Pay the Piper (24 page)

Back then, nothing released her from her compassion for Hal. Mama wrote him she was selling family silver to send money to Connie for college. And despite her own monetary situation as a divorcée, she offered to dip into her inherited stocks and send Hal money, to give him money for Tina's camp, too. After all, soon he would be taking care of her forever, she had said.
When I think of you as a contemporary locked up there, I find it hard to swallow. I feel so much for you I don't know what to do. How in the name of God you got there is the damn thing. It makes me want to run amok sometimes, trying to save you from what has already happened to you
.

What single thing here had turned out to match her dreams for it? Laurel listened to the silence of the fields and had one answer: nothing.

And she had worried about money once she was alone; when she and Rick went to a movie, she was outraged when one cost three dollars apiece:
Easy Rider
; Rick was furious the South was portrayed in a bad light. He insisted he saw familiar sights along the highway. She had to tell him the movie was not even supposed to be set in Mississippi. He loved the South so, surely he was going to move with her, she had believed. Her mother cried all the time, more worried than Laurel about the situation. One weekend when Rick and William were gone, she went to the movies alone, but the line was too long to wait. Then she had written Hal about the strange sensation of wandering about Soundport by herself on a Saturday night. She wondered what women did who were by themselves all the time. The only low-down mean thing she could think to do was to buy a package of cigarettes. She had gone home to write Hal of her longings for him, and these were made worse by his constant anguishing over her:

I feel so strapped down in this place, Laurel. I want to be way deep inside you, and never come out. To put my mouth in your mouth, my tongue with yours, Oh, God, baby, I am torturing myself and can't stop. I love you, Laurel. I want to kiss your eyes, taste your breasts, love them with my fingers, my lips, my tongue, I want to be drowning in you all the time. I'm loving all the rest of you. I want to entwine my legs with yours, baby, to stroke them, to wrap you round with my arms. I want to put my face on your stomach. This is senseless writing but I'll be damned if I'm not being helped, sharing these longings with you. I may bathe you, soap you all over. My muscles are in knots. Jesus Christ, I need to get in bed somewhere, Laurel. Well, baby, if I can get that wound up sober, think how I'd be with a snootful of bourbon.

That letter sent her to Vicksburg. A turning point. Coming home from there, she had felt sorry for William, an emotion she had never expected to feel in her life. He called on their friends explaining he was staying in the house to hold the fort for Rick. William wrote people to make sure they were still friends, even her Uncle Tate and Aunt Allie. Don't be embarrassed if you see me in the lift line, he wrote mutual skiing buddies; we can still take a run together. At that time, the wife of one of his friends at work said her husband had been telling her for years about William and she wondered why Laurel had stayed married to him. And then she regretted having been a fool for putting up with what she knew was going on behind her back.

Rick's escapades had gone on, landing him in Juvenile Court. It was required he have his behavior assessed by a psychologist. She and William saw him also. The doctor reported Rick was impotent with rage because of the divorce. Privately, she told him her reasons for it. And he said William had stripped her of all confidence in herself as a woman. He thought the divorce was a good thing, that Rick could use distancing from his father. He was taken aback about her future. “Is this man kinder to you?” he asked. She had said, “Infinitely. And I love him.” “It's a good thing he likes women,” the doctor said. “Or he'd have shot his wife.”

For the first time, she handled situations. She went to see Rick's main teacher and counselor. In case he noticed any difference in Rick, he ought to know his parents were getting a divorce. She would never forget that man's absolutely startled look. “I've always thought of Rick as a boy always laughing,” he had said. “Suddenly, Rick has stopped laughing. And I wondered why.” That was a time, she thought, looking back, she wished she had not been able to steel her nerves as she had.

She considered then that Rick would go to college, grow up; she'd be left with William, who already had in mind leaving her for a younger woman, someday. Even if that was not true, she thought, she'd never have with him the sexual excitement she had with Hal. At that point, she had thought she did not want to look back on a life without it.

