“In Stanton. There’s something else …”
“Yes?”
“That I want to clarify.”
“About …?”
“Alice. Alice and me.”
“How is she? Shauna said she had a boy.”
“Yes. A healthy baby boy.”
We were both silent. I folded my arms across my ribs strait-jacket style. It was odd how I felt about Alice—full of envy and full of dislike. Leonard was watching me. Under his thick black brows his eyes were brimming with a watery light, bright glimmers of pain which his tight-lipped smile seemed to contradict. But it wasn’t a smile, of course. It was a grimace. “The baby’s not mine,” he said. He sat up again and settled his arms on the chair arms. “In case you wondered.”
“Why would I wonder?”
He went on calmly, ignoring my lie. “I didn’t want you to wonder about my doing that.”
“Doing what? Sleeping with someone you hate?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“It’s not my business.”
“Isn’t it? I would like it to be your business.”
“What do you mean? Whose baby is it?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
“Is it Skip’s?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat staring at each other. In the kitchen, my mother’s cuckoo clock struck the half-hour. It was two-thirty.
I said, “These last few weeks I’ve been figuring out my life. I’d like to sell the house and go to medical school.”
He laughed.
I said, indignantly, “Why are you laughing?”
“Because. You’re fulfilling my mother’s dream. Actually, I’ve been figuring out my life, too. The newspaper’s folded.”
“The Sentinel? Already? What a shame. I thought it was just catching on.”
“It was.”
“What happened?”
“Skip withdrew his support.”
“His law partners objected?”
“No doubt. Anyway, it’s for the greater good. He has in mind running for State Assembly.”
“Ah. He doesn’t want to be associated with a bunch of radicals.”
“Something like that.”
“What will you do now?”
He smiled. “Fulfill your mother’s dream. I’m going to law school.”
We grinned at each other. I said, “How marvelous. How will you pay for it?”
“A small inheritance. Some help from the folks. Part-time jobs. And I have a plan, which is—suppose we both lived here?”
“What?”
“Suppose we both lived here, in this house?”
“What are you saying, exactly?”
“You know what I’m saying.” He didn’t move. There was something implacable in the way he sat in the chair. I was afraid to ask him what he meant. Did he mean share expenses? Or did he mean …? And what about John? He sat so still, with his sharp knees creasing his pants legs. And then he sighed, and rolled his head back and groaned.
I had gotten the letter from Skip just a week after I’d left the Ridge. “This is all wrong,” it had said. “What shall we do?”
I had done nothing. I couldn’t think of what to do and so I had done nothing. It came to me then that I’d done nothing for quite a long time, years, in fact. My seeming activity, constantly tracking Skip, was really a form of doing nothing. I thought I loved him. Did I? What was it I loved about him?
He was so remote.
I loved that about him.
He was inaccessible.
I loved that, too.
I loved Skip as if from a great distance, as if there were a high invisible wall all around him. I could never get to where he was. He could never get to me.
Maybe because of John, and the intensity of his illness, I needed that distance. All those years I avoided extremes of feeling. I avoided the passions. I was afraid of loss of control. Loss of control reminded me of John in one of his rages.
So I kept everything very, very cool.
And then, that day in the dairy room, I sat on a broken wooden chair reading my mother’s journal by the light that came in the flawed dusty panes of the dairy window. She had started her journal the day she arrived at the farm. It was summer, 1938. A week later, she met my father and fell in love, passionately in love. Her every thought, breath, feeling centered upon my father. She couldn’t imagine life without him. She knew they would marry, and love each other forever, and have wonderful children.
I read those pages and watched something blur the faint blue lines of the notebook I was reading. I was crying. That morning I’d said to myself, ‘I’ll never have children.’ I’d told myself it was because of John.
But it wasn’t. It was Skip. I didn’t want to have Skip’s children. I wasn’t sure why. I’d come to a realization about Skip—I would never know him, I would never trust him. (Wasn’t that what I wanted?).
I had guessed he was sleeping with Alice. I hadn’t confronted him. I knew what he would say. “Didn’t mean a thing.” I believed him. Skip used the catchwords of our generation—“open,” “free,” “non-possessive.” But what was the truth? Nothing meant anything. He was smart, he could argue, he could think, but nothing meant anything. When I looked at his eyes, those changeable hazel-green eyes, they seemed to me intelligent and utterly flat, all reflective surface, totally lacking in depth of feeling.
So I’d gone on reading my mother’s journal with a sense of emptiness and an anguished longing. I missed my mother, but that wasn’t it. I wanted something she’d had. I wanted to love someone the way she’d loved my father, in that golden summer before World War II, on that Sussex County dairy farm.
