had. Not into my skin, I said to myself. He sat at our kitchen table, drawing straight lines across his legal pad. There were occasions when I wondered if he was a charlatan. I wondered if he’d actually gone to law school, if he popped up to prey on
helpless people. I’d have to remind myself that he came highly recommended, that he was a good friend of Dan and Theresa’s.
He seemed surprised when I told him I didn’t know much about Alice’s family history. What I’d been told about her upbringing I can say in two simple sentences. She is an only child who was raised by her mother’s best friend. Her father died of kidney failure when she was twenty-two.