“They were brought up to try, try again, if at first they don’t succeed,” Rafferty said as we went out the doors, back into the furnace of the July day. Claire was whining into my shoulder and Emma was silent, keeping close at my side. “Most of us are raised to toe the line, conform, follow the
rules. Rules sure make the world go around, but I’ve got a bit of the anarchist in me. How beautiful it would be to buck the system. To get away with thumbing your nose at a few key people in high places. The trouble is the stakes are always too high. Too high.” He came down on my free shoulder. “Tomorrow, then. More of same. Same old crap, same conclusion. Onward. Upward. Back to work.” He tweaked Claire’s chin. “You make sure your father watches his manners, girls.” He ruffled Emma’s hair and then he darted between the cars to get across the street.
The second interview went much the same as the first. Claire hugged her rabbit and cried. Emma too did not want to play. She remained dry eyed. I was proud of her. She was polite, tight-lipped. She wanted to go back to her dad, she told Mrs. Lexin. When she was asked if anything bad happened at home, Emma spoke about the cat that had jumped up into the engine and gotten ground to bits. It had been I who had started the car. I was again given the recommendation that the girls get immediate help from a local therapist. As we left Rafferty looked at me and said, “We have one thorn out of our big, soft pads.” To Emma he said, “Isn’t that right, kiddo?”
Emma yanked on my shirt after he was gone. She wanted me to squat, to get to her level so she could whisper in my ear. “I don’t like him,” she said.
As the weeks wore on I stayed beyond the lunch hour at Theresa’s. Each day I stayed longer. Finally I put yesterday’s paper on the chaise lounge as protection against my dirty clothes and sat on it. I read
Time
magazine and
Country Home
. Theresa went about her chores. It was hard to catch the words to the songs she sang. I read, feeling her movements in the next room. “Aren’t you ever going back to work?” she said once. I jumped to attention. “No, no, no, Howard,” she said as she laughed. “Get back down. I’m teasing you.”
In the long, hot afternoons I dragged the irrigation rig to ever drier ground. The rig wasn’t working up to speed and still I worried that the well was going to run dry. The marsh that I had at first used as a water source was nothing now but a slick of mud. Normally there might be three or four feet of water. The pond was considerably lower than usual and I found several trout belly up, like old shoes, floating near the bank. I
cultivated the soybeans and the orchard cornfield, the two crops I meant to save. The mullein and burdock had grown well without a drop of rain, crafty, strong, leeching from the soil what was not rightfully theirs. When I couldn’t stand the heat I went in and sat by the fan. I’d sift through the stack of books I had in the living room that were to make me reasonable and informed. Rafferty had given me a newsletter for Victims of Child Abuse Laws. VOCAL, it was called. He thought I might want to pursue a support network. I didn’t feel I had anything in common with the grandparents accused by their grandchildren, or the fathers charged by their daughters. Nothing in the literature explained how Robbie Mackessy could have looked at his doll with so much distress.
I called Rafferty nearly every day around four o’clock. I wanted to be sure he remembered that Alice was still in her cage, that I was still waiting out in the sun. “Any word?” I always asked. He had failed to get Alice’s bond reduced in a hearing at the beginning of July. In August he spent a good deal of time working toward a motion to suppress her admission at the trial. He was confident he would win the day because her rights hadn’t been read to her when she babbled on. That motion also failed. At the end of August he asked for an extension, which pushed the trial back another six weeks from the October 12 date. Later there was yet another extension.
I hadn’t talked with Dan much, since the drowning. At the funeral we had clasped hands without saying anything. I had gone up to Vermont Acres a couple of times in the days afterward. We had stood around kicking a stone in the driveway. We tried to talk as if his work at the Dairy Shrine was still interesting and useful. He didn’t come down to help me milk anymore, the way he had for nearly six years. In fact, I hadn’t seen him since he’d returned from his vacation. Theresa said he went to the office before dawn and didn’t come home until late. I wasn’t sure he knew my children were virtually living at his house.
I started the evening chores around five, as usual. I have always loved the steady rhythm of the milking machines, the milk surging into the pipes and along into the bulk tank. For what it’s worth, I could go through the routine on that farm, still, with my eyes closed. I moved slowly in the dripping heat. I knew that eventually I would have to go into the kitchen and find myself something to eat. Like clockwork Theresa
brought the girls down at seven-thirty. She usually stayed long enough to explain that she had just thrown a few leftovers together, that it was nothing. There was always a brand-new brown lunch bag on the kitchen table. Inside there might be a roast beef or ham sandwich. There was liable also to be quite a few other things: an apple, a piece of pie, a plastic container of fruit salad, and a brownie. I was always startled, relieved, thankful, simultaneously. I tripped over myself, thanking her. She always ran away backwards, waving. I suppose a person likes being appreciated, but too much praise makes your ears ring. I probably should have felt like a schoolboy. Maybe I should have taken offense at her motherly attention. I didn’t. I was tired and hungry and her lunches were good.
