by Jeffrey Lent
Hewitt rolled with this. “I’m sorry to hear that, Jessica. That’s got to be a tough thing to know.”
She laughed but there was no color, no humor to her laugh—a choked grunt.
“Oh Hewitt it’s so simple. I can’t stop taking the pills long enough to have a baby or I’ll fall to pieces but if I tried to have a baby while taking those pills there would most certainly be defects. In the child.” She paused and snarled laughter again and went on. “A monster. That would be the risk. Or worse. An idiot or even one of those little weensy things born too early with its brain open for all the world to see and dead before I could ever even hold it in my arms. I’m sure of it.”
Now she paused. Hewitt watching her, trying to determine how to respond. But before he could she said, “Those fuckers. But the joke’s on them. I quit those pills. My glove box is stuffed right full of pill bottles almost all of them expired. It’s shit, Hewitt. You listening to me? You hear me?”
The weasel of experience made him wonder how many other people she’d told this story to. He slowly said, “Sounds to me like you’ve worked your way right around that problem. Sounds like you can go right ahead and have babies when you want to.”
“Oh Hewitt. Don’t be fucking stupid.”
“Well that was a nice thing to say.”
“Look, I’m going to ride this out whichever way it goes. But I’m fucking nuts. What if the baby turned out like me? That would be the cruelest thing I could think of. To even take that chance. So you see those fuckers got me—I can’t go back and I can’t stand still and I can’t go up. Down is all that’s left for me.”
Quiet a bit. Then he said, “You know, Jessica, nobody, doctors or anybody else can predict how it might happen. But things change.”
“I heard and seen too much of that bullshit to buy even the smallest sack of it. Although I do believe you meant it kindly.”
Hewitt sighed. Then he said, “So, Jessica, you hardcase, tell me this. Are you dangerous? Is there any reason why you shouldn’t spend the night in my guest bed?”
She was backed up against the sink. She said, “I’m not dangerous to anyone except myself.”
“You tried to kill yourself?”
“No. There was what you’d call a real strong pull for a while there. I’d lie in my room sometimes and play with my razor—that straight razor belonged to my grandfather. But there was never what I’d call a persuasive argument. Maybe I was just chickenshit. But that was a good while ago and I came up with a better solution.”
“Which was?”
“I left town. Hell I left Mississippi.”
“That took care of things?”
She laughed, again the easy laugh. He was beginning to enjoy hearing that from her. She said, “It helped. Along the way I met a few people that helped with others.” She darkened again. “Along with some assholes that fucked me up other ways. The road doesn’t solve anything except it keeps going. Shit.” She paused and laughed again. “Hey Hewitt?”
He was beginning to sense the rhythm of her cycle. At least this evening. “What is it, Jessica?”
“I bet you never dreamed you’d find anything like me when you chugged up the hill on your tractor this morning, did you?”
“I’ve had worse company.”
She came toward him and he stood. “That says a world,” she said. “But thank you. I’d stay the night.”
She hugged him. Free of seduction or even sensuality, a hug delivered between friends in the easy way of the young. He held her, the first time in a while he’d felt a woman against him and the intense warmth of another human body against his was shocking and soothing. How easy to forget how cold we are alone, he thought.
Her acceptance was exactly what he wanted. But now out, come from her, he was suddenly unsure. All wisdom shrieked feed her breakfast, wish her on her way and hope that whatever inner map had let her find him would be erased from her skittering brain within days if not hours. But there was something greater lurking and simple—be kind. Offer kindness in a world that was largely shorn of kindness.
He spoke quickly with his voice low, stepping back from her as he did but holding her shoulders so he touched her at arm’s length. “Jessica,” he said. “You go on if you need to. But if you want a quiet place to rest another day or two, you’ve found one here.”
He didn’t wait for her response. “Although, you feel like doing your pacing thing, stay off the road. Okay? You can march around the yard or up and down the hill or wherever out in the fields but stay out of the road.”
She cocked her head. “I had you pegged as someone who didn’t care what your neighbors think.”
“I just don’t want you dead or hurt. All right?”
Now she was quiet, studying him. Then she nodded.
IT WAS A hard night. He slept three hours and then woke from a dream he could not remember. If the dream was the prompt it did not matter but with the acute single-mindedness that only comes daytime in work or restless nights his father was with him. No ghost or shadowy filmy presence but fully occupying his mind.
As if the true paternal legacy was an acid trickle of misfortune, of weight carried inevitable as guilt, as if those hands had struck the match itself.
