by Tricia Dower
McWilliams recoils. In a deliberate manner that seems calculated to scare her, he opens his jacket enough to reveal a holstered revolver. “Where then?”
Her mouth goes dry. If she tells them he took Tavis to the barber’s, they’ll know she’s alone, as defenseless as a china doll. How foolish she was to answer the door.
McWilliams comes so close her eyes cross trying to keep him in focus. His breath smells like caraway seeds. “If we have to report you were uncooperative, it won’t look good for you.”
She backs up until her heels find the edge of the first step. “I need you to leave now.” She hates the shiver in her voice. She has to pee.
The two men glare at her for a sickening moment. Then Romano says, “We’ll be back.”
The warmth of the parsonage is shocking. Her bladder lets go.
In the Clark Gable robe Lin gave him last Christmas, Ron hunches over the Tribune. She rustles up bacon and French toast. Tavis, in the high chair he’s outgrowing, says, “Don’t like bacon.” Rain shivers on the windows and drips off the eaves, the music of roots drinking, spring on the way. A lazy moment wrapped in happiness, more precious since the agents’ visit two weeks ago.
“Listen to this,” Ron says. “Somebody broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole the files.”
She turns from the stove. “When?”
“March eighth.”
“Three days before those goons descended on me.” She behaved badly that day when Ron got home, screaming at him for not being there.
As though reading her mind, he looks over, shakes his head. “Not even Carl would have the audacity to burglarize the FBI.” He turns back to the paper.
She drains the bacon, scrambles two eggs for him. Don’t like French toast, he would say if he too were not quite three years old. He relays the news that a massive manhunt is underway. The burglars sent copies of the pilfered documents to a Washington Post writer, who concluded a “secret FBI” declared war on civil rights and antiwar activists some time ago. One document blatantly advises agents to step up the interrogation of activists. It’ll heighten “their paranoia” and “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
She slides the eggs and bacon onto a plate for Ron, sets bite-sized pieces of French toast in front of Tavis and slices muskmelon for herself. Ron has already turned to the funny pages. He loves Peanuts, especially the ones about baseball. An elusive image of Helen comes to her: heating Carl’s coffee on a hotplate in a seedy motel, rain splattering the street outside.
Two weeks later, Ron extricates a fat brown envelope from the mailbox. “Addressed to you, Lin,” he says. “Postmarked Philly.” They’ve just come from Red Owl.
Aggrieved because he rarely gets mail, Tavis howls until she lets him hold it. At home, he won’t give it up, says “Mine” and throws himself to the floor screaming when she pries it away from him. Ron heaves him over his shoulder, lugs him off to the nursery for a talking-to and no doubt a prayer.
She stows the groceries, one ear cocked until bellowing gives way to quiet sobs, takes a seat at the kitchen table and considers the envelope. The only time she’s been in Philadelphia was the day she and Arlene Varga cut school to drive there in Arlene’s father’s car. They sat in a soda shop the American Bandstand kids were supposed to frequent, had visions of crowding into a booth with them in electrifying intimacy but they were in school like she and Arlene should’ve been. She doubts the envelope pertains to that, warily opens it.
Inside are rubber-banded pages, cold to the touch, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke, on top a copy of the “paranoia” document from the FBI burglary story. Someone has circled “mailbox.” Lin double-checks the envelope. Her name is on it, all right. She removes the rubber band and turns the pages with increasing alarm:
A report detailing her work with the Draft Information Center at St. Olaf.
Her high school and college transcripts.
A list of Honeywell Project members with her name and Ron’s underlined.
A transcribed phone conversation between Helen and Lin about the anti-draft poster Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No. “Like it’s a girl’s duty to screw them,” Helen complains in the transcript. Why would anyone care? Does the FBI have nothing better to do than track small potatoes like her and Helen?
A memo congratulates three agents for fabricating a letter that forced a civil rights leader to leave Mississippi.
There’s a photocopied article about a university professor receiving a letter from the Minutemen, similar to the last one she received, “Good work, Charlie” penciled in the margin.
