Sweet Water

  I started at the beginning.

  9/10/59. Went into Boston with Cynthia Blackwell and bought this book—we’ve decided to record our fascinating lives. Let’s see how long this resolution lasts.

  Trees turning already—I can’t get used to it. All settled into Merton with three very nice girls for roommates, Nancy Dew the only one with any life in her. Taking Eng Lit 1820–1914, art history, bio, political science with Connelly (“Let us consider, ladies, the Negro question”). The sophomoric cattle roundups have begun—mixer tonight at 8. Mary and Helen are all aquiver. Not me—never again.

  Turning the pages, I found that the handwriting changed from year to year. The early entries were large and loopy; later the script darkened, condensed. As time went by—′60, ‘62, ‘63—my mother confided in her diary only periodically. On June 20, 1962, she had written:

  What kind of people go to Boston—or, worse, stay in Boston—for their honeymoon? A poor graduate student with a thesis to finish and an art teacher with evening classes to lead. Ed promises that someday we’ll do it right, but I assure him this is fine with me. We’re booked into a bed-and-breakfast with a private bath for a three-day weekend; no students can drop by, no parents can call—it’s heaven.

  Flipping ahead to the year I was born, I found this entry.

  3/18/64. I’m convinced that Cassandra is trying to talk to us, the way dolphins do. Ed’s skeptical—but I’m certain she’s a genius. She’s also vain—loves to look at herself in the mirror.

  I read somewhere that babies can’t see colors in the early months, so I’ve been making black-and-white collages and putting them up on the walls around her crib. I want to do everything right. I want her life to be perfect. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we pulled it off?

  I turned to the final entry. The writing was cramped. I had to look twice to believe it: it was dated the day she died.

  13 May 67. Ed, where are you? Mother and Daddy are fighting and everything’s awful. I was in the kitchen a while ago kneading bread, and I could hear them upstairs—I’ve never heard him cry—he sounded hysterical, practically incoherent, shouting “You killed her—you knew, so you killed her—” and she wasn’t saying a word. Afterwards I heard a door slam and his footsteps on the stairs. He came into the kitchen with his hat on, wiping his face with his hand, saying that his car had a flat and could he borrow the bus? What could I say? I said, “Do you really think you should be driving right now?” and he gave me this look—angry, desperate, I don’t know how to describe it, more naked than you’d want to see—and he said, “Ellen, don’t make me explain.” I asked him what I could do and he said there was nothing anybody could do. So I said he could take the bus, but then I remembered the Vietnam meeting I want to go to later tonight, so I went running out to catch him. He doesn’t like that stuff, so I didn’t tell him the specifics; I just asked him to be back by 8:00 to give me a ride. He didn’t even turn around, just put his hand up and left.

  She’s still up there, and I’m down here writing this, and it’s strange, I feel like every thought in my head is magnified a thousand times. I can hear her pacing around. She must know that I heard. This tension is unbearable.

  Since I’ve been here it’s been just terrible between them, the worst I’ve ever seen. Now he’s blaming her for what happened to Mrs. Davies—it has to be her, who else could it be? But why? What’s wrong with him? What happened?

  I put the diary down and sat very still for a minute. My heart was thumping against my chest. I reached into the box, pulling out and unfolding a yellowed clipping: “FATAL CRASH ON ROUTE 6,” with a fuzzy photograph of the mangled bus turned over on its side.

  A 27-year-old woman was killed instantly last night when the van she was a passenger in skidded out of control on a rain-slicked stretch of Route 6. Ellen C. Simon was pronounced dead on arrival at 6:07 a.m. at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Athens. The driver of the van, Amory Clyde, the victim’s father, was treated for minor injuries and released. Clyde is President of the Whitfield Mill in Sweetwater.

  Mrs. Simon, a graduate of East Sweetwater High School and Wellesley College, worked part-time as an art instructor at Boston University. She leaves behind a husband, Edgar, and a daughter, Cassandra, 3. She is also survived by her father, her mother Constance Clyde, her brother Horace Clyde and sister Elaine Burns.

