The Most Dangerous Thing (13 page)

“Too?”

“I was married at twenty, but there were two miscarriages before Tim. He’s fourteen now.”

That made Doris, what? Thirty-five, thirty-six? Tally wondered if it was the gray light in the little market that made Doris look so gray. If Tally had been forced to guess—thank God she hadn’t guessed—she would have put the other woman’s age at forty-five, a very hard and unforgiving forty-five.

“Oh, I’m older than I look,” Tally said. Adding swiftly, lest she seem vain, which she was, but why advertise it: “It’s the way I wear my hair that makes me look younger.”

Doris nodded. “We’ve noticed.”

T
o this day, Tally wonders about that “we.” Doris and her husband? The royal we? All the women of Dickeyville, sitting in silent judgment on the newcomer, with her long corn-silk hair and pretty, impractical clothes, living in the modern monstrosity that no one wanted? The mid-1970s was the era of
The Stepford Wives,
and if the women of Dickeyville were not the empty-eyed automatons of the book and film, they were not as individualistic as they wanted to believe. They were merely a hipper variation of Stepford wives. Eating granola and living in a historic district didn’t make you a freethinker.

Of course, Doris Halloran was and is a different kettle of fish from the other Dickeyville wives. She still wears housedresses and panty hose. Her pale red hair, on those rare occasions when it is released from its curlers, is worn in tight, unflattering waves. Yet she is younger than Tally. How can that be? Doris Halloran looks as if she has been old all her life. Had the miscarriages done that? Tally yearns to feel superior to her. Why shouldn’t she? She is pretty, vibrant, smart. She paints, and not in a dilettante way. Who is Doris Halloran to be talking about Tally’s hairstyle, to be judging Gwen for breaking up with Sean? Tally may claim to be older than she is, but she could shave five, ten years off her real age and be believed.

Tally has been lying about her age since she and Clem left Boston two years into their marriage. She lies about Clem’s age, too. Not outright lies, but evasive bits of gentle misdirection, fudging and nudging, nudging and fudging. She nudges her husband’s age down, ever so slightly, her own up, thereby narrowing the gap between them, which she finds embarrassing, although not as embarrassing as the fact that she married at eighteen and had her first child at nineteen. It isn’t the math that tortures her, but the other facts that can be inferred from these bits of arithmetic. Tally Duchamp Robison did not graduate from college, maybe didn’t even attend. Among her people—and Tally comes from people who are the sort of people who think of themselves as having people—this was unfathomable, shaming. Her great-great-grandmother had gone to college, her grandmother was a lawyer, her mother is an ob-gyn. OK, maybe she was brought up to bring home the bacon after all, but Betty Friedan be damned, the only rebellion available to Tally was an early, conventional marriage to an older man. It felt exciting and daring at the time. Now, in 1979, no one gets that. To the world at large, she is no different from the Doris Hallorans, marrying at twenty because there were no other options. Tally had all the options in the world when she was eighteen.

And she threw them all away because she was headstrong and shortsighted—and didn’t know where to go for a pregnancy test without being found out, and didn’t want to wait too long, lest others figure out her predicament.

I want to go to Paris,
she thinks, waiting to turn left at the always busy intersection near the store, still overwhelmed by traffic from the Social Security Administration at this time of day. It’s taking the line of cars two, three cycles to get through the light.
I want to be the person I’ve been pretending to be all these years.

Tally was never foolish enough to claim to have a degree, but she drops her selected facts like bread crumbs and lets people follow them where they seem to lead. She was accepted at Wellesley. True. She married young. Again, true. Her husband was a college professor—oh no, not at her college—her uncle’s best friend, from the medical school. A bit of a
scandale,
if one must know. Still true, and is it her fault if people think she was seduced while a college freshman? People eye Clement differently after they hear these bits. With more respect, because a thirty-two-year-old man who had an affair with an eighteen-year-old was not necessarily out of line, especially if he married her in the end. Tally still remembers the gleam of
who’d a thunk
it
in the eyes of their new acquaintances. Clem benefits as much as she does from this misunderstanding. Dear as he is, he is a bit of a fuddy-duddy. At a recent faculty party, someone produced a joint and Clem not only declined to try it, he also insisted they leave immediately. Geriatric specialist? Clem
is
a geriatric specialty.

