Martha fiddled with the pickle plate, then with her straw, and finally with the napkin dispenser, while I ordered half a chopped liver sandwich and simultaneously took a vow of future diet atonement. I would eat no more this day, and tomorrow I would eat the yogurt and apple in the school refrigerator, instead of succumbing to the chili dog and chips lunch menu, as I had today.
Deferring virtue always relaxes me. Martha and I made talk so small it was infinitesimal. That was okay. She had called the meeting. She could set the agenda.
Then my order arrived and, as if chopped liver were the secret word, Martha switched gears. “A minister’s wife is something of a public figure, dear girl,” she said abruptly. “One’s private life…well, there’s a reason they call it that, don’t you agree?” She didn’t check whether I concurred, but concentrated on folding and refolding a paper napkin until it was a stubby square.
A tingle, like a mild electric shock, raced through me. This was it. I felt as if I’d been looking for her forever, although it was only forty-eight hours since I’d found the book. But now, like one of those people who search for water with a stick, I was shaking in the presence of my goal.
“One is,” Martha said, now unfolding the square, “perchance rightly, perchance not, less than eager for people to know everything about oneself.”
The more she approached her secret, the more archaic her expressions. I had to intervene before we were back to Chaucerian English or caveman grunts. “Maybe,” I suggested, “if people knew, people could help.”
She arched her eyebrows, then lowered them into a frown. “You already know, don’t you?” she whispered.
“I believe so.”
Martha’s expression was bleak. “I was afraid you did.”
I rehearsed my speech about how she had to stop feeling ashamed, that this wasn’t her fault, but
his.
I was ready to commiserate about how scary it must be to dare to change after all these years. I would assure her that she had lots of happy, tap-dancing nights left.
“I suppose you were horrified.” Her voice was no more than a whisper.
“I was shocked, and upset, of course. Anybody with a shred of decency would be,” I said.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” A sparkle of tears filmed her eyes. “But how could I have known? Main Line Charities seemed so anonymous and safe. I would have never—if I’d known an
English
teacher!”
“Excuse me?”
She took a deep breath and pushed the wrinkled napkin aside. “At my age, one worries. Disaster strikes without warning. Strokes, broken hips, heart attacks.” She leaned closer. “I couldn’t sleep, worrying what would happen if my children or grandchildren had to come care for me and they found out. And Oliver worried, too.”
I tilted my head, hoping to catch the sound waves I was obviously missing. “Oliver?” She nodded. Was she saying that she’d underlined a confession of battering, but had donated it to charity only so that her grandchildren never found out? That she and the batterer colluded on this? “Mrs. Thornton,” I said. “I don’t understand.” I reviewed the entire conversation in my head, to see where I might have misunderstood, or whether we were burying ourselves in euphemisms again. Something about this discussion felt like a rerun. I’d had this misunderstanding before.
“Isn’t it understandable that Oliver would worry even more than I did?” Martha asked. “He’s a man of the cloth. People would talk.”
“But…but so what? Isn’t worrying about something like that hypocritical?”
She turned her head away as sharply as if I’d smacked her. “Try to understand, even though it must be hard for you. It’s shameful, but once it’s started, where do you stop?” She shook her head. “It’s been going on since we first married, and I’m as much a party to it as he is.”
“Mrs. Thornton, please. Stop assuming responsibility for a situation your husband created. It isn’t your fault.”
She waved away my words. “Please, dearest.” She finally looked me in the eye. “I beg you, even if you are shocked, even if you can’t understand or approve—please, get rid of them and don’t tell anyone.”
“Them?”
“I would never have put them in a collection box for a
school.
”
She looked up through the pickled air to heaven. “I should have burned them or thrown them in the compost heap.”
Them. I repeated the word to myself a few times.
“But,” she leaned across the table, “the terrible truth is, I thought somebody else could, um, enjoy them the way we did.”
I added the word enjoy. Enjoy them. What the hell were we talking about?
“I never dreamed an English teacher! Why, ever since Miss Letterbelt and
God’s Little Acre.
