Strange Fits of Passion (2 page)

There wasn't any point in asking her if I should come back. I knew now that it would be irresponsible not to, not to be there for her reaction and to answer her questions. And then I had a moment's sudden panic.

Maybe I shouldn't have come, I thought wildly. Maybe I shouldn't have brought the package.

But I had long ago trained myself to deal with panic attacks or doubts. It was simple. All I had to do was force myself to think about something else. Which I did. I thought about how I ought to find a motel room now, and after that a place to eat.

She glanced up at me, her eyes momentarily glazed from her reading. I saw that her hand, turning a page, was shaking.

She looked at me as if I were a stranger who had not yet entered her room. I could only guess at what she was thinking, what she was hearing, and what she feared.

Yet I knew better than anyone else all about this particular story and the storyteller, didn't I?

And all about the storyteller who came after that...

From: Helen Scofield
To: Edward Hargreaves
Re: The Maureen English story
Date: August 2, 1971

I think we can go ahead with the English piece now, and I'd like your OK on this. If you recall, when I last mentioned it a month ago, I thought we were going to have to kill it because I couldn't get to Maureen English, or "Mary Amesbury," as she now calls herself. I had gone up to Maine with the idea of interviewing her for the piece. I visited St. Hilaire and interviewed a number of the townspeople there and got some good background material. Then I drove to South Windham to see Maureen. I'd met her only once before. She had left the magazine just before I had really come on board. I'd seen Harrold around, of course. I knew him to speak to, but not much more than that.

Maureen met with me, but wouldn't agree to talk to me. I tried everything I could think of to persuade her, but I just couldn't get her to open up. I drove home feeling pretty disappointed. I thought I had a great story, but without her there were just too many holes.

I started work on the Juan Corona story and tried to forget about the English piece. Then, last week, I received a package in the mail. It's a series of notes written by "Mary Amesbury." There are shorter ones, and then some longer ones. It is, I suppose you could say, a kind of journal to herself and for herself, except that in her notes she is sometimes writing to me. Apparently the tape recorder or my presence in the visitors' room had put her off, but back in the privacy of her cell she was able to write her story down. I think that I must have reminded her of her former life, and that had put her off too.

Actually I'm not sure what it is that she's sent me. I do think, however, that the basic facts are here, and I'm pretty sure I can do the piece with this and the interviews from the others I've already got. I know it's unorthodox, but I'd like to give it a try. I've received just the one package, but she says that she'll be sending others.

I'm quite drawn to this story. I'm not sure why, except for the obvious. It's got a lot of strong, raw elements, but I think that if handled discreetly, it could be a fantastic piece. And I'm not sure that the issues involved in this story have really been dealt with before by the media. That alone seems to me a good reason for tackling it. I think that it's particularly interesting that this could happen to them. I know we were all stunned when we found out what had been going on. And then, of course, there's the inside angle—the fact that they both worked here. I'm thinking of in the vicinity of 5,000 words if you can give me the space.

I should tell you right off that I couldn't get to Jack Strout. He positively refused to talk to me. But I think the story can be done without my interviewing him.

Let me know what you think. I'd like to get started on this right away.

I was driving north and east. It was as far east as I could go. I had an image in my mind that sustained me—of driving to the edge and jumping off, though it was just an image, not a plan. Along the road, near the end, there were intermittent houses. They were old and weathered, and on many the paint was peeling. They rose, in a stately way, to peaked roofs and had els at the back that sometimes leaned or sagged. Around these beautiful houses were objects that were useful or might be needed again: a second car, on blocks; a silver roll of insulation; a rusted plow from the front of a pickup truck, set upon a snowy lawn like an inadvertent sculpture. The new houses were not beautiful—pink or aqua gashes on a hillside—but you understood, driving past them, that a younger, more prosperous generation (the snowmobiles and station wagons) lived in them. These houses would have better heat and kitchens.

