“Mrs. St. George, I’m very sorry, but—”
“If it’d been the other way around,” I says, “if I’d been the one with a story about how the passbooks was lost and ast for new ones, if
I’d
been the one who started drawin out what took eleven or twelve years to put in ... wouldn’t you have called Joe? If the money’d still been here for me to withdraw
today,
like I came in meanin to do, wouldn’t you have called him the minute I stepped out the door, to let him know—just as a courtesy, mind you!—what his wife’d been up to?”
Because I’d expected just that, Andy—that was why I’d picked a day when he was out with the Stargills. I’d expected to go back to the island, collect the kids, and be long gone before Joe come up the driveway with a six-pack in one hand and his dinnerpail in the other.
Pease looked at me n opened his mouth. Then he closed it again and didn’t say nothing. He didn’t have to. The answer was right there on his face.
Accourse
he—or someone else from the bank—would have called Joe, and kep on tryin until he finally got him. Why? Because Joe was the man of the house, that’s why. And the reason nobody’d bothered to tell
me
was because I was just his wife. What the hell was I s‘posed to know about money, except how to earn some down on my knees scrubbin floors n baseboards n toilet-bowls? If the man of the house decided to draw out all his kids’ college money, he must have had a damned good reason, and even if he didn’t, it didn’t matter, because he was the man of the house, and in charge. His wife was just the little woman, and all
she
was in charge of was baseboards, toilet-bowls, and chicken dinners on Sunday afternoons.
“If there’s a problem, Mrs. St. George,” Pease was sayin, “I’m very sorry, but—”
“If you say you’re sorry one more time, I’ll kick your butt up so high you’ll look like a hunchback,” I says, but there was no real danger of me doin anything to him. Right about then I didn’t feel like I had enough strength to kick a beer-can across the road. “Just tell me one thing and I’ll get out of your hair: is the money spent?”
“I would have no way of knowing!” he says in this prissy little shocked voice. You’da thought I’d told him I’d show him mine if he’d show me his.
“This is the bank Joe’s done business with his whole life, I says. ”He
could
have gone down the road to Machias or Columbia Falls and stuck it in one of those banks, but he didn’t—he’s too dumb and lazy and set in his ways. No, he’s either stuck it in a couple of Mason jars and buried it somewhere or put it right back in here.
That’s
what I want to know—if my husband’s opened some kind of new account here in the last couple of months.” Except it felt more like I
had
to know, Andy. Findin out how he’d fooled me made me feel sick to my stomach, and that was bad, but not knowin if he’d pissed it all away somehow ...
that
was killin me.
“If he’s ... that’s privileged information!” he says, and by then you’da thought I’d told him I’d
touch
his if he’d touch mine.
“Ayuh,” I says. “Figured it was. I’m askin you to break a rule. I know just lookin at you that you’re not a man who does that often; I can see it runs against your grain. But that was my kids’ money, Mr. Pease, and he lied to get it. You know he did; the proof’s right there on your desk blotter. It’s a lie that wouldn’t have worked if this bank—
your
bank—had had the common courtesy to make a telephone call.”
He clears his throat and starts, “We are not required—”
“I know you ain‘t,” I says. I wanted to grab him and shake him, but I saw it wouldn’t do no good —not with a man like him. Besides, my mother always said you c’n catch more flies with honey than you ever can with vinegar, and I’ve found it to be true. “I know that, but think of the grief and heartache you’da saved me with that one call. And if you’d like to make up for some of it—I know you don’t
have
to, but if you’d
like
to—please tell me if he’s opened an account here or if I’ve got to start diggin holes around my house. Please—I II never tell. I swear on the name of God I won’t.”
He sat there lookin at me, drummin his fingers on those green accountants’ sheets. His nails were all clean and it looked like he’d had a professional manicure, although I guess that ain’t too likely—it’s Jonesport in 1962 we’re talkin about, after all. I s’pose his wife did it. Those nice neat nails made little muffled thumps on the papers each time they came down, n I thought, He ain’t gonna do nothin for me, not a man like him. What’s he care about island folk and their problems? His ass is covered, n that’s all he cares about.
So when he
did
speak up, I felt ashamed for what I’d been thinkin about men in general and him in particular.
