The End of Always: A Novel (28 page)

The judge came back at two thirty in the afternoon. Walter Meyer sat so that his hand rested in the middle of August’s back, giving the impression that August was a man in need of comfort. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. Jared smiled at me when we sat down and patted my arm. I know he meant to show me that everything would turn out fine, but he kept his attention on the judge the way another man might watch a sniper on a parapet and so he failed to set me entirely at ease. On the one hand, it all seemed built on words. On the other, I knew what words could build, the stories that made the world.

The judge called us back to the front of the courtroom, and we took our places at the long tables in front of his bench.

“This is my courtroom,” the judge said. “And this has been my courtroom for a number of years now, probably eleven, although Mr. Meyer here would be alarmed to hear that I can’t readily swear to an exact number without thinking about it. And in matters such as these, I have discretion. I can decide what I’d like to hear and what I’d like to leave be. There is no jury in a divorce trial and no worry about reasonable doubt, the way you would have in a criminal matter. I can weigh the evidence as I see fit. So this is what I did. I had some dinner sent up from a place down the street. I sat at the desk in my chambers, and I looked at the materials before me with a great deal of caution and care. My chop grew cold, I can tell you that, and I don’t know if it was because it had to travel to get to me or because I wanted to be careful and be sure, based on what I saw before me, and I let it lie too long. Wouldn’t be the first time. And what I saw in the record suggested to me that there is an answer for these two parties before me. Like most answers you get in a courtroom, it’s not going to satisfy either party. But it’s a fair disposition of the case as I understand it, and I don’t think there is more to understand than I already do. Mr. Meyer here can save himself the time and trouble of bringing more information forward. I don’t think there is any more relevant information to be had and I am prepared to rule.” He held his hand up. “Keep your seat, Mr. Meyer. I am finished with you.” Then he looked down at a sheaf of papers that lay on the bench before him and began to read aloud. “I find that these parties were residents of Waukesha, Wisconsin, just as they described, and lawfully intermarried. I find that the plaintiff has not made a sufficient case that Mr. Bethke starved her or failed to provide for her creature comforts and the defendant is not guilty of these acts and I dismiss those charges.”

Tears came to my eyes. I should have known better than to ask justice for redress, for justice belonged to men and men alone. But Jared kept his gaze trained on the judge and said in a low voice, “Wait. Wait.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and then wiped my hand on my skirt. The judge cleared his throat.

“However,” he said. He rubbed his eyes briefly and then straightened and looked out over the courtroom again. “However. I find that the defendant was guilty of cruel and inhumane treatment of the plaintiff as alleged in the second cause of action, that his conduct toward her has been such as may render it unsafe and improper for her to live with him; that on or about June 17, 1907, the defendant unlawfully and cruelly assaulted the plaintiff and knocked her down with his fist, to her great hurt and injury, and kicked her on that same occasion such that she suffered grievous bodily harm; that on other occasions, the defendant also assaulted the plaintiff and shook his fist at her in a threatening manner and at other times held a knife to her and on one occasion threatened her with a gun. That he told the neighbors that if she misbehaved again, he would ‘lay her low at his feet’ and showed these neighbor men a revolver that he kept for his own protection. I further find that when the plaintiff left the defendant, she took with her, and continues to hold in her possession, a bedstead, bedding, with other articles of household furniture and property, all of which she needs the use of and that the same does not exceed in value the sum of one hundred dollars. She is ordered to retain these with no molestation or interference from the defendant. I find that the plaintiff is entitled to a judgment of divorce from the defendant, forever dissolving the bonds of matrimony existing between the two of them. Further, I find that she is entitled to the future care, custody, and possession of the issue of this marriage until further order of the court, with permission to said defendant to visit the child at the plaintiff’s home and take the child out walking. I also find that the defendant’s answer to the plaintiff’s charge of cruel and inhumane treatment is not proven or true. I further order that neither party shall be free to marry again until one year has passed from this date, and that the defendant must pay the plaintiff’s court costs and attorney’s fees.”

Jared put his hand on my arm again. “You see?” he said. “It pays not to be too hasty.”

As soon as the judge finished, August turned toward me with a choking expression on his face. I would not meet his gaze but watched Walter Meyer put his arm around him. Then they both stood. August looked at me and looked at me, but Walter Meyer pulled him away and propelled him up the aisle between the benches. The men who waited for justice watched him go. Then they stared at me as I walked up the aisle behind him. Our reverse wedding march in this church with its own sacraments.

My light-headedness settled when we came outside into the fresh air. The courthouse square looked different, too, each corner sharply focused, each pure block of fading sunlight alive. Even the lilac dust that rolled up from the gritty curb was fresh and spotless, as if the moment when the judge believed me had made the whole world true.

