The Legacy of Eden (18 page)

Alison, I cannot blame you. You did not know, I think, the hold you had over Ethan Joshua Hathaway. You did not realize you were his star, shining out in the darkness to him: his only guide, without which he was lost.

The first my grandparents knew that anything was wrong was when they got a call at one-thirty in the morning. Cal answered, and afterward told his wife that Sheriff Patterson was coming to the house in ten minutes. She blinked at him—for a moment neither of them able to move—and then they got up, dressed and stole quietly down the stairs so as not to wake anybody and sat in the kitchen where they saw the sheriff’s car’s headlights cast white circles up the drive when he arrived. Cal opened the door before he had walked up the porch to knock.

He didn’t bother with any preamble.

“It’s Ethan,” he said. “He’s been in some trouble. It was Alison Lomax who called us. Told us that he had come over and apparently there was an incident. Told us she thought he might do something stupid. We just thought it was some lovers’ tiff maybe, you know what the young-uns are like. Anyway, we kept an eye out and his truck was found in the ravine. He’s at Mercy Hospital now, doctors say he’s stable, but he looks worse than he is.”

“What?” asked my grandmother. “How did this happen?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Lavinia,” he said. Patterson was a good friend of my grandfather’s. “But when we got him to the hospital we called up the Lomaxes, told them we were going to need to talk to them about what happened. One of my boys went over there while I was still at the hospital. Told me that there had been some almighty row. Paul, her father—well, as one of my boys described it, his face looks like it met with a couple of fists. You need to come over and see your boy. I don’t like what I’m hearing, Cal, not at all.”

When they did they were met with a sorry sight that would keep my uncle in the hospital for weeks. Aside from a severe concussion, Ethan had broken three ribs, his leg in four places (with a metal rod in it to keep it together), his nose and two fingers on his right hand.

That would all mend, that was not what worried his parents. What hurt them was that he wouldn’t speak. Not a sound came from his lips to tell them what happened. He was a wall of silence. But he was not the only one. When the sheriff came over again some time later, he told them that none of the Lomaxes would make a statement about what had happened at the house. The doctor who saw Paul told Patterson that whatever had happened, the attack was a brutal one, and judging by the cuts on Paul’s knuckles, someone else was worse off, but no one would speak. Not when Patterson tried to grill Paul over his injuries, not when he asked his wife why she was shaking, not even when he saw Allie in her bedroom, her mother stealing into the room and curling an arm around the girl, who was bent over into her mother like she was five again, her hair spilling over her face revealing the red marks a tight grip had scored across her neck.

For an event with so great a need of an explanation, not one person involved could have been less forthcoming. Hatred hung in the air and yet they bound themselves together in their refusal to talk. Patterson couldn’t understand it. Truth be told, even for a policeman with all his years of experience, it unnerved him.

“Well, it can’t be anything to do with Ethe,” protested Cal. “He adores Allie. He was even going to ask her to marry him.” He glanced quickly at his wife. “He told me about it himself. He borrowed some money for a ring. They’d spoken about it before.”

“I don’t know, Cal,” said Patterson. “It seems a lot more serious than just some proposal going wrong. There’s bad business going on here.”

“Ethan’s suffering, too, you know,” ventured Lavinia.

“That’s what worries me,” said Patterson.

Yet Ethan never spoke of it. Not a word or even a moan passed his lips. They took him home, with his broken bones plastered, and showed him to the study they had converted to a makeshift bedroom until he was more mobile. Even after countless one-sided arguments, pleas and recriminations, he would not speak and his father and mother raged as to why he had driven their truck through two roadside fences and crashed into a ravine. And why Alison’s father had cut his knuckles on his cheekbones.

Desperate, Cal even went to the Lomaxes’ house to enquire as to what had happened, but Alison would not see him and when her father answered, Cal could not conceal his horror at the mess of chartreuse and navy that swelled across the expanse of the man’s face.

“Ask your son,” Paul said, when my grandfather found his voice. “I’ll not do his dirty work.”

No one knew what had happened. My father tried talking to his brother, but it was no use—Ethan was closed to the world and he saw no reason why he should open up the connection again.

“Do you think he tried to kill himself?” Julia asked aloud one time. Cal turned in horror and stared openmouthed.

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“Maybe he was unhappy,” said Julia and then as an aside added, “God knows we’ve all had that feeling in this house.”

She went to her brother to try and talk to him as well, but she had no more luck than anyone else. She stared down at him and, running her hands through her dyed brittle hair, sighed and said, “You’ll have to talk sometime, Ethe. If not to us then to the police.”