The final document rips the scab off a raging, salted wound: a newspaper clipping about her testimony at Eldon Jukes’s trial. How many people must know of her disgrace?
Ron pops in to get Tavis a glass of water. “He’s going to take a nap,” he says with a grin, “and think things over in his dreams. First I’ve heard him mention dreams. I wonder when he started having them.” His smile fades. “What is it? Your face looks...I don’t know.”
She stares at him in stupefaction.
He says, “I’ll take him his water and be right back.”
Her ears register floors creaking underfoot, a faint whiny complaint and a raspy murmurous response. Her eyes see only the flaking white paint of the table until there he is, across from her, reading the documents, his face registering emotions she can’t decode. When he finishes, he grips her hand. His dark eyes are sad and full of love all at once. His long thumb traces her knuckles. “We can’t tell a soul about this,” he says, his voice weighted with emotion. “He trusts us not to expose him. Sometimes the capacity of that man’s heart overwhelms me.”
She wrenches her hand away, finds her voice. “What are you talking about?”
He moves to sit beside her, strokes the tender skin on the inside of her arm. “It’s Carl, sweetheart, telling you there’s no assassin. The FBI wrote those letters.”
Angry tears burn her eyes. “It doesn’t bother you our phone might be bugged, that they track our lives? Is trading the Minutemen for the FBI supposed to be better?” She starts shaking so hard she fears she’ll fly apart.
He holds her tight and mutters a prayer, his panacea for everything.
She dreams that night of trees thick with people, their huge eyes boring into her.
Mon, Jun 14/71
Flag Day. Don’t make me salute. Somebody leaked a classified Pentagon study that shows Truman, Ike, JFK & LBJ all lied about what we’re doing in Vietnam. The NY Times printed an excerpt today. And in other news, as they say, the FBI keeps a list of Americans they can arrest & imprison w/out trial in the event of a “national emergency.” They call it the Secret Index. I’m positive R & I are on it. Who’ll raise Tavis if we’re in a prison camp?
R said that’s not going to happen. I said, bet the Japanese Americans locked up during WW II thought so too. He made a muscle & said never fear, Underdog is here, which ticked me off. Even if we aren’t rounded up some black & silent nite, we could die in a car crash. Grace is too old to raise another child. Mother and Daddy are younger but they didn’t do such a great job w/me. Cora & Bud Bostrom are a remote possibility. We asked them to be godparents because we weren’t close to anyone else except Carl & Helen & they couldn’t promise to bring him up Christian. (Helen claims Jesus was a sociopath. Think of it, she said, the cult of followers, the messianic complex.) They’re gone now, anyway. Cora’s too gossipy for my liking. Writing this down I see how friendless we are.
Northern Lights
32
Wed, Jun 23/71
How can it not gall him we’ve been played for fools?
She spends the summer feverish with rage at the FBI’s surveillance and indignant with Ron for dismissing her concerns. Whenever he leaves the parsonage she scours it for hidden microphones, listens for telltale humming
and clicking on the phone, finds nothing. Her days feel tedious and hopeless.
When her former advisor calls to invite her to a three-day workshop about a talk therapy approach gaining traction, she welcomes the diversion, takes it as a sign Somebody Up There knows she needs a change. “You’ve likely read Eric Berne’s Games People Play and I’m OK—You’re OK by his protégé Thomas Harris,” Dr. Schmidt says. “I’m told they’re wildly popular.”
She’s ashamed to admit she hasn’t. The last book she read all the way through was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
“No problem,” he says. “You’ll have your chance.” They’re the workshop texts along with Berne’s Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. She’s one of ten psych grads invited. It begins the week after Labor Day at St. Olaf’s. Can she take the time to attend?
The possibility of escaping the parsonage for a few days and using her intellect again electrifies her. She shares her excitement with Ron as they do the dishes, the smell of meatloaf and onions still in the air. He’s rolled the sleeves of his white shirt above his elbows like Daddy used to. Daddy preferred to wash, too.
