Two Rivers (24 page)

“Why’s that?”

“This war, this
fucking
war, at least it’s keeping me in business.”

Since the March on the Pentagon, Betsy’s antiwar sentiments had become less idealistic and more anguished. She grew red in the face whenever she talked about the war. At night, when we watched the news, she wrung her hands together. Muttered and fumed. I had no idea how I would tell her about my decision to join the Reserves.

“Hold
still
,” she said, putting her hands on my ears and steadying my head. We watched each other in the mirror.

I was too afraid to speak.

“I just want it to be perfect,” she said softly.

“What’s that?”

“Tonight,”
she said, exasperated. “Everything.”

At Madame Tuesday’s, we danced to every song, even though the band ended up being just four high school boys playing mostly Beach Boys covers. But even when my feet started to hurt, Betsy kept pulling me out onto the dance floor. She was manic, beautiful. She danced so hard during the fast songs, she collapsed into me during the slow ones. It was hard not to get caught up in her fervor. If it hadn’t felt so desperate, so urgent, it would have been sort of sexy. She was sweating, delirious when the MC announced that it was nearing midnight, and asked everyone to put on their coats and go outside to watch the pinecone drop.

Betsy shook her head when I offered to get her coat. “The cold air will feel good,” she said, smiling and wiping her brow with the back of her wrist. She pulled me by the hand through the front doors. It couldn’t have been more than ten degrees out. My feet, inside a pair of thin socks and rented shoes, were numb within minutes. Betsy’s hair was plastered with sweat to her neck and cheeks. I pulled at a strand that ran across her face to her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. There must have been a hundred people in the crowd, counting down as the pinecone glittered above us. She smiled weakly at me, let me enclose her in my arms, and we stood like this, anxiously waiting for midnight to come.

“Ten, nine, eight,” Betsy whispered in my ear. “Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”

When she kissed me, she tasted like the ocean. Salty from sweat. Salty from tears. She trembled in my arms, not with the cold but with something that seemed to be wracking her whole body. And in that single moment, as 1967 became 1968, I felt terror for the first time. It passed from her into me, infected me.

We stood there embracing long after everyone had returned inside the building. After the band started to play “Auld Lang Syne.” After I could no longer feel where my arms ended and her body began.

Betsy noticed him first.

“Harper, someone’s watching us,” she said, without pulling away. Her breath was hot against my cold skin.

“Where?”

“Over there, by that car.”

In the parking lot, I could see a dark figure leaning against a car, the orange glow of a cigarette and the white trail of smoke rising into the dark sky. I pulled away from Betsy and raised my arm up in a ridiculous wave. “Hello!”

Betsy grabbed my arm as the figure dropped the cigarette and started moving toward us. As the porch lights began to illuminate his face, I thought I was hallucinating. This was the monster who lived in my closet as a child, the disfigured demon who invaded my dreams.

“Great party,” he said as he came closer.

Familiar. And real. Betsy squeezed my hand. He was fully illuminated then. When he took off his hat, I tried not to gasp. And because I couldn’t speak, instead I reached to shake his hand and leaned into him, patting his back in an awkward embrace. “Brooder.”

“Montgomery,” he said.

I pulled away and looked at him, knowing that I
had
to look at him. That I owed him this.

“Pretty fucked up, huh?” He laughed, jutting his chin out, turning his face right, then left. Half of his face looked like melted wax, one eyelid drooping, one side of his nose and mouth pulled downward toward his chin. The skin was puckered and purple: the scars on his neck disappearing into his collar. But the other half of his face was exactly as I remembered it, untouched. “Ruined my pretty face.” He laughed again and slapped me on the back. I laughed awkwardly, but Betsy said nothing.

“Welcome home,” I said.

“Quite the party they’re throwing for me,” he said, motioning toward Madame Tuesday’s. “Nothing like a hero’s welcome. Must’ve known it was my birthday.”

That night, Betsy disappeared quietly into her room, leaving me with her father downstairs. He had waited up, afraid that we’d wrecked the car in the snowstorm that was in full force by the time we left the party. He was eating a bowl of graham crackers soaked in milk, a nightly ritual.

“How was the party?” he asked, his speech slow and labored.

“Fine,” I said. “Cold night though.”

