Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  And he kissed her softly on the lips, and she kissed him back, putting her hands behind his neck to hold his mouth in place. Breaking away, her mouth broke into a sly grin. ‘Listen, before we talk about anything, there’s one thing I need to know.’

  ‘Yes?’ What was she going to ask – about Sarah, or something about Ronald? He felt curiosity and dread at the same time.

  ‘Can you afford some room service? I didn’t eat any dinner – I was too nervous about seeing you. And right now I could eat a horse.’

  And then she told him how, when she had first known her father was beginning to die, she took comfort from Michael and the prospect of joining him in Ann Arbor, the prospect of a new life. She may have seemed happy in Stillriver to Michael, but she was as intent as he was on finding this new life. Therefore when Michael had taken his ‘sabbatical’ from the relationship she had been terribly upset, made worse when gossip got back to her about another girl after Donny’s visit to Ann Arbor. Yet when Michael came and asked her forgiveness, she had been so relieved to have him back that she had given it completely, so frightened was she by the prospect of losing both her father and him.

  As for Ronald, he had been constantly, almost dutifully helpful. He had never pushed, but would show up unobtrusively, like a faithful retainer, seemingly when needed most – once he had carried the parson to bed when he had collapsed in the hallway. He’d been soft-spoken, gentle – there was never any hint of all the things that gave him such an awful reputation. He understood that people didn’t trust him, and accepted that he was not the kind of fellow people would find suitable for the daughter of a clergyman. But he seemed genuinely remorseful about what he called his ‘hell-raising’ days, and equally keen to demonstrate that he wanted to better himself: go back to high school, even attend college (‘if any college would have me,’ he’d say with a self-deprecating grin).

  Ronald had been there for Cassie, which if Michael had been there as well would not have mattered so much – Ronald might have wanted more, but he would have remained only a friend. But in the emotional wake of her father’s death, when the strength she had shown for so long looking after the parson was no longer needed and indeed had seemed to desert her anyway, she was suddenly vulnerable to anyone who offered to look after her. And where was Michael? Where had he gone? His father didn’t know, his roommates in Ann Arbor wouldn’t tell; it was a complete mystery. She only knew he wasn’t there for her, and he couldn’t even be bothered to tell her why. In those weeks she hated him.

  And this seemed to have made her think that in time she could love Ronald. She tried to explain to Michael how different a person he was in her presence, how like a lost little boy he could become. And yes, there was some physical attraction on her part – there was no point denying it – for he was strong, with a man’s body well beyond the boyish stage of adolescence. But actually when she first started seeing him seriously (which Michael took to mean when she first started sleeping with him), it was more out of her fearfulness at being alone in the world, and out of anger at Michael for deserting her.

  Here Michael interrupted for the first time. He had watched as Cassie ate ravenously, a cheeseburger with fries and a side salad, a dinner roll, even an ice-cream sundae, enjoying herself with the mixture of gusto and grace he remembered, licking her fingers and laughing when she spilled a drop of ketchup on her blouse. Now they lay side by side on their backs on the bed.

  ‘Why did you go to Texas?’ he asked. ‘He could have worked in Michigan, worked with his father again if he’d wanted to.’

  ‘I think he felt he’d do better down here. In Texas he hadn’t been in trouble, not yet. And I was desperate to get away. Right then Stillriver to me meant my father and, I guess, it meant you. I didn’t think I was going away for ever, just for a while, until the hurt stopped being so bad.’

  ‘But then why did you marry him? It was all so quick.’

  She looked at him calmly. ‘Because I was pregnant. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t want to have an illegitimate child.’

  He was dumbstruck. ‘But what child?’ Mentally he counted years. ‘Sally’s not old enough.’

  ‘I miscarried just before Thanksgiving that same autumn. Nobody knew I was pregnant, except Nancy. I know she never told a soul. Thank God my father wasn’t alive to hear about it.’

