A Place We Knew Well

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  Back in the kitchen, he stood watching the milk for bubbles and struggling to get a handle on his fears. All of them—Sarah nearly naked in the rain letting the birds go, Simms dumbstruck over the downed U-2, not to mention his standing up to Kitty at the cottage—swirled around him. Each was a potential disaster. But combined? His mind was a fog of imminent doom.

  The metal shudder of the pan on the burner—the milk had begun to boil—brought him back to the task at hand. He grabbed mugs, spooned cocoa, poured hot milk into Sarah’s mug, coffee into Martell’s.

  Martell had pulled up a chair beside the chaise, where Sarah sat facing him, bundled in her robe and the blanket; wet hair turbaned in a towel. They were talking urgently.

  Avery, feeling odd man out, cleared his throat. Sarah glanced up, accepted her cup with a bright smile that immediately dimmed. “No marshmallows?”

  “Sorry,” he faltered and, after handing off Martell’s coffee, turned back toward the kitchen.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” he heard Martell say, heard his footsteps click cross the porch’s dark terrazzo. Inside the kitchen, the doctor scowled. “You know that bridge we talked about crossing the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s here.”

  Avery was silent.

  “She needs to go to Florida San, Wes. And soon. Mind if I make a call?”

  While Martell dialed the number, Avery watched himself, as if from a distance, fish the plastic bag of miniature marshmallows off the pantry shelf, walk across the kitchen, step out onto the porch, and fill the top of Sarah’s cup.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. She sipped on her mug, not looking at him.

  He was glad, because he was trying—oh, how hard he was trying—not to look guilty over what they—he—was about to do to her.

  Avery the observer watched himself squirm through a knot of questions: Did Martell bring his car? Will we drive her to the sanitarium together? In the doctor’s car or Sarah’s Buick? Has she forgotten about homecoming? What will we do if she refuses to go?

  Martell appeared in the doorway, lips pursed in obvious aggravation. He curled a single finger in Avery’s direction. Come, it said.

  Avery looked at Sarah. She was licking a combination of chocolate and marshmallow foam off her lips and staring out at the rain. She seemed, impossibly, content.

  “Everything okay, Sarah? Would you like another?”

  “Another what?” she asked flatly.

  In the brief hardening of her eyes, the sharpening of her features, Avery felt again the shadowy brush of a furtive, feral wildness. Instinctively, he folded one arm over the other, hoping to disguise the rise of gooseflesh on both his forearms.

  “Another hot chocolate, darlin’.”

  Her look softened instantly. “Yes, please. And a grilled cheese?”

  “Of course. Be right back.”

  Martell, who’d been watching their exchange from the doorway, backed silently into the kitchen.

  Avery crossed the distance slowly, sensing the other shoe and dreading its inevitable drop.

  “They’re telling me the ward is full; that we’ll have to wait for an empty bed. The chief surgeon and I were in med school together at Gainesville. I’ll pull some strings, but it might take awhile. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  “What’ll we do till then?” The guilt he’d felt earlier, Avery realized, had been lined with relief that Sarah would be safely away from Kitty and in someone else’s professional care. Now what?

  “For starters, we’ll take her off the Dexedrine; it’s obviously over-stimulating her. And let’s up the Miltown, which should calm things down a bit. The Seconal’s been working at night, right?”

  “Yes,” Avery answered, eyeing the doorway. What if Sarah walked in and found him huddled in conversation instead of fixing her cocoa? She was so erratic….“Could you write it down?” Avery pointed to the counter notepad and pen. He got out more milk, bread, cheese, and butter, set them down beside the stove, pulled out a frying pan, and refired the burners.

  “Tonight of all nights,” he was thinking. And was surprised to hear he’d said it out loud.

  Martell looked up, blinked confusion, then apparent understanding. “Oh, yes. The dance. Nancy and I are chaperoning.” He had a daughter, too, Avery remembered, a pretty cheerleader who’d be a senior next year. “This is Charlotte’s big night, isn’t it?”

  Avery nodded, resigned to missing it. Sarah wasn’t going anywhere this evening.

