Then Came Heaven (38 page)

He sat at her left, facing the same direction as she. She wasn’t even looking at him when she remarked, quietly, “You’re staring at me.”

“Oh!” He snapped his attention across the yard and felt his face flare. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I guess I’ve come to expect it.”

“Well, you do look different.”

“Yes, I know. It takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” He took a swallow of beer from his bottle and wondered just how casual he could get with her. He decided to tell her, “Lucy wanted to know what we’d do if you didn’t have hair.”

She laughed and pulled a few blades of grass, then took a tiny sip from her glass.

“Now, there you sit, and not only do you have hair, you’re drinking beer and going barefoot. Can you blame me for staring?”

“No, but my mother is watching us.”

He glanced toward the women, and sure enough, Bertha was doing exactly that, and scowling to boot.

“Mama isn’t accepting all of this very well.”

“How about your dad?”

“Much better.”

“And you?”

“It’s... taking a while. I’ve lived in a convent of one sort or another for eleven years. Those are old habits to break.” He couldn’t resist studying her profile, whether her mother was watching or not. “At times I feel as if there’s really no place for me anymore.”

“Are you sorry you quit?”

“No,” she answered without pause. “But, you see, that was my home. That was my routine—and believe me, when you live in a convent your life is totally regulated by routine. But there’s something very soothing about it. No decisions, just follow the rules and life flows on. Now I don’t really have a routine anymore, or a home. I have my family, but I feel as if I’m here on sufferance.” “I’ll bet they don’t feel that way.”

“No, I suppose they don’t. It’s just me. But it’s odd to be a full-grown woman moving back into your parents’ house.”

He considered awhile, then said, “Your letter said you’re going back to school in the fall.”

“I’d like to. If the money can be arranged.”

“I thought you’d teach.”

“They won’t let me, not in a Catholic school, and I’m not sure I want to teach in a public school.”

“They won’t let you!” he exclaimed in surprise.

“Bad influence, you see.”

He bristled. “You? A bad influence? Who the hell makes decisions like that? Oh, sorry, Sister. I mean...”

“Not on the students. On the other nuns.”

“Oh, I get it. Some of them might decide to quit, too.”

“Preservation of the Order, it’s called.”

“Pardon me, but that’s stupid.”

“It’s why there was so much secrecy surrounding my leaving. They didn’t even give me any notice. Mother Agnes just came into my schoolroom that day and said I should go over to the convent and pack my things and that my dad was coming for me.” She turned to meet his eyes. “I wanted to find you and—”

“Hello. Mind if I join you?” They’d been so intent on their conversation they hadn’t seen Liz approaching. Eddie felt as if he’d jumped from a tree limb and caught his suspender on a branch. There he hung, suspended in midair with Jean’s emotions only half-revealed.

She could do nothing but conjure up a smile for her sister and invite, “No, please... sit down.”

Liz sat, bracing a hand on the grass and studying Eddie without pretending to do anything else. “So this is the man Jean talks about all the time.”

Eddie and Jean both spoke at once.

He said, “Oh, I doubt that.”

She murmured, “Liz, please.”

Liz’s eyes perked with interest as she watched them respond, then she added, conversationally, “I’ve been talking to your kids. They’re delightful.”

With the dialogue turned to a safer subject the tension eased. Liz stayed, and they talked and talked, and Eddie saw what it was that made Liz Jean’s favorite sister. She asked questions, then listened attentively to the answers. You knew exactly where you stood with Liz because she didn’t play games with anyone’s emotions, including her own. She could praise herself and admit she was wrong with equal zealousness. Most important, she really loved Jean and wanted her to be happy, whatever it took.

In time some other family members joined the group, and before he knew it, Eddie realized the afternoon was waning and he should start for home.

Much to his regret, he and Jean never found time to finish their private conversation. When he rounded up the girls and headed for the truck, others were doing the same. Liz, her husband, Ron, and several of the children formed a knot that moved with them toward the parked vehicles. Frank came, too, and even Bertha, though Eddie suspected her motive was less to bid him farewell than to keep him from being alone with Jean. There was little chance of that anyway, with Anne and Lucy beside him all the time.

