The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  They spend the first morning writing down the family names, the ages and years, in notebooks. Sadie immerses herself in the work, the copying and matching of names from the church records. She fills pages with rough family trees that chart the demise of generations—Bigelows, Prossers, Cadwells, Burrs—and before long she must leave to pick up the children. She’s enjoyed Harriet’s company. They’ve made tea, taken their warm cups into the little records office, and chatted about the early town families. As Sadie leaves, Harriet catches her in the hallway and hands her a book—the diary of Mary Vial Holyoke, who lived in New England during the eighteenth century.

  “You seem so interested in the period,” she says. “This will give you a more personal feeling than the church records.”

  Sadie is uncharacteristically moved, and grateful. When she gets home she sets the book on her bedside table, and that night she thumbs through the entries—all of them spare and focused on chores and company—until she reaches one about Mary’s daughter:

  Jan. 8, 1764. First wore my new Cloth riding hood.

  9. My Daughter Polly first confined with the quinsy. Took a vomit.

  10. Nabby Cloutman watch’d with her.

  11. Very ill. Molly Molton watched.

  12. Zilla Symonds watched.

  13. My Dear Polly Died. Sister Prissy came.

  14. Buried.

  Craig climbs into bed, the frame groaning under his weight. In the past, they’ve laughed at the bed, an antique threatening collapse, but tonight the noise fills her with despair.

  “What’s that you’re reading?” he asks. He fluffs his pillows, leans on his arm to look at the book’s spine. “An old one.”

  Sadie closes the diary quickly. “Boring,” she says.

  When Craig reaches to take her in his arms she sighs. She expects he will initiate the conversation they always have of “We’ll try again,” but this time he does not. He rubs her shoulder instead and, with his mouth a grim little line, settles away from her on his own side of the bed.

  She tries to imagine the sleeping forms of her children, the way the house protects them from the wind that picks up in the trees, but she cannot avoid imagining Lily in her crib in the room that still awaits her, the owl nightlight on the dresser, the birds she pasted to the pale walls caught in midflight or perched on a branch. The image of the baby in the crib is so real that Sadie must restrain herself from going to the room to check. For hours she is left lying awake, listening, waiting, feeling the small aches of her body, the strange noise of her heart in her chest.

  • • •

  The next day she drives with Harriet to the cemetery. They leave Harriet’s Saturn parked along the road’s shoulder and trek up through the woods with their steno pads, their ballpoint pens. There was once a road leading here, Harriet explains, but eventually trees grew through, and the creeper and fern filled it in, and then everyone forgot about it.

  “The housing developments were built around it,” Harriet says.

  The woods have changed, the paths Sadie remembers from childhood are gone, but they reach the little clearing and the clusters of graves. The stones are slanted, or toppled over, or crumbling one into the next so that portions are just a patch of rubble. All the leaves settle around them, and their brilliant color shifts overhead like a living ceiling. She knows if she continues past the cemetery, up the rise of pasture to the line of trees, she will see down into Hamlet Hill, the neighborhood where she grew up. She tells none of this to Harriet.

  As she moves through the cemetery she has to brush the debris from the stones to read them, and she walks among them until she comes to one, still upright: Emely Filley, wife of Abijah, died November 10, 1748, age 15 years. She remembers the ghost story of Emely Filley from her childhood. It was Beth Filley, Ray’s sister, who told it to her one summer afternoon when they were little. Sadie’s mother and Patsy Filley were friends, and Sadie would often be taken to the house with her mother as a playmate for Beth. They would be told to go up to Beth’s room—a large, carpeted space with wide windows, shelves of dolls in costumes of foreign countries, and a brightly painted carousel horse in the corner. Beth never participated in anything the neighborhood kids organized. Since Laura Loomis’s disappearance she would stand at a distance or clop by on her horse, as if they didn’t exist, as if her mother had told her not to play with them. Sadie assumed she had her own friends from private school and they did things only with each other, in places Sadie didn’t know about.

  Still, Beth never complained about having to entertain her. She was clever and talkative, and she and Sadie spent hours lying on the white carpet playing backgammon. Beth would go on at length about her brother, Ray, and their plans to travel the world together—to charter a boat and sail the Galápagos Islands; to visit Mount Kelimutu in Indonesia, the volcano with different-colored crater lakes; the Guanajuato mummy museum in Mexico.

