Saying Grace (12 page)

Rue went in the back door quietly. The familiar smell of the kitchen swamped her so that she stood for a moment in the doorway, breathing it in as if every minute of the years she had lived here was still here and you could smell them.

She hoped her parents were asleep, but when she closed the kitchen door softly she heard her father stir in his chair in the parlor.

She went in to him.

He looked just the same. Lean, with a long-jawed lined face, thick hair, and pale blue eyes. If he had been asleep he didn’t look it. He got up, kissed her, and told her in the same words he always used that it was awfully nice to have her home. She felt as if she had just come back from boarding school.

“Is Mother here?” she asked. She had still been in Ellsworth when they last spoke. He nodded.

“I told her you said not to wait up, but she wants to see you. She slept a lot of this afternoon, so don’t worry about waking her.”

“How is she?”

82 / Beth Gutcheon

He considered this question carefully.

“She’s not too bad. I don’t think she can see too awful good. She says the headache is better.”

This gave Rue very little idea what to expect. But she left her father, saying she wouldn’t be long, and climbed the stairs.

In the bedroom her parents had shared for fifty-odd years, her mother lay looking so waxy that Rue’s heart nearly stopped when she saw her. She thought she must have died since her father went downstairs. But as she walked softly across the floor, her mother’s eyes opened, and her spirit, which must have been floating nearby, went into her body and animated it, so that at once, as if by conjuring, the object became a woman. Jeannette smiled, and Rue bent over to kiss her cheek. Her mother pulled herself up on the pillows.

“I made him take me out of there,” she said. Her speech seemed entirely normal, as near as Rue could tell.

“I know you did. Good for you.”

“They put a needle in your arm and leave it there, so you’re attached to this…” she couldn’t finish the description, but gestured such that Rue knew she meant the IV bottle, hanging from its alu-minum cart beside her bed, which might have been dripping in drugs or just sugar water to keep her strength up.

“I guess they have to do that,” said Rue, though she knew from being a doctor’s wife that it was often done out of routine and not reason. “I bet you hated it.”

Her mother nodded and rolled her eyes as if her daughter was a mind-reader. Rue was unused to having her mother’s approval, let alone to having her mother think she had any special gifts, so it was a new experience to be thought a mind-reader, and where her mother was concerned she dreaded new experiences.

“I had to tinkle,” said her mother in a stage whisper. “I didn’t tell him this. I had to tinkle in the middle of the night and I rang the bell, I rang and rang and rang, and nobody came.”

“Oh, Mother…” said Rue. “Where were the nurses?”

Her mother made a face. It was a deep mystery.

“Finally a nurse came down the hall and I shouted, “Yoo hoo—yoo hoo—and she came, and I said ‘I have to tinkle,’ and she said ‘I’m not on duty on this floor.’”

Saying Grace / 83

“Oh
Mother
.”

“And off she went, trip trap, trip trap.” This was the noise the goats made crossing the bridge in
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
. The copy of the story that her mother had read aloud was in the next room, as was apparently her whole childhood. And her mother still spoke in a code to her daughter, special words and signs that only she and Rue shared, that only Rue would know. Trip trap, trip trap, the nurse went away, and—what did that make Jeannette? The troll?

Rue waited to hear the end of the story. Her mother was looking at her, a look full of drama. Finally it dawned on Rue that the end of the story was that…she needed to get up, and nobody came, and she had a needle in her arm, trapping her in the bed and…the inev-itable had happened.

“Oh
Mother!
”

“I couldn’t tell Him,” she said, meaning of course her husband of fifty-four years. “I just told him I wouldn’t spend another night in that place.”

“I’m shocked. I’m glad you put your foot down.”

“I did,” said Jeannette.

They both looked at each other and Rue began to picture exactly what kind of commotion her mother had made, before and after this disaster. She said gravely, “I like the yoo-hoo part.” And began to smile. Her mother demonstrated this high point, so that Rue pictured her, upright in her hospital gown, yodeling at the goat-footed nurse.

“How long can you stay?” asked her mother.

“Till Sunday. I have a three o’clock plane.” She hoped her mother would be pleased with almost the whole weekend.

