Stony River Read online

  Dearie hadn’t been able to come up with a good-enough story about his mother’s desertion to patch Buddy’s torn heart. “Remember that poor boy looking for her every morning, not even over missing his daddy yet?” He was scared to sleep upstairs alone after Moira left. Dearie and Alfie made up a bed for him in the dining room, but he crawled in between them most nights for almost a year, smelling sour from fear and whimpering like a kicked puppy. He wouldn’t drop off until he couldn’t fight the exhaustion any longer, afraid he’d vanish if he went to sleep.

  Moira was a hard one to forgive, even at Christmas.

  Dearie wiped off the glass and put Junior back on the radiator cover. If he came home now, he’d be proud of his son overcoming so much. He’d tell Buddy he didn’t have to be the he-man he thought his daddy had been, didn’t have to prove himself anymore. Junior could help, too, with what the doctors had called Buddy’s condition. They said it could get worse over the years, but so far he’d only had one serious episode since the first. Oh, he could flare up like a struck match all right and let gloomy thoughts get the best of him, but only at home, it seemed. As far as Dearie knew, his temper hadn’t shown up at work or in class, so obviously he could control it if he put his mind to it. Junior could give him some tips on that.

  She wondered if she’d been wrong to build up his father so much in the boy’s mind. She could have told him Junior had surrendered. But picturing Junior giving up to those murdering Japs shamed her more than she liked to admit. What would it do to Buddy?

  She closed the lid on the medal box.

  Besides, it might not even be true. Alfie always said you could never see the whole truth, just like you could never see all the stars in the universe.

  JANUARY 19, 1957. When the twilight is gone—wah ah—and no song-birds are singing—wah.

  Linda had set up her record player to repeat the song over and over. The Platters sounded like black butter, an observation she’d never share aloud lest anyone think she was prejudiced which she absolutely was not. For goodness’ sake, she’d even begged for and gotten the colored baby doll advertised on Amos and Andy when she was little. Normally she could listen to records and do homework at the same time, despite what Daddy claimed. But this night, she struggled with an essay as snow fell like feather dust outside her window.

  When the twilight is gone—wah ah—you come into my heart—ah.

  Her English class was supposed to look to Our Town for inspiration. Miss Firkser had taken them to a community theater production of the play before Christmas and then assigned them an essay describing Stony River in a way that would reveal its essential character, whatever that was. Linda had sat next to Connie Boyle during the play and they’d both cried. Poor, dead Emily traveling back in time to her twelfth birthday, only to realize that the living never take time to look at one another. Linda remembered her own disappointing twelfth birthday. When the Stage Manager said the dead didn’t stay interested in the living for long, she’d thought of Mother, shut up in her room across the hall, showing little interest in anyone or anything. It made her feel hopeless and angry.

  And here in my heart you will stay while I pray.

  The Platters and groups like the Satins and the Penguins with their harmonies and high notes gave Linda goose bumps and caused her to lose her own grip on the earth for a few minutes. Make-out music. She’d yet to make out with anyone—party kissing games didn’t count—but whenever she heard a shoo do be shoo be wah she thought she knew what it would be like to have your heart all aglow. Honestly, sometimes it embarrassed her how badly she longed for it. She practiced kissing on her arm and prayed every day to keep her feelings for Richie wholesome.

  My prayer is to linger with you, at the end of the day, in a dream that’s divine.

  Should she write about the past like in Our Town? Had Stony River been much different when her father was born in the very house she lived in now? He was baptized at the same church as she. Had gone to the same school. She could see him as the Stage Manager:

  “Over yonder, two blocks south and three blocks east,” he’d say, sounding more Kansas than New Jersey, “is Mister and Missus Sulo’s house, on a piece of land once deep in blackberries. Ma would send me out in my knickerbockers to fill buckets of them so we could enjoy her jelly and jam all winter long. The Sulos came here from Linden right after Ike took office. Flush enough, I declare, to buy one of them new houses with the fancy colored stoves and fridges. The missus is a cute little thing, a nurse in the hospital’s new maternity ward, and the mister, well, we don’t see him much. A travelin’ salesman of some sort. Truth be told, neither of ’em is home enough to steer their boy, Richard, down the straight and narrow, though he does keep the lawn mowed all summer, got to give him that.”

