by Sofia Grant
Scarlett unpretzeled her legs with the grace of a cat. “Go ahead! I’ll just poke around. I only came here one time after she went in the home, to get her sweaters, but then some of the other patients stole them all. I mean, they didn’t mean to steal them, they were just all so absentminded, with the dementia and all.” She sniffed delicately at the air. “Anyway, she definitely isn’t here. She’s moved on.”
Katie resisted the urge to smile at the notion of the old woman haunting her home.
“Here’s clothes,” Scarlett said, offering Katie a lumpy white trash bag. “I brought a few things so you could pick. And there’s some toiletries and stuff.”
She dug into the bag and pulled out a cosmetic case, the kind that comes as a gift with purchase at the Clinique counter.
“Thank you.” Katie accepted the bounty, touched. “This really means so much to me.”
Maybe she ought to just take the plunge and buy the phone. Definitely, as soon as she got cleaned up and they went by the bank—and maybe she’d take them out to a nice lunch too. Even the nicest restaurant here probably cost less than a salad and a glass of chenin blanc at home.
Chapter Sixteen
September 1963
Thursday,” Margaret said, trying in vain to get Georgina to stay still enough to wipe the smudges of syrup from her cheeks. “Or maybe Friday, depending on whether it rains. He can’t take them up in the rain.”
Margaret had held out as long as she could before finally telling this lie, making it nearly all the way through breakfast before Caroline finally forced the issue, asking when precisely she could expect her son-in-law to join the rest of the family.
For nearly a month now, Margaret had been living in the groundskeeper’s apartment with Georgina, sharing the one room, bathing her by making her sit on the counter with her feet in the sink and using a sponge. When her mother went to her weekly bridge game, Margaret took Georgina into the house and took a long soak in the tub with her, making sure that everything was clean and there was no evidence of their visit before she left. Her mother certainly wouldn’t have minded if Margaret had asked—but Margaret was unwilling to ask for anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, and so they snuck around instead.
In this, she had an ally: Lucille, her mother’s housekeeper, had been unfailingly kind since their arrival. Margaret knew that it couldn’t be just because she was Alelia’s niece; Margaret was fully aware that she had tested and tried Alelia’s patience during her childhood and stormy adolescence. In retrospect, Margaret was astonished that Alelia had held her tongue as often as she had.
Mortifyingly, Margaret suspected that Lucille felt sorry for her, returning home without her husband and as poor as a church mouse. It was Lucille who had cleaned and prepared the apartment for her; when she climbed the stairs and opened the door with its tiny leaded-glass window, she was greeted with the scents of Ajax and vinegar, and every surface gleamed, even the old wobbly wooden table and the shaving mirror that hung from a nail. She opened the closet door and discovered, hanging from the rod, the clothes she hadn’t liked well enough to take to college with her nearly a decade earlier: girlish full skirts and prim cardigans, dresses with outmoded, fussy details that wouldn’t fit her anymore.
The second afternoon, wearing a sleeveless poplin that was too small and cut her cruelly around the middle, Margaret came to her room to find the dress she’d worn the day before washed, mended, and ironed and laid out on the bed. The other clothes had vanished, replaced by what were clearly her mother’s castoffs: large enough to fit her, but unquestionably matronly.
“It certainly has taken him long enough to put his affairs in order,” Caroline observed, as Lucille cleared the dishes from the table in the morning room. “I thought you said he’d found a buyer for the plane?”
This too was a lie, but at least one based on a shred of truth. Last week, Margaret had been convinced she’d finally talked some sense into Hank. He walked almost a mile every other night to borrow the neighbor’s phone after dinner, and on Friday evening he reluctantly admitted that a man was coming out from the city to make an offer on the plane.
“It’d be like cutting off my own arm,” Hank said morosely. “I only feel like myself anymore when I’m up there.”
The words had stung, but Margaret was sure that if she could just get him to come, she could help tame the dark mood from which he’d had no relief since she left. “Your place is with us,” she pleaded. “Georgie asks after you every day. She misses you so much.”
“Goddamn it, Mags, you know that’s not the issue. Hell, I miss you so much it’s like I’m—I can barely stand it. I’m starving for you. But I can’t—that place.”
“It isn’t forever,” Margaret said. They’d had this argument many times, but this time she was better prepared. “I went with Mrs. Alford to see a little place out past the Bradens’ land. It’s small but it’s only ninety dollars a month. I know Daddy would give me the money for the first month. We don’t even have to come visit here if you don’t want to—we could move there right away and you won’t have to spend a single night in Mother and Daddy’s house.”
“It isn’t the house!” he snapped. “Do you think I care about that goddamn house? And your parents—they’ve got nothing to say to me. I’m a grown man. I won’t take a cent from your father, but I have no quarrel with him.”
“Then . . . what is it?”
The silence stretched so long that Margaret wondered if he’d set the phone down. “Hank . . . ?” she finally ventured.
“The school,” he mumbled in a hollow voice. “I can’t—I can’t just walk by it every day as though—as though—I can’t forget, Mags.”
“The school? But it’s not even the same school. It doesn’t look anything like the old one. Besides, you passed by there every day for years.”
