Isabelle had experienced, nevertheless, an odd, initial period of great calm. If you could call it that, for her mouth was very dry and her leg began to tremble so that she had to rise from the arm of the couch and walk about the room. But something inside her had expanded, initially, so that later, contemplating this, she understood better the expression “rising to the occasion,” for certainly something inside her had expanded and risen. Something in her had taken over at first, rather amazingly and admirably, as though perhaps she had been preparing over many years for just this sort of crisis.
So there was tenderness in the voice she used with Amy, getting whatever information she could, and while Amy’s lips remained extraordinarily pale, and while she still did not look at her mother directly, she answered with enough scorn (“No, of course not”), with just enough derision to be believable, to her mother’s question—made with particular tenderness and calm—if intercourse itself had taken place.
“You’re very innocent,” Isabelle said, kneeling once again in front of Amy so as to try once again to look directly into the girl’s pale face. Amy turned her head slightly upward and back, and then away, with much the same silent expression that she had used as a small child in her stroller, when Isabelle had bent over to wipe some kind of food from her mouth. “And it’s possible that someone could take advantage of you this way,” Isabelle continued, as though she might actually be speaking to that small child, “without your even knowing exactly what was going on.”
It was then that Isabelle had her first real sense that her daughter had somewhere slipped beyond her grasp, that things were far murkier than she had originally imagined; for the expression on the girl’s face, the flicker of muted disgust at her mother’s words, the arrival and then disappearance of an expression Isabelle recognized immediately to be one of condescension, jarred Isabelle with a sickening wave of foreboding. The sense of calm that had taken her this far began to give way.
She stood and retreated to the window, where she leaned against the wall. “In the car today was not the first time you were with him,” she stated, and Amy’s silence appeared to acknowledge this as true.
“Was it.”
Just barely Amy shook her head.
“When did it begin?” Undoubtedly Isabelle had been in shock; had been in shock from the very moment Avery Clark had called her into his office. But it was not until this point in her conversation with Amy that the measurements of the room seemed altered; she felt an odd inability to judge distances, she had to squint to focus on her daughter.
The girl raised her narrow shoulders tentatively. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t do that, Amy.”
Amy looked at her quickly; Isabelle saw how her eyes had become wobbly with fear, and it was this fear that made Isabelle realize further that much was being hidden. Some indefinable feeling of knowledge planted itself in Isabelle’s mind as she absorbed the glimmer of superiority that had crossed Amy’s expression only seconds before, when Isabelle called her innocent.
Isabelle repeated, “When did this begin?” Her right leg suddenly jerked uncontrollably and she leaned against the sill, pressing down hard with her leg.
Amy stared down at the braided rug. She moved a hand to her mouth, a gesture of shyness she had developed as a small child. (“Get your hand away from your mouth,” Isabelle would admonish relentlessly), and said, “We got to be kind of friends this winter.”
“Since winter?”
“No, I mean—”
“What do you mean?”
The girl seemed unable to answer; beside her hand her lips opened and partly shut again.
And so it went. Isabelle’s attempts to get information from Amy, her rising sense of hysteria … At one point she went to Amy quickly, sitting next to her on the couch, taking her hands in her own, and said, “Amy, sweetheart. A man like this … Oh, Amy. A man like this is troubled. My God, when you think …”
But Amy was already shaking her head, pulling her hands from her mother’s. “It’s not like that, Mom. It’s not like what you think.” Color had come back to her lips.
“Then what is it like, Amy.” The pulling-away of her daughter’s hands, when Isabelle had taken them in her own with such love just seconds earlier, seemed not only rejecting but profoundly unfair, and so Isabelle found herself standing up and moving through the room once again, this time landing in the green upholstered chair, where for more winters than she cared to remember she had often sat on weekend afternoons and watched the chickadees at the feeder.
“He’s not a nice man, Amy,” she said, trying again. “He doesn’t care for you. That kind of man never does. He says he cares for you because he wants what he wants.”
Her daughter’s face turned from the rug to stare at her, a look of growing alarm on her face. “He wants me,” Amy blurted out, childish tears of defiance coming to her eyes. “He likes me, he does so.”
Isabelle closed her eyes and murmured, “Oh God, this is sickening.” And she did feel sick; her stomach was hot, her mouth felt coated, as though she had gone a week without brushing her teeth. When she opened her eyes Amy was staring once again at the braided rug, but now her face was squeezed with crying, her nose dribbled shiny mucus down over her mouth.
“You don’t know what the world is like,” Isabelle told the girl gently, almost crying herself, leaning forward slightly in the green upholstered chair.
“No!”
Amy spoke suddenly, loudly, turning her wet face toward her mother. “You don’t know what the world is like! You never go anywhere or talk to anyone! You don’t read anything …” Here she seemed to weaken momentarily, but moving a hand sideways through the air as though propelling herself forward, she continued. “Except for the stupid Reader’s Digest.”
They stared at each other, until Amy dropped her eyes. “You never even go to the movies,” she added, angry tears still sliding down her face. “How do you know what the world is like?”
