Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  “Will? How the hell do you know that old man?” he asked in perfect English.

  When I explained, his eyes narrowed. “Do you have a Social Security card?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Ever waited tables before?”

  “Yes, at a country club.”

  “Summer job?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned over the counter and looked me up and down. “Well, you sound smart,” he said finally, “and I can always use smart people. You get yourself a Social Security card, and I’ll put you to work. Seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. Be here ten minutes early. I got a uniform you can wear until you can afford to buy your own. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  I left, not knowing what to do. How could I get a Social Security card when I was using a fake name? But at 6:50 the next morning, I showed up for work, and Lou never said another word about a Social Security card.

  Lou’s wife, Angela, got me started. She gave me a clean white uniform—too short, but she later let out the hem—and taught me Lou’s system. I worked eight booths along the wall. Actually, they had been Angela’s booths, but my arrival meant she could move back behind the counter with Lou; that way there’d be two people on the cash register. Two middle-aged women, Judy and Maria, handled the other booths.

  The work was easy. The food was much simpler than the country club’s, and the customers were less demanding. There were three fast times during the day: breakfast, from seven to nine; midmorning, when men would come in with boxes to take coffee and pastries back to their co-workers, and we all had to help behind the counter; and lunch. In between, we straightened up, filled salt shakers and napkin dispensers, or else we just sat around. Nobody talked much. In fact, Angela told me that Judy and Maria hadn’t been speaking to each other for three years. Angela couldn’t remember why.

  Every day at 3:15, I’d catch the number six bus back to the Viking. Will was very pleased that he’d found me the job, and one day, to thank him, I bought him a tie. It was blue with red stripes, and I thought he could wear it to church, but he put it on right there in the elevator and wore it every day from then on. For meals, I’d eat breakfast and lunch at Lou’s, and in the evening, around six, I’d go out to another diner, down the street from the Viking. Always the same dinner: a tuna salad plate and a Coke. After the first three days, the waitress didn’t even have to ask me. Sometimes, after dinner, I’d walk over to the bus station. There was a newsstand there, and I’d browse through the magazines. Occasionally, I’d buy one and bring it back to my room. Except for Will and the customers at Lou’s diner, I hardly talked to anyone, and no one seemed to notice me.

  On Friday afternoon, Lou gave me an envelope with $60 in it. With tips, that meant I’d earned about $90 in the week. That was more than enough, I figured, to keep me going at the Viking. Feeling rather encouraged, I tried twice that weekend to call Bunny. I went into the phone booth in the hotel lobby, closing the accordion door behind me. Each time, I let the phone ring for ten, maybe twenty times, without getting an answer. She must be at Eddie’s, I decided, and I wasn’t about to call her there. After the second attempt, I concluded it was better not to try to reach her at all, and I never called again.

  The second week went even more smoothly than the first. By then, I was used to being on my feet all day, and my legs didn’t ache. I was starting to recognize most of the regular customers, and they were starting to call me by my name—that is, by my new name. It was Lily this and Lily that. How you this morning, Lily? Lily pond; Lily pad; Lily-of-the-valley; silly Lily; chilly, Lily (referring to a plate of eggs I’d just served—the comment broke up the entire booth). Martha had been so simple.

  Still, I was getting used to it. Going home, my pocket would be bulging with a heavy load of nickels, dimes, and quarters. The number six bus started near the restaurant, so I was usually one of the first passengers on. The driver asked my name the second day and ever after greeted me as Miss Lily. I’d always take the same seat, third from the end on the right, and stare out the window as we passed from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the middle of the run, the bus would be crowded, but by the time we arrived in front of the Viking, most of the seats were empty again.

