Riggs Park (18 page)

Penny looked up as if she hadn’t heard a word and said, “I’ll probably drop out of school. It’s been almost two weeks already.”

“You don’t have to drop out,” Marilyn told her. “We’ll help you make everything up.” In a way, we missed tutoring Steve now that we were out of high school. We would have looked forward to tutoring Penny. We wouldn’t have minded.

“I’m not sure I want to make everything up,” Penny told us.

A man began to walk along the line of widows, greeting each of them, the back of his dark head and black overcoat toward the crowd. When he reached Helen, she shook hands with him in a mechanical way. I recognized the jowls and the ridiculous slope of nose.

“Oh, no…not Nixon,” I said. I leaned on Wish. He put his arm around me and held me against the cold.

“Eisenhower should have come to the funeral himself,” I whispered. He’d gotten Sid Weinberg killed, but apparently didn’t think navy bandsmen rated a presidential visit. Musicians weren’t crucial to the running of the country; they were just background, just servants. I had always hated Sid Weinberg on Penny’s behalf, because he’d wanted sons instead of daughters, but I didn’t hate him then.

Nixon finished shaking hands, then moved away with his contingent of Secret Service men. He had a mean, mournful look on his face, like a parody of someone being serious, someone who really didn’t care.

They folded the flags and handed them to the widows. The twenty-one-gun salute began. The crack of shots into the cold air made me jump. Wish let go of me. The guns were shooting and they were lowering caskets into the graves. Penny was clenching her teeth. Helen was crying and I was crying, too. I would never hate Helen again.

Afterward, I meant to ask my mother or Bernie for a ride back to Penny’s house, but somehow I stayed with Wish. He’d also offered a ride to Paul Siegel, a boy I’d never liked. On the wet road going down the hill to Wish’s car, my shoes were soaked through and I kept slipping. I could hardly feel my feet. Paul Siegel watched me with a menacing half smile on his face. I knew he’d love to see me go down on my can.

“Let me sit in the back,” I said when we got to the car. “My feet are all frostbitten. I can’t even feel them. I need a little room to stretch.”

Paul slid into the front seat next to Wish.

I pulled off my shoes and started rubbing my feet.

“So where’s the lawyer?” Paul asked, referring to Sandy.

“Sandy won’t be a lawyer until he graduates in June.” With Paul it was always the lawyer this, the lawyer that, like I was dating some octogenarian. Under my stockings, my feet were an unnatural white.

“He’ll never practice law. He’ll go right into politics.” Paul made
politics
sound obscene. Even Essie Berman said, “People like Sandy have nothing to do with people like us. We work for the government and they come down here to
be
the government.”

In the rearview mirror, Wish looked at me rubbing my feet. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.” A little sensation was coming back into my toes, the feeling of pins and needles.

“You should’ve worn boots,” Wish said. “A heavier coat, too.”

At Penny’s house, Paul got out of the car, but didn’t push his seat release to let me out of the back. As I leaned forward to do it myself, Wish said, “Here, get out my side,” and offered his hand.

I started to put my foot onto the street. When it touched the ground, I couldn’t feel a thing. I might have been trying to stand on a pile of marshmallows. My knee buckled and Wish caught me.

“I don’t think I can stand up,” I said.

“It’s okay, probably just frostbite.” He motioned me to sit down in the car again, and he got back behind the wheel.

“Hey, where’re you going?” Paul yelled from the sidewalk.

“She forgot something,” Wish said, and drove up the block to my house.

My heart was pounding fast. I had a picture in my mind of white hospitals, white ice, my white toes.

“Give me your house key,” Wish said. My father was at work and my mother would go right to Penny’s. Wish parked at my curb and got out. “Here, hang on to me.” Still wearing his gloves, he pulled me from the car, onto my feet. Before my legs could give, he caught me under the knees and was carrying me—into my house, through the living room, and up the stairs to the bathroom, where he sat me on the edge of the tub. I didn’t know if anyone had seen us. I didn’t care.

He took my shoes off and yanked at my stockings. While he was pulling my stockings down he was running water into the bathtub. “What’s going on?” Wish was undressing me right across the street from the funeral where everyone in the neighborhood had gathered, but I didn’t really care; maybe I wasn’t fully conscious. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep.

Next thing I knew, I was sweating. Wish stuck my bare feet into the water in the bathtub. The water was cool, but against my feet it felt warm.

