Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  She refrained from asking if that was the same night he woke up, after a lot of beer, to find a frat brother blowing him. William was still bothered by that too. Knowing he ought to make the boy stop, he’d let the act conclude. Was that natural? she wondered, suspecting if she asked another male, he’d cry, “I’d have beat the shit out of the bastard.” Which might not be true. If she had a daughter, one of her first pieces of advice would have been to explain how men liked blow jobs; it was the kind of blunt, motherly advice girls ought to be given.

  William had squelched her own passion; she could see in vivid intensity the garden where it had happened, at their first little house in the suburbs. Those days had been her first attempts at gardening in a Connecticut soil which grew rocks better than plants, astounding her; in her past, if you stuck a seed in the ground, it multiplied. She had planted tuberous begonias, which bloomed with showy effects, as the catalog promised, but instantly shed their flowers. How William laughed!

  On lawn chairs near her garden, one evening after Rick was asleep, while they had the one predinner drink William allowed them, though she doctored hers in the kitchen when she checked on dinner, she was moved to climb atop him, her mouth wet and agape. He shoved her aside. “I’ve never seen such a selfish exhibition in my life. I’m astonished at your selfishness,” he’d said angrily.

  Climbing off meekly, she’d blamed her crudeness on her middle-class background and the lush, nearly tropical vegetation of her youth. Upper-class Easterners, she thought, had been refined so long they’d had the passion refined out of them. She used to long for it to rain in the East as it rained in the South, tumultuous storms that beat the earth, while thunder and lightning crashed overhead, until the rain was spent as quickly as it started, and the sun came out as hot as if rain had never been; the whole earth steamed and smelled as rank as sex.

  She paid no attention to her mother’s warnings about going south in the summer with Rick and leaving William for a month; her mother reinforced the advice by saying Mrs. Perry thought Laurel was asking for trouble. She was only surprised the idea of sex rose to Mrs. Perry’s mind. Since her own career was uppermost, why didn’t she understand her daughter-in-law went south searching material to write about? Because of Soundport’s proximity to the city, they easily rented the house to New Yorkers who, like realtors, referred to suburbia as “the country.” She always laughed, wishing they could see the countryside where she and Rick went, and know its people. If William screwed around while she was at home, why not do what she wanted to?

  Her mother had had some indication of unrest, but Laurel had not told her about the night of confession, not wishing to mention Edward. She had not revealed William’s stunning remark, “I’m known as the biggest ass-hound at Events magazine.” When he said that with pride, rather than being angry, she’d felt a little sorry for him.

  This could not be the right street, this cul-de-sac of ranch houses. She wanted to back down, for the atmosphere was wrong for the business she had to conduct. When a boy answered the door, she turned to go away. “I was looking for a Mr. Woodsum.”

  He was tall and thin and could be Rick in a few years; he wore the same L. L. Bean chamois shirt and khaki trousers that both William and Rick wore, and he had on a new kind of loafer, with tassels, which Rick had coveted and which she and William denied him.

  “This is right,” the boy said, opening the door wider.

  She had to step into a small foyer, and kept her eyes on the boy’s shoes; she saw, as Rick had said, this was the kind of loafers all the kids were going to have; she and William called them tacky.

  “Dad’s down in his office.”

  The boy opened another door toward a basement. She went down and saw at the room’s far end a silver-haired man behind a desk. A green glass-shaded lamp on it cast eerie shadows. Summoning courage, she started across, calling out in William’s hearty manner, “Hello! I’m Mrs. Perry,” and she put out her hand, while not quite meeting his eyes.

  She was astonished that he stood up; she was astonished there were tall cases full of books. He had manners. He read. She had expected a squat, tough man with a fat black cigar and a thin, profane vocabulary. He said, “Won’t you have a chair?”

  He waited till she was seated. His eyes were quite blue and seemed to stare through her. She had the feeling he had inspected her elsewhere.

  Laurel said, “I told you on the phone, I’m thinking about getting a divorce. I hate to do this, but my husband—”

  “I understand.”

  “A private detective’s evidence helps?”

  “Sometimes. Usually in most cases.” She looked at him so closely, he put down his pencil and smiled. “You have children at Elmwood Elementary?”

  “My son went there.”

  Mr. Woodsum reached to the floor and brought up a black hat with a silvery badge.

  “I thought I recognized you,” she said. “I saw your picture in the paper recently, too.”

  He was the school guard at that crossing, and a famous one. When cars with children inside drew up, he stepped off the curb and tossed a handful of candies through a window. She drove Rick to school sometimes, and he had said, “What a great guy,” reaching around to pick up scattered peppermints. Which of Mr. Woodsum’s jobs was his real one, and which job was moonlighting?

  She gave him the information he asked for: when she was leaving town and where William worked. His eyebrows rose. “A difficult building to find anybody in,” he said.

  When he asked for a description of William, she closed her eyes; she gave his height and weight, but a distinguishing characteristic he could see? He laughs a lot, she thought. The mole beside his eyebrow was too small. She did not want to think of Mr. Woodsum in a Sherlock Holmes cap, tiptoeing up to William with a reading glass. She shrugged, whispered, “I don’t know.”

