Safe Passage (6 page)

    
"All my boys have had this route," she said.

    
"They've got you out on some awful morning."

    
"Yes,"
Mag
said. She wouldn't explain.

    
The woman laughed. "Well, they've probably just got you well trained-all those boys for so many years."

    
"Probably," she said. Water was running down her neck. The truth of the statement struck her. She was a middle-aged woman delivering newspapers in a predawn rain because she was well trained. She was here because of a principle her husband believed in and she didn't. She should not be delivering papers while Percival might be lying dead five thousand miles away. She should not be bringing Simon out into the rain because Patrick expected it. She was so accustomed to his demands that she had lost her own good sense. And it was not just today. Had she followed her own instincts years ago, she would have stopped having babies before they overwhelmed her. Percival would not have been sandwiched into the middle of such a large family. She would have had more time for him, and he might not have needed to join the Marines. In the darkness it did not occur to her that if Percival were the baby, she would not have had Simon at all. She only knew that now the punishment would fall on Percival because she had let Patrick train her to a life she didn't want. The porch light went off in front of her and the woman disappeared into the house. She was shivering more than she had been in the car.

    
Her name was Margaret. She was seventeen years old and everyone called her Peggy. "What's your real name?" Patrick Singer asked, staring down her bathing suit at the only tan she'd ever had. Her breasts were not large, but the skin on her chest was golden and the bathing suit gave her cleavage.

    
"Margaret," she said.

    
Mag." Even that first day, he never called her Peggy. Always
Mag
.

    
"Short for maggot?" her father asked later. "Magpie?"

    
They were at the beach for a two-week vacation. Her father came on weekends, between his business trips, and her sister, Sally, stayed the whole time, with her baby. Sally's husband, Wayne, drove down as much as he could. When Patrick threw a Frisbee into their blanket, Wayne remembered he and Patrick had taken a class together at the University of Maryland and introduced him around.

     
Mag
liked Patrick's dark hair and light eyes. She liked his height and his leanness and particularly the way he stared at her. She was attracted but not overwhelmed. She was just seventeen, about to enter her senior year of high school and then go on to college. She had other things on her mind besides boys. She was only playing.

    
Patrick admired her hair, which had bleached almost white from so much sun. He admired her tan. Like many blondes, she normally didn't tan and was happier in winter. She liked crisp dry air; she liked to be cold. Heat and humidity made her feel untidy, and sitting in the sun made her dizzy. That summer she baked herself for hours because she was so restless. Her mother drove her crazy, sweeping the beach cottage clean of every scrap of sand. Sally wasn't much better. Peggy fled. The first day she burned a little from staying out so long. Later her skin turned beige and then golden. A sweaty, light-headed feeling stayed with her from so much sun, but she didn't mind.

    
"This is my first tan ever," she told Patrick. She did not want him to expect more from her appearance than she could deliver. "Probably my last. We almost never come to the beach. Too much sun makes me feel sick."

    
"Biologically, you must be a northerner," he said. "I like northern hair." He touched her hair, which was caked with salt from swimming, the texture of straw. She was embarrassed because normally her hair was silken. "I also like your tan, even if it's just a temporary aberration." He stroked her arm, right there in front of everyone. Her stomach began to cramp.

    
He took her to a miniature-golf course, introducing her to his friends as
Mag
. She didn't like his friends much, or being called
Mag
. She did like the way he kept touching her. She had been touched before, but less confidently, and never in public. Still, she was only
seventeen,
she didn't take it too seriously. After they went home from the beach, Patrick called almost every night, though he was at the university in College Park, an hour away, and had to pay long-distance rates.

    
She dated him all her senior year because he was less dreary than the boys at school. His calling her
Mag
annoyed her, but it seemed less important than his eyes, which were the exact turquoise color of the neighborhood swimming pool. Soon her mother and her sister were calling her
Mag
when Patrick was around. Sally's baby, Rachel, stammered out among her first words a hesitant "Ant
Mag
." Her father stuck with Peggy-Margaret when he was angry-but even he was not immune to Patrick's ability to fix cars and rig up insulation blankets for an aging hot-water heater—all those practical qualities his family of women lacked.

    
Patrick got his degree in business administration two weeks before Peggy finished high school. He came to her graduation, where her friends stared at him and referred to him as her Older Man. All summer she necked with him in the back of his car, warding off the boredom of her summer job. In the fall she went to Hood College, commuting forty minutes because there was no money for her to live in the dorm. She took courses in biology, music appreciation, history, and English. At night Patrick fondled her until she was sick to her stomach, in such odd positions in the front seat of his car that she would often wake the next morning with sore shoulders or a stiff neck.

    
"Don't, Patrick," she would say, not removing his hands. He would continue to a point and then reluctantly stop. It was fashionable then for girls like Peggy to save their virginity until marriage.

    
Living at home was duller than ever, with her mother ironing shirts and discussing toilet training with Sally over the phone. Peggy had no wish to emulate either of them. She would get her degree and then take a traveling job like her father's. She would never be like her mother, who vacuumed the carpets twice a week and ushered her family to occasional services at the Presbyterian church. College and Patrick were a temporary escape. Patrick unbuttoned her blouse in the
semisecrecy
of his car, put his hand into her pants. When her parents went out at night, they spent hours lying naked under the covers in the guest room, rubbing against each other, drunk with the sense of being alone in private, until her parents seemed likely to return. Otherwise they were relegated to the car, because Patrick lived an hour away with three roommates. They declared their love, though Peggy wasn't sure if it was love she felt or only passion. In his spare time, Patrick redesigned the seat of his car so that it went down all the way, turning the entire vehicle into a double bed. Peggy, too, had come to depend on his practicality.