  ‘Golly,’ he exclaimed with genuine wonder, for a question had been answered which he had carried around for years – since the day, in fact, when he had returned to Stillriver at the end of that summer and learned as he sat on the patio next to his father that not only had Cassie gone away, not only had she gone away with Ronald Duverson, but she had married him. Now he understood why, and he could respect it. She had married disastrously in Michael’s view, but for the right reason. But then (the cruellest twist of all) she had lost the reason. Jesus.

  Life in Galveston was fine at first. Well, tolerable at any rate. Ronald worked in the same dock-building business as before; having said he’d finish high school, he didn’t even try. But he didn’t interfere when Cassie enrolled in the local junior college, especially since she could pay her own tuition (as well as contribute to the household bills) from the money she got renting her father’s house. Ronald was still nice to her, and she no longer felt quite so adrift, for she now had a goal: she wanted to teach school. Not that life was perfect: ‘You see,’ she said and hesitated, ‘I missed you. I still hated you, of course,’ she added with a quick smile, ‘but I missed you too.’

  ‘What did you miss?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I could always be myself with you. You never seemed to want me to be anything but what I was.’

  ‘And Ronald did?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He had some idea of me that wasn’t me, if you know what I mean. It was so intense.’

  ‘What, did he put you on some kind of pedestal?’

  She nodded. ‘He thought I was a lot more special than I was. He seemed to think I should be what he thought I was, not what I knew I was. He had a clear idea of what I should and shouldn’t do; he still does, actually. He doesn’t like me to drink, not even wine – he thinks it’s unladylike (he can drink of course, because he’s a man). If I wear a shirt and jeans – you know, like I always dressed – he gets upset. He thinks I should always wear a skirt and blouse.’

  Then, over two years since moving to Texas, she got pregnant again. And Ronald changed. She felt sick, really nauseated, almost all the time; there seemed almost nothing she could get done, not even the simplest chores around the house. Yet just as she needed him most, Ronald started staying out – working late, he claimed, but as far as she could tell, spending hours in the bars. He wouldn’t come back drunk, so she wondered if maybe he was seeing other women. But then she realized the answer was simpler than that. He had started fighting again. One day he had come home with a cut above his eye, and a big yellowing bruise along the side of his ribcage. He claimed he’d had an accident stringing anti-erosion net in the Gulf, but his explanation was so unnecessarily involved that she didn’t believe a word of it. Then he spent a night in jail after hitting somebody in a cowboy bar and Cassie, worried sick when he hadn’t come home, had to bail him out in the morning. Fortunately the guy he’d hit hadn’t pressed charges, or she’d have been really stuck – she was six months pregnant at the time.

  ‘What made him start fighting again?’ asked Michael.

  She shrugged. ‘For a while I thought it was me. Funny how you can blame yourself for almost anything if you set your mind to it. We’d had a scan and knew I was going to have a girl. Ronald was incredibly disappointed.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Michael. ‘If you’re not going to be happy with either sex you shouldn’t have kids at all.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Cassie, ‘but I thought it had just been standard men’s talk – you know, I’ll teach him to play football and show him how to shoot a gun. That sort of bullshit, if you will excuse my eloquence. I never dreamed he’d actu
ally resent a girl. I couldn’t understand it – I still don’t. But you asked me why he started fighting again, and part of me thinks it’s because he just can’t help himself. You see, the odd thing is I’ve always believed that Ronald actually hates men. These days everyone talks about men who hate women, or men who love women, or even men who love men. But they forget that some men hate other men. And Ronald’s one of them.’

  ‘What caused that?’

  She hunched her shoulders in a shrug. ‘I know his father beat him something terrible when he was little. Never Mex, just Ronald. I guess he thought Ronald could take it. And he could, I guess, though I think it damaged him a lot. But who knows?’ she said impatiently. ‘I’ve never thought upbringing explains everything.’

