Pay the Piper (29 page)

Hal, I've struggled long and hard to bring myself up out of what I came from. I can't let my life come to tragedy, or go down the drain. Now I have nothing and no one but you. I wonder if you see the enormity of what you've taken on, that you really are responsible for my life. We got married on money Daddy gave you for your ten-day leave, but we are middle-aged and can't be dependent on him. I wonder if you know how hard you must struggle to stay as you seem to be, and that life won't be all making love. Reality will loom as I'm facing it now about leaving Rick. I've married someone most people think killed a boy on purpose. I can't be left someday, Hal. I am helpless without you and totally dependent. I need to be taken care of emotionally and financially.

If I were not giving up my child for you, it would be one thing. But to have done so and made some horrible mistake is another thing. I've wondered about our drinking together when you've been out, and how easily you seem to fall back into an old pattern. Having an abrupt quarrel on our honeymoon and patching it up making love is fun, but when the great rush of first love is over, are you going to stay changed, as you've said you have changed? I have controlled drinking and been as strong as I am because William was strong, and I need the same strength from you.

It's about to kill me absolutely to give up Rick. Sometimes I wonder if it will mar our marriage, if I can stand it. I wonder if you realize what is happening inside of me because of it. You are charming and handsome and romantic and I'm afraid I fell head over heels in love with you because of that, and you may want someone younger in time. You know, I think that could drive me to suicide. I'm scared.

Then the third Christmas, they were in their own house, so long planned for. She told him afterward, “You almost ruined Christmas. It's not my fault your own children weren't here.”

Her nose caught the blow. The moment before his hand flew out, she wondered if she had expected it, wanted it, enticed it, but believed it would never happen. Thank God, her mother had already left. She had turned to Pris: hadn't her sister-in-law any feeling for her that she had married Hal, given him back a life, a place for his children to come, was good to her parents, and her brother was hardly out of prison and back to dangerous drinking? She only asked, “Pris, will you help with Hal's drinking? He's broken my nose.”

“Put some ice on your nose,” Pris said.

Family? Do they love him that they'll never offer a word of criticism? Laurel wondered.

When she drove Rick to the Delton airport after Christmas, her black eye was covered by sunglasses. “I tried to talk to him, Mom,” he said. “But Hal has me boxed in, and knows it. One wrong word and he'll tell me not to come here again, and separate us.”

“God in heaven, try not to think about it. There are the good times.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “I have them with Hal too.”

Life without children was so difficult when you were used to them. There was only her and Hal's dependence on one another, a multitude of small conversations, no one to intervene, only the dogs to turn to occasionally. She left Rick at the airport, dreading her return to the silent house. He was taller than she. He looked more like William and his family. “Why does Rick lift his lip and show his gums when he laughs?” Hal had asked.

“It's upper-class New England to look like a horse,” she said.

She worried at the airport why Rick had gained so much weight; wasn't William watching him dependably as he always had? He needed a bra, she told him. He had eaten so much at dinner, he excused himself suddenly from the table. “Did you throw up?” she had asked. He said not to worry; he was keeping up his weight for boxing and the swimming team. Rick thought himself too old to hug and kiss, and walked away. Then he came bounding back; they embraced. “See you in February,” they said bravely. He said, “Mom, at home I start counting the days. I wake up in the morning and say, Only thirty more days, only twenty-nine more days.…” She could only nod. She watched him go along the corridor. She had had two husbands, and one husband was damaged by too much mother love and the other one suffered its lack. How hard the road, she had thought.

She returned to inane evening conversations after Hal had a few drinks. Once when he reminded her she had come from nothing, she found herself crying back, “I could belong to the DAR. An aunt traced it.” Overvalue the past and you can't take hold of the reins of the future. Where had she heard that? He told her Sallie was descended from Thomas Jefferson. “From his black relatives or his white ones?” she asked. “Thomas Jefferson never had a black mistress!” he cried out. “Who cares,” she said. “I'd like to sleep with a black man.” Hal had turned ashen. “In Boston, the Cabots and the Lowells speak to the Perrys,” she had said. The remark went over Hal's head.

Now she went to graduate school, which Hal thought was stupid. “What else am I to do?” she had said. “Nothing to
dew
, nothing to
dew
; don't start that again,” he said. What was there for her to do? She asked Rick if he would not ask William, since he had always programmed her life. “Mom,” Rick had said, “are you crazy?”

