Mary Hanson was thirty-nine years old and had had three miscarriages and six pregnancies carried to term. Michael and Irene were the children of her first husband, Nick Pannis, dead of leukemia three months after Michael’s birth. Nick’s aunt had taken in the young widow and her babies. The aunt owned the farmhouse and a share in the tree nursery across the road, where she worked. When she retired and took her savings to a mobile home in Florida, she gave the farmhouse and its half acre to Mary. Shortly after that Victor Hanson moved in, married Mary, and begot Wayne, then Dalton, then David, then Treese and the miscarriages. Victor had theories about many things, including sex, and liked to expound them to people: “See, if the man doesn’t get rid of the fertile material, you understand what I mean, the fertile cells, they back up and cause the prostrate gland. That material has to be cleared out regularly or they make poison, same as anything doesn’t get cleared out regularly. Same as clean bowels, or blowing your nose, if you don’t blow your nose you can get impacted sinus trouble.” Victor was a big, well-made, handsome man, much concerned with his body and its functions and appearance, a central reality of which the rest of the world and other people were mere reflections without substance: the self-concern of the athlete or the invalid, though he was neither, being healthy and inactive. He had worked for an aluminum-siding company, but the job disappeared after a while. Sometimes he worked for a friend who sold used cars. Sometimes he went off with friends named Don and Fred, or Dwight and Roy, who were in the TV repair business or the auto-parts business; he would come back with some money, always in cash. From time to time a lot of bicycles were stored in the old tractor shed, which he kept padlocked. The little boys were crazy to get at the bikes, good ten-speeds, new-looking, but he knocked Dalton across the room once for even mentioning the bicycles, which he was storing as a favor for his friend Dwight.
Michael, at fourteen, discovered that his stepfather had gone in for drug pushing in a small way, and was keeping his supplies, mostly speed, in Mary’s chest of drawers. He and Irene discussed turning him in to the police. They finally flushed the stuff down the toilet and said nothing to anybody. How could they talk to the cops when they couldn’t even talk to their mother? There was no telling what she knew and did not know; the word “know,” in this situation, grew hard to define. The one certain fact was, she was loyal. Victor was her husband. What he did was all right with her.
Michael was her first-born son, and what he did was all right too. But he would not accept that. It was immoral. If she had stayed loyal to his dead father, then her loyalty to him would have counted; but she had remarried…At seventeen Michael moved out, having got a job with a construction firm on the other side of the city. Irene had seen him only twice in the two years since.
As children she and Michael, less than two years apart in age, had been very close in spirit, sharing their world entirely. When he got to be about eleven Michael began to turn away from her, which seemed right or inevitable to her and so was a loss but no heavy grief; but as he came into full adolescence his rejection of her had become absolute. He spent his time with a male clique, adopting all their manner and rhetoric of contempt for the female, and sparing her none of it. This, which she could only feel as betrayal, happened at about the same time that her stepfather began to get really pushy, waylaying her on the way to the bathroom upstairs, pressing himself against her when he passed her in the kitchen, coming into her bedroom without knocking, trying to get his hand up her skirt. Once he caught her behind the tractor shed, and she tried to joke with him and make fun of him, because she could not believe he was serious until he was all over her suddenly heavy as a mattress, smothering and brutal, and she got away with a moment of luck and a sprained wrist. After that she knew never to be alone in the house with him and not to go into the back yard at all. It was hard always to be worrying about that. She wanted to tell Michael and get some support from him, a little help. But she couldn’t tell him now. He would despise her for allowing, inviting, Victor to hassle her. He already despised her for it, for being a woman, therefore subject to lust, therefore unclean.