For a moment he said nothing, but Margaret could hear him breathing. “It was different when I came home from the service. I couldn’t— I had to get out. That’s all Tansy was—a ticket out of there. You think I ever really wanted to work in her daddy’s bank?”
“I thought,” Margaret said hotly, “that you loved her. Most people do, you know, when they get married.”
They’d rarely spoken about his first marriage; on the rare occasions when Tansy’s name came up, Hank became oddly formal and unusually polite. Margaret had always assumed he felt guilty about the ignominious end of the marriage.
“Tansy was a nice girl,” he retorted. “Sweet. When I got back home, she was just there . . . And she was easy on the eyes and never gave me any guff.”
“Oh, I see,” Margaret snapped. “Like me, I suppose you mean. Well, she never had a baby to look after, did she? And she never had to ask you for money, either. I’d like to see her try taking care of a house all by herself, to try stretching what you call a paycheck to take care of every little thing, with no help.” The frustration and loneliness of the past weeks welled up in her with nowhere else to go. “But since she was so wonderful, I guess you could always call her up and see if she’ll take you back.”
“Shut up, Mags! You think I could have loved that girl? She was nothing to me. I tried, but—nothing means anything to me. Christ.”
The desperation in his voice made Margaret wish she’d never brought Tansy up, never said anything at all to upset him. “Hank,” she blurted. “I went to see Daddy’s friend Dr. Galbo. He says that they have new medicines now, for, for moods. There’s one called diazepam that, I mean, soldiers who came back from the war, with, when they’re having trouble sleeping, or, or all the terrible things that happened—”
“You calling me crazy, Mags?” Hank’s voice instantly hardened; if she’d been in the same room with him she would have instinctively ducked. Hank had never struck her, but he’d come close once, last year when he’d come home late in a terrible mood and she’d told him he could get his own supper; he’d drawn back his hand and stopped himself with a visible force of will. He’d brought her a bo
uquet the next day, but ever since then, there was a part of her that was always on alert.
“I never used the word crazy,” she protested. “It’s just, the nightmares, the bad dreams—”
“I don’t have nightmares!”
Margaret bit her lip; she’d tried to talk to him about his night terrors once before, but Hank grew angry when she told him that she’d woken him because he’d been crying out in his sleep, thrashing, his pillow damp with sweat.
“I have dreams,” he conceded, in a calmer tone, after a moment. “There’s times when I can’t sleep. Me and every other man in this country.”
“Well, there’s help for that,” Margaret said. Dr. Galbo, who lectured at Baylor in addition to his private practice, had listened carefully when Margaret described the symptoms and suggested that Hank might be experiencing “psychoneurotic disorder.” “The doctor says you just need some time to rest. And you can do that here.”
She didn’t share with Hank the other things Dr. Galbo had said—that his psychological issues were the result of infantile anxiety and hostility that had been buried until the air force years unleashed them; that his emotional defects had been present all along. Margaret had listened with a growing sense of despair, but also a kernel of outrage—how dare the sanctimonious Dr. Galbo, with his wall of diplomas and honors but not one moment in the armed service, call into question the deepest reaches of the man she loved?
She knew there were other men, those who’d come back missing arms and legs and pieces of their faces, with bullets embedded so far that they could never come out; and others who spent their days hunched in wheelchairs with hollow eyes and voices silenced forever. But that wasn’t Hank. Her husband was always just slightly out of reach, there but not there, slipping achingly away the moment he left the house in the mornings or rolled off her at night.
There was one thing that Margaret had made sure that Dr. Galbo understood: she wasn’t about to abandon hope. Hank was the turning point of her life—not just because he’d turned her from a silly rich girl to a woman in the lush bloom of passionate love; from an ingénue who rarely thought past what she would wear the next day to a wife and mother who put the needs of her husband and child ahead of her own. In the blink of an eye, loving Hank had made her believe that what they were together mattered more than anything they could ever accomplish alone.
It was true that Margaret had loved Hank since the first time he’d chased her and Helene down the back stairs of her house, earning a swat from Alelia. At four, Margaret had memorized teenage Hank’s sunburnt, freckle-dusted face; had found it fascinating when he swaggered to the edge of the diving board at the pool, glancing slyly at his audience before cannonballing into the water. At six, she begged a ride in his parents’ car when he got his driver’s license.
When her bosoms seemed to swell overnight a number of years later, Margaret’s first thought was to wonder whether Hank would notice. When she pilfered her mother’s Folie Rose lipstick from her purse before a pancake breakfast hosted by the Lions Club, it was Hank she imagined kissing when she blotted on a square of toilet paper, just as she’d seen her mother do. And when Hank had driven away on his wedding night with Tansy’s small blond head on his shoulder, a piece of Margaret’s heart had broken off and drifted free.
But the years between sixteen and twenty-five had brought no shortage of changes of their own. Now, Margaret understood, her soul (bruised by Hank, stunted by the strange tension between her father’s generosity and his devotion—never spoken of—to her dead sister; between her mother’s hovering scrutiny and the brittle distance she kept) had been lured by the promise of relief in the form of sorority dances, Saturday-night dates, autumn football games, summer crushes. She tended the fragile shoots of her own identity that her mother had planted and the Alpha Chi Omegas had nurtured, allowing herself to be feted and chased, toying with both boys and girls alike, ever bored and longing for something out of reach. Eventually it had been easiest to simply allow herself to be chosen, pinned, engaged, a prize won by the boy whom everyone around her had acknowledged to be the best.
