WIDOW (7 page)

When next he left their Memorial home she broke the windows, destroyed every beautiful object in the house, smashed the furniture, and ripped the carpet from the wallboards. The divorce was final before the ink could dry.

Then she had married Scott Mandel, a man who seemed honest and loving, but who hid the secret of a history of suicide and murder. While she was working at Babe's, a high-class exotic dance club that drew the businessman and his clients, Scott came through the door with co-workers. They left without him. After a few months of dogged pressure, some movies, the theater, quiet dinners, she decided to chance it again. Scott wasn't wealthy, he was closer to her age, and he promised to be faithful.

He never told her there might be a problem. He let her have their children without telling her. He harbored the idea that one day he too would go insane and kill, but he never tried to prevent it, and he carried his secret so long, with such utter deceptiveness, that she never had a clue. Not until the end.

Was that the reason he had chosen her, a young girl who danced in a topless club, a girl without education or experience of the world, so that she would never decipher what it was that made him tick? He wanted someone stupid, someone who might overlook his reluctance to see his mother, someone who was gullible and willing to do anything he wanted, agree to anything he said.

She hated him now with a fury she could barely contain. She buried her fingers in her clenched fists as she walked, head down, following the sidewalk, ignoring the traffic and the occasional catcall from the open car windows of passers-by. There was no way to get back at Scott. The release she had felt upon destroying her first husband's home allowed her to retain a shred of dignity. She paid him back for the pain he inflicted. But with Scott, there could be no act of revenge.

She shook her head furiously, hair whipping her cheeks, tears of pure frustration running down over her chin and into the hollow of her neck. If she could get hold of Scott now, she'd kill him herself. She would have killed him without hesitation had she known what he was planning to do to her children. She didn't care if he was responsible legally or not, if he had been insane or not, she blamed him for everything, from the day he walked into Babe's until the day he shattered her fairy-tale life. The boys were all she'd ever really had, all she had ever really wanted. Being a mother fulfilled her like nothing ever would again. He never should have fathered her children! He never should have taken the chance!

Hate and rage burned her cheeks and made them red. Her blood pressure soared, and her clenched hands shook at her sides as she stalked to the nearby boarding house that smelled of old women and unclean sheets. Up the stairs, into her room, closing the door, she stood still, wishing she could lash out at someone or something to release the building fury that bubbled close to the surface of her mind. She rushed across the tiny room and grabbed the pillow, began beating it relentlessly against the sagging mattress of the bed. She beat it until the pillowcase tore and the pillow went flying across the room to land with a smack against the wall.

Standing there holding the case bunched in her hands, she glared into the darkness and saw fed, the red of blood, the red of murder, the red of betrayal and lies and dying young.

Had a man, any man, stepped into her room at that moment, Kay Mandel would have turned on him and clawed open his throat with her nail-bitten and savaged fingers. Nothing in the world would have been able to stop her. It was men who left their women to raise children alone the way her father had left her mother. Men who took mistresses and thought it their divine right to do so. Men who took up guns and . . .

Men who were the enemy.

 

Six

 

Kay arrived at the Severenson Maid Service offices promptly at nine when her appointment with the manager was arranged. There was a brief interview, but the job was really hers already, due to Dr Shawn's earlier phone calls to the company. Kay filled out the W-2 forms, papers for health insurance, and was told her pay was seven dollars an hour, time and a half for overtime.

She was put into another room—a small cubicle with one chair and a television with a video recorder sitting alongside it. There, for the next hour, she watched dully as the duties of a Severenson maid were detailed. An actress in a maid's uniform went through the motions. Kay thought she wasn't having much fun. Greeting the client at the door, making sure the uniform—traditional black with a white skirt and white cap—was in order, no gum in the apron pocket, no cigarettes, hair put up off the neck, shoes clean and shined. If there was a list left by the client, the maid was supposed to do those chores first—what Severenson called “special chores, always done in good humor and with an obedient smile.” That did not negate the fact that she was responsible for cleaning toilets, tubs, doing one load of laundry, vacuuming, dusting, bed-making, and general tidying up. The video hurried the actress through these chores, showing just the beginning of them, and then the results. A perfectly clean and orderly household. Sparkling like new. A glory to behold.

