He turns to her then. “Rafe hasn’t said a word to me. If he wants to tell me something, let him say it. He knows how to talk.”
“He is too much like you to speak first.”
“He is not like me,” Tom Hardin growls. “Let him get a woman. He’s never had a woman. He’s never even mentioned a girlfriend. He’s not married. He has no family.”
Miss Camilla’s face tightens, bitter and narrow. “Neither have I, old man.” She turns and stumps across the snow-puddled yard.
A month after Raphael was born, Tom Hardin drove Miss Camilla in her brand-new DeSoto on their first trip to High Bridge. By then Rose Ella was speaking to him, to ask him to chop more wood or to see to the leaky faucet in the outbuilding where they’d rigged up a bathroom. That was all she was saying; no gossip, no jokes, no flirting.
One February day snow closed the schools, but by noon the sun emerged and the main roads were clear. Tom Hardin left the distillery to visit Miss Camilla.
He asked her to go for a drive, asked if he could drive the brand-new DeSoto. She must have wondered when he drove on and on but she did not ask to turn back. He was on the parish board, after all. He had voted to hire her—Rose Ella had seen fit to remind Miss Camilla of as much, across those days when Tom Hardin was hunting in upstate Wisconsin.
The sun was low by the time they reached High Bridge. Built over the Kentucky River gorge, it was Andrew Carnegie’s proof that the impossible could be done. At the time he built it, High Bridge was the world’s highest railroad bridge, carrying the Cincinnati Southern south from Lexington to the coal mines of Kentucky and Tennessee. Three years later someone built a higher bridge, and someone else built still higher bridges after that.
Tom Hardin and Miss Camilla walked on the pedestrian catwalk to the middle of the bridge. Words crowded his heart, jammed against each other in his throat—he stole sips from a half pint tucked in his pocket. Far below in the long winter shadows, the cornstalk-stubbled bottomland was dusted with white. From a tiny farmhouse a single trail of smoke rose to spread flat, a thin gray tablecloth of haze covering the bottoms.
“Wait,” Miss Camilla said, touching his arm. “I can feel the bridge shaking. A train must be coming.”
In a moment they heard its whistle, in another moment they saw it round the bend. The engineer blew his horn in short, angry blasts. They were close enough to see him shake his fist. The bridge vibrated and hummed, its webbing of girders swaying in harmony with the train’s speeding mass. Miss Camilla’s eyes narrowed with alarm. Tom Hardin cupped his hand to her ear. “It’s OK!” he shouted. “It’s built to do that!”
It seemed natural then to slip his arm around her shoulder and press his mouth against hers. For the long minute of the train’s passing he kissed her. She neither resisted nor kissed him back. Then the caboose passed, sucking up the train’s roar and leaving behind only the jeering shouts of the brakemen.
She pulled away. They stood until the last echoes tangled themselves in the trees’ bare limbs. Then she spoke, still looking out over the valley. “Is this a bribe?” She plunged on, not waiting for his answer. “I know your kind. You think any flat-chested woman should faint in your arms and be grateful for the chance. I’ve known your kind for years. I’ve fought them for years. Don’t think you’re any different, just because you gave me a job.” She turned away, to step smartly along the catwalk in her neat black pumps. In shame and anger Tom Hardin trailed behind.
On an indifferently sunny day in late March, Miss Camilla and Tom Hardin take their last drive, with Miss Camilla peering through the steering wheel of her 1953 DeSoto. Raphael waves them off. “Have a safe trip,” he says. Tom Hardin feels like giving him the finger, but out of deference to Miss Camilla he keeps his hands in his lap.
They are hardly out of the drive before Tom Hardin turns to Miss Camilla. “How about driving to High Bridge?”
“I knew you would ask that. That’s more than an hour, and I’ve seen better roads.”
“We’ll go slow. ‘What have we got but time?’”
She ignores his small mimicry. “Why do you want to go back there, of all places?”
“You know why I want to go back there.”
She does not answer, but she turns in the right direction. Tom Hardin settles back in his seat.
