Drowning Ruth

She'd not even noticed Clement rising, but he was standing now. No, he was already moving, draping the blue robe over his sun-browned skin as he quickly covered the distance to the beach.

  “Run, Imogene, run,” Amanda found herself whispering from her ridiculous position on the floor of the boat.

  He was close to the girl now. Amanda could hear in her mind the voice, smooth as expensive whiskey, and the courtly inflection of his words as he asked if he might carry her flowers. She saw him extend his hand, and then she saw Imogene take it and rise from the arcing green leaves. He invited her to walk, ushering her the way he wished her to go with one hand caressing the air just behind her back. Amanda knew how it was, understood exactly what was happening, even from where she lay with the binoculars pressed so tightly to her eyes that for some seconds she could see only red.

  Imogene and Clement climbed the hill, enjoying their time together, laughing, turning to face one another. At the foot of the stairs he laid the flowers in her arms, and they parted, he to go right toward the kitchen, she to go up to the main entrance, but he stopped after taking one step. He turned and followed her with his eyes, watching the way her skirt swung around her knees as she skipped up the stairs.

  Meanwhile, Ruth continued to struggle at Brown's.

  “Tell us about Imogene, Ruth,” Lillian begged. “What did she have for lunch yesterday?”

  “I don't see why the great Imogene can never spare a moment to tell us herself,” Myrtle complained. “The way Ruth tells it, it'll never be half as interesting.”

  She was right—Ruth couldn't tell it. She tried to repeat what Imogene had said about the house and Mrs. Owens for them. She described the carpets and the view of the lake, the committees, the pillars, the little sandwiches and even the garnish, but it all came out sounding dull and flat.

  Everything felt dull and flat to Ruth. The air had freshened slightly that morning, signaling the end of summer, but to Ruth the coolness was more sad than invigorating. The morning at Brown's, always frustrating, was, without Imogene, also depressing and tedious. She noticed the stains and scuffs on the pale yellow walls and the dead flies heaped on the windowsills.

  “Well, the best part,” Myrtle said, “is that sometimes she's all alone in that big house with that handsome boy. I know what I'd do.”

  “Imogene,” Ruth said, “is nothing like you, Myrtle.”

  Imogene was, however, paying even more attention to her appearance than usual, trying all the scents Baecke's stocked and being careful never to wear the same dress twice in one week. Fond as she was of the notion of herself and Ruth running their own advertising agency, now that she was working for Theresa Owens, she was no longer so naive as to think they could pull it off. The step she'd always glossed over in her imagination—arranging the meetings with important men and smart women—was both crucial and impossible. Those sorts of people would never listen to her and Ruth.

  She'd met some of them in Mrs. Owens's living room. They thanked her when she handed them her neatly typed minutes. They even asked her opinion once in a while, because they liked her—of course they liked her, everyone did—but she would never be one of them.

  Maybe if she were coldly ambitious. Maybe if she were wickedly clever. Maybe if she were a college graduate, she might be able to impress them. But she was none of these things. Imogene was a fair judge of herself. She knew she was reasonably bright, unwaveringly loyal and confident. She knew she had perseverance, good looks and even charm. And she knew that these qualities alone did not add up to a brilliant career. They would, however, make for an excellent wife, given the right husband.

  When they'd first met at the dance, Imogene had seen Arthur more as an adjunct to Bobby Hanser than as a man onto himself. She'd hoped, in fact, that Ruth would like him when she'd suggested they dance; maybe then the four of them might eventually double, since she realized her acceptance into Bobby's crowd wouldn't give her much happiness if Ruth wasn't admitted too. But his solicitousness with Ruth that night impressed her.

  Once she became Theresa's secretary, he joked with her around the house and often interrupted her work to ask for her help with projects of his own. He'd constructed an enormous scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge in the sunroom, which to her indicated remarkable talent, but pieces always needed reattaching, and she'd have to hold two bits together while he applied the glue. She decided he had a particularly winning smile, more quirky and open than Bobby's. Behind his glasses, his eyes, she determined, were exceptionally soulful. Obviously he had a promising future and an excellent family. Soon enough the pleasure of going to work was in the anticipation and thrill of his appearance in the office doorway, and soon after that she stopped driving the Ford when she knew he'd be there, and looked forward all day to the evening, when he would give her a ride home in his Pontiac coupe.

