Baker Towers (34 page)

Dorothy, always frail, now seemed broken. When Joyce telephoned her each morning, she answered in a hoarse whisper, sounding slightly panicked, as if she expected bad news. She wore ragged housedresses in summer; in winter, baggy men’s trousers cinched at the waist with a belt. (
They’re warm,
she explained when Joyce inquired. She liked to keep the furnace turned low.) Joyce offered to give her a home permanent, but Dorothy couldn’t be bothered. Her hair was wound into a bun at the nape of her neck. In the past year, gray had choked out the brown.

The house, too, had fallen into disarray. The place wasn’t dirty, just overrun with clutter. Magazines—
Silver Screen, TV Guide, Screen Stars
—were stacked in every corner of the parlor, arranged by size and date. The kitchen counters were covered with empty margarine tubs, or soup cans, or mayonnaise jars, which Dorothy had washed and arranged on towels to dry. In a cupboard Joyce discovered two large grocery sacks filled with empty prescription bottles.
ROSE NOVAK
, one of the labels read.
OCTOBER
1, 1955.

“She doesn’t throw anything away,” she told Ed afterward. “She must spend the whole day organizing and sorting this stuff.”

“Well, why not?” he countered. “It gives her something to do.”

At one time the clutter would have driven Joyce crazy. Now she understood how little it mattered, and held her tongue. She entertained Dorothy with the latest town gossip—births and marriages, illnesses and deaths. Acquaintances or strangers, it didn’t matter: Dorothy’s memory was encyclopedic. She could always conjure forth the name of the groom’s uncle, the bride’s cousin, connecting each new event to someone they both knew.

You’re alone too much,
Joyce sometimes told her.

I keep busy,
Dorothy said. She had the television; every afternoon she took a long walk. Sunday mornings she went to church. Joyce had offered a dozen times to teach her, but she would not learn to drive. She had always been a homebody. There was no place she wanted to go.

O
FTEN, IN THE SUMMER
, Evelyn Stusick crossed the street with a basket of Early Girl tomatoes, a bag of the cucumbers that grew faster than she could pickle them. Every spring she planted too
much, more than one person could possibly use. Her daughters were married now, with houses of their own. Leonard was in medical school and visited only on holidays. Like Dorothy Novak, Ev was all alone.

She sliced the vegetables in Dorothy’s kitchen and sprinkled the tomatoes with sugar, the way Rose had liked them—a sweetly grainy, acidic treat.

“How is Nicholas doing in school?” Dorothy asked. “Isn’t he almost finished by now?”

“Leonard,” Ev corrected. “He has another year of medical school.” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice. In four years her son would be a doctor. It was as if she had raised a president, or a pope. Gene, if he had lived, would have felt the same way.

“I’ll have to tell Georgie,” Dorothy said. “He called this morning. He asked after you.”

“He did?” Ev rose and arranged the extra Early Girls on the windowsill.

“He always does,” said Dorothy. “You should write him a letter. Or call him sometime.”

“I’ll leave these green ones here to ripen,” Ev said. “They’ll be ready in a day or two. Don’t let them wait too long.”

She crossed the street to her empty house. She’d deny it if anyone asked, but the silence wore on her.
You don’t have to stay there, Mom,
her daughters told her periodically. And she’d had offers. Some she’d talk about—Rebecca, her oldest, had invited her to come live in Maryland—and at least one she’d never mentioned to anyone.

The spring after the Twelve collapse, George Novak had asked her to marry him. Like his proposal—by her watch, twenty-eight years too late—Ev’s answer was slow in coming. She was simply too stunned to speak.

There was the disrespect to Gene, dead just four months; a death so
sudden and violent that no one—not Ev or his children or anyone who knew him—would ever recover from it.
He thought the world of you,
she told Georgie—after the initial shock, when she’d regained the power of speech.
He still called you his best friend.
Then there was the fact that Georgie, for all his talk, was still legally married.
Where are we, Utah?
she asked.
Excuse me if I don’t know the proper etiquette. I’ve never been proposed to by a married man.

Later, she realized that none of this was surprising, that the proposal was perfectly in Georgie’s character. He had always followed his heart, in whatever foolish direction that organ led him. Oblivious to the other hearts—hers, Gene’s, his mother’s—he broke along the way.