Kay yawned, but watched the tape through. Back in the outer office she was given two uniforms, two caps, two aprons. Size seven. She was to begin tomorrow. She was paid every Friday. She was not to be late to a client's home, and she was not to fraternize with either the woman or the man of the house. Her job had sharp parameters, these to be met precisely by Severenson rule and regulation.

Kay hated it before she left the personnel office. She knew how to endure, however, and that was part of the plan. She realized she was too old for dancing again, her competition being eighteen- and twenty-year-old women with unsullied bodies, with bellies tight as the skin of basketballs, and breasts as big as softballs. Yet, if there was a minuscule chance of dancing on stage again, she would prefer it to being a maid. At least dancing was something she knew, it was familiar. And in some way she instinctively understood, dancing in a G-string demeaned the voyeuristic men more than it did the dancer. Cleaning the beautiful residences of Houston's rich made her feel like a slave. There was no advantage in it, no power over men.

At the first house she was sent to, Kay was greeted at the door not by a grown person, but a child. A little boy hardly tall enough to have opened the door. He stood there in navy blue short pants and a crisp white shirt, staring at her with big liquid-brown eyes. “Hi,” he said. “My mother's in the bathroom.”

Kay froze. He was the first child she had seen since her own children had died. There had been no children in the section of Marion she was kept in. No children on the bus to Houston. No children at the boarding house, not with all those old women living on their retirement checks. For the first time since the horror of Gabriel's and Stevie's deaths, she faced a child, a boy child who reminded her strongly of her own dark-haired sons. She could not speak or move. She could not swallow or draw a breath.

She wanted to die.

A tall woman wearing an orange sundress and an orange headband to match, placed her hands on the boy's shoulders and pulled him toward her into the entrance way. “Oh, I see you're right on time,” she said to Kay. “I've always been able to depend on Severenson for good people. Please come in. This is Andrew. Say hello, Andrew.”

“Hi,” he said again, giving her a mischievous smile. “My mother isn't in the bathroom now.”

“Oh Andrew! You'll have to forgive him, he's at that stage where he says anything that comes into his head.” She stooped to admonish the boy. “That isn't polite to tell strangers when mommy is in the bathroom. All right?” He nodded, and she stood to usher Kay inside and closed the door. The house opened out from the tiled entrance into a modern, airy cathedral space with a two-story ceiling where a balcony overhang looked over the living area.

“Andrew and I will be gone until noon or one. If you finish by then, you can lock the front door from the inside on your way out. I don't have any special things for you to do, just . . . uh . . . you know, clean it up the best you can.” She waved a bejeweled hand around the room at the scattered stacks of magazines, newspapers, two empty cups and saucers on the wood-and-brass coffee table. Kay had lived like this once, privileged, her home more a thing to show off to business partners than a place for living. Her first husband came back to find it wrecked. And it certainly served him right. She wondered idly if this woman ever checked up on her husband's late hours at the office, his “business” trips.

Kay had not yet said anything, she had not been able to. She kept seeing her sons, holding them, cherishing them, loving them. She saw them laughing, bathing, playing with their toys on the den floor. She couldn't withdraw from the past when the past held her so rigidly in its grasp.

“Do you think you'll be able to find your way around? The cleaning supplies are in the kitchen on the counter, I set them out for you, and in the downstairs' bathroom, again on the counter so you could find them. All right?”

Andrew had sidled over to where Kay stood mute near the coffee table and now he took the loose fingers of her right hand into his own. She glanced down at the touch and her smile was beatific. “He's a beautiful boy,” she said to the mother. “Such lovely eyes. Brown.”

