“ ’Sixty-seven,” Ian said.
“Seems he was one of those folks that don’t hold with helmets.”
So Tom Dulsimore was not an option anymore—not even in Ian’s fantasies.
“Reason I know is, I phoned his mother. Mrs. Millet. She’d remarried, is the reason it took me a while. I told her I was a buddy of Tom’s wanting to get in touch with him. I didn’t say no more though till I got your say-so. Should I go ahead now and pay her a visit?”
“No, never mind.”
“She’s bound to know the kids’ relatives. Small-town kind of lady; you could just tell she would know all about it.”
“Maybe I should get her address,” Ian said.
“Okay, suit yourself. Mrs. Margie Millet. Forty-three Orchard Road, Portia, Maryland. You need to write that down?”
“I have it,” Ian said. (He would have it forever, he felt—chiseled into his brain.) “Thanks, Eli. I appreciate your help. You know where to send the bill.”
“Aw, it won’t amount to much. This one was easy.”
For you, maybe, Ian thought. He told Eli goodbye and hung up.
From the kitchen, his mother called, “Agatha? Time to set the table!”
“Coming.”
Ian met Agatha at the door and stepped past her onto the porch. She didn’t notice a thing.
The evening was several shades darker now, as if curtain after curtain had fallen in his absence. Thomas was swinging the swing hard enough to make the chains creak, and down on the sidewalk the little girls were still playing hopscotch. Ian paused to watch them. Something about the purposeful planting of small shoes within chalked squares tugged at him. He leaned on the railing and thought, What does this remind me of? What? What? Daphne tossed the pebble she used as a marker and it landed in the farthest square so crisply, so ringingly, that the sound seemed thrown back from a sky no higher than a ceiling, cupping all of Waverly Street just a few feet overhead.
* * *
“Lucy Ann Dean was as common as dirt,” Mrs. Millet said. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there’s just no getting around it: she was common.”
They were sitting in Mrs. Millet’s Pennsylvania Dutch-style breakfast nook, all blue painted wood and cut-out hearts and tulips. (Her house was the kind where the living room waited in reserve for some momentous occasion that never arrived, and Ian had caught no more than a glimpse of its white shag rugs and white upholstery on his journey to the kitchen.) Mrs. Millet slouched across from him, opening a pack of cigarettes. She was younger than he had expected, with a very stiff, very brown hairdo and a hatchet face. Her magenta minidress struck him as outdated, although Ian was not the last word on fashion.
He himself wore a suit and tie, chosen with an eye to looking trustworthy. After all, how did she know he wasn’t some knock-and-rob man? He hadn’t phoned ahead because he hadn’t fully acknowledged he was planning this; he had dressed this morning only for church, he told himself, although he almost never wore a tie to church. After services he had eaten Sunday dinner with his family and then (yawning aloud and stretching in a stagy manner) had announced he was feeling so restless, he thought he might go for a drive. Whereupon he had headed north without consulting a map, relying on the proper road signs to appear or else not, as the case might be. And they did appear. The signs for Portia, the signs for Orchard Road. The giant brass 43 glittering, almost shouting, from the lamppost in front of the redwood cottage. “My name is Ian Bedloe,” he had said when she opened the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’m Lucy Dean’s brother-in-law and I’m trying to locate some of her family.”
She hadn’t exactly slammed the door in his face, but her expression had frozen over somehow. “Then maybe you better ask her,” she told him.
“Ask who?”
“Why, Lucy Dean, of course.”
“But … Lucy’s dead,” he said.
She stared at him.
“She died a long time ago,” he told her.
“Well,” she said, “I’d be fibbing if I said I was sorry. I always knew she was up to no good.”
He was shamed by the rush of pleasure he felt—the bitter, wicked pleasure of hearing someone else agree with him at long last.
