The End of Always: A Novel (19 page)

He came outside and sat down next to me. He put his arms around me and rested his face against my neck. Then he leaned back so he could see what he had done. He touched my cheek. He held my head in his hands. He kissed my eyes and forehead and mouth. Then he wept. He told me he was sorry. He told me that he loved me. It was not his fault but the fault of the damned drink. He would cut that out. This would never happen again. He reached down and took my hand.

Our neighbors had their windows open and I could hear laughter and somewhere a woman talking in a very loud voice. I looked up and found a star. I wished that we would love each other forever, just the way we loved each other that night.

We ate dinner at the tearoom near the interurban stop. August took a table on the side of the room, under a high window through which I could see the sky. The door to the tearoom was propped open to catch the evening breeze and I could hear piano music coming from somewhere out along the street.

He leaned across the table and took my hands. He asked me what would make things right. He had not meant for things to go so far. He’d had a long day at work and the crew went out together afterward. Just one beer would do no harm. But he had made a big mistake. He had no explanation.

I wanted my August back. I did not want to see that man again, the one who lay on the floor and slurred my name, the one who came at me out of darkness. But I did not say any of this. The facts seemed beyond words. I told him instead that we needed pots and pans and plates and bowls. I knew the disruption in our housekeeping had not come from a lack of dishes, but I thought we might as well start there. I told him we needed curtains and rugs and furniture. And then I said that he could not leave me alone in that house for a day and a night and half a day again. No lights. No heat. Not even a way to take a bath.

He nodded. “I will give you some money,” he said. “Then you can take care of all of that.” He smiled and dragged his fingernails across the palm of my hand. “I am no hausfrau,” he said. “I do not know what is needed.”

“When will you give me some money?” I said. I pulled my palm away. I had not intended for my voice to sound so hard. He gave me a quizzical look.

“Right now,” he said. “Right here.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a dull red leather billfold. This he set on the table between us. Then he leaned forward and extracted a few bills. Held them up so I could see them. Laid them on the table next to the billfold. “For you,” he said. “Take them.”

I had not seen that billfold before. It was not in his pockets when he came home drunk. It rested between us like a piece of poisoned fruit.

He watched me. “Is it enough?” he said. “I have more.”

“It’s enough.”

“Fine,” he said. “Good.” He smiled and took my hand. “You see? What I said is true. I will look after you.” He patted his shirt pocket and found his cigarettes. He lit one with a match just like the kind he used to pop and cup in his hands while waiting for me in the yard behind my father’s house. He exhaled a long stream of blue smoke and smiled at me again but frowned when he saw that I was still upset.

“What is it?” he said. “Is it not enough? I will give you more.”

“That is not it,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Here.” And he slid more bills out of the red billfold and gave them to me. He told me to put them all away and not to leave money lying around in public. “You are like a child,” he said. But he looked pleased. He inhaled and moved his jaw and popped smoke rings into the air between us. “My brother taught me this trick,” he said. He leaned back and watched the loops of smoke in the air over his head. Then he waved his cigarette at my plate. “Don’t eat all of that,” he said. “It’s too much.”

I put my fork down. The expression on his face suggested that all was settled and behind us. Our problems had been solved. Now we could have fun.

“August,” I said. “There is something else.”

He groaned and stubbed his cigarette out in his plate. He poured sugar and milk into his coffee and stirred it with his spoon. “We have better things to do tonight,” he said, and lifted his cup to his lips and drank and set the cup down. “All right,” he said then, in a tone of voice that suggested I had finally said something to convince him. “If there is more, let me hear it. Whatever it is.”

He wore a look of faintly annoyed expectation. I felt a ripple of irritation.

“I want to know what happened when you went to ask my father for his permission for us to marry,” I said.

He looked puzzled. He dropped his arms to the table and leaned forward on his elbows. “I already told you,” he said.

“That is exactly what happened?”

“Of course.”

“Nothing else?”

“Say what is on your mind,” he said. “I cannot guess.”

I hesitated.

“What,” he said. “You cannot even ask a simple thing?”

I bit my lip. Then I told him that William Oliver had been in the bar when August went to see my father. That William Oliver had said that August never went into a back room, never asked permission, but had left a pile of money on the bar and left. And now I thought that my sister might be black and blue across town because everything that August had told me might not be true. Or probably was not true. Then I stopped.

He passed his hand over his eyes and looked away from me and then looked back at me with a drowning expression. “Marie,” he said quietly. “What I told you is entirely true.”

“But he said—”

“I do not give a damn what he said.”

“But he was—”

“So now you do not trust me? What I said is what happened.”

“Is Martha all right?”

“I am your husband,” he said. “Not William Oliver.”

“I know,” I said. “But Martha—”

“Why wouldn’t Martha be all right?”

“He would hold her responsible somehow,” I said. I felt tears come to my eyes. “If you did not get permission. He would take it out on her.”

“I got permission.”

“Are you sure?”

“Marie.”

I wiped my eyes with my napkin and the man who sat alone at the table next to ours watched me. “I am sorry,” I said.

“Then stop it,” August said. “I did what I said. Nothing different.”

