by April Smith
Cal was at the sink washing his hands. “I don’t know if Betsy told you, but we’re looking for our own place.”
Betsy was shocked. She’d thought that was months or years away. “We are?”
Cal rinsed off the foam from his wife’s homemade soap and, with it, dependence on the Roys. He hadn’t wanted things to end that way, but the flare-up with Scotty made it clear that it was time to move on—forward or back, he wasn’t sure which—but one way or another they could not go on living in the borrowed cabin.
“If it’s copacetic with your husband, I think we’d like to see the property.”
“Never hurts to look,” Stell Fletcher agreed.
—
Cal and Betsy left the kids with Stell for the day and, following her directions written on the back of a grocery bill, drove thirty miles southeast, along roads with no names and landmarks like “large oak tree.” They passed it several times before realizing the nondescript white farmhouse was the old Fletcher place. On paper, the property included two barns, four good-sized cattle pens, and smaller pens for farm animals, and a horse corral, henhouse, and tack shack. But when they got there, both were disappointed. It was a shambles, and as far as resale value was concerned, the house, mail order from Sears half a century ago, had been built too close to the road.
But they’d come all this way, so they pulled over. Betsy got out of the wagon first and walked around the house ahead of Cal, following a path of stepping-stones matted with overgrown chickweed. The backyard had become a field of weeds two feet high—quack grass, clumps of foxtail, thistle, and dandelion. She sat down on the porch steps. An umbrella clothesline, nudged by the wind, was turning slowly with spokes outspread like a skeleton carousel.
Cal followed, inspecting the foundations of the house. He pulled on the handles of the cellar doors.
“I’m not going down there,” Betsy warned.
“Stuck anyway,” he said, and left it to sit beside her. They watched the grasshoppers and dragonflies rise and fall in the silky grass, and after a while Cal said, “Well, what do you think?”
“It needs a lot of work.” She sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
Her pale white skin had taken on some color but still was clear and fair, no lines yet from weather and wind, smooth and trusting. She turned to her husband, squinting in the sun that outlined his broadened-out shoulders and the shape of his fedora, cocked just so, leaving his face in shadow.
“Harder than we thought it would be, isn’t it?” she said.
“Do you want to go back?” Cal asked.
Betsy shook her head and stood. “We should go inside, so we can at least say to the Fletchers that we looked.”
She took a few steps before she realized that Cal was still reclining on the porch, leaning back on his elbows, long legs crossed.
“What is it?” she asked, half teasing, wondering if his languorous pose on the warm planks was an invitation to climb on board right there in the midst of the wild meadow.
“I meant,” said Cal, “do you want to go back east?”
The question was a surprise. “But why?”
“I’ve received a new job offer. From a very good firm in Manhattan.”
“When did this happen?”
“The letter came two weeks ago, forwarded to the Crazy Eights.” He pulled an envelope from the back pocket of his well-worn jeans. “I’ve been mulling it over.”
“You have?” Betsy stared at him, eyes flashing. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Figured I might,” he said, drawling like the natives.
“Oh, stop!” she cried, striding back and snatching the letter. “What am I supposed to think?”
“A man presents an opportunity, and I’m considering it,” Cal said, his own tone rising.
“Who is the man?”
“John V. Lindsay.”
“Who the hell is John V. Lindsay?” Betsy retorted.
“I have no idea!” Cal shot back. “He’s the one who signed the letter. The firm is top-notch, and the client is the meatpackers’ union—right up my alley. The reason this kid, Lindsay, thought of me is that he also graduated from Yale Law School—”
Betsy interrupted with uncharacteristic sharpness. “That’s nice. So?”
“So, that’s not all. There’s a double whammy. Read the letter.”