So long as Michael lived at home, if she had actually yelled for help he would have come to her help. But if she yelled then her mother would know, and she didn’t want her mother to know. Mary’s life was built upon, consisted of, her love and loyalty, her family. To break those bonds would be to break her. If she had to choose, forced to it, she would probably stand up for her daughter against her husband: and then Victor would have all the excuse to punish her he wanted. Once Michael left, the only thing Irene could do was leave too. But she could not just clear out, like Michael, so long, been good to know you. Her mother had to have somebody around to depend on. She had had four pregnancies in the last five years, three of them ending in miscarriage. She was on the pill now but Victor didn’t know it because he believed that contraception “blocked the fertile material up in the glands” and forbade her to use contraceptives, which she probably wouldn’t do if Irene wasn’t there to encourage her and make a woman’s mystery of it. She had circulatory troubles; she had pyorrhea and needed major dental work, which she could get cheap at the Dental School, but only if somebody was willing to drive her clear out there every Saturday. Victor hit her around when he was drunk, not dangerously so far, though once he had dislocated her shoulder. Nobody was there with her most of the time but the children, and if she got seriously hurt or ill nobody might do anything about it at all.
She said to her daughter, with the tenderness that had to replace honesty between them, “Honey, why do you stick around out in this old dump? You ought to get a room downtown where you work, and be with some nice young people. It used to be nice out here, but these suburbs, housing developments, trash.”
Irene would defend her arrangement with Patsi and Rick.
“Patsi Sobotny, is that what you call a friend!”
Mary disapproved absolutely of Patsi for living with Rick unmarried. Once, exasperated, Irene had shouted at her, “What’s so great about marriage, according to you?” Mary had taken the attack straight on, without defense. She had stood still a minute, gazing across the dark kitchen at the window, and answered, “I don’t know, Irena. I’m old-fashioned, I think like people used to think, I know. But your father, see. Nick. It was—with him, you know, the sex, that was beautiful, you know, I can’t say it, but it was just one part. There was the whole thing. Everything else, your whole life, the world, see, is a part of it, like it’s a part of you, being a husband and wife like that. I don’t know how to say it. Once you know what it’s like, like that, once you felt that, nothing else makes so very much difference.”
Irene was silent, seeing in her mother’s face some hint of that central glory; seeing also the fearful fact that all the glory can happen and be done with by the age of twenty-two, and one can live for twenty, thirty, fifty years after that, work and marry and bear children and all the rest, without any particular reason to do so, without desire.
I am the daughter of a ghost, Irene thought.
Tonight, as she helped her mother clean up the kitchen, she told her that Patsi and Rick were on the way to breaking up. “So kick out that no-good Rick and you and Patsi find some nice girl to share with,” Mary suggested, enlisting promptly on the women’s side.
“I don’t think Patsi’ll want to. I don’t much want to go on rooming with her either.”
“Better than nobody,” Mary said. “You go around too much by yourself, you never have any fun, my baby. Hiking in the country by yourself! You ought to be dancing, not hiking. Or anyhow get into some kind of hiking club where there’s nice young people.”
“You got nice young people on the brain, mama.”
“Somebody has to have brains,” Mary said with calm self-satisfaction. She came up behind Irene at the sink and stroked her hair softly, making it into a cloudy, twisted mane. “Terrible hair you got. Greek hair, just like mine. You ought to move downtown. This is a dump out here.”
&nbs
p; “You live here.”
“For me it’s right. For you not.”
The three boys irrupted into the kitchen and at once made Treese cry by grabbing her box of cereal and stuffing their mouths. They were so cataclysmic as a group that it was always surprising to find that, one at a time, each was a mousy little boy with a husky, mumbling voice. Mary had no control over anything they did outside the house, and they ran wild; indoors her sense of decorum prevailed over all the mindless disorder of their existence, and they obeyed her. She cleared them straight off to watch television, and turned back to her elder daughter. She was smiling, the slow, happy smile that showed her bad teeth and gums. She told the good news, the news too good to tell at once, too good to put off telling any longer: “Michael telephoned.”
“What did he say?”
“Just how he was, and he asked about everybody here, you and everybody. He’s got a car, too.”
“Why doesn’t he drive it over to see us?”
