Labor Day (26 page)

Though nearly two decades had passed, I could still see his face as it had been the day I met him in the magazine section at Pricemart—the bones of his jaw, those hollow cheeks, the way he looked me square in the eye, with those blue eyes of his. Young as I was, small as I was—a boy who longed to discover what might lie within the sealed packaging of the September 1987 issue of
Playboy,
who had to settle for a puzzle book instead—he might have seemed like an intimidating person. I could see him now, looming over me as he did that day—such a tall man, with those big hands and that impossibly deep voice. But I had felt, the moment I first met him, that I could trust this person, and even when I was angriest and most fearful—that he might take my mother away, that I’d be left alone, displaced—that sense of him as a fair and decent man had never left me.

I’d heard nothing of the man in nearly twenty years, and I got a feeling, as I unfolded the piece of paper from inside the envelope—a single sheet, nothing more—identical to the one I had all those years ago, riding in my mother’s car back to our house with him in the backseat. That feeling that life was about to change. The world would be different soon. This had been good news, the first time. Now what I registered was dread.

Sitting at the counter of the restaurant kitchen, surrounded by my bowls and knives, my Viking stove, my oak cutting block, I heard his low voice speaking to me.

Dear Henry,

I hope you will remember me. Though perhaps it would have been better for us all if you’d forgotten. We spent Labor Day weekend together, many years ago. Six of the best days of my life.

Sometimes, he wrote, people donated boxes of old magazines to the library at the prison where he was currently incarcerated. This was how he had come to see the article in the magazine, concerning my pies. First off, he wanted to congratulate me on my accomplishment, at having graduated from culinary school. He’d always liked to cook himself, though as I had evidently remembered, baking had been his specialty too. And in fact, if I ever wanted to hear about biscuit making, he had some thoughts on that.

Meanwhile, he was proud and happy to read that a skill he had passed on so long ago had stayed with me.

As you get older, it’s nice to think you might have contributed some small piece of wisdom or know-how to someone, somewhere along the line. But in a case like mine, with no children of my own to raise, and having spent most of my adult life in a correctional institution, the opportunities to impart knowledge of any kind to a young person have been limited. Though I do also recall a few interesting sessions in which you and I played catch, where you displayed more talent than you had previously imagined.

He was writing now, he told me, with a question. He did not wish to disrupt my life or that of my family—ever again—or cause additional disturbance, as surely our brief acquaintance with him, so long ago, must have done. The reason he was writing this to me, and not to the individual his question most directly concerned, in fact, had to do with his extreme concern about ever again causing pain to the one person, more than any other on this planet, to whom he would least wish to bring sorrow.

I will understand if you choose not to respond to this letter. Your silence would be as much word as I would need, to discontinue any thought of further communication.

He would be released on parole shortly. He had of course had plenty of time to think about what he would do after leaving prison the following month. Although he was no longer even close to young—he’d recently marked his fifty-eighth birthday—he was still in good health, with plenty of energy left for hard work. It was his hope that he might find work as a handyman somewhere, or perhaps a housepainter, or—this was his first choice—that he might work on a farm again, as he had when he was a boy. Besides his time with us, those were his fondest memories.

But one thought haunted him, he said. It might actually be a relief, if I wrote to tell him this was foolish and crazy, but he had never gotten my mother out of his mind. Very likely she was remarried now, and living with a husband somewhere, far away from the town where we’d met. If so—if she was happy and well—it would make him happy to know that. He would never bother her, or intrude in any way in the life she had made for herself. My mother was a woman long overdue for happiness, he wrote.

But on the chance that she might be alone, I wanted to ask you whether you thought I might write her a letter. I promise you, I would sooner cut off my own hand than bring grief to Adele.

He wrote down his address for me then, along with the date of his release. He signed the letter
Truly Yours. Frank Chambers
.

Here was a man who had trusted me, when I was thirteen years old, not to betray him, and I had. My actions over the course of that handful of days had robbed him of a life—eighteen years of it—he might have known with my mother, a woman who loved him.

I had betrayed my mother too, of course. Those five nights she and Frank spent together represented the only time, in more than twenty years, that she’d shared her bed with any man. I had thought, at the time, that nothing could be worse than to lie in the dark, listening to the sounds of the two of them making love, but later I learned: worse was the silence on the other side of the wall.

In his letter, Frank made no mention of my role in what had taken place the day the police cars came for him. Or of my mother’s willingness to let the authorities believe he had tied us
up and held us against our will. He spoke only of one thing: his wish to see her again, if she were willing.

I wrote him back that day to say that it would not be difficult to locate my mother, and less difficult to locate his place in her heart. She still lived at our same address.

CHAPTER 23

S
EX IS A DRUG
, E
LEANOR HAD TOLD ME
. When sex enters into a situation, people lose all reason. They do things they would never do otherwise. These things they do may be crazy. May even be dangerous. May break their hearts, or someone else’s.

