Drowning Ruth

  Nothing else did happen, for weeks it seemed, until I was used to his fingers on my skin and, for all my shyness, I couldn't help tilting my chin up, ready for more, and then he put his fingertip just along my collarbone, just inside the edge of my dress, and then he kissed me, as light and melting and unsatisfying as spun sugar.

  When he told me he loved me, I laughed. Not in a mean way, but lightly, warning myself really, more than him, not to take it too seriously. You have to be careful with your feelings, I think. It's a mistake to let them go just because they're summoned. But, like Mathilda, Clement was very good at getting his way. It wasn't too long before I gave in and let myself believe him, let myself love him back. It seemed like a sure thing. It felt just like it was supposed to. I began to think about what would happen sooner or later; I imagined the house with the spreading elm in the front yard, the sunny kitchen and the clean, white linens, the children, four or five, at least, with his rosy cheeks and my almond eyes. Of course, I would miss my work, but I was secretly a little pleased to see my proper course lay elsewhere.

  I told him about the farm and the lake. I told him how fresh and cool it all was in the summer, how clear and sparkling in the winter. I might have given the impression that every day there was a picnic, because I wanted to please him. And I suppose I wanted to please myself. It was a relief to pretend that everything was just as it should be, picture perfect, waiting for me to come home. I dreamed of the summer afternoon when we would row out to my island together. I imagined him leaping from the water like a pike, and how I would splash him and how he would splash me, and then how he would wrap his arms around me and pull me under the waves with him.

  But I should have known better, for there were clues, if I'd cared to see them. One night we planned to go to Chicago, which usually meant dancing. I waited on the glider on the front porch, my hands in a sealskin muff.

  “Where're you off to, all dolled up?” Thea Martins asked, passing me on her way out. She had a boyfriend who lived on the next block, and he was always asking her to meet him somewhere or other instead of picking her up like a proper date.

  “Oh, wherever he takes me, I guess.” Whenever you told Thea where you were going, she claimed to have been somewhere better the week before.

  “Well, have a good time.” She waved her hand behind her head as she hurried down the stairs.

  Two men went in to pick up their dates, and then five girls came out together, all laughing, their breath making little clouds. My new cloth dancing slippers were pretty, but hardly appropriate for waiting outdoors in late October. I paced the porch a few times and then walked a few yards down the street in the direction from which Clement always came.

  He lived on the east side, I knew that, although I realized I didn't know where exactly.

  I told myself that if I went inside for a few moments, maybe ran upstairs to change my hankie, he would have come.

  Eliza was lying on her bed, rereading Jennie Gerhardt. “Call his office,” she said. “He's probably doing a deal.” She said the words “doing a deal” disparagingly. She didn't like Clement's approach to business, the way he threw himself behind every new idea. She thought he ought to stick to one thing, tried and true. She also disapproved of the champagne.

  We found the number he'd given me, and I went downstairs to use the telephone. I let it ring twenty times. Then I called again and let it ring twenty more. He's probably just down the hall, I thought. What if he answered just as I hung up? I called again and let it ring thirty times.

  Eliza shut her book. “Get something to eat with me.”

  But I couldn't. How awful it would be when he showed up, if I wasn't there.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Eliza said when she got back from her supper and found me still sitting by the window in our room. “You must be starving.”

  “No, I had a sandwich,” I lied. I took off my new shoes and put them away in the closet.

  “Well, I'm going to bed,” she said. “There's no sense sitting up like this.”

  Before she turned out the light, Eliza said kindly, “You probably got the date wrong.” But we both knew I hadn't. When I heard her breathing deeply, I couldn't help myself. I got out of bed and went back to my chair by the window, and that's where I finally fell asleep.

  All that worry, wasted. The next afternoon Thea knocked on the door to our room.

  “Visitor for you downstairs,” she said and winked. “Looks to me like someone's sorry.”

  My cheeks went hot, and I stepped in front of the mirror for a moment.

  “You look fine,” Eliza said without glancing up from her book.

