American rust (24 page)

7. Lee

S
he made lunch for her father, risotto with a starter of
insalata caprese,
French bread she'd bought at the Keystone Bakery in Monessen. She rarely got time to cook at home, as Simon preferred to eat out. Which was fine. Another reason to enjoy coming back. Afterward they sat at the dining- room table quietly drinking coffee, Henry reading his paper while she sat there, chin in hand, staring out over the long sloping lawn, the low brick walls around the property. The walls were ornamental, an unbelievable indulgence now, enough brick to build another large house. Like everything else, they were crumbling.

Her father was making his way through the
Post- Gazette,
the sun was coming strongly into the window, she let her mind wander, decided to cancel the interviews with the nurses that afternoon. She wondered if maybe Poe had made everything up, the reasons being obvious. That would be the easy thing to believe. But she was sure that Poe was telling the truth. She wasn't sure how, but she knew.

Poe's picture had been on the front page of the
Valley Independent,
under the headline
FOOTBALL STAR CHARGED IN KILLING.
She'd hidden the paper before her father had a chance to see it. It hadn't mattered. Last night, the chief of police had come around looking for Isaac. A thin, balding, pleasant- looking man, obviously thoughtful. She had liked him right away and wanted to hear what he thought but he only wanted to speak to her father. She realized it was out of respect, but still. She was able to get the gist of it—Poe was being charged with the killing of the man in the factory Isaac was most likely a witness but, at this point, not a suspect.

This morning, her father had looked haggard. He was sliding. In fact he'd gotten worse since she'd gotten here. How long? She counted: Saturday through today, Thursday. Six days. It felt much longer than that. Her father hadn't shaved in two days now and his white hair was tangled and flat on his scalp, his shoulders dusted with dandruff. The look of a heavy drinker—cheeks and nose mottled with burst capillaries—though he barely touched the stuff. Watery eyes. His clock running down.

They ate in the dining room, the old walnut furniture, an antique china cabinet and credenza, the waterstained wallpaper around the windows. A large room with a tall ceiling and a glass chandelier. It occurred to her that maybe her father had bought this house because of her mother, because he'd wanted to impress her. It was difficult to know.

They still hadn't talked about the visit from the police officer. There was something extraordinary about their desire to avoid conflict. But it would have to be discussed. She got up and decided to do the dishes.

“You finished?” she said to him.

“I got a couple years yet.”

She smiled but couldn't bring herself to laugh. She took his plate to the kitchen and ran the water until it was steaming hot, found the rubber gloves and began to scrub the dishes. When she was done she wiped down the stove and countertop, though they weren't dirty; she'd cleaned them that morning as well. At the apartment in New Haven of course they had a dishwasher, they also had a maid service once a week, she'd protested against that at first but Simon had looked at her like she was crazy. Normal people had maid service.

A feeling of loneliness came over her, this place wasn't home and neither was the other, she stood with the hot water running over her hands and then she thought: you don't deserve to feel sorry for yourself. You have to go in and talk to him.

Instead she looked for something else to clean. She would sweep the back porch. It was one in the afternoon and the deer had come out to graze in the yard among the old apple trees. The porch was filthy and she saw the stain on the couch where she'd slept with Poe. She swept. It was pleasant, sunny and green with the deer and the trees and distant hills but that was all there was, all this place had to offer. She didn't understand why her mother had come here. She didn't understand why her mother had married Henry English.

Of course she herself was making compromises but it wasn't the same as her mother. Married rich and early. When she thought of it that way it was like being punched in the stomach. She didn't want to go to law school, either, she was probably more the art school type, more the comp lit type, but she'd never let herself run with those crowds, it was out of the question given the family situation. It would have been equally nice to join the Peace Corps and just see where she landed, let the wind take her instead of having such a trajectory. Like Siddhartha— the stone falling through water. In a few years she'd have a law degree, an insurance policy—even if things went bad with Simon, her father and Isaac would be taken care of. She had a good plan and a good backup. Nothing was perfect but she went to bed happy.

