The End of Always: A Novel (10 page)

“There is a family,” she said carefully. “I have heard of them. Everyone has heard of them. This is not a good family.”

I listened to the rain. I imagined myself in August’s arms, his face pressed into my neck. I felt myself stir at the memory, rising as if he called me to him.

“You do not know that it is the same family,” I said.

She reached for my arm. “Last name Bethke. That is what I heard.”

I turned the poker and slid the point through the last of the fire’s light. I lacked patience for gossip. Pretty is as pretty does and Waukesha was full of stories. Everyone liked to talk. Everyone thought they knew everything.

The kitchen had begun to go dark around us but neither one of us had bothered to light the lamp. Rain sluiced over the window and the yard and the town and the sky disappeared. I did not want to listen to Martha’s theories about August or August’s family or any of it. Bethke was a pretty common name. In German, it was nearly as common as Smith. If she had things to tell me, it was just because she wanted to hurt me.

“You do not want me to be happy,” I said. “You want me to be as miserable as you.”

“That is not it.”

I thought of August’s mouth on my breasts, his hands in my hair. The way I felt when he said my name, as if we spoke to each other in a secret language and he would be the only one ever to reach me. We did not belong to Waukesha and Waukesha did not belong to us.

“You know what will happen if he finds out,” she said.

I tapped the iron against the stove and watched ash fall back into the embers but I did not say anything.

“Tell me you will stop,” she said.

I shook my head. I could not stop seeing August any more than I could stop breathing or stop my heart beating.

“Tell me,” she said again. “I insist.”

“I cannot,” I said.

“Why not?” She clenched her fists. “Of course you can.”

I tapped the iron against the stove again and it clanged loudly.

“Stop that,” said Martha. “Hattie is already asleep. You do not seem to understand. I am not asking you, baby sister. I am telling you. You are to stop.”

“It is you who does not understand,” I said. My voice pitched up. “You have no right to tell me what to do.”

“I am the oldest,” she said sharply. “You have no choice but to do as I say.”

I leaned the poker against the stove and pushed at the stove door with my foot. There was nothing for it but to tell her the truth.

“I cannot stop,” I said. “I
will
not stop. I love him and he loves me.”

“Oh God!” she cried. She stood up so fast that her chair fell over. She clutched at the air in front of her the way a woman might try to keep a dish from falling. “Stop and think,” she said. “Just stop and think. He will kill you.”

I swung the stove door with my toe and then let it bang shut.

“I thought you said it was an accident,” I said.

W
illiam Oliver stood in his shirtsleeves on the back steps of the laundry. When I came through the wet yard, he lifted one hand to his head and ran it through his rumpled hair and then stroked it over his beard. He watched me walk toward him.

I stopped at the foot of the stairs. The sun rose and light spread across the gray sky and the clouds still churned along the horizon.

He contemplated me for a minute and then waved at the wide expanse of sky. “Sometimes,” he said, “you can wait all day and never see anything alive. Not a bird. Not a rat. Not one thing that moves. Other days, the sky is teeming with pigeons and the roads are glutted with squirrels. Why is that, do you suppose? What makes one day different from another?”

“One day is the same as the next,” I said plainly. “It is only the seasons that change.” I was tired. I had not slept much the night before. I had gone to bed when Martha was finished with me, but I had lain awake a long time, listening to her move around in the kitchen, and then listening to the beating of my own heart.

“Ah,” he said. “The philosopher arrives.”

“I am not a philosopher.”

“But you show every sign of being a philosopher.” He rolled back on his heels. “You arrive late to work. You sleep on the floor at lunchtime. You come in here looking entirely disreputable, like someone who has lost her way. Are these not the actions of a philosopher?”

I shook my head.

“They aren’t?” He held his hands out, palms up. “And now, rain,” he said. “If we stay here, we will be soaked. I know this is a state that brings you pleasure but I do not find it nearly so agreeable. Get inside.”

We went up the dirty stairs to his office. He told me to sit down and then he sat across from me. He put his boot heels up on his desk. Rain pattered on the roof and the wagons that rolled by made a soft wet sound in the street below.

“Better keep your coat on. The man is late with the fires this morning,” he said. He looked me up and down. “Perhaps taking a page from your book.”

“Mr. Oliver,” I said.

“William,” he said.

“William,” I said.

He held his hand up to stop me. “The thing that remains to be decided is what to do with you,” he said.

I waited. When he did not say anything else, I cleared my throat. “I do not understand,” I said.

“I believe Inge told me the whole story. I believe I have all of the facts.”

“Inge is lying,” I said. Inge’s facts were not my facts. Inge’s facts were something she had dreamt up all on her own.