But such instances of disharmony are rare. Tally is an old soul, in her opinion, older than Clem in many ways. When Gwen, their surprise baby, was born, Clem was already forty, Tally not even twenty-eight, yet it was Clem who got down on the rug with her and played without inhibition. Tally didn’t have it in her. She felt ancient. She adores Gwen, who has turned out to be a most satisfactory child. But having Gwen—finally, an accident, not that she regrets it—meant postponing her next stage. What if she had started painting in her twenties? Where would she be now?

She is—what is her real age?—forty-two years old, pretending to be forty-six-ish. Clem is fifty-six, although she says early fifties when pressed. Gwen will leave for college in four years. Now throw in another four years. College-age children expect their homes to stand as shrines, as Tally learned from Miller and Fee. She will be forty-six, and Clem will be sixty, married almost thirty years. He probably won’t want to take early retirement, but he’ll be ready to leave teaching at sixty-five, once Gwen is out of college, she’s sure of it. Then they can go to Paris. Somehow, some way. She will go to Paris before she’s fifty-two.

You’ll be dead at fifty-two.

The thought runs an icy finger down her spine. This is not at all like her. She is not morbid. She is not given to dark premonitions. She blames the shiver on the black cat in the window of the dry cleaners, the one holding up its paw in salute to the glories of Black Cat rubber heels. Mired here in the line of traffic waiting to turn left, she has been absentmindedly staring at the cat, whose face has a decidedly sinister cast. “Shoo,” she says as she accelerates, her turn for the green light finally arriving.
Shoo
. Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, back at the market. Tally assumes Doris is too exhausted to go home, that the interior of her car is the only place she can be alone. It’s different for Tally. She has her studio, she has a vocation, she has—well, it’s different for her, it just is.

Chapter Sixteen

Winter 1980

D
oris gave Go-Go the spare room when he started wetting the bed last fall. Tim Junior raised a stink, of course, and Sean took his side, but she stood up to them, said it made sense because Go-Go has the earlier bedtime. It was odd because bed-wetting was never Go-Go’s problem as a toddler, if only because she was too tired to care much by the time he was born and her very nonchalance succeeded where all her effort never had.
Wear diapers the rest of your life if that’s what you want,
she told him once,
but when you learn how to tie your shoes, you can change your own pants
. At his own initiative, Go-Go was completely potty-trained at age two, a feat neither older brother could claim.

It may be his only accomplishment,
Doris thinks as she gathers up the sheets one weekday morning. No one else in the household knows about Go-Go’s problem. She doesn’t want his brothers to have any more ammunition for teasing. As for his father—she can’t bear to think what he will do to the boy if he finds out. So no one knows except Doris. At this point, Doris isn’t sure if even Go-Go realizes he’s wetting the bed up to four times a week. Why would he? She does everything possible to minimize, conceal, the problem. There is a plastic mattress pad, at no risk of being discovered, since no one else in this household would ever strip his own bed, much less wash another person’s sheets. She checks Go-Go’s bed every morning as soon as the house is empty, washing the sheets if necessary, often doing all the household linens for cover.

Thank goodness they have a washer-dryer in this house. For the first six years of her marriage, they lived in a brick town house without any laundry facilities and only one bathroom. It was hard, especially after Sean was born. What if she had actually given birth to all the children that she and Tim Senior had conceived? She would have eight children now. They never could have afforded that. Did God know? Was that why God took her children? And of all the children God took, why had he given her Go-Go? Didn’t she deserve a sweet baby, a well-behaved little girl, someone who might take her side from time to time? She had prayed to St. Gerard for such a baby. Instead, she got Go-Go, and no one, not even his mother, could consider Go-Go an answer to a prayer. Still, for all his exhausting craziness, he was sort of sweet, too, the only one of her boys who liked to be cuddled and held. That is, he liked to be cuddled and held until his brothers teased him out of it.

