Was

by Geoff Ryman

  She dimly saw the little theater in which they had met. A memory of hands on keys. A memory of him leading the audience in song. “Follow the Bouncing Ball.” Gosh, that was a long time ago. With me young and pretty with long hair wrapped around my head and thinking the world was foursquare and simple. I thought you fell in love like walking into some kind of mist, and something happened in the mist that you couldn’t quite see or feel. I’d hardly even heard of what Frank Gumm was.

  Pretty little lady with the pretty little hands, that’s what Frank Gumm would call me when we were on stage together. I’d stand up and give a little smile; he’d take my hand; we’d bow. What a con artist. Both of us.

  And everyone knew. Everyone in Grand Rapids, then everyone in Lancaster. I had to walk down the street and feel people’s eyes on my face. What a world he pushed me into.

  The pretty little lady cut her hair and became modern. The things I found myself doing because of Frank Gumm. I nearly didn’t have Frances. I can remember driving to see Marcus, Marcus our friend, our doctor. It was like being in a dream, my husband driving the car beside me, looking like such a man, being so gallant and soft-spoken. I couldn’t put it together. It didn’t make sense. A husband and wife driving off like dirty strangers to kill their child, as if they were two kids who had been caught.

  Sitting in Marcus’s office. Trying to find a way to tell him, a way to begin to ask him. We both sat grinning and coughing. We didn’t even know what to call it. An abortion.

  Frank kept smiling. His whole life was a smiling lie. I was the one who had to say it in the end, I was the one who always had to do everything.

  “What my husband means, Marcus, is that I am with child and we don’t want it and we were wondering if there was some way in which we don’t have to have it.”

  Marcus paused and looked back and forth between our faces. Frank’s fat, sweaty face all queasy and cheesy and I hated him then. It was all starting to come out in his face. He was becoming a weaselly little man.

  Poor Marcus, what was he to say? “Um. There are some ways, yes, but none of them anything I’d like to associate with you two. Do you mind telling me the reason?”

  I still can’t remember what we said. Two children is enough. Can’t afford three. Can’t afford the time. It must have sounded pretty feeble. How could I say, My husband is a sodomite and I can’t bear him, the idea of where his hands have been or the thing that is growing inside me, that he put inside me. I wanted it gone.

  Baby sensed that, somehow. She must have. She must have felt it inside me, no child couldn’t. Maybe she half remembers that Mommy wanted to kill her.

  But only because I thought she would kill me, inside. Me, Ethel Milne, wanting to do that to my own child. I’d been pushed into a nightmare. What my husband was. The lies we told. And that was only halfway through, halfway through our strange dance. Me and Frank.

  We named her after both of us, Frances Ethel. She was supposed to hold us together, and she did. There was something special about Frances. But it all got too much for Grand Rapids. The women came to tea and asked me about Frank’s friends. One of them even called them boyfriends, and my little girls could hear, and I wanted to die.

  Running away somehow kept us together too. All the way across America, going West and working on the stage.

  That drive across the whole darn country. That little town with the cockroaches. They had a one-hundred-seater in a town of five hundred. We knew then that vaudeville was dead.

  And Frances’s Spanish trousers all in a tangle, not able to get them on. Poor little thing all naked in the wings and Janie, Jinny, singing the chorus over and over, waiting for her to make her entrance. Frank fighting to get her dressed so she could go on. And Baby Frances just smiled, grinning. She knew it was happening and thought it was funny. Everything was held up for Frances. That was all she cared about even then, being in the center. That little impish grin.

  Well, imps grow up to be demons. Ethel saw the impish face, transmogrified into something medieval, a monkeylike, vengeful face. Gargoyle. Judy Gargoyle.

  So where is the goodness in my life? Where is the joy? Where has it all gone?

  Don’t think about it, Ethel. There’s more to you than that. Things go wrong, but they can’t touch what you are inside. They can’t touch what you once were. Or where you were from. They can’t touch home.

  Ethel Milne Gumm Gilmore remembered her first life.

