Hearts (6 page)

When she was a little younger, Robin wondered if the estrangement came about because she had been born a girl. Her father’s family were farmers who raised corn and oats, and farmers counted on male children to work the fields. She guessed they were like those Spartans in her social studies book last year, who were bitterly disappointed at the births of females. But at least the farm country was low and flat, without mountain peaks from which men in overalls and straw hats could hurl helpless baby girls.

Once they got to Iowa, she’d have to get Linda to give
her
some of that money she kept talking about leaving in trust for Robin with her grandfather and aunt. Then she would be able to start out on her mission to find her mother, and avenge her father.

While Robin was still packing, Linda came home
from the gas station, foaming at the mouth about reconstructed Quaker villages and underground caves, and how it was really important to see America first. What an asshole.

A few minutes later Ginger and Ray came over to take what they wanted from the stuff Robin was going to leave behind. Ray brought her some of the antibiotic capsules he’d been given by a dermatologist because of his acne. The place where he’d tattooed her had become infected, despite their careful prophylactic use of alcohol. At night she felt slightly feverish and the heart oozed and festered. It was so misshapen now, it might have been drawn by a very little kid with an unsteady hand, and it appeared to be much larger than the day they’d done it.

Linda went to the door to let them in. “Your friends are here, Robin!” she called out cheerfully, as if they were all characters on
The Brady Bunch
.

Robin didn’t answer. She had made two piles of discards at the foot of her bed. They were mostly records and clothing that she still liked but could not bring with her if she intended to travel light later on. Now she looked at them and tried to harden herself against forfeiture.

Ginger and Ray came in and went right to the booty. Ray began shuffling through the albums as if this was Disco Discounts, and Ginger moved to the mirror, holding a pink plaid shirt against her ample chest. When she smiled at her own reflection, Robin felt instant remorse. It was a nice shirt, and in good condition. It was probably her
favorite
shirt. But Ginger was already stuffing it into a paper sack she had brought with her. Then she
took off her own blouse to try on another one of Robin’s. She was wearing a deeply cut, flesh-colored bra.

Robin was glad that she didn’t have breasts like Ginger’s. Her own development had been much slower and less ambitious, and she regretted even that modest growth, and mourned her old flat and uncomplicated body.

Ray took all the records for himself, and Ginger most of the clothing, and they quarreled over a strange electrical sculpture Linda had bought for Robin as a thirteenth-birthday present a couple of months before. It looked like a little tree of limp plastic spaghetti, but when you plugged it in, it lit up and colored liquid light moved through the branches in theatrical spasms.

Ray teased Robin about going to Iowa. He kept calling it I-o-way, with an inflection and twang that got on her nerves. She finally said, “Just shut up about it, okay? I’m not staying there. I’m not staying with them.”

“So what will you do?” Ginger asked, combing her hair with her fingers. She had put her own blouse into the sack and was wearing Robin’s.

“I don’t know,” Robin said, her secret plan as bright and burning inside her as the liquid in the tree lamp. For the first time she felt desperately eager to share it with someone. But wisdom quickly overcame impulse. Saying it aloud might diminish it, turn it into melodrama or simple childish fantasy. And she didn’t trust Ray very much, or Ginger either, for that matter. In dumb-eyed reverence, she always told him everything.

“I’ll go somewhere,” Robin said. “I’ll get a job.”

Ray hooted. “Who’d hire you?” he said, and she
wished she could take her records back. They were worth plenty of money. Her father had been generous with money; he gave her anything she wanted.

Ginger tried to soothe things. “When she wears her hair back,” she told Ray, “she looks much older. Doesn’t she? You could be a waitress or something, Robin. You’d have to get a fake ID. And maybe stuff your bazooms,” she added, with a sly glance at her brother. “Say, Rob, are you taking your radio?”

How could she have been friends with them? She thought of all the days of stoned giddiness in Ginger’s floral, smoke-clouded room. She tried to remember what they’d talked about and why they had laughed so much. Had it really been fun? Is it ever fun if you can see yourself working so hard to have it?

Now they both seemed selfish and unattractive to her. Ray’s neck was flushed with acne and with greed, and his eyes were small and mean-spirited.

As for Ginger, she was a sex-crazed moron.