Now Go-Go is all sour, no sweet. Crazy, sullen, sarcastic, more destructive than ever, at least at home. Strangely, his behavior at school seems to be getting marginally better, if not his grades. There is a new priest, Father Andrew from Boston, and he seems to think Go-Go is a good kid at heart. “High-spirited, but wasn’t I the same as a boy?” he asks in his Boston accent. Doris thinks Father Andrew is very good-looking. And smart. She almost wishes he were more worried about Go-Go, which would entail meetings at the school, with Father talking to her in that wonderful voice. He is so
masculine
. He risks the little kindnesses and sentiments that Tim Senior never attempts. Once, when Doris was arriving at St. Lawrence for altar duty, she saw Go-Go’s class in the yard, playing kickball. Go-Go kicked a magnificent home run, soaring, soaring, soaring over his classmates’ heads and when he trotted to home plate, Father Andrew rubbed his hand across Go-Go’s head, congratulating him. Later, at bedtime, Doris did the same thing. She had forgotten how soft her son’s hair was, how appealing, even when in need of a wash.

“Stop it,” Go-Go said. The next morning, his sheets were yellow again and she wanted to scream. She can’t. She mustn’t. She is all Go-Go has. Tim and Sean will be fine, especially Sean. But Go-Go needs her.

Sheets in the washing machine, she shuffles into the kitchen, but she doesn’t have the energy to face the breakfast mess. Tim Senior insists on eggs and bacon every morning, and how can she deny the boys a full breakfast when their father is having one? He has been out of work since the end of the holiday season, and there was a three-month layoff before that job. He should be able to find something, though, with his experience. Maybe not at one of the big department stores—he’s pretty much burned his bridges there—but at Robert Hall, Tuerkes, Hamburger’s. He says he’s looking, but Doris doesn’t know where he goes during the days, taking their only car. “I’ve got a lead,” he will say, and she doesn’t have the nerve to ask what sort of job interview leaves a man’s breath sour from cigarettes and beer. She has heard he’s hanging out in Monaghan’s over in Woodlawn. It’s a decent place as taverns go. He isn’t running around with women. She is pretty sure he isn’t running around with women. Sex isn’t that important to Tim. After Go-Go, there had been one more miscarriage, and Doris told Tim that she didn’t think she could take it anymore, that they had to be more careful, find a way to make things work while being true to the church. The miscarriages were harder than the pregnancies. He was very sweet about it, said it was OK, his needs weren’t that great.

Abandoning the kitchen, she takes a cup of lukewarm tea into the living room and turns on the television, catching the last bit of
People Are Talking
.
Exactly,
Doris thinks. People are always talking. That’s why she has to be vigilant, keep the family’s secrets. Go-Go doesn’t wet the bed, Tim Senior isn’t out of a job, they didn’t start raiding the boys’ college funds last summer to stay afloat. She misses the program
Dialing for Dollars,
which is off the air, killed by the state lottery. At least that’s Tim’s take on it. Hard to get excited about winning forty dollars, he says, when you could win thousands and you don’t have to sit around waiting for a phone call. Still, she misses it.
Dialing for Dollars
was her respite when Go-Go was little. True to his name, he was always in motion, and when his brothers were at school during the day, Doris never knew any rest. However, he would settle in with a bottle of juice to watch
Dialing for Dollars
with her. Go-Go was frustrated that the host, Stu Kerr, never called them once, but Doris held no grudge. It’s a big city, and Doris never wins anything, small or large. She remembers when Sean put together the fact that Kerr, beneath a wig and funny nose, was also Professor Kool on
Professor Kool’s Fun Skool
. Sean was outraged. That is, he pretended to be outraged about the principle of the thing, as he saw it, but he was really embarrassed to have been fooled. Sean doesn’t like to be wrong, ever. It’s almost a little unnatural, the one characteristic that makes her nervous for her otherwise most golden child. Only Jesus gets to be perfect.

The phone rings. For a second, she thinks it’s Stu Kerr, and she panics because she doesn’t know the count and the amount, but then she remembers the show is on only in her thoughts. She rushes to the kitchen, taking inventory yet again of the sink of dishes, the cast-iron frying pan filled with bacon grease.

