The Solace of Leaving Early (20 page)

“What I want to know is this: does it work, not as a poem, but as a seductive argument? Raise your hand if you would say yes to a man or woman who’d spoken these words to you.”

And, oh Lord, what was Langston thinking? She wasn’t thinking at all; her defenses had been lowered by a number of factors, including a head cold, and before she knew it her hand shot in the air, and at the same moment, at the exact same moment she raised her hand, she realized that everyone else’s hands remained decidedly on their desks. Her fellow students grimaced, and all for different reasons, but Dr. Perrin threw his head back and laughed, even applauded a bit.

“Good for you,” he said, and with such happiness Langston had blushed scarlet. She didn’t look up from her book for the rest of the hour, and as they were preparing to leave, she heard Dr. Perrin say, “Miss Braverman, could you stay after class a moment?” Her fellow students traded knowing glances, and it was as simple as that. She was Next Year’s Girl.

*

“Next Year’s Girl?” Immaculata asked, having long ago given up the pretense of coloring. Epiphany had, at some point, crawled into Langston’s lap and was now leaning against Langston’s chest, sucking her thumb.

“It’s a figure of speech.”

*

There were things Langston didn’t want to say, details she preferred to omit: the dinners, the firelight, the smell of woodsmoke on his skin in the morning. He lived in the woods outside town in an angular, modern house; he drank martinis and collected African art and recordings of famous poets reading their work. He owned an album of Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas. There was a grown daughter in another state whom he never saw, the unfortunate product of his seduction of a
nun
. (Jacques had insisted they name the baby Dardenelle, but when he refused to marry the mother, refused, in fact, to live with her or love her or make any sort of commitment to the child, the fallen woman had taken the baby to her parents’ home in the Pacific Northwest and quietly renamed her Nancy.) He berated himself, he excoriated himself for his treatment of the woman and the child, but it was too late to fix it. He’d been young and foolish.

Langston didn’t want to tell Immaculata how Jacques had taken a sabbatical and she’d requested a leave of absence from the department and they’d spent an entire year traveling. A week in San Francisco, a week in Manhattan for an academic conference, three days in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. They were always back home by the end of the week, so that Jacques could work on his latest project, something about Donne and Paracelsus (alchemy, probably; everyone was doing alchemy that year). Walt and AnnaLee had no idea Langston had been gone.

She didn’t want to tell the child about what she called the Heraclitean Mobile that hung above Jacques’ bed: stars and fishes. The upward and downward way. Or how they had, most mornings, spent three or four hours at the breakfast table, drinking coffee and reading the
Times,
talking. Langston had told him everything.

*

“He was your boyfriend?” Immaculata asked.

“Yes, that’s one way to say it.”

*

In May, after they’d been together sixteen months, Jacques took her to the café, took her to her favorite table, and broke up with her. He’d come home from a conference in Chicago irritable and distant, so unlike himself, and there was nothing Langston could say or do, there was no way to get through to him, and within twenty-four hours she was standing in the room she’d kept in the graduate student dormitory, a room she hadn’t even visited in months, with everything she’d had at Jacques’ house, every shoe, every framed print of famous Italian operas, every book and bottle of shampoo. And she certainly couldn’t mention to Immaculata how she’d spent three days under sedation at the Student Health Center, carefully watched by a young psychiatric resident named Elise, or how Langston had followed Jacques all through the summer, calling his house every hour all night, how seriously she considered suicide when he began to be seen around town with a beautiful young colleague, newly arrived from Japan, named Song. Jacques never called the police or took any legal action, although he could have. He did something far worse, something more damaging and permanent: he told everyone in the department. He told them everything about her.

*

“He didn’t want to be your boyfriend anymore?”

“That’s right,” Langston said. Epiphany’s hands were covered with Magic Marker. Langston rubbed the side of her face.

“So what did you do? What happened next?”

Langston sighed. “I took an apartment at a place called the Greene Arms, and went to the pound and got Germane,” who lifted his head at the mention of his name. “And then I went back to school, and I tried, I did, I thought—well, I knew that there were far worse things than losing a lover, and so I just avoided him assiduously, I studied for my prelims and assembled a dissertation committee and completed my proposal, and then I showed up for my orals and he was sitting there with Song. They had recently married, and she was pregnant. In a black silk dress. He was giving me this paternal look—paternal, Immaculata? fatherly? like a priest?—and I could see that he was trying to say something to me, something about how he’d found me and saved me, he had, in some measure, made me what I was, and he had come because he was proud of me.”

