Staggerford (14 page)

“It’s a phase.”

“Well, I hope it’s a phase, and I hope it isn’t a phase. I mean I hope I get over feeling so screwed up all the time, but I would hate to quit seeing you because … I don’t know.”

“Because I have all my shit together.”

“Right. And I haven’t. And somebody who hasn’t feels
a strong attachment to somebody who has. You must attract a lot of people like me. Mixed-up people.”

“Not so many. Now and then somebody wants to talk. But not really all that often.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I tell them to get their shit together.”

“No, seriously.”

“That’s what I say. Or words to the effect.”

“Well, that isn’t much to go on.”

“It’s the best I can offer.”

“Why don’t you tell them
how
to get it together?”

“Everybody knows how. You simply go out and start gathering it up and putting it in one place, and before you know it, you’ve got it all together.”

“Where do I start gathering?”

“Start with the College Entrance Exam. Then after that, you write to the junior college in Berrington and you ask them for application forms and scholarship forms and student-loan forms—the whole package. Be sure to tell them you’re a quarter Chippewa. They’ll fix it with the Bureau of Indian Affairs so you get a free ride.”

“You told me all that before.”

“Then why do you ask?”

On the highway a car slowed down at the entrance to the park. How stupid, Miles told himself, to be lured out here to lovers’ lane in broad daylight. To his relief, the car did not turn into the park but made a U-turn on the highway and headed back toward town. It looked, through the rain, like Doc Oppegaard’s Lincoln. Doc and Stella searching for a place to park? Absurd. Nadine and a boyfriend? Nadine had no boyfriends.

Beverly took off her jacket, folded her arms, and spoke to the windshield, which was steaming up. “The thing that’s got me off balance is my mother. If I go away to college, what’s going to happen to my mother? I don’t think she could make it by herself. She’s getting worse every day. Yesterday I found her out in a field by the highway, and she was turning left and turning right and lying down and acting just crazy. I asked her what she was
doing and she said she was obeying God’s command. She said it was in the Bible that she was supposed to leave the house and walk so many paces east and then turn left and walk so many paces north, and then lie down on the ground, and then get up, and on and on like that. Her shoes were all wet from walking in the creek and her dress was torn and her stockings were torn and her legs were bleeding from thorns. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it. She kept it up until she got tired and she couldn’t go on anymore, and when she came to the fence along the highway she sat down on the ground and looked at the sky for a long time. I sat down beside her and waited till she was ready to get up and go back to the house, and finally she did. But can you imagine what it was like sitting there in the weeds with cars going by and people looking at us? What else could I do? I was afraid she might try to climb the fence and wander out onto the highway. But when she stood up she went straight back to the house and changed her clothes and fed the chickens.”

“Was that after we saw her down by the river?”

Beverly nodded. “She was doing the same thing down there when we saw her, only I didn’t realize it. She was pacing off some distances that the Bible told her to. I ran away because it embarrassed me to have you see her.”

“That was the first time I’ve ever had a good look at your mother. She’s younger than I thought.”

Beverly nodded. “I can’t trust her to be alone anymore. Not for any length of time.”

“There are people who handle problems like that. There are doctors who can help her. If she needs care, there are places she can go.”

“Like where?”

“A home of some kind. A mental hospital if necessary. If she’s going out of her mind, you can’t be expected to care for her single-handedly.”

“Then what would happen to me? I wouldn’t have a home.”

“You’ll be going away to college. You’ll be starting your own life.”

“But I wouldn’t have a home. College isn’t home. Where would I go during vacations? I wouldn’t have any home to go to in the summertime.”

“Summers you could get a job in Berrington. You could rent yourself a room.”

“But what kind of a home would that be? I wouldn’t have any ties. I just can’t stand not having any ties. My sister has broken all her ties and she’s just sort of out there somewhere. And nobody knows where. And she was the only person I was ever able to confide in.”

“You’ll make friends in college.”

