The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  The town is just waking up, storekeepers unlocking their doors and turning placards from Closed to Open. The school uniform feels like my own conspicuous sign: Runaway. My heart thumps whenever I pass anyone on the sidewalk, expecting the hand on my shoulder. But their glances brush over me without interest. I pass the diner as a man pushes the door open to go in; an aroma of bacon wafts out. My mouth waters.

  We live off the main road, two turns and then straight for three blocks. I stand at the corner of our street, looking toward the house. Clyde’s probably in there. They’re probably all in there: it’s too early for work, too early for school. The door opens and I freeze, but it’s my mother, getting the morning newspaper. She doesn’t look up, just takes the paper from the step and shuts the door. I go down the sidewalk and then around to the back of the house, to the kitchen with its mullion-paned back door.

  She’s there, spooning coffee into the percolator. He must be home; she wouldn’t make a pot just for herself.

  “Mama,” I say, but it is too soft and she doesn’t hear me. I tap on the glass, two sharp tinks. She startles and looks up; her eyes widen. She comes to the door and out onto the back step, and shuts the door quietly behind her.

  “What are you doing here?”

  No Leo, thank God you’re all right. No Leo, where have you been?

  “He sent me to prison,” I say.

  “It’s a school, not a prison.”

  This is a shock: She has known where I am?

  “I don’t want to be there,” I say. “Why did you let him send me? Why didn’t you come to get me?”

  “Leo,” she says. “I sent you there.”

  “Why?” I say when I can manage words.

  “Are they feeding you? What is that smell?”

  “Cows. Mama, I don’t belong there. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “It’s not just a place for bad boys.” She is earnest. “It’s a good school.”

  “But I don’t want to be there,” I say.

  “You’d rather be here?” She sounds really surprised. I don’t even have the words for yes, but she sees it in my face. “Well, we can’t always have what we want.”

  It’s something I’ve heard her say before to Tad or Sally when they ask for a toy. She never said it to me that I can recall. Then again, I’ve rarely asked for anything.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks, and I nod. “Wait here.”

  She slips inside. I sit down on the back step, and a few minutes later she comes out again with a sandwich and a glass of milk.

  “You don’t know how much better it is now,” she says, watching me eat. Her voice sounds like pleading. “A whole week with no fights, no shouting.”

  “I don’t shout,” I say, my mouth full. But I know she means Clyde isn’t shouting. I’m not there to shout at. I swallow. “Why can’t he leave?”

  She lifts a corner of her apron, dabs milk away from my upper lip. “I have Tad and Sally to think of. You’re strong, Leo; they’re little.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt them.”

  “They need peace. We all do. You too.”

  “Why does he hate me?” I don’t mean it to sound as babyish as it comes out.

  She takes a big breath in, blows it out again. “It’s not you. Not really. It’s just—you remind him that he wasn’t the first man in my life.” That’s stupid; my father is dead, no threat at all to Clyde. “Anyway, he’s got a job now. You know he’s happier when he’s working.”

  “I don’t remember that far back,” I say coldly.

  “If we can just get ahead of the bills. Maybe by Christmas.”

  “Christmas.” It’s May; Christmas is impossibly far away.

  “It isn’t so bad there, is it?” She is imploring. “You can bear it for a while?”

  My throat is sore from what feels like a big ball of tears gathering there. I choke down the last of the sandwich and nod, my eyes on the ground.

  “Good boy. Finish your milk and I’ll walk with you as far as the grocer. I’ll tell Clyde I had to go out for eggs.”

  Before we leave, she takes four eggs from the icebox to make her lie true, and drops them as we walk through the morning. One by one, they smash softly into the grass, the orange yolks sliding out like ruined suns.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  Clare

  HUGH AND I MARRIED IN the Woonsocket church of my childhood, the pews filled with faces from the old neighborhood. Everything was smaller and more drab than I remembered, except my mother, who was more animated than I’d ever seen her, everywhere after the Mass, talking, joking. I hadn’t heard her laugh so much since I was a child. On the church lawn, my parents kissed me. “Be a good girl,” my father said.

