A Secret Rage (8 page)

‘No. There’s an ambulance,’ Elaine said crisply. ‘Besides, the police told my friend Marsha. I’m quite sure. Goodbye, now.’ She hung up.

I was close to the improvised bar just inside the living room. Cully was there, for once making himself a drink. I wobbled over to him and put my hand on his back. He turned sharply.

‘What?’ Then, more urgently, he said, ‘Nickie! What’s wrong? Who was that on the phone?’

‘Oh, Cully. Oh, Cully,’ I said out of a fog of alcohol, exhaustion, and shock. ‘Poor Barbara. He’s gotten Barbara Tucker.’

Mimi had sensed trouble with her built-in hostess antenna, and she arrived at the bar in a swish of red, her face stern at the spectacle of two people being upset and serious at a party. So I was able to tell them both what Elaine had said.

I thought of the woman on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building in New York, and wondered what was so different here, after all.

EIGHT O’CLOCK
in the morning was a horrible time to schedule anything, much less Chaucer. I was almost stumbling on my way to the English building, trying desperately to wake up and look alert. I wanted to start briskly and keep the momentum going.

All the dreariness of registration, fee payments, orientation, book buying, had led to this first full day of classes. I was actually beginning the completion of something I’d quit years before.

Since the registrar’s office was situated on the ground floor of the English and Administration building, I passed Theo Cochran’s open door on my way down the hall. The fluorescent light was gleaming on his bald head. He looked up as I passed and gave me a little wave. It was nice to see a friendly face among the herd of strangers, all depressingly younger than I.

To say I was nervous was an understatement. Mimi had been giving me rah-rah speeches for days, after I’d finally admitted how scared I was about learning to study all over again, being pitted against younger minds, handling the workload poor Barbara had so cheerfully assured me I could bear.

Right classroom? I checked the room number on the door against that on my schedule. Right classroom, yes indeedy. I hesitated for a second. Then I grabbed my courage with both hands and pushed open the door – to be met by an audible gasp from a little guy wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt who was sitting in the first row of desks. That exaggerated gasp focused everyone’s attention on me. I stared back at their smooth faces. Had I done something wrong?

‘Wow!’ said cocky little Led Zeppelin just as loudly as he had gasped. ‘You are some
kind
of woman, woman.’

From sheer relief I started laughing, and after a second the others joined in. Even Stan Haskell chuckled from his post by the desk.

I sobered when I saw him. My amusement disappeared abruptly, as did his when he saw me watching him. He was grayer. The summer had gone from his face as surely as it was fading in Knolls. In a week, Barbara’s shy lover had passed to the other side of middle age, too early and too fast.

I pitied him and I was angry with him; but I had resolved that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from eight to nine he was going to be Dr Stanley Haskell, my professor in Chaucer, period. I had to take this class. I had my own life, I told myself. My own goal. I had to stop thinking about Barbara Tucker. So I slid into a desk, whipped out a pen, and opened the virgin notebook I’d labeled ‘Chaucer.’

* * * *

Mimi, bless her heart, was ready with a glass of wine when I got home. I’d been studying in the library until five-thirty, when hunger rousted me out. Mimi’s big push had been in the previous weeks, when she’d been assembling committees, organizing the year, and smoothing ruffled faculty and staff who ran atilt during the anxious preopening month. She would have a brief lull now, she had explained.

‘How’d it go, Nick?’ she asked sympathetically.

‘Oh boy, oh boy. I’m going to have to work my tail off, Mimi.’ I threw myself down on the couch and accepted the wine gratefully.

‘Well, you knew that.’

‘Sure. But knowing and doing are two different kettles of fish.’

‘Did you see Stan?’ She settled opposite me, and Mao arrived to jump in her lap.

‘Yes, first thing this morning.’ I told her about my resolution.

‘You’re going to have to do that, all right. But what a bastard. I just can’t think of any other word for him, Nick.’

