I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia (8 page)

“He must be…sixteen?”

“Just turned eighteen.”

I was getting old, misjudging the passage of time. “Is he in college?” I asked. “I was always so impressed by his singing, too. Is he doing anything with it?”

Teller looked surprised, and I suddenly remembered I wasn’t supposed to be interviewing him, asking about his family. This was a job interview and I was muffing it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

But now he was beaming, eyes crinkly and endearing. Further evidence of the tired truism that all the good ones are taken. “What a caring, supportive teacher you are!” he said. “After all these years, to remember one little boy so well. You’re exactly the breed we’re looking for!”

Given that praise, and an irresistible desire to please him, I felt reluctant to raise a potentially unpleasant point. Nonetheless, I felt obliged to behave like an adult. “I teach with Neil Quigley,” I said.

“Poor man! To have something like that happen—and now, when so much of his life is in upheaval.” He shook his head. “Arson, the police are saying. Kids. Dropouts. A street gang. Just for the hell of it.” He looked crushed.

“You can’t save them all,” I said softly.

He nodded and sighed. “Of course, as far as Neil’s concerned, we’ll rebuild for him, refinance. And in the meantime, I know Cliff’s working something out. We don’t abandon our own.”

Nice. Very nice. But still. “I gathered—before the fire—that Neil was having some problems. Financially, with the franchise.”

Teller looked sad again. “Neil Quigley is an exceptional teacher but possibly not exactly a businessman. The system’s designed for that—few number crunchers go into teaching, which is why we take care of that side. But Neil is, perhaps, even a little less…or, it could simply be all the pressures on him at this time. My point is, you mustn’t generalize from one example. Speaking out of school”—he winked at me after his little wordplay—“we’ll be working more closely with Neil from now on. He’ll be fine.”

He asked if I had any questions, but I couldn’t think of any, so I was offered a packet of information to look over.

“What a day for your introduction to us!” he said. “A lunatic and a fire. I hope you understand things are generally more subdued.” We thanked each other profusely. Not until I was outside, in my windy car, did I realize two things. One was that I’d never found out what had become of little Hughie Teller. And more important, I was still carrying my manila envelope of required material. I’d been so tense, I’d clutched it tight the entire interview.

I could understand my nervousness, but not Teller’s. None of the obvious, basic questions had been asked. I wasn’t even certain whether he knew what my subject area was. And yet interviewing candidates must have been second nature to him by now.

Unless, despite his serene exterior, despite his casual dismissal of the crazy lady’s claims, she’d derailed him. And if so, why?

Six

BETH’S HOUSE HAS ALWAYS SEEMED AN OASIS OF CALM, SOMETIMES ANNOYINGLY, phlegmatically so. It is dust- and anger-free, or so I always thought. It was nearly impossible to imagine its adult inhabitants raising their voices, let alone fists.

But I didn’t spend all that much time with my sister, because our lives don’t have a lot of crossover points. To some extent, Beth is a living museum, the Fifties
before
photo contrasted with today’s woman. She wears aprons and bakes cakes from scratch and performs unpaid good deeds for family, friends, and community.

The truly happy homemaker.

At least I always thought so.

But maybe I was only invited over during what the book identified as Phase Three—the loving, repentant final third of the violence cycle. Maybe when the tension built again, Beth stopped calling and we all looked the other way, like Sasha’s bruised family skeleton.

* * *

I inspected Beth during the long-distance, germ-free kissing and cooing over baby Alexander, still curled in his prenatal position, but outside his mother nowadays, in a sling she wore on her belly.

“Don’t stare,” she said. “I know I’m still a tank. If he’d weighed forty-five pounds, I’d be as svelte as you, but he was thirty-eight pounds short.”

The house denied the idea of cold or winter or night. Firelight flickered over low, full bookshelves, comfortably upholstered furniture, and a teapot covered by a cozy. Ella Fitzgerald was singing “Just One of Those Things.” My niece Karen raced in, hugged, jumped up and down, made note of how silly-looking her baby brother was, then bounded off toward the sounds of
Sesame Street
floating in from the family room. The baby slept close to his mother’s heart and we could have been on the set of a prime-time special called
Home Sweet Home
. I hoped it wasn’t as much a facade as that would be.