I love you,
he told her.
Ev, I’ve always loved you.

Oh, Georgie,
she said, pitying them both.
The years go. You can’t have them back.

T
he Twelve did not reopen. In its heyday, most of its coal had been barged to Pittsburgh, processed into coke to feed the blast furnaces of American Steel. Now AmSteel had its own troubles. Its Pittsburgh plant had closed that summer. More and more, houses were heated with oil, with gas. The world could survive without Bakerton coal.

The changes spread outward, like an epidemic. Ten families had lost fathers, husbands. Nine hundred lost paychecks, and more would follow. Baker Two was mined out; the Four and the Seven nearly so. Out-of-work miners sat on front porches. There was nowhere for them to go.

Susquehanna Avenue had one empty storefront, then two. In a year, the whole block was dark.

P
EOPLE KEPT THEIR HEADS DOWN
. They pretended not to notice. To Lucy, who had been away, the changes were astounding.
It was as if a blight had settled, a deadly fungus passed from tree to tree.

She’d been gone four years, nearly five. Nursing school, then a bachelor’s degree—school and more school, until the original purpose of her studies had been forgotten. Studies funded by Joyce, a savings account she’d fed for years with tens and twenties from her small paycheck. Started early, when she was still in the air force; still a young woman herself. In the selfishness of adolescence, Lucy had accepted this gift without question. Only later did she see how remarkable it was. At twenty, Joyce had already traded away her own future, invested everything she had in someone else.

The savings covered her first year’s tuition. Then, scholarships and fellowships; somehow the money had always come. On school breaks, she worked—in the Student Union, in Pittsburgh restaurants and hotels. Summer jobs didn’t exist in Bakerton. Waitresses, cashiers at the Quaker—they were grown people who needed the paycheck, adults with families to support.

It seemed to Lucy that she’d always been expected to leave—like her brothers, who’d roared out of Bakerton the first chance they got. It was the sisters who stayed: Joyce to care for their mother, Dorothy because she could not care for herself. They’d assumed Lucy would have no such limitations. The family’s slim resources had been lavished upon her, with no other expectation than that she would succeed in life. That she would
go.

She did her best to oblige, to do what was expected. She found a job the day before her graduation, at Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh; she shared an apartment with two of her classmates. For nearly two years she worked. She had herself fitted with an IUD, a small copper device no bigger than a quarter. She bought a car, a ’65 Ford Mustang, and every month or two she drove out to Saxon County for a visit. A boyfriend disappeared; another took his place. She grew older. Nothing changed.

She might have gone on that way for years. Instead she went back to Bakerton, the one Novak who truly wanted to stay. For a long time she’d fought the desire, through all her years of schooling, that extraordinary privilege that felt to her like a kind of exile. When she broke the news to Joyce, she did it apologetically:
There’s something I have to tell you. I hope you’ll understand.

She found a job easily enough; she seemed to be the only one in Saxon County who could. After the war, during the coal boom, a new wing had been added to Miners’ Hospital. The annex overlooked the Number Twelve, the rusting iron skeleton of its abandoned tipple. The top floor was devoted entirely to pulmonary care. The only thing, she told her college friends—late at night, by phone, after a long, exhausting shift—that Bakerton was still producing: old men who couldn’t breathe.

Except they weren’t old. Most were in their fifties or early sixties. A few saw seventy; invariably, they were the ones who hadn’t smoked. Black Lung could take ten or twenty of a miner’s healthy years. Black Lung plus cigarettes would cut them in half.

The lungs died by degrees, silently, inexorably, a slow erosion of tissue. In the end they collapsed completely; the men died gasping for breath, their eyes wide with terror. After a few months on the unit, Lucy was familiar with the process; she understood just how little she could do. She gave the men steroids and lectured them about smoking. The acute cases she placed in oxygen tents. More and more, she helped them with their paperwork. A law had been passed: if you were persistent, if you hadn’t smoked, if you were smart enough to make sense of the forms and patient enough to spend hours filling them out, your widow might be awarded a small monthly check. The men wouldn’t see a dime, themselves. They would all be dead before the money came through.

