The End of Always: A Novel (22 page)

E
arly on the fifth day, I sat up. I slowly swung my legs over the side of the bed. I held my sides and looked at the floor. When my head cleared, I got to my feet. I breathed slowly. The things that pained me came from more than flesh and would last longer than bones that broke or skin that split. August had come every night and every night Frank had refused to let him in. He had come to the back door when Frank had barred the front. He had waited on the grass by Bertha’s flower beds. He’d spoken politely at first, but when Frank would not let him in his voice had grown louder and louder, and the awful words he’d used were the sounds of a man who walked freely in the world.

Bertha had scraped the mud from my shoes. She had washed my clothes and had pressed my blouse and skirt and had taken a needle and thread to the torn places. She had laid the clothes out on the chair, where they now waited for me. I stepped out of my borrowed nightgown and lifted my arms and winced as I slipped into my chemise. I breathed and waited for the pain to slide into something I could bear. Then I pulled on my skirt, the sleeves of my blouse. I felt the light in the room dim. I inhaled slowly and then exhaled and then inhaled again. I held on to the back of the chair.

After a few minutes, I made my way to the mirror. The girl who looked back at me could not have been me but of course she was. I touched my swollen jaw and looked at the black and blue and purple and yellow skin around my eyes and the blackened cuts above my brow, across my mouth, across my nose, at my head bruised and swollen like a lost ball. I took a deep breath and closed my hands into fists. From somewhere far away, a lone train whistle sounded.

“It will be all right,” I said, and tried to make my voice strong so that I would believe this. Sometimes this is all that is available to a girl. “It is not so bad. It will be all right.”

I sat and buttoned my blouse. I waited for the pain in my sides to settle. After a little while, I lay back down and dabbed at the sweat standing on my forehead with the back of my arm.

Sometime later the rain began and I heard a soft tap on the door. Bertha turned the knob and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Then she stepped away and I saw a tall thin woman in a fraying white shirtwaist and a dark green skirt. She had walked a long way through wet streets and the hem of her skirt was soaked. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun and lay as tight as a cap over her bony skull.

I pushed myself up on my elbows. “Martha?” I said. My heart rose into my throat.

She stood by the bed and looked down at me. Then she sat heavily in the chair and put her face in her hands. After a minute, she lifted her head and made her back straight. “Look at you,” she said. “What have you done?”

I felt the cold inside of me grow colder.

“You have got to quit this now,” she said. “This has got to be the end.” She stood up and faced the window. She put her hand on the window frame and leaned her head against her arm. She acted just like I had exhausted her beyond all measure.

“How did you find me?” I said.

“Bertha came.”

“But how did Bertha know who you were?”

She turned and looked at me. “It was that boy,” she said. “That lunatic.”

“Edwin?”

“Is that his name?”

I nodded.

“He told Bertha,” she said.

“He could not tell Bertha anything.” Edwin could barely string three words together. But he had found a way to warn me anyway, as it turned out, even though I had not listened. I felt a little sob in my spine and I swallowed it before it had a chance to rise.

“But he did,” Martha said. She stepped away from the window and sat in the chair again. The lamp burned behind her head and cast its dim yellow light around her hair. “He told Bertha where I live and how to find me. And then she came to see me and told me you were”—she paused—“ill.”

“Where is Hattie?” I said.

“At work.”

“She still works?”

“Not for much longer. School is coming soon.”

I thought of my father. His rules. His policies, his plans, his principles, his priorities, his pain. His insistence on the leveling of everything, which for his daughters meant being leveled right down into the dirt.

“He will never let her go back to school,” I said. “You know that.”

She did not reply. I suppose she thought that Hattie’s work was a different argument than the one she had come to have. She did not know that I was beginning to see that it was all of a piece, like a length of net that my father wove when we weren’t looking.

We sat quietly. The trees outside in their black and sodden leaves and the rain coming down in sheets and the dead moths laid out at the bottom of the screen in furry wads and Martha before me in her wet skirt and her slowly curling hair.

“What are you going to do?” she said at last.

