The Book Borrower

by Alice Mattison

  —You wouldn’t mind if I cried every day, Mary Grace said.

  —Hell, no, I cry every day, said Ruben. You’d better live with us.

  —Peter got tired of it. My dad hates it.

  —Doesn’t he cry?

  —Yes, but I think he thinks I’m faking, after all this time. My sisters can’t believe how much I cry.

  —You were her baby. You’re too young to be on your own.

  —I’m pretty grown up. I’m older than Stevie.

  —Stay with us, sweetie, Ruben pleaded. You must stay at our house starting this minute.

  —I have to take care of my father.

  —No, you don’t. And anyway, you aren’t.

  —It’s true, I just sleep.

  —What did you do in Boston?

  —I worked as a temp. I was the one who made money. I kept working after Peter left, but then the people whose apartment I had came back, so I had to leave.

  —You really don’t know where he is? Ruben said.

  They crossed the street, Ruben looking for cars, Mary Grace not. I don’t. The note he left was about stuff between us—bad stuff. But then he said, I feel as if I killed your mother.

  —How could he feel that?

  —Didn’t we all feel that?

  —But Peter?

  —Well, said Mary Grace, my mother said you once let him fall out of the carriage when he was a baby. Maybe he got bonked on the head.

  The food was more than acceptable, and Harry was surprised and pleased to see Mary Grace. He seemed to feel sure that if Mary Grace had come, Peter couldn’t be far behind. He asked questions about the car’s problems, speculating on how far Peter might have gotten with it. Not California, he said, with satisfaction. Doesn’t sound as if he’d make it that far.

  —I don’t think he wanted to go to California, said Mary Grace.

  —Where do you think he wanted to go? Ruben said.

  —I don’t know.

  After supper Ruben went with Mary Grace to Deborah’s house. It was the first time since Deborah died that she’d gone inside. The yellow kitchen was still yellow. The house was dirty and disconsolate. Jeremiah was getting fat and gray. He had a funny way of nodding his head up and back like a pigeon.

  —Dad, said Mary Grace, I’m going to stay at Toby’s for a few days.

  Jeremiah said, I read about Harry in the paper. He’s crazy.

  —What about?

  —Tennis courts in Brandon Park. No way. Vandals will finish them off in ten minutes.

  —He thinks they’re special tennis courts. And mostly it’s going to be basketball courts.

  —Ten minutes.

  —Jeremiah, she said. I have to ask you something. Do you do wills? Power of attorney?

  —Sure. It’s my bread and butter.

  —There’s an old woman Peter used to work for . . . Jeremiah. I think you used to be interested in this woman. I don’t know if you remember. I forgot for a long time, but then she talked about her life. It’s Berry Cooper.

  Ruben and Mary Grace had gone in by the back door and were facing Jeremiah in the kitchen. Now Jeremiah stepped forward and reached for something on the counter beside him—a long spoon, though he didn’t seem to be cooking or eating anything—and poked it in the air in her direction, not threateningly but questioningly, like a microphone. Berry Cooper?

  —Yes, do you remember—when we took that class, all those years ago?

  —Peter knows Berry Cooper? She’s alive?

  —Well, I know her myself. I go to her house.

  —Why didn’t you tell me?

  They arranged for him to visit Berry. He would take care of her will and power of attorney. Of course. Ruben and Mary Grace went home, exhausted with feeling. Ruben told Mary Grace she should sleep in Peter’s room, put sheets and pillowcases in her arms, and left her watching Seinfeld with Harry. Ruben went upstairs, brushed her hair, and put on her night-gown, though it wasn’t bedtime yet.

  Ruben walked to the bookshelf. She knelt and drew out the thin, old black book, which still smelled of a used bookstore. She opened it at random, still afraid of what it might say to her. She read the words “What do you think of” and closed the book. Then she walked to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. In middle age it is not necessary to read books while walking in the street pushing a baby carriage. Or, it is not possible. Ruben started reading Trolley Girl at the beginning, and read, uninterrupted, into the night, until she reached her old bookmark: a yellowed corner of a piece of newspaper with the number 17 on it. Then she brushed her teeth and got into bed with the book. Harry came up the stairs, took off his clothes, and got into bed. He touched her leg and ran his hand up and down it under the blanket. Ruben said, Do you mind if I keep the light on?

