American Woman (10 page)

The scale of her situation at Wildmoor was exceedingly small, finite, knowable. A world of twenty-odd people or less, all living in the rhythms of a distant time, more like her vague ideas of 1933 or even 1893, the year Dolly had been born, than 1973. A true Shangri-la for its natives. After living there for a couple of months she looked up the legend of Rip Van Winkle, having seen reference to that person everywhere—it was the sort of thing that had been no part of her California education—and then began to see everyone around her as a race of Rip Van Winkles, still asleep. What would these people think if they were ever to take the train to the city, or even drive a half hour in their cars to Albany or Poughkeepsie, where the year 1973 was steaming along in all its anger and confusion without them?

The local trait found its most extreme expression in her new employer. She had never known someone with money—transcendent, atemporal money, money of such a baffling magnitude as to require only one intervention with the plane of reality to have eternal, irreversible effects. The kind of money impervious even to its own disappearance, over a couple of centuries of folly and abhorrence of labor. She had thought she knew all about class, she recognized the names and faces of the titans of American industry, had come to understand that none of these people were other than several lucky steps from the sort of hustling her father had done, lucklessly, all his life—but she'd never known someone with money. And never having known someone with money, she had never encountered what she now recognized as an axiom, that the rich are incurious. She had arrived at Dolly's with an autobiography that was neither too exciting nor too bland, too local nor too foreign, too complete (no one remembers her life thoroughly) nor too full of strange holes, yet Dolly had never asked for it. Dolly had never asked her any questions at all, beyond, “Have you got your own car? That's all right. You can drive mine.” It seemed to come as no surprise to Dolly that “Iris Wong,” “Chinese,” “from San Francisco,” should materialize to meet Dolly's around-the-house needs. And Jenny found that, far from being grateful for the reprieve from scrutiny, she was increasingly driven to make herself known. Increasingly angry at not being asked. She knew better than to offer information that was not solicited, yet she increasingly volunteered tidbits that weren't even true. “My parents never really understood my interest in drawing,” she announced one day, as Dolly sat watching the bluebirds in the sycamore tree. “My grandfather Brinson was a great collector of drawings,” said Dolly. “I wonder if we could get down some of the drawings he brought back from Peru, and hang them in the sun room.”

Then it was still Dolly's unrealized plan—Mrs. Fowler's, really, but Dolly needed the money—to open the house up for tours, but with Jenny's arrival the plan gained momentum. Mrs. Fowler had decided the restoration work itself could be called an attraction. Jenny put herself to the task of learning restoration as she'd once taught herself to handle oil paint, to repair her old car, to assemble a timer and fuse. She began using the scrapbooks of Wildmoor in the local library, since Dolly's own records of the changes the house had been through were all buried somewhere in her rooms, so that the excavation of them was its own separate task. One day, reading, she came across the accounts of a party Dolly had given to celebrate the marriage of a nephew, in 1954. Dolly had invited the entire towns of Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, as well as her social equals up and down the river. When the guests had arrived, they were divided in two—the river people ushered into the house for caviar and champagne, the townspeople sent down to the field, to the far side of a rope strung nearby the gazebo. The townspeople as one had walked out—it was 1954, after all! They weren't serfs!—and Dolly had professed herself truly bewildered. But after a town representative explained peoples' feelings to her she'd apologized in the newspaper, and added that she planned to be buried in the Rhinebeck cemetery, which was public, instead of her family's plot. The insult was forgiven.

Not long after, standing in the aisle of the hardware store reading down her list of supplies, Jenny heard someone say, near the register, “So now we have the privilege of giving the old bitch three dollars to look at her house. I guess she's finally broke.”

“She deserves to be,” someone else said.

When Jenny emerged from the aisle, with her supplies in her arms, the speakers, two Rhinebeck men, turned and stared at her. One was the proprietor. He'd been friendly the first time she'd shopped here. He rang her up on this day without speaking.

“That's her,” she heard him tell the other man as she went out the door.

