Hill Towns (6 page)

Different? How could I not be different, after all that? I might look the same—for, like Joe, I was still tall and slender and tousle-haired, and still had the small face and soft mouth of a child, and still wore the smattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose and cheekbones that I had always worn—but one profound change had been made. Only one, and that one small and invisible. But it redefined me. Before I had been Cat who could not go off the Mountain. Now I was Cat who could. Haltingly, frightened still, not far, and only after escape routes had been mapped and bolt-holes located…but

42 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I could go. Even if I never did again, I knew I could. And Joe knew.

I looked in the mirror at Cat who could go and knew I had grown, and Joe feared it and had spoken tonight from that fear. In that instant I wanted to undo it all, take back all the sessions with Corinne, go back to where I had been before Lacey’s letter came, run to Joe and fling my arms around him and cry, I’m back, I’m here, this is me, don’t feel like that about me, don’t ever speak like that to me again!

See, I’ve undone it all. Let us be again like we were.

But I knew I could not. I was doomed one day to be healed, if imperfectly and reluctantly.

I leaned my forehead against the cold surface of the mirror and shut my eyes again. “Oh, God,” I whispered aloud. “Why didn’t I see what was happening?”

Corinne had seen. Seen, and tried to make me see. But I would not, could not.

“Well then,” she said to me in exasperation finally, after nearly a year of arguing with me about Joe’s role in my recovery, “we’ll just damned well do it without him. But I don’t like it, Cat. I don’t think you realize how deeply all this is threatening Joe. I don’t think he realizes it, come to that.

He’s capable of sabotaging everything we’ve worked so hard for, of cutting your legs off under you. He wouldn’t think he was doing that, of course; he’d think he was protecting you.

I’ve known him even longer than you have. I’ve seen him operate in faculty situations. He wouldn’t hesitate, and he’d never admit he’d harmed you. It will be up to you to protect yourself.”

“I thought you were such a great friend of his; I thought you loved him so much,” I cried, furious with her.

“I am. I do,” she said. “But I love him like he really is, HILL TOWNS / 43

and there’s nothing I need from him. I can see him a lot clearer than you can right now.”

“Corinne,” I said, still angry, “I think you are probably the best therapist this side of Vienna, but if you say one more word to me about Joe, I’m going to terminate. Right now.

I mean it.”

She looked at me for a long moment over her horn-rimmed glasses. Corinne was a handsomer woman than she had been a girl, her tanned, lined face alive with intelligence and caring.

There was no answering anger in her eyes, only a kind of weariness.

“You’re right,” she said. “It was the friend talking and not the therapist. It’s one of the pitfalls. I’m sorry, Cat. No more about Joe. It was way too soon.”

I let it go. In fact, I buried it deep and forgot it. Or thought I had. But now, staring into the mirror, I saw the two of us, Joe and me, over the past two years, as if we had been on a screen in a theater and I was watching from the audience.

He had not objected to my seeing Corinne at the beginning; he had said only, “It seems a pity to go back into all that when you’ve made your peace with it. But if it’s what you want….”

“It is,” I said. “I want to do it for both of us.”

“No need to, for me,” he replied. “I like us just the way we are. I love you just the way you are.”

But he said no more, and I began the long journey with Corinne through the debris of my childhood that I had not thought was there at all.

At first when I came home white and depleted, or cried in the nights, he would hold me and soothe me. But soon the twice-a-week crises of fear and sadness seemed to annoy and then anger him.

“I can’t stand seeing what it’s doing to you,” he 44 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

would say, smoothing the hair off my face, holding me hard against him. “It’s killing you, and it’s just so unnecessary.

I’m going to talk to Corinne—”

“No,” I said. “No, Joe. This
is
necessary. This is work I didn’t do back then. I have to go through it; I can’t go around it. Don’t say anything to Corinne; this is
my
therapy.”

After that, I tried to weep when he could not hear me. I think I succeeded. He did not speak of it again.

