Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  “Should I leave?” asked Mrs. Vernon.

  “No, sit,” said the social worker. “I think you should stay.” She moved back on the sofa, sliding away from the coffee table and the collection of uneaten sandwiches. She settled herself and faced Bunny and me. “Now, tell me, if you can, how the subject of sex was handled in your house.”

  Bunny and I looked at each other.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bunny.

  “I mean just what I said. How was it discussed, what did you talk about? What kind of an education did Martha get?”

  “It was discussed,” said Bunny. “I gave her the facts of life, just like any mother would.”

  “Did you give her any advice?”

  “Of course. I told her she’d ruin her life if she got pregnant.”

  “I know this is a difficult subject,” said Mrs. O’Brien, “but please try to be a little more open.”

  “About what?” Bunny spread her arms. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” Her speech about tragedy had keyed her up. She was jumpy and excited.

  “Well, let’s start here,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “When did Martha first menstruate?”

  “Early,” said Bunny, smiling.

  “I was the first girl in my class,” I said.

  “She was very excited,” said Bunny, looking at me and giggling. “She told the whole neighborhood.”

  “What?” said Mrs. O’Brien.

  Bunny clutched her stomach and doubled over to keep from laughing out loud.

  “I got it in school, and I couldn’t wait to tell Bunny,” I explained, struggling to hold in my own urge to giggle. “But when I got home, she wasn’t there. So I waited out on the front step.” I stopped and took a breath. It was a little frightening, this powerful need to howl. Bunny’s fight to keep it in was shaking the whole couch. “And when I saw her coming, I went running down the street, yelling”—I paused again and closed my eyes for control—“yelling, ‘I got it! I got it!’ ”

  Bunny roared. “ ‘I got it! I got it!’ ” she gasped, then she roared again. “Everyone came out to look. The neighbors thought she was crazy.”

  A damp, shrill giggle burst out of me. Once the first of it had escaped, I had to let it run its course. My whole body heaved. “I’m sorry,” I finally squeaked to Mrs. O’Brien. Bunny and I rocked back and forth together. We were having a kind of fit.

  “Oh,” gasped Bunny, at last, getting control. Her eyes were streaming with tears. She nuzzled my ear. “Oh, what a time,” she said, sighing.

  The two women on the opposite sofa had watched us silently. Now, Mrs. O’Brien wrote something in her book. “Well, I’m glad there was no trauma involved,” she said.

  Afterward, Bunny and I fell quiet again. The laughing fit had wrung something out of me. I was wearied by the tension of sitting there, wearied by Mrs. O’Brien’s questions, wearied by Mrs. O’Brien herself. Except for our brief outburst, she had controlled the entire session. It wasn’t this way when I was alone with her, but with Bunny there, things were different. Mrs. O’Brien never said anything specific, but her whole manner gave the impression that Bunny and I were doing something very wrong. It was almost as if by her sheer size and her stony silences, Mrs. O’Brien had a kind of rightness about her. The room tipped in her direction, and the furniture, the tables, and most of all Bunny and I slid down to her feet.

  When she finally announced that she had to go visit another girl in trouble, it was almost noon. As it turned out, Bunny didn’t have time to go home and change; she had to head straight out to the country club for lunch. I walked her to her car.

  “I don’t think that went too well,” I said when we were outside.

  “What’s there to go well?” she asked. “Nothing could go well with that busybody.”

  “But I think she can help us. I mean, I really think she’s sort of sympathetic—she’s on our side.”

  Bunny stopped at the door to her Pontiac. “On your side, maybe.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.”

  “Is it? Shouldn’t you and I be the ones on the same side?” She looked down and picked imaginary pieces of lint off the front of her uniform.

  “We are on the same side, Bunny.” I reached for her hand and she looked at me again. “That’s crazy.”

  She sighed. “Maybe.” She shook me loose and climbed in the car. “Anyway, Beach is the only one who’s really on our side.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “He’s around.” She turned the ignition. The car groaned several times before starting up. “I gotta get Eddie to look at this again,” she said. “Bye, now.”