“You all right?” he said. His words came at me from a long way off.

“Yeah, I guess. What’re you doing?”

“I’m thawing out your feet.”

“I thought you were undressing me.”

“No, not now. Maybe some other time.” He knelt on the bathroom floor next to me. “I think we’re supposed to rub them until the feeling comes back,” he said. “You rub one and I’ll do the other.”

We bent over, heads together. Any other time I would have felt foolish, but just then I didn’t.

“You feel anything?” he asked.

“A little.”

We kept rubbing. The unnatural pallor of my feet began to give way to a pinkish color under the water. Then the pink turned bright red. My feet itched something terrible.

“This might be worse than the numbness,” I said.

“Don’t scratch. Here.” Wish handed me a towel. “The itching is normal. Dry off and I’ll wait for you downstairs.” He went out of the bathroom.

“How do you know the itching is normal?” I asked when I got to the living room. I had put on dark stockings and closed pumps, because my feet looked like I’d stuck them under a sun lamp. I kept rubbing my toes together to control the itch.

“I don’t know, I must have read it somewhere.” Wish sounded tired, or maybe embarrassed. “Come on, let’s get back to Penny’s before they miss us.”

Everyone from the cemetery had arrived, leaving no parking spaces anywhere on the block. We were walking down the hill, when Sandy came up the street toward us from wherever he’d left his little Triumph. He took my arm.

Inside the Weinberg home, the mirror by the entryway was covered by a black cloth for the mourning period. Sandy pulled himself up like someone at attention and led me to a place against the dining-room wall. “How was the funeral?” he asked.

“It was all right.” I wanted to tell him about my feet, but people were standing on both sides of us and the subject seemed too private.

We were crushed against the wall by a woman who pushed past us with a platter of whitefish and bagels and lox. There was deli and rye bread on the dining-room table, and people were bringing cakes and strudel.

“Nixon was there,” I told him. “I think Eisenhower should have come.”

“Traditionally the vice president represents the president at funerals,” Sandy said.

People jammed the whole downstairs. Bernie and Marilyn were squashed against the far wall, eating. Helen sat on the living-room couch, receiving whoever came in. I didn’t see Penny.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Sandy said.

“I’m not hungry. You go ahead.”

As Sandy disappeared into the crowd, my mother came toward me, holding an old lady’s hand. “This is my daughter, Barbara,” she said. “Barbara, you remember Mrs. Ades, Francine’s grandmother.”

“Oh, of course.” I didn’t.

“All grown up,” Mrs. Ades said. “I remember when you were this high.”

For just a minute my line of vision cleared and I watched Penny sit down next to her mother. Helen didn’t notice. Helen was talking animatedly because so many people were around her, wishing her well. No one was talking to Penny just then. Her face was vacant, and I knew she really was going to quit school.

My mother and the old woman moved away. I remembered all the nights from third grade on, teaching Steve. I’d miss having the chance to tutor Penny. I’d miss carpooling to school with her and seeing her after class. After the cold outside, it was too warm in the house. I scanned the room for Wish. I wanted to tell him how sad I was that Penny was quitting school. How sad I was that Penny was sad. I wanted us to cheer her up. We would tell her my feet had frozen at Arlington National Cemetery, and Wish had thawed them out in a tub of water, though he’d never thought to stoop so low as to rub my feet. “Other parts maybe, but never her feet.”

Penny would laugh, and even if she quit school, she would come back next year, or go to American University or the University of Maryland instead, and she would be as well as she could be. This was what we had planned, maybe without ever talking about it. One of the young men at the table caught my eye. It took me a minute to realize it was Sandy, standing among all my dark-haired friends eating bagels and lox. I smiled at him, though there seemed no point to it. He had nothing to do with me, not really, not now.

When I broke up with Sandy a few days later, I was careful not to tell my mother my reasons. Let her think, if she wanted, that I gave him up because he wasn’t Jewish. Let her think she’d won. I didn’t tell her my decision had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with being in love with Wish. But my mother already knew that, and so did everyone else.

This time, Wish was strong enough to stand up to his father. He was a college student, mature enough for a girlfriend. He’d made dean’s list and seemed on track for medical school. For the most part, Murray left us alone.

