A Cry In the Night (9 page)

She drifted off to sleep. Light was just beginning to trickle into the room when she felt Erich stir and slip out of bed.

“Erich.”

“Darling, I'm sorry to wake you. I never sleep more than a few hours. In a little while I'll go to the cabin and paint. I'll be back around noon.”

She felt his kiss on her forehead and lips as she drifted back to sleep. “I love you,” she murmured.

•   •   •

The room was flooded with light when she awoke again. Quickly she ran to the window and pulled up the shade. As she watched she was surprised to see Erich disappearing into the woods.

The scene outside was like one of his paintings. The tree branches were white with frozen snow. Snow covered the gambrel roof of the barn nearest the
house. Far back in the fields she could catch glimpses of cattle.

She glanced at the porcelain clock on the night table. Eight o'clock. The girls would be waking up soon. They might be startled to find themselves in a strange room.

Barefoot she hurried out of the bedroom and started down the wide foyer. As she passed Erich's old room, she glanced into it, then stopped. The coverlet was tossed back. The pillows were bunched up. She went into the room and touched the sheet. It was still warm. Erich had left their room and come in here. Why?

He doesn't sleep much, she thought. He probably didn't want to toss and turn and wake me up. He's used to sleeping alone. Maybe he wanted to read.

But he said he'd never slept in this room since he was ten years old.

Footsteps were running down the hall. “Mommy. Mommy.”

Quickly she hurried to the foyer, bent down and opened her arms. Beth and Tina, their eyes shining from the long sleep, ran to her.

“Mommy, we were looking for you,” Beth said accusingly.

“Me like it here,” Tina chirped in.

“And we have a present,” Beth said.

“A present? What have you got, love?”

“Me too,” Tina cried. “Thank you, Mommy.”

“It was on our pillows,” Beth explained.

Jenny gasped and stared. Each little girl was holding a small round cake of pine soap.

•   •   •

She dressed the children in new red corduroy overalls and striped tee shirts. “No school,” Beth said positively.

“No school,” Jenny agreed happily. Quickly she put
on slacks and a sweater and they went downstairs. The cleaning woman had just arrived. She had a scrawny frame with incongruously powerful arms and shoulders. Her small eyes set in a puffy face were guarded. She looked as though she rarely smiled. Her hair, too tightly braided, seemed to be pulling up the skin around her hairline, robbing her of expression.

Jenny held out her hand. “You must be Elsa. I'm . . .” She started to say “Jenny” and remembered Erich's annoyance at her too friendly greeting to Joe. “I'm Mrs. Krueger.” She introduced the girls.

Elsa nodded. “I do my best.”

“I can see that,” Jenny said. “The house looks lovely.”

“You tell Mr. Krueger that stain on the dining-room paper was not my fault. Maybe he had paint on his hand.”

“I didn't notice a stain last night.”

“I show you.”

There was a smudge on the dining-room paper near the window. Jenny studied it. “For heaven sake, you almost need a microscope to see it.”

Elsa went into the parlor to begin cleaning and Jenny and the girls breakfasted in the kitchen. When they were finished she got out their coloring books and crayons. “Tell you what,” she proposed, “let me have a cup of coffee in peace and then we'll go out for a walk.”

She wanted to think. Only Erich could have put those cakes of soap on the girls' pillows. Of course it was perfectly natural that he'd look in on them this morning and there was nothing wrong with the fact that he obviously liked the smell of pine. Shrugging, she finished her coffee and dressed the children in snowsuits.

The day was cold but there was no wind. Erich had told her that winter in Minnesota could range from
severe to vicious. “We're breaking you in easy this year,” he'd said. “It's just middlin bad.”

At the doorway she hesitated. Erich might want to show them around the stables and barns and introduce her to the help. “Let's go this way,” she suggested.

She led Tina and Beth around the back of the house and toward the open fields on the east side of the property. They walked on the crunching snow until the house was almost out of sight. Then as they strolled toward the country road that marked the east boundary of the farm, Jenny noticed a fenced-off area and realized they had come upon the family cemetery. A half-dozen granite monuments were visible through the white pickets.