“And?”

“And I only had two choices, and neither one was tenable. I could let him watch me fail, or even worse, he could see me succeed. I just walked out. I left.” Langston took a deep breath, swallowed, shifted Epiphany’s weight. “But enough about me. I want to ask
you
something. Why do the two of you wear these robes and hats every day?”

Immaculata looked up at Langston, and it all happened so fast. Her eyes got wide and she tried to take a deep breath, but no air seemed to pass her throat, and the same thing happened to Epiphany, whom Langston had thought was asleep. Whatever was happening to them was worse than the worst asthma attack Langston had ever witnessed (which had been on the subway in New York, a little Hispanic boy). The girls couldn’t breathe.

“Beulah!” Langston screamed, lifting Epiphany with one arm and wrapping the other around her sister. She somehow managed to carry them both to the couch, and by the time she’d gotten across the living room, Beulah was there with pills and inhalers, grim but calm. The rest was a blur; all Langston remembered later was Beulah working on Immaculata while Langston held the inhaler to her sister’s mouth; how Langston’s hands shook; how Epiphany tried to say the same thing over and over, a sentence that began, “We forgot to close the—” and how, every time she said it, Immaculata’s eyes rolled back in her head as if she were suffering a seizure.

“Please,”
Langston said, begging them to breathe. And then everything just stopped, the way a tornado is simply gone, and Beulah and Langston found themselves in a tangle of little girls, their faces streaked with tears, their bodies hot and trembling. “I don’t know what I did,” Langston said to Beulah, blinking back her own tears. “We were just talking, and I asked Immaculata why—”

Beulah put her hand on Langston’s arm. “It’s all right. None of this is your fault.”

The trailer door opened, and Amos Townsend walked in. It was three o’clock.

*

“I hold you entirely responsible for this,” he said, in a low voice which, nonetheless, conveyed the depth of his anger. They were standing face-to-face on the sidewalk outside Beulah’s trailer. The girls were asleep and Beulah had gone back to bed.

Langston was still shaking, and somehow her panic rose up through her body as rage. “Oh! Oh, is that right? And on what grounds, given that you don’t even know what happened? Or does your position as a pastor in Haddington, Indiana, grant you omniscience?”

For a moment he seemed tongue-tied, then was able to say, “What I
know
is that there are two little girls lying in bed nearly comatose, children who had been left in your care.”

“They’re going to be fine; Beulah said this has happened half a dozen times before, and while we’re on the subject of children left in incompetent care, why don’t you explain to me why you don’t believe they’re talking to the Virgin Mary?”

“Why I don’t, what are you—”

“Are you going to justify your skepticism with the Protestant Revolution, or have you consulted the patriarchy and gotten a thumbs-down?”

“Who in the
hell
—”

“Or are you threatened? Is your authority threatened? Are you afraid the housewives of Haddington might stop baking you cookies if they think the Queen of Heaven is speaking from a tree in Beulah’s yard?”

By this time they were standing only about six inches apart. Langston had inadvertently begun poking Amos in the chest with her index finger.

“You aren’t fit to take care of those children, and I’m going to talk to Beulah this afternoon about keeping you away from them,” he said, his voice shaking.

All the blood in Langston’s body seemed to hit her head in a rush. “If you,” she said through clenched teeth, “try to take those children away from me, listen to me, Amos. If you make a single gesture to keep me away from the girls, I will take them and run. I will
take them
and
drive away,
and you’ll never see them again.”

Amos shook his head, his hands on his hips, then turned to walk away. He’d gone only about three steps when he made some decision, she could see it travel up his spine, and he turned and strode back so fast Langston stepped backward, afraid.

