The End of Always: A Novel (23 page)

We came into a street near the courthouse, and Bertha turned the horse toward a hitching post in front of a wooden building with a green canvas awning rolled out over a double plate glass window. On one side of the door, I could see the top part of a man who sat with his back to the window, and on the other side of the door, the top half of a man who walked up and down while another man sat with his hat still on his head. The hat moved sometimes and sometimes stayed still. When we stepped inside, a long hallway ran out before us lined with doors, each fitted with a milk glass window, and we walked along until we came to a door with chipped gold lettering that spelled
Jared Thompson, Esq
.

A clerk just inside the door looked up when we came in. He sat at a spindly desk and worked over some papers and wore a green baize eyeshade. Bertha said that we would like to see Mr. Thompson. The clerk looked us over and said in a superior voice that as far as he knew, Mr. Thompson didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. I turned to go but Bertha put her hand on my arm. She told the man in the eyeshade that her husband was Mr. Frank Riewestahl of the First National Bank of Waukesha, and she had no reason to hope that this was true of course but she believed anyway that it might be possible that Mr. Thompson would be able to spare a few minutes for us. “She is in great distress,” she said. She spoke in a firm, strong voice and held my arm under the elbow. “Surely you can see that there is nothing planned about this.”

The clerk paused and considered me. I wondered how many women like me he had seen before. From the look on his face, I guessed not many.

“I make no promises,” he said. He stood and walked over to a heavy wooden door. He knocked, waited, and then opened the door and leaned half of his body inside. The office made me nervous. I leaned over and told Bertha that maybe we should just go. But she shook her head and told me to wait.

Jared Thompson rose when he saw me and crossed the room and held my elbow and steered me into a chair that faced his desk. He was a short man with dark, wavy hair and a clean-shaven face. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, but over the shirt he wore a bright yellow brocade vest, and I thought he must be a man who had a secret yen for fancy clothes.

He asked if I was in much pain. I nodded and he murmured. He appeared to wish to convey to me that he knew better than anyone the nature of my troubles and sat with women who had been nearly beaten to death every day.

He asked me to begin at the beginning and to proceed from there. But the beginning escaped me. Was it my mother laid out on her bed? My father smoking in the street? The men who carried her? The men who carried me? August under the trees? A ship on the sea? I felt it all reel through me like a world that had no exact features and threatened to spin away. My uncle Carl once took Martha and me to ride a carousel. We’d climbed up on our painted ponies and the carousel had begun with a lurch and then picked up speed, and before I knew it, I was whirling and flying, all of the colors around me running together in a dizzying blur, the music blaring, the brass ring going by, and Carl laughing and yelling that we were supposed to try and catch the ring. But it was all I could do to hang on, and when I stepped off, I staggered around the grass as if the world had been upended. I felt exactly the same when I sat across from Jared Thompson and he told me to begin at the beginning. My story had no beginning. My story was not even just my story.

Nausea rose in my throat and I was afraid that I would vomit everything out, August, my father, my mother, a steaming smelly used-up stew of confusion. But I swallowed hard and told Jared Thompson that I did not know where the beginning was. He said I might as well begin with my name and where I lived and my husband’s name and who had done this to me, for he presumed that this was why I wanted to see him. After that, I could hear myself talking and the words were my own but they came to me from a distance, the way they would if the story belonged to a girl I had never met, a story that I had heard described by someone else.

When I was finished, he tipped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. He tapped his pen sharply against his teeth and then leaned forward and lay the pen down on the desk in front of him.

“I understand your predicament,” he said. “But I don’t think I can help you.”

The room was bisected by light. A small electric fan pushed air around our feet. I hung my head. “I am sorry,” I said. “I have taken too much of your time.”

“That’s all right.” He picked up his pen and put it down again and picked it up again. “The problem is,” he said, “the law makes few provisions for people like you. Attempted murder of a married woman. If an unknown man accosted you in a dark alley, it would be another matter. He would be arrested. But you experienced this at the hands of your husband, a man with whom you have a fully executed contract and whom you are bound by law to honor and obey.” He looked at me. “You are married to him? This isn’t some common-law thing?”