Now she said, “First off, her parents drank.” She took a cigarette from her pack and tamped it against the table. “How do you suppose they had that car wreck? Three sheets to the wind, both of them. Then her aunt Alice moved in with her, and she was just plain cracked, if you want my honest opinion. I don’t think the two of them had anything to do with each other. It’s more like Lucy just raised herself. Well, for that much I give her credit: she’d come out of that run-down shack every morning neat as a pin, every hair in place, every accessory matching, which heaven knows how she did on their little pittance of money …”
She stole it, is how. Shoplifted. Not even you know the worst of it.
“… and she’d sashay off to school all prissy and Miss America with her books held in front of her chest. The boys were fools for her, but my Tommy was the only one she’d look at. You should’ve seen my Tommy. He was movie-star handsome. He could pass for Tony Curtis, ought to give you some idea. He and Lucy went steady from ninth grade on. Went to every dance and sports event together. Well, excepting Junior Prom. They had a little disagreement the week before Junior Prom and she went with Gary Durbin, but Tommy beat Gary to a pulp next morning and him and Lucy got back together. At their Senior Prom they were King and Queen. I still have the pictures. Tommy wore a tux and he looked good enough to eat. I said, ‘Tommy, you could have any girl you wanted,’ but then, well, you guessed it.”
She lit her cigarette and tilted her head and blew out a long stream of smoke, all the while staring defiantly at Ian. He said, “I did?”
“Lucy went and got herself pregnant.”
“Oh.”
“I said, ‘Tommy, you can’t be certain that baby’s even yours,’ and he said, ‘Mom, I know it. I just don’t know what on earth I’m going to do,’ he told me.”
Ian said, “What?” He felt he’d missed something. “You mean it could have been someone else’s baby?” he asked.
“Well, who can say?” Mrs. Millet said. “I mean life is all so iffy, right? I said, ‘Tommy, don’t fall for this! You could be anything! You could be a male model, even! Why saddle yourself with a wife and kid?’ But Lucy talked him into it. She had him wrapped around her little finger, I tell you. It was the kind of thing that just breaks a mother’s heart.”
“So … but this aunt of hers,” Ian said. He seemed to be losing track of the purpose of his visit. “Alice, you say.”
“Alice Dean. Well, she had nothing against it. She was delighted to marry Lucy off. Meant she could get back to wherever she came from and her old-maid ways. So Tommy and Lucy set up house in this crummy little trailer over at Blalock’s Trailer Park and Tommy started work at Luther’s Sports Equipment, but when Lucy told him she was expecting again—two babies in three years!—he left her. I don’t blame him, either. I do not blame him. He was just a boy! ‘When you going to do this, when you going to do that?’ she was always asking, but he hadn’t had him any kind of life yet! Naturally he wanted to roam a bit. She claimed he was irresponsible and she fretted about the least little thing, so of course he stayed away even more and when he did come home they’d fight. Twice the police had to be called. Then thank the Lord, he finally had the sense to leave. Got shed of her and asked for a divorce. And wouldn’t you know she hired herself a big-shot city lawyer and sued for child support. Proves what I’d been telling him: all as she was after was his money. Someone to support those kids; by then she’d had the second one and she was always yammering about, ‘I can’t feed these kids on yard weeds,’ and such. I told Tommy, I said, ‘She should just go to work, if she needs money so bad.’ ”
“But then who would watch the children?” Ian asked.
“Lord, you sound just like her. ‘Then who would watch the children?’ ??
? Mrs. Millet mimicked in a high voice. She flicked her cigarette into a tin ashtray. “She should’ve got a sitter, of course. That’s what I told Tommy. ‘And don’t expect me to sit,’ I told him. I never did like other people’s children much. So anyhow, Tommy hung around here awhiles but there wasn’t all that much for him in Portia, and so finally he hitchhiked to Wyoming. He had in mind to find work there, something glamorous having to do with horses. Well, that didn’t quite come through like he had hoped and so of course he couldn’t send money first thing, but he was planning to! And then we hear Lucy’s run off.”
“Runoff?”