Booze! While living in the house during the divorce, William stuck notes to the refrigerator, and she went on taking care of him. Rick had said if she did not fix his dad's dinner, he would have to. She recalled the evening she left a potato out on a counter for William to bake himself, and she heard his roar as soon as he entered the house. Rick asked, even after so long a time, when she was going to stop sleeping in a separate bedroom. She had told him that was required by law when you were getting a divorce. “Then you ought to drop the divorce,” he had said. “Dad's trying to hold the family together.”

“Oh. Dad's making me the bad guy,” she had said.

“You are the bad guy,” Rick said.

Those months, instead of playing tennis, William began spending weekends alone in the den, watching sporting events: she could not help but sometimes want to go down and watch with him companionably, the way they had been in the marriage. She felt sorry then for what seemed suddenly William's misery, his solitude. But she stuck to her guns. She remained in her bedroom, where she remained at night when he came home. I'm caged, too, she had written Hal.

He had hated her feeling sorry for William. He's been too cruel to you in the past for you to be taken in now. I used to feel sorry for Sallie, but no more. The ones I feel sorry for are the souls they will continue to drag down and abuse, the way they did us.

William never dragged me down, Laurel thought.

Back on that dimly lit road to Swan, she wanted to say, Mama, I know just how much you hated unpacking your own trunk here. Barely had they moved to Matagorda when Daddy told Hal they were going back to Delton. “Mama couldn't adjust,” he said. “I almost hated her.” He was still in his Tom Sawyer period. “But you stayed?” Laurel said. “Mama realized she'd never have a house anywhere else like the one she had at Matagorda.” Laurel thought her mother-in-law should have returned to the Junior League, the Delton Art Academy, people like herself, and saved her soul.

Pris got herself out of the country by the time she was twelve: foxier than Mama. She told Laurel Pris came home from school all the time crying about how mean the teachers were to her; they were jealous of the MacDonalds back in those Depression years. They had sent Pris back to Delton to Miss Poindexter's to board. Afterward, she went away to camps, a distant boarding school, college, and then married. She had scarcely lived in the country again and yet was filled with criticisms about how Hal's wives had ignored Mama. “Well, she never shows her face up around here,” Laurel said. She had had to give up too quickly her dreams about being family with Pris. Pris had never been warm to any of Hal's wives and now was perhaps just tired of changing sisters-in-law. Laurel had turned to her once and knew to expect nothing from now on, still to her regret.

As soon as Hal came home, they went up to his parents' attic to retrieve his stored guns. Legally, he was not supposed to have them any longer, but typical Southern lawmen here told him to go on hunting, just not to make no show about it. Up in the attic here, she saw things Mama had discarded—a kiln, palettes and easels, antiques from when she'd tried to run a shop, little desks from when she'd tried to hold art classes for black children on Matagorda, her heart always in the right place—and a woman's whole life seemed stored away in the attic. Laurel feared for her own life in this place.

After William had been in the house for months, Hal started ranting about that, when supposedly he and Laurel were getting a divorce. He told her it was damned embarrassing for him in front of his family, and they could not understand what was going on. Instantly, she went to Mr. Cohen saying to stop his gentlemanly, leisurely divorce or she was getting the most disreputable lawyer in Fairfield County to have a messy one, using evidence Mr. Cohen so far had held back. Soon William moved to the city; she felt a kind of lonesomeness about his absence, after all her complaints. The night before the divorce, William stayed in the house again, not to have to commute out. She came downstairs in the morning to fix coffee. She looked at William sitting on the side of the bed in a bedroom off the kitchen. He looked out the window with his hands in his lap. He had the air of a small, wondering boy; she thought of his mother, who had never quite wanted to bother with him. And what were they doing that morning getting a divorce? She had thought, This is crazy. “William,” she had said, “I don't want to think I'm never going to see you again.” She embraced him and could recall now the familiarity of the tall, hard frame. William had said nothing. In this year and a half since, she had continued to wonder what William was thinking and why she did not ask him.

