Unbecoming (3 page)

Grace hadn’t even known they could do that.

He’d probably been checking a sports score or something.

The police took the Kimbroughs into custody too, as the phone was technically theirs, and drove to the cabin with Greg’s parents in the backseat. Mr. Kimbrough was a criminal defense attorney. Greg wouldn’t have an opportunity to say anything without a lawyer present. At his parents’ urging, Greg rolled like a puppy. Alls and Riley were arrested hours later.

Grace watched the Wynne case through the foggy pinhole of the
Albemarle Record
and its local correspondent’s maddeningly elliptical reporting. Cy Helmers had been three years ahead of the boys in school and four ahead of her. He’d gone to Garland College and become the county paper’s cub reporter when he graduated. He reported the Wynne heist as if he were above gossip, as if he couldn’t stand to make his old schoolmates look worse than they already did.

The Czech front desk matron sent her son to fetch Grace twice more. No other student had received a phone call, and Grace felt conspicuous and exposed as she conducted these conversations, despite the fact that the woman spoke no English. There was a plastic window over the counter, through which students passing through the lobby could see her. Grace faced the wall.

The second phone call was from Grace’s mother, whose very voice seemed to go pale when Grace said that no, she would not come back in time for the sentencing; no, she did not know when she would come back at all. Her mother, whose maternal passions were seldom if ever directed at Grace, now implored her: How could she just abandon Riley like this?

“Abandon
him
?” Grace was incredulous on the line. “The person I built my life on, the last decade and my entire future, the one and only person I can call mine”—this was a dig—“just committed a whole parade of felonies with his idiot friends. And you think I should come home to
support
him?” She was shaking when she finished. Her mother had little to say after that.

The third and last call was from Riley’s father.

The boys had been released into their families’ custody, awaiting sentencing. It was evening in Prague, morning in Tennessee, and Dr. Graham was calling from his office at the college.

“I think I understand,” he began, “why you would not want to come back for this.”

Grace had nothing to say. It had not occurred to her that he would call. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. A truth.

“Us too. And him. He may be having the hardest time believing it.”

“I don’t think he knew what he was really doing,” she said. “He couldn’t have. People make mistakes without realizing—one bad decision can just carry you away. And the three of them together. You know.”

“We should have checked him more,” Dr. Graham said quietly. “I guess you seemed to keep him in line enough.” He laughed, a little drily. “Grace, you know we love you as our daughter.”

They had said this for years: not
like
a
daughter but
as
our
daughter, and Grace had bloomed under those words and their power to make her one of them. But it was Dr. Graham calling her, not Mrs. Graham, and he was calling her from his office, not from their home.

Grace remembered shooting skeet with the Grahams when she was fifteen, her first time. She had done well, as well as Riley and his brothers, and Dr. Graham had laughed with surprise and delight. “Goddammit, son,” he had said to Riley. “You’ll never do better.”

“If there’s anything you know that could help him,” he said now, “anything at all—”

“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Grace said.

 • • • 

Grace did not call. She did not write. Just before they went to Lacombe, she received a single letter from Garland.

Dear Grace,

Love,

Riley

She never knew whether to read it as an indictment of her silence or a promise of his.

What he must think of her, what his family must think of her—what they must say. She hated to think about it. She worried less about what Alls thought of her now. He had known long before Riley how bad Grace could really be.

2

G
race knew that a parolee had a keeper and a leash. They didn’t know where she was; they couldn’t. She
knew
these things, but that night, as she twisted under her sheet, her brain refused them. She took a sleeping pill at two but failed to submit. The night brain knew every trick.

What did she think, that Riley would murder her? That he was tracking her so he could throw lye in her face? Hanna had told her that story, from New York half a century ago. A man, Burt Pugach, had hired hit men to throw lye into the face of Linda Riss, his girlfriend, after she told him she wouldn’t see him anymore. He told her, “If I can’t have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you.” He went to prison for fourteen years, and he wrote her thousands of letters. He had blinded her in one eye. When he was released from prison, she married him.

