Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  I didn’t want to lie, but I couldn’t tell the truth. “I know your hands are tied,” was all I said.

  A look of dismay came over him, and I saw that he really had been hoping I could explain it all away.

  “Hick, your stock as a member of this organization is pretty high. Hardly anyone has been here as long as you, or written as extensively on so many different beats. You’ve trained half the guys coming up—you’ve certainly helped Bosco leap boldly into the realm of competence. I just don’t understand.” Sad Bill was worse than angry Bill. He looked heartbroken. “You spent two decades building your dream house, and two days ago, you drove a truck through it.”

  My eyes started to burn, and I felt my throat strain. But I would slit my wrists before I would cry in front of him.

  “This is the end of the line, Hick.”

  “I’ll clean out my desk,” I muttered, and stalked out. I passed John at his desk, his forehead braced on the heel of his hand while he read through a stack of notebooks. I remembered his voice calling to me in the hotel lobby and how hard it had been to keep walking away from him. Though I tried to catch his eye, he kept his head down. He was freezing me out.

  “Come on, boy,” I whispered to Prinz, and clipped on his leash.

  On the walk home, a fierce wind pried its way down my collar and made me shiver. My old pluck rose and I tried to tell myself it would be all right. It was just a job and I could find another one. I had grown up poor and I knew how to live that life—I could be poor again. Screw Bill, if he couldn’t understand the integrity I’d shown in protecting Nora. Screw John too—a fair-weather friend. I didn’t need any of them.

  But then I came to the corner newsstand where the morning editions fluttered in their racks, where each day I still checked to see my name in print and each time felt surprise that I was who the paper said I was. The sob that had been lodged in my sternum began to spread up to my mouth and all I could think of was drink, a bathtub full of enough bourbon to drown in.

  Days later, Nora’s letters had begun to pile up.

  March 13

  Darling,

  I tried calling three times yesterday. Are you out of town on assignment? I fear I have lost track of your schedule. Send a telegram. You know how I love to follow your adventures.

  Always,

  Nora

  March 14 (late!)

  Hick,

  Now I am worried that you are ill and no one is looking in on you but that dreadful woman across the hall. Please send up a smoke signal!

  N

  March 15

  My silent darling,

  Louis has heard a rumor that you have left the AP. What the devil is going on up there, and why won’t you answer the telephone? Please send word, or so help me I will be on the next train.

  Nora

  This is the part of the story I’d rather skip past, but there is no way to explain what came next without providing a glimpse of my sorry state about ten days after I left the AP’s offices for the last time. It was half past noon, and I was still in bed with the covers pulled over my eyes to block out the sunlight. Prinz was draped across the foot of the bed like a worried mother who’d been nursing her baby all night. Suddenly, I heard heels clacking on the tile and an urgent knock on my door. Prinz lifted his head. I thought it might be the landlady, back again after her failed attempt to catch me the day before last. My rent was past due, but I did not want to pay it with what little cash I had on hand. Very soon I would be out of money.

  But then I heard a familiar warble calling my name and lifted up on my elbows. My head felt like something being pulled by a tugboat. I’d managed to stay stinking drunk around the clock until I had made the mistake of falling asleep around nine the night before and put my body through fifteen hours of sobriety. I squinched my eyes shut and pushed myself up to the edge of the bed. Before I got up, I drained the lukewarm bourbon from the glass on the nightstand.

  “Hick!” Nora shouted, true panic in her voice. Prinz let out a sharp bark and darted for the door. I had read Nora’s letters and heard the phone ring and ring in the hall, yet nothing seemed to break through my haze. But now Prinz was barking like a maniac and the noise was more than I could take. I padded down the hall and grasped his collar while I turned the bolt.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” she cried when she heard it.

  Her eyes were full of tears; she rushed into the entryway and took me into her arms. The sensation of being touched by her was overwhelming, and I saw that I had been keeping her at bay because I was afraid of being comforted. I wanted to be wretched and I knew she wouldn’t let me.

  “Oh, my darling,” she whispered, and kissed my hair and forehead and pulled me against her again. Prinz sprang his paws up against her back and she gently pushed him down, once, twice, three times until he settled.

  “I thought you were dead! How could you do that to me? I was minutes away from calling the police.” Her voice was angry but she continued to hold me and pet my hair. It was nearly unbearable to be loved just then. I was so angry at myself, at her, at the warped world in which every thing that I wanted was, by default, wrong.

  “You smell terrible,” she said tenderly.

  I laughed, and then, oh, how I began to weep. And it was not the melodic weeping of a dignified Victorian woman in a novel, you can be sure. Instead, I sat down at Nora’s feet and wailed, my mouth open, snot running from my nose.

  She took her handbag off her shoulder and lowered it gently to the ground. She knelt down across from me, and from her pocket she took a handkerchief and handed it to me. I used it to try to muffle the terrible noise I was making, but the more I tried to contain it, the louder it became, as if some black thing were inside me, clawing, and had to come out. Nora just kept quiet and held my head on her lap, her arms wrapped around as if to brace it.

