Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  I leaned close. “No, Bunny,” I whispered.

  “Yes, yes,” said the judge. “Go on.”

  “It’s that woman, Mrs. Benedict—she doesn’t like me, your honor. She’s jealous, and jealousy is a powerful emotion and makes people do terrible things.”

  Judge Horner looked quizzically from Bunny to the prosecutor, then back to Bunny. “Jealous of what?” he said.

  “No,” I whispered again.

  “Jealous because.…” Bunny started slowly, but suddenly the words tumbled out. “Jealous because I’ve got a beautiful, smart daughter, and she’s got a dumpy, dumb one.”

  I bowed my head, burrowing my chin in my chest. Why’d she have to say that? Better to be marched off to prison, locked up like Tom, than to talk like that in the open. And the worst thing was, she probably believed it. She’d argue with the judge if he gave her half a chance: The town was conspiring against her; Tom got blamed for everything; now, Mrs. Benedict was acting out of jealousy. I could have recited the arguments by heart. I’d heard them all before—listening silently, holding them in as if they were our own dark secret.

  Sergeant Tony let out a long, low, dirty-sounding whistle.

  “What do you expect me to think, Mrs. Calhoun?” asked Judge Horner. He sounded gentle, almost helpless. “We’ve got a nice town here, a simple town. There are families here with six kids, ten kids, and not one of their children ends up in my court. You’ve got two, and now they’ve both been here. What am I to think?”

  Bunny glanced quickly around, looking for an ally. “But she’s been jealous of me for years. She tried to take Martha away—”

  “Mrs. Calhoun,” broke in the judge, “jealousy didn’t put your daughter in that room with that little boy. She got there on her own. This isn’t a trivial matter. I could have sent her right into the Home. Be grateful that I had some restraint.” The judge arched his back, lifting his chin. “There’s no reason on earth why the county should sit by and let you ruin another life. We’ve got a system in place here and expertise—the court, the social workers.”

  He stood, catching Josephine by surprise. “All rise,” she yelled, scrambling to her feet and glaring at us. The judge held out his arm toward Bunny. A thin, pale, accusing finger jutted out of his sleeve. “My advice to you, Mrs. Calhoun, is to get your own life in order. Use these two weeks to settle your own affairs. I think you know what I mean. I’m not about to send your daughter back into the same environment that’s produced all the trouble.” He turned to Josephine. “Let’s go,” he snapped, and she hurried in front, holding the door for him as he whisked out of the courtroom.

  FIVE

  I sometimes think that this story is as much Sissy’s as mine, that for everything I’ve learned about myself in the last few weeks, I’ve learned equal amounts about her. I see now how wrong I was about her, how much I depended on an idea that was fixed long ago and that I never bothered to reconsider. What I did was cruel, in a way—never giving her the possibility to change, until I came to know her, bit by bit, living in her room, in her house, with her parents.

  The morning after the first court hearing, I awoke early. I felt tired in every part of my body, but I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was too worried and unhappy. Lying on my side on Sissy’s bed, as the early light turned the room a dull gray, my scratchy eyes were focused on the wall. After a while, I noticed that a spot on the wallpaper just in front of my nose had been disfigured. One of the daffodils was faded and slightly fuzzy, as if the wallpaper had got wet or been rubbed down. Leaning up on my elbow, I inspected more closely. The spot had been rubbed down; it had been erased. Someone had drawn a heart in the cup of the daffodil and inside had written, “Sissy Loves Elro.” Afterward, there’d been an attempt to erase the evidence, but the pencil point had made a permanent mark.

  “Sissy Loves Elro.” There was only one Elro in Katydid—how could there be anyone else with a name like that?