  Miss Firkser said the Russians had banned Our Town for making family life appear too attractive. Linda felt sorry for communists with their drab collective-farm existence. But they were screwy if they found family life in Grover’s Corners attractive. As for Stony River, it had many more people than Grover’s Corners but was just as small in spirit. She could write something scathing—she loved that word— but a good grade might require a flag-waving essay. Ever since Korea, it seemed that criticizing anything American was unpatriotic.

  My prayer is a rapture in bloom.

  “Write about Bartz Chemicals,” Daddy said. “How it’s the center of the wheel from which radiate the spokes of Stony River life.” And from which spilled the goo that stank up the river. It bugged her that Daddy asked “Father work at Bartz?” whenever she mentioned a new kid at school. Many dads did work where he did—the plant employed six thousand, after all—but Linda objected to the implication that if you worked anywhere else you weren’t as good.

  Stony River sits on the peninsula of I’m Better Than You, she wrote. White vs. colored. Christian vs. Jew. Catholic vs. Protestant. The married sit in judgment of the divorced. People who live on one side of the highway think they’re better than us on the other and those in the big houses near the high school think they’re best of all. Patients in private hospital rooms feel superior to those in wards. Some fathers think their jobs are more important than others. Teenagers are no better. Jocks think they’re cooler than hoods and nobody wants to be a freshman.

  She struck the last. She was looking forward to being a freshman come September.

  Richie was different. He might decide to stop being a hood but he’d never want to be a jock or go to college like Daddy. Why should he? He was going to be an artist. Mother and Daddy didn’t like his looks and “the company he kept.” They’d told her to stay away from him. They believed she was at the library after school every Wednesday, the only weeknight Daddy “rustled up” dinner, as he liked to joke, giving his legs-apart thumbs-in-belt cowboy impression. But she’d be in Richie’s attic studio, posing for a comic strip about a wisecracking husband-and-wife detective team named Glenn and Gilda Daring. The deception pricked her conscience, but her parents’ prejudice against Richie bothered her more.

  With the world far away and your lips close to mine.

  On Wednesdays, she’d stay until the five o’clock blast of the Bartz Chemicals factory whistle. Richie didn’t smoke in the studio so she wouldn’t have to explain the smell when she got home. He was surprisingly thoughtful like that. She suspected it was her positive influence.

  He wanted Gilda to be “zaftig,” like Peggy Lee—she loved it when he used a word you wouldn’t in a million years think he’d know— and pronounced Linda’s figure perfect. He drew Glenn thin as a snake. Linda would have preferred to be less hourglass and more six o’clock, like Seventeen model Carol Lynley, but she’d never survive on the single head of lettuce, pound of grapes and three green peppers Lynley claimed was all she ate every day.

  Tonight, while our hearts are aglow.

  Richie’s mother was off shift on Wednesdays. She let Linda wear her trench coat and Richie’s father’s old fedora when she posed. She took Polaroid picture
s of “Glenn and Gilda” for the panels in which they appeared together. She often popped in while Linda was there to ask if they wanted a snack. All on the up-and-up, Linda would tell Daddy if he found out.

  Oh tell me the words that I’m longing to know.

  Richie sketched Linda leaning against the wall, climbing a step stool he drew as a ladder, and in profile, holding a pistol his father had brought back from the war as a souvenir. “Is it loaded?” she’d asked the first time and he’d said, “Natch. How else you gonna feel authentic?” Palming it made her nervous but a little proud, too, remembering Tereza calling her Goody Two-Shoes. Daddy had a smaller pistol he’d acquired as a volunteer policeman during the war; a hernia saved him from the draft. He kept it, unloaded, in a bedside table. Linda had never even tried to cock it. But Richie’s father had taught him how to fire their pistol.

