I.O.U

  With which (most satisfying) riposte, I walked out—only to literally run into a woman as she was bustling in the front door. We bounced off of each other and backed away, smiling in mutual, flustered embarrassment.

  “Excuse me!”

  “Oh, forgive me, dear!”

  I stepped out onto the porch with her, and closed the screen door and front door behind me. “I’m really sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, dear.” She laughed as if I’d made a great joke. “As fat as I’ve gotten in my old age, it would take a Sherman tank to run me down.” She had frizzled white hair that looked as if it might be on the sixth day after its weekly visit to the beauty shop, and she wore a bulky red polyester sweater over bulging black slacks. On her feet were white tennis shoes—with the laces untied—and, incongruously, those tennis socks that have little fuzzy balls on the heels to keep them from sliding down into the shoes. In one hand she held a black plastic trash bag, and in the other, a metal dust pan.

  “Mrs. Kennedy?” I guessed.

  “Why, yes, dear.” She smiled broadly, but then tempered that by letting her expressive eyes and mouth droop into lugubriousness. I felt my own face fall in instinctive response to her. “It was a lovely funeral.”

  “What? I’m sorry, were you—”

  “Yes, I was there, dear, of course I was, why I knew her from the time she was a tiny child, didn’t I?” The smile was back, and I couldn’t seem to help but smile back at her. “I remember the first time I ever saw your mother, at her baptism, and then the last time, too—” Mrs. K broke off, and pressed the open end of the trash bag to her ample chest, now looking flustered and distressed. I caught myself frowning down at her. The woman was a virtual one-act play, and I seemed to be the audience she held in the palm of her hand. “Oh, forgive me, you don’t want to hear—”

  “Please, I do! What about the last time?”

  Mrs. Kennedy appeared to employ whatever she held in her hands, like stage props, to punctuate her sentences. “Well, she was here.” The dust pan pointed to the steps. “At the rectory, I mean.” The trash bag pointed next door. “Come to see Father, she was, but never too upset to stop to talk to me.” The dust pan fanned the air in a kind of pantomime of “never.” I felt dust drifting up my nostrils, and nearly sneezed. “So kind she was, such a lovely, lovely girl.”

  “You say Mom was upset?”

  She had spoken in such dramatic tones that my own words came out sounding like lines of dialogue. Feeling like an ingenue attempting a tough role, I tried to sound merely curious, in a way that wouldn’t scare Mrs. K away from her memories. For safety’s sake, I stepped back out of the way of the talking dust pan. “Do you remember why?”

  “Upset?” Now it was Mrs. Kennedy who looked upset. The Irish accent that I hadn’t noticed at all when she first spoke, was by now so thick I could hardly understand some words. “Did I say that? Oh, dear, and I don’t know that I meant that at all. Nervous, is more like it, you know how your mother was, dear, hurrying and scurrying about like a pretty little squirrel sometimes.” She crossed the trash bag and dust pan back and forth in front of her several times, making the bag billow and the dust fly. “I’m sure that’s all it was, running late for car pool or some such thing, that’s all.” Mrs. K’s confusion suddenly focused on a thought that brought tears dramatically to her blue eyes. “I’m so sorry for that bit of trouble she had, and your wee family, too.”

  “I thank you, I do.”

  She leaned toward me and whispered, looking suddenly and marvelously like an old, fat leprechaun grandmother, “What sort of mood is he in today?”

  I smiled down at her and shrugged, struggling to retain a hold on my natural Massachusetts accent. “Normal, I’d guess.”

  “Oh dear. And if I don’t get his bed made and get back to the rectory, the beans’ll burn and there’ll be heck to pay for sure.”

  “How have you put up with the old tartar all these years?” I asked her, out of my own exasperation with him. “Why didn’t you ever just walk out?”

  “Leave him?” Mrs. Kennedy stared at me as if I’d just posted Luther’s ninety-five theses to the Cathedral door. “But my dear, ’tis an honor to me to serve a man who serves God!”

