Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  Two strides carried him to her side. His chin was harsh, his eyes unfathomable. His hair was definitely not too long. It was just the right length for Joelle to ravel her fingers through it, to stroke it back from his face.

  He lifted the framed diploma out of her hands and tossed it onto the bed. “I didn’t go to college so I could hang a piece of paper on a wall,” he said.

  “Why did you go?”

  “To learn something. To run the business better.” She raised her hand to his face again, but he caught her wrist before she could touch him. “To prove something to myself.”

  “That you could do it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course you could do it. Anything you put your mind to, you can do,” she said, meaning it as much as she’d meant everything else she’d told him in the past few minutes. He could do anything. His diploma was beautiful. He was Claudia’s father. No one knew different.

  She wished she could make sense of the emotion in his eyes. He seemed uneasy, dissatisfied, not at all proud. Could her mother’s idiotic words have deflated him so completely? Did he not know what a fantastic father he was, what a magnificent man?

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. Then he lowered it to her side and took a step back. “You deserved a husband with a college education,” he said, returning to the closet to put away his tie.

  She stared after him, unsure she’d heard him correctly. “You mean, because I had a degree?”

  “Because you always wanted to be the wife of a college man,” he reminded her without looking at her.

  Drew, she realized. She’d told Bobby, years ago, when they were just friends, that she’d hoped to marry Drew, who was heading off to Dartmouth. But that was so far in the past. Bobby would never have even thought about Drew if her mother hadn’t opened her stupid mouth.

  She followed him back to the closet, planted her hands on his shoulders and forced him to face her. “I’m the wife of the best man in the world,” she said.

  He managed a smile, and when she pulled him down to her, he gave her the kiss she wanted. Then he straightened and turned away, moving to the bureau and taking a pair of jeans from a drawer.

  Allowing him his privacy as he undressed, she left the bedroom and went downstairs, through the kitchen to the back door, where she could call for the boys to come inside and start getting ready for bed.

  Claudia followed the boys through the door. Her hair color lightened every spring, the sun painting streaks of platinum through the blond. The older she got, the prettier she grew. Teenage boys phoned the house constantly.

  Joelle was determined not to pressure Claudi at he way she herself had been pressured. Claudia would never feel she had to reel in a good catch, as if boys were fish. She would be successful on her own terms, by her own actions. She wasn’t a Tubtown kid. She’d grown up secure, close to both her parents, loved by both. No rambling man had passed through her life a few times, left her with a doll and a coloring book and then died in a highway accident.

  Claudia knew who she was: the daughter of a woman who would never imply that her worth was based on whom she dated, and the blessed, beloved daughter of Bobby DiFranco.

  ELEVEN

  THE WEST SIDE MOTOR LODGE on Rockwell Turnpike had not aged well. It was clean and the staff was friendly, but Joelle seriously doubted the motel had undergone any significant renovations since she’d left town thirty-seven years earlier. The pattern in the lobby’s carpet had faded so badly that the black circles resembled oil stains marring the green background. The trite still-life paintings on the walls were faded. The leaves on the fake potted plants had been bleached by time to nearly white.

  The room rate was cheap, though, and the night clerk hadn’t balked when Joelle had checked in at nearly midnight last night. She probably should have stopped for the night somewhere in Pennsylvania, rather than driving all the way to Holmdell in one day. But she didn’t want to be in Pennsylvania.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to be in Ohio, either. All she had was a vague idea that returning to the place she and Bobby had agreed to get married might help her understand how their marriage had reached this crisis.

  She’d considered driving straight to her mother’s house last night, but she hadn’t even warned her mother that she was coming to Holmdell. If Joelle had rung her mother’s bell in the middle of the night, Wanda would probably have had a heart attack. Joelle didn’t need that calamity on top of everything else she was dealing with.

  So the West Side Motor Lodge had been her home for the night. She’d staggered into the room, taken a quick shower and found herself too agitated to sleep, even though she was exhausted and aching. She’d unpacked her cell-phone recharger, plugged it in, then lifted her phone and listened, for at least the dozenth time, to Bobby’s message: Come home. Please.

