Marry or Burn (19 page)

“Far from it. He doesn't see much of us. They're Orthodox. It's not to punish us for how we did it, it's just . . .”

“Does God see these things?” she said conversationally. “See who gets punished and who doesn't?”

“I don't know. God is far from us. I don't have my own congregation, you know.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“Why should you? I just didn't want you to assign my views to the community.”

“If my community heard my views they'd run me out of town.”

“You mean the rich?”

“If they'd claim me.”
Why strike the pitiful note?
she asked herself.
There's nothing pitiful about me.
But there was, the pitiful wish to be looked at, appreciated for burning-out pigments of skin and eyes and hair that had at one time caused a stir.

“Artists. There's your community. Art, as we know, is taken very seriously here.” He grinned. For some weeks that summer there had been a furor in the papers about a statue in front of a bank.

“Art by people from somewhere else.”

“Naturally. That's where art comes from, somewhere else.”

“Far away.”

“Overseas.” After a while he said, “I would have said she was your daughter.”

“Well, thank you.” Then she thought he must have meant because the wedding was at her house. “She is my favorite. I can't help it, she always was. Her sisters were married here too,” she said hastily. “It's a tradition. I'm sure you met them last night. There they are, over there with Maggie.”

“No resemblance.”

“I have no daughters of my own. I don't really live here. When I was growing up I loved it so. I would
race
out in the morning to see my horse. I would ride with my mother. She named the horses after people in the Bible. Mine was Dinah. Dinah!” she cried, as if the mare could be summoned. “One day I turned my back on her. My mother. Everything is ruined. I hate my life.”

“I myself am in the midst of a divorce,” he said, as if to fortify her.

“Oh, no. I'm sorry.”

“It's best,” he said, bending his head and examining his hands. His broad ribcage expanded in the black coat. When he looked up it seemed that one of his eyes had filled with tears but the other had not.

“I'm really sorry. God. My horse, my life . . . stop me, somebody.”

“Stop with the horse, the life,” he said.

She laughed. She looked at the sky. She saw a vision of the parting of Tara and her shy, stern medical student, with shouts and tears. You could never say that, even if, like Jane, you were getting reckless in what you did say. Never say a sliver of ice from the future blew into you in the middle of these ceremonies so that you knew beyond a doubt that the end was coming and sometimes not even from afar, not even decently loitering while the marriage got on its feet.

He was thinking. Now both eyes had filled, and reflected the low sunlight. She had better leave him alone. She had better leave everybody alone. Over there her poor brother was fingering his boutonniere and wiping his eyes with a napkin.

“Could I ask you something?”

“Ask me.”

“Didn't you have to instruct them? Prepare them? I know you know her story but do you know her at all? She's reckless. She's driven. She doesn't think. Did you caution that boy? Do you know him?”

“He's from Connecticut. We don't all know each other.”

“That's not—”

“He'll do his best. So will she. It's a genuine enough conversion. She's way out in front of him with the Judaism, by the way. She went into the mikvah, she purified herself. And the parents, you notice they're not that worried? That's half the battle.”

She didn't say, Elaine is a romantic and with Dewey and Maggie it's relief. She said, “You got to know them, the parents.”

“What is it you're asking?”

“I don't know.”

“This could help her. The girl has a burden.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“Betrothed in righteousness,” he said, and winked at her.

 

SHE TALKED TO Mayhew, where he sat between the flower boxes. She talked about the heat, the steers grazing in the fencerow. She counted them and told him the number. She said she hoped he wouldn't mind sitting right where he was, on the terrace with the red geraniums, for one or two short sessions while it was still summer. But with field and sky behind him. In that blue shirt.

There was a certain peace in not having your smile returned. You could go ahead and drop the subject and the smile. When had he begun the unpleasant skewing of his head to stare at her? He was going through an awful simulation of a tourist trying to follow in a phrase book. The head went still, a stare took the sag out of the features. Something like horror passed over them. Horror at
her
? Something he saw.

Then he couldn't take his eyes off her.

Someone came and propped the doors open. The women in hats helped each other up out of the chairs. Fana came out to say it was his nap time. “But first I will smoke one cigarette on my break, and then I will come back,” she said. Before Jane could stand up and say, “Don't go, I'm just leaving, let me leave,” Fana had drifted down the steps past the OXYGEN IN USE, NO SMOKING sign, crossed the lawn to the buggy, and lightly mounted the iron step, where she waved out her match and faced the little field, or perhaps her own country, where
women did not smoke and those too old to be useful might be left sitting in their own yards, with children around them instead of dogs.

Mayhew had begun to struggle against the mesh belt. He kept swiping at his neck and chest with his claw hand. Was something running down his throat? He seemed to be after the bib, but the Velcro at the back of the neck wouldn't give. Finally he got the hand to his eye, rubbed viciously. Then the other hand wavered out and she felt it dab at her slacks.

She moved her leg, the hand came on. She had to touch it and finally lift it in her fingers. The palm was slick with sweat. The blue shirt stuck to him under the arms. His eyes had undergone a change. “Tara,” he whispered.

She kept the hand in hers, holding it loosely to let it dry, but she didn't answer him.

“Tara.”

“No!” Jane shook her head. “No. No.”

“Tara.”

She leaned away from him.

