Rick sat on his bed. He had taken down from his closet boxes long abandoned there. They were full of inexpensive plastic soldiers that came originally in cellophane bags. She, or her mother, used to always buy them for him. He collected regiments of them and called the soldiers “little men.” He was always playing with them under a huge forsythia bush in the backyard. The soldiers were arrayed around him on the bed and covered his knees. He did not look up at her. Rick went on moving the little toy men, having them fight one another, and making the same childhood sounds he always had. “Chuk-chuk,” he was saying as one guy after another one bit the dust. Laurel closed the door. She went downstairs to peel carrots, thinking this would be the last dinner the three of them might sit down to together.
Darling:
This situation is insane. I go on and on cooking and serving William’s dinners, the old New Haven being late half the time, and apparently we are to go on living here as if nothing had happened. Since William refuses to mention the divorce, I don’t think Rick believes one is happening, either. And this is not good for him.
William is nice about things he never was before. He begged me to stay and said if I’d try another year and still wanted a divorce, he’d give me one instantly—would write that down for the lawyers—and give me everything. I suppose if there weren’t you, I’d agree. The next morning after I told Rick, he threw up his cereal back into his bowl (yuck) and stayed home and was close to me all day; we sat on the couch midmorning and watched an old movie on TV, and he played with toy soldiers that date a long way back. The only thing he did say was how did I expect to control him alone as a teenager when I’d never had any authority in this house?
My mother said, You always have been the underdog here. Stop being it.
Yesterday William and I jogged around the block as usual in the morning. It’s strange but we are having the most compatible time. He got all worried about a pain I had after running. I have wanted you so badly, I could want him. Jubal even! Buff keeps jumping on him and Jubal seems to think she’s trying to bite his fleas. The vet said Jubal doesn’t have any street experience. Hal, it is such a relief that I adore a man capable of deep love and therefore fidelity. God! When am I going to be with you?
The other day was a Jewish holiday and Soundport like a morgue. It’s a good day to shop. My mother and I always go to a suburban Bloomingdale’s. She bought me a gray skirt as my birthday present. When I wore it, William cocked his head and asked if I’d consider having it shortened a few inches. So I will. Rick asked me not to. He said it made me look like a mother. I promised to wear it first to a PTA meeting at his school. One night in the kitchen, William did say it would be so much easier not to get a divorce. I certainly agree with that. He spoke in a lost way that was not at all belligerent. He said we had a better marriage than a lot of people. “Better than most,” he said. We seem to frequently be in the kitchen. As he reached up for a glass over my head, I ducked. He looked down and said, “I’m not going to hit you.”
Since he has never hit me, I know this is a terror that comes from the past, and not from him. It comes from the times my father hit my mother, and the times he hit me when I was trying to defend her. Once I was quite young, and when he hit me I fell off a chair. My mother said, “Don’t hit her.” You see, my mother often tried to defend me, and despite other things that have happened, I’ve always had to be grateful to her. I never would have known Christmas without her. She bought toys, she got up those mornings. My father never joined in; he slept off a hangover. There was horror then, but something tantalizing in memory about those days. I can’t analyze it out. I know it is there. Strangely, I’ve wondered if my ducking from William had something to do with your letter that arrived that day. I had asked you, Why didn’t you ever control Sallie?
You wrote back: I laid down the law as best I could. Sometimes, I beat hell out of her. Well, I’m glad you didn’t do it regularly. But only now and then. Maybe you are right, that when she sat on the floor and peed in her pants, she shut her mouth because she finally realized she could get hurt. Maybe you are right about her doing all she could to bring it on, knowing what would happen. What is it that I’ve always feared about William? His displeasure, I suppose. Just as he fears his mother’s even when she is not present. The simplest tasks have monumental goals of perfection, his family tribe always sitting in judgment in his mind’s eye. Darling baby farmer, you believed so much in your love for Sallie, you got a divorce to marry her. Let’s not be dreamy.
