Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  Joyce didn’t laugh.

  Ed started the car. It wasn’t like her to be so narrow-minded. Then again, he tended to underestimate the Catholic craziness on the subject of divorce. Though he attended St. Casimir’s each Sunday with Joyce, he’d been raised a Methodist. Divorce struck him as unfortunate and disheartening—not evil or tragic, and certainly not sinful. It was, he thought, an odd wrinkle in Joyce’s character: for all her intelligence, she was as Catholic as they came, susceptible to the same superstitions and ancient prejudices as the rest of her tribe.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “If Bernardi were married and cheating on his wife, that would be better than being divorced?”

  “He’s got four children.”

  She hadn’t answered his question. He was tempted to point this out, but he understood they weren’t having a rational discussion. On most days, and nearly all subjects, Joyce was as logical as a man; but when it came to Bernardi she couldn’t think straight. He thought of her behavior at Rose’s funeral, piling into the hearse with Bernardi and Dorothy and Lucy as though she’d temporarily lost her mind. Ed knew Joyce as he knew himself; he’d understood, then, that she was making a point. It would have been inappropriate for Dorothy to ride alone with Bernardi. He was merely the driver, paid by the mortuary. Joyce wanted everyone—Dorothy especially—to remember that.

  Bernardi. The mention of his name brought an edge to her voice. She referred to him alternately as a womanizer, an ignorant lout and once, memorably, a jackass. Memorably because Joyce never cursed; her speech was prim as a Sunday school teacher’s. Ed found the transformation astonishing. And, he had to admit, rather attractive.

  “My mother had his number,” Joyce said. “If she were alive, Dorothy wouldn’t be carrying on like this. I hate to think of her looking down from heaven, watching him hold court in her kitchen like some kind of sultan. Drinking and smoking in her own house.”

  Ed sighed. This was another problem with Catholics: nobody ever died. Joyce often spoke of her parents looking down from heaven—sometimes with pride or amusement, but usually with disapproval or downright horror. This struck Ed as a terrible burden, this sense of being watched by all your dead relatives, by numberless saints who’d been dead a thousand years but still kept a hand in things, interceding for the sick, finding lost objects, looking out for coal miners and whoever else had a dangerous job. Ed believed in God, but he also believed in death. He’d been fond of Rose Novak and saddened by her passing, but the poor woman, God love her, was dead. And that was the end of that.

  “Look,” he said, “you don’t like Bernardi, and your mom wasn’t crazy about him either. But Dorothy is a grown woman. If she wants to date a divorced guy, that’s her decision. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “But what about Lucy? What kind of example is this setting? She looks up to him, heaven knows why.”

  “He pays attention to her,” Ed said. “Girls her age are starved for that.” It was a phenomenon he witnessed daily at school. Once or twice each term, a particular girl would hang around his office for no good reason, and the secretaries would tease him about it: She has a crush on you. Always he denied it, in equal parts flattered and uncomfortable.

  Joyce stared at him. “She’s a child,” she said, clearly appalled.

  Ed didn’t respond. Lucy was fifteen, a young woman. She certainly didn’t look like a child.

  “Anyway,” said Joyce, “it bothers me that he and Dorothy are alone in the house all afternoon. Who knows what she might walk in on.”

  Aha, Hauser thought. Here’s the real issue. Joyce didn’t really care that Bernardi was divorced—or if she did, it was a secondary concern.

  “Why?” he said slyly. “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “Never mind,” said Joyce, her cheeks scarlet.

  He’d never known a woman so easily embarrassed.

  THEY HAD DATED for years—steadily, eventlessly, with few arguments and none of the petty squabbles he’d suffered with other girls. Early on they’d even worked together, a potentially awkward situation that Joyce, being Joyce, had handled with professional grace. After Helen Bligh returned from maternity leave, Joyce had taken a clerical job at the junior high. Now Ed saw her mainly on weekends, years of movies and dinners and dances at the Vets. He looked forward to these evenings, the hours spent in her company; he’d never felt so comfortable with a woman, so accepted and understood. He admired her strength and intelligence, the fierce way she tended her family. She was in every respect the woman he wanted to spend his life with. In every way, perhaps, but one.

