Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  Laura and I were busy getting used to a new school, we forgot a baby was going to be born.

  Our parents began to fight, to the extent that my father could fight when he saw no need for it. Our stories at the dinner table were not so lively; the ground at our new school was not yet firm enough for jokes. We egged my father on as he sank into a confusion of stories about his new office. My mother sat like a driver in the left lane waiting to turn. Laura and I strained to show her how to be interested, how to resume where we had left off early in the summer before there had been any murders. At night she sometimes stood in the doorway of my room or Laura’s while we were doing our homework. She might have tried to say what she was getting ready to do. We shut our ears.

  But she had done them anyway, my father had abased himself with tears, and Laura had screamed her wish to move away with him by the time I went up the steps of the high school and saw a way to blot them all out in loves of my own.

  I know my mother never offered to take us to see Mary Catherine. I can’t be sure whether we asked. Years later, in the apartment where she lived, I asked her about the Otts’ baby and she said yes, she had seen her. A girl. “But with Audrey, I had to be close by, for us to be friends. We had to be living the same life.”

  That stopped me, at the time. The incomprehensible belief that we were leading the same life as the Otts.

  “Audrey Ott,” she said sadly.

  Mr. Ott did not come out of the house for the burial of Mosquito. Probably he had gone up to James’s room. Especially since his son was there so much of the time now, he liked to lie on the other bunk with his headache and his sadness, the kind that leads to the death of something, resembling some kinds of happiness in that way.

  novel of rose

  This would be the novel of Rose. First, two stone houses on adjacent hills, in the long pause after the war when everyone in Virginia was raising children. Five chimneys between them. Seven children, four parents, two dogs, the same cat seen in the grass and moving from window to window in both houses, old walnut trees dropping black fruit, locust trees in the fencerows, with groundhog tunnels in their roots. Innumerable empty shells of the real locust, the insect, a wheat-spun-to-glass color, clinging to bark and fencepost one particular year, the year Varden first unsparingly, despairingly loved Rose.

  Anne and Sarah—the Montgomery girls. Their younger brothers Roger, known as Mont, and Varden. At the time Rose’s family arrived, Varden Montgomery was seven.

  Will, David, Rose. Two boys and a rose. The Chestons. Rose, also seven, was an Indian, a Tamil, the Chestons said, though as she grew everybody saw that at the same time she was so dark, she looked like Mary Cheston. She had the same gravelly voice her brothers had from their mother, as well. The Chestons had gone away to India and stayed years. They had gone with two children and come back with three. The novel of Rose would go into the trouble a Virginia grade school made about her color.

  James Cheston was a doctor but not a rich one. With money from Mary Cheston’s family they bought the house next to the Montgomerys, out of shouting distance but always seen as an offspring of the big old Montgomery place. In actuality it had been the original barn, a stone structure on the lower hill, accumulating dignity because of its years in county memory, and the time and labor that had gone into its conversion—the carving out of windows, for one thing, in stone walls two feet thick. And then it was a house, an immediate landmark, facing half away from the main house onto vistas of its own.

  By the time the Chestons bought it the house itself was old, and grown shabby inside, with a remnant of rat society, descendants of the barn-raiders of the century before, still holding certain passages in the walls.

  Seven children pounded up the steep front steps and landed against the screen door, where, if they yelled a password in time, they were safe. The screen hung ruined. If it was a Saturday and James Cheston was not out on a house call, he would speak quietly to the winner, who when she reappeared—for Rose, though the youngest, was the fastest—would tear unredeemed down the steps into the pack and down the hill.

  At that time their ages ranged from seven to eleven, and for a year or two the older girls, Anne and Sarah Montgomery, played as wildly as any of them, wearing necklaces of locust shells they never would have touched had not Rose been the one who strung them.

