Marry or Burn (16 page)

The nurses told everyone standing around that it happened
now and again, a dead faint like that. Her father had seen it in a medical setting but Michele had never seen a faint. She had never known anyone who even said they had fainted. It was not an act of the time.

 

MICHELE GAVE UP the baby because of the time she was living in and because the boy she loved believed it was the right thing to do. He was powerful in argument. His disease had confined him for more than a year, and made him the boy he would be when he got up again: unbending, peremptory, greedy for every satisfaction of his will. To her on the other hand the polio explained everything, gave his bare leg in the back seat of the car, almost undetectably thinner than the other, a paleness that hurt her, his angry voice an echo of supplication.

She never forgot the absorbent force in this boy, shocking her with its drag, the
wick
—that was what it was—that had transferred her to him. If she were to see him again, it would still be there, she knew, if she saw him on some street ahead of her with his limp, or in a crowd, as she persistently imagined she would, out of which one of them would follow the other into a dark room—a room briefly illuminated and then lowered like a bucket into a well—and shut the door, and feel for a bed or lean back against a wall, and draw the weight of the other down.

Polio was a neurological disease but as far as she could see it had not affected his nervous system, which was tuned high, to gradations of pleasure not familiar to very many men she was to meet, men twice his age, and to pleasure given as well as taken, pleasure that seemed to have to do with the body her father had told her about, that was all dammed water.

How would this boy, for all his harsh charm, his casual domination of her and others, know what the right thing to do was?
How would he know what she should do? Why would she, so independent all her sixteen years, brought up to be, submit to his opinion?

You would have to be wiser than most of them were in high school, or for many years after that, to know what to do.

A year and a half after that, she was lying facedown on a beach in France. With her were a little group of hitchhikers who were translating for each other across her, one of them tracing letters on her steaming back. They were talking about their parents, the ways of parents in the various countries they came from. One of the French boys was already twenty, and the others teased him for calling his parents every week. Their packs were spread out on the hot sand all around them and one or two of them were rummaging for pictures.

Michele didn't have any. She had come away without finishing high school, carrying nothing that might hold her back. While they were talking on the beach she thought of her father's face, with the suntan oil on it defining all the wrinkles of the smile he had had, the day they were talking about her mother's past and he had said he was jealous.

She had not written to her parents in months. She had put them, too, out of her mind. She did not join the conversation; she had withdrawn herself. She was just beginning to see how she was going to have to labor to find the way back. This was the period she had been warned about, nearing the end of the first year after the birth, nearing the anniversary.

She was not even sure she was going to live. Sometimes at night in a hostel bathroom she would think she wanted to be annihilated, the way the birth had been. The baby existed; his birth did not. His birthdays would come; his birth would lie farther and farther behind him, unclaimed. And she who had never seen him, never been shown him: unclaimed.

It would have been impossible to open her mouth on this hot, anesthetic, foreign sand and tell what had happened, and no one pressed her. But she had begun to think about her parents. She thought,
My father is a man who cuts into people if they make a move to leave life. To capture them and bring them back into life
. Life was better than death.

He was no kin of the phantom father.

There must have been a picture of that man, the first husband, Alonzo, and she must have seen it, to give her the vivid idea she had of him. Turning over to get the sun on her face, and then letting the others pull her up by the arms so she could smear more cocoa butter on her thighs, she saw with a detached, sad approval how dark and taut the months of backpacking in shorts had made her skin. It had taken on a textured sheen like tent nylon.

She wondered, scratching white lines on it with her nails, why she had no idea of the other one, the lover, the one who had come into her mother's young life and then defected, like a driver swerving out of the way of a crash he had caused: the one who so suddenly, shockingly,
ordinarily
, after setting off the chain of events that was to color her mother's life, had
gotten married
. And yet that man was nothing but the precursor of her father, probably even like her father in some way. Probably in reality she was, herself, more like those two who went on living than like the phantom father. Ordinary. Likely, after all, simply to marry and have children as her mother had done, and as her son would do—she bore down on herself to imagine it—her son, a child just now setting his foot down on the ground somewhere and taking a step. If that was when babies walked. Didn't they walk when they were a year old? And then they fell down, they got up, they went to school, they went to high school; they fell in love
and nothing mattered that had come before. That was what they thought, as they married and had children of their own. As he would do in his time, her son, having no conscious idea that somewhere in him were the boy's limp, the girl's ardor, the grandmother's body falling to the hospital floor.

A
T THE TOP of the terrace steps Avery Mayhew rose into view. No one in sight to stop him from wheeling his chair off the edge. Perhaps the aides indoors, in their flowered smocks with cigarettes in the pocket, wanted him to.

Or perhaps, more generously, because in the slowness of their walk they seemed in some undeliberate way generous, they wanted him to have the choice. All of the aides were immigrants, from countries with little idea of places like this, Jane imagined, and that was why they would pass her with the look, light as a brushstroke, that said something was wrong—not here inside the building but outside it, where she came from.

Mayhew never remembered her. He did retain a vestigial politeness towards women; strapped in with a mesh harness, he made an effort to sit up as she climbed the steps.

On her first visit, just after he had been moved to Calling Creek, Fana, one of the Eritrean aides, had shown her how he backed the wheelchair into his room when the meal trolleys had to pass, instead of sticking out of the doorway where they all liked to sit, claiming part of the hall as a kind of porch. Never mind spit, harness, diaper, Mayhew was established as having
manners. Fana rewarded him with a spot in the shade between two boxes of geraniums, at the other end of the terrace from the water bowl set out for therapy dogs.