  And then Hugh and I went home, to the second floor of a triple-decker frame house on one of the short streets off Hope, no more than a mile and a half from the bookshop. And I was suddenly a wife.

  Which meant all of the things my mother had always said: cleaning and cooking. Laundry and mending. Keeping a budget. All the skills I had resisted as boring and pointless. They were boring, but I could see their purpose now: to create a home. The quiet—no factory machines, no lint—was almost like a paradise. We had small luxuries: an occasional evening concert or a moving picture in the gorgeous theater on Weybosset, and we had our own radio. I didn’t play it while Hugh was at work—I couldn’t get enough silence at first—but he liked to listen after supper, and I began to enjoy it. Radio was not as overwhelming as moving pictures; you could make the faces up in your mind.

  There wasn’t the love that I’d always expected to be a part of marriage from watching the tenderness between my parents, but as the quiet days passed and slowly the girl I’d been uncurled within me, I felt a growing affection for Hugh. Maybe love would come.

  We had friends, an American couple from the first floor who came up to supper once or twice a week, or we went downstairs to them. “Hugh said you were pretty, but he didn’t mention how tall,” the wife, Mary Johnson, told me when we first met. She was a petite thing with tiny hands and feet.

  The Johnsons came up to listen to the radio with us some evenings, leaving their children sleeping on the floor below and staying late for One Man’s Family or Kraft Music Hall. One night when the program was over, I got up to serve cake and tea.

  “Turn it off,” said Hugh as I passed the radio.

  “It’s a quiz show!” cried Mrs. Johnson. “The newest thing. Let’s listen?”

  Hugh nodded, and I took my hand away from the knob and went to the kitchen.

  While I served the tea, the announcer explained: a panel of experts would answer questions sent in by ordinary people. Two dollars for any questioner whose submission was read on the air, five dollars if the experts failed to answer correctly.

  “Five dollars!” said Mr. Johnson, accepting a large slice of cake. “They had better be experts or they’ll bankrupt the radio station.”

  Would it be possible to know, after having felled a tree in a forest, whether there was a good alfalfa harvest back in 1911?

  “What in the world?” said Mrs. Johnson, putting a lump of sugar in her tea.

  “The rings of the tree stump.” Bringing my own cup from the tray and taking the chair beside her. “A dry season makes a narrow ring.”

  “What an odd thing to know,” she said after we’d listened to the science expert explain it.

  Who had two vast and trunkless legs of stone?

  “Ozymandias,” I said.

  I thought that silly—hadn’t everyone memorized Shelley’s poem in elementary school?—but the Johnsons were impressed.

  “You should submit a question,” said Mary. “You could get two dollars.”

  “Can you answer the next one?” asked her husband.

  If the North Star was suddenly snuffed out, how much time would elapse before its absence would be noted in the night sky?

  They all sat silent, watching me as I considered.

  �
�Perhaps fifty years,” I said.

  Many thousands of years, said the panel expert.

  “That one caught you,” said Hugh, and there was pleasure in his voice.

  “Not thousands!” I said with a laugh.

  You’re off by a little, said the announcer. He was laughing too. Light from the North Star travels for forty-five years to reach Earth.

  “You’re amazing!” cried Mary. “Hugh, did you ever know your wife was so smart?”

  “Perhaps our guests would like more tea,” Hugh said. His lips were thin and pressed together, his eyes like blue stones in his face. I noticed with shame that Mary’s cup was nearly empty, and I jumped up to retrieve the pot.

  After the Johnsons left, Hugh didn’t say a word while I cleared the table. He followed me into the kitchen and watched me scraping the dishes. I’d made a cheese soufflé, and there was a little bit left.

  “Do you think this will keep?” I asked him, showing him the portion. “It seems a shame to waste it.”

  “Why ask me?” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

  “What?” I put the ramekin down, reached for a wooden spoon. I’d keep the remainder for lunch tomorrow. “What’s the matter, Hugh?”

