Carmen stopped brushing and looked up. “Freaks?” she said. “Why would you call them that?”
Julia could have tried to explain it away, but she didn’t. It was just a thoughtless comment, a humorous allusion of sorts to something Flannery O’Connor had once said when asked about the characters in her stories. But it really had nothing to do with the people in Carmen’s sketches.
Julia looked at them again. No, the old woman wasn’t a freak. She was just an old woman standing in an art museum looking at an iconic modern American painting. And the vendor was only making an honest living. The man with the snake had been a natural comedian, with a deep radio voice and a friendly, rolling laugh. And the girl in the elf costume was having fun. She probably felt sorry for all the people like Julia wearing normal, boring clothes. They weren’t freaks, any of them. They were just people living their lives.
• • •
HALF child, half adult—that was Carmen, though you never knew which you were going to get on any given day. Most often, of course, you got them both. The turnarounds could happen in the blink of an eye. While it was hard at times to think of Carmen as a grown-up, it was just as hard at other times to believe she was only twenty. Her strict routines, her sensible outlook, her frugality, her moral rectitude—sometimes Julia felt that she was in the company of her grandmother. And the girl’s frequent revisiting of favorite topics, telling the same stories—this was another of her old-person habits.
Right before they turned out the light, for example, Carmen returned to a subject she continued to find irresistible—Pamela and Butch. She reviewed many of the same specifics she had covered the previous days and then once again brought up the latest news: “I finally talked him into it!” Pamela had told them on the phone just that morning, him being Butch of course, and it being a couples water exercise class at the YMCA, which was going to be their Christmas present to each other.
“How perfect is that?” Carmen said now. Julia surely hoped somebody at the YMCA understood the principle of water displacement. She imagined the swimming pool spilling over and flooding the decks when the two of them got in at the same time.
Carmen was quiet for a while, then said, “I always thought having a sister must be the most wonderful thing in the world. Or a brother. And to think, you had one of each.”
Julia turned off the lamp between the two beds. A sister and a brother—it was true, she’d had them both. But not until this moment had it ever struck her as anything to be thankful for.
They heard voices out in the hall. “I shall quote a poem as I dance with you, my lovely!” someone yelled, followed by laughter and loud thumping, and “Stop it! You’re going to wake everybody up!”
After the noise subsided, Carmen spoke in the dark. “Did I ever tell you about a poem I wrote in sixth grade called ‘Death Throes of an Earthworm’? The teacher said to pick a subject nobody else would think of. It was about this worm named Sebastian that got trapped on the sidewalk after it rained. He finally dried up in the shape of an S.”
So now she was back to being a little girl again. Nobody’s grandmother would say something like that. For some reason Julia suddenly thought of all the children who hadn’t wanted to be friends with Carmen in school. She felt sorry for them. They hadn’t known what they were missing.
A few seconds later Carmen said, “Aunt Julia, are you okay? Are you laughing?”
“I’m fine,” Julia said. “Go to sleep.”
“Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying,” Carmen said. “At least I know I do.”
Julia didn’t answer. There was no way she was going to follow up on a statement like that at this time of night.
• chapter 17 •
DOWN THE RIVER
Six days down, six to go. This was the thought going through Julia’s mind as they set off from New York the next day and headed toward Boston. It had been her custom on the few trips she had taken with Matthew to wish the days away, yearning to return to the stone house. It was discouraging to realize she was up to her old tricks. Maybe the weather forecast had something to do with it. Maybe her attitude would improve when the sun came back out.
It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept well the night before. Long past midnight, eleven stories above the Avenue of the Americas, she had lain awake thinking of the man newly released from prison after the surprise turn of events: a deathbed confession by the real murderer. She could still see the image of the innocent man being escorted from the prison to a waiting car, suddenly free but looking more stunned than happy as reporters shouted questions at him.
Lying in bed, she had thought about all the irretrievable years of injustice. She thought about the jurors and the judge who had sent the man to prison for the rest of his life, and how they must feel now. A powerful illustration of a fundamental truth: that careful weighing of facts was good and productive only insofar as the facts were the right ones.
