by Larry Crane
She recognized some landmarks from her visit a couple of weeks before. She needed to stay on Route 17 going south. Major road signs pointed the way to Weehawken, and she saw the Ticknor Building rising along Park Avenue. She left the luggage in the car. The apartment was on the third floor. She pushed on the key, twisted it, releasing the lock. She half expected to be confronted by new tenants, but the space seemed empty except for Gavin’s overcoat thrown over a chair. She slumped into it and leaned back into the coat. She closed her eyes and let her breathing return to something resembling normal.
She found an unopened can of beef chili in the kitchen cabinet, warmed it in a pot on the stove, and sat at the counter, spooning the chili into her mouth between swallows of Pinot Grigio from the half empty bottle she found in the fridge. She noticed for the first time that the phone message recorder was blinking and punched the button. One by one the nonsensical messages rattled off:
“Hey Gavin, give me a jingle. Hank.”
“Liking your ‘ain’t here’ message. Call me. Gordie.”
Then the call from Celia: “Dad, I got another letter from Pinky. Amazing. Could this be anything good? There’s this fuzzy Kodak Brownie pic of a woman and a girl, taken from in back of them. Can’t see any faces. It could be Hannah if the coat she’s wearing is the same one. But she wouldn’t fit in that one now. It’s been what? A year and a half? But we have to follow up on everything. Right? So now what do I do? Anyway, I can’t wait around. I’m calling Rathskeller. This could be big. He would know. Bye. Cel’”
Then another call: “Gavin, this is Rathskeller. Uh, this second letter from Pinky to Celia could be something. It’s extremely rare to have people follow up their first crank contact with another one. I’m driving up to Northfield. Celia said she’d meet with me.”
Then another: “Gavin, Rathskeller. Listen, this is big. The photo’s got all these numbers on the back that identify exactly what I don’t know. But it might have to do with where the negative was developed. I’m taking this to the FBI.”
She resisted an impulse to lift the phone and call Gavin. She stood and, still spooning, carried the pot to the living room window. Manhattan across the Hudson was alight in a storm of color. Headlights of hundreds of cars crept north and south along the West Highway. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State, and the Twin Towers punctuated the length of the island that could have been a postcard if the lights in the distance had not been twinkling in the cold night air. She turned, set the pot on a side table, and moved about the apartment in the light from Manhattan. It felt warm and lived in, the litter of a casual life lying about everywhere. She sank into the couch and stared up at the ceiling.
Marcella pictured Gavin in the kitchen in Fardale, the telephone pressed to his ear, talking to Celia in Northfield about her mother’s latest irrational shenanigans. This one would top them all. Why was it easier for him to talk to Celia than to her? Or for Celia to talk to him rather than to her? The two of them shared a stockpile of stories, any one of them capable of setting them off in a tempest of laughter. It was probably her imagination. Her behavior over the last many months was hardly funny. In the beginning, Celia depended on her for most everything and that held them close—but gradually through the years her role as disciplinarian drove a wedge between them that seemed immovable. Gavin went to and from work, and when he was around, which wasn’t often, the mood was definitely lighter. He never talked about troubles. He was always the good guy, and Celia was his favorite.
Her relationship with Hannah had been in that early, buddy stage when she couldn’t do anything wrong. She had been determined never to let it get confrontational. Now, here she was, unable to do anything for Hannah when she needed her most. How different it was as recently as last year when she was going full blast, juggling five balls in the air at once, at the top of her game, when she was in heaven. There was something important going on all day, lots of times more than just one thing.
She visualized their Malibu station wagon packed full of kids and one other mother, leading a procession of eight other cars down Fifty-Fifth Street in Downers Grove toward the Belmont Pool. She’d lobbied the town council to foot the bill for disadvantaged kids from the South Side of Chicago to get ten free days of swimming in July and August. When they voted yes, she had to scramble hard to round up eight mothers and their cars each time. They’d roar into the parking lot with all the windows wide open and kids hanging out everywhere, laughing, pushing, and shoving. In the pool parking lot, she was soon surrounded.