With a plunging sense of loss, Robin realized that they were also her best friends, her only friends. Nothing ever stayed the same for a minute. Everything in the world changed and disappeared. “Yes,” she told Ginger, her voice pitched to a spiteful shriek. “I
am
taking it.” And she threw the little white portable radio into the suitcase.

Ginger grabbed her sack and took one last pleased look in the mirror. “Well, I guess we better go, Ray,” she said. Then she hugged Robin and made kissing sounds near her ear. “Oh, shit, I’m gonna miss you, miss you, miss you!”

Ray gathered everything else up under one arm and
walked over to Robin. If he was going to kiss her, too, she would kill him. Instead, he reached into his shirt pocket and removed two crooked, shredding joints. “Here,” he said. “Freebies. Take them with you for the road. Go ahead.” Then he put his free hand firmly on her behind and said, “Keep your sweet ass out of trouble.” And when she merely gaped at him, he added, “And don’t forget to send me a card from I-o-way.”

Linda heard the murmur of the kids’ voices through the bedroom wall. At least Robin spoke to
somebody
.

The girl had only wanted one suitcase for her own use, which surprised Linda. People of Robin’s age usually have a firm attachment to the sentimental trash of childhood. She herself struggled with the choices that had to be made: what to take with them, what to leave behind. There wasn’t that much room in the trunk of the car, but they could put a few things on the floor in back. Something that would take up very little space was the box containing Wright’s ashes. The ashes were a residual Linda hadn’t considered when she decided on cremation. But the day after the services for Wright, the young man from the mortuary telephoned, insinuating himself once more into Linda’s life. And once more there were choices. A plastic box or an Everlasting Urn? The remains could be delivered, picked up by a member of the family, or arrangements could be made for burial. “Burial!” Linda cried. That was exactly what she thought she had so efficiently avoided, and she was ashamed of her own dismay at learning that there
were
remains, after all, that death and prayer and even fire
don’t release you from certain obligations. She chose the plastic box and promised to come by and pick it up. Later she wondered fleetingly what they could do if she left town without keeping her promise. Would she be followed and dunned forever like someone skipping out on car payments? These thoughts produced further shame.

The next day Linda went down to the mortuary and was given, after signing a receipt, a brown lucite container that resembled a book in its size and shape. Its weight was not significant. She sat in the car for several minutes with the container on her lap, like a magician who has forgotten the magical restorative words. Then she put it into the trunk and drove home. On the way, she decided that this development was too morbid to share with Robin; in fact, too morbid for Linda herself to contemplate right away.

For weeks, the box of ashes remained in the trunk of the Maverick and Linda only wondered occasionally what she would do with them. She thought of scattering them in one of Wright’s favorite places, the beach for instance, with its constant surf and infinite distance. But she didn’t get around to doing it right away. By the time she thought of it again, and actually drove to the shore, the season had started. It was a hot day and the lifeguards were whistling from their perches. Sun worshippers were tearing off their clothes, and the music from transistor radios was so loud the ocean might have been merely a backup group. Linda stood next to an overflowing trash basket, her shoes filling with sand, and decided that the beach wasn’t the best place for eternal rest, after all.

She felt it was wrong, even irreverent, to keep Wright’s ashes in the trunk of the car, like a mobster’s hostage, and she knew that she’d have to make a decision about them eventually. When she began to pack for the trip, it occurred to her that she might take the ashes to Iowa, too, and scatter them near Wright’s place of birth, maybe in the cornfields, and her heart was eased.

Linda also decided to keep a carton of Wright’s smaller paintings. She didn’t know whether they were good or not, in a critical sense, but they contained his particular vision of things. Perhaps art, even bad art, was the only thing you could leave after death that would continue your consciousness in the living world.

Iola once said she was going to have a talking headstone installed on her own grave. Anyone who wanted to know what she was like could step on a little switch that would activate a taped recording of her voice. “Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. My name was Iola Behnke …”

A few days before, Linda went through Wright’s belongings while Robin was in school. She packed his clothing in two big cartons for a Goodwill pickup: shirts, suits, underwear, even the bomber jacket he was wearing the day they’d met. For some reason the sight of his shoes touched her the most. Maybe because they took on the particular shape of each human foot, or because shoes without feet inside to move them were so poignantly inanimate. She gave his bowling ball to a coworker at the plant, who thanked her with tears in his eyes and said he’d have to have the finger holes enlarged, if she didn’t mind.