‘But I wouldn’t have a home. How can a person get along without a home? I mean what I’ve got now isn’t much, but it’s the place where I grew up and it’s got the river and the woods and the garden and the produce stand. And Mother isn’t all that bad … when she isn’t crazy. I mean if she’d just be content to gather bones, I could put up with that. If she could stay halfway sane I could come home weekends and be with her. And summers. There’s no nicer place to be summers. Our garden is big and we have that produce stand by the highway and that’s fun. That month or so at the end of summer when we open that stand is the best part of the year for me. I wouldn’t want to give that up. But, God, if she’s going to be like this, wandering around the fields because she’s hearing voices …”

“Have her see a doctor. Have her go to the Staggerford Clinic.”

“She’ll never see a doctor.”

“Have her see Dr. Maitland at the clinic.”

“She’ll never do that.”

“Then
you
see him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you why. It’s too complicated. Seeing a doctor isn’t going to help anything. It would only make things worse.”

“Why?”

“Just take my word for it.”

“You’ve got a secret.”

“God, have I got a secret.”

‘ “You want
me to see
Dr. Maitland?”

“No!”

“All right, that’s my best offer.”

Beverly said nothing. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into her lap. Miles wiped the steam from his side window. A car sped past on the highway, trailing a cloud of spray. The trees, black with rain, stirred in the wind. It was getting cold in the car. He started the engine and turned on the heater fan.

Beverly said, “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

“I’ve got a stack of papers to read. I’d like to hand them back tomorrow.”

“ ‘What I Wish’ papers?”

“Yes.”

“Did you read mine?”

“Not yet.”

After another long pause Beverly threw her cigarette out the window and said, “Do you know what I really wish?”

“What?”

“I wish you and I could be in love with each other.”

Miles squirmed. He looked at his watch. “You’re breaking Greg’s heart.”

“Whose?”

“Greg Olson’s, the airman you’re going to marry.”

“Oh, that! Did you believe that? I made that up.”

Miles turned on his windshield wipers and told Beverly that he had to get home.

Beverly put on her shoes but she didn’t get out. She sat with her arms folded, looking at the windshield, watching the steam disappear over the defroster vent. She looked angry. She said, “How do you like living with that crabby old bitch?”

For a moment Miles was stunned. “If you mean Agatha McGee, I like it just fine. She’s really quite human, you know.”

“That isn’t what the Catholic kids say. They say they never thought they’d live through the sixth grade. She was
even stricter than the nuns. Because of her, some Catholic kids leave St. Isidore’s after the fifth grade and come over to the public school, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that, but there can’t be many. Maybe one every year or so.”

“Anyway, I’m glad I’m not Catholic. I got by pretty easy in sixth grade. Mrs. Torkelson.”

“Miss McGee would have been good for you. The age of twelve is about the right time to be put through the mill. And I think most people would agree with me, judging by the respect her former students have for her.”

“Not her former students
I
know. Only her
old
former students whose memories are failing.” This was anger, called up by the thought of the other woman in Miles’s life.

“No, the younger ones respect her too. But respect for Miss McGee is not something you admit till you’re at least twenty.”

“Well, I can’t believe fear is a good way to motivate students.”

“There’s no fear involved. That’s a mystique her students enjoy keeping alive because it makes heroes out of them.”

“Mr. Pruitt, is there any chance you’ll fall in love with me?” She opened her door as she said this, and before she stepped out into the rain she leaned over and kissed him quickly on the cheek.

Miss McGee sat in the wing chair near the lamp in the front window. The lamp had a ruffled shade. On the arms of the chair were squares of embroidered linen that her mother had made. Her mother had always placed them on the arms of the chair before the arrival of eminent guests and laundered them after the guests left. Miss McGee’s father had been a state senator, and the McGees were often visited by Governor Rice. They once had Archbishop Burke to dinner. Since then, these linen squares had been lying in the cedar chest, waiting forty years for the next guest of distinction. Yesterday as Miss McGee was taking stock of
her linens, she decided to put them to use once more. What was she preserving them for? Who, when she died, would want embroidered linen antimacassars?

