American Woman (12 page)

Lying flat on the scaffold she'd built beneath the library ceiling, watching the colored lozenges of light from the faux-Flemish windows moving over her legs as the March sun came through the bare trees, gently swabbing the foul brown stains with her soap-lathered sponge, Jenny still had the transistor beside her. After its dizzying summer and fall the Watergate scandal had been in eclipse for the whole of the winter. Congress wanted the tapes, the president had refused them, and now it was up to the courts to decide. Like the rest of the audience—the sofa citizenry, she thought ruefully, whom she'd been forced to join—her attention had been taken up by the kidnapping everywhere Watergate let it go slack. But for her there was also the oddly secretive family dimension that the rest of the sofa folk knew nothing of. The ransom demand was picked apart in the Left-leaning press. It was grandstanding, self-righteous and impractical, out of touch with the actual needs of The People. A one-time food handout was just the kind of ostentatious paternalistic gesture the United States government was fond of making in the Third World countries it had previously helped to destroy. This must have frustrated them, Jenny imagined—to have labored to come up with a ransom that would clearly denote them as selfless and noble, and then to have it thrown back in their faces. Even the most radical guests on the student-run radio show she could sometimes tune in said things like, “With the movement dying out, you can't be surprised at these macabre developments. It's like a corpse twitching. You could call this the decadent stage of the Left; if there was ever a golden age, this is our signal it's over.” She felt mingled outrage and shame, and a certain fiery defensiveness for the cadre, hearing comments like these. Yes, they were probably crazy. But who with legitimate, fervent belief hadn't also been looked on as crazy? The kidnapping was a public mortification for the Left, an occasion for shirt rending and excommunication, but it also gave Jenny the sense of One Nation she'd felt during Watergate summer. Except that this nation was hers, her own nation-within, sharing borders yet pursuing itself on an alternate plane.

A few weeks after their meeting she wrote the young lawyer No. “You were right,” she explained. “I'm not ready for this.” She took the train back to Peekskill to mail the letter, so he would only have that place linked to her. Then she hoped for relief. In the weeks since they'd met she'd been desperate to see him again, even just to say No to his face. He was the first person in almost two years she had spoken to truthfully, and so it wasn't her desire so much as her failure to anticipate her desire she found so unnerving. She had dreams about him: mortifyingly sexual dreams in which they made desperate love to each other, which weren't even as bad as the abstract emotional dreams, in which she “knew” that he loved her. She wished she missed William as she'd missed him at first. She tried to summon those waves of blind pain she had felt at their first separation, even tried to revisit the worst lows of their history together in the hopes she could “plumb from their murks certainty?” of her love. She finally wrote William to explain her decision and felt guilty for some of her phrases: “Your idea that the robed judges might now be more kindly disposed gave me hope, but it isn't the case. You or anyone like you might do worse at present, or so I am told
by a very good source
.”

The Rhinebeck library sat on the town square, a graceful little building of cut stone and stained glass that had a kinship to the Rhinecliff train station. The two had been designed by the same architects, hired by a titan of railroads who had summered out here and who'd wanted his guests to embark from the train—and page through the newspaper, and bow head in prayer (there was also the wonderful church)—in the splendor to which they were accustomed, but on a quainter, more countrified scale. “Our historic river valley,” Mrs. McNulty would say. “Everywhere you look there's a door to the past.” She had become fond of Jenny for her supposed role as a restorer. When Jenny first ventured into the library not for the Wildmoor scrapbooks but for West Coast newspapers, Mrs. McNulty kept confusedly bringing her clippings about Queen Anne decor; but after some days she perceived that the errand had changed. Now when Jenny dropped into the library, always trying to seem casual, she would find the most recently arrived
San Francisco Chronicles
and
Examiners
neatly laid out stair-step style, the dates showing, at the large corner table she liked. “Please don't, it's all right, Mrs. McNulty,” she said, but it kept happening. Sometimes while she read, a new bundle of mail would come—the newspapers came on delay, as always with libraries. She'd hear Mrs. McNulty humming and clipping the string with her small pair of scissors. Then Mrs. McNulty would come to her holding the new ones like freshly baked bread. “Oh Iris, I'm afraid you're homesick,” she'd say, setting them down.