Jared set his black leather case down next to his feet and turned to face me. He told me that I was a free woman now.

“You should be proud of yourself,” he said. “Not many women would have the guts to go through with that.”

I shook my head. I did not know if I could speak or what words I might be able to say. He smiled at me as if he understood.

“To walk into a room and stand up against the man who is your husband in a room full of men to be judged by men, with not a friendly face in sight,” he said. “That takes some backbone.” He smiled again. I had never noticed before that he was good-looking and had a kind of warmth around him.

“Thank you,” I said. My voice was hoarse and my words sounded exotic, like the words of someone speaking in the language of a new country. “I know that you did not have to take this on.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought we might have a chance. We had to go at it through the divorce. That was the channel that was open to us. I’m glad we had the presence of mind to see it and to take it.” He spoke amiably, as if it was the legal challenge of the case that had interested him.

A small wind blew leaves across the pavement.

“It was all lies,” I said. “Did you know it was going to be all lies?”

He looked away from me. After a time he said, “In my experience, the question of truth has everything to do with the perspective of the person telling the story. It’s very easy for that perspective to get caught up in other things. Desire, for one. Rage, for another. The things people want that they don’t even know they want. The things going on around them that are invisible to them even as they pursue them. We are blind to our own blindness. People are complicated, and the way they come to believe the things they come to believe is never clear to them. They’ll fight you if you point it out. I’ve seen people who were outright liars take the stand and speak with all the sense of entitlement of an aggrieved party. They can get so they believe the things they’re saying.”

“So you do not believe in the truth?”

“I believe that a woman who walks into my office with her face smashed to pieces has encountered something very real, even if no one else thinks so. I think that’s about as close to the truth as we can hope to get. And I’m satisfied with that.” He picked up his case. “My wife will have supper waiting,” he said. “Can you find your way home?”

I nodded.

“Now look,” he said. “The court will have Bethke pay my fees and then the court will hand those over to me. So don’t worry about that. It’s between the court and your ex-husband now. If he doesn’t pay, they will chase him down and take the necessary steps. There is nothing left for you to do. But when that baby comes, you come and see me. We’ll bring Bethke back for custody and support. And we’ll make him pay for that, too. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “That’s fine, then.” He put his hand out and I shook it. “Good luck to you, Mrs. Bethke. I will see you before spring.”

“My name is Marie,” I said.

He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry, Marie.”

I passed through the courthouse square. Down by the town hall, a crowd of men in filthy work clothes came along the street. They carried canvas workbags and bottles of beer and yelled as they walked. I stepped to one side to let them pass and listened to the sound of shoe leather on pavement and hard voices and shouts. They stopped in front of the building where the copper companies kept their local offices. I made my way through the back of the throng and then passed into the next street. A breeze came up and then over the horizon, a break in the overcast and the single gleam of the first star. I smiled and put my hand in my pocket and counted the change by touch.

E
very morning I rose in the dark and sat on the edge of my bed until my eyes adjusted. Then I turned on the light and dressed and ate a slice of bread. I went to work at the tearoom at the end of the street. At first, I took orders and carried trays of food, but then the woman who ran the place noticed that I knew how to cook. She asked if I would like to make the breakfast menu. I kneaded dough for sweet rolls and bread and shaped the loaves and laid these into pans and slid the pans into the oven. When the bread was half-baked, I cut the rolls and twisted them and set them on a rack above the bread pans so everything would come out together. I made coffee and fried sausage and eggs on an iron griddle that lay like a slab over the stove. The first customers came in with the light.

I liked the process of making something out of nothing, the dough that rose from the flour and yeast, the loaves that took shape in my hands. The newspapers were full of stories about the strikes and then all of a sudden the banks failed in a wave. After that, men came to the front of the tearoom and looked in the window and stood there for a long time. They watched the customers eat and then they walked away. The women came to the back door. They stood in the frozen mud and hung their heads. Some of them lifted their faces when they saw me and tried to act as if they were there by accident and that none of this had happened to them. I always gave them food. They thanked me or said nothing or said something to someone who was not there and walked away as if they moved in the disconnected landscape of a dream. I found two circles carved into the doorframe and I knew that we were marked as a place that was kind to the weary traveler. It did not take much for me to imagine myself in their shoes. It did not take much for me to know that any one of those women could have been me, for we all stood in a river that threatened at any moment to overtake us.

