Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  She had a sentimental streak, especially when drunk, and she’s always been good-natured. So most of her relationships have been amiable, many lastingly affectionate. She loved it when one of them fell in love with her, which happened often. She never lost interest in the drama of that. At such times our house would fill with flowers (which I had to put in water), the telephone would ring off the hook, and the big ham would shuffle around wearing a faraway expression. “Poor X,” she would sigh. “He’s got it bad.” As she aged, X tended to get younger. She was the first big romance for an awful lot of young men. But sometimes an older one would fall, and more than once a marriage disintegrated while Abigail sighed and shook her head in fond exasperation at the crazy devotion, the total loss of perspective, of X.

  She would try to dissuade these kamikazes. I think her efforts were genuine. I heard her once on the telephone, talking down some poor sap with four kids, and I remember her saying, “No, Jack. You go out that door now and I’ll never open mine to you again.” Of course, she had allowed Jack to get to this point: to frighten his children, to wound his wife. She hadn’t lowered the boom until he stood there in his foyer with his hat on and his suitcase all packed, with shirtcuffs and pieces of sock sticking out of it, and his hysterical family clinging to his knees.

  The worst case was Big Bob Flynn, who used to be our tax assessor. He was twenty years older than Abigail, with children grown up and a grandchild on the way. A big man with a ruddy face, who told the world’s best jokes and knew half of the citizens of Frome by their first names. We got along terrifically well. Like me, he thought most people were horses’ patoots, but he liked them anyway, a lot better than I did.

  Anyway, he fell for Abigail, the old dope. It hurt me to see them together. He would come by to pick her up and always look sheepishly at me, because of his family, because he knew I didn’t approve. They never slept together here, in the house, and I think this was at his insistence. He used to send her singing telegrams, though, and balloon-o-grams. They started off funny. I got a song once by mistake, when I answered to “Miss Mather” without thinking to qualify. A nervous, tuneless young man sang three stanzas of “Let’s Do It” before I plugged him with a tip. Big Bob sent her helium balloons with silly faces on them, a Swissy Mouse balloon, a Harpo Marx balloon, a balloon that said BALLOON.

  But he fell, eventually, hardest of all. He did leave his wife and disgrace himself, for good, with his children. Abigail tried to stop him, but he was older and more stubborn than the others and, I think, more desperate for happiness. In the end he left Frome, financially broken, drinking too much, a ruin.

  I won’t say Abigail was unmoved, or that she never grieved for him, or even that she was incapable of feeling guilt. All I know is that one of the last balloons she got from Bob Flynn remained aloft through some fluke for over three months, growing imperceptibly smaller every day, gathering dust, in the dark northeast corner of the living room. It said I LOVE YOU. I could have pulled it down and disposed of it, but it wasn’t my job. And she knew it was there. One night when we were sitting in the living room and had just turned off Johnny Carson, I broke down and demanded, “Doesn’t that depress you?” pointing at the little puckered dull-skinned balloon, and “Why don’t you get rid of it, for God’s sake.” And she said, “Yeah, it’s sad.” And chewed her lip. “I just wanted to see how long it would stay up.”

  Before Conrad Lowe, sentiment played second fiddle even to the transient spirit of scientific inquiry.

  But that was B.C. A.C. was a brand-new day.

  Abigail went off her feed immediately. Starting the day after their meeting at the DeVilbisses’, she jumped whenever the phone rang, and mooned around the house like a teenager who’s two weeks late. Her appetite dwindled and I caught her more than once staring at herself in the full-length bathroom mirror as though looking at some pathetic stranger, some down-and-out dame glimpsed on a bus, whose history you try to determine from visible clues.

  “You’re too old for this,” I told her.

  “I know it.”

  At this point she still had too much pride to pump Guy and Hilda for information about his whereabouts. But, she admitted to me, every time she approached their house with the mail she got so excited she could hardly breathe, knowing it was just possible that He could open the door.

