The Talk-Funny Girl (31 page)

“I have pieces of it. There are people in these houses we’ve been walking past who have lives like that. Good people. What if God wants that for you?”

“There’s a lot of sins inside me. A lot of penances I should to make.”

“Do you really believe that, honey?”

“Inside me I do.”

“But what if it turned out you’d made all the penances you needed to, and God forgave you any sins that remained and wanted to give you a life like that?”

“It would make you afraid to think of,” I said. “You wouldn’t want ever to die.” I couldn’t look at her, because my aunt was raising shades in store windows that had things in there I believed I would never be able to own.

“What if your finding the stonework you love, and moving away from your parents, and leaving the pastor, and starting to read different kinds of books and dress differently, what if all that was God beginning to give you that other life? Asking you whether you wanted to have it or not? Have you ever thought of it that way?”

“Before now never.”

“Well, what if it was?”

We turned through the gate. Aunt Elaine stopped there with her hand on the pickets and looked at me. Her face was a nice, clean face, I thought, without any tricks under the skin. Just a mouth and a nose, just eyes on you, just a face that said, “Here I am. A bear sometimes. A mother who let go of her own child. A nice aunt. A person.”

“Then he could grab it away off you any minute.”

“He could, yes. But what if, at least for a number of years, he really wanted you to have a life like that, and didn’t take it away, and offered it to you as a gift, and gave you an opportunity to pass on some of the happiness of it to somebody else, maybe your own children, or your friends, or a husband? What if he was saying that if you worked hard you could keep it, at least for a while?”

“Then a lot of people would have it the wrong way about him,” I said. I could feel a balloon inflating inside me and it made me as afraid as anything that had happened in my life. In the world Aunt Elaine was describing I would have so much to lose.

“That’s right. A lot of people would. But a lot of other people
would have it right. I want you to start looking for those other people. Would you do that?”

“I could,” I said.

We went inside and I retreated to my room and quietly shut the door. I sat on the couch with the book on stained glass windows that I’d bought with my own money from the friendly boy at the bookstore. I tried to concentrate on the pictures and words, but my mind kept returning to the conversation with Aunt Elaine, and the feelings it had raised in me. I went out onto the porch and sat there, and tried to read the book where it was warm and sunny, but I couldn’t do it.

Twenty-five

S
ands called it “the Laney System,” the way we lifted stones up to the top courses of the walls with the ramp, wagon, and pulley. It made me happy to hear him say that. I was beginning to believe I had some real value to him, as a worker. And, as the worst of the fear lifted a little ways away from me, I was beginning to see—slowly and against strong waves of doubt—that he had some interest in me that went beyond the cathedral project. Sometimes I’d lift my eyes from the work and catch him looking at me, and he’d quickly try to pretend he hadn’t been. When he drove me into town at the end of the day and waited to see that I got safely onto the Watsonboro-bound bus, I had the sense that he might be a person who could protect me from my father, or Cary Patanauk, or Pastor Schect. I could feel that he enjoyed my company, enjoyed sitting across from me when he had dinner at Aunt Elaine’s. When he drove me to Watsonboro on those nights, he put music on his radio and said very little, but I was accustomed to that in people and preferred it to Aunt Elaine’s talk, which was pleasant enough, but, as the weeks went on, would veer in close to subjects I didn’t yet want to think about—my parents, my future. I felt a warmth in the middle of my body when I was with Sands, and I see now that it was something more than sexual.

Once in a while, even with the rails he’d attached to the upper part
of the ramp, and even with our adjustments to the system, the heavily loaded wagon would flip over the side. Depending on the way it fell, and the way the stones fell with it, the wagon could be slightly dented or completely ruined, so we bought a second, and then a third, to keep in the rectory basement as a spare. But even with those small failures the Laney System worked. Soon we’d reached the tops of the side walls and the front wall, and two of the small angular connecting walls, and we were putting together the arches above the windows—the most interesting job yet. By then it was time to make a trip to Vermont to talk with the man who was building the windows.

