Three Short Novels (28 page)

“Ilona!”

Ilona. Her name came over the din like a stone skipped over a calm lake, and in that voice was an intensity of need for her presence on earth. Against the waters sweeping her back she found her footing and made her way toward the little figure running along the sand.

Conference of Victims

W. H. A
UDEN
,
Canzone

1

T
he day was election day but Hal O. Costigan, candidate for Congress, was nowhere around to have his picture taken as the winner or the loser. By his own choice he was nowhere around to care. The day was warm and windless, the large flags at the polling places rustling a little toward evening. Inside garages swept clean and living rooms tidied up, women with an official look appropriate to the day sat at card tables and checked off the names of the voters. Everything was as it should be, except one: a dead man's name was on the ballot.

Naomi Costigan did not vote. Her brother was dead and she had no use for all the other men whose names were on the ballot. Whatever they had promised to do meant nothing to her. She went to work at the county recorder's office and was deaf to the prophetic voices in the portable radios that some men carried with them to the counter and along the courthouse corridors. The only thing she heard that day was what she expected to hear that night, her mother's grief over the loss of the son.

They sat at the kitchen table facing each other, the bereft mother and her forty-year-old daughter, dipping their spoons into their
bowls of soup. The mother wore her son Hal's high school cardigan sweater, its emerald green dulled by the years but the emblem still secure above a pocket. Maybe old women should never comb their hair, Naomi thought. They look worse when their hair is parted and smoothed down, like children keeping themselves neat so life will love them.

“Cort,” said her mother, “I told Cort, ‘You're his brother. It's your duty to find out who killed him. That's why a mother has more than one son, so they'll protect each other. If one is murdered, the brother never rests until he finds out who did it.' But Cort's a coward. He's got a birthmark on his back looks like a little eel.”

“It always looked like nothing to me,” said Naomi.

“An eel. He was always slippery.”

Naomi did not defend her younger brother. Their mother loved him and that was his defense.

“Isobel,” said her mother, “I said to her, ‘Isobel, you're his wife. You go to the mayor, you tell him they killed Hal. The man he was running against got the police to do it.' The mayor would have listened to her, but she ran away. First she sent the boy off on a plane, alone, and then she runs away herself.”

Elbows on the table, the mother crumpled the pink paper napkin under her cheekbone, into the sagging flesh, and Naomi thought, betrayingly, that she had never seen a face so intricately wrinkled, like a puzzle God presented to the daughter's gaze for her to figure out, like a warning to the daughter to act, to run, before it was too late. But how could you escape if love and conscience were your jailers?

“Can you imagine her sending him off like that? A little boy? On the plane alone. Suppose her aunt, who was going to meet him, didn't get there, something happened, and there he'd be, alone. Any degenerate could of got hold of him. They walk around everywhere, and whores, the lowest of the low.”

“I walk around, too,” said Naomi, and saw that her mother
couldn't tell whether the daughter was lowering herself to belong among the lowest or elevating herself to belong among the virtuous ones who were also present in the world.

“Why didn't they ask that girl if
she
murdered him? They hired a little whore to do it. They hired a little whore to say he slept with her.”

“Mama, cut it out.”

“They didn't find any note because the girl did it. No note.”

“No note!” Naomi gripped the table edge. “Mama! He didn't need to leave a note. He said it loud, Mama, like they told him to speak up in debating class. He told us everything just by what he did to himself.”

“What's everything?”

“Mama, I don't know what it is. How can
I
know?” How could his dimwit, homely, job-bound sister, Naomi, know what
everything
was? If she lived to be a hundred, she'd never know.

Naomi shook out a cigarette from the package by her plate. “Who's President?” she asked brightly. “Eisenhower, I bet.”

“Hal would of won,” her mother said.

“Oh, he had it in the palm of his hand.” Was it something called privilege her brother had, right from the day of his birth, and thrown away? Maybe she, too, Naomi, had been granted a privilege of sorts. Maybe you had to think so in order to live, and what was hers? A long time ago she had got herself a job, in the time of the jobless when sad-eyed men came to the back door to ask if they could earn a bite to eat. She had begun to support her mother and her brothers, and was that her privilege? That must have been it, and, though times had changed, forever after she had clung to it, that astounding privilege, as if it were her very life.

The unlit cigarette on her lip, she leaned to the radio on the counter, twirling the dial from music to audience laughter. A comedian's voice, falsely modest, falsely hesitant, insinuated its way into the expectant
laughter and capped the joke. Louder laughter and the crackle of applause tumbled out into the kitchen.

“It's your friend,” Naomi said. “The Great Goofball. He should've run for President. I would've voted for him.”

The announcer's voice cut into the laughter and applause, switching the listeners, Naomi and her mother among them, to cities where counting was in progress, the microphone moving westward from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, the nearest large city to their own small city in the interior of the state. Excited voices rattled off the names of the candidates and the number of votes for each, so far, but the name of Hal Costigan was never spoken, as if the name had never appeared on a ballot or the man had never appeared on earth.

2

O
n the front page of the evening newspaper her father brought home, there was a photo of her under the headline
COSTIGAN KILLS SELF OVER SCHOOLGIRL
. That morning when she had left the sheriff's office, her father had tried to put his jacket around her, but, alarmed by this closing-in from behind her of a garment that wasn't hers, she had thrust it away, and the camera caught her with her elbow lifted in a way that twisted her body and exaggerated her breasts in the cotton dress.
Dolores Lenci, 17-year-old paramour,
the caption said. She had never seen that word before.