  Funeral services will be held at Cease Funeral Home on May 16 at 2 p.m.

  I picked up another clipping, “LOCAL WOMAN DROWNS AT SWIMMING HOLE,” which was brief and vague, and then I leafed through the letters my grandmother had saved, all written by her, each one a carefully worded accusation of treachery and betrayal. One, I saw, was addressed to May Ford.

  I don’t know if anything is going on between you and Amory, but it’s perfectly obvious that you’d like there to be. Don’t pretend to be my friend, and don’t for a minute think you’re being discreet. One thing I’m certain of, May, is that you’ll never find what you want. You’ll never be happy. And I feel pity for you, but I’m not sorry.

  At the bottom of the pile I found a note on rose-tinted stationery, dated May 1940, written in a different hand. “Dearest Amory,” it read:

  Until last week I’d given up hope of ever being happy. Now all I think about is you. I hear the whistle blow at the mill and wonder who you’re with, what you’re doing when we’re not together. I get crazy jealous. When Frank comes home from work I endure hearing the details of his day just to get word of you. I think of your fingers on the keys of my piano, “Mood Indigo”—your soft voice making those sad words poetry.

  You’ve told me this is all I can expect, and I accept it. But I want you to know that I’d leave all I have—all of it—in a second, to be with you. If only we had met three years ago!

  I am—and always will be—thinking of you. Bryce.

  I folded the note, thinking about what Clyde had said: You can look for the answer, but there isn’t one. Whatever you think you know, you’re better off to forget. I remembered Horace telling me, We don’t talk about what happened. I picked up the newspaper clipping about Bryce’s death: “The accident took place on the property of Mrs. Constance Clyde, Mrs. Davies’ swimming companion.”

  I went through all the letters again, but Bryce’s was the only one addressed to Amory. As I started to put them away I noticed a long silver pin in the bottom of the box. Holding it up to the light, I twirled it around slowly. The head, large and distinctive, gleamed gray-pink and silvery, mother-of-pearl. I studied it for a moment and then put it back, replacing the letters and tattered clippings as I found them.

  Moving the box aside, I sat back against the wall. Now that there was room for him, Blue jumped up on the bed and started licking my face. I pushed him away, then pulled him close, stroking his head.

  I thought of my mother downstairs in the kitchen, twenty-seven years old, rolling up her sleeves to knead dough on a floured board, counting one, two, three, four. She is standing very still, cocking her head to listen—You killed her, you knew, so you killed her—and then she hears the crying, the feet thudding on the steps. When her father comes in to ask for the keys, his eyes are red and watery, his hands shaky, his body bowed in the doorway.

  I imagined them hours later, alone in that bus on a narrow back road. The night is dark and cool and rainy; the pavement is slick. The car weaves back and forth across the road, scraping tree branches; wet leaves slap across the windshield. Gripping the passenger’s seat, she asks him, Daddy, she begs, Daddy, please stop and let me drive.

  Ellen, he says, don’t make me explain.

  I picked through the bundle of clothing Troy had found in the basement. A short yellow skirt, a torn long-sleeved patterned blouse, a milk-colored bra. I stripped out of my clothes and tried the pieces one by one, flimsy fragments of fabric that smelled faintly of mold. The bra was too small; it didn’t fit around my back. I could get the skirt over my hips and zip it almost all the way, and the blouse, with its jagged rip down the side, buttoned easil
y. In the mirror above my dresser I looked awkward and gangly, my washed-out features overwhelmed by the faded geometric pattern of the blouse.

  My glance fell on a small, curled color photo propped against the mirror. My dad, young and scruffy, was standing behind my mother with an intense look on his face, his wiry arms draped over her thin shoulders. My mother wore that familiar lime-green dress and a detached, ironic smile. Her pose was cool, and her eyes were bright and clear. I watched my reflection rub the wispy blouse, smooth the textured skirt, touch the rents and the rust-colored streaks splashed across the material. Bloodstains, I realized suddenly. These were my mother’s clothes. These were the clothes she died in.