“All right, we’re going to have to line up now, please! Boys here with Mrs. Grayson, and girls over here with Mrs. Boyer, who will give you your tickets. Get a towel from Mrs. Higginbotham if you didn’t bring one. Anyone without a suit, see Mrs. Tolliver.”
“Now, listen up, children! Please! Quiet! You absolutely must get under the shower once you’ve got your suit on or you can’t go in the pool. And one more very important thing. Listen! If you have to pee, get out of the pool and go in the locker room. No peeing in the pool!” They screamed with laughter at that little lecture, and she did too, doing her best to hold back tears of pure pleasure. She stood back and watched them race through the gate to the locker rooms.
At the window in Weehawken, she stared down into the parking lot. The suitcases were in the car, and tomorrow seemed soon enough to lug them upstairs. Her image reflected in the window glass, provoking a memory of her image in another window, this one on the second floor of a high school on Kedzie in Chicago in 1965. Politics was not her thing, but mobilizing people for a good cause was. The Voting Rights Act was big news. She’d zeroed in on the provision in the Act that required Cook County to provide election materials in multiple languages. What could be more obvious? If a Guatemalan immigrant still struggled with English, shouldn’t ballots be presented in Spanish? Either that or there needed to be some place where Guatemalans in Chicago could be schooled in understanding them. She volunteered to teach them enough English to at least vote. Too bad Guatemalans in Chicago didn’t hear about it, so she waited in vain for them to show up— looking down at an empty parking lot, just like now.
That effort spilled over into the whole question of how to make it possible for people with any disability to vote. Wasn’t illiteracy one of the biggest disabilities of all? She wangled a classroom at the DuPage County Community College and offered remedial instruction on how to mark a ballot. Okay, she only managed to attract eight, but eight who voted for the first time ever because of her. She wasn’t shy about it—this do-gooder streak that wouldn’t quit. There wasn’t any better feeling than what she felt as a Carleton sophomore standing on a street corner in Minneapolis in December of ‘43 handing out pamphlets to shivering passersby urging all females over eighteen to join her in the work of putting together care packages for GIs.
She remembered sitting at the supper table with her parents and her brother and sister, basking in the glow of her father’s praise. Her Girl Scout leader had presented Marcella a special certificate as the Scout of the Year. She’d dragged her wagon around the neighborhood, going door-to-door asking for old newspapers that she heaped in the garage in bunches tied up with twine. When the trash collector man came around and weighed the loot, and paid her a nickel a pound for the lot, she donated the whole six dollars to Vegetables for the Needy, the Scout project for the year. Her dad said, “Marcie darlin’, you’ll always be the champion of the unfortunate, won’t she Mama?” That moment came back to her over and over. It had become the one thing in all the world she wanted most, to fulfill her father’s prophecy.
She meandered around the apartment over to the uninspired pictures on the walls. She’d been told through the years how well she expressed herself in writing. Like anything else, the praise had become a motivator. She welcomed the job of scribe in every club or organization she belonged to. The whole idea of collecting a couple of years’ worth of newsletters and the minutes of countless meetings into a living history settled into her brain
as work that wasn’t work at all.
She folded her arms across her chest and stared across the room, picturing her own Girl Scout troop gathering at Herrick’s Lake that lived on in a newsletter anecdote from 1968. The tent site had sat in the midst of grass and horse chestnut trees. The grown-ups had trundled the darlings off to their sleeping bags cushioned by mats on bare wooden platforms covered by a canvas tent. Gavin and Russ Reed sat on logs around a fire getting gassed on red wine—trading stories about work, money, women, and baseball—unaware of all the pre-adolescent female ears straining to hear every word. A big raccoon had come out of the woods and sat on the other side of the campfire, and stared across at them like a Supreme Court judge.