But he began to tease me, small thrusts that would have been wounding if they had not been so funny. Joe was and is a very funny man. His eye and ear for absurdity are wicked and true. He could mimic Corinne perfectly, and I would find myself laughing in spite of my annoyance when he said things like, “Now, tell me, Catherine, just when did you first notice this terrible fear of fucking on suspension bridges?”

and “Today we’re going out to the chain bridge and sit there all afternoon, and you’ll see, not a single couple will come do the Black Act on it.”

But I never repeated these incidents to Corinne. Some small sane part of me, buried deep, knew what she would make of them.

Later on, when I increased my sessions with her to three times a week, seeing for the first time a crack of daylight in the wall of my fear, Joe began to urge new things on me.

Added involvement in the affairs of the college, when I already had more committee meetings and teas and coffees than I could say grace over; more evenings spent with old friends in their homes; more parties at ours.

“You just seem to have extra energy,” he said, when I finally protested mildly. “I thought you might feel like doing some things with me now.”

HILL TOWNS / 45

“Oh, darling, of course!” I cried. “I haven’t meant to neglect you. I didn’t realize I was….”

“Well,” he said, “I know this therapy stuff has been tough on you.”

So I joined the extra committees and went to, and gave, the parties. But I did not cut back on the therapy.

Finally, midway in the second year, I began to make trips off the Mountain with Corinne. Tiny ones, at first; really just drives to the base of the Mountain and back up, or a trip in her car over to a nearby shopping mall on the outskirts of Chattanooga, where I sat in the car and waited, eyes closed and heart pounding, while she went to the drugstore. I was wet with sweat and tears when we got back, and so weak I had to go home and lie down, but I could do it. Before, I could not have. Soon I was driving my car and she was in the passenger seat, and we began to go farther and stay longer. The trips were hard—I can never tell anyone how hard—but I knew I could do them and the fear would not kill me. On the day in January that we drove all the way to Atlanta and had lunch at a suburban Wendy’s without my taking a single Valium, Corinne announced it was time for me to make a few trips without her.

Instantly the fear was back in all its old, cold weight.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t do it by myself.”

“I didn’t say by yourself,” she said. “I said without me.

You’re leaning too heavily on me. Get Joe to go with you.

Surely he knows how important this is to you, how hard you’ve worked.”

“I haven’t told him about the trips,” I said, not meeting her eyes.

She said nothing.

When I asked him, he would not go.

“I just can’t, sweetie,” he said the first time. “Midterms 46 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

is the worst possible time for me, what with Carlton and Hank out. Can it wait till early next quarter?”

Early the next quarter he brought a world-famous poet to campus for three weeks of seminars and receptions. It was a great coup, and I could see he could not interrupt the royal visit to drive to a Wendy’s or a Burger King thirty miles away with me.

In March he sprained his ankle playing tennis.

I took a triple dose of Valium and made the first trip by myself, in a white haze of sedation and terror. I don’t know why I didn’t kill someone. The second one I made on two Valiums. My third trip alone I only took one, though the fear was truly terrible. I told neither Joe nor Corinne I had gone alone.

I still saw nothing amiss in Joe’s refusals to go with me.

We truly do see what we need to see, and only that.

In late April, Corinne wanted Joe and me to go away somewhere for a weekend off the Mountain.

“Go to a fancy hotel in Atlanta,” she said, grinning wickedly. “Order room service and drink to excess and screw your heads off. I can vouch for the weekend package at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead myself.”

I laughed and made the reservation that afternoon. That night, over drinks, I told Joe about it. I thought he would be pleased with my accomplishment, and I knew he liked the Buckhead Ritz Carlton. He stayed there when he was in Atlanta for fund-raising trips with President Day or at alumni functions or SMLA meetings.

“What about it?” I said, leering over the rim of my vodka and tonic. “I could get a new nightgown for you to rip off.

Or something exotic in the way of marital aids. We could rent a porn video.”

He did not speak, and he did not look at me.

“I just don’t think we should both be away at the HILL TOWNS / 47

same time, Cat,” he said finally. “What if…oh, what if Lacey wanted to come home all of a sudden? Wouldn’t you want to be here for Lacey?”