  After a long time, when I had emptied myself of sorrow and noise, she said, “What happened?” and I let it all spill out. I confessed to every time I had compromised my work to protect her, how Bill had pressed me to write about her daughter’s divorce, about Elliott, to get access to cabinet appointments and closed discussions and the text of the speech. In the end, I explained, I couldn’t do both—be in love with her and report on her—and I should have admitted that to myself before I lost Bill’s trust and my own integrity.

  Nora looked stricken.

  “This isn’t your fault,” I said, suddenly afraid that she would feel responsible. “You didn’t ask me to do any of the things I did. But it’s over now. Everything I’ve worked for is gone.”

  “Darling, I know how much your job means to you, but … you are so poorly. You’re shivering!” She rubbed her hands along my arms. “Are you sure the job is all it is? There isn’t something else?”

  I kept quiet. I didn’t know how I could make her see. My job was the only thing between the past and me. It was the moat that kept me safe.

  Gently she nudged my head off her lap and I sat up and pressed my back against the cool wall of the entryway. Above me was a table overflowing with unopened mail—bills and the like. She went into the kitchen and changed Prinz’s water, poured new kibble into his bowl; then she crouched on the floor with a rag to wipe up a puddle Prinz had made when he could wait no longer for me to take him out. I closed my eyes, ashamed at my negligence. Then I heard the light click on in the bathroom, the metal clink of the stopper, the rush of water.

  I was so exhausted I could hardly move, but she eased me to my feet and led me to the bath. I sat on the edge of the tub and watched her take off her jacket and roll up her sleeves. Kneeling before me, she pulled pins out of my hair, one after another, and then unwound my frizzy bun as steam began to cloud the mirror. Her hands moved slowly through my hair and down to the small buttons on my nightgown. I raised my arms like a child, and Nora eased the gown up and over my head. She started to pinch the clasp on my necklace, but I clutched it with my hand.

  “I have to keep this on,” I said.


  She gave me a curious look. “Why?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “I have always wanted to ask you about it,” she said, “but I’ve been afraid to. I don’t know why. It seems to have a story.”

  I opened my hand and let the charm fall back down between my breasts. It was a flat disk of wood, sanded smooth long ago and rubbed to a sheen from years of my fingers worrying its surface. I had bought the plated gold chain with my first paycheck, but the charm had begun its life on a piece of string.

  Nora turned off the water. “Won’t you tell me, Hick? I want to know your stories.”

  “The water will go cold,” I said.

  She stuck her hand in and shook her head. “It’s scalding now. It needs to cool.”

  Does every life take this shape, I wondered, where all things that happen flow through the keyhole of a single day?

  I took a breath. Pulling the towel off the hook beside me, I draped it over my shoulders so that I wouldn’t be quite so naked. “My father was a drunk. A mean one.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “That was why we moved around so much, all over Wisconsin and Iowa and then to the Dakotas. The way he was … he could get a job but he could only keep it for a week or two before he flew off the handle. Once he beat a man so badly, he nearly killed him—we had to leave town in the middle of the night. My mother was terrified he would go to prison. She thought we’d all starve.”

  Nora shook her head. Her father had been a drunk too, but the world is kinder to a rich drunk than a poor one.

  “The year when I was fourteen, we were living in Bowdle and he was churning butter for farms nearby. And …”

  I felt my heart begin to accelerate.

  “He asked me to go out to the barn to get the eggs. It was winter and we kept these three skinny hens that lived on weeds and the food I snuck out to them, and half the time they didn’t produce anything at all. That was the kind of man my father was—he wanted the eggs, but he didn’t want to have to feed the hens to get them.

  “So I wrapped up in a big blanket and went out there. The barn was really a little shack—we didn’t have any horses or cows, just those pathetic hens. And that morning the wind was blowing over the scrap-tin roof something awful, like a broken-down church organ. Once I got to the barn, I didn’t want to have to go back out again. I decided to stay and talk with the hens for a while. I petted them. I tried to tuck more hay around them to keep them warm. There was only one egg and I stuck it in the pocket of my apron.”

  I closed my eyes. “And then I heard him. He was shouting for me and he banged into the barn behind me. I knew what was coming and braced myself—he always used the same old stave off one of his broken butter churns to beat us. But nothing happened. And when I finally turned around he was just standing there staring at me. He yelled that if I looked at him again he would kick my head in. So I turned back to my hens and that was when I heard his belt buckle jangling, and he shoved me on my face into the hay, all slick with fresh chicken shit, and the hens squawked and went flying into the rafters, and …”

  Nora’s hand was over her mouth. “Oh, Hick.”

  I felt I might be sick, but I wanted to keep going. “He was very drunk. I could smell it. I don’t even know that he knew what he was doing. When he rolled off me, I just lay there for a moment, stunned. I tasted blood—I had bitten my tongue. When I got up and pushed my skirt down, he was already passed out in the hay. I was going to try to get out without waking him, but, half thinking, I touched my apron pocket for the egg and of course it was broken.

  “And then …” I swallowed, the ghosts rising up in me like steam from the bath, my heart hammering, “something happened to me. Before I knew it, that old stave was in my hands and I lifted it over my head and brought it down on his skull with all my might. Over and over.”