  Ronald lost his job in her third trimester, claiming his boss had been cheating him on his pay, though she heard from a girlfriend that in fact they’d had a fight and that, again, Ronald had been lucky to have charges dropped. He found work through a friend, but it was in Bryan, several hundred miles north, and she was in no shape to supervise a move or move herself. So he commuted at weekends until after she’d had Sally; when they joined him in Bryan, they lived in a small tract house on the town outskirts, not even near the university, a bleak place neither desert nor swamp nor Hill Country.

  And since then life had been absolute hell.

  ‘Is he violent to you?’

  ‘No. I wish he was, because then I’d have left him.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘He doesn’t really care about me; he only cares about some idea of me. He’ll go whole days without talking to me, and as far as Sally goes, he hardly ever takes any interest at all. I mean virtually none.’

  ‘Has Ronald got somebody else?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Yet he’s obsessed that I might. Considering how little interest he takes, you’d think he wouldn’t care, but the opposite’s the case. It’s so bad I’ve learned not even to smile at a man or say hello in case Ronald flares up. Once he thought the boy loading my car with groceries at the supermarket was being fresh – the kid couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old – and he grabbed him so hard I thought for sure he’d break his arm.’

  ‘So why don’t you leave him?’

  She said nothing, and Michael propped himself on one arm and leaned over and kissed her. She responded gently with her lips, and he kissed her again until she opened her mouth and kissed him back more passionately. Slowly he moved an arm behind her neck as he continued kissing her and lay his other hand firmly on her belt, then moved it lower against her mound. She stirred at first, then reached down and moved his hand away. She broke off their kiss and said, ‘Don’t maul me, please, Michael. You know we can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ he whispered, as if afraid to express himself too clearly.

  ‘It’s all different now,’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘Of course it is. For both of us. It’s bound to be.’

  ‘You act like that doesn’t matter. Like we were back in high school all over again.’

  ‘I don’t want to make love to a memory,’ he said. ‘I want to make love to you.’

  She sat up on the bed and began putting her sandals on. ‘I have to go now.’

  He didn’t say anything. She turned her head and looked at him but he looked away. ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sulking,’ he said. ‘I’m just scared I’ve spoilt everything.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done that if you tried. You haven’t changed that much.’ She reached for her handbag and slung it over her shoulder. ‘What should we do tomorrow?’

  Tomorrow? He cheered up at once. ‘We could go swimming out at Barton Springs. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up,’ she said. ‘I may bring Sally. It depends on what Aunt Judy’s up to. Babysitting a two-year-old’s not everybody’s cup of tea.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said, closing his eyes with the happiness of the prospect. When he opened them again he found Cassie’s face leaning down over his. She kissed him lightly, then with sudden ardour until he started to reach for her.

  ‘That’s enough for now,’ she said with a small laugh, pushing his outstretched arm away. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Sweet dreams.’

  The next day they drove to Barton Springs but didn’t swim, standing instead barefoot in the shallowest part of the springs. They watched as some local teenagers went in, horsing around with an exuberance that made Michael feel older than he was. And it was with a sense of many years having passed that he stood with Cassie in the limestone springs, and told her what had happened to him since that memorable early evening when he’d heard a truck door slam, looked up from his paper, and saw Ronald run across the yard straight at him.

  He took his time, working backwards from his current situation. He told her about his work, how he had managed to extricate himself from office ‘success’ before it had destroyed his love for engineering altogether. And he told her about Sarah, and how through no fault on either side, they had grown apart. ‘Grown apart?’ he queried aloud. ‘Hell, we were never close to begin with. That was our mistake.’

  ‘So why did you get married?’

  ‘Not because she was pregnant, that’s for sure. I don’t think she really wants children – it would be better if she’d just say it, instead of always finding reasons to delay. I don’t want to raise kids in Manhattan anyway, and she won’t hear of living anywhere else.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Some things don’t change.’

