Pay the Piper (6 page)

In high school she knew both his sister and his wife. In public school, Catherine had insisted before ninth grade that they transfer to Miss Poindexter's School for Girls, a move that changed her life's direction, Laurel thought. “In time to join a sorority,” Catherine had reasoned. So Laurel set out into as much of Delton society as she knew. That remembered past came back when, in her house alone, she could real Hal MacDonald's letter again.

April 11

Dear Laurel:

I have reread your lovely letter and hardly know how to answer. I was surprised to find it and your novel. I don't know why I can't remember you as a child but do remember reading an interview about you some time ago in the
Mid-South Review
. I didn't connect you at the time with someone I should know. Being editor of the prison newspaper, for which I originally wrote my article, which was picked up by the
Delton Advocate
, is different work from any I've known—cotton farming's been my life. But I enjoy what I'm doing. It gives me the opportunity to use my mind some, for which I'm grateful. And the work is a lot more pleasant than being in the line camps and working in the fields all day. Actually, Laurel, I'm somewhat unique here because convicts with a university degree are rare indeed, whereas on the outside I would be, as I've always been, just one of the crowd. I've been well treated since coming here and I'm not blind as to why—I had help from friends on the outside. I came here determined to get along. I made up my mind to make the best of an unbelievable situation. I've been made full trusty, which means more privileges than a regular convict.

I have periods of such wrenching, absolute, exquisite misery, though, as I've never known in my wildest dreams. It doesn't last and is usually brought on by worrying over the complete destruction of my family, Sallie and our little girl, Tina, and the fact I'm helpless to do anything about anything. The situation I'm trying to describe would be true in any kind of confinement. Here we live in “camps” and each camp has “cages” where the prisoners live. At first I didn't think I could live like this and keep my sanity. I mean, I really doubted my ability to stay sane. And that scared me. This prison isn't perfect but it's a vast improvement over a few years ago. There is conjugal visiting, though most men in prison no longer have wives, or have them in name only. On visiting days we can be outside with our families. I usually arrange a picnic under a mimosa I like. But I'm always too excited to eat. Thank you again for caring enough to write me. I will write again when I've had time to read your book.

Hal MacDonald

Exquisite misery
, Laurel thought. How could she not be moved by a man sensitive enough to write those words. Of course he didn't remember her as a child—she was living on the wrong side of the tracks from the people and places he had known. Hurriedly, Laurel put away the letter. The punctual yellow school bus had lumbered up the hill down the road and passed apple trees next door to stop at the nearby corner, where Rick stepped off in his penny loafers.

3

She might well be going to Timbuktu, Siberia, or Mars as far as her Soundport friends were concerned: Mississippi? They went on questioning year after year: Why? What's there? “Nothing,” Laurel would answer, knowing they would not understand if she told them. She would smile, realizing they did not see the smile's mysterious quality, either. In their ignorance, they did not question the trip's real oddity: Going to Mississippi in July! they ought to be shouting. You are crazy!

Highways were less traveled on Sundays, and she always started the trip early that day. Rick was beside her as she pulled from the driveway, with its abutments of stone walls. Buff stood innocently on the back seat, having no idea how long her ride was about to be. Jubal had been shipped off to “camp,” as William called it, and, no matter how good the kennel, would return hangdog and medicinal-smelling. After so many years, their departures were heavy with ritual.

If only the stage setting with Mr. Woodsum had not taken place. While she could stop at a phone booth on the way, it seemed too late to call things off, and there was the deposit, spent. She must not calculate what she was doing in terms of money, Laurel said to herself, at the steering wheel. She backed slowly, fixing things in her mind's eye. William stood on the porch in his paisley bathrobe, which was old. Something happening at the school bus corner caught her eye. A car came around it, an old gray derelict car with rusty spots. “There's Gran,” said Rick, his young voice husky with its early morning usage. His eyes were not fully open. “Doesn't she know we're leaving?”

