The Sabbathday River (33 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Maybe he's lying,” Naomi considered. “Maybe he hasn't told his boss what he's got planned.”
“Maybe he has,” Judith shot back. “Maybe the whole world's crazy. Except us.”
“Oh God,” Naomi said, shaking her head. “Poor Heather.”
“Poor
Heather
.” Someone spoke from the doorway. They both looked up.
Ann Chase surveyed them with raw contempt, swung on her heavy heel, and flounced back to the circle beyond. Her rug in progress, a blue kitten in burlap, flounced behind.
Naomi and Judith looked at her, then at each other. Naomi felt anger surge inside her, and she welcomed it. It felt powerful to have an object for her hatred, almost deliriously sweet. She got to her feet.
“What are you going to do?” said Judith.
“Something I've been dying to do for ages,” Naomi said, leaving the room. She walked back into the workroom and up to the circle. Janelle Hodge's chair was directly before her, and she saw over Janelle's shoulder a crib quilt in pink and blue—a customer preparing for any eventuality. Next to her, Mary Sully was making a charmless quilt, for her sister, Naomi knew. Mary's talents were clerical, and it was just as well she'd never offered her needlework services to the collective. Ina was there, and Sarah Copley, and all the others—her most inner circle.
Good
, Naomi thought.
I want everyone to see
.
She walked around the ring and laid a hand on Ann's shoulder. Ann studiously did not look up.
“Ann,” said Naomi, “you've got something to say?”
Ann yanked at the wool in her lap, ignoring her.
“I feel you do,” Naomi said again, her voice a little harder, “have something to say. I'd like to hear it.”
“You don't want to hear what I've got to say,” said Ann, her head down. “You don't want to think about what that girl did. You're too busy caring about her
rights
!”
“I do care about her rights,” Naomi said. “Her rights are the same as my rights. And yours.”
“Oh no.” Ann shook her head, looking up for the first time. “No, thank you. I don't need the right to go root around with somebody else's husband in a car, or have kids with him while his own wife is right there. I don't need the right to throw babies in ponds or kill them with knitting needles. You just go and take away that right. I can live without it.”
“Heather didn't kill either of those babies, and you all know it.”
Ann gave her a slow, sour smile. “Fine. You think that?
Fine
. Now leave me alone. I have my own opinion.”
Carefully Naomi stepped into the circle. She faced Ann Chase and looked down at her, stiff hair the color of straw, her face hardened but unwrinkled, also the color of straw. It struck her that she had never, until this moment, recognized Ann Chase for what she was, or at least what she represented to Naomi. This face and this set of brutal features were the ones she had been trained to recognize and isolate and convert with love and holy nonviolence. Naomi knew she was supposed to respect this woman. She was supposed to show courtesy and regard for her opinions, all the while demonstrating the quiet dignity of her own,
correct, philosophy. She remembered how Mickey Schwerner had consoled his murderers before they tore him apart—“Sir, I know just how you feel.” But Naomi found, to her astonishment, that she wasn't that kind of person anymore. The truth was that she had always hated Ann.
“I'm glad she's in jail,” Ann said contemptuously. “I hope she stays there.”
“You're fired,” Naomi said.
All the women seemed to jerk at once. Only Naomi, who had known what she was going to say, was still.
Sarah twisted around to look at Ann. Ann was staring. “Excuse me?” Her rough voice rose in outrage.
“I'm sorry,” Naomi said, glaring. “I'll speak more clearly. You. Are. Fired.”
Ann seemed glazed but livid. After a moment, she found her voice. “Who says?”
“What, you don't know who I am suddenly? I'm the person who brings you commissions and sells your work and gives you the money. But not anymore. You're out.”
