by Joanna Scott
Birthed a monster and ran away.
Left him for her family to raise.
Didn’t even come back for her own parents’ funerals.
That slut.
Look at the trouble she caused.
It would be all right. Or else it wouldn’t be all right. The offense against nature had already been committed. It was too late. Or else it wasn’t too late. Remember that God forgives the penitent. You just have to confess your wickedness and be sorry for your sin.
She had to find Abe and tell him he was her son. The monster she’d birthed. Sally Werner… with her own cousin. Why, cousins were one thing, but a brother and a sister were something else entirely! He’d agree that he had no choice but to leave town, he must go away forever, and then they would all start their lives over again, one by one. Abraham Boyle, Penelope Bliss, Sally Werner. As long as the offense produced no issue, they would be spared, and eventually, with God’s grace, they would find peace within themselves. It would be as if none of this had ever happened.
Sally found Abe by calling the number on the moving company keychain in Penelope’s drawer. Identifying herself as a relative, she asked for his address. She waited until the evening to visit him, though when she arrived he still wasn’t home from work.
A storm system had stalled over the region, and a steady rain had been falling for two days. There were reports of localized flooding. The weather bureau in Buffalo warned that the rain could continue for another twenty-four hours.
Sally stood on the porch below Abe’s rented room, watching the curtain of water spilling from a blocked gutter. While she waited she rehearsed in her mind what she would say. She was prepared for his doubt; of course he would doubt her, so she’d brought along the documents from Sylvia as proof.
She also had a separate envelope containing the money she’d kept with her since she was nineteen years old. Mason Jackson’s money. Old Mason Jackson, of Fishkill Notch. After all these years she still hadn’t spent any of his money. Yet that wasn’t entirely true. Long ago, when she’d lost her purse and had no money of her own to spend, she’d had to use some of Mason Jackson’s cash. She’d never thought of that money as hers. In a way, she’d only borrowed it… and she’d never managed to return it. She’d kept it because he’d given it to her. He’d wanted her to take it and to spend it wisely.
Now it seemed to her that Uncle Mason had told her to take the money for just this purpose — to give to her son so he could begin his new life. It made so much sense, like the design of a wheel. The things that made simple sense in the world were especially pleasing to think about right then. Wheels and roofs and rain. Why couldn’t everything in the world make simple sense?
It was the fifth of November 1974. To Sally Bliss, standing on the porch of a rambling Victorian house in the Maplewood District, the political turmoil consuming the nation that week felt very far away, a dream being dreamed by a stranger while she was absorbed by her own strange dream. Her dream of the predicament she’d created. It made so little sense. Or else it made elaborate sense. Dreams could give a contradictory impression. Either way, the logic binding the elements of the situation couldn’t have been more different from the logic of something as simple as a wheel.
She was there to meet her son. She was there to say, Hello, I’m your mother, now go away. She was there to give him the money she’d kept for nearly a quarter of a century, having touched none of it — except for the small portion she’d spent after she’d lost her purse in the alley behind Potter’s Hardware.
She took out two tens from her wallet and added these to Mason Jackson’s musty bills. Good, now it was all there, the full amount of what she’d stolen — rather, borrowed, or accepted as a gift back in 1950. In honor of Mason Jackson, she was giving the gift to her son. That’s what Uncle Mason would have wanted. He was a prescient man, and he’d probably intended for Sally to use the money in just this fashion.
At quarter past eight, Sally lit another cigarette. She’d smoked half of it when she saw a car slow on the road. She watched the car back up until it was snug against the curb, and then Abe got out holding a brown bag full of groceries. He pushed the car door closed with his knee and approached the porch.
Though she’d planned a speech that was meant to combine disclosure with reassurance, her first reaction when she saw him was to rush at him and start beating him for what he’d done to her daughter. He’d taken pleasure in unspeakable perversity, and now the damage was done. For the sake of his pleasure, he had violated God’s law, and Sally wanted to punish him for this, to beat him with a stick until he understood that he must suffer for his sin.
