Riggs Park (19 page)

“He looked like—Terrible. Dying,” Jon said. “But I didn’t care. I told him what Penny had said about him. He didn’t deny it. I told him I figured Penny had come to his shop to kill him and I was sorry she’d lost her nerve.” Jon extracted a small whorled cowrie shell from a bowl on the coffee table and turned it over and over in his hand. “You know what he did? There he was, so sick, a tube in his nose, gray skin, he could hardly breathe—” Jon rubbed the shell as if it were a charm. “You know what he did? He smiled. Not a sweet smile, either. He said to me, ‘Yes, but it was your kid she had.’”

Jon turned the shell over one last time and then placed it gently back in the bowl as if trying not to harm it. “I didn’t want to believe him. But you know, the minute he said it, I knew it was true.”

I closed my eyes.

According to Murray, Penny hadn’t come to his shop to kill anyone except herself—not the innocent laborer, long ago fired in disgrace, or guilty Murray, still prospering from his business. Unaware of that at first, Murray was afraid. He didn’t know Penny was pointing the gun at him only to make him sit down and listen.

“I came to tell you I righted your wrong,” Penny told him. “You did me wrong and now I’ve made it right.”

“Put the gun down,” Murray cajoled. “Put the gun down and then we’ll talk.”

“You took advantage of an innocent child,” Penny said as she aimed the pistol at his chest.

“Listen, I know what I did to you. I’ve felt bad about it all these years,” Murray lied.

“You haven’t felt bad,” Penny told him. “It doesn’t matter how you feel.”

Murray held out his hand so that Penny could give him the pistol.

“You know, for years I didn’t even know what happened or who did it,” she said as she raised the sight to his head. “I blocked it out. People said it was the laborer, so I figured it was. Then last year I remembered. I remembered what happened with you, and I remembered what happened with a lot of guys.” She aimed the pistol at the center of Murray’s face. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have done anything I needed to forget.”

“I just wish I could make it up to you.” Murray made his voice as smooth and soothing as he could. “Maybe I can still make it up. I have money.”

“You think I’m here for money?” Penny curved her lips into an icy smile.

“If not money, what? Let me help you, Penny.”

“You know what I learned? I learned you have to help yourself. When somebody does you wrong, there’s only one way you can live with it. You have to make it right.”

“So you made it right, did you?” Murray was humoring her. He would have said anything.

“The Wishners aren’t all bad,” Penny told him. “Your wife Pauline, for example. When we lived in Riggs Park she was always nice to me. She acted like a lady. And Wish is okay. There’s a good part to the Wishners. The good part is what I used to make things right.”

With typical Penny-style logic, she outlined for Murray how she’d known that in order to survive she would have to create something more precious and good than his act of violation had been evil. She would have to create a new life. A child. She would not come back to Murray for that; he was too vile. But it was important that the positive thing come from Murray’s own flesh. She would use the unspoiled part of him that he had left behind. Jon. She had gone to Jon at just the right moment. She had always known when she was fertile, she said. That’s why she’d been so careful about contraceptives for so many years. She’d always known it would be easy to have a child when she wanted one. It had happened just as she’d planned. Penny even told Murray her daughter’s name: Vera.

She thought the birth of the child would mean a new beginning for her, she continued, trancelike now but still pointing the gun. Giving up Vera for adoption had been hard. Penny had managed because she knew her mind was too tangled to make her a good mother. She had put Vera in a good home. The evil that Murray had put into motion had been appeased. Penny would never again need to say yes to every man who wanted to touch her. She would never again need to forget, immediately afterward, what she had done with those men. Her confusion would go away.

“But it wasn’t like that,” Penny told him. “It was like, now you’ve done what you were here for, sister. That’s all there is.”

Murray made what he thought were calming clucking sounds. “It’s certainly ‘all there is’ if you do something you’ll be sorry for,” he crooned. “You’re only—what? Twenty-three?”

“Twenty-three can be a lifetime,” Penny had replied.