S
HE NEVER
meant to become a familiar face anywhere, yet she'd find herself chatting with people. Introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian. Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness—not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face. Trying to outflank suspicion. Sometimes she longed for a companion, to fulfill this desire for acceptance. A confidante, to make sure that she didn't break down and confide in the plumber. It was more and more difficult for her to trust her intuitions, her judgments, her decisions. The one-year anniversary of the day on which William had been arrested in their bomb-making workshop by FBI agents; the day on which she had fled her apartment with two grocery bags of her snatched-up belongings; the day on which Frazer had driven her in the whistling darkness down 1-5 to the Los Angeles airport came and went and she failed to notice until several days later. The oversight made her feel panic, as if she had spoken aloud in her sleep, or gone into town naked, or committed some other rash act of exposure.

Beneath all this self-criticism was the thought that she tried not to think, of how terribly lonely it was to be in this alone. She pretended her longings were purely pragmatic: A companion would give her the gift of another perspective. Two were more likely than one to make crucial corrections, to compensate for extreme paranoia, or extreme tendencies toward the sense of invulnerability. She was capable of veering in the latter direction, though never for long. But even brief veering was reckless, like jerking the wheel while driving. You might jerk off the road, and then you'd be a jerk. That was just the kind of stupid, drunk-seeming funk her mind lately slumped into. Jerk/jerk. Drunk/funk. She had a growing catalogue of dangerous sins a partner might help her confront, chief among them the irrational but insistent idea that her time was almost done; that perhaps, in just a few more months, she'd be able to come out. Completely. She had always hoped, halfbelieved, that time was the answer, as if her problem were like anything in the physical world, subject to erosion. Or perhaps it was a narrow window of opportunity she awaited, a confluence of attitudes and events that could occur any moment. If this was true, she might have already missed it.

The Watergate hearings began her first summer at Wildmoor. She listened to them as she worked, finally painting the upstairs bedrooms, which she'd fully prepared while the weather was cold. She'd stored furniture, vacuumed great bales of dust, chosen colors and gotten them mixed. Gently scraped eons of shape-dulling paint off the moldings, covered countless complexly paned windows. The radio she listened to was a cheap little transistor she'd found in the stables, perhaps forgotten by some short-lived, never-paid, handy-man predecessor of hers. It could hardly hold on to a signal; every few minutes static would rise like a sandstorm and drown the words out. She'd climb down from her ladder and yank the antennae. Finally it occurred to her to put the radio on an extension cord, and then she lashed it to her ladder with duct tape and tweaked and adjusted it constantly while she never stopped painting. The little radio taking on siftings of paint like an outward expression of static. A spectrum of static in buttercup yellow and sea green and cabbage-rose pink. She felt almost happy, to finally have vigorous work. Or perhaps she was happy to feel herself drawn in again by the life of the nation. Sometimes Watergate felt as surreal as a dream, because she had no one with whom to discuss it. No one beside her to gasp—really gasp—when Nixon's ex-secretary let fall that everything was on tape. She had rushed out of the room, in her amazement actually scrambled down from her ladder and rushed from the room to the head of the stairs—and stopped there, hearing Dolly's bland voice drifting in from the porch. Hearing teatime visitation in session, the sound of the landed who lived on this river. The sound of the “set,” anchored in ancient greatness, where even the dirt and the trees justified them. For them there was no vivid convulsion in the life of the nation. There was no odor of change on the air. There was not even the melancholy of national shame that the “average American” felt. Theirs was a nation transcending such temporal things. What must that be like, she had thought, turning back from the stairs with her brush in her hand. That complacence that said, I have no need to watch the strange signs, to scent change on the wind. I have no need to pay any attention. It certainly wasn't the thing that drove Nixon to tape conversations. That was the act of an insecure, paranoid man, never sure of his empire. On the river empire was eternal, even when funded by three-dollar tours.

When the first room was painted she rented a sander to start on redoing the floor, and sent a mushroom cloud of sawdust to the sixteen-foot ceiling. Sawdust settled thickly all along the painstakingly repainted moldings. Because the summer had been so humid, and the paint so slow to dry, the sawdust seemed as if it might stick to the new paint forever. It didn't, but only after three days of additional labor. She'd let herself cry when this happened; and then she took back the sander and decided to paint with no thought of the floors for as long as she could. She would deal with those later. The first night she could finally shut all the windows, because the paint had all dried and no scent of it lingered, was the night of first frost. Only early September. For the fall she planned cleaning the library ceiling. She did a final dustmopping of the freshly swept floors after taking up all of the dropcloths. As she stood looking over her work Dolly came to join her. Dolly had looked at the rooms perhaps three times a day every day for three months. Now she said, “I don't remember that shade on the wainscoting.