  They always played on the Chestons’ hill. The Chestons were the newcomers but they held the power. Partly because of their foreignness, their greater indifference to risk, but more the result of their deep voices, they prevailed over the Montgomerys. Their courage, passed to each one like an allowance from the father, who after fighting in the war had gone into the hills of India to fight malaria, led them into proud dangers. It was nothing to them to climb out onto roofs and use the chimneys as base, squeeze into laundry chutes, excavate groundhog holes to make caves, creep up on the neighbor’s bull, play on tractors parked out of sight of either house. Their innocence, another gift of the father, kept them from cruelty, from the clever reprisals Mont Montgomery was known for at school. As it was, Mont gave up some of his own ambitions in order to be with the Chestons, though to his sisters he made fun of the Hindi patois they could chatter in their odd, deep voices. “Abela-babela,” the Montgomerys, except Varden, called it. In time Will Cheston, oldest of the boys, held them all in a willing servitude. His rule developed without any intention on his part, because like his father he was half shy when not outdoors, where his daring carried him away.

  The other factor in the ascendancy of the Chestons was Rose.

  Like her mother and father, Rose had a sweet nature to go with her beauty. At the thought of her, of something she had said, Varden would stumble as easily as at the sight of her, streaking downhill with the dogs to the fort in the locust trees. She always beat him. Her speed and relentlessness in a race gave way to appeasement and little gifts—dandelions and violets out of the grass—for him. But she gave them to the others, too.

  When Anne Montgomery faded into her teens, she tried to get her sister Sarah and Rose indoors and upstairs, where on one occasion Rose was induced to have her heavy hair put up in bobby pins.

  By then Varden Montgomery was far gone. He hung in the doorway when the dampened hair was being rolled into black coins. The effort to make any movement casual set his face in a spasm. Now he was ten, with no foreknowledge that his voice would not change until he was fourteen. In his bed at night he tried to pitch it to the low enchanting hoarseness of the Cheston boys, and Rose, Rose too—all of them had the mother’s soft growl. Varden loved the mother, too, Mary Cheston, who seemed to know his feelings and even to expect them, who gave off a faint scent his mother said was curry powder, and whose eyebrows tapered like Rose’s, though not so dark, in long arches his mother told his sister Anne not to attempt on herself with an eyebrow pencil.

  Now Anne wore lipstick and kept to her room reading Silver Screen with the cat in her lap, though she sat by the open window and looked out when they were running. Now they were six, four boys and two girls. The fort was a castle in India. The boys and Sarah were defenders of the perimeter, Rose the queen.

  In the novel of Rose, this would be the childhood in which some secret was embedded, to be unraveled in later life and serve as evidence that things proceed from a cause.

  Varden Montgomery’s love twisted his insides, he thrashed in his sheets to get at the root of it. A kiss, his shut lips on the open laughing ones of Rose, burned his inexpert mind at Scout campfires. Eventually he would surprise himself with success in sports, reach high school, Yale, and so on, and practice law like his father and brother Mont, though milder than either in a courtroom. He would marry and have two children.

  Before his marriage he bought out his siblings to own the house where they had grown up and where the dog and cat were buried, and at his insistence the Chestons’ dog. He did not live there, and in time he let it go and had a rough likeness of it built elsewhere out of lighter materials.

  It
was long before this that Will Cheston, seated at the dinner table, saw a tear drip from his father’s jaw.

  Mary Cheston went back to India, taking Rose.

  Sarah Montgomery got a Fulbright to India and found Rose. The two of them came back and lived years together in New York. In the novel, these years would have the figure of a dance, a kind of reel. Rose would dance first with Sarah and then with others, and then, keeping to the nature of dance, with a final partner entering from the dark of the scenery.

  Will Cheston died in Vietnam. Varden’s children never knew their aunt Sarah, who stayed in New York, pursuing Rose for many years. Rose slowed her speed. A still point was coming. Resolution. The novel must end in a satisfaction of sorts. The ones who follow instead a logic of their own, succumb to it and end in the ground.