  On Friday of the second week, the only other passenger left on the bus as it rumbled through traffic for the last few blocks was a heavy-set woman with straggly, graying hair. I’d noticed her before. She always got on the bus toward the end of the run, usually carrying a shopping bag. Because she was overweight, she always paused to catch her breath after climbing the steps of the bus. Once she’d sat down, she stared out the window with a particularly blank, unthinking look on her face. I never heard her say a word to anyone, and I came to think of her as a kind of grown-up orphan, someone who moved through life without any connections to the world around her. Like me. I imagined that she, too, had once come alone to the city and was now using up her days in safe isolation. Watching her day after day, I always felt a slight wave of contentment pass over me.

  On this particular Friday, she took the seat directly in front of me. Her stringy hair looked uncombed, and she was wearing a faded print housecoat. For several blocks, she stared out the window as usual. Then she bent down and rummaged through her shopping bag. When she straightened up, she was holding an envelope with an address written on it in a goofy, childish scrawl. The envelope had already been opened, and she pulled out several sheets of note paper, all covered with that same embarrassing handwriting. As she read, I leaned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the message. I only saw one sentence, and it was enough to make my head snap back: “So what do you think, Mom, should I buy the blue Chevy?” By the time I got off in front of the Viking, tears were streaming down my face.

  I walked around the block once to pull myself together. Then, hurrying past the Viking’s front desk, I was stopped by the boy with acne. “There’s someone here to see you,” he said. The boy nodded toward the wall behind me. Crooked old Chief Springer was struggling to get up out of a frayed, sunken sofa, the only piece of furniture in the lobby.

  “Let’s get your things and be going,” he said.

  On the way up in the elevator, Will avoided my eyes, as if he was afraid to let on that he knew me. But on the way down, when he saw I’d packed to go, he came to my defense. “She a good girl,” he said to Chief Springer. “No breeng boys eento room.” Chief Springer smiled without saying anything.

  “Goodbye, Will,” I said. “Thank Lou for me.”

  Will followed us into the lobby, the first time I’d ever seen him out of the elevator. “A good girl,” he called after us.

  The ride back to Katydid took about three hours. The inside of the police car was cluttered with sections of crumpled and torn newspapers. Every so often, the police radio would break into a loud, terrible cackle—a noise that had started out somewhere far away as somebody’s voice. Chief Springer just ignored it. After a while, I asked him how he’d found me. “When a sixteen-year-old girl runs away, it’s just a matter of time before we catch up,” he said. “The world’s not a very big place when you’re a sixteen-year-old girl off by yourself.”

  Halfway home, we stopped for coffee. The arthritis in Chief Springer’s back is so bad that he has trouble getting in and out of cars. He asked me to lend him a hand. I hurried around the police car and held his arm as he pulled himself out from behind the steering wheel. It seemed like a lot of trouble for a cup of coffee, but perhaps he had something else in mind. At the table in the restaurant, he asked me how things had come to this—how a nice girl like me had got into so much trouble. His face was puddled and spotted in red, and I felt relieved to be with him. So I explained what had happened that day with Butcher, and I told him about the harassment I’d received and about the bonfire out at Banyon’s Woods. I also explained about running away with Elro. When I told him that nothing had finally happened, Chief Springer didn’t seem surprised—maybe he’d already heard the story from Elro. “I
t’s not fair,” I said at the end. “Once I’d made one mistake, things just seemed to multiply, and then I got blamed for everything.”

  As I talked, the chief chewed on the frame of his glasses, sometimes letting the glasses dangle down from his mouth. Over time, he’d eaten away most of the plastic at one tip, exposing the frame’s wire skeleton. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “That town’s only got six thousand people in it, but it lost eight boys in World War Two and three more in Korea. At this point, it gets kinda confused about its children and doesn’t always know what it’s up to. You can’t really fault the town for that.”

  “But what’s going to happen to me?”

  “You’re just a child,” he said. “You’ll grow up and move away. Nothing bad can happen to you. Think about me. I’m an old man. I can’t even stand up straight.”

