Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Alice did tell the papers that she felt terrible about one thing, about one lie. “Here it comes,” thought Duse, lightening. Alice said she had lied about the reward. She didn’t have one hundred dollars to spare, let alone a few thousand. She was divorced, and her husband had a hard enough time as it was making his childsupport payments. She had offered that much money because she would say anything, anything, to find her child.

  Duse put the paper down. She couldn’t clear her head of that story. It spoiled the vacation for her and she begged Martin to take her home.

  There was a gift from Alice waiting for them, a hand-embroidered tablecloth with a note, but Duse left the cloth shrouded in its plastic case and tucked it into a drawer. She didn’t want it on her table.

  The papers called, the neighbors, and her clients, but she told them all the truth. She said she hadn’t done one damned thing for Alice Rearson, and no one believed her. The papers insinuated that she was being secretive, holding out for a fee; the neighbors said she was being refreshingly humble. The mail began spilling into the house, scribbles about Jesus using Duse to do His will (and here Duse remembered that priest Isadora had gone to and it made her smile), letters asking for help, letters saying Duse was a miracle. Duse tried to answer each letter at first, but her simple denials seemed to win her even more converts. “Stop answering those things,” said Martin. He began to collect the mail for her, and it was odd, too, how for the first time he really became a part of her work—they had something to share. For a while he almost looked forward to getting the mail. It made him cheerful to see all those letters because he thought they might catapult Duse away from all that psychic stuff.

  Duse did retreat a little. She didn’t like the vampirish way people sought her out. Her steady clients were discreet enough. They learned how quickly she would shut them out if they kept badgering her for details, if they expected her to do the same for them when they lost track of an uncle or nephew.

  There were strange phone calls, voices begging: Find my son, find my daughter, she’s in L.A., in Houston, in Detroit, I think. Duse always vowed she would hang up as soon as a voice like that started in on her, she said she could tell by the first sound, but instead, she heard every voice out. She was polite when she said there was nothing she could do, and sometimes, too, when the callers were desperate, she would promise to call if she picked anything up. She kept a notebook of their names and she wrote everything in ink.

  The one thing that made her furious was an editorial in the paper. The man who wrote the article called her the biggest huckster since P.T. Barnum. He said they both knew the secret of never giving a sucker an even break and he offered anyone five hundred dollars to prove that Duse was a fake. He intimated that she leeched off human emotion, that she grew fat on sorrow, and he said she had to be stopped. Duse fumed over that paper. It got so that she had the very article branded right into her, and she thrust the thing at Martin for him to read. He took the paper from her, read the first line and then threw it out, but she fished it from the basket. She gingerly picked the potato peelings from the surface, skimming the clinging food clots from the print with her hand.

  That editorial tunneled into her, and she wasn’t surprised when it started a whole campaign of criticism against her. They said that because she wouldn’t come forth, because she pretended humility, she was more of a charlatan than Houdini. The one letter that was even obliquely commendatory compared her to Santa Claus, saying she was a beneficent myth. She was so enraged that she finally did write a letter to the paper and they printed it. She said, as she always had, that she had never claimed to have had anything at all to do with finding Katy Rearson. That was something from Alice Rearson’s mouth, not hers; from someone else’s pen. She said it wasn’t her fault that people yearned to believe. There was never anything you could do to stop that hammering need. The newspaper letters had nothing to do with her, she wrote, and she wished they would stop. She closed her letter with a statement that she had never asked for nor taken one penny from Alice Rearson because she hadn’t helped her.

  Duse’s was a small celebrity. People forgot, became enmeshed in something else; the phone calls and letters dwindled and then stopped. Duse sent copies of everything to Isadora, writing her that this loony faith was not what she wanted, that these kinds of hungry people were not the ones she respected. She said that that was a thing that she could share with Isadora as well as with Martin, it was a thing that could bind them all together.

  Isadora sat Indian-legged on her floor and read the mail. She was glad she wasn’t in Madison anymore. Ann Arbor gave her distance, made a thing like this manageable. Of all those letters, though, the one that inhabited her like a splinter was her mother’s own newspaper letter where she denied having anything at all to do with finding that child. Isadora was stuck on that one detail, that truth.

  Isadora never thought that anyone at the university might know about Duse. Ann Arbor was a tight community, a closed world, and sometimes she didn’t think anything existed outside of it, that there were no families or gossip or home towns. She forgot how unique her mother’s name could sound in a mouth, how that name could ease into a conversation and be connected to Isadora’s because someone always knew someone who knew someone.

  It happened first at a party. It was a large open event thrown by her botany professor, and Isadora found that not knowing anyone was an advantage, that she didn’t need hypnosis to feel brave enough to approach someone. It was easy enough to go over to the bar where everyone was sipping wine. If she was suddenly fright-stricken, she could always dip her hands into the bowls of popcorn and Cheese Ta-bits and eat. It was just party prattling, a group of people by the window, and Isadora just went over and introduced herself, she mentioned Madison. She saw how one male face in front of her suddenly piqued with interest. He told her he knew Madison, that he had transferred from the university there and that the thing he most remembered and was most glad to leave was the bats. Isadora laughed. He mentioned the student riots, the national guardsmen lining the streets in silver riot gear, and then he said he read about some psychic there who was pretty famous, who had found a little girl. “Isn’t that wild?” he said.