“Thanks for getting her home safe.” He nodded and set his bowl aside. At least Betsy’s father still saw me as the hero I once imagined myself to be. She hadn’t told him what happened in Washington, and I was grateful. I knew he would have blamed me. He trusted me to take care of her, since he couldn’t. I almost felt guilty later, after he’d gone to bed, when he started singing the opening bars of “She Loves You,” and I made my way slowly up the stairs.

Betsy was already naked when I crawled into the bed. It startled me, to feel all of that skin so suddenly. She pulled at my clothes, and I took them off as fast as I could. She pulled me against her, pressing every square inch of that glorious skin against mine. She didn’t speak. And she moved quickly, touching me in the places, and in the ways, she knew I was powerless to resist. And then she put me inside her and pressed harder against my body until there could not have been a single molecule of air between us. She didn’t make any moves to open the drawer where she kept the condoms I’d bought just for Christmas break (red and green ones that I thought might contribute to a festive ambiance). But when I tried to speak, to remind her, to protest, there wasn’t even enough room between our bodies for words. Not for a single one.

S
helly fell asleep waiting for Maggie to come back from Mrs. Marigold’s. I found her in the living room, sprawled out unconscious on the couch. Her hair was tangled, covering most of her face. I thought for a moment about lifting her up, carrying her to her room like I used to when she was little. My arms would remember how to cradle her. But she wasn’t little anymore. One long, skinny leg was stretched out, resting on an armrest. The other was dangling to the floor.
When did this happen?
Her hands were like water spiders, her fingers thin and long. Besides, she looked peaceful like this: her lips making a bow, her eyelashes dark against the tops of her cheeks.

After she was born, when they sent her home from the hospital with me, I spent exactly one night alone with her before I went to Hanna for help. That night, I remember the sky outside our small rented house was the color of plums. Starless. Afraid that too much light would wake her, I sat perched at the edge of my bed, in complete darkness, as she slept like a new kitten in a cardboard banana box at my feet. Every few minutes I bent over her, pressing my palm across the tiny expanse of her chest, terrified that she’d stopped breathing. I remember the house was so cold. The rain that had been incessant for nearly a month had suddenly stopped, and was replaced with a dry and bitter chill. I dressed her in the warmest newborn pajamas I could find from the bags Betsy had piled in the closet. And then I swaddled her in not one, but three receiving blankets. I kept the hat I’d been given for her at the hospital pulled down over her ears. There was little of her exposed except for her tiny squinty eyes and cold, red nose. But while sleep was impossible for me, Shelly’s slumber was remarkable. She woke only once (and I thrilled at the cries, at the company). I brought her with me to the kitchen, sat the box on the kitchen table, and heated the bottle as the nurses at the hospital had instructed me. But only moments after her lips closed around the nipple, she fell asleep again, leaving me alone.

“It’s not right for her to be sleeping in a box, you know,” Hanna said when I arrived at their house just before dawn, carrying her cardboard bed like a fragile basket of eggs.

I didn’t argue. I only handed her the box and said, “Hanna, I don’t know what to do.” It was so cold, my words were like wispy white ghosts lingering in the air between us after I spoke.

And Shelly was right. Hanna
did
save my life that morning. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees, but after Hanna brought Shelly inside, she stood in that doorway in her nightclothes, hugging me, holding onto me until my legs stopped trembling enough for me to climb the three steps to their house. She took me in. She took us in. Without a single hesitation.

“How are you feeling?” I whispered to Maggie when she came back.

“I’m okay,” she said. A rosy color bloomed beneath the coffee color of her face. She was still wrapped in a blanket Mrs. Marigold had loaned her. It reminded me of when I used to give Shelly baths, wrapping her up in an oversized towel to keep the chill out.

“Want some pie?” I asked.

She nodded and sat down at the kitchen table. I cut two slices from the tin on top of the stove and smothered them both with ice cream. The pie was still warm.

“She told me those pains you have been feeling are normal,” I said, nodding like some awful bobblehead doll.

She nodded too.

I looked down at my fork, at the chipped yard sale plate beneath my pie.

“Shelly sleepin’ already?” she asked brightly.

“Uh-huh.”

Maggie yawned.

“You should hit the hay too,” I said.

“Sorry about all the fuss,” Maggie apologized.

“Shelly was really worried about you,” I said. “We were both worried about you.”

“Y’all worry too much,” she said, putting the blanket back up over her shoulders.

I thought about the train ticket still in my coat pocket. I tried to imagine bringing Maggie to the station, the way she might look standing on the platform, holding her suitcase. It was nearly impossible now.

