Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  “Yes,” I said. She started down the platform ahead of me, a little nervous, eager to be off. It may have been the way she swung her arms or the impatient look she gave me when she turned and saw that I still wasn't following, I'm not sure, but I suddenly felt as if I'd been staring for years at the silhouettes of two faces and finally saw the vase in the white space between them. She'd been Aunt Mandy's baby. I couldn't believe I hadn't guessed it on my own long before. And then, as quickly as I'd caught the glimpse of Aunt Mandy in her, I lost it.

  Aunt Mandy was selfish, but what she wanted for herself was me. Imogene, too, maybe, but mostly me. She'd given Imogene up, but she wouldn't let go of me. How could I leave someone who loved me that much?

  “Imogene,” I said, and she turned back. “I can't go. I'm sorry.”

  I thought she might be angry. After all, I'd talked her into this, but she only sighed and studied my face for a long moment. She must have decided this was different from my refusal to swim at the island or to go to the dance or to play secretary for her at the Owenses', because she didn't try to persuade me. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  She came back and stood before me. “Do you think …” she began and stopped. “Don't be angry, but would you mind if I went without you?”

  “You want to go without me?”

  “No,” she said, “I don't want to go without you, but if you won't go … well, you're the one who made me see it was a good idea. It is a good idea.”

  Numbly, I reached into my pocket and held out to her the scrap of paper on which I'd written Eliza Fox's address.

  “You don't think Miss Fox would mind?”

  I shook my head.

  “I would wait, in case you change your mind, but the people Mrs. Owens called expect me on Monday. You said to hurry.”

  “It's my fault,” I said. “You go ahead.”

  “I'll look out for a place for both of us, just in case.”

  “Yes, just in case.”

  At the end of the platform she stopped, opened her purse, and began feeling around inside it.

  “Did you forget something?” I called, and I felt a little flutter inside me that must have been hope that she, too, had decided to stay.

  “Here,” she said, running back. “Keep this for me.” And she pressed into my hand the blue marble.

  I went to the end of the platform and watched her get into the car. She waved until I couldn't see her anymore, and I kept waving even after that, squeezing the marble in my other hand. She's only going to Chicago, I told myself. You could be there in two hours. But I knew it didn't work that way. When people left, in my experience, they stayed gone. Except for Aunt Mandy. She'd come back to me, just as I was going back to her now.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ruth

  Imogene is coming this summer. She's bringing her husband—Jack, she says his name is—and her baby daughter, Louisa. Named for her grandmother, Aunt Mandy said, and winked at me, yes, winked. Often now, I see how she must have been, before my mother's drowning made her hold herself tightly for fear of losing herself in guilt and grief.

  She was lying in a faint at the bottom of the stairs, her arm and collarbone and three ribs broken, the night Imogene went to Chicago.

  “I knew you'd come back,” she whispered when the doctor and I lifted her onto the davenport. “I knew someday you'd come back to me.”

  “I've only been gone three hours,” I said, but she didn't seem to hear.

  I nursed her. She had to tell me what to do, but she said I did it well. I have very gentle hands, she said. I read to her, and I prepared her favorite dishes. I even tried something new—chicken cacciatore—which we agreed turned out very well. “Your mother used to make something like this,” she said.

  I knew she meant it as an invitation, but I was afraid to begin. “When I was running on the ice,” I ventured, and stopped.

  “Yes?” she said, encouraging me.

  “When I was running on the ice,” I said again, “what was I running from?”

  “Running from?” She smiled, flexing her fingers the way the doctor had prescribed. “You weren't running from anything, Ruth. You were running to me.”

  As soon as I could leave her alone in the house, I motored to the middle of the lake and dropped the silver box in. The next morning, a man on the double-decker excursion boat spotted Mr. Owens's body washing against the concrete base of the Stoltzes' boathouse. It was supposed to be the last tour of the season, but the sensation kept the boat running for three weeks into October.

