The Solace of Leaving Early (14 page)

Langston kept all the letters she’d written him in shoe boxes, in a darkened corner of the attic, and she knew that AnnaLee kept them, too, hidden in her closet, and Taos had really, really meant it when he stood up and walked out. Langston thought she’d learned something valuable from him that night, something permanent, but it turned out she knew almost nothing. She knew nothing.

She stood up from the merry-go-round. Germane was on the far side of the basketball court, pawing at a half-buried toy. Langston whistled once, and he turned and ran toward her so hard and fast that his tongue flew out the side of his mouth, like a banner waving out the window of a passing train.
Exuberance is beauty,
William Blake wrote. Langston knelt down and Germane ran into her arms, nearly sending her sprawling. After she’d straightened up and brushed some dry grass from his fur, she looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and said out loud, “All right,” and headed home.

*

The girls (she’d heard AnnaLee mention to Walt that they were currently refusing to be called by their names) spent a lot of time outside, and so Langston spent the next few days either watching them from her attic window, which looked right onto Beulah’s little side yard, or actually strolling around outside, trying to hear their conversation and play. In truth, she was terrified of them. She was afraid of any sort of damage: wounded animals, amputations, broken cups, torn book covers, missing buttons. And she knew from the whisperings around town that the girls were damaged, and were under the daily care of a therapist in Jonah. There had been talk of hospitalizing them—rejected by Beulah—or placing them in a foster home, also denied.

Their pattern was fairly settled: they emerged from the trailer at about nine o’clock every morning, always dressed in the gowns and hats. Langston couldn’t, at first, determine whether they were wearing shoes, but eventually saw little pink ballet slippers. They walked side by side, very close together, holding hands. Conversation between them was muted; Madeline, the elder, spoke almost continuously to Eloise, who listened intently, even while doing something else. They always went directly to the small, gnarled dogwood tree at the back edge of the property, where they knelt (carefully lifting their skirts, so as not to stain them) as if in prayer. And there they stayed, on their knees, often for half an hour or more, until something moved one of them and they began to converse with the trunk of the tree. (Langston
saw
this.) The longest conversation they had with the tree was about fifteen minutes; often, it only lasted a minute or so. After they had learned from the dogwood what they needed to know, they proceeded to the sandbox, where they removed their shoes, dusted off the wooden railing around the edge, sat down side by side, and began talking again. After a few minutes, Madeline would initiate a tea party, or so it seemed, with the plastic dishes in the sand. At some point they always removed their hats, either because they were hot, or because bending over to pour sand in a pitcher they hit each other repeatedly with the pointy tops. When they removed their hats their hair spilled out like cream, white-blond. Madeline’s was straight and shone like a mirror; Eloise’s hung in ringlets around her wider face. Langston never saw them disagree in any way; indeed, their level of cooperation was not adult, it was unnatural.

At ten o’clock they stood up (were they wearing watches? Langston began to wonder on the third day), brushed the sand from their clothes, and set off for their daily walk around the block: south to the dogwood tree, west down the alley, north on Scarborough, east on Plum. Daily Langston sat and waited for them to round the corner of Plum and Chimney again, and every day they satisfied her: always in the same light, always conferring on a point of interest vital to their lives.

At ten-thirty, the girls climbed into Beulah’s old green Buick and left for Jonah, where Langston assumed they met with their counselor. They sometimes didn’t return until one, leading her to believe that Beulah treated them to lunch somewhere. Langston’s heart lurched when they got home; she could hardly bear to watch Beulah try to leave her car. She had to spend at least thirty seconds just sitting with the door open, clutching the frame with one hand and the door handle with the other. Then she would swing one leg out (and from Langston’s vantage point that leg seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds, such an effort did moving it require, and yet Beulah was thin and getting thinner daily), and eventually the other. Finally she would gather the strength to pull herself out, and from there she seemed okay. The girls didn’t wait for her, nor did they watch her struggle. In fact, they left the car quickly, without looking back.