  Elro Judy had been in my class for years. He had one of those farmer’s faces that had been sunburned and peeled away so many times that it had become a permanent pink—though, in Elro’s case, he’d looked that way ever since I knew him. He was strong and wiry and tall. From first grade on, he was one of the few boys taller than I. He and Tom used to get together occasionally for some minor mischief. Elro is younger than Tom, but Elro grew up early—physically, that is. He was the first boy in the class to start becoming a man, and it happened very quickly. In fifth grade, one day, the teacher told him to shave before he came to school again. He’d been growing a feathery little black beard. His voice got so deep you could hear him all over the playground. In gym class, when he sweated, his sweat smelled strong, like a man’s. Over the years, he developed a personality to go with that body—awkward, rough, a little bullying. Though we’d been in the same classrooms, I probably hadn’t said a word to him in five years.

  Elro had always been a bit apart from everyone else, but to strike up a romance with Sissy? The idea seemed impossible. Aside from her constant cold, her dreadful, itchy sweaters buttoned up around her chin, her old-fashioned skirts, she was a captive of religion. There wasn’t a place in her head for romantic notions, at least as far as I had ever been able to see. And even if she’d fooled us all, even if behind everything she’d really been secretly dreaming, she couldn’t possibly have been dreaming about Elro. The two of them were just too different. They hardly belonged in the same world together, let alone together in a crudely penciled heart.

  I didn’t fall back asleep, but, before I knew it, the room was full of light. The sun was up. I’d passed a half hour, maybe an hour, contemplating Sissy and Elro, and not once had I thought of my own problems. There’s a lesson there, I thought. Diversion. That’s how to survive this. Sissy may rescue me yet.

  Mrs. O’Brien came that morning for the first of what were to be our regular sessions. We sat in the parlor, a small, book-lined room off the main hall, with a sofa and several soft chairs. During the day, the oak tree outside keeps the room dark and gloomy. At night, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon sit in there and listen to the radio.

  “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself,” said Mrs. O’Brien, after she’d settled herself on the sofa.

  “Mmmm. Like what?” I watched her take a small notebook out of her bag.

  “Oh, let’s see. What about your interests. Do you have any hobbies?”

  I thought for a moment. “Not really,” I confessed.

  “Do you sew?”

  “A little, but our sewing machine’s been broken for a year now.”

  “Cook?”

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “Do you go shopping?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “Any school activities?”

  “Sometimes I help in the library putting books away.”

  Mrs. O’Brien frowned. “What do you do with your time?”

  “Oh, I’m busy,” I said eagerly. “I read a lot, do my homework, clean up around the house, talk to Bunny. Sometimes I don’t have enough time.”

  “What about religion? Your mother tells me you belong to the Congregational Church.”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t imagine why Bunny would tell her that. We’d been to church maybe three times that I could remember. The last time was two years ago, on Christmas Eve. Bunny made Tom and me get dressed up and she took us down for the evening service. Tom got bored during the sermon and started grumbling out loud to himself and making comments about the people around us. Everyone thought he was crazy. Finally, he stomped out. Bunny and I had to sit there, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.

  “I thought I’d stop over and have a word with the minister,” Mrs. O’Brien said. “Maybe he can come by and pay you a visit.”

  “Gee.” The minister was a tall, thin, blond man, quite young, and he’d looked very unhappy while Tom was making all the noise. I wondered if he’d remember us. “Gee,” I said, “do you think that’s necessary?”

  A
gain Mrs. O’Brien frowned. “It’s now or never, Martha,” she said sharply. “You won’t get another chance. When we go back before Judge Horner next week, he’ll want to know about the progress you’ve made. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Her anger startled me. It was so easy to go wrong.

  “Then let’s not have any more of this ‘gee’ stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nix on ‘gee.’ ”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, where were we?” She looked at her notebook. She hadn’t written anything down yet. “Well, why don’t you tell me a bit about your family. Go back as far as you remember.”