  “We have a map,” Beth would say, as if Sadie didn’t believe her. “Want to see it?” And she would rummage in a drawer and pull out a much-folded map of the world, dotted with Magic Marker. Sadie felt a little sorry for her, suspecting, even then, that nothing of her dreams would transpire. When asked about Laura Loomis, Beth was uncharacteristically quiet.

  “She should have come to my house that day—I invited her,” Beth said matter-of-factly. “She might still be here if she had.”

  Sadie remembers those afternoons, the times that she would catch Beth staring at her, an unreadable look on her face. “What?” Sadie would ask. “What?” Beth would say, as if she hadn’t been staring. These were the only times Sadie’s likeness to Laura made her uncomfortable. Sadie and Beth became half friends—what Sadie called friendships that didn’t feel right but could not be denied.

  She puts her hand on the stone marker and feels the pitted surface, the soft moss growing on its face. Emely Filley was one of Beth’s ancestors, drowned in the pond on the old Filley Farm land, a ghost that the family claimed still haunted the old Filley house. Sadie’s learned from the records that it was a common occurrence in those times. Drownings, accidents, spotted fever, consumption, derangement. These things were marked down by some deacon or clerk, brief details that anyone might question, and yet all that remains of the story of the dead person’s life.

  Sadie sits down beside the stone. Harriet has brought a kind of picnic lunch, and she notices Sadie sitting and asks her if she’s hungry.

  “Let me get the basket from the car,” Harriet says.

  “Oh, nothing for me,” Sadie says. “I’m staking out a spot for myself.”

  Harriet’s enthusiasm takes over. “You’re in the Filley section,” she says.

  Sadie glances around her at the stones of Emely’s siblings, her parents.

  “I knew a few Filleys once,” she says. She tries to laugh, but it comes out oddly, and Harriet’s smile dims. She remembers Ray Filley at the Mobil station, the brush of his fingertips on her face. She hasn’t seen him since.

  “You’re sure I can’t get the basket? I’ve got sandwiches—deviled ham and sweet relish.”

  Sadie has no appetite. Food isn’t on her list of necessities, but Harriet is the type for whom food is a cure for every ailment.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Sadie says. “I’ll just sort out the Filleys.”

  She pretends to take up her steno pad. She can’t move. Neither the stone nor the church records tell Emely Filley’s story, the one conveyed by Beth that summer day, her eyes sharp with fear and mischief—that Emely Filley lost her baby and her grief sent her to Mill Pond, compelled her to wade into the icy water. Buried with her, though it isn’t marked on the stone, is the lost infant son. It surprises Sadie, how many babies died, how many are without markers. Still, despite Beth’s story, she feels peaceful here in the little cemetery, hidden away from the road. She has a vague memory of the place from before, when she and her friends first discovered it, and they journeyed through the woods behind her house dressed in her mother’s long gowns,
their arms filled with apple blossoms. They saw the children’s graves and pretended to be sad and grieving. Really, they weren’t able to comprehend the loss of a child.

  When Lily was born, quiet and still, she was no more prepared. Oh, why not Craig? she thought. Why couldn’t it have been him? Easier to explain to Max and Sylvia, who waited at home for their sister. And yet there was Craig’s face, as devastated as Sadie’s, and she felt tortured with guilt, knowing that despite his sorrow he would have never wished it were her instead. Sylvia had drawn pictures for the baby. To Lily, she’d written on one. Someone—Craig, or his mother, who’d arrived out of the blue from Denver—had put the picture on the altar by the little casket. Sadie didn’t want the casket, the service, the stone. But if she remembered about this place she would have chosen it over the new cemetery—never mind that no one has been buried here since 1823.

  Harriet eventually wanders over.

  “You’ve gotten these down then?” she asks.

  Sadie hasn’t written anything. She rises, slowly, leaning on the stone for support. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she says, handing her the pen and the pad.

