by Joanna Scott
“Yes, yes, of course.” She was following Tru’s version now, and she felt a new urgent worry in response. “There was money,” she said. “I sent money for my son.”
“I know, I know. I read the letters. I don’t know what happened to the money, Sally. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”
If the money had disappeared, what had become of the child? It was possible that the child had died. Suddenly it seemed that her sister was preparing to announce the fact, and Sally, in anticipation, briefly pictured the infant’s waxen, lifeless face. She wished that the means had been available to her back then so she could have ended the pregnancy. But the means hadn’t been available, and the pregnancy had resulted in a child, and she’d abandoned the child to a fate that revealed itself to her in a flash of a possibility that was too intolerable for her to ponder at length, so she cast it from her mind, and all that was left was a powerful unwillingness ever to consider it again, along with the residue of guilt.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Tru said.
Sally felt herself flinch. It struck her as inevitable — unbelievable but inevitable — that her sister could read her mind.
“You’re thinking that I can tell you what happened to your baby. But I can’t. Daniel had him for a while. But that baby was a handful. The cutest thing, but what a handful! Sometimes Daniel would leave him with us for a day or two, and I tell you, that baby had more spirit — I mean, the way he could howl. Daniel couldn’t handle him. I would have raised him myself, Sally, I swear I would have taken good care of him. But I thought Daniel was raising him. Daniel moved from Tauntonville, you know. He traveled around for a while. I figured he had the baby with him. That’s what we were told. That’s what I thought. Daniel didn’t even come home for his mother’s funeral. Aunt Lena died of cancer, you know, and Daniel didn’t come home for the funeral. Our uncle sold the farm to Loden and moved away. I don’t know why, but none of those Werners have wanted to be in touch with us. I haven’t seen any of them for years, not even our cousin Myra, though she still lives in the area. But I’ve worried about that little boy, Sally. Daniel just couldn’t handle him. That’s the way it was. I’d have raised him myself. But I wasn’t given the chance. Once I read your letters, I realized that you’d been sending money. Loden and Clem and Willy and Laura — I asked them all, and none of them could say what happened to that money. Honestly, I’ve never been convinced that Daniel Werner raised that boy on his own. He named him after himself, you know, but I only ever heard him call the boy with curses. He couldn’t handle him. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’d given the boy up for adoption. I like to think that some nice family took him in and raised him. But I can’t find anyone who will tell me for sure one way or another.”
Tru the True. Bless her. She would never guess that despite the bleak news she was bearing, she’d given Sally reason to hope. She could hope that her son had survived and found a good home with strangers. She might never know for certain what had happened to him, but she could indulge herself imagining what he’d become: a handsome young man with a red scruff of a beard, not unlike the young man who right then was opening the front door of his own accord and calling, “Hello? Hello, Penny?” into the house after his gentle knocking had gone unanswered.
Though he hadn’t been involved with Sally’s daughter for long, he was already in the habit of letting himself in when no one came to the door. Penelope encouraged it. And really, Sally didn’t mind. She liked knowing that she made it easy for her daughter’s friends to feel at home. She remembered, long ago, being welcomed by the Campbell family in Tuskee, and she was proud to think that she’d reached a point in her life when she could offer the same sort of welcome to others. Still, she was surprised when he suddenly appeared like that, out of the blue.
“Tru, this is, this is…” Sally knew his name, but for some reason her memory of it went blank right then.
“Abe,” he offered. Before thrusting out his hand in greeting, he wiped it against his pants leg to blot the sweat from his palm. His strained smile suggested that he realized too late that it was a crude thing to do. Sally’s surprise melted to amusement, and she suppressed the urge to laugh.
“This is my sister,” Sally said.
Abe’s response was a jovial howdy — not a word Sally would have expected from him, and she wondered if she was right to sense that he regretted using it. And now that she was paying attention to him, she noticed that his face, while mature with its beard following the line of his strong jaw, had a striking childishness, with wide, relaxed eyes expressing a boyish lack of guile. She could see why her daughter found him attractive. She herself was charmed by him, and puzzled at the same time, and embarrassed that she hadn’t come up with his name on her own. If she’d been a more attentive mother, she’d have recalled the name of the fellow her daughter was dating.
“Are you Jewish?” Tru asked abruptly.
“I’m nothing,” Abe replied. Well, he wasn’t just being awkward, he was revealing himself to be more awkward every time he opened his mouth, and Sally appreciated him for it. He was nothing. Really? That’s correct. Abraham Boyle, Mr. Nothing.
Sally let out a chuckle, but it came out more like an exclamation of discovery: “Ha-ha!” Abe blinked back his startle.
“I only ask,” Tru continued, as if in response to a question, “because I was engaged to a Jewish man. I was preparing to convert. If either of you know anything about the process of conversion —”
“Good God!” Sally’s shock was expressed in a whisper. “You were engaged?”
“For three days. Pop chased him away. I mean literally, he grabbed the knife Mama had been using to bone the chicken, and he chased him from the house.”
“Why didn’t you go after him, Tru?” Sally asked, but she knew why, and she knew that it wasn’t worth explaining.
