Abbeville (20 page)

“I helped him find his way in the city,” said Luella. “He was really very sweet. But you know that, don't you? Then your mother arrived on the scene.”

Betty looked to the concrete floor.

“Oh, my,” said Luella. “I've given you the wrong idea. I was glad that he found your mother. He needed someone who could love the life I knew he was going to choose.”

Again she read Betty's mind.

“The life of a farm town,” said Luella. “The good bourgeois burgher's wife. Pillars of the community. I'm afraid I'm made differently. Tell your mother you met a crazy socialist who was trying to be a friend of the oppressed.”

Betty moved down the wooden bench to give Luella a place to sit beside her.

“Of all the capitalists in the world, they came down on your father,” said Luella. “My Joe says he must be a good man if they sent him to prison.”

“Joe is your husband?” said Betty.

“Bourgeois marriage is hypocrisy,” said Luella. “That's Marx and Engels.”

“I'm not familiar with them,” said Betty.

“Not surprising,” Luella smiled, “in a banker's daughter.”

She ran her fingers through her thick hair and then shook it out.

“What does Joe do for a living?” Betty asked.

“He operates a movie projector,” said Luella.

“Marx Brothers,” said Betty.

A tiny laugh escaped Luella.

“When I met Joe he was working at the Oriental Theater on Randolph Street,” she said. “He could get me in free to pretty nearly any show in the Loop, he had so many friends. Then came the trouble, and he didn't have any friends anymore. When he got laid off, he found a job in a picture show in Lockport. It was pretty easy for me to get work there. Letting me learn bookkeeping was the one good thing your dad's uncle ever did for me. That and introducing me you to your dad. Do they have a movie theater in your little town?”

“Abbeville,” said Betty.

“Abbeville,” said Luella. “How is Abbeville dealing with all of this?”

“Some people better than others,” said Betty.

“Smoke?” said Luella, holding out a pack of cigarettes and making a few of them pop up with a flip of the wrist.

“Oh my, no,” said Betty. She had never seen a woman smoking before except on the big screen in Kankakee.

Luella took out a cigarette, tapped it on the bench, then pulled out a book of matches and struck one. The sulfur stung Betty's nose.

Luella leaned back on the bench and let the smoke roll in her mouth before gulping it down. She talked about what it had been like to be young in Chicago at the turn of the century, the World's Columbian Exposition, the Board of Trade, and Uncle John.

“That one was all business,” she said.

“They say he managed to keep some of his money,” Betty said.

“He wasn't a captain who'd go down with the ship,” said Luella.

“My dad's brother kept his head above water, too,” said Betty, “by pushing Dad under.”

“The world is full of them,” said Luella. “Joe was the one who saw in the paper that they'd sent your dad here. We started coming regular,
it was so close to Lockport and all. Joe almost always comes along, but today he couldn't. I wish you had a chance to meet him. Another time. Your poor dad's going to be here for quite a while.”

Betty didn't like to think of it that way. Two years ago she had been a silly little girl. The sentence was that long.

“Luella Grundy,” said a voice. “Betty Schumpeter.”

They stood.

“Maybe I should wait 'til you're done,” Betty said.

“Come on, girl,” said the woman. “You had the gumption to get this far.”

She wished she had been born with a lot bigger store of gumption because this world seemed to require it.

The corridor took a couple of turns before it opened out into a larger room where the men sat on one side of a wall of chicken wire and the women sat on the other. Betty looked up and down the line at the inmates, all of them in the same faded gray, with black numbers across their chests.

“There he is,” said Luella.

He had lost at least twenty pounds, which made the clothes hang from him.

“With all the weight coming off, you just keep getting younger and younger,” Luella said. “You look like you did when I met you.”

“My heavens,” said Karl, a smile lighting him. “What did I do to deserve this bounty? Come here, Betty. Let me look at you.”

The women reached out their hands. He touched both of them and then withdrew from Luella.

