Drowning Ruth (8 page)

“I hope so,” Amanda said.

Ramona was satisfied. Most people said something along those lines.

Amanda picked up a page from an old circular and accordion-pleated it while she waited for Ramona to sort through the pile of mail behind the counter.

“I hear Carl is better.”

“Oh, yes, much better, thank you.”

“He's lucky he's got you to help out with Ruth.”

Amanda flushed. Helping Carl with Ruth? Was that how they saw it? That wasn't how it was at all. “Well, a girl needs a mother,” she said finally.

While the women talked, Ruth, placing her feet precisely heel to toe, so as to follow the path of a single floorboard, made her way to the low-hung window at the front of the post office. An automobile was rolling slowly up the street. Ruth's experience with motorcars was limited, and she'd never seen one like this, with a special seat in the rear for riding backward. When the car stopped, the boy in this seat stood up, bent his knees, and jumped to the ground, his unbuttoned coat flying out behind him like a cape. He waited beside the car then,
polishing its bright black flank with his sleeve, until the man who'd been driving came around. Together they started up the steps of the post office, and Ruth hurried back to stand beside Amanda.

“I guess this is it,” Ramona said as she laid a small pile of catalogs and bills on the counter. “No letters today.”

Amanda put the mail in her basket and turned to go, taking Ruth by the hand. Just then the door flew open, admitting a rush of fresh April air. Amanda's heart seized as if it might stop beating right there in the middle of the United States post office.

The man in the doorway smiled at her slightly, the corners of his mouth twitching and his eyes crinkling fondly, as if they shared a private joke. “Amy,” he said.

Amanda looked at the floor for a moment in confusion. Finally, relying on convention, she gave Ruth a little tug, so that the child stood between her and the man.

“Say how do you do to Mr. Owens, Ruthie.”

“Hajya do,” Ruth said obediently, but she meant it for the boy. He was older than she, which would have been enough to make him interesting, but something else about him fascinated her. He was wearing a pair of glasses, very small to fit his face and very round. Ruth hadn't thought that children could wear glasses. She wanted to try them on. Did things look different from behind them?

The boy looked down at her through his two windows rimmed in gold. “Hi,” he said, sticking his hand out importantly, “I'm Arthur.”

“Clement Owens,” the postmistress sang out from behind her counter. “You've got so much mail, I hardly know where to put it all.”

“Well, here I am to pick it up,” he said, but he continued to stand just inside the door. “I'd been hoping to run into you sometime, Amy. I have to thank you.”

Amanda stared at him.

“You told me such wonderful things about this place I figured I had to come out and take a look for myself. And now I'm building my own summer house on the north side. You see, I'm already using the post office. I've got a gorgeous lot—southern exposure, nice view of the whole west end of the lake. You ought to come see it sometime. I think you'd like it. Wait till we get the walls up, though. That's when you'll really be able to get a sense of it.”

There was a buzzing in Amanda's ears, the force of her own blood pumping in her head, she thought clinically. What could he be talking about? Suddenly, she realized it made no difference what he said, she only wanted to get away, to be away, never to have seen him, never to see him again. She took a small step forward and sideways, almost as if to suggest that she might push past him to escape.

Her behavior puzzled Clement. They hadn't parted on such bad terms, had they? And even if they had, didn't what had come before make up for that? They'd been so delighted with each other—he remembered that vividly. He remembered her quick, bright smile and with what shy pleasure she'd allowed him to tuck her hand under his arm. She couldn't have changed that much, could she? What was the matter with her that she couldn't treat him with friendliness in a public place? And then he remembered. “Amy,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “I'm very sorry about your sister.”

She jerked her shoulder abruptly, throwing his hand off. Ducking her head, she brushed past him and almost ran out the door he still held open. She hurried down the steps with Ruth in tow, so fast that the girl's feet missed almost every stair. They flew down the street, past the parked car in which sat a woman in a peacock-green coat. They turned the corner and still raced on, did not slow, did not stop, until they reached the stables where she'd left the buggy.

