Indignation (15 page)

That Monday morning my mother looked herself again, unbroken and unbreakable. After I’d finished assuring her about the helpful arrangements the college had made for my return, the first thing she said was “I won’t divorce him, Marcus. I made
up my mind. I’ll bear him. I’ll do all I can to help him, if anything
can
help him. If that’s what you want from me, that’s what I want too. You don’t want divorced parents, and I don’t want you to have divorced parents. I’m sorry now that I even allowed myself such thoughts. I’m sorry that I told them to you. The way that I did it, here at the hospital, with you just out of bed and starting to walk around on your own—that wasn’t right. That wasn’t fair. I apologize. I will stay with him, Marcus, through thick and thin.”

I filled up with tears and immediately put my hand over my eyes as though I could either hide my tears that way or manage with my fingers to hold them back.

“You can cry, Markie. I’ve seen you cry before.”

“I know you have. I know I can. I don’t want to. I’m just very happy …” I had to stop for a while to find my voice and to recover from having been reduced by her words to being the tiny creature who is nothing but its need of perpetual nurture. “I’m just very happy to hear what you said. This behavior of his could be a temporary thing, you know. Things like this happen, don’t they, when people hit a certain age?”

“I’m sure they do,” she said soothingly.

“Thank you, Ma. This is a great relief to me. I could not imagine him living alone. With only the store and his work and nothing to come home to at night, on his own on the weekends … it was unimaginable.”

“It is worse than unimaginable,” she said, “so don’t imagine it. But now I must ask for something in return. Because something is unimaginable to me. I never asked anything of you before. I never asked anything of you before because I never had to. Because you are perfect where sons are concerned. All you’ve ever wanted to be is a boy who does well. You have been the best son any mother could have. But I am going to ask you to have nothing more to do with Miss Hutton. Because for you to be with her is unimaginable to
me.
Markie, you are here to be a student and to study the Supreme Court and to study Thomas Jefferson and to prepare to go to law school. You are here so someday you will become a person in the community that other people look up to and that they come to for help. You are here so you don’t have to be a Messner like your grandfather and your father and your cousins and work in a butcher shop for the rest of
your life. You are not here to look for trouble with a girl who has taken a razor and slit her wrists.”

“Wrist,” I said. “She slit one wrist.”

“One is enough. We have only two, and one is too much. Markie, I will stay with your father and in return I will ask you to give her up before you get in over your head and don’t know how to get out. I want to make a deal. Will you make that deal with me?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“That’s my boy! That’s my tall, wonderful boy! The world is full of young women who have not slit any wrists—who have slit
nothing.
They exist by the millions. Find one of
them.
She can be a Gentile, she can be anything. This is 1951. You don’t live in the old world of my parents and their parents and their parents before them. Why should you? That old world is far, far away and everything in it long gone. All that is left is the kosher meat. That’s enough. That suffices. It has to. Probably it should. All the rest can go. The three of us never lived like people in a ghetto, and we’re not starting now. We are Americans. Date anyone you want, marry anyone you want, do whatever you want with whoever you choose—as long as she’s never put a razor to
herself in order to end her life. A girl so wounded as to do such a thing is not for you. To want to wipe out everything before your life has even begun—absolutely not! You have no business with such a person, you don’t need such a person, no matter what kind of goddess she looks like and how many beautiful flowers she brings you. She is a beautiful young woman, there is no doubt about that. Obviously she is well brought up. Though maybe there is more to her upbringing than meets the eye. You never know about those things. You never know the truth of what goes on in people’s houses. When the child goes wrong, look first to the family. Regardless, my heart goes out to her. I have nothing against her. I wish the girl luck. I pray, for her sake, that her life does not come to nothing. But you are my only son and my only child, and my responsibility is not to her but to you. You must sever the connection completely. You must look elsewhere for a girlfriend.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you? Or are you saying so to avoid a fight?”

“I’m not afraid of a fight, Mother. You know that.”

“I know you are strong. You stood up to your fa
ther and he is no weakling. And you were right to stand up to him; between the two of us, I was proud of you for standing up to him. But I hope that doesn’t mean that when I leave here, you will change your mind. You won’t, will you, Markie? When you get back to school, when she comes to see you, when she begins to cry and you see her tears, you won’t change your mind? This is a girl full of tears. You see that the moment you look at her. Inside she is all tears. Can you stand up to her tears, Marcus?”

“Yes.”

“Can you stand up to hysterical screaming, if it should come to that? Can you stand up to desperate pleading? Can you look the other way when someone in pain begs and begs you for what she wants that you won’t give her? Yes, to a father you could say, ‘It’s none of your business—leave me alone!’ But do you have the kind of strength that
this
requires? Because you also have a conscience. A conscience that I’m proud that you have, but a conscience that can be your enemy. You have a conscience and you have compassion and you have sweetness in you too—so tell me, do you know how to do such things as may be required of you with this girl? Because other people’s weakness can de
stroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can
be
their strength. A person so unstable is a menace to you, Markie, and a trap.”

“Mom, you don’t have to go on. Stop right here. We have a deal.”

Here she took me in those arms of hers, arms as strong as mine, if not stronger, and she said, “You are an emotional boy. Emotional like your father and all of his brothers. You are a Messner like all the Messners. Once your father was the sensible one, the reasonable one, the only one with a head on his shoulders. Now, for whatever reason, he’s as crazy as the rest. The Messners aren’t just a family of butchers. They’re a family of shouters and a family of screamers and a family of putting their foot down and banging their heads against the wall, and now, out of the blue, your father is as bad as the rest of them. Don’t you be. You be
greater
than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you—
life
does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again. Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks. They played them on me when I came to you and said I was going to divorce
your father. Now I have dealt with those feelings.

Promise me you will deal the same with yours.”