But she didn’t have a stick. She had a cigarette. The only thing she could think to do was to drop what remained of her cigarette and grind out the spark with her heel.
As he stepped onto the porch, he seemed to push apart the curtain of rain. “Mrs…!” he said in surprise. Either he didn’t immediately recognize her, or he’d forgotten her name. “Mrs.… Mrs.… Bliss, um, hello. Is everything all right?” How plaintive and meek his voice sounded. It was enough to remind Sally that of course he hadn’t meant to do any harm. His mistake was her fault. Everything was her fault.
“May I come in?”
“Ah… yes, I live upstairs.”
With one arm wrapped around the grocery bag, it was difficult for him to insert the key in the lock, but somehow he managed and swung open the door. He fumbled for the light in the foyer while behind him Sally took a step forward and stumbled. She reached out for his arm, instead grabbing the coatrack to keep herself from falling.
She followed him up the rickety stairs to the third-floor apartment. He set the groceries on the counter and offered her coffee. While he was filling up the kettle at the sink, she began, as she’d planned, by speaking his name aloud: “Abraham Boyle.” When he turned to face her she saw his expression mixed utter bewilderment with fear, and she was reminded again that he was a good man and hadn’t meant any harm. “I have news for you,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
____
She told him what she knew and, in detail, how she’d come to know it. She told him about riding on Daniel Werner’s motorcycle. She told him about her parents’ rage. She told him about leaving her baby like a loaf of bread on the kitchen table and running away. She told him that the river flowed north, so she’d gone north with it. She told him about the hamlet of Fishkill Notch, where she’d worked as a housekeeper for three years. She told him about Helena, where she’d fallen in love with a boy named Mole and then lost him. She told him about Benny Patterson, the father of Penelope. She told him about the haven that was the city of Tuskee. She told him why she’d fled Tuskee and ended up here, in the city of R, this mixed-up city where things that didn’t make sense were allowed to happen.
She said, “You’re not going to believe me, Abe, when I tell you that I’m your mother.”
She was right. He didn’t believe her. He refused to believe her. Disbelief left him too appalled to argue with Sally’s insane claims. All he could say was That’s impossible, that’s impossible. But he had to believe her, since she had incontrovertible proof both from the county clerk’s office in Peterkin and the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.
She would convince him that he had no choice but to accept her version of the truth as the one that would determine his course of action in the days and months ahead. But at the same time, the resolute conviction that she was wrong would plant itself just beyond articulable thought, where belief is experienced as a murky but potentially influential feeling. He didn’t believe her, and with a similar vague awareness, she recognized this. Yet he couldn’t deny that there were many reasons to believe her. She gave him more reasons than he could ever counter, and by the end of her visit he was forced to acknowledge with words that sounded artificial to both of them, when spoken aloud, that she must be right.
She was his mother, and she’d come to tell him what to do. Here was a hefty sum of money, mo
re than two thousand dollars. Take it, Abe, and run. Run away. Leave Sally to explain to Penelope why she’d been abandoned by the man she loved. Or not to explain to her, for such things, she would think helplessly, are inexplicable. That’s what she would offer instead of telling her the truth about Abe. Faced with the reality that her daughter would be raising a child who never should have been conceived, Sally would decide that the best comfort she could offer Penelope was to keep her ignorant.
Buster Boy,
Where are you?
You said you’d be here by four o’clock last Saturday. That was a week ago.
You said you loved me.
You said you would never leave me.
You stopped answering your phone.
You no longer live at the address I have for you.
You quit your job.
You broke your promise.
Why have you gone away? Answer me. But you can’t answer me because you’re not reading this letter. You’re not reading this letter because I don’t know where to send it. I don’t know where to send it because you went away without telling me where you were going. I’d hate you if I didn’t love you so much. Nothing can make me stop loving you, even the fact that you’ve destroyed me. Abe, why have you done this?
