A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “I guess so,” he said, still unable to meet her gaze.

  “And I wasn’t eavesdropping either. I couldn’t help it. I just heard you.”

  Now he looked at her.

  “Nobody’s called you on the phone all week. In fact, the only calls you ever get are from Frances. Nobody named Leland Burke called here.”

  “I called HIM.”

  “But you didn’t talk to him.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he admitted.

  “You lied to her.”

  He nodded stiffly. “Are you going to tell her that?”

  She shook her head no.

  He almost seemed amused. He leaned back against the door frame. “Of course you are!”

  “No! I won’t. I swear I won’t!”

  “Oh, I see. I get it. One more dagger over my head,” he said, still smiling. “Why don’t you just tell her, Martha? Go ahead and do me the favor.”

  “No.”

  “No, I mean it. I want you to! Why drag it out!” He waved his arm in disgust. “Just do it. Get it the hell over with.”

  “I’m sorry, Mack. I won’t say anything. I promise I won’t.”

  His eyes glazed with panic and he stared past her. “What the hell am I doing here? Jesus Christ!”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  He looked down, blinking as if surprised to find her still here. “Martha, do you want me to leave? Wouldn’t it be easier if I left? Tell me what to do! Tell me! Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

  “I want you to love me, but you love her!” she moaned, driving her fist into her palm. “I think about it and think about it and now I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  As he stepped closer, his face darkened and his eyes paled. “Listen to me! That has nothing to do with love. Nothing! Do you understand?” he growled.

  “Then what is it? What do you call it?” she cried, swinging at him in the rage she felt night after night.

  He grabbed her arms and backed her against the railing, pinning her with his leg. “It’s a fuck. I fuck her like I fucked you,” he said, then released her so abruptly she staggered sideways. “And the only time it’s love is when I fuck myself,” he said, laughing.

  She felt her way down the steps. She needed help. She needed to talk to someone before something terrible happened. She ran into the house and dialed Birdy’s number. “Please, please, please,” she whispered as the ringing began. “Help me, Birdy. Please help me.”

  “I’m sorry, but the number you have just dialed …”

  “Martha!” Frances called from the kitchen. “Steve’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

  She lay by the pool, her chest rising and falling with the slow steady rhythm of deep sleep. In her early teens, this ability to lie perfectly still for hours had provoked her father into taking her to a doctor in Albany. “What she does,” the doctor had said, “is work herself into a temporary state of catatonia.” It was a kind of self-hypnosis, a hysterical paralysis, the doctor explained. “Paralysis” was the only word her father would be able to recall of the entire fifty-dollar consultation. After that, if she did not respond when he tried to wake her, he would shake her, calling her name loudly, his breath on her face thin with fear. It came to be her way of gauging his love.

  “Martha!” Frances called again now, then slammed the door when she still didn’t move.

  Steve wanted her to come into his office and sign papers so her father’s will could be probated. She couldn’t even talk to him on the phone, much less take a trip into town.

  The last few days here had been terrible. Frances blamed Martha because Mack seldom came over to the house. She knew something had happened, but neither one of them would discuss it with her. Frances and Mack were barely speaking.

  Frances came off the deck and stood over her. “Steve’s called three times,” she said, even though Martha still hadn’t opened her eyes or moved a muscle. “I’m so sick of this. I told him it’s your business. Not mine. But, of course, we know that can never be true, can it?”

  Silence. Martha took her breath in long measured draughts. An airplane buzzed in the distance. From inside the house came radio music and the drone of the vacuum cleaner. Dawn was cleaning.

  “Lay there, then,” Frances hissed, bending close to her. “For all I care, you can rot there.”

  Martha was tired all the time. She was asleep in her room when the banging started. She opened her eyes, confused.

  Dawn was knocking on her door. “Martha!” she called. “It’s that friend of Mrs. Beecham’s, that guy Steve? I told him she’s not here, but he said he wants to see you.”