She looked at me, willed me to look into those crazy eyes. “Mrs. Marigold
did
say that travel by train wouldn’t be wise. Not with the baby coming so soon, and me havin’ practice contractions already. It’d be a long, bumpy ride home; it could even make the baby come early.”

I swallowed hard, the ice cream freezing my throat. “What makes you think I was planning to put you on a train?”

“Maybe that train ticket in your pocket?”

“What were you doing going through my pockets?” I asked, feeling both angry and guilty.

“I was emptying your
pockets
so I could bring that nasty old coat of yours to the cleaners. You know it smells like somebody up and died in it.”

Now I just felt embarrassed.

“We’ve got a pretty serious situation on our hands then,” I said. “If you can’t go anywhere until after the baby comes, I think we need to figure out exactly what your plans are.”

Maggie didn’t argue. Instead she nodded. Emphatic and certain. “I already thought it out,” she said.

“That’s great.”

Shelly stirred in the other room. I glanced toward the living room nervously.

“I suppose you wanna know what I’m fixin’ to do. With the baby?” she whispered conspiratorially.

“Sure,” I said.

Maggie wrapped the blanket tightly around her, only her face poking out. A slow grin broadened into a smile. “I’m gonna give it to you.”

B
etsy surprised me for Valentine’s Day by coming out to visit me at school. With the full load of classes I needed to graduate, I hadn’t expected to be able to see her until spring break in March. But as I was trudging through a small storm to the library, wool scarf pulled up to shield my face from a bitter wind, her voice called out, as soft as snow, “Hey! Montgomery!”

The whole campus was blanketed in a fresh coat of white; in the distance she was only a blurry crimson spot, like a fuzzy drop of blood against all of that white. But as she approached, and her face began to come into focus, I felt my heart quicken. It was a Wednesday, the middle of the week, and there she was: smack dab in the middle of the quad wearing a dark red coat, carrying her suitcase.

“Suppose Miss Katy will let me sneak into an empty room?” she asked, hugging me.

“Maybe if we bring her some chocolates.”

“Let’s go get some chocolates then, and some coffee. I didn’t sleep a wink on the bus.”

“What time did you leave Two Rivers?” I asked, pulling my sleeve up to check my watch. It was only eight o’clock.

“
Early
. It was still dark out.”

“Who’s watching the shop?”

“I asked Hanna to check in today. I can only stay tonight, and then I’ve got to get back.”

“Where do you want to go for coffee?”

“Anywhere that’s warm.”

I was hungry. On Wednesdays I didn’t have class until the afternoon. I usually skipped breakfast and studied all morning at the library, continuing to study over a tuna sandwich at the dining hall on campus. We settled into a booth at Lockwoods (the students all called it “Lockjaws”), and I ordered steak and eggs, hash browns, toast and juice. Betsy asked for toast and coffee.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“So what do you wanna do tonight? If I’d known you were coming I’d have planned something. All of the nice places to eat are probably booked up already.”

Betsy shook her head again and accepted her plate of toast from the waitress. Betsy looked at the toast and then said, “Oh, please, can I get this dry? I’m so sorry,” and handed the plate back to the waitress. “Actually, if you could just bring me a glass of juice.”

“You okay?” I asked. Betsy was never the kind to send back food at a restaurant. I’d seen her eat a steak that was still bleeding when she’d ordered it well-done, runny eggs when she’d requested them over-hard, salads with bleu cheese dressing when she’d asked for Italian. She was easy like that. “You look like you’ve lost weight,” I said.

She shook her head again, looking a little green. She forced a smile. “Thanks.”

When she set the cup of coffee down and looked out the window, I became suddenly overwhelmed by the possibility of something terrible. What if Betsy was sick? What if she had come to tell me that something was wrong with her? She was pale, thin; she couldn’t eat. But rather than just asking her, I kept trying to get her to eat—as if a fork full of my hash browns dripping in ketchup could solve all her problems.

“I don’t want it, Harper!” she said angrily, as I slipped a piece of steak from my fork onto her plate. Betsy sipped on her coffee, looked out the window.

“Want some muffin?” I tried again.

“No!”

“You look awful,” I said. “You’re too skinny. You’re pale.”

“Jesus Christ,” Betsy sighed, looked me square in the face and threw her hands up. “I meant to tell you later. Make it special. But you had to be such an ass.”

I looked at her, bewildered.

