The Story of Beautiful Girl (2 page)

She slid the cookie dough into the oven. Then she inched open the door and peered out.

The woman was facing into the flames. The man was rising from his chair and peeling off the wet signs. The widow expected him to drop each to the floor. Instead he folded them like large sheets and set them before the fireplace. Uncovered, he was revealed to be wearing only an undershirt and loose shorts. Either he’d recently lost weight or the clothes were not his.

What are they running from? Should I ask? Or should I just give comfort?

She stepped back inside the kitchen.

The refrigerator was well supplied. She had milked the cows this morning and baked bread. She’d picked apples from her trees only last week and made apple butter. All this she put on a plain serving tray. She did not need to be fancy. She’d never built up finery after her husband died, though a few of her students had
given her gifts to that end: a four-piece tea set, a silver tray. She needn’t put any of that out now. But as the kettle sounded and the bell on the timer dinged, she changed her mind.

Silver tray full of cookies, bread, fruit, and cheese, she pushed open the kitchen door.

In the living room, the man was seated and the woman was shucking off the woolen blankets into a heap beside the chair. The widow was momentarily annoyed—she’d thought the man would handle the woman’s wet garments properly. Then the woman, with one blanket still on, ceased moving and began making soft sounds. This time, though, the sounds were not grunts; the tone was lighter and higher than before.

The widow set the tray on the dining room table and stepped into the living room. She rounded the chairs and approached the wet cloths, wondering where she could dry them. The sounds continued. The widow turned, her back to the fire, and looked at the strangers.

Tucked deep into the folds of the woman’s last blanket was a tiny baby.

The woman—the new mother, the widow suddenly understood—held the child, her arms shrouded by the blanket. The man was leaning toward the child. In his hands was a piece of damp cloth—the muslin cloth that had covered the hole on the armrest. He was using it to wipe the blood from the infant’s face. The baby was making the whimpering sounds that the widow had mistaken for the woman.

The man’s touch was gentle. He had removed a pitcher of water from the dining room table, and now he dipped the muslin inside, wetting it again. Then he pushed back the blanket and cleaned the kicking body. It was a girl, the widow saw. She saw too that the baby’s skin was white. The man was moving with the caution of a father, but he was not this child’s father. Somehow
he and this woman had come together, and maybe he had even delivered the baby. Yet he had done it out of a different sense of duty from the one stirred by the sharing of genes.

“Oh, my goodness,” the widow said.

The young mother looked up. “No!” she cried. “No, no, no, no!”

The man turned his face toward the mother, then followed her gaze to the widow. He stared at her hard, though his eyes wore no fear. They wore only a new form of plea.

“It’s okay,” the widow said, knowing it wasn’t okay at all, whatever
it
was. There was a baby. A couple on the run. And they were
different
. They were
not right
.

She should call the police. She should run out of here and drive herself to safety. But her mind was accelerating even past those thoughts, so far past them that it hit a curve and turned back toward itself and then hurtled backward in time.

She scooped up the wet blankets and burst out the front door onto the porch.

As she stood staring out into the rain, holding the drenched blankets, she thought of him, her only child, the son who’d never grown as big as a name. She saw the doctor striding into her hospital room, her husband, Earl, in the chair beside her. Earl had drawn himself up as the doctor took a deep breath. “God knows what’s best with children like these,” the doctor said. “He takes the ones who are defective.” She had said, “What do you mean, defective?” The doctor had replied, “It’s gone now. You can forget this ever happened.” Her husband’s face became pleats, and he twirled down into the chair. When the moon rose that night, they got in the car in their new silence. He insisted they give the gravestone no name.

But this baby, inside her house, was alive.

She threw the blankets over the railing to dry and went back in.

The living room was empty. So was the kitchen. She called
out, “Where are you?” They had to be inside; she hadn’t heard the back door open. She went into the basement and checked around the washer, the root cellar, the sump pump. Back on the first floor, she opened the closet under the stairs. Then she mounted the stairs to the second floor.

The bathroom door remained open, as she’d left it, the towels untouched. She turned the knob for the bedroom door. The spread lay tidy on the bed. The two closets—hers on the left, Earl’s on the right—were not occupied, and the rifle had not been moved. The other bedroom, her study, where she kept her books and writing desk and Christmas ornaments, looked the same.

No, it didn’t.

She turned on the lamp. Her desk blotter—the map of America that had once hung in her classroom—was askew.

She looked to the ceiling. They must have found the panel above her desk that led to the attic, where she stored thirty years of student papers and long-forgotten mending. The man and woman must have found the tucked-away space where she rarely ventured, climbed in, and closed the panel.

These were people accustomed to hiding.

She stepped on her chair to her desk. For years now, she’d felt the strain of arthritis. She still managed her farm chores, though even with few animals left, and even with letting all but a small garden go to seed, they took longer than ever. Yet this was not a time to concern herself with aches; she tugged the rope for the folding ladder, opening it until its legs touched the floor beside the desk. She set her hand on the rungs and climbed up.

It took time to adjust her eyes to the pale light in the tiny attic. Then she saw them on their knees, leaning over the basket of mending, and in the basket she could hear the baby.

She watched them cast their caring looks into the basket, the woman leaning with obvious exhaustion against the man, her
arm around his waist, his around her shoulder. As they showered their love upon the child, the widow was struck by how these two people—one Negro, one white—clearly shared hopes and feelings for this child, and for each other. Their color did not seem of the slightest consequence to them, nor did the woman’s childlike manner or the man’s deafness; and so, although she had never seen a couple such as this, she decided it was of no consequence to her, either. She simply stood in the shadows, admiring their unbridled caring.