No one would know what it cost her going to that small college farther south in the Delta, the only one within feasible driving distance. Crossing the campus among small-town kids, hugging schoolbooks to her chest, she had wanted instead to be seeing about Rick's going to school. “Well, I guess I'd be going through something like this with Sallie by now,” Hal conceded. Sallie? Didn't the man see the difference between them? Not even two dollars' worth, she thought. That was the old story about Pepper. He'd asked Daddy to get him a marriage license in town, but Daddy forgot for a while. When he brought the license, Pepper said he had decided to marry a different girl and needed a new license. “Well, it'll cost you another two dollars for a license with another name,” Daddy said. Pepper said, Never mind then. He'd marry the first girl. There wasn't two dollars' worth of difference between them.

One time Hal had laughed, saying every time he got rid of one woman, another one was waiting. Was that what she was to him—a convenience? Once they settled in here, he heard from the little nurse, Rosalie. As he spoke about her letter, a light of reminiscence came into his eyes, the certain light men get thinking back on a woman they have slept with. “Did you sleep with Rosalie in the hospital?” she said.

“Why not? It was available.”

She only thought he should have been suffering as fully as everyone else in the case.

The refrigerator door slammed. Ice cubes fell again into a glass. He never would ask if she would like a drink. She got up to fix dinner.

She thought again about the day at the tennis court and another blow to her nose, this one unintentional. She believed Hal was watching a woman walk away from the courts, whose bosoms were jiggling. She turned to watch. He sent a ball her direction, and as she looked back, it caught her face sharply. Hal was horrified. He ran around the net crying “Baby!” She tasted blood. As her eyes closed, she had another flash of memory. They were all in the backyard shortly after Hal had come home. She was so pleased he was teaching Rick to shoot clay pigeons. “Pull,” she heard Rick cry. And then he shot.

When she looked around, Tina was hovering in the carport. She went inside. She found her curled up in a chair in this bedroom and took the girl on her lap. “Tina,” she said, “you mustn't be frightened by the sound of guns. What happened with your father was an accident.”

Tina sat bolt upright in her lap. “It certainly was not an accident. My father said, ‘I'm going to kill your brother.' He got the gun and loaded it. I wrestled him for it. I was eight years old. Then he shot him.”

She opened her eyes at the tennis court, saying, “It doesn't hurt.” People were playing golf on a bright green course beyond them. Black waiters in cropped jackets carried trays loaded with drinks above their heads. Words carved in stone in a building directly ahead of her swam into focus: S
WAN
C
OUNTRY
C
LUB
.

I'm a member, she had thought.

13

They gave a funeral but no one came. While she could speak humorously, Daddy's dying, of course, was not funny. He lay comatose for weeks for a reason no doctor could figure out, since when Daddy was cut open and sewn up, his cancer past hope, he was given the least anesthesia. Lying in the Delton hospital, he said one word occasionally, “Mitzi,” until a doctor arched an eyebrow and asked her, “Another woman? Everyone has skeletons.” She told him, “No. That was a little dog of his wife's that died soon after she did.” Why the substitution of names, anyone could guess about. But she and Hal agreed Daddy had had a nervous breakdown in his coma, the only place he dared to, at last.

Another woman? Laurel had stood at his hospital window those months back thinking about the words. What happened between her and Daddy in his bathroom became not even a memory once she came to Matagorda to live as Hal's wife, two years ago. If there had been another woman, though, late in Daddy's life, that woman was herself. Always, the look he gave her out of pale, kind eyes said he knew what she had come to Matagorda to offer—love, trust, obedience, intelligence, and respect: things her husband never seemed to realize. Here I am in Soundport again, Laurel thought, staring out a window and contemplating a world that was one sheet of ice. She tried to imagine the warm weather Hal was having in Africa.

The rented cottage where she stood was like a cocoon; its windows covered by plastic sheeting against the cold closed her in. From an upstairs window, Laurel looked out toward Long Island Sound, a gem of flashing water in the distance. When a school bus shifted gears nearby, she assumed a mother's satisfied smile. Old habits die hard. Yesterday, driving too fast, stopping abruptly, she threw out an arm to protect Rick from the dashboard. They laughed. He was twice as big as she was now. She wondered why she and William had never thought to walk at the beach in winter; it was lovely, and Buff's hair feathered out along her spine.

