Off Keck Road (3 page)

She hoped in Chicago Bea was washing her hair.

Bea had never been truly oblivious. It would have surprised Hazel to learn that for two years of high school her daughter had considered herself to be in love with Alexander Pray, a delicate boy she could barely speak to. Her body changed when he passed by her in the school hallway. She sweated behind her knees; her mouth went dry. He was a high note. Other boys—the ones who helped her on the prom committee and followed along to meetings for the March of Dimes—hardly registered as notes at all; they were only rhythm, everyday comic noise. Burps, suction, a can opening.

Alexander went along on the overnight trip to Michigan. Right before they left, as they were packing their duffels into the hold of the bus, Bea's mother stood talking to him, alone. She lectured him, telling him that her daughter had no experience of overnight outings with young men and that she expected her back in one piece.

Sometimes, Bea knew that Alexander was out of her league. Other times, she thought it was just possible he liked her.

On that trip, they'd sat together. His arm had flung around her—or was it just resting on the top of the high bus seat? They'd slept with their heads together on the bumpy ride home.

Did anything happen or not? Could it have? To this day, Bea wasn't sure, although one night, in their forties, in a bar, Alex Pray told her about Hazel's warning.

No, Bea had kept him secret, an arrogant secret, the pure high note. Later, she was ashamed to talk about it because of how little there had been.

It had happened in Chicago, too. The head of the firm; married. He probably never knew how much she felt.

During the years her daughter was away, Bea's mother had gone with several of her girlfriends out to the ecumenical church by the college. The services there were just different—less organ music and more about people's real problems, the kinds of problems they didn't talk about themselves yet but heard talked about on TV.

There was a wonderful young priest, Father Matthew. Now that Bea was back, more stylish, if not much slimmer, her mother thought she'd have him over to dinner one night. Maybe he could help her daughter. He had grown up here. He must know people. His friends couldn't all be priests.

Not much was going on in the dating department.

Bea's mother now blamed herself. She'd done too good a job raising Bea. Half of rearing a girl was scaring her into not crossing the perilous line between popular girl and loose, sex being the line itself. The good popular girls, Bea's mother noticed, suggested sex, implied it in their movements, even in the chiming music of their voices as they ambled together in a group like a cloud. But God forbid, they knew better than to give it away, to allow their bodies to be used.

·   ·   ·

One constant: the knitting.

While she was gone, a TV show came on the air out of Milwaukee, called
The Busy Knitter
. One of the girls in Bread and Book watched and knit along with the hostess, making the Scandinavia sweater. But when the show went off the air, she was only at the underarm. She called the local station, and they said, “That's all the cans we have,” and so Hazel sent the whole mess, needles and everything, to Bea in Chicago. When Bea sent it back, she'd whipped off a hat to go with.

She said she'd knit through important meetings in Chicago. But now all her yarn was black!

Since she'd been back, Bea always looked like she was going to a funeral. Black eyeglasses, black sweaters, black slacks.

Even in her late twenties, Bea was nowhere near the line. If the popular girls—or women, I suppose, her mother thought—flirted with the line, touching it and then jumping back, Bea was at the other end of the field altogether.

And now that she was back, the pond seemed still.

Maybe it was too late. Maybe they were all already married.

But then Bea began palling around with that divorced Umberhum girl, who'd also been away. And the Umberhum girl was dating, all right. Bea's mother heard she was doing quite a bit more. But she supposed that was different. She'd already been married, had a child.

Bea's mother was pretty much resigned to the idea that this so-called friend who was always slapping her own hip in her sharkskin slacks, this June, would get married again for the second time before Bea ever got her first turn. But now that Bea was almost thirty, her mother felt she couldn't say much. It was hard for Hazel to think of her daughter's virginity. Was it still a good thing?

For a first-time marriage, yes, it had to be. But not for too too much longer.

Stumped, Hazel had to take the pins out of her bun and shake her head. She always pictured a clear liquid in a jar that, shaken, revealed flakes of sediment.

In her own day, a girl like that, who'd had a husband leave his marks and shape, given birth already, was nothing a decent man would look for, in a wife.

And Bea?

Bea became good friends with the priest.

That priest who was supposed to be helping her.

But—what do you know?—it seemed Father Matthew liked to go for Chinese, too. They drove to the place a Hmong family had opened outside town, surrounded by snowy fields, Bea, June, Father Matthew, and Lord knew who else. So Bea had her group again.