  As she was pulling away, I thought of something and yelled. She stopped in the middle of the street. I ran up to her window. “I wanted to ask,” I said. “What you said inside about tragedy and lost chances—was that me you were talking about?”

  She frowned and thought for a moment, as if she couldn’t recollect what I was referring to. Then her face lit up. “Oh, no, not at all. You’re thinking too much. That was just philosophizing back there. It was all baloney. It was just to bother those two busybodies, to show them I’m smarter than they are. I could say the exact opposite tomorrow.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “It didn’t really sound like anything you’d ever said before.”

  The Scott’s Milk truck came down Oak and stopped behind Bunny. The driver, a bald man named Pete, who’s supposed to be the best bowler in town, had room to pull around. Instead, he sat there and honked.

  Bunny looked in the rear-view mirror. “Jerkface,” she said. She turned back to me. “Besides, if I was talking about anyone when I said that, it was me. You’re too young.”

  The driver honked again, this time leaning on the horn. Bunny poked her head out the window. “Shuddup, loudmouth!” she yelled. “Can’t you see I’m talking to my daughter?”

  “Do you really feel that way?” I asked.

  “Get out the way, goddammit,” screamed Pete. The top of his head was flushed red.

  “I told you it was all baloney,” said Bunny. She looked in the rear-view mirror again. “Jesus Christ, this town is full of jerks. See you later.” She pulled away, with the milk truck on her tail.

  FOURTEEN

  I wasn’t entirely reassured by what Bunny had said. Her remark about lost chances wasn’t just baloney—nothing she said was ever just baloney. Since I’d moved to the Vernons’, she’d been acting differently, thinking differently, too. Part of it was just the fact that I wasn’t with her for hours every day. But something more than that was going on. She’d never been one to look back with regrets, but now, I sensed, regrets were starting to eat at her. Practically the first thing she’d said, that afternoon at the police station, was that she never should have come to this town. Then there’d been other remarks—quick asides, mostly, thrown off as if they weren’t meant to be listened to—about her childhood, her old boyfriends, even about my father. In her hours alone, she was recollecting, wondering what had happened, maybe even trying to pinpoint the moment things had started going wrong. Thinking like that can get you crazy.

  I worried about Bunny, but, as had happened so often during the last couple of days, my thoughts kept drifting away. I really wanted to think only about Reverend Vaughn. It was wrong, I knew. I owed Bunny my full attention. I tried to discipline myself, to guide my thinking methodically back to the problems at hand, but it was no use.

  Argyle socks. What made him decide to wear argyle socks? I’d seen them advertised in Life and Look, but I’d never seen a pair on a man in Katydid, at least not that I remembered. They were so … frumpy, and yet he made them work. On him, they looked sophisticated. Was that just luck and charm, or did he know what he was doing when he shopped? And his haircut. Yesterday, while we talked, he got excited, and the hair in front fell down over his forehead like delicate, yellow bangs. He needed to get clipped. But there was something sweet about his carelessness, something very lovable. I wondered h
ow he ever decided to get a haircut. Did he just look in a mirror and form an opinion? Did he spend time thinking about it, weighing it, holding imaginary conversations with himself? I wished he would ask me. Thinking about him, I longed to be there when he fumbled in his sock drawer, figuring out what to wear. I was dying to be asked whether, yes, it’s time to climb the stairs to the itchy room above the dry-goods store and sit in that chair that swivels and bucks and let Mike Havranek clip just a bit off the top and the sides. I wanted to get personal.

  He arrived that afternoon in a bit of a rush, and the first thing he told me was that he had an errand to run. He had to visit a man on Jefferson Street—Ewell Johnston, a Katydid councilman, who’d worked for years at the KTD. Mr. Johnston was now retired, but Reverend Vaughn wanted to talk to him about what the town could do. Would I like to come along?

  We walked out Oak and headed for the area everyone calls New Town. The name is left over from years ago, when the KTD built its own subdivision. The houses that the factory put up are smaller and a bit flimsier perhaps than others in Katydid, but in general you’d hardly notice that New Town was something different, except that the streets form an insistent, regular grid, First Street to Fifth Street, Washington to Monroe.

