From inside the house, the water pipes groaned and clanged, as all the toilets seemed to be flushing at once. She looked up curiously as a police cruiser cut through the traffic with its lights flashing. It pulled right up onto the sidewalk in front of the boardinghouse, and a young policeman jumped out and whipped his hat onto his close-cropped head. He adjusted his holster as he bounded up the steps. He stood over her, and now she watched him remove the hat and tuck it under his arm. “Excuse me, ma’am. We’ve received a complaint about you disturbing the peace and trespassing here at one ninety-nine North Main Street, the premises owned by Miss Claire Mayo.”
Not knowing what to say or do, she stared down at her folded hands.
The front door creaked open. “Sonny?” Claire Mayo called.
“No, ma’am. Officer Eddie Firth. Sheriff Stoner’s off tonight.”
“I don’t want a big commotion with everyone looking, but I want her off my porch and off my property.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was just telling her that.” He stepped closer. “Excuse me, ma’am, urn, Martha? You have to get off Miss Mayo’s porch. You have to. Right now.”
Martha? Who was he? Not Martha, but Miss Horgan. From now on, she was Miss Horgan. She stood up and picked up her things, and he came down the steps with her.
“I’ll be glad to give you a ride home,” he said, opening the cruiser’s passenger door.
Ignoring him, she carried her bags across the street, into the crowded park. She was conscious of people watching her as she searched for a place to sit. She came off the path, stepping between the blankets. The only empty spot was next to a gang of boys in denim vests.
“Excuse me. Excuse me,” she said, stepping over a man’s leg, hoping to get away before they saw her, but it was too late.
“Over here!” they called. “Hey, Martha! Sit with us! Come on!”
Her ankle turned and she tripped forward but didn’t fall. Ahead now, in the farthest corner, was an empty bench. She got back on the path and raced to get to it before anyone else could. People were laughing. She collapsed onto the bench, weak with the realization of Frances’s most dire warning. Here she was alone, with nowhere to go and all her possessions in bags at her feet. Her only solace was Mack and her hope that he would miss her enough to realize that he had been wrong, it had been love after all.
The dark grass was dotted with sprawling families and elderly men and women in aluminum lawn chairs, and in the farther troughs of darkness, under trees and huddled by shrubs, the younger people, smoking, passing out bottles and cans from their coolers. To her right, a blonde couple lay on their sides, facing each other. The girl’s hand was in the boy’s back pocket, and his hand was open on the seat of her jeans. Directly behind them was a large group of teenagers that kept calling out to newly arriving friends. Occasionally they called to the couple, who ignored them.
Young children wandered from family to family. Their tired-looking mothers were so careless, she thought, noticing one little boy stray onto the path, his sneaker laces untied, his hips under his thin pajamas padded with diapers. She tensed forward as he waddled closer and closer to the upper sidewalk, to the traffic passing in a long stream of headlights.
“No!” she suddenly cried, her hand jerking as instinctively toward him as he seemed drawn to the streaking lights. A woman ran up behind him and scooped him onto her hip.
She could feel everyone staring at her, so she narrowed her eyes and focused on the bandstand. A galloping march pounded from the loudspeakers. People began to clap along, and children raced down the paths to march around the bandstand in a blur of heads. At the clash of cymbals, the trumpeters rose in resolute fanfare to the drummer’s dark trembling beat. And there, in the midst of the cheering and whistling crowd, she closed her eyes and thumped her chest and kept trying to clear her throat. Silence came, and now, as the band began to play “Beautiful Dreamer,” the first clear strains of the violin sent a chill through her.
“So good to see you,” Mr. Weilman said, sitting beside her. “I come to every concert, but I barely know anyone anymore. Where did they all go?” he asked, looking around. He shook his head. “To Arizona, that’s where. You know, I think there’s a whole contingent of Atkinsonians there, and all these funerals I keep going to are just farewell parties. They just pack themselves up in their beautiful caskets and get shipped down there.” He laughed.
