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‘She’s got pills for her back, Dad.’
He was still watching me. ‘Well, there’s no need for her to suffer with the cold when there are plenty of warmer places.’
‘It’s not the cold,’ I replied. ‘It’s the flowers.’
He pushed the lounger up into a sitting position. ‘What?’
‘I said, it’s the flowers. It’s not the cold or her back or anything else. It’s the stupid flowers. She wants to be somewhere with flowers. Even in January.’
My father didn’t say anything. It grew noticeably quiet, even with the music playing.
I studied him. My father couldn’t exactly be called a handsome man. He was of Irish descent, short and wiry, with masses of curly black hair, greying by his ears. His face had a well-lived-in look, especially around the eyes, as if he’d had a lifetime of bad nights’ sleep. But it was a cheerful face. He had a very ruddy complexion that gave him Santa Claus cheeks, and he was always betting Megs and me that we couldn’t look at him for five minutes without smiling. Neither of us could. Yet he was an unexpected choice to complement my mother’s rather awesome appearance.
‘It isn’t fair, you know,’ I said. ‘As soon as we really get settled somewhere, you guys want to up and leave. And frankly, Dad, I just don’t want to go anywhere right now. I’m a senior this year. I’m going to graduate and I want to do it here where I got some friends. I know kids here.’ I looked at him. ‘What I really want is to go to my senior prom. I want to get asked out by some guy and go on a date and be like every other girl in the senior class. I don’t want to be the only one not invited. The only one who doesn’t have anywhere to go. And if we move now, that’s what’s going to happen.’
He smiled gently and reached a hand over to touch me. ‘I know it’s been hard sometimes,’ he said, and I could tell from his voice that if it came to a showdown between Mama and me over moving, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
I sighed. Then once again, heavily. ‘I feel like I’m going to be a million years old before I even have a date. I feel like I’m probably going to be a toothless old granny, and when I get my first kiss, he’ll suck my dentures right out.’
He grinned.
‘It’s not funny, Dad.’
‘I know, sweetie,’ he said and chortled anyway.
‘Look, if Mama decides to move—’
‘Lesley, she has said absolutely nothing about it. You’re creating problems that don’t exist.’
‘If Mama decides to move, I want to stay with Brianna. I’ve already talked to her. I told her we might be moving, and she said she’d ask her mom to see if I could stay with them until the school year ends. It’d only be until June.’
‘You shouldn’t be talking to people about family matters, Les. This is strictly our personal business. I don’t think you ought to be sharing it with strangers.’
‘Daddy, Brianna’s no stranger. She’s my very best friend. Besides, I wasn’t specific. I was just sounding her out.’
‘The cold bothers your mother,’ he replied flatly. ‘If she wants to move, then I think we ought to move. We owe her that much.’
I said nothing. I put my head down and braced it between my hands. I gazed at the floor. The music coming from the radio was Rachmaninov’s. One of his concertos. I couldn’t remember which one.
‘Dad?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Do you think I’m ugly or anything? I mean, being really honest with me.’
His eyes widened. ‘Of course you’re not ugly, Lesley. What a thing to ask.’
‘I was just wondering.’ I listened to the remainder of the concerto and studied the pattern in the rug.
‘Look,’ he said, and his voice was gentle, ‘you still have plenty of time. Don’t put yourself in a state over it. Things’ll work out just fine.’
I raised my head. ‘How old were you when you first went out with a girl?’
‘Older than you are now. I was in the army.’
‘Didn’t you ever go out before that? When you were at home?’
‘The way your grandmother felt about things like that? Are you kidding? And way out there on the farm?’ He grinned. ‘I was lucky I even knew what girls were.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, see?’ He put his hand on my head, ‘Nature’ll take care of things. Don’t worry. Your time will come.’
Chapter Three (#ulink_e1372dbe-b89a-531b-8d65-9607dee431d0)
There were no tattered remnants of European aristocracy in my father’s background, no private tutors, no summer afternoons whiled away with garden parties and violin music. The son of an Irish immigrant, my father grew up on a pig farm on the vast plains of Illinois.