“Luella and I met when I was just a lad,” he said.

“We had a talk about it,” Betty said. “Your ears must have been burning.”

As he looked at her, his ears actually did redden.

“You weren't supposed to come,” he told Betty.

She wanted to press herself up against the wire and hug him the way he used to hug her when she was hurt.

“How are you doing, Karl?” Luella asked.

“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad.”

Betty kept her fingertips in contact with his, which were cold and seemed to lack the strength to push back.

“Are they feeding you?” Betty said.

“Don't forget to tell your mother how much I miss her cooking,” he said.

“What can we do to make this easier for you?” Betty said.

“Be of a quiet heart,” her father said. “That's what you can do. Forgive.”

“I can't listen to this,” Luella snapped. “You've got to fight back.”

It startled Betty, but not her father.

“That isn't my plan,” he said.

“See, that's why we weren't made for each other,” Luella said.

“Your mother knows all about Luella,” Karl told Betty. “I suppose it doesn't hurt that you know, too. She was the first big-city girl I'd ever met, and I was infatuated. Then your mother came to Chicago, and Luella disappeared.”

“Let's not talk about it,” said Luella.

“I have wanted to since way back then,” Karl said, “but you vanished from the face of the earth. And then later, well, somehow it just was never the right moment to apologize. I think now is the time and place for penitence, don't you?”

Luella response was subdued. Even her hair seemed darker.

“One day,” she said, “I hid near your rooming house and followed you when you came out. It wasn't hard to keep you from seeing me. You were off somewhere.”

Luella watched the spot where Betty's fingers were in contact with her father's. Her own fingers stroked her bare, freckled forearm below the white cotton ruffles of her blouse. Her voice was low.

“You met her in the park,” she said, “and then you walked to the beach. You talked all the way. I knew then that you would marry.”

Luella gathered up her purse and stood.

“It's time for me to go,” she said. “Joe will be waiting. We plan to stop somewhere along the way to eat, someplace charming, like I've always imagined Abbeville to be.”

N
OW, ALMOST SEVEN
decades later, as my mother sat in her living room at the retirement home, it still brought tears as she told it: Luella obviously still loving him, seeing him on the other side of the wire mesh, his fingers weakly touching my mother's, the metal rubbed shiny under them by countless hands reaching for what they could not have.

W
ITH THE VERY MODEST ADJUSTMENTS
the system in those days provided for good behavior, Karl's release came a few days before Thanksgiving. The guards led him to the storage room, where he changed back into his clothes, which had grown as baggy as a clown's. Then they handed him a paper bag with his pocketknife and other personal effects. Sheriff Hawk was waiting for him at the gate.

“What are you doing here, John?” Karl asked.

“I took you away from Abbeville,” the sheriff said, “and now I aim to bring you back.”

They did not talk on the drive. Karl had nothing to say.

When they reached the house, it seemed to have aged a decade. The paint had lost the last of its color. A large crack had developed in the massive concrete front steps, which were covered with green moss, as if no one had trodden upon them since he had left. The porch screens had holes that had not been patched against the bees and wasps. Wasn't there even enough money to buy a couple of square inches of mesh?

He entered the porch and let the door slap closed behind him. The
front door was, as always, unlocked to the world. He pushed it open, thinking of the marvel of doors that swung freely, the terror of what some doors opened onto.

The smell of fresh corn boiling on the old cookstove overwhelmed him. He put the paper bag down on the wooden bureau. The mirror above it caught his image. He did not belong here anymore.

Cristina came into the doorway of the kitchen and froze.

“We didn't expect you so soon,” she said.

“They knocked a little time off,” he said. “I should have found a way to let you know. Maybe Fred Krull can take me in.”

He took a step back toward the door.

“Where do you think you're going?” Cristina said.

“I don't blame you not wanting me,” he said.

She stepped forward and put her arms around him. At first he stood motionless. Then her embrace reached into him, and he held to her.

