Hearts (12 page)

There was the persistent irrational terror that she would die during an abortion. They were thoroughly safe and legal now, she knew, not the way they were in the old days when she’d overhear her mother and Mrs. Piner discussing girls who were condemned by ambitious druggists and rusty hangers. Clinics were popping up all over the country, like those trees of heaven Wolfie had pointed out alongside the highway, and there would be sympathetic and strictly hygienic care. Her funds would be depleted a little and the goal of reaching California somewhat delayed, but that wasn’t so important.

It began to rain, and the windshield wipers established
their rhythm and repeated it resolutely. There must have been an electrical storm close by, because when Robin turned the radio on, static crackled on every station. She turned it off and they listened to the wipers and the run of rain on the Maverick’s roof.

“Well, this is really farm country,” Linda said, as if all the fields of wheat and corn, and all the barns and pigs and cows they’d passed for hundreds of miles were only a rehearsal for this, the genuine article. She wished they could have driven this last stretch in the gorgeous weather in which they had started out. There wasn’t a cow in sight now, and the fields were flattened and dismal with rain.

“Maybe they’ll give you an attic room with a slanted ceiling,” she said. “You’ll hear sounds you won’t believe—goat bells, and roosters crowing in the morning. There’ll be mooing and neighing! You’ll be able to pour your own milk right from the cow.”

“That’s not pasteurized,” Robin said. “You could get sick and die.”

“Oh. Right, right. But you could gather some eggs for breakfast, still warm from the hen.”

“I hate eggs,” Robin said, which Linda remembered was true. Still, the girl sounded childishly petulant, and Linda could not promise her a garden where Sugar Pops and Cocoa Puffs could be picked fresh daily. What she had tried to convey, but could not articulate, was the illusion of safety in the countryside, in the perfect order of nature, that she’d held since childhood when she read
Heidi
for the first time. There was much human cruelty in the story, the way there was in life, but goodness and justice had triumphed in the end.

The storm was getting closer. The sky was brilliantly
lit by a sizzling wire of lightning, and the rain was drumming down now. The atmosphere was more like that in a mystery novel than in a wholesome children’s book. Linda’s anxiety increased, the way it had in the caverns, and she began to feel faint. “I think,” she said, “that we shouldn’t be driving in this.” Her armpits and forehead were wet and her heartbeat was erratic. She knew it was dangerous to pull off the road when visibility was so poor, but there was hardly any traffic, and the other, intangible danger she sensed was far worse, inescapable.

They were away from the main highway, on a paved, two-lane road with a narrow dirt shoulder. We’ll get stuck in the mud, Linda thought. And we’re under trees, the most treacherous place during an electrical storm—one more unshakable fact from her early education. She shut off the engine, turned the emergency blinkers on, and leaned back against the headrest. “What’s the matter with you?” Robin asked. “You’re all white.”

“I am?” Linda peered into the rearview mirror at her floury complexion, her frightened eyes. She fell back again. “I’m sick,” she told Robin.

“What should I do?” Robin whispered. She was on her knees, hovering. Her hand grazed Linda’s shoulder, and then her forehead, with a touch that was tentative with inexperience. Linda was washed with tenderness before she passed out.

When she came to, they were in motion. The sun was out, cruelly bright after that darkness, the way it is after you leave a movie theater in the afternoon. Linda was in the front passenger seat, slumped against the door, with a pillow doubled behind her head. Her neck was stiff and she had a headache, but otherwise she felt much better. Robin was driving.

After Linda took the wheel again, she asked, “Did your father teach you?”

“No,” Robin said. “My friend Ray did. Ginger’s brother. He taught both of us.”

“When?
Where?
”

“Oh, sometimes. Just around.”

“But he’s only …” Linda’s voice trailed off. What was the use? Of
course
he was only fourteen, and the girls even younger. Of course it was illegal, and outrageous, but she really drove quite well, although a little fast. And if they had stayed there much longer, they might have been mired in the mud. They were going to separate very soon, anyway, and Robin’s discipline would become the responsibility of her real family.

They stopped at a general store to ask directions and discovered they were very close, less than two miles away. “I’m getting a little excited,” Linda said. “Aren’t you?”

Shrug.