  I gave up typing. It turns out I'm a farmer after all. I've always been good with the animals, and I've discovered that I can drive a tractor a lot better than I can work office machines. With Mr. Tully's help, we broke even last year, and now that I've talked my father into quitting the Rebecca Rae, we can build the herd, and I'll bet we turn a good profit. It's a sad fact that the war over in Europe has been a big help to us financially.

  I like the farm. It's a world unto itself, a steady universe where the animals go in, go out, eat, sleep, and eat again. I like knowing that the black fields will blush green, and then the corn leaves will saw against one another and the tomatoes swell until they split their skins, and that then the ground will sleep under its cold, white sheets. On a farm, the earth has secrets, and the weather has passions, but people don't matter so much.

  Arthur Owens has asked me twice to marry him, but although each time my heart begged me to agree, I've said no. I couldn't move away, you see, and I'm not sure that he'd like to stay, what with the bridges that'll need building all over the country—all over the world, he says—once he finishes school. Still, on Sundays he comes out from town. He helps with the work, and then we walk in the woods or go for a drive. In the winter, if there isn't too much snow, he takes me out on his iceboat. Snug against each other, we rattle along, our legs turning to stone in the wooden shell, while the stinging wind brings tears to our eyes, and chips of ice pepper our faces. “Faster,” I cry, “faster,” and he flattens the sail, until one blade hikes into the air, so that, were the ice to open beneath us, we would simply fly over the crack.

  Imogene wants to stay on the island when she comes. She thinks her husband will like it. I didn't like it, the idea of Jack on our island, but Aunt Mandy said, “You'll have to get used to that,” and I knew she was right.

  We waited through the early spring, while the ice, whining and sighing, gave up its bed, until the bright morning when the lake was alive and dancing again, as if it had never been still. April 13, 1941. That's a good place to finish. In our coats and gloves and galoshes, we dragged the boat to the water and headed toward the island, to see what had to be done to ready it for Imogene.

  Released from their ice prison, the waves tossed themselves against the hull with ecstatic abandon, pitching up a fine spray that shimmered in the fledgling spring sunlight. I dipped my fingers in, and instantly my hand ached with cold. That must have been what it felt like, the night I drowned.

  Amanda

  Ruth wasn't even wearing a coat, just her nightgown and slippers. Her little teeth were chattering. I could see her shivering as far away as I was.

  “Get back in the house, Ruth!”

  But she wouldn't listen. She slid forward, oh, so carefully, onto the ice, holding her little arms out for balance, that peppermint stick still clutched in her hand.

  “I said, get back!”

  That time she caught the anger in my voice. She stopped but did not go back. She stopped and began to cry. And then it was almost as if my baby had heard her, because she began to cry too.

  “Don't cry,” I said to both of them. “Be quiet. You have to be quiet now. Don't cry.” I was nearly crying myself. It was so cold, and I was so tired.

  Far behind Ruth, a triangle of light appeared at the front of the house as the door opened.

  “Wait, Aunt Mandy, wait. Please. Wait for me,” Ruth called, and she began to run as well as she could across the slippe
ry ice.

  My heart was broken, but, knowing Mathilda would hear her now and come after us all, I turned my face toward the dark shore and went on. I moved as fast as I dared, sliding and slipping, trying to keep my feet under me, desperate not to be caught, desperate not to fall. The baby cried more insistently with every step.

  “Ruth, come back!” Mathilda called. “Mandy, bring her back!” I seemed to hear her footsteps pounding on the ice. “Amanda, come back! Come back!” All around the lake, anyone with an open window could have heard her. But I turned my ears to the wind and my eyes to the night. I would not come back. This baby was mine.

  Mattie snatched Ruth up into her arms.

  “Take Ruth home, Mattie! Get off the ice!”

  But Mathilda wouldn't listen. We were far out on the lake now, and she kept on sliding toward me, clutching Ruth to her chest.

  “Go back, Mattie!” My words were desperate now. I knew, even before the ice complained, that the two of them were too heavy for it to bear.

  And then the ice creaked. Scared, I stopped and stood still. Mat-tie heard it too.

