Granny Elizabeth saw them coming, and she leaned in toward Claire, speaking right in her ear. She said nothing about her father after all, only something that Claire would never forget: “The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I’m being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.”
Eloise hurried up and knelt down. “Are you all right? Did you fall? Beaches are so treacherous.”
“Oh no, Eloise, dear. I didn’t fall. I’m fine. I just had a weak moment. Weak in the brain. Oh my. Why is it that beautiful places give you sad thoughts?” Claire held out her hand. Eloise took Granny Elizabeth’s elbow and said, “Do you want to go back? I’m sure you must be tired.” Henry stepped forward and offered Granny Elizabeth his arm. After everyone helped her up, they continued down the beach, Rosa first, Eloise right behind her, Henry, Claire, and Granny Elizabeth behind them.
—
CLAIRE KNEW she was a quiet girl. Supposedly, she didn’t say “Mama” until she was nearly two. “It wasn’t that she couldn’t,” said Rosanna, “it was that she didn’t care to.”
But what, thought Claire, was the use of talking when no one was listening? You could see it right here in Eloise’s apartment. Some people talked all the time—Eloise and Granny Elizabeth. Henry yakked, but in spurts—Sir Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve children, he fought the Spanish Armada, and on and on. Rosa said little, but whenever Rosa said something (“We should put some mushrooms in it”), the others fell silent, smiled, and nodded. Henry was in love with her and watched her every move. Eloise didn’t notice, because she did the same thing. Rosa was a perfect example of an only child, thought Claire—she behaved herself, but it was because she was always on the stage and the lights were always up.
In the five days they spent in Berkeley, Rosa didn’t introduce them to a single girl. Plenty of boys came over—they were kind of stinky and not good-looking, and they wore messy clothes. Everyone smoked and sat around, talking and talking. They watched out to see if you were listening, but they didn’t say anything right to you, they just went on and on about being and nothingness while thinking that they were talking about something. In the end, pigs were more interesting. If Claire had been asked her opinion, she would have described how pigs look for their favorite foods in the slop, how they push the orange rinds to one side and eat the potato skins first, then come back to the orange rinds and nibble them, and she had even seen a pig eat a lemon rind and wrinkle its nose. Also, pigs had friends, and they grouped together; quite often, they liked the pigs who looked more or less like they themselves did. There were a couple of pigs in every litter whom the other pigs stayed away from. Claire had plenty to say, but not anything that anyone wanted to hear.
Eloise took them to see the Golden Gate Bridge, which they drove over one way, and then they turned around and drove back over it the other way. They went to Chinatown in San Francisco. Granny Elizabeth wanted to buy a doll, and she had the money, but Eloise insisted on bargaining for it, and then, when the price got down to two dollars, Granny Elizabeth walked right up to the woman and paid her four dollars anyway. The night before they went home, they had dinner in a restaurant where, in her show-offy way, Rosa ate only vegetables. They had ice cream for dessert. Henry told a story about his adviser, who had divorced his wife because she kept mispronouncing the word “album.” She could not stop herself from saying “alblum.” Henry said, “He corrected her, but she was really stubborn.”
“Why don’t you go digging in Mexico or somewhere?” said Rosa. “New Mexico. There’s plenty of interesting archeological stuff there.”
“There is.” Henry’s voice was sharp. “But I didn’t start with that culture. I started with Indo-European, and it’s too late to change now.” His lips snapped shut, and Aunt Eloise looked from him to Rosa. Rosa shrugged. It was a careful shrug—she knew Henry was looking at her, and she wanted him to understand that, whatever he did, she, Rosa didn’t care.
“How many languages do you speak, Henry?” said Granny Elizabeth, oblivious.
“English. German. I can read French and Italian. If you can read Italian, you can work out Spanish. I can read Latin, Middle English, Old English. There aren’t many texts, but I can make it through the Gothic version of the Bible. I’m taking Greek this semester.” Henry’s voice rose.