“I’m
pregnant,
you stupid idiot.”

“What?”

“A
baby
. We’re going to have a baby.”

I could feel the blood draining from my face.

“Have some water,” she offered, pushing a glass toward me.

I shook my head. “We can’t have a baby,” I said. “We’re not even married.”

“You don’t have to be married to have a baby.”

“I mean…you don’t want this…you always said…” I looked at her, all of that blood that had rushed out of my face now pulsing somewhere around my chest.

Betsy picked up the glass of water and drank deeply from it. She reached across the table and took both of my hands. “I want
you
,” she said.

“You have me. You’ll always have me.” None of this made sense. My heart was thumping hard against my ribs.

“Don’t you understand?” she cried, pulling my hands to her face, kissing them, her tears spilling onto my knuckles. “You’re
Three-A
now. A father. You can’t get drafted.”

That afternoon we persuaded Katy to let Betsy bunk in with a freshman girl whose roommate had failed out after first semester. I wanted to go somewhere, be with her, let all of this settle in. But despite Betsy’s news, I still had a midterm in the morning, so Freddy offered to take her to a matinee while I studied. I spent the next three hours hunched over my books at my desk thinking about the baby growing inside Betsy’s belly. “It’s already this big,” she had said, picking up a handful of snow and rolling it into a tiny snowball that I carried in my bare hands all the way back to the dorm, until my fingers were numb and the snow had melted. As I tried to study for my Macroeconomics exam, I thought instead about that little life growing inside Betsy and about the enormity of its impact.

After the matinee, Freddy helped sneak Betsy into our room. I think he must have bribed the house director because there was actually very little secrecy or sneaking involved. Freddy just showed up with her on his arm and presented her to me like a gift. In that red coat, she looked exactly like a girl-sized Valentine.

We lay side by side on my twin bed in absolute darkness. (Despite Freddy’s assurances that there was nothing to fear, I still insisted we pull the shades and turn out the lights.) It was so dark I couldn’t even see her face.

“Betsy, are you sure this is what you want?” I asked softly.

But she didn’t answer; her shallow breaths had slowed and deepened. And I thought about that time we tried to run away to Maine, about her incredible resolve. Her fearlessness. As she slept I let my fingers explore the place where our baby was growing. I must have drifted off like this, fingers pressed against her stomach, because when I woke up, her hand was covering my hand. And instead of allowing panic about my impending fatherhood or guilt about Betsy’s tremendous sacrifice seep into this moment, I just let an irresistible and overwhelming sense of relief wash over me like rain.

We agreed to keep the baby a secret. And I carried that little snowball with me through the winter: on my way to and from class, in the shower, in the dining hall, in the library. No one at school, except for Freddy, knew that by October I would be a father.

I don’t know how I made it through that final semester. I was swamped with schoolwork, but I took the bus back to Two Rivers every weekend, terrified of missing something. I read on the bus, in a free barber chair as Betsy worked, and on the Parkers’ couch for hours after both Betsy and her father had fallen asleep. By the time I got back to campus on Sunday night, I was so exhausted I collapsed into bed before the sun had even set. But my exhaustion couldn’t begin to compare with what Betsy was going through.

Keeping the secret was relatively easy for me; I just kept my mouth shut. But for Betsy, who was vomiting almost hourly and so sleepy she once fell asleep midsentence on the phone with a Lucky Tiger salesman, explaining her behavior took a great deal more creativity. She told her father that she was just tired from working so much. She told her patrons she was tired from taking care of her father. At home, she was able to keep the visits to the toilet a secret by using the upstairs bathroom. But at the barbershop she started sneaking out to the alley when one of her regulars raised an eyebrow when she excused herself for the third time while giving him a simple shave. (The smell of Barbasol, unfortunately, was one of the great offenders.) And the alley certainly couldn’t have helped matters: the barbershop was right next door to Athena’s Diner. The combination of smells (of shaving cream and fried eggs) must have made the alley something akin to hell for Betsy.

She didn’t go to a doctor—couldn’t go to the doctor. Her family physician would never have been able to keep it to himself, and Dr. Owens, the only baby doctor in town, got his hair cut at her daddy’s shop. Word would get back to Mr. Parker. She figured it would be best to wait until after I was done with school and had procured at least some form of employment before she sprung the news on her father. So, in the meantime, Betsy relied on Rosemary’s wisdom. Rosemary told her to drink peppermint tea and ginger ale. To eat water crackers. And to nap whenever she got the chance. She gave her pamphlets she had received from Dr. Owens, which Betsy studied with the same intensity as I studied my Monetary Theory and Policy texts. Each weekend she offered me another fruit analogy:
plum, peach, orange, grapefruit
. By the time spring arrived, she was hiding a small honeydew.