There was a song my mother used to sing: it’s simple to wish, and simple to dream.
I was singing that song in the shower on Saturday afternoon when I was getting ready to see you. You know a lot about me, but you haven’t heard me sing, since I sing only in the shower. It made me laugh to think that someday you’d hear the terrible noise I produce called singing. My mother is the singer in my family. She could have made a career of it. She might have tried if I hadn’t come along. She had to find a job to support me. It’s hard for single mothers. Did you ever consider that?
But I was telling you what I did on Saturday. I took a shower, dried my hair, put on the jeans you like, the skinny Levi’s with the button-up fly. I watched the TV in the common room. There was an interview with an Englishwoman who was fired from a cannon. She wanted to break the human cannonball record and fly clear over a river, but she missed her mark and fell into the safety net. She said she thought they’d ironed out the troubles with the cannon, and she was going to try again. I was planning to tell you about her when you arrived. By then it was four o’clock, and I waited for your knock on the door. I kept waiting. At six o’clock I called your house, but there was no answer. At eight o’clock I called Stacey and got your friend Sam’s number. But no one answered at Sam’s all evening. I skipped dinner. I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing your car wrapped around a tree on some back road. My Buster Boy. What has happened to you? I finally got Sam on the phone the next morning, but he didn’t know where you were. I called your work number, and they said you’d quit. I called Stacey and asked her to go to the address I had for you. She called me late in the afternoon. She’d talked to the landlord and learned that you’d packed your bags, paid up your rent for the month, and moved away.
That’s impossible. You wouldn’t have moved away without telling me.
Where are you?
Don’t you love me anymore?
This is how I’ve been spending my days: I wake up in the dark, about five a.m. I look at the phone to see if it’s ringing, and even though it’s not ringing I pick up the receiver and wait for your voice to speak to me. But you don’t speak. I hang up the phone and go down the hall to the bathroom, where I throw up. I throw up once every morning. Our child is a small hard bulge low in my belly. I sing to it in the shower, I sing, It’s simple to guess that you and I will never stop being in love.
Where are you?
Why won’t you answer me?
After I take a shower I get back into bed and read. I’m reading Dreiser’sAmerican Tragedy. I read chapter 41 this morning and thought of you. Here’s a quote: “All that he would see or feel was that this meant the loss of everything to him.” Here’s another quote: “The loss of all his splendid dreams.” Did this bulge in my belly threaten all your splendid dreams, Abe? Is that why you’ve gone away? We didn’t need to have this child. These are modern times, and we have won the invaluable freedom to choose how to live our lives. I thought we’d made the choice together, Abe. You and me. We were committed to each other by the power of love. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together. Forever. You said that word to me. You whispered it to me, remember, when you were inside me.
I thought you meant that FOREVER went with the word LOVE. But now I wonder if I’d been deceived and you were only pretending to love me so you could fuck me on a regular basis. If that’s true, Buster Boy, you deserve an Oscar, for you really had me fooled. When I had my legs wrapped around you and we were both sloppy with sweat, you had me fooled. When you traced the center of me with kisses, you had me fooled. When we were pressed hip to hip, you had me fooled. When I spent the rest of the day smelling your aftershave on me and daydreaming about us together, I never guessed that I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book.
I am baffled and disgusted and desperate. But I can’t be angry with you, not until you admit that you were using me. I need you to put it into words. Say it, say that I am nothing to you. Nothing. I want you to whisper it in my ear. Repeat after me: You are nothing. I don’t care about you. I don’t love you and I never loved you. I want to hear you say it. You’d better say it over the phone and not in person, or otherwise I might tear your eyes out. Just kidding. But it would be a relief to be furious. I can’t be furious at an absence. I am nothing, and you are nothing. We are the space left behind by broken promises.
