The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  Late one morning toward the end of November I looked up to see Martha and Hattie on the sidewalk outside. Martha had bare hands but she wore her blue hat with the netting. Hattie wore my mother’s old coat with the piece of rope tied around the waist. They shaded their eyes against the morning sun and tried to look in the window. When they came inside, Martha hugged me and gingerly put her hand on my belly, as if she had never seen a pregnant woman before. They sat at a table next to the stove. I told them to bring their chairs closer and get warm. Martha’s hands were red. She folded them under her armpits to warm them.

  “We have been so worried,” she said. “You never sent word.”

  I sat down. “Hattie knew,” I said, confused. “Hattie came with the wagon and then she came with me to Milwaukee to Carl.”

  “We knew that,” Martha said. “We just never knew anything else.”

  “What else was there to know, Martha?”

  She reached up and fiddled with her hat and then took it off and set it on her lap. “I do not know,” she said at last. “Something.”

  “You did not come,” I said. “Hattie could have shown you the way. Or Carl.”

  “How could I have come?” she said. “It was all the way in Milwaukee.” She made it sound like I had asked her to travel to a foreign land, not to a city she had been to many times before. And here she was in Milwaukee today, a fact she chose to ignore.

  “Do you want something to eat?” I said. “You look hungry.”

  She glanced at the rolls piled in baskets on the counter. She shook her head.

  “I do,” said Hattie. “I could eat a horse.”

  “Hattie,” Martha said. She used her warning voice.

  I stood up. “I will put something on the table. In case you change your mind.”

  “I said I was fine.”

  “I know,” I said. I felt a ripple of kindness toward my older sister, rigid and thin as a straight line. She must have thought I planned to charge her. “But you can have the coffee and rolls for free,” I said.

  They ate in silence. The tearoom was empty and I could sit with them. I could feel the pleasure of being back with my sisters again, even if Martha and I never saw eye to eye.

  “Has August been to see you?” Martha asked suddenly. She shook her skirt to dislodge the crumbs.

  “August?” His name came to me like a word I did not want to say.

  “Does he understand your situation?”

  “What situation?” I gave her a quizzical look. I knew what she meant but I wanted to see if I could get her to talk about it.

  “Your circumstances,” she said delicately. She waved her hand in the air over my stomach like a magician trying to do a trick. “I want to know if he is taking care of things and treating you well,” she said.

  “What difference would that make?”

  She sighed. “It is time for all of this to stop,” she said. “It is time to mend fences. You need to go back to him. You must do whatever it takes to set this right. You have more than proved your point.”

  Hattie set her roll on her plate. “Don’t do it,” she said to me. “I mean it.”

  The stove creaked as it cooled. I stood and took wood from the kindling box and dropped it inside. I poked the fire to make sure it would flame. Martha finished her roll and put her hands in her lap and sat there looking at the top of her hat and then ducked her head and reached for the basket and helped herself to another roll. She would not look at me as she ate. When she was through, she put her hands under her armpits again as if she had to work to warm herself.

  Hattie spread another roll with butter. “Do you like it here?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I like the work,” I said.

  Hattie took a bite and chewed. “We don’t have good bread at home now,” she said after a minute. “But that’s all right. It’s better that you’re here.”

  I felt a rush of warmth toward her, my little sister who only wanted the best for me.

  “Just tell me,” Martha said, her voice as reedy as the sound of wind by the river. “Are you ever going to go back to your husband?”

  I did not reply immediately. I wanted to give her the courtesy of pretending to consider this, to think that she could provide advice. Eventually, however, I had to say something. “I do not think so,” I said. I looked up at the ceiling as if this thought had just come to me out of the air.

  “I am sure he is sorry by now.”

  “I am sure you are right.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Hattie.

  “Come back with us,” said Martha, ignoring her. She put her hand on my knee. “We can get your things from Carl’s room next week.”

  “No,” I said, the word blunt and firm and final.

  “It is not just you now.” She dipped her chin at my belly as if I might have forgotten that I was pregnant.

  “I know that.”

  “I do not understand you,” Martha said.

  I nodded. “I know,” I said.

  She cleared her throat and rubbed at an invisible spot on the table. I felt sorry for her. I knew she did not want this gulf between us any more than I wanted it, but I could not see how to cross it. I am sure she felt equally at a loss. “So,” she said. “You will never go back to him?”

  “You shouldn’t,” said Hattie.

  Martha glared at her. “Shush,” she said.

  “I will not,” said Hattie.

  “No,” I said. “I will not go back to him.”

  “But what about us?”

  “I can see you,” I said. “You can see me. That will not change.”

  “You know that he will never let you back into the house,” she said. I knew who she meant. We were not talking about August now.

  A log fell in the stove and she turned ever so slightly toward the noise. “The shame you have brought on us by running away. He cannot get over it.”

  “If you come back, you know what will happen,” said Hattie.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I did not intend to bring shame on anyone.”

