Harriet took the “Way Back When” clipping from Sue Ann and slipped it into her purse. Maybe she should change her plans for supper and the dance. Maybe she should stay at home with Kate tonight. Though she hated coddling, Kate was bound to be upset by the item in the paper. When Harriet got home from work she would see how Kate was feeling.
When she thought of all the grief that Archer Canby had caused, Harriet had to shake her head.
The night of the accident, Harriet had answered the doorbell at about 2:00 A.M. to find Constable Wall standing on the porch, crying.
“Harriet,” he said, “that son of a bitch has killed her.”
Gus Wall and his wife, Marie, had lived on the corner diagonally across the street from the Drews all the years since Kate and Martin and Celia had moved to town. Harriet had opened the screen door and he’d come in, blowing his nose and clearing his throat. She knew right away who had killed whom. There wasn’t a moment’s doubt that Archer had killed Celia.
“How? Where?” she asked, pulling her robe around her and shivering although the night was hot and still. “Where’s Archer?”
“He’s dead, too. Car accident out at Jessups’. They hit a tree. Archie Voss and I decided Kate shouldn’t see ’em.” Mr. Voss was the mortician. “Will you make the identification?”
After calling Cousin Frieda to come stay with Kate, Harriet went up to Kate’s bedroom and wakened her. The first thing Kate said was “Something’s happened to Celia.” It was like everyone had always known that something would happen. Archer Canby was doom waiting to happen.
Back in 1932, when Celia had married Archer and moved out, Harriet had been with the Drews only a few months. Over the following years, she and Celia, who were nearly the same age, had grown fond of each other, but they had never become what Harriet would call close, and Celia had never confided in Harriet why she stayed with Archer.
Harriet wasn’t one for divorce, but she thought most women would have left Archer Canby. Harriet had finally concluded that Archer had been a kind of obsession of Celia’s, a madness. Women did lose their sanity over men, and men over women. You couldn’t call it love, could you?
Mr. Voss had a whiskey ready for Harriet in his office when she was done identifying the bodies. But she was sick as soon as she drank it, and she hadn’t been able to put much more than weak tea in her stomach for a couple of days.
When Harriet returned to the house that morning, Dr. White had come and gone. Cousin Frieda had called him, and he’d given Kate something to calm her. But Kate hadn’t gone right back to bed. She’d put on a robe and was sitting in the kitchen on the stool, ripping rose-colored trim from the neck and pockets of an old black percale dress.
Harriet and Frieda stayed with her awhile, but along toward 4:00 A.M., when the sky had begun to lighten, Kate said, “Don’t hang around. Go to bed.” She wanted to be alone.
For Harriet, the worst part of the night was watching Kate sit by the window ripping the trim from that old black dress. She’d rip a section, then stare out the window as if a car might yet pull into the drive from the alley. Then she’d rip another bit. She wore nothing but black for the next two years.
Could anyone tell Harriet why a newspaper would print such a story ten years later and bring it all back? It was criminal. She looked up the number for the Standard Ledger and picked up the receiver.
“Seven-three-eight, please,” she told the operator.
“Ledger. Can I help you?”
“I want the person who does the ‘Way Back When’ column, please.”
A young male voice came on the line. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Harriet McCaffery and I’m related to the Drew family. You carried a piece about them, about a car accident, in the ‘Way Back When’ section, and I want to know why you would do that. Both Katherine Drew and Bess … Elizabeth Canby still live in this town. Can you imagine how they’re going to feel, reading that?”
“I just moved here a month ago, Mrs. McCaffery. I don’t know the Drews or anybody else. I’m sorry if I chose a piece you don’t like or a piece that’ll upset somebody. But I’m just told to find interesting copy from the back numbers.”
“Well, don’t you ever check something before it gets in the paper?”
“Mr. Hardesty, the publisher, is up at Leech Lake on vacation with his family. We’re doing the best we can down here. I’m sorry if I upset you. I don’t know what else to say. I’d think that after ten years these people would be, well, past it by now.”
