Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  Eventually bows were taken. Eventually the German Choir came back for closing hymns. And while the mood of solemn consecration Miss Rose wanted was never achieved, a new warmth rippled through the crowd of smiling faces. I’d seen fainting women and flailing men wild with the Holy Spirit. This was different: gentle and binding, like a major chord through a piano’s wooden body.

  “Well, of course,” said Miss Rose after bows were taken, cookies passed, and mulled wine poured. “I thought why not use a mother and child?” Violet and I exchanged looks. “Nothing like real emotion, a mother’s love, to capture the drama of the scene. Rebecca was wonderful, was she not?” And continued to cast commentary like chocolate coins to the knot of people surrounding her.

  I was watching Mama—Little John, too, and Mr. Dryfus, puffed up, shocked, and proud as I’d ever seen him (William had left with Clara)—but mostly Mama, whose dark eyes found mine across the benches. Pride and bafflement and love, all of these ached through me; yet I was afraid to approach her, knowing I’d never f ind words to tell her all I felt, or I’d say the wrong thing. So I blew out the luminary candles, folded the tablecloths, made myself nominally useful until, with a backward glance, Mama left with Little John and Mr. Dryfus.

  It was only then I remembered Hanley’d missed it all.

  26

  The next morning, Christmas Eve, Miss Rose ordered me to the print shop for the holiday. I made a token resistance, but really, I didn’t mind going. Wanted to go, in truth. Watching Mama cry in front of all those people had been the shock of my life, and not only because I knew her tears had risen from that vault of memories she kept locked. I’d supposed I understood Mama well enough to guess, one day to the next, what she’d do, how she’d behave. Even keeping Little John a secret made sense, given what I knew. Now I wasn’t sure.

  What I did know was that I wanted to be as close as I could to her, if only for a few days. And after six weeks transcribing Miss Rose’s recollections, I knew, maybe for the f irst time, what I needed from Mama—an account of herself. Some explanation of her life and mine and the way things were between us. Walking through town, down Union Street to the print-shop alley, I became determined to do what I hadn’t had the courage for: I would ask her. The very thought f illed me with hope, with fear and an offended sense of entitlement, which bolstered me until Mama answered my knock on the backdoor and my resolve scattered.

  I couldn’t say anything. Not even hello. She held a broom. She wore a frown and an apron over a pretty muslin housedress, and her lovely face, no longer pale and fragile as it had been onstage, was flushed and damp with heat. I can’t tell you the expression in her eyes, because I could not meet them.

  “Well,” she said f inally. “Come in, if you’re coming,” and I followed her inside.

  Christmas that year was not nearly so sparse as the last. This is not to say Mr. Dryfus developed a religious bone, but that year, for Little John’s benef it, Dryfus invited the season into his home. No goose graced the table, of course, but there were sweet breads, stollen, marzipan fruits. William came to string popcorn around a pitiful little f ir tree. I sat between him and Clara at the Lutheran church for Christmas Eve carols, and on Christmas Day I was proud to give the few things I’d made: a scarf each for Clara and Mr. Dryfus, a rag doll for Little John. I brought for Mama a piece of paper from Miss Rose—Mama’s f irst commission for a dress. For William, I’d cross-stitched with great care (I usually had little patience for such things) the f irst four stanzas of “The Lady of Shalott,” which he promised to frame on his studio wall. I even brought Hanley, who’d oddly not been around, a little cob pipe, to prove how graciously I’d forgiven his behavior the day before the pageant. Indeed the day passed so well, I’d all but given up my intention of asking Mama anything.

  That is, until the night of Saint Stephen’s, the night before I would return to the manor. Mr. Dryfus was in his study, Clara in bed. I sat with Mama beside Little John’s cot in William’s old room, watching her snuggle him to sleep in a lacy smock she’d made him. The sash was open, the moon bright and cold, the street so quiet the only sounds were a dog far away and Mama singing a song Dot used to favor when picking slugs off tomatoes.

  The way she held him, as much as the song, got to me. If I’d thought about it, I would have recognized this as the wrong time to confront her, but hearing that song and watching her rock Little John opened a wound of spite and longing inside. I knew, sure as I knew anything, Mama would never leave Little John as she had left me. And as she laid him in his cot and closed his door, the questions I’d been swallowing for two days fell clumsy from my mouth.

