by Marge Piercy
“You have to go see where they lived,” Gracie said. “At first they lived over a dry cleaner’s in Hyannis, but then they bought the condo near the water in Falmouth. Becky fixed it up just lovely. She did that kind of thing.”
“It wasn’t a house, but it was nice,” Mrs. Souza said, shaking her head. “We kept hoping they’d start a family. But then he lost his job, and he never got another one. Never. Months and months went by.”
Becky’s father made a batting-away motion with his hand. “I offered to bring him in on the boat, but he wasn’t interested. He thought he was too good to take to the sea for his living. He’d rather sit on his behind than do an honest day’s work he thought beneath him. He believed the sun rose and set on his parents, but they never got him a job.”
From the bathroom she learned there were many males in the family who aimed at the toilet and missed, there was still a baby in diapers, and she would use a convenient McDonald’s on her way to her next interview instead.
It was Saturday afternoon. Leila headed east on I-195, musing that neither Becky nor she herself came from money. She had grown up in what men she had gone out with in college had freely referred to as a slum, although to her it had just been the neighborhood. Her early childhood had passed in a single family dwelling in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but by the time she was halfway through grade school, her father had begun the downward slide that carried them all far and fast till they came to rest on what her mother Phyllis’s earnings could provide: a two-bedroom apartment in mostly Black Strawberry Mansion in Philly.
How could she compare those streets and alleys, the liveliness and the danger, the gangs and the music that beat always as a background day and night but louder on mild days when the windows were open, to the bleak poverty of New Bedj, as the locals called it? In some ways the Souzas were much more comfortable, with their chickens and garden in the yard, than her family had been, and much safer. But they had less alternatives available, less views outward. She had taken a bus to the museum. She had had the public library with its thousands of volumes to draw her out of her life. Movies, foreign as well as domestic, were just a walk or a bus ride away. She had looked out the windows of their flat not into the dark alley echoing with family quarrels and drunken clashes, but beyond to Paris and Xanadu and London and New York and the eighteenth century and the Attic experience. She had learned early that there were options upon options if she could only escape, if she could only find the road out, which she realized by the tenth grade led through college. Books had been her drug; books had saved her.
She drove to Falmouth, to a shingled two-story condo built around a courtyard, with parking behind the building. It was in an area with many year-round houses and a number of summer cottages. There Becky and Terrence Burgess had lived for the last year and two months of their marriage. It was like a hundred other similar complexes thrown up in the middle and late eighties, vaguely New England in inspiration with imitation miniature cupolas on top.
The condo sat on a hill three-tenths of a mile from a beach, close enough to Buzzards Bay for the air to smell fresh and damp. The condo had been young but not new when the Burgesses moved in, she guessed, time for the drab landscaping of yews and barberries to take root, the little trees to cease looking like green lollipops. Time enough too for the decks to begin to sag, paths to be worn across the skimpy grass, plastic to start cracking and aluminum to warp out of shape, the trim to cry for paint it was not getting.
She found Helen Coreggio, as she had hoped. Mrs. Coreggio was living on social security and a pension, alone in the condo immediately below the one Becky and Terrence had owned. “Oh, it’s empty now. It has to stay empty till after the trial. But you know, she didn’t do it. I don’t believe any of it. Down, Florrie, down! She was always fond of my Florrie. On cold mornings, she’d take Florrie for a walk for me. Becky was truly kind.”
Helen Coreggio was a pencil-thin woman who had probably had a stroke, as her face was slightly distorted, the left eye in a permanent half-wink, but she could talk perfectly. She talked fast, showing Leila photos of grandchildren and her husband, who had passed on of a heart attack. A large shaggy fluffy-tailed black and white dog sat beside Mrs. Coreggio’s overstuffed chair and punctuated the conversation with a sharp bark from time to time, as if disagreeing. The dog looked even bigger sitting than it had standing. It looked Leila in the eye as she sat on the low listless couch, her knees stuck up before her like a child’s drawing of mountains. Great Dane, maybe, mated with something really hairy. It followed the conversation, turning its great head.