This afternoon in the wing chair Miss McGee was mending a slip and listening to the rain. She was also working up the courage to read the Sunday paper. Because of the predictable awfulness of its news, she thought of the Sunday paper as an adversary, and she put off reading it until her curiosity got the best of her—for the only thing worse than reading bad news was being unaware of it.

Finishing her mending, she picked a section of the paper off the coffee table. It was indeed a day for bad news. She took it all to heart. Engaging the enemy, she gave voice, like any valiant soldier, to the exertions of battle. She groaned to read of the American families being evacuated from the Middle East. Her reaction to the photograph of the Secretary of State being spat upon in Central America was a loud snort of disgust, a more fitting response (she thought as she studied the photograph) than the sappily smiling Secretary had permitted himself. How can you smile, she wondered, with spit on your glasses? She clucked her tongue and shook her head at news of the secret agent who revealed to the press that he had been assigned to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.

When she came across the priest in Seattle, she was struck dumb. She put down the paper and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. This priest in Seattle, it said, had announced from the pulpit that he was the father of his housekeeper’s eight-year-old boy. While the coffee was heating, Miss McGee went back to her chair and peeked at the next paragraph. “I hope,” said the priest, “that this will not in any way alter my relationship with my dear parishioners. I wish to be a father to Toby and a father to my flock at the same time.”

“Where’s the man’s bishop?” cried Miss McGee, hurrying back to the kitchen.

On her third try, with a steaming cup of weak coffee in hand, she finished the article. The bishop, when asked his opinion of the matter, said he would have to think it over.
Miss McGee threw the paper on the floor and turned off the lamp. She watched the cold rain. It spattered the street and sidewalk and it agitated the broad brown leaves of the dying ferns in the flower bed.

Rain’s only value, for Miss McGee, was that it reminded her how precious was good weather. She despised rain. But she knew that to the earth, rain was as necessary as sunshine. Could it be, she wondered, that the vice and barbarism abroad in the world served, like the rain, some purpose? Did the abominations in the Sunday paper mingle somehow with the goodness in the world and together, like the rain and sun feeding the ferns, did they nourish some kind of life she was unaware of?

Miles, returning from Pike Park, entered the house through the back door, turning on lights as he came.

“What are you doing in the dark, Agatha?”

“I was having a thought.”

“Yes? Tell me.” He took off his coat and rubbers and went to the closet at the foot of the stairs.

“Don’t put your coat in there until it’s dry, Miles. Hang it over the banister.”

He did so.

He sat in the other chair by the lamp, a Victorian chair with a back shaped like a bass fiddle. “Tell me your thought, Agatha.”

“Well, it’s this, Miles. You see the rain. It’s uncomfortable to the touch and depressing to the mind and just generally bad from every human point of view.”

“I never think of rain that way.”

“Well, I do. I’ve never cared for rain. But look at those ferns in the flower bed.”

He looked. They were bowing and turning under the weight of the rain.

“They’re still alive, Miles. It’s November and everything else in the flower bed is dead, but those ferns are still alive and beautiful.”

“Yes, but they’re dying. See how brown they’re getting at the edges.”

“Of course they’re dying. They’ve been dying since the
day they sprouted if you want to be that way about it. But the fact remains it’s November and there is still a bit of life in them. And do you know why?”

“Why”

“Because of yesterday’s sun and today’s rain. They’ve been thriving since the middle of April on sunshine, which I think is lovely, and on rain, which I think is dreadful, and now at the end of a long season of sunshine and rain they’re their most beautiful.”

Miles agreed. Each frond was gold-green at the center and rust-brown at the lacy edge. The colors, despite the darkness of the afternoon (or perhaps because of it), were luminous.

“So what was I thinking, Miles, was that maybe there is a similar process going on in human affairs. If you let sunshine stand for the goodness in the world and you let rain stand for evil, do goodness and evil mingle like sun and rain to produce something? To bring something to maturity, like those ferns? Does God permit sin because it’s an ingredient in something he’s concocting and we human beings aren’t aware of what it is? Is there sprouting up somewhere a beautiful fern, as it were, composed of goodness and sin?”