“Of course.” How many times had they talked about the exact hour? And she told her mother she was not the only wife who left her husband to his own devices in the summer. Other wives settled in the Hamptons or on the Vineyard or the Cape and husbands came on weekends; they had many nights alone in the city. Once they went to Fire Island and William laughed that on Friday evenings wives and children went to meet what was called “the daddy boat.”

On the porch, William had not shaved; there was his faint darkened stubble, his familiarity as Dad and husband. She had smelled coffee on his breath when she stood on tiptoe reaching beyond his chin, where the top of her head came, and their mouths brushed in goodbye. He had grabbed Rick in a crunch that made the boy cry out and look sheepish. Somewhere in the distance an inconsiderate lawn mower began; the smell of grass would reach them if they stayed long enough. When would they get off with her mother here? Mrs. Wynn parked and came along the roadside, her eyes downcast, embarrassed by her arrival. Bile rose to Laurel's throat. She wanted to drive away, saying, If I wait another minute, I won't make it with just one night on the road. “I'm not going to keep you,” her mother called, stepping along carefully through damp grass. “I couldn't sleep.” Her long nails grasping the rolled-down window seemed those of a swimmer holding on to something for dear life. Her eyes briefly met Laurel's. Her sleeplessness was because of Mr. Woodsum, she meant. Laurel looked away.

William called, “Hello, old dear. I'll be right back. Got to go indoors and poo.”

“Dad.” Rick laughed. “Tell the neighborhood.”

“Here's a little money, Rick.”

“Gran, thanks.” He reached across the front seat. “It'll help with my twenty-two.”

“Bah. You don't need another gun.”

“He only has a BB gun, Mother.”

“Bah. He doesn't need that. He's not supposed to shoot it in Soundport. That's why he's always in trouble with the police.”

“That's why he likes Mississippi,” Laurel said. “To be able to use the gun.”

If she says Bah again, I'll kill her, she thought. “Bah, he doesn't need to shoot anything,” Mrs. Wynn said. She meant to remind them she grew up in Mississippi with a passel of brothers clomping mud into the house and bringing in bloody, stinky birds and animals she had to see plucked and gutted and had to smell cooking and finally had to eat. “I brought William my little extra fan. He says the apartment he subleases is so hot every summer.”

“He's taking the air conditioner out of my office,” Laurel said.

“Going to be comfortable.” Mrs. Wynn tried to smile and make eye contact again, but Laurel refused. If her mother attempted to malign William, she would champion him, because it had always been her nature to take up for any underdog.

Mrs. Wynn looked away toward the neighborhood. “A lot of long days while you're gone. Sundays are the worst.”

“Why don't you start going to church, Mother?”

“Why? What for?” Her eyes lost their sadness.

Where had her mother's feisty nature come from, so unlike her own? Laurel wondered. From having so many siblings? She could remind her mother she could wear her new clothes: people did not particularly go to church for Christian reasons. Between piousness and Christianity there is a fine line, it's been said.

“If I go to church, all they'd do would be to start asking me for money, or to be on some committee. They're always building something.” Her mother's voice wavered. “Maybe you won't stay so long.”

“How can I not stay, Mother? The house is rented.”

“Do you have Jewish tenants again?”

“Yes.”

“That's good. They're the best. Always leave the house better-looking than the way you left it.”

“Thanks,” Laurel said.

“I'm not going to any church. When I was little, I had to go to church twice every Sunday and to prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. And then every night for two weeks during protracted meeting.”

“You mean revival?”

“Whatever they call it now.”

Amused, Laurel would not laugh. But she watched her mother walk away with a different sense, noting her short legs, her round ankles, which gave her a peasant girl's look despite her fashionable clothes.

“The house looks fine, Mom.”

