Summers at Blue Lake

by Jill Althouse-Wood

  “You evil girl. You are not pretty, yet you tempt men. You do not walk with angels, but with Satan. You must repent before God. Feel the fires of hell. And if you cry out, you will be punished. God does not like ugly whores, bastard daughters of factory workers. Repent.”

  Lena would undress, and stand naked before her stepfather. He would hold the lit end of his cigarette to her buttocks so she could feel the heat. If she cried, he would press it further until it burned full moons into her flesh. When he was finished with his cigarette, she would dress, and he would zip. Then, he would open the door to her room a crack, and they would kneel by the end of her bed to pray. Usually about this time, Lydia, finished with the supper dishes, would join them and pray aloud for her daughter’s soul. She was so happy that her new husband and her daughter got along so well, and this fact she included in her “Thanks be” prayers as a postscript.

  It was little wonder that it took the Reverend Platz eight years to impregnate his wife. The Reverend’s sermons were the only evidence of any virility that Lena had witnessed. The Reverend’s visits to Lena’s room stopped when he discovered he had fathered a child by his wife. All those warnings against boastfulness and pride did not apply to him. At long last, after many prayers, his wife was pregnant.

  Not long afterwards, Lena met Hank. She never had many friends at school, and never a boyfriend. She had started a secretarial course after high school. He was an engineering student. They met when he came to the business school looking for a student to type his term papers.

  Lena volunteered to type his paper before she had a chance to think about the consequences or her own shyness. Hank loved the way he could leave his imprint on Lena, so innocent and willing to be whatever he needed in a girlfriend. They had only dated for two months when he proposed to her on the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  If you think it was difficult for me to hear Lena’s story, you are right. She did not tell it willingly. After each installment of her story, I went to her and hugged her. She did not back away from my embrace, as I suspected someone might who had been victimized by a touch. I did not even know the worst of it, and wouldn’t until later.

  I asked Lena if I could touch her belly, feel the baby. I always asked, and she always let me. I marveled at the tautness of her smooth abdomen and the irregularities of little elbows and feet that greeted me. Her face registered delight each time I told her of the love I already felt for the baby. We had stopped knitting socks for Charlie and started on projects for the baby: a bunting, booties, and even a white baptismal sweater. I had promised Lena that we would have the baby baptized. Through all her trials, she still loved the church. It was literally her sanctuary. I had never grown up in church, but I was sure that Charlie would want to bring the baby up Lutheran. Lena and I discussed names. Graybill was a solid surname. It sounded good with most given names.

  The nights were hot in D.C. We lived in the city where the heat never quite evaporated into the hills of Maryland and Virginia. The heat stayed flat and steamy along the river, between the buildings, and in our kitchen. I still baked breads to sell in Washington when the flour supply was reliable. The house felt like a brick oven in the evenings, and we needed to escape its torture.

  Some nights Lena and I would find a secluded section of Rock Creek and walk beside it or dip our toes into the glassy edge. That was when I would tell Lena of the farm where I would take the baby until Charlie returned. I had received a telegram informing me that my tenant had been drafted by the army and could no longer pay rent on my property. Now the farm was an empty cradle, waiting for my baby.

  “You should see it, Lena. It has hills and a stream, and the whole place is surrounded by these wild mulberry trees. We could raise chickens and maybe a have a cow for some fresh milk. We used to have fresh milk every day when I was a girl. Charlie’s family owns a dairy farm.”

  Lena never talked of her plans for her future, after the baby was born. Of course, I invited her to stay with me until Charlie returned, but she was uncertain.

  “We’ll see,” she would say and turn her face away.

  I saw some softening in her when I described the lake near Mulberry Farm. “It goes as far as the eye can see, and in the evening the sunset makes dancing sparks of light on its surface. It is so peaceful—nothing like it. We can take the baby for walks; there is a path nearby. Or we can even go swimming.”