  “Put Ruthie down!” I shouted, but the wind blew my words away.

  Mattie's voice, on the other hand, sailed right to me, as if she were screaming in my ear. “Mandy, please come back, come back to me!”

  I was frightened, then, with the ice creaking under me, too frightened to go on. I decided to go back.

  The moment I started, it happened, as it has happened every night since, whenever I close my eyes. The ice cracked and stopped my heart. Mathilda, with Ruth in her arms, lurched left and sank to her waist, then to her shoulders, and then they were gone, both of them, gone.

  I ran then. It's hard to run on the ice, harder still with a newborn in your arms. I heard splashing. I heard her calling me, “Mandy, help! Help me, Mandy!”

  But my feet would not go fast enough. I slipped. I fell to my knees. I seemed to be getting no closer. I left my baby on the ice and tried again and again, throwing myself forward, screaming Mattie's name.

  By the time I reached the hole, Mathilda had already pushed Ruth back onto the ice, but she had disappeared. I lay on my stomach and reached into blackness. The water was so cold. I reached and reached, until my hands were numb, but I could catch nothing.

  And then, though I could barely feel it, my fingers tangled in Mattie's hair. I pulled, gently, so as not to lose my grip, but swiftly as I dared.

  With a gasp, she broke the surface.

  “Mattie!”

  I pulled her sodden arms around my neck. For an instant, she hung there, safe in my arms.

  But the ice refused to hold us. A piece cracked off under my shoulder and my head splashed into the black water. Down Mattie went again, but I held on, the collar of her nightgown bunched in my fist. Now that I had her, I could never let her go, not even if she dragged me down after her.

  And she was dragging me down after her. The ice beneath my other shoulder gave way. I tried to work myself backward, to shimmy my hips, to dig my toes and my knees into the ice. I was so strong, and she was so tiny, I couldn't believe that I would not pull us both to safety. And then the ice beneath my chest gave way.

  If Mathilda had not surfaced again, if she'd not thrust her frozen, drowning body back once more toward the sweet air, we would all of us be dead, Ruth and Imogene, frozen on the ice, Mat-tie and I beneath it. But she did come back. She opened her mouth for breath, and then she closed her teeth on my hand and bit with all her might.

  I would've held on. I would not have let go. I didn't even feel the hurt. But my fingers opened. They just opened. And Mattie slipped through.

  I reached and reached again. “Mattie!” I screamed, pushing my head under that black freezing water. But she wasn't there. I reached. I called. But she wouldn't come back.

  Finally I saw Ruth, a still, little shadow on the dark ice. So much time had passed. I forced my breath between her frozen lips. I pressed my numb and bloody fingers to her neck to find her pulse. But I was much too late. She was gone too.

  I picked her up and carried her to where I'd left the baby, wrapped both of them in my sweater and coat and carried them in one bundle together as fast as I could across the ice.

  And here is the miracle. With that warm little body pressed next to her, Ruth thawed. She came back to life. When I reached the shore I heard her cough.

  I knew Mary Louise would be a good mother, so I gave the baby to her. Her arms went out for that child, as though she'd been waiting for it, as though it was meant to be. I hadn't thought what I would say.

  “It was terrible,” I managed at last. And out of my mouth came something like the story Mattie had made up about the farm girl. “The baby's name is Imogene,” I said. “Please take her.”

  Why is Ruth in her nightgown? I thought they'd ask. Where is Mathilda? Where is Mattie? I wanted to scream it myself. But Imogene had all their attention.

  Soon Ruth and I would steal away, but for now I held her close in the Lindgrens' spare bed to warm her. I felt her pulse grow strong, as I pressed her as tight as I dared against my skin.

  I will have you, I thought. I will keep you. We will begin again.

  In the following letter, Christina Schwarz takes the opportunity to answer some of the many questions readers have asked her in letters and in person since the publication ofDrowning Ruth.