From one to three they remained in the trailer, where nothing stirred. (Do children eight and six still nap? she wondered. What did Beulah do with them for two hours every day—hours that were shortly to be Langston’s sole province—in such a silence?) At three, Amos Townsend came strolling down Plum Street. Langston did not know how to account for his walk, his height, or his presence. She had never before seen anyone like him. His black hair, cut short but still riotous, became snagged in branches every time he approached a tree; his Adam’s apple protruded; his broad shoulders only emphasized the dramatic length and thinness of his torso. And it would have been enough for him to have a long upper body, but he had to combine it with legs that seemed to belong on one of those collapsible toys, the sort Langston loved as a child. The figure (a dog, a pony, a minister) stands on a small box, all its joints connected by an elastic string. When pushed, a button retracts the string, and the figure collapses in a heap. Release the button, up pops the pony. Whatever was amusing in that concept was amusing in Mr. Townsend. Langston couldn’t help but smile at the way his stride covered whole sections of sidewalk, and how he seemed to be looking straight ahead, but walked into branches anyway. He dressed casually, and in a way that appealed to Langston (although it struck her as a bit hapless and frumpy, and not at all the way she would call on parishioners): a soft, blue work shirt, khaki pants, and soft leather shoes of the sort one might garden in.

Amos knocked on the door at precisely three every day (he undoubtedly had a watch), and stayed until five. Again, there was often no movement or indication of activity in the trailer. Once, however, he walked outside with the girls. They took him to the dogwood tree, and he very carefully bent over and inspected it. Madeline talked to him a few minutes, and he nodded all the while. From Langston’s vantage point the two of them appeared to be simply two adults conferring about a tree (about a fungus, for instance, or an injury), except that one was very tall and one was very short.

At five o’clock, AnnaLee crossed the street to Beulah’s, carrying either dinner or groceries. She would spend the next three hours cooking, cleaning, supervising the girls’ baths, and putting them to bed. Beginning the following week, she and Langston would divide the work: her mother would do all the cooking, cleaning, and organizing, and Langston would take care of the children directly. They would take turns driving them to their appointments in Jonah. This was to be Langston’s summer. In the fall, someone else would determine whether they were to go back to school, or if they’d need to spend a few more months at home, with a tutor. Langston hadn’t even met them yet, and she certainly hadn’t begun her life of servitude, but already she was too tired to write. At night, climbing into bed with Frithjof Schuon’s
The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
she often fell asleep without opening the cover. She had no idea what that book was about.

*

From the start, even from the distance of her attic window, Madeline and Eloise made Langston grievously uncomfortable. She couldn’t say why. They were so quiet and civilized, nothing at all like the children one encountered elsewhere. Langston supposed she was bothered by the obvious: the girls harbored a tremendous sense of loss; their behavior was spooky; they knew something she didn’t know, i.e., orphanhood—assuming Jack was gone, which he must have been—but there was something else, too.

She began walking Germane only during the hours the girls spent in the trailer, and during those walks Langston recalled the strangest things. She remembered Alice’s hair, just a flash of brightness in the summer sun, as she rode her bicycle down the street, and the way they once tasted a mud pie at the same time. Alice had thrown up, Langston had not. Alice loved
7
Up and corn chips, and could read by the time they started first grade, but pretended she couldn’t. She was always the third person to turn in her test paper, even if she had been the first to finish. There had been no one between them in the alphabet, Baker and Braverman, just one other
B,
Scottie Bryant, and so they often ended up beside each other in line.