“Uch,” was all Bea's mother would say. She would not drive to the ecumenical center anymore.

Her friends, who were sensitive women, stopped going, too.

V

I
n 1967, Shelley's mother explained the whole system of female sins. She illustrated them on Shelley's little brother's blackboard, just as she had with the planets and the different branches of our government. That had been hard to listen to. Shelley's attention had drifted, much like it did at school.

Sitting on their lap was a form of petting, egging them on. Letting them touch you or put their tongues in different places, your ears or arms, say, was also dangerous.

Kimmie was invited to a party at a house way out in the boonies, where there were going to be boys.

Their mother got a ragged laugh when she said, “Oh, they'll try, all right.”

“Why don't you talk to them two?” Kim asked, nodding toward the room where Butch and Tim shared bunk beds. “Tell them the sins.”

“They're boys.” Her mother shrugged. “Plus they know.”

Shelley had been in the room all the time, sitting on her bed holding her hands in her lap like two big leather mitts.

She was already taller than both of them, and strong. Recently, she'd lifted a nine-foot hickory limb felled by lightning.

“What about her?” Kim pointed.

Their mother's mouth pulled down. Maybe she was thinking of it for the first time. “Don't you let anyone fool with you, Shelley,” she said quietly, but stern. “Some boy may try, but it'll only be to laugh at you for it later.”

Shelley saw herself considered with a new consternation—a tooth mismatched with a lower tooth, making her mother's whole face look broken.

Shelley knew she wasn't pretty. Not from looking in the mirror; she stared at her reflection in the bathroom medicine chest door many minutes of those days, but—to herself—she looked just about like everybody else. No, she understood from how boys at school were with her and her sister. Here at home, on Keck Road, it was easier. But in school, Shelley had to do more to get their attention. She had to rush hard to be in the right place; she had to say something; she could not let up. Kimmie, she just got it all coming to her from different directions. Kimmie was the center of a star.

But her mother was still looking at Shelley, worried now.

So there was sex for the pretty and for the unpretty, too. You weren't entirely spared either way.

Shelley could tell it would be different for her than for Kimmie or for June across the street and her daughter, Peggy, whose clothes were as clean and sugary as molded Easter eggs with paper scenery inside them. With them, she thought, it would be quaint like a valentine. Precise touches, trembling, hummingbirds eating from flowers.

For Shelley, though, it would be something else, a way of catching her, getting her down to hurt her, dust in her mouth and dry heat, a rubbing.

She had seen it with animals. Once it was started, they couldn't stop, even if people shouted, even if everyone was looking.

She'd seen dogs like that in George's yard, the one on the bottom looking out at you with big eyes when you clapped or called, hanging helpless because it needed that hit hit hit.

It was hard for Shelley to be around people her own age. Those occasions made her excited and sad, sometimes alternating, sometimes all at once.

Most of the time, she kept quiet in school and on the playground. But when she said something, it could come out wrong—a rectangular bar that stayed in the air and made people look at her acutely. That was her experience: people not looking at her at all and then full on, suddenly sharp, as if she was a danger.

It was a little better out Keck Road in her old clothes. The kids ran together down to the railroad tracks. Sometimes they shot skeets. Shelley was a straight shot, but she never got her own gun, like her brothers. And later on, different as she was, she sided, the way the other girls and women did, with the birds, that they should have a finished life, complete, just like a person, dying when they were already old, for them, in their years. Let the birds be, she said.

On that dead-end street, what the children spoke of, fought over, taunted one another with all the time was money. Funny to think of on a road with eight houses, none of them worth much, off the highway running east–west, almost out of town. The first house as you turned in was the Keck house, a small box of cream color. Then there were empty wooded lots until Dave Janson, who lived with his fat wife and two boys. At the end was the biggest yard, first cleared by Phil Umberhum, who had worked for years as a guard in the tower of the penitentiary. Now his widow lived there alone.

Once, at a picnic, his grandson Petey brought a jar of olives. People talked about those olives for years. That kind of money was what made George's family different.

The kids climbed over creeks on rocks and cement drainpipes; they built forts in trees—and all these things Shelley could do. She knew to just be quiet and wait for them to notice the work she'd done. Her grandmother had told her a long time ago, when she was a kid and came running inside because the neighbor children and her brothers and sister, too, were playing Polio and wanted to make her be it.

