The Memory of Running

  “No thanks.”

  She sat down at her desk. “I saw your sister about ten this morning. She wasn’t growling or anything like that.”

  “Yeah, the last day it’s gone back in there.”

  “Who?”

  “It. The . . . you know . . .”

  “The voice?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ah.” Georgina wrote something down. “Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?”

  “Huh?”

  “In the army. Did you have to kill anyone?”

  “No, I didn’t kill anybody. I never even discharged my weapon.”

  “But you got wounded.”

  “I got wounded all right,” I said. “I really got wounded. I got the Purple Heart.”

  “And now you’re home. Living at home?” Dr. Glass shifted in her seat, and the Brown University crest fell slightly between the outlined points. Did I live at home?

  “Well . . . you know . . . I’m helping my folks out with Bethany. It’s just until I’m sure they can handle things. I’m . . . you know . . . I got the Purple Heart and everything.”

  Dr. Glass smiled at me, and it was a very pretty and, I would say, girlish smile. But maybe not. “It’s all right to live at home. I lived with my parents after medical school until I got married.”

  “I would want my daughter to live with me until she got married, too,” I said, like someone with his high-school diploma posted on his forehead.

  “And Bethany lives at home because . . . ?”

  “Because of the voice. It’s a different situation with Bethany. She’s beautiful, but there’s that voice, and it does things that mess her up. It’s hard to explain. I like the way you’ve done your hair.”

  “My hair?”

  “Yeah. It’s nice. That’s a ponytail kind of thing.”

  “Not really, it’s just longish in the back.”

  “Longish. That’s what I meant.”

  “You think it’s an entirely different personality, from the perspective of, say, a division of selves? That far?”

  “Uhh . . . it’s just, I don’t know. I like it.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair.”

  “I was talking about Bethany’s voice.”

  “Oh, of course. Well, yes, yes, a . . . of selves.”

  “You’re very close to your sister, aren’t you, Mr. Ide?”

  “Yes, and it’s okay to call me Smithy.”

  “Smithy. How close?”

  “Well, she’s my big sister. Sometimes she gave me good advice about stuff, and I was always helping find her, and she’s got a wonderful beautiful voice—singing voice I mean, not the bad voice—and we talk about stuff.”

  Dr. Glass wrote down some quick thoughts on a small pile of index cards she had stacked on her desk. She leaned back on her chair. Her breasts shifted ever so slightly to the left. She didn’t speak for a while, so I did.

  “We’d . . . you know . . . well, we were interested in Pop’s baseball—he played with Socony—and we’d go and be together and talk and stuff.”

  A big cat curled up on a corner of her desk.

  “That’s Mitsi. She’s a good girl. You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Mitsi?”

  Mitsi yawned and closed her eyes.

  “What about sex? Have much in the army? High school?”

  “Huh?”

  “Intercourse.”

  “Well, I . . . I guess, for sure. I mean . . .”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot that question out of nowhere, but I’m curious, frankly, from all I’ve observed of Bethany, to know the extent of your relationship.”

  My blank face may have stayed blank—I’m not sure—but the raw endings of my nerves twitched me in that chair.

  “For example, Bethany at one point told me that you often showed her your penis as a boy.”

  My mouth was open, but the words were not there. I might have made a slight sound like a cry a million miles away.

  “And that often you would touch her and finally you would have sex with her.”

  My upper palate had no moisture. My mouth was sand dry. My lips stuck together.

  “She . . . she . . . what? What?”

  I was absolutely at my Purple Heart point of tears, but my small brain warned me not to let them out.

  “She said . . .”

  “I heard.”

  I stood on wobbly legs and walked behind my chair. Oh, Bethany, I thought. Did that goddamn voice really make you believe that? I’m Hook. I’ll always be Hook.

  Dr. Glass watched me calmly, but I felt a little touch of hostility. Maybe. “Bethany told me—and I must say, in the kind of detail that might stretch a fictional account—that your fucking her became a daily routine. Almost a way of life.”

  To answer something that the mind’s picture of is so revolting, so past anything ugly I ever imagined, seemed beyond me.