  He was standing in the parlor, holding a large bunch of lavender tulips in front of his face. Those were expensive flowers in October. “I'm sorry, Amy,” he said, peeking around them, pretending to be afraid of how I might look or what I might say.

  “It's only that I thought you might have been hurt,” I said, taking the flowers from him, “or worse.” Although those were not, in truth, the only possibilities I had feared.

  “It was an emergency,” he said. “I'm an investor in a lead mine in Hazel Green, you know, and I had to go out there to look things over. The country needs lead now. I was doing my patriotic duty.”

  “But couldn't you have called?”

  “And waked the whole house? You wouldn't want that.”

  “Next time,” I said, “I'll sit right by the phone and pick it up, first ring. Then I won't worry you've been in an accident.”

  “No,” he said, “I don't like the idea of your having to wait up. It isn't healthy. And you know, sometimes these meetings go so late, you can't imagine. And there isn't always a phone, Amy. That's the way my business is. I've got to go where the opportunity is. You understand that, don't you? You'll forgive me, won't you? That's a good girl.”

  With a war on, you see, people had to do things they wouldn't otherwise. That's what I told Eliza.

  “Why isn't he in France,” she asked, “if he's so crazy about patriotic duty?”

  I knew how to answer that. One of those nights as we drove and drove, he'd told me how he'd tried to join more than a year before, that very first summer. Although he was nearly forty, he'd stood in line with the young fellows who could imagine nothing better to do with their youth, and the doctor had turned him away.

  “I guess my heart's not what it should be,” he said. “They said it's because I had rheumatic fever once.”

  He looked away from me, out over the dark fields, as he told me this, as though it were a difficult thing to admit. It made me love him more to think that, while he knew so much and could do so much, he was fragile inside.

  The war ended, but Clement was still busy. The next time he stood me up, he'd been doing a real estate deal in Oshkosh. “You've got to stay and have a drink, or they'll think you've cheated them,” he said, and he lay a dozen apricot-colored roses in my arms. What he said seemed likely enough. What did I know about business?

  “Roses should be red,” Eliza said, but what did she know about roses?

  “Anyone can find a red rose,” I said, arranging them as well as I could in my tooth cup. “These are special. They bring them by train all the way from New York.” I had to prop them against the wall to keep the cup from tipping over, but they made the mustard of our room seem a rich, warm gold and they lasted almost a week.

  The time after that I left the porch when an hour had passed and had a bowl of soup in the drugstore and then took myself to a movie. It was so difficult, always having to explain to Eliza.

  What was a night waiting here or there? It wasn't as if I had anything better to do. And he did. He had important things to do, and if, now and again, he couldn't leave them just to have a good time with me, well, how could I complain? I knew he would rather have been with me. He loved me so much, you see. That's what he said, and it made me so happy to believe it was true.

  And then the United States Army decided it wanted to see the vacuum box. He ran f
rom his car up the walk that evening and bounded up the stairs. “I'm in, Amy! In!”

  He wrapped me in his arms and swung me around. The cloud of breath that issued from his mouth smelled faintly of gin.

  I tipped my head back and laughed. He was so excited, he'd forgotten to give me the pink carnations he held. I tugged at them playfully, and he laughed, too, and released them.

  “In where?” I asked it so casually, expecting to hear about another partnership I wouldn't understand, another investment with the “smartest fellows” he'd ever met, an invention that did something I didn't know needed doing. I buried my nose in the flowers, such a sweet scent.

  “In the Army!” he said. “They're going to use me, send me to Washington, maybe to France! Say, I bet you can't guess why.”

  “But the war's over,” I said. I sat down again on the glider, and he sat beside me.

  “I know, it's funny, isn't it? The war's over, and now the Army wants me. But you haven't guessed why,” he said, and he put his arms around me and began to nuzzle my ear.

  “Clement!” I pushed him away, embarrassed.

  “Well, aren't you going to guess?” He looked hurt.

  I tried to make it up to him, tried to come up with some reasonable or at least amusing answer, but my head was buzzing. My fingers picked absently at the string around the flower stems. I couldn't think.

