Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “War widow. Son died when he was fifteen. That’s a lot to bear.”

  “She was unhappy then? Always?”

  “Some people don’t have a great capacity for happiness to begin with, Hannah. I think maybe Orna Phillips was one of those.”

  “I never knew her first name.”

  “Why all this sudden interest?”

  Hannah looked into the gray recesses of the stone church. She felt the truth clawing at her insides.

  “I guess I’m depressed.”

  “For some time.”

  “I try not to be.”

  “Maybe too hard, eh? There’s no crime in it, Hannah, being unhappy.” Father Joe placed his hand on the small of her back. “Go on in, my girl. Down on your knees.”

  Tears welled against her lower lid.

  “When you’re ready, Hannah. I’m here.”

  They stepped into the vestibule of the old church and her head filled with a favorite smell—cold stone and old incense—a smell that meant permanence and quiet and being small again.

  “Did I go to the boy’s funeral?” she asked, stopping beside the first pew. “I can’t remember.”

  “You were there with your mom and dad. I imagine it was a pretty deep shock to lose someone who’d lived next door to you all your life. And by an accident that could have happened to any of you kids.”

  “Strange how I remember some things so clearly but the rest is just gone. Why would I forget?” She couldn’t believe what Mindy said, that it was normal to forget what caused her pain. If that were true, why couldn’t she just forget everything about Bluegang. Why was some of it so clear, so clear it hurt her eyes, her whole head, to look at it.

  “You were such an open-hearted little creature, Hannah. Into everyone’s business, asking questions all the time. Full of great big emotions. Billy Phillips’s death was probably the first time you ever thought about your own mortality. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a little kid.”

  Father Joe left her to change into his vestments and Hannah took her favorite place at the back of the church and knelt to pray. But the prayers wouldn’t come and finally she gave up and daydreamed about Angel instead.

  The crunch of the Volvo’s tires on the gravel drive woke Liz. She had been dreaming of water, of rain and of swimming. She reached across the bed to the nightstand where she’d laid her book, spread eagle, the night before. She propped herself up on the pillows and read for a while. The book was Justine, a favorite from college days.

  She would tell Hannah and Jeanne about the baby today when they were together at lunch. She put down the book and practiced her dialog. I have something to tell you both. Hannah would think cancer or AIDS because her mind worked that way. Jeanne would think that, whatever the news was, Liz was dramatizing . . . because she always thought Liz dramatized. I’m here for an abortion. They would be stunned and then sympathize, they might say it served her right after all these years. Hannah would offer to drive her to the clinic.

  Not much longer, she thought, laying her hand on her stomach. What should she feel? Odd, this disconnect.

  She read a little longer and dozed off again. The house began to stir and she heard zing and ping video sounds from Eddie’s room. She got up and dressed for a run. For longer than usual she stretched, feeling creaky and old, bloated and mildly out of sorts. The house seemed awfully busy, awfully early, and she was eager to be off like a dog with its nose to the wind.

  Hannah turned from the stove and smiled at her as she came into the kitchen. “Bacon: the breakfast that kills.”

  “God, I love that smell.”

  “I’m making a feast. How long will you be?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “It’s chilly out there.”

  Liz turned left at the end of the driveway. She meant to turn right, run past Hilltop, up and around Overlook Road; but instead and without thinking she went down Casabella Road toward town. She glanced at her watch: 9:20. Seven minutes down and twelve back, allowing for the hill.

  The road swung into the hairpin turn at the Bluegang bridge and then up a rise and to the right. The air seemed to crackle in the arid cold, but the sun warmed the back of her neck; and when she rolled her head to the left and then the right, the stiffness melted out. Casabella swooped into a wide turn and sloped down the hill past more old houses, villas and cottages and all of them perfectly restored. The street was an architectural gallery. Three blocks. Two blocks. One. And there it was, her house. A woman in running clothes sat on the front steps reading the newspaper.

  Liz stopped. The woman looked up.

  “Mrs. Sandler?” Hannah had told her the woman’s first name but Liz could not remember. She stopped at the edge of the property. “I’m Liz Shepherd.”