  “She told me she knew how wrong it was, but you were so insistent and then violent. She’s showed me pictures. Pictures of her face all scratched and bruised. You just had her over and over until her mind was broken, didn’t you? Tell me. At least tell me the truth so we can start healing that poor little girl.” With those words Dr. Glass threw down four photos that Bethany had kept from the four major “accidents” the voice had caused. The pharmacy, the Red Bridge, the hippie commune, and the prom. I recognized each one. There were three taken by the police and one by a plastic surgeon. I knew she saved them. I never knew why. I looked at them and arranged them slowly, chronologically, on the desk. I was crying now. I was crying for my sister. The events of each terrible day roared over me. Of course, Dr. Glass took it all as the remorse of the pervert Smithy Ide.

  “It’s all the proof I need to go to the police, Mr. Ide, and by God I’m going to.”

  She pointed to the pharmacy photo.

  “Remember this one? You beat her over and over, until she finally gave in.” She pointed to the Red Bridge photo. The one used in the follow-up story by the Providence Journal. “And this one?”

  There was no mistaking Dr. Glass’s vengeful anger now. “How you threw her into your swimming pool and wouldn’t let her up to get to your mother’s cabana. You just kicked and pushed until she acquiesced. And this?”

  Dr. Georgina Glass slammed her fist down on the photo of the prom, where we had found my sister mosquito bitten and scratched. I sobbed to think of her, alone, in that swamp. My poor, poor sister. “Look at what you did, Mr. Ide, when you scratched her over and over while you kept her tied in the basement. What kind of a person does such a thing to his own sister? Answer me, goddamn it.”

  For the first time, I looked up from the pictures and directly at Dr. Glass. She stepped back from her desk.

  “People know I’m here with you. Don’t try anything. I’ve got all the dates and the times. For your own sake, come clean. You have to end this cycle. You’re as sick as your sister. You have to act fast to reactivate your soul.”

  Her tone softened. Her fists unclenched. She took a deep breath.

  “Look, I know you must suffer horribly over your actions. Remember last Thanksgiving?”

  Last Thanksgiving my lungs collapsed in Denver. Last Thanksgiving they stuck tubes in my chest and inflated me like a cartoon character.

  “You told your folks you were going to go to the family lodge in Vail for a little relaxation. You only did that because you knew that Bethany was already there.”

  “Last Thanksgiving?” I asked through my sniffles.

  “Don’t play dumb. It’s time to start healing yourself. Bethany. Look . . . I know how you kept her a virtual prisoner in Vail and then Aspen, and I won’t even get into the Paris thing.”

  “The Paris thing?”

  “Okay, have it your way. You’re a terribly sick individual, Mr. Ide. Terribly sick. And like most sick people, you have affected the well-being of everyone around you. And I’m not surprised your parents have failed to protect Bethany. Maybe they didn’t know, maybe the
y did, or maybe the rich just live differently than we do.”

  “The rich?”

  “Nevertheless I’m going to the authorities with this. Bethany gave me permission.”

  “Dr. Glass . . .”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Ide.”

  I walked to the door of her office. My eyes ached and threw short, incredibly sharp stabs of pain back at my brain. I put my hand on the doorknob and talked to the door.

  “We don’t have a swimming pool,” I mumbled.

  “Did you say something?” she said.

  I turned around. Dr. Georgina Glass stood behind her desk with her hands on her hips. Her feet were spread apart. I have seen pictures of matadors standing next to dead bulls that did not give off anywhere near her sense of victory. “I said, we don’t have a swimming pool.”

  “Well, that—”

  “No pool. None, and we don’t ski at all, let alone have a place in . . . where?”

  “You don’t have a place in Vail?”

  “No.”

  “Aspen?”

  “No, we don’t. That . . . that first picture . . . that one on the left . . . your right . . . East Providence police took that at the drugstore she worked at. The next one, the swimming pool one, is when she jumped off the Red Bridge.”

  “She . . . jumped off the Red Bridge?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Dr. Glass narrowed her eyes and thought hard. She didn’t look nice. She looked old, at least to me. If she lifted up her sweatshirt, I would have closed my wet eyes before I would look at those previously interesting breasts. “I suppose you have an explanation for last Thanksgiving.”