  Hmmph, I thought, echoing the grumpy priest as I moved aside to let her enter: Reminds me of the old joke about the fellow who swept up after the elephants in the circus. “Why don’t you quit?” somebody asked him. “What?” he cried in horror. “And leave show business?”

  “Good day to you,” she cried, as she closed the front door with a final flourish of the trash bag.

  I grinned at the space where she’d been—it still seemed to vibrate— and shook my head. And the top o’ the mornin’ to you, too, Mrs. K. I was willing to bet that even the trivia of everyday life was high drama to her. My God, I thought, as I turned away, what a challenge he must be to her, and how she must get on his nerves!

  At the end of Father Gower’s front walk, I took a little notebook out of my purse and jotted a couple of questions in it: One, why was my mother “upset” on what may have been her last visit to her parish priest? Considering Mrs. K’s tendency to overdramatize, I was a little wary of taking her word for the “upset,” but I put it down anyway. And, two, what did Father Gower mean by that reference to his “memories of other people’s confessions”?

  I flipped back to a previous page in the notebook: Here was where I’d made my list of things to do and people to see in my (possibly quixotic) quest for the truth about my mother, our family business, and—maybe at least by inference—me. According to that list, and my watch, I had a luncheon date with Miss Lucille Grant at noon and an hour and a half to kill until then.

  There was time enough to start my “investigation” into the Fall of the House of Cain Clams.

  6

  THE PORT FREDERICK MAIN LIBRARY, LOCATED NEAR THE downtown square, had long been a favorite place of mine, a calming port of balm and refuge where I could hide among the books and stacks. It was a wonderfully quaint and rambling building with English ivy climbing its quarry-cut stone walls, and cozy nooks and crannies inside, along with long, shining walnut tables and wingback chairs in which to curl up and read Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. It was a place where seagulls roosted in the eaves, looking as if they’d flown out of the pages of “The Ancient Mariner,” and where drafts straight out of Wuthering Heights whistled through the cracks, and where, once, when a kid (me) knocked over a table lamp, the librarian greeted the crash with a cry of, “Hark! What light by yonder window breaks?” Pronounced “libree” around these parts, accent on the first syllable, with the second syllable cut short, it looked and smelled and even sounded the part of the quintessential New England public library, right down to the American flag at the door and the portraits of the presidents on the walls.

  And that’s where I walked, late on that crisp March morning, thinking I would research the bankruptcy of our family business just as if it had belonged to other people, just as if I were a graduate business student doing research on an assignment.

  Subject: Cain Clams

  Problem: Pinpoint the cause or causes for the apparently sudden and heretofore inadequately explained collapse of a thriving, 100-year-old family firm. Use interviews with the principals, examination of available company records, and other pertinent materials to buttress your hypothesis.

  I’d kept my library card current at all times since I was five years old. It had been my mother who had taught me to use it, and now maybe I’d be using it to look her up.

  “Hi, Jenny,” called the librarian at the front desk.

  She was a former schoolmate of mine, but I only smiled at her and didn’t stop to chat, hoping she wouldn’t think I was snubbing her. Hah, that was a laugh. As low as the Cains had fallen after the bankruptcy, who could possibly feel snubbed, for any reason, by any of us?

  Here at my beloved public library, I’d have access to the Boston and New York newspapers, to t
rade journals and The Wall Street Journal. Cain Clams had not been significant by international standards, but it had been a “major player,” as we used to say at business School, in the East Coast shellfish industry. And for at least two generations, it was Top Clam in Massachusetts.

  First I looked it up in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. It felt so strange, looking up my own name: “Cain Clams.” After noting the publications in which articles appeared, I submitted my microfilm requests to the young man at the periodicals desk. He handed me a foot-high stack of films, which I carried to a microfilm projector, where I pulled up a chair and sat down.

  There were fewer articles than I had expected, and almost all of them had appeared locally, with nothing more than what amounted to a few business bulletins appearing in the national press. That immediately surprised me, because I had always assumed we were bigger news than that. Just goes to show how we inflate our own importance in the world, I thought, feeling oddly diminished. Guess we were a big fish in a much smaller pond than I’ve ever been led to believe.