  “Why’d you leave me with Dot? During the war. Did you go looking for him, Landis Wilcox?”

  Mama didn’t seem to have heard what I’d said. She remained still, her hand on the latch, staring down the hallway.

  “I think I deserve to know!”

  She heard that. “That’s what you think, huh?” she said. “You think . . .”

  She didn’t f inish, for below, outside the shop, we heard a frantic voice calling, “Mr. Dryfus! Mr. Dryfus!”

  Mama and I reached the staircase in time to see Dryfus open the door to a breathless deputy. William, my f irst thought, and from the look on her face as she shuffled in, Clara must have thought the same.

  “All of them in bad shape, Mr. Dryfus,” the deputy was saying. “The woman worst of all, and now the baby’s coming, and she won’t let the doctor near. She’s asking for Clara, and Constable Shultz thought . . . well, he thought you’d be able to calm the boy, talk some sense.”

  “Hanley?” I said.

  Mama, in the shadows beside me, stepped forward.

  “He’s murder mad if I ever seen it,” said the deputy. “Nobody gonna get close without shooting him f irst, or shooting Robey, who climbed under the house with the pigs and won’t come out, neither. I’d shoot Robey myself, give me leave, honest.”

  “He’s talking about Hanley?” I asked.

  “Madelyn,” Mama said, but I had decided.

  “I’m going,” I told Mr. Dryfus. “I’m going too.”

  I threw on my overcoat, telling myself, even as fear clamped my chest, that Hanley was alright. Everything would be alright. Mama sent me to fetch Mrs. Smith to watch Little John, and when I returned, the three of them, Mama and Mr. Dryfus on either side of Clara, were ready to go.

  We shuffled along as fast as Clara was able until we reached the butchers’ block, south of Stuttgart, where streetlamps ended, as did any streets of mention. The houses beyond were scrap-wood shacks owned by the glass factory, though dockworkers lived there too, and men working the lime pit. And something in the beat-down state of those hovels, or maybe in those dark windows, made me remember the look in Hanley’s eyes before the pageant. The violence in them. The helplessness. I kept trying to remember what he’d told me about his sister (not much), or her husband, Robey (nothing at all). I kept thinking about all those bruises . . .

  Two blocks over, I saw lanterns, and then men holding them. Fifteen or twenty men huddled close, their breath a heaving white fog. They smelled of liquor and smoke, and I stayed as close to Mama as I could until we passed through to f ind the deputy and the constable, a barrel-chested man, hunched beside the falling-down porch of Hanley’s sister’s place.

  “Not that it’d be much a loss, Robey,” the constable called under the porch. “But you stay there bleeding like that, them pigs bound to tear you up, and this place stinks enough without you rotting in pieces.”

  A bent f igure in the shadows beside the porch staggered into the lantern glow. “He comes out,” the f igure growled. “I’ll kill him.”

  It was Hanley. He was swaying side to side, his left arm hanging loose from his shoulder, his nose smashed to one side, blood dripping down his mouth and chin; yet none of this scared me so much as his eyes, f ierce as his voice.

  “Han
ley?” I said, but Mama held me fast, and I let her. Robey, under the porch, began yelling, “Muriel! Muriel! Spatzi! Ich liebe dich! Muriel!” and crawling out, sat on his haunches, hands in the air.

  Not Hanley, not the Hanley I knew, but a beast with the same voice, same build, raged through the two men holding him back and kicked Robey in the head once, then again, before Mr. Dryfus, brave or crazy, I didn’t know which, stepped between them. He reached out to touch Hanley, then didn’t because Hanley began to sway again, and the two men trying to hold him back, now held him up.

  “Late. You warned me, Mr. Dryfus, but, oh God, my sister.”

  He slipped to his knees between the men. No sound but wind hissing through trees, until inside the shack a low wail spiked into a scream. I felt nothing. I felt cold. I felt nothing but a sharp, shivery cold through my whole body, and still would rather have stayed with the men, in the yard, than follow Mama and Clara inside.