There were seven children. My dad was the fourth child, the second son. They weren’t a poor family, not dirt poor the way a lot of farm families were in the Depression. Not the way his father had been when he’d arrived, aged four, in steerage with his parents at Ellis Island. But my dad had recollections of just getting by. My favourite was the one about how he got into a fight at school because another boy had said his coat was a girl’s coat. It had been. His mother had made it over for him from one his sister Kathleen had outgrown. When he was recounting that episode, Dad would always end up grinning. Yes, he’d say, it had been a girl’s coat, but he sure wasn’t going to let Jacky Barnes say so.
The mainstay of their lives had been religion. Both my father’s parents were devout Catholics. All the children had had at least a few years at parochial school, even with the hardship of the Depression. One of his sisters had later joined an order of nuns devoted to helping the poor and still lived in Colombia. His younger brother taught theology at a university in Massachusetts.
When my father was thirteen, his father was killed in a farm accident. He had been mangled under the wreckage of an overturned tractor, and two men near by had helped free him and bring him down to the house. My dad had been alone at the time. He was hoeing in the vegetable garden and keeping an eye on the baby, who was about two. The men had come, carrying his dying father between them. Dad wasn’t one for telling stories. Unlike Mama, he couldn’t spin out a small incident into a captivating drama. But when he told this, you felt it. You saw the skinny kid in worn overalls and dusty bare feet. You saw the baby with his one-eyed teddy bear. Daddy’s mother had gone down to the neighbours’ and so he’d been alone at the house with his small brother and his maimed father and he didn’t know what to do. And every time he told us about it, you felt his horror.
So I never knew my grandfather. We didn’t even have a photograph of him. Once, Dad told us, a travelling photographer had stopped by the farm and offered to take a picture of all of them. His mother made the children wash and dress in their Sunday clothes. But when the photographer returned with the developed pictures, he wanted more money than he had said initially: they hadn’t said there were so many children, the photographer told them. A deal’s a deal, Dad’s father replied. In the end, the photographer was sent packing, photographs and all.
Grandma O’Malley, however, I knew well. When I was very little we’d gone to Illinois every summer to visit her. She lived in a little row house in a northern sector of Chicago not far from Uncle Paddy and Aunt Gretchen’s house, and I remember the cool, damp-smelling attic room where I slept. Later, when I was in grade school, I spent the month of July with her each year.
She was a tiny woman with white hair that she kept in a braided bun and skin stretched so tightly over her bones that her forearms and hands always reminded me of the legs of a bird. Being very much my mother’s daughter in respect of height and bone structure, I was bigger than Grandma O’Malley by the time I was ten.
I always looked forward to those visits when I was in grade school. What I actually loved most, I think, were the journeys to and from Chicago with my father. They were great adventures to me. We always went alone, just him and me, and left Mama at home to take care of Megan. All my Julys were bracketed with memories of Daddy and me sitting way in the back of the bus where my mother refused to sit because it made her carsick, of sharing Cokes and candy bars with him, of making wishes on white horses we saw in roadside pastures. We ate, in steamy, dimly lit bus depot cafés and slept in motels with saggy mattresses and chenille curtains at the windows or dozed in drowsy, diesel-scented darkness.
The visits themselves I anticipated rather less. There were plenty of good aspects, particularly after Megan was born, when I was relieved to discover that I could still go alone and Megan couldn’t come because she was too little for Grandma to take care of. Plus, my cousins lived just down the street from Grandma’s and were a constant source of familiar playmates each summer, which I longed for after our frequent moves. And Grandma was usually willing to spoil me a little. She had small gifts for me when I arrived. She gave me all the pennies from her change each night. Best of all, she would make me buttermilk pancakes for breakfast any morning I asked for them, which was something my mama would never do because she’d never adjusted to the idea of making a whole meal out of something sweet.
There were, however, less enjoyable aspects about going to see Grandma. From the moment I arrived with Daddy I was always aware of a subtle uneasiness, that kind of tension you can detect so readily when you’re young. And it permeated the entire stay. Regardless of the little surprises and treats Grandma had in store for me, the visits always left me anxious and on my guard.
From a very early age I knew what lay at the heart of the matter. Grandma O’Malley was devoutly Catholic and my mother was not only not Catholic but not even what could honestly be called Christian. Consequently, neither my sister nor I had been baptized, confirmed or even taken to church. This left my grandmother aghast.