  Martell tapped the tip of his pen on the paper. “Look here, Wes. We’re supposed to be there at seven-fifteen. I could come here instead. Then you could go on with Nancy, watch the ceremony, and come back.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that—”

  “Oh, yes, you could. Y’see”—Martell shot Avery a conspiratorial wink—“the Gators are in Baton Rouge and they’re televising the game at seven. I come here, I could probably catch the first quarter, maybe even the first half.”

  “And Sarah?”

  “This’ll knock her out for the rest of the day,” he replied, ripping his note off the pad. “When I come back, I’ll give her a shot that’ll take her through to tomorrow morning.”

  Before Martell left, he explained her new dosage to Sarah.

  “An afternoon nap?” she asked.

  “Absolutely!”

  Avery, bringing out lunch on a tray, heard Martell’s follow-up lie: “You need your beauty sleep for homecoming tonight, right?”

  “Y-yes, I guess so.”

  After lunch, at the doctor’s suggestion, Avery drew a hot bath. The new dosage, four round white Miltowns plus two Seconals, appeared to take the edge off her, but he was hesitant to leave her alone in the tub. He left the bathroom door slightly open and, keeping her in view, moved to sit down on the unmade bed. But the sight of it jarred him.

  Sarah was a stickler about making the bed. From their earliest days, she’d always had the same unfailing morning routine—get up, put on robe and slippers, make the bed, brush teeth then hair, in that order.

  Would seeing the bed a mess stop her the way it had just stopped him? Put her off from taking her prescribed nap? Not wanting to risk it, he quietly tucked and smoothed their bedding into place for her.

  In the tub, Sarah began to hum a low, mournful tune. Then slowly, softly, she began to sing a song he hadn’t heard in years.

  “I am a po-or wayfaring stranger, a-travelin thro-ugh this world of woe.” Avery sat down on the bed, listening.

  “Yet there’s no sick-ness, toil or dan-ger in that bright world to which I go. I’m going the-re to see my father….”

  They’d sprinkled the aisle of the revival tent with sawdust. Just like at the circus. The smell of it had clogged his nostrils, reminding him then, as it did even now, of his father. Strong arms swinging the honed ax blade high above his head, then down in a perfect arc onto a stump, splitting logs for his mother’s cookstove. It was the smell of sawdust, and the bright promise of relief from his crushing grief, that had propelled him out of his seat.

  “I’m only go-ing over Jordan, I’m only go-ing over home,” Sarah was singing in her deep, rich contralto, while Avery, in his mind, was walking the sawdust aisle. “I know dark clouds will ga-ther ’round me. I know my way is rough and steep. Yet, beauteous fields lie just be-fore me, where God’s re-deemed their vigils keep.”

  Up at the front of the tent, he’d declared to the preacher his desire, his eleven-year-old’s overwhelming need, to “see my father,” to know that his strong arms, mangled and flayed to the bone by the tractor’s axle, his life’s blood pooled in the dirt of the barn floor, had been made whole again in heaven.

  “Yes,” the man had promised. “Yes,” his mother, overjoyed, had nodded to him from afar. And the choir, as if on cue, had sung:

  “I’m going the-re to see my mother. She said she’d me-et me when I come. I’m only go-ing over Jordan, I’m only go-ing over home.”

  He’d believed it then
and, in a post-revival fervor, he’d been baptized and pronounced born again. It was afterward, however, when the promised vision of his father returned-to-wholeness never appeared, when his mother’s demands for more and more attendance at church events reached shrill levels, that he’d given up on blind faith and fervent religion, and adopted instead his grandfather’s more quiet, more practical spiritual creed. “Life, like the sea, comes at us hard,” he could hear Old Pa saying. “It’s kindness—simple, human kindness—that buffers the blows.”

  “Why, Wes!” Sarah, in her robe, was surprised to see him there.

  “I was enjoying the singing.”

  “Of cours-se you were.”

  Avery noticed the smiling slur in Sarah’s speech, the slight unsteadiness in her step. The pills appeared to be working.

  “You know I’ve always loved your voice.” He stood up to take her arm and help her to the velvet stool in front of her vanity. Did she know—had he ever told her?—how, after his father died, that song came to signal the official end of his childhood?