We made love for the first time a few months later, in a rooming house at Rehoboth Beach. We spent the entire afternoon in the bedroom while Marilyn and Bernie and Penny and Steve were out enjoying the ocean. A breeze blew into the open window as Wish took off my clothes item by item, careful not to hurry. He kissed me everywhere, and did not stop kissing until I moaned and came and sighed. After a while he started kissing me again. He guided my hand to his penis. By the time he entered me, I was so wet, so stretched, so ready, that it did not hurt. I was surprised, afterward, to see blood on the sheet.

We lay there until the sun dropped behind the trees to the west, dozing and waking and talking. “I’ve waited for this since forever,” Wish told me in a raspy voice.

“Since the day we fell off the sled,” I added. I traced the line of his injured shoulder with my finger, amazed that at last he was mine to touch.

When the others returned, everyone knew what must have happened. Wish and I didn’t care. We had waited and were not sorry. This, both of us had known, was for the rest of our lives.

B
y the time Interstate 40 ended and dumped us onto College Road in Wilmington, I was finally waking up. The medicine had worn off. A slow ache crept up my spine and fanned out into all my limbs. When Jon looked over and gently asked me how I felt, I avoided his eyes, steeled myself against softness. I let the pain remind me I’d been left bruised before, and not just physically. All I needed now was the resolve to confront him. Traffic mishaps aside, there could be no more diffidence or hesitation.

In our driveway at last, Jon opened my car door and reached in to help me. I pulled away. “I’m not an invalid.” Ignoring his puzzled expression, I wriggled out of the car, marched up the steps as fast as my gimpy limbs allowed, and waited in the living room while he carried my bag to the bedroom.

“Now we’ll get
you
tucked in,” he said when he came back, humoring me in a voice laced with an exhaustion I tried not to hear.

“I’m not ready to be tucked in yet.”

“Barbara, what’s wrong?”

I opened the sliding glass door to the deck, to the sight of a gray and foamy sea. Although the breeze was not balmy as it had been a few days before, I ignored the chill and willed the sound of the ocean to drown out the blood beating in my ears. “Sit down, Jon.” In a voice more modulated than I expected, I told him everything. He listened in stunned silence until I got to the part about Penny having his child. Then I saw by his expression that he was not surprised.

“You knew all the time,” I accused.

“I didn’t know ‘all the time.’ I didn’t know until five years ago. Right before my father died.”

“Who told you?”

A solemn stillness dropped across his features. “It’s not the way you think it is, Barbara.” He took a long breath. “However you imagine it, it’s worse.”

He told the story almost in a monotone. I had the feeling he’d memorized the exact words, bled all the emotion from them. I had the feeling the task had taken most of his life.

When Penny had shown up in the Camp Chesapeake dining hall on a Wednesday evening in July 1963, Jon said, at first he’d been puzzled. The camp was a far more glamorous place than it had been eleven years before when Penny had endured the fateful camping experience from which she’d finally escaped. There was now an Olympic-size pool; the cabins sported ceiling fans and window air conditioners; a lighted tennis court sat next to a newly paved parking lot. Even so, Jon didn’t think Penny would be curious to see the improvements. Her memories of the place, he imagined, were still unpleasant enough to keep her away.

His next thought, as Penny scanned the room and stopped when she spotted him, was that something had happened to me. After graduating from G.W. in June, Marilyn and I had gone to Europe for a long-anticipated, long-saved-for fling. Penny would have come with us, but she still had another year at the University of Maryland, where she’d enrolled a year after her father’s death, and didn’t have the money. Watching the grim, set line of Penny’s jaw as she made her way through a dining hall full of campers, Wish knew I must have been hurt. It would be like Penny not to want him to hear by phone. Why else would she drive all the way to southern Maryland to seek him out like this?

Penny said no, she hadn’t come because of me. “It’s something else. Is there somewhere we can talk?” The dining hall was sweltering, but Penny crossed her arms tight over her chest, and when Wish touched her elbow to lead her out, she was shivering.

They sat atop the bluff overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, on a blanket Wish had grabbed from his bunk. “This is no friendly social visit,” Penny said. “I came to tell you what happened in your father’s upholstery shop that summer after eighth grade.”

Already wary, Wish decided the best thing to do was suggest that, whatever had happened that terrible summer, it could no longer be as important as she thought. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

“It could have been yesterday,” Penny told him.

The hot, pretty day was dwindling into a long, green twilight. A few perfect white clouds floated over the silty brown water. Penny did not seem to notice.

“I was only fourteen,” she said softly.

“I know. That’s what I mean. A long time ago. It was bad, but it’s past.”