Neither she nor Rick mentioned her going south again when Hal came back from Africa, in two months. These two months he had been gone were more precious than she had anticipated. But she had not expected the night Rick appeared on her rented doorstep with boxes of his possessions. “I told you you didn't have to move in with me while Hal's gone. I'm fine. You've had enough uprootedness.”

He pushed on in, arms loaded. “Dad's getting a divorce. I don't want to live in a house without a woman in it.” Then he put down all those things in a room upstairs. “Where you are, Mom, is really where home is.”

Those words brought the sharpest pain. Only now did she let herself think about the woman she had been who left him. What had she seemed like to the neighbors, what had his friends said, what had he gone through that she would never know anything about? she wondered.

This time going south, she would not be looking for something that did not exist—the past. Too long, she had tried to return to her first memories knowing what she learned later. She had wanted to bring the past into the present, to say what she should have said at some time gone past when she had been too afraid to speak her mind, to jeopardize being loved and liked. William had always complimented her about not talking as much as most women; Hal, too, liked that she did not “run her mouth.” However, he preferred dogs to people; they did not talk back at all, he said.

These mornings encountering Rick first thing, he threw his hands over himself. He slept in boxer shorts but must hide what she guessed was an erection. She wondered if he was a virgin, and what her son was like in bed, and whether this was a question you could ever ask a daughter-in-law. In the long months before her divorce, when William stayed in the house, she walked into the bathroom once while he was taking a bath. William threw a washcloth over his private parts. She had thought that silly after fifteen years of marriage. Hal was so jealous of William back then, she wondered what he would think, now, with her in Soundport alone, if he knew William was getting a divorce. “William doesn't want your name mentioned in front of him,” her mother had said.

The unexpected night Rick showed up with his possessions saying his dad was getting a divorce, she saw something in his face that made her fearful; yet she wanted him to be a man able to go out into the world better than Daddy and Hal, and maybe that took grimness. She had no right to ask about William's divorce and only said lightly, “Without step brothers and sisters, you won't have to go through all that quibbling I watched with Hal and Pris about dividing things up after Daddy died.”

Once Daddy died, she and Hal had moved into the big house. They moved everything on flatbed trucks provided by Savano. She told Rick about the morning Hal let the dogs out, so early Carrie's roosters had not even started crowing. He was back in the bedroom and shortly said, “Laurel. Somebody's in this house.” They always had been slightly afraid someone from the prison might show up, even two years later. They went apprehensively down a hallway, hearing noises in the living room. Pris looked up at them. She was sitting on the floor swathing in tissue paper objets d'art from every table and shelf. Hal quietly asked if she'd return the few he had brought Mama from Japan when he was there in wartime. With a look of hatred, she complied. She and Hal could not stop talking about how Pris simply walked into the house, not knocking, not having called. She'd had to leave Delton before daylight to get there at that hour. She knew then, Laurel said, Pris was never going to accept her and Hal as the MacDonalds of Matagorda, never graciously accept that they lived in that house.

For weeks, Pris scavenged the place, bringing her own lunch and six-packs of sodas for everyone. She only said, Pris, we have lunch every day anyway. You're welcome to eat our food. She did not say they always had baloney sandwiches and she'd change the menu for her. She was then writing in Daddy's old office, which looked over the orchard. She used to sit there hating the sight of Hal's black pickup turning down the driveway between the trees at exactly twelve minutes past noon every day. He got out of the truck and seemed dwarfed by the house. Daddy had been slight, but there was a difference. Finally she realized the difference was dignity: something Hal lacked. She longed for it for herself sitting at the typewriter. But every morning Carrie interrupted to ask, “What us having for lunch, Miss Laurel?” She finally told Carrie to have baloney every day, and Hal never seemed to notice. He ate his sandwich carefully pinched between his hands, reminding her of a raccoon. Drinking iced tea, he gave her a sweet gaze over the rim of the glass. His expression was like that of a grateful child whose thirst has been quenched when the child's too young to quench it himself. She sat at the table looking off into the magnitude of silence in the orchard, hating the tininess of her life, wondering that she had brought herself to it. All she could do was make each day pass, and then another day, and not look back. Where was the man who had written her those letters?