“I do not know,” I said. In the light of the bedside lamp, her face was all sharp lines and angles, her mouth straight, her eyes deep in gaunt sockets. Some people cannot bear sorrow except as refusal. Martha grew thinner and thinner after our mother was murdered and now she looked like she would disappear completely. I could not tell her how happy I had been. I also could not tell her what it had felt like when happiness fled.

Downstairs, Bertha dropped something. It sounded like the lid from a pot. I listened for the grinding interurban or the rustling birds overhead or the barking cries of geese or just a dog. But there was nothing. Just the faint sound of Martha breathing while she stared at me. The rain beyond.

“Marie,” she said. She spoke as if it took some effort for her to keep her voice even. “You have to tell me what you did.”

A familiar tiredness rolled through me. “I did not do anything,” I said softly. But I thought of the way I touched August and of the way he moved toward me even as he pulled away.

“There has to be a reason,” she said. “He did not do this without a reason.”

His hands on me in our bed at night and the darkness of love that rippled over me and the way I clung to him when he held me. My breath caught in my throat.

The wind softened. The rain pattered on the roof and then faded and then pattered on the roof again.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

I turned my face to the wall. “He found my food,” I said.

“All right,” she said briskly. “Now we are getting somewhere. And then what?”

“He said that I humiliated him.” Tears. I rubbed them away.

She sat back in the chair and thought about this. A wind pushed through the leaves. I watched water fall in spirals to the ground.

“Did he say how you humiliated him?”

“Because I got money from you so I could eat.” I sobbed hard and then worked my mouth and tried to stop.

The leaves outside the window showed their silver underbellies. After a time she said, “I can see how he would feel that way. No man wants to have his wife begging in the street.”

I tried to stop crying.

“The important thing is that it was your fault,” she said.

I dropped my forearm over my eyes.

“It is not as if he is a beast who acted without mercy,” she said. “He is not a madman who did this for no reason. You provoked him. So now you apologize. Make sure he is always happy. This is what a wife does. She puts herself last.”

“I was hungry,” I said tightly. Martha was not going to help me. “I thought I would starve to death.”

“Starve to death?” she said. She laughed. “Do not be so dramatic.” She stared down at me and shook her head. “I do not know where you get your ideas,” she said. “But the important thing is this has been settled. You can apologize. You can go back. Everything will be fine.”

After Martha left, I made my way down the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail with every step. Bertha sat in the living room with a magazine in her lap but she looked up when I came in. “Did you see this?” she said. She showed me the picture on the cover, which was a photograph of men in dirty work clothes standing in a knotted bunch in front of a mine. Behind the mine, trees whose trunks were limned with new snow. They must have made the picture before the spring melt. The caption said something about the strikes that I did not bother to read.

The picture made me tired and then it made me angry. No one ever talked about us so that the people who read about us would understand. We were just tantalizing stories told for the reader’s enjoyment. Or perhaps we were supposed to serve as warnings. Go this way. Do not go that way. Be the girl we have told you to be. As if we all needed an endless reiteration of what might befall us, should we forget for just one minute. Should we step out of line.

Bertha and I sat on the front porch with plates on our laps. The sun had come out and the grass steamed and the trees dripped. A man in a brown tweed suit came along the street. When he saw us, he tipped his hat and went off whistling. I looked over at my house. The windows were blank and dark. I had never hung the new curtains. I had never planted anything.

When she finished her sandwich, Bertha set her plate on the porch floor and cleared her throat and asked me about my plans. “Since you’re feeling better now,” she said kindly. “It will be good to have some idea. What did your sister say?”

“She said I should tell him I’m sorry.”

“I see.” Bertha gazed up at her dripping trees.

I fiddled with my plate.

“Are you thinking about going back?” she said. She spoke very softly. She seemed to think she could spook me like a rabbit in the grass.

I swallowed and swallowed again. “I do not see what choice I have,” I said. “I am married to him.” I swabbed my face with my napkin. The man who lived across the street came out of his house, looked over at us, turned, and went back inside. You will understand why I had begun to feel that we were always under scrutiny.

My ribs hurt with a boring pain, like someone was trying to screw a bolt right through me.

“You can’t go back,” Bertha said flatly.

I twisted my napkin into a ball. “He loves me,” I said.

“So he says,” she said. It was clear she didn’t believe him.

