The Solace of Leaving Early (11 page)

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable estate, instituted of God, signifying the mystical union between Christ and His Church . . .” Amos began, feeling sweat break out over his upper lip. He glanced over at the windows (they were open) and then up at the ceiling fans (they were on). The church was unbearably hot.

*

He began to behave with increasing desperation: talking to her all night, waking her up if she dozed off. He began letting the children sleep in their bed, something he’d never let them do before, claiming their presence would erode the intimacy of marriage, and those were the only nights Alice got any sleep, with her arms wrapped around one of the girls, the other tucked up against Jack. They were all legs then, the girls, and the bed wasn’t nearly big enough. And twice he locked Alice in the house with the new deadbolt he’d applied to the outside of the front door, so she couldn’t attend one of her own openings in a gallery two hours away, convinced she’d opened her own checking account with the money from the pieces she’d sold, convinced she was having an affair with the director of the county arts council.

*

“. . . which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and with the first miracle at the wedding of Cana in Galilee, and is commended of Saint Paul to be honorable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” Amos was openly perspiring, and tried to pull his handkerchief out of his pocket without making a scene. His glasses seemed to be fogged, and were slipping down his nose, and if he didn’t do something soon his whole face would melt and he’d have to just excuse himself and give up.

*

And was it five months ago? or was it only four? that Alice showed up at Amos’s house in the middle of the night, pounding on the door and begging for his help? He barely recognized her: she was in just her pajamas (flannel, blue, with white clouds), barefoot. Saying Jack had put the girls to bed, and then asked Alice to sit outside with him (and it was cold outside—was it January, December?) and he wouldn’t let her take a coat, there was no time, and she didn’t even put her shoes on, and they’d stepped outside and Alice sat down on the swing but Jack stood above her and said that he wanted her to think about what life would be like without him and the girls, the howling wasteland of the world when they were not together, he wanted her to think about it very carefully, and with that knowledge they could go forward and live the rest of their lives happily, knowing the tragedy they’d avoided, the longing and the emptiness and the meaninglessness, the
cold
. Then he’d walked in the back door and closed it, and Alice found herself locked out, rather than in, and her children in there with him. She’d used the emergency key she kept in her wheel well and driven straight to him, straight to Amos; he could see she was terrified (and freezing), and after he’d given her a pair of socks and wrapped her in a blanket and asked if she wanted him to call the police and she’d said yes, he turned to her and said the thing he said. And standing there now, in the sight of God and in the face of this company, why had he really said it? He was worried about her and about her children and even about Jack, but wasn’t there, if he looked deeply and honestly into his own heart, something else? Wasn’t there her collarbone to consider, visible when the neck of her pajama top shifted, wasn’t there a plain girl inside who had never had power and wouldn’t dream of misusing it? Hadn’t she cut off her own hair to make a little cup, and didn’t he feel sort of like that detective, the one who worked tirelessly to save the innocent and allow righteousness to prevail? They were standing at the bottom of the staircase, the walnut staircase with the shining rail, under a small, hanging light in a pewter fixture, and he’d taken her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye and said,
“You must take your children, and leave him.”

*

“Into this holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him speak now, or forever hold his peace.” Amos wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and waited to see if anyone would stand. Joannie’s mother was weeping into a battered tissue; Jim’s parents were staring stoically at the lilies on the altar. Amos saw Walt and AnnaLee Braverman in the middle of the church, and someone sitting beside Walt—was that Langston? staring at Amos with a furious concentration. Her whole body seemed coiled, about to spring. For one dreadful, thrilling moment Amos believed Langston would interrupt the ceremony, would actually, for the first time in his professional life, proclaim a reason that two people should not be married. But she didn’t rise.

“If there are no impediments, who gives this woman in marriage to this man?”

“Her mother and I,” Ed said, his voice cracking, then leaned over and kissed Joannie on the cheek before turning to sit down with Sue. But Joannie wouldn’t let him go, she clung to her father too long and Amos felt his eyes start to burn with tears, how wretched this suddenly seemed, that Ed should be losing his daughter this way, to a stupid, truck-driving, country-music-loving, football-playing idiot like Jim Cross. An
animal
. She was someone’s
daughter
. Amos felt his stomach flip over once, just a warning of imminent danger, but not the disaster itself.