  “You should know.” His voice sarcastic. “You know everything.”

  “What in the world. Are you upset? About that quiz show?”

  “You embarrassed yourself.” A hiss. “Showing off like that.”

  “They just happened to ask some questions that I happened to be able to answer.” Using the spoon to lever the soufflé away from the scalloped wall of the dish, trying to get it out in one piece. “You’re the one who’s embarrassed. I can’t imagine why.”

  At that he took the soufflé dish from the counter with both hands, knocking my spoon away, and dropped it from chest height onto the floor. It had been my grandmother’s, one of the few things I had brought to the household. It shattered into pieces, spraying bits of egg and pottery everywhere.

  “That’ll need to be cleaned up,” he said.

  I stood there for a minute, utterly blank. What had just happened?

  “Clean that up,” he repeated.

  I got the broom and pan from behind the door. Under his eye I swept up the damp clumps of cold soufflé and the fragments of dish, and dropped everything into the bin in a tinkling rush. The sweeping made smears across the clean floor; I leaned the broom against the wall and filled a bucket, then knelt with a cloth, feeling my legs shaking as I did. Who was this person standing over me? I’d seen him angry before, but never like this, never at me. I was his darling mouse, his sweet mouse, his prettiest girl. Invisible slivers of china needled my hands when I wrung out the cloth into the bucket, and my blood tinted the water.

  He watched me for a while, tapping his cigar ash a couple of times onto the damp surface so I had to wipe again. I kept my head down. Finally, the floorboards shifted under his weight and his shadow moved away, his footsteps going out of the room and down the hall. When I heard the front door open and close, I sat back on my heels and waited for the shake of the house from the downstairs entry door. After I heard that, I dropped the cloth into the bucket, untied my apron, and lifted its loop from around my neck.

  I got as far as the sidewalk, rehearsing how it would go. He broke Nana Cirette’s dish, I would tell my mother, and she would put her arms around me. She would summon my father, and—I stopped short. I could see their disappointed faces in my mind. What did you expect, chou-fleur, my father would say. What have I told you about pride? And my mother: all couples argue; you don’t make a marriage in a day.

  Like a flash I saw the evening as if it were a moving picture playing before me; I heard my own smug voice giving the answers, saw my pleased expression as I basked in the Johnsons’ astonishment. I had been showing off. Apparently, the girl who had uncurled from her slumber inside the mill drudge was a conceited know-it-all.

  A force turned me around on the sidewalk then; it pushed me back through the front door and up the steps to the apartment. The bucket stood in the middle of the floor of the kitchen, dumb witness. I donned the apron and tied it behind me, tipped the bucket out into the sink and filled it again, knelt and cleaned the kitchen floor meticulously. Then I washed the dishes and dried them and put them away and moved the chairs back to the table from their semicircle around the radio. Methodically returning the apartment to the way it had been before supper, as if unmaking the evening.

  Hugh came in very late. I pretended to be sleeping but lay awake all night at the very edge of the mattress; in the morning, I was grainy-eyed with fatigue.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him as he was eating breakfast. “I didn’t mean to be a know-it-all.”

  He nodded. “I know you didn’t.” Then: “I just want my little mouse back.”

  I kept my eyes down, accepting his kiss.

  Was that the bargain we’d made? I would stay timid, and Hugh would be gallant and protective? I wondered about the wives in the couples we knew. Did their marriages involve similar pacts? Conversation, even when we were “just girls” without our husbands, touched only lightly on the difficulties of domestic life, and usually in a humorous way. But are you happy? I wanted to ask. Does he actually like you? I imagined their heads turning to me: in puzzlement, or in relief, or in disgust.

  A year into my marriage, I ventured back to Woonsocket, to the old church, where I unburdened myself to the now-ancient priest, the one who’d baptized me twice. He listened as I said what I hadn’t told anyone: I think my husband hates me.

  “Does he strike you?” he asked after a wheeze-filled, contemplative pause.

  “No.” There hadn’t been any actual blows. “But—he speaks unkindly.”

