The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  ______

  In the morning Thomas dressed, thinking that he had to go in person, that this could not be done by letter. His only theatrical gesture was to take the letters and put them in his pocket.

  It was the saddest drive of his life. She was sitting at a table when he arrived. She might have been there for hours. Just waiting. Just smoking. A chaste cup of tea in front of her. Her skin was blotchy, her hair and face unwashed. Doubtless fresh from personal horrors of her own.

  —Why? he asked in the nearly empty café.

  She couldn’t answer him.

  —It has to end, he said. I have no choice.

  No need to mention that Regina was pregnant, for that had been revealed to Linda, out of his hearing, the night before. No need for Linda to say she loved him, for that, too, had been said to Regina the night before. Out of his hearing. Though he’d heard the words repeated often enough in Regina’s shrill voice as she’d hurtled around the room.

  —I’ll always . . . Thomas began. But he couldn’t finish the sentence.

  There was a great clap of thunder then — the clap of a jester at a royal performance (pay attention now!) — and the rains began, a sudden deluge that released a thousand — no, a hundred thousand — knots of tension in an instant. The rain was warm, nearly hot, the café umbrella furled and not giving them any protection. Linda was crying with no shame. He put the letters on the table, tucked them under her hand.

  He made himself walk away, thinking as he walked: this would be the worst he’d ever know; nothing would ever hurt this much again.

  PART THREE

  Seventeen

  She stands at the edge of the pier in the October cold. The moon is high and so bright that she could read a book. The boys are silent behind her, not believing their luck. One of them says, “Don’t,” but she knows that he wants her to, that he can’t help himself. The water twitches in a cone of light, and, briefly, she has an image of swimming to the horizon. She steps to the edge, and in the next instant, she is out over the water in a perfect dive.

  The ocean closes over her head, the water like silk along her body, a phrase she will later give to the boy who said Don’t. The sea is briny in her sinuses and eyes. She swims out and away from the pier before surfacing, enjoying the perfect clean of the water, though she knows that at the bottom there might be old shoes and broken bottles and used tires and saggy bits of underwear.

  In a moment, she will have to break the surface, and she will hear, as though distantly, the hoots and awed cries of the boys who will be calling to her. But for now there is just the clean and the dark, a perfect combination.

  ______

  She is sent away for years. The word slut flung across a room and hitting her like a thrust stone. An aunt returning too soon and shrieking at the girl and the man, who scuttles away like a beetle. The aunt approaching, arms flailing, all fury and righteousness, shouting whore and then slut again, and then ungrateful and then bitch. Words that ring in the air like notes from a bell.

  ______

  The place that she is sent to is beautiful and harsh. A house stands above the ocean. The surf is constant and comforting, a whisper-rumble of indifference. The house is cavernous and is filled with other girls who have been called whore and slut as well. They live in small bedrooms and go to a Catholic girls’ school around the corner, but the center of their lives is the laundry. In the basement of the house are a hundred tubs and washing machines and whenever the girls aren’t otherwise engaged — with school or with studying or with sleeping or with eating or, on rare occasions, watching television — they do the laundry. Girls, like herself, with hot faces and reddened hands from the water and the bleach, wash the laundry of the rich and the merely harried: linen sheets and oblong tablecloths; Oxford shirts and belted dresses; babies’ sleepers and soiled diapers. It gets so that Linda can guess the story of any family who has left their laundry. Men’s and boys’ overalls and corduroy shirts speak of a household without a woman. Sheets stained from a birth speak for themselves. Boxer shorts with stiffened crotches suggest furtive pleasures, and women’s underpants with blood on them tell them no more than they already know. A household that quite abruptly ceases to send the baby sleepers suggests a tragedy that requires silence.

  ______

  The hands of the girls will always be red, the damage too deep to be salved with ointments. They will remain chapped for years, the nuns repeatedly tell them, a reminder of their lot, as if it had been planned. The hands will be, for years, a badge of shame.

  ______

  Good drying weather. The phrase is a clarion call. The damp laundry that never dries properly inside the basement is pinned to ropes with wooden clothespins, then left to furl in the breezes, smelling of the sun when the wash is brought inside in wicker baskets.

  Coming back from her classes, rounding a corner, Linda sees the wash on the line: acres of white and colored shapes moving in the wind. It takes the breath away, the sight of all that wash, and seems like fields of crisp flowers, a strange, enchanting crop. The bloodied sheets are clean, the labor pains forgotten, the stains of all that lust rinsed away. Shirts fill with air and move, so that she can believe that they are occupied. Overalls kick out sturdy legs, and nightgowns drift fetchingly in the air. Sheets billow and snap and seem to have a life of their own, defying their owners and the girls alike.

  ______

  The house is called Magdalene, as are all the establishments that take in wayward girls for sins committed or imagined. There seems to be little difference: the parents wish them there and pay. Insurance money that cannot be used elsewhere is sent by a bank to settle Linda Fallon’s bills.

  Occasionally one of the nuns refers to the Home as a boarding school for young Catholic women. But nobody is ever fooled.