About how smut corrupted you, poison through the eyes, she said. About how she had to take a
bath
after reading it.” Martha Thornton was talking to herself, her eyes focused inward. “My own fault, of course. I should never have brought it to school, but I promised a friend, and it fell on the classroom floor. In front of her, and I knew she could see right through me, could see into my corrupted brain and know that I’d read others just as bad. But to send me home—in front of everybody. To have
Mother
know and—”
“
Those books
?”
Confessions of an Anonymous Barmaid, Peyton Place,
Jackie Collins. That’s where I’d had this conversation before. With Sasha and the picture frame. Just switch a few euphemisms and vague allusions. Damn us all for our false and dangerous tact. “You’re talking about sexy books?”
She flushed. “Never intended for the eyes of an English teacher!”
“But I—”
“The fact is, Oliver didn’t—doesn’t think they’re wrong.”
“Honestly, Mrs. Thornton, I—”
“Please. I would never have admitted to it, never have come here today, but I was afraid you’d decide to ask Patsy and Ardis after all, and then they’d know, too. Patsy’s mother, God love her, has a mouth.”
“But—”
“I beg you to destroy them. And keep my secret. Don’t tell anybody. I am—we are—at your mercy, dearest.”
“Listen, I’m not Miss Letterbelt.” Maybe we needed an antidefamation league for English teachers. “Mrs. Thornton, can you keep a secret?”
“Dear child, isn’t it painfully obvious that I can, and have?”
“I took
Fanny
Hill
and
My Secret Life
home with me. Your copies. And I’m enjoying them a great deal.” That wasn’t completely true. I hadn’t yet retrieved my cache from backstage, but she needed all I could give her. There were forms of abuse other than spousal, and Miss Letterbelt had been expert at one of them.
Only then, when they doubled in size, did I notice that Martha’s eyes were aquamarine. “Can you keep another secret?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I didn’t give all of them away.” And then she giggled.
“Here’s a plan,” I said. “Whenever you’re not reading them, put them in a box labeled ‘Confiscated material. Please save for Sunday School report.’ Then, you don’t have to worry if your grandchildren ever do find them.”
“That’s what you do, eh?”
“That’s what awful Miss Letterbelt did, too. All those prudes—think about it. Was it absolutely necessary for her to read all the way through something that disgusted her? Couldn’t a reasonably intelligent person tell by page ten? And in the bathtub, of all places!”
Recognition blossomed on Martha’s face. “Miss Letterbelt?” she whispered with amazement. Sixty years old at the least, and still convinced English teachers were born without sex organs. She giggled so hard, white-silver ringlets bounced on her head. “Well, well,” she said. “So that’s that. And now, no more of your search for the, um,
diaries.
”
Her smile brought out her dimples. “Dear heart, what is it?” she asked. “You suddenly look so unhappy!”
“You don’t understand. I really was looking for a woman who left a message in a book. She underlined passages and wrote notes. A woman afraid that her husband was going to kill her.”
“And you thought it was me? That Oliver would, or could…? Why on earth?”
“The book was in that carton. The one meant for Main Line Charities. The one you dropped off at my sister’s house.”
“But I didn’t, dearest. That part was true. I was a collection point. I picked up donations from Patsy and Ardis—actually, Ardis left hers at Patsy’s house—but I didn’t take them anywhere.”
I reached across and put my hand on hers. “Please,” I said. “Who did?”
“Who picked them up?” She wrinkled her brow. “My memory isn’t so…we joke and say that’s why we have to read those sexy books.” Then she brightened. “Oh! I remember. But it’s too silly, because Lydia Teller wouldn’t deface a book. And beyond that, of course, she’s not in any danger. It’s too ridiculous to mention.”
“Why did she pick it up from you?” I needed to make sure Lydia Teller wasn’t another false lead, another single step in Main Line Charities’ endless chain of volunteers.
“She was area captain. The Learning Centers have a large van, and it’s easier on the person whose garage we’re using, like your sister, if only one drop-off is made, not dozens.”
“Let me get this clear. Nobody except Lydia was involved with that carton between your house and my sister’s house. Am I right?”
