Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  Well, all's well that ends well, Clement assured himself, spreading a thick layer of butter on his toast. If he'd never known Amanda, he'd never have found this place, this new setting that had invigorated him, made him feel like a young man, full of promise all over again.

  The cook came into the kitchen, tying her apron around her waist. “Up early again, Mr. Owens?”

  “The early bird gets the worm, Trudy.” Clement took a large bite from his buttered toast, as if to prove his point. Then he poured her a cup of coffee from the pot and added some to his own.

  “Well, if it's worms you want, you'd better get out in the yard,” Trudy said, pulling out the flour bin. “I'm making popovers.”

  “One of these days I just might do that,” Clement said. Carrying his coffee with him, he went upstairs to bathe.

  It was that damn vacuum box, he thought, while the water rushed into the tub. If that had been a success, his thoughts would never have gone back to Amanda. You'd think he'd never failed before, the way that disaster had got under his skin. And Theresa—he frowned at himself in the mirror, was his hair getting thin at the temples?—a wife was supposed to support you, not continually remind you with patronizing sighs that it was her money you were spending and that she'd always said this or that was a foolish risk. Amanda had not thought the vacuum box was foolish. She understood its potential, and she was a nurse, which ought to count for something. She appreciated his other projects, too. He remembered her asking about the lead mines. Did they use canaries there? she wanted to know. That was the night she squealed when the waiter brought the caviar to the table. But she'd tried it when he urged her, and she'd liked it when he said she should. He eased himself into the hot water, thinking what a pleasant thing it was to spend an evening with a woman like that, a woman who really believed in you.

  But in that dim post office, she was not at all as he'd remembered her. He would never have imagined she'd still be angry, not after more than a year, but there wasn't an ounce of friendship in the way she looked at him. She'd looked older, too, and thin in the cheeks, which was not, as he considered it now, unattractive on her. If he could've touched her face, he thought, or even her hand, it would have been better, it would have brought her back to him, but that was impossible with Theresa in the car just outside and that woman watching from behind the counter.

  And what was Amy doing with that little girl? In his mind, Amanda still wore her tidy nurse's apron all day and sat demurely on the glider of the nurses' residence at night.

  Through the door, Clement could hear his wife, sliding the chair back from her dressing table, opening the drawer in which she kept her combs and her hatpins, preparing for morning Mass. He knew just how Theresa looked, holding her back very straight as she sat before the mirror, brushing her hair deliberately.

  “Theresa! I'm out of soap!” he called, wrapping the bar he'd been about to use in the washcloth and pushing it under his knee.

  “In the little table,” she said, and he heard the dressing-room door close behind her. Did she expect him to stand shivering and dripping in the middle of the bathroom, searching through drawers? What if he really had been out of soap?

  But it would serve him right if she never wanted to do anything for him again, wouldn't it? Clement began to scrub himself. The idea that he'd been chasing a woman who turned out to be a lunatic scared him a little. Well, it was over now, all of that. Theresa would see that from now on things would again be the way they'd once been between them.

  This is a lesson for me, he told himself, a warning. From now on I'm faithful to my wife.

  Saying that always made him feel optimistic. He sighed and lay back in the soothing warm water. He closed his eyes and draped a wet washcloth over his face to soften his beard. He began to think about that camera that took pictures of bones right through the skin. Couldn't that be used somehow in mining?

  Avis Owens, sixteen years old, padded down the hall wearing the robe and slippers in which Clement had, on one recent uncomfortable morning, mistaken her for a woman. Maynard, eighteen, groaned, stuffed his face in his pillow and then, in one dramatic desperate movement, threw off his blankets and swung his bare feet onto the floor.

  Arthur, six, came to full wakefulness as the water splashed into the washstand that stood against one wall of the room he shared with his brother. He stayed still with his eyes closed, listening to the hangers scraping along the rod and the dresser drawers sliding open and not being banged shut. When Maynard left the room, Arthur got out of bed and went in his pajamas to squat beside his city of blocks. He did his best work in the morning, while the bolt on the bathroom door slid open and shut, open and shut, the water rushed through the pipes, feet galloped down and up and down the stairs, china clinked in the kitchen, and finally the front door slammed and slammed and slammed.

  And then, for a time, the morning's noises lulled and the only sound in the house, as the shaft of sunlight across the bedroom floor headed steadily toward the closet, was Arthur's faintly adenoidal breathing and the dense click of the wooden blocks. Just after eight chimes on the front-room clock, his mother's slippers shuffled along the hallway floor, and then she would be standing over him, stretching her arms like a cat and afterward retying the belt on her housecoat. Hiking the housecoat up, she'd sit on her heels beside Arthur on the floor and move blocks purposefully about, as if she knew where they were supposed to go. He let her put them wherever she wished, although of course he had to move them later. Finally, when she was bored with her efforts at play, she swooped over him with a kiss. He smelled her coffee-laced breath and her sweetly lotioned hands. At last, their day would truly begin.

  Theresa had left the raising of Maynard and Avis when they were young and uninteresting to nursemaids, but Arthur was different, or perhaps she was, and she dreaded September when he would start school, and she would no longer be able to have him with her all day.