  He wondered if they’d simply waited too long. In the beginning he’d been cautious, tentative. She was a resolute creature, with firm views on everything; he feared there would be no second chances, that one false move would alienate her forever. She’d had bad experiences with men in the air force. She didn’t elaborate, and Ed didn’t press, but the knowledge made him even more careful. When he kissed her, she didn’t pull away; but neither did she warm to him. Her response was oddly neutral. She did not object to his touch; she might possibly have found it pleasant. Sometimes she smiled at him in a friendly way. Her attitude—he hated even to think it—was cordial.

  For her thirtieth birthday he’d given her a ring, but Ed was in no hurry. He wanted to wait and see.

  AFTER THE MOVIE he suggested a drive. The night was clear, the moon full. He drove westward out of town, the Towers glowing in the distance.

  At the top of Saxon Mountain he rolled down his window. A few snowflakes had begun to fly. There was a rich, leafy smell, dark and fecund. He parked the car and flicked on the radio.

  “It’s cold,” said Joyce, hugging her arms.

  “Come here.” He loved the smallness of her, the tiny bones of her shoulders and neck. She nearly disappeared in his embrace, but he could feel her, birdlike, a delicate warmth against his heart.

  He kissed her, softly at first. Her eyes closed; he felt her relax in his arms. Deeper then, pressing her to him. Fingers splayed, his hand was nearly as wide as her back.

  At one time or another he had touched her everywhere, always outside her clothes. She had not touched him at all. Lately he’d felt keenly the inequity of this, but it had been their unspoken agreement, as far as they would let themselves go.

  Still kissing, he took her hand and placed it on his groin. She stiffened in his arms.

  “Shh,” he said, pressing her hand to him.

  “Ed!” She pulled her hand away as though something had burned it. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Joyce, come on. We’re not schoolkids.”

  She retreated to her corner of the seat. “Can you take me home, please?”

  “Fine,” he said, hating himself. He wasn’t sorry, not for a minute. He thought of Bernardi and Dorothy, who spent Friday afternoons alone in the house, doing things Lucy might walk in on. Angelo Bernardi would not have taken her home. He’d have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her into the woods.

  “Let’s not argue. You know how I feel about this,” Joyce said, fumbling with the buttons of her coat.

  “I know.” He started the car. “Don’t tell me again. I think we’ve covered it.”

  AT HER DOORSTEP they said a stiff good-bye. Later he regretted being cross with her. She would spend all Saturday in class; in the evening he’d call and apologize, take her to dinner as though nothing had happened. More and more, their weekends followed this pattern. They had reached an impasse. Nothing would free them, it seemed, but marriage; and that posed its own set of dangers. He feared marrying a cold woman, as his brother had. The term, frigid, Ed knew from his reading. Apparently there was no telling beforehand. His sister-in-law was an attractive girl, charming and vivacious. There was simply no way to know.

  He had dated loose girls, but not often and not for long. For love he had chosen a girl of admirable character; he hadn’t wanted any other kind. Now, with marriage looming, he wished for a ch
ange—no, nothing so drastic; just a slight moderation of her temperament. Joyce had proven her virtue. Now he wanted her to relax, to metamorphose into the passionate creature she would be in their married life.

  But Joyce didn’t relax. She didn’t change in the slightest. Engagement wasn’t the same as marriage, she insisted. Certain things would have to wait.

  He’d tried reasoning with her. “You see the problem, don’t you? It’s like buying a car without a test drive.”

  “I did that,” she said, without a trace of irony. “My Rambler. It runs fine.”

  “But, honey. How are we supposed to know if we’re compatible?”

  “Of course we’re compatible. If we had any more in common we’d be the same person.”

  This was true. They were both churchgoers, Democrats; on bank holidays they flew the flag. They believed in education and personal responsibility, fair trade and equality for Negroes. Senator McCarthy, they felt, had taken leave of his senses. On books and movies they had lively discussions, but their deepest values were utterly the same.

  “I mean sexually compatible.”