“Don't let 'em see that it bothers you. Go right back and say, ‘Okay, I'm it.' Say that like you don't give a hoot. If they see they can get you riled up, they'll just keep piling on more.”

So for years she'd played Polio. She was it.

The only place she had full relief was in her gramma's house.

There was nothing Shelley could say that her gramma would mind much, and over there she didn't get the urges she sometimes had at home and at school to sass back.

And her grandmother let her flick her foot. She'd had only a little polio—so little it seemed it was something about herself, and not the polio, that made her strange to other people. It was as if a feather had brushed her with the sharp edges of each tiny thread, so fine were its marks and traces. Only one leg from the shin down, mostly the foot. And her mouth dragged a little, too, on the left.

But while she watched TV or just did nothing, she liked to flick that foot. Everyone always said, “Stop it; you're doing it again. Stop it with the foot.”

Butch, her oldest brother, used to hold his shooter. Her parents said the same to him.

“Keep your hands off of it.”

Then, when Shelley was fourteen, on March 16, 1971, her grandmother died.

It was a Tuesday. Shelley came home that afternoon and walked across the yard. The only snow left was gray and porous, in drifts plowed by the side of the road. Oozy black mud showed through last year's grass. She felt, the minute she let herself in, that the house was empty.

Her gramma had had a stroke in her car, the toe of her right shoe daintily pressing down the brake pedal. On the seat next to her were two envelopes she was taking to the post office and her list—“coffee, oranges, oleo.”

Shelley lifted her just the way she was into the house. By then, Shelley had already grown to be over six feet.

VI

I
n December of her third year back, Bea received a change-of-address card from the ad agency she'd worked for in Chicago. The agency had moved to New York City, to an address on Madison Avenue!

This required a special session with June at Kaap's, where they resolved to plan a shopping spree in Milwaukee.

Bea had always wanted to live in New York City. She and June worked for hours on an appropriate card to send the woman who had been Bea's boss (bribing Peggy with dimes, one at a time, buying themselves the few minutes it took her to walk to the long cases at the front of the restaurant and select a candy).

The woman who had been Bea's boss had always liked the Green Bay side of her. At first, Bea had knitted only with her hands beneath her desk, but when the head of the firm caught her at it and complimented her garter stitches, she began to purl in the open. At her wildest, she'd stuck her hair up in a bun, with a Takuma bamboo circular needle. Her boss eventually worried, as Bea's mother had, about her personal life. “How's your weekend?” she'd say. “Having fun? Good.” At the office, there was a young assistant in the art department who stopped asking Bea to lunch after their meals turned out to be, well, only lunches. Married man, the boss decided, and didn't press it.

Bea and June wrote the note to her on a Green Bay postcard that showed the bridge over the Fox River lifting up in two parts as a tall boat went through.

Congratulatory but not fawning. Jaunty—with the implication she might soon be back on board, in New York. At the same time she mailed that card, Bea posted a check for a subscription to
New York
magazine.

After that was all over and Bea stopped waiting for a reply
—No, they agreed, you don't really answer a congratulations note
—June mentioned that they had lived in New York.

“When?” Bea asked, flabbergasted. Who was “
we,
” anyway?

“With him. When we were married.” June was always vague about her few years with her husband. Bea could only estimate how long they were married. She knew they had lived in Milwaukee for a while. She imagined a small aluminum house with a fenced-in yard. Now, it seemed, they had been to New York, too.

“Where did you live?”

“We lived, we lived on Madison Avenue,” June said. She looked away in a vague, closing way that discouraged further questions.

Bea didn't believe her, not exactly.

Bea had the distinct impression that Madison Avenue was all businesses, not residence. The way she pictured it, it was a street lined with buildings, each a little different, each one housing an ad agency.

Because her mother was so concerned with romantics, Bea tried to forget altogether what wasn't there. But there had been flickers and glimmers that, in her solitude, passed from secrets to private shame. By now, she was willing to admit it. She was no good at love. There had been misunderstandings. But she was sure that if she'd told her mother about them, they would've seemed even worse. Mysteries. Perhaps even tragedy, or crime.

There had been an all-day outing with a young college professor, new to town from Saint Paul. He'd talked about his girlfriend, an elementary school teacher still back in Minnesota. He said he was waiting for the right time to “let her down.”