The fire Hewitt learned of only after his father was dead and so deprived of ever discussing. The secret not only Hewitt but his sister Beth also lived within without knowing—that surrounded them as players upon a vast stage they knew nothing of, a world behind the world they walked through and thought they lived and knew but would be revealed as a veil and shroud. An illusion of necessity and love.
MARY MARGARET DUFFY was a recent immigrant who worked by day in the kitchen of a hotel and lived just off Second Avenue south of Murray Hill in a two-bedroom coldwater flat she shared with four other girls. She had a nursing degree from Dublin but in 1948 there were ample well-trained American nurses to fill the hospitals and private clinics, a frustration she never forgot, that colored and embittered her life in ways hidden or explosively misdirected although at the time she believed she was happy enough, rising early to take the subway to midtown where she entered into a labyrinth of steam and heat and spent the first half of her shift preparing huge pans of soft scrambled eggs and the second assembling a stream of endless club sandwiches in every variation anyone might dream up. Mary Margaret was a quick study and so with the exception of her Tuesdays off she ate at work and held tight to her cash and allowed herself the pleasures of the great city rapturous with postwar elation although she did most of this as pedestrian and observer. Not for her the museums and grand concert halls or the wonders of Fifth Avenue where afternoons ladies with hats and white gloves were shopping, but as the nimble slip she was, quick on her feet and fleet with her eyes, her strawberry blond hair curled to her shoulders in the style of the day and her three good off-the-rack dresses, her skirt and sweater set, she spent her afternoons along the avenues and cross streets and found refuge in the reading room of the public library or further uptown in the smaller more comfortable rooms of the American Irish Historical Society. Evenings she would stay in and read magazines or listen to the radio or often as not slip out with one or more of her roommates down to the music hall which was nothing more than a bar with pool tables in the back and a jukebox with Sinatra and Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers but also Bing Crosby and Ruthie Morrissey and Christopher Droney, the mighty John McCormack and others all set to get the lads singing together and dancing with the girls on the ten square parquet feet of dance floor, and very quickly abandoning her glass of ale for a gimlet, ordered after overhearing the name and then sticking with the drink for the lightness it brought her head and body.
She’d noticed him from one of her first evenings but hadn’t given him much thought, the tall fair-haired older man sitting hunched and quiet over his whisky always at the far end of the bar in the small corner with only room for a stool or two, a man large enough and silent enough so more often than not regardless of how full the bar was, the
corner was his own. What she did notice was what he was not—no devilry or merriment to his eyes, no effort to speak or even watch the girls as the other men did, no apparent motion at all beyond lifting his glass always half-full and furthermore he was of an age she couldn’t quite place but seemed lacking all vitality. But she kept noticing him, noting his rough sweater or denim working man’s shirt, his heavy overcoat that once had been quite fine and his raincoat of the same sort. Most notably, she never saw evidence at all of a hat, surely a mark of eccentricity that seemed to her carelessness as much as negligence.
Until finally Nancy the roommate she was most fond of one evening elbowed her ribs and near shouted into her ear, “If you won’t at least ask Frank as regards that one’s caught your eye I’ll do it myself. But it’s each to her own from there.”
Motioned close Frank leaned and told her, “I can’t tell you much, love. But he’s a timepiece of sorts for me. Two years now it’s the rare day he’s not in right at the spot of four and sits until half past ten and then is gone. All I can say is his money’s always on the bar and he drinks enough for most of the younger men but never so much as wobbles on his way out. He’s the sad man, that’s what he is.” Frank glanced down at the man and back to Mary Margaret. “There’s plenty men from the war with the long stare but that one, that one’s eyes are empty. Whatever’s brought him to that place is not, I’d swear, a thing I’d want knowledge of.”
So Mary Margaret Duffy slowly finished her drink and glanced at her little Woolworth’s wristwatch and ordered another and at ten minutes after ten stood off her stool. Nancy was twisted about, talking to two men at once and never saw Mary Margaret lift her purse and drink and walk down to the corner where there was no vacant stool but a space beside the sad man. If he saw her approach he made no sign. She placed her drink on the bar, leaned her hip against the wood and lifted her foot to the rail and gone suddenly all skittish and boggy brogue said, “I’m thinking if there was ever a man looked to need a kind human ear I’d wager you’re the one. If I was the betting sort of girl but I’m no gambler or grabber or whore. An there’s more to me than ear. I can set an brood as well as the next. I’ve seen it done champion. My da was first place and me mam not a full step behind. Listen to me run. Tell me to be off and I be a vapor to ya.”
His elbows heavy on the roll of the bar, his head down with his hair dull and she thought, The man needs a haircut. Then without looking at her his voice came, a near steady rumble. “Leave me alone. Please.”
