Shirley (16 page)

M
ARCH
IT
IS
, and march I must. Up to the campus, finally, with the baby well wrapped under blankets. It is a beautiful day, a veritable lamb of a day. We are aglow with the anticipation of spring. Warm enough to unbutton my navy winter coat for the first time, but I don't. There are two small patches of baby yurp on my blouse, and I don't want to think about them. I can never remember the name of the French writer who said every woman is as beautiful as some man thinks she is, but I know I have him in the back of my mind. I am taking my baby up the hill and onto campus, eager to display her—and myself—to make my husband proud. He loves us, and I am certain of it. One thing he often says is that we are the reason for all he does.

The sky is bright, the air is soft. I can see clear across the campus, through the still-bare trees, all around the bowl of the valley and up the mountains in every direction. Paula Welden was lost over there, to the southeast, on Glastenbury Mountain, and to the north is the pond where we will swim again, I hope, come summer. I push the carriage over the rutted, half-frozen muddy road, at one with the students—girls in open jackets, books hugged in crooked
arms, braided hair, cheerful knitted scarves slung loosely. We greet the spring together, another ancient female rite.

My boots are smeared with mud thrown back by the baby carriage's wheels. It is close to noon, and Fred's morning class will let out just as I round the duck pond. With luck, we will catch him before he heads back to his office in the Barn Building. Squirrels dart across the path. I slide briefly on a patch of black ice, catch myself without losing control of Natalie in her carriage, and giggle. I feel life everywhere—sap slowly recalls the course through maple trees; sleepy fish nose the underside of the melting pond surface; long-limbed girls trot past me, calling to one another with insouciance born of anticipation—
Life! I'm in it!

Gleefully, we round the bend past the student center. Pairs and groups of girls emerge from the science building, begin to run toward the Commons or back to dormitories. August professorial types stroll at more leisurely paces, attended by one or more adoring acolytes. I grin with pride. Which one is Fred?

There is no warning, and so you won't have one, either.

He stands in the middle of the road, his arms locked around a small, peacoated, red-hatted girl, her bookbag smartly slung around her back so that they can press as closely as possible. They are kissing.

They are kissing.

Fred is kissing someone else, passionately kissing another woman, out there in the clean, chill air, with the blue of the sky reflected across the roof of the new library and in the snow-dipped puddles all around his feet. Nobody seems to notice, or give him a second glance. Have they seen this so frequently it means nothing?

He kisses. She kisses.

She is blond, like me; I can see the little wisps of hair escaping from under her red beret. They cling to one another the way you cling when you already know the body of the other but aren't yet used to it.

They are no more than ten feet from me. My heart pounds. I open my mouth, I want to call to him, to scream at him,
Fred! What in God's name are you doing?

I close my mouth.

And Natalie begins to cry.

Fred's lips pause and hold, his eyes flicker open, he twists—still clinging to her damn mouth with his—and even when he sees me, and pushes her away, he keeps one hand against the arch of her back. She does not know me, has no idea; her expression is forgivably mystified.

“Rose.”

I stare. I want him not to say anything.

Natalie's wail grows thinner, becomes a screech cutting through the balmy air, my panic her knife. I bend to her. I feel something so enormously blank that it has size and shape and volume in its absence. When Natalie left my body, there was a moment, the moment after pain, an indescribable agony teetering on the edge between now and memory—but this is worse. This is the worst moment that has ever been.

“Rose,” he says again. He lifts the baby, holds her against his coat. Where the girl was. He holds my baby against that same warm spot, against his heart, against the chest where my head has lain, where I supposed no other head would ever be.

“Give her back.”

“Rose.”

I feel but do not see that the girl has left, has scampered down some pathway to the dorms. For a moment, I track with her; I wonder if she knows about me. I wonder if she cares. I want to blame it all on her.

“Fred,” I say. “Give my baby to me.”

He shakes his head. “Our baby,” he says.

I want to say,
How could you?
I want to say,
I can't believe you.