  She wanted to lean on Mr. Woodsum and say there were hurts she couldn’t reconcile herself to, and she wanted to ask his advice about things that had happened and see what his opinion of them was. She could tell, however, that Mr. Woodsum was like a doctor. He would do the best for you he could without really wanting to hear everything that had caused your pain.

  “You brought a picture?”

  Laurel had a candid shot in her purse but did not want to open it. “Only an old one.” In her study she had gone through shoeboxes full of snapshots; these were a record of her fifteen years with William and of Rick’s whole life. She had meant many times to paste the pictures in some orderly fashion into an album, and how like her that she never had.

  “I believe I’d better see it, Mrs. Perry.”

  When she handed over the picture she saw to her horror that on the back Rick had printed in his childish scrawl of some years ago two words: My Daddy.

  William had been snapped by a friend at the beach without his knowledge, while reading The New York Times. “I’m glad I wasn’t picking my nose, old buddy,” he had said. For him to be viewed the same way a second time seemed unfair. What kind of person was she? As Mr. Woodsum looked at the picture, she longed to be home. She did not mind cooking those two damn dinners every night as much as her mother thought. Mr. Woodsum slipped the picture into a manila folder, and with a hollow feeling she thought, My file; I don’t want one.

  “I think I’d better see Mr. Perry in person. This picture’s not too good.”

  “See him how?”

  “Does he go grocery shopping with you, perhaps on Saturday?”

  “William? No.” She’d have hated William to be one of those pussy-footed husbands who follow wives around grocery stores as if they had nothing else better to do. “He never goes grocery shopping.”

  “Mrs. Perry, it’s your money. I can’t assure you of anything with this picture to go on.”

  “Well, this Saturday,” she said reluctantly, “we’re going to look at a new car at the Chevrolet place.”

  She wanted to tell him how they never bought anything on credit, how buying a new car was a
large event in their lives, how conscientiously William had pored over Consumer Reports; she wanted to say how she felt disloyal replacing faithful products with newer ones.

  “Fine,” he said. “Call me just as you’re leaving home.”

  How could she call? she wanted to ask. And she knew right off, she’d find a way. She could see herself already running back indoors to the bathroom while William sat impatiently at the wheel of the old car. Why was she apt and capable? Why did people know innately how to be sly? She longed to ask Mr. Woodsum if everybody had the same ability to learn so quickly to deceive.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for a retainer’s fee.” He seemed truly apologetic. She wrote out a check, wishing her father had not died and left her money.

  “Don’t forget the viewing,” he called after her.

  She said, without looking back, “I won’t.” William laid out waxen in a coffin rose to mind, and he would hate that idea since his family believed only in cremation. At her father’s funeral he had made fun of people coming up to the casket and saying things like, “Look at that rascal, doesn’t he look peaceful?” “Wasn’t he handsome?” “God broke the mold after he made old Frank.”

  “This is barbaric,” William had said. “Primitive. I’ve never seen anything so disgusting.”

  “It’s Southern,” she had said, shrugging.

  She found her way back to town where gulls were wheeling and dealing over the saltwater inlet that ran in from Long Island Sound. In a bank, she transferred money from her savings account into the checking account to cover Mr. Woodsum’s check, thinking how she’d always been aghast at the idea of being a woman who had to ask her husband for every penny. Had she been in that position, she could not have seen Mr. Woodsum. She might have been better off. Across from the bank, she looked at the marquee of a movie she wanted to see. William said they had seen it. Then he clapped an obvious hand to his mouth saying, “Oops. I must have read a review in Time.”

  How many movies had he seen twice? she wondered. William’s wanting her to know the truth was curious. Laurel shopped carefully, having never been a piker about cooking, though she hated time spent in grocery stores. She bought bubble gum, hoping Rick did not already have the baseball cards inside. She spied Almond-Mocha ice cream and was thrilled. She bought a lot. It was William’s favorite flavor and hard to come by. She rummaged around in a bin of odds and ends, hoping to come up with a device she once bought William, which he was crazy about but lost. His habit on the train was to cut out newspaper items of interest for his work; the little cutter slit them out without raggedy edges and had its own case. Alas, there was not another one. She thought the marriage revolved around William and his likes and dislikes.

  She came from the store thinking of her habit of silence. Too often in childhood to speak out had had disastrous results. Long ago, she told herself about her parents, “They’ll never make me cry again. I won’t feel anything.” Perhaps she had learned her lesson too well. A time came when her father threw up after a week-long binge, her mother frantically spreading newspapers around the floor, and she had been unmoved that her father thought he was throwing up blood. She had stated, “It’s the tomato soup he had for lunch.”

  “What does she think it is?” He used her mother as intermediary too.

  “She says it’s tomato soup,” her mother had said.

  She remembered a sad sense of fury that she, so young, was the one to decide if her father was dying of a hemorrhage or losing his lunch. She wanted then to be where people loved her better, and where such scenes did not take place.

