Penny describes the book in detail. She sort of chokes on some of those details. And he flushes, more red a flush as each detail is laid bare before him. He scooches down on the stony edge of the pond, stares into the glassy water.
Penny relates all the conclusions of the Settlement women who have conferred. She remains standing, her arms crossed under her breasts, such flowery dress fabric, thus flowery breasts.
Something in the pond splashes once. The ripples roll out softly and the gold and blue reflected sunset shivers.
“We . . . her new mothers . . . decided not to tell you at first . . . or any of you guys . . . because . . . we thought you might overreact.”
He snorts, rubs one eye with the heel of his hand. “Where is she right now? She told me it was her turn to make supper at home. But there’s a philosophy salon tonight. Maybe she had some other things—” He cuts off his own sentence. Sighs. He stands but still doesn’t face his wife.
“Who knows what’s going on . . . at the Vandermasts?” Penny says darkly.
He rubs his palms together. Slowly.
She says, “No cops, Gordon. We need to be in control of this, not—”
He waves a hand to dismiss the very idea of cops. And his eye flinches violently as if whacked by or pepper-sprayed by the aforementioned.
“Gordon, all the time you’ve spent with her, has she hinted in any way about this?”
He squints. “I don’t know. I’ve got to think.”
Penny wades through the tall weedy-smelling goldenrod to get closer to him, steps to the stony edge of the pond. She looks him hard in the eyes. “You haven’t been messing with her.”
“No.”
She touches one of his work boots with her toe. “Just checking.”
But he looks stunned and embarrassed and something else. Guilt. Yes, guilt. It’s as if he were the one who had wrapped the girl’s wrists in dog chain so she could be enjoyed by customers again and again and again. How many times? How many years? Penny knows how it is with Gordon. He often takes on in shards, in conscience, the sins of other men, wears the guilt, and then tries to speechify his way clear, and he will also confuse Bree’s “heart” with the “hearts” of other women. His grief can never be sampler-sized, only jumbo. Right now, he seems pretty dumbstruck, avoiding the eyes of his pretty wife, this wife who has known just gentleness since she came here in her early twenties. He takes Penny into his huge arms now, as if to protect Penny from the Vandermast men and “customers.” Yeah, he is pretty quiet, just hiding his face in her clean-smelling hair. And that pringly, zingy, aggressive odor of the marigold pinned there, sort of awful, sort of nice, so naturally a part of her, her handsome womanly sunny ways. “I love you,” he whispers. Then, “I’m sorry.”
“We need to help her, Gordon.”
“Yep.”
“We need to figure out how we can get her to come live here. Away from that. And you can try to remember things she has said. Clues.”
“Yep.”
Around 10:30 p.m. on a summery September night.
Claire’s little house.
Only a thin Settlement-woven, Settlement-dyed tapestry is the wall that divides the ell bedroom into two skinny bedrooms, Catherine and Robert sharing a pallet made of quilts and sheepskins on the tiled floor there on one side, Claire’s big bed rammed against the opposite wall on the other side. Gordon has arrived for his “prearranged night over” in spite of Claire’s insistence that he now wait till after Catherine has gone back to her life in Portland, when she is “healed.” Usually he’s sensitive to this, the decisions or moods of his wives, their various schedules and cycles, the way at any given time they either want him or don’t want him in their beds. And he is careful not to seriously fondle one woman in front of another. Or in front of anyone, for that matter. He understands these dynamics, the hard-won semitranquillity of Settlement life. So this, tonight, in all ways is out of character for him. He appears in the bedroom door, makes a point of not looking to the right side of the tapestry, steps to the left, and opens his hand around a bedpost.
The rosy light of the small lamp blushes through the thin tapestry, a lamp Catherine Court Downey can’t sleep without. She is not afraid of the Settlement dark, just sleeps better with light, she has said.
“Go!” Claire commands in a whisper. “Not tonight. Get!”
Gordon imitates the whine of a chastised dog. He sniffs the air, short quick sniffs the way dogs do. He sniffs the bedpost. Cowers a little. Not at all playful, Claire sighs. “Okay then. Let’s talk. Something’s come up.”