The woman wasn't listening. She had found her purse on the entrance table and the keys to her car inside. She was gesturing Andrew to hurry. “We've got your piano lesson and then we have to meet daddy for lunch. Hurry up now, we don't want to be late.”

When the front door closed, the latch snicking shut, Kay shook herself as if she were coming in from a rain shower. She didn't know how long she could stand this. She wondered if every child she saw would affect her so keenly, or if it would be just boy children. What about little girls, or babies? Did everyone she might clean for have children? How could she bear it if they did?

Rage filled her again, coming up from her gut to her torso and finally suffusing her brain until the room turned red. She blinked, unclenched her fists. She made herself walk through the house to the kitchen for the cleaning products. She did a load of dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned the white counter, mopped the red-tiled floor. She had to finish before noon. She wanted out of this house and away from another meeting with Andrew. Next time she might break down and weep. She might lose her job. She might never come out of this as a survivor. Damnit, if she would let that happen.

Severenson sent her to other homes the rest of the week, but she realized she'd be servicing the one with Andrew in it every Monday, regardless. The four other homes she cleaned did not upset her quite as much. One of them had three teenage girls living in it with their parents. It was a tougher job, but at least she didn't have to fight off waves of nausea thinking about her sons. Two of the houses were occupied by professional couples too young and too work-oriented to think about bringing children into the world. The fourth house had a single mother who seemed to be at work all the time, leaving her three-year-old daughter in the care of an elderly aunt. The little girl tugged at Kay's heartstrings, but not nearly as badly as Andrew did.

It was Andrew who reminded her too much of her loss, and it was Andrew who made her feel tortured every minute she spent in his home even when he was not there. In his room she would catch herself immobile, staring at his bed made in the shape of a racing car, or she would find one of his Tonka toys on the carpet, and stand holding it like a talisman until her eyes burned. In the boy's closet she could spend an hour touching his little shirts and trousers or holding his pajamas close to her face so she could inhale the baby scent he had not yet lost.

With her first week's paycheck, Kay started going to an exercise club not far from downtown. It wasn't as good as the Houston Racquet Club or some of the more expensive exercise arenas in the city, but they had enough equipment, and the men didn't bother her as long as she didn't look at them much. One of the employees, a muscle-bound hunk with surfer-blond hair, tried to put the make on her the first time she came in, but she took him aside and whispered, “If you come on to me one more time, if you even raise your eyebrow in my direction, I'm going to the management and report you, then I'll ask for a full refund of my membership fees. They won't be happy with you. Do you fully understand what I'm saying to you?”

He steered clear of her after that, though he still stole looks her way when he thought she wouldn't notice.

She had to take buses everywhere she went or sometimes, when it wasn't far, she walked, but she meant to remedy that soon. She had her eye on a used Toyota in a car lot she passed on the way to the diner. If she scrimped and saved, if she remained in the run-down boarding house with the old ladies, if she ate sandwiches two and, sometimes, three times a day, she'd be able to get her body into shape and still save enough for the car.

She called Charlene at the end of the first month she was out of the hospital. “I'm getting it all together,” she said, hoping she sounded happy. “I have a job, which I hate . . . “ She laughed a little to soften her words. “But this job will afford me the things I need to get out of it. I'm getting a car in another month so we'll have transportation. It isn't much, about ten years old, but it's a Toyota and they run forever. So, how are you doing? Are you all right?”

Charlene babbled on and Kay stopped listening after ten minutes, but she held the line and waited patiently, glad she had someone who wanted to talk to her. “I'll call you again next month. If they start talking about letting you out, call me at the boarding house. I'll give you the number, okay?” What Kay didn't say was that she hoped Charlene didn't get out until things were more under control. They needed the car. You couldn't get around in Houston without one. The Metro Transit System worked, but it took a lot of time to get anywhere, and the men on it seemed to think they were destined to flirt with every pretty woman they saw. She spent all her riding time brushing off men and giving icy stares that would have shriveled the hottest desire.