The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  7

  “Truth Comes in Blows” (April–June 1997)

  Paul’s memorial service, held on Shakespeare’s birthday, was everything a memorial service should be. If you’re part of a small liberal arts college, you don’t need religion. You don’t need a church. The college will provide all the things the people used to expect from a church: a sense of community, an active interest in the large questions about the meaning and purpose of human life, and even a memorial service when you die.

  It was a lot of work. I sorted out photos for a slide show, and one of Paul’s students put it on a computer. I even included one of Paul and his first wife, Elaine, who came all the way from New York to the service.

  The slide show was impressive, and as people were filling Kresge Recital Hall they could listen to the third movement of Bach’s sixth Brandenburg Concerto as pictures of Paul appeared and disappeared on the big screen at the front of the stage—pictures of Paul in the classroom, pictures of Paul at various Shakespeare parties (Paul as Falstaff, Paul as Juliet, as Lear, as Hamlet’s mother), Paul clowning at the Bernini Fountain in Piazza Navona in Rome, Paul and his first wife on Little Cranberry Island in Maine, Paul at the Blüthner grand, Paul at the head of a dining room table covered with dishes and bottles of wine, Paul and me in our tomato garden, Paul and baby Stella, Paul and Stella at Stella’s various graduations.

  Paul’s colleagues were eloquent. They took turns at the microphone on the side of the stage and reminded me–reminded everyone–how much Paul had been loved. I wasn’t the only one who would miss him. Father Viglietti spoke too, reminding us that Paul’s insights into Shakespeare were insights into our own lives as well.

  The college provided the food, but I had to pay for the wine. I didn’t want to use up the rest of Paul’s Barolo, still in the closet, so I bought a good Sicilian red wine that Tommy Gagg had recommended when I called him, trying to reach Stella.

  Stella showed up at the memorial service. I hadn’t seen her since the trip to Milwaukee, and then I saw her coming out of Kresge Recital Hall after the service. She’d been sitting in the back. How many times could I forgive? But she looked so terrible I could have made it to seventy times seven without breaking stride. I wanted to take her home, put her to bed, take her temperature, bring her a cup of bouillon, but she said she couldn’t stay. We walked across the campus without talking. Finally she said, “‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream,’ I thought Pa wanted someone to read that poem when he died.”

  “Ed Wilson read it at the graveside,” I said. “When we buried the ashes.”

  “In my first class at the workshop,” she said, “Professor Roberts tried to tell us that Yeats was being ironic. I almost walked out.”

  “You want to walk to the Fourth Street Bridge?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She had to get back. I walked her back to her car, Ruthy’s pickup, which she’d left on Cherry Street. I knew better than to argue with her. I knew better than to start crying. I watched her drive off and went back to Kresge, where people were still drinking wine in the lobby, and when it was all over I called Ruthy at TruckStopUSA. I was a little high, a little drunk, and I vented.

  “How can she want to be a fucking truck driver? She was going to be a poet. She had so much talent.” This question had been festering for a long time in my subconscious.

  “I don’t know any poets,” Ruthy said. “Do you know any truck drivers?”

  “No,” I said. “That makes us even.”

  “Depends,” she said. “Tell me about poets.”

  I thought about all the poetry readings Paul and I had sat through in the Common Room in Old Main. Names you’ve heard of. Distinguished names. I thought of W. H. Auden, so drunk that at the reading in Kresge Recital Hall he kept pushing the podium over to the edge of the stage. Almost pushed it off. Paul and Bill Young were ready to jump up from their seats in the front row to push it back, but Auden always caught himself just in time.

  I thought of living poets, poets whose names you see in the New York Times Book Review, and The New York Review of Books. I thought of Poet A, who stopped to kiss his student girlfriend in the middle of his reading. More than once. I thought of Poet B, who boasted that he was the highest paid faculty member at the University of X. I thought of Poet C, who came as an external examiner for three honors projects and bedded all three honors candidates. I thought of Poet D, who brought a coterie of adoring students from Maharishi University, students who crowded at his feet while he read and asked him to read every poem twice. I thought of E, who propositioned me after a dinner party at our house, and Poet F, who read so long that Paul had to bring the reading to an end by standing up and starting to applaud.