“Three o’clock? Can’t you stay for Sunday supper?” her mother asked, as if only willfulness or thoughtlessness could explain this odd planning.

“I’m sorry—I can’t.”

Her mother seemed to sag a little. Then she said, “Do you have exams?”

Rue was momentarily frozen.

“No, I have a job, Mother. I run a school. You know that.”

“Of course I know that,” her mother said smoothly. There was a brief pause. “I meant, is it exam time at school? At Country?”

84 / Beth Gutcheon

After a moment Rue said, “No, it’s only October. We don’t have exams until right before Christmas.”

“I don’t believe in this new business, you know,” said her mother.

Rue waited. Finally her mother said, “This not giving grades. This business where they don’t have tests. Life is a test. They have a new principal here at the Consolidated, she’s got the whole town in an uproar….”

“Yes, I know you feel that way.” At Country, there were no letter grades until fifth grade, and no exams until seventh. She had no way of knowing if her mother remembered this and couldn’t resist provoking, or if she had eliminated it, along with so much other unwanted information. Her mother kept all Rue’s swimming ribbons and award certificates framed in Rue’s old room. She had her National Merit Scholar certificate over the wood stove, and her college and graduate degrees beside them. It still pained her that Rue wouldn’t give her her Phi Beta Kappa key, so Jeannette could have it put on a charm bracelet for her.

“How is Georgia…” her mother asked. She was clearly reluctant to let Rue leave, though her fatigue was now palpable.

“She sounds very well, Mother. She’s at The Juilliard School, in New York, you know.”

“The Juilliard School!” Her mother made a sort of actressy face of delight. “Juilliard! Mother wanted me to go to the Conservatory, too, you know. But I said Juilliard or nothing.” Rue did know. This was a seminal story in her mother’s history, and every time Rue told her about Georgia, the news got routed to a side track, while the great engine of her mother’s disappointment came charging up the main line with fresh news from 1938.

“Georgia—at The Juilliard School. And she’s playing the…”

“Singing, Mother. She’s a soprano. Lyric.”

“Soprano!” exclaimed her mother, losing interest. She herself had played the piano.

“Mother—you should try to sleep. We’ll have plenty of time in the morning.”

“I don’t need much sleep,” said her mother. Rue thought she had just been asleep, with her eyes open, and snapped herself back.

“I know. That’s good—I’ll see you early, then.” She got up. “Would you like this light on?”

Saying Grace / 85

“No—no—not this one. I want the one in the bathroom.” Rue went into the bathroom and turned on the ceiling light. The old white tiles had been replaced by something plastic and textured, with baskets of blue flowers on each square. The old claw-footed tub was freshly scrubbed, and her father had put out her mother’s monogrammed towels. The towels had been a wedding present and now had loose threads along the warp at each side where the hem had worn away.

“Not that…not that one the…”

Rue turned on the light built into the mirror, and turned off the overhead light.

“…one beside the…oh the…”

“Mirror, Mother.” Rue came out and left the door standing open.

“No that’s too…”

Rue closed it until there was just a sliver of light and looked toward the bed. Her mother waved her hand toward the ceiling. Rue opened the door a few more inches. The hand dropped, satisfied.

Rue went back to the bed and stood looking down.

“I’m sorry to be such a…nuisance,” said her mother.

“Don’t be silly. I’m so glad to be here.” Her mother nodded.

“Are you ready to have this light off?”

She shook her head NO. “Leave it for Daddy.”

Rue tiptoed out to find her father sitting on the bed in her childhood room, with the light on and door open, waiting for her. She went in.

“I thought you might sleep in the guest room while she’s sick,”

said Rue.

“No, we’ll do all right,” he said. She looked at him in the light and thought he looked drained.

“I’m sorry to keep you up so late.”

“It’s good for us. Change in routine.” He stood up, and she realized with a shock that he was now hardly more than an inch taller than she. “There were some phone calls for you, earlier.”

“Important?”

“Fellah sounded pretty druv’ up. It was a Mr. Herring.”

Rue thought for just a moment to get from herring to kipper.

“Kip,” she said.

86 / Beth Gutcheon

“Yes. And Mike, he called twice.”