All these things happen about a divorce that I never knew happened. I had to take my lawyer a deed to the house for him to put an attachment on it, though I do not understand exactly why. Mr. Cohen says I’m the most naïve client he’s ever had about money. I don’t want to tell him yet about the certain future I have ahead. William had to be served papers at the train station by a sheriff. I never knew Soundport had a sheriff; I thought they only belonged to little country towns in the South. We had him served there to avoid his being served at home in front of Rick. And I had to go down and point out William’s car. I felt strange in that dead place pointing out William’s old, broken-down station car to a stranger. He has let Rick and his friends paint graffiti over it, which seemed childish to me; but William lives through Rick a childhood he envisioned and never had; we don’t worry about having a better car or keeping up with somebody else. I was mortified before that sheriff. I do not wish anything bad to happen to William.
Then he came home making a big joke about having some man accost him out of the dark, waving papers and telling him he was getting a divorce. Instead, it was I who was left with a kind of hurt that he would laugh.
Last night he cooked my birthday dinner and served everything himself. Only he left the birthday cake on a counter in the kitchen, and when he went out for it, Jubal had eaten half—candles and all. We ate what was left. In the middle of dinner, William said, “This family’s got to start making plans for a summer vacation. But what we need to spend money on first is new porch funiture.” Rick had a guest and there was nothing I could say till the boys left. Then I looked the length of the table and said, “In light of the reality of things, do you think this is the kind of conversation we ought to be having? In the first place, it’s not fair to Rick.”
“What is the reality?” he said.
“That we are getting a divorce.”
“The reality is you’ll never be granted one.”
“You’re going to get your hole in a crack.”
Laurel turned in front of her bedroom mirror, astonished by her mother’s crudity. Any other time, she would have laughed. She was leaving in an hour for the airport and would spend two days with Hal, at an AA convention in Vicksburg. Her mother must understand how ecstatic she was. And nothing would have kept her from going. Not her mother’s piece of advice. Not even a warning from Mr. Cohen if I’d told him, she thought. She had no idea a divorce could be so hard, that William could stay on in the house. She had never hated William, but a little slow hate crept in the longer he stayed. No one knew her secret life except her mother, though others saw the toll her present life was taking. A friend had said she looked haggard. Frightened, Laurel wondered how she would look to Hal. Her gray skirt was better shorter, the way William suggested. But it was too loose at the waist. Rick had guessed that she now weighed less than Jubal. And Jubal went to the railroad station, another of William’s uncommon suggestions. Rick had been right. What were they doing as a family one Saturday morning at the railroad station weighing a dog? “Mother, are these heels all right?” She needed help. “Hal’s not so tall.”
“You sound just like you did in high school.”
Oh, why couldn’t she be kind? Laurel thought, walking around in a motel room. There was that little tag end nagging in her mind about her mother’s being right. But what is wrong with being in love? She liked all this racing and beating inside herself, and a craving for someone. She hated even now lying to William, but William still spent all
the nights he wanted to in New York. When she turned over her prison article in despair to William for his expertise, he said the piece lacked feeling. Doesn’t that kill you? she wrote to Hal. He knew she was a woman who all her life had been dependent on men, who wanted to be, but she should stop turning to William as if he was gospel, about the length of her skirts and what to write, he said. How did she think he felt, locked up, unable to fight for his woman, with William in the house and the possibility of her weakening? Darling! Darling! She had covered pages with scrawls; didn’t he understand how she loved him and how wonderful their future was going to be? She told William she was giving the article one more try, one more research trip for two days.
A car door slammed, and she was at the window, peeking out. There were Buddy and Hal in the parking lot. Buddy had a room here too. She let the curtain close. The risk they ran was in seeing someone Hal knew, maybe an agricultural salesman who dropped by Matagorda, he had said. He told her how such men never cursed in front of his father or told a dirty joke, they so admired him as a gentleman. Hal looked up to him, and she went on dreaming about, finally, being part of his family, and cherished already how things were going to be. When he came in the room, they could kiss as wildly as they had so long imagined doing. “Let me catch my breath,” Hal said.