  Nora grasped my hands. She felt like the only thing keeping me on the face of the planet. “I just kept thrashing away until the stave broke in my hands. Can you believe it? That old thing had been used for God knows how many beatings over the years, and it just splintered and pieces of it went flying all over the barn.

  “I didn’t know whether he was dead or not—he wasn’t, it turns out, but I didn’t know that at the time. I looked down and right next to my shoe was one of the pieces of wood. So I picked it up and took it with me. Then I walked the five miles into town with blood running down the inside of my legs, and I never saw that fucking place again. Once I landed where I was going, I pounded a hole through this with a hammer and nail, and put it on a piece of string. I haven’t taken it off since.”

  Nora lifted my hand and kissed my fingers.

  I took a shuddering breath, exhaled. “So now, do you see? Being a reporter isn’t just a job to me. It is me; it is the thing I fought to be so that I didn’t have to be that farm girl anymore. Without it …”

  Nora dipped her hand in the water as she considered my words. I was glad she couldn’t seem to muster any reply. It was a strange point of pride to have a problem so broken it couldn’t be fixed, even by a woman who was known for solving impossible problems on a grand scale. My wounds, I realized, were precious to me; if she told me there was a way to heal them, I feared I might disappear.

  Nora gently lifted the towel off my shoulders and hung it on the hook. Then, with her hand on my back, she helped ease me down the slick porcelain into the heavenly still-hot water. She soaped a blue cloth with Ivory and washed my back, my arms and legs, in slow circles. Then she turned the tap back on while I tipped my head beneath it. Nora braced my forehead with her palm so that the water would not splash in my eyes.

  When I sat up and squeezed the water out of my hair, she said, “What if … what if your story is still being written, Hick?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t try psychology on me, Nora.”

  “It’s not psychology. It’s … it’s the frame around the picture. What if what you are is changing? What if we all are? Look at me. I was a daughter until my parents died and I became an orphan. I was a mother and my baby died—I saw my baby go into the ground, and I thought I would die of grief. But I didn’t die. I was a wife until my husband betrayed me, and the very definition of being a wife changed. And I tasted freedom.” She touched my shoulder and ran her fingers down my arm. “And love.”

  I considered this, the possibility that there was hope for me yet. While she shampooed my hair, she kept her gentle eyes on me and under her gaze I felt an unrecognizable sensation run from between my shoulders down into my fingers. Peace. The black thing I felt when I thought of Bowdle and that barn, a grackle thrashing in my chest, had gone out of me. At least for now.

  When I was dry and dressed, Nora lay down beside me in bed and said, “Let’s take a trip together, just the two of us. It will do us good to get away.”

  I looked at her. “How, Nora? The first lady cannot just ‘go on vacation.’”

  “If I say we’ll do it, we will. I keep my promises, Hick.”

  When my face didn’t lift, her voice turned stern. “The man who did that to you is dead. He cannot hurt you anymore. Your life is in your hands.”

  “But what can I do?” My voice choked. I was sick to death of crying. “What is there for me to do?”

  Her voice was kind again. “A world of things. Let’s talk about it. I have a hundred ideas—”

  “Not now,” I said, my eyes closed and my nose pressed against her collarbone. I thought I might be able to believe in divinity because of the solace of that collarbone; I wished I had known it was waiting for me years and years down the road from that worst day of my life.

  “Tell me about our cottage instead,” I whispered. I could see it in the shade of two old trees. I could see the smoke coming out of the chimney and Nora walking up the path at the end of the day, coming home to me at last. “Tell me what we’ll talk about when we sit on our porch swing.”

  Part Two

  What happens to any of us as individuals, what we thin
k or desire or hope to do, seems so trifling in the face of what I’m seeing these days.

  —Lorena Hickok, in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt

  Chapter Eleven

  July 1933

  When Nora first announced to the president and his staff that she would be taking a vacation north through New England and Quebec, driving in her own car with her journalist companion, the head of the Secret Service said, No, absolutely not, preposterous.

  Nora called me at Mitchell Place, delighted. “They think they can tell me no,” she said.

  I sat down in the chair beside the telephone, and Prinz trotted out the open apartment door and sat on my bare feet. I hadn’t really expected the trip to pan out, hadn’t allowed myself to get my hopes up, so I was unperturbed. “And they can’t?”

  She laughed her lovely singsong laugh. “They say it has only been a year since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped—that we could be abducted. Shoved into the trunk of someone’s car.”

  A smile opened on my face, and the feeling was as inelegant as the wrenching of a wedged cupboard door. After a few months of drink and sorrow, of scraping by on savings and freelance assignments, I was starting to thaw. I kneaded the thick fur around Prinz’s collar. “I’d like to see the criminal who could lift me into a trunk. Still,” I said, “what can you do? If they say no, they say no.”

  “We’ll see,” Nora said.

  A few days later, she called back. “Pack your suitcase, darling.”

  “No. I don’t believe it.” Mrs. Jansen’s head popped into the hallway and the hem of her quilted dressing gown swept the doorframe. She disappeared with a huff when she realized that yet another call had come in for me instead of her.