Laurel smiled, but the little barb had hurt, with a familiar feeling. As she edged the car slowly backward, fir trees beyond the house receded and grew more slim. Well, it was her fault all that work had to be done, cleaning out drawers and closets for other people to use, fluffing down cobwebs she had paid no attention to before. The slim New Yorker who came to rent the house had brought a child who seemed a minor appendage to her life as an executive. How did women acquire such acumen? How did they know how to command offices and make important decisions? Being a writer and staying at home, she was considered by other mothers not to be doing anything. They were running around Soundport on committees. It was therefore logical that she should chauffeur the neighborhood kids. But she would like to be out in the world, jumping into cabs, calling out directions, having a limousine wait for her outside Four Seasons, be recognized in Bendel's and have little time to shop. She longed to have an engagement calendar scribbled over with appointments and to have to make a lunch date three months in advance. As the tenant inspected the house, Buff came up cordially to sniff the skirt of her daughter, who shrieked in terror. “Don't touch the doggie,” the mother cried. “The doggie has germs.” “Oh, get away,” Laurel told Buff, meaning the opposite might be true. The poor city child would never love a dog or have the love of one in return. Once again, she had felt how out of her element she had always been in her exposure to New York.

Mrs. Wynn looked back. “Poor Buff,” she said. She got in a parting shot in a warring game Laurel never played. Just when she could feel sympathy for her mother, Mrs. Wynn ruined the moment; often that was the case.

“Does Buff mind being in the car two days?” Rick said.

“No.”

William on the porch again drew his chin into a long face and wiped at an imaginary tear. “See you soon, pal.”

“'Bye, Dad.” Rick hung out the window.

Laurel, smiling through the windshield, thought, No sad face for me and no long goodbye.

Rick shouted, “Gran, fly down and drive back home with Mom.”

“I'm not going to Mississippi in August! I lived to get out of that heat, period. Send me a postcard from wherever you're going out west.”

“Thanks a lot,” Laurel said.

Rick settled inside. “I knew she wouldn't come,” he said.

He rose onto his knees and looked back until the house no longer filled the rearview mirror and they were around the corner from two familiar people, her mother and her husband. And suddenly, it seemed odd to Laurel that they were there together while she drove away leaving them.

On the front seat lay a piece of paper covered with what she called William's “squinchy” writing; it was hardly decipherable. His listing exit numbers and highways for her was the only way she got through New Jersey and Pennsylvania each year. She could not understand maps. In her worse times, she thought his handwriting showed a mean, suspicious, small nature, but Rick's handwriting had turned into a carbon copy. So she changed her mind, deciding that in handwriting analysis probably opposites were true: small writing meant largesse of mind, a warm, loving, and sympathetic nature. She smiled at Rick, playing with a Slinky train at his age, folding the wire in and out like an accordion.

Later, as they traveled into New Jersey and passed green exit signs for Princeton, she wondered about Edward and if he still lived there. She fumbled for William's paper because soon she needed the exit for Pennsylvania. “Mom, why can't you remember how to go year after year?”

“I'm stupid. Once we get to Virginia I'm OK. It's the same highway nearly all the way after that.” All the way
home
, she thought, home free. In Virginia, the countryside began to feel, look, and smell Southern. She slowed again for a toll. “Do you realize it costs almost eight dollars to get from Soundport to Philadelphia? In the South there are no toll roads.”

“What am I supposed to say about that this year?”

“Jesus, God!”

“What, Mom?” The Slinky train fell from Rick's hands.

“I missed the basket. Help me. Help me find the right change.”

“I thought you'd had a heart attack. Get out and get that money.” But Rick grabbed the purse she held out and found coins.

“I couldn't get out.” Laurel breathed slowly again, driving on. “The sign says not to.”

He repeated, “I thought you'd had a heart attack.” The Slinky train lay in his hands. “Dad says your whole generation grew up afraid of authority.”

“Oh, be quiet till I get out of this traffic.” She rose in the seat while cars flowed around her, gaining in speed and spreading in all directions; if she was not in the far lane in time for the next exit, she'd wind up in Atlantic City or someplace worse. The sound of a car horn bleating like a lamb in the line of cars that waited while she fumbled at the toll booth came back: another dumb female, William would have said.