“I can’t check something like that with you sitting right here, Mrs. St. George,” he says. “Why don’t you go down to The Chatty Buoy and order yourself a cruller and a nice hot cup of coffee? You look like you could use something. I’ll join you in fifteen minutes. No, better make it half an hour.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so very much.”
He sighed and began shufflin the papers back together. “I must be losin my mind,” he says, then laughed kinda nervous-like.
“No,” I told him. “You’re helpin a woman who don’t have nowhere else to turn, that’s all.”
“Ladies in distress have always been a weakness of mine,” he says. “Give me half an hour. Maybe even a little longer.”
“But you’ll come?”
“Yes,” he said. “I will.”
He did, too, but it was closer to forty-five minutes than half an hour, and by the time he finally got to the Buoy, I’d pretty well made up my mind he was gonna leave me in the lurch. Then, when he finally came in, I thought he had bad news. I thought I could read it in his face.
He stood in the doorway a few seconds, takin a good look around to make sure there was nobody in the restaurant who might make trouble for him if we was seen together after the row I made in the bank. Then he came over to the booth in the corner where I was sittin, slid in acrost from me, and says, “It’s still in the bank. Most of it, anyway. Just under three thousand dollars.”
“Thank God!” I said.
“Well,” he says, “that’s the good part. The bad part is that the new account is in his name only.”
“Accourse it is,” I said. “He sure didn’t give me no new passbook account card to sign. That woulda tipped me off to his little game, wouldn’t it?”
“Many women wouldn’t know one way or the other,” he says. He cleared his throat, gave a yank on his tie, then looked around quick to see who’d come in when the bell over the door jingled. “Many women sign anything their husbands put in front of them.”
“Well, I ain’t many women,” I says.
“I’ve noticed,” he says back, kinda dry. “Anyway, I’ve done what you asked, and now I really have to get back to the bank. I wish I had time to drink a coffee with you.”
“You know,” I says, “I kinda doubt that.”
“Actually, so do I,” he says back. But he gave me his hand to shake, just like I was another man, and I took that as a bit of a compliment. I sat where I was until he was gone, and when the girl came back n asked me if I wanted a fresh cup of coffee, I told her no thanks, I had the acid indigestion from the first one. I had it, all right, but it wasn’t the coffee that give it to me.
A person can always find
somethin
to be grateful for, no matter how dark things get, and goin back on the ferry, I was grateful that at least I hadn’t packed nothing; this way I didn’t have all that work to undo again. I was glad I hadn’t told Selena, either. I’d set out to, but in the end I was afraid the secret might be too much for her and she’d tell one of her friends and word might get back to Joe that way. It had even crossed my mind that she might get stubborn and say she didn’t want to go. I didn’t think that was likely, not the way she flinched back from Joe whenever he came close to her, but when it’s a teenage girl you’re dealin with, anythin’s possible—anythin at all.
So I had a few blessings to count, but no idears. I couldn’t very well take the money outta the joint savings account me n Joe had; there was about forty-six dollars in it, and our checkin account was an even bigger laugh—if we weren’t overdrawn, we were damned close. I wasn’t gonna just grab the kids up and go off, though; no sir and no ma’am.
If I did that, Joe’d spend the money just for spite. I knew that as well’s I knew my own name. He’d already managed to get through three hundred dollars of it, accordin to Mr. Pease ... and of the three thousand or so left, I’d put at least twenty-five hundred away myself—I earned it scrubbin floors and warshin windows and hangin out that damned bitch Vera Donovan’s sheets—
six
pins, not just four—all summer long. It wasn’t as bad then as it turned out to be in the wintertime, but it still wasn’t no day in the park, not by a long shot.
Me n the kids were still gonna go, my mind was made up on that score, but I was damned if we was gonna go broke. I meant my children to have their money. Goin back to the island, standin on the foredeck of the
Princess
with a fresh open-water wind cuttin itself in two on my face and blowin my hair back from my temples, I
knew
I was going to get that money out of him again. The only thing I didn’t know was
how.
Life went on. If you only looked at the top of things, it didn’t look like anything had changed. Things never
do
seem to change much on the island ... if you only look at the top of things, that is. But there’s lots more to a life than what a body can see on top, and for me, at least, the things underneath seemed completely different that fall. The way I
saw
things had changed, and I s’pose that was the biggest part of it. I’m not just talkin about that third eye now; by the time Little Pete’s paper witch had been taken down and his pitchers of turkeys and Pilgrims had gone up, I was seein all I needed to with my two good natural eyes.