  “I can't guess,” I said finally. “Tell me.”

  “They want the vacuum box! Isn't that amazing? They want to test it in Washington and then, if they like it, I'll help 'em. We'll take it everywhere, all over the country and to Europe too! I can't believe it.” He was pacing back and forth on the porch now, his shoes squeaking against patches of hard-packed snow. “Here, let me help you with that,” he said, producing a silver pocketknife and opening the blade. But he could not hold still long enough to cut the string. He gave the knife to me and began to pace again. “But I can believe it,” he said, hammering the words down with conviction. “I can believe it. Because I know that this is a great thing, an important thing.” He turned to me again, put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me.

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When do you go?”

  “In a week. There's hardly time to get everything together.” He stopped, then, and seemed finally to sense my mood. “So tonight,” he said, “you'll celebrate with me, won't you?” He took my hand and pulled me gently to my feet and drew me against his coat. He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It may be our last night for a long, long time.”

  A light layer of snow made the tires hiss against the road as we drove and drove that night. When he tucked his arm around my waist, I couldn't remember why I'd never before slid tight against him. All along I should have been holding on to him as tightly as if there were no tomorrow.

  We stopped at a roadhouse in Racine, where I tried my first martini, and a tavern in Kenosha, where I enjoyed my second, and another place in Winnetka, where I drank, but hardly tasted, my third.

  As he steered me toward the door of a plush Chicago hotel, a tall woman with almond eyes and a long, graceful neck, smiled dreamily at me in the glass. “Look,” I said, pointing at her, “so pretty.”

  In the room, while he rang for champagne, I thought the strangest thing. This will show them, I thought. This is what happens when they leave me all alone. It almost made me cry, thinking that. But then he hung up the phone and drew me to the window to look at all the lights, and I forgot that I was alone. Forgot entirely.

  When it was over, I was frightened, sorry. I couldn't look at him, knowing what we'd done. I couldn't look at myself. I kept my eyes on the whorls of a cabbage rose patterned in the carpet. “We shouldn't have,” I told the cabbage rose. I kept saying it over and over, sitting there on the side of the bed, bent over a pillow clutched tight over my lap. “We shouldn't have.”

  But he draped the sheet gently over my shoulder. He was so dear. He took all the blame on himself. He loved me so, he said. He couldn't help himself, he said, couldn't I understand that? He begged me to forgive him, and of course I did. I understood.

  “It's all right,” I said at last. “Of course it's all right. We'll get married now. Tomorrow morning. Or tonight, maybe even tonight, there might be someone …”

  “You know it's impossible,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he stroked my hair.

  “Well, tomorrow morning, then. Tomorrow will certainly be all right.”

  “I thought you understood,” Clement said. “I thought you knew. I'm married already.”

  Chapter Five

  Clement and Theresa Owens lived with their three children in a brick house on Prospect Avenue with high ceilings and pink globes around the new electric lights and a door knocker shaped like an angel.

  Very early Sunday morning, Clement felt the smooth skin of Amanda's thigh press against his own. He awoke suddenly and threw the blanket back.

  “What is it?” Theresa mumbled.

  “Must be those stuffed peppers you made me eat last night. I told you peppers don't sit well with me.”

  Clement took himself downstairs to recover.

  Dawn found him in the kitchen, sipping coffee and staring out at the ripening day. A light was on in the big house next door, and occasionally Clement's glance would be drawn across the strip of side lawn and through the hedge that separated his house from his neighbors'. He watched the neighbors' cook bend over to pull something from the oven and felt suddenly hungry.

  Amy had been a mistake in the end, he thought, lighting the oven. Of course, none of them were ever pleased when he broke it off. One had laughed unpleasantly, he remembered that. A couple had railed, but most cried. He was good with tears. He wasn't hardhearted. He felt bad for them. But they all knew as well as he did that the fun had to end sometime. Sometimes he wasn't even the one to call it off. He didn't like when that happened, but he never made a fuss—a lady had to consider her own situation. But poor Amy. Thinking he would marry her! Where had she got that idea? Hadn't he been perfectly clear all along? Well, if not perfectly clear, clear enough for any reasonable person to see what was what. He sighed, feeling vaguely that she had wronged him with her expectations, and slid two thick slices of bread into the oven to toast.