“And you're the boss lady!”
“This building is my property.” Naomi sounded calm. “If you trespass on my property, I will file charges against you. Go on,” she said, freshly angry. “Get up. Get out.”
“I don't believe this.”
“You were always a bitch, Ann. But there's no law that says we have to like each other. And, believe me, I'm not telling you you can't have your own opinion. You can, of course, even if it's asinine. But I won't have this kind of viciousness against a co-worker.”
Ann got to her feet. “I thought this was a collective! I thought nobody was the boss!”
“In ideal circumstances, maybe. These aren't ideal circumstances.” She didn't want to hear exactly what she was saying, it occurred to her suddenly. If she didn't pay too close attention now, she couldn't reproach herself later.
“If that isn't the most hypocritical—”
“And anyone else,” Naomi cut her off. She turned to look at the rapt faces ringing her. “If you want to leave, if you think I'm being unfair, or punishing Ann for how she feels about Heather, if you want to walk
out to show solidarity with her, if you want to go on strike or just stop working—
fine.
You can do that. Or you can tell me how you feel and I'll listen. Or you can think what I think, that Ann was very cruel and very unpleasant and her presence here made it difficult to be around her, so it's fine that she's gone. You all know I've never done this before. I've never felt it was necessary. But it's necessary now.” She looked back at Ann, who still stood, her kitten rug at her side. There was something electric in that blue, Naomi thought, peering at it. She wondered if Ann had been sneaking in acrylic fabrics. This idea made her even more furious. “So that's it.” She looked at Ann. “Get out. I'm not going to ask you again. You leave now or I call the police.”
“The police!” Ann protested. “You're insane.”
Quite possibly, Naomi thought. She knew how this would fly around Goddard.
“You know,” Ann said, stopping to yank up her big bag of wool, “I always thought it was strange you found both those babies. How'd you know where to find them, anyway? It seems to me you
knew
where they were!”
“Meaning what?” Naomi yelled. “Oh, never mind, just get lost.”
But she stood for another moment, looking around the ring of frozen faces. No one else had gotten up.
“Well?”
Ann demanded after a moment. Then she turned to her right. “
Sarah?
”
“What is this, high school?” Naomi shouted. “If you get cut from the team everyone else has to quit, too?”
“Let me think,” Sarah Copley said. “I'll call you tonight.”
“You
better
call.” She knocked her chair aside. “Well, I'll be glad not to have to see
you
every day,” she sneered at Naomi. Then she noticed Judith, who was in the doorway and had been watching. She stopped, and shook her head. “Your kind really sticks together, doesn't it?”
From across the room, they all heard Judith mutter:
Jesus Christ
.
“What would
you
know about Jesus Christ!” Ann yelled. She crossed the room with short strides, pushing past Judith. Then she stopped. “You get her off,” Ann said, nodding. “You do that. You make her out like some poor victim. Don't think about what she
did
.”
“I think about it,” Judith said, her voice even.
Ann was gone. The slam of the door woke Polly, who cried immediately. Naomi lifted her and put her own face against Polly's cheek, swaying and hugging the little girl. She was crying, too, she felt now.
Judith came up behind her and put her arm over Naomi's shoulder. They stood like that for a while, in the numb silence. She felt Judith kiss her, and smiled. Then she heard Judith speak, though her voice was soft. “It's all right,” she said. “We'll sort this out.”
But it wasn't, and they wouldn't, and both of them knew it.
Mud Season
A Polish midwife was assisting at my birth.
And I gave birth to a beautiful girl.
There on the stones. In my own filth.
No soap. No cotton wool. Without hot water.
 