In the weighty silence that followed, Abe looked from one sister to the other and then examined with fake interest a ceramic frog on the mantel. He looked grateful when Penelope breezed into the room. He looked more than grateful. He looked as though he’d forgotten everything else and was melting with infatuation for his girlfriend.
“Cute frog, huh?” Penelope gave him a kiss on the cheek. She was wearing a sack of a blue linen halter dress that reached to her ankles, and she paused to retie the straps as she stood facing him.
“Shall we go?” She hooked her arm through his and said to her mother and aunt, “See you later.”
“When’s later?” Sally asked.
“The movie ends at eleven,” Abe said.
“Midnight, then.”
Penelope hadn’t had a curfew for years, but Sally wanted to give her sister the impression that she had instilled in her daughter a sense of limits. Fortunately, Penelope didn’t bother to protest.
In the lull that followed their departure, Sally gathered the cups and carried them into the kitchen. She hoped that her sister was convinced that she’d made a good life for herself here in Rondo. She had a pleasant, welcoming home and a lovely daughter who came home by midnight.
At the sink, she found herself watching with odd fascination as bubbles from the dish soap swelled and popped beneath the pressure of the running water. Tru, standing nearby, leaning against the counter to rest her weak leg, said something in a murmur.
“What’s that?” Sally asked, setting a saucer to dry in the dish rack.
“Wouldn’t you say he looks like a younger version of Loden?”
“Who?” Sally didn’t look up from the sink.
“Your brother. He’s the spitting image.”
Of course Loden was her brother. But who was his spitting image? Why, Abe was. You could say that Abe resembled Clem Werner, too, and Willy when they were young, but most of all he looked like Loden.
Tru didn’t say, It’s obvious.
Sally didn’t say, Dear Lord in heaven.
Instead, she coughed lightly into her fist before she said in the flattest voice possible
, “Oh, that’s because they’re redheads. All redheads look alike.”
Penelope had chosen Abe by chance, yet with the intuitive confidence that she was right. It was as easy as deciding on a favorite color. She just recognized him as the right man when she saw him, even before she knew him. They belonged together. They were destined to move along the paving stones to the driveway, both of them practically skipping, so happy to be with each other that it was hard to summon the desire for anything else. They certainly didn’t want to waste their time in a movie theater, and so Abe drove directly to the house where he was renting a room on the third floor. They tried to climb up the rickety back staircase side by side, but the space was too narrow, so Penelope slipped in front and catapulted up the stairs two at a time while Abe scrambled to keep up and at one point used his hands, leapfrogging to the landing. He couldn’t wait. She couldn’t wait. They started kissing even before Abe had unlocked the door, and they kept kissing while he fumbled in his pocket for his keys.
Penelope had been around enough to know that the era’s promotion of free love was not as much of a bargain as it first appeared. In her experiences so far, the boys she’d been intimate with were unreliable. While they didn’t try to buy her off with the promise of commitment, neither did they want to limit themselves to just one girl. It was taken for granted that they would play around, as they put it, and they didn’t want to be held accountable. Penelope thought she’d learned to expect nothing more than frivolity from love — until Abe Boyle came along, and then she realized that she could let herself expect more.
There was more good to be felt with him than she’d ever allowed herself to hope for. And with more good came the wish for more time to spend together. When she was with him, she’d let herself believe that the hours would last forever, but it was always over before she was ready to go home. When they were apart she would lose herself in an elaborate mix of fantasies and memories of him, reliving and imagining intimacy in daydreams that would absorb her so completely that she failed to notice when someone was trying to gain her attention. The phone would ring repeatedly before she heard it. Her mother would have to ask her a question at least twice before receiving an answer. And once when she was in the lifeguard chair at the pool, she didn’t see the boy in the deep end splashing and flailing and calling for help, so his mother had to jump in to save him. It turned out that the boy had only been pretending to drown to impress his friends, but it was enough for the club manager to put Penelope on probation for a week.
Together in the rented room on the third floor of the house on Jay Street, the lovers began with their fingers to trace the curving lines of their ears, their chins, their shoulders, and soon they were pressed against each other, belly to belly, their mouths locked together, their hands exploring, working each other up until it became impossible not to go further than they’d meant to, and though neither was a virgin and both knew they should be using contraception, they weren’t going to stop everything just because they didn’t have a rubber handy. They’d use one the next time, or the time after that.
Buster Boy.
Baby Doll.
Because now was now, the present wouldn’t last until the future and so must be lived in all its fullness, pleasures tangling in perfect proof of the rightness of their love. There was no question: it was breathtakingly clear that they were meant for each other. And how easy it had been to see the potential back when they first picked each other out from the group of their friends — as easy as recognizing a familiar face in a crowd.
Tru Werner stayed with her sister for three weeks, passing the time while Sally was at work watching the black-and-white TV, a treat for her, since she didn’t have a TV of her own back in Lafayette. Sally didn’t mention Arnie Caddeau to Tru and during this period saw him only in the office. They didn’t return to the subject of Sally’s son. Instead, they talked at length about their parents, about their habits and foibles and the faith that made them unforgiving.