  “I used to swim at a water hole near Pittsburgh,” she’d say. “I loved to swim. My mother says I could swim before I could walk. It is the only memory of my real father, floating with me on that pond. I must have been two or three because he died before I turned four. Do you think it is a real memory?”

  “Of course, I do.” I did not lie.

  “I swam in pools, too. I got a blue ribbon one summer for swimming the fastest of any girl in our town, but that was before my mother married Daddy, and we moved to Philadelphia.” Lena was shy then, as if she had spoken out of turn.

  Sometimes we would hold hands on our walk. It was platonic, but the things we were about to share were so visceral that we needed to grab tight. Those nights were white with our fears, red with our dreams. We were both expectant with so much more than a baby. We wanted the world to be a good place where evil cowered not only in the far reaches of the warring world, but also in the bedrooms of little girls. Yes, I knew you would be a girl, Judy, for how else would we be able to seek redemption? I knew, too, there would be a Barbara Jean, for our demand was too great for one generation to bear.

  I was weaving ends back into a baby sweater when Lena shared with me the second part of her story. She lit a cigarette, as she was in the habit of doing since we had come to the capital. We didn’t yet understand the health hazards of cigarette smoke for unborn babies. I never liked the smell, but I did like Lena’s show of independence, so I never chastised her.

  She blew the smoke out of the corner of her mouth. Perhaps she was reserving the rest of her mouth for her words.

  “Anja, do you remember the night of my party?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you remember the things that the Reverend said about me?”

  “He was drunk. I didn’t pay attention.”

  “Oh, Hank did.”

  I remembered back to Hank’s vacant blue eyes, and how they absorbed all the drunken whispers from the Reverend. Hank looked every bit the soldier then, uniformed and filled with the anger of a nation. Those eyes. I did not see my own protection in them, but imagined them to be rather like those of the enemy we were fighting. Blue eyes for Hitler’s Aryan race. I tried to shake off my feelings and support this man who took a great cause upon himself, but I still had my Greek ways. I still had my intuition, and that was something the gypsy in me could never extinguish.

  Oh, Hank did. From that statement came the story I didn’t want to know, yet I already did. Hank had walked Lena away from the brownstone to the small room he rented near the college. He had to sneak her inside. His landlady had expressly prohibited smoking, drinking, carousing, and women. Lena was a bit lightheaded from the dessert wine we had used to toast her birthday and upcoming nuptials. She felt very close to Hank, and she opened up to him emotionally. My feeling was that she would have opened up to him physically, too, if he had given her the chance.

  Lena told Hank of the abuse she had suffered as a child, and how happy she was that he was saving her, taking her away from it all. She told him of the zippers and the prayers and the cigarettes. Hank was livid. She thought he might be, and she tried to calm him by saying that she had survived. It was over. She had him now. However, Hank was not angry with the Reverend; he was angry at Lena.

  He knocked her on his cot and twisted her arm. “How could you?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, and he slapped her hard across her mouth. “You slut. You couldn’t even wait for a date; you had to get your action with your daddy. And to think I waited patiently for you. Well, not anymore.”

  With one hand he
held her down, and with the other he undid his belt. She tried to deny his accusations and resist his weight, but he just gagged her so she wouldn’t be heard in the adjacent rooms. Then the man she had promised to marry, the man she wanted more than anything else to please, the man to whom she would have given herself in five days—that man raped her.

  What did Lena know of sex? She only saw the limp cowardice of a child predator. Lena had not known that a man’s organ could inflate against her, could tear her flesh. She backed herself against the wall and made herself very small, but not small enough. “Look at me,” Hank said. He yanked her hair back until she could see the sweat on his lip and smell his breath, sour with the wine. She started to count inside her head the way she did when the cigarettes burned her buttocks and inner thighs. One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, knock on the door. Five, six, pick up sticks. Seven, eight, lay them straight. Nine, ten, a big, fat hen. One, two . . . Over and over, the mental rhyme numbed her senses. Eventually Hank’s grip loosened, and he rolled off of her.