Of course, Grandma O’Malley did her best to rectify what she considered an unthinkable situation. The moment my father had left, Grandma would call up the priest and have him come over to see me. She bought me Sunday dresses and patent-leather shoes and books of children’s Bible stories. She marched me off to Mass and catechism classes and vacation Bible school. During mealtimes she quizzed me about the life of Jesus. While we were doing the dishes, she would listen to me reciting the Bible verses she’d given me to memorize. And the summer I was nine, she promised to give me five dollars if I would go home and see that Daddy had Megan baptized.
With deadly regularity, my July visits would end with a terrible argument between my father and my grandmother. Dad’s first words to me as he arrived to take me home were invariably about church. Those questions doomed me. If I lied and said I’d had nothing to do with church while I was there, I got into trouble for not telling the truth. If I told the truth, he yelled at Grandma because he had expressly forbidden her to send me to Bible school or catechism classes or whatever and, of course, she always went ahead and did it anyway. Then they’d progress to his telling her that I was his child and if she didn’t like his rules then I wasn’t going to be allowed to come again, and to her telling him that she was not about to have any grandchild of hers burning in Hell. Within moments they’d be arguing about Mama.
Grandma knew Mama’s views on religion. It was impossible not to. If you knew Mama, you knew her views. My mother was fanatically opposed to religion in any form of the word. It was because of the things she had seen in the war, she always said, and because of the way she saw religious people react. She said they knew. She said a lot of people knew – the foreign governments, the people in high places, even a lot of ordinary people. She said they knew of the various kinds of terrible suffering that was tolerated in Germany. And she said they still went home at night and had their suppers and said their prayers and went to bed. They all thought of themselves as good Christians when they were in church on Sunday. They thought they lived in Christian nations. But what kind of teaching was that? Where was the Pope when the Jews were in Auschwitz? Where were the nuns and the priests and the clergymen and all the good, righteous Christians in Congress and the world parliaments, who could have helped, who could have passed laws to let in more refugees, who could have provided more routes of escape or, more importantly, who could have stopped what was happening altogether? Mama always maintained it could have been stopped. If everyone had tried. Together, the Christians, the churches, the Pope, all of them, they could have formed a voice that no leader, not even Hitler, could have ignored. But they hadn’t. Even if it wasn’t conscious, she said, they had chosen not to help. And my mama had no use whatsoever for the doctrines that had allowed so many to turn their backs so easily on all that suffering.
Grandma, for her part, had no use for my mama. I don’t think it was so much Mama’s personal atheism, because I don’t think it mattered a whole lot to Grandma what became of Mama’s eternal soul. Even though she never said so, I always suspected that Grandma felt Hell would probably suit Mama just fine. But what did matter to her was that Mama had taken my father away from the Church. And with him, Megan and me.
Despite my father’s threats about keeping me home, I went back to Grandma’s every July until she died, the year I was thirteen. Almost all I knew about my father’s youth came from those summers.
I think my dad, a quiet and undistinctive boy from the sound of things, might have escaped notice in the rough-and-tumble anonymity of such a large family, if it hadn’t been for his poor health: he had suffered a mild case of polio as an infant and later, scarlet fever, and these had left him with what Grandma called ‘a weakness of the chest’. Consequently, he had been sick a lot, often seriously, and much of his childhood was marked by long periods of isolation and convalescence. Because of these, he’d grown into a shy, introverted boy, not bookish, the way his brother Colin was, but just self-absorbed. Grandma said she’d never been much worried by that. With the casual certainty about destiny that is so common in devoutly religious families, it was assumed my father would become a priest, because he was the second son and that’s what second sons did. So Grandma was comforted by the knowledge that he was not inclined toward fast cars, parties and the high life, the way Paddy, Kip and Mick were.
Of course, my father didn’t become a priest. Nor did he achieve Grandma’s other aspiration for all her sons: a college education. When my dad finished high school, the Second World War had started and like so many other young men of his day, he’d ended up in that. What always went unsaid in these conversations with Grandma but was implied was that Dad had met my mother while he was in Europe. Grandma was capable of attributing virtually anything my father didn’t accomplish to the fact that he had married my mother.