The house was set far back from the road, like most of the farmhouses they had passed. There was a barn a few hundred yards to the west and acres and acres of land, but nothing seemed to be growing in them. It had not rained here, apparently, and everything had a parched and barren look. Linda tried to remember some of the main causes of crop failure. Drought? Locusts? No wonder they hadn’t answered her telegram. Maybe she’d have to turn over all the money, except what she needed for the abortion and the rest of her journey, out of simple charity. Maybe she and Robin would discover skeletons in overalls huddled around a dead fireplace.

They went through a gate marked Reismann, and again Linda experienced the surprise of that shared
name. It was Robin’s too, she reminded herself, their last fragile connection.

There was no neighing or mooing here; whatever animals they had must have been killed off by whatever took the crops. And there was no sign of house occupancy, either. “Wait a minute, Robin,” Linda said, after they got out of the car. Robin hadn’t moved. Linda opened the trunk. She looked at the plastic container that held Wright’s ashes and silently promised imminent release. Then she selected one of Wright’s paintings, a peace offering from beyond this world, she thought, and tucked it under her arm.

They walked up the front steps together and Linda rang the bell. The door was solid and the shades were drawn. She remembered standing on the porch of the house on Roper Street and this same sensation of suspense. Robin’s fingers worked against one another, as if she were knitting.

Suddenly the door opened and dreaming Linda almost fell inside. The woman standing there looked familiar. Like James Cagney, Linda decided at last, and realized that Wright had also, only not so distinctly. This had to be his older sister, Verna, although she did not look like a farmer’s daughter, especially like the unmarried drudge on an impoverished farm. She was dressed smartly in a beige linen suit, was heavily made up, and her arms jangled with gold bracelets, a cacophony that could never be mistaken for goat’s bells.

“Yes?”

“I’m Linda,” Linda said. “Your …? I sent the telegram. And this is Robin.” She tried to push the girl forward, but she had rooted herself to the porch, like a
weed. Linda wished that Robin would step out of character for once, just this time, and make some attempt to charm, to be ingratiating. Her presence alone should speak for her, of course. She and this woman, her aunt, shared genes, ancestors, history.

“Well, come in, I guess,” Verna said. It was not the warmest of receptions, and when Robin continued to stand there, Linda yanked her arm, and they were inside.

Some of the furniture looked new, and shockingly modern in the old house. A ruddy, heavy-lidded man in a gray suit was sitting on a low sofa, part of a modular grouping, and drinking a martini. He was much too young to be Wright’s father. Linda peeked through a rear window behind him to see if any surviving livestock were out back, but only two cars, a Continental and a long silver Buick, grazed there, nose to nose.

Wright’s sister said, “Lewis, this is my brother’s wife, and his daughter.” She didn’t go any further, didn’t say their names, or who the man was.

Linda sank to the armless unit opposite him. Her knees almost brushed her chin, and she tried to arrange herself to look comfortable and relaxed. Robin stood in the doorway.

“You know, it’s not really what I expected,” Linda said.

Verna raised an eyebrow; the man, Lewis, his glass to his lips.

“I had a kind of romantic fairy-tale vision of farms. I guess I didn’t account for modern technology.” Yet where was the corn growing? Underground?

“The place is sold,” Verna said. “They fought with us to put I-80 through here for years. I wanted to, but my
father held out. Now it’s all going for housing development. The whole area’s being rezoned for half-acre tracts. Lewis is the builder.”

The glass went up again. That wasn’t all Lewis was to Verna. Linda would have bet on it. She saw them lying locked together in one of those burnt-out fields, and the noise of the bracelets was deafening.

“But where will you go?” Linda asked.

“I’ve taken a condo in Dubuque. I’m going to travel. And I’m thinking of writing a book.”

Linda turned to see how Robin was taking all this news, but she wasn’t there, had probably gone off to find a bathroom.

“And Mr.… your father? Doesn’t he mind, about this?”

“That’s right,” Verna said. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Upstairs,” Verna said, walking.

Robin was coming from the other side of the stairway. Linda beckoned and she followed them.

