by Gail Godwin
“I never let anything touch my skin but Camay.”
“Put everybody on my ticket.”
Judge Castle lingered after the rest had gone and Rex went off to the men’s room.
“It’s been good to see you again, honey. We’ve worried about you, Rex especially, but you’re looking well. You’ve got people who care about you up in Mountain City, and you’ve got them here in Barlow. I get cases in my court every week—I tell you, they sicken my heart. Kids who probably aren’t going to make it because they’ve been dealt such a mean hand. There are way too many parents who don’t deserve the children they’ve got. Whereas you’ve got a superabundance of good people on your side. Don’t close any doors prematurely, Chloe. Give us all a chance to do right by you.”
Eric and Jack looked older than their father-to-be. Eric, when he rose from Rex’s former desk, revealed a sloping belly. He was now the office manager, keeping the accounts and scheduling the crop dusting. Jack, trimmer and shorter, serviced the planes and taught flying lessons with Rex; he was wearing Rex’s old flying suit with the trouser cuffs turned up. Their voices, boyish and high-pitched, tumbled together, eager for her approval. Chloe was ashamed of herself for being disappointed in them. Here her day in Barlow had hardly begun and she felt like a weary dignitary who was counting the apperances she still had to make.
At the cemetery she had to struggle to hide her distress over the wording on the gravestone with which Rex was so pleased.
Agnes Wright
1916–1951
Beloved Wife of
Capt. Rex Wright, U.S. Air Force
Where was her mother’s middle name, Teresa? Her maiden name, Vick? Her first married name, Starnes? It was as if Agnes had possessed no life before she belonged to Capt. Rex Wright. And couldn’t he have saved the Air Force stuff for his own stone?
Look on this as a good thing, Chloe. It hardens your heart for your task.
On to the Angus Barn, where Rex’s wife-to-be, her countenance set in an expectant smile, awaited them at a table. She was a petite woman, nicely though not stylishly dressed, and younger-looking than her sons, though she must have been Rex’s senior by a few years. She had let her feather-cut hair go gray, but you could still see the “cute” girl she had been in high school. She was not at all what Chloe had pictured. After this, there remained only the return to Rex’s house and the completion of her task.
To Chloe’s relief, they did not act like an engaged couple. They behaved like people already married taking an out-of-town guest to lunch. Brenda did not question her about school or her life in Mountain City. She did not call her “honey” but addressed her by name, on a person-to-person basis, particularly as a person who had lived in the house she herself would soon be running. That Agnes had also occupied the house during those four years was not mentioned, and yet she was present to Chloe in much of Brenda’s proposals for better living. “I’ve been thinking, Rex could move the washer and dryer out of the basement, to the porch off the kitchen. Does that sound okay to you, Chloe?”
“It would save a lot of stairs.” (Hearing in memory Agnes’s footsteps running down and up, down and up, between loads of laundry.)
Rex had allowed himself a Budweiser, since he wasn’t flying that day.
“And I’d like to put in a fenced garden where we could grow vegetables and flowers for cutting. All the fertilizer we’ll ever need is there from the chickens you used to keep.”
(“Thank you, Your Grace.” Agnes bowing to Cackles as she backed away with the hen’s fresh-laid egg cupped carefully in crossed palms for her daughter’s breakfast. As carefully as she now carried her soul through its daily round of purgatorial assignments.)
THEY WERE BACK at Rex’s house by a little past two. Madeline was due at three.
Soon now. Then it will be over.
Agnes was speeding things right along. After a tour of the rooms, upstairs and down—except for the upstairs one whose door remained closed—with Brenda respectfully submitting to Chloe her ideas for re-decoration, and after they had finished their slices of Brenda’s lemon chiffon pie in the kitchen (Chloe saying it was the best she’d ever eaten and Brenda offering almost shyly to teach her), Rex, as if on cue, started praising Chloe’s drawing.
“Show Brenda that picture you did of your teacher, Chloe.”
Chloe reached for book bag, which had been biding its time beside her feet. She kept the pad close to her chest as she leafed past other drawings. Folding back to the requested one, she placed it on the table.
