After the Fire (18 page)

Homer and Jane were just finishing a supper of fish and chips. Homer stood up to shake hands and say what a good job Karen did as a volunteer fireman, not back there at the hall making sandwiches but right out there with the men. Karen was embarrassed at what her father might think of such unladylike behavior, but she was also glad she’d found the courage to keep going to fire practices.

Adam, leaning on the bar with his beer, remembered the university her father was president of and asked respectful questions.

Only when Karen turned and saw Milly sitting alone with a glass of wine did she feel that old familiar panic of her younger years. Would Milly remember about the grave Karen had claimed was her great-grandfather’s?

“Is that handsome man your father?” Milly called cheerfully.

He turned and smiled in return, never tired of the flattery of women, even women his own age, which Milly must be. And she was looking somehow softer tonight, her claws well hidden in her fur. Karen introduced them, but she steered her father firmly away and down into a lower, quieter nook of the pub before any conversation could develop.

“You have a lot of friends here,” he observed when they’d given their orders.

“I work here most nights,” Karen finally confessed, “and I work on the ferry dock, too.”

“When you’re not fighting fires?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I’ve only been to one real fire. I nearly quit after that.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said. “There’s going to be money from your mother, and I’m not exactly hanging around waiting for government compensation. There’s all the help in the world for you to
do
something with your life.”

Karen shrugged.

“I want you to be all right,” he said.

“Does it ever occur to you that I’d like to say that to you, too?” Karen asked.

“No,” he answered, looking into his whiskey which was the same color as his eyes.

That would have been the moment for him to tell her he was going to marry again nearly at once, but he didn’t. He wrote to her a week later.

Why hadn’t he, who had some use for them, kept her mother’s engagement and wedding rings? Karen put them, along with all the other jewelry her mother had sent, in the handbag he had also returned.

Karen grieved more for the robin that flew against her window than she did for her mother, and felt unnatural. Her only real emotion was the twinge of fear her blue eyes could give her as she glanced at herself in the mirror.
Could I?
She told no one of her mother’s death, her father’s remarriage. She thought of Dickie burning himself to death. She hadn’t asked her father how her mother had done it. Now she never would.

Red put out a garden chair and helped Henrietta out to it where she could sit in the sun and teach Red what to do.

“I’m fine with vegetables,” Red had confessed to her, “but I don’t know a flower from a weed.”

“You be careful with yourself now,” Henrietta said.

“Women can just squat down and have their kids in the fields,” Red said, herself squatting at the neglected ferns.

“Some may; most don’t,” Henrietta answered, flinching away from the memory of her own miscarriages.

She had no skin. Nearly everything touched some raw place. In that month of crazed apathy, she had not healed but had further damaged herself. Now she knew she had to eat. She had gradually to teach her neglected muscles to do her bidding. But what to do with the running sore of her psyche she didn’t know.

Henrietta had not yet agreed to go out in the car again to call on Miss James. She still refused to see Milly. Even when the quiet Karen sometimes took Red’s place, Henrietta felt at the edge of panic until she was alone again. A different sort of panic reasserted itself when she was alone, but at least then she was free to whimper, cry, talk to herself. Only Red’s presence gave Henrietta some respite. Red was firm with Henrietta, but she didn’t pry.

As Red’s child grew, her own quietness had a different quality to it—not of griefs held back or needs not shared but of placid waiting.

“I’ll plant bulbs at my place this fall,” Red decided.

“Daffodils,” Henrietta said. “The deer don’t eat them.”

Even that much advice cost effort, but it was possible. If she could keep up this slow pace of return, she might gradually be able to face the greater demands of life.
But how do you heal shame?

“You don’t. It heals itself,” Red said.

“Are you reading my mind?” Henrietta demanded, the panic rising.

“Things that need to, come out,” Red said quietly. “I thought maybe now you knew what they were.”

“What things? What things?

“You haven’t got anything to be ashamed of, Mrs. Hawkins. As you get better, you’ll know that.”

“How do you know that?” Henrietta demanded.

“I just know,” Red said.

“You don’t know anything! You’re an ignorant child. Take me back to the house.”