The men slept six to a ward, loud with the rush of oxygen tanks. The
tanks breathed in unison, a sound like the rhythmic roll of the ocean. Weaving in between the beds, checking the men’s vitals, Lucy imagined herself aboard a battleship, ministering to wounded soldiers at sea. Her patients were all veterans; she knew it from their stories, their bearing, the greenish marks tattooed on their withering biceps. Listening to them, she thought of the father she couldn’t remember, the face she knew from a single photograph, taken on his wedding day. She recalled Angelo Bernardi’s deep laugh, his cigarette kiss on her cheek, his breathing audible from the next room. The two men who’d loved her had disappeared from the world, without ever knowing the person she had become.

At the end of her shift she drove across the bridge, barely used since the explosion at the Twelve. She passed the abandoned tipple, the weathered outbuildings, the Towers still glowing in the distance, as though nothing had changed. Sometimes, driving into town, she passed Connie Kukla and Clare Ann Baran, still inseparable, walking home from their shift at the dress factory. Connie had married Steven Fleck, who worked for a strip-mining company in West Virginia and came home only on weekends. They shared a house with Connie’s widowed mother, which made sense to Lucy. She couldn’t imagine Connie being alone.

Of all the differences between them, it was perhaps the most profound: Lucy’s life was solitary. She couldn’t imagine it any other way. She’d tried living on Polish Hill with Dorothy, but the memories paralyzed her, and Dorothy’s silence only amplified the emptiness of the house. Finally she’d rented a small apartment above a flower shop, in what used to be called Little Italy. The neighborhood distinctions had disappeared; now people lived wherever they pleased. More and more, that meant leaving Bakerton entirely, for steady work in Maryland or Virginia or the eastern part of the state. Next door to Lucy was the building that had housed Bellavia’s Bakery, its windows now dark. Across the street, the Sons of
Italy and Rizzo’s Tavern still did a brisk business. Above Rizzo’s was the apartment where her mother had lived as a girl. At the end of the block was Nudo’s Pennzoil station, its concrete wall stenciled with large letters:
TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST. TOUGH PEOPLE DO
.

On warm nights, in summertime, the neighborhood was still lively. Music spilled through the open windows; voices and laughter in the street. Infrequently, on a Friday or Saturday, Lucy had a drink at one of the bars. When a man approached her, she flirted out of habit; but always she went home alone. The need that had once possessed her—to be watched and listened to, noticed and approved—had simply vanished. She still felt hollow inside, cored like an apple; she still hated sleeping alone. Yet she no longer believed that love would fill her. Each night she ate supper at the window, listening to the radio. And sometimes, after a particularly long shift at the hospital, she smoked a single cigarette.

I
t was summer when the motorcycle came. Dorothy heard it from her porch swing. She had visited the graves that morning, to avoid the heat. The afternoon stretched long before her. The late August sun was warm on her skin. Her eyelids fluttered, opened, fluttered again.

She heard a gentle buzzing in the distance, like the drone of a bumblebee. At the top of the hill, a hunting dog bayed. The buzzing became a great roar, the sound rising in pitch. Then the Poblockis’ beagles joined in.

A motorcycle shot up the hill at a speed that seemed impossible, chrome blinding in the sunlight. It roared past Dorothy’s house, then made a sharp U-turn, spraying gravel. She shaded her eyes with her hand.

The bike skidded to a stop. Tied to its sides were saddlebags and a scruffy bedroll. The rider was a young man in a denim jacket.

“My word,” Dorothy said.

The rider stepped off the bike. He wore a scruffy beard and dirty blue jeans, torn at the knees. His helmet was decorated with the Stars and Stripes. He glanced around as if he were lost.

He climbed the porch steps and took off his helmet. “Aunt Dorothy,” he said, offering his hand. “How do you do?”

A
RTHUR MOVED INTO
Joyce’s old room. The room where his mother had slept, tranquilized, during her one visit to Bakerton, where Sandy had ironed his monogrammed shirts the winter of the strike. The mattress sagged, but compared to the places he’d slept recently, Arthur found it exquisitely comfortable. After dropping out of Swarthmore, he’d spent several months riding: as far west as Nevada, he told his aunt; then south and eastward across Texas. His aunt fed him and listened to his stories. She seemed to enjoy them, although she sometimes looked at him strangely, as though she weren’t quite sure who he was.