After she’d gone, the girls and I halfheartedly whacked a baseball around. Sometimes they drew a picture for their mother, or had me read the day’s letter which she always wrote them. In her letters she asked them to remember the dramatic or funny or frightening times that were already a part of our family history. “Remember,” she wrote, “when we came upon the dog in the woods wrapped around the tree by its own leash? Remember how Dad helped us climb a tree before he moved in, closer and close to that dog, and how when he cut the leash, the poor thing stood there for a minute, barking and barking, before it took off? Remember how we felt like monkeys up in that tree?”
After a quick bath I read to them, a short book. They rarely asked for more, or complained. I didn’t play my clarinet and they didn’t dance. They lay on Emma’s bed, waiting for me to go away before they shut their eyes. They had been sleeping together since Alice had gone. They wanted me to leave the room so that they could forget. They were smart to know that sleep would take them to another time.
My primary goal was to preserve our family, to make our home secure for the girls. Had it been possible I would have changed places with Alice. What made it tolerable for us to go along, week after week, was the fact that she was managing there. That fact continued to surprise me. She was usually cheerful and philosophical during our Sunday visits. Her skin had turned the color of old asphalt early on, but otherwise she seemed healthy. What took its toll, more than anything else, it seemed, was her need to say the right things, to make the visit go along happily.
“I’m alive,” she said at one meeting, several weeks into the ordeal. “Please don’t look at me as if you’re trying to figure out if I’m breathing.” She covered her nose and her mouth with her hands and then let them slip to her chin. She pulled her lower lip down so that I could see her pale gums and her crooked bottom teeth. “Are the girls all right?”
I had debated whether or not to tell her about the interviews once they were successfully concluded. I had thought I might write her. I didn’t know how to explain the episode simply on paper. It was afterward, I guess in relief, that I often considered asking Theresa if I could borrow her garage door for the purpose of smashing my old milk bottles. I couldn’t speak to Alice about the interviews in person with the time constraints and the continent of glass between us.
“They like going up to Theresa’s,” I said. “They—”
“There’s my cell mate,” she whispered, turning to look behind her. A large blond-haired girl with sores on her face passed behind Alice. “I keep hearing all these voices, sort of like your life flashing before you, only it’s on audio. What’s that sonnet—’They that have the power to hurt and will do none—’ ”
“What?” I said.
“It’s about how great you are if you don’t give in to the temptation to be cruel, how noble it is to be strong and at the same time gentle. You know, the perfect human being. I have this terrific urge to read poetry to my fellow inmates, but they’d probably sit on me and stuff up my mouth with wrapped vending-machine candy. I opened my eyes this morning, Howard, and looked, and it was exactly like the first day at Camp Everglade. I remember when I was nine, waking in the musty cabin and saying to myself, ‘I didn’t ask to be sent here.’ I said that out loud this morning. This is real, you know that? This makes everything else seem like some vaporous thing, some heavenly vision. But then I hear some of the sad stories and I feel like Virtue itself. All these crazy sayings keep going through my head, phrases like, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I have never thought those words in my life. Theresa always used to say that. I wonder if she does anymore. How is she? Does she mind taking the girls? Is she feeding you?”
When I didn’t answer instantly she said, “You don’t have to look so sheepish. What, does she bring you down lunch boxes with a chilled can
of soda in an insulated pouch, and salt in a little cardboard shaker for your hard-boiled egg? I can almost taste her fruit salad with kiwis and strawberries and a half-dozen other things that are out of season.” She had closed her eyes with the imagining, and when she opened them and looked at me she said, “She does! She brings you fruit salad! I can see it in your face! I bet you don’t ask her how much she’s spent on groceries either.”
“She makes me lunch on occasion,” I said.
“I’m glad! I’m very glad. I’ve been worrying that you’re going to starve. At least I can rest assured that you’re getting the major food groups now and then.”
I remember again feeling as if I’d been caught at something. Alice had wanted the girls to play with Audrey. I had thought all along that I was only doing her bidding. I must have known, as she talked about a recipe that Theresa had made with fifteen dollars worth of capers, that my afternoons in Vermont Acres had become increasingly important to me. If Alice had changed her mind, if she had said that the girls shouldn’t play there anymore, I would have stopped the routine with reluctance.