Hearing this, knowing what was coming, I caught my breath. I hadn’t eaten all day, but the hollow in my stomach felt like it belonged to someone else. “So that accounts for the note,” I said. “‘I’m falling through the hole/in the bottom of my soul—’”

“‘And there ain’t nobody to catch me,’” Jon finished. He took a long, slow, thoughtful breath. “You know what else? I think she figured splattering herself all over my father’s shop would reflect badly on his business.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. That was precisely how Penny would have seen it: that leaving a mess in Murray’s office would condemn him.

When Penny stuck the pistol in her mouth, Murray claimed he tried to stop her, with talk at first and then, seeing talk was fruitless, approaching her and holding out his hand. Jon didn’t believe him. Murray was a strong man, and Penny was a small woman with the power to ruin him.

Everyone knew the rest. Penny sat down in a chair in the middle of Murray Wishner’s office and pulled the trigger.

With the evidence of Penny’s suicide note in her pocket, Murray was never suspected.

Jon sank back in his seat, his olive complexion sallow as wax.

“My God,” I whispered.

“You think you aren’t going to live through things,” he said. “And then you do. All those years passed. By the time I saw you on TV in the hurricane, Penny was dead such a long time, it was such ancient history—You forget you’re ever going to have to deal with it again. You think you won’t. I know I should have told you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I’d just spent a couple of years trying to find Vera. All I found out was that in adoption cases the search can only be instigated by the child. If the child wants to find the parent, okay. But not the other way around. I went to Penny’s sisters. If they knew anything, they weren’t saying. Actually, I think hearing about a baby shocked them. I’m not sure they believed it. Going to Essie Berman never occurred to me. I was running into nothing but blank walls. Finally I just wanted it to be over.”

“So you came to North Carolina and started this—Started us. And still didn’t feel like you had to tell me.”

“I was happy,” Jon said quietly. “I didn’t want to spoil it. After a while, I stopped thinking about Vera. Everything was better than it had been for a long time. Except the times when…”

“What?”

“When Robin came to visit.”

“Robin!”

“She’s just a few years younger than Vera. Every time I saw you with Robin, it brought it all back. I guess, in my mind, Robin and Vera were the same.”

I was momentarily dumbfounded.

“So that’s why you were so solicitous to Robin?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I guess so.”

“I was beginning to think you had designs on her.”

“On Robin?”

“Well—”

“The only one I have designs on,” Jon said softly, “is you.” He leaned across the coffee table toward me, but I froze, unable either to shrink back or to move forward toward him. Now the mysteries were stripped away. Now everything was clear. How like Penny to assume the sins of the father could be erased by the infidelity of the son. How like Penny never to imagine a quickie with Jon on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay could ruin our friendship, any more than the sorority had back in high school. Friendship was precious, inviolate; sex was fleeting and cheap.

Jon, on the other hand—Jon could have said no.

For a long time I didn’t move. Jon got up, went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of water and one of my pain pills, which I took. I wasn’t grateful. I was cold. I shivered. Finally, I made myself get up, walk to the sliding glass door. The rain had stopped, but the air felt damp and raw. I shut the slider against the steady, rhythmic breathing of the sea. I closed the curtains and sat back down.

Jon got up, paced. “Listen to me,” he said. “I love you. I loved you when I was fifteen and I loved you when I was forty-five and I love you now.” He sat next to me, grabbed my arm, held it immobile. “I’ve made some horrible mistakes. I’ve run away from them. When I came to North Carolina, I was going to make up for everything and didn’t. I handled everything badly. But I love you. I was hoping to spend the rest of my life here with you, whatever’s left of it. I still am.” Aware that he was squeezing, he dropped my arm. The indent of his fingers remained on my flesh. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. His eyes were black as olives, lambent and sober. He hung his head in a posture of capitulation. “It’s your call, Barbara. What do you want?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Some time to think, maybe.”

“Then as soon as you’re better, tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go.”

“Go where?” My voice felt far apart from me. Nothing felt real.

“A motel, I guess.”

“This is your house. Your office.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to bring feeling into them.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be okay. Take as much time as you need.”

And the next morning, after spending the night in his office, checking on me every hour, he was gone.