“Have you explained this to your father? He is the kind of man who would be extremely interested in your experiences, if I am not too much mistaken.” William Oliver smiled at me through his billy-goat beard. “No? No explanations for your father? Well. I guess I am not really surprised.” He leaned forward and dropped his heels to the floor. He stood up and began to walk up and down in front of me. “It is understood that a girl like you is going to have adventures,” he said. “This is unavoidable. But certainly not the kind of adventure you are having now. Certainly not some lout, a boy who can barely read and write, who drags you out into the woods and throws you down on the ground to have his way with you. Surely not. This is nothing but common. Nothing but coarse.” He stopped in front of the window. “I would think you would want better than that, Mary. I would think you would hold yourself in higher esteem.”

“It is not like that,” I said, protesting. William Oliver knew nothing of August Bethke. He knew nothing of the way August held me.

“No?” He turned and looked at me. “What is it like, then?”

“Not like that.”

“I believe Inge has a different opinion.”

“Inge is lying,” I said again. “She has no business talking about something she does not understand.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Mary,” he said. “Inge is a neutral party here. Why would she lie? She has nothing to gain. I can rely on her to tell me the truth.”

“She is lying,” I repeated. “You are not being fair.”

“Fair?” he said. “Fair? I’ll tell you what’s not fair. It is not fair that you come to work late and expect to be paid. It is not fair that you sleep on the job and expect to be paid. It is not fair that you show up in a dress so misused that you threaten to make the place infamous all by yourself. That is what is not fair in my humble estimation.”

“I do not expect to be paid,” I said hotly. This was more than I could bear. What were we talking about? My night with August, which was certainly none of William Oliver’s business, or my pay?

“Is that so.”

“Yes.”

“Did you come and tell me that?” He looked around the office. “I do not remember that conversation, Mary.”

“I did not think of it,” I said slowly. This was true. And if this was all that William Oliver wanted, I did not mind. I would gladly forgo all my pay if only this conversation would stop.

“Your thoughts were elsewhere, no doubt.”

I stared at my hands.

“I can assure you that I thought of it,” he said. “I can tell you that Inge thought of it. I feel quite certain that all of the girls thought of it. They are arbiters of equity, after all. This is practically all they talk about.” He waved his hand at the street. “In our kind of market, which is not yet a socialist market, no matter what men like your father might say, we work from basic principles. You work for wages, which I set. I also set the work that must be done for those wages, the terms and conditions. It is a simple economy. Do you understand?”

I nodded slowly.

He glanced over his shoulder and met my gaze. “Of course,” he said, “money is not the only thing that can be exchanged. But whatever the exchange is for, in order to maintain harmony and equilibrium, the contract between the two parties depends on the equation I have described. Which is why it is so easily undone when a girl like you does not follow the most fundamental rules. Which is why your adventures have really upset the apple cart.”

He turned away from the window and walked back to his desk, where he sat down and reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He patted his chest in search of a match and then stood up and fished around in his trouser pockets. Finally he found what he was looking for and scraped the match across the underside of the desk and rolled the cigarette in his teeth until the tip poked into the flame. He watched the flame for a brief moment and then shook it out and dropped the match into a porcelain cup. He drew hard on the cigarette and then exhaled.

“It comes down to you,” he said. “You have put all of this in motion. You have suggested a new equation. You have laid out a new set of rules.” He picked a piece of tobacco from his lower lip and flicked it away. “I think I will be happy about this, in the long run,” he said. “When we look at the greater scheme of things. And I know that you wish to be happy as well. The question is this: How do we take the next step?”

“I do not know what you mean,” I said.

“I think you do.”

I knotted my skirt in my lap.

“I often visit that tavern where your father works. Surely he explained this to you. That this is how you came to have this job. That it was my suggestion.”

I felt the air go out of my chest. “Please,” I said. “Mr. Oliver.”

“William.”

“William.”

He waited but after I said his name, I said nothing. Naturally, I wished to dispute everything he said but I could not find the words. I had thought myself strong and full of ideas that needed only to be put into practice, but when I sat in William Oliver’s office, it seemed a suffocating passivity had settled over me. Only a child raised to be silent will know what I mean when I say this. You can want to speak but then you cannot. The truth of the matter was that I could not afford to lose this job. I could not go home to my father and tell him I had lost my place of work. And I did not know how to balance that need—which in any case I felt to be more of an affliction than a need—with William Oliver’s thinking.

I knew what he was asking. I knew that I would never do it. What I did not know was what would happen after that.

He lifted his heel and ground the spent cigarette against the sole of his boot and then dropped it in the cup with the match. He raised his gaze and looked at me. “I would not be too quick to say no,” he said. “Not understanding things the way a bright girl like you understands things. What good is all of that philosophy if in the end you cannot answer this kind of question?” He sighed. “Mary,” he said. “You will see this as a problem that does not have a solution, for that is the way the young always think, as if the only road is the one they would have chosen for themselves. They fail to see the possibilities of roads that are chosen for them. I believe that I have offered you a plum opportunity. We two can share quite a bit of pleasure. I will make it pleasant for you and you will come to enjoy it. But I can see that you do not yet share this view. That is fair. I will give you some time. I think it will not take long for you to come to your senses.”