Penny shook her head. “When I got to the shop after my dentist appointment, my sister was out on an errand. Just like I told them. There was nobody there except for one person. I told them that, too. But the person wasn’t the laborer,” Penny said. “You know who it was?”

“Who?”

“It was your father,” Penny told him.

“I don’t believe that.” Wish’s mouth went dry, and a buzzing started inside his head.

“You do believe it.” Penny held him with a steady gaze. He was the one who broke eye contact first.

“He invited me to wait in his office,” Penny continued. “I thought he was being nice. It was the only air-conditioned part of the shop. When he closed the door, I thought it was so he wouldn’t let out the cool air. I sat down on the—You know that couch he used to have?”

Wish nodded.

“He kept some magazines on the end table. I started reading one. Your father was at his desk doing some work. I could tell he didn’t have his mind on it. He kept looking up at me. Studying me. Frowning. Finally I asked him what was wrong.

“He kind of smiled. Not quite.” Penny’s voice grew clipped and mechanical, as if she’d rehearsed. “He said, ‘You’re an
ugly
cunt, aren’t you?’ I thought maybe I hadn’t understood. Mr. Wishner wouldn’t talk that way. Yet—I thought, well, it was true: I
was
ugly. I didn’t know the word
cunt
.”

Penny sat hunched over, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Your father had this way of sneering. Just a kind of—a little lift in the corner of his upper lip. He said to me, ‘Yeah, an ugly cunt, no kidding. Too ugly to stick a dick into.’ I was—in shock, I guess. I said, ‘What?’ He kept sneering. ‘You heard me,’ he said.”

Her voice was a tiny thread now, so soft Wish had to strain to hear. “I just sat there. I was too scared to move. By the time I bolted for the door, it was too late. He was right behind me. He caught me by the arm and turned me around to face him. His face seemed—magnified. He smelled like onions. He said, ‘Yeah, way too ugly to stick a dick into. I guess I’ll have to let you blow me.’”

Slowly, Penny turned to look at Wish. “I was just fourteen. I didn’t know the term
blow me.
”

Wish looked down at his fingers, the blanket, a clump of grass growing in the sand.

“So your father showed me,” Penny said. “He told me if I bit, or if I told anyone, he would cut off my breast.”

“I don’t believe it,” Wish muttered, though both of them understood that he did.

“That’s exactly what happened,” Penny told him. “I’ve never told anybody about it till now.” By the time Penny got home that afternoon, she had developed a befuddled but complete amnesia about what had happened. She hadn’t remembered any of it until recently, the weekend she went to West Virginia to see Steve.

“Why do you think it came back to you then?” Wish asked.

Penny shrugged. “Who knows? All I know is, now I remember everything.” She didn’t elaborate, but both of them knew she meant not just Murray Wishner but everything that had happened since, and that it was a heavy burden to bear.

Penny and Wish sat for a long time in silence. “Why did you tell me this?” Wish asked finally. “What do you want me to do?”

Penny said, “Your father did me wrong. I want you to do me right.”

That night, the waters of the Chesapeake Bay stretched to the horizon in a white path of moonlight. The main thing Jon remembered afterward was that the air had been hot and so close it had been hard to breathe. The humidity must have been a hundred percent.

Goose bumps rose on my skin as soon as Jon started to speak, but it didn’t occur to me to close the door to the deck. Nor later, when the daylight faded and the room grew shadowy, did either of us think to turn on the lamp. As far as I knew, the lights had dimmed everywhere, and it seemed fitting that they should. Even at a remove of all this time, I couldn’t bear to see Jon’s face.

“I had no idea she was trying to get pregnant,” Jon said. “I didn’t know about the baby. I just thought it was—”

“You thought it was just a little old roll in the locust leaves.” I kept my eyes downcast, stared at my hands.

“I have no excuse, Barbara. I wasn’t drunk.”

“You knew she was crazy. You used to say she was pathetic.”

“She
was
pathetic. But also…I was angry at her for telling me. Even though I believed her. Especially because I believed her. I wasn’t nice. Then she started to cry. She said the only way she could make it right was to do…to do even more with me than she’d done with my father. Only to do it gently. If I was gentle, it would make up for what happened before.” Jon ground his hands into fists, opened and closed them. “We were sitting on the blanket. She moved over toward me. And I was so mad. I can’t explain it. I thought, ‘Okay. Okay, you asked for it.’ And I did what she wanted. Only I wasn’t gentle. I was like my father.” His voice was less than a whisper. “I didn’t know I had it in me to be like that.”