Only at the end, he'd told Bea the real reason: Gigi, a half-wit who worked in her father's store, attached to the filling station outside Suamico. He'd taken Bea's hand and looked her in the eyes, then asked, “What do
you
think I should do?”

She couldn't remember anymore what she'd answered.

She told the story to June at Kaap's that December night, three years after it happened. Bea's double-pointed knitting needles chittered while they talked. She was using eight-ounce alpaca, dark gray.

June cleared away the shame with her answer. “The cad,” she said. “But he was interested. Definitely. That was his way of feeling
you
out.”

Telling June was like an excavation. An event.

June now was working as a teacher in the Brown County school system, and they began to share the gossip they learned at their respective jobs, breaking the rumors down to their component parts. They dissected troubled marriages with particular relish.

Bea's mother, who spent a good portion of her day on the telephone or at the bridge table, could sometimes contribute. They often met at her house in De Pere and Mrs. Maxwell would join in until her bedtime, which was only a little later than Peggy's.

June was always polite to Hazel. She asked her about bridge.

“I've played since 1927. I'm still no expert. I have no master points. If I get too good, I've got nobody to play with.”

The two younger women felt that they could
see
Green Bay society, the way they could in fact see Green Bay topographically from Dr. and Mrs. Maxwell's front window, which offered a clear wide view of the river, with its beauty and barges, its columns of smoke and piles of sulfur and coal.

They shared an interest in fashion. When Bea got around to something, she would dig to the bottom of the subject. And clothes no longer daunted her. She had her own style, which required trips to Milwaukee and Chicago and packages arriving from stores in places like Dallas. If she saw a dress in a magazine, she'd just order it right then. Some worked; some needed to be returned, airmail. This at an age long after most women in Green Bay had given up on such things and gotten what Hazel's hairdresser, Rolf, called “mothercuts,” and perms for ease.

Hazel had always admired her daughter's thoroughness, up to a point. But there was also something to looking fresh and cleverly stylish as a young woman, when it mattered. Later on, when you were married and had children, what did you care if your clothes weren't the latest?

Hazel's arthritis came and went. Some days, she felt like an invalid; on others her old self. The day after Bea replied to the change-of-address card, her mother was in bed again, so she went to the
Press Gazette
office and quit. She walked from there to the old courthouse, where Bill Alberts worked, and asked for a job. Once before, she'd asked him for a charity donation and he'd written her a large check. “How many dimes go into five hundred dollars?” he'd said.

Bill Alberts ran the biggest real estate company in town—with his left hand, as he liked to say. People said he was the first person in northern Wisconsin to understand the meaning of land. It was Bea's idea that as a real estate agent, she could spend more time with her mother. She could even take her along.

“Edith, put Miss Maxwell on the payroll,” he shouted, from his desk, into the adjoining anteroom. “Sit down, sit down,” he told her.

“Today? But I haven't even started the course to get my license.”

He waved away her concern, then folded his hands and looked at her directly. “So tell me your plans. Will you stay in Green Bay?”

“Oh, I think so,” she said. “I've been back now—what? Three years.”

“I ask because we're the generation who will bring culture home to us. Green Bay, right here.” He talked quite a bit with his hands. “Our parents all drove to Chicago or at least Milwaukee to hear music, see theater, shop, whatever they did.” His hands chopped and flew.

Bea tried to think if her parents ever went to Milwaukee. They had not. Once, her mother's friend Lil got up a group to drive to Goshen, Indiana, to hear Marian Anderson sing. It was the old story. At the last minute, a child was born eight weeks early and Dr. Maxwell couldn't go. Hazel had gone anyway, but she'd had a bad time. She felt conspicuous because it was three other couples and her.

Bill Alberts wore a white shirt with French cuffs and suspenders. From his phonograph speakers, a man's low, raspy voice was half-singing, half-whispering things that might better be said in private. “But we'll change all that. My sisters moved away. Every one to a bigger city. Your sister's where? Minneapolis. You see, I want to bring the cities to us here.”

Bill Alberts was someone Bea could've known growing up, but she just hadn't. He was older, in the same world as her parents but Jewish. Her father worked with his parents at the hospital. He apparently had known about her, though. He'd seen her picture in the paper, he said, at the Winter Ball, ice-skating on the frozen Fox River.

That would have been along with other girls from De Pere High, she reminded him. She knew the picture. They'd worn flared felt skirts and carried fur muffs.

“I don't remember others,” he said.