  “All men?” she asked.

  “I didn’t mention the women.”

  “Were they jerks too?”

  “No. But one of them talked on her cell phone while the department chair was introducing her.”

  “You want me to tell you about truck drivers?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m sure they’re the salt of the earth.”

  “Let me explain something to you, Ms. Godwin. You have to understand that I love your daughter too. You’re going to have to get used to that.”

  “You make it sound like a threat.” I could feel the strength in her voice, like a flower splitting a rock.

  “Maybe it is. Up to you.”

  I could hear the sounds of the restaurant in the background, the clatter of dishes and silverware. I thought that whatever I said now would determine who I was going to become, but I didn’t know who I wanted to become.

  What I said was, finally, “Ruthy, I’m sorry.” And I was sorry. Sorry that I didn’t understand my own daughter any more than I understood the boy who delivered our morning paper. Sorry that I had never accepted her choices. Not really, not deep down.

  “It’ll be okay,” Ruthy said. “Everything’s going to be okay. But Stella has to figure it out for herself first. People can beat the love out of you, even unconditional love, if there is such a thing. That’s what’s happening now.”

  About a week later Stella called from TruckStopUSA. Every time I heard her voice something with sharp edges twisted around inside me. She and Jimmy were on their way to Anna, Illinois, that evening to pick up a load of peppers.

  But I wasn’t listening to her words. I was listening to the sounds in the background.

  “Why are you calling from a bathroom?” I asked.

  “How do you know where I’m calling from?”

  “I can hear toilets flushing and water running and the sound of an electric hand dryer.”

  “I’m using Ruthy’s cell phone.”

  “Why don’t you go outside?”

  “Jimmy doesn’t want me to call . . . He gets pissed . . .”

  “Jimmy’s pissed? Jimmy’s pissed? Your father’s dead and Jimmy’s pissed? Excuse me.”

  “Ma, calm down. I think I’m in trouble . . .”

  Drugs, I thought. Pregnant? “Stella,” I said. “Every morning when I look at the advice columns, I think one of those letters is from you. It used to be Dear Abby and Ann Landers, now it’s something else. What’s the matter with these women? I’m really in love with this guy, and he can be real sweet, but he’s got a temper—”

  “Ma,” she interrupted, “you already said that. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand all right,” I shouted into the phone. “You need professional help. You need to get the hell away from Jimmy. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. You need to come home.”

  “Ma, I’ve got to go. I’ll be okay. It’s just—”

  “Just what?” I asked. But she’d already hung up.

  I called Tommy Gagg, in Milwaukee, but he’d gone to Italy for a funeral and wouldn’t be back for a week.

  Ruthy called on Wednesday morning just after midnight. Jimmy had pushed Stella out of the truck as they were pulling out of the TruckStopUSA onto I-80. “He wanted her to go down
on him. Suck him off, you know, while he was driving. She wouldn’t do it. He started punching her, grabbing her by the neck. She got the door open and he pushed her out. Somebody picked her up, another trucker, and brought her back to the truck stop. She doesn’t want me to call the police, but she wants to come home. She’s afraid. She wants to be far away. I’m going to bring her to Galesburg.”

  I felt the thing with sharp edges twisting my stomach, something between anger and grief and joy, too. At least she was on her way home.

  “Truth comes in blows.” Paul liked that passage in Henderson the Rain King. Henderson is chopping wood and a chip of wood flies up and hits him in the head.

  I got the bed in the guest room ready and put clean towels in the bathroom next to the guest room. Stella’d have a space all of her own, where no one could touch her.

  I opened up the big couch in the living room for Ruthy. It made a comfortable bed. No bar to kill your back.

