My Latest Grievance (16 page)

I said no, I did not.

"Are you going over to Marietta's?" my mother asked.

I wasn't, but visiting Marietta struck me as an excellent suggestion, armed as I was with parental grievances, and in the relatively bad mood that would make us more compatible.

Mrs. Woodbury's Cadillac was parked askew in the circular driveway. Ordinarily, by dusk, someone would have lit the omnidenominational holiday bulbs, but the house was dark. Even the front-porch light, meant to symbolize an open door and round-the-clock hospitality, was extinguished. I rang the bell once, a long peal. When no one appeared, I tried the three-beep signal we guides used to announce
tour in progress.
The door was open. I let myself in.

"Anybody home?" I called. "Hello?"

What was I looking for, possibly even hoping for? Brothel noises, evidence, sights and smells? Or dramatic nothingness, an abandoned house, which I would thrill to report:
The Woodburys left town! Mrs. Woodbury must have issued an ultimatum: That housemother or me. Leave everything, leave the Caddy. I won't spend one more minute in this soulless and frozen place.

What I found was worse: the unmistakable sound of sobbing from upstairs.

I tiptoed to the stairway, then up to the first landing, past the Currier and Ives skaters on the Boston Common that I bragged about in the art-appreciation portion of my tours. "Is everything all right?" I called.

I climbed higher, another landing, a grandfather clock, the gift of the loyal class of 1950. "It's me. Frederica," I tried, louder. The crying stopped abruptly.

What was my duty? Since childhood, I'd been taught the protocol: Keep an eye out for the depressed and the disheveled. Tell David or Aviva or alert an RA. If no adult was present, call the dean of students, the infirmary, or, if the girl's safety was in question, 9-1-1.

From the top step I said, "Mrs. Woodbury?"

"Not here," said the voice.

"Grace?"

"I told you: My mother's not here!" said the voice.

"Marietta?" I tried.

Mrs. Woodbury's unmistakable voice came back in a brighter tone. "Yes, that's right. It's Marietta."

"Is everything okay?"

"I have a bad cold. I can't say another word, so you have to leave."

"Sure. Sorry. Okay." At the halfway landing I yelled back upstairs, "I'm leaving. I won't tell anyone I was here." And then, so she'd think her impersonation had succeeded, "Call me later if you can sneak to the phone, okay?"

"I shall," the faux Marietta warbled.

Where would I take this information? Home to my parents for a political discussion on the rights of privacy? And what would I say? That I had let myself into Marietta's house, assuming she was closeted in her room and, as usual, deaf to the doorbell? Oh, and incidentally? I found Mrs. Woodbury sobbing.

"You don't know the context," they would say. "She was probably watching a sad movie or reading a sad book. We have to respect an adult's right to cry in the privacy of her home." I would have had to frame it as a union matter or a dormitory dilemma: Someone under your wing, Mom and Dad, someone on the verge of buying a term paper or filing a grievance sounds seriously depressed.

I went looking for Marietta, first in the library, then at the student center, the commuter lounge, and the bookstore, where she was known to buy gum and candy bars, and finally at her father's office. His secretary, still named Bunny in her late sixties, was a holdover from the previous administration, and had been in the same creaky desk chair since I was born. "Is Dr. Woodbury in?" I asked Bunny.

"Do you have an appointment?"

I said, "It'll take one minute."

"Someone's in with him," she said.

"Can I wait?"

She looked at her watch. "It's late. I don't know how long this appointment will take."

I said, "You don't have to wait. I can watch the office for you."

Bunny, who'd never lived on campus, who reportedly threw away union notices contractually required to be posted on the bulletin board in her custody, and had never doted on me, huffed a
no thanks.

I crossed the royal blue carpet and its Dewing seal to a leather chair. "How's our new president doing?" I asked.

Bunny didn't look up. "Why?" she asked.

"Do you think he's happy here?"

"Extremely."

"He's auditing one of my mother's seminars."

"I know that. Tuesdays and Thursdays, three to four-thirty."

"Does he like it?" I asked.