  The “come home” she could handle. The “please” filled her eyes with tears.

  She couldn’t bring herself to call him. She’d tried to talk to him all week and he’d shut down on her. Well, now it was her turn to shut down. She’d phone him when she was ready—and she wasn’t ready yet.

  She’d crawled into the hard motel bed and willed herself to rest. The sheets had smelled of starch and bleach. The air conditioner had rattled like a tin can rolling down the sidewalk. The curtains at her window didn’t meet, and through the narrow slit she’d seen the occasional flash of headlights as a car barreled down Rockwell Turnpike, heading toward Indiana.

  Eventually she’d drifted off. But the first gray light of dawn to slice through that crevice in the curtains roused her, and by seven-thirty she was seated in the motel’s sleepy restaurant, sipping coffee that tasted burned and waiting for a platter of scrambled eggs.

  Was Bobby awake yet? Was he eating a decent breakfast? Had he ever grilled the shrimp?

  Her phone rang, and she checked the caller ID. Bobby again. Why did he want to talk to her now? Why couldn’t he have talked to her before she’d left, when she’d been begging him to open up?

  The phone stopped ringing, and she checked to see if he’d left another message. He hadn’t. If she’d answered, he probably would have only asked her to come home. Maybe he would have said “please” again.

  She didn’t want to go home, not until she knew what she was going home to.

  She was on her third cup of coffee when Claudia called. As soon as she answered, she realized Claudia was phoning from Joelle and Bobby’s house. She heard Doors music in the background—not a listening choice Claudia would make in her own home. Claudia assured her that Bobby was all right and Joelle told her to tell Bobby about the Prius’s outstanding highway mileage.

  She signed her breakfast bill to her room, then left the motel. More than ten years had passed since she’d last been back in her hometown. It was so much easier to fly her mother to Hartford than to try to haul everyone to Holmdell for a visit, especially now, with Jeremy and Kristin in the family. Since her mother had more or less retired from her job at the Bank Street Diner, she had no real constraints on her schedule and could visit Connecticut without having to negotiate for vacation time.

  She still went to the diner a few days a week to run the cash register, because sitting around her apartment was boring. She had no family in town; she’d told Joelle that her coworkers at the diner were her substitute family and she’d go there when she felt like seeing them. She’d station herself behind the cashier’s desk and schmooze with the customers, and most people seemed to think Wanda Webber’s presence at the Bank Street Diner meant all was as it should be.

  Joelle drove up the turnpike into town and turned onto Bank Street, stopping at the corner where the diner sat, only because a red light forced her. The eatery’s windows were cloudy, the interior dimly lit, but the awning shading the windows appeared new, its green-and-white stripes vivid in the pale morning light.

  The traffic signal changed and she continued down the street. The sidewalks had been inlaid with bricks in
a herringbone pattern, she noted, and a few concrete planters had been installed along the curb, holding clutches of impatiens. Evidently Holmdell had hired the local version of DiFranco Landscaping to spruce up the downtown area. Although limp in the late-June heat, the flowers were pretty.

  She noticed that Fontaine’s Beauty Salon was gone, replaced by something called Kwik-Kuts, and Clement’s Hardware had been taken over by one of the national retail-hardware franchises. Beldon’s Department Store had looked like something out of the thirties when Joelle had been a child; it still looked like something out of the thirties, its limestone facade boasting an art deco flavor and its outer walls stained from decades of auto exhaust. A Starbucks stood next to Harley’s convenience store, where Joelle used to work. Even Holmdell had its own Starbucks now, Joelle thought with a smile. The Bank Street Diner had better improve the quality of the coffee it was serving if it hoped to compete.

  She passed the bank building, a massive structure with a clock embedded in its front wall. When Joelle was a child, the clock had been round, with ornate hands and gothic numerals. That clock had been replaced by a digital panel that flashed not just the time but the temperature in Fahrenheit and centigrade. The clock was off by eight minutes, and the thermometer claimed it was only sixty-five degrees. It felt warmer than that to Joelle.