The greedy, piggy way Joe’d watch Selena sometimes when she was in her robe, for instance, or how he’d look at her butt if she bent over to get a dishcloth out from under the sink. The way she’d swing wide of him when he was in his chair and she was crossin the livin room to get to her room; how she’d try to make sure her hand never touched his when she passed him a dish at the supper-table. It made my heart ache for shame and pity, but it also made me so mad that I went around most days feelin sick to my stomach. He was her
father,
for Christ’s sake, his blood was runnin in her veins, she had his black Irish hair and double-jointed little fingers, but his eyes’d get all big and round if her bra-strap so much as fell down the side of her arm.
I seen the way Joe Junior also swung wide of him, and wouldn’t answer what Joe asked him if he could get away without doin it, and answered in a mutter when he couldn’t. I remember the day Joe Junior brought me his report on President Roosevelt when he got it back from the teacher. She’d marked it A-plus and wrote on the front that it was the only A-plus she’d given a history paper in twenty years of teachin, and she thought it might be good enough to get published in a newspaper. I asked Joe Junior if he’d like to try sendin it to the Ellsworth
American
or maybe the Bar Harbor
Times.
I said I’d be glad to pay for the postage. He just shook his head and laughed. It wasn’t a laugh I liked much; it was hard n cynical, like his father’s. “And have
him
on my back for the next six months?” he asks. “No thanks. Haven’t you ever heard Dad call him Franklin D. Sheenyvelt?”
I can see him now, Andy, only twelve but already purt-near six feet tall, standin on the back porch with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, lookin down at me as I held his report with the A-plus on it. I remember the little tiny smile on the corners of his mouth. There was no good will in that smile, no good humor, no happiness. It was his father’s smile, although I could never have told the boy that.
“Of all the Presidents, Dad hates Roosevelt the most,” he told me. “That’s why I picked him to do my report on. Now give it back, please. I’m going to burn it in the woodstove. ”
“No you ain’t, Sunny Jim,” I says, “and if you want to see what it feels like to be knocked over the porch rail and into the dooryard by your own Mom, you just try to get it away from me.”
He shrugged. He done that like Joe, too, but his smile got wide, and it was sweeter than any his father ever wore in his life when it did that. “Okay,” he said. “Just don’t let him see it, okay?”
I said I wouldn’t, and he run off to shoot baskets with his friend Randy Gigeure. I watched him go, holdin his report and thinkin about what had just passed between us. Mostly what I thought about was how he’d gotten his teacher’s only A-plus in twenty years, and how he’d done it by pickin the President his father hated the most to make his report on.
Then there was Little Pete, always swaggerin around with his butt switchin and his lower lip pooched out, callin people sheenies and bein kept after school three afternoons outta every five for gettin in trouble. Once I had to go get him because he’d been fightin, and hit some other little boy on the side of the head so hard he made his ear bleed. What his father said about it that night was “I guess he’ll know to get out of your way the next time he sees you comin, won’t he, Petey?” I saw the way the boy’s eyes lit up when Joe said that, and I saw how tenderly Joe carried him to bed an hour or so later. That fall it seemed like I could see everything but the one thing I wanted to see most ... a way to get clear of him.
You know who finally gave me the answer? Vera. That’s right—Vera Donovan herself. She was the only one who ever knew what I did, at least up until now. And she was the one who gave me the idear.
All through the fifties, the Donovans—well, Vera n the kids, anyway—were the summer people of all summer people—they showed up Memorial Day weekend, never left the island all summer long, and went back to Baltimore on Labor Day weekend. I don’t know’s you could set your watch by em, but I know damn well you could set your
calendar
by em. I’d take a cleanin crew in there the Wednesday after they left and swamp the place out from stem to stern, strippin beds, coverin furniture, pickin up the kids’ toys, and stackin the jigsaw puzzles down in the basement. I believe that by 1960, when the mister died, there must have been over three hundred of those puzzles down there, stacked up between pieces of cardboard and growin mildew. I could do a complete cleanin like that because I knew that the chances were good no one would step foot into that house again until Memorial Day weekend next year.