by Peter Orner
After, she said it was just a joke. At first that’s what she said. After he’d marched barefoot the five miles back to Iron River and found his car parked on South Cotter Road around the corner from Sue’s parents’ place. After he’d pounded the front door, then the side, then the back. All locked. After he chucked a rock at her curtained window and shattered the pane and shouted. She peered out the broken window and looked down. “It was a joke, Wade.” And she laughed at him. Then she went downstairs and opened the door and told him something closer to truth: “I drove away, Wade. Just like you’re always talking about driving away.”
She stood at the door in shorts, and he wanted to hit her. You fucking bitch. But he didn’t say anything, just looked her over. At Sue, with her shorts and bare legs and applesauce yellow-brown hair and headphones on her neck and puggly nose and little sucked-in cheeks like two tiny waterless ponds.
“I thought you were kidnapped, raped. Jesus.”
“Just drove away, Wade.” Now not smiling, now glaring him straight in the face, so it felt as if he was the one being hit. “Just like you’re always blabbing about doing.”
He felt for her across the bed. Nothing. He opened his groggy eyes. Early, not much after seven, but the sun was hot already. Sweating. Alone in the bed. First, he figured she’d gone outside to the bathroom. But when he got up and looked out the window at the trees, he didn’t see her. He shouted for her. No answer. He shouted again and listened, and all he heard was his own sudden panting. He slid his legs into his pants and climbed out the big window. He ran without shoes across the gravel to the stand of pines, knowing she wasn’t there, because he could see she wasn’t there, but checking anyway. Knowing she wasn’t the type of person to take a walk on her own in the morning, and where the hell was there to walk to but the thick mosquitoed woods. Still trying to stay calm. Shouting calmly: Sue! Suzy! Nothing. Then screeching: Suzy! Suzy! He ran around the back and for some reason first looked in the empty pool and thought, Whatever the explanation for this, not waking up with her is the worst thing that will ever happen to me. He thought of his father dying. Thought of himself alone in the house, listening to the clocks. I’m a disgrace of a son. Ashamed but still knowing, even so, that this will always be worse, wherever Sue is, whatever happened, this right now will always be worse than any funeral. He ran on and arrived at the empty space where he’d hidden his car twelve hours earlier and felt in his pocket for his keys. And then—and this he knew with as much certainty as he knew that he’d be buried next to his father behind St. Bartholomew’s—that there would be worse things than even this, so many worse things than this. He knelt down and touched the tire tracks in the mud as if their familiar pattern alone could explain why she’d done it.
Sue peeled out the gravel driveway and thought how kickass it felt to no longer be a virgin and speeding away in your boyfriend’s car. It had everything to do with driving and leaving. But there was more. She loved him. She’d told him that. He’d never told her, but that wasn’t why she stole his keys and took off in his car at dawn. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew he did. That wasn’t it. And she didn’t drive away because he was going to drive away from her sooner or later either. No. She realized as she drove down 53 and away from him and his gaped, sleeping mouth that she was driving away because he thought, One day I’m going to drive away. Because he aspired without her. Like he had some kind of birthright. Her father had gotten away with it. So as she sped by the Ino bar, things made more sense. She was punishing Wade’s thinking. Not the real leaving. The real leaving—if he even had the guts, which was an open question—she could handle, just like her mother had, and maybe by then she wouldn’t even care.
But then her driving became something more, and she drove west, away from Iron River, loving the car and the new blacktop on the two-lane to Poplar. No one on the road that early except for a few trucks. The tall pines of the Brule River State Forest on both sides, towering over the highway. Trees that meant home. The muddy trails that wound through them. The thousand deer. She kept going west and drove all the way to Route B, which circled around Lake Nebagamon, that quiet lake where she and Wade went once in a while to get away from Hulbert. The little beach with the raft. NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. A sign they liked. They always did their best to lie on the beach and avoid watching the children splashing—refused to tell any of them not to push each other off the raft. She drove with her head out the window, wind gusting in her face, sometimes seeing glimpses of the lake through the damp green trees, sometimes not. Near the bait shop she got out and walked to the end of the dock and dangled her feet in the waveless water. A man was swimming across the small cove by the bridge, and she watched his slowly arcing arms. She thought of Wade stomping down the highway and his anger and how he wasn’t going to get it and how she was going to have to explain it to him. When she got home, her mother and stepfather were both already at work. A note from her mother was waiting for her on the kitchen table pad. Her mother’s looping, forgiving handwriting. She didn’t read it.
Sitting Theodore
MRS. GOLD down the block in the colossal brick house tried to off her husband, a huge Cadillac-driving guy named Jerry, by hiring two hit men from Bolingbrook to murder him in the shower. Turned out one of the guys was an undercover Chicago cop specializing in spousal homicide. Later, in prison, Mrs. Gold fell in love with the lawyer working on her appeal, my mom’s friend, the formerly unassuming and mousy Fran Swanner. This all happened in Morton Grove, Illinois, in 1981. There’s more. When they sent her down to Five Hills Correctional in Centralia, Mrs. Gold was pregnant with the baby of one of the hit men, the real hit man, the one who wasn’t a cop. Mrs. Gold was sentenced to six years, and for the first two, the baby, Theodore, lived with his mother at Five Hills. Then, on his second birthday, he moved into Fran Swanner’s house on Cedar Valley Road. When Mrs. Gold got paroled a year later, she joined them.