‘Well . . . yes. But I don’t think he dropped Barbara like a hot potato because he’s a
basic
bastard. Do you see what I mean?’ Attila materialized on the arm of the couch. I took a long sip of my wine and tickled the cat below his chin. He began cleaning my knuckles ardently. Maybe he’d missed me today? More likely he was hungry. ‘You know I don’t know them well, not nearly as well as you do. But I think he just
can’t
talk about it to her. And if he can’t talk about that crucial thing, they can’t have a relationship. He can’t even stand to see Barbara, he can’t face any part of what happened to her.’

‘Why not?’ Mimi had been especially sensitive to disloyalty ever since Richard left her.

‘I guess he just can’t.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘When I saw them together I thought they were a matched set, and you say they were in love for at least two years. But I guess Stan’s just weak, or something.’

‘Like it was her
fault!
’ Mimi interrupted.

‘I’m not defending him,’ I said gently. ‘I’m just trying to understand, because I need to. I have to stay in the class.’

‘I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you know how broken up Barbara is, and Stan acting like this is all she needs, right? Now is when she needs him most. Now is when he bows out. Remember how she kept asking?’

I didn’t want to remember our visit to Barbara. I’d suffered with, and for, Barbara Tucker as much as our limited acquaintance would allow, since I’d so naturally liked her at first meeting. Now I was weary of the pain and fear her situation had given me.

But I couldn’t help remembering. I heard again her bewildered voice asking Mimi if she knew why Stan hadn’t been by. That had been the day after the rape, when Barbara was still disoriented and in pain.

When Stan had dropped her at the door, she told us, they’d both been sleepy from too much to drink. Stan started back to his own place to collapse. Barbara had climbed the steps to the front door of her garage apartment as usual – probably making a lot of noise, since she was clumsy from the bourbon.

The man had already broken in the back door. He was waiting for her in the dark. When she’d reached to turn on the light, she had instead touched an arm.

We could scarcely bear to hear it, but Barbara went on and on in a shaky voice. She had finally fainted. After the rape. When he hit her on the jaw.

But it wasn’t over when she’d come to. It wasn’t over for a while. Now it would never be over; never. That was what had shaken me to the core, so painfully that I’d recoiled from Barbara. What had happened to her could not be mended, healed, shoved aside, bought off, glossed over. It was irreparable.

In New York, I’d known women and men who’d been robbed on the street or burglarized. But by chance I’d never been close to anyone who’d been the victim of a personal and violent attack by another human being.

Like Heidi Edmonds, Barbara had never seen her attacker’s face. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what he looked like: eyes, hair, build, or anything.

But he had called her Barbara.

Mimi and I agreed later, once we’d gotten home and calmed down a little, that his knowing her name might mean a great deal, or nothing at all. If he’d been stalking her (Stalking? In
Knolls?
), he’d have easily found it out. On the other hand, he might be someone she knew well. She seemed sure of it. And that was so unthinkable that we just blotted it out.

TWO MONTHS
went by while my thoughts were turned to my books. Those weeks were so full of adjustments and assignments requiring all my concentration that the outer world just had to get along without my participation.

Alicia dropped by from time to time, and we went to dinner at her house. Ray seemed to like me more now that I was doing something as ordinary as finishing college. Whenever I talked about my life in New York, though, those pale eyes would flicker.

Mimi and I met Cully at the Houghtons’ for a Sunday brunch. It was an uncomfortable meal. Mimi and Elaine sniped at each other from the underbrush, and Don still had that gleam in his eye that made me uneasy. Cully, too, was at his dryest that day. He said his counseling load at the college was much heavier than he’d expected – a lot of freshman students were already having qualms about attending college at all. They were homesick. He and I seemed to have established some kind of truce. The talk and feel of things between us was easier and more relaxed. I caught him watching me at odd moments, and developed the notion that he was beginning to see me as a rounded human being, not just a beautiful dodo. But that was the only bright spot of the meal.

I decided to ruin the day good and proper, so I called my mother. She’d been to church, come home, and started drinking. Jay wasn’t there. She tried hard to sound sober, but I knew she wasn’t. However, she was proud of my going back to college, and she managed to ask correctly after the Houghtons and send a polite message to them. Mother also said one curious thing. She told me, quite out of the blue, that she hadn’t told Jay where I was.