  Then she read the newspaper interview, and took to driving by the Howard Johns in the early evening, afraid to stop and stake out the place, afraid that he would catch her out.

  One evening, when Anna was staying overnight at a friend’s house, I sat Abigail down for a talk. She was beginning to worry me. “Look at me,” I said to her. “That man is the most objectionable person I have ever met. He’s a sadist. He’s a manipulator. He likes to hurt people, and he especially likes to hurt women.”

  Abigail nodded like a cow, her eyes luminous and large. Just talking about him made her bovine.

  “He may even be a psychopath. He made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and quiver.”

  “I know.”

  “You know? Abigail, what I’m saying here is dead serious. The only thing confining him to merely emotional destruction is self-preservation. If he thought he could get away with it he’d kill people.” I heard myself and this sounded a bit much. “I don’t mean that. I just got carried away.”

  “No,” Abigail said. “I think you may be right.”

  “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you all of a sudden? You’re no masochist! You’re no martyr! Why, the very idea—”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s going to be horrible.” She doubled up in some kind of pain and bowled over on her side of the divan, clutching her middle, her face screwed up and unrecognizable. “Oh, Dorcas,” she said, shamelessly crying.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “I’ve got to have him! I can’t stand it! I want him so bad!” The precise nature of her want would have been obvious to a Martian. She was jacknifed and keening in a rhythmic, hopeless way.

  “Abigail, stop it. Stop it this instant.” She keened louder. I lost control then, so awful was this spectacle, and degrading, to both of us. Especially to me. If she had smeared herself with wolf dung and sacrificed some helpless creature to a gibbous moon I would not have been more dismayed. She had always had pride. Pride alone, I could see now, had kept her from this bestial state. She was mindless now and desperate with need, where once her sexual confidence had been, and the sight was more than ugly and degrading. It was frightening, and in a way I have never been able to explain.

  All I know is that watching her so out of control, so frustrated, so empty, made me feel that something was terribly wrong, on a scale which dwarfed us both. The spectacle was unnatural. It made me mindless, too, it made me panic, and I couldn’t shake the conviction that this was wrong, that my sister must not be denied, that her present unnatural state was a piece of cosmic bad news; and I became frantic, and for a crystalline moment I considered how best to satisfy her, I imagined going to Conrad Lowe as a supplicant, begging him to come, or in a threatening posture, kidnapping him, bringing him here, trussed and in prime condition, to my sister, pimping for my sister. In just the way that the screams of a newborn in pain will bring strangers running, covering their ears, ready to sacrifice anything to save it, so the sight and sound of my needful sister aroused in me the subhuman instincts of a pimp.

  I drew back, at the brink of what I don’t know, and slapped my sister across the face for the first time in our adult lives. This had no effect on her, nor did the second slap, nor the great shake I gave her so that her body wobbled bonelessly like a thawed carcass. And in the end I went to the kitchen and filled my biggest pot, my old pressure cooker, with cold water, and threw it on her as if she were a tantrumming child or a dog in the street; and this slowed her down some, but did not stop her, so that I had to refill the pan again and again, and by the time I had won, the divan was sodden and wrecked and there was water standing halfway acr
oss the living room rug. At which point we both came to, and stared at each other, and the telephone rang, and I picked it up. “Surprise!” said Conrad Lowe.

  Wordlessly I handed the telephone to dripping Abigail, who listened for a second and handed it back to me. She whispered, “It’s you he wants.”

  I brought the receiver to my ear. “…wrong foot,” he was saying, “and I was wondering if I could take you someplace for dinner tonight. The restaurant of your choice?” His voice was distorted. It sounded as if he were applying a toothpick between some late molars. It sounded as if he were flat on his back in bed with the receiver cradled between ear and pillow. It sounded as if his bed were unmade. “…surf and turf? What is that? Boiled kelp?”