His voice so unexpected and her own speech leaving her tilted she was sipping her drink when his words came and so she set her glass down and laid a hand on his arm and said, “I will. But ya have to look at me an tell me to my face,” only adding the last because as she was swearing to leave him she also felt the convulsive tremor jump his muscles when she touched him. She took her hand away and gathered her purse and looked long at her drink and decided she’d proven she’d had enough of that and turned and made her way shifting and dodging and short of breath out toward the avenue, out toward the air. Out to where she did not know but away from her fool self. A cool September evening with her purse hugged tight and the pooling yellow light of New York night shot through with other lights bright and dim as she walked, the lights of passing automobiles and taxis, storefronts both closed and open, the gray of the sidewalk almost soft to look at but hard under her short heels and for a striding moment she wondered how long it had been since she’d walked on bare earth and then her lip curled as she walked toward her empty night when she heard the voice behind her, the voice which had been there for at least a block but penetrated finally as meant for her, directed toward her. Coming not only after her but already surrounding her.
“Wait,” he called. “Please.”
She stopped under a streetlight and stood, huddled tight to herself. She wouldn’t look up when he came upon her.
Tender and tentative as spring rain he said, “I want to drown you.”
The sidewalk had bits of quartz the size of an eyelash embedded in it. She faced about to him, her arms folded tight over her chest and said, “I’m sure I heard ya wrong. Speak clear or I’ll scream Police.”
He stepped back, his hands extended slightly, open, harmless but halting, fumbling. His eyes in a panic. She almost believed he was a madman when he said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m out of practice with formalities I suppose you could say.”
“I could say most anything.” She ventured a cautious frown. “But it’s not a great line to try on a girl. Telling her you want to drown her.”
She watched roiling emotion scudding fast over his face. Fear and something close to revulsion and he worked his lips, wet them with his tongue and said, “Draw. You misunderstood. I’m an artist. I’d like to draw you.” The words now thickly encumbered as if his tongue was loathe to let them out.
“Sure ya would. Without a stitch, is that it?”
He blinked and then a smile came and went. “No, no. I’d like to draw your face. Just trying to catch your face with a pencil. That would be enough.”
She studied him, her frown deepening. She said, “You’re frightening me. I think you should leave me alone.” The bog gone all out of her now, stiff and clear.
He made another attempt to smile, this less successful and she knew it was because he was trying. “I will if you want. But would you give me another chance? I could introduce myself and we could walk back to Frank’s where your friends are and we could talk there. I’d make an attempt at explaining myself.”
Mary Margaret looked hard upon the man before her. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought, perhaps in his early or middle thirties. His face was creased with weather and cares and his eyes freighted as he blinked under her scrutiny. She said, “If you’re a true artist you’d be a madman to want to draw the likes of me. And I’ve had enough of the bar tonight. If you had it in mind to walk and talk I’d be willing to do the same. If nothing else, you’re a story needs out.”
THE LONG HOURS of night following the afternoon when Hewitt’s father died and he sat with his mother in the basement room next to the wine cellar, the locked room with its old rolltop desk and the wall of wide shallow steel map files, his sister Beth waiting in the Charlotte airport for a flight to New York and the train up from there, Mary Margaret told him all she learned that long-gone night but also of how little; how the stories that came out did so over the next year; of how Thomas Pearce would come into her life for days at a time, then weeks gone, and how she knew even from that first night that it would be this way until one way or another it would not. And she was prepared to await that answer.
SHE SAT FOR him and he tried to draw. His studio was a cheap gutted apartment far down on the East Side, work tables of planks on sawhorses with cans and thick tubes of unopened paint, stacks of blank stretched canvases leaned against the wall, a pair of spotless easels. An old worn velvet daybed with a heavy mahogany scroll at one end, a mattress on the floor behind a curtain strung on a wire, a small gas cookstove and a sink. None of it quite new but nothing like she’d expected; the only color, the only pigment, the only paint was not the speckles and smears she’d expected the first time she went there but a broad oval on the plaster wall that even her untrained eye could see was nothing more than deep blue paint squeezed straight from the tube into a palm and then the hand working in furious swirls streaks and daubs upon the wall. She contemplated it as she sat for him and slowly the obvious rage began to make sense to her; a man had been forsaken by old and trusted tools. Or as he sat perched on a tall stool with a pad on his knees and a handful of sharpened pencils in his shirt pocket and after fifteen minutes or three or an hour and a half would rip the sheet from the pad and hurl it crumpled onto the floor all this wordless unless she moved when he spoke his frequent command “As before, as before.”