The sheriff knew Cal well and he was as lenient as he could be, but even he began to run out of patience. “We need to talk to him,” he said on Cal’s porch a week after Ethan was discharged from hospital.

“He won’t say anything,” replied Lavinia. “He hasn’t spoken since the crash.”

“Doesn’t matter, we need to hurry things along now. Alison’s leaving for Georgia in a few days, we need to get everything about that night straight.”

“What do you mean leaving?” my grandmother asked.

“She’s going. Family are rushing her out quick sharp. Staying with some friend of the family down there ’til she starts college in the fall. Anyway she’s not saying much, either, but we got to know. One of them will break soon, but without meaning to worry you, I think something pretty bad happened there.”

He paused and looked out into the sun. “Look, if it were just a case of your son getting drunk and smashing himself up we could try to overlook it. Not like he’s the first, but this is a bad business and I don’t like bad businesses festering in my town.” He spat on the ground and then changed tack. “Your boy, he was never prone to violent outbursts or nothing, was he?” he asked.

“’Course not,” Cal shot back.

“Hmm, well—let’s hope someone cracks soon,” Patterson replied and he kicked a clump of dirt with his shoe.

Days passed. Both Piper and Lavinia tended to Ethan, even Julia began to help. Theo found he could not go in there and face the silent vacuum that had replaced his brother. He avoided that part of the house and though it was noticed, no one commented on it. Then in the second week of Ethan’s silence my grandmother somehow contrived to find out the routine of Allie’s mother and one afternoon she ambushed the woman as she searched for new bed linen in Kacey’s department store.

“I have nothing to say to you,” she said frostily, putting the linen back on the table.

“Please,” Lavinia said, stepping in front of her. “Please, he won’t speak. He won’t tell us what happened. You must understand—”

“You ask for empathy for that—that—” Alison’s mother broke off in disgust.

The two women faced each other, a silent battle raging in their faces.

“What did he do?” Lavinia finally asked.

In the middle of the night, Lavinia gently got out of bed so as not to wake Cal and crept downstairs to her son. He was wide-awake, staring into nothing when she opened the door.

Closing it behind her, she stepped into the room and approached the foot of his cot.

“I met Alison’s mother in a department store today,” she said. “I asked her what happened that night.”

There was no flicker, no trace of life behind the glassy facade of his features.

She stretched out her hand and opened her palm.

“She gave me this to give back to you,” she said and then paused for effect. “Was it because I asked if she were going to college that you decided to ask her to marry you? Did you really have no idea what she had planned or had you just not bothered to find out?”

Silence.

“It must have been a shock, I can understand that, but what you did, Ethan, or at least what you tried to do— Did you not know or just not care that her family were only a few rooms away? Or was that all part of it? Punishing her for her refusal of your proposal. Did you feel she had led you on? That she behaved like a little tease. I can imagine how you would have wondered if she could do this to you, what else she had done, but still…even I was shocked at your methods of retribution.”

She dropped the engagement ring onto his lap.

“She won’t talk. She’s refusing to. They think—well, they think it’s out of love or fear or maybe even both. She won’t see anyone, has cut herself off from everybody. They think it’s out of shame. Her mother said you’ve destroyed her. That must make you proud.”

He dropped his gaze from the ceiling to her face.

“I will not speak of this to your father. Alison won’t speak of it to the police. I will compose a story that you will tell to the sheriff by the end of the week. There will be no more room for these errors anymore, Ethan. I hope you unleashed your beasts to the full because that will have to last them a long time, do you hear me? I am not having you jeopardize everything I have worked for, because you can’t control yourself. Have you any idea what your father would do if he knew? You’d never be able to get out of that bed again for a start.”

She rubbed her hands together and then pulled at another blanket resting on a chair and shook it out to settle over him. His eyes were boring holes in her. Just before the blanket fell down, Ethan reached out and snatched the ring from his lap.

“If you want to take it back—to the jeweler’s, I mean—you can,” she said quietly as she smoothed the blanket out. “Or maybe not. Maybe you don’t want to give it back. If that’s the case it’s okay.” She leaned over him and stroked his hair. “You can always keep it to remember her by.”

A few days later just like she said, Ethan made a report to the sheriff. Patterson then went, by all accounts to the Lomaxes’ place, where he was finally permitted to see Allie. She sat across from him and listened to what Ethan had told him and at the end, all she had done was nod. Without waiting for the sheriff to speak again she had risen heavily and gingerly made her way upstairs.

