Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  In bed in his childhood home, Dennis would tell Molly the things he was privy to as a kind of civic figure in Ulster. He told her that the woman who had taught her kindergarten class was having an affair with the man who ran the hardware store, and who was just about to declare bankruptcy. He told her that the kid who used to work at the Mobil station had not joined the Marines at all – he had left town with money stolen from his parents, who made up the story to cover their shame. He told her how many times in the last month the town sheriff had been called out to Annika’s house, to try to settle down her parents. He wasn’t being insensitive; he had no idea Molly and Annika were friends, because she never mentioned her life at school, except for scheduling purposes, and he never asked about it, not wanting to have his sense of his own perversion stirred up by any reminder of how young Molly really was.

  “You know what I wonder?” Molly said. She lay on her stomach, and Dennis sat beside her tracing with his fingertips the unflawed skin from her shoulder blades to the backs of her knees. “Has there ever been a day when you’ve come here, fucked me, and then gone home that same night and fucked your wife?”

  The tracing stopped. “What would you want to know a thing like that for?”

  “It wouldn’t bother me, really. I was just curious about it. Don’t you think it’s an interesting question?”

  “No.”

  “What, too intimate?”

  He sighed. “‘Fuck’ seems like such an angry word to me. Anyway, no. That’s never happened. It’s a pretty easy situation to avoid. She has a very exhausting life just now. I know it must be hard for you to imagine a life like that, but just wait.”

  That was the last time she ever saw him.

  The golf course closed shortly after someone drove a car on to it at night and did doughnuts on the fairways. One of the officers of the charity organized by the IBM spouses was caught stealing from it to make her own mortgage payment; not long afterward the charity voted to dissolve itself.

  On a Friday afternoon in March, misty and warm, Molly got off the bus at the stop nearest the Vincents’ and walked up to the front door with her jacket tied around her waist. She knocked, and a few seconds later Joyce Vincent opened the door. She was not dressed in one of the smart, boxy suits that generally indicated she was going back to the office. Nor, Molly saw, was she wearing any makeup. In fact she had been crying, which made her silence now all the more unsettling. The children were not in sight behind her. She stood in the doorway staring up at Molly – who was now taller than she was – with a look of utter disbelief, as if the girl were someone she had been told was dead.

  “I’m here,” Molly said, confused.

  Joyce’s head pulled back slightly at the sound of Molly’s voice. There seemed to be something she wanted to say but a few seconds went by and she couldn’t get it out. The corners of her mouth turned down. Then she slammed the door in Molly’s face.

  Molly waited on the porch. There was no sound within the house. In a minute or two she turned to face the street, and the meaning of what had just happened began to bear down toward her as if on wings. She tried to figure out what had to happen now. For one thing, she had no way to get home. She knew a few shortcuts through the woods but it was still four miles at least. Lightheaded, she descended the porch steps.

  As she grew more and more tired she really only wished that the trip were longer – that it would take her days of solitary hiking, sleeping under the moon, to get back home. She didn’t have any idea what a woman in Joyce Vincent’s position might do. All she knew was that she liked Joyce and was sorry she had been hurt. That hadn’t been the intention. If there were two worlds to live in, then everyone’s feelings could be spared, which is how Molly would have wanted it; but now the two worlds had fused back into one.

  It was twilight when she finally walked through her own front door. At first she thought no one else was home because she heard no sounds from the television or the kitchen, no voices, no hiss from the dishwasher. But when she turned the corner into the living room, her mother and father were sitting there, Kay with her face turned away, Roger with his fist held up to his mouth. They sat in their chairs like two characters from the last act of Our Town.

  The phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” Roger said.

  Instead she went up to her room. They didn’t follow her. She stayed there most of the weekend.

  It turned out that Dennis’s parents’ house was so ideally suited for secret trysts that within months of its vacancy it had been discovered by the high-schoolers in Ulster too; they used it to get high, or when it was too cold for the playground, or for the same purpose as Dennis and Molly. Someone must have seen them arriving, or leaving, or in the act. It could have been Annika and her boyfriend for all Molly knew. She never found out.

  Monday morning Kay didn’t come out of her room. Molly wanted to talk to her but she understood it would have to wait. She herself had slept a lot the last two days, at first as a refuge from depression but later out of a developing sense that the worst had happened and so there was really nothing more to worry about. Her father didn’t say a word to her either. He tried to make his silence seem like punishment but she could see that the truth was he had no idea what to say. It was the sort of offense that made all his authority seem like a fiction, lighter than air. Then, as she was on her way out the door for school, Roger said to her, “Have you told any of your friends about this?”

  “About what?” she said.

  His nostrils flared. “Don’t make me say it.”

  But that was what she wanted; if she was to be shamed, she had decided, she didn’t want to be shamed by euphemisms. Still, she felt sorry for him then. “Of course I haven’t,” she said.

  “Good. Don’t. We have to figure out a way to keep this all under wraps.”