  Dear Reader,

  Drowning Ruth began because, as a child, I had a mysterious neighbor. She was a sort of Boo Radley character, reclusive and unknowable. People talked about her, but not directly to her, as far as I knew. My great aunt had been acquainted with her when they were both young. She'd wait in the car, Aunt Margaret said, while her husband went to parties.

  To adults, I understand now, this woman was merely eccentric, probably agoraphobic, but to a child, she was fascinating. She had a huge house and lots of property surrounded by a chain-link fence. She kept two white German shepherds, which barked at anyone who passed along the road. She had outbuildings, one of which I was told (or perhaps I'd simply decided) was an aviary. And she was rumored to have shot a BB gun at teenagers who tried to cross her lakefront yard. She also mowed her lawn on a riding mower, her face hidden by a floppy sun-bonnet, but somehow this normal behavior made her even more interesting—she was almost, but not quite, like everyone else.

  I first thought I would make up the story of her life, full of tragic betrayals that would cause her to want to have nothing more to do with other people. I would begin with her childhood and follow her until she was eighty, ensconced in that house, reaching for a BB gun whenever she spotted some children sneaking around the perimeter of her lawn.

  It didn't work. For one thing, I kept getting stuck when my character, who eventually became partly Ruth and partly Amanda, was in her thirties—my own age. But thinking about her helped me generate the world that Drowning Ruth's characters would eventually inhabit. Very early on, I wrote the scene in which Ruth watches Imogene at the dance. And then I wrote another scene with Ruth and Imogene and Arthur, something about a driving lesson; a scene that is now stored in a long file box, along with lots of other scenes that in the end wouldn't fit into the book. I thought about Ruth as a little girl. What would her childhood be like? Who would take care of her? I remembered a foster child who would wait for the school bus with me when we were children, but then get on a smaller bus that would take her to a different school; she was another fascinating, mysterious person, and thinking about her helped me write the chapter in which Hilda comes to stay with Ruth. I also thought of a story my father had told me about a brother and sister who'd raised two adopted children together on a farm, when he was growing up. From this, in a way, Amanda and Carl emerged—they were brother and sister at the start.

  Once Amanda had distinctly arrived, she took over. I could hear her voice quite clearly, always her tone, and often her harsh, sardonic words, and I quickly grew very attached to her. Because her voice was so vivid, I started writing scenes in the fir
st person. I particularly like the idea that a novel can show several interpretations of a single event, and alternating first person with third person helped me do that.

  For awhile, I wasn't sure whether Amanda was Ruth grown up or Ruth's guardian. Even though, literally, she turned out to be the latter, in some ways, I suppose she is both. I wanted Ruth to echo Amanda, both because Amanda raises her and because of their genetic connection. In a larger way, too, I wanted to imply repetition in this novel, which is one of the reasons I set the book between the two world wars. Although I don't know enough to be sure it's true, I'm intrigued by the notion of human events moving in cycles, because of the way one generation inevitably influences the next.

  I realize now that I used impressions from my childhood for Drowning Ruth, because everything seemed so dramatic then, when I didn't understand the mundane underpinnings of events and relationships. This attraction to things I don't thoroughly comprehend is also the main reason I set my story in the past. My father's side of the family has lived in southeastern Wisconsin for generations, and my ancestors have long had an intimate connection to the lake on which I modeled Nagawaukee. I lived for the first ten years of my life over a boathouse that was originally part of my great-great-grandfather's summer estate, the main house of which was the model for the Owens's house. Stories about the place, from my great aunt, my grandmother, my father, and my uncles, were inescapable. To me, separated from those times by at least a generation and hampered by a child's limited understanding, these stories were vague. They weren't narratives so much as splotches of color and patterns of light and shade, peopled with characters with names like Bub and Hep. The stories gave me a vivid sense of a world I could never quite know; a place that draws me, precisely because it will always elude my grasp. Beyond a detail here and there—the culverts on the school playground, the couple that meet and fall in love at a parade, the double-decker excursion boat—nothing in Drowning Ruth is true, but the sense of the place and time, I think, is right.