*

They moved to a small, rented house outside Haddington, toward the bigger town of Jonah. Beulah had helped Alice pay the rent until she was on her feet, and had helped with the girls, because by then Jack had started calling Alice every hour and sending her three or four letters every day, and showing up outside at odd hours. And she had done everything she could, no one could argue with that,
the full extent of the law
was how one of the deputies had described it to Amos.

Amos knew what the letters said because he’d gotten them, too, almost fifty of them. They were in a file folder in his study at home marked “Baker-Maloney.” In it were the notes from his counseling sessions, three postcards of Alice’s baskets, a log of their appointments, photocopies of letters Amos wrote to the county sheriff, and the letters Jack had written Amos.

It is God’s dearest wish that our family be together on earth as we will be together in heaven. I am so depressed I can’t think. The doctor has increased the dosage of my medicine to
75
mg a day and I am shaking all the time. Something terrible is going to happen. Alice has cut her hair again and is wearing a new pair of pants, green corduroy, and I am sure these two things are designed to attract men. She will have men in the house with my children. If she doesn’t come home to me we are all damned the evidence clearly states that children can recover from the death of a parent easier than from a divorce.

*

“Will you, Jim, take this woman to be your wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep only unto her as long as you both shall live?” Amos’s palms were slick with sweat; he fumbled with his Bible, caught it just in time.

*

At the end of the full extent of the law, Alice bought a handgun, legal, authorized, having endured the requisite waiting period and background check, a used Colt .
45
semiautomatic, the sort of gun that would cause a grown man to panic and run. She practiced with the gun at a shooting range in Hopwood. Amos couldn’t help but marvel at Alice, here, in this part of the story. How she brought the gun home and explained to her children that it was profoundly dangerous, and she couldn’t hide it, she needed to keep it close, and how they never touched it, but knew it was there. How Alice sent only one reply to the two hundred or so letters she received from Jack: “If you come near me, or near my children, I’ll kill you, and
then
you’ll know something about tragedy.
Then
we can test your theory about whether children recover faster from death than from divorce.”

*

“I will,” Jim said, without any discernible conviction, but nervously, as if he’d suddenly realized where he was.

“And will you, Joannie, take this man to be your wedded husband?”

*

She had just picked the girls up from school, the girls were carrying bags with the costumes from a little Renaissance drama they’d been in at school, Alice had made the costumes, and they’d walked in the front door and let the screen close, and no one closed and locked the storm door, she wasn’t barricaded in there, it wasn’t a fortress, after all.

*

“Repeat after me.”

*

Alice had seen him drive up, and get out of the truck, walking with a terrifying purpose, Amos imagined, although all he could do was imagine. He knew she picked up the phone and dialed
911
, then said to the dispatcher, “This is Alice Baker-Maloney, I live at
1411
Pettigrew Road, and I believe my husband is going to try to harm me.” Then she lay the phone down on the table so the dispatcher could hear what happened.

*

“Repeat after me.”

*

He was going to kill the children, kill Alice, and then himself, or so said the note he left, but by the time he burst through the front door, his own gun already raised (a
9
mm, borrowed from a man who worked for him at the dairy), Alice was standing between him and the children. (You could hear the children on the
911
tape, the sheriff’s deputy said to Amos later.) Things happened very quickly after that.

*

“Bless O Lord this ring, that he who gives it and she who wears it may abide in thy peace, and continue in thy favor, until their life’s end.”

*

Robbie Ballenger, the local funeral director and county coroner, had spent an hour with Amos at the funeral home, patiently explaining to him what had happened, the sequence of events, all of which were visible at the scene and validated by the taped phone call, and by the witnesses. Witnesses? Amos asked, stunned. The children, Robbie meant.

*

“Forasmuch as Joannie and Jim have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and theretofore have given and pledged their faithfulness, each to the other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving a ring and by joining hands, I pronounce that they are Husband and Wife. Welcome them, please.”