  “I’m busy,” she said, looking around at the mess. Yesterday, after another blow-up with Frances, she had threatened to move out. Dumping out her drawers and closet was as far as she had gotten.

  “He said it’s important.” Dawn paused. “He said he’ll come up if you want.”

  At that Martha swung open the door. “I’m cleaning,” she explained as the wide-eyed girl stared in at the dark piles of clothes.

  All the while Steve spoke, she was conscious of how dirty she must look. She hadn’t showered in days. Her pants smelled. She crossed her legs and held her arms close to her sides. “Yes,” she murmured, nodding in reply to some question she had barely heard and did not understand, but she knew by Steve’s gesture toward this typed and seal-embossed document that she was supposed to sign it.

  “Take your time. Read it. People should,” Steve said, going to the window. His hair bristled over his collar, and his suit pants bagged at the knees, and the toes of his cordovans had been scuffed colorless. She could tell by the way his wrinkled jacket sagged from his shoulders that he had lost weight. Steve had joined the unloved, whose ranks included herself.

  She moved her eye up and down the page, then handed it back. He gathered his papers, examining each one with exaggerated attention before returning it to the manila file with her father’s name on the blue tab. “So!” he said. “How’re you doing?”

  “All right,” she said, and he nodded, busying himself with the straps on his worn briefcase. He fumbled with the buckle. “And how’s Frances doing?”

  “Good.”

  “That’s good. So!” he sighed, bending over the windowsill and looking toward the garage. “Where’s the handyman? Mackey. He still around?”

  “He’s over in the apartment. That’s where he writes. Well, not right now. Mostly he writes at night. Sometimes he’ll type for hours. His light’ll be on and all I can hear is his typewriter.”

  “I wonder what he’s writing,” Steve mused. He turned from the window, smiling at her. “Who knows, maybe he’s writing about you, Martha.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “I don’t think so,” she said, and she began to cry, all the hurt of these last few weeks finally erupting.

  He flinched, his expression roiling with pity and repugnance. “Martha, I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. “I didn’t mean that he might be writing about you for any particular reason.” He looked more closely at her. “Do you see much of him? Does he spend much time over here?”

  “No,” she sobbed. “Because he hates me. He hates me.”

  “Martha! I’m sure he doesn’t hate you. Why would he hate you?”

  Just then a car tore around the driveway, and he hurried to look out the window. He wet his fingertips and smoothed down his hair.

  Frances was angry to find Steve with Martha, who was red-eyed and blowing her nose. “I told you to forget it,” she said to him. “This is what’s wrong. Everyone treating her like a child. Julia’s right! I should let her fend for herself. Why should I be the one …”

  “Frannie, what’s going on?” he blurted. “You won’t talk to me on the phone. You’re avoiding me, aren’t you? I love you, Frannie,” he whispered hoarsely. “I need you. You’re my whole life!”

  Frances’s mouth fell open. “Your whole life! How do you f
igure that?” she said with a laugh.

  He said he missed her so badly he was barely eating or sleeping anymore. He couldn’t concentrate at work. It felt as if a part of him had died. She laughed again, and now he paused, looking at her as if he had just come to an enormous decision. He slid the case folder into his briefcase, then stood with his hand on the doorknob. “I’m done here. But you mean too much to me to just walk away without telling you something about your friend Mackey. I made a few phone calls, and, Frannie, there’s a publishing company in New York he owes over thirty thousand dollars to for a manuscript he got an advance on and never finished.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “He still sends them outlines of books that never get written. Now they just ignore him.”

  “I know all that. Mack already told me.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, why should it?”

  He swallowed sourly. “Because now he’s telling them he’s found a patron who’s willing to pay that all back for him.”

  “And he has!” She laughed. “Steve, I’m just taking your advice. You’re the one who’s been telling me all these years it’s my own money, that I should say the hell with Horace’s accountants and just do what I want with it.” She smiled sweetly. “And so I am!”