  Mrs. Sandler smiled and waited.

  “I used to live here.”

  “Oh. Shepherd. Of course.” She put out her hand. “Glad to meet you. I’m Mitzi.”

  “The house looks wonderful.”

  Had it always been beautiful? It troubled Liz to think that she had lived seventeen years of her life oblivious to the beauty around her. What she remembered most clearly was being embarrassed by the busy-faced, old-fashioned house in the unfashionable part of town. She had wanted to live in a shake-roofed ranch house out by the country club, like Gail.

  She pointed up. “That was my bedroom. We called it the turret.”

  “The corner tower.” Mitzi Sandler folded her paper, The New York Times, and stood up. “We’ve turned it into a playroom for the kids. Our daughters.”

  Liz nodded.

  “Would you like to see inside?”

  Liz looked at her watch.

  “Actually, I’m staying with Hannah Tarwater—”

  “I know Hannah. She’s terrific.”

  “We’ve been friends—”

  A buzz came from the cell phone on the steps.

  Mitzi looked apologetic and reached for it, saying as she did, “Look, if it’s not convenient now, I’d love to show the old girl off another time. Can you come back later in the week? We’re going to be working in the basement but—”

  “Thursday?” Liz asked.

  Mitzi Sandler nodded, smiled and punched a button on her phone and said, “Hello.”

  Jeanne preferred the 10:30 service at St. Margaret’s and always sat up front. “For the theater,” she told people. By which she really meant “for the mistakes”—like the time the acolyte dropped a plate of consecrated wafers and the priest had to eat every one of them while the congregation pretended not to notice. Most mistakes were more subtle and only noticeable to those who, like Jeanne, had participated in the Anglican liturgy all their lives and knew it well enough in all its rites to let her mind drift and think of other things.

  God and church didn’t have much to do with each other in Jeanne’s mind. God seemed like wishful thinking but the Church made excellent sense. Jeanne did not like to think of a world minus the Ten Commandments, minus reward and punishment.

  She genuflected and crossed herself, never missing a beat. She said the words of the Creed and Thanksgiving while she thought of all the things she had to do before the end of next week. She knelt for the Confession, resting her hands on the back of the pew in front of her. She laid her head on her hands and closed her eyes.

  A hangover drilled at the inside of her skull.

  She had only intended to soften the edges of the evening. A few glasses of wine was like applying an airbrush to the guests at Hannah’s table. Their flaws disappeared. No moles, no wrinkles, no unsightly hair. Nobody bored her, not even Gail. But it hadn’t worked. The more Gail talked, the less she said; and Teddy, glossy and smug, had laughed at every joke. He meant it when he said he planned to ask her for money. His fawning irritated Jeanne like a burst of poison oak she couldn’t stop scratching. And as if that were not bad enough, Mindy—who by all the laws of life should have been a bitter, neurotic, drug-addled ruin of the Sixties—was contented and self-accepting as the Buddha
himself. All Mario did was remind Jeanne of the past. Like every other girl at Rinconada High School, she had adored him.

  The thought of love powered the drill in her head.

  Which was worse? Drinking on purpose or trying not to drink and still doing it? Either way she went, she mirrored her parents. Her father had been a slow, purposeful, daily drinker who took a shot of Jack Daniel’s every hour or so from midday until bedtime the way some people dose themselves with aspirin for constant pain. By nightfall he was a zombie but still able to lay down the law. Her mother had regularly tried not to drink; but eventually, after a week or a month of white-knuckled abstinence, she succumbed, drank and wept and blamed herself for her son’s death, blamed Jeanne for daring to live on, and took to her bed.