He dropped down into a chair by the door. He was a nervous wreck not knowing till the last minute whether they’d make it across those tracks; he had imagined Laurel arriving here for nothing, a fiasco like Greenwood. “I hate being totally dependent on someone else’s charity for every goddamned step I take off that fucking farm,” he said. She sat in his lap with her arms around his neck. “This hasn’t happened to me much in my life,” he said more quietly.
“Sallie never sat in your lap?” He shook his head. Laurel thought about a party years ago in Delton when she saw Sallie sitting in Big Greg’s lap and swinging, swinging long legs. She had been envious and intrigued that Sallie could be so uninhibited in public, or at all. And she felt a great circle was completed that she was back among people about whom she had so many memories. Though maybe Sallie never sat in Hal’s lap because she didn’t have to bat an eyelash to get him.
Hal slid a hand under her skirt. “I think you’re ready, baby,” he said, his voice low. They lay a long while under a tent of covers in bed, his mouth resting on hers without any pressure; quietly, they went on breathing together. “I think you’re as desperate for affection as I am,” he said. She nodded. But she grew restless and even bored. When was something more to begin? He might be worried about not having been to bed with a woman in a year, but she had not been with anyone either. His fingers fluttered to her private parts, in the obligatory gesture men know they are supposed to do. She made herself breathe hard and fast, remembering some man once told her what made sex exciting was the other partner’s being aroused. She rolled on top of him. She always thought it difficult staring face to face that way, eye to eye. She buried her face in his neck. Once, after sex with her, William had said he hated the dumb look women got on their faces. She had to rise up for air, and she moved down to the end of the bed and put her mouth on him.
She liked the way men cupped your head then in a gentle way, holding their hands over your ears till it was like being inside a seashell. She liked the way they lay there mesmerized, with their soft skin, without taste, hardening and rising in your mouth. Her knees were curled near his head, and in a while he obliged her and put his head between her legs. Soon he was on top of her. When Hal lay smoking with his arm around her, he said in the beginning of their marriage, Carla asked for oral sex and he wouldn’t think of it. He had not been able to imagine it before.
When Laurel went home, Rick said he missed her at first, and by the second day forgot all about her. Did that hurt as much as I think it did, angel? Hal wrote. Anything that hurts you hurts me now too. Because we are one.
11
Laurel MacDonald stood inside the big house at Matagorda watching her mother-in-law’s hand slide down a curving banister. It was November, but she and Hal stood in tennis shorts waiting for Mama. Their legs were not even cold. Laurel thought back over the two years she had waited to be here, two years of struggling to be together, so much agony and longing. She had thought then that never again could she bear so much aching, and now she felt the same tremulous pain waiting for Rick to come here to visit, missing Rick.
On the landing above her a high arched window with beveled glass looked out over the lawn, the orchards, the Negro shacks, and the railroad. An I.C. train passed, hooting its laughter. Blacks in the orchard were picking up pecans. Tommy Savano rode his tractor back and forth giving whatever orders seemed to be given about anything around here. Soon it would be Christmas and Rick would come again. Rick.
She watched Mama’s hand with the heavy coral ring sliding down the banister. She fingered her light tennis sweater, wondering, What is wrong with this sweater? She tugged at its waistline.
If only she could ask William, What kind of sweater do I need? How had she this insecurity when she’d lived so long in the East, with proximity to New York fashion sense and with William’s advice? Why was she not more chic than anyone else? Hal stood in his tennis sweater from prep school days aged a golden color and banded with navy and maroon. “Brooks Brothers 1940,” he had said, grinning. All that long-ago time you were already way ahead, she had thought. Mama traveling to New York to buy you the right clothes. The right schools. All that long-ago time when I didn’t know anything. Once I remember running down a block in Delton in my new Buster Brown oxfords, believing I’d run faster because that was the advertising slogan: KIDS RUN FASTER IN OUR SHOES. I ran no faster, the awkward shoes going clop-clop-clop and I learning betrayal.