Rosa turned her head slowly, toward him, and then away from him, across the room. Aunt Eloise took another sip of her wine. Claire saw then that she and Rosa did have something in common, and that it was keeping secrets. Claire’s secrets might be about the family life of pigs, but Rosa’s were more interesting, and maybe sadder than that.
Granny Elizabeth wiped her mouth and said, “Well, I am sorry to go home! And the penny jar is empty, upside down, drained dry, but this trip was worth it!”
“What’s next?” said Henry. “You should go to England, Gran.” He dragged his gaze away from Rosa.
“I think Hawaii!” said Granny Elizabeth.
—
WHEN JOE CAME IN from cultivating the field that ran behind the house, the first thing he did was splash water on his face at the outdoor sink. Then he kicked off his boots. It was hot and he was thirsty, and although later he remembered that the door was ajar, at the time he just closed it behind him. He was hungry. He shouted for Lois, but there was no answer, and then he glanced out the kitchen window and saw that the car was gone. Minnie, of course, was at the high school, administering something or other—even in the summer she was gone most of the day. He opened the refrigerator. The plate of leftover ribs, right next to a dish a strawberries, had a little note—“Took Jesse to his six-month checkup. Annie is with your mother. Eat them all, Lois.”
He did eat them all. They were cold and delicious. He ate them standing by the kitchen counter, and with the strawberries, he did a thing slightly frowned upon, at least by his mother—he dipped each one into the sugar bowl before sucking it off the stem. Then he scraped and rinsed the plates, washed his hands, and went back out. He had at least four more hours, he thought, but he didn’t mind cultivating. It was precise work; he liked seeing the weeds uprooted and covered by the soil, but the rows of corn plants still standing—small, neat sown seams.
Sometime later, he saw Lois waving to him. He finished his row, made his turn, tried to ignore her. He hated turning the tractor off and on unless he had to. She went inside. He continued his task, but he watched, promising himself that if she came out and waved again, he would go see what she wanted. She didn’t come out. Joe finished the field, once in a while glancing toward the house. Nothing.
On the porch, Joe heard Minnie say, “Do we call the sheriff?”
Through the screen, Joe said, “What about?”
Minnie’s face turned toward him, blanched but blank. She said, “My father is at the bottom of the basement stairs.”
Joe didn’t understand at first, then, when he registered how pale and how angry Minnie looked, it finally clicked. “Is he dead?”
Lois said, “He’s really cold. As though he’s been down there a long time. I saw him when I opened the door to go down for ajar of peaches. What was that, an hour ago.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
Joe peered down the stairwell. There wasn’t much light, but he could see the old man staring upward, his neck twisted to the right and backward. His hands were above his head, as if he had been reaching for something on his way down. He was wearing a dirty shirt with long sleeves, and overalls.
Sheriff Dee arrived just then with his deputy. After they spent maybe fifteen minutes in the cellar, they sat everyone at the kitchen table for the questions, which Sheriff Dee asked as if he were reading them from a piece of paper, though he wasn’t. Lois bounced Jesse on her knee. Minnie looked half upset, half angry, but Lois looked blank. The deputy, Carson, wrote everything down. Joe told about the back door being ajar when he came in
the first time. Lois told about noticing a car by the side of the road when she went into town, but she didn’t recognize it, it was partly in the ditch, there was no one in it—she’d thought maybe someone had run out of gas. They never used the front door, but, no, neither of the doors was locked. No one locked their doors around here. And what had they all been doing today? Rosanna had been at her house with Annie, Minnie had been at school, Joe had been out cultivating the corn, Lois had been away for about four hours, taking Jesse for a checkup, then shopping, mailing some letters, visiting with Dave Crest at the store, and browsing at the Denby library. Witnesses? Joe didn’t say anything at first; then: “I guess my only witness is the cultivated field.”
The deputy nodded, but Sheriff Dee remained serious and still.
