The Confessions of Frances Godwin (17 page)

I looked her in the eyes, wondering what she was thinking, would think if she knew. I looked up at the sky, but there was too much light pollution in the parking lot for star gazing.

I realized with a shock that I’d left the gun in the cab of Jimmy’s truck. I went back for it, put it in my purse, and put a handkerchief over my finger and locked both doors. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I tried not to look at him through the window as I wiped the door handle on the passenger side.

I pulled over at the next rest stop on I-80 to let Camilla out to pee. I could hear the grass growing, the trees leafing out, creating a dark canopy, blocking the stars. An owl hooted, and I thought of the owl that Camilla hears in Book XI of
The Aeneid,
as she prepares to kill herself. I could smell the dampness of the earth. I could hear Camilla (the dog) sniffing, then disappearing for a moment behind a tree. For a minute I couldn’t see her, and then I did see her, sniffing another dog, a little white border collie on a long lead. On the one hand I didn’t want anyone to see me; on the other, I needed some human contact, if only for a moment. Contact with another dog person. It was very dark; I couldn’t see this person, but the dog itself stood out against the darkness.

I talked briefly with the owner, trying to keep my breathing steady. She had the dog on a retractable lead. A woman my age. She was crying.

“I didn’t see you pull in,” she said. “But I always feel safe with dog people.”

“I just stopped to let the dog out,” I said.

“He doesn’t run away?”

“She,” I said.

“She doesn’t?”

“No. At least not yet. Are you all right?”

“Not really,” she said. “Sometimes I just need to cry.”

I felt like crying too, but I was too keyed up.

“Toby’s started jumping the fence,” she said. “And then he’s off. The neighbors are wonderful, but sometimes he goes pretty far afield. And crosses some pretty busy streets. I tried tying him up, but that just makes him miserable. I probably need to get a higher fence.”

“You might try spending more time with him out in the yard. You can’t play with him when you’re inside and he’s outside.” This was something I’d read in the dog training book that Paul ordered from Amazon. It seemed like good advice. “I know it’s a pain, but you don’t want him to get bored. If stuff’s going on at home, he won’t be so eager to run away.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Come on, Toby.” The retractable lead made a ratcheting sound as Toby came running and jumping. “Have a good trip.”

“Safe home,” I said.

I stayed in the rest area for a while. It was very dark and the stars, which you could see from the side of the road, where the trees had been cut back, were very bright.
Praeterea tam sunt,
I said out loud,
Arcturi sidera nobis.
I made the students in Latin 2 memorize this passage from Book I of Vergil’s
Georgics
:
Praeterea tam sunt Arcturi .
.
.

The star of Arcturus, and the days of the Kids, and bright Draco the Serpent, are as much ours as theirs, who sailing homewards over stormy seas, brave the Pontic sea, and the straits of oyster-rich Abydos.

It was two o’clock in the morning. Arcturus was low in the west, and I, Frances Godwin, was sailing homeward over stormy seas. Instead of getting off I-80 onto I-74 and heading south, I kept on going west to Rock Island, then crossed the Mississippi into Iowa on the Centennial Bridge, which had low railings on the sides, so it was easy to pull over and drop the gun off the bridge into the middle of the main channel. I followed 67 east on the Iowa side till I got to 74 and then headed south, back across the river and home to Galesburg. I still had a quarter tank of gas.

8

Vigil (June 1997)

I woke up in a panic. Everything had changed. I couldn’t imagine a future, couldn’t even see ahead to the end of the day. I didn’t want this one act to define me for the rest of my life, perhaps forever. The blood pouring out of Jimmy’s chest. On the other hand, I couldn’t deny that I was glad that Jimmy was dead, and when I heard Ruthy in the kitchen, making little clicking sounds, the vision of blood faded. She’d made a pot of tea and was holding a large blue cup in her hands when I came into the kitchen. Or I should say kitchen area. Small, but designed very cleverly. I’d already disposed of my clothes, even though they weren’t spattered with blood, and was in my pajamas.

“I see you found the tea pot,” I said, “and the tea cozy.” I was looking for a sign that she knew I’d gone out in the night. She was wearing a blouse that had been washed so many times you couldn’t tell what color it was.

“Sleep all right?” she asked. Did she know something, suspect something? I was feeling hung over, confused, disoriented.