  The shack was two rooms divided by a curtain, now torn from its mounting. A splintered chair was heaped in the corner by an upturned table. Beside the stove, an iron pot vomited stew over bloody floorboards. I heard, above the moaning in the other room, a catlike hiss, and looked to f ind a small boy in the loft, thin arms locked around two baby sisters. A sallow-faced woman, hair wet with sweat, emerged from the back to speak with Clara. Then, with a few stiff, kind words she coaxed the boy and his sisters from the loft and took them away. Clara, masked in the same indomitable calm she wore the night we went for William, ushered Mama and me with her into the back room.

  No windows. No air. The stink of blood and waste went straight to my head. I could see nothing. Then a frame bed. Then an insensible mound in the middle, all flesh and tendon straining. Clara relit a lamp by the bed, and I could see the mound’s swollen-shut eyes beaten the color of bark. It was not Hanley’s sister, Muriel, lying there. It was no one at all, only open legs, a bruised belly tracked with f ist marks the brownish-blue color of root stems—and then arching like one possessed, she screamed.

  My legs went limp beneath me. Clara crouched in the mess between the mound’s legs.

  “Maddy.” Mama’s hand on my arm. “Maddy, we need water, rags. Lot of them. Go.”

  It didn’t take long. Two neighbor women had boiled water and gathered a pile of their own sheets. Mama beckoned me to Muriel’s side while she balled up the soiled bedclothes and gave Clara the new. Muriel grabbed my hand so tight I thought she’d break it.

  “Is he? Tell me, is he?”

  “Hanley’s okay,” I managed to say, though I wasn’t sure. “I think he’s going to be okay.”

  Muriel’s head shook wildly. “Robey,” she hissed. “Is Robey . . .” The pain again.

  This time I didn’t, I couldn’t answer but tore myself away and out to the porch to f ind Hanley in his shirtsleeves sitting on the stairs.

  I stood watching, as wary of his great stillness as I had been of his rage, yet felt an overwhelming tenderness. He jerked but didn’t budge when I called his name. Someone had cleaned him up, but blood still oozed from a cut above his swollen-shut eye; his nose looked as if it had been forgotten, then been tacked crooked on his head at the last minute. His left arm hung useless by his side. I found a f ilthy old quilt bunched behind a crate. Laying it over his shoulders, I eased down as close as I dared on the step beside him, then closer as a tremor escaped him. I, too, was shaking.

  “I was late, Maddy.” His voice was flat, his eyes straight ahead. I was not afraid of him. “Mr. Dryfus is always telling me not to be late, and I meant to be back before he was, but I was late and that bastard. He was already laying into her.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything. Images of the dead woman in the river kept forming in the back of my mind, and a shivering cold rose so slowly on every side of me, I didn’t even f ight it, just sat for a long time watching our breath cloud and vanish. I don’t know how long. Until the spectacle lost its appeal, and only Mr. Dryfus and a few drunken onlookers remained, until the black sky began to soften, until the cries inside stopped, and no others rose up to take their place.

  Clara called for Mr. Dryfus. He emerged again with Clara heavy on his arm, her shakes oddly still, her breath a rusty gate. She laid a hand on Hanley’s head as Mama, drawn up tight within herself, passed a wrapped package the size of a loaf of bread to the neighbor woman.

  “Hanley,” said Dryfus. “She’s okay. She lost the baby, but . . . Come back with us, son. Mrs. Markell is going to stay. There’s no use you . . .”

  But Hanley shrugged off the quilt and walked into the shack without another word to me, to anyone. I felt nothing then, couldn’t even manage angry. I wasn’t angry, not at Muriel. Or even, though I wished to be, at Robey. I wasn’t mad at Hanley for lying about Robey beating him. He hadn’t lied, after all. He’d simply said nothing. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I must have known. At least, I must have known there was more to those bruises than war play and f isticuffs. Or if I didn’t, then Mr. Dryfus—lots of people must have known and done nothing to stop it.

  I remembered, later, what Alby had said about “blessed misfortune.” Dot used to say something similar. She used to say, “Maddy, God reveals his grace in our misfortunes.” Meaning what? That all misfortune was a good thing? That God wanted bad things to happen so we remembered to need him? That God wanted Robey to beat his wife, to beat Hanley who, for so long, offered himself in his sister’s place? I wasn’t sure what I thought about God, but I didn’t believe that. I don’t think Alby or Dot did, either. What kind of God would do that? It was one of those things you say to make yourself feel better for being so helpless. I never have been ready to feel better about that night.