  Joyce blushed violently. “Oh, Ed. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She meant it sincerely; he could see that she did. She was a thirty-year-old virgin, her sexual experience limited to kissing in his front seat. The rest—things they would do at some vague time in the future when the ban had been lifted, the danger removed—had been set apart in her organized mind. For now it was a murky abstraction, impossible to think about. That the act could unfold smoothly or awkwardly, rapturously or disastrously, hadn’t occurred to her. She was like a dispatcher of trains whose entire attention is directed toward scheduling arrivals and departures. The actual driving of the locomotives she had never even pondered.

  In the spring Lucy began to disappear.

  She was still a big girl, but no longer a fat one. Food tasted wrong now, or didn’t taste at all: Dorothy’s oatmeal, the cafeteria slop, Joyce’s bland casseroles. The daily trek to St. Joe’s was a brisk half hour each way. Lucy walked in all weather, in rainstorms, in snow. It was better than riding with Joyce.

  The weather warmed, and she returned to her spot on the school steps, joined, now, by a junior named Marcia Dickey, a freckled girl who smoked menthol cigarettes. Marcia talked, and the two girls smoked.

  Marcia was a farm girl. Her father raised dairy cows on a tract west of Moss Creek. Lucy had seen the name stamped on neat aluminum boxes on porches all over town—DICKEY’S DAIRY—and felt as though she were meeting a celebrity. The Dickeys’ farm was so remote the school bus didn’t come near it, so every morning Marcia rode into town on one of the milk trucks. For two hours she sat in the cafeteria with the other farm kids, waiting for the classrooms to open. After school she rode home with her boyfriend Davis, in his father’s car. Davis played on teams: baseball in the spring, football in the fall. While the teams practiced, Marcia waited on the steps.

  Lucy had seen Davis around school, a lanky boy with hair like an Irish setter. He was as quiet as Marcia was talkative; they looked so alike they appeared to be related. Once he’d walked by the steps when the girls were smoking, and Marcia had introduced him to Lucy. It was as close as she had come all year to talking with a boy. At St. Joe’s the classes were segregated by gender. Boys and girls saw one another only in the halls. They were permitted to sit together in the cafeteria, though only the steady couples did. Couples like Connie Kukla and Steven Fleck, a senior with comically large shoulders. Connie wore his class ring on her engagement finger, heavy as a penance on her tiny hand.

  The cafeteria was as large as a train station. Girls filled the tables at the front of the room, while the boys gravitated toward the back. Lucy liked the noise of it, the bustling anonymity. She and Marcia Dickey sat with their backs to the wall, watching. One by one the students filed through the line, holding their trays, looking for a place to sit. In that moment, they all wore a panicked, baffled expression. In that moment they were all the same.

  Sometimes boys stared at Lucy. She had not noticed this herself; Marcia had pointed it out one day in the cafeteria line. The school uniform, a plaid jumper, was designed for petite girls like Connie Kukla. The snug fit, the busy pattern, made Lucy’s chest look enormous.

  “It’s not my fault,” Lucy said, her cheeks reddening.

  “Who said fault?” Marcia smiled. “I’d kill for a figure like yours.” For a moment Lucy heard her mother’s voice. Lucy is beautiful. She’ll always be beautiful.

  “This lunch is disgusting,” she said, covering her meat loaf with a napkin. She busied herself with not eating, afraid she was about to cry.

  THEY WERE SITTING on the steps when Davis pulled up in his car. Music on the radio, a song Lucy recognized.

  “Ready?” Davis called out the window.

  Marcia looked up at the sky. “It looks like rain. Can we give Lucy a ride?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said quickly. Two boys were already sitting in the backseat. “I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

  “You won’t,” said Davis. “I’m already taking these jokers into town. Hop in.”

  The back passenger door opened and a tall boy stepped out, wearing gym shorts and a damp white T-shirt. Lucy recognized his broad shoulders, his shiny black hair. He was Connie Kukla’s boyfriend, Steven Fleck.