I worked beside Ella and Inge and Johanna until quitting time. They eyed me when I came back from William Oliver’s office, Inge with a smug, self-satisfied air, Johanna quiet as a cipher, Ella far away. But I said nothing and did my best to keep my distance. At lunchtime we stood in the yard but they turned their backs to me and talked among themselves. I should not have been surprised. Water will seek its own level. I walked across the yard and sat with my coffee tin on the doors of a coal chute and unwrapped my slice of bread and half a pickle. These I ate sitting alone in a long oblong of sunlight, my skirt tucked under my knees.

That afternoon I stood on the top step of the ladder and looked at the burbling water and the sheets that swirled like strange billowy fish. I thought about the girl who had been at the laundry before me and how it must have been when she slipped, what she must have known the minute she felt herself going in.

I stood on the back steps at night and watched the stars blink into position and waited for August, but he did not come. At first, I wandered between my father’s house and William Oliver’s laundry in a state of disbelief. I could not imagine August would stay away. That was the hardest time. That was the time when August suddenly began to seem entirely unreal, just like a boy in a dream, and then the things we had done began to seem unreal also. But I knew those things were true. There were words for what we had done. We had made our way in the dark. We had climbed the luminous cliffs and up under the black evergreens and along the top of the bluffs. We had followed the long escarpment that ran from the foot of the river all the way east to the great falls just as if we had walked the long spine of America. We had reached the little house tucked into the woods. We had disappeared from the world. And when I thought he was gone, you will easily understand why I at first churned like the plates of the country itself, deep below the surface, wrecked and ready to split apart. If he did not come back, I would never be the girl I had been again. That thought was too terrible to put into words.

Only when I was finished with that did I start to feel righteous and angry. His absence did not seem to fit with all the things he had said and done. It did not seem possible that he would leave me just as soon as he had shown me that cabin in the woods. But I knew that this was the kind of thing that happened to other girls. I knew that it could happen to me.

Martha came out onto the back steps with her broom. She put her thin arm around my shoulders. “Is there a moon?”

I shook my head.

“Too bad. I would have liked to have seen the moon tonight.”

I turned toward her and raised my eyebrow.

“Sometimes you just want to see the moon,” she said defensively. “You are just in the mood for it.” She paused. Then she squeezed my shoulder. “I saved you some soup,” she said.

“I am not hungry.”

“You need to eat.”

“I must be coming down with something.”

She frowned and stood her broom against the rail. Then she sat on the step and patted the stair next to her. “Sit next to me,” she said. “Just for a minute.”

I sat. A furry gray moth fluttered over the yard. I had hopes that she would be kind. I did not want to say so but I longed for her sympathy, as if that would prove she understood and did not hold anything against me. I sat with my hands open in my lap, palms up and fingers wide. I suppose you could say it was some sort of supplication, but I would not go so far as to say it was a prayer.

The man who lived in the house behind ours came out to the yard with his pile of newspapers and trash. These he dropped into the barrel at the foot of the garden. He leaned into the barrel and lit a match. After a few minutes, yellow flame licked up the insides of the drum and he searched the ground for dry leaves and twigs. He stood feeding these to the fire.

Martha stared off at the flames. Finally she heaved a sigh and put her hands on her knees. “I need to know,” she said flatly. “Is he coming back?”

I shook my head.

“Oh my God,” she said. She grabbed my arm and dug her nails into my skin. “He is not coming back?”

“No!” I said. “Stop that!” I pulled away. “That is not what I meant. Of course he is coming back!”

She softened slightly. “What did he say to you? Tell me
ever
ything.”

“He said that he loves me.”

“Of course he said that he loves you,” she said. “They all say that. What else?” My sister had a way with contempt. It was her constant companion, like an imaginary playmate.

“That he wants to marry me.”

“Indeed.” She knocked against the broom and it fell into the yard. We both looked at it.

“Yes,” I said.

“That is not much. He owes it to you to marry you.” She made it sound like August had stamped and canceled me like a transaction at the bank.

The night sky bright with stars then and the air soft and cool and my sister beside me stiff as a bone, barren and dry as if eaten by animals, unable to see what I saw, unable to feel the things I felt.

“What if I do not want to marry him?” I said slowly. I did want to marry August. I wanted to marry August more than I had ever before wanted anything. But the idea of not marrying August suddenly came over me and provoked a weird elation, as if I had by my own choosing done something that was mine and mine alone.