“Not there. If I there, I stop him.” Ezra hit the floor hard with the walking stick.
“Of course you would have.”
Ezra watched me a minute to make sure I believed that. “I upstairs. I hear them fight.”
“You mean he struck her?”
“He never hit Miss Amalia. They were fighting with words.”
“What did they say?”
Ezra looked away. “I can’t make it out.”
I didn’t believe him. “Not any of it? How did you know they were quarreling?”
“I reckon I know when somebody speak hate.” He placed the walking stick upright in front of him and put one hand over the other on its knob.
“Who was hateful, Miss Amalia or Mr. Bayard?”
“Mr. Bayard. She too good—good as gold.”
“You know Miss Amalia was my father’s mother.” I leaned toward Ezra and waited, but he neither confirmed nor denied it. “Were they fighting because Bayard Lott was his father?”
Ezra didn’t move. He stared out the jib window, looking across the meadow to the woods beyond. Then his thumb stirred a little on the stick. He took so long to reply that I thought he would not answer. “Maybe he is; maybe he isn’t.” He dropped his head and looked at the floor. Ezra’s answer came with a great effort and with sadness.
“But Miss Amalia was my grandmother.”
“That the Lord’s own truth.” He stood and walked heavily to the window and closed it. Then he shuffled around the room, closing and latching the other windows. “Aunt Polly got supper ready.” I followed him outside, where he closed the front door and secured it with a key the size of a hammer.
We walked back to the quarters in silence. Ezra had told me as much as he was going to, so I didn’t annoy him with more questions. He walked quickly, silently, resentful that he had revealed so much about Amalia. Perhaps he wanted to get back at me for my prying and that was why, just before we reached the quarters, Ezra said cruelly, “It too bad you don’t come see Miss Amalia after you get you a divorce. She help you. Might be if you done it, your husband don’t die in the airplane crash.”
Or perhaps Ezra meant nothing at all by the remarks. How could he understand my guilt? Ezra knew only what had been in the newspapers. Still, I felt hollow inside, and when we reached the quarters, I told Aunt Polly I was not feeling well. Before she could reply, I picked up the box of keepsakes and hurried off.
__________
The first newspaper account of David’s death had been a straightforward report of the facts about the aeroplane crash. David was killed when the craft he was flying hit the side of Lookout Mountain, west of Denver. His flight teacher told reporters that David had been a careful and methodical pilot but that he’d lacked experience. The instructor speculated that the plane had been caught in the vicious winds that sweep along the Front Range, and he said that even a seasoned pilot would have had difficulty controlling the little plane.
The subsequent newspaper articles were sympathetic. The reporters found no evidence that David had been careless or that he had been drinking. There were a few sentences speculating that someone might have sabotaged the plane. After all, David had handled messy divorce cases, and there had been occasional threats against him. David himself, it was pointed out, had been divorced just recently, but, fortunately for me, the idea that the end of our marriage might have had something to do with the crash was dismissed out of hand.
Mostly, the articles told about David and his career, describing him as a successful lawyer who was active in civic affairs. There was information about me, about the “socially prominent” family David had married into, and there were photos of the two of us at society events, “in happier times,” as the papers put it. An anonymous friend of mine was quoted in the Denver Post as saying that the divorce had been amicable, that David and I had grown apart but remained firm friends. That was untrue, of course, as the friend—most likely Caroline—knew.
Henry learned about the accident first, and he hastened to my apartment to tell me. His voice breaking, for he was very fond of David—and the two of them had continued their weekly luncheons even after the divorce—he said, “It was one of those terrible things that happen for no reason. Sometimes God makes mistakes.”
But it wasn’t God who’d made the mistake. I knew the instant Henry told me the circumstances of David’s death that it had been no accident, that David had deliberately flown the plane into the mountain. He had committed suicide, and I was responsible.
I had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile from the quarters when my shoulders began to ache from carrying the heavy box, and I sat down on a log beside the road. A boy came along in a jalopy and slowed, offering me a lift into town. But I could not bear to talk to anyone just then, and so I turned him down. A few minutes later, a man in a wagon drawn by a pair of mules stopped, but I waved him off. Then it was quiet, and I stared into the tangle of woods, which were soft and friendly and mulberry-colored under the rich shadows. I let the memories come back then—the sordidness and the revulsion, my love for David and my hate, and, most of all, the fear that my love for him had been worthless, his love for me a fraud.
Mother and I had made plans to spend the weekend at the Broadmoor, and we were motoring down to the Colorado Springs resort in David’s car when she suddenly took ill. We turned around and drove to the Marion Street house and summoned her doctor, who diagnosed a case of the flu. He assured me she would be fine in a few days and that I’d been wise to cancel the trip. When Henry came home, I promised to check in with Mother the next day, then left for the apartment. I thought David would be surprised and pleased that none of our friends knew I’d returned and that we would have the weekend to ourselves. He had been distracted lately. In the morning, he could sleep late and have breakfast in bed. I would set it on a silver tray with a flower, because David liked things done elegantly.