  He nodded toward the car, and Lucy slid over to the middle of the seat, next to a small, blond boy she didn’t know. Marcia got into the front seat, leaned in close to Davis, and kissed him on the mouth.

  They peeled away from the curb, and Davis turned up the radio. Frankie Avalon backed by hushed female voices, a song Lucy heard everywhere that spring: Venus, make her fair/A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair.

  Oh, brother, Lucy thought. Even Frankie Avalon was in love with Connie Kukla.

  “Whew. It stinks in here.” Marcia rolled down her window. “Carful of sweaty guys. Ew.”

  Steven Fleck laughed, so Lucy did, too. His face and neck and arms looked moist and flushed, as though he had been running hard. In the gym shorts his legs looked thick and muscular. She was relieved to see that his thighs were wider than hers.

  Davis drove fast and carelessly, like her brother Sandy. The first time he made a left turn, Lucy lurched to the right, directly into Steven Fleck’s lap.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” he said, laughing.

  It was amazing what you could learn about a person without talking, just by sitting close. His hands were large, the nails bitten low. (She bit her nails, too.) His legs were dirty, the skin scraped raw and bleeding a little at the knees. You had to take a game seriously to slide that hard at practice. Lucy had played the same way: kickball, dodgeball, she had always wanted to win. Baby games, she knew; that was a long time ago. She hadn’t played anything in years.

  Davis stopped at a traffic light. “Where to, Lucy?”

  “Polish Hill,” she said.

  The blond boy piped up. “Fleck’s girlfriend lives up there.”

  Lucy had forgotten he was there; she looked at him now with intense dislike. She often felt this way toward small, blond people: Connie Kukla, her sister Joyce. Steven Fleck was big and dark—like her mother, like Angelo Bernardi, like Lucy herself.

  Davis looked over his shoulder. “Fleck, you want me to let you off at Connie’s?”

  “Nah, that’s okay.” He glanced sideways at Lucy. “I just saw her at school. That’s enough for one day.”

  In the front seat Marcia burst out laughing. Lucy, too, started to laugh. They were still laughing when Davis pulled in front of her house. Steven Fleck stepped out of the car and Lucy slid out, holding down her skirt with her hand. The seat was warm where he had sat. The vinyl stuck to her bare thighs.

  “See you in school,” said Steven Fleck.

  “Sure,” said Lucy. “See you.”

  She stood in front of her house a moment, watching the car drive away
. Then Leonard Stusick rode up on his bike, his book bag and lunch box tied to the rear fender. He wore his navy blue pants and sweater, the grammar school uniform. He was twelve but looked ten. “Who was that?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t know them.”

  “How do you know?” Leonard squinted, shielding his eyes from the sun peeking through the clouds. “The big one is Steven Fleck. He plays in the Pony League, for Reilly Trucking.”

  “He does?”

  “Watch this.” Leonard spun a fast circle in the road, wheeling up on his back tire.

  Lucy ignored him. “How’d you know that?”

  “You didn’t even watch.” Leonard stopped suddenly, spraying gravel. “What? Is he your boyfriend now?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “That’s guy’s an idiot,” said Leonard. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trust me.” Leonard popped a wheelie and pedaled into his driveway. “I know what I’m talking about.”

  IN THE KITCHEN Joyce stood at the sink, rinsing lettuce for salad. “You beat the storm,” she said. “I was about to come and get you.”

  “I got a ride home.”

  “I see that.” Joyce shut off the water. “Who are your friends? I didn’t recognize the car.”

  Lucy’s cheeks heated. “Nobody. Just some kids from school.”

  “Well, I figured that much.”

  Joyce waited.

  “Marcia Dickey,” Lucy said finally.

  “What about all those boys?”

  “You were watching?”

  “I heard a car come up the hill.” Joyce dried her hands on a towel. “The radio was playing full blast. I’m sure the whole neighborhood heard it.”

  “It wasn’t that loud.”

  “Lucy, who were the boys?”

  Am I under arrest? Lucy thought. She wished she had the nerve to say it.

  “Davis somebody,” she said instead. “He’s Marcia’s boyfriend. And Steven Fleck. The other boy I didn’t know.”