  Then I got Pa’s old .38 out of a banker’s box in the garage. I noticed a little rust on the trigger. I spread out newspapers and cleaned it at the harvest table. The new gun, also a .38 with a long barrel, was in the drawer in a table next to Paul’s side of the bed. I don’t think he could have lifted it at the end.

  Camilla sat with her head in my lap. Cammy. We had bonded, but I didn’t allow her to sleep on the bed. At least not when I was at home. She was good company and sang softly when I played the piano. She was partial to Chopin.

  The gun had been clean when I put it away, but I tied a strip of cloth around the rear cylinder opening and ran a brush through the barrel, then a patch with cleaning solvent, then two dry patches. I cleaned the cylinders the same way and then rubbed the gun with a light coating of oil, wiped it, and put six bullets in the chambers.

  I didn’t expect Stella and Ruthy for another hour. Camilla and I went to the small park by the depot and waited for a freight train. I was wearing a new pair of shoes. Vigotti Salla. Boot-type shoes. Very comfortable. The parking lot was always full on weekends. People going to Chicago. But there were plenty of spaces tonight. The depot was closed. The first Amtrak train would come at seven the next morning, but there were freight trains all night long. Paul had complained. Everyone complained. Except me. People were agitating for a quiet zone, but I liked the sounds of the trains.

  We were standing where Carl Sandburg had once stood to see William Jennings Bryan. Near the huge old steam locomotive that had been given to the city by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. The beautiful big Burlington depot had been torn down, of course—I’d bought Paul’s railroad desk at the auction—and replaced with a smaller modern depot, which would soon have to be torn down and replaced with a larger depot.

  I wasn’t up on Galesburg’s railroad history, but I knew that the CB&Q trains had run on these tracks, or at least on this road bed, as had the Toledo, Peoria and Western. The old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe tracks ran by the house on Prairie Street. Now all the tracks are owned by BNSF, but they’re used by Amtrak, TP&W, and Union Pacific trains, too.

  I let Camilla loose. She sniffed the earth, returned, as she always did, to investigate a spot where someone had dumped some cat food a couple of weeks earlier. She never set foot out of the park. Maybe that’s because I started to scream if she even looked like she was going to step outside. She pooped and I picked it up in a plastic bag and dropped it in the trash can by the station.

  Once she helped the police with their inquiries by herding another dog that was loose in the park. I expected the policeman, at the end, to say, “You know, you’re going to have to keep that dog on a leash.” But he didn’t. She herded everything herd-able, including the other dogs in the loft apartments. She was friendly enough, but given a chance she’d herd them into a corner of the deck and wouldn’t let them out.

  We didn’t have to wait long for a train, coming from the south, out of the yards. It made a hell of a noise at the Chambers Street crossing: federal regulations now required a long pull at 110 decibels. The train wasn’t going very fast, so the pull lasted a long time.

  Standing at the back of the car rental place, I fired two shots into the ground. I picked up the casings and used my trowel to recover the bullets. Camilla came running to investigate. She was interested in the gun. I couldn’t wave her away.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” I said. We’d had this conversation before, not about the gun, but about abuse. She was afraid of men with beards and it had taken her a while to warm up to Paul. The crows, startled by the gun, had started an unnerving racket. Black shadows in the branches.

  “I need your help,” I said. I let her sniff the gun. “Good dog, good dog. Now you can understand better. Maybe not everything. But something.”

  I wanted to walk to the Fourth Street bridge, but I didn’t want to carry the gun around with me, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time. I put the gun in my purse and went back to the apartment.

  What was I feeling? Maybe I was feeling like Caesar in his tent, the maps spread out before him, about to take a fatal step. Alea iacta est, he said. The die has been cast. Except what he really said, according to Plutarch, was Let the die be cast. I had not yet crossed the Rubicon, but I was about to, and not for the first time in my life.

  The crows had settled back down in the big ash tree in the park and in the locust trees at the side of the Packing House Dining Company.

  I had my night vision by now. Orion was long gone, but Boötes the Herdsman was overhead, and I could still see Spica in the west.