  But it was too late for that already. Joyce Vincent had considered the matter and had settled upon the course of public exposure as retribution for her husband. For one thing, she had thrown him out of the house and needed an explanation for it. Her defaming him, on the phone and then in person with all her friends and family, was mostly retributive, because she felt that he had disgraced her irremediably – that her home had been blown apart not by a sexual folly but by the proof it provided of his utter lack of regard for her, what she did and what she went through. Had he betrayed her with someone she had never met, or even someone she just didn’t know very well, she might have found a way to put it behind her; instead, though, in the evenings, after the confused, tearful children were put to bed, Joyce sat up helplessly sorting through the memories of the hundreds of times she had welcomed Molly into her home, kissed the girl, gossiped with her, played the mother to her because her own mother was known to be unreliable, done small favors for her, entrusted her children to her. She heard the voice that said she was punishing the kids by kicking their father out – that a better person than her would find a way to forgive even this, for their sake – but Joyce was who she was and there was only so much that could be asked of her. She couldn’t think which was worse: if the two of them, lying together, had smiled lewdly at their conspiracy to mock and degrade her, or if they had never even given a thought to her at all.

  In school everyone cleared a path for Molly as if she were on fire. She felt the eyes on her at her locker, in the girls’ bathroom between periods, felt the silence she created wherever she walked. At lunch she arrived early and sat at her usual table; when Justine and Tia got there, they coaxed each other with impatient glances for a minute before Tia finally said, in a whisper, “So is it true?”

  Molly shrugged. “Yeah, it’s true,” she said.

  They weren’t really sure what to ask after that. Molly had found the limits of their apathy; in their eyes, she had gone too far – there were kids involved, after all – and for what? Dennis himself had never been considered one of the best-looking older men in town anyway. But they suppressed any desire to ask for details, sexual or otherw
ise. It was the hostility of the whole thing – the way Molly must have known all along, as they were finding out only now, that their own supposed intimacy with her was really just an indulgence, a lie – that surprised and, ultimately, estranged them. As for Annika, she never came to lunch that day at all.

  It wasn’t bad, Molly thought stoically as she sat alone on the bus at the end of the first day, this sort of amazed ostracism. Because all it signified was that she was not one of them. She had always known it. Now everyone knew it.

  But she wasn’t familiar with the other feelings that feelings of difference engendered. They were not about to esteem her for taking them all by surprise. They would not long be content to leave her alone. Whispers behind her back, which turned into accusations in her face: she didn’t really care. Ridiculous pranks: someone poured a can of motor oil through the vent in her locker. Someone painted the word WHORE on her gymlocker door. Then one morning she opened the front door of their house and the word had been painted there too.

  Roger called in sick to work that day, to think and repaint his door and try to find some safe point of escape for all the fury he felt inside him. If he could have he might have tried to find and beat Dennis Vincent – Roger had never beaten anyone in his life, but he had rage on his side, and Vincent was a small man; and even the alternative, which was taking the beating himself, was bound to be more cathartic than doing nothing. But Dennis had vanished: quit his job, left town with a car full of clothes; wherever he was he kept phoning his former home, asking to speak to his children, but his wife forbade it. She did not want Kevin and Bethany, if she could help it, to grow up with any version of the catastrophe other than her own. Dennis never tried to contact Molly; perhaps he was too afraid one of her parents would answer the phone. Or perhaps he had come around to blaming her somehow for the whole thing. In any case, he was probably not very far away; but when it came to such an exotic task as locating a man who was in hiding, Roger Howe had no resources at all.

  A full week went by before he suddenly appeared in the doorway of Molly’s room, finally seized by the courage to talk about it. Molly had had a lot of time to prepare and had decided that this conversation was at least going to have the merit of complete candor.

  He stood with his back to the dresser, his hands behind him. Molly sat on the bed.

  “I suppose the first thing I should ask you,” he said, “is whether this, whether you were forced or in any way felt you were under duress, threatened …”

  “No.”

  He nodded, neither pleased nor displeased, his lips pressed together. “Because I know that an adult can be a real figure of authority, and can trade on that—”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. No one forced me to do anything.”

  “You wanted to do it?”

  “I did it of my own will.”

  “Whose idea was it, whose initiative?”

  “His.”

  “And at some point he expressed this idea to you.”

  “Yes. But in a conversation. He didn’t force himself on me or anything like that.”

  “How long did it go on?”

  “About six months, I guess.”

  “You guess. Were you – was it your – well, never mind about that. I don’t know why it matters. How long was it supposed to go on?”

  “Sorry?”

  “When was it going to end? When you went to college? Or was it going to continue after that?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Probably not. So you just thought it could go on indefinitely. Did you really think you wouldn’t get caught?”

  “Yes, actually. I really did think that. Maybe that was stupid.”

  “You didn’t want to get caught, on some level? Maybe to get Joyce out of the way? Or maybe to ruin Dennis’s life, because you were really—”

  “No, Dad. I honestly didn’t think anyone would ever find out about it.” She paused, and in the pause reminded herself of her resolve to leave nothing unsaid. “That was the whole point of doing it. To not get caught doing it.”