It was the happy ending that most troubled Grace.

Tomorrow they’ll be out
, the night brain taunted her. She took another pill at four and begged for defeat. She went down at six and slept through her alarm.

When Grace got to work the next morning, Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, picking at her cuticles and blowing smoke from the side of her mouth, her door wide open. Amaury was already stooped in his dark corner, cooing at the pocket watch under his yellow lamplight. His table was as far as possible from the basement studio’s high windows and the meager sunlight they let in from the narrow street. As far as Grace could tell, he lived his life underground: in this basement, on the metro, and in his basement apartment in Montreuil. Grace had seen him getting off the metro in the morning, blinking unhappily in the sun.

Hanna had tied a white smock over her clothes. She’d lined up Grace’s worktable end-to-end with the two extra tables that were left over from better times, when there had been more work and more staff. Grace counted ten bowls and containers arranged along the tables, largest to smallest.

“Tu es en retard,” Hanna scolded her. Hanna was never late, and her hands were never still. Whenever she and Grace had lunch together, Hanna bobbed her knee as she ate, always impatient to get back to work. “Are you ready?”

“As ever,” Grace said, tying a smock over her own clothes.

“I didn’t want to start and then have to stop again to explain it to you.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Grace said. “The train was late.”

“We’re cleaning the beads. As you know, they’ve discolored from someone’s shortsighted application of oil to their surface. But, as with hair spray or nail polish, this has only damaged them.” She looked at Grace from the side, through the gap between her face and her eyeglasses, and Grace ran her thumb over her own clear-polished fingernails.

She and Hanna seldom worked on a project together. Until recently, there had been enough to do so that they each stayed late, piecing parts back together and buffing out scratches in satisfying silence. But Grace hadn’t gotten anything after the birdcage, and she knew to worry. Jobs like this one were few and far between, and without a visa? She’d gotten lucky. If she were let go, she’d be a hotel maid again.

Hanna raised her chin toward the repurposed chafing dish at the end of the table. “Container one,” she said. Hundreds of tiny dark beads were sunk in turpentine like coffee grounds, the dirty oil clouding around them. “Those have been soaking overnight.”

“How late were you here?” Grace asked. Hanna’s eyes were as red rimmed as her own.

“One, maybe half past,” Hanna said. “Use the ceramic spoon to stir them around a bit, very gently, not breaking a single one. Then you will gently sieve them out, about fifty at a time, into container two.” She pointed to the large metal mixing bowl next to the chafing dish. “Move the beads into the clean turpentine, clean the sieve, and begin again, moving the beads to container three. Four through six contain a castile soap solution, and seven through ten are water. There will be at least a dozen batches of beads like this to move through the system.”

Hanna looked at Grace as though she were leaving her child in Grace’s care. “I know I don’t have to tell you how vital it is that you clean the sieve between each container, and especially between each solution.” Her pale eyes glowed brighter against the bloodshot. “Yes?”

Jacqueline trusted Grace to regild and re-leaf holy relics. Once, she had called Grace her “little spider,” and Grace, disturbed by the comparison, turned to Hanna to laugh about it and found her pink with jealousy. It didn’t matter that neither Grace nor Hanna had any great respect for Jacqueline—Hanna still needed to be the best.

“Yes,” Grace said now, smoothing her flyaways.

“I’ll perform the hand cleaning,” Hanna said. Her own table was set with a paper-lined tray of paintbrushes and magnifiers arranged like dental tools. “I’ll begin when you make it to container seven. Until then, I will be constructing a sheep out of wool to replace this one with the cracked neck.” She gave a dainty smile, showing her small, square teeth, and opened her palm to reveal what looked like a balled-up tissue held in a sweaty hand for two hundred years. The sheep’s barely discernible ears were suggestions cut from felt, smashed flat. Only two legs remained, scabby sticks protruding from dirty gray stuffing.