“We forgot the cocoa,” Ruth said anxiously, as Amanda plunked her onto the buggy seat. Amanda didn't answer.

When he heard the screams coming from the house, Carl was coming up the path that ran through the woods to the lake. He broke into the best limping run he could manage up the final hill. Despite the chilly air, he was slick with sweat, and his legs were shaking and his breathing ragged by the time he burst into the house.

In the kitchen, Ruth was wailing through chattering teeth as she struggled to climb out of her bath. Her little hands gripped the rim of the metal tub, and she pushed herself up on her toes, trying to lift her leg over the edge. It was a pitiful sight. He grabbed her up and wrapped her as well as he could in a dishtowel that hung near the sink. He held her close until she stopped crying, and then he shifted her to his hip and went to his sister-in-law, who all the time had been looking out the window, rocking slightly, holding one hand by the wrist with the other.

“Amanda, what's going on here?”

She turned toward him and smiled. “You see? I told you. She isn't drowned.” She reached to take Ruth from his arms, but he hesitated, held her back. “Give her to me!” she demanded, and then repeated, her voice frantic and shrill, “Give her to me!”

And when he still wouldn't relinquish the child, she tore at his arm and pummeled the shoulder he turned toward her, howling, “Mattie is mine! Mattie is mine! Give Mattie back! Mattie is mine!”

“Stop it! Damn it! Stop acting crazy!” He pulled Ruth away and ran up the stairs with her, slowing at the top, when it was clear Amanda wasn't following. When he came back down half an hour later, having soothed Ruth to sleep, she was no longer in the kitchen.

He moved through the house, opening doors and quietly calling her name. “Amanda,” he whispered outside her room. When he got no answer, he hesitated, and then, tentatively, pushed the door further open and looked inside. The room was empty. Half guilty and half curious, he stepped in.

Amanda had taken for herself the room her parents had used when they were alive. It was large enough for three windows, two on the wall that overlooked the flower garden, now just a wide strip of black mud—he'd need to cultivate that soon—and one that caught the afternoon light. All three windows were tall and so deep that the glass started below Carl's knees. It was dizzying to stand too near them. He looked at the ground below, with a sudden, terrible thought, but no, the windows were closed.

The dresser top was prettied with a runner on which lay a silver grooming set, the back of the hairbrush monogrammed with initials he knew to be her mother's. Beside that an oval frame held a photograph of a solemn, straight-backed girl, her lap buried in a froth of christening lace from which peeked an infant's face.

Carl wanted to slide one of the dresser drawers open, but he didn't dare. She'd know if he'd touched anything; he was sure of it. He looked quickly over his shoulder toward the door, but the house was quiet.

At first, thinking she'd gone off to calm herself, he didn't worry much and tried to go on with the afternoon. He cleaned the tub and mopped the water off the floor. He played with Ruth when she woke up. He did the evening milking. It was hard, though, to keep his mind on these things when she still didn't come back. Where was she? Finally, at dusk, he asked Rudy to watch Ruth and went to look for her.

He searched the barn, the chicken coop, and the root cellar hurriedly, holding his lantern high in the corners. He knocked on the door of the outhouse. He hoped but didn't truly expect to find
her in any of these reasonable places, but he needed to feel he was looking thoroughly, systematically, and it made sense to start with the nearest, sanest possibilities. At last, with expectant dread, he started for the lake.

It was cold, cold enough to make Carl wish he'd worn gloves, and he passed the lantern from hand to hand often as he walked, pressing the free one into his pocket. Halfway, he began to run as well as he could over the dark and knotted ground, groping his way down the same path he'd hurried up that afternoon.