  She turned off Bank Street and headed toward Tubtown. The gentrification that had improved Holmdell’s business district hadn’t reached this part of town. The neighborhood was still dreary, houses and duplexes crowded together, sidewalks crumbling or nonexistent, buildings crying out for paint or a new roof. At least every fourth house had a bathtub shrine adorning its front yard.

  She steered down one familiar street and then another until she reached the DiFranco house. The last time she’d been here, her goal had been to empty the house and shut it down after Bobby’s father died.

  Mike and Danny had driven out to Ohio with Bobby and Joelle when they’d received word that a neighbor had found Louie lying dead on his kitchen floor. The coroner wasn’t sure how long he’d been there—a couple of days, at least. Fortunately a funeral home had already carted his body away by the time Joelle and the family arrived. All medical evidence had indicated that Louie DiFranco had died of a massive stroke, although according to the autopsy, he’d had a great deal of alcohol in his blood.

  Claudia and her new husband had flown in for the funeral. Eddie had traveled east from San Francisco, leaving his partner behind. Louie hadn’t left a will—that would have made things too easy—but his estate hadn’t been large or complicated, and Bobby and Eddie had agreed to split whatever was left after expenses. The funeral service at St. Mary’s had been sparsely attended. Wanda had offered to pay her respects, but Joelle told her not to bother.

  Joelle had felt sadder viewing Bobby’s mother’s grave than watching Louie’s casket as it was lowered into the ground beside her. Bobby had remained expressionless throughout the entire ritual, one hand holding Joelle’s and his other arm looped around Eddie’s shoulders, as if he still felt he had to protect his baby brother from Louie’s fists. There would be no more fists, no more violence.

  Joelle and Bobby had sent the boys home on a plane with Claudia and Gary, and then they and Eddie tackled the daunting task of emptying Louie’s house. Running fans in the windows, they managed to chase most of the foul, musty smell from the rooms. They threw out empty pizza boxes, bags of stale bread, a plastic container of rice pudding edged in blue mold and all the liquor Louie had left behind, scattered in bottles throughout the house. While Joelle scrubbed the kitchen, Bobby and his brother sorted through Louie’s belongings in the rest of the house, stuffing his old clothing into boxes, gathering up the unpaid bills piled on his dresser, filling trash bag after trash bag with the contents of his drawers and cabinets.

  Bobby tuned his father’s radio to an oldies rock station so they’d have music to distract them while they worked. Above the din of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles and Pink Floyd, she’d hear Eddie shout, “Hey, look at this!” or Bobby holler, “Damn—remember this?” When their words were followed by laughter, she’d smile and scrub the stained counters and sing along with whatever was playing on the radio.

  After three days of sweaty labor, the house was as empty and clean as it would ever be. Bobby gathered the few items he intended to bring back to Connecticut with him—an old, weathered baseball glove, a ratchet set and a crucifix that had belonged to his mother—and hired a Realtor to sell the place for him and Eddie. Then they’d driven away.

  “Are you sad?” she’d asked him.

  He’d thought awhile before answering. “I’m sad that I don’t feel sadder.”

  Someone had painted the house yellow since that August day so many years ago, but the place still seemed shabby and mournful. The roof was missing a few shingles, the shrubs were overgrown and the Madonna statue in Bobby’s mother’s bathtub shrine listed as if she’d been guzzling some of Louie’s leftover booze. Joelle knew someone else had bought the house the spring after Louie’s death, and maybe more families had moved in and out since then, but the place seemed abandoned. No cars in the driveway, no tricycles or basketballs on the lawn, no plants visible along the windowsills. Joelle parked, strolled up the front walk and knocked on the door. No one answered.

  She wandered around to the back of the house. The back porch still sagged and the back door’s screen still sat crookedly on its hinges. She recalled a night when light had spilled through that screen door and she’d heard voices coming from inside. Bobby had stood behind her in the shadows, fearing for his life, while she’d peeked through the door into the kitchen and seen Louie with his busted nose.