Her mother had called out to her from the bottom and had pleaded with her “to see sense.”

But she did not. And by the end of the month, she had left for Atlanta, Georgia.

My uncle gradually began to heal and a month after Allie’s departure he finally spoke and asked my father to bring him a glass of iced tea. There was a general sigh of relief when my father reported this. They assumed that Ethan was getting better.

But he had changed, and though they only realized it gradually, they saw the ways in which he was different. He was solemn, quiet, prone to being alone even more now than before. He threw himself into working on the farm when he was well enough, but he had no passions, no notable pleasures. He seemed to view the world in a filter of gray but he did not complain. My father tried to talk to him, to cajole him, but my grandmother would catch him wheedling my uncle and she would draw him aside and tell him to leave well alone.

“I’m handling it,” she’d say.

“But look at him,” my father protested.

“It doesn’t matter, leave it to me,” she insisted before turning from him.

My father waited, but his brother made no progress toward being the boy he had grown up with. Something in him had broken and died.

From that time on Ethan refused to ever let another person mention Alison’s name around him again, as his brother once learned to his cost.

Theo came home limping from the barn one afternoon holding his side while his face winced with pain, and his mother, noting what he told her, barely said a word as she bandaged him up.

“Now you’ll know for next time,” she’d said to him. “I told you—leave it to me.”

Two days after I had arrived in Iowa, I sat in my makeshift bedroom on the window seat and hugging my legs, stared at the sky, which was black except for the moon burning a white hole among the clouds. I had forgotten the sky could look like that. In New York you are surrounded by so much electric light and neon you have no need to look up and seek the stars.

I thought how the moon would be shining on the husk that was now Aurelia. How its light would find the withered rose garden, the dead cornfields, the empty homes…

Its inhabitants are now scattered but I can still feel the pull of the farm, like an invisible cord routed around my navel. Whenever I feel like I am beginning to forget, it tugs ever so gently, making me wince with nostalgia. It is a constant throbbing ache, a wound that weeps beneath the hasty bandages I have pulled over it. It is a fight that will stay with me my whole life, but it is also one I know I will never win. By now, having lived with it for so long, I am scared of what I would be without it.

Chapter 9

I LOOKED DOWN at her as she finished speaking and waited for her to continue but she turned her head from me and faced the wall. For weeks I had debated telling Mom what was happening, what she was telling me, but I never did. I was afraid, both of what Mom would do if she knew, and also what I would do if she stopped. I longed to know the truth now, to fill in all the holes that she had made, and she was the only one who could help me. At least that was how I justified it to myself.

“Why did you do it?” I asked her.

Her breath rattled out of her throat.

“Because it was the only way to keep it. To make sure it went to who it was supposed to.”

“But she had just as much right, Grandma. It was just as much her home.”

“Oh, she didn’t give that for the place, not a thing. She would have run it into the ground, she didn’t know anything about farming and as for that husband of hers—he couldn’t stand up to her. He was so weak, always dreaming about being a musician, always hoping for that piece of luck that would swoop down and save him. Huh, fool. Sweet dreaming fool
.”
She turned to look at me and her eyes were struggling to focus, but she battled on. “It was for the good of the farm, for you, for all of us.”

“And Julia, Grandma? What about her?”

“Oh—” she waved a hand “—she never counted.”

In 1968, my aunt cut her hair and wore it in a bob that curled underneath her ears. She took to wearing the latest fashion, like miniskirts, paisley prints and slim-fit pants. She would totter around the farm looking completely out of place as her son lagged behind her. She spent her days poring over magazines, shopping, driving into town to look at more shops and planning her next expedition. She hung around her father’s kitchen while Piper fed and played with her son and she would stare out the window, absorbed in her own mind.

It was around this time that she and Jess began to really argue.

She would burst into my grandparents’ home in the early hours of the morning clutching Cal Jr.—who was half-asleep on her shoulder—her hair askew, crying or raging or both, at the ineptitude of her husband. No one ever knew what the arguments were really about; Julia was never clear. Instead she would list a damning indictment of Jess and all his faults, starting with his ridiculous pipe dreams about being a musician. My grandmother noted with inner satisfaction that the very trait that had allured her to Jess, had now become one of his worst faults. Life is hard, isn’t it, Julia? she thought.

In the end Jess would always come for her and there would be tears and recriminations but they would eventually reconcile. My grandfather scratched his head, unable to understand. “Why doesn’t she just leave him?” he’d ask his wife and sister. “She knows we’d take care of her and the baby. She knows it. She don’t need him.”