I checked around and saw that you have a sterling reputation representing Gimbels Local 2, as well as Berle, Berle, and Brunner, but what caught my attention is an uncanny coincidence. Not only are you and I both Yalies, but we each served in the navy during the Allied Invasion of Sicily. This makes us men of good taste and courage. I’d like to swap war stories over drinks, but more than that, I’d like you to consider joining us here at Webster and Sheffield…
Cal said, “You see why this caught my attention?”
“No, I don’t. Why are we here, Cal?” she asked, letting her arms drop. “Why did we come all this way?”
“Look, I haven’t made a decision—”
“Thank you very much!” She turned away. “Since when are you deciding our lives from up high?” she said, flinging the words over her shoulder as she rounded the house.
Cal stopped her before she could get back into the station wagon.
“Why are you so hot over this?”
“Are you backing out on me and the kids?”
Cal looked astonished. “Of course not. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“It’s a vote of confidence for you, of course…I just didn’t think we were looking back.”
“Who knows if South Dakota will work out?” Cal reasoned.
“We haven’t really given it a shot,” Betsy said.
She was close to tears without understanding it. Neither did her husband. All he could do was put his hands on her shoulders and offer something, any little thing, just to make peace.
“Let’s take a look inside before we decide anything,” he offered.
As Betsy turned the key in the lock on the peeling, half-rotted door of the farmhouse, she wondered what it was that had sprung up like a dirt devil to cause this rift with Cal. It wasn’t the job, she realized, but that her husband had been holding back a secret. It brought up painful memories of the same thing that had happened in New York, shortly after they’d first met. He’d confessed that he’d been having an affair with a woman in his office named Frieda. He’d said it was over and didn’t mean a thing, but she’d trusted this man without question and in an instant it had all been shattered. They’d almost broken up because of it. Now he had been keeping something from her once again, just when she had to face one of the biggest decisions of her life.
—
The night she was released from jail, and Betsy and Cal walked all over New York City in the blissful delirium of new love, they’d said good night in a swoon of expectation that was buoyed over the next few weeks with breathless phone calls and hasty meetings over lunch and drinks, as they began to weave the strands of their lives together. But soon enough, Betsy noticed a disturbing pattern. Her new beau’s free time did not seem to include anything after six p.m., and rarely on weekends. No dinners, no clubs, no Sunday afternoon walks in the park. Betsy was still bunking with Elaine and her roommates, who, in pajama-clad midnight consultations, came to the conclusion that Calvin Kusek was not a serious prospect, but a married man looking for a fling.
“This is not normal,” Elaine warned.
Despite the bowel-churning possibility of losing him forever, Betsy ironed her black linen sheath dress, pinned a spray of violets on the collar, and decided to wait for Cal, unannounced, in the lobby of his office building. He spotted her right away, standing against the brown-freckled marble wall, her face pale and drawn in the glow from the lighted office directory, and when he saw her, his delight seemed genuine.
“Why, hello!” He kissed her cheek. “What a nice surprise!”
Despite her rehearsals and determination to
appear unconcerned, Betsy couldn’t stop herself.
“I have to talk to you,” she said right away.
“Is something wrong?”
“Are you really single?” she asked frankly.
“That’s a funny question.”
“I’m serious.”
He looked bemused. “Am I single? Why do you ask? What is this, some kind of a cockamamie proposal?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she answered, but couldn’t stop the smile that was softening her face.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he pledged, exaggerating a frown. “I’m a confirmed, single bachelor! Now that we’ve cleared that up, can we please go somewhere and get a drink?”
“Why not dinner?”
“Sure, if you like.”
“Uh-huh. Well. That would be a new one,” Betsy commented sarcastically.
“What do you mean?”
“We never go out to dinner,” she protested, not moving from the safety of the wall. “Or see each other over the weekends.”
Cal didn’t seem to be listening. “I’m just thinking…How about that Italian place?” he suggested. “We could sit at the bar.”
“Are you seeing someone?” Betsy blurted out.
He must have been listening, because without hesitation he answered truthfully: “Yes.”
“Yes?!” she cried. “What are you telling me?”