Martha hardened, moved behind a gloss of proper matronhood. “It isn’t Lydia you’re seeking, the poor woman. Sickly, you know, and absolutely adored. I’ve seen how tender and caring that man is toward her. He sends her flowers, beautiful gifts for no reason. He protects her, is with her constantly. Comes home for every meal, they say. They’re members of our church. Good people. The best. I’ve seen how it is with my own eyes.”
No. She’d seen how it was with the public’s eye. Lydia Teller had let me see how it really was. Let Martha think Wynn gifted his wife for no reason. His wife had shown me his reasons.
It made sense. The little I had so far all fit. “Please don’t think I’m nosy, or out of line,” I said, “but has Lydia ever gotten help for…emotional problems?”
“And what if she has? Do you know about that son of hers? A slap in the face to his father, if you ask me. I mean here’s Wynn, saying any child can succeed, and Hugh goes out of his way to prove he won’t. He’s Lydia’s emotional problems, far as I’m concerned. And she’d already had enough trouble in her life. Both parents dying in that crash, no family. Things pile up. Really, Miss Pepper, I thought prejudice about psychiatric help was over. You aren’t going to upset her with this lunacy, are you? I’ll be sorry I ever talked to you if that’s the case.”
“The last thing on earth I want to do is add to her problems.”
“Good.”
“Where does she live?”
Martha’s aquamarine eyes turned arctic. “You can’t think I’d help you do something cruel like that.”
“I think she’s in trouble.”
She shook her head and opened her wallet.
“No,” I said. “My treat.”
And that was that, once again. Martha left, but I sat a while longer. I pushed the untouched sandwich out of sight, because I was sick to my stomach.
I thought of pudgy Hugh Teller and what horror he must have lived through. The faraway boarding school became comprehensible as protection. She’d underlined the part about hurting the children. The child.
His problems and acting-out. The
slap in the face to his father,
as Martha had put it, was less metaphorical than she suspected, and very understandable.
But, oh, I felt ill. I liked theoretical villains. Categories, types, behavior patterns, not a man who’d charmed me. I’d liked him, been attracted to him. Given other circumstances, he was a man I would have dated.
Then it could have happened to me. I was no smarter, no more magically protected from becoming a victim or recognizing danger than the terrified woman in the book.
I wanted out. Everybody was right. I was an English teacher, not a lawman. If I hadn’t, by chance, opened a book two days ago, I’d have no idea this was going on, and my main concern would be getting kids to use semicolons. A potential murder was none of my business, and I was involved only by happenstance.
Why me?
And then I wondered how often and for how many years Lydia Teller had asked herself that same question.
Nine
TODAY, THEN, I WAS GOING TO FIND HER. THE ANTICIPATION NEARLY paralyzed me. I took deep breaths and thought of the underliner. I could at least be as brave as she was, couldn’t I?
It was still afternoon. Wynn Teller would not likely be home. Lydia might well be. Which meant it was time to turn my words into action, even though my limbs felt heavy as sandbags.
I went to the back of the deli where the rest rooms and telephones were. I intended to use both, but couldn’t. No W. or L. Teller listed. Of course not. How could I have believed it would be that easy, ever?
I had no dimes, so I deposited a quarter and a computerized voice informed me that I had a five cent credit with the phone company. They failed to tell me how to collect it.
“Beth, I need Lydia Teller’s address,” I said after minimal pleasantries.
“Why on earth?”
“She’s the lady in the book.”
“What book?” Beth asked. Then she answered herself. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s ridiculous! Laughable, if you weren’t so grim about it.”
On and on she went. She didn’t get to speak to adults often enough during daylight hours. I wondered if the phone company would remember my credit and allow me an extra five cents’ worth of sisterly monologue.
“If you knew the Tellers, you’d know they aren’t that sort at all!” she said.
“There is no
sort
!”
Now that my stereotypes had been thoroughly disabused, I could be high and mighty about the less informed.
“Well, whatever sort they don’t have to be, they aren’t!” Beth’s grammar was confusing, but her message wasn’t. “They’re famous for their perfect marriage. I mean really, Mandy—first you thought I was the one, then Martha, now Lydia. You have a serious problem.” I hadn’t paid much attention to her wise older sister routine since I was twelve, when Beth at least had interesting facts of life to demystify.