I nodded.

“And the terms of the contract have been realized?”

I did not reply. I had fallen in love and gotten married. I did not fully comprehend what he meant.

He lowered his voice. “What I mean to say…” he said delicately. “You have been with your husband in the way that a wife must be with her husband?”

“Oh,” I said. I felt myself go hot. I nodded.

“All right, then,” he said. He looked around the room as if he would find what he was looking for in its dusty sunlight. “I haven’t seen too many of these cases prosecuted.” He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I’m not even sure I can find a precedent.” He studied me. “And you will have to get divorced. Likely that will be the only way.”

I flinched. That word again.

“Mrs. Bethke,” he said. “If you have the slightest doubt, let’s stop right here.”

“No,” I said quietly. I never felt pushed into any of it but I never felt that any of it was my choice, either. I believed I could make things turn out all right if I just tried hard enough, but it also seemed to me that I had no such power. How could August be two things at once? Or my father? Or any man? I knew that whatever I said from this point forward meant that I would travel to a place that did not include August. But I was suddenly resigned to all of it. I had long ago set out on a journey that I should have realized would bring me here.

I looked at Jared Thompson, with his wavy hair and bright vest. “It is all right,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. He sat back quietly, as if deliberating. Finally he said, “We might have more success if we set aside the question of attempted murder and pursue divorce on the grounds that you are in fear for your life.” He put his pen down and leaned toward me. “Would that be a fair thing to say? That you are in fear for your life?”

The clock tower struck its time. Jared Thompson watched me. “You understand that everything you tell me is something confidential between us?” he said. “That I cannot tell anyone what you have told me here, even if I do not take your case?”

“Yes,” I said softly. My chin trembled, whether from the pain of the question or the pain in my ribs, my head, my mouth, I could not say.

“Then tell me.” He spoke as if he could wrench the truth from me the way you wrench a root from the ground. “Is it a fair thing to say that you are in fear for your life?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“And are there witnesses who can testify that you have good cause to be in fear for your life?” His words bored into me. “People who can say that what you say happened is what happened?”

The men who carried me through the night. Bertha and Frank, standing on their front porch, listening to my screams. “I think so,” I said.

“You think so or you know so?”

“I know so,” I said.

“And who would these people be?” He gazed at me, a level, steady look.

“They had to come,” I said. I felt the awful crush of shame. “They pulled him off me.”

“How many?”

“Three men,” I said. “Or four.” My cheeks burned again.

But the fact that there were witnesses did not worry Jared. It pleased him. “Good,” he said warmly. His eyes sparkled, two shiny lights. He wrote on his pad. “And did anyone know that he starved you?” His pen poised over the paper.

“My sister.”

“Your sister. Good.”

I could not imagine what was good about this. “She will not say so,” I said. I thought of Martha, who did not want to spare me anything. But she had given me money so I could eat. She had wanted to spare me starvation at least. “She thinks I should go home and be a good wife.”

“Is that what you think?” His words made a hole in me, and then everything that had happened poured into me, like water through a funnel. I sagged in my chair.

“I do not know,” I whispered.

Jared Thompson set his pen down. “Mrs. Bethke,” he said. “If you want to sue for divorce, I am willing to help you. And I can assure you that it is only your very pitiable state that compels me to do this, for it will be difficult. I see you before me, severely injured, but by the time we get to court, these wounds will have healed. Even if we get your friend outside to sign an affidavit today, and I will do that before you leave, these wounds will have healed. And even if we pursue divorce, I think it’s far from clear that we will prevail. No one likes to see a case like this come into court. It’s too unequal, in point of fact, and because of that, it’s hard to argue. Very difficult to get the upper hand. The husbands always seem to come out on top, and who knows but that the law tends to favor them? The law or man, it doesn’t really matter which, when you get right down to it. But when I look at you, I know that I have to be willing to try. We’d have no system of justice at all if people like me didn’t look at someone like you and say that we are willing to try. You’re not going to have any luck at all unless we set this as right as we can. But I do not want to start something that you aren’t willing to finish. If you are happy being bloodied in the name of something you call love, that’s your choice. But if that’s the case, let’s call it a day.”

