Next to Love (20 page)

She goes on standing in the yard, staring at the lights in her neighbors’ windows. Strange how happy other people’s lives look, even if you know the glow is a lie. Her mind knows it, but her heart is swollen with envy and sore with self-pity.

The night has turned cool. She should have grabbed a sweater, but she did not know she was coming out to the yard until she was here. As she stands hugging herself in the light from a stingy sliver of moon and her neighbors’ windows, she wonders what life would be like without him. The thought is terrifying. It is also heady. She turns and goes back into the house, stealthy as a felon trying to hide the crime she has committed in her mind.

FOR HER BIRTHDAY
, Millie and Grace chip in and give her
The Cordon Bleu Cook Book
. He says she needs a hobby. She’ll show him. Vindictiveness spices the meals she begins to labor over with seeming love.

She starts simply, but before long she is spending her afternoons poaching chicken breasts in butter with wine and cream sauce, sautéing veal scallops with chicken livers and ham and mushrooms, and roasting duck. Even an all-American steak is not permitted to arrive at the table without a béarnaise sauce. Claude says the last reminds him of something he ate in France. He never talks about France. The vindictiveness begins to burn off, like the alcohol in a sauce. She redoubles her efforts.

She starts her preparations at three or four in the afternoon, as early as two for the really elaborate dishes. She moves around the kitchen, chopping, dicing, boiling, reducing. As the afternoon progresses, she sometimes lurches. The wine is not only for cooking. She reads the recipe. One cup, two tablespoons, a pinch. She forgets, crosses the kitchen to the cookbook, reads it again. She is distracted. She is distracted by herself. How did she get here? She can picture Millie in her place, or Grace, but she cannot put herself in focus. And where is Claude in this setup? He compliments her on the sole and poulet and boeuf bourguignon, but she knows it’s just fish and chicken and stew to him, despite the comment about the béarnaise sauce and France.

One afternoon, just before he walks in the door, the knife slips. He finds her standing over the sink, trying to stanch the flow of blood with a kitchen towel. The white cotton is already soaked red. His face blanches. The sweat beads on his forehead. For a moment he looks as if he is going to bolt. He shakes himself, a wet dog let in by mistake, then steps to the sink and unwraps the towel. He takes her hand in his. His touch is gentle. It does not go with the crazed eyes and wet dog of a moment ago. He peers down at her finger. The tip hangs by the skin. Her knees go weak as she looks at it, but he examines it closely. He wraps the finger with a clean towel, hustles her into the car, and drives to Dr. Flanner’s office, which was, briefly, Mac’s office. The doctor stitches. Good as new, he says as he wraps the gauze around her finger. On the way home, neither of them mentions that she has sliced the second finger of her left hand, which is one of the two he is missing.

AT FIRST SHE THINKS
the noise is Claude shouting. He is having another nightmare. Then she realizes it’s the telephone. It is on her side of the bed, and he is already reaching over her to pick up the receiver. The clock on the night table says three-twenty.

Her head feels as if someone has put a steel band around it and kept winching tighter. Her mouth is dry. The night before, Claude came home and decided to make old-fashioneds.

“Who is it?” she whispers.

He goes on listening.

She puts her head close to his. A man’s voice on the other end is saying something about neighbors complaining. He made old-fashioneds, but they did not make any noise. She is sure of it.

“I understand,” Claude says.

The voice on the other end goes on.

“I bet it was Mrs. Wright, the old killjoy,” she whispers.

Claude shakes his head no. “I’ll be right there,” he says into the phone, then reaches over her and puts the receiver back in the cradle.

“What is it?”

“Grace.”

“What about Grace?”

He is already pulling on his trousers.

“She was out on her front lawn. In her nightgown. Screaming. Cursing, actually. From the way the cop told it, words I didn’t think Grace knew. The neighbors called the police.”

She throws her legs over the side of the bed and stands. A knife slices through her scalp. “I’ll go with you.”

She goes into the bathroom, swallows two aspirins, and brushes her teeth. The toothpaste helps. The aspirins will take longer.

She comes out of the bathroom, finds the slacks and shirt she threw on the chair the night before, pulls them on.

“Where is she, home or the police station?”

“Home. The cop said they’ll stay with her until we get there.”

“What about Amy?”

He smiled for the first time. “One of the policemen is looking after her. I’d like to think it’s sheer altruism, but I doubt the fact that she’s King Gooding’s granddaughter is lost on any of them.”

The first thing Babe notices is that Grace is wearing a trench coat over her nightgown. The second is that the nightgown is sheer and the coat is buttoned wrong. Her hair is a furious tangle. Her face is puffy and pallid as uncooked dough. Her eyes look pink and raw.

Babe sits on the sofa and reaches an arm around her. Grace begins to cry. Claude walks the policeman to the door. The other one is already there, waiting.

“The kid’s asleep,” he says.

“Thanks.” Claude wonders if he is supposed to give them money. He is sure King would. But he is not King, and he doesn’t want them to think he’s trying to hush up the incident or obstruct justice, whatever that means under the circumstances.

“There are no charges,” the first cop says, as if reading his mind. “Neighbors reported an intruder on the grounds. We investigated and didn’t find anything.”

“Thank you,” Claude says again, but keeps his hand out of his pocket.

After he closes the door behind them, he climbs the stairs to check on Amy. She is sleeping on her stomach with her arms and legs spread out, like the photographs of men parachuting out of planes. He stands looking down at her. Strange that he has never feared hurting her as he did Millie’s baby. He is good with Amy. Sometimes she strikes him as another of the walking wounded.