The town that I had picked lay at the end of the road. I came upon it like a signpost in a storm. There was an oval common, a harbor, a white wooden church. There was, too, a grocery store, a post office, a stone library. At the eastern edge of the common, with their backs to the harbor, stood four tall white houses in varying stages of disrepair. In the harbor there were lobster boats, and at the end of a wharf I saw a squat cement building that looked commercial. I, thought it promising that the essentials of the town could be taken in at a glance.

I parked across the street from the store. The sign said Shedd's, over a Pepsi logo. In the window there was another sign, a list: Waders, Blueberry Rakes, Maple Syrup, Magazines, Marine Hardware. And to its right there was a third sign—a faded relic from a local election: Vote for Rowley. A boy in a blue pickup truck, parked by the Mobil pump / out front, brought a paper coffee cup to his lips, blew on it, and looked at me. I turned away and put my hand on the map, folded neatly on the passenger seat. I put my finger on the dot. I thought I was in a town called St. Hilaire.

The village common to my right was shrouded in snow. The light from a four o'clock December sun turned the white surface to a faint salmon. Behind the steeple of the church at the end of the green, a band of red sliced the sky between the horizon and a thinning blanket of clouds. The crimson light hit the panes of glass in the windows on the east side of the common, giving the houses there a sudden brilliance, a winter radiance. Yet I noticed, above the wooden door of the church, the odd graceless note of an electric cross lit with blue bulbs.

The storm was over, I thought, and was moving east, out to sea. The street in front of Shedd's had been plowed, but not to the pavement. I imagined I could actually see the cold.

I shook open the map and laid it over the seat, with Maine crawling up the backrest. With my finger I traced the route I had driven, from my parking place at Eightieth and West End, up the Henry Hudson and out of New York City, onto the parkways that led to the highways, along the highways and across the states and finally north and east to the coast of Maine. In ten hours, I had put nearly five hundred miles between myself and the city. I thought it might be far enough. And then I thought:
It will have to be
.

I turned to see my baby. She was sleeping in the baby basket in the back seat. I looked at her face—the pale eyelashes, the reddish wisps of hair curling around the woolen hat, the plump cheeks that even then I could not resist reaching back to stroke, causing Caroline to stir slightly in her dreams.

The stuffy warmth from the car heater was fading. I felt the cold at my legs and pulled my woolen coat more tightly to my chest. The horizon appeared now to be on fire. Gray swirls of clouds above the sunset mimicked smoke rising from flames. Along the common, the lights in the houses were turned on, one by one, and as if in invitation, someone inside Shedd's snapped on a bulb by the door.

I leaned against the seat back and looked across at the houses. The windows at the fronts were floor-to-ceiling rectangles with wavy panes of glass. The windows that were lit reminded me of windows I used to look into when I was a girl walking home after dark in my town. The windows of the houses there—warm, yellow frames of light—offered glimpses of family rituals hidden in the daytime. People would be eating or preparing supper, and I would see them gathered round a table, or I would watch a woman, in a kitchen, pass through a frame, and I would stand in the dark on the sidewalk, looking in, savoring those scenes. I would imagine myself to be a part of those tableaux—a child at the dining table, a girl with her father by a fireplace. And even though I knew now that families framed by windows are deceptive, like cropped photographs (for I never saw during those childhood walks a husband berating a wife or hitting a child, or a wife crying in the kitchen), I looked across the common and I thought: If I were in one of those houses now, I'd be sitting in a wooden chair in the kitchen. I'd have a glass of wine beside me, and I'd be half-listening to the evening news Caroline would be in an infant seat on the table. I would hear my husband at the door and watch as he kicked the snow off his boots. He would have walked home from...(Where? I looked down the street. The building on the wharf? The library? The general store?) He would crouch down to pet a honey-colored cat, would bend to nuzzle the baby on the table, would pour himself a glass of wine, and would slide his hand across my shoulders as he took his first sip....

I stopped. The image, filled as it was with critical falsehoods, was a balloon losing air. I looked at my face in the rearview mirror, quickly turned away. I put on an oversized pair of dark glasses to hide my eyes. I draped my scarf over my hair and wrapped it around the lower part of my face.

I looked up again at the simple white houses that lined the common. There was snow on the porches. I was thinking:
I am a settler in reverse.