  Isadora sweated into her black silk shirt. She told him she remembered it, but that the woman had said that she hadn’t done one damned thing, that she had had no part in finding that kid.

  “Oh hell, that’s just false modesty,” he said. He irritated Isadora. She said again that Duse had never claimed anything, and then he asked her how the hell she knew. “I know,” said Isadora. “That woman is my mother.”

  His face stilled contemptuously. She saw how it changed, what a difference it made, and she braced herself for more questions. She never knew what to say about Duse, and she was already feeling the hard knots working their way through her belly. She could lie, she supposed. She could say that she knew her mother had a talent; she could lie and say that she didn’t think her mother had one jot of talent at all; she could lie and say she was bored by the whole thing and didn’t want to dig out details for anyone. She wondered too what would happen if she said very casually that, oh, by the way she had this starred marking in her right palm that was supposed to indicate that she had some gift or another, but that she didn’t believe it. It was just a birthmark, probably.

  When the questions came, they centered more on Isadora than on Duse. Isadora, after all, was right there, someone they could touch. Later, she would think that some of that was her fault, that she shouldn’t have said that she didn’t like talking about her mother, because she had given them no alternative but to ask about her instead.

  Could Isadora read palms, someone asked, did she do those funny kinds of cards, what were they—tarot or something? A flatringed hand was placed on her arm, against the silk of her shirt. “No, I don’t do that,” said Isadora, stepping back, letting that hand release.

  “I had my cards read once,” a woman said to Isadora. “I thought it was rubbish but t
hen everything those cards said came true. God, I was devastated.”

  “Sure, you were,” said the boy next to her. “What did the cards say—you’d lose your glasses, bounce a check?”

  She ignored him for Isadora. “You really don’t read the cards?” she said.

  “I don’t do that,” Isadora said. She frowned. She was suddenly bombarded with questions about feats people thought her mother might have taught her. Someone even brought up voodoo, although everyone laughed when he did. Isadora kept shaking her head, all the time feeling as though she were apologizing. She left the party early, and when she went out the front door, she could still hear those people swirling her about in their conversations.

  It made her nervous. Duse had once acidly told her that just because she refused to admit the existence of something didn’t mean that that something didn’t exist. Isadora made herself crazy worrying about all the things that those people thought she could do. It was one thing to hear Duse telling her she had a gift, to hear Duse’s clients wonder about her while they, themselves, were talking about spirits and UFO’s; it was another to listen to people she shared a city with, people she knew were intelligent.

  Isadora tried to concentrate on rational things. She studied her botany more than she had to, dragging that textbook out, memorizing tables and discoveries, diagramming her notebook pages up with cross sections of leaves and stems and roots. I don’t have a gift, she told herself. Duse doesn’t have any gift. Over and over, she wove those phrases into her mind. Even so, it was difficult. She was in class one day when she heard a voice in her mind, something saying her name. She started. I was half asleep, she told herself, I was dreaming, that’s all it was.

  The worst times were at night when she lay flat in her bed and thought, when the chair and her familiar wood table were hidden and shadowed by the dark. She’d feel the hollows in her hand and remember her star. A birthmark. Christ, that’s all it ever was. Sometimes she thought it was a medal from a fall, a scar. She never forgot it was there. Sometimes she glanced into other hands. When someone in class raised their hand to answer a question, Isadora pivoted around to look at them. She wanted to believe that everyone had weird markings on them, that it meant nothing more sinister than human diversity.

  She never stayed thinking in her bed long. She was up, kicking the sheets free, turning on every light in the place. She made brownies from the cheap mixes she got at the corner grocer, and she sat up eating them, picking them out of the pan with a bread knife, sliding them warm and soggy and underdone into her mouth.

  Daytime she ran. She had initially started running to fulfill her gym requirement, and to make herself exhausted, to wear herself down so she could sleep out the nights. She wouldn’t run outside like most people. She wanted, instead, to become oblivious with motion, to be nothing but feet, moving, pacing out space. She ran on a small circular track in the gym. It always smelled of damp socks and sweat, but she didn’t care. She ran until her hair dripped down her back, until she could feel her heart pulsing frantic and alive in her throat, and then she would flop down on one of the tattered gray mats by the door, too tired and frail to worry, too sleepy to think about anything more serious than what she could bolt down for dinner before she tried to go to bed, before she hoped for dreamless peace.

  Duse’s small fame colored the way Isadora met people. It was really nothing new; the old Madison shyness crept back into her bones. She tried to fight it, to edge her way back, telling herself fiercely that this was Ann Arbor, her place, and things were not the same as in Madison. Defiantly, she began bringing men home, people she liked. She had one curly-headed poet from an English class and she celebrated with new sheets, very bold and bright red. She liked making love with him, liked the way his body smelled of lime aftershave, and she liked how dead and deep she could sleep with him beside her. The problems started one morning when he wouldn’t leave, when he simply assumed that they would spend the whole day together. She watched the lazy way he spread his arms on the wood of her table, saw the way he helped himself to her cocoa mix. She wasn’t used to sharing time and so she told him she wanted to study. He took one of her paperback novels and started to read, proud of his own quiet. But, she repeated—she made those words a thrust—he had to go. The slow, hurt way he took his departure unnerved her—the way he kept looking at her, as if she had beat him. He was never so friendly and fond with her again, and more than she missed him, she missed the way the nights passed with him.