“She loves him, Cal,” Piper would soothe, but Lavinia knew better. For once she could empathize with Julia; she knew why the girl brought these middle-of-the-night dramas into their home, why she stared out of windows, why she took to wearing daring hemlines and outrageous clothes.

“Oh, I knew, I knew what was really going on inside of her, but even I could not have seen where she would let it take her. Always surpassing expectations, that girl.”

But she did not share these thoughts; she knew they would neither be welcomed nor listened to. But, to put it this way, whenever my grandmother went to Julia’s redbrick house from then on, she would always inspect the kitchen windows for knife marks.

This part…well, this part is vague. I guess no one in my family really wanted to talk about it that much. It was seen for a long time as an embarrassing stain on a history that was already patchy. But due to the prosperity of the farm and its reputation, people were willing to, if not forgive, at least gloss over the murkier parts. So I will try to remember what I can and to make sure it is accurate, but even my grandmother was reluctant to speak of the finer details, unlike anything else before or since. I doubt it was out of any sense of propriety toward Julia, but rather because of what it did to my grandfather: something not even she expected, or could ever fully overcome.

Julia was twenty-five when it started. And though her name was mired with shame and disgrace all the years I grew up, I cannot help but pity her. Where was I at twenty-five? I was living in Italy in a rented apartment in Umbria that I shared with two English girls and a German boy. I was studying sculpture at the International School of Art; driving around the winding cobbled roads on my moped; eating in small cafés and for the first time in a long time, I felt my life was one long route of unencumbered possibility, at least in the daytime. At night, well that was a different story. I may not have been completely happy, but for all intents and purposes I was free. Julia did not even have that.

At twenty-five Julia had a three-year-old son and six–year-old marriage with a man she had probably never loved and had never really tried to. She woke up on the farm, she went to bed on the farm. She played the roles of wife and mother and knew that this was all there was for the next twenty-five years and the next lot after that. Though she tried, she could feel her life slipping away from her—the promise, the dreams all bursting in midair and settling down on her as an aging farm wife. This was never what she had had in mind.

So she became restless. And the town she was raised in, the one I was born in, was never one for the restless. It was a place for those who either wished to settle, or needed some safe stopover until they could leave. And she could not leave, but neither did she wish to settle. Boredom is a dangerous thing.

She began looking for other ways to overcome the ennui. It wasn’t to be found at home, so she found it elsewhere. She was still good friends with Betsy, who had dropped out of Iowa State College and had been working in a clothes store one town over ever since. Betsy was single and she and Julia would go out on the weekends with her friends from the store to bars for some girl time. Jess did not stop her: perhaps he knew better by then, than to get in the way of Julia’s wishes. But that was how it started, innocent drinks in bars on weekends so that she didn’t want to scratch her eyes out.

No one knows when she found the first one. No one ever asked, but pretty soon she began to step out on her husband. At first with random men out of town, but then it crawled closer to home. They used to throw parties with some of Betsy’s friends, and of course Julia would go. Though no one would ever tell me exactly, from the half-whispered things I overheard over the years, the things she did during that time were not considered to be…well, anything that my family had encountered before. She moved with the times and she didn’t care where it took her. By all accounts, she was more than happy with any kind of experimentation, just so long as it was fun, just so long as it didn’t have anything to do with being a wife or a mother. She wanted to feel like a girl again—free, unencumbered. She was lying to herself, but as she’d spent most of her life lying to others, it was only a matter of time before she, too, fell under her own spell.

So like a secret drinker, my aunt was, initially, very good at keeping her secret life hidden from all fear of rebuke or discovery. She was very careful for a long time, but her ability to fool those around her only enhanced her arrogant belief that she was untouchable. She had gotten away with so much in life and this, she felt, was the last straw. If she could do this, she could do anything. She started to believe in her invincibility.

It’s not that hard to see why. At the age of three she had survived a car accident that had decapitated her mother; she had stolen from her father and run away from home to find she could return as the prodigal child. She did things that no one would ever suspect her of even knowing, let alone living, and she did them without suffering once in consequence of her actions. She was charmed.

And then one evening, my grandmother went to the home of Mrs. Healy. A card party had been planned and she came over bearing a tray of homemade macaroons and settled herself in the Healys’ large pistachio-colored kitchen as she helped her friend set up. The Healys were having repairs done to their roof and the workmen were directly outside the window. Mrs. Healy went into their lounge to arrange the bridge table while my grandmother made a pitcher of iced tea.