“I promise you. I will.”

We kissed, and thinking in unison of my father, we were as though welded together by our desperate passion for a miracle to occur.

A
t the infirmary, I was shown to the narrow hospital bed—one of three in a smallish, bright room looking onto the campus woods—that would be mine for the next week. The nurse showed me how to pull the curtain to encircle the bed for privacy, though, as she told me, the two other beds were unoccupied, so for the time being I’d have the place to myself. She pointed out the bathroom across the hall, where there was a sink, a toilet, and a shower. The sight of each made me remember my mother cleaning the bathroom at the hospital after Olivia had left us to return to the campus—after Olivia had left, never to be invited into my life again, should I go ahead and keep the promise I’d made to my mother.

Sonny Cottler was with me at the infirmary and helped me move my belongings—textbooks and a few toilet items—so that, in keeping with the part
ing instructions from the doctor, I didn’t have to carry or lift anything. Driving back from the hospital in the car, Sonny had said I could call on him for whatever I might need and invited me to the fraternity house for dinner that night. He was as kind and attentive as he could be, and I wondered if my mother had spoken to him about Olivia and if he was being so solicitous to prevent me from pining for her and breaking my deal with my mother or if he was secretly planning on calling her himself and taking her out again now that I had forsworn her. Even with him helping me, I couldn’t get over my suspiciousness.

Everything I saw or heard caused my thoughts to turn to Olivia. I declined going to the fraternity house with Sonny and instead ate my first meal back on campus alone at the student cafeteria, hoping to find Olivia eating by herself at one of the smaller tables. To return to the infirmary, I took the long way around, passing the Owl, where I put my head inside to see if she might be eating by herself at the counter, even though I knew she disliked the place as much as I did. And all the while I went looking for an opportunity to run into her, and all the while I was discovering that everything, starting
with the bathroom at the infirmary, reminded me of her, I was addressing her inside my head: “I miss you already. I’ll always miss you. There’ll never be anybody like you!” And intermittently, in response, came her melodic, lighthearted “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth I knew not where.” “Oh, Olivia,” I thought, beginning to write her another letter, this too in my head, “you are so wonderful, so beautiful, so smart, so dignified, so lucid, so uniquely sexed-up. What if you did slit your wrist? It’s healed, isn’t it? And so are you! So you blew me—where’s the crime? So you blew Sonny Cottler—where’s …” But that thought, and the snapshot accompanying it, was not so easy to manage successfully and took more than one effort to erase. “I want to be with you. I want to be near you. You
are
a goddess—my mother was right. And who deserts a goddess because his mother tells him to? And my mother won’t divorce my father no matter what I do. There is no way that she would send him to live with the cats in back of the store. Her announcing that she was divorcing him and had engaged an attorney was merely the ploy by which she tricked me. But then it couldn’t be a ploy, since
she’d already told me about divorcing him before she’d even known of you. Unless she’d already learned of you through Cottler’s relatives in Newark. But my mother would never deceive me like that. Nor could I deceive her. I’m caught—I’ve made her a promise I can never break, whose keeping is going to break me!”

Or perhaps, I thought, I could fail to keep the promise without her finding out … But when I got to history class on Tuesday, any possibility of betraying my mother’s trust disappeared, because Olivia wasn’t there. She was absent from class on Thursday as well. Nor did I see her seated anywhere at chapel when I attended on Wednesday. I checked every seat in every row, and she wasn’t there. And I had thought, We’ll sit side by side through chapel, and everything that drives me crazy will suddenly be a source of amusement with Olivia enchantingly laughing beside me.

But she’d left school entirely. I had known it the moment I saw she was absent from history class, and had then confirmed it by calling her dormitory and asking to speak to her. Whoever picked up said, “She’s gone home,” politely, but in such a way as to
make me think something had happened beyond Olivia’s simply having “gone home”—something that none of them were supposed to talk about. When I did not call or contact her, she had tried again to kill herself—that had to be what had happened. After being called “Miss Hutton” a dozen times in twenty minutes by my mother, after waiting in vain for me to phone once I was back and settled into the infirmary, she had taken measures of just the kind my mother had warned me about. So I was lucky, was I not? Spared a suicidal girlfriend, was I not? Yes, and never before so devastated.

And what if she had not merely tried to kill herself—suppose she’d succeeded? What if she had slit both wrists this time, and bled to death in the dormitory—what if she had done it out at the cemetery where we had parked that night? Not only would the college do everything to keep it a secret, but so would her family. That way no one at Winesburg would ever know what happened, and no one but me would know why. Unless she’d left a note. Then everyone would blame her suicide on me—on my mother and on me.

I had to walk back to Jenkins and down to the basement, across from the post office, to find a pay
phone with a folding door that I could tightly shut in order to make my call without anyone overhearing it. There was no note from her at the post office—that was what I’d checked first after Sonny had installed me in the infirmary. Before making my call, I checked again, and this time found there a college envelope containing a handwritten letter from Dean Caudwell:

Dear Marcus:

We’re all glad to have you back on campus and to be assured by the doctor that you came through in top-notch shape. I hope now you’ll reconsider your decision not to go out for baseball when spring comes. This coming year’s team needs a rangy infielder, à la Marty Marion of the Cards, and you look to me as if you might well fill the bill. I suspect you’re fast on your feet, and as you know, there are ways to get on base and help score runs that don’t necessitate hitting the ball over the fence. A bunt dropped for a base hit can be one of the most beautiful things to behold in all of sports. I’ve already put in a word with Coach Portzline. He is eager to see you at tryouts when they’re held on March 1. Welcome back rejuvenated to the Winesburg community. I like to think of this moment as your return to the fold. I hope you’re thinking
that way too. If I can be of any help to you, please do not hesitate to stop by the office.