Aurora 04 - The Julius House (3 page)

The knock at my door scared me out of my wits.

No one knew where I was except Amina, and she was in Houston.

I pitched the remains of my supper in the trash on my way to the door. I’d put the chain on.

Now I opened the door a crack.

Cindy Bartell was standing there looking tense and miserable.

“Hi,” I said tentatively.

“Can I come in?”

I had some bad thoughts: “Rejected Wife Murders Bride-to-Be in Motel Room.”

She interpreted my hesitation correctly. “Whoever you are, I don’t mean you any harm,” she said earnestly, as embarrassed by the melodrama as I was.

I opened the door and stood aside.

“Are you . . .” She stood in the middle of the floor and twisted her keys around and around.

“Are you Martin’s new fiancée?”

“Yes,” I said, after a moment’s thought.

“Then I’m not making a fool of myself.” She looked relieved.

I thought that remained to be seen. There was an awkward pause. Now we
really
didn’t know what to say.

“As you know,” she began, “or I think you know?” She paused to raise her eyebrows interrogatively. I nodded. “So you know I’m, I was, Martin’s wife.”

“Yes.”

“Martin doesn’t know you’re here.”

“No. I’m here to buy his wedding present.” I indicated she should have one of the two uncomfortable chairs on either side of the round table. She sat on the edge of it, doing the thing with the key ring again.

“He told Barrett he was getting married again, and Barrett called me,” she explained. “Barrett said his dad told him you were very small,” she added wryly, “and he wasn’t kidding.”

“For Martin’s wedding present,” I said steadily, “I want to buy him the farm he grew up on.

Can you tell me where it is? I haven’t told the realtor I want to see this one particular farm because of course she’ll know I want it for some reason, and Joseph Flocken won’t sell to me if he knows I’m going to give it to Martin.”

“You’re right, he won’t. I’ll tell you what you need to know. But then I’m going to give you some advice. You’re a lot younger than me.” She sighed.

“It’s a good idea, getting the farm for him,” she began. “He always hated someone else having it, someone else letting it fall into ruin. But Joseph always had it in for Martin, in particular, though he wasn’t too fond of Barby. I’m not either, for that matter. One of the disadvantages of being married to Martin is that Barby becomes your sister-in-law . . . I’m sorry, I promised myself I wasn’t going to be bitchy. Barby had a hard time as a teenager. The reason the blood’s so bad between the kids and Flocken— Martin’ll never tell you this, Barby told me—

she got pregnant when she was sixteen, and when Mr. Flocken found out, he stood up in front of the whole church—not a mainstream church, one of these little off-sects—or off sex, ha!—and told everyone in the church about it, with Barby sitting right there, and asked their advice—so she got sent to one of those homes and missed a year of school and had her baby, and gave it up for adoption. And nothing ever happened to the kid who was the
dad,
of
course,
he just went around town telling everyone what a slut she was, and what a stud he was. So Martin beat him up and blacked Mr. Flocken’s eye.”

What a dreadful story. I tried to imagine being publicly denounced in that fashion, and cringed at the thought.

“Okay, the farm is south of town on Route 8, and you can’t see the house from the road, but there’s a mailbox with ‘Flocken’ on it by the gate.”

I copied the directions onto the little pad the motel left in the drawer below the telephone.

“Thanks,” I told her. And I braced myself for the advice.

“Martin has a lot of good qualities,” she said unexpectedly.

She was giving the good news before the bad.

“But you don’t know everything about him,” she went on slowly.

I had long suspected that.

“I don’t want to know unless he tells me,” I said.

That stopped her dead. And I couldn’t quite believe that had come out of my mouth. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He has to.”

“He never will,” she said with calm certainty. Then her mouth twisted. “I’m not trying to be bitchy, and I wish you luck—I think. He never was bad to me. He just never told me everything.”

I watched her while she stared into a corner of the room, gathering her strength around her, regretting already her display of emotion. Then she just got up and left.

It took everything I had not to get up and run after her.