And the way Madeline and Eloise held hands, for instance, or touched during tea parties, reminded Langston of swimming with Taos in a pond at the edge of town. They went there most summer days for years, or at least she thought they did, but she’d forgotten about it. How could she have forgotten? She hadn’t been afraid of anything then, or at least not much. Sometimes they floated on inner tubes, sometimes they swung out over the deep middle of the pond on a rope, letting go right at the highest point. Taos loved to dive toward the bottom and scare her; he loved to float on his back; he loved to race from one side to the other. Langston never won. There was a particular silence under the water, a periodic echo she could feel more than hear, and the occasional boom—from what? And she could recall the way sunlight barely penetrated the murky water; under the branches of the tree on which the rope hung, the sunlight shafted down in stripes. There was scarcely enough light for them to see each other, even when they were just beneath the surface.

But what she recalled most of all was floating along, minding her own business, and suddenly feeling Taos grab her ankle, horrifying her. Sometimes he would touch her and then swim away underwater, and she would turn and turn, looking for some sign, some disturbance, that might indicate where he was and what he was about to do. Often he came up where she hadn’t expected, far away and in the opposite direction from the one she was looking in.

And sometimes he just touched her as they swam. He held her hand, or they did somersaults around each other, and he hoisted her up on his shoulders so she could dive. Even when they were quite young he was strong enough to lift her, and she never feared for her safety when they were together. He could swim and swim forever, as long and as deep as necessary.

On Saturday Langston asked her mother if anyone ever swam in that pond anymore, and AnnaLee said sometimes, and then Langston regretted asking. For many nights she had dreams she didn’t dare consider during the day: the rope, the slats of light, the echo, something waiting patiently in the blackness at the bottom of the pond. Frantically turning, watching for some sign on the surface,
get out of the water
. She tried and tried, she gave it everything she had, but she was always much too late. They were just dreams.

Chapter 13

THE GOVERNESS

On Monday morning Amos realized he hadn’t checked on the Waltzes for a week. Slim was home from the hospital, following a light stroke, and Etta was caring for him alone, both of their children having moved out of the state. Amos knew he should have stayed in contact, probably should have, in fact, spent the first day or so out of the hospital with them, but he couldn’t keep track of everyone. He headed into the kitchen, trying to remember their phone number.
5232
?
5523
? There were fives, and numbers that added up to five, he was certain of—

“Yes?” The voice that answered was not Etta.

“I’m—hello—I’m sorry. I’m trying to reach Etta Waltz.”

“You most assuredly have the wrong number.”

“Is this
5223
, or—what number have I reached?”

“In general I consider that a rude question, but I’ll answer it this time. You’ve reached
5352
.”

“Oh! I called Walt and AnnaLee! Is this, then, am I talking to Langston?”

“Yes, and who’s this?”

“Langston, sorry, it’s Amos Townsend. I was trying to reach Etta, to ask about Slim.”

“Ah, yes. Small-town names. Slim Waltz: a fat man performing a slight dance.”

Amos froze a moment. “Slim isn’t actually overweight, Langston. Calling a person by a nickname intended to designate the opposite characteristic is linguistically Southern, I think. He’s called Slim because his younger brother couldn’t pronounce his real name.”

“Which is what?”

“Something with an
S.
Maybe I don’t actually know.” Why was Amos talking so much? “And anyway, I thought you never spoke on the telephone.”

“I don’t, as a rule. But just now something thoughtless and Pavlovian overcame me. I’m the only one home; I was crossing in front of the telephone; it rang; and I picked it up.”

“Is there a reason you don’t use a telephone?”

“Well, yes,” Amos heard Langston hesitate just slightly, “there is, in fact. I have a recurring bad dream about telephones.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Someone is in trouble, someone I love. For instance, I’ll dream my mother is in danger, and our only hope is for me to call an ambulance, and I pick up the phone—this is what happens in every dream, with some variation—and I begin to dial the number, which is long, twenty-three or twenty-four digits, and I get the last number wrong and have to begin again, and as I’m misdialing, the person is growing more ill or the house is burning or I’m missing the last opportunity I’ll ever have to reconcile with—”

“To reconcile with?”

“My only point is that I have obsessive thoughts, like anyone else, and I see no reason to encourage them if I don’t have to.”

“You have obsessive thoughts? Like what?”