He saw her as what might save him long before she understood this. By the time of that comprehension on her part she knew it was true. And believed she
would.
In the end it didn’t happen in New York although those years were as necessary as the two visits over two years when they took the train to Vermont to spend unholy weeks of manic infused vacation with his mother where Mary Margaret understood it was the place as much as the woman he wanted her to learn but also knew his mother saw her very differently than Thomas Pearce did and both women knew nothing was to be done about that although Lydia Pearce did outright ask if Mary Margaret was sleeping with her son and why bother with the charade and extra work of separate bedrooms. This over tea and cookies with thimbles of sherry on a summer afternoon when Thomas was wandering the woods above the majestic house.
The summer after that they went to Nova Scotia and the vast pile of the rest of their lives together that she’d seen from the start and held to finally tumbled and came to rest about their feet. Around them as sure as the frothing tide-rise.
But before this, long before this, she learned what had to be learned and then a lid clamped forever, nothing more. There came the dawn they’d been up all night when suddenly the wave of high energy she’d almost gotten used to came over him and he ordered that they dress and go out into the fog-drift of morning and hiked up to the bridge to Brooklyn and walked across it as the sun began to burn through and he led her up toward Clinton Hill and then down a small side street where they stood looking at a three-story brick building and as they had walked there he told her not only where they were going and what to expect but also where they were going in the past. To that evening distant and immediate as this spring morning. Which did not stop her from sitting on the curb across the street when his account trailed to nothing and he stood gazing upon what was not there, would never be there again, and she left him and sat facedown into the fabric of her gay spring dress and wept.
As if describing events happened to another, he told her. How he’d rented the third floor apartment while still a student at the nearby Pratt Institute and how it was not long after that he met his wife not in Brooklyn but Manhattan, a student of ballet, of galvanic personality and ambition but when the two met both knew their destinies with each other and he knew he was the perfect foil for her acerbic stringent wit and laced fury, believed she was as necessary as oxygen, and it was in these early days when he began to be noticed, to be taken a bit apart from his own crowd—a place he admitted he’d always thought himself to be. And still she danced and he loved that she danced, was happy to see her off mornings to classes and wait expectantly and braced late afternoons when she returned from auditions and what he did not say but the young Irish woman knew was that this woman was lovely and lithe, athletic and demanding and very likely angry also as his recognition grew as hers did not for then there came the baby, the little girl. And it was here and only here that his account faltered before he gathered and went on. How his love for Celeste and hers for him was instantaneous and ferocious but the morning Susan was born and he held the newborn looking down at her he was then and there flooded with a love he’d never dreamed existed, never expected from himself or thought possible in any human being. And how that never changed, as Celeste resumed her now more daunting efforts at the barre, and he took much care of Susan so very quickly a toddler and then a little girl who was he said in a voice as if recounting the previous day’s weather the only thing, human or otherwise and especially human, who was never ever an interruption to his work, who he’d hold on one hip as he worked on the canvas before him, learning to rethink his actions and speed as a one-handed man. How she knew the names of the colors and could find the right tube by the time she was three. How she’d go with him down to the naval yard or the piers or further south to the leather tanning yards, the boatyards, the ironworks and manufacturing blocks, the warehouses of goods bound for the ships or across the river to Manhattan, or setting up on the rocky shoreline of the East River within view of the magnificent bridge as he sketched boats and barges and tugs and freighters of all manner and size. The little girl leaning against his side so she could watch the pencil work on the paper. How Celeste slowly and without apparent bitterness retreated from auditions but never the classes and how the phonograph was in constant play ranging from the great ballets, primarily the Russians, to swing records but also music Celeste found and brought home and introduced him to—the older Negro jazz and race records of music she called the blues and also hillbilly music or the wild peculiar mixture of western swing and also the food, the food gained and gathered from all edges of the city as if for Celeste learning food was learning languages. And Susan grew and on her fourth birthday they held a party for her that was all adults, all people she knew and how he stood watching these formally attired guests and the poised little hostess and knew those people were here not only because of him but honestly for her as well and how she would lead, was already leading an extraordinary life. Now fully away from Pratt and almost all other formal ties except for the midtown gallery that handled his work as well as the Philadelphia and Chicago collectors, the wooly-haired duke or earl or whatever he was—an Englishman—who sent monthly telegrams and appeared two or three times a year and at the moment was bent at the waist in his tails as he led Susan in a delicate and not altogether disastrous attempt at a waltz. The upswell of cheers in the darkened room as she blew the candles and opened the pile of brightly ribboned boxes and someone handed her a half-filled flute of champagne and she sipped it as if it were the only reasonable complement to the occasion.