So, my father had joined the army and was posted to England. He was only twenty-one when he married my mother, who was almost two years his senior. After that, he never found the time or the money or the energy to pursue a higher education. And frankly, I don’t think my father ever particularly minded.
What did bother him were the kinds of jobs he ended up with because of his lack of skills. What with moving so often and having no real training, my father had always done whatever he could find, taking dead-end jobs that were easy to get and easy to leave. They never paid enough money, and they usually required physical effort, which made him less employable as he grew older. When we’d moved to Kansas from our previous home in Nebraska, my father had been unemployed for over two months before he found work at Hughson’s Garage. No one was looking for a fifty-year-old unskilled labourer.
I knew he hated his jobs. He never said so but it was one of those things you could feel. He would linger a moment too long over his morning coffee. He would come home with his hands black and his clothes dirty and apologize to Mama even before he kissed her, although Mama never complained. But mainly it was the study. In every house we’d ever lived in my father had always insisted on having an extra room for his study. Even if it meant Megan and I had to share a bedroom. Someday, he told me once, he’d have a job where he’d have to bring home work from the office to do at his desk and he’d need a study – somewhere quiet to get away from the noise of the TV and Megs and me and Mama’s records, so that he could do his paperwork. So far he had never found such a job, but every night after supper he went upstairs and sat for a while behind the desk and waited.
While my father dreamed, my mother acted. We lived like Gypsies because of Mama. She pursued happiness down a real road. Wherever we were, my mother assumed peace of mind must be waiting over the next hill. Nowhere suited her for long. She wanted it cooler; she wanted it warmer. She wanted to be in the country; she wanted to be in town. Always searching, never finding.
There was a regular routine to our moves. First Mama would grow restless, pacing around the house, uprooting things and transplanting them in the garden, paging through Megs’ or my schoolbooks and constructing fabulous tales about what she imagined the places in the pictures must be like, while my sister and I would sit captivated, eating our afternoon snacks at the kitchen table. Then would come the depression. Any little thing my sister or I’d do would upset her, and she’d start having more and more spells. Her anxieties would increase, in particular her fear of leaving the immediate environs of the house and yard, because she’d begin thinking the people in the community didn’t like her any more. Then Dad and I would get stuck with all the grocery shopping and the errands. When those things started happening, I knew it was only a matter of time before we would head off for some new horizon.
I hated the moves. I hated the awful weariness right afterward when I would wake up in the morning and realize that all the people out there were strangers except for Mama, Daddy and Megan. I hated the discouraging task of starting over, of trying to make new friends, of even wanting to try.
My feelings, however, never appeared to make much difference. When my mother was in that state, she had no energy left over for other people’s feelings. As far as my father was concerned, relieving her discomfort was all that seemed to matter; he never questioned the process. If Mama wanted to move, we moved. If Mama thought we’d be happier in Yakima or North Platte or Timbuktu, then that was all it took for my father. He would drop everything, give notice at his job, sell whatever was necessary to raise the money, then pack up and go to wherever it was Mama believed she’d be at peace this time. And he expected the same devotion from Megs and me. We were not allowed even to question the move in front of Mama: this was just something you did when you were part of a family.
The guidance counsellor was waiting for me again when I came out of my calculus class on Wednesday of that week. She was leaning against the lockers on the other side of the corridor, and when I came out of the door of the classroom, all she did was nod and I knew the nod was meant for me. Without exchanging any words, we went back to her office together.
The counsellors, six men and Miss Harrich, were together in the new part of the school building. Each one had a little cubicle just large enough to accommodate a desk, a desk chair and a second chair and still have space to close the door. In Miss Harrich’s cubicle there was a large framed print hanging over her desk that said, in letters that were nearly impossible to read, ‘A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone.’ It took me the better part of three visits to puzzle it out.
Sitting down at her desk, Miss Harrich lifted a file with my name on it from a stack by the dictionary. For several moments she riffled through the contents, stopping to read occasionally with such absorption that it was hard to believe she had read it all many times before.
‘So, how’s it going?’ she asked me.
I shrugged. ‘All right.’