“Everyone protects you, Langston,” he said, right in her face, “your mother, Beulah, Walt. They protect you the way they would a wounded animal. But I think they’re wrong, I think your shell of denial and self-protection, your amnesia, are all guarding what is essentially psychosis. Your mother told me you still don’t even know how Alice died, you still insist it was cancer or some disease, wait, don’t even think about walking away. Madeline and Eloise lying tranquilized in a storage room, those children you think will be fine? Their father, Jack, shot their mother, Alice, twice, no wait, wait, get this part: Alice was standing right in front of the children—her blood hit them in the face. And somewhere between Jack’s first and second shot, or maybe they fired at exactly the same moment, Robbie Ballenger isn’t sure and it doesn’t much matter now, anyway, Alice blew off the back of Jack’s head with her own gun, children still present, mind you, and after both bodies had fallen the girls had to run past their dead parents to reach the front yard, and hold on, what about this? Their shoes were soaked with blood, they had blood in their
hair,
when the police and the ambulance arrived they were standing in the front yard screaming, clinging to each other, they’d left bloody handprints all over each other’s clothes, and at DSS all they had to change into were those costumes they won’t take off because Alice made them.
Those,
” he spit at Langston, “those are the children you’re threatening to steal, the children who are going to be fine.”

Langston saw her own hands fly into the air, and then the sky, and then nothing. She fainted.

Chapter 19

THE TASTE OF NEW WINE

There was no question. He would resign, and he would do so tonight, after he finished this bottle of wine and felt capable of facing his own shame. And what would he say, in his letter to the district? He would say, “I am like an officer at Gettysburg; I have destroyed my own troops in the name of a lost cause.” During the past few weeks, minutes, sometimes whole hours, passed when he forgot he was responsible for Alice’s death (and for Jack’s—he mustn’t forget), so taken up was he with the lives he was trying to save. But every crime was returned to him tenfold in the moment he saw Langston begin to lose her balance, the way she blindly reached for him, but missed: reached for him! the man who had tried consciously to destroy her. And then, when he somehow managed to catch her before she hit the ground, and he felt in his hand the curve of her ribs, her narrow waist, he realized there was almost nothing to her. She had been, all this time, making her way through the world with just this slight . . .

He shook his head. It had felt like holding a bird. Amos’s thumb had gotten caught in a narrow strip of elastic in her bra, and then he had begun to pray, probably out loud,
Forgive me forgive me forgive me
. He recalled the famous photograph of a firefighter carrying a dead toddler out of the bombed Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and how Amos’s eye had been drawn not to the child’s burned skin or missing hair, but to the single article of clothing still recognizable on her body: a little white sock. Only an artist (this nearly made him laugh out loud, so gruesomely perfect an example it was of the problem of evil) could have imagined such a scene: the square-shouldered fireman, his face heroically impassive; the dead child; the viewer’s eye drawn, the mind pulled straight down into grief, not by the scene
in situ,
but by one little flash of white.

His whole life, Amos decided, had been a single, long war of attrition. His father and mother were gone, his brother was gone, the whole of the Mt. Moriah Christian Church: vanished. Alice and Jack were dead, the children could not, perhaps, be rescued, and Langston, although she was conscious, hadn’t moved since Amos carried her into her house, followed by a frantic Germane. It had been eight hours since he lay her on her bed in the attic, nearly undone by heartsickness, and she hadn’t moved. He called AnnaLee every hour until ten, when she said she’d call him if there was any change. She hadn’t called. Amos had asked: Does she have a doctor? No. Does she take any kind of medication? No, never, not under any circumstance. Is there a friend, a lover, someone from school, someone she grew up with? No, and no. No one.

And Beulah. Beulah was going; Amos had seen the signs. She had given Amos power of attorney, and named him the legal co-guardian of the children (with Langston, who didn’t know it) in the event of Beulah’s death. And she’d stopped checking on the girls’ aunt Gail, who was in a private, Catholic institution almost a hundred miles away. Gail was not her problem, Beulah said, shaking her head. The last time they spoke privately, Amos asked her what she thought had happened in those days the girls were alone with Gail, after Alice died, and Beulah had sighed, disgusted and weary.

“I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I think whatever Gail did to them started years ago, when they were going to church all the time and spending nights with her. But the girls could take it then, you know, because they were strong and normal and had a happy life. And then—” She stopped. Amos knew what she meant to say. It didn’t matter so much, what happened in those last days. Beulah and Amos were seeing the full flowering of seeds planted long ago.

“Do you know that each year during the Lenten season, Alice let Gail take them to Mass every day? They hadn’t even taken their first Communion! What was the point? They attended the first service of the morning, at six forty-five, and then Gail would take them on to school. And every year I’d say, ‘Alice, I think this is a mistake.’ And she’d give me that look of hers. She was an innocent, Alice was. Never thought for a moment that anyone might have motives less pure than her own.”