  I knew I had to open up, so I started talking about Bunny and Tom and our life together. I told Mrs. O’Brien about Bunny’s house and the neighborhood, the trips to Grandmother’s when we were little, the Sundays we used to spend at the city park or on picnics out at Mason’s Farm. I tried to explain Tom as best I could, and I mentioned a couple of Bunny’s boyfriends. But I didn’t go into details on the touchier things. They would have been too hard to explain. Occasionally, Mrs. O’Brien asked a question or two, and every now and then she jotted something down. Mostly, she just let me talk. She didn’t seem disturbed by anything I said; she didn’t seem particularly interested, either. She just listened. Her manner was perfectly pleasant, actually. I sort of enjoyed myself. Even depressed as I was, I had the feeling that I could win her over, that she’d come around to helping me. The problem, I was afraid, would be Bunny. Mrs. O’Brien didn’t like her. It wasn’t just my imagination—when Bunny was around, Mrs. O’Brien was cooler, more formal, more of an authority. Even now, when Bunny came up in our conversation, Mrs. O’Brien’s eyes darkened, her voice got lower. The signals were clear. But that left me with a dilemma: How was I going to befriend Mrs. O’Brien, earn her sympathy, without being disloyal to Bunny? I’d just have to be careful, I decided.

  After we’d been talking for an hour or so, she folded her notebook, sat back on the sofa, sighed and closed her eyes. Her orange hair, the only bit of brightness in the room, stood out like a new summer hat. I wondered if she had to do anything to it to keep it that color.

  “It must have been hard on you,” she said after a while. “Your father running off like that and then all the trouble with Tom. It must have been hard.”

  “Not really.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t really hard on me.”

  She nodded. “Sometimes the person who’s suffering most doesn’t even realize the trouble she’s got. It’s like being born blind—you don’t know what you’re missing until you can see.”

  “But I can see. I can see perfectly—or, at least, I thought I could until this trouble came up.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention Butcher’s name. “I mean, I never knew my father, so I didn’t have any reason to miss him. And Tom’s getting in trouble was hard, but I knew I always had Bunny, we always had each other. We were close, no matter what. So I never felt deprived. It never even occurred to me.”

  Mrs. O’Brien smiled weakly. “Shall we turn on a light?” she said. “It’s awfully dark in here, isn’t it?”

  I got up and turned on a floor lamp. The shade was made from a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and it threw off a yellowish light that seemed particularly false, given the bright sunlight outside.

  When I sat down again, Mrs. O’Brien said, “I keep hearing about this Eddie Boggs fellow.”

  “You do?”

  “Here and there. You mentioned him. And then the judge.”

  “The judge?”

  “Sergeant Tony, too. When we were having the bench conference in court. He sounds like trouble—Eddie Boggs, that is.”

  “I really don’t know him that well.”

  “How serious do you think it is between your mother and him?” Mrs. O’Brien’s face was open and smooth. I couldn’t tell what she expected of me.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “They’ve been going out for a while now, haven’t they?”

  “I guess.”

  The social worker let her gaze wander around the room. “It worries me,” she said.

  “Worries you?” I caught my breath.

  She turned back. “Oh, it’s just me,” she said cheerily. She’d noticed my distress. “Don’t you worry about it. I’m supposed to worry. That’s my job.” She threw her head back and laughed.

  I managed to squeeze out a smile.

  “I’m paid to worry. That’s what a social worker does.”

  “Do you think things will work out for me?” I said. “I mean, do you think things will get settled.”

  She shrugged. “Look, at least you’re not pregnant.”

  “Oh, no!” I held my stomach.

  “That’s irrevocable.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing I can do about that.” She started telling me a long story about another case she was handling. It involved a girl over in Fogarty. She was sixteen, like me, and from a nice family, but she had a habit of hanging around with a bad crowd. She was fascinated by hoods for some reason. After a while, she started going steady with one. He was a rough character. His main preoccupation was fixing up his car, and he liked to steal things to put in it—hubcaps, fancy mirrors, things like that. He looked so ominous, however—long sideburns, slicked-back hair—that salespeople at the auto-supplies stores were always suspicious. So he taught the girl to steal the stuff, and she got quite good at it. When they finally caught her, they found a whole junkyard of auto parts hidden behind her family’s garage. Anyway, she was in trouble, and he was on his way to reform school when they made their next big mistake. They took his car and ran away together. They got as far as Chicago and checked into a crummy hotel. He thought he was going to get a job at a gas station, but he didn’t have a Social Security card. They ended up just hanging out in the hotel room until they ran out of money and the hotel clerk called the police. By that time, they were guilty of both stealing and running away, but worse, the girl had got pregnant.