He was not like Alexander Pray or any of his successors, all of whom looked, one way or another, the same.

He, too, had grown up in a large house by the river. He, too, had gone away to college and then come back. Bea wasn't sure how old he was. Older, definitely. But ten years or twenty? He was a man who probably had never been handsome, so it was hard to tell. He was short, five two or five three. He'd lost the majority of his hair long ago, certainly before Bea paid him any attention, eliminating some of the usual suspense of middle age. His baldness gave a certain nakedness to his features, so that no matter what angle you beheld him from, it was hard to see him as good-looking.

His hands were always moving, making fists or baskets in midair, his fingers snapping or drumming on the desktop. Dark against the cuffs, his wrists and hands were attractive.

Bea walked to her car, holding her keys out in front, with a light step.

She felt something—a yes-and-no feeling. Not like
the
something, but something else, new, an agitation like the scratchiness of wool in spring.

She found out that evening from her mother that Bill Alberts had been a bachelor in Green Bay for many years. He'd lived with his parents. Even after he finally bought his own place—the Kaap river mansion—he went home every night to his mother's table for supper.

“Until he married
her
,” Hazel said.

Some years ago, Bill Alberts had married Marge Garsh, a local girl, the undertaker's daughter. “And I suppose then
she
cooked.”

From the church, Bea's mother knew the lady who had been his childhood nanny. The old woman still went to iron his shirts every Tuesday and Thursday, but she wouldn't do a thing for the wife. “Doesn't like her,” Bea's mother said, as if that made perfect sense.

Money had never been a problem for the Alberts family. His father was chief surgeon at the hospital and his mother was a doctor, too, an obstetrician. That would have been unusual, even scandalous, for a woman in her time in Green Bay to have four children and keep working—except that they were Jewish. All they did was held to be in another category.

Bill Alberts himself had already made several other fortunes—ruining the city, his own father said. Bea's mother repeated that with a down-curved voice that contained a certain relish.

Bill's taste differed from his European parents', that was for sure. He had a sharp, flat American vision. Tract houses did not offend him, Bea knew, and his developments from the fifties were made of sound materials and planted with young trees. She golfed in a club that ended at the backyards of one of his subdivisions. They were cheerful houses, hard to tell whether rich or poor, and though small, they were somehow smart.

Thirty-five years later, when those trees were mature, most of the houses were still standing and in good repair.

But he didn't like to think of himself as a realtor. Everyone knew his passion was jazz music. In the thirties, some of the Big Bands had played Green Bay at the Ace of Spades, and apparently Bill's parents—the two doctors—had gone dancing. He himself played drums. For years, he'd bored anyone who would listen to his stories about trips to Chicago in the forties and fifties to hear the great bands at their peak. He'd bought himself a whole building downtown, the old Green Giant canning factory, to turn into a nightclub for his band.

Most evenings, he smoked a cigar in his office, music playing out the open windows: Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Jo Jones. At seven, he headed to dinner at a restaurant downtown before his own local band convened. They called themselves the Fox River Trotters. They all called him Little Jazz.

Rumor had it that there was no family life inside the stone house Bill Alberts owned on one of Green Bay's oldest and best streets. It had been the carefully tended home of the Kaaps, an elderly brother and sister who lived together for more than forty years and walked on the river path every afternoon at four.

“He runs around,” Mrs. Maxwell said.

“Really?”

“I think so, sure. Yes.”

But though they believed he was an unfaithful husband, Mrs. Maxwell and her friends were not sympathetic to Bill's wife. They said it was because Marge had let old Mabel Kaap's rose garden go to rack and ruin.
Thank God she's not here to see it
.

“They say Marge doesn't like music,” Bea's mother said. “And you know him.”

But it wasn't the roses, Bea understood, or music. Even though she'd grown up in De Pere and attended the same schools and the same church, Marge Garsh's father was the undertaker. She was a perfectly decent choice for Bill Alberts—she'd been a moderately popular girl, a candy striper in the hospital and then a cheerleader—even though she was so much younger. It was not as if he'd married someone Polish.

Still, Marge Garsh was not immune to criticism from these women, as their own daughters were, as Bea knew herself to be. When Celia Howard, a daughter of the family who owned
The Press Gazette
and one of the paper mills, lost Kip Dannenford's grandmother's pink diamond swimming in Fish Creek, Bea's mother and all her friends just laughed.