  —Just tip it. It was what he always said. She tipped the shade so the light fell on her. She sat up in bed and arranged the blanket so it covered Harry, who was lying down, and Toby, who was sitting. She put the old scrap of newspaper on the table beside her and continued reading what came next.

  I persist, more than forty years later, in imagining Sarah, who was one of the passengers on the second green trolley, looking out the window to the side. I don’t want her to look out the front and see what’s coming, but she probably did. When I sit in the first seat of a public conveyance—which is where, we eventually learned, Sarah was sitting—I look out the larger front window, not the side one.

  The first interurban trolley had traveled to the end of the line, arriving empty: its two passengers had disembarked two thirds of the way along, at Ridgefield. It was returning empty. These trolleys didn’t have a place to turn around; they had two fronts, and so the scab motorman carried his key from one end of the trolley to the other, accompanied by the conductor with the few cents he’d taken in. Then they set out again. Their task probably seemed simple. They just had to traverse the track they’d already traveled, back to the trolley barn.

  Either they didn’t understand the signals, or the signals had been tampered with—by my sister Jessie or by others—for the purpose of bringing the cars to a halt, or for the purpose of destroying them. Or the motorman and conductor of the second trolley didn’t understand. Or nobody understood. Sitting on the front seat of the second Lake Avenue Interurban with a homemade present for the Livingstons’ little boy on her lap, Sarah saw the first car speeding toward her. With a crash that sickened and terrified people in the shabby little houses on either side of the right-of-way, the two long green elegant trolleys collided head-on. Both motormen and one conductor were badly injured, and my sister Sarah was crushed to death in a moment.

  I was at the trolley barn, searching the crowd. Of course we knew nothing. I was hoping the trolley that had left was not the Lake Avenue Interurban but one of the others. I resisted asking; the one person I stopped wasn’t sure. I also hoped Sarah had been dissuaded by somebody she happened to meet, or by the general sense of confusion and disorder, or by fear of the angry crowd.

  After a while I saw a man I knew, and he told me with certainty that the Lake Avenue trolley had indeed departed; he’d seen a young girl who might have been my sister Sarah getting on. I kept looking, though. Then all at once some-thing changed; I’ve tried to think, over and over, all these years, what changed. I think what may have changed was the kind of noise. People had been making angry, excited, uncertain noise; suddenly there was fearful noise.

  When the trolleys collided, there were witnesses. People in neighboring houses hurried to the wreckage. The second trolley was lying on its side. The front was smashed into the rest like a partly closed accordion. A Mr. Brewster somehow climbed over the still vibrating wheels, while people screamed that he’d be electrocuted. Of course the wire was overhead and everyone knew that, but I suppose it had been torn. Mr. Brewster managed to break a window and reach the two surviving passengers and the injured scab workers.

  Meanwhile the electricity up and down the line stopped. I don’t know if there was a way the trolley compa
ny could detect that, but I believe that Mr. Brewster’s daughter walked to a house not far away where she knew there was a tele-phone, and phoned the trolley company, or the police. We at the trolley company suddenly saw men in suits, quite different from the working people in the trolley yard, hurtling from the company’s offices. A car drove up and several men got in. It sped away. Somehow the crowd knew these people weren’t just avoiding unpleasantness. A few people ran forward to block the car, but others blocked them. Soon rumors were everywhere and it was no longer possible to remember how one had received the news.

  I knew a girl was dead. The rumors, at least, were that a girl was dead.

  I found the crowd intolerable, and now people were clutching one another and screeching. In a terrible way, people enjoy that kind of trouble. I made my way to the edge of the crowd and found myself walking back and forth in a vacant lot that was scrabbly with weeds in summer but now covered with snow. My feet were already damp but soon they were soaked, and I had the dim knowledge that my shoes would be ruined and that neither my family nor I could afford to buy new ones. It was a double knowledge: my shoes, my feet— and, simultaneously, my sister Sarah. I held the knowledge of what had happened to Sarah away from myself. Maybe some other girl had taken the trolley. Rumors can be false; perhaps no one had died. As darkness came on, the crowd dispersed. No trolleys were running.