  I thought about Stella’s telescope. It was very complicated and Paul got angry at the instructions, but we had got it to work, focusing on one bright star after another. It was still in the garage.

  Clouds drifted overhead, covering a waning gibbous moon like strips of gauze.

  I pushed the ejector rod and dropped the four remaining rounds into the palm of my hand.

  I was back at the harvest table when Ruthy called from the parking lot, downstairs, about three o’clock. Stella didn’t want a doctor, didn’t want the police.

  Ruthy’s long red hair was darker than Tommy’s. When she tossed her head you could see a little white birthmark on the side of her neck, shaped like a sock. She stayed in the guest room with Stella. Shared the little half bath. They had to shower in the big bathroom off my bedroom. Stella turned away from me when she came in to take a shower in the morning. Her hair was caked with dirt.

  “How is she?” I asked Ruthy, out in the kitchen.

  “Able to sit up and take nourishment.”

  “That’s what her dad used to say.”

  Ruthy was a lovely woman. Beautiful. Tough. Alive. Jaunty. Her hair was still wet from her shower. Her jeans were too long and formed a puddle around her shoes. She acted like a woman who wanted to be seen and heard, acknowledged.

  “You remind me of my husband’s first wife,” I said.

  “Is that good?”

  “Good but complicated,” I said. “She came all the way from New York to the memorial. She was very kind to me. She was a good woman, but she couldn’t stand the Midwest.”

  I drove out to Thrushwood Farms to get some pepper bacon. Stella’s favorite. Pepper bacon and poached eggs. Stella stayed in her room. Ruthy took her breakfast to her.

  “Why can’t she come out and eat at the table?”

  “Give her some time,” Ruthy said.

  We were sitting out on the deck. Ruthy was wearing some of my clothes. She was peeling an orange. I’d brought up the Italian flower pots from the garage but hadn’t planted anything. The pots were plastic, not terra-cotta, but they looked real, and they were beautiful. Different colors.

  “I haven’t gotten around to planting anything yet,” I said. “I haven’t been up to it.”

  “It’s not too late,” Ruthy said.

  Jimmy called from Milwaukee about ten o’clock.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She jumped out of the truck. Crazy bitch.”

  “
You pushed her, Jimmy.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “Jimmy,” I said, “you made things miserable for my husband at the end of his life and you’ve made life miserable for my daughter. For your uncle, too. You’re lucky you’re not back in jail right now. And you will be if you touch Stella again. She’s done with you. Through. Finito. Basta.”

  I was standing in the kitchen. Ruthy was making signs: “Stella’s got to tell him herself,” she mouthed. I handed Ruthy the phone and she took it to Stella, in the bedroom, and closed the door. I couldn’t hear.

  A few minutes later Jimmy called again. “You’re going to bring her to the truck stop tonight,” he said. “You don’t want me to come up there, do you?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t want you to come up here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  “Tell that bitch dyke Ruthy she’s starting to repel me.”

  “I think she already knows that.”

  “Eleven o’clock,” he said. “Tonight. Be there. Bring my wife, you hear, or I swear to God . . .” He didn’t finish swearing.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You hear?” he said. “I want to hear you say it.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  I was glad that Ruthy was with us. For both moral and physical support. We took Stella to the hospital in the afternoon. It turned out she had a ruptured spleen and a cracked rib. And she’d also, the doctor told us later, had a miscarriage after she arrived at the hospital. She was not going to need surgery, but she’d have to stay in the hospital for a few days.

  Back at the apartment Ruthy and I did the dishes. Two women in the kitchen. We let Camilla lick the plates before we put them in the dishwasher.

  “I know a couple of guys at the truck stop who’d be happy to put Jimmy in the hospital,” Ruthy said. “More than a couple. But I wanted to talk to you first. He’ll be there tonight. He’ll have to sleep for a while, fill in his log book.”

  I put a hand on Ruthy’s shoulders. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too,” Ruthy said. “We should plant some flowers tomorrow.”