“What's that, Mommy?” Beth asked.

She opened the gate and they went inside the enclosure. She walked from one to the other of the tombstones, reading the inscriptions. Erich Fritz Krueger, 1843-1913, and Gretchen Krueger, 18471915. They must have been Erich's great-grandparents. Two little girls: Marthea, 1875-1877, and Amanda, 1878-1890. Erich's grandparents, Erich Lars and Olga Krueger, both born in 1880. She died in 1941, he in 1948. A baby boy, Erich Hans, who lived eight months in 1911. So much pain, Jenny thought, so much grief. Two little girls lost in one generation, a baby boy in the next one. How do people bear that kind of hurt? At the next monument, Erich John Krueger, 1915-1979. Erich's father.

There was one grave at the south end of the plot, as separate from the others as it was possible to be. It was the one she realized she had been looking for. The inscription read Caroline Bonardi Krueger, 1924–1956.

Erich's father and mother were not buried together. Why? The other monuments were weathered. This
one looked as though it had been recently cleaned. Did Erich's love for his mother extend to taking extraordinary care of her tombstone? Inexplicably Jenny felt a stab of anxiety. She tried to smile. “Come on, you two. I'll race you across the field.”

Laughing, they ran after her. She let them catch and then pass her, pretending to try to keep up with them. Finally they all stopped breathless. Clearly Beth and Tina were elated to have her with them. Their cheeks were rosy, their eyes sparkled and glowed. Even Beth had lost her perpetually solemn look. Jenny hugged them fiercely.

“Let's walk as far as that knoll,” she suggested, “then we'll turn back.”

But when they reached the top of the embankment, Jenny was surprised to see a fair-sized white farmhouse nestled on the other side. She realized it had to be the original family farmhouse now used by the farm manager.

“Who lives there?” Beth asked.

“Some people who work for Daddy.”

As they stood looking at the house, the front door opened. A woman came out on the porch and waved to them, clearly indicating she wanted them to come up to the house. “Beth, Tina, come on,” Jenny urged. “It looks as though we're about to meet our first neighbor.”

It seemed to her that the woman stared at them unrelentingly as they walked across the field. Unmindful of the cold day she stood in the doorway, the door wide open behind her. At first Jenny thought from her slight frame and sagging body that she was elderly. But as she got closer, she realized that the woman was no more than in her late fifties. Her brown hair was streaked with gray and twisted high on her head in a carelessly pinned knot. Her rimless glasses magnified sad gray eyes. She wore a long, shapeless sweater over
baggy, double-knit slacks. The sweater accentuated her bony shoulders and acute thinness.

Still there were vestiges of prettiness about the face, and the drooping mouth had well-shaped lips. There was a hint of a dimple in her chin, and somehow Jenny visualized this woman younger, more joyous. The woman stared at her as she introduced herself and the girls.

“Just like Erich told me,” the woman said, her voice low and nervous. “‘Rooney,' he said, ‘wait till you meet Jenny, you'll think you're looking at Caroline.' But he didn't want me talking about it.” She made a visible effort to calm herself.

Impulsively Jenny held out both her hands. “And Erich has told me about you, Rooney, how long you've been here. I understand your husband is the farm manager. I haven't met him yet.”

The woman ignored that. “You're from New York City?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Our daughter Arden is twenty-seven. Clyde said she went to New York. Maybe you met her?” The question was asked with fierce eagerness.

“I'm afraid I haven't,” Jenny said. “But of course New York is so big. What kind of work does she do? Where does she live?”

“I don't know. Arden ran away ten years ago. She didn't have to run away. Could just as easily have said, ‘Ma, I want to go to New York.” I never denied her. Her dad was a bit strict with her. I guess she knew he wouldn't let her go so young. But she was such a good girl, why she was president of the 4-H club. I didn't know she wanted to go so bad. I thought she was really happy with us.”

The woman's gaze was fixed on the wall. She
seemed to be in a reverie of her own, as though explaining something she had explained many times before. “She was our only one. We waited a long time for her. She was such a pretty baby, and so
wanting,
you know what I mean. So active, right from the minute she was born. So I said, let's call her Arden, short for ardent. It suited her real nice.”