I was going to have to think about that.

Before I went to sleep that night, I decided that Jay might have dropped a hint to Mother, God knows why, that he’d gotten rough with me all those years ago. It also occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d known Mother to hold off drinking long enough to get dressed and go to church. I tried to cancel that thought; I pinched myself in punishment. I would not hope.

Time ran through my fingers as my life with Mimi settled into a comfortable routine. Having two separate floors to live on made that much easier. We didn’t collide in the bathroom, we didn’t keep each other awake with lights or music or studying. Our most serious disagreement was the great debate about when to put the garbage out – the night before pickup was due, so we wouldn’t have to surge out in our bathrobes at the crack of dawn, but the dogs often got it; or early in the morning, in which case the dogs still might get it, but not if we watched to shoo them off. We solved this knotty problem by alternating garbage duty instead of sharing it.

Because of our lavish cooking I gained four pounds, which Mimi swore became me. I thought I looked like I’d swallowed a cantaloupe.

Attila became quite possessive. He cuffed Mao un-mercifully when the smaller cat ventured too close to me. I grew used to studying with a heavy load of tabby on my lap. When I was alone, I discussed things with Attila in disgusting baby talk. Mimi overheard me a couple of times and made graphic gagging noises.

Occasionally I heard from New York friends. Their phone calls seemed like communications from a foreign land. I was sliding back into my own. My speaking cadence slowed. I didn’t wear camouflage on the street. My manners resumed their former polish. My way of thinking reverted (a little) to the labyrinthine.

But mostly I studied. I had to. If I wasn’t reading, I was writing: not the novels of my dreams, but essays and term papers of one kind or another.

I dated a friend of Charles’s once or twice. He was nothing worth working at, just good for a mildly pleasant evening; for one thing, he talked about duck hunting too much. But our double dates gave me a chance to observe Mimi with Charles. To my relief, she showed distinct signs of finally having developed a streak of caution and a sense of her own rights.

Sometimes she sang in a fair-to-middling alto as she got ready for a date, and sometimes she had that exalted, melted, ‘in love’ look. But more often she seemed thoughtful. I was glad to see that; I hadn’t brought myself to like Charles yet though I was trying. And I did not, repeat did not, criticize him to Mimi. But perhaps she sensed my anxiety. He was courting her at such a furious clip that I’d become semiseriously concerned about finding another place to live in Knolls, in case Charles really did succeed in sweeping her off her feet and to the justice of the peace. Housing in Knolls was no idle concern. Because of the shortage of dormitory space, every doghouse and garage in town was rented during the college year. Barbara Tucker had had an awful time finding a place to live after she got raped. She just hadn’t been able to stand her garage apartment any longer.

Poor Barbara. She was the only specter on a horizon I found full of promise, and she was becoming a very faint wraith. I was truly busy, desperately busy; and the tiny tremor in her voice reminded me that I should, must, treat her specially. She was of the walking wounded. She marched down the sidewalks of Houghton very swiftly, and very alone. Stan’s defection had proved permanent. From a comment she dropped during one of our rare meetings, I got the idea she was seeing Cully professionally, and I hoped my surmise was correct. Cully’s calm, restraint and precision would be comforting to a woman in Barbara’s situation, I thought.

Talk about Barbara’s rape was no longer current in Knolls, partly because neither Heidi Edmonds (the first victim) nor Barbara had ever been figures in the mainstream of town life. According to Mimi, the feeling prevailed that the rapes were a campus problem – though plenty of residents strolled through the gardens, and of course Barbara’s rape had happened off-campus. The scare had hit hard only among faculty wives and town women who worked at the college. These women watched what went on around them more carefully, and many installed extra locks. The female students went in pairs after dark, at least while the fear was fresh.

Mimi and I were conscientious about locking the doors every night and I tried to do all my library work before I came home to supper. We decided we were doing everything we reasonably could to make ourselves safe. I distinctly remember the phrase ‘fortress mentality’ coming into our conversation when we discussed security measures.