  She had a few other men over, people who didn’t seem to need so much from her. Still, she could never open up to them, she was wary when anyone asked her anything, and if a man showed interest in anything psychic, she dropped him.

  She began to feel that things were rotting away beneath her, that she was being too paranoid, too ridiculous, and in the end she went to health services to get a prescription for a tranquilizer. If she could be calm, she could think, she could sleep, she could make things right.

  She spoke a little less frequently to Duse, to Martin. She never told Duse that people here knew who she was, and she certainly kept quiet about people intimating that Isadora, too, must have some gift. She didn’t mention how tense she was, how she couldn’t sleep, how her very bones seemed threaded with wire. Instead, she asked how Duse was, how Martin was, and she said, as she always did, that everything was fine, that she was happy, and that no, they couldn’t come up to visit. Not yet.

  12

  Isadora hibernated away the Ann Arbor winter, the damp soggy spring, and one month before classes were over, she managed to dredge up a summer job. It wasn’t much, just a slave labor job tying together the punched index cards for the library catalogue and then refiling them, but it would keep her in Ann Arbor, would put a safe wedge of space between herself and home.

  When she called her parents to tell them, Martin was exasperated. “But we miss you,” he said. “When are you coming home?” He said he found it impossible to understand how she could have worked her Christmas break on a paper, how she could have spent her spring break studying for exams, why she hadn’t been able to do those things just as well, if not better, in the comfort of her home. She didn’t interrupt his tirade, she couldn’t tell him that her home wasn’t Madison any longer, that that tie was in the process of being severed. He said he couldn’t understand why he and Duse couldn’t have come up to see her, even once, that whole year. They could have stayed in a hotel, he said; she still could have had her privacy, any and all of the freedom she needed.

  It bothered Isadora to hear the cracks in Martin’s voice. He sounded older and she suddenly missed him. “I love you,” she told him, and then Duse got on the line, but Duse’s voice was arid. Her only comment was to ask Isadora what in God’s name was the matter with her. “I don’t know what’s with you and that place, but you don’t want us there. Fine. That’s fine, but we still want to see you. You’re our daughter. And if you don’t come home by the fall, we’re coming there, whether you like it or not.”

  “I’ll be home by August,” Isadora said.

  Ann Arbor quieted in the summer, everything tightened. A flux of students left, but a great number were simply too settled to even think about departures. Isadora began to spot the same faces now, there was suddenly room on the sidewalk to move, seats in the restaurants, and no line for the film co-op movies every night. Her job dragged tediously. She didn’t like the people she worked with. Her boss told her she wasn’t library material and suggested that come next summer, Isadora look someplace else for a job. “I see you writing letters on the backs of call slips,” he said. Isadora didn’t care. By four-thirty every day she could get free of that place and there was always light until ten, life until dawn.

  It was in that summer that she met Daniel. She was leaving a late movie. It was midnight and she had only a few blocks to walk, routes speckled here and there with people so that she always felt safe. She picked out a path, following couples, crossing and looping the streets when they did, an
d she was a block away when she heard this insistent voice like a catcall, and she violently turned, thrusting her keys through her fingers.

  “Those loaded?” said a voice.

  She blinked in the darkness. “You scared me out of my socks,” she said, and then she peered at him. “What’s that, a parrot on your shoulder?”

  He grinned. “Yup,” he said. “I like to take him with me when I walk this late. He likes the warmth. He never gets enough of it in this climate. And at night no one stops us. We’re left alone.”

  He was older than she was, she thought, and he had a clean loose build, unkempt brown hair. He started apologizing to her for the scare, and he was so polite that she couldn’t imagine him attacking anyone, and when he offered to walk her home, she accepted, she was happy for the company.

  His name was Daniel Whentworth and he told her that he owned a pet shop right outside the campus. “I can’t resist any animal,” he told her. “I keep the ones the shop can’t sell. The parrot comes from the guy who used to own the shop. That bastard ordered tropical birds that died and wheezed and gave one another bronchitis all winter long. This was the last of them. I took him in when I bought the shop. I figured I could care for him better in my heated house than in the shop with the doors always banging open and shut all day.

  “There was a monkey left too, and I kept him until I could arrange to ship him back to Africa. He was toilet trained, but he missed a lot. I was always swabbing up his pee, on the floor, the tiled walls, the bathtub sometimes. He was fussy about what he ate and he tormented the cats every chance he got. That little sucker found a roll of masking tape once and he wrapped those cats up with it, nearly suffocated them. I was asleep; I couldn’t hear them mewing and it was only when I got up to get a drink of water that I found them. I stepped on one and it clawed me when I removed the tape. Everyone was delighted when that monkey left.” He told Isadora that now he had three cats, two dogs, a rabbit and a turtle.