  Her plan to become Mrs. Arthur Owens was going very well, but it was difficult to include Ruth, although Imogene tried. “Last night he took me sailing to watch the sunset. It's like you're a gull, Ruth, so quiet and glidey. Next time I'll tell him we have to take you.”

  “That's all right,” Ruth said. She turned on the radio behind the bait shop counter and fiddled with the tuner.

  “But I want you to come. I want you to like him.”

  “I like him.”

  “We're interested in the same things—travel and music. And he loved The Awful Truth—remember how much I liked that movie? He's teaching me some of the newest swing steps, too. Here, I'll show you, so we can all do them next Friday.”

  Ruth followed Imogene's steps, but she said, “You've never traveled anywhere. You've never even been to Chicago.”

  “I want to, though, that's the important thing.”

  Ruth stopped dancing. “We'll go to Chicago,” she said pointedly, “when we start our advertising agency.” She had to say it. She had to make Imogene admit she was spoiling everything, not just stand aside and let her go, as if there'd never been any promises.

  Imogene sighed. “I know. I know I said I'd do that with you.”

  “You wanted to do it! You made me go to Brown's and now you're not even there anymore!”

  “I know. I did.” Imogene went behind the counter and hoisted herself onto the stool. She put her head in her hands for a moment and then looked up again at Ruth. “The thing is, now I know that was just a game, just a childish fantasy.”

  How about sailing to watch the sunset? Ruth thought. That even sounded like a silly nursery rhyme.

  “Ruth, no one's going to buy ideas from us. We'd work and work, if we could even get jobs …”

  “I'm sure we could get jobs!”

  “All right.” Imogene raised her hands. “Yes, I guess we could get jobs. Mrs. Owens said she could get something for me in Chicago if I wanted it. Not in advertising, but a job.”

  Ruth said nothing.

  Imogene ran her fingers over the keys of the cash register. “But,” she said, “I guess I don't want to go anymore. You have to understand. I can't help how I feel about him. I would understand,” she added, “if it were you.”

  You wouldn't have to understand, Ruth thought, because I'd always put you first. And anyway, it wouldn't be me. But she said, “I know. I do understand.”

  “But, Ruth,” Imogene said, leaning over the counter to take Ruth's hands, “I want us to do things together, all three. You like him, don't you? I know he likes you. Why can't we all three be friends?”

  Ruth knew it didn't work that way, and she'd no desire even to see Arthur again after her embarrassing night on the boat, but after all, there was Imogene, looking so hopeful and eager. “ We can,” she said. “Of course we can, if that's what you want.”

  Imogene and Arthur began to pick Ruth up at Brown's at the end of the day, and they'd all go over to Frederick's Pharmacy for malts. Arthur lent Ruth books, and they'd talk about them.

  “Did you like The Minister's Charge?”

  “I don't know. I liked it up until the end. Then it was just to
o awful.”

  “You didn't think he should have married Statira?”

  “No, I think he made a terrible mistake. To be trapped with one woman when he really loves another? It's wrong.”

  “But isn't he right to take responsibility for leading her on? He certainly behaved as if he meant to marry her, even after he knew he loved Jessie better.”

  Ruth sighed. “I guess I admire him for it, but it still seems a high price to pay for an innocent mistake. I mean, he thought he loved her. At first.”

  “A high price? But she isn't so bad, is she?”

  “No, of course not, but that's the other problem, what he's doing to her. After all, what makes him think he's so special? He's robbing her of any chance to find someone who really loves her. Does he think no one else will? He loved her once.”

  “You remind me of Jessie.”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head and bent over her straw, blushing. “I'm nothing like Jessie.”

  “Who's Jessie?” Imogene asked, sliding onto her stool. She'd run out to examine a hat in Jackson's next door, while they waited for their malts.