Then, grasping what she needed to do, she stepped back down the ladder.

In her bedroom, she opened her husband’s closet. She had long thought she should give her husband’s clothes away. But she’d grown used to the way a turn of a knob and the sight of a shirt could fill her inside, as his memory, untainted by the pain of vanished parenthood, ushered her back to the early days of their marriage, when he hadn’t stifled his tenderness, nor she her affection. Now she pulled out a shirt and laid it on the bed. At its hem she placed trousers. She unhooked a jacket, too. She remembered him wearing it when he first drove her to this farm, she newly arrived from Altoona for a job at the schoolhouse. He had looked so smart in that jacket.

She opened her own closet. The woman too needed clothes; her misshapen attire was threadbare and as worn as an overread book. The widow set out a white dress, left over from the days of church. She found white slippers, a shawl, and underthings. Remembering the aftermath of birth, she unearthed a long-forgotten pad in the bathroom.

Then she heard them emerge from the attic, shutting the ladder. She stepped into the hall—and they were finally fully visible. The man was maybe twenty years older than the young mother, who was a natural beauty. Her hair was ropy and unkempt, but
her bones were delicate, not bone-bare, as the widow had first thought; the woman’s features were almost elegant.

The widow urged them into the bedroom.

“Yours,” she said, and by the woman’s astonished look, the widow knew her word had been understood. The woman gestured to the man. The two moved forward, and with no indication they had any right to be alone, they stripped the clothes right off their backs.

The widow went downstairs. She stoked the fire and set the dining room table. They would sit, proper guests in proper clothes, and eat a decent meal, whoever they might be.

Later, so many miles from here, she would wonder how she could not have known. Yet maybe no one could have known. Her farmhouse was two hours away—two counties over. How could she blame herself for what she had never seen?

She heard them leave the bedroom, and by the time she’d reached the foot of the stairs, the man and young mother were descending the steps toward her. Newly dressed, hands clasped together, they were both breathtaking. The jacket brought out the man’s handsomeness. He looked fit as a farmer on Sundays, turned out and proud. He had helped himself to one of her husband’s hats, too, the brown woolen cap she’d loved so much. It looked so good on him. The dress and shawl brought out the mother’s loveliness. Both their faces were radiant.

The widow touched her chest as they came toward her. “Don’t you look like a dream.”

Thwunk, thwunk.

The young mother froze, one step from the bottom of the stairs, and held back the man.

The widow whirled around.
Thwunk.
It was a pounding on her front door.

She gasped. Even above the rain, the sound overtook the room. She looked back to the couple. Their faces wore terror.

“No, no, no, no!” the woman said.

The man said nothing. He must have felt the force through the floor.

All this happened in an instant, so quickly that the widow had only enough time to turn back before headlights came on and shone through the front window.

“Police,” said a voice on the porch, sounding more weary than menacing.

The widow glanced back at the couple again. They looked as if they wanted to run but hadn’t the slightest idea where to go. She whipped back toward the front door.

“What do you want?” asked the widow, making her voice louder than the rain.

“If you’ll just open the door.”

“I would appreciate knowing why you’re here.” She extended her arm behind her, gesturing for them to stay where they were.

“Martha Zimmer?”

“That is correct.”

“Are you all right, Mrs. Zimmer?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Please just open the door.”

“I would like an explanation.”

“Don’t make this difficult. We’ve been out here for hours, and we just want to finish our job and get home.”

“I believe the Constitution would support me in saying that I have a right to know why you’re shining a light through my door.”

“There are two people missing, Mrs. Zimmer, and we’re concerned for their safety.”

“
Their
safety?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you were concerned for
my
safety.”

“Look, we don’t want to break down this door. If you’ll just open up—”

“And from where are those at risk to themselves
and
to me missing?”

“A school.”

“I taught at every school in Well’s Bottom except the high school. Since when does the high school send out police rather than truant officers—and at this hour of the night?”

There was a pause. She could hear shuffling. Through the window beside the staircase, she saw silhouettes rounding the porch toward the back door.

“I’ve asked a question,” she said. “What school?”

“The State School, Mrs. Zimmer.”

The words hit like a hard wind. She knew. She’d known all along. She could see it now, the name printed in block letters on the wool blankets draped on her porch railing, illuminated by the headlights: the Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded.

She whirled around. The couple no longer stood on the steps. But before she could search, the front door flew open, and she heard the back door do the same. And into the house came policemen—two she’d seen in Well’s Bottom, four she’d never set eyes on—and also a tall beanpole of a man she’d never seen before, who wore white like a hospital orderly. He must have been an attendant from the State School, the place behind the high walls, the place for the defectives, the place her husband would never drive by after their baby—after their
defective
son—had been born and died.

And the flurry was all around her. They were swarming her house, no question about privacy, no response as she circled the floor behind them, saying, “Please, be civilized!” They were going through the closet under the stairs, the living room, dining room. When they poured into the basement, she returned to the door
and looked outside. With the headlights beaming, she could see halfway down her sloped field, though she made out no runaways. Just three police cars and a sedan from which a man was emerging. He wore a trim mustache and expensive raincoat, his gray hair parted in the middle. He opened his umbrella and came up the drive.