In recalling her arguments with Larry over the skiing trips they had taken as a family, Mallie regretted both her naiveté and her acquiescence. She realized over time that, of course, there was no possibility those trips could have been covered by Larry’s salary. In her heart she knew they couldn’t afford such luxuries, but when Larry had accused her of nagging him, she gave up and became complicit in his financial recklessness.
For so long, however, Mallie had been unaware of all the other drains on his financial resources: his business trips that included unexplained, extended weekends away from home, his “entertainment” expenses that she was sure he would not have dared to claim from the company. And the apartment he had rented in downtown Memphis, the one that she learned about from the anonymous letters.
She had no idea when Larry had reached the end of his inheritance. But none of that mattered anymore. The puzzle at hand was how to divide Larry’s income so that it would support two households.
“I don’t think it makes sense to sell your house,” John said. “Except for the mortgage, which is reasonable, it’s pretty sound and the expense of finding anything today in a place you would want to live with the boys—at least three bedrooms—would be more than you could manage. Also, there are so many hidden expenses and difficulties in moving.”
Mallie agreed that it was a good decision to keep the house, particularly for the boys. Even Larry understood that it was important to try to hold as much continuity as possible in their lives.
“The question is whether you can cut back on all your other living expenses,” he added.
“All I want to do—besides take care of the basics—is go to art school,” Mallie said. “I don’t care about anything else. If I can pay the mortgage and I know the boys’ education and health insurance are taken care of, I’ll be fine.”
John Bradford, Mallie’s old friend from childhood as well as her lawyer, looked at her over his reading glasses. “Mallie, I’ve known you a long time. Can you really stay out of Goldsmith’s and Levy’s women’s clothes departments?” He was not smiling.
Mallie felt squirmy. She was embarrassed that she had loved—and worn—beautiful clothes all her life. From her growing up years in Memphis, she had led an active social life that required beautiful clothes. But she would no longer need them.
“Clothes don’t interest me anymore,” Mallie said, the squirm diminishing under the anticipation of her changing life. She already had plenty of jeans in her closet from her summers in Watch Hill. “I’ll live a different life, John. I’ve got enough dressy clothes in my closet to last a lifetime.” She smiled. “I may never wear any of them again.”
It was true. Mallie had already replaced the importance of Cotton Carnival parties, symphony balls, and Country Club Saturday nights with art classes and movies with friends. School functions with the boys and St. Michael’s chapel on Sunday mornings did not require a special wardrobe. She had replaced her previous life with Larry with dreams of a different life. Somewhere deep in her mind she kept the possibility of some future connection with Tom Matthews. Meanwhile, she would be alone. She could not see herself entertaining as a single woman in her house on Walnut Grove.
“I can live on a lot less, John,” she said.
Chapter Forty-three
Occasionally Mallie began to see Tom at St. Michael’s on Saturday mornings. One morning in late October, she arrived to find him in a particularly ebullient mood. “It’s such a gorgeous day,” he said. “Let’s take a walk outside.”
“What a wonderful idea!” Mallie was ecstatic. His suggestion was a sign of their growing intimacy and ease with one another. For many months, her relationship with him had been cloistered in his study. Taking a walk was such a normal thing for couples to do on a beautiful fall morning.
The air outside was soft and warm in the sun, but as they passed under the shadows of shade trees, Mallie felt a crispness that she knew meant the coming of winter. The leaves of the great oaks and the sweetgum trees had turned red and yellow—some had already fallen into multi-colored piles on the ground.
The area around Victorian Village was a perfect place to walk. So many preserved pre-Civil War houses stood close together like dignified old soldiers still in uniform. The Mallory-Neely house was the most prominent, an elaborately decorative, three-story building with turrets and a tower. When the last family member died, the house had been turned over to the Daughters of the American Revolution to maintain and use for its headquarters. On that Saturday morning no human presence was apparent, only the silent houses with their draperies still pulled shut.