  She untied the binding on her mouth herself. Hank did nothing to stop her. It was so dark; she had to feel around on the floor for her panties. Lena pulled on her underwear without doing anything to stop the blood. It spread until it was a map on the white cotton. When she opened the door Hank called to her: “I won’t marry a secondhand bitch. Find some other fool.”

  Lena walked home alone. Like a conquering nation, the map in her panties flooded its borders. Each annexation brought a wave of nausea, and she grabbed the sides of a trash can and retched. Adding mockery to offense, Lena’s diamond sparkled, winking the reflected light of a spotty streetlamp.

  Nobody wants to hear about her own conception. We hide that messy business behind baby showers and baptisms and strollers in the park. Judy, I never thought of your beginnings in those ugly terms. How could such a gift come from such brutality? I never believed in original sin, and likewise, I never believed that you were born out of anything but my desire to hold you in my arms.

  We did go to the hospital as planned. Many women accompanied other women to the delivery rooms, especially then. In the small room at the end of the hall, I waited with more female relatives than daddies-to-be. Each woman pressed a picture of a serviceman into my hands. My son.

  My sister’s husband. My neighbor. I had a picture of Charlie with me in the pocket of my dress, but I did not show it for fear that I would reveal our hoax. Instead, I fingered the photograph until its edges were sueded from my touch.

  Lena’s labor had started early on the morning of December fourth. We had walked around our neighborhood until the pains grew stronger and closer together. I, who had never driven a car before, had practiced driving Lena’s cousin’s 1937 Oldsmobile Club Coupe until I could drive it smoothly through the city. This was no small feat. The car was large, sold to Lena’s cousin by the DuPont family chauffer. It had a built-in radio with two speakers, a luxury I could not enjoy for fear of distraction. When the hour came, my anxiety was compounded by Lena’s labor, but I managed to drive us safely to the hospital. They whisked Lena away in a wheelchair. I watched her go. The attending nurse asked me for the patient’s name.

  “Mrs. Charles Graybill,” I said.

  “And you are?”

  “A friend.”

  That same nurse returned to inform me of your birth, shortly thereafter. Lena named you in those woozy hours after you were born. We had never known anyone named Judy. It was a clean name, free from expectation, even though you were not. I was afraid that Lena would change her mind about giving me the baby, especially since, as a girl, you did not carry the mark of her attacker.

  My fears were unfounded. The moment she handed you to me was her greatest triumph. Lena had wholly succeeded in pleasing another person, a feat she had never before accomplished. Did she fall in love with me the day I validated her existence? We’ll never know, but she did accept my proposal to move to Mulberry Farm—as if to say no would have threatened her very life.

  I COULD NOT FINISH the letter. I closed the notebook and looked at my son who in turn was watching ants move about in the dirt beneath the swings. I knew the truth about us now. Lena was my real grandmother, my blood and bones grandmother. Lena was my son’s great-grandmother. Even Sam was not who I thought he had been an hour ago. I had no artist in the family, only a family history of cancer and incest. The late morning brought a chill, an intimation of autumn and my life to come. The past, this very house, neither could blanket me in its warmth, and for the moment I felt a loss greater than any of the many I had experienced in the past year.

  Why had I never suspected? Those moments Lena and I had shared out in the garden together. Why had Grandma Lena never told me? She had let Nonna have all the glory. I wondered if subconsciously I had known it then. The lie had to be present at the cellular level, somewhere. Did my mother know or, at the very least, suspect? There had to be some code embedded in our brains. A child knows its mother. It is a matter of survival. Then again, my mother didn’t survive, did she?

  Bryce opened the kitchen door. He was wearing only a towel wrapped around his hips. His body was pink from exertion and damp from a recent shower. I had not realized he had come home from his jog. I must have been too absorbed in the notebooks to notice his return.

  “I just wanted to let you know, I blew a fuse with that fan upstairs and my electric razor,” he said. “I was going to fix it, but I couldn’t find the switch for the cellar light.”