  They put me in the Children’s Home, as I’d expected they would, but it hasn’t turned out to be so bad. I’d forgotten that my great fear of the Home came from when I was six or seven, when the possibility of being an orphan was terrifyingly real to someone with only one parent. Over the years since, I’d kept the fear without realizing that it’s really just a child’s notion. Living here isn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  A man named Mr. Noren runs the place. He’s a frantic sort of person, always late, always hurrying down the hall with his shirttail flapping out the back of his pants. He apparently sees me as someone he can confide in. He tells me how tired he is and complains about the orphans he gets these days: all without manners, all badly educated. Once, we were walking down a hall, and he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. We were alone and I was frightened, but all he did was lift up his foot and show me the ribbed rubber sole on his shoe. “I have to go all the way into Chicago for these,” he said. “They’re the only things that keep me from sliding all over the floor.”

  Most of the children are far younger than I. Mr. Noren put me in a tiny room with one of the few girls my age, Mary Lewis—Crazy Mary, as she’s known. She’s actually two years older, and she’s lived in the Home nearly all her life. Her parents were killed in a car crash. She has straight black hair and black eyes, and she likes to wear black clothes—black stockings, black sweaters, black skirts. She explained to me once that black soaks up the light. She almost never talks, though. Days go by, and she never says a word.

  The room itself is very plain, with pale green walls, two single beds with terrible, itchy, gray-wool blankets, and two small wood desks. The desks are old, and their tops are so marked up and nicked that you have to put a piece of cardboard under the paper if you want to write something. Over the years, instead of being sanded down, the desk tops have simply been recoated with varnish, which has sealed in the scratches and made them seem almost historical—the archives of countless orphans from the past.

  The day after I was brought back to Katydid, another hearing was held down at the courthouse. Chief Springer was there this time instead of Sergeant Tony, and my new social worker, Mr. Lowry, came up and introduced himself. He is young, with unruly brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he looks out of place, somehow, as if he should be playing the smart kid in a very old movie. “Mrs. O’Brien sends her best,” he said. “She’d be here but she has a conference to attend in Fogarty.” He frowned, and I gathered he expected me to be unhappy at this piece of news. Then his face lit up. “I’m in such a good mood,” he said. “I got married this summer, and my wife is wonderful!”

  Judge Horner scowled when he came into the courtroom, and he told me I was a fool for thinking I could run away from my problems. But his scolding could have been worse. In the end, he said he wanted to “take another look at this thing,” and he told Mr. Lowry to prepare a new report “in light of how circumstances have changed.”

  Judge Horner didn’t say it outright, but he was referring to the fact that Bunny is in a hospital in Rockford, recovering from exhaustion. She was checked in two days after I ran away. I haven’t seen her, but I’ve talked to her twice, using the phone in Mr. Noren’s secretary’s office. The first time, Bunny sounded dreamy, her words were loose and she had trouble following the conversation. The second time, a few days later, she sounded much better.

  “Why him?” she asked. “I can’t imagine what you saw in him.”

  I explained that it didn’t have anything to do with Elro personally, that he was just the only one who would take me away.

  “I should have taken you away,” Bunny said. “We should have left when we had the chance.”

  “How’s Eddie?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Oh, he’s all right, I guess. He’s been over to visit a few times. The doctors don’t like him, though. They say he stirs me up, and I’m supposed to have complete peace and quiet.” Her voice cracked. She started to cry. “It’s true, he does stir me up.”

  “Bunny—”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Don’t think about it. You’re supposed to relax.”

  “I’ve grown old. I look at myself in the mirror here—they took away my compact, but there’s a mirror in the bathroom. I look at myself, and it’s an old woman’s face looking back. I could be fifty, sixty, seventy years old. It’s all the same. I’m an old woman.”

  “Bunny—”

  She snorted, a laugh bubbling through the tears. “And you know what else? My bottom’s got fat. I sit down now, and it spreads out like a bag of sand. I’m an old fat bottom.”

  “Bunny, you’re beautiful, you’re the most beautiful woman in Katydid.”

  “I was, my darling, I was. But that’s all gone now, that’s the past.”