“Like anyone else’s, I’m sorry, is this news? As I’m falling asleep, or as I’m walking, or just . . . I’ll see myself repeatedly turning cartwheels, for instance, in a wide, empty field. Or I hear a voice say, ‘Tell the court what happened next.’ I
despise
that one. Just the most standard thing.”

“Hmmm.” Amos rubbed his chin, trying to imagine a connection between the dreams and the cartwheels and the voice of the judge or attorney. “And would you say that—”

“Oh,” Langston said, the tone of her voice completely changed. “You’re quite good, aren’t you? You probably know a little something about everyone in this town, you probably know things about my family—”

“Langston, I didn’t intend to—”

“No, it was entirely my mistake. However, let’s do hang up, shall we? I believe the Waltzes’ phone number is listed.”

“Wait—Langston. Wait. You’re going to Beulah’s for the first time today, isn’t that right?”

“Yes?”

Amos could hear her try to hide her irritation at being kept on the phone, so he spoke quickly. “There are some things you ought to know about the girls. I’ve been with them over the past few days, and I think—”

“Thank you for your concern, but I’ll be fine. I’m simply taking on the role of a governess, which I imagine I can handle competently.”

A
governess
? “The situation is fairly complicated; perhaps you don’t appreciate the—”

“Pastor Townsend? I’ll be nannying. It isn’t rocket science.”

“It isn’t? Do you know anything about children?”

“Only that I was one, and that I consistently see them being reared by people of subsistence intelligence. It can’t be too difficult.”

Amos felt something he hadn’t experienced in a long time, maybe not since he and his brother were still at home in Ohio, fighting silently in their bedroom over a contraband comic book: the fluttery, sharp tingle of a lost temper. “Well. I’ll just wish you the best then.”

“And to you, as well. Shall I tell my mother you called?”

“No, no. I certainly didn’t mean to, did I?”

*

For the next fifteen minutes Amos could barely stay in his skin. He paced the length of the kitchen five or six times, then walked out onto the screened porch, slamming the door behind him. She was insufferable. She was a thousand times worse than AnnaLee had suggested, and Amos had thought AnnaLee was exaggerating. He thought there were mother-daughter issues that clouded Anna’s perception, that she was projecting some of her own fears onto Langston (because Amos knew the quality of AnnaLee’s mind, he knew she was also, to some extent, a castaway), but in fact, Anna wasn’t projecting, she was
protecting
Langston. She might have said, “My daughter cannot be tolerated.” She could have admitted, “There is something synchronistic in the convergence of Madeline and Eloise with Langston’s arrival home, but I would never expose innocent children to her.” Not just innocent children, but children in trouble,
Alice’s
children. And why hadn’t anyone told Amos about the quality of Langston’s voice, as smooth as honey and overenunciated, the sort of voice used by airlines to convince rioting passengers that the plane wasn’t really going down? Extraordinary. He slammed into the kitchen, began pacing again. What was Anna thinking? What was Amos thinking, allowing AnnaLee to make such a decision without Amos first, at the very least, interviewing Langston? And Beulah! Beulah had said yes right away, even though she’d known Langston for
years,
maybe her whole life.

That’s it,
he thought,
I’m just going to call the whole thing off.
I’ll find someone else.
One of those sweet, fat women who live at the edge of town and spend their days making crafts; the opposite sort of woman from Amos’s own mother, who had been thin and fastidious. Someone with a minivan and a permanent and lawn ornaments. A sweet, fat, sweatpants-and-sneakers sort of woman who will bake cookies for the girls and periodically pull them into suffocating hugs, pull them right up against her enormous breasts. Children pretend to hate that, but surely they need it, especially right now.
I’m going to
fire her,
he thought, and I’m going to hear her voice one more time,
and he picked up the telephone, dialing so fast and hard he missed the third number and had to start over.

But the phone at the Bravermans’ rang and rang. Langston wouldn’t answer twice.