T
he next month was among the strangest I ever spent in my life. That first night, I huddled under every cover I could find, trying to stop chills that shook me like a carnival ride. Having asked Jon for time to think and being rewarded with his going, I no longer felt righteous. I felt abandoned. I tossed and shivered. Toward dawn I fell into a deep, heavy, dreamless sleep from which the phone jolted me a few hours later, with Steve and Marilyn talking at the same time on two extensions, telling me that Steve had told Marilyn everything.

“Oh, Barbara, I’m so sorry,” Marilyn gushed. “Lucky for you I’m a woman with great largeness of heart, phoning even after you ran off without telling me about the baby. And Jon! What a bastard. I had no idea.”

I sat up in the bed, feeling every bone and muscle groan. “I’m a woman with great largeness of heart myself,” I said, “coming to D.C. even after you kept your cancer secret for a week.”

“So how are you, sweetie?” Steve interrupted. “I tried to get hold of you yesterday, but no answer. Did you have your talk with Jon?”

I told them about the accident, and how Jon had come to get me. I told them what Murray had done to Penny, and her trip to Camp Chesapeake. I told them Jon had moved out so I could think. It was a good thing both of them were on the line at the same time, because I couldn’t have related the story twice. I insisted I was fine.

“Fine,”
Marilyn growled. “Oh, Barbara.”

“Well, if it’s not true now, it will be,” Steve asserted with such confidence that I believed him. “If you need anything, give Uncle Stevie a holler. Or call Marilyn. Anytime, even three in the morning. Promise us, sweetie. Now I’m going to let the two of you talk.”

“I’m coming down to be with you,” Marilyn said as soon as he hung up.

“That’s ridiculous. The best thing you can do for me is get better.”

“I wish you’d told me about Jon and Penny before you left,” she said.

“Too upset. Besides, you sounded like you really hoped Steve and Penny had a baby together. Aside from everything else, I thought you’d be disappointed.”

“Disappointed!”

“I thought you wanted a niece. So you could find her and be nice to her. Make it up to Penny, somehow, for not always treating her very well.”

“Make it up!” She paused long enough to reconsider this. “Well, if I did, this cured me. Anything we did to hurt Penny, she certainly went us one better. Now, none of us needs to feel guilty about Penny anymore. Not you, not me, not Steve. It’s a big relief for all of us.” Then she caught herself. “I don’t mean it’s a relief that you got hurt in the process, Barbara. Never that.”

“I know.”

“Let me help you. What do you want to do, Barbara?”

“Right now? Just lick my wounds a little.”

“At least promise you’ll call every day. Promise you’ll check in.”

“Of course,” I told her. As if I, not she, were the ailing patient.

During the short time I’d been gone, the season had moved decisively from summer to fall. A run of warm, dry days and cool, clear nights replaced the sulky heat. Temperatures dropped to the seventies, the ocean grew jewel-toned, the sand golden in the angled light. Seized by an unexpected inertia and ambivalence, I wandered mechanically through the fine bright days, toying with a small research project, cleaning my computer, staring at the indigo sea. I thought very little about Jon. I thought very little about anything.

I didn’t come out of my daze until the fourth morning, when Jon showed up at the door.

“I know I said I wouldn’t bother you,” he said, looking sheepish, “but I need some clothes.” He was wearing the same shirt he’d had on when he left. As I opened the door, I was aware of his physical beauty as I hadn’t been since our first months together, if the term
beauty
could be applied to a man approaching sixty.

He disappeared down the hall and returned with a pile of clothes and a stack of files from his office. “This should do it for a while.”

“I’ve kicked you out of your own office,” I said.

“I have my laptop. The motel is cheap this time of year. I meant what I said, Barbara. Take as long as you like.”

“Have you been wearing that shirt every day?” I asked.

“I took advantage of the sale at Redix.” Redix was a store just east of the drawbridge, which carried everything from fishing gear to fine clothing, and had excellent sales at the end of every season. Knowing how much Jon hated to shop, I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth.

“If you need anything, call me. I mean it. Errands you need to run. Groceries—” He stopped. We’d always gone to the supermarket together on Thursdays. “Anything.”

I remembered then what we were about. “I won’t need anything,” I told him.