In the evening, she would take her sister out on the town. They’d eat dinner at a strip-mall Chinese restaurant, and afterward they’d go to a movie or a nightclub. On Thursdays the department stores downtown were open late, so they went shopping. With Sally’s help, Tru found bargains hidden on the racks and came away with a clutch made of lambskin, a linen pantsuit, a straw hat, and a red silk party dress, which she bought only reluctantly, at Sally’s urging.
On a Sunday afternoon toward the end of her stay, Sally took Tru to see the new pedestrian bridge spanning the downtown gorge. It was a warm, humid day, but the gorge was cooled by the wind blowing across the crest of the falls, and a crowd of people lolled about, enjoying the breeze and listening to a man puffing on a harmonica. Tru couldn’t walk far because of her bad leg, so they sat on a bench and tossed pieces of a roll to the pigeons that had followed them from the parking lot. Voices seemed to float around them, lingering, as if spoken by the shadows of passersby. At one point a gust of wind curled up from the chasm of the gorge, caught Tru’s new straw hat by the brim, lifted it from her head, and blew it right off. It landed first on the pavement, but before Sally could retrieve it the wind blew it skittering across the bridge and over the edge.
One and two and three and —
That’s about how long it took the straw hat to fall from the bridge to the river. In truth, though, Sally wasn’t measuring the time. She was too mesmerized by the hat, which seemed to soar of its own volition, as if it had sprouted wings, and then slid at an angle through the air, descending along a steep invisible slope before disappearing into the river.
Sally sputtered an apology, and though Tru assured her that she wasn’t to blame, Sally apologized again. She was sorry for bringing her sister to this windy site only to lose her nice hat, her nice new hat from McCurdy’s, which Tru had gotten to wear just once. Sally should have thought about the wind before she dragged her sister onto the bridge. Tru reminded her that she hadn’t been dragged; she’d come along happily, and she was glad of it, the breeze felt rejuvenating, and what did she need with a new hat anyway? She hardly ever wore hats anymore.
Though it was, as Tru indicated, a minor incident, the loss of the hat reminded Sally of the river’s presence and power. She was compelled to notice it again, to remember that it was still there and still flowing from its source to its mouth. The ruddy, sludgy river, thick with sewage and chemicals. In the depths lived strange, elusive little creatures, part worm, part human — river angels, as Sally liked to think of them. She had long since given up hope of ever catching sight of one again. She knew the Tuskee well enough to expect that it would guard its secrets. She knew more about the Tuskee than most people knew, since she’d followed it all the way from the spring on Thistle Mountain. She knew that the headwaters were gray with cement dust in Fishkill Notch. She’d seen how the river widened and surged along a shallow course on its way through Helena, it deepened and flowed calmly through the city that shared its name, it tumbled down shelves of slate through the ravine in the state park, and in its last ten miles it plunged over three sets of falls on its way to the lake.
The Tuskee River flowed north from the Endless Mountains, and Sally Werner had traveled north with it. Even when she’d inadvertently wandered from it, she’d never been so lost in her life that she couldn’t find her way back to the river. She’d come to where the river had led her and was confident that she’d arrived in the place where she was meant to be. But something about that hat, that straw hat sliding along the slope of wind and disappearing into the river — that hat hadn’t been bought in order to be lost. It had been lost by accident, and it made Sally wonder about other accidents that she might have mistaken for destiny.
She drove Tru back to the house after leaving the bridge. Following a simple dinner of deviled eggs and salad, Tru went to pack and then to bed, since she had an early bus to catch. Penelope was out for the evening, and Sally stayed up late reading magazines. Really, she didn’t do much reading. She glanced at the photogr
aphs and their captions while she pondered how her life would have been altered if she hadn’t followed the river all the way north.
She would have found a different job in a different office. She wouldn’t have met Arnie and been swept up into an affair with him. Her daughter would have grown up with different influences and wouldn’t be thinking about law school now. And Penelope certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to meet the young man named Abe, who just happened, wouldn’t you know, to be the spitting image of Loden Werner.
She spoke to Daniel Werner in her dreams, in her thoughts, in letters that she wrote and tore up. Tell me where you sent him, tell me what’s become of him! She rehearsed what she would say to him so she’d be prepared when she finally tracked him down. Did you give our son away, Daniel Werner? Tell me the truth! Did you give him away? She pictured Daniel Werner’s worn face in middle age. She imagined his response of a dull, mulish silence. She knew just how she’d fill in the blanks for him: Yes, you did, you don’t have to speak, I already know the answer. You couldn’t handle the child, so you gave him away. You gave him away, I know you did. Her sister had planted the idea, and now it was all too easy to guess what Daniel Werner wouldn’t want to admit. I gave the boy to my parents. They gave him to you. You gave him to strangers. Good for you. It’s the one right thing you ever did in your life. She imagined filling in the words for him. You gave him to a family who could provide for him. And then you went away to start over. We both had to start over, from scratch, and we did, and that’s good, that’s the way it should be, that’s what we were meant to do. She even went so far as to plan what she knew she could never bring herself to say. Good for you and good for me. Our son had a better life without us. I left him behind, and you gave him away. He’s a happy, handsome young man by now, all grown up. Yes, sure, he’s better off without us.