  In the car my grandfather is muttering to himself, cursing, his hands unsteady on the steering wheel as my mother pleads with him: Daddy, let’s go back, these roads are dangerous at night, her eyes open wide in alarm. All at once, the back right tire thumps into a ditch, slamming her head against the seat, knocking her knuckles against the side window. He turns the wheel sharply to the left, straight toward a tree, then violently to the right. She is screaming, or maybe she’s too scared to move or cry out, her hands up in front of her face. I can see him hunched forward, his chest pressed against the wheel, choking out something she strains to hear. You killed her—you knew, so you killed her—and all she can say is No—

  Wh en I think about it now it’s funny that Amory acted like he was so worried about my driving but didn’t even pretend to be concerned about the reservoir a half mile from the house on our property where I spent so many afternoons alone. The kids had used it as a swimming hole for years; when they were little I’d pack picnic lunches and lead them, single file and barefoot, down a path Jeb had cut through tall grass and a short stretch of woods. I’d sit on a large rock and sew or read magazines while they splashed around. Sometimes I’d stick my toes in. I had never learned to swim, but for some reason we didn’t worry about that, and nothing ever happened to any of them. But when Horace got old enough he got it in his head to teach me.

  I was afraid of the water, the cold blank surface of it giving no clue as to its depth, but nothing I could say would dissuade him. So I went to Carole’s Fashions and purchased a swimming costume—blue-striped with yellow flowers—and a matching robe, and very gently, very slowly, he coaxed me in and taught me to float. I’d lie on my back in three feet of water looking up at the heavy green leaves hanging over us, the blue sky with veins of white running through it, and Horace would say, “Relax, Ma, stretch into it, keep your chin up, weightless, weightless.” When I mastered that, he taught me the breast stroke and the crawl, and then it hardly seemed possible that I could have spent so many years stranded on the rocks.

  For a long time Horace wouldn’t let me swim by myself. He showed me where to steer clear of jagged outcroppings and made me promise to keep away from the whirlpool by the boulder. “One hundred feet deep right here,” Horace told me, standing on top of the boulder and pointing down. “If you get caught in the slide of that funnel it’ll be near impossible to get back out.” He showed me how to watch for mud-colored moccasins, which swim with the current and surface in the sun. He bought me a whistle to wear around my neck, to alert Jeb or Lattie up at the house if I was out too deep and got tired, or got bitten. I told him it was a silly idea: who’d have the presence of mind to blow a whistle when they were drowning, and what chance would they have of being heard anyway? But he said it would make him feel better, so I wore it.

  As long as Horace was living at home he went to the reservoir with me or made sure someone else did. But after he left for college and Ellen went north and Elaine got married, I was free to do as I pleased. Some days I’d take my lunch and go down to the rocks and never even step in. I’d just sit and watch the way the leaves twirled on the glassy surface like hurricane patterns on the weather report, the way the wind ruffled the water like a shirred dress.

  I was there by myself on the day JFK was shot. It was near the end of November, too cold to swim, but I was sitting on a blanket in a chiffon scarf and a sweater, writing a letter to Ellen. The whistle blasted at the mill and it wasn’t lunchtime, so I knew something was wrong. I jumped up, scared to death. All I could think as I hurried along the narrow path was that Amory was hurt and I needed to reach him as quickly as I could. When I got home I insisted that Jeb drive me to the mill to see for myself.

  I arrived to find the workers listening to the radio, wiping tears from their eyes, and I knew the whistle had nothing to do with Amory. My husband was not hurt; in fact, he was nowhere to be found. Martha, his lazy, well-fed secretary, said he’d left a few hours ago for an appointment and probably wouldn’t be back. There was nothing in his appointment book, but that didn’t mean much, she said. And of course it was fine with her; she got to sit at her desk and read magazines until quitting time.