  The usher touched Jeanne’s shoulder. Old Mr. Applebee. Since his wife died he seemed to have forgotten how to comb his hair. Jeanne smiled at him, rose, genuflected in the aisle, then stepped back to let the boys she’d brought from school go before her where she could keep an eye on them. She imagined her own boy at the same age as these. Adam Weed had stayed behind at the school; his father had said they were not churchgoers. Teddy was afraid Simon Weed would take his son out of school at the first hint of trouble. Teddy the Know-it-All. Teddy Mr. Big Bucks. Jeanne knelt at the altar rail, crossed herself and lifted her hands for the Host. She wished for once Teddy would get what he deserved. She grabbed the chalice when the priest offered it.

  At Hilltop Jeanne parked the van in the transportation shed and the boys ran off, yelling, to change their clothes and meet in the dining hall for a baked ham dinner. Sunday was a free day for the older ones; but after a quiet hour following dinner, the younger boys were required to play organized games. According to the Hilltop Method this encouraged cooperation and healthy competition. Late in the afternoon there would be study hall and story hour followed by cheese on toast and tomato soup.

  A memory smacked her.

  Billy Phillips’s mother, when she was cook at Hilltop School, had instigated the Sunday night tomato soup and cheese on toast. It had been a year for tomatoes, the plants drooped from the weight of them. Jeanne had been sent into the garden with a bushel basket, hauling it back into the kitchen and stopping every few yards along the way because it was heavy and she was—what?—eight or nine, no more than that. Mrs. Phillips had shown her how to blanch the tomatoes and slip off the leathery skin and moosh the fruit with the potato smasher, simmer the pulp with a little chicken broth and then push it through the ricer. Mooshed, smashed and riced tomatoes, evaporated milk, salt and pepper; the cooks still used Mrs. Phillips’s recipe. She had been finishing her kitchen shift on the day her son died. Jeanne, out of breath from running, had passed her coming out of the kitchen on her way home, clutching her straw bag filled with leftovers.

  Slow down, Jeannie. There’s fresh cobbler in the pantry.

  Jeanne could have told her then.

  Coulda, shoulda. Damn Liz for bringing it all up again.

  Hard to believe, but Jeanne was older now than Mrs. Phillips had been back then. She thought how the burden of being a war widow with a young son, a problem child, must have burdened her. And then he was dead and she was alone and Jeanne supposed her widow’s pension was enough to live on alone. In some ways her life was probably better without him. She had stopped working at Hilltop and from Hannah’s bedroom window the girls often saw her sitting in a canvas chair in her backyard knitting. Even in summer she knitted.

  Jeanne locked the van and slipped the keys into her purse. Her fingers touched Teddy’s Waterman. Ahead she saw a trash can. She dropped it in and gave the can a kick so the pen dropped to the bottom.

  Jeanne detoured around the administration building, and crossed the lawn to the rose cloister where she stopped a moment to sit on the lion-footed bench, postponing. Dawdling, her mother would have said.

  The glory season was over. Tomorrow Mr. Ashizawa would spend the day pruning the plants back to the wood. Few blossoms remained from Saturday morning’s cutting and those that clung were sadly overblown. Petals carpeted the ground beneath the plants. In some places the covering looked inches deep. She had read that Cleopatra and Antony made love in a chamber filled with rose petals. The lovers waded to one another through rose petals and fell upon them like silken sheets.

  Jeanne wondered if Teddy would ever make love to her again. And if he didn’t, how much did she care. She imagined making love with Simon Weed. He would have a small penis, she guessed. But capable.

  When she passed through the oleander hedge a few minutes later, she found Teddy on the patio drinking a gin fizz and reading a paperback.

  “Hair of the dog?” he asked, holding up his glass.

  “I’m having brunch with Liz and Hannah.”

  “Lucky you to be so popular.”

  “Do you have a headache?”

  He shook his head. “You?”

  “I feel great,” she said.

  Jeanne walked past him into the house. When she emerged thirty minutes later she had changed into a peach-colored pantsuit with a bright scarf at the neck. Her hair was loose and curling about her shoulders. Teddy raised his glass.

  “I see there’s life in the old girl yet.”

  “Do I look okay?”

  “Do you care what I think?”

  Her spine stiffened. “Teddy, can’t you just answer me straight? Does everything have to be a punch line? Do I look all right? Maybe I’m too old to wear my hair down. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re showing off for Liz.”