“Sad little fellow,” Hanna said, not concealing her glee. “No use rehabbing him. I’ll have to start from scratch!”

Grace bent over the chafing dish of turpentine. The smell reminded her of Riley, but she hardly needed reminding. The
Record
had reported that he had been drawing some in prison, what Cy Helmers had called “charcoal lines and squiggles.” Grace had winced at “squiggles,” but Cy Helmers hadn’t meant to become an art critic. Grace wished that she could see the drawings herself; they would help her understand Riley’s state of mind. What kinds of squiggles? Anxious like Twombly’s, dancing and light like Hockney’s swimming pools, or lightless and grim like Fautrier’s? Grace didn’t know whether to blame herself or Riley for the fact that she could think of his artwork only in terms of copies, of either real artists or real objects or real life—what was the difference? But she blamed Cy Helmers for his poor descriptive abilities. “Squiggles” could mean anything.

That the drawings were at all abstract was at first a wonder to Grace. Riley had always been an insistent realist, painting the historic buildings around town. His father used to refer to their house as the Garland Visitor’s Bureau. Grace had tried to push him toward abstraction, or at least pull him away from Garland, to no avail. Maybe he’d changed his style because in prison there were no historic homes to observe. More likely, he didn’t want to show off anymore.

He’d never painted his family’s own house. He said it was too familiar. His family’s house was far more special to her than it was to him, she knew.

 • • • 

Grace was not a Garland native. She’d been born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was eighteen, her father nineteen. They’d met at a party after a Van Halen concert, Grace’s father once told her, but such details were rare. Her parents were unwilling to discuss anything before their marriage, before Garland, as though Grace had been a witness they’d expected to remain silent.

Her father’s parents had taken care of her until she was three, while her father was in college and her mother was somewhere else. She’d never been told where.

After that, Grace lived for varying stretches, some repeating, in North Carolina with her aunt Regina and her kids; in Smyrna with her father, after he dropped out of Tennessee State and took a job at the Nissan plant; in Paducah, Kentucky, with her mother and two other young women who, it turned out, were not willing to babysit their roommate’s kid when she was kept late at work; in Memphis, briefly, when her father was married to a woman named Irene who had bald eyebrows and made Grace spaghetti sandwiches before her bartending shifts; outside Chattanooga with her mother and an older man named Alan, who wore collared shirts tucked into chinos every day and had two grown children who did not seem to like Grace or her mother very much; and in Ocean City, Maryland, where Grace’s mother was waitressing when Grace’s father came up for the season to try to talk to her and make things right.

Her father came in June, and by August, Grace’s mother was pregnant. Her parents married and, together for the first time, they all marched back south to Garland. Grace was nine. She started fourth grade two weeks late and newly legitimate. When the teacher introduced her, Grace looked out from under her dark bangs and felt a thrill that not one of them knew who she had ever been before.

Grace’s family moved into a small white-sided ranch house behind the grocery store. Her mother planted white begonias in circles around the two small trees in the yard, and her father surrounded them with dyed-red mulch, which Grace noticed as soon as she noticed that the people in Garland’s nicer neighborhoods used mulch that was brown or black.

The house was nearly silent at first. The three of them had no idea how to interact. Any two people could be talking in a room, but when the third entered, the conversation would fall apart, all parties self-conscious and suddenly overwhelmed. Grace had always read a lot, and she’d seen so many adult faces slacken with relief when they found her engrossed in a book or a magazine, as though she had
un
intentionally absented herself from whatever forgotten carpool pickup line or tense phone call was in the background. Now she disappeared into her books again, hoping to ease the pressure on her parents, who even she could see were struggling to play the roles they had finally submitted to. She’d spent long stretches of her childhood in fictional worlds, and trapped in this new and uneasy diorama, what was real and what wasn’t began to seem uncertain. When Grace found a box of her father’s secret detritus in the basement that included several photos of Irene, she was relieved to see that she had not imagined that whole episode, among others.