  “Are you not willing? That can sour a man’s disposition.”

  Blushing. “It’s sometimes painful, Father.”

  “You’ve been more than a year together. You’re not—taking steps?”

  No, I told him once I understood his meaning, I wasn’t doing anything to avoid having a baby. I wouldn’t even know the first thing about that.

  “Good.” He cleared his throat. The sound that had always signaled the conclusion of confession; he was ready to absolve my sins and prescribe penance. “My child,” he said. “I have known you since you were born.”

  My shame began to ebb as I waited to hear the rest: You should be honest, be yourself, don’t be afraid, the Lord will help you learn to love each other.

  “I always suspected you’d be a challenge to your husband,” he said.

  It was as if I’d opened my mouth for the Host, eyes closed and trusting, and instead a stream of scalding water had been poured onto my tongue. The shock of it made me mute.

  “You were always selfish. And proud.” His voice stern. “A man marries to gain a helpmeet, to give him comfort and children. He goes out into the world, and he comes back weary. Are you a comfort? Is your home a respite for him?”

  “But, Father.” When I could manage words. “I’m not happy.”

  His laughter purred behind the screen. “Happiness is something that children want. You are a grown woman now. You are a wife.”

  “He doesn’t love me, Father,” I whispered.

  Did he not hear it, or did he simply dismiss it?

  “He must be anxious for children. God grant him patience, and may He bless your union soon.” A shadow moved across the oblong of latticed light falling into the confessional booth as he lifted his hand to the screen. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”

  “His mercy endures forever,” I responded automatically.

  “You must turn your heart away from selfish concerns. Pray to Saint Anthony of Padua for humility, and for the strength to be a good wife.”

  The door slid shut.

  He was right. I could be arrogant and selfish and impatient; I wasn’t willing in the bedroom. Hugh wasn’t violent; he kept me
fed and clothed and safe. Shouldn’t that be enough? A tiny voice inside me protested: no. But of course that selfish voice was proof of all that the priest had said. For the first time in my life, I left the confessional more burdened than when I’d entered it. I knelt in a pew and prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua to grant me humility.

  During the months that followed I prayed regularly, to various saints and to Jesus Himself, but it was as if my words went out to a vast emptiness. I felt no comfort from prayer as I had in years before. My soul, untouched by grace, shrank to a stone.

  * * *

  WE DIDN’T SEE much of my parents, although we lived so close. I made various excuses, but the truth was that Hugh disliked visiting them, how the conversation sometimes slipped into French and excluded him. When he did concede to spend an evening there, he’d be stiffly angry for days afterward. It was far easier not to go. We miss you, chou-fleur, my father told me after church one crisp autumn Sunday. I’ll see you soon, I said, but I didn’t. He died that next week, falling from a height at work and breaking his neck. He wasn’t even known by name there; he was documented as French laborer in the ranks of their dead. When he didn’t come home for supper, my mother sent Michel out to the job site, where the night watchman told him about the accident and directed him to the nearest undertaker. When Michel went there, interrupting the undertaker’s supper, he learned that the body had been refused for lack of guaranteed payment. I can’t even think of it now, how strangers squabbled over my father’s broken body. Luckily someone thought of the French undertaker; that’s where Michel found him.

  I stayed with my mother through the funeral, the bliss of being home mixing into my grief and regret. I remembered the last words I had spoken to my father, the insincere hurried promise while Hugh tapped his foot at the bottom of the church steps.

  As a widow, my mother would normally have come to live with me, the only daughter, but Hugh did not offer and of course she would not ask. My older brothers offered to take her back to the Midwest, where they’d settled their families, but she demurred. She would not be imposing on them, nor on Michel, who was blackballed now at the mills; his new job as custodian of a downtown building required him to live in a tiny basement flat there. She announced to us all that she didn’t want to leave her garden; she’d be staying on in the bookshop alone. The boys could all contribute a bit every month to keep her. It was an unusual arrangement, and I burned with shame as the puzzled eyes of the family kept darting to me.