“I'm sorry, Rosie, I didn't, it isn't. It really isn't—”

“Isn't what? Isn't what, Fred?” Grit marbles my voice. I'd set fire to anything, wouldn't I, if only to release this pain.

“Everyone—” he begins, and then stops.

“I thought you loved me, it was all for us. That's what you said.”

His breath comes in little clouds. “I do. I do, Rosie. I swear. We can't talk here, we have to talk. Come to my office.” He keeps the baby tight in his arms but lowers a hand as if to take mine. How can he? That same hand, it has been on that girl's back, and now he uses it to touch me?

“Get away from me.”

“Rosie, not here. We need to talk.”

I can't say whether the people moving past us in either direction are gawking. I don't care. Fred's eyes brim damply; he watches only me, determined not to see himself being seen.

I am afraid that if I grab the baby from him, I might throw her. Rage trembles all through me; I can't control what I am, I don't know. I don't know.

I do remember that I spat at him, saliva clinging to his stupid,
foolish Stanley-worshipping beard. I turned. I ran. Just like one of those lucky students with their brilliant minds, I sprinted. Past the Barn Building, down the long front drive, and out the main gates of campus, without stopping.

If I was crying, it would have been difficult to tell, what with all the ice melt dripping from the high branches of the trees that lined the road.

I ran across the street, stopping short at a melting snowbank, and stuck out my thumb. Not three minutes passed before I was perched on the front seat of a truck, aimed toward the mountains, away from North Bennington, away from Fred and Natalie, away from Stanley and Shirley and all the tainted souls I had not been smart enough to fear.

“Where you heading?” the man asked me. He was a farmer; I had seen his haul of bundled hay and chicken feed jouncing on the truck bed as I stepped up into the cab.

I was not crying.

“You a student?” He was mid-fifties, grizzled, his jacket emitting a complex and not altogether pleasant aroma, like liver cooking. The pockets under his eyes were deeply etched, deckled with brown spots; his smile was kind. Flesh had embedded his wedding ring through the years. An enviable malformation.

“Yes,” I told him. “Glastenbury Mountain. I want to hike the Long Trail.”

He put on his blinker, turning right. “I live up that way. You'll have about a half-mile to go after my place.”

Melting ice blobs, caught under the windshield wipers, streaked the window.

“Don't know what it is about you college girls and that trail. Half the time that's where you're headed, no matter the time of year.”

“It's a good place to get away,” I said.

“I guess there's other places I'd rather. My wife says it's dangerous up there, what with mountain lions and such, dangerous for you girls don't know how to handle yoursels. You know about that girl, don't you, the one that never came back?”

I nodded. My throat was tight. All I wanted was to be alone, alone, alone, away from Fred and all other people. There was no one to trust and never had been.

“The fella dropped her off up there, he never got over it. Neighbor of mine, passed on these ten years at least, and never did get over it. The wife wanted to sell his acreage, after he died, but Martha said no. South-facing and clear, we could have used it, but she wanted no truck with him.”

“He had something to do with it, the girl?”

We came to a halt at the stop sign before the mountain turnoff. The man lowered his window, spat, placed his bent elbow against the frame. Cold air shushed brightly through the window, well worth breathing.

“You ask me, no. But once't something like that happens to you, folks never see you the same.” He eyed me suspiciously. “So don't you go disappearing, hear me?”

“I won't,” I said softly, but in truth, I think I was meaning to. Is it lost girls who go to mountains, or do girls go to mountains so that they can be lost?

“Boy troubles, innit? I ain't supposed to see you was crying, so
I'm going to act like I don't. Martha says it's always summat with boys. Up there, a girls' school, you rich girls on the hill, and allus trouble with boys.”

“They have boys up there,” I said. “Husbands and such.”

We were silent for some miles, the truck straining on the rutted, partially paved incline. Muddy snow spat up under the tires so high it spackled my window; as warm as the sun made me, I would not roll the glass down. I loosened the buttons on my coat.