“He’s working very hard,” said the mother, turning away to close the doors of the dish cupboard.
So he’s working hard, Irene thought, he could come see his mother once a year. But telephoning’s a big enough favor for Big Mister Man to do. And Mister Man’s mother laps it up and says thanks…
I can’t take it, I really can’t take it any more. Now I just hurt mama saying that about why doesn’t he drive over to see us. Everybody I know just hurts each other. All the time. I have got to get out. I can’t keep coming home. Next time Victor tries to cop a feel or even touches me or treats her like shit I’m going to blow, I can’t shut up any more, and that’ll just make it worse and hurt her more, and I can’t do anything, and I can’t take it. Love! What good is love? I love her. I love Michael, just like she does. So what? God help me, I’ll never fall in love, never be in love, never love anybody. Love is just a fancy word for how to hurt somebody worse. I want to get out. Clear out, clear out, clear out.
That night when she left her mother she did not go down the road to Chelsea Gardens, but turned left from the house, walking up the gravel road till she was out of the glare of Victor’s floodlight and then cutting off left again across the fields. It was unpleasant walking in the dark, for the ground was hard and uneven under the tangled grass, and she carried no flashlight for fear of attracting the attention of a bunch of leatherjackets or the suburban weirdo gang that sometimes hung around near the factory. The same stupid fear that spoiled all walks alone since her school friend Doris had been raped by a gang in a half-built house in Chelsea Gardens, the stupid fear that left no free place except the sweet desolation of the ain country.
But in the woods the path did not lead down between the laurels and the pine into the clear, eternal evening. It was warm, dark; crickets sang loud and soft, near and far; under that singing was a heavy, continual sound or vibration, cars on the highway perhaps or the sound of the whole city, whose glow in the heavy night sky made it possible to walk even here in the woods. But there was no sound of water running. She walked a few steps past where the threshold should have been, and then turned back. There was no way.
She remembered then how she had watched him go through the gate, across the threshold, the heavy stranger, how he had walked on and the twilight had flowed on before him like a wave. That had been frightening; she did not like to think of it. It had been his fault. It had happened to him, not to her. She could always get back. She had brought him back. It was from this side that she could not always cross.
Could he? Was he there now, where she could not come?
Dogged, she came back to Pincus’s woods the next afternoon after work, and every two or three days for a week, two weeks, as if it were a contest that must be won by willpower, by refusal to give up. At the end of the second week she began to drive every afternoon after work first to the paint factory parking lot, leave the car there, and cross the fields to the wood. She found she was beating a path in the dry August grass and changed her route, going round about one way or another each time, so as to leave no track for others, that other, to follow. But there was nothing to hide. The woods; blackberry thickets; a path; a culvert; after a while a barbed-wire fence straggling across the foot of a hill among the trees. A couple of sparrows chirping, the faint drum of the cars on the highway, and the sound of the city like the breathing of an animal thirty miles long, so big you couldn’t hear it. The hot, late sunshine and the soft, bluish air. Usually she stood a minute where the path came down, where the threshold should have been, then turned around, plodded back across the fields to her car, drove to the apartment, a few blocks west of Chelsea Gardens Avenue.
Patsi and Rick had been having a hectic sexual reconciliation, the last flare-up. On a Saturday night after a visit with her mother she got back in the middle of the biggest fight yet. She could not get out of it. She was part of the family. When Patsi accused Rick of sleeping with Irene she had to defend him and herself; when Rick accused Patsi of not sharing fair on the money she had to stand up for Patsi, who then turned on her for pushing everybody around. After hours and hours of it she realised that the only thing to do, and she should have done it hours ago, was to pack up, pay up, and get out.