  I read the headlines, because I had to, but I didn’t stop to read the bodies of the stories. In fact, I literally averted my eyes from them, because I didn’t want to take the chance of getting all emotional right there in the middle of the library. I felt exposed enough as it was— sitting there staring at headlines that included: CAIN CREDITORS SEEK PAY-BACK GUARANTEES, and CAIN ATTEMPTS DEBT RESTRUCTURING, and CAIN BLAMES CASH-FLOW PROBLEMS ON CHESAPEAKE POLLUTION, POOR CLAM CROP, and CAIN LAY-OFFS ANNOUNCED. They blared off the machine at me as if they were posted in 64-point type, when they were really printed much more discreetly in a mere 14-point. Still, I didn’t want passers-by reading those headlines over my shoulder; it would have felt too much like putting a scandalous family diary on public display.

  I thought of my mother opening The Port Frederick Times every morning, dreading the possibility of facing this news. That image of her —in bathrobe and slippers, with her coffee growing cold in front of her and her cornflakes getting soft in the bowl as she read the paper—made me feel nearly as ill as I imagined she must have felt. I tried to clamp down on my imagination and to concentrate on the process of making copies of the articles to take home with me. I dropped in dime after dime to make photocopies.

  When I finished the first stack of microfilm cannisters, I perused other catalogs, looking for more references to articles about Cain Clams. It took me only the hour and fifteen minutes I had available to accumulate a stack of copies about half an inch high. I rolled them up and secured them with rubber bands borrowed from the librarian at the periodicals desk.

  “Making a family scrapbook, Ms. Cain?” he asked as I handed back the microfilm cannisters. I had been unaware that he’d recognized me until he spoke.

  “No,” I said, “this isn’t the kind of family history I cherish, you know?”

  “My mother kept all the articles, too.”

  I looked up sharply, to find him staring at me. He was about ten years younger than I, which would have made him about seven years of age when the company folded.

  “She took them around with her to job interviews in other towns,” he said, impassively, “to prove that it wasn’t her fault that she got fired.”

  I felt myself flushing. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you should be,” he said, taking back the cannisters and averting his eyes, as if he couldn’t stand to look at me any longer.

  The sheaf of copied articles trembled in my hand as I walked out of the library into a day that had turned colder while I was inside. This wasn’t the first time I had been directly confronted with the bitter residue of the fall of Cain Clams, nor was it by any means the worst of those times. But it was rare for anybody to throw it up to me, especially after all these years. I was only a Cain child, after all, hardly responsible for the disaster. Was this what my mother had endured, and much more frequently and harshly, because she was the very visible wife of the owner? Was that why she had made herself less and less visible, hiding in her house, in her room? Was this what she had faced every day on the phone, and every time she walked out of her front door? And for what reason? Was she any more to blame than her daughters?

  As I walked on weak legs down the front steps to the sidewalk, I realized that for the first time in my life, I wanted to know—truly wanted to know—the real reasons for the bankruptcy, and not just the lame excuses my father made. I wanted to know who or what to blame, even if it turned out, as I suspected it would, to be him.

  “Because,” I said to myself. “And so.”

  If nobody else could do it for me, I would fill in the blanks of my own life. I suspected I might be setting myself an impossible task; I didn’t know it was also a dangerous one. I only knew that I was supposed to meet my sixth-grade teacher for lunch in ten minutes and that I felt as if I would throw up if I had to swallow anything more than water. Having your family’s business go bankrupt and throw dozens of people out of work is, I had long before discovered, like waking up with a terrible hangover: The guilt is enough to make you start drinking again just to help you forget how bad you feel about it.

  I had a sudden craving for a big glass of beer.

  That, I could swallow.

  “You don’t want to drink this early in the day, Jennifer.”

  Miss Lucille Grant, my former teacher and the only female trustee on the foundation board, smiled at me across the dining table at the C’est La Vie Restaurant down by the harbor. Since I had an unbreakable quarter-century habit of following her good advice, I reluctantly canceled my order for a Beck’s Light and ordered a crab salad, instead, even though my stomach clenched at the thought of eating it.