“Oh, my,” said Brenda. But instead of following up with gushing superlatives, she inspected the pencil rendering of the nun at the blackboard.
“There was a better one I did first,” Chloe said. “But I gave it to a friend for her birthday.”
“I feel I am seeing this person,” said Brenda. “Don’t you think this is good, Rex?”
“Bill Castle said she ought to have lessons.”
“It looks to me like she was born with the lessons inside her. But I could speak to my neighbor, old Mrs. Ledbetter. She taught art at Converse for years and still takes an occasional private student.”
They believe it is all going so well, thought Chloe sadly. They see me in their life, picking vegetables and flowers, learning to make Brenda’s pie, and studying art with old Mrs. Ledbetter.
No sympathetic scruples, Chloe. Now it’s time.
“I wonder,” she asked Rex, “would it be all right if I went into the room upstairs for a few minutes?”
It was clear from the look they exchanged that they knew which room she meant. “Well, sure, honey. We didn’t know whether you’d want to go in—”
“But naturally you would want to,” Brenda quickly put in.
“There wasn’t time after the funeral. Uncle Henry wanted to get back to Mountain City.” Chloe was helping them along, as she had felt Agnes helping her along all day.
“You want to go up alone, or you want someone to go with you?” Rex asked. “The room is pretty much the same. I couldn’t—. I sleep downstairs now.”
“I’d like to be in there by myself for a few minutes. To say some prayers. And then, Rex, maybe you could come up in about five minutes.”
“Just me?”
“If that’s okay.”
“Well, of course it is,” Brenda warmly assured her. Brenda would have been a loving stepmother, quick to understand and to back her up.
But that doesn’t have to happen now, does it?
Chloe heard her own light footsteps climbing the stairs as if she were the two of them listening from below. As she proceeded down the hall, carrying the book bag, she was thinking of Tildy. This would be Tildy’s dream of a scene.
Rex said the room he had shared with Agnes was pretty much the same, only now it could have passed military inspection. All evidence of daily habitation was gone. The room was chilly: the radiator was turned off. Rex probably had to sponge dried blood from where Agnes hit her head on the rungs when she fell. There could have been blood on the floor. Rex would have cleaned the room after the funeral, when he could take his time, sobbing as he carried up the mop and bucket and Pine-Sol and the Old English lemon polish and his dust rags and sponges. Rex yelled at Agnes if she kept a sponge longer than a month. He went around the house smelling them and throwing them out.
As he had scoured and buffed this room toward the memorial aspect it bore now, he would have changed his mop water frequently, emptying the dirty water down the toilet, perhaps choking up as he refilled the bucket from the bathtub tap.
You could have bounced your quarter off their double bed. Her toiletries had been removed from the dressing table’s glass top, but a fresh antimacassar had been placed under the gilt-and-pearl music box Malcolm Vick had given Agnes when she graduated from Mount St. Gabriel’s. When you lifted its lid, it played “Toora Loora Loora.”
From the book bag, she took out the drawing pad and laid it on the dresser. She unscrewed the little bottle, one of Ro
sa’s many scalded and saved containers, that held holy water filched last Sunday from the stoup after Mass.
Do the radiator first.
She sprinkled the water along the top, rubbing it gently with her fingers into the cold rungs.
Absolve, O Lord, the soul of Your faithful departed Agnes from every bond of sin. And by the help of Thy grace may she be enabled to escape the judgment of punishment and enjoy the bliss of everlasting light.
Now the floor.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace.
When Rex knocked she was still kneeling on the floor.
“Just give me another second.”
“Take your time, honey.”
Get up from floor. Replace bottle in book bag.
“Okay, you can come in now.”
He had no idea what he was coming into. She had never seen her stepfather look so humble and anxious.
Now is not the time for softening of the heart. Stay firm. It’s almost over.
“Did you get all your prayers said?”
“There weren’t many. Just the prayers we say for the dead.”
“I never properly understood your mother’s faith. If I had it to do over, I would make more of an effort.”
“She forgives you,” said Chloe.
He didn’t like this. “Oh, really?” The old Rex creeping back into his tone. How easy it was to summon the old Rex back!