  This morning, after church, they were going to pay a call on a Mrs. Herman Kessler, who'd promised to make a contribution toward the new public library. Theresa knew that people who gave money liked to see a thankful recipient rather than send their check through the anonymous post. At 62 Newberry Street, they were shown into a bright parlor where Mrs. Kessler and her friend Mrs. Jones were leafing through a sheaf of watercolors.

  “Look at this one!” Mrs. Kessler commanded, holding for Theresa to admire a roiling seascape, in which blues, greens and grays had been mingled to form a sort of mud. “I don't know where my Charlotte gets her talent. I can't draw worth a stick and Herman can hardly sign his name.”

  “It's lovely,” Theresa said.

  “Remarkable,” Mrs. Jones concurred.

  “The way she's captured the feeling!” Mrs. Kessler said, holding the painting at arm's length and squinting in an attempt to bring some aspect, any aspect, of the picture into focus. “That's the mark of a true artist.”

  Theresa politely agreed. And then, since she'd met Mrs. Kessler and Mrs. Jones when they were serving on several Red Cross committees during the war, they discussed when they'd last seen and what they'd last heard about this woman and that, and laughed about the day they'd shoveled three hundred pounds of peach pits for the gas masks, while Arthur had nothing to do but take a cookie whenever it was offered and turn the pages of a picture book he'd brought along.

  “You know, I think we saw your daughter last week at the Milwaukee Turners,” Mrs. Jones said finally to Theresa. “Do I remember rightly that her name is Avis?”

  Arthur began to listen then. It always seemed strange to him that people he'd never seen before should know his sister and brother.

  “How good of you to remember,” Theresa said.

  “She was with another young lady,” Mrs. Kessler said. “A girl with an unfortunate nose.”

  “Meta Kunkel. Yes, it's really too bad about her nose.”

  “I'm sure she's a lovely girl,” Mrs. Kessler said, with the complacency of one whose daughter's nose was straight an
d neat.

  “She's not a girl I would choose as a friend for Avis, but one's children don't always do just what one would like, do they?”

  Theresa thought Meta was awkward, loud and humorless, and unlikely to attract the sort of people she wished Avis would associate with. In particular, she wanted Avis to show more interest in the young men of her social circle. It upset her to see her daughter—with so many opportunities and so much talent (although Avis had never seen a body of water larger than Lake Michigan, her seascapes really did capture the sense of the ocean)—squander her chances for happiness. Still, Theresa comforted herself, Avis could be quite pretty when she got herself up. Surely she would grow into a more appropriate attitude.

  Mrs. Kessler sipped her tea and didn't answer, but her look above her teacup was pitying and smug.

  “Maynard,” Theresa said, “my older son, has got a very good position. He's with the First Bank, you know. And the things they have him do! Really, it makes me nervous sometimes to think of all that money.”

  Of course, Maynard did not yet have any real responsibility. He mostly carried papers from one office to another for bank officers to sign. But they were very important papers. And the vice-president was always assuring him that he would go far.

  “So he's not going to college?” Mrs. Kessler said, biting a lady's finger carefully so the powdered sugar wouldn't fly.

  “Well, no. He didn't see the point. You see, he worked at the bank as an errand boy in the summers, and when he graduated from St. John's, they offered him this job right away.”

  “I'm not saying he needs the education. Goodness knows, my Freddy came out of Yale as stupid as he went in, but it's the friends you make, the society. You can't expect him to get ahead unless he knows the right people.”

  “Probably he'll go to college in a year or two,” Theresa said rashly. “I wouldn't be surprised.”

  A significant look passed between Mrs. Kessler and Mrs. Jones, whose son would be a junior at the U. of C. that fall, and Theresa could see that she had somehow shown herself to a disadvantage.

  Mrs. Jones opened a fresh subject. “I understand you're building a summer place.”

  “Yes,” Theresa answered warily. What would they make of a too narrow house on a too steep slope on the wrong side of the wrong lake?

  “Oh, I wish I could convince Herman to do that,” Mrs. Kes-sler said. “You can't get away from the smell of the river here in the summertime. It's simply unbearable. But he won't leave the city. You miss too many opportunities, he says, when you're away. That's all very well for him, but what opportunities would I miss? He doesn't give a thought to Charlotte. She doesn't see why we should have to stay in town—especially when all of her friends go. ‘If we must stay, we have to have a place on Lake Michigan,' I tell Herman. But he won't do that either. ‘This house was good enough for my father,' he says, ‘and it's good enough for me.' So here we are, completely dependent on the good graces of relatives and friends who have summer places.” She smiled at Theresa.