I know you are surprised to hear from me. I think that I was rude to you when you came to visit. Perhaps it was the tape recorder—that intrusive black machine on the table between us. I have never liked a tape recorder. It puts a person off, like a lie detector. When I was working, I used a notebook and a pencil, and sometimes even that would make them nervous. They'd look at what you wrote, not at your face or eyes.

Or perhaps it was your presence in that sterile and formal visitors' room. There was something that you did that reminded me of Harrold. Sometimes he would sit, as you did yesterday, your legs crossed, your face expressionless, your fingers tapping the pencil lead on the table, quietly, like a brush on a snare drum.

But you're not like Harrold, are you? You're just a reporter, as I was once—your hair pinned back behind your ears; your summer suit wrinkled across your lap—just trying to do your job.

Or possibly it was simply the process itself. You'd think that I'd be used to that by now, wouldn't you? But the problem is that I know too much about how it works. I'd be talking to you, and you would seem to be looking at me, but I would know that you were searching for your lede, listening for the quotes. I would see it on your face. You wouldn't be able to relax until you'd got your story, had seen its center. You'd be hoping for a cover, would be thinking of the length. And I'd know that the story you would write would be different from the one I'd tell. Just as the one I am going to tell you now will be different from the one I told my lawyer or the court. Or the one I will one day tell my child.

My baby, my orphan, my sweet girl...

I took the name of Mary, like a nun, though without a nun's grace, but you will know that, just as you will know that I am twenty-six now. You'll have seen the clips; you'll have read the files.

You'll describe me in your piece, and I wish you didn't have to, for I can't help seeing myself as you must have seen me the day you came to visit. You'll say that I look older than my years, that my skin is white, too washed out, like that of someone who hasn't seen the sun in weeks. And then there is my body, shapeless now in this regulation jumpsuit, and only two or three people, reading your article, will ever know how it once was. I don't believe that any man will ever see my body again. But that's hardly important now, is it?

I know that you're probably wondering why it is that I've decided to write to you, why I've agreed to tell my story. I have asked myself the same question. I could say that I am doing this because I don't want a single other woman to endure what I went through. Or I could tell you that having been a reporter, I suffer from a reporter's craving—to tell my own story. But these explanations would be incorrect, or only partially correct. The true answer is simpler than that, but also more complex.

I am writing this for myself. That's all.

When I lived it, I couldn't clearly see my way. I understood it, and yet I didn't. I couldn't tell this story to anyone, just as I couldn't answer your questions when you came to visit. But when you left, I went looking for a piece of paper and a pen. Perhaps you are a good reporter after all.

If you can find the facts in my memories, in these incoherent ramblings, you are welcome to them. And if I tell this story badly, or get the dialogue wrong, or tell things out of sequence, you will hear the one or two things that are essential, won't you?

When I opened the door to Shedd's, a bell tinkled. Everyone in the store—a few men, a woman, the grocer behind the counter—looked up at me. I was holding Caroline, but the glare of the fluorescent lights and the sudden heat of the store were confusing to me. The lights began to shimmer, then to spin. The woman standing by the front counter took a step forward, as if she might be going to speak.

I looked away from her and moved toward the aisles.

They'd been talking when I walked in, and they started up again. I heard men's voices and the woman's. There was something about a sudden gale and a boat lost, a child sick with the flu and not complaining. For the first time, I heard the cadence of the Maine accent, the vowels broadened, the r's dropped, the making of two syllables out of simple words like
there.
The words and sentences had a lilt and a rhythm that was appealing. The accent grows on you like an old tune.

The store was claustrophobic—you must know the kind I mean. Did you see it when you were in St. Hilaire? A rack of potato chips and pretzels had been squeezed next to a cooler of fresh produce. There were two long rows of cereal boxes and canned goods, but at least half the store appeared to be given over to shelves of objects associated with fishing. I moved along to the back wall and picked up a quart of milk. I held the baby and the milk in one arm and slid a packaged coffee cake into my free hand from the bread aisle. Walking to the front of the store, I passed a cooler filled with beer. I quickly snagged a six-pack with my finger.