The Second Silence
The Second Silence
Eileen Goudge
Three silences there are: the first of speech,
The second of desire, the third of thought…
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Contents
Burns Lake, New York, 1969
PROLOGUE
M
ARY JEFFERS GAPED IN ALARM
at the man charging through the front door. She scarcely recognized him as her husband. For one thing, it was early afternoon and Charlie didn’t get off work until five. And though he’d been driving their old Ford pickup, which hissed going up hills and got nine, maybe ten miles to the gallon—that was on a good day—his shorn black hair glistened with sweat and his face was stamped with color, like he’d run the whole way. As he jerked to a halt before her, she saw that the tips of his ears were red, too, a sure sign of something bad. It was exactly how Charlie had looked when she told him she was pregnant, what felt like a hundred years ago.
Gooseflesh skittered up her arms like tiny biting insects. Seated in the rocking chair by the woodstove, the baby asleep in her arms, she hardly dared to breathe. She hadn’t the slightest idea what might have brought Charlie racing home in the middle of the day, looking like four kinds of bad news, but in a peculiar way she’d been half expecting it. That was how it was when you were poor: Every day brought some new piece of the sky crumbling down.
She clapped a hand to her heart to still its anxious thumping, asking in a soft, tremulous voice, ‘Charlie, my God, what is it?’
He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. The expression on his gaunt, troubled face was the one he wore when peering under the hood of their Ford at the balky fuel pump held together with spit and a prayer—as if wondering how much more she could take. Except for his lanky frame and the ink black hair pushed up in damp spikes, he might have been an old man instead of a boy of just seventeen. His shoulders were slouched in a permanent question mark, and a blackened groove stood out in his worn leather belt where it had all too recently been hitched in another notch. After a moment he straightened and took a step in her direction, adding a snowy boot print to the uneven trail leading away from the door.
‘Corinne’s dead.’ He spoke slowly, as if for the benefit of a foreigner who had trouble understanding English. She saw that his hands, chafed with cold and hanging loosely from the frayed sleeves of his hunting jacket, were trembling.
His words melted on impact like the snowflakes landing with a soft, sizzling sound against the window. Dropping her gaze, Mary noticed that there was a button missing from his jacket and that the plaid shirt underneath was badly creased. She wondered idly if flannel was the sort of thing you ironed. Not that it mattered; she hadn’t ironed anything since they got married last October, the day after her seventeenth birthday, when she was already so big that standing for any length of time caused her ankles to swell. Then the baby came, and there was hardly a minute to—
It hit her then, knocking the wind out of her. She struggled to draw a breath, her chest hitching like an engine that wouldn’t start. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No … not Corinne. There must be some mistake.’
But Charlie was shaking his head. ‘Mary, I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.’
Her mouth moved of its own volition, shaping itself about the unspeakable. ‘How?’ she breathed in a cracked whisper.
‘They found her in a motel just off 1-88, up near Schenectady. Her wrists were—’ He paused to clear his throat. ‘They’re calling it a suicide.’
Mary’s arms jerked up reflexively as if to ward off a blow. The bottle propped against her chest, its milky nipple grazing the baby’s sweet little rosebud of a mouth, rolled away, landing with a muffled thunk on the braided rug at Mary’s feet. Noelle twitched in her sleep, her pale pink eyelids like the insides of seashells fluttering partway open.
Don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up,
Mary pleaded silently. The cold her three-month-old had come down with earlier this week had left Noelle cranky. She’d been crying on and off most of the day.
If she starts up again, I’ll lose it this time. I really will.
Mary remained frozen, the news of her best friend’s death encircling her like barbed wire that would prick her if she moved even a hair. Oddly the image stuck in her mind wasn’t that of Corinne floating in a bloody bathtub, but one from last Christmas. She and Corinne had been shooing the horses away from a trough while Charlie hacked at the frozen surface with a shovel, the three of them laughing idiotically at the uselessness of it; the stupid beasts kept circling back in an attempt to nudge him out of the way. She herself had been big as a house, due to give birth in just a few weeks, and Corinne, though tall, had seemed almost petite in comparison. Her thick, straight hair shone like polished oak against the turned-up collar of her navy peacoat. Her cheeks were red with cold, her lips parted in laughter.
As if she hadn’t a care in the world.
Mary’s heart caught as if on something sharp. She began to tremble violently. Instinctively she reached for Charlie. ‘Quick, give me your hand.’ Feeling the grip of his long fingers with their knuckles like knotted rope, she felt her trembling ease. ‘Oh, Charlie. Say it’s not true. Say you might have heard wrong.’
‘The newsroom picked it up off the band not more than an hour ago.’ His gaze cut away, as if he couldn’t bear seeing what this was doing to her. ‘Ed Newcombe double-checked with the sheriff’s office.’
‘Oh, God … poor Corinne.’ The words emerged as a sob.
‘I wanted to tell you in person. I didn’t want you to hear it over the phone.’ With his free hand Charlie reached out to stroke her hair. She could feel the heat of his palm against her scalp.
She nodded slowly in appreciation, Charlie’s hand and the warm weight of the baby seeming to anchor her in some way. When she spoke, her tongue felt thick and clumsy in her mouth, like after a trip to the dentist. ‘Does—does her family know?’
‘Someone must have told them by now.’
