by Stephen Cox
They lived under the shadow of the Bomb, but they believed that the times they were a-changing. Gene and Molly hitched across the state to hear the singers and bands they both loved, whose music was not just beautiful but meant something profound. They’d marched against unjust laws, against the vicious, stupid war and the draft that fed it, against the horrendous weapons which threatened all life on land and sea and sky.
But Gene and Molly argued endlessly too. A trip to New York City revealed his indifference to real art like painting and sculpture; he hated having to be in the endless photos she took of everything. Meanwhile, he couldn’t believe she was so quick to sneer at the bands taking risks and breaking new ground. Sometimes, with a few old friends he trusted not to mock, Gene would pick up his guitar and play their favourites, love songs and protest songs, singing in his light, ordinary tenor.
They had been on other dates, but this one felt special. On the pond people swooped, trailing the white memory of their breath, laughing and shouting as they bumped into each other. Some walked on the ice like new-born foals. Molly saw a teenager take a tumble and heard a so-called friend cheer. Gene was all legs and arms, so skating might be embarrassing.
‘I haven’t done this for years,’ Molly said, taking a few hobbled steps to the edge. He held her hand so she could step safely onto the ice.
Like riding a bike, you couldn’t forget – then he zigged and zagged away, competent and picking up speed, and she accepted the dare, beginning the chase and gaining confidence as her body remembered. How different his movements were now; even when he was showing off she forgave him.
He grinned as she caught up. ‘The creek behind the farm froze every year.’
She thought, A man who can skate can learn to dance.
Above them the Moon was almost full, haloed with ice. Soon she’d taste his mouth and he’d taste hers, familiar and exciting all at once.
Out on the pond, a dark-haired mother was helping a little girl of perhaps six. The woman held the girl’s hands in hers, her face shining with encouragement. The girl looked down at her feet and up at her mother, fear and hope balanced. Molly wished she’d brought her camera to capture the moment.
Gene smiled; he often smiled at children. He wanted a family too. Already, something burned in her heart. Please, please, please.
They sat very close on a cold bench, making clouds with each breath. Her face burned with cold as she sipped hot chocolate, admiring the Moon. It made her remember her years in the bustle of Brooklyn. Out here in Amber Grove, she could get away from electric light and wonder at the stars blazing, filling the night with glory.
She went back to their old argument. ‘Put a man in a tin can and whizz him around the Earth, what good does that do?’ she asked. ‘They’ll send soldiers to the Moon, with bombs, so every time we look up we’ll see the threat of war. We’ll spread death through the stars like a disease.’
He took her hand, as he did at any excuse. ‘Humans got here by being willing to look over the next hill, to risk crossing the next sea. Space is the next place to go.’
‘People down here need real help now: clean water and safe births and a hundred vile diseases to conquer,’ she said. She was glad to be there right then, with him.
He looked up at the sky. ‘We’ll live to see people living on the Moon. There’ll be a city run by the United Nations, for science and peace and exploration. Weapons will be banned, it’ll be a place of kindness, so when we gaze up at it, we’ll see hope. In fact, maybe they’ll get a woman to run it.’
‘You idiot,’ she said, touched by his vision. If he didn’t kiss her soon, she’d make the move herself.
‘You know, the film was okay. As a metaphor, the flying lizard people worked,’ he said, his eyes sparkling behind the glasses.
She gave him a little punch on the shoulder. She didn’t want to talk disintegrator rays and whether those trashy books he read could ever be art, so she shut him up with her eager mouth. That kiss told her. She decided beyond all doubt: this man who believed in spaceships and aliens and justice and world peace was the one for her.
*
Molly waited, barely patient, for him to propose. It took Gene until that long hot summer when President Johnson stepped up the bombing in Vietnam. There in his tiny apartment which smelled of the laundry below, he did it with his guitar and a song, ‘Molly Skating on the Moon’. With tears in her eyes she said of course she would marry him, what took him so long? She didn’t know he wrote his own songs, the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for her. He pulled faces and said none of his stuff was any good.