Henrietta trembled with the effort, and tears tracked down her face as unbidden and betraying as words. It didn’t matter that Red beside her didn’t look at her. Red knew.

“You’re an indecent, ignorant girl!” Henrietta shouted from the safety of her kitchen chair.

Red looked at her for a speculative moment and then smiled. “I’ll be back in a while,”

It isn’t funny!
Had she spoken that aloud? Red had turned away and didn’t answer. How could Henrietta have shouted at her like that?
I’m behaving like a Milly Forbes, spewing out my shame all over other people.
She hadn’t even known she was doing it.
I can’t trust myself.
She could not bear the idea of being no better than Milly, no better even than Sadie. At least Sadie had had the excuse of being drunk. Were all women, deserted, reduced to this?
I didn’t even know I was.
But she hadn’t really been alone in those years. She’d had the Hart that old man took to the grave with him. An illusion. That old man
was
Hart. But she couldn’t have made all those visits if she had accepted that. That old man had been her duty, not her love. And what was the reward of all that duty but the shattering of illusion.
I am not a good woman. I didn’t wake him because I didn’t want to wake him. I didn’t know he could kill Hart.

Henrietta wanted to lie down. She didn’t know if she had the strength to get to her bed, but she must. Slowly she worked her way from chair to doorjamb, from doorjamb to bookcase, from bookcase to bureau, her face soaked with tears, her nose running. Finally she stretched out on her bed. A cool breeze from the window gradually soothed her burning face, and she slept.

The dream was also gentle. Her husband’s face, not so much as it had been before the strokes as beyond them, smiled at her.
I’m all right, Hen dear, I’m all right now.

“So her ladyship’s finally receiving guests, is she?” Milly asked.

“She’s had a rough time, Mrs. Forbes,” Red said.

“I thought she was made of tougher stuff.”

“So did she.”

“Well, I’ve missed her,” Milly conceded. “I guess I’ll just drop over there now and get out of your way. What am I going to do, by the way, when that baby arrives?”

“Let the house get dirty for a week or two,” Red answered.

“A
week
or two?”

“I can bring it with me, can’t I?”

“Well, I suppose,” Milly said. “I don’t really mind babies until they learn to talk back.”

Milly went into her bedroom to check her face. She hadn’t been putting in much time on it lately. She looked older, and that somehow seemed appropriate, even a relief. Who was there to kid anyway? Tarting herself up for Hen wouldn’t raise Hen’s spirits. No woman felt better unless another was looking worse.

Milly was, however, shocked by Henrietta’s appearance. She must have lost fifteen pounds, and she didn’t have them to lose. Her clothes looked as if they belonged to someone else. And her beautiful hair had somehow simply wilted. She was an old, old woman.

“Hen!” Milly cried in distress. “What’s happened to you?”

“I hardly know, Milly,” Henrietta sighed. “But I think I’m over it. I just need time now to get my strength back. You’re looking wonderful.”

“Am I?” Milly asked, surprised.

“And after what you’ve been through!”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Milly admitted. “Except for getting tired awfully easily, I feel better than I have in years. I don’t know why I waited so long. I want to go around recommending it to every woman I know.”

Henrietta smiled her modifying smile and looked for a moment a bit more like herself.

“My daughter was awfully good to me, Hen. I’d forgotten how much I used to enjoy my kids. She works in a travel agency, you know, and she offered to send me off on a cruise.”

“‘Where are you going to go?” Henrietta asked.

“Oh, nowhere,” Milly said. “I haven’t got the right clothes, and anyway I wouldn’t want to travel around alone. Can you see me in a cathedral or a museum? The Grand Canyon would give me vertigo, and the one time I saw Niagara Falls, it was just noise. Do you know what Red said to me? She said, ‘You love this house,’ and the fact is, I do. I’m actually glad to be home.”

“Red’s had her hands full, hasn’t she?” Henrietta said. “She’s been here nearly every day.”

“Not just her hands,” Milly retorted. “What have you said to her about her condition?”

“Once I knew she wanted the baby, I told her I’d be any help I could.”

