by Nelle Davy
Julia was twenty-five when it started. And though her name was mired with shame and disgrace all the years I grew up, I cannot help but pity her. Where was I at twenty-five? I was living in Italy in a rented apartment in Umbria that I shared with two English girls and a German boy. I was studying sculpture at the International School of Art; driving around the winding cobbled roads on my moped; eating in small cafés and for the first time in a long time, I felt my life was one long route of unencumbered possibility, at least in the daytime. At night, well that was a different story. I may not have been completely happy, but for all intents and purposes I was free. Julia did not even have that.
At twenty-five Julia had a three-year-old son and six–year-old marriage with a man she had probably never loved and had never really tried to. She woke up on the farm, she went to bed on the farm. She played the roles of wife and mother and knew that this was all there was for the next twenty-five years and the next lot after that. Though she tried, she could feel her life slipping away from her—the promise, the dreams all bursting in midair and settling down on her as an aging farm wife. This was never what she had had in mind.
So she became restless. And the town she was raised in, the one I was born in, was never one for the restless. It was a place for those who either wished to settle, or needed some safe stopover until they could leave. And she could not leave, but neither did she wish to settle. Boredom is a dangerous thing.
She began looking for other ways to overcome the ennui. It wasn’t to be found at home, so she found it elsewhere. She was still good friends with Betsy, who had dropped out of Iowa State College and had been working in a clothes store one town over ever since. Betsy was single and she and Julia would go out on the weekends with her friends from the store to bars for some girl time. Jess did not stop her: perhaps he knew better by then, than to get in the way of Julia’s wishes. But that was how it started, innocent drinks in bars on weekends so that she didn’t want to scratch her eyes out.
No one knows when she found the first one. No one ever asked, but pretty soon she began to step out on her husband. At first with random men out of town, but then it crawled closer to home. They used to throw parties with some of Betsy’s friends, and of course Julia would go. Though no one would ever tell me exactly, from the half-whispered things I overheard over the years, the things she did during that time were not considered to be…well, anything that my family had encountered before. She moved with the times and she didn’t care where it took her. By all accounts, she was more than happy with any kind of experimentation, just so long as it was fun, just so long as it didn’t have anything to do with being a wife or a mother. She wanted to feel like a girl again—free, unencumbered. She was lying to herself, but as she’d spent most of her life lying to others, it was only a matter of time before she, too, fell under her own spell.
So like a secret drinker, my aunt was, initially, very good at keeping her secret life hidden from all fear of rebuke or discovery. She was very careful for a long time, but her ability to fool those around her only enhanced her arrogant belief that she was untouchable. She had gotten away with so much in life and this, she felt, was the last straw. If she could do this, she could do anything. She started to believe in her invincibility.
It’s not that hard to see why. At the age of three she had survived a car accident that had decapitated her mother; she had stolen from her father and run away from home to find she could return as the prodigal child. She did things that no one would ever suspect her of even knowing, let alone living, and she did them without suffering once in consequence of her actions. She was charmed.
And then one evening, my grandmother went to the home of Mrs. Healy. A card party had been planned and she came over bearing a tray of homemade macaroons and settled herself in the Healys’ large pistachio-colored kitchen as she helped her friend set up. The Healys were having repairs done to their roof and the workmen were directly outside the window. Mrs. Healy went into their lounge to arrange the bridge table while my grandmother made a pitcher of iced tea.
What happened next she believed was divine providence.
The men were mumbling together outside on the veranda. At first she barely listened, but as their talk grew coarser she couldn’t help but overhear what they were saying. They were talking as men do, about a woman they had slept with. In disgust my grandmother realized they had taken turns with her one after the other, even at the same time, and they were discussing her and her performance under hushed tones, crude jokes and abstract hand gestures and winks. Even though they were talking quietly, in the silence of the kitchen, where the only sound was the pouring of iced tea into a large glass jug, their voices carried. She winced as they delved into particulars and then she caught something she was not expecting. What they said next she would repeat to my grandfather word for word, though she hardened her features when she did so. Some have said that it was too much, that there was no need for her to tell him the truth so vividly, but I think she did it because any loophole she provided, Cal would have clung to like a man drowning. And so the phrase those men threw out about my aunt has come down through the generations to mine, still intact, as an epigram of both shame and betrayal.
They laughed at their own joke. Their hoarse chuckles drifted through the kitchen, refracting off of Mrs. Healy’s pristine surfaces.
For years after, people would ask why. My father, even my uncle: people did not understand. Was she influenced? Was she coerced? Did they force her into it—but that couldn’t work because she went to those parties and bars time and time again and lied so smoothly before and after about it that no one could be in any doubt that she was in control.
So why? Why risk everything? Why do those things and have them done to her? Boredom couldn’t be it surely, no one could do that just because they were bored. This was her home, had always been. How could she turn against it so?
Why?
As my grandmother answered, “Why not?”