*

Without a word, Jack raised his gun and shot Alice twice, once in the neck (just grazed her, that one), and once low in the left shoulder, and Alice raised her gun and fired it only once. “Hit him right between the eyes, Amos,” Robbie had said, shocked. Amos had nodded, “She had a steady hand.” By the time the police arrived, the children were standing in the front yard, wailing and pointing at the house, and it was all over.

*

“Congratulations, you two,” Amos said, shaking Jim’s hand and kissing Joannie on the cheek. “Best of luck to you,” he said, and he meant it, he meant it.

 

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

JOHN DONNE

Chapter 10

AT THE CORNER OF
PLUM AND CHIMNEY

Her mother told her she didn’t have to stay for the cake-and-punch reception, for which Langston was greatly appreciative. She stood and slipped out of the church before the receiving line formed, and as she walked down the street toward home she tried to figure out what had happened.

There had been a woman at the wedding and Langston had seen her first, Miss Grogan, who used to be the secretary at the high school; re-tired now. Langston hadn’t thought of Miss Grogan for years, but recognized her right away, and when Miss Grogan saw Langston she tried to stand up and hug her, but she was a large woman and none too steady on her feet. After she’d pulled herself up (holding on to the pew in front of her), she took a moment to tug on the hem of her fuchsia blouse, a delicate gesture that aligned the shoulder pads and made her appear better ordered. There was something in the scene, the struggle to stand, the automatic straightening of the hem, which caused Langston pain, and frightened her, as well. She saw something in it, a terrible thing, akin to how Nan Braverman, God rest her soul, used to eat her dinner. At the end of her life, Langston’s parents took every meal to Nan, and Langston was sometimes forced to help feed her; Langston’s consistent pleas that her sensibilities were being violated fell on deaf ears, AnnaLee’s argument being that if Nan could manage to die, Langston could probably afford to watch.

Langston hugged Miss Grogan and asked her how she was enjoying her retirement. She said she was looking forward to a trip to the Holy Lands with her church. Langston patted her on the hand, remembering Nan sitting at her round, gray Formica table, how AnnaLee used to move around the kitchen, putting soup in a bowl, cutting bread into bite-size pieces, pouring a glass of prune juice, and all the while Nan sat without moving. Her patience was a horror. She was just sitting, waiting for AnnaLee to put her food on the table, waiting for Langston to begin spooning it into her mouth. And Nan wasn’t dead yet, she wasn’t without feeling; something quick moved yet in her eyes. What was it? What connected that posture of her grandmother, the childlike faith that the necessary thing would arrive and move her into another day, with Miss Grogan’s agonized rising?

And then Amos Townsend walked out, and Langston had to admit to being taken aback by his appearance. For one thing, he was far more graceful and old-world than she thought the first time she saw him (although Ichabod Crane was
barely
American), going gray at the temples and wearing very stylish eyeglasses. His fingers looked as if they had been carved by a puppet-maker, and he wore a spring tan. AnnaLee reported that he gardened. But mostly he looked stricken, haunted by something, and Langston wondered what. What was causing him to suffer so? And then when the service began it appeared he might faint or otherwise revolt, and she studied him very carefully, trying to discern some clue from the ceremony itself, but of course, it was just the standard fare, nothing of his or anyone else’s condition in it. By the time the poor couple were actually joined in holy wedlock, Langston was afraid for the minister, who was pale and perspiring and once almost dropped his Bible.

As she was leaving the church she glanced one last time at Miss Grogan. It was something simple, probably. She and Nan were both perfectly familiar with the limitations of their bodies, both beyond the point of hoping for a certain kind of change. Langston couldn’t see it all, sitting there in the wedding, and she couldn’t have said it, but she knew for just a moment that there are so many ways to go—an infinite number of ways to go as we spiral out from our genesis. Some fight against any measure of grace, and some decide to sit very still at the table and linger. Some stand right inside their impossible weight, tug at the edge of a blouse. Fuchsia. However did people manage?

*

Before she left graduate school, Langston had embarked on three projects, all of them intricate and time-consuming. She had written every day, sometimes for six-hour stretches; most of that work was rejected upon rereading, inasmuch as she considered herself a person of exacting standards. She had tried (with little fruit) to keep up the practice after she moved back home to Haddington.