“Calm down. Her name is Frieda. She works at the firm.”
Betsy’s eyes narrowed. “Ain’t that ducky?” she said.
“She’s a nice girl—”
“I’m so glad.”
“—but it’s over.”
“Since when?” said Betsy.
“Since yesterday,” said Cal.
“You mean to stand there and say that with a straight face?” Betsy said. “Talk about a surprise!” she added acidly, and headed for the revolving brass doors.
He followed, and when they were both out on the street, he made her stop in the crossway of evening crowds.
“I swear, I was just going to tell you,” he said.
“When?”
“It’s over. I promise. I’d never lie to you.”
“But it is a lie, when you don’t say anything, all this time, letting me think one way when it’s actually the other.”
“It’s the same. Except different. I’m not usually this tongue-tied, it’s all your fault,” Cal said, trying an appealing grin. “It just took a while to get everything straight with Frieda. Honey, I owed her that. Look, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Is she still working there?”
“Yes, of course. But she knows that between us it’s kaput.”
Betsy was torn between forgetting it and murdering both of them. “So you’ll still see her every day.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cal insisted. Then, with the best intentions in the world, he earnestly took both her hands and said exactly the wrong thing: “I need you, Betsy. You can help me get over her.”
After that, Betsy refused to see Calvin Kusek or answer his phone calls. Her father had relented and she slunk back to the Bronx like a wounded animal. The Gimbels strike was settled on September 12, 1941. The union won a forty-hour week and two dollars a week raise. She went back to her old job at the store. Betsy and her comrades had changed the standing of retail workers forever.
But along the way, Betsy had become disillusioned with the revolution. At Young Communist League meetings, the big talkers were all in the same clique, imposing rules and ridiculing weaker members. Earlier that year Hitler had invaded Russia and nearly brought the country down, until Stalin regained his iron grip. Human nature was brutal and not going to change. If you wanted to help humanity, Betsy decided, the best way to do it was person-to-person.
She quit the party, but continued to work the soup line at headquarters down on Twelfth Street near Union Square. A month passed. On a clear fall day, she was ladling watered-down minestrone into bowls held by the needy, many of them men dressed in coats and ties, when a taxi pulled up and double-parked, blocking traffic. Drivers honked and yelled as the cabbie got out, unlocking the trunk for a well-dressed male passenger who looked incongruous in this shabby neighborhood.
Someone was calling her name.
It was Calvin Kusek who had climbed out of the cab, and he was engaged in lifting from the trunk a cardboard carton so enormous he could hardly get his arms around it. As Betsy stared, he staggered to a donations table piled with Carnation evaporated milk and a mountain of carrots with the tops still on, and shoved everything aside to deposit the box, which was packed to the brim with poppy seed Kaiser rolls.
“For the unemployed.”
“Thank you for your contribution,” Betsy said primly.
“It wasn’t easy to find you,” Cal replied, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “They said you’d quit.”
“I did, but I still do this.”
Smartly, Cal refrained from congratulating Betsy on seeing the light about Communism.
“You look nice,” he said instead.
“Get out of here. I look like your great-aunt Ethel.”
Like the other volunteers, Betsy was wearing a long white apron over her dress, and her blond curls had been squashed into a very unbecoming black hairnet.
“So,” said Cal, smacking his palms together, “are we finished now?”
“Finished with what?”
“The worst thirty-two—no, thirty-three—days of my life?”
“Maybe.”
“We never did get those oysters,” he reminded her slyly.
In response, she handed him a ladle. He pushed the lock of shiny brown hair that always fell across his noble forehead aside and joined her, offering rolls and soup to the destitute shuffling by the scruffy six-story brick structure that held the offices of the Daily Worker, as well as the radical Yiddish paper Freiheit. On that mild October day, the lofty blue sky seemed to bless the intentions of anyone who chose to labor beneath it in order to fashion a more just human world, and yet Cal sensed unhappiness lingering over Betsy.