Though she saw before her what she would do, she could not help but feel wary. She would not relish this task; there was no way of accomplishing it without clearly showing the dirt on her hands. It would be a pyrrhic victory but a victory nonetheless and this spurred her on. Daring: you couldn’t beat Lavinia Hathaway for that.
So she observed her stepdaughter closely. She would document later the times she went out with Betsy Turner, when she came home and where she said she would be. She began to gather things together. She even hired a private detective, but first she took the name from Mrs. Healy of the repairmen she had employed.
“They did such a good job on your roof,” she had said.
“You think?” Mrs. Healy turned around and observed her roof plates. “If you say so.”
Looking back, there were signs, but no one saw them. My grandparents and great-aunt didn’t have a clue about things like that back then and my uncle was a solitary recluse so would not have cared even if he had realized what was happening, while my father had a more pressing concern on his mind than noticing the despondency of his sister: the draft.
He was eighteen and while he had been accepted into Iowa State College, my father had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Ostensibly he was going to college to study history, but this was met with little fanfare in his family. What was he going to do with a history major? they asked him. How was that going to help him on the farm? Because there was never any doubt in their minds, nor really in his, that he wasn’t going to end up right back on Aurelia. He had never thought of a future outside of it, but that didn’t mean he wanted his whole life to have been centered on it.
The time was approaching for when he had to register for the draft, and he thought about it often. Ethan was no longer a serious contender after the injuries he had inflicted on himself the night he proposed to Allie Lomax. For the rest of his life my uncle would be plagued by pains in his bones whenever there was rain and his left leg was forever held together by a metal rod. Besides, he did not s
hare my father’s hankering to pursue a life outside of Aurelia, even if it were only temporary. He had tried a dream once and it had failed him, so he did not dream anymore.
But my father did, and what he longed for was adventure, experience, all the things you want when you’re eighteen and on the brink of finding the world. Did he know about the Quaker who had burned himself in protest of the war, or the march of five thousand people in Illinois led by Martin Luther King Jr., or Muhammad Ali’s conscientious objection? Sure he did, but that was miles away. My father would describe growing up on the farm as sometimes feeling as if you were part of a different country. He knew these things occurred elsewhere but they did not immediately affect him here. The newspapers reported them dutifully and the TV showed the same pictures across the country, but in the streets, on the farms, in the community, the events of the day were muted. So, yes, he did know all these things, but did he feel it? No, he did not.
What he felt was that somehow his home had changed. His brother had never been the same since Allie, and his sister was always so unhappy, so vicious in her boredom, and he saw his father’s worry and his mother’s unnervingly quiet observation of them all, and this made him want to leave even more. In vain, perhaps he thought that it would eventually go back to how it used to be given time, and that he could seek a life elsewhere until it did. But my father was never one for spontaneity. He did not have the willful spirit of his sister or the purpose, however misguided, of his brother. He was a follower, my dad—a good man, but a follower nonetheless.
My father did not know when his moment would come, but he knew that it would be soon. As the days went on he became restless. He did his chores around the farm and he went through the routines of his day as before, but he was not like before. Though the sky was clear, he could smell rain, he would later say. Something was coming, and back then he still believed that it was to do with him.
But Lavinia was making plans. She looked up at the clearing and saw the paleness of the sky and thought how splendid it would look against an array of black and gray.
And then one day my father woke up and realized he was leaving. He woke earlier than usual, showered and dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of coffee. He was soon joined by his father and his brother, who sat at the table while his aunt fried eggs, bacon and mushrooms in a large pan.
His hands clasped around his mug as he sat and he was overcome with the feeling that all this—the plate with the blue swallow pattern set down before him with breakfast, his father talking over their chores as he scanned his paper and his brother silent as ever beside him—was for the last time. It would not leave him, this notion, and so he walked through his morning as if in a dream, as if it was the lie and he would soon wake up and face the truth.
Which he did, around lunchtime. He came into the house to find a circle of women facing him. Their faces were blank, but then his mother came forward and handed him an envelope. He knew what it was before he opened it and suddenly he felt light, almost heady as he gripped the paper, his fingers playing at the corners.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ethan as he came in behind my father.
“I’ve been drafted,” he said.
Everyone was somber after that. They had known it was coming, it was happening everywhere else. Though they had never talked about it, now that the news was not just on the TV sets or in their papers but in their home, it finally came to roost with them that death could once again come to Aurelia and come for the young.
But my father did not think of these things. He was scared and he was nervous, but most of all he was relieved. Here was his chance, he thought, here was his chance to see the world, to escape and go somewhere, do something other than farming, live a little. Yes, it was war, but what did he know of war? What did he know of how it would be like—what he would see, what he would do, what he would let happen? There was never any question in his mind that he wouldn’t come back, and though he had no idea about army life, he wasn’t afraid of hard work and he would just muck in like all the others.
But now that her son was going away, possibly to die, something happened to my grandmother that rarely ever happened to her. She lost her patience.