  Poor Mack, Martha thought. He needed Frances’s help more than he had been able to tell her. Now she understood both his bitterness and his desperate fear of Frances’s finding out about them. Frances had bought him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Steve said. “He’s a bum. A down-and-out bum.”

  “No, he’s an investment, Steve. As you well know, time’s been the only thing I’ve ever dared invest.” She smiled. “Now I think I’ll try money.”

  Steve closed his eyes and sighed. “This is my punishment, isn’t it?”

  “Oh no, Steve. I’m just following your good example. Rehabilitation is so gratifying.”

  Nineteen

  “Slow down!” Martha kept calling. Mack was driving too fast for these narrow back roads.

  “I’m only going thirty-five,” he called back, grinning.

  “Where are we going?” she asked again.

  “I told you, it’s a surprise!”

  “Please tell me. I hate surprises.”

  “You’ll see. We’re almost there.”

  Here the road tunneled into the leaning shade of wild ash in which the white birches flashed past with a reach of ghostly limbs, and now this stand of tall spindly pine so dense the lightless lower branches, rubbed bare of needles and even of twigs, had fused to a black impenetrable fence. The car slowed with the road’s steep dark climb. At the top he pulled off to the side, gesturing to the three houses below, the two on the left, small weathered boxes onto which square rooms had been appended, both flat corrugated roofs pierced by identical silver stovepipes. Long-legged chickens strutted past the wheelless, windowless, rust-eaten vehicles tossed up in their common front yard like recent glacial rubble. Behind the second house there was an ancient snub-bodied mustard-yellow milk truck with ball-fringe curtains sagging on string across the windshield. At the driver’s door a lush white clematis climbed a strand of wire. Nearby were the sprocketed skeletons of old bikes and a baby carriage with its brittle canvas faded an inky blue, its rusted handle severed.

  “That’s the main house,” Mack said, pointing to the larger, two-story house across the road. Its only adornment was a narrow porch from which the roof had been recently removed. Pink tufts of insulation protruded like raw flesh from gaps where clapboards had been crow-barred away with the roof. On the porch, to the left of the front door, was a bronze-toned refrigerator. Atop that was a silver ice bucket filled with orange plastic flowers.

  “You ever been here before?” Mack asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Its unyielding tenacity was familiar; reminding her of thrift and the bare, hard using of things. “It’s … it’s …” The words eluded her.

  “The Horgans,” Mack said. “Your father and Frances grew up in that house. His cousin’s there now, and across the way there’s his cousin’s two sons, and down back, you can’t see from here,” he said, gesturing, “in the trailers, are the two daughters and, I think, another son, and all their families.”

  Nearby, through the rock-ribbed hidden ravine, ran the Cold River. That was the sound she could hear, the rush of the unseen river like dry leaves rustling beyond the still trees.

  “Maybe I came here when I was little. I don’t remember,” she said, the dampness so pervasive she could taste its piney greenness.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it? This is where Frances Beecham grew up. She lived right down there. In that very house. Probably looked out that very window down on this same road.”

  “Is this the surprise?” she asked uneasily.

  He turned abruptly, his arm over the back of her seat. “You’re going to meet your family! Come on!”

  When they got out of the car, a shaggy black-and-white dog shot around the side of the house, barking and digging its paws into the dirt in its half-friendly challenge. The door was opened by a slight gray-haired woman in red pants and a flowered sleeveless smock. She came off the porch, her head at an angle, squinting, her nose twitching as if to determine their scent.

  “Anardelia? It’s me, Mack. And this is Martha.”

  “Oh my God,” she cried, coming closer. “Now, look what’s here! Can you just stand it.” Smiling, she examined Martha from every angle. “Sorry I didn’t make the funeral,” she said with a righteous jerk of her head. “But when a man turns his back on family … Well, like Earl always said, there’s no sense arguing with the dead, and besides, Floyd had his reasons.” Again she smiled at Martha. “But look at you!”

