A Secret Rage (12 page)

Gradually I became surrounded by people, as though Barbara and I had formed a dam to hold back their flow. We were all quiet for a long moment. Then the chunky blonde girl who sat to my right in class said, very formally, ‘I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, Nickie, but you have my complete sympathy, and I hope they catch whoever did it. And I hope he resists arrest and I hope they shoot him dead. For Dr Tucker, too.’ She said this in one breath, touched me gently on the shoulder, and marched off down the hall. There was a chorus of ‘Right’ and ‘Me, too,’ and then a loud and shrill ‘Kill the son of a bitch’ from my dear Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

‘Sisterhood, Nickie,’ said a tiny girl named Susannah with great earnestness. I tried to smile, which caused a cut on my lip to open and bleed. The militance that had filled the hall altered to sick horror.

‘Thank you,’ I mumbled, so the poor things could go.

Barbara’s hand on my arm began to urge me toward the women’s bathroom. She awkwardly pulled a tissue from her purse with her other hand and dabbed at my lip as we reached the door. We sat on a hideous brown couch. Barbara gave me a cigarette and lit it. Her face twisted.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said furiously, ‘don’t cry.’

‘Neither of us needs that, I know,’ she said. She gulped a few times. ‘Okay. Do you think there’s any chance they’ll catch him?’

‘Minimal, in my case. No fingerprints. No one saw anything, least of all me. Except maybe Attila the cat. It was too dark.’

‘Same here. The first thing the police asked me was, “Is he black?” ’ Barbara said grimly.

‘White. I could tell by the voice.’

‘Me, too. I think I’m so damn fair-minded. But you know, that’s the first fear I had when he grabbed me. Is it a black? The great racist bogeyman rises again.’ She brooded over that for a moment while she put out her cigarette with a vicious grinding motion. ‘What’s made this thing a nightmare for me is how Stan hasn’t been able to handle it. I haven’t seen him away from the college since it happened.’

Right now, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about how Stan Haskell was handling it. I was worried about
me
handling it.

‘He can’t deal with it at all,’ Barbara continued. ‘I can’t fathom his attitude. He’s a caring man, he surely believes in the equality of women, but he can’t come to terms with me being raped at all.’

‘Cully says some men are just embarrassed,’ I offered. Then I remembered that I’d suspected he was counseling Barbara, that he must have formulated the advice he’d given me from his experiences with her.

There had been a flatness in my voice that had penetrated to Barbara. She flushed. ‘You have enough problems without me burdening you with mine,’ she said.

I realized I was doing it again. Shoving her off. ‘Barbara,’ I said, ‘we share something pretty unique. I can say this to you, I think. Screw Stan. Let him grow up on his own. He’s not tough. We are. We’re here. We’re going on. Not all men are like him. You’ve lost something that must have been pretty wonderful. But we’re here, alive.’

She sensed what I was saying, but it didn’t satisfy her, of course; I’d had no right to expect it would.

‘Anyway,’ she said finally, ‘I couldn’t go to bed with him, or anyone, now. Maybe after a long time. With care. A lot of care.’

That hadn’t been a prime concern of mine, since I hadn’t any partner. But I suddenly wondered how that was going to be for me.

We had been wandering through our separate fears for a couple of minutes when Barbara roused herself to ask me how I was physically.

‘No broken bones. The dentist tomorrow – I expect a lot of dental work. The eye doctor said Saturday that there wasn’t any permanent damage to my eyes, just bruising. I’m sore, and stiff, and I hurt like a sick dog. But I’ll get over all that. Mostly, I’m just mad. Barbara – do you hate?’

She flipped the clasp of her purse open and shut a couple of times. She pushed her glasses up on her snubby nose. At last she looked at me directly; I saw something naked behind those glasses.

‘For the first time in my life, I frighten myself,’ she said.

‘I know exactly how you feel. What can we do about it?’

‘There must be something. I’m torn up inside. Sometimes’ – and she pushed a wisp of hair behind her ear – ‘I can’t believe that I can walk and talk and teach class and tell people good morning . . . and all the time I’m carrying this terrible cancer inside me.’

‘We can pool what we know. We can think, we can figure.’

‘The police are professionals at that.’

‘It happened to
us
.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing I know that I don’t think the police took much stock in. He knew me. He didn’t just know my first name. He
knew me
.’

I took a deep breath. ‘He knew me, too.’