  Not long afterward, Mr. Lowry arranged for Bunny’s doctor, Dr. Wheeler, to talk to me. Sitting at Mr. Noren’s secretary’s desk, I made the call at the appointed time, eleven in the morning. The doctor wasn’t in his office, and in the background, I could hear the paging system calling his name. After several minutes, he picked up, but he sounded rushed and irritated. “I recommend that you write your mother from now on and not call,” he said. “Her condition is still very delicate, and conversations tend to upset her. Keep your letters to unimportant subjects—the weather, school, that sort of thing. Don’t mention anything that might make her worry.”

  “When is she going to be able to come home?”

  “We can’t know that, but she won’t be home soon. She’s been living on borrowed emotional energy for years, and now she’s paying the price. I suggest you just go about your life in your own regular way and hope that some day she’ll be ready to catch up with you. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ve got lots of patients to see in addition to your mother.”

  “Wait!” I yelled. I was holding the receiver in both hands, dreading the click on the other end. If he hung up now, the silence would be unbearable. “Dr. Wheeler?”

  After a long pause—perhaps he had heard me but was considering hanging up anyway—his voice came slowly. “Yes, I’m still here.”

  “Dr. Wheeler, I was wondering. You know, I got in trouble here this summer and then ran away, and now I’m worried that maybe I caused this to happen to Bunny, that I made her sick.”

  “You know perfectly well it’s been a traumatic summer for her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your brother—”

  “Yes.” Please help me, I begged silently.

  “But illness like this isn’t set off by one thing or even two. It’s an accumulation of things over time. Some of them are obvious, and some aren’t. It doesn’t do any good to backtrack. The best thing is to accept this and go on with your own life. You aren’t to blame.” He sounded efficient, clipped, even bored. How many sons and daughters had heard this speech before? “Now, I really must go.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I hung up and sat at the desk without moving. I tried not to think. Mr. Noren’s secretary believes in neatness, and everything has a container with its own place—pencils, pens, stamps, p
aper clips, coins, thumbtacks, tea bags, sugar packets, throat lozenges, hard candies. I scanned the candies in their small, round tin. Cherry, strawberry, lemon. Ahhh—I took a lemon, unwrapped it, and threw it in my mouth. Suddenly, Mr. Lowry burst into the room, his face crimson, his arms flapping. “Guess what? The tests are positive! My wife’s pregnant!”

  On the same day that the Exponent carried an article saying that the owners of the KTD had decided to keep the factory open for at least another year, Reverend Vaughn called me up. The phone connection was distant and crackly, and he sounded a bit uneasy, talking too fast and asking too many quick questions. I got the idea that he thought I’d run away because of him, because of the story he’d told me that night in his study. Explaining would have been too hard and too tiring over that scratchy phone line, so I just tried to steer the conversation to other things. He told me he was in Chicago, staying with a friend until he found another church.

  “Are you worried?” I asked.

  “Actually, it’s rather nice,” he said. “I hang out at the Art Institute, read a lot—I really sort of wish I never had to work again.”

  “Did you hear about the KTD? It’s going to stay open.”

  “For now,” he said. “It got a reprieve, not a pardon.”

  “But you helped. That ought to make you feel good. You did something, and it helped.”

  His familiar light laugh trickled over the wire from Chicago. “You’re sweet, Martha, but no. What I did didn’t help a goddamn bit.”

  School has started, but they won’t let me go back yet; they’re waiting to see how Judge Horner resolves my case. That’s fine with me, because it means I have the dormitory room to myself during the day. Mr. Lowry brought me some textbooks, and every now and then I look through them. But mostly I’ve used the time to write—that’s where all this comes from. In the late afternoon, after school has let out and the kids are coming back, I hide the pages under the mattress. We eat at six, spend an hour and a half at study time and have to be in bed, with the lights out, by nine. Someone always comes around to check. Then I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling. Usually it takes hours to fall asleep.