  “Your mother,” Miss Grant said, continuing her narrative where it had been interrupted so that we might order lunch, “was a good little girl, as you were, although she was more conventional in her goodness than you are.” There was a hint of a twitch at the corners of the old schoolteacher’s mouth, and I knew she was thinking of the fact that I had wanted to drink a beer at midday. My beloved mentor was older by now than I liked to admit; her soft skin folded into countless wrinkles, her once-resonant voice wavered and trembled now, though her opinions did not. In one of the restaurant’s cane-back chairs, Miss Lucille sat as straight as arthritis and a touch of widow’s hump allowed her. Her large, plain hands remained immobile, reflecting the “small, still place” within her that always radiated a calming effect upon me, her perpetual pupil.

  “One day,” Miss Lucille said, in that wonderful, storytelling way she had of making me feel as if I were ten years old and seated at her feet again, “it had been raining off and on in the morning before recess, so that when I took the children outside to the playground there were little puddles everywhere. Naturally, I instructed them not to jump in the puddles.” She smiled at me. “Of course, teachers are supposed to instruct children not to do those things that are the most fun to do. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d jumped in the puddles—it is fun, isn’t it, and we all want to do it, really—but it was a cool day, and I didn’t want them to go through the rest of the afternoon with wet feet. I didn’t want them to catch colds, or to ruin their shoes, for that matter.”

  The waitress set down rolls and butter, and Miss Lucille waited for her to finish.

  “Anyway,” she continued then, “your mother astonished me and I think she astonished herself by jumping in a puddle. I watched her stand outside of that puddle and look at it, and I could tell she was weighing the pros and cons of, by golly, just letting go and pouncing into that puddle! Well, the devil won. She jumped. With both feet. She made a great splash, and water landed on her skirt. Her little girlfriends gasped and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Meg, you’re in trouble now!’ And then your mother jumped out of the puddle, looking pleased and frightened all at the same time.

  “Well, I had to call her over to reprimand her. Frankly, I didn’t want to do it, because I was so happy to see that dear good child do somethin
g wrong for a change, but the other children had seen her break a rule, and they would have thought I was playing favorites if I didn’t punish Margaret Mary. So I called her name. Your mother came to me with her head down, dragging her wet feet, her little hands hidden in her wet skirt. I said to her, as gently and casually as I could, ‘Meg, you know you’re not supposed to jump in puddles.’

  “Well, your poor mother burst into tears. Not loudly, of course, she wouldn’t have allowed herself to make such a fool of herself. But her lips quivered and the tears came down her cheeks, and she whispered to me, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Grant.’ She stood there like a pitiful little penitent until I dismissed her, and then she ran away back to her friends, who whispered and giggled while she shushed them and cast frightened glances in my direction. I felt such an ogre! I wanted to call her back, to say, ‘Meg, it wasn’t such a bad thing, it was just a little petty rule you broke, something any child might do, something I would like to do with my great black clodhopper shoes, it’s nothing so awful for you to feel so bad as all this.’

  “But I didn’t do that, you see, because I doubted she would believe me. Margaret Mary’s little world had many rules—there were rules of etiquette and rules of polite society, there were religious strictures and rules for law-abiding little persons, there were parental rules and school rules, rules, rules. I could quite understand how she had to stay right on top of them, and try not to break any single one of them, for fear they might all tumble down around her. Children are like that, you know, unconsciously they quite expect the death penalty for the most minor infraction.”

  Miss Grant stopped talking long enough for the waitress to set our iced teas and salads before us and then she took a few bites of her lunch before continuing her story. I sipped my tea, and hoped she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t eating. She put her fork down and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.

  “I understood how your mother felt, Jennifer, but I was frankly appalled at her overreaction to my little reprimand. Any other child would have said, ‘Sorry!’ and run off giggling to do it again when I wasn’t looking. But your mother was mortified by this terrible sin she had committed of being childish and jumping in a puddle. She was quiet the rest of the day, and hypersensitive to any criticism, and I felt so sorry for her, but there wasn’t any help for it. She was supposed to be a nice little girl and that, by golly, was what she was going to be if it killed her.”