Every Friday night they had to eat oysters with Mama and Daddy in Swan’s only restaurant. Daddy drove at a snail’s pace over dark roads the ten miles from Matagorda. Mama turned one night, saying, “A woman moved here from Baltimore once and didn’t unpack her trunk for two years. Have you unpacked, Laurel?” In the darkness, she had said nothing. No one noticed, as she had not thought they would. She and Hal were in the backseat like chaperoned children, the way they had been with Buddy those two years she waited. Flower power; it won. He was holding her hand when Mama turned and he hid it from view. In my relationship with my parents we never discussed the possibility of sex, he had said; there had been only the one sad time he went off to prep school. Yet when he told Mama he and Sallie were married, she said right off, “And is a baby coming? I think that’s lovely,” without a word of criticism. He said, too, his family had never offered a word of criticism about his killing Greg.
At dinner Daddy announced he had finished paying for painting done on her and Hal’s house months before. She remembered holding her oyster fork in astonishment; her father never let a bill languish in the house overnight. Being a Delta planter maybe Daddy had a more relaxed attitude, or was short of cash. Only she recalled Hal’s saying once, they were not considered to be Delta people, they’d come down here from Delton.
In looking back over those long months she waited for Hal, when finally her divorce was over and then his, and their relationship known, she visited him in prison and stayed overnight in this house so many times; it was then she began to love it, she thought. She believed she would always see herself a tiny figure traveling those interlocking rural highways alone. The times she was here Mama would be locked away too, having what Daddy called a nervous condition. Back then, Hal had said she would get used to Mama’s “oddments” without being very specific, she realized now. She believed, too, that being as sexually aroused as she was by Hal, and alone for long evenings with Daddy as she was, it was inevitable that something would happen. She was glad they never indicated even by eye contact that particular evening.
Lock, stock, and barrel. God! That was just how she had moved a few days before Hal came home, and Daddy helped her set up the household. She had never before shopped in Sears where he took her to b
uy a stove. Her own was left in the house in Connecticut where William and Rick lived; better not to think about it. Yet she knew a moment never passed that she did not wonder what Rick was doing. He was right that Matagorda was too lonely a place to live, for him. But mostly he was intent on finishing out his boyhood in Soundport and deserved what he wanted. She had sensed in Sears Daddy wanted to be conservative and agreed the wallpaper in the master bedroom was fine. So they lived with Sallie’s selection of ivy leaves and cabbage roses; only later had she started to wonder what memories they brought up for Hal. In the same way, did he ever think about sleeping in the bed with her where she had slept with William for fifteen years? In the wide bed, Hal looked so small. Maybe Daddy was strapped for money because of what Hal’s defense had cost. Here her husband stood, a dependent still, in his late forties. It was a stunning surprise arriving in the emptiness of this plantation to learn Hal was not going to farm again, that he had never farmed but a fraction of Matagorda’s acreage; a token job? In his third year in prison, she had not paid enough attention when he kept writing that Daddy was renting out more land. I’m beginning to feel set adrift, he had said. She looked into the orchard, thinking, Adrift? We are sinking.
Just as Hal was about to be paroled, Daddy rented the last land to Savano. She had wanted ever since to ask if he could not have saved the orchard for Hal. She was afraid to ask. Daddy’s thinking of our future. She remembered the letter Mama wrote to Hal at the time, which he sent along to her. In Connecticut, she had not understood the full implication of Mama’s words then. Those months they had waited were diabolical. Hal had said: I feel the way Scarlett did about Tara. Once we get home to Matagorda everything will be all right. Meanwhile we can only bend with the wind like bamboo. I guess that’s the only way to survive under conditions of oppression. Well, she had survived as she had told him she could:
Pay the Piper Page 17