  ______

  Sometimes a girl runs away, and who can say where she has gone? Other girls give birth, and the babies are taken from them. Sometimes — rarely — a family whose wash has been laundered and delivered repeatedly by a certain girl asks if she can come to live with them.

  None of this happens to Linda.

  And, actually, she has no desire to run away. She cannot see the point. She endures the school, but likes the sight of the wash on the line. She has learned to count on the white noise of the surf and the front porch and a nun who is kind and befriends her.

  ______

  In the beginning, there are letters from the aunt. Blunt missives with bulletins of news, mere notes of discreet pretending that nothing serious has ever happened. A month before Linda turns seventeen, however, a different sort of letter arrives at the house for wayward girls. Linda is to return home. Linda Fallon is going home. She protests to the nuns that she has no home, that she will be a stranger there, that she has less than a year to go before she graduates from the Catholic girls’ school. The sisters merely look at her.

  You have to go, they say, consulting their bookkeeping. The money has run out.

  ______

  Linda has only indistinct memories of her mother and no real ones of her father. Her mother, she is certain, had long brunette hair folded into waves. When she laughed, she held her hand in front of her mouth. She wore slender woolen dresses with jewel necks, or she was a woman in a fur coat clutching the hand of a small child as they walked along the street. She had perfectly shaped brown pumps and tiny feet.

  In the photographs, her father is tall and despite his crooked teeth, resembles, in an anemic sort of way, a movie star. Leslie Howard, say. In the photographs, her father always wears a fedora and is smiling.

  ______

  In the upstairs bedrooms of the home for wayward girls, Linda cries with the other girls who live in the house. Hysterically, as teenage girls will do in the face of calamity. She promises to write and smiles bravely through her tears, as she has learned to do from the occasional uplifting movie they have been allowed to see.

  ______

  When Linda arrives home, she discovers that
the aunt’s boyfriend has gone off with another woman, abandoning the aunt with six children of her own from a failed marriage and a niece in a school for wayward girls. As a result of this defection, the aunt and her cousins have had to move to a succession of smaller and smaller apartments, settling like a tumble of blocks down a flight of stairs. So that when Linda returns to the fold, the aunt and the cousins are living on the top floor of a triple-decker in an undesirable neighborhood in a working-class town.

  ______

  The apartment into which Linda moves is a warren of tiny rooms smelling of Johnson’s baby oil and onions. She shares a room with two of her cousins, Patty and Erin, girls whom she hasn’t seen in over three years and who hardly know her now. Linda will wear Eileen’s clothes, the aunt decrees; there will be no money for new ones. The clothes that once fit Eileen, who has gone to New York to seek her fortune, are, however, just slightly too small on Linda, since she is taller than Eileen. The clothes are skirts as short as the public school will allow and tight sweaters with low V-necks. For years, Linda has worn a uniform, and so the clothes are strange to her and oddly exciting, as if they were a costume she were trying on. She can theoretically become a different person.

  Faint echoes of the word slut still ping against the walls. Linda wears bright shades of lipstick that Patty lends her, and she learns to tease her hair. Linda’s aunt remains tight-lipped in the face of Linda’s youth and presence.

  The cousins, variously, resent Linda or are solicitous. It is understood that she is damaged, though they do not know, and will never know, the specific crime that caused her to be banished. It is a secret between the aunt and Linda.

  ______

  The aunt is now the unimaginable age of fifty. She has papery skin with fan wrinkles, eyebrows dotted with bits of gray. Her mouth has puckered, creasing her upper lip. To make herself look younger, the aunt has dyed her hair blond, the result a strange alloy of brassy gold with dark silver roots. Despite the difference in age, however, it does not escape Linda’s notice that, in certain lights, she resembles her aunt. In fact, she looks more like her aunt than some of the cousins do — an intimate connection that makes none of them very happy.

  Every day, the aunt goes to Mass. Her missal sits like a bomb on the arm of the sofa in the den — a bomb about to explode with liturgy and dire predictions of the aftermath of sin.

  ______

  Linda begins her senior year at the public high school during the first week of October. She dresses in a charcoal skirt and a white blouse of Eileen’s, but she refuses Patty’s offer to paint her nails, being self-conscious about her hands.

  The school is located at the end of a long peninsula. It appears, at first glance, to be a prison. The low brick building is flat-roofed and is bordered by chain-link fencing to keep the students away from the water. There are no trees and only an asphalt parking lot. It is the sort of building that suggests guards in towers.

  The high school seems to have little to do with its surroundings, as though it purposefully ignored them. On that particular October morning, the ocean dazzles, and the sky is an unblemished blue. In the distance, Linda can see Boston. The school is, like the town itself, anomalous: as if a working-class community had been transplanted onto what might have been, had things turned out differently, the most expensive real estate south of Boston.

  Inside the high school, the windows are opaque with sea salt and wire netting, protection from the gulls that periodically try to batter the glass to get in. They want the students’ lunches. High on the list of school rules is this one: Never feed the gulls.

  The cousins have not been discreet, and rumors have flown before Linda has even arrived. The vice principal regards her warily, making note already of infringements. “Get rid of the skirt,” he says.