The first person she told about the wedding was sharp-nosed, brown-eyed Janice Henderson, her best friend from nursing school; she had a dirty laugh and a spine of steel. Janice’s neighbour Diane came over to share the celebration. She taught in middle school, Amber Grove’s first black teacher, and you just knew no mean boy would dare pull braids in her class. She’d lost her husband the year before, a lean, healthy man whose heart just stopped, leaving her and three kids; one of those tragedies that made so little sense.
The women saw a future bright and just and full of hope. They shared fierce books and articles about how things had to change for women and the world; they drank and they argued. Sometimes, Molly remembered, the three friends danced, just them, drunk in the kitchen at midnight. Gene liked her friends, but a couple of times he’d commented, ‘Hey, you and Janice can really put the booze away. Jeez, I couldn’t drink like that.’
Molly thought marriage mattered – not what they spent or whether they had a honeymoon, but the act of it; their promises before the people who mattered to them.
It was the second winter they’d been together. Her wedding day dawned very cold, the sky the bright blue of the brooch Gene’s mother had lent her. Molly’s cream dress was too tight. She was so nervous she had nothing but Scotch for breakfast. Gene’s father walked her into City Hall – her own parents had taken their frigid judgements to sunny Florida years ago, and good riddance.
Gene stood grinning in his best suit, with the flower in his lapel crooked. He was the one for her. The people they loved had come to support them and neither of them tripped over the words. Then off to dance, to his choices and hers: ‘Stop in the Name of Love’, the Temptations and the Supremes. Peter, Paul and Mary, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Stones.
Hours later, it was Janice who said, ‘They’ll have to put the old Baker place up for sale soon. It’s a ruin, so it should be cheap. We could be neighbours.’
*
The first warm day of spring. Crooked Street ran right up to the drop, that sharp slope of trees too steep to build on. Down there was the disused railroad line and then the meadows, a square mile of scrub, old walls and little creeks. Number forty-seven was the last house in the last turn, six houses half surrounded by the woods. With those gables and that porch, it should have been made of gingerbread.
Gene chuckled. ‘Looks a tad Addams Family. This place hasn’t seen any love for years.’ Creepers swamped the fences, two windows were boarded up and paint peeled on the front door.
The portly lady realtor in bright blue could spot newlyweds at a hundred paces. She chatted away as she stepped onto the porch and they heard the boards groan. When she opened the door, something scurried away.
Stairs creaked and they fought to open doors. The whole place smelled damp; mould had left green messages across the wall. Its last makeover was probably in Roosevelt’s time. But as Molly explored, she recognised her home-in-waiting; it was Cinderella by the fire.
‘I smell rot,’ Gene said. ‘What’s wrong with the roof?’
The realtor’s bright smile got brighter. ‘The kitchen has real potential. And the woods make it lovely and quiet.’
Molly signalled Gene with five fingers behind her back. Five was ‘adore’. Gene gave her a three, with that twist of the eyebrows she k
new well.
Gene played the hard cop, but the realtor knew you always sold to the wife. ‘Look, wouldn’t this make the most darling nursery ever?’ she said, opening a door with a flourish. Yes, it would, with the view over the overgrown yard, then through big old trees; she’d paint it blue for a boy, pink for a girl.
Molly hugged Gene, full of wild baby-making thoughts.
‘I’ll be honest,’ the realtor said, ‘the place is a fixer-upper. Yes, it needs work. But the executors want a brisk sale, so that’s in the price.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Gene said. ‘I mean, it’s got a certain ruined grandeur and it’s not a bad size. But it’s a three-legged horse – it’s what’s missing that matters. That roof worries me . . .’
That evening, Gene drove them to one of their secluded places to talk over the cost. He had bought an old mud-green Ford, which already bore a new scar. Sober and on a fine day, he had misjudged a turn and scraped a wall.
Molly touched his home repair and felt a tiny whining mosquito of anger. Don’t spoil the mood.