I skipped classes on Wednesday and took the bus into New York. I walked from the Port Authority up to Columbus Circle and then across 59th and up Fifth Avenue. I stopped to browse at a book vendor, and I picked up a copy of a book. It was the Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy. Have you ever read it? It seems strange to have to ask, but I’m only just starting to realize how much I don’t know about you. I was reading the description on the back of the book, when all of a sudden I heard your voice. You said, “And then we’ll take the night train to Vienna.” But it wasn’t you, of course. It was another guy, he was about your age, a few inches shorter, and he was walking with his arm around a girl. They were planning a trip, I guess. They were talking about traveling around Europe together, and it made me so jealous and sad to think that we would never take a trip like that, and now it’s too late, you’ve moved on to a better life and left me behind. I was thinking about this as I started to walk away. I kicked at the rotting leaves and thought about how alone I was. I was still holding the book, Dreiser’s novel, and the vendor shouted at me, he called, “Hey, lady, are you going to pay for that or what?” And guess what I did in response. That’s right, I started to cry. I stood there bawling on the sidewalk while appropriately clutching An American Tragedy. I am an American tragedy. I was duped into playing the role of the naïve girl. How did that happen? I would never have thought I could be so easily trapped. I’d always been so tough and independent, you said so yourself, you said I was the toughest girl you’d ever known. But you wore me down, Abe. My love for you has made me pathetic. I was a pathetic mess, standing there bawling on Fifth Avenue. An American tragedy. It’s an old story, a familiar story. Can tragedy be pathetic? That vendor, he must have felt sorry for me. He gave me the book for free. It was just a used paperback with a creased cover, priced at fifty cents. But the man wanted me to have it for free. So I said thank you, and I took the book and managed to stop crying. As I walked uptown carrying that thick book, I considered how stupid I’d been. I’d always thought I could recognize a trap when I saw it. But I was starting to realize that the world was like the unread book in my hand. Until I took the time to read it, I wouldn’t be able to tell up from down. There was so much to learn. I needed to learn more about other lives in order to understand my own.
I felt a little better after spending a few hours in New York. I called my mother from a pay phone in th
e Port Authority and told her I was coming home. I got there at midnight. She was waiting for me at the station. On the car ride back to the house, I told her about us. I was surprised at how easily our story could be summed up, how small and predictable it seemed to my own ears. But mostly I was grateful because my mother didn’t react to the news of my pregnancy with disappointment. She became suddenly practical and reminded me that abortion is safe and legal. She doesn’t want me to repeat her mistake and become saddled with a child before I’m ready. But it’s too late, I’m already committed, and I’m not going to let your cruelty change my mind. Once my mother understood that she couldn’t talk me out of it, she was so quick to come up with a plan that it almost seemed like she’d rehearsed it. She reminded me that I must see a doctor for regular checkups. And she told me to get back to school so I could finish the semester. I’d take the spring off, she said, and then she would look after the baby when I returned to complete my degree in the fall. She said she wants me to prepare for whatever career I choose. This isn’t the end of my life, she insisted. It is a beginning, she said, and she promised me that as long as I kept looking to the future, I’d get over you.
She’s wrong about that. I won’t get over you, Abe. I will think about you every day for the rest of my life. I will imagine you in different places around the world, caught up in different jobs, in bed with different women, enjoying new adventures to replace the old ones. I will come up with a thousand explanations for why you left me. Thirty years from now, I will smell your aftershave in a crowd, and it will be as if no time at all has passed since we last made love. I will love other men, but they will never replace you. I won’t forgive you, but neither will I stop loving you. And even if I’ve discovered that I don’t really know you as well as I thought I did, I know you well enough to continue believing that you would have chosen to stay with me forever if the situation had allowed you to choose. Something beyond your control drove you away. I want to blame you, but I can’t. All of which is to say that despite the fact that you broke my heart, Buster Boy, you’ll always be welcome if you ever want to come back. I am writing to tell you that.