“Let me tell you, young man, I identified the bodies. Mrs. Canby had been decapitated and Mr. Canby’s face was gone. Do you think that’s something people get past?”
Harriet hung up the phone on him. She didn’t think she’d hung up on someone twice in her life, but really … The girls were looking at her. She began to tidy her desk. When they saw her put the cover on her typewriter, they started closing drawers, extinguishing desk lamps, and blowing eraser crumbs off the tops of their desks.
As Martha started out the door, she called back to Harriet, “If you see DeVore Weiss tonight, tell him hello from me and my mister.”
Now, how had Martha known about DeVore Weiss? I must be as transparent as a window, Harriet thought.
Chapter 3
ELIZABETH CANBY
The supper crowd at the Loon Cafe had been pretty thin, so Dora let Bess Canby go early. Dora didn’t like her waitresses standing around looking for customers who probably weren’t coming. And if she was going to let somebody go early, it was going to be Bess, not Shirley, Dora’s niece. Pay the wages to family.
Bess didn’t care. The Loon Cafe was hot and greasy. In the winter the grease went up to the tin ceiling. In August it settled on your skin like a coat of Vaseline.
Bess picked up the copy of the Standard Ledger lying on the counter where customers could read it when they came in for coffee. Dora always had two copies for the customers.
“It’s okay if I take this?” Bess asked.
“Sure. Nothin’ in it.”
Dora never read the “Way Back When” column. What did she care what happened ten years ago or twenty or a hundred? “Fifty years ago Mr. and Mrs. Bill Smith of Red Berry were guests of Mr. and Mrs. Anson Obermeier of this city on Saturday evening. Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Obermeier are cousins,” she’d read aloud one afternoon, laughing and tossing the paper on the counter. “Who cares what happened back then? Nobody gives a hoot.” But plenty of people cared. They read the column. They remembered. They gave a hoot.
When Bess had read the “Ten Years Ago” item about Celia and Archer that afternoon, she’d been furious. Wasn’t that the cruelest, stupidest goddamned thing you could think of, rehashing a story about people’s deaths ten years ago? Great-aunt Kate had seen it by now, Bess was sure. The paper was delivered on Wednesday afternoon. Aunt Kate always read it as soon as it came. Every last column.
In a sense Bess hadn’t been surprised by the piece. Cousin Frieda had said a week or so ago, “It’s nearly ten years.” But why stir up everyone else’s memories? In a little place like Harvester, the past never became history, but sat side by side with current events, like an old woman pushing in among the young ones, insisting on being a part of things.
Bess thrust open the screen door of the Loon Cafe and stepped out into the blazing six-thirty shimmer of Main Street. The street was nearly deserted but she sauntered along with uneasy disdain as though, the item having been delivered to everyone’s doorstep that afternoon, many eyes would be fixed upon her, waiting for her to stumble.
When Bess slammed the kitchen screen door at six-forty, her great-aunt was puzzled. “Thought you were working till eight,” she said.
“Not enough customers.”
“I didn’t fix supper, just a slice of melon and an ear of corn. Too hot. I’ll put something on for you. Only take a minute.” Kate pushed herself up from the dining room table.
“I’m not hungry, just thirsty,” Bess told her. “I’ll get
some iced tea.”
Kate’s copy of the Standard Ledger was conspicuously missing from the dining room, hidden in her desk or in the sideboard, and she had not remarked on Bess’s copy lying on the table with her purse.
Kate followed Bess into the kitchen, carrying the plate with the denuded cob and green melon rind on it. “Harriet’s having supper at Rose’s. They’re going to the dance.”
“At the Dakota?” Bess asked.
“I expect.”
“But it’s Old Time tonight.”
“She’s been going to the Old Time dances all summer,” Kate observed, sprinkling pepper along the melon rind. Rind didn’t draw ants, she said, if you sprinkled pepper on it before you put it into the garbage.