  I couldn’t speak. I was staring at Abigail, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to speak up: to let him know I could see his game. He was trying to play us off each other, just for the hell of it, the way certain little girls enjoy breaking up friendships. Conrad Lowe had a feminine appetite for social mischief. He was calculating in just the sort of way a particular sort of amoral female is calculating. I thought of this, while he spoke, and wondered how to use it as a weapon against him, and saw that I could not. That this female side of his nature made him even more formidable.

  “Come on, Dorcas,” he was saying now. “I’m going nuts in this burg. Just give me one evening. A few hours of your time. If you still don’t want anything to do with me, you could point me in the direction of some interesting people. What say?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Abigail snatched the receiver from my hand and buried the mouthpiece in a sodden cushion. She hissed, inches from my face, “It’s going to kill me. But if you don’t go I’ll never forgive you.”

  “But I don’t want—”

  “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me!”

  “This has nothing to do with you. I just don’t want—”

  “Tell him! Tell him you’ll go!” She thrust the receiver into my face with such force that she almost chipped a tooth. She had never in all our lives used her superior size and strength against me. I had never before been physically afraid of her. She was not in her right mind.

  “Mr. Lowe?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll see you. But just this—”

  “I’ll come by at seven.”

  “No! No, I’ll meet you.”

  “Where?”

  We settled in the end on Lobsterama, a South County bayside place. I insisted on meeting him there, even though this would mean identical twenty-five-minute drives for each of us. We’d probably chase each other down the highway. He didn’t argue. He was laughing when he hung up.

  So it came to pass that I had the first “date” of my entire life, with Conrad Lowe, a man I feared and despised, and at the insistence of my deranged, lovesick sister.

  When I was halfway out the door—I have a real thing about being late, and it was already six thirty—she shouted at me. “Where do you think you’re going, looking like that?” I was wearing my best suit, my only suit, and I had shined my shoes. She said I looked terrible. I said I had always looked terrible, if by “terrible” she meant “sexually unappealing.” She said something could still be done about that. Grimly, over my weak protests, she did something with my short thin hair to give it “body” and rouged my cheekbones so roughly that even after I wiped them off they remained pink and glowing, from the abrasion.

  First he had turned me into a pimp, and now he was doing the same for my sister. “Take off that hideous suit,” she ordered. “I’ve got a dress that might fit you, if I can find that wide belt,” and she started to wrench the jacket back off my shoulders, whereupon I did finally, like the old hand which I by now was, give her a smart clop in the chops. This was all it took. She started sobbing and collapsed into a chair.

  I lectured her for five minutes before leaving. I said she was to pull herself together, stop being disgusting, show some respect for herself, try self-discipline for a change. I said I was ashamed to have her in the family. I promised to do my best to steer Conrad Lowe in her direction.

  Chapter Eleven

  Declaration of Moral Bankruptcy

  Hilda apparently didn’t know about my date with Conrad Lowe, for which I give Abigail grudging credit. Her chapter eleven, of course entitled “Herstory,” explores the “psychosexual histories” of her two sexual psychos. Hilda expatiates upon our parents’ shortcomings, Mother’s “feyness,” Father’s insecurities and consequent “failure to validate” and when she finishes slandering them, she starts in on Dr. and Mrs. Lowe, who are by now, I guess, fair game. The centerpiece of this dreary pseudo-scholastic chapter is a pull-out chart in which two Circles of Abuse (which look like those weather cycles you see in high school science books, where OCEANS & LAKES & STREAMS, CLOUDS, and RAINFALL chase one another around with little curved arrows) overlap each other with perfect symmetry.

  My chapter eleven is not so theoretical.

  I was early, of course. Or he was late. I was seated by a window looking down over a little marina. The waiter, “LARRY,” asked me if I wanted to face the window or sit with my back to it. I didn’t know which I was supposed to want. I elected to face the large brightly lit room, so I could see him coming. I ordered a sherry, Fino.