“Run away with some man. That lawyer that handled her divorce. It was Mr. Blalock called and told me, down at the trailer park. She owed him rent. He said her trailer was empty as last year’s bird nest, door flapping open in the wind and everything hauled away that wasn’t nailed down. Said her neighbors saw a moving van come to take her belongings. Not a U-Haul; a professional van. The man was loaded, was what they guessed. She must’ve went with him for the money.”
“Went with him where?” Ian asked.
“Why, to Baltimore, but at first we didn’t know that. At first we had no idea, and I told Tommy he was better off that way. The slate has been wiped clean,’ I told him on the phone. ‘I do believe we’ve seen the last of her.’ But then guess what. She calls him up a few months later. Calls him in Cheyenne. Tells him she’s in Baltimore and wants the money he owes her. Oh, I just wish I’d have been on the other end of the line. I’d have hung up on her so fast! But Tommy, I will say, he was a whole lot smarter by then. He says, ‘I thought you had yourself some rich guy now,’ and she says, ‘Oh,’ says, ‘that didn’t work out.’ Well, I just bet it didn’t work out. I bet the fellow was married, was what. That’s the kind of thing you see happen every day. Tommy tells her, ‘I can’t help that, I met somebody here and we’re planning on a June wedding. All I got is going for the wedding,’ he says. Then he says, ‘And anyhow, where’s my things? You took every blasted thing I left in that trailer,’ he says. ‘Stuff I was coming back to fetch someday you packed up and hauled away like it belonged to you.’ ‘Tommy, I need money,’ she says. ‘I’m in a awful fix right now.’ He says, ‘First you send me my things,’ and signs off. You see how he’d got wise to her. Oh, she aged him, I tell you. She hardened him. She callused him.”
Mrs. Millet stubbed out her cigarette and sat staring into space. Over the stove, a plastic clock in the shape of a cat ticked its long striped tail back and forth.
“It was the winter of ’sixty-seven he had the accident,” she said. “Motorcycling on icy roads. His wife called me up and told me. I will never hear the phone ring again as long as I live without going all over cold and sick.”
Ian said, “Well, I’m sorry.”
But it was only the most detached and courteous kind of sorry. He would never have left the children with such a man, even if the man had been willing.
“Of course, that second wife was pretty no-account herself,” Mrs. Millet said.
Ian stood up. (No use staying on for more of this.) He said, “Mrs. Millet, I appreciate your talking to me. I guess what you’re saying is, there was only that one aunt.”
“That’s all as I ever heard of,” she said.
“And no brothers or sisters, or cousins, or anything like that.”
“Not as I know of. Chances are the aunt has passed on too, by this time. Lord, lately it seems the whole world has passed on.”
It did seem that way, at times. At times, it really did.
At Prayer Meeting the ghostly smell of dry-cleaning fluid mingled with Mrs. Jordan’s cologne. “Pray for me to accept this cross without complaint,” Sister Myra said. Accept what cross? Ian hadn’t been listening. He bowed his head and felt the silence wrap around him like a clean, cool sheet that you reach for in your sleep halfway through a hot night.
“For our Sister Myra,” Reverend Emmett said at last.
“Amen.”
“Any other prayers, any other prayers …”
In a row toward the rear, Sister Bertha stood up. “I am troubled in my heart for another person tonight,” she said. She spoke pointedly to the empty chair in front of her. “I know of someone here who seems to be experiencing a serious difficulty. I was waiting to see if he’d ask for our prayers but so far he hasn’t.”
He? There were only three men present: Reverend Emmett, Brother Kenneth, and Ian.
“I know,” Sister Bertha said, “that this person must be feeling very overworked, very beset with problems, and he’s casting about for a solution. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that he could bring it up at Prayer Meeting.”
She sat down.
Ian’s cheeks felt hot.
Surely private detectives were sworn to secrecy, weren’t they? Just like lawyers, or doctors. Weren’t they?