  “You are hard-hearted, you know that?” Martha would not look at me when she spoke.

  “No more than you,” I said.

  She sat back and looked a little offended at having to say all of this out loud. I did not really blame her. We each had our own truths and they would never match.

  We sat without speaking. I watched a team of huge gray Percherons pull a wagon by the shop, their hides rippling and their blond tails flying. The thunder of the wagon wheels faded as the horses pulled away.

  After a while, Hattie kicked the table. “I think you should stay here,” she said.

  “You are a child,” said Martha.

  Hattie shrugged. “I think she’s safe here,” she said. “And that’s what’s important.”

  When had she gotten so grown up? I thought of her as she helped to load the wagon outside of the house I shared with August. I thought of her on the train to Milwaukee. She had taken her braces off. She had stood on her own two feet. Martha and I had tried to protect her by standing between her and our father. She would grow up and see things a different way, as if she had grown up in a completely different family.

  “Sometimes when bad things happen, you have to take care of yourself,” I said. I spoke to my older sister as if she was a child, and who was to say she was not? “So I got a lawyer and I went to court and I took care of this. This is my job. I live down the street. You can come see me here anytime.”

  “What are you saying?” Martha said. She grabbed my arm. “What do you mean, you got a lawyer?”

  “I got a divorce,” I said. It was not so hard to say the word now that it was a reality, and I saw that what it really meant was a world in which no one hit me. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “Oh God,” she cried. She clawed at my sleeve. I pulled away.

  “You are hurting me,” I said.

  She stood up and looked at Hattie. “Put your coat on,” she
said. “We are leaving.” Then she scowled at me. “It is not all right,” she said. “It is not fine. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” She stabbed at her hair with her hat pin. “Try as I might,” she said, “I do not understand how you can be so selfish.”

  Hattie hugged me and promised she would come and see me when the baby came. But Martha stood buttoning her coat and would not look at me. Before she left, she paused in the doorway and told me that I might as well know that my father had been keeping company with a woman who owned a dairy farm in Price County. She was a widow. Along with the dairy farm, she owned a small hotel and kept a herd of pet deer penned in the yard so that visitors could see something wild. She had her own hunting permit and used it. Then Martha said our father had decided to marry this widow and she thought that his marriage would happen soon. He would move himself and the last of their household to Price County, and Martha and Hattie would go with him, at least until he could secure work for them.

  It did not take much for me to picture it, the white house sitting atop a rise, the long, undulating pastures of rich grass, the chasms in the earth where water rolled, the horizon of expectations now real, the idea of the land he had always wanted hurtling at me like a wall I would hit at high speed. My mother was gone and everything of our family could be wiped out with a new marriage and a signature on a deed. This was the reason, I thought, this and no other. I wondered how long it had taken him to decide after he met her. My father had always wanted land. My father had always felt that land was his destiny. He had not crossed an ocean to come up empty. Martha had her hand on the doorknob and Hattie had tied her rope into a sash, knotting it at the waist to keep her coat closed.

  “What is she like?” I asked.

  Martha shrugged. “I have not met her,” she said. “He always takes the train there.”

  When they were gone, the tearoom was very still. I went back to the icebox and leaned my head against the door and thought of my mother dead in the ground and of my father and his terrible crime and his terrible plan. And then I fell weeping to the floor. When the woman who owned the tearoom came in, she saw me lying wet-eyed and heaving in the flickering light from the stove. She knelt down and put her arm around my shoulders. She told me that everything was all right and I should go into the back room and lie down, for clearly I was overtired. For a time I lay on a cot set up beneath the shelves of canned beans, but I could neither sleep nor could I rest. I stood up and went back to work.

  You have known girls like me. You might have been a girl like me. We are all the same under the skin, girls who pick up leaves and stones and have hopes for the future and who are taught that we must marry and obey and love. Our mothers told us, It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know how to touch you the right way. Our mothers told us to forgive him. Our mothers told us it was our fault. You should have seen it coming, they said. You should have known that he would do that. You should not have made him angry. And so we are shamefaced and still and silent and scared. We are afraid of him and afraid that no one will save us and sure that we cannot save ourselves. These things should be as familiar to you as the song you sing when you do the wash. You know us and you have been us and you might be one of us yet. It might not be a hand or a brick or a blade. It might be a word or a look that promises the course of the cane. It might be a darkness that you cannot name but which you know is with you and has been with you for as long as you can remember. Perhaps these ideas are too common even to bear repeating. And yet they must be repeated because every day the papers are filled with the stories of women who have been thrown from windows or shot with guns or lost in the night, a long, terrible story that is as familiar as the air we breathe. We have not seen the last girl. She has not yet walked among us.

  24

  Some nights my mother told us a story about the Princess Svanvitha, whose father had once been a powerful king on Rügen. I believe this was my mother’s favorite story, for my sisters and I could count on her to tell it once a week. For our part, we never tired of it and I imagine it gave my mother great pleasure to have us nestled around her, our heads on her knees or on the pillow behind her back, where she could smell our hair and look into our faces as she spoke.

