Authors: Callie Wright
Now here they all were: Olivia Riley and a spouseless Stu Everett and fifteen other people whose names were only slightly tweaked if at all. Bob’s neighbors, acquaintances, people who lived right here in town. Marlene Poynter, who ran the Community Chest raffle with Joanie every Thanksgiving, had been cast as a gossip, a floozy, and a drunk. Bob’s own name never graced the pages, thank God, and although he was weak with gratitude that publicly, at least, he had dodged the bullet, privately he knew Joanie was nowhere near finished with him.
A white-hot knot of anger formed in his stomach and spread through his chest to his hands: it wasn’t right—Isabel Moore had no right. A book like this could ruin people’s lives, their marriages. Botched abortions, rapes, scandalous affairs—if the author had begun her story with grains of truth, she’d ended up with such a gross misrepresentation of life in Cooperstown that Bob couldn’t see Cooperstown in it.
When he finally went up to bed at a quarter after three he was only mildly surprised to discover Joanie awake and ready to chat, and Bob quickly found himself on the losing side of a moral debate.
“It’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing,” said Joanie. Her position seemed to be that if the storied affairs were true to life, then the heels had gotten their just deserts.
“Maybe,” Bob hedged, “but what gives the author the right to splash people’s private affairs all over town?”
“It’s a cautionary tale,” said Joanie pointedly. “If this is happening in some houses, you can bet it’s happening all over.”
“It’s not happening anywhere,” said Bob desperately.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Joanie. Then, “You should hear the gossip.”
Gossip
hardly began to describe the furor that erupted over
The Sex Cure
as Anne began her eighth-grade school year, and Bob and Joanie were completely at odds as to how to handle the matter when it came to their daughter. Bob forbade Anne to read the book, but Joanie left her copy unattended throughout the house. He assured his daughter that the author would soon be brought up on charges, while Joanie took to scrapbooking—clipping and saving every
Sex Cure
–related article that the local press put out. No matter how irritated Bob grew with Joanie’s campaign to promote the book, there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop her. If he denounced Isabel Moore for writing it, Joanie accused him of defending the characters’ behavior; if he denounced the characters’ behavior, Bob was effectively condemning himself. In Joanie’s hands, the novel had become an instrument of torture that left Bob never wanting to have another affair in his life.
It wasn’t until the last week in September that Bob finally heard from Stan Cavett. They hadn’t spoken since the lawn party—Bob had thought of calling Stan, but the talk on Main Street had been so damning he’d decided to keep to himself. Bob told his secretary to put the call through, then closed his office door.
“Stan,” said Bob.
Stan sighed irritably. “Did you hear Preston’s taking a sabbatical from the hospital? Not entirely his idea, of course, but with everything going on it can’t be helped. He and Elva and the kids are already making plans to spend the year with her family in Baltimore.”
“That’s terrible,” said Bob.
“Meanwhile, I’m paying our housekeeper a king’s ransom to stay on seven days a week and overnight. She does the shopping, takes the kids to and from school—Betsy won’t leave the house.”
Bob wondered if Stan expected him to ask after Betsy. The last time they’d been together was at a country-club dance in late August, when Bob abandoned Joanie during the twist to lead Betsy to the seventeenth hole on the golf course overlooking Blackbird Bay. Now Bob couldn’t believe he’d gotten caught up with all that. Never in his life would Bob share Joanie with another man, although he wondered if in some way his hypocrisy made him an even worse husband than Stan.
“It’ll blow over,” said Bob.
“I guess,” said Stan. “No one in New York seems to know about it yet. Maybe Betsy and the kids can go there for a while. You can’t imagine it,” said Stan, “opening a book and seeing your own name written there. You know the author is John Moffat’s mother-in-law? What was he thinking?”
“I’m sure he didn’t know,” said Bob, who had never exchanged a word with the man, owner of Cooperstown Stables, the thoroughbred-horse farm on Beaver Meadow Road. Bob didn’t jump horses or play bridge at the country club or keep an apartment in Manhattan or any of the other highfalutin things Stan and his friends did, which was no doubt why Bob had been spared. He wasn’t rich enough; he wasn’t an interesting character. No one in town cared what Bob got up to—except his wife.