The wrung out feeling came on suddenly, when she relaxed a little and the reality of the ways in which she’d scuttled her father’s prophecy crept in. So much had happened in such a short time. She’d made her decision to get away by herself to take action—to do something of her own making to try to fight off the darkness that never went away, and now she was living with it—but she still wasn’t sure. How was she going to cope with being alone with her fears that the worst had actually come to pass for Hannah? Gavin was good at pushing uncertainty off into a corner somewhere where it remained isolated, something that didn’t have to be addressed. She wasn’t.
Moving away from Naperville still stuck in her throat like a fishhook. It was true that everywhere they turned there was another reminder of Hannah. If they were ever going to be free of that, they needed to move away. But it still felt to her like the biggest betrayal of all. She would never be able to move on with life as they knew it before Hannah’s disappearance—they shouldn’t be able to, should they? That was it. They should never be able to forget for even one second. But even that, not forgetting, wasn’t enough. And that’s where Victoria came in. Maybe fighting on for Vickie would give her some relief from the clinging guilt.
She had a nightgown or two in the suitcase, but they would have to remain down there in the car. She didn’t have the energy to even think about bringing them up. The bed was rumpled from Gavin’s last night in Weehawken. She got down to her underwear and threw back the bedspread, wishing she’d at least brought up a toothbrush. Could Gavin have left his? She hurried to the bathroom, shivering. A water glass, soap, a tube of paste, and a toothbrush magically materialized when she flipped on the light. The ceramic tile was cold against her bare feet. She stared at herself in the mirror as she went after her teeth with a vengeance using Gavin’s frayed brush. Her hair was a mess but she didn’t look bad, at least not as bad as she imagined herself looking. She’d actually taken to avoiding mirrors all together. But, she was looking okay. Okay. She bent over to spit into the sink and caught a glimpse of something in the soap dish. Something. She spat. She took some water in her mouth, gargled, and spat again. And she reached to pluck a single pearl earring from beside the green bar of soap.
She actually staggered a little as she backed away from the sink and stared at the pearl between her thumb and forefinger, blinking to get rid of the sting in her eyes. She looked up at the mirror and saw herself with her mouth open and eyes wide, disbelieving. She backed out of the bathroom and into the living room. Still clutching the earring in the palm of her hand, she grabbed the bottle of Pinot from the fridge, plucked the cork out with her teeth, and swallowed a long gulp of wine and then another. She took the bottle with her to the couch.
She dropped the earring on the side table and brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them. She tried to fight off the gush of despair rising up. She didn’t cry. Was Celia right when she speculated about the real reason for Gavin wanting to move? Was it to free himself from the gloom that she only made worse? Was it Yasmina’s earring or somebody else’s? Then she straightened her knees and let her feet dangle as she looked down at her hands clenched in her lap. The distance she felt from Gavin wasn’t all on account of his reactions to Hannah’s abduction. She’d felt it long before, and it wasn’t his doing. It was hers.
She and Gus Breedlove were meeting at the Motel 6 in Warrenville for months before she got pregnant with Hannah. Not a lot, but regularly. She’d be at home. The phone would ring three times and stop. She would answer with three rings. When she hung up, she’d be engulfed in guilt and ready to cancel, but she never did. She’d dive into the shower and then get into her best underwear and into one of her short skirts that she stopped wearing altogether at any other time. He was always there before she arrived. She was always feverishly hot when she pushed the door open.
Hannah was Gavin’s. She knew that for certain, but it wasn’t because she and Gus had called it all off—no way—it was because Gus in his conscientiousness never failed to free a well lubricated condom from its foil packaging and to roll it down his member, his word.
His member. How priggish he was when referring to his equipment, how filthy naming hers. “Show me that cute fuzzy gash of yours,” he’d snigger. They did it in the rumpus room, he called it—Room Eleven, around back, where they went to play—where he got his rewards for being such a marvelous state senator—checking all propriety and modesty at the door, putting all their fantasies into action. It was fitting for them both—for him, legitimizing their little fucks as of no importance at all and requiring no need to preserve her dignity—for her, the insult she deserved for surrendering to lust.