The room was bright and hot. The electric fan whirred air around my knees but my legs were sticky under my dress. I could hear the clerk in the front room, banging something out on a typewriter. I thought of Bertha waiting for me. I thought of the horse outside. The long way home. Then the tide rushed in or maybe it was the beating of my own blood. “I want to,” I said. My voice caught. “I do. You have to believe me.”

But Jared did not seem to feel the weight of this moment or of the things that I felt. He just pushed himself up from his chair and said that since that was the case, he would be glad to proceed. Then he reached over the desk and shook my hand, as if all of this was business as usual. He opened the door for me. Out in the room where the clerk worked, Bertha stood up. But Jared waited in the doorway with the door held open in his hand. “Understand,” he said to me. “This is going to take some sacrifice on your part. You aren’t going to make any friends. Waukesha can be a hard place. It didn’t get carved out of the wilderness on tea doilies and good manners. It promised a good life to people from all over, but a promise isn’t the same as a reality. There are dozens of ways life can be hard here. I think you know that.” He folded his arms in front of him. “It’s the way of the world,” he said. “Your own particular piece of ground isn’t so good. You’ve come up a little bit short. But let’s see what we can do.”

Bertha stood the horse in a set of cross ties and wiped him down and put him back in his stall. She fed him while I cleaned the bit and hung the harness on a hook. We got home just before dinner but I wasn’t hungry. I climbed the stairs to my room and lay down on my bed in the fading light. When I slept, I saw nothing. No one came to me and I did not travel and no ship rose below my feet and no wraiths appeared in the trees. If August came that night, I did not hear him.

In the morning, I woke and let nausea roll over me, a gut-wrenching feeling of sickness. I swallowed and swallowed again. My skin warm and then clammy and then some kind of fever washed over me and abated. My hair wet against my scalp. But nothing came up. After a time, the nausea washed away. I could feel the pillows beneath me again. The cool air in the room. I unstuck myself from my nightgown and licked my lips. Then I stared at the ceiling and began to count backward. My own little incantation. My love spell. My chant to keep me safe. It ended when I sat bolt upright and clutched myself around the waist. “August,” I said. But of course he could not hear.

I knew it the way you know the sound of your own name. There could be no truth other than this. I was pregnant. That was why nausea followed me unbidden. The nausea meant a baby, and if I did not recognize it before this it was because it had never occurred to me that I could have a baby. Babies were for other girls: The girls who jumped down wells. The girls who had money and rooms painted yellow, waiting. The girls like my mother who had children already. Under the best of circumstances, babies were not for me. And now? Even worse.

The house was quiet. I looked down at my lap but all I saw was my own shape under the nightgown. I told myself that I would have to think about this later. I dressed and came downstairs and took my coffee cup out onto the back steps. I looked at the lawn. I listened for the sound of hammers from the construction site at the foot of the yard, but the morning was still. Blue shadows lay across the damp grass and the wind lifted my skirt and I dropped my hand to hold it in place. “Little one,” I said to myself, trying out the words in the way of someone speaking an unfamiliar language. Then I felt silly for saying these words out loud. I put my hand on my flat stomach and wondered at the sea within. Then I imagined the baby like a fairy in the grass flying on transparent wings, glistening silver like the dew. Maybe it would show me what to do. I was sure I had no idea how to be a mother.

I looked again at the darkness on the edge of the yard, where a bank of forsythia bushes bordered the grass and hid the alley from view. The branches moved in the wind and then something else moved and Edwin stepped out into the sunlight. He wore his old-fashioned clothes and his collar was still crooked. He crossed the grass and said my name. Then he said my name again.