‘All right,’ Barbara said with a briskness she hadn’t displayed in a long time. ‘We’ll do it. Think about everyone you know. Write names down.’

‘I’ll make a list,’ I said. This was going to be a different list from any I’d compiled before. ‘We’ll compare. It’s a pity Heidi Edmonds isn’t here at Houghton anymore.’

I straightened up. I felt my shoulders brace. Even probably futile action was better than no action. In my heart I was quite sure that the trained, professional police would do the best job possible. And in New York, our plan would have seemed laughable. But here in Knolls . . .

‘I think mad is a good way to take it,’ Barbara was saying consideringly. ‘The little girl – she really was, you know – who got raped last summer; she got
sad
. Heidi was one of Stan’s students. He told me she became so frightened she wouldn’t even go to the bathroom without someone to go with her.’

‘Oh, I’m scared all right,’ I said grimly. ‘It takes an hour and sometimes a pill to get me to sleep. Then I keep waking up. But going away isn’t the right thing for me. It may yet get to be too much for me here, but I’m going to try to stick it out.’

‘I have to stick it out here, I have no option,’ Barbara said. ‘The job. Speaking of the job, I have to go meet a class.’ She gathered together the paraphernalia teachers and students carry with them everywhere. ‘If you ever need me, call me. Anytime.’

We clasped hands briefly and tightly. When I left for my next class, I felt better. I was not alone in that darkened room anymore.

And I made it somehow through the rest of the school day.

* * * *

When I got home, a locksmith was putting new hardware on all the windows and doors. Mimi was following him from room to room, a cigarette lit but disregarded in her hand. I was appalled by my mental estimation of the cost of this. I cornered Mimi to tell her I’d pay for it. With one terse phrase she turned me down. When the locksmith left a check tucked in his pocket and a smile on his face, Mimi asked me if I was ready to move upstairs with her. I’d been sharing her king-size bed for the past two nights; she had been as restless as I.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep my bedroom. And sleep in it, starting tonight.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Mimi said bluntly. ‘There are two rooms upstairs you could have. All it’ll take is a little time and muscle.’

It was foolish of me to insist I would sleep in my own bedroom. Sheer bravado, rather than courage. Having determined I wouldn’t let this get me down, I was bullheaded enough to persist in any resolution, however ill-reasoned. I should’ve made some concessions to myself, given myself a little leeway. I should have known my life would never again be exactly as it had been.

‘With all those locks you put in,’ I insisted, ‘no one in the world could break in unless he was a professional and had lots of undisturbed time.’

‘Then, Miss Martyr,’ she said tartly, ‘Cully’s going to sleep in the dining room right opposite your bedroom.’

‘There’s no need for . . .’

‘Just cut out this heroine stuff,’ Mimi said. Her voice soared high and thin. I saw her hands shake when she lit another cigarette. ‘You may be willing to be an iron woman, but my God, I’m
scared
.’ Even the cats, sleeping together peacefully for once, lifted their heads at the warning note in her voice. I felt very small: as my father used to say, ‘knee-high to a grasshopper.’

‘Mimi . . . I’m sorry. I’ve just been so set on overcoming this thing that I hadn’t thought about how you must feel.’ I shut my eyes (they were watering) and bit my lip. Which of course promptly bled.

‘Okay, you don’t have to flagellate yourself,’ she said unevenly. ‘You have enough on your plate right now. You’re doing great. Just don’t carry it too far. I want Cully to move in for
me
. And he wants to. Just for a while, okay? Charles wanted to move in instead’ – and her mouth turned up in a lopsided smile – ‘but I told him the town had given us enough attention as it was. Besides being good for us, I think the move would be good for Cully.’

‘What do you mean?’

We had migrated into the kitchen. Mimi began washing dishes. She paused in her task, her hands immersed in the soapy water. She sucked in her lips, a sure sign that she was thinking heavy thoughts. ‘Cully is a psychologist, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to the syndromes he treats in other people,’ she said finally. ‘I think he’s probably very good professionally. He’s always in control, he always knows what he wants to say. And he can keep so calm and detached. Boy, is he good at detachment!’ Mimi screwed up her face expressively, and I laughed a little. I picked up a dish towel and began drying.