Mrs. Coreggio served instant coffee and Sara Lee pound cake. Leila did her best to consume enough of each to pass muster.
“Of course she shouldn’t have been having an affair with that boy, if she really did. People will repeat any filth about a good-looking woman, you should know that. Becky is little and too skinny, but she’s cute, with those big eyes and that blond hair. She’s darling, you’ll see. Her husband wasn’t good enough for her, I don’t care what his family thought. Becky came from nothing, but she made something of herself through hard, hard work, and I respect that. Her husband came from a comfortable home and was content to lie around all day watching the soaps with his TV turned too loud. Now, I don’t watch the soaps myself, you understand? Do you watch them? Of course you don’t get in the habit when you work, and I worked every day of my life except when the children were little. I worked and my husband worked and my children helped around the house, and never one of them got in a day’s trouble. I watch the news every night, and I like the game shows, where they ask questions and you can see what you know. There was this grown lummox watching all that made-up silliness day after day.”
When Mrs. Coreggio talked about Terrence Burgess, her mouth pursed. His name was vinegar on her tongue. She spat him out. When she mentioned Becky, she smiled. She smiled and the dog thumped his tail. Becky might be lynched in the media, but she was popular here. “She was a good girl. Whenever she could, she would even run home at noon to make sure he had a hot lunch. What woman acts like that nowadays? She worked all week, on the weekend she did laundry and cleaned, while that useless big sausage lay around watching soaps and sports. I’m sure when she married him, it seemed like a dream. He worked with computers, a job with a future, ho ho. She was crazy about him. But after a while she saw through him, how if it didn’t come easy, he wouldn’t go after it. He wanted life handed to him like his lunch, that was for sure.” Mrs. Coreggio shook her head sadly and heavily. Her good eye held Leila’s gaze. “She was trying to make the best of a bad bargain. You wouldn’t expect a live wire like her, a young pretty girl, to take any interest in an old woman. Young people nowadays generally detest us. They think we should all die the day after we retire. But not Becky. We were friends.”
Leila had trouble disengaging herself from Mrs. Coreggio, but she had the distinct feeling it would not be wise to explain she was due at the older Burgess household. What she did was insist she had to get home to make supper for her husband and her son, and it would be an hour-and-a-half drive.
The Burgess house was in Osterville, only ten miles away. Their house was on a marsh, tawny now in November, on a cul-de-sac after a sprinkling of large modern houses set well back on spacious lots. It was a low long house, a ranch gone sprawling, with well-weathered cedar shingles, enough expanses of decking to hold a large party, the lawn well kept, the foundation plantings trimmed, the little azaleas mulched with pine bark, a holly tree placed symmetrically on either side of the front walk.
She was met at the door and ushered to what must be the formal living room, for the doors of the television were shut and the carpeting was white and spotless. Everything in the room was white or blue. The dried flowers had been purchased dyed blue, although the marshes outside were full of naturally dried grasses. From below came the throb of heavy metal. That was probably the younger brother, Chris, mentioned in the papers.
Mr. Burgess did the talking, whil
e his wife sat upright on a colonial wing chair that matched the couch and wrung her hands. He was a big man, his skin tight on his flesh, as if he had recently gained weight or swelled. “There’s nothing to write a book about, nothing to say. That little tramp killed our son. If there was justice, she’d hang for it. As it is, she’ll spend the rest of her miserable life in prison, where she belongs.”
Mrs. Burgess nodded her head fervently. “Stay calm, Francis, stay calm. Justice will be done.”
“But, don’t you think it’s important that someone objective write about what happened? Wouldn’t your son want the real story known? The full human truth never comes out in court. Think of it as a memorial to him.”
“We remember him perfectly well. Our family doesn’t need a memorial from any outsider. I’m sure you’re well intentioned and you want to make a buck, but you can’t help us. It won’t bring Terry back.” Mr. Burgess glared at her.