  “She's a bohemian,” Arthur told her. “An artist. She gives up the hero when she finds out another woman loved him first.”

  “Does he love her?”

  “Certainly. She's exactly what he's been looking for his whole life.”

  “Then she's a fool,” Imogene said. “All's fair in love and war.”

  “You don't think some things are more important than love?” Ruth asked.

  “No. Nothing,” Imogene said. She frowned at her malt. “I probably shouldn't drink this.”

  “I hope you're not listening to my mother's crazy ideas,” Arthur said.

  “I was, but if you think I look all right …”

  “ ‘All right'? Sure,” he said, smiling, “you look all right.”

  Arthur's car was a two-seater, but they fitted three in easily with Imogene leaning against Arthur's shoulder and Ruth wedged against the door. Amanda, waiting at the kitchen window for Ruth to come home, watched the girl nearly spill onto the drive when the car stopped.

  Imogene hung out the window, waving after her. “Eight o'clock tomorrow night!” she called.

  Amanda had watched the Owens family closely enough to know the car and to guess who would be driving it. “Are they serious?” she asked later, when she'd poured coffee first in Ruth's cup and then in her own and taken her seat at the table.

  It was just the two of them now at supper, as long as Carl was away. Last spring Rudy had decided he was too old to work on the farm, but apparently not too old to marry. They'd had the ceremony in the front room. Amanda had baked the wedding cake, and Ruth had played three songs on the piano, and Rudy had moved into his wife's house in town.

  “Are who serious?”

  “Imogene and that Owens boy.”

  “I don't know.” Ruth shrugged. She often felt she had to protect Imogene from Amanda's prying questions. Why was it any of her business?

  Amanda frowned. “I would hope she'd have better judgment.”

  “There's nothing wrong with Arthur. He's the nicest boy I've ever met.” Ruth was somewhat surprised to realize she believed this. Did he really think she was like Jessie?

  Careful, Amanda told herself, it's not worth making a fuss if it turns out to be a schoolgirl fancy. Hadn't Imogene been in love with some other boy just a few weeks ago?

  “I just meant, they're only summer people,” she said. “I hope she knows there's no sense getting serious over summer people.”

  Still, she thought, this would bear watching. She felt as if someone were playing a game with her, making a move and then sitting back with a cruel smile, waiting to see what she would do in response. So far, she hadn't made the right moves. That was obvious. Whatever her intentions, in the clinch, she'd always let her instincts drive her, and her heart, as it turned out, was an idiot, not to be counted on. Here she'd been acting wrong again, even tonight, waiting behind the curtain for Ruth to come home, when it was Imogene she needed to worry about. In fact, raising Ruth was the only thing she'd done right.

  Amanda gazed across the kitchen, where Ruth was now pumping water to wash the supper dishes. Probably she'd break one; she often did, hastily rattling the plates together, paying scant attention to the work. Amanda always felt exhilarated near Ruth's wild energy, even though she cringed at the clumsiness that accompanied it. While Ruth knocked things over right and left, Amanda hadn't lost her grip on a single fragile item since she'd dropped her mother's crystal vase the day Mattie and Carl were married. Keeping things whole, she reflected, rubbing the base of her thumb, demanded a great deal of concentration.

  After Arthur took Imogene home, he drove aimlessly along the country roads. That summer, the path he'd been following, the route chosen and painstakingly marked by his parents, had forked. His brother could arrange a place for him at the bank or he could start some business of his own—his parents had made clear that their fondest desire was to finance an enterprise conceived and captained by Arthur E. Owens. But a sense that there might also exist some entirely different destination, one that he couldn't yet see but which lay just beyond the obscuring undergrowth of long habit and expectations, troubled him and kept him from moving forward. He had no idea how to hack through that foliage, nor whether whatever he uncovered would please him, but neither did he want to follow blindly the manicured course on which his feet were already set. He was restless; he felt forces massing within him, ready to propel him in whatever direction he chose, but he could not decide. He had given himself the summer to loiter, but now it was fall.