When they walked back into Tom’s study, Mallie sprang an idea of her own. She held her breath as she spoke. “Tom, how would you like to take a picnic out to Shelby Forest this afternoon?”
Taking a picnic out to the pristine woods that surrounded the lake was something she had often done with Larry and the boys. About twenty miles outside of Memphis, Shelby Forest was one of her favorite places. The day would be perfect for the colorful leaves and, perhaps the last bright, warm afternoon before the bleakness of November. Also, she knew that this was the Saturday afternoon that the boys spent with their father, so she would not have to be concerned about them.
Tom immediately responded with an apology. “I wish I could, Mallie,” he said in his most sincere voice, the same one he used when he arrived late for an appointment. “I’d love to do that—really, I would—but I promised my wife I’d take her to the Pink Palace Crafts Fair for the whole afternoon.”
Mallie had forgotten about the Crafts Fair. The annual event had grown increasingly popular through the years and become a big deal in Memphis.
“She’s really counting on it,” he said, as if he needed to confirm his commitment. “I’m so sorry.”
Mallie said she understood. She was reminded of Tom’s burden with a wife who was ill. She wondered if he would have to take a wheelchair, or if his wife would be able to walk on her own. There was so much that she didn’t know about his life and so much that she had to leave unasked. She contented herself with his response that he loved the idea of the picnic with her in Shelby Forest.
After an abbreviated kissing session on the couch—“I really have to go now,” he said, pulling away from her—Mallie drove home. Full of the excitement of their walk and her time with Tom, she sang along with the music on the radio in her car. “Volare, oh, oh. Cantare, oh, oh, oh, oh. Nel blu di pinto di blu.”
She had not heard that melodic Italian tune since before she and Larry were married. It took on new meaning. She was truly flying. Nothing, not even her dashed hopes that she would spend the afternoon at Shelby Forest with Tom, was going to get in the way of her fantasy: someday she would have the whole day with him.
Turning up her driveway, she was happy to see the familiar crew working in her yard. Twice a month, Henry Mathis, who had worked for her mother for years, and his two teenaged sons came with his truck and cleaned her yard, mowed the grass, trimmed the bushes, and hauled away the brush. Her mother had given her the gift of Henry’s bi-weekly yard service for a Christmas present.
Watching them at work as she walked toward the house, Mallie was struck with an idea. Suppose she gave up part of her time with Henry and took the crew over to St. Michael’s for the afternoon to clean up the chapel yard. It was always a mess. It would be a surprise for Tom. She created a picture in her mind: Tom would come to officiate at the service on Sunday morning and the yard would have been magically been restored. She would not tell him that she had been responsible, but he would eventually find out—and he would be grateful to her. Such a perfect idea!
Henry agreed to go. Mallie suggested that the crew stop for lunch, and, as soon as she changed clothes and finished her lunch, they could follow her to the chapel.
She left her car down the street from the parking lot at St. Michael’s, just in case someone might drive by and recognize it. She wanted her project to be a complete surprise. Henry parked his truck righ
t behind her car. She walked around the grounds of the Chapel, showing Henry and the boys what she thought needed to be done. Once they got started, she went to the back yard to weed the flowerbeds herself.
Within minutes after Henry began clipping the hedge and the boys were raking up leaves, Mallie heard a car drive into the parking lot. She stabbed the sharp end of her weeding tool into the ground to remember where she had stopped and walked around the building to see who the visitor might be.
Instantly, Mallie recognized Marilyn Jamison’s Dodge station wagon. She felt a gasp in her throat. What was Marilyn doing there? After catching her breath, Mallie marched over to the car and stood on the driver’s side staring at Marilyn through the glass. Marilyn rolled down the window and looked quizzically back at her.
“Tom’s not here,” Mallie said flatly, as if Marilyn had brought wares to sell and no one was at home to buy. A heavy smell of flowery perfume floated out of the front seat.
“I’m a little early,” Marilyn said, raising her wrist to check her watch.
“No, I mean he’s not coming here today,” Mallie said emphatically. “He’s taking his wife to the Crafts Fair for the whole afternoon.”