They sat on the hood of the wounded car, looked up at the heavens and talked for twenty minutes or more as they tried to decide.
Then Molly pointed. ‘Look! A shooting star!’ A rock burned in the sky, just a bright hairline streak of falling silver.
‘Make a wish,’ Gene said, joking, ‘but don’t tell me, or it won’t come true.’
She kissed him and thought it already had. Everything was possible.
*
Gene and Molly told themselves it was a bargain if they did the repairs themselves. For months, they lived among crates and ladders and dustsheets and when they went to work, they smelled of fresh paint and old dust, no matter how much they showered. Gene slogged away at it every evening and all weekend, his dark hair dripping with sweat, while Molly worked extra shifts at the hospital to keep ahead of the bills.
Their first evening, Molly, Diane and Janice had sat on boxes and toasted Molly’s new home. Janice drank soda, pulling a face; she was pregnant again and alcohol made her ill. It had taken them years to conceive again after Chuck was born.
Friends helped when they could: Gene’s dad came down and the men fixed the roof with few words between them and no beer until afterwards. Molly stripped paper at midnight and, half-asleep, rolled paint onto everything. Sometimes Molly and Gene, exhausted, quarrelled about nothing, but they solved every problem under their old patchwork quilt.
Soon after moving in, one breakfast in that old-fashioned kitchen when she was tired and queasy and had a long shift ahead, she snapped, ‘If you want bacon, cook it yourself.’
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and after a moment’s fear, she took the plunge.
‘I’m, you know, late.’ She wanted to conceive so much, but there had been a false alarm before which had brought disappointment so deep it shook her.
Gene held her and the seconds rolled on and on. ‘See the doctor,’ he said at last. ‘If it’s not this time, well, it’s fun to keep trying. It’ll happen.’
Soon, even a whiff of alcohol made Molly ill. Every morning the sun came up with a song and she’d be bent over a basin in a horrible and joyful sort of way. Gene wanted to touch her belly all the time.
It’s a girl, Molly said, she just knew, and they argued about names. She’d feed the baby the natural way; the baby would drink love from her own body.
Gene’s blue eyes, her hazel – the baby might have either.
The busy weeks passed, she felt the baby move and the whole world changed after that. The leaves out back started to colour, one or two canary or scarlet. Molly dreamed of a bright birthday with the trees in bloom, her daughter blowing out her candles under the flowers. What a strange new world the girl would inherit.
There were no portents of doom, no croaking crows or sinister shadows. Gene was working, bleary-eyed, and Molly was up a step-ladder, half-asleep, finishing the nursery – sunshine yellow, in case it turned out to be a boy, but she’d filled a drawer with pretty things for when she was proved right.
Someone ran a sword into her side, a burning sword, and she thought she’d faint. She swayed on the ladder but didn’t fall. No pain would let her risk that. Clinging to the steps, then the banister, while the beast gnawed at her guts, she made the long march to the phone downstairs.
By the time the ambulance came Molly was on the floor, coming around from the faint, sobbing with pain. Her baggy overalls were smeared with yellow paint, but Molly’s hand was daubed with red.
‘Call Gene,’ she sobbed, ‘call Gene.’
CHAPTER 3
Two cursed years
Someone folded up the sunshine and put it away. Dark clouds rolled down from the north and filled the marriage bed. The joy drained out of the music Molly and Gene had so loved, through the cracks between the boards and down into the earth.
When they came home from the hospital, Molly stood in front of their house, the place where it happened, with Gene’s strong arm around her shoulder.
She hadn’t given her lost girl a name. In her grief, she hadn’t been able to decide, so the child was cremated without one. That failure ached.
‘I’ll get the door,’ Gene said, and Molly felt more tears bubble up. Would they ever stop?
In the weeks that followed, even waking up felt like a betrayal. Molly walked away from the work she loved because she couldn’t face the sick and dying. Worse was seeing a healthy baby in its mother’s arms: that was a wound.