Patsi and Rick were sullen, shellshocked. Patsi made an elaborately fair division of the raspberry preserves they had put up together last month, insisting that Irene take exactly half the jars; she kept crying, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, but she did not say goodbye. Rick helped Irene carry her stuff down to the car and kept saying, “Ah, shit. Well, shit.” It was after eight on Sunday morning when Irene got away. She drove her car, loaded with her worldly goods in two grocery cartons and a handleless suitcase, down Chelsea Gardens Avenue and Chelsea Gardens Place across the road to the farm. The three little dogs began to yap and the Doberman to bellow at the sound of the car in the Sunday-morning silence. Except for the dogs, the farmhouse, surrounded by gutted automobile carcasses, looked derelict. She backed out of the yard, turned right on the gravel road, drove to the parking lot below the paint factory, and parked there. She locked the car and set off once more across the weedy fields already simmering in the heat of what was going to be a fierce day. If the way’s closed I’ll wait there, she thought. I’ll sit down and wait there till it opens. I don’t care if it takes a month…She was crazy-headed from the endless night of quarreling, arguing, explaining, recriminating, excusing. She had had no breakfast, though between four and five A.M. she had eaten a box of pretzel sticks and drunk a quart of milk while Rick was telling Patsi how she played power games and she was telling him that he was a male chauvinist…I’ll go to sleep there in front of the threshold, and wake up every now and then and see if it’s open yet, Irene told herself. Open, open, open, the word jolted in her head as her steps jolted her body. Hot daylight glared in her eyes. Open, eyes. Open, door. There’s the woods, there’s the way into the woods. There’s the ditch, there’s the ivy patch. There’s the big thicket, there’s the path down, the pine with the red trunk, the gateway and the gate, the opened door, the way into my country, my own country, my heart’s home.
She entered into the twilight. She drank from the stream, then crossed and went a little way upriver to a nook sheltered by two big elder bushes where, years ago, she had used to sleep. She lay down there, and made a little moaning sob in pure weariness and the bewilderment of a wish fulfilled; and slept.
Sleep in the ain country was so deep it had no dreams. I am the dream, she thought drowsily, the dream am I. I am the mare but there’s no night. What’s that?—and she was awake sitting bolt upright and her heart pounding, for it had been a noise that waked her, a high gobbling scream far off in the woods—had there been a noise?
Nothing but the sound of water running and the sighing of wind high up in the trees. The sky was quiet. Nothing moved in the forest.
After a while she stood up cautiously, looking about her for any sign of change, of danger. It’s his fault, she thought, that fat face, that slug. He’s changed everythin
g. It’s not the same any more. She was glad to give her uneasiness a cause, and a detestable cause. But as she looked about for traces of the intruder, his hearthplace, his pack, and saw nothing, she was in no way relieved of fear. Her heart went on pounding, her breath came short. What am I afraid of? she demanded, outraged. Here, here of all places? It’s the same as ever, the safe place. I must have had a dream, a bad dream. I want to go to Tembreabrezi. I wish I was there now, indoors, in the inn. I’m hungry. That’s what’s wrong with me, I’m hungry.
She drank again long and deep to fill her stomach, and picked stalks of mint to chew as she went, and set off on the way to Mountain Town. She went lightfoot as always, lighter and faster than ever, for hunger drove her, and fear drove her, and she could not afford to stop and think about either one, for if she did they became unbearable. So long as she kept going she need not think, and the dusk forest flowed past her like the water of the streams; so light, so fast she went that nothing would hear her steps, nothing would notice her, nothing would rise up before her on the path closing the way to her with white, wrinkled arms.
There were candles in the windows of the inn, as if they were expecting her. No one was in the street. It must be late, suppertime or past. At the thought of supper, of soup, bread, stew, porridge, anything, anything at all to eat, she felt her head spin; and when Sofir opened the inn door to her and there was warmth and light and the smell of cooking and the sound of his deep voice, she found it difficult to keep standing up. “Oh, Sofir,” she said, “I am so hungry!”
At the sound of her voice Palizot came, and though she was a woman not lavish of gesture, she kissed Irene and held her for a moment.
The Beginning Place Page 8