  In India, Mary Cheston is speaking of her dead son Will to someone who listens with his hands clasped. The younger son, named David, the other brother of Rose: Did everyone forget him? What happened to him? And so on. The novel would have gone into this. Though the novel might not linger over the house in India as it did the ones in Virginia, in the novel we would see the man. He would be in some contrast to the soldier’s mustache and doctor’s kindness of James Cheston. What could he be like, to exceed these things? The novel would have told us. We will never know.

  criminals

  The time came for Jean to meet Michael’s friends. Like his housemates, the friends, two women and a man, were his own age, a dozen years younger than Jean who was forty, something she knew was not going to matter to them because they were easygoing about everything, while Jean kept coming back to the fact that she had been a girl of thirteen when somebody was weighing the newborn Michael, the size of a kitten as his mother always told him, on the little scale for preemies.

  She sat half awake at Michael’s picnic table in the sun, waiting for his friends to arrive. Dozens of tiny birds had swooped into the forsythia and made it blink with bits of gray. They were the minute, restless bushtits she had once watched in her own yard in summer, at a time when she had paid attention to birds and looked them up in guides, a time when she had had interests.

  The table occupied a clearing in the yard, under a gnarled cherry tree with a net over it. Mylar balloons printed with owls’ eyes flew from strings tied to the net, and higher up, wired onto the gutters of the house, sat two large, real-looking plastic owls. All of this was to protect Michael’s cherries. The yard was full of lumber and sawhorses because he was remodeling and had just finished ripping out the back steps, so going in and out of the house they had to use a ramp.

  The three friends came through the gate, threw down their packs, and shook her hand. Before she knew it that part was over and they had opened beers from the cooler and straddled the picnic benches. They cut into Michael’s bread and soon they were all, all but Jean, talking lazily in the sun. They were complaining about music. They didn’t know all the songs the way they had even a few years ago, when there was a song for each of their occasions, each of their moods.

  They seemed little more than children. Yet one of them—Jean could not remember which one—worked in the DA’s office with Michael.

  The conversation turned to song titles and Jean heard herself enter it. “I used to wonder why there’s no song called ‘I’m Pregnant.’ A happy song.”

  There was a moment and then it caught. “A girl song! Or how about ‘I’ve Got My Period,’” said one of the women, the one with the shining, light-brown braid. Lisa. She had swung her long leg over the bench and begun tearing wedges of bread off the loaf Michael had made, spreading cream cheese and cherry jam, talking with her mouth full. “Well, that’s an important occasion. And for some of us it was a real cause for celebration. When it first came, I mean. And then of course many times afterward,” she added, licking her fingers, “so I guess the song would be ambiguous. Michael, your jam is incredible.”

  “It’s the cherries,” said Michael. They all gazed up at the protected tree. “Starlings. They’d get ’em all.” Everything you do, Jean thought, all this shoring up of house and yard every weekend, making jam, growing zucchini, for God’s sake, all of it is orderly. It’s all planned, it’s careful, you write it down in those notebooks of yours. What for? Is it important? Why be so careful and ceremonious? Of course it was because he was a lawyer—or did he say “attorney,” the way people his age liked to?—why be a lawyer at all at his age, and in the prosecutor’s office, when it didn’t suit him—surely when he had children he would not be good at punishing them—why try to do it, or any of the complicated, futile projects he engaged in, if not out of pride masquerading as modesty and simplicity? And yet he seemed modest, simple, kind.

  By a silent agreement they did not have to work at any conventional understanding of each other, they had bypassed that. If they were seriously interested in each other, and it was not clear that they were, it was in some other way.

  “But why not ‘I’m Pregnant’?” Jean persisted, realizing as she said it that it sounded like an effort to turn things in her own direction. Neither of the women at the picnic table had yet been pregnant, as far as she knew. Or no children, anyway. No marriages. No deaths.

  “Yeah,” said Lisa thoughtfully. “Maybe a reggae. Hmm. There’s ‘Having Your Baby.’”

  “That’s different.”

  “What about the poor pregnant teenager?” said Steve. Already Jean didn’t care for Steve because of his frequent soft, confident laughter, and her suspicion that he was the other prosecutor. “‘I’m Pregnant’ would be like ‘oh God, what am I gonna do now?’ It’s kids that songs are for now, they don’t write them for us.” He ended with the soft laugh.