  “No.”

  “I thought not.”

  “I asked the doctors why my lungs just collapsed in the army hospital in Denver and why Thanksgiving Day they had to stick tubes in my chest to pump me up, but they said that it just happened. They couldn’t give me any explanation. No.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I walked out of her office, and then I walked out the front door and down the steps. By the time I turned onto the sidewalk, she was at the door.

  “Sorry,” she called.

  43

  I finished reading Ringo in Colorado. I had now read two books by Harold Becker, the author. Here is what he would say about Smithy Ide:

  Page one. “He sailed across the open plains like a jayhawk. Blown high and wide and away from everyone. He felt that Kansas was the most beautiful of places, until he saw the push of the Rockies outside of Goodland. But maybe this Smithy Ide was a plainsman. Maybe that would be his legacy. A momentum of bike and body blown high and wide through the history of jayhawkers.”

  That’s the style. A little flowery, but this Becker guy could take a common person and describe him like a knight, or a hero, even if the odds were stacked so high. Iggy, with all the prejudice and stuff that went along with being black in 1878, never felt sorry for himself at all. And Ringo, with one arm and one leg, sat taller in the saddle than anyone. It just took him a lot longer to get up there. I didn’t have anything to overcome, except maybe my fat ass, which dropped off somewhere in Missouri—or, at least, part of it did. Even the clothes that the doctor in Indiana had bought for me hung loose.

  This October—I can say for certain because it was October—the American plains swayed orange and gold. The days were Rhode Island crisp, and the nights and early mornings were freezing. I rode hard, one day even going three four-hour jaunts. Twelve hours. Blew a tire outside of Oakley, Kansas. Fixed my tire at Ray’s Bike Shop, had a pile of fried chicken, and then found a sweet, flat field about two hundred yards off the road to set up my tent and even build a fire out of scrub wood.

  In the morning, cows looked in my tent, and their heavy tails swished against the nylon material. I lay wide awake in my warm sleeping bag, feeling particularly secure. I suppose that comes from the toasty bag in the middle of the freezing field. I ran my fingers along the sides of my chest. I could feel my ribs. I mean, I knew they were there—people have ribs—but I hadn’t felt my ribs under the layers of me for maybe twenty years. I felt the cavity the bottom of my ribs formed around my stomach. “Losing weight,” I said out loud.

  That afternoon in Keana, Kansas, a town that was a gas station, I weighed myself for a nickel. Two hundred twenty-eight pounds. I stepped off the machine, put in another nickel, and weighed myself again. Two hundred twenty-eight.

  Possible?

  I stood on the machine, looking stupidly at the meter.

  “That means . . . that means I’ve lost fifty-one pounds,” I said, again, out loud.

  Possible?

  I made numbers in my head. Had I been gone thirty-three or thirty-four days? Fifty-one pounds?

  “Norma?”

  “Smithy. Hi. Hold on one second. I have to put my screen saver up on the computer.”

  “Do what you have to. I can wait.”

  “I have a Mac. There.”

  “Macs are supposed to be good.”

  “It’s got a lot of capabilities. Do you have one?”

  Oh, my God, this girl. There was a huge world out there, and she wasn’t afraid of it one bit.

  “Why?”

  “People can have fun with them.”

  “I don’t think I could learn how to use one.”

  “They’re easy. I’ll teach. I’m going to teach you, Smithy.” Another Smithy-Norma pause. A nice pause. A moment filled up and not at all uncomfortable.

  “Norma. I lost weight.”

  “You don’t have to lose weight,” she said, as if she were defending my right to be a load. “I like you just the way you are.”

  “I’m in Kansas. Kansas is beautiful.”

  “Oh, Smithy. Kansas. You’ve taken your bike to Kansas. I’m looking at my map. Kansas is ridiculously big.”

  “Big and flat.”

  I told her about the cows and the weather and the way I get almost hypnotized by the road after a while. She said, “I love you, Smithy.”