Mary rubbed a thumb over the back of his hand, feeling the rough spot where he’d scraped his knuckles on the corral gate trying to force it open in the foot of snow that had fallen the night before last. His angular features and pale skin on which every emotion stood out like a slap made her think of the faces staring with haunted eyes from Mathew Brady daguerreotypes, Civil War soldiers who’d been boys when they marched into battle and had come home men. She wanted to reassure him in some way. But how? What could she say? That it would be okay? Right now it didn’t seem as if anything would ever be okay.
I wasn’t there for her.
The thought pricked hard enough to make her flinch. Mary was ashamed to realize how far apart they’d drifted these past few months. It wasn’t Corinne’s fault.
She
was the one who’d changed. Her days were no longer filled with school and glee club practice and endless hours of gossiping over the phone. She couldn’t recall when she’d last concerned herself with split ends or a C- on a trig test … or even the Vietnam protest rallies in which she and Corinne had begun marching last spring. When her friend phoned last week—or was it the week before?—Mary had been far too preoccupied even to chat. She’d promised to call back when the baby was down for her nap. But had she? Mary honestly couldn’t recall.
Oh, but you do,
a cruel voice injected.
You remember perfectly well. She sounded like she’d been crying. And secretly weren’t you just a tiny bit annoyed? Thinking that whatever the reason—another fight with that creepy boyfriend of hers, no doubt—it was a molehill compared to the mountain
you
had to climb each and every day. So you didn’t call back. You
meant
to … but somehow you just never got around to it.
And now it was too late.
‘I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe Corinne would …’ The words melted from her lips like the snowy tracks darkening to a muddy trail on the rug. The truth was more painful in some ways than the simple fact of her friend’s death: Mary couldn’t even guess what might have driven Corinne to such a desperate act. Lately she’d been far too consumed with the mess she’d made of her own life.
Each morning she woke before dawn to her baby’s hungry cries. In the beginning she’d tried breast-feeding, but Noelle fussed endlessly. Nervous milk the doctor called it, which meant she didn’t produce enough: her first failure as a mother. So now there were bottles to be warmed as well as endless diapers to be changed and washed and hung out to dry. Even when Noelle was down for her nap, there was the woodstove to be fed and stoked, meals to be cobbled together out of whatever was in the fridge. And oh, yes, let’s not forget the spoiled little rich girls who boarded the horses she and Charlie fed and watered in exchange for rent. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in breeches and two-hundred-dollar riding boots who showed up regularly at the back door, needing everything from a Band-Aid to a glass of cold water to the use of the phone. By nightfall Mary felt as drained as the bottles Noelle greedily sucked dry.
But now that Mama and Daddy had turned their back on her for good, Charlie and the baby were all she had. When her husband sank onto his haunches before her, Mary felt something flare in her chest like a spark from one of the frayed electrical cords strung like Christmas lights along the walls and baseboards of their converted bunkhouse.
Charlie was tall in the loose-jointed way of a long-distance runner so that hunkered down, he was eye level with her. Gazing into his long, angular face, she saw his Iroquois ancestors in its beveled planes and the high slashes of his cheekbones. In their sophomore year at Lafayette, when they first started going together, Charlie’s hair, black as a crow’s wing, had flirted with the collars of his shirts; now it was cut short as a marine’s, orders of his boss, Mr Newcombe. Charlie hated it, she knew, hated it because he’d had no choice. But secretly she approved. It set him apart from the boys with hair down past their shoulders who boasted of burning their draft cards … while at home their mothers made their beds and packed their school lunches.
His eyes were his best feature, though. Wide set and tipped down at the corners, they were an unusual ocher-green that made her think of sliding into the cool water of a shady creek hollow. Mary leaned into him, bringing her cheek to rest against his shoulder and curving her body to form a hollow in which Noelle could sleep on undisturbed.
We’re like the two-by-fours propped against the barn,
she thought.
We kept each other from falling down.
‘What do we do now?’ she whispered like a child lost in the dark.
Ordinarily she’d have phoned someone. But who? Since she’d dropped out of school, Mary hadn’t seen much of her friends. Beth Tilson’s parents had discouraged Beth from visiting—probably because they feared that whatever Mary had might be catching. Jo Ferguson was working after school and on weekends at the SuperSave to earn enough for college and never seemed to have any spare time. Even Lacey Buxton, the last person to desert a friend in need, had suffered her own fall from grace in the form of a visiting family friend with whom she’d been caught naked in the Methodist church choir loft—a man old enough to be her father—and been to sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Buffalo, presumably to set her on the straight and narrow.
‘There’ll be a funeral, I’m sure.’ A deep line like a buried stitch had drawn Charlie’s dark brows together over the bony ridge of his nose.
A picture formed in her mind of Corinne’s mother and father and three brothers gathered in sorrow about the freshly dug grave. Then the picture morphed, and suddenly it was
her
grave with Mama and Daddy standing over it. Daddy, stoop-shouldered with sickness and defeat, his scalp gleaming white as bone through the thinning hair on top. And Mama, stolid and ageless as the house on Larkspur Lane, the house from which Mary had been forever banished.
The tears came then, rolling hotly down her cheeks as she gazed at the drowsing infant in her arms. Noelle’s thatch of black hair that swooped up in a fat comma was the only thing she’d gotten from Charlie. Her gray-blue eyes and upper lip that dipped in a cupid’s bow, the narrow nose from some blue-blooded ancestor: Mary might have been looking at a snapshot of herself at three months. She felt a rush of love that was immediately swamped by an even greater wave of despair.