  “You s-should’ve heard me in high school.” She picked up the tortoiseshell comb she used to untangle her wet hair. “I was the sophomore s-star of the s-senior follies!”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes-s. I even auditioned wi’ the great Frank La Forge—touring the S-south in search of the nex’ big star! You have any idea who Frank La Forrrge was, Wes?” she asked, yawning widely.

  “Can’t say that I do, darlin’.” Avery took the comb from her and gently ran it through her hair. It was something he used to love doing when they were newly married. Then Charlotte got big enough to try and took over. Then, at some point, he didn’t remember when, Sarah did it herself.

  “Frank La Forge trained Mar-yan Anderson. Turned her from a gospel singer ’nto an innernation’l star.”

  “Is that so? And you auditioned with him?”

  “Yes-s. Said I reminded ’im of a young Sigrid Onégin.”

  The singer on Beauchamp’s record, Avery recalled.

  “He invited me to study with ’im in New York.”

  “But…” He caught Sarah’s eyes in the mirror. “…you chose not to go, right?”

  “Cho-se?” Her voice rose and cracked bitterly on the word. “Who told you that?”

  His mind raced back, to her early letters, his brief stay in Tuscaloosa. “I…well, actually, I don’t know. I just thought…”

  “Y’thought wrong, Wes. There was no choice involved.”

  “Why not? Dolores wouldn’t let you go?”

  Sarah’s pale face froze with recalled pain. “Kitty got pregnant, Wes.”

  “What?” Avery saw his own astonishment reflected in her mirror. He’d dropped the comb on the carpet. As he bent to pick it up, he did the math in his head. He couldn’t square the dates.

  “After th’ dance, night she was Homecoming Queen. Somebody slipped her a mickey. Spanish fly. Whatever. Afterw’rds she couldn’t remember who, or what, or even how many.”

  “My God!” This happened in high school? When Kitty was what? Seventeen? Same as Charlotte is now. Which made Sarah what? Fifteen?

  Her eyes had become ashy coals, burning heat in his direction. “All Mama wanted was for it to go ’way. She made Daddy sell Kitty’s car f’r the money, but day it was s’posed to happen…Kitty woke up bleedin’. She lost it. Lost them. Twins.”

  She took the comb from him and studied it, fingering the tangle of loose hairs from its teeth into a small nest in her palm. “First time I ever heard th’ word miscarriage. Or that women in our fam-ly were prone to ’em.” She dropped the nest into the small wastebasket at her feet.

  “Oh, darlin’.” Avery drew her up and into his arms. “How horrible for you both.”

  For a moment, she leaned heavily against him, head bent, face buried in his shoulder. Then she drew back to tell him the rest of it.

  “ ’Twas bad for me, but worse for her. You can’t ’magine the things got scrawled in the halls: ‘Whore-Coming Queen,’ ‘Kitty, Queen of Alley Cats.’ ‘Kitty lost her litter.’ Stuff like that.”

  Avery stepped her to the bed, helped her sit on it, then sat down beside her, steadying arms around her waist.

  “She had to get outta Tuscaloosa…go to a private school upstate. ’Course…they couldn’t afford that and sendin’ me to New York.”

  The words New York seemed to sap whatever strength she had left. She collapsed onto the bed and lay facedown, shoulders shuddering, chest heaving with dry, despairing sobs. Avery knelt beside her, stroking her hair. “There, there,” he told her, feeling incapable of soothing her. So that’s what Kitty meant, calling Sarah the “sacrificial lamb”?

  “I know…” She was speaking so softly he had to lean in to hear her. “You got t’ Tuscaloosa, you thought us monsters. But…you got no idea…no idea how much we scrimped ’nd scraped to keep ’er at that fancy school…only to have ’er run off ’nd join the WAACs…wind up back home…same fix all over again.”

  “But…” Questions, explanations were clogging his brain.

  “You’d think…” She turned on her side to face him, reached out and grabbed his forearm, her grip surprisingly strong. “You’d think what happen’d to her would’ve tamed ’er…certainly did me…but only made her wilder. She got kicked out of th’ army, Wes. Not ’cause she was pregnant…Mama checked…She was dishonor’bly discharged. Morals charges! ‘Hellcat in heat,’ one guy tol’ Mama. ‘Little more than a whore,’ ’nother guy said. Nobody b’lieved that cockamamie story ’bout Carlo…nobody but you.”