Gordon eases his weight onto the edge of the big bed, a bed he himself has made from pine with every sort of lathed and carved embellishment, one of the hundreds of almost desperate ways he pays homage to Claire, his old friend, his first and only legal wife.
He twists around to look down at her; her golden face, which, without glasses in this dim rosy light, holds two very dark, very dangerous-looking eyes. No-nonsense eyes. No ha-ha. There is one thin blanket and a sheet to cover her up to her nearly bare shoulders. Fat. Behind the tall ornate headboard, there’s an open screened window. Two distinct sounds, a close neighbor not far beyond the birches, sawing away on his fiddle, and thousands of tall grass bugs sawing on theirs.
“Gordon.”
“What?”
“About Bree.”
“What now?” He looks at her hard, her darkly and rosily lit face.
And she says, “You’re going to be honest with me, okay?”
He stands up, his keys jangle. He unbuttons his shirt fast, like a shirt-unbuttoning race. Tosses it to the floor. Then the T-shirt. Facing her, he is half black, half red. One arm in the darkness that Claire’s side of the room makes, his other half, which is nearer the colorific tapestry, glows.
Claire pushes herself up, sheet settling around her tremendous middle, her summer nightie a massive plain of wee flowers. She says, “There’s more than just the book now.”
He arches his back, scratching himself between the shoulder blades, turned now so that his back is bright, his front dark.
“Gordon, it’s her paintings. Big ones. Nearly big as the walls. She’s so gifted, it’s . . . creepy. Catherine saw them this morning after Bree left to . . . you know . . . to go work with her . . . her family.”
Gordon eases tiredly onto the bed.
Claire goes on, “She’s, artistically speaking, left Maine and gone on to a Dante’s Inferno sort of place . . . mythical . . . or biblical . . . whatever . . .”
One boot falls and there’s the hiss of sand from a sock.
“A Minotaur. A seraph. And a devil . . . to name a few. As Catherine points out, they’re primarily male creatures, representing Bree’s own repressed energy, and her abuse. There is extraordinary attention to anatomy. Most artists take anatomy courses to get that good. Bree obviously hasn’t had that luxury. She’s been forced to be more than face-to-face with the real thing.”
The other boot falls. Sand. Sock.
Claire’s fingers close on the velvety hard muscle of Gordon’s left upper arm . . . huge left upper arm. “In every painting, the central figure, the focal point of the event, has your face. And . . . your body. I mean . . . the body is exactly yours. Chest hair. Everything.”
“It’s summer.”
“I don’t mean just chest and arms.”
“I thought you said they were Minotaurs.”
“Seraphs. Devils.” She stresses the Ss, F, and V. “Devils with horns, your exact beard, writhing in blue fire. Shows the whole body. Some front. Some back. Feet. Ankles. Toes. Your toes. The way your middle toes are long. And private parts . . . the way yours is. Uncircumcised.”
He sniffs indignantly. “Probably a good guess.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“But experienced, remember? Remember the book?”
Claire tightens the tips of her fingers into his bicep.
He snorts. “Dictionary is loaded with uncircumcised peckers. All those
Greeks.”
“Not exactly like yours.”
He says deeply, “She could have had an instructive huddle with any one of you women here. That’s all you women talk about anyway is dirt and smut. Why, she could have asked my mother! Same shape as I used to be, just bigger. Bree’s good at math.”
Claire is not amused.
With an edge of irritation, he says, “In every other way you’ve accepted that this girl is more intellectually keen than most fifteen-year-olds. Why not this? And sex and bodies aren’t something that takes a lot of intellect to figure out—”
“Exactly! What it takes is experience! You just boxed yourself in on that one!”
He grips his face with both hands. “She’s just a normal horny girl,” he insists through his fingers.
Claire’s eyes widen. The fiddling in the house next door has taken up the weird old tune of Polly Vaughn, or is it Swan Lake? Both unnerving.
He snickers. “She’s obsessed with men.”
“Abnormally.”