“Well, he should’ve known,” said Stan, and Bob agreed that a man in his own house ought to have a measure of control. Stan sounded defeated and Bob wanted to offer him some comfort, so he asked if there was anything he could do.
“Actually,” said Stan, and it seemed to Bob that, with that one word, what Stan had really said was
I’ve done a lot for you
. “Tom and I can barely show our faces in town without starting the talk all over again, but no one’s watching you,” said Stan.
Bob thought of Maud Corley’s father, who had sabotaged his father’s livelihood in retribution for Bob’s imprudent night with Maud—his father hadn’t done a thing to fight the cooperative’s decision; he’d simply accepted that he was out and tried to make do with what he had left, which was next to nothing in a few years’ time. Bob fundamentally believed that Stan and Tom had a right to avenge themselves, and, frankly, Bob, who felt as if he were on probation himself, was also eager to get even.
So when Stan asked him to buy a few cans of spray paint and a small can of kerosene, Bob agreed and didn’t ask what else this plan might entail. He went to a hardware store in Oneonta, where he wouldn’t be recognized, and took his time selecting the paint, finally settling on the brightest, the most stigmatic, the most enduring color and type he could find: three cans of Kerpro automobile paint in cherry red.
At home, Bob ducked into his shed and was hastily arranging the paint cans on a low shelf above his worktable when Anne suddenly walked in.
“What’s that for?” she asked, a stack of library books in her arms.
“Nothing,” said Bob. Thankfully, the kerosene was still hidden in its paper bag.
“Are you painting the Buick?”
“No.” But his cheeks were beginning to roast.
“That’s automobile paint,” Anne pointed out, reading the label. They regarded each other for a moment and finally Anne shrugged and said, “Maybe you can return it.”
For her part, Joanie continued to report on every new tidbit of the unfolding scandal: the thrice-divorced author had gone to Barnard, or maybe Columbia; had an apartment in Yorkville, or was it Hollywood; and counted as her friends Cary Grant and even the late Marilyn Monroe. After church one morning, Bob lost his temper and slammed her scrapbook into the garbage can, but Joanie just waited until he’d stormed upstairs to retrieve the volume and brushed it off.
Then one Saturday in the car on the way to a high school football game, Joanie announced right in front of Anne that Isabel Moore was working on a sequel about how a small town persecutes an author.
“That’s enough,” said Bob, anger pressing vertiginously behind his eyes so that all he could see were his hands clutching the steering wheel.
“I agree,” said Joanie. “It’s just that she has so much material in town to work with, I guess she feels there’s enough for another book.”
“Another?” asked Anne from the backseat. “I read it, and I don’t think she should’ve been allowed to write the first one.”
Bob braked in the middle of Walnut Street and turned around to face his daughter. “What do you mean, you read it?” he asked.
Anne shrank toward Joanie’s side of the car. “Mom said I could.”
“Joanie,” said Bob, turning his gaze on his wife. “We talked about this.”
“You talked about it,” said Joanie evenly, and suddenly Bob felt as if he had two teenage daughters. Without hesitation, he grabbed Joanie’s upper arm and when Joanie tried to twist away, Bob held on.
“You’re hurting me,” said Joanie, but Bob wouldn’t let go.
When another car pulled up behind them, Bob reached through the open window with his free hand to wave the driver by. He let go of Joanie’s arm only as the car passed, but he could still feel the strain of the grip in his fingers, his digits ghosting the shape of his wife’s arm.
“This can’t go on,” said Bob.
“It can,” said Joanie, meaning, Bob supposed, that she had found a weapon, a tool to curtail his behavior, and if Bob thought she would easily relinquish it, he was wrong.
Joanie pressed herself against her window, cradling her left arm in her right hand, tears starting to fall, and Bob considered opening his car door and simply walking away. There seemed to be nothing he could say now except that he was sorry, and he was sorry, but he didn’t say it.
Bob looked in the rearview mirror and caught Anne’s eye. “You’re not to read that book again,” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s not going to be another book,” said Bob. “People have had enough. Pretty soon, someone’s going to take care of her.”
Anne’s face appeared at his elbow. “Take care of her how?” she asked.