“I got up once to take the dog out,” I said. “She doesn’t usually need to go in the night, but I forgot to take her out before I went to bed. Just down to the courtyard.”

We ate soft-boiled eggs and toast and then went to see Stella in the hospital. I was too tired and too overwhelmed with anxiety to think about the murder, if that’s what it was. I thought that if I pretended not to be anxious, after a while I wouldn’t be anxious.

Stella was doing okay, but she was going to have to stay in bed for a while. She spoke mostly to Ruthy. She wouldn’t look at me, and she flinched when I tried to touch her.

The police didn’t come to notify Stella till the next day. They hadn’t found Jimmy’s body for a while, and then they hadn’t known where to find Stella.

What Stella told them was that they’d been arguing and she opened the door to get away from him, and he’d pushed her out onto the highway. What she didn’t tell them, till Ruthy prompted her, was that Jimmy had been trying to force her to go down on him.

The police detective, Detective Landstreet, questioned me at the apartment afterward. He knew that I had bought a gun and had been taking shooting lessons. He knew that the gun that had killed Jimmy was a .38, the same caliber as the gun I’d bought at the gun shop across the street. The police had recovered two bullets.

“Jack Ruby used a Colt .38 to kill Lee Harvey Oswald,” he said. “You remember that.”

I indicated that I remembered.

“That was a little one, though. A Cobra.”

By the time he was done he had a pretty good understanding of the way things stood between Jimmy and me, but the more he questioned me, the stiffer became my resistance, my resolve not to be pushed around. I told the truth about everything—all the little things—knowing that little lies point toward larger truths. I didn’t want to be caught out. That left one big lie, of course, at the center, like a big arrow pointing right at me. Detective Landstreet thought he could see it, but he couldn’t see it clearly. He kept coming back to the gun I’d bought at Collector’s, which I produced for him, nestled comfortably in its wood-grained box.

“Are you sure you don’t have anything to add right now?” he kept asking. “You know, Mrs. Godwin, no one would blame you for plugging that lowlife. I might have done the same thing myself, someone did that to my daughter, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I’m sure I don’t have anything to add.”

Ruthy was sure, too. She held up under intense questioning. Detective Landstreet was determined to break my alibi for the night of the murder.

“Could Mrs. Godwin have gone out in the night?”

“Anything is
possible
.”

“You were here the whole time?”

“I was at the hospital till about nine o’clock.”

“And Mrs. Godwin was here when you came back?”

“Yes. We had a cup of tea.”

“You would have heard her go out?”

“The dog makes a tremendous racket every time she goes out. She whacks her tail against the wall.”

“And you didn’t hear anything like that?”

“Not at all.”

“You’re sure about that? Because if you’re not .
.
.”

“Look,” she said. “There are a lot of truck-stop guys who’ve got beefs with Jimmy.”

“We’re looking into that, too,” Detective Landstreet said.

The police took the gun with them, the new gun, not the one I’d used to kill Jimmy. And that’s the way it ended.

Stella came home on Saturday morning. In the afternoon Ruthy and I filled the window boxes on the railing of the deck with geraniums; we filled five of the seven Italian pots with petunias and two more with basil and parsley.

Stella sat in a deck chair, a recliner, and watched me watch her. She didn’t seem to have anything to say, and she didn’t want me to touch her.

Later she took a nap, and Ruthy explained, “She’s ashamed of herself. Shame can be very powerful. Give her time. She’s not ready to face you.”

“I’m her mother,” I said.

“That’s the problem.”

“Oh.”

“How can she feel that she has to ‘face’ me?”

“She’s embarrassed. She knows she’s in the wrong. She didn’t come home when her dad died. She barely made it to the memorial service and then she left right away. She wants to make it right, but she doesn’t know how. Just don’t fuss at her.”

“How come I’ve learned more about my own daughter from talking to you than I do from talking to her?”

“Because you’re her mother.”

I didn’t return to the scene of the crime—TruckStopUSA—but I drove by it on my way to Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon. I had to push aside involuntary memories—the bullet wounds, the weight of the gun in my hand, peeing by the side of the truck. Leaving DNA evidence on the tarmac.