At the lawyer's bargaining table, she was told William wanted first refusal when she sold the house. Everyone knew her plan; Mr. Cohen had said it sounded like a bad novel. She agreed to the request and, glancing at William, saw his eyes filled with tears; they pleaded. She looked off miserably, thinking, It's too late. We should have shed our tears before now. She knew it was easier for her getting the divorce because she was going on to someone else. Her mother was waiting to be her witness. At the moment Laurel came up to her, the lawyers pushed open double doors into the courtroom, and she faced it. “Why do you have on that shade of lipstick?” her mother said, squinting up close. She wanted to scream at her. Didn't she understand what was happening in her life? She had stepped forward, her mother's voice close to her ear. “You could wear a shade so much more becoming,” she said. Laurel had never felt so alone in the universe.

Out on the courthouse steps again, she had blinked in sunlight: I'm divorced, she had thought. It's a very strange feeling. She was something of a pariah, and had felt odd about going home to Rick no longer married to his father. After they got into her car her mother closed the door. “Well, now you've ruined your life,” she said.

Laurel had wanted to hit her. She told her to get out of the car. Her mother refused. Not knowing anything else to do, she drove them on to Bloomingdale's as planned.
Hal, I shake all the time but I've gone ahead and done what I said I'd do, and knowing it means belonging to you eventually is what has made me able to do it at last
.

November sunlight in the orchard was like a silver cloth, without shine or luster. Daddy with his usual attendant expression waited for Mama: frail, aged beyond their years by what they could never have imagined, much less been expected to endure. She could not further burden them and cross the orchard tattling on Hal's return to his old patterns. Just then, with Mama's shadowy approach and Daddy's quiet, waiting manner, Laurel knew, with certainty, they had never said one thing to Hal about William living in the house.

Who was she to emulate here, Mama? Mama even tried Catholicism and, attending a Sodality of Mary meeting, viewing what were supposedly dried tears of the Virgin Mary, not understanding, she thought what was passed beneath her nose were mints, and she ate one. The stalwart, devout ladies screamed! The incident was retold these years later with laughter, but Mama had never lived it down. Back then, the rural South was considered missionary country; a bishop was sent down from the East to speak. Mama invited him to hold a service for the blacks on Matagorda in their own church. The farmhands were not at all impressed by the solemn mute ceremony, mumbo-jumbo and lighting of candles, or even by what seemed the costume the man wore. However, when the bishop showed them wood from the Holy Land that came from Christ's cross, there was a stir in the congregation that became a commotion. An elderly black man jumped up, crying, “You say that's wood from the cross my Savior died on? Hallelujah!' and that shout was taken up. Soon there was foot patting, hand clapping, a rollicking hymn from the pianist who'd only sat in boredom waiting, and they had a good Baptist service going shortly. The bishop lost his miter on the way down the aisle and never went back for it. So the story went. People looked around often for it on the head of some darky in the fields, but no one ever saw it. Mama kept trying to help the blacks. She was either an innovator or a damn fool, Laurel was told. When she sent round toilet seats for all the hands' outhouses, these ended up on the walls of their cabins as picture frames. Laurel supposed that one day Mama just gave up. When might that day come for her? Would she go on here measuring time by Rick's next appearance?

She had started going to doctors like Mama. A rash, a sinus headache. “Have you been around any pecan trees?' the sinus doctor asked. “I live in an orchard of five hundred of them.” Then he told her, “I believe you're allergic to pecan trees bearing.”

“Great,” Laurel said.

She casually met women at first when she and Hal might be shopping. “Do you play bridge?” they asked right off. She felt handicapped when she answered, “No.” Later she knew invitations might not have been forthcoming if she'd answered in the affirmative.

In an old portrait in the hallway, Hal peered down with a look of petulance or resentment, possibly a boy's at being captured in a green velveteen suit; but an old look by now, she thought. A lock of hair fell over his forehead in the picture, as one fell forward now in person. He wore his hair longer since prison. Often he blew the lock upward and smiled into the eyes of whatever women were present. The act made her heart jerk, it caused movement in her crotch. In her tennis shorts, she had what she considered to be a perpetual hard-on for Hal; it had been there from the beginning. He himself had written,
In the foyer of the administration building when I saw you, that was the moment it all started. Almost as if I had willed falling in love
. They had both been ripe for that happening. Often she had seen similar expensive portraits in fine houses in Delton she came latterly to know. She compared this one to the childhood picture of herself over her mother's bed in Connecticut, a tinted photographer's studio portrait.