‘Are you thinking, as I asked you to? About where you want to go to college?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Have you decided?’
I shrugged.
‘Lesley, I hate to have to keep reminding you about this, but the time is coming. You’ll have to get an application in. You can’t procrastinate for ever.’
I nodded.
There was a pause and she looked back down at the file. I was sitting across from her and could see what she was reading. I already knew what was in the file: my IQ score, my test results, a long note from my old chemistry teacher that said he thought I was an under-achiever. I could read upside down easily.
‘You’re exceptionally good at languages, Lesley. German, French, two years of Spanish. Do you still speak Hungarian at home?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said.
‘There are some promising career opportunities for linguists. Have you thought about doing something like that? You’re very good. And it’s an open field, jobwise.’
I nodded.
Miss Harrich sighed. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, although I could tell she thought I was. Or at least that I wasn’t being very cooperative.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I am trying to help you, Lesley. I know you think I’m just hassling you, but I’m not. I’m worried that you’re going to just keep putting this off and putting it off until it’s too late. And you’re such a bright girl. You have so much potential. I just don’t want to see you waste it.’
I stared at my hands. My stomach hurt and I wanted to leave.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. She watched me, and because I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face, I studied her clothes. She was an older woman, perhaps near sixty, but she dressed very fashionably. Soft wool skirts and silk-look blouses, in muted, earthy colours. If she’d been someone else, I would have liked to ask her where she bought them. They didn’t look like what you found in our town.
I shrugged wearily as the silence grew too heavy for me. I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t even know what was wrong, why it was so hard to look at the applications and do something about them, why I hated coming in here so much that it made me feel sick to my stomach.
‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how’s it going for you? Generally speaking. Classes all right? Are you having any trouble?’
I shook my head.
‘Are things OK at home?’
I nodded.
She regarded me for a long moment before finally opening her desk drawer to take out a pad of hall passes. ‘If you ever need anyone to talk to,’ she said, ‘you know I’m here.’
‘I have history now,’ I said when I saw her hesitate over that blank on the form. ‘Room 204. Mr Peterson.’
‘You heard me, didn’t you? That’s why I’m here, Lesley. To help out when things get rough. I do care. You know that, don’t you?’
I stood and held out my hand for the pass. When she laid her pen down, I snatched the form from the pad and left.
Claire, one of my group of friends from school, was having a party the next Friday night. Her mother was helping her clear the furniture from the family room, and there was going to be a live band. It was a local band, made up of three boys from our high school and someone named Frog Newton from Goodland, who played the drums. Frog was a friend of Brianna’s cousin, and Brianna said she thought he was one of the weirder monkeys not in the zoo. She always referred to him as Fig Newton, which in my mind was an improvement on Frog.
Claire’s party was the big social event of the term among my crowd, which by and large didn’t seem to generate many big social events. None of us girls who were friends that year was exactly femme fatale material. Claire still had a generous amount of what her mother affectionately called ‘puppy fat’. Brianna wore glasses and braces and had hair like Little Orphan Annie’s. And of course there was me. Naturally, Claire intended that we all bring dates. But she did tell us that her brother and a bunch of his friends were coming, which was a diplomatic way of saying that there would be at least some boys on the premises.
After lunch on Wednesday I went down to my locker to change books for my next class. I stood alone, sifting through the debris in the bottom of the locker, searching for my German vocabulary notebook.
‘Where were you in history class today?’
I looked up.
His name was Paul Krueger. I didn’t know him well because the only class I had with him was history and he sat across the room. All I knew for sure about him was that he was reckoned to be a whizz kid in physics. Otherwise, he was an ordinary sort of boy with brown, wavy hair and a lumpish build, like a wrestler’s.
‘I was down at the counsellor’s office. Miss Harrich is always hassling me about college applications.’
Shifting his books from one arm to the other, he leaned back against the locker next to mine. ‘Too bad you got her. I got Mr Perryman. He’s not so bad.’
‘Yeah. It’s because my last name begins with O.’
‘Yeah. Mine begins with K.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Silence. We both looked away.
‘Luckiest kids are those with last names starting with S, because they get Mr Kent. He’s really nice. I know. My friend Bob’s got him.’