Mr. Weilman talked throughout the concert. He remembered when this bandstand had been built, to replace the original one of wood, which had finally collapsed in a violent summer storm. The money and materials had all been donated by local merchants. Horace Beecham had been one of the project’s prime movers. Horace had had a great sense of civic responsibility, Mr. Weilman said, adding with a chuckle, “Which is probably the only sense the old goat ever had.”
He became more animated as the concert went on. A most embarrassing incident had just taken place, he confided, telling her how one day, in the supermarket checkout line, he had bagged his own groceries, then stayed on talking to the cashier while he continued bagging other customers’ groceries. Next thing he knew, he had been hired. And now, four weeks later, this very morning, he had been fired for the very disorder that had gotten him hired in the first place, logorrhea.
She glanced across the street. When the concert ended, she would sit here until all the lights went out in the boardinghouse, and then she would go back and sleep on the porch.
“Do you know what an affliction logorrhea is, Martha?” He regarded her pensively. “Do you even know what logorrhea is?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure. It’s certainly not contagious, since that’s the first word you’ve spoken to me tonight.”
Twenty-one
Mr. Weilman lived on a narrow tree-lined street of closely set houses, their dark yards walled by ancient tangles of spirea, forsythia, lilac, and honeysuckle. “Careful,” he warned, stepping around the two tricycles and a go-cart on his front walk. “Left where they fell at the bedtime knell,” he said with a chuckle, setting down her suitcase while he unlocked the front door.
As he showed her through the house, he explained that he had been giving away all but his most necessary furnishings. Now each bedroom contained only a bed and a chest of drawers. In the dining room, the mahogany chairs sat seat-down on top of the table for easy cleaning. He had already given the buffet, the tea cart, and the silver chest to a young couple down the street. “I don’t need them, and I’d rather see them go to people I like than have it all end up someday with strangers,” he explained. Their footsteps echoed down the bare hallway.
The living room ran the length of the house, with an acrid-smelling fireplace set between two bays of uncurtained windows. In this long high-ceilinged room there were only two worn green chairs on a thin red-and-blue Oriental carpet that had most of its fringe chewed away. Against the wall, on a square table with cut-glass drawer pulls, was a tall brass lamp with a dented shade. The teetering piles of books under both windows made her think he had given away his bookcases, and probably just recently.
In the fall there were mice in the walls, he said, and in the attic, an occasional bat. There were some nights when he would wake from a sound sleep convinced the old place had sprung to life with all its creaking and groaning and, from the dark side of the attic door, hissing if he came too near. He said he had begun to think of the old house as an enormous conveyance, straining at its moorings, wanting to lift off as soon as enough ballast had been discharged.
Everything was clean, he assured her, turning on the light in the kitchen. He scrubbed the bathrooms, floor and fixtures, himself once a week, the tub walls every other month. The rest was done monthly by a cleaning service. “When was, the last time you ate?” he asked, pulling out a chair for her at the drop-leaf table.
She said she wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t hungry, so it didn’t matter. If anything, she felt sick to her stomach. She sat down and braced her
chin on her hands, watching dazedly as Mr. Weilman slapped ground meat into a patty, which he fried and served to her on a paper plate along with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. This way he had no dishes to wash. “I travel light,” he said and she wondered if he had also given away his dishes. Chewing dryly, she got the meat caught in her throat, but because he was so anxious to please her, she kept at it. He sat down and watched her eat, his gaunt old face glowing with pleasure.
“You know,” he said, “there’s no sense looking all over town for a room when I have all these empty.”
Exhausted, she sipped her coffee.
He smiled hopefully. “What do you think?”
“Would you mind?”
“Mind! I’ll mind if you don’t! In fact, you can move in for good, if you’d like. Might as well! Two lonely souls, seems like the logical thing to do.”
That would be perfect. Mack could visit her here with much less attention than at the boardinghouse. She covered her mouth to hide her nervous smile. “I don’t go out at night. You could lock all the doors by seven.” She tried to remember what other rules Claire Mayo had posted on the foyer pillar. “I never shower longer than five minutes and I never leave a room with the light on.”