We went west from downtown and over the long bridge that crossed the Connecticut. Out the side window I studied the men fishing there to see if one of them might be my father. But they were unfamiliar men in jeans and baseball caps, standing close to each other and talking. My father would have been off alone at the rail with his cane propped conspicuously beside him, not acknowledging anyone else, just staring down into the water, willing a fish to take his hook and then jerking it up in the air with a violent motion. Even with the possibility of a legal threat from Aunt Elaine—who had, she told me, managed to permanently close down Pastor Schect’s church—it seemed strange and worrisome that, in two, three, and now almost four weeks, my father had never driven by the work site, or come and bothered me there. It didn’t make sense that he would have started a penance like that and not finished it, or that he’d passively accept the end of the income from my work with Sands. I wondered if he’d found an under-the-table job, or moved away, if Aunt Elaine had sent them money or a threatening letter, if Cary Patanauk had gone to the police after all and filed an assault charge, or if Sands was too frightening a figure for my father to face a second time. I wondered how my mother was feeling, well into her pregnancy, but I didn’t speak of those things with anyone.

We crossed the river and climbed into the hills on the Vermont side. The road there brought us through the hamlet of Hensonville, which had been in the news a few months earlier. As we were passing
through the tiny town center—a general store, a gas station, a pizza place—I thought of mentioning it to Sands. This is where the girl was coming home to, I wanted to say. Somewhere right along this road was where the police found her bike. But I held my silence, as if I believed that speaking about something so evil and horrible would invite it into my own life. I looked at the houses we passed, wondering if the girl had lived in one of them and what her parents thought about when they drove by the place where their daughter’s bicycle had been found. What they thought when they got into their bed and it was dark all around them, and the room where their daughter had slept was empty, night after night, morning after morning. One body had been found—the most recent disappearance—and there was a rumor that the police had clues from it and were close to arresting someone. I looked carefully through the newspaper that was delivered to my aunt’s house every afternoon but saw nothing beyond those few facts and letters to the editor from fearful citizens. Why, they wanted to know, after two years and what seemed to be five murders, had the police detained only one suspect—who turned out to have an alibi, at that. With all the state troopers in town, all the police overtime, why hadn’t the killer been caught? What tormented me more than anything was the question of whether or not I should go to the police and tell them about Pastor Schect. But, in our family, voluntarily going to the police had always been the near equivalent of spying for the Russians or defacing a statue of Christ—something done by traitors, sinners, or crazy people. And, in any case, what would I tell them? That the pastor had come to our house, one time, and I thought I’d seen something evil in his eyes? The same kind of thing I’d seen in Cary Patanauk’s eyes, the blaze of lust, a desperate hunger for a female body? No, where men like that were concerned, the best thing to do was avoid talking and thinking about them, keep them as far away from your mind as possible. Finding the kidnapper was a job for the states, for people like Sands’s friend.

Still, I was sometimes touched by a nibble of guilt.

The man who was making the cathedral windows carried a bush
of white hair on the sides of his head and had a kind of name I’d never heard before. There was something about him I immediately disliked. I was used to men we met—at the hardware store, at the lumberyard—staring at me in a certain way; it wasn’t the way of Pastor Schect and Patanauk, it wasn’t bad. But the window maker shook Sands’s hand and barely acknowledged me, as if I couldn’t be a true worker, just a girl. Being ignored like that, after all the work I’d been doing, lit a familiar fuse of insult in me. Dad Paul had been that way: I’d been invisible to him.