Late one morning toward the end of November I looked up to see Martha and Hattie on the sidewalk outside. Martha had bare hands but she wore her blue hat with the netting. Hattie wore my mother’s old coat with the piece of rope tied around the waist. They shaded their eyes against the morning sun and tried to look in the window. When they came inside, Martha hugged me and gingerly put her hand on my belly, as if she had never seen a pregnant woman before. They sat at a table next to the stove. I told them to bring their chairs closer and get warm. Martha’s hands were red. She folded them under her armpits to warm them.

“We have been so worried,” she said. “You never sent word.”

I sat down. “Hattie knew,” I said, confused. “Hattie came with the wagon and then she came with me to Milwaukee to Carl.”

“We knew that,” Martha said. “We just never knew anything else.”

“What else was there to know, Martha?”

She reached up and fiddled with her hat and then took it off and set it on her lap. “I do not know,” she said at last. “Something.”

“You did not come,” I said. “Hattie could have shown you the way. Or Carl.”

“How could I have come?” she said. “It was all the way in Milwaukee.” She made it sound like I had asked her to travel to a foreign land, not to a city she had been to many times before. And here she was in Milwaukee today, a fact she chose to ignore.

“Do you want something to eat?” I said. “You look hungry.”

She glanced at the rolls piled in baskets on the counter. She shook her head.

“I do,” said Hattie. “I could eat a horse.”

“Hattie,” Martha said. She used her warning voice.

I stood up. “I will put something on the table. In case you change your mind.”

“I said I was fine.”

“I know,” I said. I felt a ripple of kindness toward my older sister, rigid and thin as a straight line. She must have thought I planned to charge her. “But you can have the coffee and rolls for free,” I said.

They ate in silence. The tearoom was empty and I could sit with them. I could feel the pleasure of being back with my sisters again, even if Martha and I never saw eye to eye.

“Has August been to see you?” Martha asked suddenly. She shook her skirt to dislodge the crumbs.

“August?” His name came to me like a word I did not want to say.

“Does he understand your situation?”

“What situation?” I gave her a quizzical look. I knew what she meant but I wanted to see if I could get her to talk about it.

“Your circumstances,” she said delicately. She waved her hand in the air over my stomach like a magician trying to do a trick. “I want to know if he is taking care of things and treating you well,” she said.

“What difference would that make?”

She sighed. “It is time for all of this to stop,” she said. “It is time to mend fences. You need to go back to him. You must do whatever it takes to set this right. You have more than proved your point.”

Hattie set her roll on her plate. “Don’t do it,” she said to me. “I mean it.”

The stove creaked as it cooled. I stood and took wood from the kindling box and dropped it inside. I poked the fire to make sure it would flame. Martha finished her roll and put her hands in her lap and sat there looking at the top of her hat and then ducked her head and reached for the basket and helped herself to another roll. She would not look at me as she ate. When she was through, she put her hands under her armpits again as if she had to work to warm herself.

Hattie spread another roll with butter. “Do you like it here?” she asked.

I nodded. “I like the work,” I said.

Hattie took a bite and chewed. “We don’t have good bread at home now,” she said after a minute. “But that’s all right. It’s better that you’re here.”

I felt a rush of warmth toward her, my little sister who only wanted the best for me.

“Just tell me,” Martha said, her voice as reedy as the sound of wind by the river. “Are you ever going to go back to your husband?”

I did not reply immediately. I wanted to give her the courtesy of pretending to consider this, to think that she could provide advice. Eventually, however, I had to say something. “I do not think so,” I said. I looked up at the ceiling as if this thought had just come to me out of the air.

“I am sure he is sorry by now.”

“I am sure you are right.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Hattie.

“Come back with us,” said Martha, ignoring her. She put her hand on my knee. “We can get your things from Carl’s room next week.”

“No,” I said, the word blunt and firm and final.

“It is not just you now.” She dipped her chin at my belly as if I might have forgotten that I was pregnant.

“I know that.”

“I do not understand you,” Martha said.

I nodded. “I know,” I said.

She cleared her throat and rubbed at an invisible spot on the table. I felt sorry for her. I knew she did not want this gulf between us any more than I wanted it, but I could not see how to cross it. I am sure she felt equally at a loss. “So,” she said. “You will never go back to him?”

“You shouldn’t,” said Hattie.

Martha glared at her. “Shush,” she said.

“I will not,” said Hattie.

“No,” I said. “I will not go back to him.”

“But what about us?”

“I can see you,” I said. “You can see me. That will not change.”

“You know that he will never let you back into the house,” she said. I knew who she meant. We were not talking about August now.

A log fell in the stove and she turned ever so slightly toward the noise. “The shame you have brought on us by running away. He cannot get over it.”

“If you come back, you know what will happen,” said Hattie.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I did not intend to bring shame on anyone.”