  And then she walks off through the woods. Harriet calls her; she can hear the woman’s voice, first quizzical, then the edge of panic in it. Sadie ignores her. She walks through the abandoned orchard and up the rise of land where the trees have grown together, and the way is clotted with saplings and fallen leaves. It takes her a long time to reach the crest that looks down into Hamlet Hill. There is her old house, a Dutch Colonial, looking much the same as it did years before, although a vine has gotten up the side of the garage and wound its way into the gutter. The back deck is peeling and sagging. The sliding glass doors into the basement are dark and cold looking. She walks down the woods, crosses the little brook, and goes through the side yard, where the pines have grown so tall they form a thick wall separating the yards.

  From the front the house looks more in decline. The siding has come off—a strip of it sags up high near the roof. The maple tree seems dwarfed, and she realizes that it is a new tree, that the old one must have died and been replaced with a Japanese maple, the leaves a bright solid red and ugly to Sadie, who grew up with the sugar maple’s brilliant gradations of color. Betty’s house across the street seems to be in better shape. Sadie hasn’t heard from Betty in years. She knows that her father got sick and sold the house, that he and Betty’s mother moved to a retirement community near the shore. Betty and her siblings live scattered across the state. Every so often Sadie runs into one of them, and despite the way time erases the past, they still avert their eyes and pretend they don’t know her, rather than try to come up with something to say to her.

  Sadie feels urged to walk up to the front door of her old house and open it and walk inside. She imagines the interior unchanged—the wallpaper the same, the slate hall, the empty living room, the carpeted stairway. She stares up at her house, half-expecting to see her mother peering out one of the bedroom windows. She cannot decide where to go next. Up the street is Bea Sidelman’s, and farther, the Filleys’ house, Wappaquassett. She wonders if Ray Filley is still in town, imagines him spread out on his childhood bed, and then she remembers that Beth is living there as well. Sadie feels a vague unease at the prospect of running into Beth, and she decides to head down Hamlet Hill Road instead, past the Schusters’, the Battinsons’, the Frobels’, past Francie Bingham’s house, imagining each of them the way they were that last summer—their freshly painted shutters, the potted geraniums, the smell of the lawn sprinklers hitting the hot tar, the hazy time between afternoon and evening, the sound of children in the yards playing Mother, May I?

  She walks to the end where Hamlet Hill meets Wadhams Road and continues down Wadhams until Craig, alerted by Harriet, passes by in his car, searching for her. He pulls over and flings his door open, approaches her on the road with a look of incredulity, his arms out, his suit coat flapping. She senses he is there to rescue her, though she is unsure what he is saving her from, and she feels both relief and fury. Craig’s face is mapped with confusion and love, and she is reminded, suddenly, of the time he approached her counter at Lord & Taylor to ask her out. She was twenty-three, and Craig had come into the store more than once, always alone. The first time he was in men’s, buying shirts, and she caught him glancing up at her, sandy haired, smiling, his broad shoulders pulling at the fabric of his suit. He came over to her counter and said he needed a pair of gloves. A week later—a scarf. He was an attorney at Travelers Insurance and seven years her senior. The women in cosmetics told her to be careful.

  “He probably has a wife at home,” one said, her lips dark and lush on her powdered face. “And kids,” another piped in. The two of them laughed at Sadie’s horrified expression.

  Craig was too old for her, she told them. A Yale graduate, a star debater, the kind of man Sadie might have been destined for had she lived her life differently, although she didn’t tell them that. Her own father had been disappointed that she hadn’t continued with college. “A store clerk?” he’d said, not bothering to mask his disdain. “That’s what you want to do with your life?”

  The Saturday afternoon Craig appeared again, Sadie was busy with a customer, and when another girl offered to help him he declined. He wandered into the men’s department, pretending to sort through the ties as the customer Sadie was with, a young woman trying to pick out a gift for her father, asked to see one wallet after another. Finally, Craig sidled up beside the woman at the counter and smiled at her. “I really like that one,” he said, beaming, pointing to the wallet in her hands, and the woman blushed and made her decision. After she left he asked Sadie to dinner, and all she could think about were the cosmetic ladies’ warnings. She stared at him for so long that his face grew pale beneath his ruddy cheeks. She couldn’t refuse him, not because she was too nice, but because she’d seen his desire for her in his eyes and craved more.