Chapter 21
The alarm clock read 8:00 a.m. She’d lain awake since 4:00 a.m. on the couch—damned if she’d touch those sheets in the bedroom—agonizing over the urge that grabbed hold of her and sent her running. Then the image of the pearl earring took over. Then the memory of fessing up to the kiss and then far worse, the unconfessed—the business in Room Eleven—all of it piled on into a mishmash of emotions. On top of all that, the luggage was still downstairs in the car. It gave her the shakes. She threw the blankets aside, rolled off the couch, and padded into the bathroom, then the kitchen. She searched the cabinets and the refrigerator for something to eat and found only a tin of coffee.
I can’t stay in this flat, she thought. I’m not going anywhere near that bed and those rumpled blankets—never taking another swig out of the bottle of wine they shared. And I want to know how that thing got in the soap dish! Then the dawn. Oh, come now! You fucking hypocrite!
You’re the same tart who had no problem going back to the rumpus room, time after time—chastising yourself after every tumble, lashing yourself with a hickory switch, yes—but that didn’t keep you from rushing back to Gus Breedlove, full of desire, did it? You’ve already guzzled from the bottle of wine they shared and somehow survived the humiliation. Sat on the same toilet seat. A million reasons, that’s all these jealous rants are, one after another after another, competing with each other to scuttle the guts you finally located. You’re staying. God damnit. And not on the stupid couch either. In their bed. You’re going to make the most of it. You’ve been a shit, but you didn’t lie to Gavin, not really. It was over when you said it was, when you knew you were pregnant. And there had been no relapses.
The elevator doors opened onto the empty lobby and the wall of mailboxes that last night was unseen in the darkness. She drove down Park until she spotted a convenience store attached to an Exxon gas station. She filled a paper cup with black coffee from the urn on the counter and pulled a sausage and egg breakfast sandwich from the warmer. At an A&P, she shopped for food to fill the fridge and grabbed a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. She wrestled the suitcases and typewriter into the lobby and into the elevator in three trips. She slumped onto the couch and opened Edgar Smith’s Brief Against Death to the introduction entitled “Friend in the Death House” by William F. Buckley, Jr. It recounted his first visit to the Trenton State Prison:
The squat red-stone prison dominates the center of Trenton. Visitors are immediately apprised of the regulation stating that visitors in general were unwelcome. One member of a prisoner’s immediate family may visit once a month. They may write home five tim
es a month. Presumably to prevent preparations for a jailbreak being transmitted through the mail, all letters are checked by prison guards. A guard sits beside all visitors to listen to all verbal communication.
A pair of corridors led out from a silo-like structure. The central communication center of the prison is surrounded by bullet-proof glass and is located above the circular core. Visitors cannot leave the silo to get out into the open compound without getting permission from the command center. From the compound, visitors walk the length of a couple of football fields to the relatively small, separated windowless fort within which prisoners lived in solitary confinement.
The fort is lit by naked light bulbs hanging from above. The corridor has three television sets blaring constantly. Each TV serves three convicts who vote for the programs that play. At the far end of the corridor, visitors come within a few feet of the electric chair that is in a separate space with its own metal door. Guards roll a steel screen over the 8 foot wide and 9 foot tall front of the cell holding the prisoner who has the visitor.1
The inside of the hardcover and first page of Brief Against Death were covered with Smith’s handwritten retelling of the snide exchange he had with one of three psychiatrists who had been assigned the job of assessing his mental acuity back at the time after he had been arraigned. It dripped with the sarcasm and self-importance that defined the twenty-three-year-old know-it-all who sat on a chair with his feet propped atop a desk in the prosecutor’s office just after he was brought in for questioning. He was sure he could outsmart all of them. It was a cramped backward slanting lettering job, an instrument of a bigoted, angry kid off the street.
Some editor at Alfred A. Knopf had seen it differently—to him or her, it showed a raw but superior intellect, a punk with self-confidence, and a facility with words, never mind the fundamental wickedness of it.