  He'd been hoping to see her again, obviously. How else explain what he'd done, convincing Theresa that this particular lake near this particular town was the only possible place to build a summer house? Why a summer house at all, for that matter? He swallowed some coffee and winced at the bitterness.

  Of course, it hadn't been like that exactly, he reminded himself, spooning sugar into his cup. He wasn't such a fool as that. He had simply gone to Nagawaukee one day out of idle curiosity, or so he told himself, thinking he would take a look at the place she'd told him so much about. Nothing wrong with looking, was there? And then, well, anyone with imagination could see the possibilities. Advertising copy had run through his head—the pretty lakes strung together like sapphires, or nestled like robin's eggs among the green hills. In a nearby town there was even a spa.

  Clement checked his toast, toffee-colored on one side, perfect. He turned the slices over and shut the oven door, careful not to make noise. The Schumachers had bought a place out there and so had the Koches and the Steinmans. Brewers and bankers and lumber barons were buying and building all over the area. Once he'd shown Theresa the fieldstone mansion the Schumachers had built on Lake La Belle, she was willing to let him have the money for several choice plots, long stretches of lakefront property that up until now had been wasted on cows. Reselling this land to people who liked the idea of owning an “estate,” a place where they could be connected to the salt of the earth, the fresh, open air, and an aquatic playground, would be simple. He would keep some of it, some to develop, some to rent—there was no reason why only those who could afford to buy should have access to such a paradise—and he had chosen one twelve-acre plot for his family.

  He'd got a deal on that partic
ular site, since the slope on the property that bordered the lake was alarmingly steep and the only spot for a house was a little too close to the water. And then, too, there were more fashionable lakes and more desirable locations even on Nagawaukee itself. But those drawbacks pleased him—it never made sense to buy at the top. You made money only when you could see what others couldn't. And he could see that spread. He would put the land to work—which was another reason not to pick the sort of neighborhood where enterprise was frowned upon. He planned to do some farming, maybe produce cheese—some people in Janesville were having excellent luck with a white cheddar—or raise angora goats. And he planned to build an impressive house.

  His idea was a sort of Greek temple, with white pillars rising from the wide front porch to the roof. Because of the hill, the house would have to be narrow, but that was no matter since no one would see it from the side anyway. It was the facade that counted, and the facade would be grand. He would put a white lattice gazebo on the front lawn, and friends would gather there—men in cream-colored suits and women with parasols, their gauzy summer dresses rippling in the breeze off the lake.

  The architect had tried to talk him into something more modest, something retiring in browns and greens, a Swiss chalet set back in the woods, furnished in rustic pine. “Perhaps,” the architect had suggested, “you might make some of the furniture yourself.” Clement was not one to scoff at a suggestion. He liked the notion of himself sawing through the sweet-smelling wood, building fine, sturdy pieces his family would wear smooth for generations. He even went so far as to consult a man at the lumberyard, who sketched a small chest and made him a list of wood and tools. And then one afternoon he took his youngest son, Arthur, into the backyard for company, and managed to cut the bottom of the chest and two sides, before ruining three boards and gashing his index finger.

  He told the architect he would not be making his own furniture and insisted on his original plan. What good was a house people couldn't see? Theresa agreed. In fact, she'd had ideas far better than the architect's to Clement's mind. She understood the purpose of the house, the way the wind had to sing through it from end to end, the way the porch had to invite picnickers in off the lake at noon and command the sunset at the cocktail hour. She'd suggested the house be three stories, with spacious attics, as well. She sketched the kitchen in a separate building, connected to the dining room by a breezeway to keep the main house cool. She insisted they also buy two lots to the east, so as to have plenty of space for a boathouse and land for Maynard or Avis or Arthur, maybe all three, to build houses for themselves. That was the way people did it, she said. He knew what she meant by “people”—the kind of people who would be putting him up for their clubs.