  They sat in the bright room that was the parlor end of the kitchen. A partition of unpainted sheetrock filled the wide oak doorway that had once led to other rooms. Anardelia explained that her granddaughter and her husband were converting the house into a two-family. They had started work on it last week.

  “That’s Velma,” the woman explained with a gesture back at the patched opening, “married to Binky, one of the Herebondes. Distant something or other, way on back. I can’t keep track. Earl did. He had all the connections right up t’here.” She tapped the top of her head. “He’s the one I told you Miss Francie-pants cut cold.”

  “Miss Francie-pants!” Mack laughed. He sat back on the afghan-covered sofa, legs sprawled, arms stretched along the high roll of the sofa back.

  “That’s what we called her when she was just that high.” The woman held out her hand. “Little bit of a thing, and just as different as the day was long. That came from being spoiled so. The mother died having her, and then, some years after, the father died too, and, Lord, what use was Floyd, living on the Beecham place? So me and Earl raised her a few years, but of course, with seven of our own, we were busting at the seams, so when Floyd married Pearl we went and said, ‘Now, Floyd, you got to take some responsibility here. By then she was twelve or thirteen maybe, and raising hell like you never seen before. I can’t tell you the nights I sat out on that porch watching the moon rise and the moon set, and then I’d go wake Earl up, and off he’d go till he found her.”

  She patted Martha’s knee. “But look at you. Earl’d feel good to see you here. He always said, ‘They can say what they want, but they won’t ever know until they walk a mile in her shoes.’”

  The windowsill was jammed with pots of spindly geraniums, their limp hairy leaves drooping in the dusty sun. The woman had twice offered them coffee, which they had twice refused. Something cold, then. Heat poured into the room. Did they want ginger ale or beer, she asked, half out of her seat. Mack said beer was fine and looked at Martha, but she shook her head and went on chewing the soft side of her thumbnail. She was disappointed. The little she had been interested in was already past, her father and her mother, so now she only half listened. The woman returned from the porch, where she h
ad gotten a beer from the refrigerator. Martha’s stomach felt queasy at the pop of the tab and the foam on the rim. She watched the fervid set of Mack’s jaw, his teeth bared to the can, his eyes closing as he sighed with his first long swallow. He and the woman continued talking. He seemed familiar with most of her stories. Anardelia was telling him how, on the pig man’s wedding day, his house had been burned to the ground by his bride’s addled brother; how, when Doe Friester won the Tri-State lottery, she gave up drinking and joined the convent—a belated vacation, they called it—and now old HotTop, whom she’d divorced years before, was suing both her and the Sisters of Sweet Pity for all his back alimony. Mack roared with each story. From the other side of the partition came the piercing scream of a startled baby.

  In a moment more, Velma came down the stairs with a squalling red-faced baby over her shoulder, bringing with her the sweet close smell of talcum powder. She regarded them with the same blank docility Martha remembered from their first meeting.

  “He’s the one I told you wanted to know the family history,” Anardelia told her granddaughter. “The same one you and Binky saw. That time up to Beecham’s!” Anardelia was clearly exasperated with the girl.

  “Oh yah,” Velma said.

  “She’s got blank spots. Drugs,” Anardelia confided, taking the infant into her arms. She licked her pinky finger and kept dipping it into the sugar bowl before she put it into the baby’s mouth. Velma moved between the refrigerator on the porch and the pan of boiling water on the stove, where she was heating a baby bottle.

  When the bottle was warm, the girl took the baby from her grandmother and sat on the couch next to Mack while she fed it. The girl stared over the narrow coffee table at Martha. “You ever find a handyman?” she asked when her grandmother went to the porch for another beer for Mack.

  “Him,” Martha said with a nod.

  “Need any help?” Velma asked with a quick look at Mack as she fitted the baby to the sweaty curve of her neck and patted its square little back. “Binky said it’s too big a place for one man.”