When they were inside the truck with the engine started, Jean’s hands were the last folded over the window edge.

“Goodbye, girls. Say hello to everybody back home.”

“ ’Bye, Sister.”

“ ’Bye, Sister.” They had forgotten themselves and called her by her old name. She merely smiled at the slip, then turned that smile to their father.

“Goodbye, Mr. Olczak. Please come again.”

“I will. Goodbye.” He, too, found it difficult to say Jean for the first time.

But as he put the truck in reverse and backed out onto the gravel road, he promised himself he would. And soon. As soon as he could get back here to pay a call on her.

Without the girls.

CHAPTER TWENTY

One week passed, one hot, lengthy, impatient July week with the sun so intense it seemed to have faded the blue out of the sky. In the garden, the string beans grew so fast they needed picking twice a day. Morning and evening Jean picked them, and during the day, helped her mother can them.

And all the while she thought of Eddie.

In Browerville, Eddie passed the week sanding and varnishing school desks, dizzy from the scent of resin and alcohol, if not from his thoughts of Jean. He’d made up his mind he’d drive back to the farm and visit her the following Saturday night, though the girls were campaigning for him to go with them and watch the free movie under the water tower. Every Saturday night during the summer, the city put up a screen and sold popcorn from a popcorn wagon while every kid in town watched the Three Stooges or Ma and Pa Kettle, and scratched their mosquito bites until their ankles bled. Eddie could think of a lot better way to spend his Saturday night.

On Thursday he told his sister-in-law Rose, “I need a favor on Saturday night.”

“Sure, anything, Eddie.”

“I need to have the kids go to the free show with your kids, then sleep overnight at your house afterwards.”

“Oh, really? Aren’t you going to the show?”

Eddie cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “No, I’m not.”

“Oh, where you going?” Rose didn’t mean to be nosy. It was just that life in such a small town was so predictable, it was the exception rather than the rule when someone broke with tradition. And the free movies under the water tower were tradition.

“I’m going to visit someone.”

“Someone? Why so secretive?”

“Actually, it’s... ah, Sister Regina.”

“Sister Regina?” Rose repeated, her mouth and eyes widening as if she’d just inhaled gasoline fumes. “You mean our Sister Regina who isn’t a nun anymore?”

“That’s right. Only her name is Jean now. Jean Potlocki. She lives over toward Foley.”

Rose said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Eddie shifted his weight back to the first foot and said nothing.

“How long has this been going on?” Rose asked, point-blank.

“What?”

“You. And our ex-nun.”

“You mean the kids didn’t tell you the girls and I went to see her this past weekend?”

“No! I didn’t hear anything about it!” She sounded put out that nobody had slipped her such juicy news. “So what’s going on? Are you dating her?”

“Aw, come on, Rose.”

“Well, are you?”

“No. I told you, I’m just going over to visit her.”

Rose pointed a finger at him and got a sly look on her face. “Eddieeee... Eddie, Eddie, you’re blushiiiing.” She ended in a singsong.

“Look!” he said, his patience growing short. “If I have to go through the third degree just to leave the kids here overnight, I’ll find someplace else to take them!”

“Settle down, Eddie, I won’t ask any more questions. Of course you can leave the kids here. Does Romaine know about this?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m gonna tell him.”

“I’m sure you will. And everybody else in town, too, I suppose.”

“Well, is it a secret?”

“No. How can it be a secret when I took my own two kids along last Sunday?”

“Well, then...” Rose looked very pleased with herself. Eddie walked out of her kitchen, shaking his head.

________

He bought new clothes for Saturday night, a pair of pleated trousers, blue, and a nice light, cottony shirt with short sleeves and pale blue-and-white stripes. When the girls saw him getting dressed up they asked if he was going to a dance.

“No. No dance.”

“Then where?”

It was harder to tell them the truth than Rose.

“Well... what if I said I’m going to see Sis... Jean again?”

“Without us?!”

