by Ed Ifkovic
Carlotta refused to leave her room where, the night before, she’d retreated on her son’s arm. After Stas arrived and worked with a dizzily happy Johnny Marks, the two men escorted Peggy out, and there was a brief moment when everyone moved, helter-skelter, like hornets, their nest shattered by a boy’s stick, buzzing out of control. But then, almost like a stage clue, the house was silent and empty, save for Carlotta’s hysterics in her room. Peter and Delia sat with her. Exhausted, I went to bed.
Later, unable to sleep and staring out the night window, back toward River Road and Eben’s home, oddly still ablaze with light in the middle of the night, I heard noises downstairs, Peter and Delia were mumbling goodbye. But Carlotta’s voice swept up the stairwell like a hurricane wind.
“I want that woman out of this house,” she roared.
Peter mumbled something unintelligible.
“Did you see what she did here? She used my house for . . . a performance. I’m the actress here. I am. And all my business is now public knowledge. All of it.”
She was still ranting as I heard Peter’s car leaving the driveway.
So in the morning I sat alone, a cup of tea before me.
Shortly afterwards Stas drove up and, walking with him, I visited a waiting Millicent Wright, who’d whispered the night before, “See me in the morning. You’re obviously going to have to get out of Dodge before Emerson descends on you.”
The three of us talked quietly for an hour or so, a summing up, really, with Stas talking of Peggy’s hysterics at the barracks, some Hartford lawyer rushing there in the middle of the night, accompanied by Henry. “They’re saying Peggy only confessed because she thought she needed to protect her husband—that she was delusional. But Peggy herself kept screaming, ‘I planned a good life for us both.’ Over and over.”
Millicent sighed. “So it’s over.”
“And no one likes me,” I said.
Millicent grinned. “Consider that a compliment, Edna. Why curry favor with a stupid world?” She looked tired that morning. “I do hope you’ll keep in touch with this old lady.” I nodded: of course.
Stas smiled. “You did a wonderful thing, Ferb. You pulled it off.”
“And I really didn’t suspect it was Peggy until halfway through. Honestly. I started thinking it was Henry. And then it all came together. I had to lie.”
“A good lie.”
“We did it,” I said to him. “You and I.”
He nodded.
“Tell me,” I said suddenly, “before I leave this town—why are you a state trooper? I’ve been curious. I need to know.”
He hesitated, then looked into my face. “When I was a boy, I saw how the locals, a lot of old Yankees, treated my papa and the other Polish around here. Like they were dirt. Like they were stupid. I just made a vow that I would do things differently. You see, my father loves America. It’s his country now, and I know this sounds hokey and sentimental, but I wanted America to be the country I learned about in school.”
I smiled. “American Beauty.”
“Dziedzictwo Amerykanskie.”
Millicent opened her eyes: “Sounds subversive to me, frankly.” But she was grinning.
Stas stood. He put out his hand to me. “Ferb, it’s been a pleasure watching you work. For a tiny lady, you got a lot of spunk.”
Spunk, I thought. I liked that.
“Well, for a young man you seem to have escaped the callowness of your generation.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He turned to go. “Ferb, I bought myself a book yesterday. It’s by some woman I never heard of. Book called, I think, Cimarron.”
“I trust you’ll enjoy it.”
“So far so good. I’m on page ten.”
“Wait till you get to page eleven.” I was smiling.
Back at the Inn Eben put my bags in the Pierce-Arrow. Carlotta still had not risen, nor did I expect her to. That friendship was over, I realized. I identify the murderer of her sister—in fact, exonerate Carlotta herself—and I become the enemy. Well . . .
Eben said nothing on the drive to the station, where I’d catch the local train to Stamford. As he placed my bags next to me, he paused, tipped his hat. “Ma’am.”
“Thank you, Mr. Travers.”
“Ma’am,” he said again and turned to go. Then he looked back: “My grandson is a handsome lad, isn’t he?”
That surprised me. I thought of the boy I’d seen once, that strapping, alert boy, half-Yankee, half-Polish. “He certainly is.” And thought: another American beauty, that one.
Eben left, and I found myself alone on the platform, the only rider waiting for the local. Just like when I stepped off the local two weeks back, I thought: the solitary visitor, coming and going. Rawley’s Depot was quiet, as usual. I looked around for another soul, but I was alone, except for a flock of black, squawking crows in a nearby tree, all of the leaves gone now, piled around the trunk, scattered by a slight wind. The crows made too much noise, raucous and shrill, a little too menacing. I couldn’t wait to get back to Manhattan—taxis honking, peddlers cursing or hawking wares, buses bellowing eye-smarting smoke, gaggles of walkers bunched on street corners. I’d plan a dinner party, I thought. Yes. Impose some order on my life. Order.
Sitting on the train I felt elated. Yes. American Beauty. I could see it taking shape in my mind’s eye. A kaleidoscope of bombarding imagery assailed me: Stas Wolniak, lawgiver, gentleman, a man intelligent and handsome. Broad shoulders, cobalt blue eyes, that straw-blond hair. A hero, really. And suddenly a flash to Julia’s polite and deferential son, that lad of fifteen, himself striking, with that square jaw line, the quick, inquisitive eyes, with the lanky lithe movement of an athlete. That boy, half Polish, half Yankee. Him, too: American Beauty. And so as the train lumbered out of Stamford, headed to Grand Central, I played with my characters, with Captain Orrange Oakes, with Tamar, with Big Bella, Polcia, Ondy, Jude Oakes. All of them: alive in my head. Alone now, I understood them fervently, and honestly. Now it was just a question of putting their lives to typescript. It was all there, intact, whole.
I leafed through a notebook I’d carried with me, my literary jottings under the care of Miss Dangerfield. But as the train rocked and twisted and I became drowsy, I reread a note I’d taken that first day in Rawley’s Depot. It was a quotation I’d copied from a slender volume of essays. Thomas W. Higginson, literary arbiter of another American century, Emily Dickinson’s visitor, wrote to Matthew Arnold in England: “As I take it, Nature said some years since, ‘Thus far the English is the best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; we need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop of nervous fluid, and make the American.’” Reading these words now, I felt them to my marrow. A new breed, this American man, this new creature. I caught my reflection in the window: I was smiling.
THE END.