  My prayer and the answer you give …

  Richie drew her hair a brighter blonde than it really was, with her curls peeking out from under the fedora like fringe. He gave her pointy breasts that made her blush. He did the drawing and she did the speech bubbles. Glenn called men “cats” and women “dolls.” Gilda, whom Linda envisioned as an older Nancy Drew—outspoken and fearless—said things like “You big lug” and “Cigarette me.” They were working on a story Linda thought they should call “The Case of the Cry in the Night” in which two schoolgirls suspect that a sinister man holds another girl prisoner in a creepy old house, but their parents don’t believe them. So they contact Glenn and Gilda, who take the case for free because they’re secretly wealthy and on a mission to help the disadvantaged. “Privilege demands social responsibility,” Gilda tells the mayor in one panel.

  May they still be the same for as long as we live.

  Linda removed her glasses and stepped to her bedroom window. She cupped her hands and pressed her nose against the chilly pane. She studied the snowflakes that swam in streetlamp light before sinking to the ground. The snow was too fresh for footprints. She thought of Miranda and Tereza. To disappear with so few people caring seemed sadder than to die.

  She returned to her desk and wrote: Stony River is the ground asleep under snow, its secrets imperceptible from behind a thick pane of glass.

  Miss Firkser had begun teaching them about metaphors. Linda didn’t know how to extend hers or whether it was even the right one. Maybe it described her own home more than Stony River, with Mother both sleeper and snow. She wished she could tell friends that Mother was terminally ill and she and Daddy were making her last days as comfortable as possible. But Mother wasn’t dying. Periodically she’d rise from her bed and take charge with such firm resolve you could hardly believe she’d ever been sick. She’d make beef stew, starch and iron Daddy’s shirts, drag Linda out for new shoes. Insert herself into Linda and Daddy’s routine as though they were incompetent and needed to be rescued. Eventually Linda or Daddy would say or do something (they were never sure what) to make Mother untie her apron and go back to her room.

  That you’ll always be there—dadadadadadadadada wah—at the end of my prayer.

  “She claims she wanted to go to England during the war and drive an ambulance,” Daddy said one night. “She says I wouldn’t let her. I don’t remember even discussing it.” He looked so lost. Linda was confused: Mother didn’t even know how to drive, for goodness’ sake.

  Linda heard a shovel scrape. The snow was falling more thickly, piling in the windowpane corners and turning her room into a cocoon.

  In Our Town, the Stage Manager said that as far as they knew, nobody remarkable had ever come out of Grover’s Corners. Linda intended to be remarkable. She was going to leave big footprints in the snow.

  ACROSS THE HALL, Betty Wise sat in bed, propped up with pillows, trying to ease the throb in her neck and shake the dizzy feeling from those dang pills. Over her shoulders, against the room’s chill, was a yellow and white afghan she’d knitted back when she felt like knitting.

  Roger thought she should be able to “snap out of it,” whatever “it” was. When the appendix came out, they’d found scar tissue— the fancy word was adhesions—gumming up the works from the hysterectomy the year before. The surgeon claimed that would have accounted for the pain. But Doctor Pierce disagreed. He’d told Roger it was in her head. He and Roger didn’t know beans from apple butter. As if she could spunk right up just because they said so.

  Linda was across the hall right now, playing her music without a thought that her mother could use some company. The only time she visited Betty’s room was after school to ask if she wanted anything. An act of duty, not love. It got Betty’s goat that Linda didn’t call her Mom. She’d never signed a birthday or Christmas card as Mother. Roger said, “You have a voice. Tell her what you want,” but it wasn’t the same if you had to ask.

  Betty could hear them as they watched their shows at night, their laughter drifting up through the register. Their morning voices were full of hurry. She envied them a place to go each day. She’d stay in bed until she heard Roger backing down the gravel driveway, fix a cup of tea and wander the house picking up after them. She didn’t suppose they noticed.