The next morning I met Mary Anne Bishop at her office. I was in a brisk frame of mind. I asked her which farms we were to see today, looked at the spec sheets, and asked that we see the one on Route 8 first. Looking a little puzzled, she agreed, and off we went. I looked carefully at each mailbox as we passed, and spotted one labeled “Flocken” just before the farm we’d come to see, which we toured quickly. I paved the way by telling Mary Anne that the area felt right, but the farmhouse was too small. On our way back to town, I asked her about the road that led from the mailbox over a low hill. Presumably, the farmhouse was not too far from that. “I liked not having the house visible from the road,” I commented. “Who owns that property?”

“Oh, that’s the Bartell farm,” she said instantly. “The man who owns it now is called Jacob—

no, Joseph— Flocken, and he’s got a reputation for being cranky.” But she pulled to the side of the road and tapped her teeth with a pencil thoughtfully.

“We could just drop in and see,” Mary Anne said finally.

“I’ve heard he wants to move, so even though he hasn’t listed the farm, we can check.”

The farmhouse was large and dilapidated. It had been white. Now the paint was peeling and the shutters were falling off. It was two-story, undistinguished, blocky. The barn to the right side and back a hundred yards or so was in much worse shape. It had housed no animals for some time, apparently. A rusted tractor sat lopsidedly in a field of weeds and mud.

A tall, spare man came out of the screeching screen door. He didn’t have his teeth in, and he was leaning heavily on a cane. But he was shaven and his overalls were clean.

“Good morning, Mr. Flocken!” Mary Anne said. “This lady is in the market for a farm, and she wanted to know if she could take a look at yours.”

Joseph Flocken didn’t speak for a long moment. He looked at me suspiciously.

I looked straight back at him, trying hard to keep my face guileless.

“I represent the Workers for the Lord,” I said, making it up on the spot. “We want to buy a farm in this area that needs work, a secluded farm that we can renovate. When the work is done, we’ll use the dormitories we build as shelter for our members.”

“Why this farm?” he said, speaking for the first time.

Mary Anne looked at me. Why indeed?

“Not only does it meet the criteria my church lays down for me,” I said staunchly, praying for forgiveness, “but God guided me here.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mary Anne looking over the mess of mud and weeds dubiously. Perhaps she was thinking God apparently had it in for me.

“Well, then, look around,” Joseph Flocken said abruptly. “Then come on in and look at the house.”

There wasn’t much to look at outside, so we murmured together about acreage and rights-of-way and wells, and then went inside.

Martin’s childhood home.

I gave Flocken some credit for trying to keep the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, and his bedroom clean. Beyond that he had not troubled, and observing the pain it caused him to move, I could not blame him. I tried to imagine Martin as a child running out this kitchen door to play, climbing up the stairs to the second floor to go to bed, but I just could not do it. Despite the immeasurable difference loving parents would have made, I could not see this place as anything but lonely and bleak. So great was my wish to be away that I negotiated for the farm in an abstract way. Flocken obviously relished details of how the church members would have to work their butts off to build their own shelter, so I managed several references to the strict work habits my church required and encouraged. He nodded his gray head in agreement. This man did not want anyone to have a free ride, or even a pleasant one.

He and Mary Anne began to discuss the selling price, and suddenly I realized I had won. All it took was someone asking, someone he was convinced Barby and Martin would not want the farm to go to.

I wanted to
leave
.

I leaned forward and looked into his mean old eyes.

“I’ll give you this much and no more,” I said, and told him the sum.

Mary Anne said, “That’s a fair price.”

He said, “It’s worth more.”

“No, it’s not,” I snapped.

He looked taken aback. “You’re a tough little thing,” he said finally. “All right, then. I don’t think I can take another winter here, and my sister in Cleveland has a spare bedroom she says I can have.”

And just like that, it was accomplished.

I shook his hand with reluctance; but it had to be done.