  “Think of it,” Mrs. O’Brien said, her voice rising. “Sixteen years old, on the way to reform school, and about to become a mother. What’s she going to do?”

  I shook my head in exasperation and, satisfied, Mrs. O’Brien got up to go to her next appointment.

  Afterward, I stayed down in the kitchen while Mrs. Vernon chopped vegetables for a church dinner. I offered to help, but she said no, that it was pleasant enough just having me for company. She poured me a cup of chamomile tea, so mild it was barely more than plain hot water, and I sat at the kitchen table. She’d been at her garden, and neat rows of carrots, beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes were lined up on the counter. She picked up a long knife with a wood handle and a blade that was wavery and bright from many sharpenings. As she pushed the vegetables forward, the knife kept up an even, metronome pace in her right hand. Watching her was a comfort, her work was so steady. All the while, she chattered on about Sissy.

  I waited for my chance and finally, at a pause, I said, “Do you remember Elro Judy from our class?”

  “Of course I know Elro,” she said softly. Her eyes were downcast; she was hurt. Why had I assumed that she’d want to talk about this, that her daughter was a mystery to her, too? “The spring before Sissy died, Elro used to call on her,” Mrs. Vernon went on. “They went out on dates a few times.” She fumbled with the vegetables. Every knife stroke now was slow and carefully positioned. She’d lost the unconsciousness of it.

  “Sissy went out on dates?”

  “They only went to the movies. Sissy wanted to, and I couldn’t see any reason to say no.” Mrs. Vernon paused. “I think she had a crush on him.” The word “crush” was hard for her, she struggled saying it. “I don’t know why he stopped calling,” she continued. “But it’s been tough on him in the last year or so, what with his mother dying that slow death, and his father selling the farm. They live out at the Gardner place now, in the tenant house.”

  “Oh.” I still could
n’t imagine Sissy and Elro together. What happened when she talked about Jesus?

  “Sissy was disappointed when he stopped coming around. She didn’t let on, but a mother can tell.” Mrs. Vernon put the knife down and looked up. “Walter never liked that boy, though. He never said anything specific, but he used to grumble a lot—that’s Walter’s way. He just didn’t like the boy and was glad when it ended.”

  “Did you ever ask him why? I mean, Mr. Vernon—did you ever ask him why he didn’t like Elro?”

  “No, I figured he had his reasons.” She took a white glass bowl off a shelf and pushed the piles of chopped vegetables into it. “Some boys are men’s boys, and some boys are women’s boys,” Mrs. Vernon said. “And I figured that Elro must just have something that women notice.”

  That some women notice, I thought. Very strange women.

  SIX

  At about three that afternoon, I heard Bunny pull up outside. She owned a blue 1948 Pontiac that made a rattling noise when it moved, as if a stone were loose inside a hubcap. Eddie Boggs once checked, though, and didn’t find any loose stones. “That car’s just got a death rattle,” he said. Anyway, I could hear it when Bunny was within half a block.

  She parked at the curb and came up to the Vernons’ front stoop. She was wearing her waitress uniform, and her hair was carelessly pinned up. Mrs. Vernon opened the door, but Bunny wouldn’t come inside. Speaking through the screen door, she said she had to take me away for an hour or so to run errands. Mrs. Vernon was unsure—Bunny could certainly visit any time she wanted, but it wasn’t clear whether she could leave with me. Bunny was indignant. “Do I need permission to drive my own daughter down to the square?” she demanded. Reluctantly, Mrs. Vernon let me go.

  “I can’t stand to set a foot in that house,” grumbled Bunny as we got into the car. “It always smells like toast.”

  “Mrs. Vernon makes a lot of toast,” I said. “She even makes her sandwiches with toast at lunch.” I’d been rather impressed.