Still, there was plenty of junk, and she had to hurry before Robin came home. In the very back of the bedroom
closet, behind a box of barbells, she found a smaller box, and it was sealed with heavy gummed tape and tied with rope. Linda opened it with a straight-edged razor and the fearsome instinct that she had found treasure.

She wasn’t really wrong. Inside were things Wright’s first wife, Miriam, had left behind when she abandoned him and Robin. Maybe he’d kept them at first because he had hopes she would return, and then later because their disposal would have required a ceremony he couldn’t bear. Sealed up like that, and hidden, they were obviously not relics he browsed through and brooded over on solitary evenings. There was a hairbrush with a silver-plated back and nylon bristles that still held long strands of brown hair. There was a much-folded note, and as she opened it, Linda knew this was an invasion of unguarded privacy, but that didn’t stop her.

It wasn’t even a love letter. It just told Wright that there was some cold chicken for dinner in a blue bowl in the refrigerator, and that the cleaners didn’t have his slacks ready. “See you later. Love, M.,” it said, so it wasn’t the farewell note, either, if there had ever been one. He’d probably saved it because it was written in her hand.

There was a pharmacist’s vial of small pink pills prescribed for Mrs. W. Reismann (that was herself now!) by Dr. Victor Klein. One tablet after meals and before bedtime. There was a deck of Tarot cards bound with a rubber band. Did Miriam lay out her own future and discover the other man in the cards? Finally, there were two manila envelopes, one large and one small, and they were both as thoroughly sealed as the carton had been. The smaller one felt as if it might have photographs in
it. Linda thought of wedding pictures, and she wondered if there would be anything suitable for Robin. But when she opened the envelope, only a half-dozen faded brown Polaroid prints fell out. Someone had forgotten to put that stuff on them to fix the images. Five of them were of the same woman, nude, in various poses. Her face had faded the most, but, because of dark lipstick, it was clear she had been smiling. Two dark smudges of hair, above and below. She was lounging across a bed, surrounded by rumpled bedclothes and other things. Peering closely, Linda could make out magazines and cigarettes and what was probably the case of the camera. Then she began to recognize other, unfocused details. It was
this
bedroom, the same bed, night table, lamp. In the last photo, Wright, blurred, but obviously clothed, appeared beside the woman. He must have had one of those timers. He was smiling, too, his arm around her waist, and Linda thought he looked breathless and happy, like a man who has boarded a train just as it was pulling out of the station.

She tore open the larger envelope. There was a stapled sheaf of papers inside. The top one read:
Report on Mrs. Miriam Reismann, nee Diamond—April 2 thru April 11, 1971
.
Albert J. Lapozzi Agency, Detection and Protection
. There was an address in downtown Newark.

Linda sat down on the bed and read quickly through the pages. It was like reading the outline for a detective novel about a missing person. All the characters, major and minor, had been sketched in; the plot was implied.

Miriam’s Newark friends claimed they had no knowledge of her whereabouts, but hinted at her friendship with a man named Tony.

Lapozzi had gone to the ex-wife of the man, Anthony Bernard Hausner. Mrs. Hausner had not seen her husband for more than a year, but he called his children on the telephone occasionally, and sent them birthday gifts. He had not been in touch with them since March 15, the suspected time of his departure with Mrs. Reismann. Mrs. Hausner gave the names of two male friends of her ex-husband’s who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. They didn’t, but one of them remembered Tony mentioning the possibility of a good job with an electronics firm in Sarasota, Florida. A check with a Florida agency contact proved negative. No Hausner or anyone fitting his description had applied for employment at any of the large electronics firms in that area. April 5 to 9 was a dead end. Hausner’s mother in Milwaukee said she didn’t know where he was, and what’s more, she didn’t care. He had not tried to contact his brothers or old army buddies. Mrs. Reismann had not visited her hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio, since 1964. Both parents dead, no siblings. Then, on April 10, Mrs. Hausner’s twelve-year-old son received a postcard from his father postmarked Glendale, Arizona. It was stapled to the last page of the report. There was a picture of a giant saguaro cactus on the front. “Hello,” Hausner had written. “Here I am in the wild, wild west. There are lots of Indians here. It is 108 in the shade. Take care. Love, Dad.”