  Reverend Vaughn walked briskly in his disjointed way. He had on a short-sleeved dress shirt, and his tie flapped as he moved. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said after we’d gone a few blocks.

  I thought he was talking about my case. “Oh,” I said cautiously.

  “Nobody seems to care.” He sounded bitter.

  “I know.”

  “Either they’re all stupid, or they just can’t face it.”

  I nodded.

  “Hundreds of people are going to be out of work.”

  “Oh,” I blurted out, “you’re talking about the KTD.”

  “Well, yes.” He looked at me quizzically. “What did you think?”

  I considered trying to fake it but gave up the idea almost immediately. “Me,” I said sheepishly.

  “You? Well, of course, you.” He laughed. “I suppose the same stuff all goes for you. Only I think we’re going to solve your problems, and the KTD is still going to close.”

  “I hope not.” I felt a twinge of guilt for wishing earlier that the factory would shut down immediately.

  “By the way,” he asked, “how are you and Mrs. Vernon getting along?”

  “Oh, fine,” I said. “She’s different from what I’m used to, but she’s been very nice.”

  He shook his head. “I happened to talk to her minister the other day. Reverend Wallenback. What a sour character he is.”

  “Really? I’ve never met him. She thinks he’s wonderful. She even suggested that I talk to him.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I don’t really want to.”

  “He’s pasty,” Reverend Vaughn said. “Do you know what I mean? He has a very pale, pasty complexion, and he talks with a heavy drawl, as if the words are stuck in his mouth and he has to pull each one out.”

  I laughed. “I had an image of someone different.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t tell Mrs. Vernon I was complaining about him. She’s suspicious of me already. Probably because I’m a Congregationalist. Too soft on Satan, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, she’s crazy about you,” I said. “She thinks you’re wonderful.” In fact, though, I’d noticed that her enthusiasm for him had dropped a few degrees since his first visit. Once or twice, I’d caught her staring at him with a look that was almost hard.

  “I’m not so sure,” he said.

  At the corner of Fifth and Monroe, we passed the New Town Variety Store. Three children were in front, standing on the scruffy lawn, picking sugar drops off a long, white sheet of paper. They looked up and stared hard at the tall, storky man who was passing down the sidewalk.

  “Ichabod Crane,” whispered a pudgy boy in baggy shorts. I glared at him, and he returned to the candy.

  “Why were you talking to Mrs. Vernon’s minister?” I asked.

  “I had an idea, something I’d been working on,” Reverend Vaughn said. “I tried to get in touch with all the clergy in town. I wanted to see if we could organize something on the KTD, some kind of protest or, at least, something that showed we were concerned.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it was like moving rocks. You could barely budge them.”

  “What kind of protest?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to talk it out. In fact, I shouldn’t have used that word ‘protest.’ That was one of my mistakes. I mentioned it to Jack Forrester—you know, the Lutheran minister—and I suggested that the square would be a good place for a rally. And you know what he said? ‘We don’t want any of that ban-the-bomb stuff here. That won’t go over in this town.’ Can you believe it? You just mention the word ‘protest,’ and he immediately gets visions of people marching around with placards. He’d probably seen a picture in the papers once or something on TV.”

  “So nobody wanted to do it?”

  “Everybody had an excuse. ‘Let’s wait a bit.’ ‘We don’t know enough.’ ‘It’ll just make the owners mad.’ At least Wallenback was straightforward about it. ‘A minister should concern himself with spiritual issues,’ he said, ‘not these day-to-day events.’ ”

  At hearing him say “Wallenback,” I felt a flash of warmth, like a sudden spot of sunlight on my cheek: Three days ago, he would have said “Reverend Wallenback” in front of me.

  “But day-to-day events!” Reverend Vaughn went on. “How can you call the closing of the largest employer in town a day-to-day event? And the thing that’s amazing is that Wallenback must have dozens of families in his church who work at the factory. I mean, that’s not a wealthy congregation. Those are working-class people. Wallenback himself could be out of a job if enough people have to leave town.”

  “Did you talk to Mayor Krullke?” I asked.

  “Huh? Krullke’s a joke. If the owners of the KTD saw who was supposed to be running this town, they’d probably pack up tomorrow and be glad they got out when they did.”