He said, “My Martha told me a story. 'Bout one of them professors up there at the college. Couldn't believe my ears. Made her tell it twice. She says one of them fellas fooled around with one of those girl students and got her in the family way. Martha says that teacher up and got the girl to come live with him, and his family, wife and children and all. Big old house near the campus. Acted like it was all right as rain. And when the wife found out, what did she do?”

“What?”

He tapped the brakes hard, twice, so that I had to hold on to the door handle to keep from flying forward.

“That lady, that wife, she killed herself. Yep. That's what Martha told me. Heard all about it at the library.”

“And the girl? The pregnant girl?”

He shot me an evaluative look. “Lady took pills and kilt herself. That other one, the student? She up and married that professor, raised his kids. Added her baby to the stable like a new horse, shift the stalls and it's all good, and that was that.”

I laughed. “That's a short story,” I said. “A story by a writer named Joyce Carol Oates. It's not true.”

He shrugged. “Martha ain't much for making up stories.”

“She didn't,” I said. “She read it in a magazine.”

He said, “You're too young to know how evil folks can be. You get to my age, you'll have heard it all.”

“People in the village, they don't like the college much, do they?”

“It's not that. I say live and let live. That fellow Martha heard about, though, maybe it's wrong for folks like him to be allowed to do what they do. Summat like that, a man like that, don't you think he should be punished?” His tone was dark.

“Yes,” I said. “Men like that.”

He circled the truck at the edge of the turnaround, angling the nose back to the road. “What with talking, I took you the whole way. That's the trailhead, right there. You be careful, miss. Sun goes early enough, this time of year.”

“I'll be fine,” I said. “Thank you for the ride.” I scrambled down from the high cab and held the door open for just a moment.

“You know there's a feller up there teaches a class about folk songs? My own daddy coulda taught that. Good money your parents pay, for you to listen to some devil teach you all the same such songs my daddy taught me hisself, out in the barn milking cows.”

I smiled. “That's funny,” I said.

“Sad is what it is,” he told me. “Now shut that door and walk away with your sorrows. My pap woulda told you that, and he couldn't read nor write to save his life. Called himself Jim Harris, had to use a thumbprint to sign his name.”

“Jim Harris?”

“Yep,” he said. “James Harris. Just like the song.”

“Amazing,” I told him. “Your father was one famous guy.”

“Just like me,” he said, and winked. “But I ain't never been the devil, nor intended to turn into one.”

I patted the car door. “Nice to meet you, Jim Harris, even if it means I've lost my mind.”

He chuckled. “You made my afternoon, missy. Be safe out there.”

•   •   •

I'
D
BE
LYING
if I pretended the trail didn't scare me, not another set of human footprints in the mud, and deer and wild turkeys stopped still in their tracks, eyes wide and frightened, backs rigid, as I strode past them in the brush, partially hidden by leafless scraggy oaks. When a squirrel scampered across the path in front of me, my heart caught. I restrained a scream.

You wonder, what was going on in my head? Did I think about what I'd seen, my husband kissing another woman, a fresher, prettier woman than I could ever hope to be again? I wonder, too.

Pain has an element of blank; it cannot recollect when it began, or if there was a time when it was not.

I did not have to look up those lines of Emily Dickinson's. I already had this as my answer, always did. I was numb. I walked as quickly as I could, my boots making sucking sounds in the mud. My fingers rapidly grew cold; tears froze in my eyelashes. In the woods, it is never as warm as it is in town.

I stuck to the path. In the back of my mind was the thought that I would stumble across her, across Paula Welden, a pile of bones not found in all these years. I would lie next to them, perhaps caress them. I would fall asleep there, waiting for the sun to set, and
nobody would find me, either. I fancied the thought that Fred and the girl would raise Natalie, that my name might never be spoken again, he Ethan Frome, or she the quiet replacement bride for Manderley, the new Mrs. de Winter. So what if I was no Rebecca; my curse would cling to him.