  She climbs into the car on the road’s shoulder and feels his anger wash off of him, charging the air. It is later than she thought. One of the neighbors has been asked to pick up the children from school.

  “What were you thinking?” he says. “You frightened that woman.”

  Sadie tells him she’s sorry, she is so very sorry. Still, she doesn’t cry. She watches the roadside blur by, the houses altered by time, the pastures now threaded with fresh asphalt and dotted with newly constructed houses. Craig drives quickly on the narrow road, one hand clenching the wheel. His silence presses her against the car door. Sadie allows herself to be driven home, feeling displaced, as if she is one of the dead, returning as her own ghost.

  That evening as she lies on her bed watching the shadows of the trees on the wall, Craig comes into the room and sits down on the edge of the mattress. He takes her hand in his, contrite.

  “What about Girl Scouts?” he says quietly. “Why not volunteer to be a troop leader?”

  Sadie rolls over and looks up at him. His face, pale, handsome in the half-light of the bedroom, is entirely sincere. “I was going to ask you if you were serious,” she says. “But I’m disappointed to see that you are.”

  Craig is exasperated with her. It’s the end of a long, trying day. Sadie tells him she is fine. “I like to be morose,” she says. “It’s better than feeling nothing.”

  “Not for the rest of us,” Craig says, suddenly indignant. He gets up off the bed and goes downstairs and Sadie hears him throwing around pans, trying to cook dinner. She stays on the bed a while longer, listening to the sounds of her family below her—Max asking his father for more milk, Sylvia sliding her chair back, saying she will get it for him. She experiences the odd feeling of being absent from their lives, of being forgotten, and she stays listening until the darkness presses up against the windowpanes and she feels the chill of the room. She rolls over and gets up, and goes to the mirror above her dresser and turns on the lamp. Scattered on the dresser top are small gifts from the children—a white, sea-washed stone; a feather g
lued to a piece of construction paper; a heart drawn with crayon, and Max’s shaky letters—MOM. Her baby is gone and now something is needed to fill the space where she would have been. She remembers Ray Filley, the way he looked at her, as if he saw something there she had forgotten existed. Her face in the lamplight isn’t her mother’s, but admittedly, he is right—it is a striking version of her. Sadie’s cheeks are fleshed out, heavier from the pregnancy, but her eyes are her mother’s same blue, her hair the same pale blond, worn long and waving past her shoulders, the way her mother used to wear hers. Like a model in a hair color ad, Sadie thinks, and laughs. She leans toward the mirror and is surprised to see that her smile looks entirely convincing. Then she goes down to the heat and light of the kitchen, to the children, who leap from their seats at the table and welcome her back as if she’s been gone on vacation, to Craig, his sleeves rolled up, his face grim.

  “I’m going to join the Tunxis Players,” she says.

  Craig claps his hands together. “Great!” he says. He looks down at the children. “Your mommy’s going to be an actress!”

  The children cheer as they always do for grand announcements. Sadie laughs and rolls her eyes at Craig, determined not to take it seriously, and he shrugs and gives her a hopeful look, as if he is willing to do whatever it takes. And somehow, for the next few months, that is how their life evolves—Sadie playing her role, and Craig playing along.

  June 15, 1979

  EVERY SUMMER REQUIRED SOME DIVERSION, and Sadie, inspired by Bea Brownmiller’s intriguing past, and in an unacknowledged attempt to impress her mother, sat down to write a play titled The Memory of the Fleetfoot Sisters. The play’s debut was slated for July. It was a musical, with original lyrics composed to the music-only versions of already-popular songs from bygone eras. These were songs Sadie found in a box set of records called Music for Your Every Mood, organized into categories. (“In a Haunting Mood,” “In a Bewitching Mood,” “In a Carefree Mood”), with music from Dennis Wilson’s Cocktail Piano with the Rhythm Quintet and the Philharmonic “Pops” Orchestra. Sadie wouldn’t know the songs already had words until she was a grown woman and heard “Love Me or Leave Me” sung by Doris Day on the oldies station. She still remembered her own version, performed by Betty’s sister as Lottie, the unhappy shoe clerk: Love me or leave me / Just leave me, or love me / I’m in some trouble / Don’t know what to do! / Give me the answer / and keep me from feeling blue!