“Thank you, Daddy. Sleep well—do you mind if I use the phone in the kitchen?”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Can I bring you anything?”

“Not a thing.” She watched him make his way quietly into the darkened bedroom and close the door behind him.

She watched him walk off, and when his bedroom door closed behind him, she made her way back down the narrow darkened staircase to the pitch-black kitchen. For a moment she couldn’t find the light switch; she was feeling for the switch in her kitchen at home.

T
hat’s
it
,” yelled Chandler Kip into the phone, when Rue returned his call at 10 p.m., Pacific Time. “That’s it, she’s a nutcase, she’s making a laughingstock of the school. I want her fired, Rue, and if you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself.”

“No, Chandler, you will not. Look, could you hold on just a minute? Hold on, I’ll be right back to you. I’d like you to tell me again what happened.” Rue was cursing herself for not getting through to Mike Dianda before she called Chandler. Mike’s line had been busy for ten minutes and it was getting late to call. She did not want to have this conversation without knowing both sides to the story. The kitchen was cold and the coals in the wood stove were almost ash, and she’d had a long day and frankly didn’t want to have the conversation at all. But. She put new kindling and a couple of birch logs into the stove, and went back to the phone.

“She called Child Welfare and told them Oliver Sale, my firm’s general counsel, broke his daughter’s arm,” Chandler announced, and Rue’s heart sank. “This is an upstanding member of the community and a valued colleague of mine,” Chandler’s voice was rising,

“and he is very upset.
Very
upset. And so would
you
be, if you suddenly found the police at your door because some harebrained…”

“Chandler, please stop shouting at me. I can’t make a sensible decision if I can’t find out what happened.”

“I just told you what happened!”

“In the first place, it’s not police who come, it’s a social worker, and they don’t go to the house. In the second, Mrs. Trainer didn’t call them without a reason.”

“How do you know, you’re three thousand miles away! Wouldn’t you be upset? If the police or whoever came prancing on campus to decide whether you’re fit to raise your own child…”

“Chandler, stop shouting at me.”

“This is a man with an impeccable reputation, and now of course this rumor is all over town, Oliver Sale beats his kid!”

88 / Beth Gutcheon

“Stop shouting at me.”

There was a moment of silence. Finally Rue said, “I take it Lyndie has been injured in some way.”

“She fell down the stairs in the dark and broke a bone in her wrist.”

“I see.”

“And she told Mrs. Trainer that. She told her exactly what happened!”

“And whom else did she tell?”

“Oh
whom
else? Could you stop for once talking like you’ve got a goddamn hot potato in your mouth?”

“Yes, I can. Sorry. Did she tell Mr. Dianda?”

“I suppose so, he took her to the hospital.”

“And she told the doctors, I suppose.”

“Look, I have to get back to Oliver. I told him I’d have an answer for him tonight. What am I going to tell him?”

“Please tell him that I am extremely sorry that this happened, and I’d like to meet with him and Sondra on Monday.”

“I’m not going to say that, Rue, I’m going to tell him that Mrs.

Trainer is fired.”

“You can’t do that. You can set policy, but you cannot do my job for me.”

“This
is
policy.”

“It absolutely is not.”

“Rue, let me be clear. I am taking this personally. I want you to consider this as if it had happened to me.
Your
teacher, a useless neurotic, who I’ve warned you about before, has accused someone very close to me—a lawyer, Rue! She’s accused him of a felony, he could be disbarred, did you think of that? I told the Sales I would give it my first priority, as if it had happened to me. To
me
, do we understand each other? I told them it would be taken care of.”

“And so it will. But if it’s taken care of by anyone but me, you’ll be looking for another school head.”

Chandler hung up.

Rue dialed Mike Dianda and got a busy signal. She waited five minutes and tried again. Still busy. Mary or Trinnie must be on, probably doing homework with a friend across town. She called the operator and told her it was an emergency.

M
ike, it’s Rue.”

“We’ve been trying to reach you all day!”

“I know, Chandler got to me. Tell me what you know.”

“First let me tell you about the Oliver Sale School of Charm. He called me this afternoon and said if I didn’t put you on the fucking phone he was going to come over and rip it out of the wall.”