  The man I’d talked to before, who was the proprietor of the fruit and vegetable market where my mother shopped, came to the edge of the lot. He didn’t call to me; he just waited. When I turned, I saw him and walked toward him. I remember how he looked. He was dressed in brown, and was holding his brown cap fast to his thigh as if he’d caught a mouse in it. Because he had already taken off his cap on such a cold day, I knew he had to tell me bad news. I thought he was going to say that an identification had been made and Sarah was dead, but instead he said, “I am sorry to tell you, miss. They are saying your sister was arrested by the police.”

  He meant Jessie, of course. I experienced a moment of wild joy. Sarah was not dead, she was merely, somehow, a criminal! Then I understood. Jessie had been arrested. She’d been arrested for murdering Sarah. Gradually we all learned that the police thought Jessie had walked miles along the right-ofway next to the Lake Avenue line, in the cold, and deliberately turned off the signal lights that the conductors had lit, in order to cause a trolley wreck. She had been discovered walking near the right-of-way, far out in the country, alone.

  I heard over and over again that Sarah was dead and Jessie was being blamed. Oh, others were arrested, too, other known radicals, but Jessie was the only suspect found any-where near the tracks; Jessie was everyone’s culprit. People were kind to me. Jessie had been regarded as our family’s bad luck for years. Now we’d been truly cursed. Kind women, or those who throve on melodrama, enclosed me, sobbing, in their arms and coats. Someone led me to the store, where, even though it was Sunday, Miss Fredericks had materialized. She washed my face in warm water. I remember that her touch felt frightened, as if she thought my face might burn her hand. Then I was escorted home. I felt rage more than sorrow. I blamed myself, my parents, the trolley company, the scabs, the stupid Livingstons, and Sarah. Fm not even sure I blamed Jessie at first. Jessie was the only one who at least thought she knew what she was doing.

  By the time I got home, my parents knew. For hours, we weren’t alone, and it was just as well. Rabbis and prayerful old men appeared, though we didn’t belong to a synagogue. Neighbors, relatives, busybodies. Food was carried in. Tea was forced on us. My mother and father sobbed, but I was silent; maybe the neighbors thought I was a co-conspirator. Later, when we were alone, my parents screamed. “She should die in the electric chair!” my father shrieked. I went into the bedroom I shared with Sarah and felt absolute terror that she was gone. And it was unthinkable. All through her life, Sarah had barely left our block except to go to school. The room seemed enormous. Never in my life had I spent a night alone in a room, without the sound of breathing nearby, the breathing of one sister or the other or both. I didn’t go to bed but spent that night wringing out wet cloths and patting my mother’s face with them, as Miss Fredericks had frantically patted mine. My father left the house and was gone for hours.

  I thought my mother would never speak intelligibly again. The few words I made out were in Yiddish. When I remember that night, I understand why, through the years that followed, I never let myself get close enough to a man to consider bearing his child. My mother was not a particularly intelligent or strong woman. If she’d had an easy life—if there is such a thing—maybe she’d have carried it off well. But nothing much happens to anybody that’s worse than what happened to my mother that night.

  I don’t know how much my mother understood of the American justice system, and I don’t know when she made up her mind between anger at Jessie and fear for Jessie. By morning she knew which she felt, and it was anger. And for the rest of my mother’s life, after that night when I bathed and kissed her over and over again, the serious quarrel between us was about pity and love for Jessie or anger at Jessie. I explained, that night and on many other nights, that it wasn’t certain Jessie had done anything wrong—that she had been arrested, not convicted. To my mother, though, Jessie had done wrong when she first had left our house and taken lovers, and those actions were the cause of Sarah’s death. Not that my mother hoped for Jessie’s conviction. She wanted to scream at Jessie and hit her, not to have the law take an interest in her.