It changed everything, her saying that. For Isabelle it changed everything. Remembering it weeks later, in the soft darkness of night, it brought to her the exact intensity of silver pain rippling through her chest that it had delivered at the time it was spoken; without moving, she seemed to stagger, her heart racing at a ridiculous pace. Because the humiliation was hideous. Mispronouncing the name of that poet might not be a moral shortcoming, but in the end, so what. The truth is that Amy had scored accurately, had delivered a blow more powerful than she probably ever intended or imagined she could do.
Isabelle, who had received this shattering while sitting in the green upholstered chair (it would be a year before she sat in that chair again), had remained silent for quite some time, as though in order to absorb this her body needed to remain still, and then she finally said quietly, “You have no idea what it has been like raising a child on my own.”
What she did not do, and wanted to so badly she could almost feel the shape of the words in her mouth already formed, was to shout: You weren’t supposed to even be born!
Whenever she went over the dreadful scene in her mind, the way she was now in the darkness of her room, she allowed herself a moment of approval, because it was, really, very good of her not to have said such a thing.
But she hurt. She hurt remembering all this, and even though she could not remember everything that had taken place that afternoon, she remembered well enough that sickening and growing realization that she had been living with a daughter she barely knew. She remembered how they had sat in silence and then how she, Isabelle, rose and opened a window; the air outside had struck her as stagnant and warm as the air in the room, and she had leaned against the windowsill. “Who is this horrible Robertson man, anyway,” she finally said. “Where did he show up from?”
“He isn’t horrible.”
These words infuriated Isabelle. “What he did,” she told her daughter in a scathing voice, “was, to begin with, illegal.”
Amy rolled her eyes, as though this
was further indication of how foolish and provincial her mother really was.
“You don’t need to roll your eyes at me, young lady,” Isabelle had said, anger shooting through her. “You go right ahead and tell yourself that your mother is an illiterate moron and that she’s too stupid to know anything about real life, but I’m telling you that you are the one who doesn’t know anything!”
It had become that senseless and awful, yelling at each other about who was the most stupid.
Tears ran from Amy’s eyes. “Mom,” she pleaded, “I just mean you don’t know about Mr. Robertson. He’s a really nice man. He never wanted to …”
“Never wanted to what.”
Amy picked at the skin around her thumbnail.
“He never wanted to what? Answer me!”
Amy clamped a fist around her thumb and looked in anguish toward the ceiling. “I was the one who kissed him first,” she said, her face pale again. “He didn’t want to. He said not to do it again, but I did.”
“When?” Isabelle’s heart was racing.
“What?”
“When. When was that?”
Amy lifted her shoulders tentatively. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t remember.”
It was sinking in—trying to, as she watched her child’s pale face, averted eyes—the sense that this girl had been living a separate life, the sense that her daughter was strikingly different from what she had thought, that the girl hadn’t even liked her. (“You don’t read anything except that stupid Reader’s Digest.”)
What followed was something that Isabelle would speak of only once, years later, when her life had become a very different one. Amy, on the other hand, would later on in her adulthood tell a number of people, until she realized finally that it was one story in a million and ultimately didn’t matter to anyone.
But it mattered a great deal to them, to Amy and to Isabelle, and while over time they would forget parts and remember parts differently, both remembered and would always remember certain aspects of the scene. How, for example, Isabelle began throwing the couch pillows across the room, screaming that this Mr. Robertson creature was nothing more than a pimp. One of the pillows knocked over a lamp, smashing the bulb into little bits against the floor, and Amy began to cry out “Mama!”—a child terrified.
The cry brought with it the sudden memory of Amy as a little girl, a blond, curly-headed little girl sitting in the front seat of the car next to Isabelle as they drove to Esther Hatch’s house each morning. “Mama,” Amy had sometimes said in a querulous voice, trying to hold her mother’s hand.
This memory was anguish now, and while part of Isabelle wanted to rush to the side of this tall, pale, teenage child, instead she brought her hand down hard on the back of the couch, and this hurt her and made her cry out the word “Goddamn!” She saw how this caused her daughter’s thin shoulders to jerk with fear, and that her daughter was afraid of her only enlarged Isabelle’s fury; she felt something very big had been released, something that must go back generations and had been gaining speed for years, she didn’t know—but something terrible inside her was being released.
She went to find Mr. Robertson.
THE MAN’S NAME had not been in the phone book, and so Isabelle had picked up the telephone and, in a bizarrely cheerful voice, obtained from Information the telephone number and address of one Thomas Robertson.
She was curiously aware of the car as she drove, the rumbling looseness of its metal construction as she sailed up a hill and rounded a curve, that tiny momentary gap in space between the turning of the steering wheel and the answering move of the car, as though it were a living thing, bewildered and old, but obedient. Shuddering, bouncing, tires squealing slightly, the car did what she wanted it to do.
The man lived in the sort of apartment complex that Isabelle scorned; cheaply constructed and painted gray, it was a phony attempt at New England attractiveness and included a gratuitous white picket fence—stiff and plastic—leading up the walkway to the main door. The interior hallway smelled like a hotel, and rapping on the door of Apartment 2L, Isabelle could hear the rattle of pots and pans from the place directly across; she reminded herself at all costs to keep her voice low.