The PURCHASE went swiftly since there was no loan to approve. I’d thought I’d have to do a lot by mail, or perhaps make a return trip, but it wasn’t necessary, to my relief. The essential work had been accomplished after three days were up. By the time I drove my rental car back to the airport in Pittsburgh, I’d paid two more visits to the bookshop, eaten in every restaurant in town, and rigorously avoided Cindy’s Flowers. If I could have announced who I really was to someone, I might have passed the time with people who knew the man I loved, but I had to stay in character when I wasn’t in my motel room. The chances seemed distant that someone would find out the real reason I wanted the farm, someone who liked Joseph Flocken enough to tell him. But I couldn’t risk it. So I was virtuous, and ran in the morning, tried not to eat too much out of sheer boredom, cruised all the local shopping, and was heartily sick of Corinth, Ohio, by the time I left.

I swore I’d never wear my hair in a bun again.

I wanted Martin to meet me at the airport, so passionately I could taste it, but of course he’d want to know why he was meeting a flight from Pennsylvania, and I didn’t want to give him his wedding present in the airport.

When I got off the plane in Atlanta I felt more relaxed than I had in a week. Carrying my luggage as though it were feather-light, I located my old car in the longer-term parking, paid the exorbitant amount it took to get it out, and drove off to Lawrenceton reveling in the familiarity of home, home, home.

When I passed the Pan-Am Agra plant on my way in to town, I had to stop.

I had only been in the plant a couple of times before, and felt very much out of place. At least Martin’s secretary knew who I was.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Mrs. Sands said warmly, her grandmotherly voice at odds with the luridly dyed black hair and lavender suit. “Maybe now he’ll be happier.”

“Something wrong?”

“Oh, he got some mail from South America that made him angry, and he was on the phone all day that day, but he’s back to normal now, just about. Go on in.”

But I knocked, because he was at work; so he was looking up when I came in.

He dropped his pen, rolled back in his chair, and came around the desk in a second.

After a few minutes, I said, “We should either lock the door or postpone this until tonight.”

Martin glanced at his watch. “I guess it’ll have to be tonight,” he said with an effort. “I should have an appointment sitting out in the reception area by now. Mrs. Sands is probably wondering what to do. However—I don’t mind keeping him waiting . . .”

“No,” I said, trying not to giggle. “I have to confess, it makes me feel a little self-conscious knowing Mrs. Sands is sitting out there. Tonight, then?”

“We’ll go out to eat,” he said. “I know you won’t feel like cooking, and I won’t get through here until seven, so I won’t have time.”

Martin’s cooking is limited to grilling steaks, but he never minds doing it.

“See you then,” I whispered, giving him one last kiss.

He tried to pull me back, but I wiggled away and grinned over my shoulder at him as I left the room.

“Bye, Mrs. Sands,” I said in what I hoped was a collected voice. It probably would have been more effective if I hadn’t suddenly realized my blouse wasn’t tucked into my skirt any longer. I scooted across the room quickly, catching just a glimpse of the dark-complected man waiting to see Martin; a man with a heavy, piratical mustache, thick black hair, and ropelike arm muscles.

He looked more like a nightclub bouncer than a job applicant.

I called my mother from the townhouse to tell her I was home, and learned what had happened in town in the few days I was gone.

“Thanks for the flowers, Aurora. I don’t know what the occasion was, but they were lovely.”

I started. I’d forgotten all about sending the flowers from Ohio. I mumbled something deprecating.

“Have you seen Martin yet?” Mother was asking. She sounded as if the question were loaded.

I could see her at her desk at Select Realty, thin and elegant and self-possessed, remarkably like Lauren Bacall.

“Yes. I stopped by the plant. But he didn’t have much time. We’re going out tonight.” If I’d had antennae, they would have been pointing in Mother’s direction. Something was afoot.

“How’s John?” I asked.

“He’s just fine,” she said fondly. “He’s been planting a garden.”

“In the backyard?”

“Yes, something wrong with that?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. If I’d ever doubted my mother adored her recently acquired second spouse, I knew differently now. I could not imagine in a million years my mother allowing someone to dig up her carefully groomed backyard to plant tomatoes.