For months now she had collected information on her stepdaughter. The detective she had hired had been instructed to get the names, descriptions and if possible, photos of all Julia’s activities, evidence that my grandmother now kept in a large brown envelope and which she documented in the early hours of each morning before the house awoke, so she could pore over them. Yet still she did not expose her. She had been waiting for the opportunity to present itself to her, for despite her hatred for Julia, this was one task in which she did not wish to appear to be directly involved. She knew that whoever came to my grandfather and laid the photographs and accounts under his nose, would incur not only his wrath, but also his hatred for destroying the love and belief in his daughter he had once been convinced was unconditional. It would not just be Julia’s weakness that came to light, but Cal’s, and that was a dangerous mission. But when she learned of her youngest son going to war and looked out onto the farm to see Jess talking to the foreman, or Cal Jr. toddling through her house with Julia’s voice calling after him, she saw her hopes fade and the visage of Julia triumph over her. At this point my grandmother believed that should my father go to war he would undoubtedly die. Theo was too good; she had always known this. She had not taught him the art of self-preservation because she was sure he would never stoop to the lengths that it required. And the notion that one of her children would die in some godforsaken place abroad, while her stepdaughter continued to pollute their farm with her brats and all their claims, stood on the boards of her self-control and broke them.
So she scoured the names of the men whom her stepdaughter had been with, looking, searching, for inspiration.
“I was looking for something new, something I hadn’t seen or thought of, something different. And then I realized, why teach a dog new tricks when the old ones work just fine?”
And that was how my grandmother came to find herself at the house of Betsy Turner for the second time.
It was a gamble, irrational even, and far beneath her usual careful handling of such things, but Theo was due to leave for boot camp in a week and my grandmother was resolved that he would not be alone when he went.
So she found out the address of Betsy’s apartment, which she shared with another girl, and caught Betsy just as she was on her way out. She didn’t say much, she simply pulled out the brown envelope and handed it to her.
“I believe this is more to your taste than mine,” she said. Betsy took the package from her, bewildered, and as my grandmother turned to leave, she heard the girl open the flap to peer inside before letting out a moan of horror.
“Mrs. Hathaway, Mrs. Hathaway, please!” she called out after her in desperation, already running after her and coming to stand in front to block her path, her arms flung wide.
“Just ripe for a crucifixion.”
Even though years had passed since Lavinia had sat on the couch of Betsy’s mother, nothing had changed. Cowering in fear, if anything, Betsy was even more pliant, even more willing. To her surprise and disappointment, the girl was far less of a challenge than before. And much more cowardly: she immediately blamed Julia.
“And where would she have had the chance to do these…these disgusting things if it hadn’t been for you?” my grandmother shouted, holding up the photographs to Betsy’s whimpering face.
“She would never have even thought to go to these places, be around these people, if you hadn’t introduced her to it.”
“No, I never, I never introduced her to anything. It was Julia she…she just—”
“My God, look at this filth!” my grandmother said as she rifled through the photographs like a deck of obscene cards. “Can you imagine what people will say when this comes out? Your poor mother has no idea the rotted thing she has given life to. Admit it,
you made Julia do these things, you led her on, didn’t you?” She crouched low and craned her neck up into Betsy’s face, her eyes serving as a flashlight of accusation under Betsy’s chin. “She never showed any signs of this sort of depravity before she resumed her friendship with you—and God, look what happened the last time? Ran away from home to get married to a man we’d never even met!”
“Please, please, you have to believe me—I never did any of this. I mean I was there, but…but I didn’t—”
“Who? Who will believe you?” my grandmother interrupted. “She’s a mother and wife. If this comes out who will believe that she would willingly jeopardize all this without your influence?”
It was a bold lie. Everyone knew Betsy had no will of her own; the idea that she could have manipulated Julia into doing anything was a laughable concept, but struck by terror and shock, Betsy was in no fit state for rational thought.
“Couldn’t—couldn’t you just…if I make it stop, if I don’t see her again…?”
My grandmother scoffed in righteous indignation.
“You think I can keep this from my husband? Her father? You think when he finds this out there won’t be an uproar? He’ll be looking for someone to blame and since you were the one providing her with—”
“I did not—”
“—opportunity and God knows what else, you’ll be the first one he’ll blame. There’s no way of escaping that.”
Betsy looked at my grandmother, stricken; the photographs lay on the coffee table underneath her shaking hands.
My grandmother gave a sigh and her shoulders slackened.
“I know what my stepdaughter is like. I’ve seen the way she is around Jess, those clothes, that attitude.... I could sense things were wrong but she’d never come to me about it. If only you, her friend, had come forward and told me what she was getting herself involved in. Then I could have saved her, stopped her. I would be able to say to anyone if they’d asked that you had come to me as a friend in an effort to save her from herself. Or even to Cal if you didn’t feel you could talk to me. He’d have listened to you under those terms. All what must now happen would have been prevented. Foolish Betsy, you were so foolish. I don’t understand it.”
