by Patti Abbott
Once he left town, men began to come around. Most didn’t realize Ronnie was mentally handicapped, and somehow such a thing meant less then. Low intelligence was not necessarily a fatal flaw in farm wives, who spent their lives raising children, food and animals. Ronnie’s handicap was apparent to anyone who spent time with her, but in church, the only place most people saw her, she was picture of competence at the piano waiting for the minister to nod, her cue to begin.
But more than once, Jim had come home to find a man hanging around, watching hungrily as Ronnie tended her mums or swept the porch. Once Jim came upon an out-of-work mechanic waltzing her around the yard, both of them out of breath with laughter. There were many men that year with nothing to do, men who hadn’t had time on their hands since childhood and who only knew childish ways to fill it. But winter came finally, and once it grew cold, Ronnie stayed inside.
Over the last seventy years, I’ve spent countless evenings thinking about where Jim’s idea of using Ronnie to solve our financial problems came from. I think Jim tried to find a job, called relatives in the area, tried to track Daddy down. Mother seemed incapable of doing anything that fall, he said later. In retrospect, she must have counted on Daddy to return at some point and bail us out. That was why the money in the tin box a few weeks later didn’t surprise her.
Sitting in church week after week, watching men’s faces slacken or go tight when Ronnie walked up the aisle to play “The Old Rugged Cross,” Jim must have believed the only solution to our problems lay with Ronnie. Or perhaps it was, Mr Tyson, his high school English teacher, who spawned the idea. Certainly it was Charles Tyson I saw climbing the stairs that final night.
Our town was small though and secrets got out. Some time that spring, our family physician, Dr. Large, under the guise of a routine examination, told Mother that Ronnie was no longer “intact” suggesting rather firmly that she should be sterilized as soon as possible.
“She’ll be carrying someone’s child by autumn,” he predicted dourly to our shocked mother.
The case of Buck v. Bell was only a few years in the past and the sterilization of retarded girls was a routine procedure. “It’s your duty,” Dr. Large continued, “to insure that another child with Ronnie’s…deficiencies… isn’t born.”
The reverence of nurses for doctors made Mother susceptible to Dr. Large’s strong-arming advice, and Ronnie was spirited away on the pretext of a shopping trip and the procedure took place in a doctor’s office in a nearby city.
She returned three days later, proudly holding a wicker birdcage with a salmon-colored canary in it, a lasting reminder to us, if not herself, of what she’d lost. The canary, Sweetie Pie, whistled “Life in Just a Bowl of Cherries” incessantly, a popular song that year. It was soon all any of us could do to listen to it.
When the four of us had settled back into the semblance of a normal life, and, most of all, when I was a little older, I began to blame Jim for much of what happened. Why had he embarked on such an extreme course of action? Before I was old enough to ask, he left Coryell’s Crossing suddenly, taking a job at the Navy Yard in Norfolk Virginia. A few engineering courses at the local college won him a position there, and he rarely came home afterward. The war, with its dependence on the “inventions” of men like Jim, put even more distance between us.
In 1937, an older man with grown children asked for Ronnie’s hand. Ed was a good man. He hired a woman to look after things and Ronnie tended the garden, fed the chickens and played the piano he bought for her. If Ed ever wondered why no children came, he never asked. Mother remarried during the war, when she could finally divorce Daddy for desertion, and found some happiness of her own.
I became a teacher but never married. I centered my life on my students, my books, and a long line of tabbies and was never the worse for my choices.
Jim and I rarely saw each other over the next sixty years. As I write that number, it seems impossible. When he came home, it was only for a day or two, and other family members always surrounded him, with Ronnie hanging on tightest of all. His only lengthy visit occurred when Ronnie died in the 1980s.
“There’s not a soul here under fifty,” the friend of relative observed to the small circle of mourners at the back of the room.
“Well, none of us had children.” I said defensively. We all looked at our shoes for a minute.