  Mr. Dryfus took hold of one of Clara’s arms; Mama, the other. I waited until Mama looked back for me, and when she did, I followed at a distance, my feet numb and heavy, conscious of cook f ires and voices rough with sleep falling from windows. I remember standing at the top of the green, open like a hand beneath the courthouse. I remember how small and far away the three of them, Mr. Dryfus and Clara and Mama, looked in the palm of that hand, how ghastly the great oak appeared with its naked arms upstretched in the morning light. But that’s all. I don’t remember turning north, away from them, up the frozen pavement, past Millionaire’s Row. I don’t remember the split in the road or the sight of the manor huddled on the ridge. I don’t remember curling into a ball in the seam of warmth beneath the kitchen door, where Mrs. Nettle must have found me.

  27

  Gray winter light slanted though the curtains. It took me a moment to f igure where I was—in the manor, one of the guest rooms from the look of it, with no idea how I’d gotten there, or that New Year’s Eve had passed without me. My throat burned. My tongue was thick and useless. I felt a strange dead weight upon my chest, cotton between my ears. Through the cotton, a voice:

  “Well, now, look who decided to join the living? No, now. Stay down.” Lipman pressed me back into the pillow. “You been days in delirium, gabbing all sorts o’ nonsense—women turning to trees and such. Stands to reason, with that book you read old man f illing your head with no good.” She roughed her hand across my forehead. “I tell you, hon. Thought we’d lost you. Thought it was scarlet fever, thank merciful God. No. Stay down, I said. Your sister’s due in a minute, and no sense overtaxing.”

  Even more shocking than waking up in that fancy room was seeing Mama walking through the door with Mrs. Smith. She’d been there every day for four days since the danger passed, Lipman told me. Today she and Mrs. Smith wore walking dresses; Mama a pretty lace f ichu, her hair in a chignon. She sat tracing the fleur-de-lis pattern on the arm of her chair, glancing up at me now and again in a way that made me nervous. Mrs. Smith did the talking for both of them.

  Hanley was okay, she told me. No saving his eye, and his arm might not be good for much. “But he’s okay. His sister will be.” She paused. “Robey,
too.” She looked at Mama, back at me. “They let him go, Maddy. Kept him two nights, and then they let him go.”

  “They . . . But why?” I managed, my voice unsteady.

  It was Miss Rose, resplendent in the doorway, who answered.

  “Didn’t you know, Madelyn?” She wore a forest-green gown, ermine cuffs, braids and curls atop her head, each movement a hush of fabric. “A man,” she said walking in, “might be arrested for cruelty to a horse, but he has every right, under the law, to beat his wife—even at the cost of his unborn child. Such an outrage would never, never be allowed if women had the vote. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Dryfus? No, don’t get up. I came only to witness our young scholar back from the dead. Work on my book is useless without you, Madelyn.”

  Mama, dwarfed by Miss Rose, sat awkwardly down.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Smith, “he ran off, at any rate. But that means there’ll be no money coming in. Other than what Hanley brings. Muriel might take in laundry. Mr. Mason, at the glassworks, will take her boy. But the house . . .”

  Miss Rose roused herself. “She will not lose the house.” Then looking from Mama to me: “Mrs. Smith, may I have a word?”

  We stared after them, Mama longer than I. She f iddled with her handbag, then stood, heading for the door, I thought, but closed it instead and sat again, this time on the very edge of the chair, gripping that handbag. Her dark eyes, for a moment so far away, came to rest on me. And what I felt was fear. Weak as I was I felt a fear deep inside that overwhelmed all spite and longing.

  “Mama?” I said.

  “I wasn’t looking for him, Landis,” she said. “When I left Dot’s, I wasn’t—”

  “Mama, don’t.”

  “Let me!” She put her hand up, closed her eyes. “Things in this world, they aren’t like they are in your books. It’s not so . . .” She stopped, sat there, f ishing for words and not f inding them, started over, telling about the promises Landis made, how he said it was nothing wrong, what they were doing, though she knew it was and always felt wrong after. “But he talked so f ine, about so many things,” she said. “I didn’t disbelieve him.