“I love him,” I said softly. “You do not understand.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“He loves me,” I said. I could not comprehend why this was so difficult. She knew what it was like to be married. She must know what I meant.

“I know he says he loves you,” she said. “It isn’t really the same thing. Frank thinks you need a lawyer. He thinks you should get a divorce.”

I winced at the word.

She sighed. Her face pained. “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” she said.

I heard the clarion blare of a woodpecker’s call. “What,” I said.

“August has been talking to the men who live around here. He’s been telling them what he’s going to do when you come home.”

I brushed the hair out of my eyes and wondered if it was possible to hurt any more than I did just then. “I know,” I said. “He has a gun.”

She put her hand on mine. I could not tell whom she was trying to comfort, me or herself, but I grabbed her fingers and she held my hand. “He told Frank that he would use it,” she said. “He said that if you ever stepped out of line again, he would not hesitate to do what he needed to do.”

A goldfinch flew pell-mell over the lawn, glinting gold and black, rising and falling and rising again.

“A lawyer would get you some money so you could start over,” she said.

Tears ran off my chin. I ran my sleeve over my face. “I do not want to get divorced,” I said.

“Why not?”

I clenched my hands. I felt August rise and expand around me, a kite still filled with wind that I was not yet willing to release.

“It is shameful,” I said. I thought she would understand that. I knew she would never understand why I still loved August.

“What’s shameful is what August did to you. That’s what’s shameful.”

“I did it to myself,” I said. “That’s what Martha said.”

It was not just Martha. If something went wrong, it was the fault of the girl. If the man had a knife, she had caused him to use it. If a man had a gun, she had given him reason to fire it. If he raised his fist, she should not have walked into it.

Bertha studied her garden, its armies of roses and its battalions of hydrangeas. “Your sister and my husband have very different opinions,” she said, her voice so mild that I knew she had to work to keep it from rising. “Frank thinks you need a lawyer. Frank says that the judge can make August pay.” She put her hand on my arm. “He should pay, Marie. For the lawyer and the hurt he’s caused you. For all of it.” She gave my arm a faint squeeze. “Frank told me you should see someone he knows through the bank. But you need to go today. Frank said things will go better for you if you go while you still look bad.”

I touched my face, my swollen jaw, my split skin. The sun sparkled on the wet grass and bees hummed over the flower beds. Everywhere a smell of wet earth. This world was very beautiful, but it was not my world and it seemed it never would be. A bottomless fatigue rolled over me.

Bertha stood and picked up the plates and laid the brightly polished silverware across the top plate and leaned over and picked my napkin up from my lap.

“If we’re going to see the lawyer, we need to go now,” she said.

A grackle fluttered overhead and then another and another and finally a wave of dark birds skirled through the sky, an undulating wave of black that broke across the vault of blue and split and wheeled away.

Bertha borrowed a cart and horse from the woman who lived two houses away and we drove down into town as the afternoon turned warm. I had seen a woman drive a cart before but the women I had seen were the women who worked outside, digging in the dirt on their family’s farms, their bodies thick with overuse. I had never seen a woman like Bertha drive a cart, and I swayed beside her and watched her expertly guide the horse down the hill into town. She told me that she had grown up in Milwaukee in a pretty house with a mother and father and two sisters. Her father had been the chief brewmaster at Schlitz, and her mother had kept house and had taught her daughters to sew and to paint and to play music on a piano they kept in the front room. She had seen to their needlework and their tatting and to their ability to recite the poems of Whitman and Longfellow. It seemed their very futures were wrapped up in the words of a land to which they could only gain entrance by finding love. Bertha shook her head when she said this, as if remembering the love stories told to young girls, these bright tickets to a world that would never be their own. Then she said that by the time she was born her family had been here for two generations and her father was very kind to her, which gave her a sense that the world was kind and she would find kindness in it and so she had. And she had stayed with this belief even though she knew it was more of an idea that anything material. You could not really lay your hands on the real experience of it and in fact were often confronted with its opposite. So as she had gotten older, she had learned that the idea of liberty, especially the idea of liberty that the country had been founded upon, did not entirely apply to her or to any girl and that no woman was ever really exempt from the demands of men. But she had made a religion, she said, out of her belief in kindness.