Beth and Tina shrank against Jenny. There was something about this woman, about the staring eyes and slight tremor, that frightened them.

My God, Jenny thought. Her only child and she hasn't heard from her in ten years. I would go mad.

“See her picture here.” Rooney indicated a framed picture on the wall. “I took that just two weeks before she left.”

Jenny studied the picture of a sturdy, smiling teenager with curly blond hair.

“Maybe she's married and has babies too,” Rooney said. “I think about that a lot. That's why when I saw you coming along with the little ones, I thought maybe that's Arden.”

“I'm sorry,” Jenny said.

“No, it's all right. And please don't tell Erich I've been talking about Arden again. Clyde said Erich is sick of listening to me always going on about Arden and Caroline. Clyde said that's why Erich retired me from my job at the house when his dad died. I took real good care of that house, just like my own. Clyde and I came here when John and Caroline were married. Caroline liked the way I did things and even after she died I kept everything just so for her, as though she'd be walking in any minute. But come on in the kitchen. I made doughnuts and the coffeepot's on.”

Jenny could smell the perking coffee. They sat around the white enamel table in the cheerful kitchen. Hungrily Tina and Beth munched at still-warm powdered doughnuts and drank milk.

“I remember when Erich was that age,” Rooney said. “I used to make those doughnuts for him all the time. I was the only one Caroline ever left him with if she went out shopping. Felt almost like he was my own. Still do, I guess. I didn't have Arden for ten years after we wuz married but Caroline had Erich that first year. Never saw a little boy loved his mother more. Never wanted her out of his sight. Oh, you do look like her, you do.”

She reached for the coffeepot and refilled Jenny's cup. “And Erich's been so good to us. He spent ten thousand dollars on private detectives trying to find where Arden went.”

Yes, Jenny thought, Erich would do that. The clock over the kitchen sink began to chime. It was noon. Hastily Jenny got up. Erich would be home. She wanted terribly to be with him. “Mrs. Toomis, we'd better run. I do hope you'll come and visit us.”

“Call me Rooney. Everybody does. Clyde don't want me to go to the big house anymore. But I fool him. I go up there a lot to make sure everything's nice. And you come back here again and visit. I like having company.”

A smile made a remarkable transformation in her face. For a moment the drooping, sad lines disappeared and Jenny knew she'd been right in guessing that at one time Rooney Toomis had been a very pretty woman.

Rooney insisted they take a plate of doughnuts home. “They're good for an afternoon snack.” As she held open the door for them she started to turn up the collar of her sweater. “I think I'll start looking for Arden now,” she sighed. Once again her voice had become vague.

The noon sun was brilliant, high in the heavens, shining on the snow-covered fields. As they turned the bend, the house came into view. The pale red of the
brick glowed under the sun's rays. Our home, Jenny thought. She held the girls by the hand. Was Rooney going to walk aimlessly around these acres looking for her lost child?

“That was a very nice lady,” Beth announced.

“Yes, she was,” Jenny agreed. “Come on, now. On the double. Daddy's probably waiting for us.”

“Which daddy?” Beth asked matter-of-factly.

“The only one.”

Just before she opened the kitchen door, Jenny whispered to the children. “Let's tiptoe in and surprise Daddy.”

Eyes sparkling, they nodded.

Noiselessly she turned the handle. The first sound they heard was Erich's voice. It was coming from the dining room, each angry word pitched slightly higher than its predecessor. “How dare you tell me that I might have caused that stain! It's obvious that you let the oil rag touch the wallpaper when you dusted the windowsill. Do you realize the entire room will have to be repapered now? Do you know how difficult it will be to get that pattern again? How many times have I warned you about those oil rags?”

“But, Mr. Krueger. . .” Elsa's protest, nervously loud, was cut off.

“I want you to apologize for blaming that mess on me. Either apologize or get out of this house and don't come back.”

There was silence.

“Mommy,” Beth whispered, frightened.