  I don’t remember much of Sarah’s funeral, which took place the day after her death. I remember a small room, narrow corridors made smaller by black drapery, crowds jostling in the narrowed halls, crying and lamenting. I remember Sarah’s schoolmates and their parents presenting me with their distorted faces. Crying makes people ugly, and nobody was decorously sorrowful.

  A day or so later, when my mother was being tended to by relatives—she was like a sick person, mostly in bed, bargaining and stalling for hours before she’d accept morsels of food from patient cousins and sisters-in-law—I slipped out of the house, concealing my coat by crushing it against my body until I got outside. Then I put it on and walked to the city jail.

  I thought I’d have to wheedle and plead, but a frightened policeman, a young, skinny Irish cop, who’d obviously never expected to have to deal with a serious crime, listened to me respectfully, nodding vigorously and too many times, as if he himself were the accused person. “You can see her in the parlor,” he said incongruously, and even in my distraught state I marveled that a jail would have a parlor.

  Of course it didn’t; he meant what we’d call a waiting room. He showed me into a plain, narrow room with benches along the walls and a big dusty oak desk in one corner, with nothing on it at all. He pointed to a bench and I sat down. Then he left, and in a while I heard the sound of a door, and he brought Jessie into the room.

  She stood still. She looked angry. Her bobbed hair was matted and stuck out, seeming to make sharp points around her face. She was wearing her own clothes: her gray dress. She looked buxom and square, stubborn. The policeman stood beside her for an instant, then turned and moved to-ward the empty desk as if he meant to sit there, supervising our conversation. The desk had no chair. Narrow and dark in his uniform, he stood and looked at the desk a moment, and then he left the room, almost on tiptoe, walking in back of Jessie, as if she were the authority figure.

  Jessie and I stayed where we were. I didn’t stand and take her in my arms; she didn’t step forward or cry. Her arms and legs, under the demure dress, seemed rigid, and they were spread a little, clumsily: limbs hacked off by torturers and carelessly refastened. Her face held only horror and rage. She didn’t seem to see me.

  I leaned to the side and began to make a sound, a shriek that I muffled with my hands because we were in a place where I could not let go. I hadn’t shrieked before. I had cried, but mostly I had kept silent, bringing wet cloths. Now I was afraid I’d vomit on the floor and the jailers woul
d be angry. At long last Jessie sat down on the bench, not close to me—as far away as someone could and still be in a conversation. “Miriam,” she finally said urgently. “Miriam.” She sounded stern. At length I stopped making sounds, passed my hands over my wet face, and sat up. I turned in her direction.

  “How’s Mama?”

  “In bed.”

  “And Papa?”

  “Oh, very bad.”

  “I never thought she would go,” Jessie said. “She never did anything like that.”

  “I didn’t think she would. I had no idea,” I said. But I was thinking that if Jessie didn’t expect Sarah to take the trolley, it meant she knew there would be trouble. I was overcome with fear. It was physical. I was so afraid Jessie would die in the electric chair that I couldn’t stand up, as if my bench were perched up in the sky and if I stood I’d plunge to my death. At last I moved closer to her, and put my arms around her. “Jessie, if you did it, never tell me,” I said. “Promise me you’ll never tell me. Tell me you didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t do it,” she said.

  We held each other. I wasn’t close enough to feel her soft breasts. We were both pretending, as though the jailer was watching us after all. I felt that the wrong sister had died, and it was my fault because I’d always preferred Jessie’s intelligence and wit to Sarah’s stupid goodness. Jessie’s political beliefs, her ideological beliefs, seemed, just then, like dry pedantry. She’d killed Sarah over fussy little notions. I stopped being afraid Jessie would die in the electric chair. I wanted her to die in that hideous manner, in humiliation and terror, being walked consciously to her death. Now I’d scared myself so badly, wanting such a thing, that I couldn’t speak, but on the other hand, I was no longer afraid to move. I stood up and hurried away. The jailer, whom I found in the anteroom reading the newspaper, was surprised and embarrassed. He’d have let me stay a little longer. He pushed the paper away and later I realized he must have been reading a story about us.