He goes down the stairs and back to the sunporch. Grace is still sitting on the couch in her misbuttoned coat with Babe’s arm around her shoulders, but she has stopped crying. On the phone, the policeman said she was screaming obscenities. He insisted on quoting a few. The man has probably never read Kipling, but he’s a cop. He knows about
the Colonel’s Lady
—or in this case the King’s daughter-in-law—
an’ Judy O’Grady
. He also said that she was screaming the obscenities at Charlie. Claude looks at the wall covered with pictures of Charlie.

“Let’s go into the kitchen.”

“Do you want coffee?” Babe asks when they’re seated around the table.

Grace shakes her head no.

“Hot milk?”

“Are you trying to make me sick?” Her voice is ragged as a serrated knife. Her anger embraces the world, then collapses in on itself. “Did the police tell you what happened?”

“A little,” Claude says.

“How can you be angry at someone you love?”

“Who else is worth getting angry at?” Babe asks, and does not look at Claude.

“But it’s different. Charlie’s not here.” Grace starts to cry again. “How could I have yelled those things at Charlie?”

How could you not, Babe wants to ask.

OCTOBER
1950

Babe stands at the stove, scrambling eggs. She makes enough for the three of them, though she knows Amy, who is staying with them while Grace is in the sanitarium, will eat only a bite or two. She refuses to worry about that. What ten-year-old girl eats a hearty breakfast?

She hears Claude’s step on the stairs but does not turn. She is afraid to look at him this morning. No, she is afraid to have him see her watching him. Don’t look at me that way, he shouted once after he’d had the third old-fashioned. I’m not some wounded mutt you’re debating whether to put out of his misery.

He comes up behind her at the stove and puts his hand on her shoulder. Some mornings he cups her bottom. This is a shoulder day. It has been a shoulder month, if not longer. He still keeps his eyes closed when they make love, but she doesn’t. His face is brutal. Sex as assault.

She puts down the spatula and covers his hand with hers.

He takes his away. “I’m sorry about last night.”

“No need to be. I went back to sleep,” she lies.

She picks up the spatula and starts scrambling again, but she is waiting to see if he is going to say more. Last night was worse than it has been in a long time. The sweat was so heavy he drenched the sheets. She was sure the shouting would wake Amy. Screams in nightmares are supposed to come out as whimpers in the real world. Hers do. She thinks she’s shouting help, only to wake to find she’s mewling. But Claude yells and howls and sobs. His are not nightmares. They are his real world.

“What time are you and Millie leaving?” he asks, as if he cares, as if he is not simply trying to change the subject.

“Around nine. I don’t want to be late and have Grace think we’re not coming.”

He pulls out a chair and sits at the table. “Maybe I’m the one you ought to be visiting in the funny farm.”

He says it before she can, though he knows she would never say it. Still, he has to head her off, just in case.

“You have your nightmares in bed, not on the front lawn,” she says as she spoons eggs onto his plate. “In this cockamamie world, that qualifies as sane.”

His smile comes out as a grimace.

AS CLAUDE STEPS OUT
of Bill Simpson’s Chevy and thanks him for the lift, he notices that the garage door is open and the car is not there. Babe knew she would be late, so she arranged for Amy to go to a friend’s after school. No one will be home. He is relieved.

He walks through the garage, lets himself in the side door, and climbs from the den to the kitchen. The only sound is the hum of the refrigerator. Sometimes he finds the noise homey, like the purring of a cat. Now it is only the whirring of an engine. Magnify it, and it could be a tank or a ship or a plane.

He goes to a cabinet, takes out the bottle of scotch, and begins to pour. He drinks too much. They both drink too much. Just about everyone he knows who came home from the war drinks too much. But he needs it now. The bottle clinks against the glass. His hands are still shaking.

Nothing happened. He recovered in time. He is sure none of the kids in the class caught on. He pretended he was picking up a piece of chalk. But if Babe walks in now, she will see, with those eyes that are always tracking him, that something is wrong. And she will add it to her list, her loving long-suffering list. The thrashing and shouting and sweats in the night. The silences during the day. The quick temper and the withering sarcasm. The child they do not have.

He has a logical explanation for it, half a dozen logical explanations. The episode last night. The kid who came into class this morning wearing a Soviet jacket his older brother took off some dead North Korean. What kind of a man takes a jacket off a dead soldier and sends it to his kid brother? No wonder it goes on and on. The fact that his back was to the class when the fire alarm went off. But you cannot write on the blackboard without turning your back to the class.

He started to hit the ground. Only started. That’s the important thing to remember. He recovered in time and jumped up, waving the piece of chalk in his hand to show his agility. Lucky he still had the piece of chalk in his hand.

“Got it,” he announced to the class in triumph, and began herding them out of the room for the fire drill.

Horsing around, flirting, and looking for trouble, they burst out of the building into a lush autumn afternoon as dazzling as a stained-glass window. By the time he marched them back inside, they had forgotten what some old geezer who taught history did. But he hadn’t forgotten.

Five and a half years after the goddamn war, and it’s still going on. He was sure it would get easier with time.

He carries his drink upstairs and goes into their room. The sight of the bed sends a wave of nausea through him. She left it unmade with the top sheet and blanket pulled back, because she had to take Amy and him to school, then drive to the sanitarium. A wavy salt line runs down the middle of the bottom sheet, dividing his sweat-drenched side from hers, her normal world from his madness. She usually strips the bed and puts on clean sheets before he gets home. She’s a stickler for hiding the evidence. Sparing his feelings. Why does it make him angry? Would he prefer to come home to the proof, as he has now?

He takes a swallow of his drink, puts it on the night table, and begins stripping the bed. A model husband, if you don’t count the rest, the only part that counts.

ELEVEN

Grace

SEPTEMBER
1946