  I used to play tennis in a long skirt that went all the way down to the ground. Mutton sleeves, tiny waist. You had to play so that you didn’t sweat too much. You couldn’t play to win; you didn’t give it everything you had. You were supposed to break everything off. We’d play tennis, the girls of Superior, Minnesota, and we’d laugh. We’d all get together Sunday afternoons after church, around the piano, the whole crowd, boys and girls in a group chaperoning each other. A date like they have nowadays would have caused a scandal.

  Chasteness seemed so sensible in those days. Foursquare. No nonsense. Everything dirty seemed a continent away. Real people got married and were happy and if there were problems they’d solve them. We had a girl who did the scrubbing, and an old fat woman who did the laundry, and some tough skinny old bird who polished the house. All we had to learn was how to be beautiful. Taste and refinement. You learned how to speak properly and sit up straight. There were knives and forks and flowers on the table and laughter in the front hall. You cooked special dishes for church socials.

  And the clubs. I would be the president of one and the secretary of another. Superior Chapter of the Order of the Rainbow. Young Ladies’ Music Society. What were we going to do? We were going to make a good world by setting an example. By living well, we lived for everyone.

  There was such a thing as progress. You learned about it. People talked about it; they believe in it. We talked about science and morality as if the two were the same thing. Light bulbs, motion pictures, flying machines, all the products of rationality. And rationality was always clean, calm, sensible. Enlightened. We thought mutton sleeves and laugher were a sign of rationality. Progress meant men who shaved and didn’t drink in secret. We thought there was no need for secrets and that most people didn’t have them. We thought passion was something sweet and orderly, smiling fresh-scrubbed behind glasses. Poetry was progress. Learning Tennyson by heart and singing simple songs. I was ever so daring, working in a theater. Lizzie, I can still see Lizzie, going all red. “Ethel!” she said. Brave, she thought, singing in public and risking approbation.

  “I see nothing wrong in singing harmless songs and bringing harmless pleasure,” I said. I felt ever so modern with white cotton up to my chin and my wrists and ankles hidden well away and a little watch hanging from my waist.

  “You’ll be smoking a pipe next,” Lizzie said. Flushed face, bright spectacles.

  How, Ethel wondered, how did I end up here? Half a century later? Airplanes in the sky and me driving a motorcar as if it were a bicycle. Me. I’m not some old divorced lady who works as a clerk. I’m some fat old lady called Ethel who nobody has to listen to or take care of. They all think that I’ve done nothing with my life. They take it for granted that there is nothing more to me than fat arms and cheap dresses and well-applied, scented powder. They think that I’ve done nothing but wash diapers and follow my husband around and grow fat. Fat and deserted when my children left me, with nothing to do but make ends meet. If only they knew.

  Knew that I could once walk into a theater, any theater, and put people at their ease and get real work out of them. I knew how to do it. I treated it as a business proposition. And I knew my babies were good. And I knew darn well that when the second storm broke, where people found out what Frank Gumm was a second time, when we had to flee in shame again, I was darn well certain that I and my babies were going to be able to cope on our own, without him, without Frank Gumm to pull us down into the mud again.

  I was ready for the next time they rode him out of town on a rail. I saw it com
ing. I saw those boys, hanging around the movie house. They blackmailed him into giving them free tickets. They sat in the front row, next to my babies, their faces, their smirks, joking about fat old Frank so that everyone could hear, everyone could know. His poor wife, everyone would say. His poor wife. Mind you, she puts up with it. What goes on behind that smiling mask of her face?

  The men of the town would come sidling up to me, sideways.

  Oh, they’d heard about Frank Gumm, and I suppose they’d heard about me too. They’d come up to me, talking without moving their lips, hardly bothering with pleasantries. “Come on, honey, you’re a married woman. You know what it’s about.”

  They knew I needed love. They needed something other than their wives. Adultery, to call it by its proper name. I took lovers. Me, Ethel Milne, took men who didn’t always shave, who had secrets, who cheated each other in business deals. Who cheated me. Who treated me like a business deal.

  There was Billy. Young, burly, blond. Oh, what a difference, to be really wanted. That look in his eyes. And the way I opened up to him. Opened up in that deserted shed, back of town. He was a barber. No. A barber’s boy. Hah. Frank and I had the same taste in men.