“You’re not planning to work as a therapist, sweetheart,” he says.
“Not right away, but someday with more training. Wasn’t that the point of my degree?”
“I thought it was to give you the self-confidence to use your unique gifts in the church.”
“And what exactly are those?”
He stares straight ahead as if the answer is in the swirly blue/green design of the wallpaper above the sink. “You’re musical and terrific with kids. You did a bang-up job on Vacation Bible School again this year.”
She laughs. “Yeah, I don’t poison stray dogs, either.”
He groans.
“We talked about my getting a job someday,” she says.
“That was before Tavis.”
“Your mother worked.”
“And I hated it, letting myself in after school, alone all day when I was sick.”
“Where was your father?”
He shrugs. “Saving the world, I suppose. You want some help with that?” She’s struggling with a drawer that’s swollen stuck from the heat. Silverware rattles as she gives it a hard, sudden pull.
“No, I’ve got it.” She drops forks and knives in, is not about to let him change the subject. “I don’t plan to do more right now than attend a workshop. It’s free except for the texts.”
“Who’ll watch Tavis? I can’t manage more than an hour or two a day with the new confirmation class starting. You can’t expect Mom to do it.”
She hands him back a plate with a stubborn piece of meatloaf on it. “I’ve already asked. She’d love having him to herself for three days.”
He shakes off the soapsuds and leans against the sink, his lips forming a mirthless smile. “It would’ve been nice if you’d told me that up front. What if I can’t drive you there and back?”
She’s been reading Dr. Spock’s advice about three-year-olds. Countering your child’s every objection with reason only encourages him to argue every point. “No problem,” she says. “I’ll put Tavis in his stroller and walk there. I can use the exercise.”
He drowns his hands in the dishwater again. “The county road is completely unsafe for walking. You know that.”
“I’ll wear bright colors.”
Holland Hall, where she took her psych courses, will become an ice palace in mere months, its stone turrets coated with rime, its radiators hissing. Today the ivy bearding its walls shows hints of fall’s crimson. Inside it’s dank from having been closed up since July.
She and the other workshop participants claim chairs at two long wooden tables, the four men at one, the six women at the other. They shyly introduce themselves like new first graders. Still a week of summer left yet the men are in corduroy jackets, the other women in knit dresses. Lin paid Cora Bostrom two bucks to take in the red cotton shirtwaist she’s gotten too thin for yet wanted to wear today.
The men are all in post-grad. One woman works as secretary to a psychiatrist, another as a personality test researcher at the U of M, the others in jobs unrelated to their major. Lin is the only stay-at-home mom. She overstates her counseling role in church.
The slim, gray-suited Dr. Laura Klein, starched white hair forming a halo around her head, marches in and opens an arched window. She wastes no time unveiling a theory of the mind Lin’s been searching for since her first psych course. In addition to Freud’s id, ego and superego (which, to be honest, Lin has always found hard to keep straight), Dr. Klein says we experience ourselves in three other ego states: the child, the adult and the part that imitates parents.
It’s so logical, so grail-like.
She’s practically levitating from intellectual liberation when Ron pulls up at the base of the library steps to pick her up later. Tavis looks tickled smug in the front passenger seat. She peers into his glittering eyes and says, “Can Mommy sit here, too, honeybunch?” then silently scolds herself for asking permission.
Tavis says, “Yip, yip,” a new favorite expression thanks to Sesame Street. She scoops him onto her lap and buries her face in his hair. It smells of grass and sun. “Bet you went to the park with Grandma.”
“Yip, yip.”
“Did you jump over the moon?” Lin plays that with him at the seesaw’s low end to help him launch both feet off the ground at once, part of her program to advance his motor skills.
“Nope, nope.”
“What, then?”
“Tavis found fossils.”
Ron gestures toward a bag beside her feet. “Rocks,” he says.
“Fossil rocks,” Tavis says.