Rosanna said that, yes, Roland Frederick had appeared—when was that?—two years ago now, came and went, said he was working in Omaha, seemed like he’d been drinking steadily for eight years, hardly coherent, but, no, he hadn’t seemed threatening, exactly, and he’d gone away as quickly as he came. She had told Minnie about it. Joe’s head snapped toward Minnie; then, under the table, he took Lois’s hand.
Minnie said, “I thought I mentioned it to you, Lois.” She cleared her throat.
Once they had been “questioned,” Joe and Minnie sat there while Sheriff Dee and Deputy Carson—oh, Seth, his name was, Rodney’s kid—walked around the house, looking at this and that, going out on both of the porches, then coming in, staring at the floor, checking doorknobs. They went back down into the cellar, but this time only stayed for under five minutes. It was now after six. Sheriff Dee went to the phone and called the undertaker. Lois asked if they were free to go over to Rosanna’s for the rest of the evening, and that’s where Minnie, Lois, Jesse, Rosanna, and Annie did go, taking Poppy along. But Joe stayed, sitting quietly at the table, making sure that Nat sat next to his leg while the undertaker and his two assistants carried the shrouded corpse up the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the front door. Nat growled once or twice, but he knew better than to bark. Joe gazed at him, wondering what he knew—he would not have been in the house, but he might have seen something. Joe felt ashamed and somehow suspected, though he didn’t know why or of what. Maybe because he really was an interloper in the Frederick house? Maybe because at last the farm was his?
—
DR. KATZ SAID, “How about dreams?”
Andy was lying on his couch, though it was more like a daybed. He was behind her. This was her thirty-second appointment. She had started in the summer, after reading about how H-bombs had potential as usable conventional weapons. She realized that she could not get the word “fallout” out of her mind—it was planted in there like a black pea that sometimes sprouted and sometimes did not—but Dr. Katz didn’t seem interested or impressed by her worries. He said he wanted something “deeper.” She was up to five days a week now, as of September 1, when they both returned from their August vacations. It had been fifteen dollars a session, but since she was seeing him every morning, like a regular job, he was doing it for $12.50. Frank didn’t mind. This year he stood to earn fifty thousand dollars at Grumman, and that did not include their investments in what they called their “Uncle Jens Fund,” named after that strange great-great-uncle of hers who had left all his money to be divided up among his descendants, but only after those who were living when he was still alive had themselves died—a grouchy, Nordic legacy that Andy hadn’t yet mentioned to Dr. Katz. She said, “Not much. Well, one sticks in my mind.”
It was part of her job to offer the dream. She lay there for a minute or two, allowing the silence to build around her, then said, “Two mornings ago. I’d sort of forgot it, but it’s coming back to me.”
She closed her eyes and continued. “There were hills, but no trees. I am on a hillside, and a river is running below me, fast and frothy. I am supposed to go down there. I’m a little afraid. I also know that I’m a very beautiful girl—say, fifteen. But I’m not me. I have silky blond hair to below my waist. I’m sitting on the hillside, twisting my hair between my hands.”
Actually, the dream was not a dream, but a story she had read. Andy, as far as she knew, didn’t have any dreams. But Dr. Katz seemed to like the dream stories she told him, and to find them revealing.
She went on, “I’ve been married twice already. So maybe I’m not fifteen. But it seems like both those things are true. The main thing is the feel of the grass on the hillside—rough and full of burrs.”
“Hmm,” said Dr. Katz.
“Then a man comes up to me, and I know that this is my new husband, and I really like him best.” She paused, then said, “He smiles more than the others did. He’s not Frank. Anyway, we walk along the hillside, which is steep, and then, all of a sudden, he has a bow in his hand, and he’s shooting arrows at some people. And his bowstring breaks, and he asks me for some of my hair. I say no.”
“Explain, please,” said Dr. Katz.
“I can’t explain. I just say no. So he stands there with the broken bowstring, and then he is shot through the neck, and I woke up. I guess I looked over at Frank, and he was lying on his back, but he was fine. So I lay there for a few minutes, and then went back to sleep.” In fact, Frank was not next to her. But, then, she hadn’t had the dream, either.