That was another way Amos knew he was losing Beulah, because she could talk about Alice so calmly, with such philosophical detachment.
She was here, and now she’s gone
. When he asked Beulah how she’d managed it, the first time Beulah brought up Alice’s name without tears, she’d said, “Well, I just realized I couldn’t have taken her with me where I’m going, anyway.”

And then, and Amos simply had to allow himself to enjoy the irony of this, Beulah had started asking, nearly every day, for someone named Sarah. No one seemed to know who Sarah was or what she meant to Beulah, but the name certainly meant something to Amos. Sarah had been the name of his first lover, all the way back when he was an undergraduate at Ohio State; they’d met their sophomore year in a history class. They were both virgins, and had figured it all out together, the whole mess, with a noisy, giddy, acrobatic joy.

Amos never thought of Sarah. He hadn’t remembered her for years, and he had come to believe, with a paranoid certainty, that Beulah resurrected Sarah on purpose, to remind him of something, to point out that the past isn’t dead (it isn’t even past, as Faulkner said). In the last two weeks Amos was able to remember Sarah in such vivid detail that he felt punished, all over again, for what happened, forgetting, naturally, his own dictum in pastoral counseling, anytime a congregant bemoaned mistakes or expressed deep regret: “It was just your life. You were just living your life.”

Sarah was short and curvy (she was overweight, really, but Amos didn’t mind a bit), big-breasted, with bouncy red hair (curly—wild—she could do nothing with it) and freckles. She was freckled everywhere. There was a gap between her two front teeth, and she was loud. She had a big laugh and she talked so fast sometimes Amos would begin to laugh regardless of what she was saying, and then she’d punch him in whatever part of his anatomy was closest to her, hard. She’d grown up in a big, sprawling, noisy Irish family in East Chicago, and had come to Ohio State because her father had graduated from there, and it was the only school he’d pay for. She was studying social work, but wasn’t ambitious; in fact, she never finished anything she started (but loved starting). Amos knew Sarah would never graduate, knew she was just biding her time until . . . what? He asked her repeatedly, but she’d learned early in life to change any subject, and so he’d let it go.

Maybe he had been confused about what they were doing, or maybe there had been a miscommunication, or maybe these were just the lies he perfected all those years ago, after they’d spent a thousand nights together in either his dorm room or hers (he thought of it that way: a thousand nights), after they’d fought and wrestled like puppies and learned how to be a man and a woman in the process. Sarah had taken the child out of Amos, he knew it even as it was happening, and raised him right up. She did it naturally and painlessly; she was gifted from all those years with siblings. It was love (what she felt for Amos, what she did for him), and he had allowed her to love him with the whole of her bounty, even though he didn’t love her in return and knew he never would. How could he have taken her into the future as his helpmate, a pudgy little woman with an industrial accent and no sense of decorum?

By the time Amos graduated and Sarah didn’t, he’d known he was going on to seminary, and when Sarah asked Amos what he thought she should do, he said, “I think you ought to go home for a while.” What had she thought he meant by that? he wondered now, twirling his wine glass in his fingers and looking out at his dark garden. He had meant: go home, think about it, then get on with your life. They’d helped each other pack, and he’d loaded her things into her father’s station wagon, and Sarah had sobbed, she’d wept with such abandon, Amos had never seen anything like it. He pitied her, but in a distant way (he was already a professional, really), and mostly he wanted her gone, so that he could go about his own business undistracted.

There were letters (he no longer remembered this part very clearly), and desperate, pleading phone calls—threats? did she threaten him, maybe?—over the summer, and Amos somehow held her off, kept her at bay. By the time he was installed in seminary, Sarah had nearly given up and Amos had nearly forgotten her. When her name did occur to him, then and over the years, he always felt the slightest shudder. They would have been entirely wrong for one another, as adults. They were both lucky it had ended when it did.

Amos poured himself another glass of wine and added Sarah, as Beulah had done, to the list of charges against him. He knew he hadn’t loved her, he knew he would leave her, and had slept with her, anyway, for three years. He knew every inch of her freckled body, and had taken all she could possibly give, and now didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Hadn’t thought about her for years.

*

Smooth, blond, cool Alice. In his letter of resignation—not just from the Haddington Church of the Brethren, but from the ministry in general—Amos would write: “I chose to counsel Alice and her husband, Jack, now both deceased, because I thought Alice was my soulmate. I believe now that all the honorable intentions I fabricated at the time were merely that: fabrications. And at a critical juncture in the story, I urged Alice to leave Jack, which precipitated her death.
Moreover,
” . . .