  And for a second I saw Norma in Pop’s baseball hat, with a hot cocoa, and the Red Sox filling up our porch. I think it was that spirit, and then the metal chair was just nothing to her. I saw her in it outside the funeral home. I saw her tall and almost angrily proud, and I missed her. I hadn’t really seen her more than forty-five minutes total in thirty years, but I missed her so much my stomach ached.

  “I . . . I miss you, Norma. I really miss you.”

  Another good silence. Another wonderful, filled-up, forty-some years of silence.

  “Oh, Smithy . . .”

  More silence. More long Kansas wheat-and-cow pause. Sun-dipping pause.

  “Bye, Norma.”

  “Bye, Smithy.”

  So much is Kansas, then. So much room and so many rolls of the earth. That writer, that Harold Becker, would say in that Iggy way, in that one-arm, one-leg Ringo way, he’d say, “Sometimes in the afternoon, when you squint the glare away, you can’t tell if that old girl Kansas is the sky or the sky is the earth. It turns you around so.”

  44

  I wasn’t mad at Bethany. I figured that the damn voice was doing the terrible lying to Dr. Glass. I wasn’t mad, but I never went with her again to the doctor’s office. How could I?

  Bethany got better—that was the important thing. She got out of her cloud and healed nicely, except for a narrow rip scar from the corner of her eye to her temple. But it was a real small scar, and unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t notice it. She cut her thick hair short and began wearing eye makeup that made her eyes look enormous. It was a pretty look, maybe beautiful—at least that’s what Jeffrey Greene of Attleboro, Massachusetts, thought.

  Jeff Greene was twenty-seven when he met my sister. His mom had to go to Bradley because she kept having mental problems. Jeff told me “mental problems.” I don’t know any specifics, and, really, I don’t think anybody else but loved ones should know certain things. That’s what I think, but I don’t know. Jeff would visit his mom, then go sit in
the patient park for a smoke, and one day he met Bethany.

  Jeff used to visit his mom once a week, because he didn’t think she knew he was there at all, but after he got to talking to Bethany, he began coming every day. They would sit and talk for hours and hours, and Dr. Glass told Mom and my pop that Jeff should get a lot of the credit for Bethany’s snapping out of it. He even brought Bethany home on Sunday afternoons when she was allowed out, and finally, when she was released, he decorated his car with signs saying BETHANY IS GOING HOME, and he took her.

  I was, I guess, a little jealous of Jeff. I was usually the one looking after her, but now it was Jeff, and, really, he was very good at it. I had moved into my apartment in Pawtucket, near Goddard, so it was good she had Jeff, but I worried. You know what I mean? I’m a worrier. Anyway, Jeff had what I thought was a great job. He was the manager of Benny’s Home and Auto Store on Newport Avenue in Pawtucket, and lived, like I said, in Attleboro, in a nice house he had just bought. Jeff Greene was a guy that had things falling into place. And he deserved good things. Not only because he was in love with Bethany, but because he was one of those genuine hardworking people my father admired, even if he was Jewish.

  “As long as he’s good to Bethany,” my father would say.

  “I just don’t know,” my mother would say.

  But after a while we all found we liked Jeff very much. He was tall and heavyset and walked a little flat-footed, which was why he didn’t have to get drafted, but he had so much energy, and when he was around, which seemed like all the time, we had energy also.

  The change in Bethany was so complete, love and all, that the joy popped back into Mom and Pop’s house. Pop went back to the baseball field as a third-base coach for the Socony Sox, and we’d all go to the games when we could. It was a wonderful time, although I was having trouble meeting people, and work was boring, and the tall lagers were filling up my nights, and while Bethany was returning to normal, I had begun to lose my face in a storm of food and alcohol. Still, it was great to see her so happy and herself.

  Jeff now accompanied her to her visits to Dr. Glass. Bethany had started working as an assistant librarian at Ann Ide Fuller Branch, under the East Providence water tower, and whenever he could, Jeff Greene would drop in and visit. When I think of Jeff, I think of this guy waiting to say hello to Bethany and give her a little kiss and then be happy just to stand next to her. I understand this. It would be great to get to a place where there’s comfort all around in just being somewhere.