  Sidney Krullke owns a tire store outside of town, near the new Montgomery Ward’s. I know him slightly from the country club.

  “No, Krullke’s no good,” Reverend Vaughn continued. “I tried Harry Childs, though. He’s on the council, and he’s in our church, but he wasn’t any help. He sounded as if he hardly knew what was going on. He’s a businessman, pretty successful. I don’t think factory workers are really his constituency. So that’s why I want to talk to this guy Johnston. At least he used to work there.”

  We came to Jefferson Street, in the heart of New Town, and turned left. The street was deserted. The flat, patchy lawns baked silently under the hazy afternoon sun. Reverend Vaughn consulted an address he’d jotted on a piece of paper and turned to follow the walk leading to a trim, two-story white house tucked under the branches of a healthy-looking elm. The Cunningham house. I held back for a moment, pausing on the sidewalk. The Cunninghams had long since moved away, but when I was about five, an upstairs bedroom had burned, killing the family’s twin boys. They were younger than I, maybe two or three years old at the time, and I remember seeing their mother wheeling them, side by side, in a double stroller that looked incredibly big, as wide as a porch swing. After the fire, someone had taken me past the house. I don’t remember who it was—I can’t believe it was Bunny, it must have been one of her boyfriends. The fire had come in the winter, and, in my memory, the elm is prickly and gray, but the house looks just as it does today, except for a border of smudged black soot around one upstairs window. It looked as if you could take a damp cloth and a container of Bon Ami and wipe the smudge away. Then it would be as if nothing had ever happened.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Reverend Vaughn.

  “I didn’t know Mr. Johnston lived here.” I said.

  He consulted the piece of paper again. “Two-twenty-two. That’s what he told me.”
/>   I hurried to catch up. No reason to mention the Cunningham twins. I didn’t want him to think I was morbid.

  Mr. Johnston came to the door wearing a raggedy brown bathrobe over a pair of brown pants. His thinning gray hair was disheveled, and he looked as if he’d just got up from a nap.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, when Reverend Vaughn introduced himself. “Come in.”

  “And this is my friend, Martha Calhoun,” the minister said. “She came along for the walk.”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Mr. Johnston.

  Inside, the house felt closed up and dusty. I wondered if the councilman’s wife was sleeping somewhere. He led us down a narrow hallway. A large painting of a boat hung on one side. Suddenly, he stopped and turned. “Is that Bunny Calhoun’s daughter?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Reverend Vaughn, smiling.

  Mr. Johnston studied me. “She’s big,” he said.

  “Ah, where can we talk?” said the minister.

  Mr. Johnston took us into the living room, darkened by a drawn curtain. “The girl can wait here,” he said.

  “Why can’t she listen in? She won’t be a bother.”

  “This is council business,” said Mr. Johnston gruffly. His irritation gave him energy. His shoulders straightened, and the front of the robe fell open over his worn, sleeveless undershirt. “Can’t have a girl here for that.”

  “Do you mind waiting?” Reverend Vaughn asked me.

  “Not at all.”

  The two of them went out and down the hall. They must have gone to the kitchen, because in a few seconds I heard a chair screeching against linoleum.

  Now that I was alone, the living room appeared to grow darker. As best I could estimate, I was probably directly under the room that had burned. The air had a faint, stinging odor to it. Smoke. Was it my imagination, or could you still smell the fire? How did the Johnston’s stand it? From down the hall, the muffled voices of the two men drifted through the stillness. Sitting quietly on a sofa, I became aware of scampering noises over my head. I strained to listen. Again, I wasn’t sure whether it was my imagination or something was really moving around upstairs. I stood up to get closer to the ceiling. Now the noises changed, becoming playful and watery, like the far-away sound of a waterfall. The faintness, however, was maddening. Was the noise inside my head or out? To get even closer, I kicked off my shoes and teetered on the spongy cushions of the sofa. My ear was just inches from the ceiling. The scampering returned, then the water. The sounds mixed and overlapped, then moved in circles over my head. I wasn’t imagining things. Something was up there. Ghosts.