It takes two winding hours. They pass landmarks: My Old Kentucky Home, where Stephen Foster never set foot; Perryville Battlefield, where on a hot, drought-ridden September day, eight thousand Union and Confederate soldiers died in a fight for a drink from the only running spring.
They reach High Bridge at noon. Spring is early—on the south-facing side of the river, redbud and white and pink dogwoods bloom against the limestone palisades. Miss Camilla parks in the gravel lot, under the historical marker. Hers is the only car.
Tom Hardin climbs the small stoop to the bridge catwalk. At the top of the steps he stops, wheezing and panting. Under his shirt his right side hangs heavy, his swollen liver pressing against his belt.
He takes Miss Camilla’s arm. “I was going to make a lamp from that block of wood.” He chooses his words carefully. He does not want to misspeak now.
“I know.”
“I was going to give it to you.”
“I thought as much.”
“I’ll never finish it. Turning it takes a good eye and a steady hand. I’ve lost that. But I thought you would want to know. I was making it for you.”
“You’re very kind.” With her cane she points to the blooming redbud. “It’s greener now than it was then. Really, this is a better time of year to come.”
“Miss Camilla.” He is afraid to form the question, his words come out flat and hard. “Can I kiss you?”
She laughs, short and harsh, “May,” she says. “May I kiss you. No, you may not.”
His disappointment and humiliation are too great not to give them voice. “My God, Camilla, why are you saying no now? What difference does it make?”
“Before, Rose Ella lived, and you took what you wanted. Now she is dead, and suddenly you ask.”
“I couldn’t ask, then.” He forces himself to find and say the words. “I didn’t know how, then. Things are different now. I’m older.”
“Old enough that even I look good.”
“You looked good to me then.”
“Anyone would have looked good to you then. Anything would have looked good to you then. I was available, with a new car and a school holiday.” She plants her cane, covers one mottled hand with another, stares over the valley. “Tom Hardin. You seem to think I have never known love.” She speaks in a voice determined to convince. She might be lecturing herself. “I have known love. I have been lucky in love.”
“Tell me who has loved you.”
For a long moment she says nothing. Then, “Those of us not so fortunate as to be born to family must make it for ourselves, if we are to have it at all. I have made my family, and it has sufficed.”
“And who are they.”
“My neighbors.” Her voice falters. “My students. Your son.”
Tom Hardin drops her elbow. “I should tell that boy to leave.” He walks to the car. Along the way he listens for her voice. He hears only the rush of the wind through the bridge girders and the chatterings of the swallows.
When finally she reaches the car he holds the door for her, but does not shut it once she has climbed in.
“Tom Hardin,” Miss Camilla says gently. “You have been looking in the wrong places.”
He does not move. “Do you think she ever forgave me?”
She says nothing. He knows she is turning her answer over in her head, an answer she is sure of but uncertain whether to present. “No,” she says finally. “No, I don’t think she ever did.”
They arrive home as it is getting dark. Raphael bounds across the yard, full of noise and concern. Miss Camilla leans across the seat to plant a kiss, her lips cool and paper dry on Tom Hardin’s cheek. “You’re persistent,” she says. “
I’ll give you that much.” She climbs from the car and shuts the door.
That night is a bad one, brought on, Tom Hardin knows, by the sitting and riding and by Miss Camilla’s words. The next morning he is in the shop before Raphael is out of bed. He can do no more than sit, now, but he prefers sitting here, among his tools, to sitting in the house, where Rose Ella reigned.
Though Raphael no longer brings coffee, he still comes and sits on the stool near the woodshop stove. Some mornings he has sat for half an hour and they have said nothing.
This morning Tom Hardin waves Raphael away from the stool. “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“I want you to take this package over to your friend next door.” He has wrapped the block in brown paper grocery sacks. He waves Raphael at it. “Tell her I thought she might use it to fuel her stove.” Raphael lifts the sack, feels its weight, hesitates. “Go on!” Tom Hardin says.
He watches his son cross the yard. In Raphael’s walk he sees his own walk, that bow-legged strut peculiar to the Hardin men.