I went to my cot. No mattress, just a cover.
And in the morning, Mengele.
My breasts were bandaged up:
to see how long a new-born lives
 
deprived of food. I had no choice.
Each day I chewed my bread
and wrapped it in a scrap of cloth
I soaked in soup. A peasant dummy.
 
With this I fed my child. My God.
The child lost weight
and every day came Mengele.
Soon she had no strength to cry.
 
She only whimpered, and my milk got up.
I couldn't give her anything.
Except, about the sixth or seventh day,
the syringe of morphium.
 
Cut slanted like a quill.
And warm from Matza Steinberg's hand.
I can understand ghosts.
How they have to come back.
 
What it costs to return
through the bricks of a house.
Eyes tight shut.
Weeping, broken skin.
—Craig Raine, “Sheol”
The Farthest Edge of the Diaspora
IN MUD SEASON NAOMI NEVER FELT COMPLETELY clean. The dank communal depression from first melt to the first bud on the first deciduous tree was a foil to the New England calendar, an annual humbling for a region unused to ugliness, if not downright spoiled by beauty. It was, Naomi felt, like a yearly rewind of seasonal change, a necessary pause before the familiar, spectacular film could start again with its usual sweet variety of warmth and cold and color and starkness: lush summer, inexpressibly lovely autumn, then winter—chill, pure, and white. This mud season, like each one before it, the steep drive down to her house got boggy, but this year she was terrified of skidding down the hill with Polly in the car. She took to parking her car up at the top and ferrying down her loads—groceries, work, baby—cursing Daniel every soggy step of the way. She forgot what it was to trust the ground, to believe in its faculty for holding her up. Water rose underfoot, summoned, it seemed, from the very depths of the earth to pull her back, or at least to cake her boots with dirt and soak the cuffs of her jeans. The sky was unchanging gray, only pausing
in its somber monochrome to spill rain now and then. This time of year, it seemed to her, the people who actually lived in New Hampshire were too much left to themselves: devoid of distractions, mired in muck, bitter at winter taking so long to clean up after itself. Left to themselves, with too much mud underfoot and too intense an urge to sling it elsewhere.
By now, Heather's self-proclaimed lovers were legion, a happy chorus spouting salacious praise of her charms. There was almost, Naomi thought, a kind of cads' agreement that
everyone
had slept with her. Confident looks and offhand shrugs were engaged whenever men were present and the topic of Heather and her dead babies arose.
What could you expect, a girl like that who didn't even care who she did it with?
Naomi heard that Heather had a virtual boudoir in the utility closet in the high school's north annex. She heard Heather had fucked Ashley and other men at the sports center, in the staff bathroom, which could be locked from the inside. She heard Polly was not Heather's first child, and that Heather had given three or four of the guys on the basketball team VD. People seemed to take it upon themselves to tell Naomi these things, and with a spirit of almost sympathetic neighborliness, as if she alone was not aware of what Heather had been up to and could therefore be forgiven her bizarre support for the girl. At first, Naomi had taken a shot at a few of these kindly messengers, challenging them for dates and locales, for any shard of proof. Was So-and-so, Heather's newest self-proclaimed swain, planning to testify about their wanton past at the coming trial? Well, no. None of them would get up in court and say openly what they were saying over at Woodstock's, and no one else seemed to think there was any call for them to do so. On the contrary, there seemed to be some kind of tacit agreement that the dates and settings of these carnal events were not relevant to Heather's infamy. It had all happened
before
.
Amazingly enough, for a girl with such ravenous appetites, no one could recall having sex with her lately. Say, after last January or so. Heather's mysterious second lover, the theoretical father of the theoretical twin Ashley had not fathered, remained elusive.
This did not deter Goddard from embracing with great gusto the theory of the second lover, which had the benefit of attributing an even higher concentration of baseness to the woman awaiting trial in Peytonville, and lessened the already minimal portion of blame assigned to
Ashley. He'd been duped by her, too, the theory went. More, perhaps, than anyone else. To cheat on a lover who was cheating on his wife! The fugitive second lover was Ashley's entree into the fellowship of the betrayed, and Naomi watched with horror as he took up his role. She began to not call him when she needed his help. She began to despise him.
People who had never talked to Naomi before went on not talking to her. That didn't matter. People whose nodding acquaintance had always sustained her fantasy that she was in fact a member of this community went on nodding, but curtly. That didn't matter, either. Ann Chase's bitter departure from Flourish swept two or three of the lesser rug hookers out on her coattails, but Sarah Copley had hung on, and more—she had her mother hooking now, from a nursing home up near Warren, and the mother's roommate had started a schoolhouse quilt just to see if she could still do it after all these years. (Nursing homes! Naomi thought, shaking her head. That she hadn't thought of it herself made her a little cranky.) So Flourish flourished even as Goddard hardened its heart against her.
None of it mattered. For the first time in years, Naomi had a real friend. She had forgotten what it felt like, to pick up the phone and hear not some formal query but only a gruff “Hey, it's me.” She had forgotten the stopping by, and the hanging out, and what it was like to stay up late to gab over nothing laced with humor. She had forgotten the rhythm of falling in with another person's routine, and of another person knowing what she herself was doing at eight in the morning, or noon, or seven at night, and not having to catch up with the news of a husband's new thesis topic or a kid's triumphant school report before having to offer the lame excuse for oneself—
What am I up to? Not much.—
because it never exactly seemed newsworthy, your own life, especially when compared to the news bulletins from the other end of the phone. But Judith knew. She admired Naomi for the small and everyday events that were her occupation in these muddy, suspended months between Heather's arrest and her trial. She was the only person Naomi could crow to over Polly's new word, or complain to about Ann Chase's brutal small-mindedness.
And she helped Naomi recover the dialect of sarcasm, a language that had atrophied from lack of use. It amazed her how pleasurable it was to speak this way. It made her remember nights in college, in
crowded rooms lubricated by marijuana and noisy with students who couldn't quite pronounce the names of their great-grandparents'
shtetl