For many years Langston was a student of literature who was secretly attracted to philosophy and religion, but she always believed she would finish her Ph.D. and become a university professor in an English department. The life was deeply attractive to her, for a variety of reasons, and she could easily picture herself taking a tenure-track position at a small, affluent liberal arts college and staying there until she retired. Germane and she would live quietly in a small cottage at the edge of campus, where she would tend to her lovely English-style garden (the details here were foggy, since gardening wasn’t so much in her nature) and write her scholarly books on the American Romantic period. Her students and a few well-chosen colleagues would come a few times a week for tea. Perhaps the college would be somewhere in New York state, or in New England, thus allowing her to spend some weekends in the city, pursuing cultural objectives and occasionally indulging herself in a . . .

There was no use considering it now. She had closed that particular door, and so would have to make her way in the world in some other fashion. She felt, again, that odd creeping grief come over her when she considered that she had given up the life she had planned; she saw, as if from a great distance, the flowers in the garden at the back of her cottage, the front door with its brass mail slot (which made the house appear to be smiling), the vines around the windows with their many panes of glass. And what was this? She seemed to be endowing the scene with some stolen light, so clear to her was every lost aspect. Through the kitchen window she could see peppers drying on a string, a bouquet of flowers hung upside down on a nail, and something else. A small blue bottle, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand (if she had been able to touch it). A cork was broken off deep in the neck of the bottle, as if someone tried first to pull it out, and then to push it all the way in. There was an image embossed on the side of the bottle: a goat, or a horse with a wreath of flowers around his neck. Langston remembered, or thought she remembered, what the bottle had once contained: medicine. A sticky-sweet cure for—

She came to her senses with a slight jump. Where had she been?
And where was that house?
Her heart was pounding, and she noticed, for the first time, that Germane was chewing obsessively on one of his paws.

“Stop that,” she said, a bit harshly, hurting his feelings. Only a dog could drag a person so mercilessly back into the present. She rubbed his ears, assuaging him. It was hot in the attic, and a storm seemed to be gathering in the west.

*

The only fate left to her was writing. She had thought at first that she would do something very edgy, risky. She’d imagined some postmodern/noir/urban setting in which the fate of the characters (and the revelation of the metaphorical intent on the author’s part) developed through an accident, a slip of the tongue, a wrong number, something like that. A typographical error. A failure to listen. The book would take place almost entirely in basements, subways, and dark rooms. The fact that she’d never lived in a city might have been considered a limitation, but she had great faith in Henry James’s position:
a writer is a person on whom nothing is lost.
She would simply combine what she knew about “the city” (the city of the psyche, that is) with images she had gathered over the years from other novels, and from movies.

That novel (working title:
Tunnel
) began promisingly enough, Langston thought. Our protagonist, who is without either a name or a gender, is riding the subway from one end of the city to the other. He/she is minding his/her own business, when a homeless man (definitely a man) approaches the—let’s just call him/her The Protagonist—and says: “I have a message for you.” The Protagonist is sublimely disinterested in the machinations of the plot; in fact, The Protagonist will do everything in his/her power to thwart the plot, in a postmodern fashion. The Protagonist neither answers nor fails to answer, but spends quite a long time considering the attire of the homeless person, some of which seems genuine and some of which lacks verisimilitude. The “homeless” man, less confident now, says, “Aren’t you the one? Did you see the V of geese this morning?” (Are there geese in the city? Langston felt certain there were.) The Protagonist says nothing, but reaches in his/her pocket and pulls out a deck of cards, extracts the jack of diamonds, and reveals it to the “bum,” which causes him to back away from The Protagonist in a state of great fear and respect.

That was as far as she’d gotten on
Tunnel
before she lost interest in it. Even though it was clearly headed in the right direction, she couldn’t seem to work up any excitement over it. Some essential heart was lacking in the postmodern novel of the subway.