  ‘Sorry,’ and he took a deep breath. ‘I suppose I married her because I thought I would get a new life that way, one that would let me get over you. But it didn’t work.’

  She reached over and took his hand. ‘It didn’t for me, either.’

  Which brought him at last to Ronald and the truth about what had happened. He had been steeling himself to tell her, for it still seemed to him a tale of cowardice and fear, one that never failed to fill him with self-loathing. But he omitted nothing from his account of Ronald’s assault and his flight from town, and when he finished she was staring at him, part in wonder, part compassion.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I’d be ashamed of you? Did you think it was like cavemen fighting over a girl, that I’d want to go with whoever won? Did you think I’d believe you were less of a man because Ronald could beat you up?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe a little bit.’

  ‘But you weren’t brought up that way. You weren’t a Bogle boy, after all. Your father was a gentle man.’

  ‘But a strong man, too. Nobody messed with him.’

  ‘You sound like a school kid. Did you really think that would matter to me? How could you think that?’

  ‘Actually, I didn’t really think that of you, Cassie. It was even worse, if you have to know. I wasn’t thinking of you at all, I was thinking of me. It’s like something snapped inside me. I felt I had to run away or I’d go mad from the fear of it all. That, and the humiliation.’

  ‘What humiliation? Ronald’s a violent man. You’re not.’

  ‘I can’t explain it – it was so many different things. There was the fear, like the fear I had after my mother died, only worse. And then the place, the town, it seemed so wrapped up with what had happened to me that I couldn’t bear to stay. And what would have kept Ronald from doing it again? Every day if he’d wanted to; I couldn’t have stopped him.’

  ‘You should have gone to the police. Stillriver’s not exactly the Wild West. Jerry Dawson would have done something.’

  ‘That’s what Pop told me to do. But then everybody would have known. I know it was just pride, but I couldn’t bear the thought of that, not when the whole town knew me from the drugstore. It was already bad enough that my father had witnessed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know we were never close – after my mother died he wasn’t any help to me at all. I learned not to need him – and then he goes and
saves my life.’

  ‘He’s your father. He would have wanted to save you.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of owing him anything.’

  Cassie still looked confounded. ‘That’s just nuts.’

  He looked quickly at her, then away. ‘I probably was nuts for a while, Cassie. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. And by the time I’d got sane again, and come back, you’d gone. I waited too long because I was too scared, and off my head, and then it was too late.’

  She nodded as if she understood. But then she said, ‘Some day you’re going to have to forgive him, you know.’

  ‘Who? Ronald?’ he demanded.

  ‘No, dummy,’ she said, and touched his arm with a soft, flat hand. ‘Your father.’

  ‘Forgive him for what?’

  ‘For always trying to help you. Because if you don’t forgive your father while he’s still alive, you’ll never forgive yourself.’

  The job in Texas lasted four months, and although he had told Sarah he would be back half a dozen times during the duration of the project, he managed only two visits to New York. He saw Cassie six times instead, all of them in Austin except for one brief lunch outside Bryan, where they propped Sally in her stroller with a bottle of milk and a cookie while they ate barbecued ribs on the back deck of a roadhouse. The little girl was beginning to talk, and he could only pray that she wouldn’t mention his name in front of Ronald, who had seemed satisfied, according to Cassie, with her explanation that the requirements of her teaching certificate course included several weekend seminars at the University of Texas in Austin.

  They never had much time together, so they didn’t go to the movies or attend concerts, or do much of anything that might get in the way of talking to each other in a mutual pact to fill in the gaps inevitably created by eight years’ separation, learning more about what had happened to each of them in that time, and through an unspoken agreement trying to discover how far apart they might have grown. They walked, usually around the Texas campus, or sat in restaurants and coffee shops, often leaving their meals largely uneaten for talking so intently. She always seemed to have a book on the go, in addition to the heavy reading load she had for her education classes – after stopping when she had Sally, she now was studying to be a teacher.