  “But…” Was Kitty lying back then? And as recently as the other day? Was she even in real estate, as she claimed? If not, where did the money for the Chrysler and the cashmere come from?

  “ ’Twas too late to abort,” Sarah rushed on, “all we could hope was she’d lose it…You will never know…,” she said quietly, painfully confessing, “…how long, how hard I prayed she’d miscarry again ’nd be gone ’fore you came.”

  “Oh, Sarah.” He felt a rush of pain for her.

  Her shoulders sagged. “I know…” She looked lost. Avery knew that look, and the loneliness behind it tore at his heart.

  “When I was little, Kitty’s wildness…terr’fied me. When I see signs of it in Charlotte, I’m scared all over again. But…I don’ know…mebbe a little wildness isn’t so bad. Because…well…a too tame life…” Her eyes returned to him, squinting as one might at a stranger at a distance, then wandered past him, and through him, to the dark pleated curtains tightly closed against the light; the small chest of drawers where she kept her “unmentionables”; the pale slipper chair and matching footstool where every morning she put on her stockings and every evening she sat to remove them. “…can feel…,” she whispered, her gaze floating to the ceiling, “…like a kind of livin’ death.”

  Her chest heaved with misery, and a wave of raw pity consumed him. He felt numb and mute and enormously sad. He reached out to stroke her surprisingly dry cheek, remembering Charlotte saying that Sarah was “crying her eyes out.” Was it possible to run out of tears?

  He sat with her, adjusting her pillows, the covers, the light beside the bed until, finally, exhausted, she fell asleep.

  He unplugged the phone on the nightstand, and closed the bedroom door quietly behind him. How was it, in seventeen years, he’d never heard the whole story…until now? And even if he had heard it, what could he have said or done to help her feel differently? What could he say or do now? He felt overwhelmed by Sarah’s truth, her guilt and suffering over wishing Charlotte had never been born, and, worst of all, her crushing disappointment. “A too tame life,” she’d said, “a kind of living death.” The words—and the judgment in them—stabbed deep.

  Wandering back into the living room, Avery heard the sound, saw the flash of green from his own truck pulling into the carport. He went to the side door to greet Charlotte, intending to tell her that her mother was calm and resting. But the look on her face stopped
him.

  “What is it, kiddo?”

  “Turn on the TV, Dad. The Pentagon’s about to make an important announcement.”

  “Where’s Mom?” Charlotte asked, warily scanning the living room.

  “Took a hot bath and went to bed. Doc Mike changed her pills and”—Avery lowered his voice, glanced toward the hallway leading to their bedroom—“he’s making arrangements for Florida San, probably tomorrow.”

  Charlotte took a shaky breath and let it out softly. Her face reflected a painful, shifting mix of emotions: worry over her mother’s welfare, doubt over the doctor’s arrangement, then, finally, a glum nodding assent. This won’t be easy, her eyes seemed to say, but we have no other choice, do we?

  Avery shook his head. No, we don’t.

  She crossed the room to stand beside him. She offered and he accepted a comforting hug. Then, releasing him, she turned and snapped on the TV.

  All three networks—Channels 2, 6, and 9—were tuned to the briefing room of the Pentagon, where a spokesman stood at the podium on the flag-draped dais. His statement was delivered bluntly:

  “A US military reconnaissance aircraft conducting surveillance over Cuba is missing and presumed lost. A large air and sea search for the plane and its US Air Force pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina, is currently under way, and will continue throughout this afternoon and evening.”

  Jimmy Simms was right.

  “At the request of the secretary of defense, the air force has called up 24 troop carrier squadrons and their supporting units, approximately 14,000 air force reservists, to immediate active duty….”

  When the reporters in front of the podium erupted with questions, the spokesman held up a hand—No answers, it said—and stepped aside.

  In the shouts that followed him off the dais, before the round, eyeball-shaped logo of the CBS network silenced them, Avery heard the reporters giving voice to his own fears: “…escalation?” “…retaliation?” And most sobering of all, “…World War Three?”