  Princess Svanvitha was a beautiful and pure girl. She lived with her father the king in her father’s castle in a town not far from Garz. Her mother had died long ago and her father had never remarried, so the girl lived with her father as if enchanted by the spell of his power. Years passed, but soon enough she came of age and many suitors came from across the land, hoping to claim her hand.

  The prince of Poland wooed Princess Svanvitha for a long time and tormented her with his suit, but she always declined him because she did not like him. She chose the prince of Denmark instead, who seemed to her to be a kind boy and a boy who would care for her. Her father was happy with her selection, and the people were happy because they knew there would be a wedding. Perhaps they thought it would be a wedding as perfect as a wedding in a fairy tale, which is the most perfect kind of wedding you will ever find. My mother described Princess Svanvitha’s bridal gown at length, the exquisite stitching of the lace, the weight of the satin, the abundance of pearls, the jewels that adorned the bodice and the skirt. Her veil was to be so ethereal that it would appear as if wings had sprouted from her back and she had become a fairy princess before the eyes of the onlookers. My mother pointed out that only a beautiful princess could wear such a dress, and Princess Svanvitha was so slender and lovely and pure that the people called her the King’s Lily. My mother made us think that no title would be more apt for us, either, and we should not aspire to any other.

  Despite Princess Svanvitha’s choice, the spurned prince of Poland never gave up his suit. He still insisted that he was the better man. He tried to tempt Princess Svanvitha with the promise of riches, if only she were to change her mind. But on the very eve of her wedding, when joy and celebration spread across the land, the prince of Poland was forced to accept that Princess Svanvitha really would marry another. And so his heart conceived a wicked plan. By his arts he managed to convince her father and everyone else that Princess Svanvitha was not the modest young lady they all believed her to be. He told of her improprieties and her flirtations and he intimated that more than that had passed between them, so much more that he dared not speak the truth aloud.

  Immediately, the prince of Denmark mounted his horse and departed, taking with him all the dukes and duchesses and kings and queens who had come to Garz to attend the wedding. The harpists and bagpipers and other musicians who had been preparing for the festivals and tournaments also disappeared. The castle was left sad and deserted and the disgrace of the poor princess was bruited about everywhere, even though she was as innocent as a newborn babe.

  The king her father was beside himself and nearly out of his mind and wanted to kill himself over the humiliation Svanvitha had brought on the royal house. Days passed while he ranted in his chambers. But when he was again in his right mind, he became merely furious and called out to have Svanvitha brought before him. For her part, she stood trembling before him and did her best to protest the lies. But the king would not listen. Instead, he tore her hair and ripped her dress and struck her. Then he commanded that she be removed from his presence and taken to a secret chamber so that he would never have to set eyes on her again. Around this room he caused a strong, dark tower to be built, into which neither sun nor moon could shine. The chamber itself was a small and barren place, with neither bed nor chair nor carpet and only a tiny hole through which her keeper could hand her food. Svanvitha had to sleep on the hard floor and go barefoot. She could not comb her hair nor play music nor wash herself. In time, her fine clothes became nothing but rags.

  Thus passed three years. The poor princess was but a young girl—just seventeen—when her father banished her, and she would have died of her misery had she not had the certainty of her innocence to keep her spirits up. This she clung to like a rock. She knew her father had put
her in the tower so she could reflect on the terrible shame she had brought to his family. It was true that during those dark days she had nothing but time for contemplation. But she did not spend one minute thinking of her own disobedience, for that was nothing but the lie of the suitor she had spurned. Instead, she waited for her father to come to her and tell her he was sorry for all that he had done against her. Sometimes she imagined that one day the king would call for her and her very innocence would be proof enough to set things right. But her father never requested a second audience and Svanvitha had no chance to tell her side of the story.

  My mother told us that Svanvitha was at her most pitiful when she thought the king might call for her. Anyone could tell that he would never do that. He would never listen to her side of the story. He would never admit that he had made a mistake. He would never apologize for having done wrong.

  One day Svanvitha lay on the floor in a corner of her chamber. She rested her head on cold stone. She tried to remember Garz as it had been when she last saw it. She could see herself picking flowers near the temple of the ancient goddess and walking in the shadow of the battlements. All of a sudden she sat bolt upright and jumped to her feet and began to pace up and down. After all of these lonely months, she had suddenly remembered the legend of the parapet. When a pure and chaste princess walked the rampart between twelve and one on Midsummer’s Eve, naked and as God made her, the earth itself would open and reveal a secret chamber filled with treasure. That treasure could be removed. That treasure could be brought to her father. That treasure would prove that the prince of Poland had lied. The only thing she would have to watch out for was the gray ghost that guarded the cavern and sometimes turned himself into a snarling black dog.