Of course if only it had been that easy. Fran Swanner was married when she and Mrs. Gold fell hard for each other. To a courtly real estate agent named Don, and they had two very bright kids, twins. I think Jeremy ended up at Harvard, Lisa at Johns Hopkins. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, that was after. Fran and Don’s kids were seniors in high school when all this started. Fran had just served them plates of fried fishsticks and hash browns. Don was still at work. “Kids,” she announced, “I’m divorcing your father and intend to live with Lena Gold—whom I love—as soon as she is released from prison, where she is being wrongly held. As soon as my writ of habeas corpus is approved by the Third District of the Appeals Court of the State of Illinois on the grounds of unconstitutional government entrapment…” There was a little Get out of here with your law stories, Mom, until they realized her earnest legal babble was dead serious. After this, there was a lot of shrieking and door slamming. What-the-hell’s-gotten-into-you sort of stuff. But what was done was done. Their mother’s voice didn’t crack and she was matter-of-fact. “This is non-negotiable, but remember, I will always be your mother and your father will always be your father.” Then Lisa and Jeremy took off in Fran’s car, and she remained at the kitchen table with folded hands and waited for Don to return home. He took it better. Don endured the news, as he did every other setback in his life, with a baffled shrug. Fran, although shy, had always been unpredictable in small ways, particularly when it came to sex. He’d spent much of his adult life charting her desires, trying to keep up with her. In 1974 they bought a water bed. In the spring of ’79 they attended a conference, called “Orgies for the Happily Married,” in Scottsdale, Arizona. The year before, the Rosenkrantzes, Glo and Simon, had spent an interminable Memorial Day holiday in Fran and Don’s bedroom. This, of course, was bigger and was going to ruin his life, but what could he say? Our house? Our family? Fran wasn’t a cold woman, and in twenty years of marriage she’d never lied to him. She had always been steadfast in her love. Now her love had changed focus, dramatically. “I ache for her, Don. I
t hurts. I’ll say that much. It hurts me not to be there with her this very second.” Two days later, Don and Jeremy and Lisa moved into a rented apartment above Don’s Century 21 office on Simonian. He accepted a generous cash settlement as well as a half life interest in the house, split between him and the kids. Fran also contracted to pay both Jeremy and Lisa’s twenty-thousand-plus tuitions.
My mom told me most of this. Not about the murder plot itself. That part was in the Chicago Sun-Times for three days running. She told me the rest, though. She was in on all that. Nothing shocks my mother. When Fran Swanner told her that she’d fallen fast and hard for one of her clients, the infamous bouffant-haired husband-killer Lena Gold, and that she was divorcing Don and he was taking the kids—and that she was going to help raise Mrs. Gold and the hit man’s child—I can see my mom waving away, for the moment, the complications and giving Fran one of her smothering hugs and sloppy lipstick smooches and gushing, “Oh, honey. I’m absolutely thrilled you’re in love!”
I played a cameo role in the saga. I was Theodore’s babysitter after he moved in with Fran. Theodore was a pretty normal kid, considering. A sweet kid who was always handing me presents like half-eaten strawberries. He was also quiet. He never cried while I watched TV. He was mostly content simply to play with his mother’s old shoes. Best of all was that I got ten dollars an hour, which was six dollars more than the going rate in those years. And after she got paroled, Mrs. Gold always tipped me another five when Fran wasn’t looking. Then she’d speak to me in a raspy whisper I have forever associated with the way women talk in prison. “Little Beth,” she’d say, even though I was nearly as tall as she was, “go nuts with the extra.” I always got the feeling that Mrs. Gold tipped me more for not being afraid and not passing judgment than for anything I ever did for Theodore. Whatever the reasons, having Lena Gold’s money in my pocket made my neck sweat. I’d get pricked by the power of it passing into my hand from her long, spidery fingers. As though now I had license to do something dramatic, like break someone’s car windows on the way home. Or better, let my gym teacher—Mr. Carl—see me naked in his shoebox office, with the door locked. Because I knew how much he ached for that.
And even after she got out of prison, Lena Gold still had all that big white hair. It looked the same as it did when I was ten and would see her squatting in her front garden. In hind-sight, I know she was probably masterminding her plan to get rid of Big Jerry, right there among her impatiens and petunias. But if anyone deserved it, he did. Jerry Gold was a loud, crashing guy. A wildebeest in a Cadillac, as wide as his whale of a car, a Coupe DeVille with doors the size of Toyotas. He used to drive 85 down Paulina Street. I’d be riding my bike around no-handed on a Saturday and Jerry would come barreling my way, jamming his horn, a suburban Ahab roaring out his sunroof, “SIDEWALK! SIDEWALK!” I don’t think there was anyone in our neighborhood, including the forever cloistered Mrs. Newton Rimwaller (whom my brother swears he actually saw once in the fall of ’79), who was very sad to hear that Lena Gold had hired two guys to dress up as house painters and assassinate him while he sang and farted in the shower. I know a lot of us were sorry she’d failed so embarrassingly.