“Good grief,” said Bob. He hadn’t heard from Stan in nearly three weeks; for all he knew there was no plan. “Run her out of here!” he said.
“Can you just run someone out of town?” asked Anne.
Bob shrugged. Right now he felt capable of anything.
* * *
On October 21, Bob was finally summoned to Tom Halloway’s hunting cabin, twelve miles outside town. As the only one of the three men to have served during wartime, Tom appointed himself general and doled out orders, first to Bob, whose job it would be to phone the village police department and warn them that “something” was going to happen to Isabel Moore.
“Why would I do that?” asked Bob incredulously.
“Maybe she’ll take a hint and leave on her own,” said Tom. “Think of this as the diplomacy phase.”
So the next evening at his office, as soon as Charlie had gone, Bob pulled the phone under his desk and wrapped his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. He felt like a patsy for accepting an assignment Tom could easily have done himself, but when the time came for phase two—which would apparently involve kerosene—it might be useful to have already taken a turn.
Bob dialed the number that Tom had copied down and asked to speak to the officer on duty, then nearly hung up twice while waiting to be put through.
“Go ahead, sir,” said the operator.
“Something is going to happen to Mrs. Isabel Moore,” Bob read from Tom’s index card.
“What’s that?” said the officer.
“Something is going to happen at Twenty-one Lake Street,” Bob continued.
He could almost hear the officer shaking his head. “Do you know what’s going on tonight, buddy? Forget Lake Street,” he said. “Turn on the TV.”
* * *
And there it was: from the island of Cuba, Soviet missiles had been trained on the United States of America, and the nation’s attention shifted utterly to the possibility of full-scale nuclear war. Cast lists and who’s whos on Main Street were abandoned for the terrifying new vocabulary of Strategic Air Command, B-47s, and DEFCON 2. As President Kennedy prepared to defend the security of the entire western hemisphere, Joanie prepared to defend her family with cyanide salts, if it should come to that—better to go quickly than to wait for radioactive fallout—but Bob told her to get rid of them before Anne saw. The two of them hunkered down in front of their television set and tried to keep Anne close, inviting her to sit on the couch or even on Bob’s lap if she was scared, but she skittered away, catlike, watching her parents as much as they watched the news. She was almost fourteen; it was only natural for her to withdraw, perhaps, and Bob was too busy contemplating the lunacy of mutual assured destruction to truly worry about Anne’s teenage mood swings.
From the night of the president’s address to the morning of Khrushchev’s promise to remove all Soviet missiles from Cuba, less than six days would pass, but to Bob it would feel like a lifetime. After his ridiculous phone call to the police, he stayed home from work; then he and Joanie pulled Anne out of school, too, where she was being drilled hourly in the futile exercise of ducking under her wooden desk and covering her head with her bony arms. At night Bob tucked in his daughter, then watched his wife sleep with his hands folded in constant prayer: that Khrushchev would come to his senses; that the man with the jug ears and balding head of a doddering grandfather would be reasonable; that when Bob awoke from this nightmare he would be forgiven, and he would do better next time.
At the end of October Khrushchev blinked, and Bob’s relief was palpable. He breathed easier, slept better, woke early to do squat thrusts and lunges in the backyard. He greeted neighbors with hugs instead of handshakes, and he was extremely affectionate with his wife. They were alive, and life in America would indeed return to normal, just in time for Halloween.
Anne had never been one for costumes or trick-or-treating and predictably planned to hole up in her room, but this year especially Bob felt like celebrating. He went all out with scarecrows on the front lawn and jack-o’-lanterns on the porch. He bought a witch’s hat for Joanie and a pair of plastic fangs for himself. To punctuate the end of the Soviet Union’s threat of world domination, Bob and Joanie would hand out homemade popcorn balls to an endless stream of cowboys and hoboes in their tidy front yard.
Bob hadn’t thought about Stan Cavett or Tom Halloway in nearly ten days when he opened the newspaper the next morning and noticed a short wire item at the bottom of page three:
Local Author’s Home Vandalized
State and local authorities are searching for clues in a vandalism attack at 21 Lake Street, on the home of Mrs. Isabel Moore. Village police discovered the offense after midnight. The culprits used red paint to spray obscenities on all four sides of the large white frame house.