    
In her own spare time, she studied less and thought more about having sex with Patrick, though she resisted the ultimate act. Some nights she refused to let him put the car seat down, to show him she was serious about preserving her virtue. During one of these nights Patrick slid her underpants off completely-something he had done before only in the spare bedroom. She held onto them. "Come on, we're sitting up, nothing's going to happen," he said. He turned her so she was spread-eagled on his lap facing him, her knees on the seat on either side of him, her breasts cradled in his hand. He rubbed her nipples with his fingers and her lower parts with his penis. After a time she realized he was moving not only
against
her but in, just a little. She was too curious to resist. They had waited so long. She was only slightly astonished when her hymen broke, suddenly, with a few drops of blood and a pop like a bursting balloon, but no pain.

    
"I thought it was supposed to hurt," she said afterward.

    
"I think,
Mag
," Patrick told her, "that these past couple of months we loosened it up."

    
Patrick had gotten a job in Washington. It was 1958. Peggy told him she was going to stop having sex with
him,
she was going to concentrate on college. He said that was ridiculous, he loved her, he respected her, what difference did it make. She argued with him but discovered that once you started having sex you couldn't stop. To offset the arguments, Patrick offered marriage. The day of her wedding, her father, the last holdout, started calling her
Mag
.

    
Alfred was born a year later. Her water broke before she went into a labor, with the same
balloonlike
pop that had marked the end of her virginity.
Mag
believed that this was some kind of sign-the pop of the hymen
precursing
the pop of her waters, indicating that Alfred's birth had been preordained. This reassured her, because she had not planned a baby so soon. She had intended to continue school and work part-time, since Patrick's salary was enough for them to live on but didn't allow for any saving. But as her pregnancy advanced, she gave up her part-time job and dropped all her courses but one, a survey of English history from ancient times to the present. Even then she sensed that Patrick was training her to live according to his plan and not her own, but she resisted in her own way. The baby arrived just as she was studying Alfred the Great in school, and it was Alfred she chose as his name. The original Alfred had saved his country from conquest, laid the basis for the unification of England, written a great code of laws.
Mag
did not know if she chose the name for herself, since she was only nineteen and hadn't done anything yet, or her hopes for
tlie
baby, who was unplanned but cute enough, and apparently preordained.

    
Izzy
came along two years later, when she was studying ethnic modern literature. Patrick wanted to name him after his late father, William, but
Mag
thought a baby named Isaac
Bashevis
Singer would be nice, in honor of the writer. Patrick disagreed. Isaac
Bashevis
Singer was famous for his ethnic Jewish stories, and Patrick was
not only not Jewish
but had given up religion years ago. Why foist it on his offspring? Why name a son Isaac
Bashevis
and open the whole Judeo-Christian can of worms?
Mag
didn't give in. Patrick's father had been a Methodist, she argued; his mother was a Catholic;
a Jewish patriarch generations
ago had given Patrick's branch of the Singer family its name. How could he get away from religion? Besides, there was another Isaac Singer in recent history, not a writer but the inventor of the sewing machine—and since Patrick was already something of an inventor himself, what would be wrong with passing that name on to the child? They compromised by calling the baby Isaac William instead of Isaac
Bashevis
, and dubbed him
Izzy
right away.

    
For the next few years
Mag
was busy tending babies and not pursuing a career, but when she looked at her sons, she saw Isaac
Bashevis
and imagined an intellectual; she saw Alfred the Great and envisioned a leader of men. She hung her dreams for a great career on her children, figuring she would get her chance later. Even so, she was restless. She hated hauling diapers back and forth to the laundry room, washing diapers, hanging diapers out to dry. She hated diapers even after her complaints led Patrick to invent the makeshift disposable diaper she rarely used but that turned out to be good enough for the manufacturing company.

    
She might have wised up then, but she didn't. Patrick stroked her thigh under the table even as the babies were mashing strained peas between their fingers. Watching the green mess did not keep her stomach from cramping with desire, or her thoughts from imagining Patrick's mouth on her breasts. His eyes were turquoise; his chest was broad. He woke her from a dead sleep in the middle of the night, with his hands between her legs and her crotch already wet. He was training her. She not only let it happen; she kept going back for more. Percival was born on November 22, 1963, the day Jack Kennedy was shot. Patrick wanted to call him John, but
Mag
insisted on something grander, more knightly: Percival. She had just read
Malory's
Morte
D'Arthur
and named her son for Camelot. Did she think it would make any difference? Did she think it would gain her
her
career? The jobs she began to take when Simon was four were always just that—jobs, not careers—and now, twenty-five years since the beginning, nothing had changed.

In her office at the county public-relations department, her colleagues called her
Mag
, not Margaret or Peggy. Her parents called her
Mag
, and so did her sister Sally and her two grown nieces. She was so well trained that she had gotten used to it. But the truth was that Patrick had changed her completely-from Peggy, who was young and free and ambitious, to
Mag
, with all those sons. To
Mag
, who at his request would go out and deliver papers in rain and darkness with Simon, wondering if Percival were still alive.