“Oh, Henrietta Hawkins, have you no shame?” Milly mockingly demanded.

“Plenty,” Henrietta answered, “but doesn’t it seem funny now to think in terms like unwed mothers? Such a lot of bad sermons we were raised on.”

“Aren’t you even concerned it will be a bastard?”

“Heavens no,” Henrietta replied. “That’s just as silly.”

“She says she’s going to bring it to work. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the money to pay her to baby-sit her own child.”

“Maybe you’ll have to do it then,” Henrietta suggested.

“Are you going to suggest that to Miss James?”

“Ah, Miss James,” Henrietta said thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen her for weeks. She’ll know by now, of course.”

“It seems to me Red’s expecting a good deal more tolerance than she has any right to,” Milly said.

“Oh, she doesn’t expect it,” Henrietta said. “Why should she? She hardly knows what it is.”

“And the father? Shouldn’t he be made to take some responsibility? Disapproval isn’t a sin, you know. It can nudge people in the right direction.”

“I’ve never found that so,” Henrietta replied.

Something in her tone reached and warned Milly not to press her any further. Milly’s own energy for a good debate was also limited, and she had come close enough to losing Red to think it might not be such a bad idea to take a page out of Henrietta’s book. The only disapproval that had done Milly any good was her own, and did she really enjoy it?

K
AREN WAS SITTING ON
her deck, willing herself away from finding something to do. She needed to think about her mother. Each time she tried, she found she was thinking about herself instead. Karen had for a long time strained to identify not with her father exactly but with the Japanese side of herself. She didn’t know why, since he had always been so firm in rejecting his own racial identity and had never offered her the slightest clue to its meaning. Aside from an occasional Japanese meal, there had never been anything in the house, a dish or a print, to suggest a Japanese heritage. It was as if her father had accepted the lessons of the camp or, to prove them wrong, insisted there was nothing different or distinctive about his race. Perhaps she clung to her difference to dissociate herself from a mother who had run away. Had Karen, too? Had she simply lacked the energy or insight or whatever it took to get through the difficulty with Peggy and come out on some better side? And, if she were like her mother, would she finally become so detached or frightened or despairing or whatever it was that she’d kill herself?

Karen had trouble remembering exactly what her mother looked like. When she took out the few photographs she had, it was the photographs rather than her mother that were familiar to her. How could she grieve for someone she didn’t even clearly remember? Peggy had never understood why Karen didn’t resent her mother. But her mother had never been very clear to her even when they had lived in the same house. Whatever sense Karen had of her had faded gradually. The woman she occasionally went to visit was a stranger who had wanted to please her but didn’t know how. What they had shared was embarrassment. And perhaps regret, though that was a stronger and more lasting emotion than Karen could really claim.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Karen said aloud and did not know what she meant by it.

Behind her in the cottage, the phone rang.

“I’ve got a phone,” Red announced.

“What made you finally decide?” Karen asked.

“The baby, I guess. And Mrs. Hawkins and Miss James. I haven’t given Mrs. Forbes the number.”

“All she has to do is look it up.”

“Not for a while.”

“Listen,” Karen said. “Why don’t I make up some sandwiches and we can go up on the bluff for lunch?”

Red hesitated and then said, “Okay.”

Since the driving lessons were over, Karen had seen very little of Red, and she missed her. Without being able to phone, she’d had no casual way of reconnecting; for Red, aside from being busy with her ailing old women, was never just out and about these days. Karen knew the whole island was speculating now about whose baby Red was carrying, though such conversations ceased abruptly at Karen’s approach. Rat was the only one of the young men to have a good word to say about Red. He was grateful for a free baby sitter so that he and his wife could occasionally come to the pub together. It was he who had asked Karen whose kid it was. “Ask her,” Karen replied. Rat had shrugged, obviously embarrassed.

On the bluff at lunch time, they might meet an early tourist or two or a local walking a dog, but they wouldn’t have to deal with the rude stares Red had encountered from the young men even before her pregnancy was obvious. Karen couldn’t decide whether Dickie’s being the father would make Red better or worse in their eyes.