“And then you came home,” I said. “And you didn’t tell me.”

But Jon seemed not to be listening. “The worst part was…Afterward Penny got up and she—She
thanked
me, for Christ’s sake.
Thanked
me.”

“I knew her pretty well,” I told him. “Maybe I would have understood.”

“Maybe.”

“But you just ran away.” Even now the memory filled me with equal parts fury and pain. When Jon had returned from camp in August, and I’d returned from Europe, we’d flown into each other’s arms with such passion that I’d thought nothing had changed since we’d parted in June. During that first embrace, our future unfurled in my mind like a bright flag over our pending engagement, his first year of medical school, my first job. Then he let go of me, and I knew something was wrong. Within minutes, he picked a fight about something so meaningless, so petty, that I could never remember what. We argued for what seemed like hours.

“Wish—” I finally said. “This makes no sense.”

“Don’t call me Wish!” he shouted then. “Wish is a word that means something you hope for but probably won’t get. It isn’t my name, it’s only the story of my life.”

“Wish—” I was as bewildered as I’d ever been in my life.

He leaned close and whispered in a voice bordering on contempt (whether for me or for himself I was never sure), “Not Wish. I was never Wish. My name is Jon.” Then he’d slammed out, and except for a brief moment at a funeral when we’d both been too upset to talk to each other, we hadn’t seen each other again for more than thirty years.

Now, sitting in the chill, dark echo of the ocean, I said again, in what came out as a tortured rasp, “You didn’t even have the decency to tell me.”

“No. I acted like a shit.” His voice ached with bitterness. He knew exactly what he’d done. Knowing Penny was helpless, he’d taken advantage of her. Loving me, he’d screwed around with my friend. He was his father’s son. He did not deserve the happiness he had planned for himself. His nickname, Wish, seemed a special irony. As for Murray, in Jon’s view he did not deserve happiness at all. If Jon’s going to medical school would please him, Jon would not go.

“I was running away from my father,” he said. “I was doing you a favor.”

I swallowed hard. “Not a favor. Not even close.”

Outside, an undecided rain began, fell in fits and starts onto the roof and into the ocean. Jon reached over and switched on a lamp. It shed the kindest, gentlest light.

“The irony,” he said, “was that except for losing you, my life was better. I would have been a lousy doctor. I would have hated being around sickness and death. I liked writing about sports. Maybe I would never have been a world-class swimmer anyway, but after I broke my shoulder I missed it. Writing about sports was like a way of having it back.” He leaned toward the coffee table that separated us. “But Barbara—I missed you every day of my life.”

I felt myself softening, then caught myself. “Don’t be melodramatic,” I snapped. “How did you find out about the baby?”

“From my father. A deathbed confession. He probably would have told me a lot sooner if I hadn’t been avoiding him for twenty years.”

“Your father knew?”

“Penny told him,” Jon said. “She told him the day she walked back into his shop with that gun.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I told you it was worse than you thought.”

I understood everything then, even before he told me the rest. I had known much of it before; all Jon had to do was fill in the blanks.

Of course,
I kept thinking.
Of course.

Penny had gone into Wishner’s Upholstery Shop for the second and last time in October 1964, six months after the birth of her daughter. On this visit, as opposed to the previous one, she came armed with a pistol she’d bought at a pawn shop the week before. It was late on a sunny, crisp afternoon. She waited outside until all the employees had gone home, leaving only Murray Wishner in the office. Penny was wearing black slacks and a black sweater, colors she never wore because with her red hair she believed they made her look washed out. In her pocket was the poetic note Steve would later put to music.

Later, Murray told the police Penny had come to the shop looking for the laborer who had assaulted her back in the fifties. “Of course we’d fired the jerk right away. Years ago. He would have been arrested except that Penny clammed up. Who knows where the guy is by now?

“Penny knew that laborer wasn’t at the shop anymore,” he’d said angrily. “It was crazy.
She
was crazy.”

Not until his final day of life, confessing to the son who’d fled from him after Penny’s visit to Camp Chesapeake, did Murray amend this story. Jon had come to his father’s bedside only because his mother begged, and he was not prepared for what he was about to hear. But Murray had been in the final stages of congestive heart failure and had had no reason to lie.