And so she’d found herself on her mother’s path—but Margaret, with no other outlet for the hunger and fire inside her, blazed bright enough to eclipse everyone around her. Caroline had had to carve out a life from the scraps that fell from the table of her wealthy employers, but Margaret—unfettered by her mother’s humble beginnings—would settle for none other than the best to be had at UT. Her mother had landed the grandest home in New London, but Margaret would take her place among Austin’s elite. If her mother—and here it grew complicated, because there was a murkiness in the past that Margaret could never understand (Why just the one child? Especially when her father had so clearly longed for more, and they could more than afford them.)—but anyway, if her mother had had one perfect little girl, the spoiled and celebrated and beloved Ruby, Margaret would have three or four: boys first, girls to follow, all of them smart and precocious and destined for charmed lives.
When she thought of Hank in those years (which she did, more often than she ever confessed to anyone), she felt almost ill with bitterness that Tansy had captured his heart first. She imagined him working near his father-in-law, perhaps by now the youngest vice president at the bank; imagined Tansy arranging flowers for the table in their home, waiting at the door for his kiss. (These notions had been naïve, but of course back then Margaret had known little about the practical aspects of marriage outside her parents’ incomprehensible union.)
When word came that Hank and Tansy had split up (and it came through none other than Helene Dial, whom Margaret ran into on a visit home during the winter of her junior year), Margaret surprised herself by feeling, of all things, betrayed. Because if Hank could leave Tansy, who was perfect in every way, then what chance would Margaret have had with him?
She’d been in Linden’s Pharmacy with a list of things her mother had asked her to pick up, and didn’t recognize the thin woman dragging a snuffling little boy by the hand, clutching a bottle of calamine. Margaret had gotten in line behind her and been mildly repulsed by the angry red bumps of poison ivy on the little boy.
But after the clerk gave the stranger her change, and she turned to go, she spotted Margaret and her eyes widened. It took several seconds for Margaret to recognize her, and then it was too late to pretend not to have and escape without a conversation.
Helene forced a thin smile and looked her up and down. “Well, college agrees with you.”
“And marriage agrees with you!” Margaret exclaimed. She made a few desultory comments about the little boy (named Billy after his father, who must have had an enormous forehead and a pronounced underbite if his little boy resembled him at all) and then couldn’t resist asking.
“And how are Hank and Tansy?”
Helene regarded her through narrowed eyes, and it suddenly occurred to Margaret that the secret she thought she had guarded so carefully all those years, of her love for Hank, had not been a secret at all.
Helene tipped her head slightly to the side and said, “Actually, I wouldn’t know. Hank hasn’t been in touch lately, I’m afraid. Which means that I really must get home to Father, since there’s no one but me and Mother to look after him.”
And with that she cut their chance encounter short, leaving Margaret to goggle after her.
Of course, Helene had given her the entrée she needed with her own mother, for now she could say, “You’ll never guess who I saw at Linden’s—and what she told me!”
When she did, Caroline—who was tugging at a loose thread in her coat at the time, lamenting the purchase of an American designer recommended to her by her girl at Neiman’s, a mistake she did not intend to repeat—rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, that. People really ought to mind their own business.”
“But . . . why did he leave her?” Margaret asked innocently. “Surely she was faithful . . . ?”
“Margaret Anne!” Caroline reproved, tossing down the coat and whip
ping off her glasses. “Where on earth you get these notions, I’ve no idea!”
This conversation had often come back to Margaret during the eternal weeks since she’d returned home, because Caroline looked at her with precisely the same thin disgust that she had back then. Hank’s ignominious annulment had been beneath her consideration then; now she was being made to endure the insult of having him as her son-in-law. Occasionally Margaret almost felt sorry for her mother: she could hear the pain and shame in the brittle, cheery comments Caroline made to her friends, as she tried to put the best face on an untenable domestic situation.
But this would be too much. In the matter of Hank’s continued absence, as in so many things, her parents kept secrets from each other. The trip to see Dr. Galbo was framed, by her father, as a trip to see “a fellow who could use an ambitious young man like Margaret’s Hank.” If Caroline knew that they’d actually gone to discuss his psychological issues, it might be the last straw—Caroline might bar the gates to the family and forbid Hank entry. And while Margaret often fantasized about telling her mother off once and for all, she couldn’t do so until she was sure that she and Hank were set up for whatever was to come next for them.
“No one needs to know,” Margaret repeated, twisting the telephone cord around her fingers. “Dr. Galbo has an office in Tyler. We can say you’re there for—for an injury sustained in the service. A training accident.”
“Margaret, I swear to God that I’ll never go see this quack or anyone else.” She could hear Hank’s breathing, heavy and labored—and something else, the slight slurring of the voice that signaled he’d been drinking. “Besides, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“What do you mean?”