  This was not, I was pleased to note, a place for dating couples. It was way too noisy and roomy. It was the kind of place you brought your extended family to, and all around the barnlike room babies in high chairs littered the floor with crushed oyster crackers, and clattered their plates, and screamed with frustration and fatigue.

  I saw him before he saw me. He stood at the entrance beside the hostess’s lectern. She was scanning a list and saying something. He cut her off with a familiar hand on her back, dipping quickly toward her for an instant of charm, and then quickly away, for he had spotted me. He moved toward me through the crowded room with absolute ease. There was no trace of self-consciousness, even though he had to stop three times for waitresses to glide by with heavy trays, and was forced more than once to squeeze sideways between the chairs of obese diners. He brushed past obstacles, human and otherwise, with indifferent grace, never acknowledging for an instant the possibility that he could stumble, or trip someone, or get stuck somewhere in the maze and have to backtrack and reroute. He cut through the crowd like a shark through choppy waters, and he never took his eyes off me.

  He smiled and sat down opposite me, without saying a word, the early evening light, the last rays of sunset, full on his face. He told Larry, without looking up at him, that he wanted a double bourbon on the rocks with a dash of bitters. When Larry left he leaned forward on his elbows and widened his smile at me, and continued to say nothing.

  He was absolutely familiar with me. The easy way he smiled, as if he had the right to say nothing, the right to a companionable silence, made me wonder, crazily, if we had done this before, many times, in some other life. I could have been, on the evidence of his smile alone, the depth of his apparent pleasure in my company, the only woman in his life. It just about made me sick.

  When Larry brought his drink and the big wooden menu, Conrad Lowe put the board facedown on the table without looking at it, and drank his drink, still looking at me. This was too much.

  “Aren’t you going to read the menu?” I asked.

  “Oh, is this a menu? I thought it was a fraternity paddle.” He actually winked at me.

  “Are you going to read it?”

  “You decide. You pick something out for me.”

  “No! Don’t be ridiculous. I do not know you. I have no idea what your tastes are.”

  He laughed. “You’re perfect. You’re totally consistent.”

  “You are totally objectionable.” This time I thought deliberately of Katharine Hepburn. “Food is an intimate subject, and intimacy cannot be enforced, Mr. Lowe.”

  Now he was not stung, but pleased. “Sure it can,” he said. “Take rape. That’s enforced intimacy.”

  “Wha
t I meant, of course, was that it should not be enforced.”

  “But you didn’t actually say that.”

  “With some people I would not have to say that.”

  “Because some people,” said Conrad Lowe, “actually feel the force of the categorical imperative. The buddy-buddy between should not and cannot, between ought and is. Because some people are moral agents.” He finished his drink. “And some are not.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. It had not occurred to me that he could know himself so well. I could not use the truth against him. He had already appropriated it.

  Conrad Lowe procured another drink and continued. “They call these people psychopaths. They often say, of these people, ‘They are not like us.’ They are born without consciences, they say, like babies born blind.”

  “I never called you a psychopath,” I said, silently adding to your face, crossing my fingers under the table, to preserve for my soul’s sake the letter of the moral law.

  “A lot of women have. But they’re wrong. Do you want to know how I know this?”

  No, I thought, because I already know how important it is for you to believe yourself complete. No one wants to be a monster.

  “Because my earliest memory is of the experience of moral outrage. How many children can say that? Now, my father…My father was a walking advertisement for the categorical imperative. My mother, breathing air, laughing, happy in work and play, was a living illustration of injustice. These were the first facts I knew.” He regarded me in dead earnest. “I was raised by a nurse, a succession of them actually, but the first was Concetta. She lasted for four years, and then they canned her, but I saw her again about ten years ago. She wrote to me when Violet Angel came out, and we met for lunch. She wanted to talk over old times. To fill me in on stuff I didn’t remember. To help me, she said, in case I ever wanted to do a sequel. Well, she was hustling, but that’s okay. That’s inevitable. Anyway, do you know what she told me? My first words. Can you guess what my first words were?”