During his first days home he missed the prison rituals that had emptied time of meaning and made it light enough to bear. Now there was nothing to give it shape. It wasn't possible to revive his older habits: the early-morning visit to the grain elevator, the opening of the bank. The evening pinochle games were still going, but Karl could only bring himself to stand on the porch in the chill and look across the prairie grass and tracks toward the lights in the garage.

“They would welcome you,” said Cristina.

“Because they pity me,” he said.

Everywhere houses were slumping in disrepair. The paint of the elevator had faded to a dirty gray, and the words “Schumpeter Bros.” in big black letters along its side were an accusation. Someone had nailed three boards across the Coliseum's door, and planking covered the windows. The only part of the building that still functioned was the tavern in the cellar.

Thanksgiving morning found Karl awake before dawn. There had been a stirring in him that had not permitted him to fall asleep even after Cristina had unaccountably given herself to him. Eventually he had drifted off, but only for a few hours. Then the stirring came again. He got dressed quietly in the bathroom and went out back for a pipe among the chickens. As he sat on a stump, the rooster came out of the coop, hopped up on an egg box, and preened. Then it reared back and crowed. Once. Twice. Three times.

“You made your point,” Karl said.

The rooster crowed twice more.

“At least you know what you're good for,” Karl said.

Suddenly an idea came into his head. Ideas were what got him in trouble. He shook it off, got up, and went to the basement, where he stoked the furnace until it was so fully ablaze that he had to close the cast-iron door with a poker. Then he climbed back up the stairs and went to work on the banked embers in the cookstove.

Soon Cristina was up and about. Then Betty arrived home. She was seventeen now and had finished high school early to take a job as a clerk in Potawatomi, earning room and board by continuing to keep house for the family she had worked for while she was in school. Karl hugged her and listened uncomfortably as she told him how much she had been able to pay off on the house.

“It's time to pick out our meal,” he said to change the subject, then led the way to the chicken pen. Cristina chose a bird, and he wrung its neck.

“It will have to pass for turkey, I'm afraid,” she said.

“I've always been partial to the smaller fowl,” said Karl.

When it came to preparing the meal, Cristina was the impresario, a role Karl loved watching her play. It obviously annoyed their newly independent daughter, however, who with Karl was relegated to fetching
and washing and peeling, sweeping and dusting and setting pictures aright on the walls. Soon Cristina had fresh bread in the oven. A pie waited its turn, the bird sat trimmed up in a roasting pan, the vegetables in pots ready to be boiled.

“There's a service at the church this morning,” Cristina said.

“I can't face them,” Karl said. “You go. I'm sorry.”

But she continued her preparations, and he went to the screen porch and sat on the swing. The church bell pealed. Eventually he heard the muffled sound of the choir and then the congregation singing the doxology.
Forever and ever. Amen.

Eventually Cristina came to the door with a bowl of mashed potatoes and called him inside. Next she brought to the table green beans she had put by from her garden and, of course, corn on the cob. There were no cranberries, but there was plenty of stuffing, though little of it had ever seen the inside of the bird. Finally she brought out the chicken itself. It made the platter seem enormous.

“You first, Dad,” said Betty.

Karl took a bit of white and brown meat, then passed the tray to his daughter.

“Sit down, Mom,” Betty said—a little sharply, Karl thought.

It must have been hard on both of them, with Betty paying for the house and Cristina trying to hold on to her place in it.

Eventually the cook conceded that everything was in good enough order that she could relax a moment before starting to fuss over the pie. As she sat down, a knock came at the door. Cristina cast a nervous look at Betty, who got up and opened it.

“He's here, isn't he?”

Karl recognized Henry Mueller's rough old voice.

“Of course he is,” said Betty.

Eyes upon tablecloth, Karl heard the rustle of people entering.
Then he snapped to his feet as if it were an inspection. He did not know what to do among decent people anymore.