  Oh, Bobby… Maybe one of the things she’d loved about Drew Foster back then was that he’d been so simple. No deaths in his family, no drunks, no father swinging his fists. No ghosts in his soul, no torment in his eyes. Whatever he’d wanted, he’d gotten. He had never had to fight for anything.

  Bobby had always had to fight. He’d fought here, in this house. He’d fought in Vietnam. He’d fought his own body after a land mine had shattered it. He’d fought to create a viable business, to become an educated man.

  And now he was fighting Joelle. He was fighting Drew. He was fighting to hold on to the lie on which they’d built their lives—but he’d already lost that fight.

  How could she get him to stop fighting?

  Sighing, she trudged back around the house, across the scraggly front yard to her car. Her heart was so heavy it seemed to pull her off balance. When she gazed through her windshield at the bathtub shrine, she wondered whether perhaps the Madonna’s heart was heavy, too, and that was why she couldn’t stand straight.

  JOELLE STEERED AWAY FROM the DiFranco house, away from the leaning Madonna and the memories and drove back through downtown, past the rivet factory on Bailey Street where Bobby’s father had worked; past the cemetery; past the high school, to where the altitude and the economic status were elevated. The houses on the Hill were spacious and solid. No vinyl siding here, no rusty rain gutters, no driveways with weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. No half-buried bathtubs.

  The curving roads in this part of town bore names like Cedar Lane and Glenville Terrace and Harvard Street. The air smelled of newly cut grass and sun-warmed roses. The houses featured elaborate stonework, leaded windows and heavy oak front doors with polished brass knockers. The two-car driveways that weren’t vacant held Audi coupes and Lexus SUVs.

  She cruised down Harvard Street, then veered onto Birchwood Drive. The road arched around the golf course, the rear yards of the houses separated from the fairway by rows of Scotch pine and aspen. When she reached the house where Drew Foster used to live, she coasted to the curb and turned off the engine.

  Drew’s house, a symmetrical mansion of brick and stone with a peaked slate roof flanked by chimneys on either side, had once seemed like a palace to her. The few times she’d been a guest there she’d felt like a village pea
sant paying homage to nobility.

  It seemed a bit less grand to her today. She’d grown used to the rambling houses of northwest Connecticut—and she’d grown, period. She was no longer a poor girl in awe of her hometown’s wealthiest residents. As she gazed at the Foster house, she acknowledged that the Fosters had a grandson who might die too young from a terrible disease. How could anyone envy them?

  The front door opened and a slim woman with short red hair emerged. She had on a tank top and cargo shorts, white anklets and sneakers. She might have been dressed to go for a jog, or to clean house. If Joelle were home right now, she’d be dressed much the same way, and she’d be dusting and polishing furniture, pushing the vacuum around, making the bathroom sinks sparkle.

  Instead she was in Holmdell, spying on a stranger as she strolled down the slate front walk to the mailbox at the curb. The woman opened it and emptied it of its contents, then marched back up the walk to the house.

  Watching as the woman vanished behind the ornately carved wooden door, Joelle acknowledged that the Fosters no longer lived there. They’d probably decamped to Florida or Arizona or wherever rich retirees who no longer wanted to deal with snow lived.

  She stared at the house for a minute longer, trying to envision herself living in it, ambling down that front walk past rows of flowering spirea, past a lawn as smooth and green as the surface of a billiards table, to pick up her mail. She couldn’t picture it. Even if Bobby hadn’t married her, she could not imagine herself living the life of a Foster.

  She started her car’s engine, U-turned and drove back to Harvard Street, to Glenville Terrace, down the hill, toward town. On Jackson Street, she slowed as the black wrought-iron fence bordering the cemetery loomed into view. Alongside the cemetery’s border, she eased to the curb and yanked on her parking brake. Through the fence she saw the rows of head-stones, all different sizes, different sentiments. Somewhere up the rise, near an umbrella-shaped oak tree, was a marble bench beneath a tree where she’d found Bobby one September afternoon and asked him for a favor.