5.
That same week in September my father called with good news: they’d finally found a witness to John’s beating. The witness was Alice Hintle. In fact, there were two witnesses—Alice Hintle and Skip. Why hadn’t Skip come forward sooner?
Skip been at The Rainbow’s End with Alice that night, so when John appeared Skip thought of it as “damned awkward.” Then I’d left the Ridge, just sort of left without even a message for him, and he’d decided the hell with it, he’d go to Maine. The Conant Marshalls had a family compound (two houses, two guest cottages) on an island off the coast of Maine and the entire Loomis family had been invited for a couple of weeks of sailing. Skip loved to sail. By the time he got back to the Ridge he was certain he wanted out of our marriage.
He said to me later on the telephone: “Okay, so it wasn’t exactly my most shining moment. I was confused. I knew how you’d react to my, uh, being with Alice that night. You always had a problem with her. And at that point I was still hoping we could save it. The marriage, I mean.”
I said, “You were thinking of our marriage? That’s why you didn’t come forward to help out John? Skip, you’re a lawyer. John could have been indicted. You’re telling me you didn’t realize that?”
“You’re overreacting as usual, Liz,” Skip said. “They had no case against John. Nothing would have happened.”
“Really? And how about in the meantime, Skip? In the meantime, before we found that out, we were all going through hell. You didn’t realize what this was doing to John? To all of us?”
It is true that John was not indicated, but this was entirely due to my father and his friend, Dr. William Weems. My father had called the State Senator from Union County who called the State Senator from Sussex County who called the County Coroner. The Senator strongly recommended that a new autopsy be performed on the murder victim, Erroll Knacker; that the autopsy be performed at the new medical college in Newark; and that Dr. Weems, a distinguished Professor of Forensic Medicine, be present at the autopsy.
So poor Erroll Knacker was disinterred and taken from the Cedar Knoll Cemetery in Dix Mills to the Medical Center in Newark. His burned and battered body was reexamined. The cause of death was more precisely established. The second pathologist’s report showed that Erroll had died of a massive wound to the chest, a wound tha
t had been overlooked at the first autopsy perhaps because of the charred condition of the body. The massive wound was unusual, the doctors said, because the instrument used wasn’t a knife, nor an ax. From the way the flesh was torn—out—the doctors theorized that some kind of implement, a hook-like implement, had come at Erroll with great force. The implement had ripped into Erroll’s chest literally lifting his heart up and pulling it to one side.
Dear God, forgive us.
Forgive us for what we did not do.
Dan Knacker went to prison for fifteen years, long enough for the Knacker Farm to fall into decay. Eventually, the farm was auctioned off for back taxes.
A while ago someone sent me a clipping from a northwest New Jersey newspaper. There was a photo of Elston “Skip” Loomis looking distinguished but rural in jeans and boots, sitting on a horse. The article enthused about Loomis, a well-known local lawyer-developer who had bought the old Knacker Farm. The Knacker Farm adjoined Loomis’s own farm, historic Cool’s Ridge. Loomis’s current plans for the two properties included a sensitive development which would preserve historical features and rigorously observe environmental constraints. The “Cool’s Ridge” development would combine luxury villas, condominiums, a golf course and a club house. The development would be a “gated community.” Several local and civil rights groups had protested the presence of a “gated community” in this rural area but, according to the article, “Loomis has assured everyone that the gated community actually represents democracy at its best.”
“‘It’s a democracy of money,’ says Loomis. ‘If you can afford it, you can belong. What could be more democratic than that?’”
“A Republican member of the State Assembly from the 23rd district, Loomis is married to the former Eileen Marshall of Washington, D.C. He is running for Congress (16th district) as a Republican in the next election.”
6.
Leonard came over to me and I stood up hastily, with my hands thrust out to ward him off. He took my wrist, and bent his head. I moved away.
“Come on,” he said gently. “Give in.”
I whispered, “I can’t.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?” he asked in a low voice. “Of me?”
“Not of you. Don’t you see …”
“What?” He gently persisted.
“There’s my brother … John.”
“Oh I know,” he said. “I know … I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes and tipped his head against mine. I thought of John and I felt so sad, as if an arrow of pain had lodged between my ribs. And then I stopped thinking of John and put my arms around Leonard’s neck. I felt him shiver and I thought of that moment in sailing when you’ve been lost in a fog, becalmed, and then the wind shifts, the fog lifts, the stays creak, and the boat trembles in its deep eagerness to go forward.
I was frightened, then, but determined and deeply happy, and I had no idea where our journey would end.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Ursula Perrin
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2486-0
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Distributed by Open Road Distribution
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Cool's Ridge Page 30