Finally he broke from the trees, and the lake, which had only days before shed the last ragged scraps of the winter's ice, rippled wide and black before him. And yes, unbelievable though it seemed, there Amanda was, almost as he'd imagined her as he rushed through the woods. She wasn't floating, though, but standing up to her shoulders in the water, her head a silhouette in the white spill of moonlight. He splashed in without stopping to lay down the lantern, so that when he reached her he had to fling it into the water to grab hold of her with both hands. He dragged her back toward the land, maintaining his own footing on the bottom with difficulty, especially since in the numbingly cold water he couldn't feel his feet and could barely sense his legs. How long had she been standing there? What had she meant to do?

“Amanda! What're you doing? What're you doing?” he repeated over and over idiotically.

She gave no answer, but neither did she resist him. By the time they reached shallow water, he realized he'd been carrying her and would have to continue. She either couldn't or wouldn't support her own weight.

“She's obviously hypothermic,” the doctor said, “and I'm sure there's frostbite in the feet and fingers, but I think she'll be all
right that way.” He looked significantly at Carl. “It's her mind that worries me.”

“Yes,” Carl said, nodding energetically, relieved the doctor had noticed. “There's something wrong with her, isn't there?”

The doctor recommended St. Michael's. “A little rest,” he assured Carl, “will do her good.”

In April 1920, when Ruth was four, her Aunt Mandy went away.

“It doesn't surprise me one bit,” they said. On Cottonwood Drive and Maple Avenue, in the dry goods store and at the butcher, in the bank, in the tavern turned tearoom and in the post office they all agreed that there had always been something a little funny about Amanda, even as a girl.

“That time I brought that great big dish of potato salad over,” Mrs. Alberti said to Mrs. Zinda over coffee. “This was years ago, of course, back when Lucy was getting ready to have that darling Mattie. Well, Amanda came to the door—she must have been only seven or eight, just a little bit of a thing then. I was going to take my potato salad to the kitchen, look in on Lucy, you know, but that girl took my dish right out of my hands. It was so heavy the bones in her spindly wrists were standing out, and ‘Thank you very
much,' she says, and with one foot pushes the door closed, right in my face. Isn't that the limit? I don't know that I ever did get my dish back. It was the nice square one. You know, with the lid. I think you've got one like it.”

“You remember the way she was when Lucy and Henry got sick the other year,” Trina Eschinger said. “Throwing her own sister out with that tiny baby. And then running off like that when the old folks died.”

Yes, Amanda had always been funny. This didn't surprise them one bit.

If only I could have kept her small and close, but no, she wouldn't stay in that dark, secret place. She forced her way out, for all the world to see, and then look what happened.

It is you and then it isn't you—that's the trouble with a baby. And it keeps on and keeps on, growing and growing, monstrous. There's nothing you can do. You are no match for it. But that comes later.

I was so happy those months with Mama on the davenport, all mine, waiting for Mathilda to come. Tucked under her arm, I listened to her read and waited for the tap tap tap of Blind Pew and the light fairy laughter of Cowslip and Parsley. She could do all the voices. We dressed my doll Suzanna for the ball in a fold of Mama's shawl—Mama knew all the most interesting places a doll could go and what she would say when she got there. Sometimes we studied the photograph of my brother Randolph, who'd died of diphtheria just after I was born and would never be more than three years old. The picture was taken before he was buried and Mama had hired an artist to paint open eyes over his closed ones, but they didn't
look the same as his real ones, she told me. Other times she played the piano and we sang as loud as we could, so Rudy and Papa could hear us down in the meadow.

Every day then, when I left for school, Mama was on the davenport in the front room. I knelt beside her so she could fix my unruly hair in its tight braids. When I came home again, she was there still, just as I knew she'd be. Her arms would be open, and she would be waiting for me to bend close, to brush her hair, to draw a tiny heart with ink on her arm, to bet with her which marble I would hit. She would be waiting for me to draw the paper clothes that she would then cut out for my paper dolls, waiting for me to get us milk and brown sugar sandwiches from the kitchen. Every bit of her was there, just waiting for me.