  “Country songs, they do.” Jean looked up because this was said by Michael.

  “For you, maybe.” Steve slapped Michael on the plaid flannel of his small, hard shoulder.

  Michael had persuaded Jean to spend a weekend with him, then another. They did not sleep together. Why was he pursuing her? The question made her queasy. I am, she said to herself, like a can of something in the back of the refrigerator. Web and mold. But not mold, because I’m not alive. You don’t know that, though, she thought, eyeing Michael, so you can’t be blamed. Or if you said “dead,” it would be a metaphor.

  The sun was high. It was afternoon on Sunday, on his mowed grass with the neatly stacked lumber, netted tree, tomato plants and trellised peas, picnic table, all encircled by the high cedar fence he had built, with a row of hollyhocks growing up against it. In the spaces between forsythia bushes he had planted the tall flowers, soft, worn-looking blossoms with furred leaves. That was what he liked, that suggestion, in the countrified pink flowers, that nothing in the tiny field inside the fence had to do with what was outside it—the freeway they could hear gusting close by, the courtroom a few miles down it where he went in his gray suits. But Jean didn’t want to be in a little field. She was waiting for the friends to go so she could say good-bye to Michael in some acceptable but abbreviated way and get back to her own unmowed, flowerless yard, her house. Her house! Her heart gave a throb of appetite and fear.

  “Maybe you should move,” Michael had said. At that time he hardly knew her, her friends pointed out. But he hadn’t said, as those friends of hers, friends now half forgotten, had said, “What’s in that house for you?”

  She couldn’t tell them, but she had told Michael. His soul. His soul is there. It hasn’t gone, not yet. I can’t leave. I don’t like to be away this long, a whole weekend.

  “OK, Jean,” was all Michael would say to her wild look. Pity. She recognized his talent for graceful pity. A person could cry in the rather sharp hollow of his neck and shoulder, certainly; she had done so. But she would not again. Tears were not what they had been on that occasion. Tears had reverted that one time to their old purpose of cleansing and relief. Usually they were more like vomiting, they worked on the muscles, and now the few times they came, mostly in the car, she felt afterward as if she had fallen down t
he stairs.

  “Have you considered seeing somebody?” This he threw out lightly, while he was making the bed. She had been standing at the new window the whole time he was putting the room in order because he was going to give his friends a tour of the house. She had picked up her things, there was no reason not to stand there a little longer and lean her head on the glass.

  “Who, a counselor, a grief counselor?” She stopped him with her palms on his chest.

  “Oh, right, I’m talking wellness.” In the morning, climbing the hill in silence after he made her get out of bed and put on clothes and walk around the lake with him, they had seen it, the bumper sticker. “Visualize Wellness.” Jean was out of shape and couldn’t get her breath. The three-mile walk, the steep grade were nothing to Michael, a five-mile run barely raised a sweat, but when he walked with her he always stopped to give her a rest. This time he leaned on the car with the bumper sticker and screwed up his face. “I’m visualizing. I think I’m getting it.” He opened his eyes. “I’m not going to say what it is, though. Each person has to see Wellness for him or herself.”

  He never came closer than she wanted. Now he was letting her stand at the window in his bedroom. If she wanted to she could stand there all day without moving, just looking out and smelling the wood; he would not interfere. He merely said, “I would not make suggestions to a person unless”—he paused—“I really wanted her to be in OK shape so I could use her and cast her aside without any qualms. Because she’s older. And us young guys don’t have any conscience yet. That comes when you’re forty.”

  “Well, maybe it does. And conscience is going to keep us together?”

  “Oh, you want to keep together?”

  “Oh, Michael.” She did like using his name. It had been the name of her son’s best friend. Was still his name. Michael. She could hear it being called down the stairwell in a voice. Out the window in a voice. Hey! Michael! “They’ll be here and you won’t have any lunch ready,” she told him.