“Tara . . . are we old?”

She dropped the hand. She stood up, steadying the backs of her legs on the planter. The red eyes kept up their demand. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yes, Avery, we are, now. We're old.”

Tearing now from being rubbed, the eyes undertook an examination of her face and body. With care, she sat down again, folding herself away from view. “But . . . but listen to me. We've had a good life.” The stare dropped to her breasts, rose to her face. She clenched her teeth. “I know you don't remember.”
Stop that. God help you if there's a mirror in there, if you think
I'm
old. Do you think I want to come here? I don't know why I come. I come because I can't see the end of this. Is that it?

She made herself look at him. She let her stare grow as bold
and sickened as his. Nevertheless she kept looking. Somewhere behind what she was seeing was the face from the yearbook, the face Tara trusted her to comfort. The beloved.

“Avery,” she said finally, as if in the long habit of coaxing explanation, wifely forbearance, “everyone gets older.”

From the buggy, Fana called to the women at the far end of the porch, “Time now, time to get ready for your meal.” They had their dinner at 4:30. Fana didn't come right away; she let them pretend not to hear. “Are you ready, Mr. Mayhew?” she called.

“The important thing is”—Jane came out of the chair, sank to her knees on the flagstones and crushed his hands in hers—“I'm here. You see? I'm here.”

“Tara.” He leaned down as far as the harness would let him, and sighed with a groan that stirred her hair.

There was a bloodstain on the fur of his slipper. Through her hair she saw the bones of his foot move in the thin white sock. The beloved. She raised her head. “It's all right, stop it,” she whispered harshly, intimately, to the shut eyes. “Oh, it's all right, Avery. I'm here.”

Behind her Fana said, “We will go in now.”

He kept his eyes shut. Jane got to her feet. Fana took hold of the handlebars, bent to the back of his head. “Today, Mr. Mayhew, is the day you will see your friend.”

“His friend?”

“His friend the dog.” Fana made a face. “For this friend, he is waiting.”

 

THE RABBI WAS in the parking lot, standing beside his car. Neither of them showed any surprise. “Hello there,” she said.

“So, how did it go?” he said.

“Well, I have a question for you. What was that about ‘great mercy'?”

“‘You have dealt with us according to your great mercy.'”

“‘You have dealt with us.' That's it. That's the part that applies.”

Across the hot concrete from them the sun had turned the sweet-bay trees along the fence a tropical green. Phthalo green yellow, it might be. You could put in a red sky, filling up most of the space, keeping the strip of field a blue green inch at the bottom of the canvas. If you did it small, and got the red right—red could combine torment and calm—and put in no human figure, you would have a tiny painting of still, intense memory.
Farm.

“Mercy,” she said, combing her fingers through her hair and shaking it as if the groan might have lodged there. “I don't think so.”

“Who are you to say?”

“Who are
you
to say?”

“I'm the rabbi.”

“I see.”

“I came because I thought we might want to walk down to the creek.”

“There's no creek there any more,” she said bitterly. “Oh, a trickle.”

“Clean, though. They cleaned it up. The fish have come back, I'm told.”

“Fish,” she said in despair. “I couldn't read that fish story of yours. I looked in an old Bible I have and it's not in there.”

“I will read it to you,” he said.

Behind the house, Queen Anne's lace and milkweed nodded through the rails of the fence at the mown grass with its sprinklers. If he knew about the creek he must have walked here before. By himself. Thinking of his wife, who was divorcing him. Jane felt sure it was that way around. He was not a man who would cast somebody off. He already had his foot on the fence rail and she had to show him there was a gate farther down, at the corner of the yard where the fence met another coming up
from the barn. She showed him the thin path made by cows, leading downhill to the barn.

“When?” she said, opening the gate for him as he tried to figure out the looped wire on a stick of wood.

“When what?”

“When will you read it to me?”

“Today,” he said. “You'll come to the house. The apartment. My wife has the house.”

“I'm sure she does,” Jane said.

“So. You like him maybe a little. Mayhew. This guy who gives up everything. And for what does he do this? For a woman.”

“A woman!” she said. But she didn't argue. There was more to it than an explanation, however long, could cover. Often it seemed to her the explanation of anything that came to pass would have no beginning and no end. If you painted a thing, that was the shortened explanation of it.

When they sat down beside the creek, almost invisible but gurgling under the vines, she held up her foot. “I wore the wrong shoes.” He studied her sandals, her toe ring. He had been panting as he walked and he was still breathing hard. About that, she would talk to him on another day.

H
IS DOCTOR PUT him on the plane and he flew home to

Seattle alone. It was September, and he was well.

Your mind can rush you like a tackle. His mind had been warning him, and his mother, for long enough that on the day she came in from work and called his name twice from the door, she knew.

He had been shooting baskets with Chris. Then he was walking home from Chris's house, but walking on and on and not getting there, not getting home. By the time he got to the porch he had a shrunken, sickish feeling, light-headed and hot. His memory of it was from describing it. At the door of his room he had braced himself against the onrush of something, a kind of furious speech, close to his ears yet too faint and tinny to make out, that he had been staving off all day. He got down on the floor and covered his ears. The next thing he knew his mother's hands were loosening his fingers and he could find no answer to the normal words she appeared to be saying.