Tom Hardin sits for a few minutes, then Raphael returns. He comes in without knocking and places the unwrapped block of wood on Tom Hardin’s workbench. “She thanks you,” Raphael says, “but she insists that it be finished, and says to tell you that she does not want to see it otherwise. She tells me that I am to finish it. You are to show me how, she says.”
“She does.” Tom Hardin takes the block of wood and holds it to the unforgiving light, which shows forth its warped seams and unsealed gaps. “It can’t be done,” he says. “It won’t hold up to the lathe.”
Raphael moves to the doorway, looking out at the newly greened lawn.
From across the yard Tom Hardin hears Miss Camilla’s door open, and he lifts his head. Raphael steps out and crosses to offer his arm, which she accepts. For a second they talk, then they turn away, to return to Miss Camilla’s house.
Tom Hardin studies her three-legged walk, as she pulls herself to the door with the help of her cane. I am too old, he thinks. I have too little time left to change. If that is stupid and narrow, so be it. I have earned that privilege.
Yet he watches Miss Camilla poling away from him, his son at her side. He hefts the wood in his hands, turning it over in the window’s light, his unthinking fingers testing its strength against the turning on the lathe.
Back Where She Came From
[1991]
Elizabeth Hardin props her feet on the dashboard, to wedge a bottle of nail polish between her big and second toes. She unscrews the brush from the bottle and touches its maroon tip to the cuticle of her big toe. Dennis pushes the floor stick through its shift pattern. “The first time I kissed you, you were painting your nails.” He sniffs. “Twenty years since we’ve kissed and that smell still makes me think of making love.”
“Not with me. I never once let you past second base.”
“That’s not to say I wasn’t thinking about it.”
Elizabeth waves her glistening toe in the hot air rising from the sunbaked dash.
They are driving a 1961 International Harvester farm truck from Philadelphia to their childhood home in Kentucky, where Elizabeth’s parents and two of her brothers are buried, where her remaining family still lives, where Dennis sells automobiles, has a wife, three kids, a suburban tract home. Elizabeth shares a Hollywood Hills apartment with her lover Andrew, an artist specializing in high-concept, postmodern, postminimalist sculptures—such as the Hardin family tombstone, which Andrew designed and ordered from Italy, and which Elizabeth and Dennis have just retrieved from a Philadelphia dockyard.
Dennis points at Elizabeth’s feet. “Springtime. 1968. You were sitting on the glider in your folks’ backyard, painting your nails. I looked the length of that long leg and got up the nerve to kiss you, in broad daylight. Twelve years in Catholic school couldn’t keep me from it. The first time I’d ever kissed anybody. The first time you’d ever been kissed.”
Elizabeth remembers the incident another way: She’d been sitting in the front yard, her nails stripped and ready for polishing, when Dennis walked up. Worried that he would think her blanched nails ugly and cracked, she reached up and pulled his face down to hers and kissed him before he could look any closer.
At seventeen, vice-captain of the cheerleading squad, could she have been so brazen as to tell him she’d never been kissed? At eighteen, captain of the basketball team, could Dennis never have kissed anyone else? “Totally,” she says aloud.
“So it’s more than twenty years and here I am, still ogling Bette C. Hardin painting her nails. But in a borrowed farm truck this time, with a mountain of pink rock from Italy riding the flatbed.”
“It’s not pink,” Elizabeth says. “Anyway, don’t look at me—I didn’t order it. Andrew insisted that my family deserves the finest marble in the world, which to a sculptor means Italian marble.” Elizabeth pulls a package of violet tissues from her purse and busies herself wadding them between the toes of her finished foot. “Besides, there’s a plaque that Andrew designed and that he says could only be cast by this one Italian firm.”
“So Andrew orders the stone and designs a plaque, and you call your high school boyfriend for the first time in years and ask him to dig up a truck and meet you in Philadelphia.”
“I didn’t ask. You volunteered.”
“You’re right. After discovering somehow that you needed a volunteer.”
She props the finished foot on the overnight bag that Dennis has stuffed beneath the dash, then raises her remaining foot for critical inspection. “So how are Crystal and the kids? Last time I saw you, you two were on the verge of breaking up.”