“So, Montgomery, do you plan to marry that girl?” Freddy asked one day in late March.

It was the first day the sun had shone in months. It was still only forty or so degrees, but everyone had come outside to welcome the sunshine, removing their coats to reveal a sea of white arms. Freddy and I were sitting on the steps to the library, drinking coffee, trying to study. Freddy had given up, closed his books and leaned back with his hands behind his head, basking in the small warmth offered by the sun.

I couldn’t tell him that while Betsy Parker was willing to have my child, I was highly doubtful that she was ready to become my wife. It was something I knew would sound ridiculous if I tried to explain it, and so I said, “Just waiting for the right moment, I guess.”

“Cadit quaestio.”
Freddy smirked.

“What does
that
mean?” I asked.

But he only shrugged his shoulders. Over the last year, Freddy had become more and more cryptic. Since my decision not to emigrate to Nova Scotia, I’d felt like a failed protégé.

“I’ll ask her,” I said, aware that I was being scolded. “When the time is right.”

Freddy leaned back against the steps and closed his eyes.

“I
will
.”

What he didn’t know was that I had scoured the pawnshops for a ring that might somehow represent my tremendous gratitude. (I knew I could never find or afford a ring that would adequately signify my love.) I had rehearsed the speech I would deliver to her father. I had even practiced how I might broach the subject with Betsy, though this part of my ruminations always left me in a cold sweat. I knew that I had to ask her; hell, I’d imagined asking her this single question almost my whole life. And so I bought a bus ticket to Two Rivers for the first weekend in April, and spent all of my savings on a ring that I hoped might ask the question for me.

On Monday I felt optimistic, excited even, on Tuesday my optimism and excitement had devolved into a sort of blind determination, and by Wednesday I was ready to call the whole thing off. I was spinning the ring across my International Trade textbook at my desk when Freddy came into the room. He was in his ROTC uniform, sweaty and breathless. “They shot King,” he said.

“What?”

“Martin Luther King. Some sniper got him coming out of his hotel room.”

The ring spun across the page and dropped to the floor. It rolled under the bed, a jingle-jangle and then silence.

There was no answer at my parents’ house all afternoon. I parked myself in the hallway next to the pay phone, redialing every fifteen minutes. The anxiety I’d been feeling about the impending proposal was edged out by the much larger worry about my mother. When night fell and there was still no answer, I reluctantly returned to my room. I turned on the radio and listened to the reports regarding the chaos that was erupting in the streets all over the country. Outside my window, all was quiet; the sun was gone, the promise of spring broken, as snow started to fall, softly at first and then with a sort of frenetic quality. I’m not sure how I managed to sleep, but I did, for a couple of hours, leaping to my feet when the phone rang out like a shot.

My mother had printed up a special edition of the
Freedom Press
almost immediately after the bullets riddled King’s body. The headline read
DREAM TURNS NIGHTMARE
. Below this was a candid photo of Martin Luther King Jr. holding his infant son, both of them smiling.

She was out on her usual delivery route, the back of her station wagon filled with bundled copies of the paper. She made this trek monthly, leaving the
Freedom Press
in coffee shops and beauty parlors and schools all over the city. There wasn’t a single neighborhood she neglected: from Cambridge to Little Italy. Brookline to Dorchester. But on April 4, when she drove down Blue Hill Avenue, the street was on fire, and the last thing the residents of Roxbury wanted to see was a crazy-haired white lady driving a Buick through a riot. When they swarmed her car, rocking it like a cradle in their arms, she didn’t scream in protest or try to explain. She simply waited. When a dark-faced man ordered her to roll down the window, screamed obscenities at her, and spit in her face, she only smiled and closed her eyes. And when they smashed the windows and glass fell all around her, she quietly accepted the punishment she must have felt we
all
deserved. This is what I imagined anyway, as my father tried to explain. The beating she suffered this time might have been endurable had she been younger, stronger, a
man
. But she wasn’t, and after only an hour in the Harvard Medical Center emergency room, she went into a coma and then quickly died. My father arrived after she was already gone.