  Roger sighed, and walked to the window. “So you weren’t in love with him.”

  “No,” Molly said, and couldn’t quite suppress a small laugh that went along with it. He spun around.

  “Don’t you laugh at me,” he said, his voice shaking. “Don’t you do that. You think I like asking these questions? The only reason I’m doing it is because I still think it’s important for some reason that I know more about what’s happened to my family than the woman at the drugstore or my secretary at work or your classmates at school.”

  Molly’s strength wavered. She’d never seen her father like this – suffering beyond his ability to try to pretend otherwise. Still, while she was genuinely sorry for the pain she had caused him, she also couldn’t help thinking that that pain was outsized, misdirected, that for some reason she couldn’t figure out he was intent on making this an even bigger deal than it really was.

  “But I couldn’t expect you to give a damn about that,” he said. “How you can sit there, with that blank expression on your face—”

  “I can’t help the expression on my face.”

  “—and just blithely ruin two families, and you don’t even seem sorry about it.”

  “Ruin? How are we ruined?”

  But he didn’t pay attention to that. “Dennis Vincent was a friend of mine, you know.”

  “I never heard you—”

  “I considered him a friend of mine. Which just makes the whole thing that much—” He stopped himself. “Well, this whole thing is my fault somehow, I won’t run from that. But the point is I don’t see how we can stay here now. I’m laughed at everywhere I go.”

  “Daddy, I don’t—”

  “I can quit work, of course. What are they going to do, fire me? But it’ll probably mean turning down the job in Armonk.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the worst possible time to sell the house, of course, but we’ll have to take the hit—”

  “We were ruined already!” Molly said. Her own calm was in pieces now. Roger, his eyebrows low, folded his arms and stared at her. She had found her way through his defenses, to the anger at her there, and she was no longer so sure that candor would be their salvation. But she pushed on.

  “I mean, what is it you think you’ve lost? You’re not friends with the Vincents anymore, that’s true; and I’m not a virgin, that’s true too, but if it makes any difference to you, I wasn’t one before either. As for the rest of it, this town will be a ghost town in a year, everyone knows that. I really can’t believe that all the people in Ulster who are going to be broke and unemployed soon, if they aren’t already, are as concerned with your daughter’s sex life as you think they are. What do they care? And this house is breaking up anyway. Richard’s gone, I’m almost gone, you’ll sell it in a year either way. There’s not much left of it to break up. All these things were already happening. So why are you making such a big thing about me and Dennis?”

  His arms were still folded, but the look on his face was now more like fright. He couldn’t believe, quite apart from the truth of anything she was saying, that she would have the disregard for him to say them at all.

  “I’m very sorry that you and Mom are in such pain because of me, but I can’t help it, I don’t know why you care so much what everyone else thinks.”

  “All I care about,” he said softly, “is you.”

  She winced at the onset of tears. He still can’t say what he means, Molly thought. All I care about is you. He could have picked that up in any of a hundred places. She stood up and put her arms around him, carefully, as if he were much older than he was.

  “I’m fine,” Molly said earnestly. “I’m perfectly okay. Nothing bad has happened to me. So why can’t that please be the end of it?”

  The best reason to go to school, really, was to get away from this conversation, and from the problem of how far to go, out of pity for her family, in apolog
izing for things she didn’t really feel sorry for. But school was breaking her down as well. She wasn’t as impervious to their rejection of her as she had thought; not that she minded being an outsider, but why return day after day to a place just to show that you didn’t belong there? To make matters worse, she was now constantly propositioned, in all sincerity, by the same boys who taunted her in public. There was little difference between the taunts and the come-ons: she was viewed as a source, as a locus of dreamily unfettered sex, and they were never going to leave her alone now, never going to stop trying to stumble on to the secret of something they had no hope of understanding. Finally one Monday just a month before exams she stayed home; she had her father call the principal’s office to say she had mononucleosis and would like her homework assignments sent to her at home until further notice. They knew he was lying. They sounded grateful about it.

  She had a fantasy that Annika would be the one to deliver the assignments to her: but it was only a freshman boy who lived at Bull’s Head, drafted into this extra duty by the principal himself. The boy smiled nervously, involuntarily, whenever the Howes’ door was opened to him, as if he were visiting the home of a celebrity.

  When she couldn’t take it any longer she went and presented herself to her mother, sitting patiently on the end of Kay’s bed, staring searchingly at her, waiting to be spoken to. Her parents were more alike than she had ever understood. Barely speaking to each other, they had nonetheless between them frothed up this scandalous incident until it grew large enough to contain the explanations for all the damage life had done to them. The fundamental difference between them – which held their marriage together as effectively as a similarity might have done – was that Roger felt he must be responsible in some way for every bad thing that happened, while Kay felt that the whirlwind of bad things around her was responsible for the wreck of her own early promise.