Her cousin Harriet had always hated the Wednesday-night dance at the Dakota. It was oompah music, polkas and schottisches and country waltzes. “A bunch of perspiring, red-faced Germans mopping their brows and blowing big horns,” Harriet sniffed. “Educated people don’t go to Old Time. It’s bad enough at the Dakota on the weekends when the music is modern, but Wednesday nights are … common.” “Common” was Harriet’s most damning epithet, one she’d picked up from Aunt Kate. “Common” was anything not to Harriet’s tastes, and she was a woman of exceedingly refined tastes, having graduated from business college as well as high school.
Purple, orange, and lime green were common colors. Women who had their ears pierced were common. Men who didn’t snap the front of their hat brims down, but had them turned up all the way around, were common, and so were men who wore white socks to church.
Oompah music was common. Yet here was Harriet, off to the Wednesday-night Old Time dance at the Dakota Ballroom, trailing Tabu through a sea of Evening in Paris. Unless she had to sit near the rest rooms. Near the rest rooms even Tabu could not fight its way through the reek of urine.
Bess stood by the refrigerator drawing the cold tea glass across her forehead and hating the greasy smell of her tan Loon Cafe uniform. Aunt Kate sat on a high stool across the kitchen, plucking withered leaves from African violets on the windowsill.
“She started going to Old Time night about six months after DeVore Weiss’s wife passed away,” Kate said.
“DeVore Weiss? The one who farms over by Ula?”
“The same.”
“Jesus H. Christ.” She leaned heavily against the refrigerator and stared at her glass, two fine lines appearing between her brows.
“Don’t swear. It sounds common.”
“DeVore Weiss is an old man.”
“He’s …” Kate stopped to calculate. “He’s forty-some. He was two or three years ahead of your mother in high school, so he’s not much older than Harriet.”
“And he’s got kids still living at home,” Bess went on, unimpressed by the arithmetic. DeVore’s son Lyle was a year behind Bess in school, and another son, Delwin, was a year behind him. Tall, rawboned boys with crimson cheeks and hands and ears, they laughed at themselves and everyone else. Bess was sure they were simple, but they were passed to the next grade every year.
As if the glass were suddenly too heavy to hold, Bess set it on the Hoosier cupboard. “My God, can you see Harriet married to a farmer and with his kids at home? She’d have a nervous breakdown making sure nobody tracked manure in on their shoes. Why would she want that? She’s got a job.”
Kate smiled, then raised a dish towel to her face to cover the smile. “I never said she was getting married. But, if she did, what’s wrong with that? She’s not a spring chicken. She doesn’t want people calling her an old maid. You know her well enough to know that.”
“I wouldn’t care if people called me an old maid, not if I had my own money.” Bess thrust out a hip defiantly.
“It’s my impression that Harriet’s fond of DeVore.”
“Anyway, calling somebody an old maid is dumb,” Bess pressed sullenly. “I’d rather be an old maid and work at the Water and Power Company than be married to DeVore Weiss.”
“Pride is cold in bed.”
“Hot-water bottles are cheap. There’s worse things than being a virgin.”
“What do you know about worse things than being a virgin? What have you been up to?” her aunt asked without worry.
Kate knew that Bess was a virgin. She’d been concerned last winter when Bess was seeing Jack Comstock, but after she’d broken off with him in April, Kate had asked her if she was crying because she’d gone too far with Jack, and Bess had said, “I’m crying because I didn’t.” They’d laughed at that.
Bess later reasoned that if she’d been able to maintain her virgin state with Jack Comstock, who was a prairie Adonis, then he was not it. When she met it, she wouldn’t have a will of her own. On the other hand, if she never met it, she would have her maidenhead intact forever. And she would rather sleep in the coldest single bed in Minnesota for all eternity than go looking for something at the Old Time dances.
“I think it’s disgusting,” she said, “if Harriet’s dancing polkas just so she can see DeVore Weiss. It’s … it’s shabby and dishonest. And … and pathetic.”
Snatching the iced-tea glass from the cupboard, she fled the kitchen, grabbing the Standard Ledger and her purse from the dining room table. She mounted the stairs, hands shaking, tea slopping on the wooden steps as she went. “Disgusting.”