Impossible. Beyond this point may lie monsters—but not this particular point. Sometimes, in this setting, I feel the Pauper to Beth’s Princess and I yearn to get to the part where our roles are reversed when Beth tackles the singles’ jungle, unpaid bills, maladjusted kids, and men in not much better shape. Let me cope with polishing silver and kissing scrapes.

But only sometimes, and only fleetingly, and definitely not tonight.

Beth asked how the interview had gone, and I regaled her with the doings at the Learning Center. “Poor Wynn,” she murmured. “Kooks seem the price of fame, don’t they?”

“Things were so crazy, I forgot to send your regards to him or his wife,” I admitted.

“No matter. I’ll see her soon. She missed the last meeting—she has some condition, something that started in Africa when she was a child, and she—” Beth stopped and wrinkled her brow. “Wait a minute—
I
was the one who missed the meeting.” She slapped her palm to her forehead. “Sam says my brain’s become baby-mush.”

She smiled. It wasn’t serious. Or was it? Did he secretly criticize her? I remember that from the book, the impossible and desperate attempts to be good enough, to
be
enough. Was it a lack of confidence that drove her to be so devoted and intense a housekeeper? I certainly couldn’t fathom any other motive.

She poured me a cup of herbal tea. She was nursing and avoiding drinker-unfriendly stimulants and substances. “Sam won’t be home until late,” she said. “Business dinner.” She looked distinctly uncomfortable. “So, um, look, I feel funny about this, but…” She took a deep, steadying breath.

Now, I thought. She’s going to say something before I have to. A shiver ran from my hair follicles to my toenails.

“Karen’s feeling displaced,” she said while I told my follicles to relax. “The new baby blues. Anyway, she’s been begging for pizza at Fireman Dan’s, and Sam absolutely refuses, so would you consider—”

“No problem.” Karen would be happy, the baby would be asleep, and Beth and I would talk. “Actually, I’m starving.” An apple and a Coke last only so long.

Beth drove because her Volvo had car seats and no hole in its hood. “Fireman Dan’s!” Karen repeated loudly all the way there.

We saw neither hide nor hair of Dan, but perhaps he’d been trampled by children rushing to push joysticks or climb the fire truck in the middle of the room or cheer the animated cartoons on the walls. Or perhaps he had wandered off, dazed and deafened by screams and clangs, by high-pitched electronic shrieks and zings and Hollywood special effects. My impulse was to follow him, wherever he had gone, as long as it was out of here.

Karen, however, was in a state of bliss. She could play with mutant turtles, and Alexander the dummy couldn’t. She could eat pizza, and Alexander the baby didn’t even have teeth. “And I can climb the fire truck, and you’re too little,” she told his sleeping head before she ran off.

“What’s happening with Mackenzie?” Beth asked before I had swallowed my first bite of pizza. She’s my mother’s daughter and possibly her clone. If my mother hadn’t mailed me the tome on how to meet men in my spare time for fun and profit, Beth would have. I told her about the visiting Jinx.

“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t like it. Not at all. Asking for trouble.”

“Trouble is her name,” I said mournfully. But I appreciated the fact that old-fashioned Beth didn’t raise the issue of whether men and women could truly be friends. She didn’t turn Gertrude Stein-y and remind me that a sofa bed was a sofa bed. She didn’t mention that I was supposed to trust Mackenzie, who was, in fact, being open and straightforward about this business.

No. In her archaic, old-fashioned, knee-jerk, thoroughly appreciated way, she simply disapproved, irrevocably, clipping out stern-jawed dictums about decency and respect, terms that usually signal a sibling dispute. Tonight, I had no quarrel with them. Men were rats. I finished the piece of pizza with gusto and debated another one.

“He’s abusing your trust!” she said.

Maybe we were pushing it a bit far. He had told me, after all. Maybe I was abusing his trust. And suddenly I was tired of indignation, righteous or not. And without it, only the word
abuse
remained, echoing.

No matter the ridiculous surroundings. When we’d be home again, it would be time for baths and bedtimes and, very possibly, Sam’s return. Now or never, despite a background that sounded like a disaster movie. I pushed away the pizza. “Beth,” I said, “my school’s having something we call a Not-a-Garage Sale this weekend.”

“I know.” Her eyes dropped to her baby. I couldn’t tell if it was a case of adoration of him or of avoidance of me.

“Yesterday, I was sorting books.” I paused and waited for a reaction.

Beth raised her eyebrows with polite, but dim, interest.