But that night my bed felt deserted. I felt sorry for myself. In a way, I even felt sorry for Jon. When Penny had told him about his father, how horrified he must have been. Had his first reaction been disgust? Repugnance? Shock? Surely shock. He’d been away at camp when Penny had been molested at age fourteen and hadn’t returned for a month. He had no reason not to believe the story about the laborer. If he’d had sex with Penny all those years later, while he was still stunned with the horror of his father’s perversion, he’d also had the decency to part from Penny full of self-loathing, believing his behavior was a mirror of his father’s, knowing that in some vile way, he would never escape the taint of being Murray Wishner’s son.

No wonder he hadn’t told me. No wonder he’d fled.

But still.

What I didn’t forgive was that he’d left in order to keep his secret, and in the process robbed me of half my life.

I tossed in the bed, unable to get comfortable with so much empty space beside me. Had he really
robbed me
of half my life? Too melodramatic. I had
had
a life. After Jon’s desertion, I’d suffered grandly for a year, creeping through days dry and featureless as a slab of concrete. Then I’d discovered that the young body is a hungry, fickle beast, yearning so urgently for pleasure and joy that it usually gets it. A year after Jon left, I put my youthful angst aside and fell in love with Wells. A dentist, no less! A man out to repair the teeth of the world!
Tikkun Olam.
A son-in-law even Ida would approve! The navy had paid his way through dental school, so he owed them eight years. Amazingly, he was never sent to Vietnam, only all around the States: Carlsbad, California, where our apartment looked out to the Pacific Ocean; Tucson, Arizona, where the sharp desert air was always too hot or too cold, the sun a bright white fire; Pensacola, Florida, near the lush, humid, semitropical Gulf.

I loved each new assignment, until after Robin was born, and Wells decided to make the navy his career. By then we’d acquired so many
things
that moving began to seem a chore. I was tired of making friends and leaving them, getting established and moving on.

When Robin was ten, Wells returned from one of his six-month floats and I, throwing my arms around him in greeting, realized I was not glad to see him. And vice versa. Our life together had unraveled so gradually that neither of us noticed until it was too late.

We didn’t get around to divorcing until Robin was a teenager. After a hard first year, I found single life exhilarating. I worked for a small research firm, then a larger one. Eventually I started my own business. By the time Robin was grown and gone, I realized I could live anywhere. One thing the navy had taught was that if I didn’t go to the sea now and then, ill will would fill me and make me miserable. Walking by the ocean was the only cure. I found Wrightsville Beach and calculated I could afford a house in Wilmington, fifteen minutes away. I could breathe the sea air whenever I liked. Except for the loneliness that drifted through me now and then like a chilling shadow, I knew I’d come home.

How could I have thought, even for a minute, that Jon had robbed me of half my life?

I let the image of him go, sift out of my mind like dust. When finally I dozed off, there was nothing left. I dreamed instead of Penny, amnesiac and confused after the incident in Murray’s shop, baffled by her growing fascination with men, in the bus station, pregnant…dead.

I couldn’t be angry with her. I had loved her. I was only sad.

The next day, I was able to work again. In just over a week, my life had fallen back into some kind of routine. I could do without Jon. This proved it. Of course I could.

Then the garage in Richmond called to say my car was ready. Jon wanted to drive me up there to get it. I didn’t really have a choice.

It was a beautiful day, crisp and clear and invigorating. We opened the windows and shouted to each other over the breeze. By the time we reached I-95, we’d closed the windows again and fallen back into our easy pattern of speech as if nothing had interrupted. I found myself telling Jon about my visit with Essie Berman (no matter that she was the source of our current troubles) and with Marcellus Johnson. “No kidding, Jon,” I told him. “He’s the only person I ever met who had a different set of grammar rules for every listener and every mood.”

After that journey, Jon showed up at the house more frequently—to pick up his mail, to search for his files, to rummage through his clothes. He insisted he was fine working at the motel on his laptop, but he’d appear at least once a day, sometimes twice.

This went on for more than two weeks. Did he know his comings and goings kept me in a constant state of agitation, listening for his car in the driveway, his key in the lock? Was he keeping me off balance on purpose?