Close beside the man’s house stood a small log cabin that served as his workshop and was as tidy inside and out as the cab of Sands’s truck. The man was nearly finished with the first set of windows. He’d laid them out on a long workbench for Sands’s inspection. Four of the windows were rectangles with curved tops, seven feet by three, and one was a circle four feet across. Sands had told him not to put images of saints or Christ in them, and no words, but to make them so just the colors and shapes gave a feeling of peacefulness. When we opened the door and stepped in, there was sun pouring into the log cabin, and even though it wasn’t shining through the stained glass windows, it was falling on them, and I could see that the white-haired man had done his job. The windows showed curling vines and green leaves against a background of clouds, and the designs were lit by a light that was somehow mysterious. Looking at the colors and shapes, I even had the sense that the kindhearted God Aunt Elaine talked about might have sneaked in and touched the windows with a finger and then sneaked out again before there could be any trouble. I could see how much Sands liked them. He kept pushing his glasses up, glancing at me, walking back and forth in the shop so he could examine the windows from different angles. He stood still finally, ran his fingers along the lead solders, looked at the designs again the way he had looked at the paintings in the Boston museum, met my eyes.

He wrote the man a check and shook his hand enthusiastically, but I could see that he didn’t want to leave. He asked the man about the
delivery schedule, and how we were going to lift the windows into the spaces in the wall and hold them there, and how we were going to seal them to keep the rain and snow and cold out, and if it was better to put the roof on first or not. The man answered in short sentences, always smiling at Sands and ignoring me. I noticed that he seemed odd or different in a certain way, and that Sands seemed more comfortable with him than with some of the other men we’d had dealings with.

At last, Sands shook the man’s hand again and we got back in the truck and headed down toward the river.

Just at the place where I imagined the girl had been abducted, I said, “Are you a Q?”

“What?”

“A Q.”

“How did you know?” he said. We were winding down the road, and I could see that the girl probably couldn’t have ridden her bike up a hill like this unless she’d had very strong legs. It would have been natural for her, especially if she was late or tired, to leave her bike in the weeds and start to walk, or to stick out her thumb and hope for a ride. It had been a mistake to do that, but the size of the punishment didn’t fit the mistake at all, so why had God let that happen?

A piece of the river, like a ribbon of green metal, showed between the hills below.

“How did you know?” Sands said again.

“Because you don’t to have a girlfriend ever.”

“I’m a little … what are you talking about?”

“Q,” I said again, vaguely disappointed. “Queer.”

“Gay?”

“That’s the same. The kids say ‘Q’ now.”

“You’re asking me if I’m gay?”

“Never a mind. You just said. It doesn’t make a lot of matter to me.”

Sands was laughing in a quiet way I didn’t like. He looked across the seat at me when I thought he should have been watching the road.
“I’m a Quaker,” he said, laughing, and then smiling in a way that made me twist in my seat. “I thought that’s what you meant. Q. For Quaker. I thought your pastor wouldn’t let you say the word or something.”

“He’s not anymore.”

The road bottomed out, then came, after a ways, to the old two-lane highway that ran along the river. We turned south on that road, went along a few hundred yards, and made a left onto the bridge.

“Do you know what a Quaker is?” Sands asked over the noise the tires made on the steel roadway.

“It means you don’t like boys or girls but you like to hurt with birds. Crows you like so much. Kissing on sparrows is your fun.”

He was smiling and watching the road. “You’re a joker now, all of a sudden.”

“I was before. You just didn’t see of it.”

“I just didn’t understand you, I think.”

“The girl what talks funny is why.”

“That’s what they call you in school?”

I decided not to answer. Since school had let out, ten days after I’d moved to Aunt Elaine’s, I’d been making more and more of an effort to change the way I talked. Tiny steps in the direction of the polished world. But I was nervous then, on that ride, and the old words bubbled out of me. “You don’t to having girlfriends, don’t you,” I said.

“Not at the present moment.”

“What about the state police girl?”

“Just a friend.”

“Why not? Because of to be a Quaker?”

“Because I’m waiting for the love of my life.”

“God might to send her someday.”

“I hope so.” Sands watched the road for a few minutes and then turned to me again. “You have a boyfriend, you said, am I right? That boy with the truck? A girl who looks like you, I’d think you’d have a lot of boys asking you out.”