But as much as Lena Gold’s story has fascinated me for all these years—the roller coaster element of it, the intrigue of such crimes and domestic upheavals amid the square-lawned primness of my suburban northwest Chicago—when I think back on it, I mostly think of Don, the real estate broker. He was the fawn in the headlights. He was the one the botched attempt really did end up killing. Inadvertently, true. And yes, not literally. My mom tells me he’s doing just fine these days, still living above his office. Oh, you know Don. He’s a trouper’s trouper. But I think I know differently. Something broke in that man, something I doubt even all this time has been able to heal. I’ve had enough of my own blind sides to know that while it may be easy to clear away the wreckage, it’s much harder to stop fingering your scars.
I last saw Don in the winter of ’85, a year after Lena Gold’s early release. I was sitting Theodore. Fran and Mrs. Gold were at the opera. It was a Friday night in February, around 10:30. Theodore was already asleep when the front doorbell rang, which was weird. Fran and Mrs. Gold’s house on Cedar Valley Road was what my mom called a “forget knocking, barge in the back door” kind of house. A house where you didn’t wipe your feet, and where you simply merged into the chaos: Mrs. Gold’s cooking spatter, Fran’s case files all over the place, Theodore’s play shoes, Mrs. Gold’s salsa music. Only the Jews for Jesus rang the front bell, and they were welcome, too. But that night it was late and silent, and I turned on the outside light and opened the front door to a pale, nervous, jacketless man. In the brightness I could see that he’d cut himself shaving. His chin was bleeding.
“Mr. Swanner?”
“Evening, Beth.”
“Hi.” I rubbed my sweater arms. It couldn’t have been more than ten degrees, and Don’s shifting feet creaked in the ancient hard-packed snow.
“I’d like to take a walk around, if you don’t mind. Just for old times.”
I continued to stare at him. His quick small breaths were like puttering exhaust in the cold. I mentioned before that Don was courtly. A beautiful man, as far as men go, I overheard Fran once tell my mother. But this was post–John Wayne Gacy Chicago. I thought, What if this famously mild-mannered ex-husband turned spurned lover suddenly, finally, goes berserk and tries to strangle Theodore—the love child of his wife’s ex-con live-in girlfriend—to death in his angelic sleep? Gacy the clown juggled at birthday parties. Gacy the politician shook hands with Rosalynn Carter. The police found twenty-seven bodies in his crawl space. Lena Gold was a decorated Brownie troop leader at the time of her arrest. I was fifteen and one-third, and I was the babysitter. Don gazed at me with beaten, patient eyes as I stood in the front hall he used to sweep every Sunday.
“I’m not sure I can let you in,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not sure if it’s okay.”
Don examined the way I was squinting at him. He saw that I had the potential to be afraid of him, and this made him laugh. “I know you’re just doing your job, Beth. That you’ve got a responsibility.” He held up his right palm. “I absolutely promise not to run off with the silver, and God strike me dead this moment if I would ever hurt a child.” His eyes pucked out when he said that last part, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.
I stepped aside. He thanked me and offered his hand. We shook as if we’d made some kind of deal, but I wasn’t sure what we were agreeing to. Though Don was at least six feet tall, his hand was so small and sweaty, so fightless, so unlike Lena Gold’s, that I wondered if Fran hadn’t cast him out because of his puny hands. I hovered behind him as he skulked around the house with his hands behind his back, as if he were taking a tour at the Art Institute or, more likely, some frighteningly realistic exhibition dedicated to his previous life. He paused at the bulbous umbrella holder in the back hall. He nudged the faded green Oriental rug back into position. He reset the grandfather clock to match the time on his own watch. After trailing him for ten minutes, I went back to the den. I turned the sound down so I could listen to him creep around the kitchen. I heard him open the refrigerator, as if a look at Lena’s strange and healthy foods (tofu, eight varieties of beets) would somehow explain what had gone wrong. For another ten minutes I heard nothing. I imagined him in a chair at the kitchen table, silently weeping with his head in his hands, antagonized by memories of Fran, pantless and beckoning, clad only in one of his dress shirts. Then, from the living room, I heard the loud swipe of a kitchen-size match. I was certain that he’d at last gone over the edge and had poured gasoline all over the furniture and that Theodore and I were done for, as good as charred. When I skidded into the living room in my socks, Don was squatting before the fireplace, feeding kindling to budding flames. He twisted around and looked at me.
“Thought I’d warm the place up a bit. Okay with you?”
“
I guess so.”
He rubbed his hands together. “It’s been so long since I made a fire. I used to make—” He stopped and clapped. “Hey. How about a game of chess? How about it, Beth?” His face was redder than it had been at the door, and his voice was suddenly too perky, as though he was trying desperately to be chipper, to be light. He went to the cabinet above the stereo. “We used to keep the chess set right in here, and maybe—” He yanked a cardboard box, turned around, and shuffled the plastic game pieces at me.