Given that, how she'd arranged her life, it was baffling what had happened to her mother. Somehow she'd decided that Henry English was her best option. You are a bitch for thinking that, she decided, you are a terrible person. But the fact remained. It had been much harder for her, Lee thought. Thirty- one, unmarried, no family in the country. Henry English sits down next to her in a dive bar, a stable, predictable, honest man. A man who is proud of her, who would never leave her, who knows she's more than he deserves. Then everything in the Valley falls apart and he loses his job and there goes the stability and on top of it there are two kids. He's out of work for two years and then lives in Indiana for three years, sending money back until his accident.

Then you get into college and things begin to change. Her moods get deeper—higher highs and lower lows. Sunday after graduation, everyone goes to church and that afternoon she disappears. Two months later you leave for New Haven.

Before her father, she knew, her mother had been engaged to another man, a student in the music department at CMU, but he'd broken off the engagement at the last minute. Long before that, her mother had split from her family in Mexico, she'd come from money but been too proud to return to it, and by the time she died she hadn't spoken to them in twenty- five years. Lee wondered about this side of her family occasionally, but her interest was only theoretical. Meeting them would not unlock any secrets that she needed unlocked. She suspected it would only depress her.

In the end it was impossible to know. Her mother must have felt some sense of desperation, or loneliness, or time creeping in on her, if she had married Henry English. A beautiful woman with a master's degree in music composition. But she was also thirty- one, living in a country that was not her own, no family to speak of, little support structure, and here was a man who would never leave her, a man with a good job, a man who wanted to take care of her. Knowing how her position might be worse if she married a wealthy man. Or maybe Mary English, née María Salinas, had the same notions as Lee's Marxist friends at Yale— solidarity, noble workers, an impending revolution. She had wanted to marry a worker, a final rejection of her family. There were certainly people like that in the Valley, Mr. Painter, the history teacher at Buell High who'd written Lee's letter of recommendation, he told Lee he'd moved to the Valley to bring socialism to the mills, he'd been a steelworker for ten years, lost his job and become a teacher. Graduated from Cornell and became a steelworker.
There were lots of us,
he'd told her.
Reds working right alongside the good old boys.
But there had never been any revolution, not anything close, a hundred and fifty thousand people lost their jobs but they had all gone quietly. It was obvious there were people responsible, there were living breathing men who'd made those decisions to put the entire Valley out of work, they had vacation homes in Aspen, they sent their kids to Yale, their portfolios went up when the mills shut down. But, aside from a few ministers who'd famously snuck into a white- glove church and thrown skunk oil on the wealthy pastor, no one lifted a hand in protest. There was something particularly American about it—blaming yourself for bad luck—that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream. In France, she thought, they would have shut down the country. They would have stopped the mills from closing. But of course you couldn't say that in public, especially not to her father.

The porch was swept. There was no point in putting it off further. Lee went back into the house, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where her father was still sitting.

“Dad?” she said.

“That's me.” He looked up reluctantly. He knew what was coming.

“What did the police chief talk to you about?”

“Isaac's friend Billy,” he said. “They locked him up for killing someone.”

He went back to his paper and she could tell he was uncomfortable. She wondered how much he knew. It seemed much warmer in the room all of a sudden.

“I don't think he did it.”

“I guess that's possible, but it's not worth speculating over. They'll get it figured out in court.”

“Maybe what I'm getting at is I'm pretty sure he didn't do it.”

“Maybe your view of him is skewed.”

It was quiet for a few seconds; she felt her face get hot. Her father wanted to drop the conversation and she did also but she forced herself to keep talking: “He told me that Isaac is the one who killed that guy.”