Since she couldn’t be an academic, she’d decided to continue working on the academic novel she’d begun in Bloomington, and to that end had been compiling descriptions of English Department Types. So far she had no plot, setting, or conflict, but she did have sixty pages of character description she was sure would stand her in good stead when she entered the actual writing of the book. Today she was considering three types:

1
.
The Sage
. The Sage is almost always a man of great maturity and academic rank, a man who saw himself from an early age as possessed of a certain tender erudition that needed to be shared with the young. His ambition is so subtle as to appear nonexistent, and so he has seemingly floated into his full-professorship without incurring the disdain of any campus radicals or poets. He is soft-spoken; does not hold with punitive grading; sometimes breaks into song during a lecture on the American folk tradition. The Sage has a predilection for the Good Life, and so is a lover of red wine, Italian opera, old maps, and European travel. The Sage is an elusive creature, and is rarely present for office hours. Over the course of his career he will perfect the syllabi in the four or five courses he will be asked to teach in the fifteen years approaching retirement, and he will deliver the memorized lectures again and again, as if extemporizing, never picking up a text, but quoting it at length. (Indeed, The Sage often stops reading altogether somewhere in his late forties.) His students will find themselves agog at the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Many dewy-eyed young women will approach him after class, all to be turned away kindly. The Sage is no predator, although he may have many wives. He is after, if Langston may be so crass, a certain level of income in a woman, enough to supplement his salary (including merit pay, honoraria, the occasional fellowship, etc.) all toward the goal of allowing him to
cease teaching altogether
. The perfect life for The Sage is one in which he is known and honored as a Professor; paid as a Professor, but not required to Profess. He wants to write, he wants to paint, he wants to build a harpsichord. His wife (first, second, third—no matter) briefly takes up yoga in a serious way, or photography, or puppeteering. Their love is deeply civilized. Perhaps they drag a communal rake through their Zen garden. The Sage (and his wife) can often be found either departing for or returning from Paris (wherever geographically the Paris-of-the-moment happens to be: Prague, Tuscany, Venice, etc.). The most common statement of The Sage (if he can ever be found), is, “I miss my students, of course, and our rigorous interaction, but my work is going well. The northern Italian landscape is more conducive to creativity than any other in the world.”

2
.
The Wasted Genius
. Usually a man, the Wasted Genius is (maybe) the most brilliant human being academia has ever encountered, but it’s impossible to say for certain. His poetry is written in cantos; his lexicon is entirely idiosyncratic; his wild-eyed lectures often include references to the most obscure elements of sixteen other disciplines. Stranded for vague historical reasons (all tragic) at a third-rate state institution, the WG usually takes up alcohol and drugs in copious amounts. He witnesses a murder in a darkened bar on the wrong side of town. Visiting poets try to match his wildness, his brokenhearted edginess, drink for drink, and end up blinded or in fistfights. By the end of his career (which is usually marked by the presence of a large-caliber handgun in or near a classroom) his lectures have become so cryptic that his followers must write down everything he says in order to remember the life-altering experience of hearing him the first time. He retires to a vast western state and is never heard from again, although there are many sightings of him, all apocryphal. The favored statement of the WG: “Why do the voices of the dragon tell us we must kill our families? Because we awaken unto death, the fire in the attic, the swamp in the basement. In the end, Macbeth is unable to sit in his own chair, at his own table—and that,
that
is what the dragon means. I’ll kill your family for you if you’re too chickenshit to do it yourself.”

3
.
The Grown-up Nerd
. The Grown-up Nerd can be either a man or a woman. If the GUN takes the male form, he can go one of two ways: He can become the purveyor of strange and arcane information, usually from seventeenth-century England, which he will toss about as if he were gossiping in the most clever way, and as if everyone finds inside humor about Jacobean theater funny. This man has the potential to paint his garage floor, and listens solely to the chants of Hildegard of Bingen, typically wearing an expression of abandon. He is deeply ecclesiastical and hierarchical, and makes for a grand administrator. The first type is harmless, and indeed, can be benevolent. The other male GUN is one of the most dangerous men in the department, because he is driven to use his newfound status to attain the attention (if not the affections) of all the people who might have ignored him in junior high and high school. He will collect the prettiest, smartest undergraduate women—those who are moved by insightful explications of Wittgenstein, for instance—eventually breaking their hearts, and will undermine in subtle ways all the undergraduate men, especially those who remind him of himself.