  She swung unsteady legs over the side of the bed and shuffled to the window overlooking the backyard. The snow was streaked with light from the house of a woman who came out when the moon was full and ranted in German. Betty steadied herself on the windowsill, fighting nausea. The Bible said a good wife was tolerant and understanding, didn’t complain, didn’t provoke her husband’s anger. When Betty disagreed with Roger he’d tell her she was wrong but he wouldn’t say wrong. He’d use words like emotional, irrational or impractical. He could gnaw an argument to the bone. If Betty went to college she’d learn to argue better, but even if they could afford it, Roger said one family didn’t need two degrees.

  If he ever raised a hand to Linda, she’d be on the next train home to Mom. But he worshiped her, didn’t see her faults. If Robert had lived, Roger would have doted on him and not stolen Linda away from her. Mom had told her countless times to put the boy behind her and love the child God gave her, but three people wasn’t much of a family, not like the eight kids her own parents had. The plain truth was that Roger and Linda didn’t need her.

  She sat back down on the bed and turned her pasty face toward the dressing table mirror. If she had the energy she’d rouge her cheeks. Being with Mom last summer was swell, despite Roger having ruined Linda’s birthday by forgetting to get the car serviced beforehand and then spoiling Linda’s chance to spend time with a decent boy instead of that hoodlum she seemed to have a crush on. Betty wanted to warn Linda against giving herself away too easily, but she didn’t think Linda would listen. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and knocked it over. Got down on trembling knees and wiped it up with the afghan.

  She was sure she’d get well if they moved closer to Mom and had more land. Betty would plant a vegetable garden and raise a few chickens. She’d tried rhubarb, raspberries, carrots, lettuce and tomatoes over the years, but their postage stamp of a yard didn’t yield much.

  Roger would never move away from the house he was born in. Betty accepted that. Those first few years she didn’t mind sharing a home with Mother Wise, as she insisted Betty call her. She didn’t mind taking care of her when she was dying, even though the woman called Betty a hick. After she died, Betty wanted Roger to give some thought to living near her mom for a while. But he said, “You’re the one who came out here and decided to stay.”

  True enough. She just wished he’d try to make it more worth her while.

  THIRTEEN

  MARCH 9, 1957. The air was bitter at two in the morning when Herman drove Tereza home. She let herself in, closing the front door softly so as not to wake Dearie and Buddy. Dearie had begged off work the night before, complaining about her back. She’d planned to take some aspirin and get an early night. Tereza slipped off her shoes, tiptoed across the parlor and turned off the lamp Dearie had left on for her. She was surprised t
o see light coming from the kitchen and hear Dearie’s voice, firmer than usual, fierce even. “Not a word more about it ever again. Ain’t nothing to do with us.”

  Tereza found Dearie and Buddy at the kitchen table, Dearie wrapped in a blanket. Buddy, his leather jacket still zipped up, sat slumped and teary-eyed like a scared little kid.

  “What’s going on?” Tereza asked.

  Dearie jerked a bit then recovered. “Forgot you was still out. Just my bum back. Can’t sleep for the aching. Buddy’s keeping me company. Ain’t he sweet?”

  It was the first time Tereza had known Dearie to lie to her.

  Dearie didn’t go to work the next night either. The ladies’ john was full of talk about some cop’s murder. One customer showed Tereza a newspaper with the word FALLEN in thick black letters above a picture of the cop. His face looked familiar.

  MARCH 11, 1957. The phone ruptured the silence.

  Buddy and Ladonna were at work. Dearie had been in bed for two days, wanting nothing more than to sink into a dark lake of sleep. But the same dream kept fishing her out, not letting her rest: Junior with his arms over his head in surrender and Buddy’s twelve-year-old face on him, a panicky look in his eyes. She’d wake feeling like a heavy stone was pressing on her chest.

  She considered not answering the phone in case it was the cops. She pushed away the memory of Buddy punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall when she’d visited him in juvenile detention.

  Yesterday was the first Sunday in years she hadn’t cooked a roast, or anything else. She’d blamed it on her back so that Buddy wouldn’t know how poorly she was taking things. She could usually stay cheerful for his sake. She’d told him more than once, “Act like everything’s normal and pretty soon you ain’t acting anymore.” But right now it wasn’t working for her. Talking to Alfie didn’t help either; she couldn’t think of what to say.