  What a world, after Superior, Minnesota. Where was the bright and coming world of flight and public railways then? When you were fending off a strong young man who you wanted just as badly as he wanted you. Fending him off in a shed in Lancaster, California. The two of us had dust in our hair, and the place smelled of chicken manure. Why was I fending him off? He was angry; I was angry.

  Suddenly, that shriek of laughter, outside, the laughter of children exploring, and me leaping away, pulling my head back from Billy’s chest.

  And there was Frances, my Baby, looking at Mommy playing with strange men in a shed. Thank goodness our clothes were in place and we hadn’t been doing anything. Her dark eyes scowling with a question. Where is Daddy? Why aren’t you with him? Who is that man?

  Brats, Billy muttered. He called my Baby a brat and I knew. It wasn’t love he felt or he couldn’t have called Frances that. He should have knelt down and reassured her and showed me that he could love her too. But she had interrupted, interrupted his sport, another man’s brat who got in the way. His face was young and sullen, handsome, but soft too, and I suddenly saw how his face would go as he aged. He wouldn’t look that different from Frank. He would be gone, chasing younger women. Women younger than me, younger than himself. I saw that we had no possible real life together, even as secret husband and wife. So I left him, left beautiful, blond, young Billy. After that I would drive into Los Angeles alone and find my men in Los Angeles.

  Frances must have known. She knew what Billy was. She never asked. She never had to. She never said in front of Frank: Mommy, who was that man? She never said it because she knew, and she thought she had to protect Frank, and I suppose she still remembers Billy, and she remembers the things she saw in Los Angeles.

  So she doesn’t respect me. She saw her fat, ordinary mother chasing man after man in L.A. and always being dumped and disappointed. Treated like a towel on which men wiped themselves. Some fat old widow from Lancaster with a Buick, that’s what people thought until it turned out her husband was still alive. She bounced her fat old hips like a mattress. And Frances, coming back early from Meglin’s and her new dance steps, would sometimes see the men leave. She must have thought the lessons were just an excuse to get me to L.A. and to the men.

  Can’t you forgive that now, Frances? After all the men you’ve had? After the divorces? Can’t you understand?

  Nothing works out for either of us, Kid. Like me, marrying William Gilmore. The nice neighbor man with the dying wife. My life, Baby, is a parade of mistakes, and I still don’t know what I did wrong.

  I remember meeting the Gilmores for the first time. We were the nice new couple who bought the movie house. They were neighbors two streets down. We had them in for bridge. I’d serve iced tea and try to pretend that there was anything gracious about the gray bleached streets of Lancaster. Mary Gilmore would come into the kitchen after dinner to help me wash up, talking about the town. Mary didn’t like Lancaster either. You couldn’t like that heat. We’d talk about ways to keep cool, damp cloths and scent. We’d talk about the local school and how to keep the kids healthy.

  If only we had seen the future, Mary and me. Me marrying her husband. Baby Frances becoming this thing on posters, this giant creature. Mary dying. I saw her die, of a stroke, like a rose in the Lancaster heat. I saw William Gilmore cry, and I thought, Who will cry for me? I saw a nice, decent man.

  Two years later Frank was dead, Baby, and I was more sorry than you’ll know. The strangeness of life. I had loved him once, Baby, when he was twenty-eight and still beautiful, and I had lain with him and we produced three children before the horror finally closed in on us.

  Frank was dead, Baby, and the marriage had died years before, and I was alone, and Mary was dead too, and I confused sympathy in mourning for sympathy in life. So I married Bill Gilmore, and the nice decent man turned out to be dull, Baby. Dull, yes, after your father. I found I had married an old man who just wanted his slippers and his supper cooked. I had been permanently swindled, Baby, swindled out of a whole part of life, when you’re married but still young enough to attract each other. I never really had love like that. Like peaches that fall before they’re picked. You can’t put them back on the tree. Nice dull Gilmore wanted two minutes out of me once a week, with his eyes closed, pretending I was something young and lovely. Or even pretending I was Mary. Too many ghosts.