“It may be off by a tone or two. It's hard to match these historical colors.”

“I don't mean the tone, dear. I mean the color. I don't recall having drab gray wainscoting when I was a girl.”

After a long silence Jenny said, very calmly, “I used the scrapbooks in the Rhinebeck library for all of the colors, and then you approved the paint chips.”

“The scrapbooks I donated? Did Mrs. McNulty go through them with you?” When this had been confirmed Dolly said, still with a touch of displeasure, as though an unfair point had been wrested from her, “Mrs. McNulty does a wonderful job.” Dolly's eyes narrowed at the wainscoting.

“They're wonderful scrapbooks,” Jenny heard herself saying. “I've learned so much from them. I read about that big party you threw.”

“That must not have been me. I'm not one for big parties.”

“You had a big party in 1954, when your nephew got married.”

“Did I? I much prefer just hosting tea.”

“I wondered whether that's why you began hosting tea. To open the house to the town, after closing it to them.”

“I'm not sure what you mean. Tea is just a tradition. My mother held visiting hours, and my grandmother, and all our set.”

“But anyone can come to tea. Not just your set.”

“You'd have a hard time finding any of my set anymore.”

“What I mean is, you wouldn't let people who were not of your set in the house, at your nephew's big party.”

Dolly looked at her for what seemed the first time. “That was a long time ago. I hadn't realized how much things had changed.”

“Things are still changing,” Jenny said. To stop herself saying anything else she went quickly downstairs.

I
T WASN'T UNTIL
the late fall, when the leaves were yellow on the trees again, and then on the ground, and brief flurries of snow had begun, that she understood what the Watergate scandal might mean for her. She'd been to Red Hook for the papers, and had a letter from William. In the papers were the reports of the president's having fired the special prosecutor and abolished his office, and the attorney general and deputy attorney general having resigned. Congress seemed daily more in favor of Nixon's impeachment—but these things she already knew from the radio news. In the letter was this:

“We've finally come back through the looking glass to the side that is sane. When even the crooks in the government are ready to call the president the biggest crook of all, I can see the conditions for general uprising we once feared would never arrive. The “average American” wants Nixon out. The critical faculty we tried so hard to inculcate with regard to the war has arrived with regard to the White House. I wonder how I
—or any person like me
—would fare now, brought before the robed judges, in this altered climate.”

Attached was a short note from Dana. “William asked me to get you the name of this
very good friend
. William thinks you should look this friend up. Write to him at the address below and set up a phone call.”

The language of the note, the
good friend
that she should
look up
, was obviously William's. She hadn't known Dana and William corresponded with each other independent of her. That behind her back the two of them pondered something so private as her, Jenny's, fate. It annoyed her, or at least, something did. She was aware of a childish unwillingness in herself to realistically face what surrender would mean. When she imagined it, she saw herself among the neatly dressed, anxious visitors to San Quentin, placing her hand on the Plexi partition with her palm matched to his, somehow feeling the warmth of his skin. Not herself on the far side of the glass, without even William among her rare visitors. She couldn't really imagine surrender at all. Although she was amazed to realize it, she and William had never discussed what they'd do if they got separated. They had endlessly discussed what they'd do if they both were arrested, but they had never discussed, perhaps because it had never occurred to them, what they would do if only one of them was caught. Every action they had ever done they'd done assiduously together. That had been part of the power of it, that their every movement was in tandem. Then his arrest seemed to come as a freak, a complete accident. On his way home he'd planned to drop by their workshop, a garage that they rented, to pick up a tool. She'd been at home making salad to have with their dinner. Listening to the police band, as was her around-the-clock, paranoid habit. Peeling a carrot, listening less to the cops than for William's footfall on the stair. Lasagna in the oven. Sometimes the harvester's scythe falls and you are left standing. Running through the apartment with grocery bags, grabbing your things. But why? she asked. Why was she spared? A true marriage, he'd once said, was one in which the fear of outliving the other rendered minor the fear of one's death. His arrest had been like his death to her, and she'd wanted to be dead as well. But she'd known that she had to live on, to wait for him, and this was the thing that she felt she lived for. His suggesting she turn herself in somehow seemed like his cutting her loose, though she knew this was not what he'd meant.