“Lee,” he said, without missing a beat, “Billy Poe nearly killed someone last year, beat the guy's head in with a baseball bat, and the only reason he didn't get locked up for that is that Bud Harris, the police officer who came by yesterday, is friends with Billy's mother.
Friends,
if you know what I mean. Which is something that now they're all going to have to deal with, now that he's done this other thing.”

“I know all that,” she said. But she hadn't known it—that was not exactly how she'd heard the story.

“I didn't mean to snap at you. What Bud Harris told me is that he thinks Isaac was there, but that it's better if Isaac stays out of it. He doesn't think Isaac should get involved unless it's absolutely necessary, which is fine with me.”

“If there's a trial, you can be sure Isaac will get involved.”

“I know that. I've been up all night thinking about who I know who's a lawyer around here.”

“It doesn't bother you that Isaac saw those things?”

“I feel guilty about it, if that's what you mean.”

“That wasn't what I was getting at.” She didn't know, though. Maybe it was. She went and stood next to him and he reached up to squeeze her hand.

“I already told Simon. He said we can use the family checkbook.”

“We'll be fine on our own,” he said. He squeezed her hand again. “That was smart, though. That was good thinking.”

She was struck by the absurdity of what was happening: you've both just admitted you've been hiding something from each other, that the police chief thinks Isaac witnessed a murder, that Poe thinks that Isaac was involved in the murder, but you're going to keep on acting like everything's normal.

“What else should we be doing?”

He shrugged. “It sounds like you already took care of it. In any case, I think it's pretty safe not to trust what Billy Poe tells you.” He looked up briefly from the newspaper. “Goes without saying that you're married now.”

She could feel her face flushing even more and she looked around the room, she knew if she said anything else she would start crying. Henry rattled the paper and cleared his throat and made a show of being interested in something.

“Your friend Hillary Clinton is making more speeches.”

She nodded. Let him change the subject. She looked out the window and then she felt him take her hand again.

“You're a good kid,” he said.

“I'm not sure.”

“I mean it. You're a good kid and I'm proud as hell of you.”

She nodded and cleared her throat again and smiled at him and he smiled back sympathetically.

“I think I need some air.”

“Alright.”

Outside, she sat against the brick wall that wrapped down around the lawn, field, whatever it was, down toward the ravine, out over the empty woods and hills, the long high ridge in the distance. The old man knew about her and Poe, it wasn't that surprising. He forgave her—she was surprised by that, of course she was. But maybe those were the things her mother had seen in him.

She wondered what he really thought about Simon, and her new life, and the fact that she never came home. He was not a simple man, he only acted that way when it was convenient. He wanted peace with her at all costs. Only he was wrong about Poe. She thought about that. She thought about Simon's accident, the feeling had begun to nag her—what if he hadn't been trapped in the car? What if he could have walked away, left that girl pinned there?

That was the thing about Simon and all the others, so pleasant on the surface, always knowing what to say, but underneath there was something else, they were not the kind to sacrifice themselves—they'd all been taught they had too much to lose. No more verdicts, she told herself. But there was John Bolton, caught in Manhattan with all that cocaine—charges dropped—and later you find out there was another man with Bolton when he was arrested, but everyone knows better than to ask what happened to him. Meanwhile Poe goes to jail for something he didn't do. For your brother.

She wondered where Isaac was now. California, Poe had said. It didn't make any sense. She could hire a private investigator or something to follow him, he would have left a trail, airline tickets, bus tickets, something—four thousand dollars is what her father said he'd taken—that would be more than enough to pay for his trip and leave plenty of seed money to settle down, Isaac was happy to live on macaroni and cheese. How had he reached this level of desperation? But she knew it was simple. Not hard to understand at all. You simply chose not to. Always knew his life wouldn't be easy, he didn't know how to relate to people. No ability to conduct small talk, thinks he should speak his mind honestly at all times, expects others should do the same. Nothing he ever said was tied up in
what are they going to think of me?
It made her both admire him more than anyone else she knew and feel enormously sad for him. To her, that seemed like the smallest part of human communication.