The aides had unfriendly words in their own soft languages for these animals. “It is not clean,” Fana said. “But he like-es the dogs. Monday and Thursday they will bring them, they will take them in-to the bet-rooms.” Jane liked to hear her
T
's, they were so delicate, so refraining; they held a suggestion that everything would lie lightly upon one, never pierce.

While her husband Avery was in the hospital near death, one article said, Mrs. Mayhew had taken his dog to the vet and had her put to sleep. She told the reporter who knocked, “The dog was old and she was sick. And don't let me see you on this porch again.”

“Hello, Avery,” Jane said. “I'm back. Yes, it's me. I'm back. I'm glad to see you.”

Without gladness, his blue eyes saw her. The rims and whites were angrily inflamed. “He rubs his ey-yes,” said Fana, crossing the terrace with a Dixie cup and a pill. “You do that don't you, Mr. Mayhew?” She put a lament into the name.

He was dressed in a blue plaid shirt with a terrycloth bib; his feet were in what looked like women's slippers lined with bunny fur. “Comfees, we have put,” said Fana, indicating the slippers. She turned her face to speak out of the side of her mouth like a comic. “On the heel. Bet-so.” Bedsore.

“Oh, no,” Jane said. She quickly clamped her teeth, which often chattered when she first saw Mayhew or heard physical details offered about him. Who did Fana think she might be? Not the wife. The wife, Doris Mayhew, had never come, after the state removed him from her care. The removal was Jane's doing. Why had she involved herself? For her niece. Because her niece Tara begged her to. Now she had her brother's sad warning
that this particular caprice was one he found it hard to excuse, when everyone else was rebuilding, after seven years, had rebuilt. Rebuilt what? She bent towards Mayhew. “Today, I came without my paints. But next time.”

He heard her with the dull look of an old horse. She was several years his senior, but she wore high-heeled sandals and a toe ring, the gift of a man, her lover Karel—or Karel who had once been her lover—while Mayhew wore slippers, a bib, and on his wrist a Wanderer's Alarm. Mr. Mayhew, the history teacher. Seven years ago her niece Tara had been one of his students.

Then for more than five years he had lived in a chicken coop. There was legal proof of that. Days after the accident—still called that, in town—the Mayhew family had disappeared. It was as if they had never lived on a named street in town; never attended the Methodist church; never passed, the sons, through the gauntlet on the steps of the school where their father had taught. Doris Mayhew must have made a trip back to get him, because the hospital, which was in the next county, had a record of his release to her. It was not as if anyone had been visiting him to notice. Of course a wife can sign out a husband.

Then it took a long time for word of them to reach town, and longer for any sense to be made of it. She had bought herself a piece of scrubland, it was said, down near the Tennessee border where her people were originally from. Gone on teaching the fifth grade. How could she retire? Mothers recalled how you could hear a pin drop in Doris Mayhew's classroom. Not to excuse him.

“I redid the whole place,” she was reported to have said, holding the door of the chicken coop for the girl from the Health Department. A toilet, a tin shower with a chair. Doris Mayhew lifting, soaping: Jane tried not to imagine it. If anyone washed the man. Maybe the sons, while they were still at home. Maybe
the sons rebuilt the chicken coop. And had they had any say, when the dog was put down? Boys who had gone to school with Tara, one of them in her class, enduring World History with his father at the blackboard and the girls listening with their heads back, their eyes half closed or sliding sideways at each other, as girls' eyes always had, in his father's class. The girls raising their hands, teasing for his father's notice. The son must have figured he could get through that, his father's following. His brother had. He must have thought that was the thing that would be asked of him that year.

“When you will paint,” said Fana, “I will watch.” She lowered her voice but kept it loud enough for him to hear. “It is good you will paint Mr. Mayhew because he is hand-some.” The metal chair she was dragging gave a screech on the flagstones. “For you.” At the other end several women came out in floppy gardening hats and walked on their own to chairs in the sun.

The Residence at Calling Creek stood over its built-on wing of red brick like a cow with a calf not her own. It had been a farmhouse, one of the big old fieldstone places parting with their fenced hills one by one. The old porch had given way to an open terrace, and the double-hung windows had been replaced and stripped of their black shutters; with a gaze like someone missing her glasses the stone face of the building looked out over the circle drive and the parking lot. In the yard was a buggy, shafts in the grass, left over from the period when the place had been an antique store. Beyond the parking lot was a small field, leased to somebody now to finish his Herefords. Thick with clover, it sloped in its square of board fence down to bulldozers and the close-ranked new roofs of Calling Creek Acres. The creek itself was nowhere to be seen; it ran under the tangles of Virginia creeper somewhere at the back of the original farm.

Her brother Dewey said, “I'm not sure why you're going down there at all. And you're taking your paints? I can't altogether see why you feel you need to do that.”

“Not need, want. I just want to paint a couple of things.”

“Like the buggy?” he said, aggrieved but optimistic.

“No, not that.” Could he ever have looked at her paintings, and think she would paint a buggy?

The next minute he said, “Anymore, you don't ride hardly at all.” He lapsed into his country lawyer talk when he had a point to make.