The apartment was dark. David must have gone out, I thought, perhaps with friends or to the movies by himself, as he’d begun to do lately. But there were voices from the bedroom. I decided that he’d gone to bed early and fallen asleep with the radio on. I tiptoed down the hallway so as not to awaken him, but at the bedroom door, I realized the voices were real and that they were coming from the bed. Without thinking about it, I pushed the button on the wall. As the bright light came on overhead, David half-rose from the bed, ashen-faced. Then slowly, a second head turned to me, eyes wild and confused, like those of an animal caught in the light of car lamps on a mountain road. The face and hands were tan, but the body was as white as a dishrag.
“Arthur!” I cried.
The three of us froze for a painfully long time, staring at one another in the harsh glare of the overhead light. As the scene sank into my consciousness, I felt disgust and rage and betrayal and finally a sadness so overwhelming that I could have drowned in it.
I was not naïve. I knew about such things, of course, but until that moment, it had never crossed my mind that David was a homosexual. Such men were supposed to be frail boys, like satyrs, with nervous darting eyes, or pudgy fellows with big soft lips. David was masculine and fit. So was Arthur. The great irony, of course, was that I had wondered if he were infatuated with Betsey.
“For God’s sake, Nora, turn out the light,” David said at last. His voice was high-pitched and filled with anguish.
My hand was still attached to the light button, but I could not push it. At that moment, my body would not function. My legs were limp, like empty Christmas stockings, and I had to clutch the doorjamb to keep from collapsing onto the floor. I gaped at the two of them, until finally Arthur pulled the sheet over his pale, firm body and buried himself under the spread—a spread that I had made from remnants of lace and silk and velvet.
“Nora,” David said. “Nora, let me explain.”
“No, David.” My name coming from that horrible bed pulled me out of my transfixed state. “You can’t. You can’t ever explain.” I turned and ran from the apartm
ent then, not knowing if David called me or came after me. I hurried down the stairs and got into David’s car, and without making the decision to do so, I found myself motoring west, rushing into the mountains and driving on and on. I tried to explain away that awful scene, but my mind was so filled with the picture of David and Arthur in the bed that I knew there was no explanation other than the obvious one. Something precious had become rotten. Or maybe there had never been anything precious about our marriage.
David was all the ugly words—queer, pantywaist, fairy, sissy, some even worse. I knew so little about homosexuality. Had I caused it? Could David be cured? Did he want to be cured? Had there been other men? Perhaps this was the first time, but thinking back over the friendship between David and Arthur, the excuses they had made to be together, I knew it had happened before. Later, in the one very long talk that David and I had, he told me a great deal. But that night, I had no answers, only the knowledge that David had never loved me, but only used me to cover up his horrid secret.
Late in the evening, I stopped at a filling station high in the mountains. An oxbow hung beside the door of the little shack. When I switched off the motor, a man in greasy coveralls emerged from behind the remains of a Conestoga wagon. “Fill ’er up,” I said, rolling the window all the way down and shivering in the cold air, realizing there was snow on the road. I had been too lost in thought to see it.
“You got money, do you?” he asked suspiciously. “I don’t give up nothing I’ve worked for without a pretty fair trade.”
Not knowing whether the man was drunk or just surly, I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocketbook and held it up. Then he stood silently with one foot on the running board, holding the long hose against the tank while the gasoline went up and down in the big glass pump.
“Where you headed?” The man had hung up the hose and was using a rag to wipe spilled gasoline from the side of the car.
“West,” I replied vaguely, realizing I had no destination.
“Shouldn’t drive it at night if I’s you.”
“Is the road bad farther on?”
“If I can’t say nothing good about it, I don’t talk. And I’m not talking.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I can’t tell you. I got troubles of my own.” He took the bill, breathing on me with his liquory breath, and went inside for change, while I pondered whether his information was good or just whiskey talk.
The man came back and counted out the dimes and nickels and dollar bills, then said, “I guess you’re between the rock and a hard spot about going over Suicide Pass yonder.”
I had never heard of Suicide Pass and did not know if it were a proper name or a local moniker. I wouldn’t for anything let on that he had upset me. Mountain people depended on the flatlanders, as they called those of us who lived on the plains, but they resented us and enjoyed deriding us. Sometimes, they played practical jokes on us. Tomorrow, the man would sit with his chums on the bench in front of the filling station and embroider on the story of the foolish woman from the city who had tried to drive across the mountains at night. They would find me even more amusing if they knew why I’d fled, I thought bitterly.
Snow glinted in the moonlight on either side of the dark road ahead. I knew I would not like to be caught on a mountain pass in a blizzard, especially when my mind was so troubled. There was no choice but to turn back. I put the car in gear and drove across the road to a café.
A woman wiping a table with a rag looked up as I came through the door and said sourly, “You don’t want supper, do you? I’m about to close. Got to wash my feet and go to bed.”
“Just coffee.” I could not swallow food.
A man at a table nodded at me and said to her, “I guess she must have heard about your cooking, Sis. The meat’s so tough, you can’t cut the gravy with a knife.”
“Oh, go on with you, Folger. I notice it ain’t stopped you from coming in.” Sis had become more good-natured now that she didn’t have to fix food for me.
“Well, I’m going to stop, ’cause I got laid off at the mine. Anymore, if you’re not twenty-five or thirty years old, you can’t get a job.”