“Oh . . . right . . . if she hadn’t been raped, she’d have no interest in men. Well, hell, I’ve been obsessed with women since I was twelve. I guess I musta been raped by a buncha hags—”
“Shut up.”
“This doesn’t sound like you,” he says wearily. “You’re really stretching the space between nonexistent dots on this one.”
“Well, we’ve turned a corner on this.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Because these paintings . . . are you! And—” Now she covers her face. “It all feels so sleazy!”
“And you say Catherine saw these,” he asks quietly. “But you describe—”
“I went over and saw them after.”
“That’s Bree’s own private space. You didn’t honor it?”
“It was an emergency! If someone is having a heart attack in the bathroom, you bust in.”
He hangs his head. “I thought you all had decided to take it slow . . . not to make a crisis out of it. I thought that that was quite wise.”
“Have you, Gordon? Have you been intimate with Bree . . . fifteen-year-old Bree?”
“No.”
“You lie, you son of a bitch!”
He snatches up her hand. “I don’t lie,” he says in a hard ugly way.
Beyond the thin, ever-so-slightly swaying tapestry, only a small distance from Gordon’s bare feet, Robert’s thin voice. “Mommy?”
Catherine’s clear not-at-all-sleepy voice says, “It’s okay, sweetheart. They’re just talking.”
Robert speaks now in a conspiratorial whisper. “Gordon’s here.”
“Yes, it’s Gordon. Gordon’s here tonight.”
“Why?”
No answer. Just the giggle of the boy as his mother distracts him with a light tickle or a nuzzle, their dark silhouettes fluttering upon the glowing tapestry.
Gordon unbuckles his belt loudly. Throws his work pants over the nearest bedpost, dives into the covers, throwing an arm and a leg over Claire’s great soft body, which is now turned away from him, and he bites the back of her neck and growls.
“Ouch!” She turns toward him, laughing a little but also gasping in that short-winded way of the obese. “I’m sorry,” she whispers against his forehead. “It’s just hard to figure. This with her family, if it’s true, is . . . is . . . driving us all crazy. We want to save her from that, to lure her out of that. Abused women and children are trapped, not just physically but by their attachment to the perpetrator. Invisible chains. They’re the most insecure people in the world.”
Gordon breathes against her ear, “I hate the chairperson.”
Claire ignores him. “And she goes home to these monsters every night!”
He now takes one of Claire’s small hands and presses it into the hollow between his jaw and neck and shoulder.
“And as you know, Gordon, she’s not showing any signs of quitting that job with them in the woods.”
“Claire?”
“What?”
“If the paintings of me are imagination, a great imagination of a natural master, why are you so sure the ones of her family are real?”
She wiggles her fingers against his neck. “I think you’ll find that most of the women here and some of the guys would say that that part about you is also true. You’re alone with Bree a lot. And she acts differently with you than anyone else. That giggle would be seen as a knowing giggle, a lover’s giggle.”
“What about you? What do you think?”
She simpers. “Well, my dear. Natty is only eighteen and big as a house with your progeny and Leona was not even seventeen when she came here and had her first wrastle in the pickup truck with you.”
“With Leona that time, I was only in my twenties!”
“But what about Carol?”
No reply.
“She said you were pushy, that you made assumptions.”
“I’ve never touched Carol.”
“She said you haunted her.”
“How?”
“She said she didn’t want you. No glow. You were a nice person, but no glow. But you must have thought she had plenty of glow. She was uneasy enough to go back to Princeton. I called Bob F. and he and Macky came and got her. And Geraldine said some would call your assumptions about her rape.”
“But—”
“Yep, but . . . okay . . . but I also know you are a sucker for . . . for women who want you.”
“That’s—”
“Hush up. I know you keep confidences when someone has asked you to. And yes, I know you don’t lie. But keeping confidences and telling the full truth are contradictory. I—” She falls silent, cocking her head as if to enjoy the fiddling of the neighbor and the tall grass bugs, then says abruptly, “Everybody was just here.”
“Everybody?” He sighs, eyes narrowed.