And indeed Bess was sickened. She’d never thought of Harriet leaving. Harriet McCaffery, with her scrawny neck and her pretensions, was part of an indivisible family: Bess, Aunt Kate, and Harriet.
When Bess left Harvester to go to college, and later, when she started an exciting job God only knew where—maybe London—and married some highly educated man who smoked a pipe and had leather patches on the sleeves of his tweed jackets, it was Aunt Kate and Harriet who would weep, wish her well, and welcome her back for visits; Aunt Kate and Harriet who would write long letters about Harvester and the cousins and neighbors; Aunt Kate and Harriet to whom Bess would write tissuey airmail letters about punting on the … Cam? and about her “flat” and Albert Hall and the Lake Country.
Out there, in the world, was life—possibilities rushing toward you, too bold and lush to be imagined without the breath catching in your throat. Back here, in Harvester, was only the known and knowable: that which could be readily grasped and, like bread dough, easily punched down to its small, familiar stickiness.
Bess would write to Aunt Kate and Harriet about the world out there, sharing its fabulous monuments and subtle charms. Kate and Harriet’s world would expand as Bess shared hers.
How could Harriet, then, run after DeVore Weiss as though she didn’t care a damn about being in this family? As though she had no responsibilities here?
Bess sat down at the dressing table made of orange crates and dotted swiss, like one in Seventeen magazine, and looked at herself in the mirror. To whom did she belong if not to Aunt Kate and Harriet? And didn’t they belong to her?
Most of the time Bess felt strong and grown up, even sophisticated, by Harvester standards. But when someone left you, she thought, part of you sickened and shrank. Oh, you revived enough to go to work or school, but you were gasping for breath the rest of your life. You never entirely recovered—like Grandma Drew’s cousin Dennis, who was gassed in World War I.
Bess had experience with being left. Archer and Celia Canby, those distant but distinct figures who had been her parents, had left her late on a Saturday night, on a graveled country road coming home from a dance at the Dakota Ballroom.
Archer had had too much to drink, everyone said, and he lost control of the Ford coming around that corner by the Jessups’ farm where there was a grove of cottonwoods.
The cottonwood tree that Archer hit was barely damaged, but the car and the two people in it were destroyed. Not that Bess had seen the bodies. They hadn’t let her see them. But months later she’d heard Eunice Bensinger in the library telling Alice Penny, “Decapitated, she was, and his face was gone. The road to hell is paved with whiskey bottles, that’s what Re
verend Purdy says.”
Alice Penny, who worked at Lundeen’s Dry Goods and was a friend of Harriet’s, told Eunice Bensinger, “I don’t want to hear that sort of thing. Celia Drew [Miss Penny still called Celia by her maiden name] was as nice a woman as you’d hope to meet, and she isn’t in hell.”
Bess’s mouth twisted. Yes, she had experience with being left. She’d been humiliated and left gasping for air when her mother abandoned her on a hot summer night to drive off with Archer.
Archer, who, Aunt Kate said, had drifted north like a bit of cottonwood fluff, when everybody else was blowing west. Working on threshing crews, he’d filled in here and there for room and board. Kate could never forgive that damned Okie (no matter that he was from Texas) for carrying off Celia and killing her—Celia for whom she’d had such plans. That Okie, with the handsome face and bad arm that had kept him out of World War II, had blown in like a natural disaster, dragging Celia off and preventing her from going to teachers college.
Now here was Cousin Harriet hoping to leave. Harriet wasn’t really like Bess’s mother, but she was nearly the same age as Celia would have been. And she’d taken an interest, and been around all these years.
Bess opened the Standard Ledger to the “Way Back When” column. Taking the manicure scissors from the dressing table, she painstakingly snipped the column from the paper, letting the Standard Ledger slip to the floor. She reread the words about Celia and Archer, then tucked the clipping among the blank pages of the diary lying beside her cologne bottles. She’d never written in the diary, which Harriet had given her last Christmas. Her thoughts were too private for paper.
What a Woman Must Do Page 2