“Mrs. Halloran?” It is Father Andrew’s lovely voice, but she doesn’t want him to know she recognizes it instantly.

“This is she.” She stands up a little straighter, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Where’s the curler that held the hair? She spots it on the drainboard.

“Father Andrew up at St. Lawrence. We have a little situation with Gordon.”

Doris appreciates the euphemism but knows it has to be bad for the school to call.

“He’s OK,” the priest says, rushing to assure her. He is so nice. “But you see, another boy brought a baseball mitt to school today, a birthday gift he wanted to show off. It went missing and we found it in Go-Go’s desk.”

“He isn’t a thief,” she says quickly. “He just likes . . . nice things.”

“He was also very forthright. Didn’t lie or pretend it was put there by mistake. Just said he admired it and couldn’t help wanting to touch it. Still—I thought it might be effective if we spoke to him together.”

Together
.

“I would be right there, but we only have the one car and Mr. Halloran has it and—” She breaks down, begins to cry, which is as shaming as Go-Go’s thievery. It’s too much. Her son, stealing from a classmate. Her husband unavailable to her, and even if she could reach him, she would never dare ask for his help in such a situation. Tim Senior would probably take a belt to Go-Go for this offense, and Lord knows, a part of her has yearned to beat him, to scream at him, to shake him. Father Andrew being so nice—that makes it worse. The thing is, she would like nothing better than to drive to the school—after taking out her curlers, maybe a quick bath—and talk to Father Andrew. Men who give up women, as priests do, are so much easier to talk to. She can take him some cookies, store bought, and maybe he will make her tea on the little hot plate he keeps in his office. She is surprised to realize how much she has noticed in her visits there—the hot plate, the mug from Northeastern University, the photos of children, presumably his nieces and nephews, a large photo of what was clearly a family reunion in some place very green. It could be anywhere, but she wants to believe it was Ireland. They would speak to Go-Go constructively, then send him back to class, and then talk privately about what a challenge he is. Like Father Andrew, she will find positive, optimistic words.
Challenge, situation, incident.
She might even tell him about the chronic bed-wetting, ask if he has any insight into why an almost ten-year-old boy would regress this way. Father Andrew probably has all sorts of reassuring insights.

But she is stuck here because they have only one car. No other family in the neighborhood has only one car, except for that chaotic single woman across the street, the one who doesn’t mow her lawn until the neighborhood association insists, tells her it’s a breeding ground for rats. What are they going to do when Tim Junior gets his license? How are they going to afford the extra insurance for having teen drivers on their policy? She cries harder.

“There, there,” Father Andrew says. “I can handle it alone.”

“Does everyone know?” she chokes out.

“I’m afraid it was a little public for my tastes. But he was caught, he confessed, he was punished. I’ll make sure that the children understand there is no point revisiting such things.”

He will, somehow. Father Andrew has that kind of power. The children love him as much as their mothers do. Only the fathers don’t seem to get Father Andrew’s charm. The thick, dark hair, the high color in his face, the bright blue eyes, the broad shoulders. It would be unbearable if he were a regular man, because then he would have a girlfriend or a wife. But as a priest, Father Andrew is available to her.

“Maybe we should still have a meeting one day?” she asks. “About Go-Go’s . . . situation.”

“Sometimes, the less said, the better. Let it go. He’s learned a valuable lesson.”

She is torn, wanting to tell him about the sheets, the other problems, if only to prolong the conversation, yet feeling it would be a betrayal.

“About Go-Go,” she starts.

“Yes?”

She can’t do it. “What do you think of him? Truly.”

“I think he’s a boy, ma’am, with all the inherent contradictions and conflicting impulses. He wants to be good. He really does. But it’s hard to be good.”

This is such a generous assessment of her son that she yearns to believe it. Yet a part of her mind steps back and hisses like a goose:
You’re a fool, Father. He’s a bad, bad boy. He’s an awful boy. And maybe he has every reason in the world to be that way, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep all his secrets.