“Agnes is in purgatory now. It’s not a bad place or a scary place. It’s a place that makes perfect sense; it’s where you go to get cleaned up. You want to go there before you go somewhere better. Rushing off before you’re ready would make you feel soiled. Agnes used to say it would be like coming home from school all tired and sweaty and then putting on your best dress and going off to the dance without taking a bath first.”
“Oh, yes, those catechism lessons of hers.” The corners of his mouth twitched. His arms hung at his sides, his hands clenching and releasing. He was struggling to keep his temper.
Walk to the dresser and pick up the drawing pad. Open to the first drawing and hand him the pad.
“Back at the coffee shop, you said I could make people—you said I could show more things than the naked eye could see.”
It was like watching a pantomime of a man going from indulgent curiosity to shock, and then from shock to disgust.
“What the hell—? What is this—thing?”
“It’s her. After she fell against the radiator.”
His whole body stiffened. His eyes boiled at her with their old hatred. “What kind of damn fool trick—?”
“Turn the page,” she practically whispered. “There are more.”
“Who wants more? This is just—” But he turned the page. And the next and the next.
“Just what are you trying to do here?” His lower jaw had begun to tremble, and his voice had taken on that impacted, choking sound that always came from deep in his throat as the violence rose in him. You could watch it rise up his neck and spread out into his shoulders and arms and down into his blunt, hard fingers.
“It’s how she looked. After you left the house. After you hit her.”
“After I—? What the fuck?”
She flinched and was sorry. He would think she’d flinched out of fear of his next move, when she had simply been caught off guard by a word she had not heard since leaving his house almost a year ago.
“The way you always hit us. Then you’d leave the house and forget about it and come back in a better mood. But we hadn’t forgotten.”
Now something was beginning to dawn. He stepped back, as though she had suddenly turned radioactive. She knew he was afraid he might hit her and fulfill her prophecy and prove his own viciousness. He flexed his fingers, then crumpled one fist inside the other. His whole body seemed to crumple. “You think—” His voice came out high, incredulous. “You think I hit her—that day—and knocked her against the radiator and then left the house? What kind of monster would do that?”
“No,” said Chloe, keeping her voice low and careful, “you didn’t do that. But you two had an argument and you hit her, the way you always did, and then you left for the airfield. She lay down on the bed for a while, and then she got up and felt dizzy and fainted and hit her head.”
“You misguided little ninny, you weren’t here! You were up in Mountain City with that fatuous uncle. You never saw how she looked when I found her. I can assure you she didn’t resemble any of these—these bleeding Madonnas. Have you ever seen someone who’s been dead several hours? I’ll spare you the details, you sheltered little fool.”
“It’s just that—she forgives you,” Chloe whispered, her voice shaking. “That’s all these were about. So she can—get on with her cleansing in purgatory.” But now her words sounded stupid and ridiculous to her.
“What do you mean she ‘forgives’ me? For what? For loving her? For aspiring to her? For putting up with her airs and her high-minded expectations and that goddamned religion? I still miss her. There’ll never be another woman like her. Not even Brenda. I like Brenda better than I ever liked Agnes, but I could never love another woman the way I loved your mother. And she loved me. Right up to the end, she wanted me. Yes, ma’am, she wanted me. I suppose since you two have been having your Catholic afterlife conversations, you knew about the baby. Or had she told you she was pregnant when she was still alive?”
“I—didn’t know about a baby.” Chloe’s mouth had gone dry. “It’s just—I understood things while I was drawing the pictures. When I’m drawing people I can go inside them. And I saw what probably happened that day and that—that she forgives you. She would want you to know that. It’s all okay now.” This last sounded lame and foolish, even to her. “Fatuous,” Rex might say.
“Well, you missed the mark this time, young lady. I think we have all flattered you too much about your artistic abilities and it’s gone to your head.”
He was getting back his self-mastery and his mastery over her. He leafed on through more drawings, lips twitching, then paused over one that made his repugnance soften. “There she is in that head scarf of hers. Collecting the eggs. Why couldn’t you have stopped with that one, you sanctimonious little bitch?”