“Rose never married,” Jim finally said, his voice gruff. “And I married late—with the war and all. Of course, there was no way we could allow Ronnie to….” He said it regretfully, but with a finality that convinced me once and for all that it was Jim who went to Dr. Large about Ronnie.
A queer, creeping cold crept up my spine, and I believed then that I could never forgive my brother. It was bad enough he’d used Ronnie to raise money, but unforgivable that he had exacted such a price when it was over. Sterilizing her.
Last week I decided it was time I called Jim. Only a few hundred miles separated us but we hadn’t met in nearly a decade, my first illness precluding my attendance of his wife, Betty’s, funeral.
“It’s me,” I said when he picked up the phone.
“Rose?” he asked finally. I could hear the teariness of age in his voice.
“It’s me,” I repeated, my voice gruff too. We talked a bit—about family and friends. And then I told him about my prognosis.
He sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t call just to talk.”
“We never did have that find of…relationship.”
“Sunday? After church?”
“How about the Sunday after?” I asked him. “Still driving these days?”
We agreed on the next Sunday and I did all I could not frighten him with my appearance. I had my hair trimmed and curled, putting on my best dress with a care I hadn’t exercised in months. I took an extra capsule from the prescription the doctor gave me and sat waiting quietly for my brother. Each time I heard a car turn down the street, I craned my neck, but it wasn’t until the agreed upon hour that he arrived.
Holding the door open, I was heartened. For a man in his mid-eighties, his color was good, his weight much the same. Certainly, he seemed destined to outlive me. There’d be one family member to mourn my death.
I showed Jim the garden, accepting his compliments on my lilies, the astilbe and bee balm.
“Do you know what day it is?” I asked when we’d both sat down.
He looked at me, nodding. “She’s been dead—what—twenty-two years? Did you ever think you’d know more people dead than alive?” he asked, rubbing his cheek thoughtfully. He put down his iced tea, gazing out the window where the twinkling yellow of the coreopsis framed his view. “She didn’t have such a bad life. With Ed, I mean. Nobody expected much for…for girls like her in those days. She had her own home, her own piano.”
I let it pass, watching a cardinal alight on the dogwood through the window just behind him.
“Remember that damned bird she brought back from the city?”
Jim laughed. “What song did it whistle?” he asked. “’On the Sunny Side of the Street?’”
“’Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries.’ Sweetie Pie never learned another song.”
“Your memory’s as good as ever,” he said. “I wanted to throw a cover over its cage more than once.”
Of course I remember every detail, I thought impatiently; my future was set in stone that year. I stabbed at his pain relentlessly. “Ronnie cried her heart out when that bird died.”
Jim got up and opened the window wider. “Someone bought her a dog after that, right? Buster, wasn’t it? A real junkyard dog, though I almost preferred his endless barking to that bird’s eternal trilling.” He unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. “Why don’t you have air, Rosie? You could put a unit in here for peanuts.”
“I’d miss the smell of summer.” He nodded as I hurried on. “Jim, what exactly happened that winter? The one after Daddy went away?” It was out in the open at last for us to pick at with our arthritic fingers. I eye
d him furtively as he walked back to his chair.
Sinking back into his seat, he shook his head again. “I’ve nothing but regrets when I think back on that year.”
“Can’t have been easy to keep it to yourself all this time.”
“You won’t think better of me after hearing the story. No matter what you think happened, it was worse.” He looked at his wristwatch, comparing its time with the clock on my mantel.
“Two minutes slow,” I told him. “And as to your story, anything is better to me than dying ignorant.” I sat rigidly expectant in my straight-backed chair.
He nodded wearily. “I see you’re playing hardball.”
“Dying has some cachet then?”
“You think that’s funny?” he asked scowling. Without waiting for my reply, he began. “Daddy left for good after I found him in Ronnie’s bed.” I nodded, realizing then I had suspected it for some time.
“I’d wondered about it before that night,” Jim said echoing my thoughts, “He was so careless…so thoughtless, banging that headboard into my wall like it was a percussion instrument in the school band.”