“Everyone who’s been trying to help Bree through this. Lee Lynn, Lorraine, Vancy, Penny, Leona, Glennice, Bonnie Loo, and . . . uh . . .” She taps her fingers counting. “. . . Patricia. And Ann and uh . . . Stephanie and . . . ummm . . . Geraldine. Also Josee. Suzelle and Jacquie. Gail couldn’t get up here. Misty couldn’t. Did I say Cindy?”
No reply.
“. . . oh, and Bev and Barbara, of course. Lucienne came for a moment and left. Adrianne and Cathy. Natty. Diane. Terry. Donna. And Fran.”
He grins hugely. “Here? In this house?”
“You bet.”
He grunts. Rolls away from her, covers his eyes with a forearm as if her voice saying “you bet” was a terrible light in his face.
She presses on, “You know, darling, you tell outsiders all that pretty talk about democracy, democracy, democracy . . . for a better world. And all us Settlement folk love our little so-called ‘town meetings’ here, which . . . were your idea, yes . . . and they feel sort of like democracy. But you know . . . this is no democracy. You’re a dictator! A benevolent dictator. But a dictator. One could say it’s because the Settlement is on your property.”
Gordon’s chest muscles clench.
Claire laments wearily, “This place is like medieval patriarchy, oh, feudal lord . . .” She trails off.
Toward the silent glowing tapestry with Catherine beyond it, Gordon raises a hand, middle finger up. Holds it that way for several seconds.
Claire grabs his arm, pulls down the hand with the offending finger. “No, Gordon. You’re wrong. I’ve been thinking this myself for ages. All by myself.”
He shifts abruptly. Makes the bed bounce. Takes her left wrist. Mashes his whiskery mouth to the top of her hand. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss. “That is total unabridged bullshit, Claire,” he now whispers, and then mournfully, mostly to himself. “I am everybody’s slave.”
Beyond the rosy tapestry, the cartoonish voice of Robert. “Mommy?”
Gordon tsks. No, he never liked the word Mommy. As everyone at the Settlement has heard him preach over and over and over, “Mommy” is a TV word, a greeting card word, which has worked hand in hand with o
ther cheap words to tear down everyone’s true culture, everyone’s regional real cultures, with the epitome of the commercial culture, the commercial industrial capitalist fossil-fuel-driven satanic mother word, Mommy! Indeed, he has pressured all mothers here, even those who are not mothers of his children, to keep the Mommy-word from the children’s vocabulary. Mum or Mumma or Ma or Mother, as beautiful and strong as four million New England hardwood trees. Momma, if you are Southern, fine, also beautiful . . . “in its place, place is the thing, where you are or grew out of, Mammy, too. And then there is Maman, ah, music! Anything but Mommy or Mom!”
No TV.
No teenage girls or women out alone after dark without two full-sized watchful Settlement male chaperones.
No grades in college.
No Mommy.
“Go to sleep, Robert,” Catherine’s voice whispers.
Gordon stares at the glowing tapestry, one eyebrow raised, his best-so-far unhinged look. “So. What was the unanimous decision of the council on my guilt or innocence? Was there a unanimous decision?”
“No.”
He chuckles. “Well, there. See where real democracy gets you?”
On the road out of town, Gordon and Rex run into each other at the Convenience Cubicle gas stop, Rex ahead of Gordon at the pumps.
Rex putting gas into his York Electric work van. Gordon stands there with the thrumming hose between them, dumping change from one hand to the other. Back and forth. He looks in and sees the little Bible in there on the van’s dash. Bible on the dash, service pistol under the shirt, or somewhere near . . . under a jacket on the seat, maybe. Rex tells him that the guy from the Virginia militia will probably be up for the Preparedness Expo in Bangor and will stay at his place for that night before and the night after.
Gordon nods, “Just one guy?”
“Maybe three.”
“You get crowded, we’ve got room. Let me know.”
Rex is watching the digits flash on the face of the pumps. Gordon watches Rex as though numbers, or something even more critical to this universe, were flashing over his profile. Rex is not wearing his sunglasses. They’re on the dash with the Bible. And no floppy green army cap. He is dressed in blue Dickees for work. Bare-headed.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 50