"We've never discussed it," said Bunny.

"What about Mrs. Woodbury? Do you think she's just as happy here?"

She looked up. "I wouldn't know, Frederica. And it's not our business."

"But you talk to her all the time, right? And don't you sometimes work over at the house?"

Bunny didn't answer. She swiveled away from me to face her typewriter and fed two sheets of paper, a carbon between them, into it.

After a few moments I said softly, "I think she must be miserable, don't you?"

I studied her shoulders and the back of her head for any sign, any twitch of agreement, but she, a pro, wouldn't give me that.

"Should I knock?" I asked after a few more silent minutes.

"No."

What did I think I was going to say to the president of the college?
I hope you know that your wife is upset. Possibly having what laymen call a nervous breakdown. I was going to tell Marietta, but I can't find her. I think you should go home and see if she's all right.
"Maybe I'll come back," I said.

"Do you want to make an appointment?" Bunny asked.

I crossed to her desk and planted myself in front of her typewriter. "I don't think that's necessary, do you? We both live on campus, and I'm friends with his youngest daughter. I see him all the time."

"Suit yourself," said Bunny.

I walked back to my own dorm by way of Curran Hall. The evening meal wasn't out yet, but one of my hairnetted buddies wrapped three éclairs to go.

Before we'd opened our menus, my father announced that we were all going to Grandma's house, respecting her wishes, like the mature and flexible people that we all knew ourselves to be.

"What happened?" I asked.

"We talked about it and we decided we have enough confrontation in our lives," said my mother. "And here was an issue we could shelve without compromising any principles—"

"Knowing that Laura Lee is not our enemy," my father added. "She is, in the eyes of the college, simply the newest housemother and she needs a ride home at Christmas."

"Who are 'the eyes of the college'? Someone she told about her plans, so now you can't leave her high and dry?"

My mother's glance swept the room—we always bumped into colleagues at the Coach House—before she said, "Apparently she told Eric Woodbury that we were taking her home for Christmas, and he was pleased."

"Did he say why?"

"I would imagine," said my father, "that the president of a college does not want any employee to be spending her holiday on a locked-up campus—"

"In a nearly unheated dormitory," my mother added.

I asked how they knew Woodbury was pleased.

My mother said, "He came to class today."

"And mentioned to your mother something along the lines of what a nice gesture it was to extend a hand to the new girl on the block, given that she's all alone."

"Did you say, 'What's it to you, buddy?'"

"No, I did not," said my mother.

"And that was it? You didn't say anything?"

"Such as?"

"That anyone with two eyes in their head can see he's cheating on his wife, who's just as much the new girl on the block, and probably all alone, too."

They both sighed, reached for rolls, buttered them. My father said, "Here is a cold dose of reality, Frederica: How often have we spoken to the man when it hasn't been adversarial? Once? Twice? Never? Yet here he was saying, in effect, that despite pigeonholing the Hatches as pains in the ass, he was now seeing us in a different light."

"Which one?" I asked.

"A friendly and collegial one. Even an altruistic one."

I asked if Laura Lee was by his side as he was making his speech.

"They've stopped doing that," said my mother. "They sit separately and they hardly exchange glances."

"Why not? If everybody knows."

"What everyone knows is gossip. Your mother and I ignore the rumors, especially after Laura Lee admitted at our own table that no one was disrupting any happy marriage."

"They were making euphemisms," I said. "Isn't that when you say something to protect the innocent?"

My mother pointed to a box on my father's menu: "Bouillabaisse for two persons." He nodded enthusiastically.

My mother asked what I was in the mood for. Before I could answer she said, "Let's leave it this way: Sometimes adults know what's best. And reaching out to Laura Lee is the right thing to do at this point in time."

I asked if she meant now, December, the holidays, when lonely people get lonelier and jump off bridges.

"That. And with a cost-of-living adjustment on the table," she said quietly.

I studied my menu, which I knew by heart. "Fine. No one's committing adultery in front of your impressionable daughter. No one's noticing, and no one's suffering. As long as the faculty union profits, I'm happy."