Dennis holds out his right hand, palm up, then flips it over to show the flat, square back of his hand, branching into fingers as square and ordinary as the International’s hood.
“I’m surprised she let you come, myself,” Elizabeth says. “Crystal never impressed me as your New Age kind of woman.”
“New Age?”
“But pretty. She was always the one to get asked out by the guys on the other team.”
“And ready to get married. Unlike somebody else I could name, who was hot to trot to get herself off to Hollywood.” Dennis stretches his arms overhead, first his left, then his right, which he drapes across the back of the seat in an awkward arc.
Elizabeth touches the brush to her last naked toenail, stuffs Kleenex between her toes, leans back to study the effect: maroon nails spaced out with crumpled violet tissue. “It’s been years since I painted my nails. Andrew calls it tacky.”
“So what does Andrew know? You’re the actress.”
“Andrew grew up in Los Angeles. He’s an artist—he really has a better sense of what impresses people. I mean, I’d still be dressing out of Sears catalogues except for him.”
“You dressed out of Sears catalogues in high school and looked pretty damn good, if you ask me.”
“But now we’re talking L.A. Where, thank God, I’m not.” She scrunches down in the seat to study Dennis, silhouetted against the window’s glare. His hair is thinning, his shirt creases at the bulge over his belt, but he still tends toward blond, he looks boyish in a way that probably sells lots of cars. The square cut of his chin, the broad slope of his forehead are strong as ever . . . She points her foot, tipping the truck’s rearview mirror with a maroon toe.
Abruptly she sits upright. “Sorry,” she says, reaching to straighten the mirror. Her hand collides with his.
“Cute. Very cute.” He squeezes her shoulder, then replaces his hand behind her back, resting it lightly on her neck.
Elizabeth pulls maps from the glove compartment. “Where do you suppose is Pittsburgh?”
An awkward moment, then Dennis removes his hand from her neck. “Sorry. An actress must have guys putting the move on her all the time. I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”
She winces at the hurt in his voice. “Dennis. Why would guys put the move on me? In acting it’s in one day
and out the next, and I’m out. Boy, am I out.” She busies herself in the folds and flaps of Rand McNally’s Eastern Seaboard. “But so what? The same thing could happen to anybody. Look at you. People in Louisville stop buying Fords and all of a sudden you’re selling Hondas.”
“Well, now, I don’t know about that,” Dennis says carefully. “I’d have a hard time putting my heart behind a Japanese car.”
The International hits a pothole. The draft from the rotting floorboards catches the map from Elizabeth’s knee, to flap it across the cab and into Dennis’s face. Dennis swerves, swatting the map to one side. A passing BMW lets loose an angry bleat. Dennis gives the driver the finger, then resettles his arm behind her back.
Elizabeth wrestles with Rand McNally. “There is no Pittsburgh. This map stops at Lancaster.” She crumples its panels in her lap.
Only last night Elizabeth had taken the red-eye from her home in Los Angeles to meet Dennis and, at a Philadelphia dockyard, the well-traveled tombstone. Now she closes her eyes against the relentless striping of the road and the hot, late-morning sun of August to drift into a place between waking and sleep, to a conversation she had with her mother, when Elizabeth first announced she was thinking of breaking up with Dennis and moving to California to be an actress.
“Move to California,” Rose Ella said.
“Mo—ther,” Elizabeth said. “How can you be so certain about such a tough decision?”
Rose Ella shrugged. “Dennis will provide. This much we know already. But you don’t need a provider. You can provide for yourself.”
“You talk about it like you know the future.”
Her mother sighed and took Elizabeth’s hand in her own. “Bette C. Let me tell you about Dennis. He’ll be . . . a salesman. They love sports stars in sales, everybody remembers their names. He could sell anything. It’s good money. He won’t much like the job but he’ll take it because of his family, and he’ll be right to do that. People will respect him for it.
“But you don’t want a family. You want a man with ambition. He’s going somewhere. You’re going somewhere. You meet and love each other along the way.”
Scissors, Paper, Rock Page 3