She had eventually drifted off to sleep, but not a deep sleep and not for long. She had awakened sometime later, aware that Carmen was restless. She heard the rustling of covers and moist little clicks of lips and tongue as if the girl were mouthing words, then whispering, and a long sigh. At one point, Carmen drew in a sudden breath and sat up in bed. “Aunt Julia, did you say something?” she said softly. Julia didn’t answer, and the girl had finally settled back down.
• • •
IT was late Friday morning, and traffic was bound to be heavy all the way into Boston. This would be Julia’s last stint as driver. Once they left Boston for the rural roads, she intended to turn the wheel over to Carmen. She was more than ready to be done with driving on freeways and in big cities.
Carmen was quiet today. Since waking and dressing, she had been preoccupied, had spoken very little over breakfast. Currently she was slumped down, staring out the passenger window, her right foot propped up on her left knee. As she wiggled her foot, the laces of her canvas sneaker flapped back and forth.
It began to rain, the kind of big splatty raindrops that precede a downpour, and the windshield was fogging up. It was a cold day, more like December than October. Regrettable weather since today, rain or shine, would be their only chance to see Boston. Julia turned the defroster on and adjusted the speed of the windshield wipers as the rain increased.
She hoped this didn’t mark the beginning of a long wet, cold spell. In her research for the trip, she had read about such New England Octobers of the past, when heavy rains stripped the trees of their leaves before the autumn show. She had a sudden thought, so dire it was almost funny. What if winter paid an especially early visit to New England this year? What if they had to walk through snow to get to the authors’ homes?
The radio was on, and Garrison Keillor began reading his daily Writer’s Almanac segment on NPR. On this day in 1856, he said, Gustave Flaubert’s first installment of Madame Bovary was published, though an offending passage was omitted, and in 1885 Louis Untermeyer, U.S. poet laureate from 1961 to 1963, was born. On his ninetieth birthday Untermeyer announced that he was writing his third autobiography since “the other two were premature.”
As always, Garrison Keillor ended the segment by reading a poem, this one titled “Letting Go.” He read it gravely, respectfully, from the first lines—Long past childhood I carried my balloon—/ A fat red grudge on a short, dingy string, / Heavy for a thing so light—all the way to the end: Until one day in early winter, I let it go as the sun sank, / Watched it float skyward and melt into pink clouds.
The soft, measured words faded away, and a sprightly Strauss waltz soon took its place. The rain had intensified by now, falling in heavy gray curtains, thrumming hard on the roof of the Honda. Julia slowed to forty-five, then forty. And still, above the sound of the rain and the thunder, and the swish of wet tires as other cars passed, the lilting waltz continued. And still the poem lingered inside the car, as if waiting to be acknowledged.
The balloon poem was an apt little metaphor, Julia mused, though not
hing especially clever, certainly not profound. Forgiveness was good, even in the winter of life, even for grudges blown out of proportion. Not that it had anything to do with her. Forgiving implied repentance on the part of someone else, generally for a specific act, not for a lifetime of general misery. You couldn’t forgive globally. The failures of her parents were facts of her life, as permanent as the DNA they had equipped her with. You couldn’t send such offenses up into the clouds to disappear. No forgiving things like that, no forgetting.
And forgiveness assumed some kind of ongoing relationship anyway. How could she forgive two dead people, especially two dead people who never once said they were sorry? Though she should, and did, try to shut their faults out of her mind as much as possible, she felt no moral obligation to pardon them.
She paused to consider the word itself. Forgive—such an angular, strident sound for such a soft meaning. It should be a much prettier word since its root, give, was the bedrock of so much virtuous behavior—sacrifice, courtesy, respect, and, of course, love. But there was nothing to be done about the word. You couldn’t go around changing all the words that didn’t sound like their definitions.