“No more pretending,” he promised. “Not about anything. I mean it.”
She stiffened. “You’re the one who was seeing someone on the side.”
“I was stupid. But I came clean, didn’t I?”
“Not until I practically had to ambush you—”
He set the ladle down with a finality that scared her.
“I refuse to fight.”
“I don’t want to fight, either,” Betsy said with a catch in her throat.
“You have no idea how hard it is for me to abide beneath that sign on the building that says ‘Vote Communist,’ but that doesn’t change—”
Betsy stopped him with a deep and passionate kiss.
“You’re right.” Her smile was glowing. “Doesn’t change a thing. Let’s get married.”
—
As they walked out the front door of the old Fletcher farmhouse and locked it behind them, Cal asked what Betsy thought. Inside, the place was scarcely better than the Roys’ cabin. Every inch needed to be stripped out and replaced. There were no indoor toilets, and mold in the bedrooms had eaten the walls down to the studs. There were water stains on the ceilings where the roof leaked. The skunky odor that pervaded the rooms was even more dreadful outside.
Betsy shrugged. “It’s the best we can afford. What’s that funny smell?”
“Probably the septic tank,” said Cal. “Needs to be replaced.”
“Oh, joy.”
They picked their way across the rotted porch boards and through the empty front yard toward the barn.
“Chickens!” Cal pointed to the hard-packed dirt, then counted off imaginary livestock in the large pole pens with swinging gates between them: “Cows, cows, cows, cows, horses, horses, training ring.”
The barns were in better shape. Beside the largest was a tack room and smaller pens for sheep and goats, and across the way a Quonset hut that housed
a workshop.
“The house is secondary,” Cal remarked.
“That’s for sure,” Betsy said.
“The rest is pretty much ready to go.”
They followed a path behind the farthest pen, where they found a creek. Two deer hopped away into the thick foliage, flicking their white tails. Cal and Betsy crossed the stream and climbed a short trail up a ridge, and then they saw a staggering view of the top of the world. The farmstead was below them and rolling open pasture dotted with cottonwoods lay ahead. They could own a piece of this magnificent country. It would be there for Jo and Lance.
Betsy turned to him with a look in her eyes that said she’d made up her mind.
“It’s fantastic,” Cal agreed.
She grinned mischievously. “What will the Roys say?”
He gave her a hug.
“Good-bye, New York!” Cal shouted to the sky. “Forget the law offices of Webster and Sheffield. I’d trade anything for this.”
“Even Chinese restaurants?” Betsy said.
They laughed and kissed, and the wind was as mild as that warm fall day when they’d stood together, working the soup line at the utilitarian brick party building, which now seemed like a page out of a children’s book, she had been that naive. How dark and convoluted those idealized youthful arguments had been, compared to the bright simplicity of living off the land. In a marriage, whether you know it or not, you are always making the choice to stay, Betsy thought. Nine years, two children, and twenty-five hundred miles later, she was on the brink of choosing a new life with the same good man. She was falling in love all over again, and she felt it all with a full heart.
“It’s everything we hoped for,” Betsy said.
On the way to the truck, across the windblown yard they’d already claimed, they reminisced a bit about New York, reciting the addresses where they’d lived, naming all their favorite haunts, and recollecting times they’d shared with other young couples who used to matter so much in their lives, but who were gone now, just memories. Betsy felt lucky. It was so easy to emphasize the wrong things.
MERCY MEDICAL CENTER
DECEMBER 26, 1985
1:05 P.M.
Jo was on the pay phone in the hall when the male nurse came to get her. She’d been talking to her boyfriend in Portland. As a firefighter and EMT, he’d seen every kind of medical trauma, but he didn’t have enough information about Lance and Willie to help Jo. Instead he assured her she was doing as much as possible and spoke encouragingly about their friends who had formed a prayer circle. He was taking an emergency leave from the fire department and would be in Rapid City the following night.