I told Corinne about it. I couldn’t not, not this time. She was silent for a time, and then she sighed, and got up and walked to her window and looked out at the new green that shawled the Mountain.

“I’m only going to make one speech, Cat, and then I’m not going to mention it again. You can do with it what you choose. If you need to terminate because of it, so be it. Will you listen?”

She did not look back at me.

“I’ll listen,” I said.

“OK. I think this whole thing—the fear, Joe’s peculiar reaction to your handling of that fear, and your
extremely
peculiar reaction to his reaction—is all about control. Control.

Up here you can control your world…and what a world you’ve made. It’s orderly, it’s serene, it’s beautiful. Very few people on earth can live like you and Joe do, and almost no one can do it except in places like this. In the Domain. The famous Domain. You control your world, and you control Joe, and he controls you. And it’s all in the name of some kind of…specialness. Who in their right mind would want to give up being wonderful, special? Not Joe. Not you. I know you had an awful shock when you were a kid, and you had a few bad years with your grandparents. But look at the life you’ve lived since you got into the whole Trinity thing.

I don’t think it’s safety you’re so afraid of losing, I think it’s this specialness. Up here you’re not just a housewife, you’re a Domainian. Joe is not just an English professor, he’s head of the English Department in the Domain. On the Mountain.

You think he wants you to go running down to the flatland and leaving Eden

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whenever you want to? Hell, no; he’d have to go with you or lose you, and he doesn’t want to do either. Go on, Cat.

Go by yourself, then. Hole up in the Ritz and read wonderful books and eat gorgeous food and swim and shop and drink champagne and watch TV, and see what the real world is like. If you can call the Ritz Carlton the real world, of course.

If you don’t go now, I don’t think you ever will.”

It was a long speech for Corinne, and her square figure was taut with the passion of it. But she never did turn and face me. I literally could think of no words and stood silent.

“What if Lacey did, for some reason, want to come home?”

I said in a small voice, knowing as I spoke how ridiculous I sounded.

“Cat, Lacey isn’t going to come home again,” Corinne said.

“You know that, don’t you? You worked hard enough to see that she didn’t have to, and you succeeded. You know she isn’t going to come home. Joe knows.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I know she isn’t.”

And I turned and walked out of Corinne’s office.

I did not go back. When I called to tell her I wanted to terminate, she said only, “Well, it’s probably time. You’ve done good work, and you can take it from here. We still friends?”

“Always,” I said, meaning it. “Always. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

“Then send money,” she said, laughing, and I laughed too and hung up. I felt light and limp with relief. All was well between Corinne and me. All was as it used to be. I could still be her friend and have her at our parties, and Joe would still laugh with her at faculty meetings and at the club. And spring had come, the ineffably beautiful HILL TOWNS / 49

green spring on the Mountain. All the Domain bloomed with it.

I did not go to the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta. I let the sweet swirl of social activities that catches us up in spring wash over me and planned for the day in June when Lacey would come home for her short summer break, before going back for the first quarter of her senior year at Berkeley. Come home and then go away again. Corinne was right. Lacey was not ever coming back for good to the Mountain. I had indeed seen to that.

When she was born, her eyes were not the indigo of the newborn but so clear and light a blue they looked almost silver, washed in a sheen of light that might have been tears but was not. She was a happy baby from the very first. I cannot remember a time when Lacey did not crow, or gurgle, or laugh outright. It was Joe’s laugh, froggy and enchanting, ridiculous in a tiny baby. Everyone was enthralled with her.

I think I sensed something was wrong from the first instant I held her, something to do with the strange, beautiful eyes, though it was only much later that I let myself know. When I did, long past the time that Joe and the doctor suspected, when even I could not explain her unfocused stare as a baby’s undeveloped muscles, I felt a quick, fierce stab of gratitude beneath the pain and grief. I pushed it away, hating it. But the aftersense lingered.

“It could have been so much worse,” I said to Joe, trying to comfort him in his anguish. “It could have been something fatal. It could have been something that would hurt her, cause her pain. It could have been something…disfiguring.”