“The thing is, somebody donated…” Donated was too genteel a word. “Somebody put in a book that had…”

“Umm?” Eyes still on Alexander. Was this standard obsessive new-mother behavior, or terror?

“I think it had a message.
Was
a message. A call for help.”

“Somebody left a note in a book?” she murmured, touching her lips to the baby’s hair fuzz.

“Notes in a book. On the pages.” My voice was too harsh, fighting the sounds of bedlam and Beth’s charade of noninvolvement. “Underlined passages.”

“Remember Miss Ardmore and that business about a book’s being a holy temple, never to be defaced?” She giggled.

“I’m not talking about that kind of thing. I’m talking about a woman leaving a message in a book that she’s being—”

Beth’s brow wrinkled. She was listening now.

“That a man is…” I remembered the night she tiptoed in and woke me up and showed me her engagement ring. “Hurting her, Beth. Beating her up.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Awful,” she said. “Who wrote it?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Me? How could I?” She rocked Alexander back and forth. He would someday spend time in analysis working through a preconscious Fireman Dan trauma.

She seemed capable of playing Let’s Pretend indefinitely. I wasn’t. I leaned close. “Beth—it was your book.”

“Why on earth are you saying that?”

“Please. Don’t be embarrassed or sorry that you broke the silence. You don’t have to pretend anymore. No more cover-ups.”

“I have to be honest, Amanda.”

“Good.”

“You sound insane.”

Insane. How had I managed to forget that the woman in the book had been thought schizophrenic because of her lies and cover-ups? Beth had never been institutionalized.

“Mom! Aunt Mandy! I nearly won! I nearly won! Can I have more quarters?”

Broke or not, with moral reservations or not, beginning to feel creepy and embarrassed or not, I gave the child two dollars to be turned into change by one machine and swallowed by another.

Beth waited until her daughter was gone. Her face was a reserved mask. “Why would you think
I
wrote in your book?”

“Because, well, Sasha told me you gave it to her the day of Karen’s birthday party. Remember?”

“No. A book? Karen turned five two weeks after Alexander was born. All I remember was hoping he’d sleep until after they left, and that I’d have the energy to pick up the cake the kids were throwing and squashing.” Her expression darkened, features contorting into something close to anger.
Beth
anger, which was scary. “How could you for one minute think Sam—
my
Sam…
?” She sat back in her chair, as if getting as far from me as she could.

“The book,” I said, feeling lame. “The book said you couldn’t tell. That those men aren’t monsters—or not visibly so. They’re ordinary men. Doctors, lawyers—”

“Sam wouldn’t even whap the dog when we were house-training him. Oh, Mandy, how
could
you?” She looked ready to cry.

I picked pepperoni off the remaining slice of pizza. “I guess I can’t, really. I’m sorry. But then who could it be? Who is it?”

“I don’t have any way of knowing. I haven’t
dusted
our books, let alone sorted through them, and I never owned a book about wife-beating.”

“Sorry,” I said again.

She sighed. “Sasha confused me with somebody else. That girl can be a flake, you know.” I could see how tired she was, and I volunteered to wean Karen from the machines.

We returned to the calm and glowing stone house and I endured and somewhat enjoyed supervising and unwillingly sharing some of Karen’s bath, but all the while, internal voices reminded me that although Beth was not a victim, somebody still was. If the underliner wasn’t my biological sister, did that mean I could ignore her call for help and not even try to extricate her from the hell she lived in?

Except, of course, I no longer had a clue as to how to find her.

“He’s asleep,” Beth said, entering the bathroom. “But I finally woke up. Or at least caught on. When Sasha was here, I was grumbling about how tired I was and how many projects I’d left undone before Alexander, let alone since.”

Karen, scrubbed and shiny and looking like a pink bunny in footed pajamas, stopped brushing her teeth. “Alexander, Schmalexander,” she muttered.

Beth sat down on the edge of the tub and yawned. “So,” she said slowly, “I must have mentioned the garage, which was an absolute mess. I was the drop-off house for Main Line Charities, but they didn’t want everything for the silent auction—and the leftovers plus our normal clutter was so bad I couldn’t park my car inside. Sasha offered to take a few cartons with her. For your sale. I’m embarrassed to say I still haven’t cleaned the garage, so I don’t know what she took; but it could have been books.” She yawned again. “I’m beat,” she said. Then she opened her eyes, stood up and put her hand on my shoulder. “That means I’m
tired,
not wounded, understand?”