(“I'm pretty sure it was called Anatevka,” one pathetic girl had actually said) but thought it was somewhere in Russia, or where Lithuania used to be, or was it Latvia? She remembered a guy one of their housemates had brought home their senior year, a political scientist with a beard, mustache, and shag of hair that all seemed to merge over his head. “There's a town named after my family back in Poland somewhere,” he told them over vegetarian chili. “I think it might have been the other way around,” Naomi had responded. Chattering their language of
Men are meshugenneh
and
What, this surprises you?—this
was the dream of a common language, Naomi thought now, because it was dreamy, like speaking in tongues must be. Their pitch had taken generations of a conjoint heritage to perfect, and yet she had lost it willingly over this past decade, or at least without putting up a fight, and only now did she feel the cost of that, as she felt the intense gratification of hearing herself think and think aloud. One afternoon, she had stood with Judith behind a woman at a pay phone in Peytonville, waiting for their turn so that Judith could call her office, and the woman, despite glances back at them, had gone on and on to her invisible interlocutor, about nothing—television programs, a friend's bad taste in carpeting—before at last turning to look at them and asking, with deep insincerity, “Oh. Are you waiting for the telephone?” Judith and Naomi had looked at each other and rolled their eyes in unison, then spoke in a single caustic voice. “No. We're just standing here.”
Her admiration for Judith was unqualified. It amazed her that one woman could do so many things and be gifted in so many individual ways. Judith was fierce in her role as Heather's advocate, thoroughly cool even as she ran a frenzied circle around this sluggish, lackluster girl, and as she dealt cordially, tactically with Charter, whom she despised. She could rage at will, then pull herself up to perfect pitch for the strategy at hand: fluid, brutal, transmutable. At the same time, Judith was serene—in her off-kilter beauty, the close eyes and high, rounded nose, the widely placed hips that, alone, took her out of single-digit skirt sizes. She was serene in her willingness to be still, without entertainment, and in her willingness to age—once, that is, the requisite attention had been drawn to a new wrinkle or a suddenly gray lock woven into her curls. She could cook, too. Naomi, who was not a very accomplished
cook, who viewed cooking as something like a laboratory experiment, loved to watch Judith chop things and fling them into tians and casseroles. She kept two great copper pots on the stove, threw chicken carcasses and vegetable ends into one for stock, and the shells of shrimp into the other for risotto. She read cookbooks for pleasure and kept a stack in the downstairs bathroom (this never failed to amuse Naomi), but she never used them for actual cooking.
They fell into routines: Friday nights at Judith's, where Naomi brought her week of laundry (to her shame, she had soon abandoned cotton for disposable diapers, but Polly still produced an imponderable volume of dirty clothes) to wash while they ate, and Mondays at Naomi's, just the women, a six-pack of Rolling Rock, and pizza brought over after work from Peytonville. Even after all these months, she had not quite gotten over her relief at Judith's appearance in Goddard, or Judith's nonchalance at being here, as if it were the most normal, inconsequential thing imaginable for two women like themselves to be settled where they were—up here, at the farthest edge of the Diaspora, and in these craggy, inhospitable hills.
So wide were the vistas of their conversation that Naomi learned not to begrudge those few things that seemed never to come up between them, the things she could not seem to get herself to pry about. She wondered, for example, why Judith, who had said after all that she wanted to have children, had not told Naomi that she was pregnant, or that she was trying to be pregnant, or that she was trying but could not seem to succeed in being pregnant. She wondered why Judith, for all her emphasis on the necessity of having children, did not ever extend herself to Polly, was not warm with Polly, nor even very interested in Polly, and touched her only stiffly when she had to touch her at all. Joel, too, seemed not to notice Polly, nor did he talk about having a family. Maybe it was a disagreement between them, Naomi theorized, but Joel, like Judith, apparently had nieces and nephews whom he loved and whose photographs he kept pinned to the bulletin board in his office. Of Judith's own nephew, the one who was sick, Naomi heard nothing, and only once asked, when Judith phoned to say she had to cancel their Friday night because she was going to Providence.
Your nephew.
Naomi made it offhand, like an observation, but with a smack of concern.
He's still sick?
He was still sick, Judith had said, and before Naomi could stop herself,
and because she wanted to know, and it seemed so odd to her that she didn't know, asked what was wrong with him.
You've never heard of it,
Judith said.
But if Judith and Naomi talked of everything—or nearly everything —Heather remained intractably uncommunicative with her lawyer. Even as the time for her trial came near, Heather said little about what was ahead, and nothing at all about her baby. She dug into her silence. She fell over it as over some object she had elected to guard with even her life. It was as if, Judith sometimes told Naomi, bitter in her frustration, the girl had to be repeatedly reminded what this—this baffling incursion in her life, this brutal separation from Polly—was after all about.
Nor, to Judith's disbelief, would Heather agree that Ashley might at least be held to account for having left her so harshly, without accommodation for the child that already existed or the one to come. What had happened between them to make him leave her, Heather insisted, was first of all private to them, a matter of intimacy, even as their passion had been, but beyond that her own ultimate fault. Enraged, Judith tried to assault this claim, but Heather would not part with her rendering of a perfect Ashley brought low by her own imperfection. She dreaded the trial for
his
sake, she admitted to Naomi one day, and Naomi, to her own surprise, understood this immediately. Heather wept and withdrew in preemptive shame, unable to bear the thought of him up there, having to admit to the degradation of loving her as he had. She wanted to save him that. She could not understand why things were moving so steadily forward in the wrong direction, or why Judith couldn't stop them. She could not understand what she had to do with that other baby, the one from the river, or why Charter was insisting on making her its mother. She had enough to answer for with her own baby, Heather complained, but in a tone that did not imply she was thinking overly much about this, either. Above all, she could not understand this great disaster that had grown up around her, and ensnared her, and taken away her child, and laid terrible, intolerable crimes at her feet.

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