“Did Mother know what was going on?”
“I doubt it. She was gone so much. I don’t think she’d have tolerated—it—although she put up with pretty much everything else from him.”
“Did you tell him to leave on the spot?”
Jim flushed. “No, I couldn’t get a word out. Stood there frozen while he scrambled for his clothes. Fifteen was awfully young then, and Daddy could be so…crazy.” I nodded, remembering how he could fly off the handle at the smallest thing.
“Ronnie was naked, and Daddy didn’t even try to cover her,” Jim continued. “He mumbled some nonsense about Mother never being around when he ‘needed’ her.” His lips puckered.
“So he left—when? The next day? Without saying anything?”
Jim nodded. “And a night or two later, I turned over to find Ronnie in my bed.”
I shuddered involuntarily, and Jim turned his head. “I didn’t touch her, of course. All I could think was to send her back to her bed, but she turned up the next night and the one after. Who knows what was in her mind?” He struggled with it. “She probably just liked the warm body in her bed. It could get pretty cold in that house.”
“She didn’t come to my bed,” I reminded him.
“I had to tell someone.”
“Who could you tell?”
“Right. Who could I tell?” He got up and began to pace.
“My Tyson?” I guessed. He turned around startled, and then nodded.
He laughed harshly. “Yes, I finally went to Mr. Tyson. All the kids with problems turned up in his classroom after school. We were a weird little bunch.”
“And he came up with the idea of finding men who would pay to sleep with Ronnie.” I didn’t even realize I’d said it aloud until I saw Jim staring at me, his face full of shock.
“What men? I went to Mr. Tyson,” Jim continued, ignoring my interruption, “and he agreed to tell Ronnie that her behavior was inappropriate, or whatever the phrase was then. I had no doubt he could make her understand. He seemed omnipotent to me at fifteen.”
“So you brought him home?”
He nodded. “Mr. Tyson asked me to leave them alone, which made sense. I didn’t want to hear what he said to Ronnie anyway. Then, after a bit—maybe fifteen minutes—I went back inside.”
“He hadn’t harmed her?” I asked, dreading his reply.
“No,” Jim said hesitantly and I saw from his eyes he was back in that front room. “Ronnie was gone and Mr. Tyson was sitting on the couch. He assured me he’d made some progress although ‘feeble-minded girls’ don’t learn easily. His words. Then he asked about our financial problems.”
“You told him about our debts?”
He nodded.
“And then he came up with the idea of charging men to have sex with Ronnie?”
“No, it was me he wanted.”
“Oh, no.”
He cleared his throat. “When I told him about Ronnie, suggesting that he come home and speak to her, it may have looked like…something else.”
“You’re being too easy on him. Children always think they bring these things on.”
“I was used to his hand on my shoulder, a pat on my head. I’d stopped flinching months earlier.” I nodded. “When it was over that day, he placed a five-dollar bill on the table. He came back again and again. Until I had enough money for Mother. I forget how many times.”
“Twelve.”
We were both sobbing quietly. Neither of us was good at it though, and we stopped as quickly as we started.
“He left little notes for me in my locker after that. Signing them with his initials—in some ornate script. Like I might mistake them as notes from someone else.” Jim shook his head. “He wasn’t very good at it, the sex, I mean. It was always over quickly, with him looking embarrassed, anxious to get back to talking about a book he wanted me to read. Or a piece of music he’d heard. Sometimes he just wanted to hold me…for as long as I let him.” He paused. “That was even creepier to me.”
“So it was you. All these years, I thought it was Ronnie.”
“I put that in your head, I guess. Couldn’t bear to have you know it was Tyson and me up there.”
Our eyes floated up simultaneously. We sat silently for a few minutes, remembering the events of that year.
“Jim,” I finally said, “then why did Dr. Large have Ronnie sterilized? Why did you go to him if she wasn’t sleeping with men?”
“She continued coming to my bed,” he said. “I could resist her advances, but someone else might not. She was alone in that house too much.”