“Will you show them to me when we get home?” That’s better. Not asking permission but respecting his dominion over the rocks.
“Yip, yip.”
“Mommy had fun today, too,” she says, looking at Ron.
Ron doesn’t respond, keeps his eyes on the road.
That night in bed, he surprises her by squeezing her breast. She thought he was still peeved she’d gone ahead with the workshop. He’s splashed himself with Old Spice, too. “Exactly what sort of fun did Mommy have today?”
She sits up against the headboard and hugs her knees to her chest. “I learned my inner Child holds all the children I used to be at every age I ever was. Isn’t that amazing? It makes me want to look at old photos of myself. I’m going to ask Mother to send me some.”
He wraps an arm under her knee, pulls her toward him. His moonlit face is all platinum bones and black hollows. “I’d like to see those pictures, too.”
She pulls her knee away. “Lucky I’m learning this before Tavis is totally messed up.”
He kisses her throat, makes sexy breathing sounds. “Who says he’s messed up at all?”
“Everybody is. Everybody has a Not OK Child. Childhood dependence makes it so. We are so small, clumsy and inept compared to our parents. We couldn’t have prevented his Not OK Child, even if we’d been perfect from the start. But if we get our Adults in order, we can guide him to the I’m OK–You’re OK position.”
“Who says we didn’t do everything perfectly?” He hooks a finger in her panties. She gets it now. He’s acting out of his Playful Child.
She grabs his finger to keep it still. “What’s worse, he’s a little tape recorder. Whatever he sees and hears gets recorded in his Parent. And the recording is permanent.”
He grins. “Good thing he’s downstairs right now.”
She turns and rises up on her elbow. “I’m serious, Ron. I need you to listen. His Adult has already started forming. Whenever he acts for himself he decides if what his Parent ego state has recorded is true. We have to tell him there’s no Santa Claus. If he finds out later from someone else, he’ll feel so betrayed.”
“Did you feel betrayed when you
found out?”
His mocking laugh ticks her off. “I don’t remember.” She slides out of bed, heads down to the bathroom to pee. In fact, she remembers it well. After the initial shock of Mother’s “Santa Claus is in your heart,” she set out to discover where the presents were hiding.
He has a meeting in Faribault so Grace will drive her and Tavis home after day two of the workshop. She walks briskly to Grace’s under a canopy of maple and black walnut, the toasted wheat smell of Malt-O-Meal in the air. Leaves crackle under her shoes, the sound of summer saying goodbye. She welcomes fall and winter’s safety, the parsonage shut tight against invading winds and FBI agents, the snug warmth of a fire. She passes the Ole Store Café where she attends prayer breakfasts, the hospital where Tavis was born, the park he found rocks in yesterday. A light breeze dances through her hair and workshop refrains play in her mind.
Tavis must’ve been watching from the porch. He holds Grace’s hand as they descend her front steps then breaks into a run down the long walk, bellowing, “Mommy!” He’s lengthening out, losing the toddler tummy. The wild and happy look on his face makes Lin’s insides want to burst. She goes down on one knee and opens her arms.
He runs into them, says, “Tavis has an inversible jacket.”
She holds him at arm’s length. “I can see that.” The outside is tan and green plaid, the inside solid tan. “Looks like Grandma took you shopping.” Grace is wearing her sturdy brown traipsing-from-store-to-store oxfords.
“Yip, yip. Tavis is fancy on the inside and outside.”
She smiles up at Grace. “Watch Mr. Rogers this afternoon?” Tavis loves the “Everybody’s Fancy” song about private parts.
“Yip, yip,” Grace says. “Thank heavens for that man. I dozed off for a few minutes while he mesmerized Tavis like a snake charmer.”
Lin is alarmed. Grace is sixty-four. Lately, she’s been walking as though her bones ache. Her hair is whiter than black these days. Suppose she falls asleep and Tavis gets into poison or unlatches the front door and stumbles into traffic? “He wears me out, too,” she says. “I could skip tomorrow’s session.”