He considered this. “Interesting.” He rubbed his chin. “So, if there’s a light on, you must remain in the room.”
“Yes,” she said, then shook her head. “No!” He’d been catching her in these word traps since childhood. These were precisely the convoluted conversations Frances and her friends had so little patience with.
“Then who turns it off?”
“I do.”
“But I thought you said you never leave a room with the light on.”
“I never leave a room with …” She pointed up as his eyes flickered eagerly. “UNTIL I turn off the light. First,” she added, happier than she had been in weeks.
It was noontime, and now the phone just rang and rang. Every time she called, it was always Frances who answered, never Mack. After four days of this, she was beginning to wonder if he had left. She hung up and dialed again; this time she counted the rings. She hung up on fifty. Next time she would wait till sixty. He might be out in the orchard or swimming in the pool. She dialed and began to count. Downstairs, Mr. Weilman’s back-porch door slammed again, and she lost track. Was she on thirty-seven or forty-seven? Her hand shook as she pressed the buttons, then began to count each ring. “One, two, three, four …”
BANG! Bang! Bang! It was the door again. She hurried out of the bedroom. Someone was down there banging it on purpose. All morning long, there had been a constant stream of neighborhood children in and out of the house for water, crackers, chalk, to use the bathroom. Right before Mr. Weilman left to take her check and her deposit forms down to the bank, one thin little girl in a rumpled sundress had limped in, sobbing, with blood from her scraped knee trickling down her shinbone. She had fallen off her tricycle in Mr. Weilman’s driveway. He knelt in front of her, his quivering hands attempting to pull the little red string through the bandage paper, as he asked in an endlessly patient voice how many times had he warned her that his driveway was different from hers. His had two pebble-studded concrete ramps just wide enough for automobile tires, with a broader strip of grass growing in between. The little girl shrugged and her chest heaved with the aftershock of a tearless sob. She kept looking at Martha, hunched over the table, filling out the new account forms Mr. Weilman had gotten for her yesterday.
“Maybe a hundred,” Mr. Weilman said, stretching the bandage over the cut. “Or maybe a thousand,” he sighed, getting up.
“But I was careful,” the girl said.
Martha’s head shot up. Oh, and didn’t she remember that tone from her own childhood, that pathetic little whine that could turn so venomous so fast. I WAS CAREFUL. BUT SHE PUSHED ME. IT’S NOT MY FAULT. SHE DID IT.
“Careful isn’t careful enough, or else you wouldn’t’ve fallen off and you wouldn’t have that cut!” she blurted, instantly regretting the childishly gloating tone and cadence of her voice.
Both the girl and Mr. Weilman looked at her, then glanced at one another.
“So there you go, Hilary,” he said, lifting the child off the chair and setting her down on the floor. “Almost as good as new,” he called as she limped outside. The door slammed and Martha winced.
Mr. Weilman looked at her. “She’s only four,” he said.
Well, she hadn’t said anything then. But now she would. The brats. Listen to them down there. He wasn’t even home, and they thought they could just run in and out of here whenever they felt like it. Poor old man, she thought, racing down the stairs, he let everyone run all over him. In the few days she had been here, she had seen more traffic in and out of this house than in all her years at home; at Frances’s, she corrected herself, wheeling around the corner. In the kitchen, two children were trying to pour lemonade from a heavy glass pitcher into a trayful of small paper cups. With each pour, lemonade sloshed into the tray.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, bearing down on them so quickly that the child with the pitcher jumped back and knocked over two of the cups. Martha yanked the dripping pitcher away from the girl and set it in the sink.
“We’re making freezer cups,” the boy said behind her.
“Oh no, you’re not!” she said. “No, sir! Not in here you’re not!”
“Mr. Weilman said we could,” protested the boy. His hands were dirty and his arms were streaked with the drying sticky lemonade. Small dark splatters of it were on the floor. “He always lets us,” he said, licking between his fingers.