  “You shouldn’t go down there without shoes anyway. I’ll get it.” Seeing his half-shaved face, I knew his concern was immediate. “If you can just stand here at the door and keep an eye on Sam, I’ll be right back,” I said. “Oh, and Bryce, please don’t flash my neighbors.”

  Still clutching Nonna’s notebook, I brushed past Bryce on my way to the basement. I felt the spark but denied it. It was only Bryce’s assumed familiarity that had unsettled me. His nakedness implied an intimacy that wasn’t there. I would have to make certain boundary lines with him, just as I would have to make limits for Travis.

  Travis. I opened the door to the cellar and stared into the dark vacancy of the stairwell. Had I suspected that Travis and I shared not just a story but also an ancestry? My only love sprung… from my own family? I pressed the notebook into my chest and fumbled for the light switch. I didn’t reach it until I had descended the three top stairs. I pressed the button until it clicked. One naked bulb exposed the narrow stairway enough for me to negotiate the rest of my way. Not so with Nonna’s story. With so many questions raised, I could almost be sure that I would have to read to the end before I found all the answers I needed.

  ♦ 47 ♦

  BRYCE HAD GIVEN SAM the option of where he wanted to go for lunch, and I had cringed when he said Chuck E. Cheese’s.

  “Maybe with his arm the way it is, we should …” I began.

  “He’s fine,” Bryce interrupted in a way that told me the decision had been finalized.

  I did not know what my real objection was. The three of us climbed into Bryce’s 4Runner. I immediately wished I had driven. Everything seemed to be on Bryce’s terms, and I wanted desperately to prove that things were different now—even if that difference was limited to the symbolism of taking the driver’s seat.

  The restaurant was less crowded than it had been on that rainy day in early summer. We ordered a pizza and sat down to wait while Sam scurried from one game to another.

  “It isn’t in our arrangement, but I am thinking of driving in for Sam’s birthday.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. We have two months to think about it. I’d kind of like to get him started in school and see how that goes.”

  “It’s no problem, is it?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I am going to get our drinks. What would you like? Cherry Coke, no ice?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I was anxious to get away from Bryce. Perhaps I could convince Sam to give me some tokens so I could play a few games before the pizza
arrived. How silly it was that I was avoiding my ex-husband. Now he wanted to come in October for Sam’s birthday. If I didn’t negotiate my terms now, I was setting myself up for future difficulties. I returned to the table with the trio of drinks and a determination to set things straight. Bryce stood and took the cups from my grip.

  “Look, Bryce, I don’t have a problem with you coming in October, but maybe it would be better if we got you a hotel room nearby. Maybe the Holiday Inn with the indoor pool and miniature golf course. That way you could take Sam swimming.”

  “Am I in the way?”

  “I think it’s great for Sam, but we are getting on with our lives, and I don’t want there to be any confusing issues from here on out.”

  “Are you talking about the towel, because if that’s—”

  “No, I just don’t want Sam or anybody else to get the wrong idea about our relationship. We need some boundaries.”

  “You’re right. A hotel room is probably for the best. Do you want me to get one for tonight?”

  “No, you don’t have to,” I said much too quickly. I wished I had thought before I answered, but I couldn’t take it back now. At least, I had stood my ground about future visits, and that gave me license to relax. I couldn’t help thinking about the baby. Karen had said the baby was due in September. When in September? The beginning of that month was only days away. Would his girlfriend be so quick to allow him to travel ten hours away in the uneasy weeks of new parenthood? Was she okay now with Bryce traveling so close to the end of her pregnancy?

  I searched my brain for a new subject. As flustered as I was, I resigned myself to the habitual questions about work.

  “Work is good. I took a couple of weeks off to be with Sam and worked at home sometimes and quit working early during the other weeks he was there. I’ll have a lot of catching up to do when I get back, especially with Larson retiring at the end of the year.”