The girl's family had responded to the demand for the goodwill gesture with a fastidious attention under which the demand could only look absurd. “We're sure grateful to those folks, honey, for shooting straight with us,” the girl's father said to a lawnful of cameras. “And we're working away to see how we can meet this demand. But the thing is, it's a little bit vague. A week's worth of food, over the course of a month—we're thinking, a few times a week for a month? We just want to be sure we get everything right. As for the numbers—well, honey, I hope you can convey to these folks that, in a big state like ours, it's not easy to find everybody who's poor. We have so many ways of calculating that number, and it's likely to be such a big number—and that doesn't make anyone happy. But that's the way that it is. We've got some folks here who are praying for you, and are helping us out just so much—they're mathematicians and statisticians. And they think—well, their estimate is that maybe we're talking about half a billion dollars' worth of food.” Here his voice cracked. “And I have to say, there's no way I can do it. But I'm going to do the very best that I can.”

The response came within just a few days, another tape at the door to a radio station—the tapes seemed to drop from the sky, and bore no fingerprints. “These people want you to know, Dad, they didn't mean to make a demand that nobody could meet. Um—what you said, about doing the best that you can, that's just fine. Just do it, really quickly, okay?” But the girl's nervousness seemed to alternate now with a different, peeved tone. “These people want you to know they're not crazy. Don't try to make them look crazy. Their message is a political message, it's about poverty and the problems of capitalism, and I'm a symbol of all that, as they said. They are fulfilling the conditions of the Geneva Conventions . . . in accordance with the Codes of International War.” She had a script, but she seemed to be straying from it. “And if you'd tell Mom the way she keeps crying—that's really depressing. It's like she's standing right next to my grave.”

Doing the very best that he could seemed to involve, in the end, compliance with some of the least advisable of the cadre's demands, and disregard of many of the others. With the dispatch of exceptional wealth the girl's family set up a food-distribution command center and rented a flotilla of refrigerated trucks. And then, pointing out that the cadre had insisted they do so, they hired to distribute the food only welfare recipients, paroled criminals, and other often-unemployed individuals. There was a predictable range of results. A few ex-cons told the papers they were grateful for the second chance in life. One truckful was hijacked at gunpoint. Others vanished in more subtle ways. Where the trucks did arrive unmolested, workers hurled the food hand over fist out of the back, while crowds trampled each other. An eight-year-old boy was knocked out by a frozen whole chicken.

Jenny knew she shouldn't have found it surprising how skillfully the family was able to present itself as the beleaguered party, doing its best to accommodate, but outflanked on all sides by plain greed. Public sympathy for them kept increasing; they were the quintessence of noblesse oblige, they were doing the best that they could, and who doesn't prefer the rich who give a crumb of their wealth, to the poor who rush forward to take it? This was where the Left lost its last shred of patience. Only this band of irresponsible adventurers, they complained, could have made the rich so sympathetic. The one observer of the spiraling affair who seemed displeased with the family was the victim herself. The food program debacle unfolded, and like a missile the third tape arced out of the sky. “It seems to me you're not doing your very best at all, Dad,” the girl said, and now she was starting to sound really angry. “It looks like that food program was a complete total sham. I know it's a tax write-off anyway. Isn't it, Dad? And I just have to wonder, I feel like if you or Mom, or Alexa or Katie was kidnapped I would just do whatever it took. Which is not what you're doing!” She didn't seem to be reading a script at all anymore—or perhaps her kidnappers had started to know how she spoke, how she tended to phrase things. Perhaps their new scripts showed a talent for slickness they seemed to lack everywhere else.