Reverend Emmett looked uncertain. He said, “Well …” and glanced around at the other worshipers. His eyes did not linger noticeably on Ian, although of course he must suspect. “Does this person wish to ask for our prayers?” he said.
No response. Just a few rustles and whispers.
“In that case,” Reverend Emmett said, “we won’t intrude. Let us pray, instead, for all of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them.”
He raised his arms and the silence fell, as if he had somehow cast it forth in front of him.
Sister Bertha is a nosy-bones, Ian thought distinctly. And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair.
After the Benediction, he was the first one out the door. He left behind even Mrs. Jordan, who most likely would want to walk home with him, and he set off at a brisk, angry pace. So the last thing he expected to hear was Reverend Emmett calling his name. “Brother Ian!”
Ian stopped and turned.
The man must have run the whole way. He must have left his flock unattended, his Bible open on the counter, his church lit up and unlocked. But he wasn’t even breathing hard. He approached at a saunter, seemingly absorbed in slipping on a cardigan the same color as the dusk.
“May I tag along?” he asked.
Ian shrugged.
They set off together more slowly.
“Of course, it does come down to whether a person feels ready to let go,” Reverend Emmett said in the most conversational tone.
Ian kicked a Dixie cup out of his path.
“Some people prefer to hug their problems to themselves,” Reverend Emmett said.
Ian wheeled on him, clenching his fists in his pockets. He said, “This is my life? This is all I get? It’s so settled! It’s so cut and dried! After this there’s no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” Reverend Emmett told him.
“You said that! You said to lean into my burden!”
“But those children will be grown in no time,” Reverend Emmett said. “They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness.”
“Okay,” Ian said. “Fine. How much longer till I’m forgiven?”
“No, no. The burden is that you must forgive.”
“Me?” Ian said. He stared at Reverend Emmett. “Forgive who?”
“Why, your brother and his wife, of course.”
Ian said nothing.
Finally Reverend Emmett asked, “Shall we walk on?”
So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow—not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.
7
Organized Marriage
It was Agatha who came up with the notion of finding Ian a wife. Agatha was graduating that June; she’d had word she’d been accepted at her fi
rst-choice college; she would soon be leaving the family forever. And one night in April she walked into the living room and told the other two, “I’m worried about Ian.”
Thomas and Daphne glanced over at her. (There was a commercial on just then, anyhow.) She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, her tortoiseshell glasses propped on top of her head in a purposeful, no-nonsense manner. “Who will keep him company after we’re gone?” she asked.
“You’re the only one going,” Daphne told her. “He’s still got me and Thomas.”
“Not for long,” Agatha said.
Their eyes slid back to the Late Late Movie.
But they knew she had a point. In a sense, Thomas was already gone. He was a freshman in high school now and he had a whole outside existence—a raft of friends and a girlfriend and an extracurricular schedule so full that he was seldom home for supper. As for Daphne, well, their grandma liked to say that Daphne was eleven going on eighty. She dressed like a tiny old Gypsy—muddled layers of clothing, all tatters and gold thread, purchased on her own at thrift shops—and was generally off in the streets somewhere managing very capably.
“Pretty soon all he’ll have will be Grandma and Grandpa,” Agatha said. “He’ll be taking care of them like always and shopping and driving the car and helping with the housework. What kind of life is that? I think he ought to get married.”
Now she had their attention.
“And since he doesn’t seem to know any women, I think we’ll have to find him one.”
“Miss Pennington,” Daphne said instantly.
“Who?”
“Miss Ariana Pennington, my teacher,” Daphne said.
It was just that easy.
Miss Pennington had been teaching fifth grade for only the past two years, so neither Thomas nor Agatha had had her when they were fifth-graders. Thomas knew her by sight, though. Every boy in the neighborhood knew her by sight. Not even the youngest, it seemed, was immune to her hourglass figure or her mane of extravagant curly brown hair. Agatha, on the other hand, had to be shown who it was they were talking about.