They had come to the house in the morning, after a farmer's children, going down their dirt road to the highway to catch the school bus, had come upon his car parked among the willows. They knew, the sheriff's deputies, that she had been the last person with him that night. They knew because a deputy, cruising the outskirts of the city and surprising lovers in cars parked off country roads, had surprised them, had contemptuously asked her her name and her age, and contemptuously not asked the name of the man with her because he was recognizable in the flashlight as the young, respectable attorney, father, husband, and candidate for U.S. Congress. In the sheriff's
office they had questioned her about what he had said that night, whether he had told her anything about the campaign, about money, about enemies, whether he had threatened to kill himself, whether her father had threatened to kill him, whether she had threatened, and though they asked their questions as if they knew what they were after, she felt that they were asking for no answer, only enjoying themselves, titillating themselves with the presence of the girl whose lips could barely move.

Dolores's mother came in after the cafe was closed and sat down on the bed, but the girl pushed away the hand that was dear to her and covered her face again with the blanket. Whenever her mother came to her, that evening and again in the morning, her mother was the stranger, her hand was not
his
hand and could not go to the parts of her body where his had gone; but in the hours she was alone,
he
was the stranger. Her body bore the impress of the stranger. At times his strangeness, intensified by his act of suicide—who was he?—bore down upon her and, with hands, with mouth, with whispers, set all the places astir again, each place desiring, until all was clamor. By his dying he had made the demand upon her to
know
him.

At noon, the next day, alone in the house, she sat at the kitchen table and read the two days of newspapers and gazed at the photographs of him, Hal Costigan, and his wife and his son and even his sister, who stared at the camera from among the record books and filing cabinets in the county recorder's office. She gazed at herself on the front page and saw nothing in that girl to warrant the man's risking anything for, and the thought that he might already have known what he would do if they were caught and had risked his life for her—that thought was a burden. She fed herself tasteless toast and wept, not for him and not for herself, but in fear of all the things she knew nothing about, until the newspaper pictures between her elbows grew damp and dark and the type showed through from the page underneath.

“What did he do it for?” She asked it of her father as he was taking off his shoes in the kitchen.

“What you got to learn,” he said, pulling at a dusty boot, “is that everybody is a little bit crazy.”

He glanced at her sideways, a secret glance of satisfaction that said the most respected, the most popular, the ones on their way up, as Costigan, were no better than the dolts, than himself, a maintenance man in an oil refinery, and, in this glance that was without any sympathy for the dead man, he revealed a stoniness of heart she had not glimpsed before. It was not that way all the time, his heart. Only now, and was it his own little bit of craziness? She opened a can of beer for him and set it on the table with a glass, and when he glanced up, his fatherly love for her had returned to his eyes.

After a week she went back to school. She told herself not to keep her eyes down, but they went down anyway, there were so many eyes looking at her. She had always met the eyes of the men who came into her mother's cafe because it was her way of telling them that she was somebody else beside the girl they were appraising. She was somebody who could appraise them, but always in this exchange was the excitement, concealed or unconcealable, of joining in the discovery of herself. Now she was unable to return anyone's gaze because the discovery of herself was public knowledge. A man had died and told them all about her. She wore a buttoned sweater that was too large and a bulky pleated skirt, but under these garments was the girl who had lain with the man.

When she came into the cafeteria, the voices went silent, the clatter dimmed down. When she went along the halls from class to class, clusters of boys would fall silent and watch her walk by, the more nervous among them laughing. The girls in the lavatories stopped their chattering or their languid conversations, and she did not look at herself in the mirror or stay long enough to comb her hair. The teachers were as respectful of her as though she had lain sick for a month, but
they were self-conscious before their students, and all lectures and all formulae pointed to on the blackboard seemed as trivial to the teachers as they were to the students. In the home economics class where, a month ago, the teacher had singled her out as an example of a “neat-minded” girl, she sat in her commendable style and embarrassed the teacher by confronting her with her teacher's superficiality, for within the nice clothes was the body that was not, and within the candidate's suit from the best men's store in the city, behind the smile, the wit, the eloquence, the respectability, everything that had charmed the teacher, was the man who had lain with the girl.

The newspaper photos of the funeral troubled her, in the days after. The women in black, a color incriminating of her, had known him better than she had known him, and they mourned the man they knew, while she went around the house in her pastel cotton dresses or in her sky-blue bathrobe. The figures in black accused her of ignorance of him and of destroying him, and she could not turn the blame on him because his suicide seemed to be an act of expiation. The girl with her long brown hair, which she had let grow long because it was exciting to men to see it hanging down her back, the girl alive and aware of her tantalizing self,
she
was to blame. She accepted the blame because the mystery of her lifted her above the sordid and, after a time, above the blame, and, without blame, she called up the times on the blanket in the back of the station wagon parked among the yellow willows by the creek. She became the girl desired beyond any risk, and the memory of herself and the man overcame her as she sat in study hall, her head bowed over a book, as she walked home, as she lay in her bed at night. All the details of love, the entwining of bodies, everything was recalled, and the time she had drawn herself upon him and loosened her hair into a dark silken enclosure for their faces and in that enclosure drawn upon his mouth until, with a sudden knotting of his body, he had thrust her under him. Again the willow branches scratched the windows, stirred by the night wind
that moved like a creek above the creek; again the yellow-smoke trees surrounded them as she lay in the blanket he had wrapped her in to cover her nakedness, which he had explored and still explored; and again she lifted her head from his chest because his heart was beating under her ear—an overwhelmingly secret sound, the heartbeat of a stranger.