The doctor wrote her a prescription for pills that stopped her feeling anything at all, except empty-headed and dry-mouthed. She existed, that was all, too dead to rise before Gene left the house or to stay awake for his return. She couldn’t choose which book to read, or between two cans of beans in the supermarket. Trees, sunsets and pretty girls’ dresses all turned to washed-out grey.
After three weeks, she flushed the pills down the toilet and reached for a bottle of Scotch, making a different choice to dull the pain. So days ran into nights and then into months.
One blurry day among many, she woke in their bedroom, confused by the dim evening light. Gene stood by the bed with a tray. The acid taste of vomit clung to her mouth and nose, but she didn’t remember being sick. She must’ve passed out and he’d washed her and got her to bed. Tomato soup steamed in one of their best china bowls, buttered toast beside it on the matching side plate. Her stomach revolted and her head rang. She smelled of sick people and she was thirsty.
‘You’ve got to stop drinking,’ he said, red-eyed. ‘Coming home to find you like that? I’m worried half to death.’
‘I’m a grown-up,’ she snapped. ‘You’re not my mother. Leave me alone.’
‘Eat something and we’ll talk,’ Gene said. ‘I thought this’d be good for your stomach . . .’
‘I need a proper drink. I don’t want to talk.’
He sighed. She hated the conversation he’d start – she knew it by heart now. Janice and Diane said the same things: none of the doctors thought it hopeless. There was a famous specialist in New York City. They’d find the money. He’d always thought adoption was a cool, loving thing to do. He held a childlike faith that she could do it, that she could be a mother.
Molly seethed with rage because he did not understand. She might feel a new life stir inside her and then have to live through another death. She couldn’t dare to hope again.
‘I’m not a damn car to be fixed.’ She shoved the tray away and the bowl toppled over the edge of the bed and smashed. Red soup sloshed over the carpet.
‘Hell. I’ll sort that.’ Frowning, Gene went off.
Molly rolled out of bed and knelt. She felt disgusting; the hand tremor was back and she thought she might throw up again, even though her guts were empty. A small drink would settle her.
The half-full bottle of Scotch wasn’t under the bed. She looked again. She was forg
etting things nowadays, but she knew she’d left it there. It was the last of six she’d bought in Bradleyburg, hoping she’d be less conspicuous in the bigger town.
Gene stood in the doorway holding a wet towel.
‘Where in hell did you put it?’ she said, levering herself up.
‘I poured it down the sink, and the bottle downstairs too. Don’t move, you’ll cut your feet.’
‘Good,’ Molly said, shoving past him.
*
A few days later, it was raining. She’d screamed and shouted at him, at death and at the sky, and now Gene shouted back, and slammed doors. She just wanted to sleep and not wake up, or be so drunk she couldn’t tell the difference.
They stood at the back door, looking out at the tangled garden and the tall fences. Rain ran off the piebald leaves, like the trees had lost their child too. Molly felt washed out with crying, empty and hollow. Without Gene’s strong arms around her she could’ve dissolved herself in Scotch and poured herself away.
She needed him, always, but he had to leave her wounds alone.
Gene grieved like a dying animal, out of sight. Sometimes she heard a groan, or choking gasps, but if she dared mention it, he would walk away. He played the radio loud to shut her out, or he retreated to the attic. There were nights he left the house. He started smoking again; she loathed the smell that permeated the house. Gene’s parents came and John took him away to do whatever men do about grief – fishing, maybe, long silences by quiet water – while Eva sat for hours at the kitchen table, holding Molly’s hands. Janice and Diane came too, and listened and talked, holding her head above water, for a while. They had both known grief and understood it, although not the death of a child.
The nights grew longer and her heart grew bleaker. And it didn’t stop.
*
She wanted to work – at least, part of her did – but the wards now raised such dread in her. Fall turned to winter and many people faded from their lives. The phone rang less often, so staggering down the cold stairs, Molly wondered, Who calls at five in the morning? But it was Roy, Janice’s husband, calling from the hospital: their twins had decided to arrive a few weeks early.