Mrs. Burgess was watching her husband rather than Leila. “Don’t get overwrought, Francis.” She turned quickly to Leila. “There’s really nothing to be said. Nothing.”
“Her defense is bound to present her as sympathetically as possible. I haven’t spoken with her. I want to understand your point of view first.” Leila rose and admired a studio portrait of Terrence, whose face she recognized from the newspapers. “He was a handsome young man.” Actually he was. In spite of Mrs. Coreggio’s description of him as a sausage, he appeared tall, lean and good-looking in an unformed way.
Mrs. Burgess came to life. “Wasn’t he? He was always the handsome one. He always made friends. Why, the boys in his fraternity in college used to come and see him all the time. When he made a friend, he kept that friend. And he and his brother were close—not like a lot of boys who are at each other’s throats. No, they were what brothers are supposed to be, and we were always so proud of them.”
But they viewed her with distrust. She had to be careful. She would start out sympathetic to Becky, because the Souzas had been kind and open with her, and down on the victim, because his family was self-righteous and stiffed her. They served nothing. The room was immaculate, with an odor of furniture polish. Even the bathroom gave her little, for when she asked, she was ushered to a guest bathroom nearby. It was small and also blue and white. She wiped her hands gingerly on the tiny embroidered towel, feeling as if she were using someone’s scarf. They must not entertain often. Although the room was clean enough to roll about on the tiny floor, if she were so inclined, the guest soaps in the form of blue roses were slightly dusty. Obviously it never occurred to whoever cleaned this superfluous room to dust the soap.
“If you do decide to talk about your son, I’d be glad to return,” she said and handed Mrs. Burgess a card.
Mrs. Burgess handed it to her husband, who took out his reading glasses and peered at it suspiciously. LEILA LANDSMAN, Jew and Snake Oil Peddler. Friend of the Corrupt Media. Don’t call me, I’ll put a tap on you.
She had had enough. She would wait a few days—of necessity, because she must put some genuine effort into her classes and her students and make sure her assistant was finishing the incest bibliography. Then she would attempt once again to see Becky Burgess.
Driving back, she felt a little guilty. She enjoyed interviewing too much. It was a license to tromp through other people’s lives. One of the cheap pleasures her parents had when she was little was to visit houses advertised for sale in the Sunday paper. They couldn’t afford to buy. It was simply fun for them to see how other people lived. Her father would get ideas for cabinets to build and her mother would decide to redecorate the kitchen. They would gossip about the people, imagining their lives. It was always an intimate evening after the Sunday strolls through opened houses. Her parents would joke a lot and then go to bed early. It was only as an adult she realized they must have made love. Instead she noticed they always turned on the radio in their bedroom Sunday when they retired. She forgot sometimes that there had been a time when they had been loving with each other, when they had seemed happy. Before her father had lost control and thrown their money away.
She too liked to visit other people’s scenes. She was endlessly curious. Often she irritated Nick with her chatter about colleagues or neighbors. Oh, Nick liked the results well enough. He did not pay enough attention to what was going on with people. His eye was on his own goal, the work he was creating, the spectacle, the pacing, the style of the performance. He would ask her to explain people to him, he would ask her to tell him why an actor was angry or what Old Simmons, his departmental chair, wanted.
Then she felt valued by him and she worked hard to figure out what he needed to know, bringing all her powers of observation and analysis to bear, wifely Holmes to the detective task. She was a nosy person, one who would never tire of learning about her fellow humans. Women’s lives particularly were lived often in a kind of shadow of inattention, and there were hidden dramas to uncover, a perspective that could be shocking or engaging by turns. That was her job perhaps in a sentence: making obvious to people what had been invisible to them before. One of the most interesting discoveries of the day was that probably Helen Coreggio was telling the truth, and there had been a most unlikely friendship between the two women. That made Becky more interesting.