Fat little face and those hard little eyes … Ooh, she didn’t like him … not at all.… No respect … Listen to him sputtering on and on about lemonade and freezer cups, fresh thing. As if it were his right.
“It’s his turn,” the girl offered timidly. She had retreated to the door, where she waited with her hand on the latch.
The boy kept explaining the same thing, that it was his turn. He said it again now as he started to open the refrigerator to retrieve the pitcher she had just put there.
“No!” she cried, slamming the refrigerator door so hard he jerked along with it. “Now get out of here! Go!” she ordered, then steered him by the shoulders onto the narrow side porch. His thick-lidded eyes regarded her sullenly through the screen.
“C’mon, Josh! That’s Marthorgan!” the girl said, the very word embodying the nightmarish creature that had been breathed suddenly into flesh-and-blood life before their eyes.
“That’s Marthorgan. That’s Marthorgan,” Martha said in a singsong. She watched them dart across the shady street into a sunlit strip of side lawn, then around the back of a gray house that, like all these houses, was filled with children like them, messy, cruel children. Marthorgan. That’s who they saw. Marthorgan. And there wasn’t a way she knew how to change it. She had always hoped that contained somewhere in all this turbulence there was a quiet normalcy that would one day emerge to deliver her into the world, confident, calm, and likable. As a teenager, she had lain awake countless nights trying to figure out what made her different, trying to determine what was good about herself. In an effort to find her best feature and capitalize on it, she would study her slender feet and hands, her long neck, her thick hair, her wide mouth, bright eyes, her full breasts; but no matter what the fashion magazines advised or the mirror reflected, she knew the flaw was too deep.
Lately she had begun to wonder if her vision, her perception might not be too keen. Most people invented their own truth as both armament and balm, like Mr. Weilman thinking he was being good to the children by giving them the run of his house when it was as plain as the nose on her face what was going on here. They thought he was a fool and probably had some name for him too. “Marthorgan, Marthorgan,” she chanted as she began to scrub the sticky mess from the counter. The wet paper cups sat swelling in the tray of lemonade. All at once she threw down her rag. She would leave the mess here and let him see what a disas
ter his carelessness had caused.
The phone rang: A woman asked to speak to Mr. Weilman, and Martha told her he wasn’t back yet.
“Who is this?” the woman snapped.
“I’m a friend of Mr. Weilman’s.” She wasn’t about to give her name to some stranger.
“Is this Martha Horgan?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Laura Barrett. I’m Joshua’s mother. I live across the street in the gray house. Joshua tells me that you shook him and pushed him and …”
“I didn’t shake him and push him!”
“Well, that’s not what Joshua says, and that’s not what Jennifer Hoffler says!”
“He wouldn’t leave, so I put my hand on his shoulder and I opened the door and … and that’s what happened.” She covered her eyes. Her heart was racing. The brats. See what happened when they didn’t get their own way.
“Don’t you ever touch my son again! Do you hear me?”
“He was very fresh to me!”
“Then you should have called me! If this ever, ever happens again, I’ll have you arrested for assault and battery, and don’t think I won’t!” The phone crashed in her ear.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Mack. She had to talk to him. She missed him, missed being near him, hearing his voice, or washing the dishes he would leave in the sink, or just smelling his citrusy cologne. She dialed, and he answered on the first ring.
“Mack! It’s me, Martha!” she cried, grinning and slapping her forehead with relief.
“How’re you doing?” He hesitated. “Is everything all right?” he asked in a low voice.
“Everything’s all right! How are you? Did those cuts heal? How’s your ankle? It’s not broken, is it? I’ve been so afraid you broke it. And then, every time I called, Frances answered, so I started to think maybe you left or you were in the hospital or something. And then nobody answered.”
“Hey, slow down.” He laughed, and it made her laugh. “I’m fine. My ankle’s fine. It was just one mean bruise, that’s all. I haven’t answered because when I’m writing I always disconnect the phone, and then these last few days nobody’s been here because we drove up to Quebec City. So what’ve you been doing? Isn’t this weather beautiful?”
A Dangerous Woman Page 30