Of all the people she knew, she could think of no one she needed to forgive, no one against whom she was harboring a grudge for an excusable offense. The balloon poem was well conceived, its theme valid for a good life, but she felt no prick of guilt, as she sometimes did when a poem touched on something like selflessness or honesty or fortitude.
• • •
CARMEN finally broke the silence by turning the radio down and asking a question: “Forgiveness is one of the hardest things, isn’t it?” Then a pause, followed by a string of words that could only be from one source: “Pray for deliverance from the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.” And then, dolefully, “That’s a deliverance I sure need.”
Julia said nothing. She didn’t want to talk, not on a rainy day in heavy traffic, certainly not about a subject like this.
Carmen either didn’t read her mood or else chose not to. Still facing the window, she said, “Going all the way back to things that happened to you many years ago.”
Julia felt like saying, Stop, not one more word. She couldn’t bear the thought of another heartrending memory recalled from the girl’s fatherless childhood. Anyway, it always irked her to hear young people refer to their past with a phrase like “so many years ago” when they had lived so short a time.
But Carmen continued. “Things might seem little now that you’re grown, but they sure didn’t when they happened.” Julia gripped the wheel tighter and leaned forward to indicate that all her concentration was needed for driving. Wasted effort, for Carmen didn’t notice. “Like forgiving Daddy for cutting the string off your Chatty Cathy doll,” she said. “That must have been hard to do.”
A moment of surprise as Julia realized whose childhood Carmen was talking about, then perplexity as she wondered how the girl knew about the incident with her doll. But had she said Daddy? Maybe Julia had misunderstood. A quick clarification—“I never called him Daddy,” she told Carmen. “Not even Dad. I avoided calling him anything, really.”
Carmen’s foot quit wiggling. There was a long pause. “I meant . . . my daddy, not yours. You knew that, right?” She turned from the window to look at Julia.
Julia played the words over: Like forgiving Daddy for cutting the string off your Chatty Cathy doll. She felt like she was listening to a riddle. She glanced at the girl. “How did you know what happened to my doll?”
“Daddy told me.” Carmen uncrossed her leg and sat up straighter. “When I was a little girl”—she spoke slowly, clearly—“Daddy told me what he did to your doll. He told me more than once. He said he used his mother’s nail scissors with the tiny curved blades.”
There was silence as Julia tried to take it in. She could feel Carmen looking at her, waiting for a response. She heard the words again: Daddy told me what he did to your doll. He told me more than once. Maybe it was just a matter of ambiguous pronoun reference.
The Strauss waltz had ended and something else was playing now—something Julia couldn’t put a name to. Though the volume was turned down, she could hear a repeated dissonant fanfare and a lot of percussion, as if pieces of heavy machinery were flying about. Something twenty-first-century, no doubt.
Carmen turned to face Julia squarely. She spoke in a near-whisper. “You didn’t think . . . your father did that to your doll, did you?”
“I knew my father,” Julia said. “You didn’t. You weren’t even born when . . .”
Carmen interrupted her. “Wait, just listen.” What followed was a revelation that took no more than two minutes yet turned a lifelong certainty inside out. Her daddy had often told her, she said, about cutting off the voice ring of Julia’s doll. He said it was the first real memory he had from childhood with a beginning, middle, and end. He never talked about it in a joking way, but always to underscore a serious truth: that the human heart was bent on mischief. And that a thoughtless act could never be undone. “I think Daddy could’ve made a good preacher,” Carmen said. “He really knew how to drive a point home.”
He hadn’t expected the prank to be irreparable. In his child’s mind, his only thinking ahead was to imagine a brief time of comical consternation for his big sister and then . . . what? First, the unavoidable scolding, at the very least, though that was never a deterrent to his foolish, impulsive behavior. But after that, what? Maybe an easy fix by his father, who could repair anything. Who could say what thoughts were behind the act of a five-year-old?