What happened next she believed was divine providence.

The men were mumbling together outside on the veranda. At first she barely listened, but as their talk grew coarser she couldn’t help but overhear what they were saying. They were talking as men do, about a woman they had slept with. In disgust my grandmother realized they had taken turns with her one after the other, even at the same time, and they were discussing her and her performance under hushed tones, crude jokes and abstract hand gestures and winks. Even though they were talking quietly, in the silence of the kitchen, where the only sound was the pouring of iced tea into a large glass jug, their voices carried. She winced as they delved into particulars and then she caught something she was not expecting. What they said next she would repeat to my grandfather word for word, though she hardened her features when she did so. Some have said that it was too much, that there was no need for her to tell him the truth so vividly, but I think she did it because any loophole she provided, Cal would have clung to like a man drowning. And so the phrase those men threw out about my aunt has come down through the generations to mine, still intact, as an epigram of both shame and betrayal.

They laughed at their own joke. Their hoarse chuckles drifted through the kitchen, refracting off of Mrs. Healy’s pristine surfaces.

For years after, people would ask why. My father, even my uncle: people did not understand. Was she influenced? Was she coerced? Did they force her into it—but that couldn’t work because she went to those parties and bars time and time again and lied so smoothly before and after about it that no one could be in any doubt that she was in control.

So why? Why risk everything? Why do those things and have them done to her? Boredom couldn’t be it surely, no one could do that just because they were bored. This was her home, had always been. How could she turn against it so?

Why?

As my grandmother answered, “Why not?”

Though she saw before her what she would do, she could not help but feel wary. She would not relish this task; there was no way of accomplishing it without clearly showing the dirt on her hands. It would be a pyrrhic victory but a victory nonetheless and this spurred her on. Daring: you couldn’t beat Lavinia Hathaway for that.

So she observed her stepdaughter closely. She would document later the times she went out with Betsy Turner, when she came home and where she said she would be. She began to gather things together. She even hired a private detective, but first she took the name from Mrs. Healy of the repairmen she had employed.

“They did such a good job on your roof,” she had said.

“You think?” Mrs. Healy turned around and observed her roof plates. “If you say so.”

Looking back, there were signs, but no one saw them. My grandparents and great-aunt didn’t have a clue about things like that back then and my uncle was a solitary recluse so would not have cared even if he had realized what was happening, while my father had a more pressing concern on his mind than noticing the despondency of his sister: the draft.

He was eighteen and while he had been accepted into Iowa State College, my father had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Ostensibly he was going to college to study history, but this was met with little fanfare in his family. What was he going to do with a history major? they asked him. How was that going to help him on the farm? Because there was never any doubt in their minds, nor really in his, that he wasn’t going to end up right back on Aurelia. He had never thought of a future outside of it, but that didn’t mean he wanted his whole life to have been centered on it.

The time was approaching for when he had to register for the draft, and he thought about it often. Ethan was no longer a serious contender after the injuries he had inflicted on himself the night he proposed to Allie Lomax. For the rest of his life my uncle would be plagued by pains in his bones whenever there was rain and his left leg was forever held together by a metal rod. Besides, he did not share my father’s hankering to pursue a life outside of Aurelia, even if it were only temporary. He had tried a dream once and it had failed him, so he did not dream anymore.

But my father did, and what he longed for was adventure, experience, all the things you want when you’re eighteen and on the brink of finding the world. Did he know about the Quaker who had burned himself in protest of the war, or the march of five thousand people in Illinois led by Martin Luther King Jr., or Muhammad Ali’s conscientious objection? Sure he did, but that was miles away. My father would describe growing up on the farm as sometimes feeling as if you were part of a different country. He knew these things occurred elsewhere but they did not immediately affect him here. The newspapers reported them dutifully and the TV showed the same pictures across the country, but in the streets, on the farms, in the community, the events of the day were muted. So, yes, he did know all these things, but did he feel it? No, he did not.

What he felt was that somehow his home had changed. His brother had never been the same since Allie, and his sister was always so unhappy, so vicious in her boredom, and he saw his father’s worry and his mother’s unnervingly quiet observation of them all, and this made him want to leave even more. In vain, perhaps he thought that it would eventually go back to how it used to be given time, and that he could seek a life elsewhere until it did. But my father was never one for spontaneity. He did not have the willful spirit of his sister or the purpose, however misguided, of his brother. He was a follower, my dad—a good man, but a follower nonetheless.