To Eleanor, and to my own thirteen-year-old self, maybe—lying on my narrow single bed, pressed up against the wall on whose other side was my mother’s bed, with her in it, making love to Frank—the story of what happened in our family that long hot weekend was only about sex. To my thirteen-year-old self that summer, everything was about sex, in one way or another, though in the end, when the opportunity had been presented to me, to discover it—
try the drug
—I chose not to.

The real drug, I came to believe, was love. Rare love, for which no explanation might be found. A man dropped out of a second-story window and ran, bleeding, into a discount depart
ment store. A woman drove him home. They were two people who could not go out into the world, who made a world with each other, inside the too-thin walls of our old yellow house. For a little less than six days they held on to each other for dear life. For nineteen years, he had waited for the moment when he could return to her. Finally, he did.

Because of his status as a convicted felon, emigration to Canada was not possible, so they moved as close to the border as they could, to Maine. It’s a long drive from upstate New York, and a little difficult, with a baby. Still, we go there more often than you might think.

When our daughter cries, we pull the car over by the side of the road and unbuckle her seat belt, and just hold her. Sometimes the place we pull over may be inconvenient for this. An interstate highway, more than likely. Or we might be only twenty minutes from their house—close enough that you might say, never mind, push on through.

But I always stop to hold our daughter. Or one of us does. If there are large trucks barreling past, we may walk down the embankment, away from the noise a little. Or I’ll cup my hands over her ears. If there’s grass, I may lie down in it, and lay her on the bare skin of my chest—or if it’s winter, buckle her inside my jacket, or place a handful of snow on her tongue, and if it’s night, we may look at the stars for a minute. What I have found is that a baby—though she doesn’t know words yet, or information, or the rules of life—is the most reliable judge of feelings. All a baby has with which to take in the world are her five senses. Hold her, sing to her, show her the night sky or a quivering leaf, or a bug. Those are the ways—the only ways—she learns about the world—whether it is a safe and loving place, or a harsh one.

What she will register, at least, will be the fact that she is
not alone. And it has been my experience that when you do this—slow down, pay attention, follow the simple instincts of love—a person is likely to respond favorably. It is generally true of babies, and most other people too, perhaps. Also dogs. Hamsters even. And people so damaged by life in the world that there might seem no hope for them, only there may be.

So I talk to her. Sometimes we dance. When our daughter’s breathing is steady again—maybe she has fallen asleep, maybe not—we buckle her up in her car seat and continue north. I always know, whatever hour it may be when we pull down the long dirt road leading to their house, that the lights will be on, and the door will be open even before we reach it—my mother standing there, with Frank beside her.

You brought the baby, she says.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
OFFER DEEP THANKS
to the MacDowell Colony—and all who make it possible—for providing the most supportive environment an artist colony could hope to encounter, and to the artists with whom I shared residencies at MacDowell and at the Corporation of Yaddo, whose shared love of their work nurtured my own.

I owe a debt to Judi Farkas, who offered first encouragement, and put my manuscript in the hands of the one from whom I received not only enthusiasm, and faith, but also brilliant editorial guidance, my agent David Kuhn. Huge respect and gratitude as well go to Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow—possessor of a perfect ear and a tender heart of rare proportion. And of the many at Morrow who helped to shepherd this book into print—every one deserving of my thanks—I want to single out the incomparable Lisa Gallagher. It’s a lucky writer who gets to be published by Lisa.

I cannot imagine a writing life without my family of friends, and those friends—many known only through letters—who are my longtime readers. I tell every story with you in mind.

My daughter and firstborn child, Audrey Bethel, helped me celebrate this book—and a bond lasting as granite—by climbing, with me, on Labor Day, to the top of our favorite mountain, Monadnock. And my love always to the man whose belief and support never wavered through twelve far from easy seasons: David Schiff.

About the Author

JOYCE MAYNARD
has been a reporter for the
New York Times
, a magazine journalist, a radio commentator, and a syndicated columnist, as well as the author of five novels, including
To Die For
, and four books of nonfiction. Her bestselling memoir
At Home in the World
has been translated into nine languages. She is a regular contributor to
More
magazine and has contributed to the
New York Times
, National Public Radio,
O, The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek
, the
New York Times Magazine, Forbes,
and Salon. Maynard appears as a storyteller with The Moth in New York City.

The mother of three grown children, she divides her time between homes in Mill Valley, California, and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where she runs writing workshops.

www.joycemaynard.com

To book Joyce Maynard for a speaking engagement, please contact www.harpercollinsspeakers.com.

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A
LSO BY
J
OYCE
M
AYNARD

Fiction

B
ABY
L
OVE

T
O
D
IE
F
OR

W
HERE
L
OVE
G
OES

T
HE
U
SUAL
R
ULES

T
HE
C
LOUD
C
HAMBER

Nonfiction

L
OOKING
B
ACK

D
OMESTIC
A
FFAIRS

A
T
H
OME IN THE
W
ORLD

I
NTERNAL
C
OMBUSTION

Credits

Jacket design by Mary Schuck

Jacket photograph © by Mark Bennett/Trevillion Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

LABOR DAY
. Copyright © 2009 by Joyce Maynard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.