  And then there was this girl, Imogene. He felt almost as if he'd conjured her up, the way he'd met her that night and then found her, sparkling and chattering, with her quick smile and easy laugh, at his mother's desk the next week. She clearly admired him, and his mother had indicated she would approve. “Sometimes a blank slate is best,” she'd said. “There's something to be said for a girl who's open to influence.” Theresa Owens believed it was important to be broad-minded when it came to love.

  Imogene was bright and pretty and obviously ambitious. She listened to concerts on the radio to teach herself to identify composers, and she asked his mother a hundred questions about the paintings on their walls. When his mother bought her a ticket to see A Doll's House with them in Milwaukee, Imogene found a copy at the library and read it twice, and also Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck for good measure. Out of the corner of his eye, as he sat next to her in the theater, he saw her mouthing the lines. He knew it was patronizing of him, but he found her attempts to become cultured endearing. And beyond her looks and her charm, he admired her sense of certainty. She knew where she wanted to go and how to get there. It was tempting to align himself with someone like that, a woman who would take him in hand.

  Imogene's friend, however, confused him. Ever since that first night when Ruth had told him about her mother drowning, he'd wanted to say to her, “I found her. She's the lady in the ice.” That her mother had called to him through that glassy blackness, that he'd been the one to find her, to discover her blue skin and staring eyes, made him feel close to Ruth, who seemed to hold herself apart. In the drugstore he'd wanted to reach for a string of the hair that was always dripping down along her face, to twine it around his finger. At best, she looked ordinary. Her complexion was not especially clear, her eyes were too wide and her lips too narrow. Still, something reserved, even secretive, in her manner intrigued him. He was sure that she would take him somewhere he'd never been, somewhere he couldn't even imagine.

  “You drive,” Imogene said to Ruth the following evening. “I'm too jumpy. You need the practice anyway.”

  Imogene had given Ruth driving lessons the summer before, but they hadn't taken. She needed several tries to get the car moving, and she forgot to look left before she lurched into the road.

  “Don't you think he should've picked me up tonight, Ruth?”

  “But didn
't he say he'd be driving out from town? That he'd be late? He wanted to be sure you were going, didn't he?”

  “He was just being polite. Or curious. Or … I don't know, but he should take me somewhere on a real date, if he means for this to go on after he moves back to town.”

  Ruth concentrated on keeping the wheels on the road.

  “Did I tell you he gave me a four-leaf clover yesterday?”

  “No,” Ruth said dutifully. She wished this would be over one way or another, Imogene and Arthur definitely together or definitely not. She wished she never had to hear another word about him. “I hope you pressed it immediately in a book of poetry,” she said.

  Imogene buried her face in her hands and laughed. “Yes,” she admitted. “I don't know what I'm going to do if he doesn't say something soon. I think I'm in love with him, honest to God.”

  She sat up straight in the seat then and changed her tone. “What I'm thinking is I should dance first with Bobby. Then maybe with Ray. Make him wait his turn. Let him wonder a little bit. The trouble is he can see me every day of the week, if he wants to. He does see me almost every day of the week, so he doesn't realize that if he wants to keep, you know, seeing me, one of these days, he's going to have to say something.”

  Ruth was easing the car into the parking lot at the dance pavilion now. When she turned off the engine, music flooded through the open windows. It was the last dance of the summer. Already the vibrant green had begun to drain from the masses of leaves, and soon the world would draw itself into its hard shell. Even in a month's time it would be nearly impossible to remember the smothery, soft lushness of summer nights. In a month's time Arthur Owens might be gone.

  Imogene slammed the car door. “Now, Ruth,” she said, leaning on her friend to keep from tipping in her new high-heeled sandals, as they walked across the gravel, “if you see we're trying to be alone, you'll help me out, won't you? Distract Ray. You know how he loves to talk to you—he thinks you're a serious person. Or make him dance with that horrible Zita.”

  The band had switched from a fast number to something dreamy and the brilliant pavilion seemed almost to float on the dark water, if you looked at it from the right angle. Even Ruth sensed its promise as she filled her lungs with the poignant air of the coming fall.