“Oh,” Marilyn said.
They stared at each other like two ticket holders for the same seat.
In a matter of seconds, another car drove up and parked at an angle on the other side of the parking lot. Tom Matthews got out and strode across the pavement toward the front entrance of the chapel.
Mallie felt stupefied, as if she must be dreaming, as if what she had seen could not possibly be real.
Without looking directly at either woman, Tom acknowledged their presence with a simple nod and a barely audible greeting. “Hello, Mallie—Marilyn.” He walked past them, up the steps, and through the front door.
Marilyn opened her car door and said, “Excuse me” to Mallie, as she followed Tom across the parking lot and into the building.
Conflicting thoughts collided like bombs in Mallie’s mind. Impossible! This is impossible. This can’t be. Tom had lied to her. He had not gone to the Crafts Fair. He had come to the chapel to see Marilyn Jamison. She had come to see Tom. It had all been planned.
Instinctively, Mallie charged up the steps to the front door of St. Michael’s. The door was locked. Setting her jaw, she walked around to the side door of Tom’s study. That door, too, was locked. The only sound breaking the silence surrounding the chapel was coming from the power mower in the back yard. Mallie stood trans-fixed, staring at the door to Tom’s study, as if it were the door itself that had locked her out of his life.
Blinded and sickened by stabs of nausea and dizziness, Mallie staggered across the parking lot and closed herself inside her car. She felt her body swelling up with rage, torrents of confusion and anger crashing over her in the enclosed cavern of her car. Never in her life, not even in all the years of Larry’s women, could she have imagined that she would be in such a place, that she was capable of feeling such fury. Tom. Over and over in her mind, she heard the detachment in his voice saying “Hello, Mallie,” as if she were a mere acquaintance who just happened to be standing in his parking lot. She had stood there, next to Marilyn’s car, watching him walk past her—a completely different Tom from the man who had taken a morning walk with her only a few hours before. She saw Marilyn Jamison, her face heavily made up and the scent of her perfume still lingering in Mallie’s nose. Marilyn had followed Tom into the Chapel, as if it were a familiar routine. Mallie felt the cold locked doorknob of Tom’s study in the palm of her hand. She squeezed her fingers shut as if to strangle it. The word hate pounded on her brain like the blows of a hammer. Hate, the word she had been taught from childhood never to use. Hate, the emotion she had been taught never to feel. She could not control herself—she felt hate like fire burning in every pore of her body. She curled up in the front seat of her car and buried her face in her hands, trying to stop thinking, to keep from blacking out.
Nearly unconscious, Mallie was startled when Henry knocked on her car window. “We’re finished, Miz Vose,” he said. “We’ll be off now.”
She sat up and rolled down her window to thank him. She could barely see him, or the work he had done in the yard. She mumbled a few words of gratitude, then watched him pile the rakes and mower and tools in the back of the truck and drive off.
There was still no sign of life inside St. Michael’s. The two cars were still in the parking lot, across from each other—Marilyn’s car purposefully pointed toward the entrance to the building, Tom’s car skewed at an angle. Mallie recorded the scene as if for evidence at a trial. But there would be no trial. No objective verdict could alter the betrayal she felt. Nothing could change what she had witnessed. She had trusted Tom Matthews. Believed in him. Loved him. She had spent so many Sunday mornings in the third pew of St. Michael’s Chapel, listening to Tom’s voice reciting the opening prayer of Rite II: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.” She had believed that God shared her secret love for Tom, and somehow she was certain that he approved. Sunday after Sunday she had tried to imagine that, as Tom said those opening words, he might be sharing the same secret with God about her.