When March came to an end Jenny drove to Buell's for wood stripper, paint, new dropcloths, and a safer stepladder. It was warm enough to work with open windows again and she could start the restaining job in the upstairs conservatory; soon enough it would be hot and humid, and the stain would goo up like molasses and never get dry. In the course of the winter opaque bumpy ice had closed over the river, but now they heard the ice groaning and cracking at intervals all through the day. Sometimes it went
pop!
with a suddenness, like a shotgun. As she drove back to Wildmoor with the ladder sticking out the back window, the newly mild wind filled the car; spring still had the power to move her, to make her feel burgeoning change. It was always a short, vivid, heartrending spring in this place. White filigree cherry tree blooms, the hot pink apple blossoms; crocus and daffodil and narcissus spearing out of the ground. This was her second spring here. The autumn would be her third autumn. When she thought about this her enjoyment evaporated and instead she felt something—despair, more credible each time it came. She shrugged it off harshly, as if despair were an irritating though well-meaning person with a hand on her shoulder. Turning south between fallow gold fields, parallel to the river, she could smell the sea brine on the air. Sometimes, driving this road in a deep reverie, she would feel as if snatched from the car by a hand and raised high in the air. She would see the Atlantic tide pushing kelp miles up the river, and the Atlantic itself, spreading out from the foot of Manhattan. And Manhattan's wild spires casting shadows halfway to Ohio, and then the vast carpet of grass racing toward California. Her life there, and her shadow life here. She would see all of that and herself seated in Dolly's car—and then it would end and she was in the car, driving again. She pushed in the car's cigarette lighter, and turned up the radio loud when she heard a voice say another tape had arrived from the cadre. She pulled over to the side of the road and lit her cigarette there; she'd never mastered using lighters while driving. She was always afraid she would weave and be stopped by a cop. The tape, like the three before it, was broadcast after assurances from the newscaster that it had not been at all shortened or altered. The girl's voice sounded hollow again, as it had at the start, almost two months before. “Today is April 3, 1974. I have been given the following choice: to be liberated to rejoin my family, or to join these comrades in their battle. My decision is made: I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is. They are my family. My old family did not care for me; this new family does. My old family did not care for the poor; this new family does.” To go with her new life the girl had taken a new name: Pauline. Jenny felt her gaze space out, refocus. She realized irrelevantly that the windshield was spattered with bugs: it had gotten that warm. Sitting there on the mill road from Red Hook, with the old fields stretching away. All the old fields going to seed and the old stone wall crumbled in places and bristling with weeds. She felt an odd tremor, from what source she could not have said. There had never been a Watergate amnesty; there had not been a window. Still, she felt something slide quietly shut. She tried to restart the car and it let out a horrible shriek, because it was already running. The post-tape commentary began, and even the newsmen made no effort to hide their revulsion. It made you disgusted, one said, to imagine the tortures the poor girl had endured, to say something like that.

Getting back to the house she was surprised to see that even Dolly had the television on. “Brainwashed,” Dolly said from her chair, as the newscasters droned.

“How do you know?” Jenny said. “How do you know that she doesn't agree with them?”

“Oh, please,” Dolly said, with a voice full of scorn for the people that would have to be agreed with. “Not a girl from a family like that. Not a girl like her.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER
the cadre held up a bank and made off with fifteen thousand dollars, “Pauline” clearly visible on the security tapes, looking either brainwashed or eerily calm, depending on your view. The money would fund The People's Liberation. The bank happened to belong to a prominent business partner of Pauline's father. Then the cadre disappeared; they seemed to have slipped through the dragnet with remarkable ease. Over the protests of her family the attorney general declared Pauline a criminal, no longer a crime victim, and issued a Wanted poster with her face. The Left-leaning press scolded those of its own who stole Pauline's poster to decorate their apartments. They were equally displeased with the people who were spray-painting things like
WE LOVE YOU, PAULINE!
onto buildings. Jenny floated in clouds of wood stripper, lightheaded and vague, as the radio droned and the languid breeze failed to siphon enough of the fumes. Unthinking and wood stripper—stoned. Unmolested by Dolly or anyone else. In the late afternoons when the teatime approached she would lurch from the house for a walk, and drink in the fresh air. The house, still a shaggy King Lear despite all of her efforts. For more than half of the mile-long slope that led down to the water it stayed visible at the top of the hill, though it sank by degrees. Lines of trees began to appear as the slope grew more steep; the trees seemed to form doorways through which, as you looked riverward, the water loomed larger and larger. There was the gazebo just past the first line, giving a view of the water in front and of the uppermost point of the house, its ridiculous tower, behind. Then at last the house sank out of sight. The grounds had been laid out a century before to look carefully wild, like an English farm going to seed, but now the effect was much more natural. The screens of trees had widened with decades of new growth, and grown gaps where some old trees had died. And the fields were truly overgrown with weeds now, not made to appear that way. There really were moors, and a sense of forsaken remoteness, though once you reached the last vista before the drop-off you saw the railroad tracks just by the water, and the electric lines just beside them.