  “We would love to have you stay with us as soon as the house is ready,” Theresa said. “We'll be joining the yacht club and the tennis club, and I know Avis and Maynard would be delighted to take Charlotte with them to the various functions.” In fact, Avis was dead set against joining any clubs she judged “hoity-toity,” and Maynard had never managed to get the knack of tennis, but Theresa trusted that these minor hitches would solve themselves, once she got her family into a new setting, where their true personalities had room to flower. She was counting on this house also to rectify one major problem—the waywardness of her husband. Already she could see a change in Clement. He arrived home promptly every evening so that they could pore over the blueprints together. He described his plans to her with the same excitement he'd shown when they were first courting, and he was eager to hear how she'd receive them. And he knocked on her bedroom door frequently. Yes, he'd certainly come back to her, and she was convinced that this new project, for which he welcomed her ideas as well as her money, just as he'd done in the early days, would keep him close.

  Later, when Theresa paused on the steps of the Kesslers' house and released Arthur's hand so that she could fold the check and slip it into her purse, she decided that the visit had been satisfactory overall. That the house was all right was a particular relief. She hadn't been sure before this. Clement had been sure, but then he was positive about every one of his schemes—his enthusiasm meant nothing. But Florence Kessler wouldn't approve just anything nor would Alice Jones.

  Now Theresa felt free to imagine her family there—Arthur pushing a toy sailboat along the shore with a stick, his knees grass-stained, and his hair grown sweetly shaggy; Maynard, at the tiller of a real sailboat, squinting up at the bright white canvas, maybe even winning a regatta and then presenting her with the silver cup; Avis sitting with a nice boy, a friend of Maynard, perhaps, in the gazebo the final hour of Sunday evening, enjoying the agony of the thought that they wouldn't see each other again for at least a week.

  And she and Clement? Too soon, too soon, she thought. She didn't dare count on it. But she kept the notion warm, like a seed beneath the frost line.

  At four o'clock each day Theresa and Arthur took a nap together on the cool satin comforter that covered her bed. Before they fell asleep, each would lie listening to the quiet, steady breathing of the other, watching the afternoon shadows slowly stain the ceiling. Sometimes Arthur would rest his head on Theresa's stomach and wonder at the continuous gurgle that no one but he could hear.

  At five-thirty Arthur went out to sit on the stone front steps to wait for Clement to come home. He couldn't be dissuaded from this duty, even in the worst weather. When it rained or hailed, he stood close to the house, under the overhang that protected the front door. When it was sunny or snowy, he amused himself while he waited by jumping from step to step. Sometimes he ranged over the entire yard, using the steps only as a base. Always, though, he kept the street strictly in sight, for he worried that, if he did not, his father might not come safely home, and he knew his father ought to come home, even though he sometimes wished he wouldn't.

  Chapter Six

  On the advice of Pastor Jensen, Carl had arranged for Hilda Grossman, a second cousin once removed on his father's side, to come from Tomahawk to do the housework and keep an eye on Ruth while Amanda was at St. Michael's. Hilda had made clear that she was not entirely pleased with the arrangement.

  “I'll say it straight out, Carl,” she'd said, dropping her carpetbag so that it fell at her feet with a thump. “I know there was something funny going on in this house. You might think we're ignorant up in Tomahawk, but we hear things. Another one mightn't have come, but you're in a fix and family's family, so here I am.” She crossed her arms over the hills of her bosom and waited for him to answer.

  “What do you mean, something funny?”

  “I don't know, but I do know that a decent woman doesn't hide on an island for months, not speaking to another soul, and I also know that a decent woman drowns in broad daylight, when everyone can see what's what, not in secret in the middle of the night. That's what I know.”

  Carl narrowed his eyes, as if trying to sharpen his vision. “I don't understand. What are you driving at?”

  “I'm not saying anything more. Gossip is wicked. That's how I was taught. I just wanted to make my position clear.”

  But she'd only made things more murky for Carl. What had happened while he'd been away? He should have pressed Amanda when he'd had the chance; asking her now was out of the question. That night, in his room, Carl searched the photograph of Mathilda that stood on his nightstand. He picked it up by the frame and shook it, trying … what? … to make her speak, to change her expression? She smiled on, looking as if she meant to live forever.

  For the first week or two after Amanda went away, Ruth was restless. She wandered from room to room, stopping to stare out of every low-silled window. She picked up objects as she went, light, little things�
��her blanket, her bear, a spoon, a stocking from Amanda's drawer—and she dropped them absently along her way, so that by the end of the day the house was strewn with litter. And she cried, although really the sound was more of a whimper, a weak keening that seemed to hover at the base of her throat, spilling out at the least provocation and often with no provocation at all and was unstanchable once begun.

  Once or twice Hilda patted her lap and held out her arms to the little girl. “Come to Hilda, now,” she said, smiling reassuringly at Carl. But Ruth turned away, would not even come close. Hilda, embarrassed, seemed to close her heart against Ruth then. “There's no pleasing some people,” she said, standing abruptly and brushing her lap away.

  Carl held Ruth and rocked her, but never for long. She slipped from his arms and out of his lap like quicksilver, and he was unable to arrest her drift until she fell asleep in some corner, exhausted.

  And then one day at breakfast she held out her glass in both hands.

  “What do you say?” he prompted, lifting the milk pitcher.

  When she said nothing, only thrust her glass forward again, he realized that he hadn't heard her speak a word in days.