“This is insane, Marilyn,” I finally said in one of our frequent phone calls.

“So? I don’t see you doing anything to change it.”

True enough.

“Get over it, then. It will resolve itself soon enough.”

“I suppose.” I didn’t see how.

A dark silence filled the air, hovering until I thought we’d lost our connection. “Marilyn, what’s wrong?”

“That’s just the trouble. Nothing’s wrong. I feel good. I’m even starting to look good. My jowls are gone. My turkey neck is gone. I look better than I have in years.”

“But that’s wonderful.”

“It means I have no excuse to delay my treatment,” Marilyn said. “Then I’ll probably feel like cow plop. I’m tired of feeling like crap.”

“Oh, Marilyn.”

“Don’t ‘oh, Marilyn’ me. People are always ‘Oh, Marilyning me. Be glad all you have to worry about is kicking out some guy because he acted like an asshole half a lifetime ago.”

“Half a lifetime ago. You make it sound like—like
nothing.
”

“Well? Isn’t it?”

“Maybe by comparison, but I thought you’d—Why are you defending him?” A chill skittered across my collarbone, up my neck. “What’s eating you, Marilyn?”

“Cancer. A numb face. All kinds of things. And you know what? You’re not twenty-one anymore, either. You think this big dark secret is the worst thing that can happen? Fine. Kick Jon out for good. You’re healthy right now, so why not? You figure you can have any life you want. But I’ll tell you what—you’re no spring chicken and neither is he. You don’t know how many good years you’ve got left. Take it from the voice of experience. Why would either of you want to spend them alone?”

Why, exactly? Given a chance to love someone, to make a life together—rare enough—why would you run away? That was the question I’d posed to myself when I was twenty-one, and now again, the question of the moment.

I was healthy. I’d been happy. Could I run away because, as Marilyn put it, someone had treated me like crap half a lifetime ago?

Yet in spite of all the reason I tried to put to it, there were moments when knowing Jon’s secret still filled me with the same slicing anguish I’d felt at twenty-one when he’d first walked out on me. The same breathless, paralyzing anguish.

“Listen,” Marilyn said. “I don’t mean to pass judgment. It’s just that—Betrayal can be a snaky, easy kind of thing. Sometimes it’s over even before you realize what you’ve done.”

“As in screwing Penny?”

“Yes. But also—the wretched way he stomped away and disappeared without explaining anything. And you were stubborn, too. You probably could have found him and made him confess. But you didn’t. Not that I blame you. But it was—” She stopped. “It was a snaky, easy thing for both of you,” she whispered.

I felt as if I’d been slapped. After all, I
hadn’t
run after him. Too proud. Too hurt. Too stubborn. After all: Who had betrayed whom?

“And speaking of betrayal,” she said, “if you’re so angry at Jon, why aren’t you angry with Penny, too? I’ll tell you why. Because you see Penny as wounded. Not weak, but wounded. Why can’t you see Jon that way, too?”

“Because I know better. And so did he.”

“All right. Even so. You think you were betrayed? Everybody betrays you. Penny betrayed you whether you like it or not. Even your own body will betray you someday. I know all about it. But you don’t abandon it. You try to make it well. Because you want to live there. Because it’s your life.”

I was taken off guard, floundering. “What’s all this about, Marilyn? What’s going on?”

She said nothing for a minute, then let out a long sigh. “I’m just out of sorts. Call me tomorrow. Okay?”

“Take care of yourself, Marilyn.”

“You, too.”

I hung up, shaken. I needed to see her, to touch her. I didn’t trust what I could only hear from three hundred miles away. The next morning, when the phone rang just as I was brushing my teeth, I knew there must have been a crisis. At that early hour, who else but Marilyn could it be? I almost tripped over a throw rug as I bolted across the bedroom to answer

“Barbara? Phyllis Levy here.” The smoky voice belonged to a woman I’d met at the Temple of Israel, where Jon and I occasionally went to services. “I called to remind you about the
oneg
tonight.”

“The
oneg?
” My stomach twisted into a knot. Months ago, I’d signed up to provide refreshments for the social hour after the Friday-night service. I had completely forgotten. It was too late to back out.