Dr. Katz said, “Do you feel that you withheld something from your husband, and it killed him?”
“Well,” said Andy, “he was outnumbered.”
“Is that what you feel, that he was outnumbered?”
“Why would he think that he could use hair as a bowstring? It makes no sense.”
“Did you feel that in the dream, that his idea was a foolish one?”
“I felt nothing. I just said no.”
“Did you feel in mortal danger?”
“No.”
Andy was beginning to regret that she had told this story. Finally, she said, “People die in my dreams all the time.” From, she thought, fallout. Dr. Katz said, “Yes, they do,” which surprised her. She said, “But it seems like, in the dream, I always know that it’s a dream, and that the person is not really dying, or that the person is not really a person. One or the other.”
“You do not grieve for them.”
Andy said, “No.” A question offered itself: was she a heartless person? When Lillian told her over the phone the night before that the son of a friend of hers, nine years old, also named Michael, had been hit by a car crossing the road by the house, killed instantly, Lillian wept in sympathy, but Andy felt cold, stared at the ash of her cigarette, had nothing to say. Was she the most heartless client he had? But you weren’t supposed to ask questions, you were supposed to arrive at answers.
There was an extra-long silence. Andy thought of being honest and telling him that she had related a story, not a dream. But then he would ask her what the difference was, and she would have to say that she didn’t know.
1957
WHEN DID LILLIAN HAVE TIME to read the papers, or to watch the news on TV? And yet things filtered through—Hungary in November, the Suez crisis at the same time, both of them crushing. Even so, though Arthur came home a little late, he did come home in the usual way, full of fun and with a big appetite, two helpings of everything, though you couldn’t tell that to look at him. He didn’t lose his sex drive until February, which Lillian thought, secretly, was a bit of a relief. Then, one night, she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she got back to bed, in the moonlight the tears were glistening on his cheeks and his eyes were wide open, even though he was lying still and not saying a word. It was like getting in bed with a stranger. She said, “Arthur?”
He rolled onto his side, his back to her, and she slipped under the covers. She put her hand on his head and scratched, just very lightly, and it put her right to sleep. Sometime after that, he slipped his arms around her sleeping body and woke her up, sobbing on her shoulder. He hadn’t been like this for years, not since Timmy was born alive and healthy. Even when his father died
, his eyes had remained dry and his back straight.
She did what she did with Debbie and Deanie, just let him sob, patting him lightly on the leg. She could see the phosphorescent hands of the clock glowing from where she lay—a quarter after three, marching on to a quarter to four. Finally, he heaved a big sigh, pulled his one arm from underneath her, and sat up. She said, “You okay?”
He wiped his face with the corner of the sheet and sighed again. He said, “Well, if this room is bugged, I’m probably out of a job.”
“Is this room bugged?”
“I’ve checked. I don’t think so.”
Lillian said, “You’re kidding me.”
“I hope I am.”
He stood up and went down the hall to the bathroom. She heard him open and close doors—peeping in on the boys and the girls. Then he sat down in the armchair and said, “Did we say Dean could sleep on the floor?”
“For now.”
“Okay. I just wanted to make sure Timmy is not imposing some cruel and unusual punishment.”
“No, Deanie’s agitating for a tent. He wants me to tack one side of his blanket to the wall.”
Arthur said, “Please tell me that we’ve been married less than a hundred years.”
“We’ve been married eleven years and three months.”
Arthur let his head drop onto the back of the chair and inhaled deeply. Lillian was sure right then that he had found another woman—someone who had no children, or whose figure was holding up better. She, who had once worn a 4, now wore an 8. What had ever made her think that such a dashing man as Arthur would be satisfied with her? Georgetown was a hotbed of infidelity—the women who didn’t talk about it all the time were those who sleeping with their friends’ husbands, and so you could always tell who had just commenced an affair.
He said, “I don’t know how I’m going to take it anymore, and now—”
“Now what, Arthur?”