  Jeanne walked away.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  That gave her a lot of options.

  The restaurant was called La Vache and it tried for the French country look. On the second floor dining terrace, round tables covered in rough cotton cloths and shaded by green-and-white umbrellas overlooked the dusty oaks and shedding sycamores of the town park. Potted flowers, artificially crumbled stonework: the effect was pleasant but not like any France Liz knew. Dress at La Vache was casual for which Liz was grateful. She wore a black tunic over pants with an elastic waistband. This would not be an easy meal. She had to be able to breathe.

  Liz and Hannah ordered sparkling water from a waitress in a pushup bra and talked about Jeanne while they waited for her to arrive.

  “Have you ever told her she drinks too much?”

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “A couple of years ago.”

  “And?”

  “What you’d expect. She got that arch superior look, lifted her eyebrow, the whole thing.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Something like, ‘I can handle it.’ Very cool. Made me sorry I cared.”

  “She’s formidable.”

  “Sometimes we go for a walk in the morning and I can smell it on her breath.”

  “She told me she never drinks during the day.”

  “I think she tries not to and she can be super-controlled—”

  “What else is new?”

  “—and then something happens and she loses it.”

  “Sounds like her mother.”

  “Did you know they drank?”

  Liz nodded. “My mother used to talk about everybody in the neighborhood. Being superior gave her permission to be a gossip.”

  Hannah tore a morsel from her French roll. “I’ve thought about suggesting an intervention but I don’t have the guts to do it alone and Teddy wouldn’t help. He loves it that she has a weakness.” She brushed bread crumbs into her palm and dumped them in a potted plant. “Her parents died drunk. You weren’t here but by then everyone in town knew. If Jeanne and Teddy weren’t running the school they would have lost it.”

  “And now she’s headed the same way. How’d she get like this, Hannah?”

  “How did any of us get to be the way we are?” Hannah spoke as if first causes were of no interest to her, as if their conversation the night before had not taken place. They were back to “making” convers
ation, twirling and pirouetting over Billy Phillips’s grave.

  Liz said she had seen Mitzi Sandler that morning. “I’m going to go into that house. I’m going to force myself.”

  “Your parents did the best they could.”

  “It isn’t just them, Hannah. You know that. The house, the creek, Billy Phillips, they’re all part of the knot I’ve got in my stomach.”

  Hannah looked wary. “You’re not going to start on Bluegang again, are you? Wasn’t last night enough?”

  “It’s the elephant in the living room, Hannah.”

  “If there’s an elephant in anyone’s living room, it’s in Teddy and Jeanne’s.” Before Liz could respond Hannah went on. “Over the years I’ve given a lot of thought to those two and I’ll tell you, Liz, I’m sure there’s a secret there. A nasty little secret our Jeanne’s too ashamed to talk about.”

  Liz had sometimes thought the same thing. “What do you think it is?”

  “Haven’t a clue. But it’s there. Buried way back probably. I’ll bet Teddy knows.”

  “Whatever it is, he probably holds it over her.”

  “Such a jerk,” Hannah said, shaking her head.

  “But he’s still handsome.”

  Hannah laughed. “For a scumbag.”

  “That was a beautiful shirt.”

  “He spends more on himself in a month than Jeanne does in a year. Two years.” Hannah glimpsed Jeanne talking to the hostess and waved. “Here she is.”

  Jeanne’s hair was loose around her ears, shiny in the autumn sunlight and the peach pantsuit brightened her complexion or, Liz thought, she might have brushed on a little color. For some reason, this effort, which in another woman would have been unremarkable, made Liz terribly sad; and there were tears in her eyes when she stood up and hugged Jeanne.

  “What’s that for?”

  Liz shrugged. “I guess I love you.”

  Jeanne looked as if she expected to hear a qualification. After a beat she smiled and hugged Liz back.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Jeanne dropped into the chair next to Hannah. “The kids had to get their God-fix.” She poked Hannah. “Did you make it to eight o’clock?”