  Laurel went from the store to a cleaner’s and picked up William’s shirts. Then she stopped at the end of her driveway to collect the mail. There was nothing interesting today. But there would not be anything as interesting as the correspondence her friend in Delton inadvertently had started.

  She had been surprised to hear from Catherine a few weeks ago. Enclosed in her letter was an article from the Delton Advocate written by Hal MacDonald about his incarceration. She could not believe he was in prison in Mississippi. How could a man from his background survive such a place, even its ignorance? Her heart went out to him with more sympathy than she’d ever had to feel for a contemporary. The article was not only moving but beautifully written. Laurel had had to write him in return; she sent her first novel as an introduction.

  Even now, the awe with which she used to think of the MacDonalds in her growing-up days in Delton could come back in memory. She wondered if she could go to that prison and meet him. She had seen him once in that long-ago time, and she could remember everything about it vividly. She knew so much about him, having never met. She knew his whole life-style, so different from her own back then—the country club set, a great plantation down in Mississippi. She may have been there once.

  In high school she knew both his sister and his wife. In public school, Catherine had insisted before ninth grade that they transfer to Miss Poindexter’s School for Girls, a move that changed her life’s direction, Laurel thought. “In time to join a sorority,” Catherine had reasoned. So Laurel set out into as much of Delton society as she knew. That remembered past came back when, in her house alone, she could real Hal MacDonald’s letter again.

  April 11

  Dear Laurel:

  I have reread your lovely letter and hardly know how to answer. I was surprised to find it and your novel. I don’t know why I can’t remember you as a child but do remember reading an interview about you some time ago in the Mid-South Review. I didn’t connect you at the time with someone I should know. Being editor of the prison newspaper, for which I originally wrote my article, which was picked up by the Delton Advocate, is different work from any I’ve known—cotton farming’s been my life. But I enjoy what I’m doing. It gives me the opportunity to use my mind some, for which I’m grateful. And the work is a lot more pleasant than being in the line camps and working in the fields all day. Actually, Laurel, I’m somewhat unique here because convicts with a university degree are rare indeed, whereas on the outside I would be, as I’ve always been, just one of the crowd. I’ve been well treated since coming here and I’m not blind as to why—I had help from friends on the outside. I came here determined to get along. I made up my mind to make the best of an unbelievable situation. I’ve been made full trusty, which means more privileges than a regular convict.

  I have periods of such wrenching, absolute, exquisite misery, though, as I’ve never known in my wildest dreams. It doesn’t last and is usually brought on by worrying over the complete destruction of my family, Sallie and our little girl, Tina, and the fact I’m helpless to do anything about anything. The situation I’m trying to describe would be true in any kind of confinement. Here we live in “camps” and each camp has “cages” where the prisoners live. At first I didn’t think I could live like this and keep my sanity. I mean, I really doubted my ability to stay sane. And that scared me. This prison isn’t perfect but it’s a vast improvement over a few years ago. There is conjugal visiting, though most men in prison no longer have wives, or have them in name only. On visiting days we can be outside with our families. I usually arrange a picnic under a mimosa I like. But I’m always too excited to eat. Thank you again for caring enough to write me. I will write again when I’ve had time to read your book.

  Hal MacDonald

  Exquisite misery, Laurel thought. How could she not be moved by a man sensitive enough to write those words. Of course he didn’t remember her as a child—she was living on the wrong side of the tracks from the people and places he had known. Hurriedly, Laurel put away the letter. The punctual yellow school bus had lumbered up the hill down the road and passed apple trees next door to stop at the nearby corner, where Rick stepped off in his penny loafers.

  3

  She might well be going to Timbuktu, Siberia, or Mars as far as her Soundport friends were concerned: Mississippi? They went on questioning year after year: Why? What’s there? “Nothing,” Laurel wou
ld answer, knowing they would not understand if she told them. She would smile, realizing they did not see the smile’s mysterious quality, either. In their ignorance, they did not question the trip’s real oddity: Going to Mississippi in July! they ought to be shouting. You are crazy!

  Highways were less traveled on Sundays, and she always started the trip early that day. Rick was beside her as she pulled from the driveway, with its abutments of stone walls. Buff stood innocently on the back seat, having no idea how long her ride was about to be. Jubal had been shipped off to “camp,” as William called it, and, no matter how good the kennel, would return hangdog and medicinal-smelling. After so many years, their departures were heavy with ritual.

  If only the stage setting with Mr. Woodsum had not taken place. While she could stop at a phone booth on the way, it seemed too late to call things off, and there was the deposit, spent. She must not calculate what she was doing in terms of money, Laurel said to herself, at the steering wheel. She backed slowly, fixing things in her mind’s eye. William stood on the porch in his paisley bathrobe, which was old. Something happening at the school bus corner caught her eye. A car came around it, an old gray derelict car with rusty spots. “There’s Gran,” said Rick, his young voice husky with its early morning usage. His eyes were not fully open. “Doesn’t she know we’re leaving?”