Apparently he was expecting her. This did not register until many days later when, reviewing the scene in her mind, she saw that he had answered the door with a certain hostile complacency; that Amy had undoubtedly called to say her mother was on her way. What did register, however, was some immediate sense of conspiracy that this man had with her daughter.
He was short and barefoot.
“I’m Amy Goodrow’s mother,” Isabelle had said, hearing how brisk and tart her voice sounded, and how it was all quite wrong somehow, right away. “And I would like to talk to you. Please.” This she said quietly, aiming in her tone for a superior detachment, which was ludicrous of course; she was in agony.
“Won’t you come in.” A very slight bow, a slow dropping of the eyelids beneath the rimmed glasses, as if he were mocking her. Later she realized he probably was. He appeared both somnambulistic and wary; his bare feet, flat and white at the end of his jeans, offended her in their nakedness.
Stepping past him into an angular and barren living room (there were no pictures on the wall, a small TV was placed upon a crate), Isabelle, before she turned back to face this man, caught briefly the view in the partly opened window. It was merely a tree. Part of a tree, a maple close enough to the building so that the leaves, green and thick and dappled by the early-evening sun, appeared to be pressing toward her through the open window. She heard for a brief moment their gentle rustling.
Why this particular glimpse of a tree with early evening beginning to settle upon it should present to her the most awful feeling of sadness and utter loss she had ever in her life experienced she was not able to precisely understand, but for a moment she thought she might crumple to the floor. Instead she turned to the man and said softly, “You are Thomas Robertson?”
He blinked his eyes slowly, not seeming to close them all the way. “I am. Would you care to sit down?” His jaw moved like a puppet’s when he spoke; his full beard made it impossible to see his mouth.
“No. No, thank you.” Her fatigue made her almost smile. In fact she felt, just slightly, the corners of her own mouth turn up, and even experienced, bizarrely, briefly, the sensation that they were working together, united in some understanding of catastrophe.
She no sooner felt this than she realized of course it was completely untrue; there was no hint of an answering smile from him. Instead she perceived in his gaze the watchfulness of someone encountering instability in another. She said, “But please. You sit down.”
He sat on the edge of a gray vinyl couch, resting a forearm on each knee, still watching her, his neck thrust forward.
“Let me tell you what I know of certain laws,” she said, and she proceeded to recite, rather quickly, what she knew. At the time she felt he had been impressed, though later, remembering it (there was a great deal she could not seem to remember), she felt that to proceed that way had been a terrible mistake, that she never ought to have exposed herself in such a way to him.
Because in the end he “won.” In the end he had retained his sense of dignity and managed somehow to destroy hers. This was unspoken, but they both knew. And she was not able to remember or figure out exactly how he had done it.
She had stated her case concisely: she wanted him out of town. “Of course I would like to go to the police,” she said quietly, “but my main concern is Amy, and I won’t have her put through any of that.”
He had not said anything. He gazed at her with a curious indifference and eventually slid himself further back into the seat of the vinyl couch, crossing one leg over the other’s knee, so that he seemed audaciously at ease.
“Have I made myself clear?” Isabelle asked. “Is there anything I have said that you don’t understand?”
“Not at al
l,” the man replied. “The picture is perfectly clear.” He glanced around the living room, which seemed more and more to Isabelle to have the sort of temporariness in its decor that one would find in the dwellings of a college student (a spider plant sat on a bookshelf near the door, many of its fronds brown and bent at the middle), and then, running a hand slowly over his head, the deep brown waves of hair rising off his forehead making Isabelle inwardly shiver, said that he could, if it pleased her, leave town tomorrow.
“Just like that?” she asked.
“Sure.” He stood up then, and walked a few steps toward the door, as though to indicate their interview was over. “I have no reason to stay,” he added, turning his palm upward, as though both the words and the gesture would reassure Isabelle that he was telling her the truth.
But she heard in his remark the disposability of her daughter; and while she would have been mightily offended had he attempted to say he cared for the girl, she was even more offended that he did not.
“Have you any idea,” she said, her eyes narrowing, taking a step toward him, “have you any idea how you have injured my child?”
He blinked rapidly a moment, then tilted his head slightly. “Excuse me?”
She could have harmed him, ripped his hair from his head and clenched it in her fist with little pieces of skin still clinging to its roots, she could have twisted his arm through the cotton shirt until she heard it snap inside the skin, she could have killed him easily. Her eyes blurred, making things sway.
“You have taken a very, very innocent girl and put your handprint on her forever.” Horribly, she saw two drops of saliva shoot from her mouth and land on the sleeve of his cotton shirt.
He glanced at his arm, letting her know by his expression that he considered himself to have just been spit upon (which was incredibly unfair, Isabelle felt, her head roaring every time she thought of this).
He placed his hand on the doorknob. “Mrs. Goodrow,” he said, and then he cocked his head. “Is it Mrs. Goodrow? I’m afraid I was never quite sure.”
Her face burned. “It is Mrs. Goodrow,” she whispered, because her voice seemed to have given out.