“So when Dr. Large saw she was no longer a virgin he suggested sterilizing her?”
Jim nodded. “He didn’t once ask me who’d been with her. I’m sure he thought it was some neighborhood boy. Or me.”
“Well, you were right not to tell me. I don’t think I’d have understood any of it. I wonder what happened to him? Mr. Tyson.”
“I’m sure he’s dead.”
“You never had the chance to even things up?” I looked at him closely. He was examining the clock. “He just disappeared? And then you took off too.”
“I did even things up,” Jim said, his voice shaky. I nodded hesitantly, afraid he’d say he’d murdered Tyson. “I kept all his—assignation notes, I guess you’d call them that— in that Typhoo tea can where I had stowed the money and when I was ready to leave a few years later, I handed them over to the police. All eleven notes.” He shuddered a bit.
“Did they do anything? The police?” In those days, men were given more leeway than now.
“You know how things like this were dealt with back then. Or maybe you don’t. They convinced me a trial wasn’t in my best interest, that they would take care of it themselves—quietly. When I put up a bit of a fuss, they reminded that he’d probably done it again. With some other kid.” Jim took a breath. “And then I remembered seeing another younger boy following him to his car several times. I finally agreed to let them handle it. I think they probably did something pretty awful.”
“They wouldn’t just let him go on to another school.”
He shook his head. “Anyway, I never saw Tyson again. The locker door in his classroom was hanging open the next day, all his things gone. Even the teapot he always kept on his desk, his books, the old blue cardigan he kept on the hook.”
I shook my head. Jim, boy that he was then, had driven off both men who threatened our family. Did what needed doing despite the cost.
We went along to dinner soon after, my brother and me, trying as hard as we could to pretend were like anyone else out to a Sunday dinner. We ordered wine, dessert and an after-dinner brandy. From the smiling and attentive service we received, I’m sure the waitress thought we were an elderly married couple out on an anniversary or a birthday, with children and grandchildren waiting our safe return before dark.
; HOLE IN THE WALL
It was this sort of trip: days, going on weeks when Martin didn’t speak to anyone other than the odd rail station employee or the desk clerk at a hostel. Once or twice, he had brief conversations with bookshop owners or waiters, but these exchanges never lasted more than a minute or two. Most of the younger tourists in Europe traveled in groups of three or four, and if they wanted to kick it up chose other similarly numbered groups, passing up the single traveler. At home, he could usually rely on an older woman to take an interest in him and draw him out when he walked into a room. Here language barriers prevented this.
The idea of a trip surfaced when he lost his job at the agency and was given a generous severance package. His former employer—a fat bastard who should have retired during the Bush Administration—couldn’t wait to be rid of him after the incident with the missing car. There was no proof, of course, no written accusations made, but the episode further muddied their uneasy relationship. So much the better: Martin had always wanted to see Europe. Unexpectedly, he had both the time and money.
At twenty-eight, Martin was older than most of the people at the hostels or on the rail and dressed differently, preferring the look of Jean Paul Belmondo in those sixties gangster movies: tight black pants, fitted shirts, pointed Italian shoes. His hair fell across his forehead and he attended to it often, flicking the comb through it with his eyes closed— an action he practiced to perfection in front of the mirror after the idea of this trip took hold.
The first week or two, he made it a point to sit at tables with other people in cafeterias or to pick a seat on the train next to someone his own age. But he nothing ever came of it. No one ever suggested dining together later. No one asked, “Where are you staying? Where have you been?”
He began to think there was something sinister about him, something more unusual than his clothes or hair. Women seemed slightly more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt if he caught their eye, but no extended conversation was forthcoming. Once or twice, when he grew itchy, he picked up a local girl who spoke a bit of English and took her back to his room. Although the girls were never prostitutes, he was expected to take them out to dinner before or for a drink afterward. He obliged them half-heartedly, but it never went well. They never spoke more than a few words of English and usually resorted to talking to patrons at nearby tables or spent too much time in the ladies’ room.