“But I thought you wanted to go to the free show.”

“Well, we do, but...”

He knew he had them because Browerville didn’t have a theater, so those free shows were the most exciting thing that happened around here. Cars started pulling in with two hours to go before sunset, and every kid in town went early and goofed around. Sometimes the car horns started honking, demanding the show before it was quite dark, and the cartoons were so vague you had to squint to make out the figures on the screen. Add to that the novelty of buying their own popcorn, and he knew his kids wouldn’t object too loudly to being left behind.

Lucy tried a new angle. “Why don’t you wait till tomorrow, Daddy? Then we can go with you.”

“Thought I was going to take you fishing tomorrow at Thunder lake.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

Another quandary, because he’d taken them fishing three times this summer, and now that they’d caught their first sunfish, they loved that, too. Also, he let them take their bathing suits along and go swimming for a while along the shore.

So, shortly after supper on Saturday night, he found them each a blanket to take to the free show, and walked them down to the end of the alley to the water tower, where cars were already starting to park around the perimeter, and kids in pajamas were running everywhere trailing quilts and army blankets. He gave them each money for popcorn, and left them with their older cousins with a full two hours of daylight left.

________

Jean recognized his truck coming down the road, raising a cloud of dust, and thought, Oh no, oh no, why didn’t I follow my instincts and take a bath and put on some decent clothes and let the beans go for just one night? But she’d been afraid to believe he’d come again so soon, so she’d slipped on her dad’s barn boots, tied a dish towel on her head to keep the gnats out of her hair, and had gone out to the garden to pick the second batch of beans in the evening cool.

She stood there in the middle of the bean patch, straight as a scarecrow, watching his truck approach and flicker along on the other side of a tall, wide band of raspberry bushes that separated her from the road.

He didn’t notice her there, but drove into the yard, parked and walked up to the house.

The garden was huge. She was fifty yards from the back door when she saw her mother answer his knock and point down at the bean patch.

He turned, searched, and she knew the moment he spotted her, for he didn’t waste any time starting her way. She wanted to move, but couldn’t. It felt as if her feet had taken root with the bean plants, and her heart seemed to be swelling faster than the doggone string beans themselves, which she desperately wished she would have forgotten till morning. Instead, there she stood, looking an absolute fright while the man she loved walked straight toward her between the vegetable rows.

He thought how cute she looked in the four-buckle overshoes that reached halfway to her knees and the white dish towel flattening her hair. The dish towel made her look more familiar, more like the nun he remembered, yet not enough to mar the realization that she was just plain Jean now. There wasn’t the first hint of a smile on her face. She looked merely breathless as he continued toward her, forcing himself to walk when he felt like racing.

He stopped one bucket of beans away from her, his toe nearly touching the galvanized pail that sat between the rows, half-f.

There was so much to say, yet they thought of nothing, only to gaze at each other while the sun sat on the horizon and the shadows from the trees in the distant farmyard stretched clear down the sloping garden and painted it with gloaming. They had waited so long for this first moment alone, and had weathered so many repressed emotions that the burst of them, allowable at last, quite overwhelmed them both.

He spoke at last, only after the silence had become intolerable with yearning.

“Hello, Jean,” he said, speaking her given name for the first time ever.

“Hello, Eddie,” she replied, for the first time, too.

Their voices fell softly, in keeping with the twilight and the cabbage moths he had disturbed with his passing.

“I hope it’s okay that I came back so soon.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied avidly, too honest, too ingenuous to try to hide her breathlessness.

“I would have telephoned, but..” He didn’t bother finishing.

“And I would have taken a bath and gotten dressed, but...”

She shrugged, and they both laughed.

“I’m glad you didn’t. I like finding you out here like an ordinary woman.”

“A little too ordinary, I’m afraid,” she said, touching the dish towel on her head. “I look a fright.”

“Not to me you don’t.”

She dropped her hand and her eyes, and said self-consciously, “No man has ever paid a call on me before. I didn’t picture it happening with a dish towel on my head and my daddy’s barn boots on my feet.”