“He said he hardly ever saw the doll after that,” Carmen continued. “He also said you never held it against him, you just treated him like it had never happened. I remember thinking you must be some kind of angel to forgive him for something like that. He liked to use that story whenever he talked to me about sin and its consequences, which he did a lot. He said it was the first time he knew how bad it felt to do something really mean to somebody else.” She shook her head. “But you never even knew he did it? How could that be?”
A long pause. The rain was slackening, but Julia kept driving slowly, trying to find a hole in the truth Carmen claimed to be telling. At length she said, “I . . . really don’t know. But my father hated that doll. I never once doubted that he did it.” What a cold, blighted house of fear theirs had been, she thought, that not one word was ever exchanged about the incident. She wondered if her mother had known the truth, and her father. For sure Jeremiah had. She wondered if Jeremiah was punished.
She wondered other things—if they all thought she knew it, why no apology had been required, if any of them had an inkling of what she had endured. Pointless questions, all of them. The fact was that she did know now, if Carmen’s report was to be trusted, and though it didn’t exonerate her father from all his other unkindnesses, it did cause a revision of this particular distress. Nothing to shake the world, but evidence, if she needed it, that assumption and error were often the same.
If it weren’t such a commentary on the wretchedness of family life Frederickson style, it could be something to laugh about—one of those funny discoveries grown-up siblings make in later years: So you were the one who did that? But it wasn’t funny, though there was one part Julia could almost smile over: the fact that, without saying a word, she had received credit in Jeremiah’s eyes for forgiving him, had been held up as an example to his own child, who had thought her aunt was an angel. She couldn’t help wondering how she would have behaved all those years ago had she known Jeremiah was to blame. Most likely not angelically.
But what difference did any of it make now? It had happened almost fifty years ago. And subtract one hurtful act from her father’s long list, it still left a multitude.
“Water under the bridge,” she said. “And down the river and around the bend and on to the sea. Just a drip compared to all the real suffering people have endured in the history of mankind.” She laughed lightly. “After all, what’s a brok
en doll in comparison to . . . say, the Holocaust? Or any number of other genuine tragedies.” And she meant it. She hoped Jeremiah hadn’t been punished for his childish act.
“Well, yeah, but it’s still sad,” Carmen said. After a while she sighed and added, “Sometimes it’s easier to forgive others than yourself, isn’t it?” Julia gave no answer, and the girl didn’t press for one.
• • •
WITHIN a few moments the music on the radio, the same piece evidently, seemed to be reaching a climax—a sustained roar underneath more clanging noises, like a freight train plowing through a crowded car lot. “Heavenly day,” Julia said, and turned it off. The rain had diminished to a slow drizzle. She turned the windshield wipers to the lowest setting. The distance to Boston wasn’t far, but long enough for more talking if she didn’t act. “How about starting Ethan Frome?” she said. “It’s short. We can read a couple of chapters a day and be done by the time we get to Edith Wharton’s home.”
Never had Carmen refused to do anything Julia had asked of her. Nor did she now, though it was obvious her heart wasn’t in it. She reached into the backseat and pulled the book out, then adjusted the back of her seat and started reading.
Only after she had read the first paragraph did Julia remember how foreboding the whole introduction was. But, oddly, Carmen’s spirits seemed to lift as she continued to read, though perhaps it was just an act. She began slipping in a few comments of her own, so smoothly it was hard to tell she was departing from the text. Only a few times did she trifle with the serious tone, however, as when she read the part about Ethan Frome’s disfigured face: “But since he didn’t want to be confused with the Phantom of the Opera,” she inserted, “he decided not to wear a mask.” Not for a second did she pause for a reaction but kept right on reading.
She finished chapter one, then put the book away as they were nearing Boston. “Well, that’s pretty . . . lugubrious,” she said. “I mean, we already know he ends up crippled.” She readjusted her seat and turned to look out the window as Julia again reminded herself to give more careful thought to what they read aloud. Something light and humorous would have been a better choice on a dismal day like this. Well, too late now. They rode the rest of the way without talking. It was still drizzling lightly, and the sky showed no signs of clearing. Wet, gray fog muted the colors of the leaves.
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