To hinder the cross-examination, I timed my announcement to coincide with the arrival of our smiling waiter. "I'll have the porterhouse steak, medium, with fries," I told him. "For one."

"Were you being ironic?" my mother asked.

"Did you mean that any benefits that accrue to the union do
not
make you happy?" asked my father.

"I'll come back," said the waiter.

A
NY ONE OF US WOULD
have been grateful for nothing worse than an awkward roundtrip across the state. Instead, we Hatches were whisking Laura Lee, now the official other woman, out of town after Grace Woodbury attached a vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her Caddy and nearly succeeded in killing herself.

I received the news on December twenty-fourth, waking to find my mother seated at the foot of my bed wearing such a tragic expression that I cried out, "What happened? Where's Daddy?"

"Daddy's fine. He went to his office." She dug beneath my covers, found my right hand, and rubbed it. "But, honey—Marietta's mother attempted suicide."

"
Attempted?
"

"She's alive. At Mass. General. In intensive care."

"Is she going to be okay?"

"We don't know much more, except that she's in a coma."

I asked how, when, where? What else did she know?

"Yesterday. In her car, in their garage, with the motor running."

"But then changed her mind?"

My mother said no. She was rescued. Thank goodness for an astute and observant UPS man who was delivering a fruitcake from the board of trustees.

"Who told you?" I asked.

"Marietta's father told Laura Lee. Who called Daddy."

I lay back down, put my pillow over my face, and asked from underneath it, "Why aren't you saying that she's going to be all right?"

"It's too early to tell," said my mother. "And we're getting our information from a fairly hysterical source."

"Don't people come out of comas? They always do on TV."

"It depends on the neurological damage. Daddy's at his office right now reading up on carbon monoxide poisoning."

"Where's Marietta?" I asked.

"Presumably at the hospital with her father."

"Is Marietta okay?"

"Laura Lee didn't mention her, but that doesn't mean—"

"Did Dr. Woodbury mention Marietta? Or is he too busy praying his wife won't make it?"

"Frederica!"

I sat up. "Wouldn't it be convenient? He'd be a widower. Everyone would feel sorry for him and he could screw every housemother who brought him a casserole!"

She found one of my ankles through the cover and held it. "You're angry at him. Of course you would be. You enjoyed those rides to school with Marietta until Mrs. Woodbury became too humiliated to carpool."

I said, "We let this happen. We should have seen it coming. I could have stopped her."

The resulting expression was a combination of maternal concern and academic curiosity. Finally she said, "Honey? Why do you think you let this happen? Can you tell me? This is important."

I lay back down and folded my arms across my face.

"In this family we talk," she tried.

I whispered, "She was crying when I went over there."

"When was this?"

"Night before last."

"Did you talk to her?"

I said no. Well, sort of. I'd only exchanged a few sentences with her from the stairwell.

"What did she say?"

I didn't want to confess that Mrs. Woodbury was impersonating Marietta and I'd played along. "Not too much."

My mother sounded relieved. "How could you possibly have predicted she might do harm to herself? Even a psychiatrist wouldn't have deduced that from the stairwell."

I sat up again and yelled, my voice choked, "Maybe I could have put two and two together. Maybe somebody should have noticed that she was depressed. Maybe some professor of criminology could have kicked them out of class for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on somebody's wife."

My mother met this with silence. Finally she asked, "Do you really think that someone in my relatively controversial position could tell the president of this college to behave himself?"

"Somebody should have," I said.

"And said what? 'Cut it out'? 'Your wife seems depressed'? Who
isn't
around here?"

I confessed then that I had gone to Woodbury's office to tell him that his wife was all alone in a dark house and sobbing as if her heart was broken.

My mother moved from the foot of the bed to my side. "What did he say?"

"I didn't see him. He had someone in his office and I decided not to wait."

"Did you tell Bunny it was important?" asked my mother.

"Important?" I repeated. "How about urgent? How about life or death?" I flounced onto my side, then into the fetal position, which always got attention in my family.