  “Where is he, Martha?” I demanded. “The President of the United States has died and I need to know where my husband is.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Mrs. Clyde. I honestly have no idea.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Twitching her nose like a fat little rabbit, she sat forward and stared at me. “If I knew I would tell you, but I don’t, so I can’t,” she said. Her voice was testy, but there was no malice in it, and I thought I could detect a note of pity. Amory had chosen wisely; she’d be loyal to the last.

  There were plenty of these times when I’d run up against the obvious. It was almost as though people were daring me to say it: “He’s with another woman, isn’t he? He’s not at a meeting at all. He’s in bed at some hideaway on the other side of town.” When Horace cut his first teeth; when the telegram arrived from my mother—“Your father is dead. Come at once”; when the brains of the President of our country fell into the lap of his wife. When, on a warm and sunny day in 1967, Bryce Davies dived off a flat-topped boulder into the whirling depths of the reservoir on his property and never made it up for air.

  I cannot recall a time, in all those years, when Bryce and I weren’t friends. When I found that first letter in my husband’s pocket, I did indeed confront him about it, but he took me by the shoulders and very kindly and patiently told me that it’s a hard reality of life, but sooner or later the wife of a successful man has to face the fact that a lot of women out there are going to find him attractive and are going to make up all kinds of malicious lies to try to get their way. He said he purposely left that letter there as an indication of the lengths some gals would go.

  “Now, I’m not judging her,” he said. “Only God can do that. But I can surely understand if you choose not to be friends with her anymore.”

  “But she’s the best friend I’ve got,” I said.

  “Evidently not,” he pointed out. “And besides, there are other fish in the sea. I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

  That made me suspicious. I may not have known much about the world, but I had learned that there’s often a big gap between what people say and what they believe. When he said she was a ruthless back-stabber who only befriended me in a futile attempt to get closer to him, I was willing to concede that some of that might be true. But I also knew that my friendship with Bryce made Amory uneasy; he was afraid one would tell the other too much and he’d be caught in the middle with nowhere to turn. It would be much more convenient for him to keep us separate.

  So Bryce and I stayed friends. I wrote her that letter to help me calm down, and then I took her letter and mine and sealed them in my box, and that was the end of it. We watched our children grow up together, sitting on the porch or over on her veranda, making up games for them to play, sewing costumes for school. And some afternoons I wouldn’t see her and I’d imagine that she was with him, sneaking down a back road, his arm around her waist, the wind in her long black hair.

  Oh, it was terrible; it was intolerable. But I had learned to live with it the way I’d learned to live with other things, like the fact that I’d probably never be a teacher again,
or that Amory would never really know how to show me he loved me, or that I’d probably never have the guts to find a man who could. After a while it got so that when I knew and she knew he was off with someone else I almost felt sorry for her, as if she was the one he was being unfaithful to. Without either of us saying a word, I could tell she’d grown to care for him almost as much as I did. I loved him for what we’d had together long ago, for what we’d been through over the years, for the day-to-day intimacies we shared as husband and wife. She loved him, I’m sure, because he was powerful, her husband’s boss, because he made her feel young and daring and free, because he thought she was exotic and told her so.

  But all that was years before. By 1967 we had weathered Taylor’s pregnancy at age sixteen and her elopement with a local garage mechanic, Ellen’s move up north and marriage to a Jewish graduate student, a plant closing, a strike, the births of six grandchildren. I thought it was long over between them. I thought we were old. So when I found that hairpin in his breast pocket—a Thursday morning, rain falling as soft as cats’ paws outside the bedroom window onto the roof—I felt a pain in my chest as if she’d stuck it in me. I held the pin to the light and looked at it closely: it was fairly ordinary, as hairpins go, except for the luminous quality of the head. I have never seen another one like it. I thought of her taking her hair down while we were talking, placing the pin between her lips while she made a chignon, and then carelessly, gracelessly, inserting the pin again to hold it together. There was no question that it was hers; I’d seen her wearing it hundreds of times. Did he take it as a keepsake? Did she put it there for him to find? It didn’t much matter. What mattered to me was that I thought it was over and it wasn’t, and the wounds I thought had healed were as raw, as painful, as the first time I suspected.