“You never worked that hard anyway.” Sis poured so much coffee into a heavy china mug that it slopped over. She didn’t wipe the cup, just shoved it across the counter.
“The Blind Tom owes me for two weeks, and it owes the whole town for letting it throw all them tailings down the mountain.”
“Oh, that mine don’t owe we a dime. It’s kept us going for years.”
I wiped the side of the cup with a paper napkin and paid the woman for the coffee as well as for the mug, so that I could take the hot liquid with me. It would keep me awake during the drive back to Denver. I did not know that I would not sleep that night—and, in fact, would not sleep much at all for a very long time.
As I left the café, Folger said, “They’re so spiteful, they don’t know what to do with theyselves. They’s weighted down with grievements.”
He might have been talking about me, because my life, which had seemed perfect only a few hours before, was indeed weighted down with grievements. Back in David’s car, I looked for a place to set the coffee, but the auto’s dashboard was sloped and the cup would not fit on it. So I propped it on the seat beside me and drove back to Denver, taking a perverse pleasure in the way the coffee sloshed onto the seat. David disliked seat covers and had refused to install them. He would be furious at the coffee spill. Then I realized that David would not care now about stains.
As I came down Lookout Mountain and saw the lights of Denver spread out below, I realized that I did not know where I was going. The apartment was out of the question. I would have to face David sometime, but not now. With neither suitcase nor kitbag, I couldn’t check into a tourist court. If I asked to stay with Caroline, she would ask questions. The only place for me to go was home to Mother and Henry. I would let myself in with my key and think of something to tell them later.
But as I opened the door of the Marion Street house, Henry emerged from the living room, a cup of tea in his hand. “She’s all right. You mustn’t worry,” he said.
“I couldn’t sleep and thought she might need me,” I said, grateful that Henry had provided me with an excuse. Our aborted trip to the Broadmoor seemed so long ago that I had forgotten Mother had the flu.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Oh, but it’s what I want.”
Henry turned on the hall light and took in my ghastly face and swollen eyes and the wrinkled motoring suit that I had put on in the morning for the drive with Mother to the Springs. The hem was out where the heel of my shoe had caught it at the mountain stop. “What’s wrong?”
I started to tell him that nothing was wrong but knew he would not believe me. “David and I had a spat. He knows I’m here.”
“He must have forgotten, because he’s called three times.” Henry caught my arm and said, “It can’t be all that bad. Don’t you think you ought to make up?”
“Make up?” I shrieked. “Make up?”
Henry put his finger to his lips and pointed upstairs to where Mother slept.
“Oh, Henry, we’ll never make up. I’m going to file for divorce.” I made the decision at that instant, knowing that there was no other choice. My marriage had ended when I pushed that light button.
Perhaps Henry called David after I left the house in the morning, because David was waiting for me at the top of the stairs when I returned to the apartment. He was looking even more haggard than I did. He held out his hands, but I could not take them. “Not now. I need a bath.”
“Let me draw one for you.”
“No.” I locked the bathroom door, turned on the hot water, and threw my clothes onto the floor. Then I got into the tub, sitting there until the water turned tepid. I brushed my hair and put on the soft wool robe that David had given me for an anniversary gift. Although the heat was on in the apartment and the sun shone through the windows,
I was cold. In fact, I would be cold for weeks, cold to my bones, sitting in the hot sun with a coat on and sleeping in a flannel nightgown under heavy quilts. The warmth never seemed to reach beneath the skin.
David had set cups and saucers on the table in the sunroom, and when I joined him, he poured coffee into the pot that was part of the Christmas silver service. “Do you want eggs—scrambled eggs or a soft-boiled egg?”
“Is that what we’re going to talk about—eggs?” I asked shrilly.
“Nora . . .”
“What?”
He sighed, and his whole body shook. “What do you want me to say?”
“Oh, well, why don’t we talk about the weather. Or Mother’s flu—or in the excitement last night, did I forget to tell you about it? Or maybe the coffee I spilled on your car seat. So sorry.” I drew in a deep breath, for I had intended to be civil. “Or maybe we should talk about the divorce.”
David drew into himself. “That’s pretty drastic, isn’t it? We can work things out. I promise never to see Arthur again.”
“That is a promise you cannot keep.”
“I can try. We don’t have to be hasty.”
“Yes, David, we do. Our marriage is over. I can’t stand to be married to you, can’t stand to even look at you.”
“But all the years . . .” David had tears in his eyes as he reached across the table for my hand, but I would not give it to him. “Dearest, I’m so sorry.”
I felt a little sad for him then and said, not unkindly, “Tell me about it. I want to understand. You owe me that.” Then, because I could not stop wondering, I asked, “Is it my fault?”
David’s open hand turned into a fist, and he put it into his lap. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It started before I even met you, back in college. I thought by moving here, I’d end it. I’ve always had those feelings. You remember when I broke our engagement. It was because I was all balled up inside and wasn’t sure it wouldn’t happen again.” He glanced up at me pleadingly. “Then I decided that you were such a dear girl and that marriage would cure me. And it did.”
New Mercies Page 23