AFTER MADELINE DROPPED off Chloe at Rex Wright’s, she had become so involved in her lie that she drove away thinking, “Where exactly in Statesville does Nan’s sister Dolly live, anyway?” Prepared for intensive questioning, she had provided her characters with names, histories (the fictional Nan had been a sophomore with her at Mountain City High, before Nan’s father was transferred to Statesville), and lots of other ephemera that nobody asked for. (Dolly had eloped while still in high school, but the family was now reconciled because everyone was looking forward to the baby. Dolly’s married name was Johnson because you could always count on plenty of Johnsons in the phone book.)
For veracity’s sake, she went all the way back to Statesville, as if someone were checking up on her from a helicopter above. She lingered over a cheeseburger and fries at a drive-in, singing along with Nat King Cole on the car radio and wondering how Chloe was faring back in Barlow with that tense stepfather. Then she doubled back to the movie theater she had spotted. She had missed a few minutes of the early matinee, but she had already seen A Place in the Sun with her friend Cynthia, whose chief interest had been in Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe. Madeline’s favorite scene had been the one after Montgomery Clift has gone to jail for drowning Shelley Winters, when lovesick Liz is languishing at her parents’ summer lodge during a storm, being fussed over by her worried mother.
This time she noticed incidentals and discrepancies: those shrubs outside the lodge in Liz’s languishing scene were being blown too hard by a wind machine. The windows of Montgomery Clift’s rented room were much too spacious and nicely curtained for a boardinghouse. But the worst was Montgomery Clift’s sloppy preparations for the drowning. Leaving the car parked on the road by the lake, giving a false n
ame when he rented the rowboat, stumbling into a campsite and waking everybody up, dropping clues like candy, right and left, on his trail. By contrast, Madeline’s imaginary baby shower had been plotted masterfully. “It makes one pause, doesn’t it?” Mama had remarked when they were creating the minutiae of this trip. “Think of all the things you’d have to plan for before setting out to commit a real crime.”
She emerged, blinking, into the bright wintry sun and was mystified to see a gift package perched on the backseat of her car. I’ve been living in too many fantasies today to keep them straight, she laughed at herself, stuffing the ungiven baby gift back into the shopping bag and tucking it behind the spare tire in the trunk of her car.
“It’s a good thing we planned better than poor Montgomery Clift,” she heard herself reporting to Mama later. “Because Chloe came out of that house loaded with stuff, with Rex and Brenda following right behind her, each carrying boxes, and guess where everything had to go? Wouldn’t I have had a red face if you hadn’t thought of that shopping bag!”
But Mama was still out when Madeline returned home shortly after dark. Daddy was off somewhere, too. She hurried upstairs, armed with a fresh lie should Tildy erupt from her room demanding to know what was in the shopping bag. “Something for a nosy little person who’ll have to wait until Valentine’s Day,” she would say, letting her have a peek. Which would mean buying a gift roughly the size of the package and wrapping it with this same paper and ribbon and giving it to Tildy next week. Lies went on and on, like tapeworms. But Tildy’s door remained shut.
This whole Saturday felt unreal to Madeline. She had driven a fake package two hundred miles and gone to a movie she had already seen. Neither Rex nor Brenda—nor even Chloe—had questioned her about the baby shower in Statesville. Brenda had hugged Chloe to her in what seemed a burst of genuine affection, but Rex Wright, stiff and remote, had shaken Chloe’s hand and brusquely enjoined them to have a safe trip back.
As soon as they were out of sight of the house, Chloe had asked Madeline to pull over. No, she wasn’t feeling sick, just terribly tired. So Madeline had driven home with the radio playing softly. She couldn’t be sure whether Chloe slept or not. The girl lay without moving on the backseat, using her book bag as a pillow, and covered up to the chin with a coat that had belonged to her mother. She was taking all of Agnes’s clothes home, she had told Madeline, and they had kindly packed up all of the books that had belonged to Agnes and herself. Also a music box that Malcolm Vick had given Agnes as a girl. That was all Chloe volunteered about the errand for Agnes.