He’d gone out to her new house, at Alice’s invitation, for a cup of coffee, after the girls were asleep. The house was quiet and warm, and there was a sense of sweetness in everything: the homemade Mother’s Day cards on the dining room table, and the smell of the girls’ bubble baths still radiating from the bathroom. Amos felt happier—no, no, that wasn’t exactly it—he’d felt closer to domestic happiness than ever before in his life. He felt as if it were just within his grasp. They had talked, he and Alice, for probably an hour about everything except her pending divorce (Jack’s name was never mentioned, and neither seemed to find that suspicious). Alice had confessed her love for all things Frank Lloyd Wright, even the fountain pens, and Amos had admitted that for years, all through his undergraduate studies, he hadn’t understood Emerson.

“And then when I was in seminary, I don’t know why, but I took his essay on nature into the bathtub with me. I was maybe a little ridiculous at the time. And I read it out loud, every word of it. When the water got cold, I’d let it out and run more, I just wanted to . . . I just wanted to stay until I got it.”

“And did you get it?” Alice asked.

“I . . . do you know what Emily Dickinson said about poetry, her definition of poetry?”

Alice shook her head.

“I can’t quote it exactly, but it was something like: ‘When I feel like the top of my head will blow off,
that
is poetry.’ ”

“And that’s how you felt that night?”

Amos nodded. “There were sentences, whole paragraphs, maybe, I couldn’t read out loud because I was so moved and stunned. Emerson is an indictment. Who said that, do you remember, that beauty is an indictment?”

Alice looked confused. “I don’t know, I’ve never heard that before.”

“Pound? Pound said it, I think, or else someone said it about Pound.”

Their conversation had gone on this way for an hour, and then a storm blew up out of nowhere. Rain began to slant against the windows, and Alice remembered she’d left her car windows down. Amos stood to go roll them up, but Alice ran out the door before he could stop her. She hadn’t been wearing any shoes, and the rain was cold, and Amos saw more of her in that gesture than in anything she’d said during the evening: her ease in the world, her lack of fussiness and self-protection. Impulsiveness. And that’s what did it, the realization that she was impulsive, that made Amos consider, for the first time, what kind of lover she might be. By the time Alice came back in, soaked to the skin, her teeth chattering, Amos was in a state of desire so acute it felt like despair. He’d gone into the bathroom for a towel, and when he saw her standing in the doorway, dripping, he’d crossed the living room in two steps and wrapped her up so tightly she couldn’t move. Alice tipped her head back to look at him, and he pressed his body against her, and then she was leaning forward, her lips about to touch his, had they touched his? and one of the girls called out, and Amos took a step back so far his head hit the doorframe.

“Whew. It’s become a dark and stormy night,” Alice said, unwrapping herself, looking away.

“Yes, yes, I should go.” Amos took his car keys out of his pocket, his hands unsteady, and then looked once more at the kitchen, at their two cups on the counter, the cupcakes in a plastic container, the copper teakettle, so many things that belonged to her, that were a part of her life with her babies, he wanted to inventory them all.

She didn’t say
Don’t go;
she didn’t stop him with a touch or a look or a word. She smiled at him and thanked him for the visit, said she’d be in touch, and he had tried, fumbling to shoulder as much of his professional mantle as possible, but he knew right then. There was a world inside her, and Amos had been seconds away from becoming a fool in order to find it. Within days she was dead.

“There was a world inside her,” Amos would write, “and I destroyed it.”

*

Music,
Amos thought, standing. He’d become a bit blurry, maybe, but not drunk. Not exactly. Walking through the back door he weaved, bumped his shoulder on the doorframe. “Whoa,” he said out loud, and remembered his best friend in college, Daniel, saying, “Brother Amos, you’re listing starboard.” He laughed out loud; it was a
great
thing to say when they drank, a bunch of Ohio farm boys who’d never been near a boat. Daniel was great. For a moment, a wave of adolescent male glee welled up in him:
I’m free. I’m listing starboard, and I’m free.

What music to resign to? he wondered, walking toward his small, portable stereo. What was Daniel doing these days? Whatever became of him? Berlioz, something dark? Or sacred: Bach? Something predictably resigned: Mahler? Delicate and passionate, like Segovia, or disturbing, Schoenberg or Cage? Something to make him regret his wasted life, and also enjoy the regretting? Coltrane?