‘I bet lots of people think he’s a cold fish,’ she continued soberly. ‘But he’s not underneath. He’s as vulnerable as anyone else; and maybe more tender than average. Rachel’s leaving him hurt, just as bad as Richard’s leaving me. But I wailed and cried to you, and now it doesn’t ache quite so much.’ Mimi’s crooked smile lit her face. ‘Cully, now, hasn’t wailed and moaned at all. Mama thinks that means he’s glad to “get shuck” of Rachel. Well . . . he may have fallen out of love with her, but he had shared a life with her, and he had a lot of pride involved in that marriage.’

‘Being a psychologist wouldn’t help in that situation,’ I said as I put the glasses away in the cabinet. ‘You’d feel like everyone was saying, “Ha, ha, look at the pro who can’t even counsel his own marriage back into shape.” ’

‘Exactly.’ Mimi nodded vigorously, the dark cloud of hair flying. ‘So Cully really needs to feel all male and effective right now, and I do want him here. I think it’s a good thing for all of us. Really, won’t you sleep a little better with a man in the house?’

‘I think, frankly, that I’d sleep better with a shotgun in the house. But since I’m not about to buy one and have no idea how to fire one if I had it, Cully will have to do.’ I imagined briefly how Cully would react if he knew he was running second to a shotgun. Then I handed Mimi the last dirty cup and saucer and headed toward the living room to try to read my assignments. My body was reminding me at every step that it had been abused, and the damn movie was still playing. Studying wasn’t going to be easy, but I had to start sometime.

‘Hey,’ called Mimi as I reached the door. I turned.

‘I just want you to know, you’re a great woman. Now don’t come hug me or anything,’ she added hastily as I took a step forward. ‘Or I’ll cry again. But I just wanted to tell you that. You should already know I feel that way, but sometimes I want to tell people things I’m sure they know.’

‘I love you very much, Mimi,’ I said, and left the room. My eyes were watering again.

SO CULLY MOVED
into the house, in a limited way, the next weekend. Since Celeste had left the dining room suite to a niece, the room opposite mine was already empty. Mimi and I had made an exploratory trip to the attic in search of furniture for Cully’s room and had discovered a bed set that apparently had been stored up there for years. We managed to haul the mattress halfway down the stairs, but I was too sore to get it any further. Fortunately, at that point Alicia breezed in. She willingly helped Mimi drag the mattress out into the backyard to air. Until her arrival, our labor had been a hasty chore of sweat and curses, and pain for me. With Alicia on the scene the old house rang with giggles and a stream of comments flavored with her heavy accent.

‘I hope you all have a beer in the icebox to pay me for that!’ she gasped, after the box springs had followed the mattress out into the yard.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We have two six-packs left over from the party.’ I creaked into the kitchen and bent stiffly to peer into the refrigerator. The bruises on my torso and face were assuming a fainter but wider spectrum of colors now that most of them were almost healed. I had all the hues of a sick rainbow. The deepest cuts were still scabbed, a healthy but hideous development.

It was a temperate early November day. The sun, radiant in a clear sky, was a blessing, not the curse of full summer. The leaves were turning in a halfhearted southern way; a light breeze fluttered them from the oaks. There was peace in that day, and calm; I think we all felt it as we sat on the porch drinking our beers.

‘Is Cully going to see his private patients here, Mimi?’ asked Alicia idly.

‘No, he’ll go back to his apartment for that.’

‘Good. You don’t want those folks coming in and out here. I reckon it might be one of them that did this to Nickie.’ Alicia inclined her head toward my bruises.

Mimi’s eyes met mine in surprise. ‘Why do you think that, Alicia?’

‘Oh, it stands to reason,’ she said calmly. ‘Any you-know-what who can do a thing like that’ – and she crossed her expensively trousered legs tightly – ‘has got to be sick in the head.’ Alicia stared out over the serene backyard where Celeste had spent so many hours. The roses were still blooming, but reluctantly, tired of the task. Mao was industriously stalking an oblivious cardinal. ‘Not that that’s any excuse. You hear all the time about criminals with four and five convictions getting back out on the streets in no time. Remember Cotton Meers, out on work release two years after he shot his ex-wife’s boyfriend? And us – the people who pay the taxes that pay those judges – we’re the ones out here with ’em. We pay over and over. Not them, not the criminals. Oh no, they’re sick and they have to be
cured
. Pooh. Some people are just
bad
. Born bad. Not sick – evil. Cure them, hell. They should be
removed
. Like rabid dogs.’