I was still glad Jimmy was dead, but it would have been better if he’d simply gone away, disappeared. And I was dreading the vigil. I didn’t see how I could face Tommy. It was not impossible, of course, that Tommy was “glad” too. Or, rather, relieved. But I doubted it. I didn’t think Tommy was that kind of person.

I was thinking of the bed in the Palmer House. All those pillows, and the chocolates on the pillows when we came in that night. The awkwardness. The false starts. The goodwill. The final uncomplications of bodily desire.

The vigil was held in Tommy’s apartment. The funeral would be in the morning at a church. I didn’t want to go to either, but as Jimmy’s mother-in-law, I had no choice.

I had crossed a line, of course. Another Rubicon. There was no end of Rubicons. No going back. Not that there’s ever any going back. But what was the nature of this line? I’d committed a mortal sin. I’d known it was wrong to shoot Jimmy. It was an act of free will, I knew it was wrong, but I’d gone ahead and pulled the trigger.

Actually, there was a way to go back. I knew the drill: contrition, confession, satisfaction. But I was in no mood to turn around.

I left my car at the hotel, the Knickerbocker Hotel, where Paul and I had stayed a couple of times, about half a mile from Tommy’s apartment. I walked—I needed the exercise—down Prospect, a tree-lined street on a bluff overlooking the lake, but the view of the lake was blocked by apartments, and large houses (mansions, actually), including the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music.

I rang the bell, was buzzed in, and took the elevator to the eighth floor. The top floor.

There wasn’t much drinking at the vigil. Not like the Polish wakes that I remembered where people banged down potato schnapps and vodka. The apartment was full. Some people were sitting in a corner with a priest saying the rosary. Out loud. In Italian. Fingers active. I didn’t join them. I was surprised to see the coffin, on a stand or dais in front of the windows, which looked out over the lake. I was glad it was closed.

People commiserated, asked about Stella. How much did they know? I wondered. I was going to have to talk to someone. Not at the wake, but later, sometime. Maybe a shrink. Would a shrink have patient confidentiality? But shrinks didn’t do talk therapy anymore. Just pills. Maybe I could take a pill.

I could see a car ferry going out. An ore boat coming in. Ships passing in the night. Pictures of Jimmy on a table in front of the coffin. Stella too. Jimmy and Stella together.

Most of the people were older. The vigil had an old-fashioned feel. An old aunt sat by the coffin. She was crying seriously. In black. She was from another world. Unembarrassed. She hugged me, wouldn’t let go, spoke to me in Italian. “My daughter, now my grandson. He used to .
.
. come by my house .
.
.” She spoke with such a strong accent that I could hardly understand the words. But I could understand the grief—unembarrassed, unrestrained.

Everyone asked about Stella. I said she’d been in an accident. I hadn’t prepared my lie very carefully and didn’t know what Tommy had told them. I said that she’d gotten banged up in the parking lot at TruckStopUSA. A friend had brought her to Galesburg. It wasn’t a very good lie, but it was the best I could do.

Some of Jimmy’s high school friends were there, and some of the men from the market.
Nil nisi bonum.
No one was speaking ill of the dead. There was some talk, among the friends, of going down to the truck stop to find out exactly what the hell had happened and take care of it themselves. But mostly people circulated happy memories, turning Jimmy’s life into a string of anecdotes. The consensus seemed to be that Jimmy had been a little wild, a good kid, but wild. Even Tommy, who should have known better. Tommy, who didn’t want Jimmy to live in his house. Dubious pranks were turned into humorous escapades: Jimmy drag racing down Broadway (the market) with one of the trucks; Jimmy’s first car, a 1975 Mustang; his string of accidents with both cars and trucks; the drum set he bought from Goodwill and set up on the sidewalk one night in front of the warehouse; stealing the night watchman’s little house, taking it up in the elevator to the second floor; shooting rats in the alley with a .22; hiding in the banana cellar under the sidewalk and pretending to be trapped; stowing away on the car ferry and getting tossed off the boat in Ludington. Tommy had to wire him money to get home. Then instead of buying a return ticket on the car ferry, he hitchhiked up through the Upper Peninsula and then down to Milwaukee. Wearing his blue leather jacket and wrap-around sun glasses in church on Good Friday, and the priest refusing to serve him the wafer at communion. The time he forgot to close the door on a car of corn and somebody called Tommy, and by the time he got down to the freight yard a hundred crates of corn had gone missing.