She experienced a sharp drop in energy as she walked into her house, dark except for the hall light she left on. She hung her coat, turned on lights, closed draperies and thermal blinds, turned up the heat to sixty-eight, walked into the kitchen and found herself so depressed she sank in a kitchen chair and sat for half an hour, unmoving. She was not hungry, because of the brownies she had eaten at the Souzas and the Sara Lee pound cake at Helen Coreggio’s, but she felt a strong desire for real food, a sit-down dinner face to face with family, companionship. Something warm.
Maybe it would be good to have Shana move in. However, Mrs. Peretz was still living in Melanie’s house and, when she had brought up the matter with them, it had been awkward.
It was Saturday night, and where was her life? When Nick was on the road, she would have spent Saturday with Melanie. They would have rented a movie or gone out to one, a play, a concert, supper with other women friends or just the two of them eating Chinese and talking, endlessly talking. That was why she had never felt desolate when Nicolas was off directing a play in San Francisco or Seattle. Moreover, she had also had David.
Cambridge was an easy city in which to stay home or relax with friends. Except for Harvard Square, it did not exactly pulsate with singles life like New York or San Francisco on a Saturday night. The streets did not ask her, where are you going and why aren’t you getting laid and don’t you want someone to love you right now, or at least someone to pay some attention?
Perhaps she was jolliest when she was focused on some other woman’s troubles and decisions, and her own life diplomatically retreated. That made her feel second rate. A human being should not be happiest when thinking about other people, should she? But she felt better after her three interviews—even though the last one had been as total a failure in communication as she had ever undergone—than she had felt since Melanie’s death and that bombshell letter from Nick.
She had to forgive him, of course, but she could not quite get around to it yet. She still was too angry, too hurt. What he had done was a great jagged lump that had not shrunk or softened during the past week. She could not even imagine to whom she could pour out her anger. She had said too much to her son already. Jane was too hostile to Nick to fill in for Melanie. No, it was best to try to keep her mind off him and to stay busy with school and with prowling around the life and times of Becky Burgess, the hardworking and apparently quite domestic murderer. Soon Nick would be home, and they would have to renegotiate their marriage, gradually, conversation by conversation. They had come back from separation and his infidelity perhaps fifteen times. They could do it again. They would.
In the meantime she needed some warmth and companionship, and she must buy it. Men bought prostitutes; w
omen got pets. A cat or a dog? She traveled too much for a dog. She hit the lecture circuit often. No, a cat. There would be no problem getting someone to feed it when she traveled. She remembered that her cleaning lady had told her she also ran a pet-feeding service.
Tomorrow she would go out and buy herself companionship. Then when she came home, at least there would be some creature happy to see her.
She nodded her head briskly, glad she had settled something, anything. She opened a can of sardines and threw together a salad from what was left in the crisper. Then she made herself get back in the car and drive to Harvard Square. She would go to one of the big record stores, Tower or HMV, and look at CDs. She should listen to music more. That should take her out of herself. Both stores were open late. After all, Becky Burgess would not be having a jovial and social Saturday evening either. She should be glad for her freedom and her comfort She had a paid-off house, a good job, a loving son and an interesting project. Even if she was furious with her husband and he was in New York doing a version of Oedipus as South American dictator with Jocasta cum Eva Perón and a rap chorus—a production that had given her a headache—and screwing Jocasta, nevertheless a professional woman with a circle of friends always had other options. If she felt lonely, it must be her own fault. Still, she thought suddenly, a twenty-four-year-old Jocasta rather blew the point of the play, didn’t it? Even when producing Oedipus, he couldn’t imagine a man in love with an older woman.
NINE
Becky
Becky continued seeing Ted all through the winter. The first warm day, a Tuesday in late March, they strolled along a beach near his house, before they went to dinner. He remained patient with her absurd schedule, saying that he understood how working and going to college ate up her time, and that it was very, very important that she stay in school. He never pressed her to spend the night. He too came from a Catholic family. “I can very well imagine the response of your parents. Why should we cause them unnecessary pain? I have to get up fiendishly early anyhow. I’d be gone when you awaken.”