“I brought you these books on the legal system,” I said. “There’s one here about testifying in court. I think you should glance through them and see if there’s—”
“I want novels,” she said. “Rafferty will look after the rest.”
“You have confidence in him,” I stated.
“He’s great, isn’t he? How are we going to pay him? I have about two hundred dollars in my savings account. Don’t we have an IRA? No, we cashed that for the baler, didn’t we? What will Nellie say when you tell her that we have the best criminal lawyer in the universe? You’re only supposed to have the top dog if you’re guilty. What will Nellie say?” She started to make her voice go higher, “ ‘That Alice, always seeing the dark—’ ”
“I want to have you out,” I said, trying to be calm and honorable and sentimental, as always.
Her stretched, mocking face, the huge, open eyes, the elongated, pursed lips abruptly collapsed. She pinched the phone between her neck and her shoulder and hid behind her hands. “Howard,” she said, between her fingers, “I’m sorry I just said that about Nellie. I didn’t mean it. And
I’m the one who insisted on Rafferty; I’m the one who said the stupid things to the nice investigating officers who I thought were Mrs. and Mr. Deputy Friendly.” She held the phone away from her and shook her head. She adjusted herself and sat straight. “You have every right to be furious, don’t you, and you’re just as steady as can be. I put so much stock in these visits, you can’t imagine.” If she’d been a different sort of person she might have begun to weep. “I’m living in my head, that’s all. You can’t guess what’s swirling around in here—a million things I never thought before. Seeing you is like being allowed to look up through a skylight to see the polestar. So I know where I am. I see you, and everything that’s charging through my brain falls like dust to the ground and settles, and I think, North, South, East, West. Howard. Howard.” When I didn’t say anything she took a deep breath and went on. “So, you’re getting fed. I just want these fifteen minutes to be the perfect visit. It’s like some date I’ve been looking forward to for weeks.” She smiled ruefully.
I always drove home from the jail shaken, not because my wife was in an awful stink of a hellhole where sunlight never penetrated, but because she was in a stink of a hellhole and surviving so admirably. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. She was spending her time reading Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Damon Runyon, P. D. James, J. D. Salinger, and who knows what else. I guess I had expected that she would continue on her downward spiral that had begun after Lizzy’s death. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d fallen apart, although I couldn’t have said exactly what that would entail. It had taken me a long time to understand that she needed help. It had finally registered one morning when I was trying to get her to notice Claire with a sharp knife in her hand. She hadn’t cared about the danger. She had turned around and gone upstairs to the bedroom. She’d kicked me in the jaw the night before, in bed, flown up from the sheets as if she’d been stung. I had known then that Alice needed professional help. That she was bearing the county jail now threw me for a loop. My wife had gone to jail and was as stoic as Mary, Queen of Scots. I was at home, wandering around picking up rocks from fields, unable to fix myself a sandwich or a bowl of cornflakes.
Periodically, during the long afternoons, I’d have to sit in the shade and try to think out a few things. At thirty-six I was coming to understand
some fundamental truths. I finally knew that all of our meanings are put upon us from the outside. There’s nothing much inside that belongs to us at the start, or even along the way. We are shaped, time and time again, by luck, the prevailing winds. I had been formed and reformed a dozen times, according to the personalities of my housemates. In high school I went to a friend’s cabin and did nothing but sit and fish under the hot sun. I kept looking in the mirror during those months, seeing not only my shaggy hair, my unshaven face, but also the clean-cut, good, smart, strong young man my father insisted was his son. Alice thought I had powers which probably all along I knew I actually did not have. She seemed to trust my capabilities. She would certainly not have believed me if she’d known how willing I had been to go to Vietnam. I had stood in line to get my physical after I’d been drafted. I was eighteen. I had been in ROTC in high school and I figured there wasn’t any chance of getting Conscientious Objector status. My father and I had talked about what it meant to fight for my country. We had talked about the burden of democracy. I would go to Vietnam and kill enough people and then hopefully I’d come home. I worked hard at accepting the duty. My friends and I argued about the war all summer. I talked myself into thinking there was justification for the conflict and that I was heroic to go. I probably sounded like a self-righteous ass. When I went for my physical I was excused because of a heart murmur. Not good enough for fodder. My hair grew long. I marched quietly in Ann Arbor and once in Washington, hoping my face wouldn’t show up on the evening news in Minneapolis. That wasn’t the last time I have felt one way and then right away felt another. When I told that story to Alice, she heard only the parts she wanted to hear. It was a happy ending, my being rejected. But to me, over the years, the story became emblematic of a flaw. My gravestone will say, “He never stayed any course. He was never sure.”