“You are hard-hearted, you know that?” Martha would not look at me when she spoke.

“No more than you,” I said.

She sat back and looked a little offended at having to say all of this out loud. I did not really blame her. We each had our own truths and they would never match.

We sat without speaking. I watched a team of huge gray Percherons pull a wagon by the shop, their hides rippling and their blond tails flying. The thunder of the wagon wheels faded as the horses pulled away.

After a while, Hattie kicked the table. “I think you should stay here,” she said.

“You are a child,” said Martha.

Hattie shrugged. “I think she’s safe here,” she said. “And that’s what’s important.”

When had she gotten so grown up? I thought of her as she helped to load the wagon outside of the house I shared with August. I thought of her on the train to Milwaukee. She had taken her braces off. She had stood on her own two feet. Martha and I had tried to protect her by standing between her and our father. She would grow up and see things a different way, as if she had grown up in a completely different family.

“Sometimes when bad things happen, you have to take care of yourself,” I said. I spoke to my older sister as if she was a child, and who was to say she was not? “So I got a lawyer and I went to court and I took care of this. This is my job. I live down the street. You can come see me here anytime.”

“What are you saying?” Martha said. She grabbed my arm. “What do you mean, you got a lawyer?”

“I got a divorce,” I said. It was not so hard to say the word now that it was a reality, and I saw that what it really meant was a world in which no one hit me. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“Oh God,” she cried. She clawed at my sleeve. I pulled away.

“You are hurting me,” I said.

She stood up and looked at Hattie. “Put your coat on,” she said. “We are leaving.” Then she scowled at me. “It is not all right,” she said. “It is not fine. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” She stabbed at her hair with her hat pin. “Try as I might,” she said, “I do not understand how you can be so selfish.”

Hattie hugged me and promised she would come and see me when the baby came. But Martha stood buttoning her coat and would not look at me. Before she left, she paused in the doorway and told me that I might as well know that my father had been keeping company with a woman who owned a dairy farm in Price County. She was a widow. Along with the dairy farm, she owned a small hotel and kept a herd of pet deer penned in the yard so that visitors could see something wild. She had her own hunting permit and used it. Then Martha said our father had decided to marry this widow and she thought that his marriage would happen soon. He would move himself and the last of their household to Price County, and Martha and Hattie would go with him, at least until he could secure work for them.

It did not take much for me to picture it, the white house sitting atop a rise, the long, undulating pastures of rich grass, the chasms in the earth where water rolled, the horizon of expectations now real, the idea of the land he had always wanted hurtling at me like a wall I would hit at high speed. My mother was gone and everything of our family could be wiped out with a new marriage and a signature on a deed. This was the reason, I thought, this and no other. I wondered how long it had taken him to decide after he met her. My father had always wanted land. My father had always felt that land was his destiny. He had not crossed an ocean to come up empty. Martha had her hand on the doorknob and Hattie had tied her rope into a sash, knotting it at the waist to keep her coat closed.

“What is she like?” I asked.

Martha shrugged. “I have not met her,” she said. “He always takes the train there.”

When they were gone, the tearoom was very still. I went back to the icebox and leaned my head against the door and thought of my mother dead in the ground and of my father and his terrible crime and his terrible plan. And then I fell weeping to the floor. When the woman who owned the tearoom came in, she saw me lying wet-eyed and heaving in the flickering light from the stove. She knelt down and put her arm around my shoulders. She told me that everything was all right and I should go into the back room and lie down, for clearly I was overtired. For a time I lay on a cot set up beneath the shelves of canned beans, but I could neither sleep nor could I rest. I stood up and went back to work.

You have known girls like me. You might have been a girl like me. We are all the same under the skin, girls who pick up leaves and stones and have hopes for the future and who are taught that we must marry and obey and love. Our mothers told us,
It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know how to touch you the right way.
Our mothers told us to forgive him. Our mothers told us it was our fault.
You should have seen it coming
, they said.
You should have known that he would do that. You should not have made him angry.
And so we are shamefaced and still and silent and scared. We are afraid of him and afraid that no one will save us and sure that we cannot save ourselves. These things should be as familiar to you as the song you sing when you do the wash. You know us and you have been us and you might be one of us yet. It might not be a hand or a brick or a blade. It might be a word or a look that promises the course of the cane. It might be a darkness that you cannot name but which you know is with you and has been with you for as long as you can remember. Perhaps these ideas are too common even to bear repeating. And yet they must be repeated because every day the papers are filled with the stories of women who have been thrown from windows or shot with guns or lost in the night, a long, terrible story that is as familiar as the air we breathe. We have not seen the last girl. She has not yet walked among us.