  Putting Linda in her place. Just in case she has ideas.

  ______

  Linda follows corridors and stands before an orange door with a narrow slit of glass. Through the slit, she can see a teacher and a group of students — the boys in colored sport shirts, the girls with curled hair. When she opens the door, the teacher stops talking. The faces of the students are a blur. There is a long silence, longer than it should be — seeming to stretch beyond endurance, though it cannot be more than ten or twelve seconds at the most. The teacher, who wears black-framed glasses, asks her her name.

  “Linda,” she has to say, wishing she were a Gabrielle or a Jacqueline. Anything but a Linda.

  The teacher gestures with his hand to take a seat. In Eileen’s stacked heels, she walks to a desk behind a boy.

  “We’re doing Keats,” he tells her under his breath.

  Linda studies the boy’s profile. Arrogant and aristocratic are words that come to mind. He has brown hair, slightly dirty and worn as long as is acceptable, and when he turns, the jawline of a man. There is a boil on his neck she tries to ignore. He must be very tall, she thinks, because even slouching he is taller than she is in her seat.

  He hovers in a half-turn, as if bringing her within his sphere, and from time to time he gives her, sotto voce, bits of information: “Keats died when he was twenty-five”; “Mr. K. is a good guy”; “You have to pick a poet for your paper.”

  But Linda knows all about Keats and the Romantic poets. Apart from having learned how to use a washing machine, she had a solid education with the nuns.

  ______

  Before he has curled out of his desk, the boy introduces himself as Thomas. His books are folded under his arm, and a scent of something like warm toast wafts from his body. He has navy eyes, and like most boys his age, a moderate case of acne. Her shoes pinch as she walks out of the classroom. She has not worn stockings and is supremely conscious of her bare legs.

  ______

  After school, Linda takes the bus to Allerton Hill and sits on a rock overlooking the ocean. The activity is familiar to her and reminds her of the home for wayward girls, about which she is now vaguely nostalgic. She chooses a place to sit that is not precisely in one yard or in another, but in a sort of no-man’s-land in between. From there, she can see most of the town as well: the hill itself, which winds around in concentric circles, each house grander than the next, though most are boarded up for the winter and the grounds look unkempt; the village, set apart from the rest of town, a community of quaint homes and historic landmarks; the beach, where cottages built in the 1930s and 1940s are occasionally washed into the sea during the hurricanes; Bayside, a neighborhood of bungalows and cottages neatly divided into alphabet streets that run from A to Y (what happened to the Z?); her own neighborhood of two- and three-family houses with rickety fire escapes and breathtaking views; and along Nantasket Beach, the amusement park and its honky-tonk arcade. The centerpiece of the amusement park is its roller coaster.

  ______

  When Linda arrives home, she walks into the den to talk to her aunt about clothes. Her aunt, however, is not there. Linda sees, instead, the missal on the arm of the sofa and picks it up. It is a small, leather-bound book with gilt-edged paper, demarcated by ribbons in yellow and black and red and green. On the cover are the words SAINT ANN DAILY MISSAL , and in the lower right-hand corner, a name: Nora F. Sullivan. The book is laced with Mass cards and with lurid depictions of the Five Joyful Mysteries, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries and the Five Glorious Mysteries. Looking at these illustrated medallions, the name of Thomas catches her eye. She studies the picture in the circle: it is of a clearly penitent and disastrously ill-looking Thomas being crowned with thorns. Under the picture is written: Crowned with Thorns: For Moral Courage.

  She flips to the page marked by the red ribbon, and reads the prayer written there: “O God, Who by the humility of Your Son have raised up a fallen world, grant everlasting joy to Your faithful people; that those whom You have rescued from the perils of endless death, You may cause to enjoy endless happiness. Through the same, etc. Amen.”

  With a snap that echoes through the apartment, Linda closes the missal so as not to let
any of the words escape into the air.

  ______

  The aunt works in the coat department of a store in Quincy. The cousins more or less fend for themselves. The dinner hour is an unknown event in the triple-decker, and consequently there is no dining table, only a table covered with oilcloth in the kitchen. One of the cousins is assigned each week to prepare the meals, but since Jack and Tommy are too young, and Michael is usually too busy, the work almost always falls to Linda and Patty and Erin. By common agreement, each of the cousins eats when he or she is hungry in front of the television in the den.

  The noise in the apartment is constant. Jack and Tommy are always underfoot. Michael plays his radio loudly. Patty and Erin fight like cats.

  The bedroom that Linda shares with Patty and Erin has green wallpaper and two twin beds. A mattress has been set between them to make a bed for Linda. In the morning, it is almost impossible to tuck in the sheets and covers, which is, under normal circumstances, something Linda can do well (the nuns insisted). When Patty and Erin get out of bed, they sometimes inadvertently step on her. To read, Linda has to lean against the nightstand.

  A feature of the room that appeals to Linda is a small window set beneath a gable. If she sits on Patty’s bed, she can see the harbor, and beyond the beach, the open water of the ocean. She can also see the roller coaster.