The old man was in the bedroom Linda had imagined as Robin’s. It was small and cozy; the ceiling slanted, and blue floral paper was fading on the walls. It stank in there, the unmistakable odor of prolonged illness. The old man had had a stroke; the diagnosis was easy. His features were in crazy disorder, like a child’s drawing of a face, like her mother’s had been. One pale eye was fixed on them, and wept.

Linda heard a small, breathless sound behind her, from Robin. “It’s okay,” she said, and then walked to the bedside, her hands clasped at her waist. “I’m Linda,” she said. “Wright’s wife? I’m the one who sent you—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Verna said. “He can’t hear a word you’re saying. He’s in a
coma
.”

“But his eye …”

“It got stuck like that when it happened. Three months ago.”

A toilet flushed nearby and a fat woman in a white uniform and brown Space Shoes came into the room and took her place in a bedside chair. “Well, visitors!” she said. “How do,” and picked up a magazine and began to read.

“You kept him at home,” Linda said, touched by that.

“No private insurance,” Verna said briskly. “And his Medicare days ran out. If he’s still alive when the bulldozers come, Lewis’s company will pay for a nursing home.”

While Verna was speaking, Linda thought she perceived a flicker of response in that staring eye. What if he could hear everything, and was only unable to respond? If the other women were not in the room, she would have spoken to him, introduced Robin, explained about Wright. Just in case. Verna led the way out. There was to be no deathbed reconciliation, no chance for last-minute repentance.

This was her father’s house. Robin wandered into the kitchen after Linda went off to the living room with that woman. Maybe he had sat at this table to do his homework when he was a boy. It looked new, though, so she supposed it must have been at a different table. But he had looked out through those windows, dreaming about becoming a husband and a father someday.

The remains of dinner were on the table and the countertop: the bones of a well-picked chicken, a salad limp and drenched with dressing. She opened a drawer in a cabinet next to the stove and saw the usual chaos of kitchen utensils. The silverware looked old, with its heavily carved and curved handles. She picked up a fork and put it into her mouth, tasting the metal. There were footsteps overhead, creaking, and Robin panicked, shoving the fork into the pocket of her jeans. This place gave her the creeps. She would stay here about three minutes after Linda left. She had to get the money first, though.

There was a telephone on the wall, and under it, the local directory. Reismann, Wright Sr., was listed, making her heart stutter. She shut the book and went into the hallway just as Linda and that woman came from the living room. Linda curled her finger at Robin, indicating she wanted her to follow them upstairs.

An old man was lying in a child’s bed, staring at them with one terrible eye. It smelled like a laundry hamper in there and Robin sucked in her breath and held it. Linda and the woman spoke and then they went downstairs again. The other man was in the hallway. At a signal from the woman, he took Robin back into the kitchen. Had they discovered the fork was missing? She felt its cold presence against her thigh. He poured more whiskey into his glass and said, “Want an apple? Want some ginger ale?”

“I’m not hungry,” Robin said.

“Go to school, do you?” he asked, leaning against the refrigerator, his eyes almost closed, and Robin knew this asshole’s purpose was merely to distract her while the
women spoke. Well, she didn’t care what they said to each other. She felt supremely calm, superior, armed.

“She doesn’t look like Wright,” Verna said.

“Yes, the coloring. And around the eyes. There’s a definite family resemblance.” Who had said that before?

“She’s half and half, you know.”

Linda was confused. She thought of the cream mixture they used in their morning coffee and cereal. “Pardon?”

Her confusion amused Verna, who looked even more like James Cagney when she smiled and her eyes narrowed. “The chosen people,” she said.

“What?” Linda asked, but it was only reflex; she understood. “Was
that
what the falling-out was about? Between you and Wright and your father? Does it go back that far?”

“That one was in the oven when he married her. My father used to say he wouldn’t crossbreed cows, even to get a better milker.”

Linda felt ill again, the way she had in the car. And beyond the malaise, anger was building. She wanted to tell Verna how Miriam had left him, how he had raised Robin so valiantly by himself, but she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. And of course she couldn’t leave Robin here, even if Verna was willing to take her. She could not leave Wright’s ashes in this hostile atmosphere, either. Linda had imagined scattering them over cornfields within a playful wind’s distance from his first home. But the home itself would be gone soon, and although he’d never told her this, she knew now that his childhood had been miserable.