  I had nothing, Baby. My life had gone wrong again. And you danced when the marriage failed, Baby. I saw your smile. I saw you be so glad the marriage had died. Just because it wasn’t your precious father, because I dared to have a life of my own, after you and he had gone. Why do you think you own me? And if you do own me, why don’t you take care of me?

  Well, listen, Baby, listen, Frances, I hate you too. I hate you for that smile when Ethel Milne passed through the name of Gilmore and out the other side. You wanted me to fail. As hard as I wanted you to succeed, you wanted me unhappy. What was I supposed to do? Stay and hold your hand when you ditched friends and husbands? Be your mommy when all you ever did was tell me I was in the way? Where was I supposed to go, when I saw that evil light come into your eyes and I knew you were going to snap again or make me feel small? When I knew you were going to extract revenge like pulling teeth out of my head.

  Your friends. They would look at me with that silent, smug little smirk, that Lancaster smirk that said we know the whole story, you don’t fool us, we know what you are, Judy has told us about you. Those smart Hollywood young people, smirking as I tried to make myself useful, passing around canapés as Baby barely bothered to be polite.

  Oh, smart young people, blaming me for your precious Judy’s red, red eyes and the fact that she lied, over and over, playing nervously with her hair. Going mad in front of your eyes, blaming me, and doing nothing.

  Did they ever help you, Baby, all your smart young friends? What did they do for you except pour you another drink, or keep you supplied with the pills? What was I to do, Baby, but get out of your way for good? That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?

  So Ethel Milne moved again. Listen, Baby, I am of frontier stock. My people built houses out of sod, brought them out of the ground from nowhere. We don’t need anything from anybody. My people made their own soap and made their own shoes if they had to. Here come the Redskins, move the wagons into a circle, duck the arrows, and take up a rifle and shoot. Then move on.

  So I moved again, my little Gargoyle, when I knew you didn’t want me. I moved to Texas. I went to live with Jinny, the plainest and plainest talking of all the Gumms. Who else did I have? Jinny didn’t know me, but at least she didn’t hate me. Didn’t look gleeful when I did something wrong. Didn’t relish every opportunity to curse me in my own house.

  Texas was Lancaster all over again: another hot dusty town. It was a pat
tern by now. I still couldn’t get away from the pattern. I opened a movie house, Baby. Only I didn’t play piano anymore, and I had no one to sing with, and I had to be careful not to visit Jinny too much in case I overstayed my welcome. It wasn’t home, Baby. If I had a home left anywhere, I would have gone to it. Back to Superior? Back to those bright gals, with their sensible husbands? Those bright sagging gals in their fifties whose faces had so changed I wouldn’t recognize them, whose world was so far away from the one we were part of together? Mother dead, father dead. We all go down into darkness, Baby. It opens up under our feet. If we’re here together for such a short time, why do we make life so hard on each other?

  We were right, us girls in Superior. Right to be cool and sensible, tough but clean, right to believe in the rational. It was the rational that left us. What a world, what a world. Opening up inside us, opening up in the dark and fertile places. Good and evil mingle there, blood and darkness, where children are born and blood comes pouring out. A wound. All women are wounded, Judy Gargoyle. You more than any of them. What did I do to you?

  You tried to cut your throat. I read about it in the papers. So I came back from Texas and you wouldn’t see me, and your smart young friends told me I was the reason. And I had to see it then, see that you had an arrow in your heart, and you thought it was me.

  It was your father, Frances. And the one good thing I've done in my life is never tell you. I know he is the only thing you still hold dear. So I don't tell you, and I will never tell you. You will go to your grave not knowing. So if there is a God, maybe He’ll forgive me for that. Maybe there are Gates, and maybe they will open for me.

  I left Frank Gumm because he would destroy us, Baby. I worked us so hard because we needed to be able to make a living without him. He was driven from Lancaster because of the things he did there, with everyone knowing. They tried to forgive him, poor Frank, poor poor beautiful Frank. They tried to forgive him, and tried to ignore it, but I guess without me there, he just went to pot. Went too far. Danny Boy.