Mallie stared blankly through the glass of her car window, her mind’s eye roaming the pews of the chapel during all of the Sunday services she had attended. Occasionally Marilyn Jamison and other single women whom she did not know were present. At the time, she had not given Marilyn—or any of them—a suspicious thought. Seeing them in her memory, she felt another wave of nausea. Perhaps they were there for the same reason she was there. Tom had been her only secret, but, obviously, she was not his only secret. He had Marilyn Jamison—that was clear. Maybe others. No, surely not. She could not bear to think there were others. For a brief second the thought crossed her mind that she—Mallie Vose—was no different from Marilyn Jamison or any of those women. But that could not be true. Her love for Tom—his love for her—was different. She had truly believed that it was different. In England, Father Jon had said that she had been “blessed” by having Tom in her life. She thought of the passage about “love and betrayal” from Martin Israel’s book. She had loved and she had been betrayed. According to Martin Israel, she was supposed to learn something about herself from that experience. In that moment, Mallie could not imagine what she might learn about herself. She hurt too much to care what she might learn.
All of her circuits jammed. Mallie could no longer think. She felt weak, limp, as if every muscle and nerve in her body had collapsed, and she was left helpless, immobile. She knew that she should drive away from St. Michael’s. Go home. She should never see Tom Matthews again.
Chapter Forty-four
The last thing on earth Mallie wanted to do was to take Troy and David to a movie after dinner that Saturday night. Ideally, she would crawl into a dark cave somewhere. See no one. Talk to no one. All the way home from St. Michael’s she tried to think of ways to get out of it. Tell them she was sick. She was certain that she looked sick enough. But she had promised them. She had even bribed them to get their homework done before Saturday night and she would take them. She had no choice. It was their second—maybe third—viewing of Star Wars.
Mallie lost herself in the darkness of the theater and the cosmic universe of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. As if in solitary orbit, she floated out of her beleaguered known world into a fantasy place where the events of the day held no consequence and required nothing from her. With an unexpected jolt to her complacency, the face of Tom Matthews jumped out from behind the black mask of Darth Vader. She instantly closed her eyes. His deep, dark voice encircled her as if he were locking her in a steel girdle. Her body tightened. Her heart lunged against her chest, taking her breath. Stop it! She forced herself to open her eyes. Tom was gone. Darth Vader was gone. The scene had changed to another planet with Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the wise and comforting, godly man, speaking to each other. Their voices sounded
garbled. As if double reels were playing simultaneously, Mallie found it was difficult to concentrate on the screen. The nightmare of her real life was every bit as dramatic and frightening as the film. She saw herself as Princess Leia, both of them playing the role of a struggling, naive young woman trying desperately to do good in the world—the forces of evil against them. But she was not in a movie. She was not Princess Leia.
Mallie thought about the letter she had received from her father-in-law at the time of her separation from Larry—the first and only letter he had ever written her. He had begun the letter by telling her how deplorable he found his son’s philandering behavior and then he urged Mallie to forgive him. He wrote that, perhaps, if she examined her own heart, she would find a Jezebel somewhere deep inside. Mallie had been outraged at the suggestion. Jezebel? She was not a Bible student but she knew the implication of Jezebel. The woman was a seducer. A harlot. Mallie was horrified that her father-in-law could have implied such an accusation. Whenever she, as a married woman, had been attracted to another man—and certainly she had felt desire for other men—she had denied it and never acted on any of her impulses. But that was before she had known Tom. She was still married to Larry and she had fallen desperately in love with Tom Matthews. A married priest. She realized what little thought she had actually given to Tom’s wife. Mallie had even been willing to try to seduce Tom in her own home.
Mallie’s mind was as scrambled as the screen full of planets and robots and space ships. Her world was out of control. She kept having surges of violent hatred—hating Tom, hating Marilyn Jamison. Maybe she truly was Jezebel. She no longer had any idea of what or who she was.
Periodically, throughout the two hour movie, tears flowed down Mallie’s face. When the lights came on, she felt as if she had been on a binge, but instead of being filled, she had been emptied, depleted of all the emotional liquid in her body. She could barely focus her swollen eyes. She walked quickly ahead of the boys and threw cold water from the tap in the ladies’ room sink on her face. The stiff brown paper towels stung her cheeks, nearly raw from tears.
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