When we got to our house, August took me by the hand and led me into the yard. We stood under the stars. He put his arm around me. I felt myself go soft and loose against him. He ran his hand down my back and then looked up. He pointed out Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. I looked up, too, past his shoulder, but I could not really see the constellations as things separate and apart. I just saw all the stars overhead as if they had become one huge field in which we would always walk. When I was with August, I could put the old parts of my life behind me. I could become the girl I wanted to be. I could promise myself that there were a million ways to be hopeful.

Inside, he undressed me carefully and slowly. He brushed his fingertips against my lips. He smoothed my hair. When we lay down, he wrapped his arms around my back and we lay still like that for what seemed a long time. When he began to move, he moved very slowly and gently. I clung to him and said his name again and again and called him back to me, the boy I loved. I let the other man slip away.

The man behind the counter watched me as if he expected me to grab something and run. I smiled at him but this had no effect. I did not mind. It was a pretty day and I had money in my pocket. Let him think what he liked. I would take as long as I wanted to choose my things and he could watch me the whole time. It did not matter.

I walked up and down the narrow aisles, picking things up and putting them down. Silver cans of peas and beans and potatoes and spinach with bright labels all stacked neatly on the shelves that ran to the back of the store and beyond that, a counter with a cash register and cloth sacks of oatmeal and flour and sugar and popcorn. A jar of stick candy striped red and white and another of brown horehound drops dusted with sugar. I looked down at a pile of newspapers on the counter. The headlines screamed about the strikes up north. I could only imagine what my father must be saying. So many men in chains, I thought, all of them enslaved to masters who did not give a damn. It was amazing that any of them lived through the day.

Finally the counterman could stand it no longer. He asked if he could help me.

“Do you have plates?” I said.

He came out from behind the counter and brushed past me. He showed me a low shelf stacked with china, a blue and white pattern stamped on the face of each plate. “How many do you need?” he said.

“Four plates,” I said in a soft voice. “Four bowls.”

When these were wrapped in brown paper, he looked at me. “What else?”

I fingered the bills in my pocket again. I asked for a skillet and a saucepan and four sets of tableware and a teakettle. The man looked at me as if he did not believe me but he gathered these things and slowly rang them up. He kept glancing at me as if he expected me to stop him. I didn’t blame him. I knew I looked like a poor girl who had no way to fend for herself. The bottom of my skirt had begun to come undone and the cloth had torn where I had stepped on it. My shirtwaist was stained. But I did not care.

I asked him to cut six yards of white voile and add a spool of white thread and a packet of needles and a pair of shears. I heard the sound of a bolt being turned as he measured out the yards and then the sharp thwack of the long blade cutting through fabric. When I stood in front of him and counted out the money, I saw the look of surprise that passed over his face and felt deeply satisfied that I was able to pay and was not the girl this man thought I was. It was good to have money and be on my own. Then I stepped out into the street and thought of August again and it seemed the weight of him was something I had known my whole life. Clouds moved over the sun and the wind lifted. The air smelled sweet, like early flowers.

T
he days grew longer and warmer. Two weeks passed and then three and then a month. In midsummer the world was overspread with a calm and even light. Sparrows spiraled up from Bertha’s garden and vanished into the trees. In the evening, she watered her beds. In the morning, she cut her flowers. When the days grew hot, she put a fan in the window of her bedroom, where it whirred all night long.

August and I had no fan. We could barely catch a breeze, even with all of our windows open. And with the windows open, mosquitoes rose from the grass and came into our rooms, as well as flies and moths and shiny black beetles that rose into the air with a whirr. We often sat in the dark, just to try to keep the wildlife at bay. But all of this was fine with me. I liked to think the woods drew closer as soon as the sun went down.

Every night when August came in, he let his tool belt fall to the floor. He crossed the room and put his arms around me and held me against him. His clothes were sweaty. His skin was sweaty. His hair was sweaty. He smelled of a long day of work. But that did not matter. I could meet him where he stood. He kissed my hair, my neck, my ears. I touched his face. I felt the long muscles in his thighs. I pressed my face against his shoulder and began to strain against him. I could not bear to wait. I felt his breath hammer through me.

Some nights we fell to the floor right where we stood, with the sky full dark and no light but the light cast by our neighbors’ rooms. I wanted nothing more than to be like this forever, to hold August Bethke and have him hold me.

If sometimes I felt a little suffocated by August’s desire and thought that in all of his pounding he pressed the air out of me the way you press the air out of a rubber ball, I put those feelings aside. I told myself that I wanted August. I told myself that naturally I would sometimes feel like all of this was too much. That it was all right to feel that way. It was not like I really wanted it to stop. And when he came through the door at night, I had no trouble breathing. I found that the air rushed in and out of me just fine.

I had the voile and the shears and the needles and the thread so I set about making curtains. That summer, each house in our neighborhood was a square with windows shaded against the heat, each lawn a rectangle trimmed within an inch of its life. I wanted our house to look like the houses around us. If every house on the block had white curtains that blew at the windows, we would have white curtains that blew at the windows, too.

I had forgotten to buy a tape measure, so I had to improvise. I walked in the woods until I found a long, straight stick. I laid the stick against our window casements and marked the width and length of each on the bark. I spread the voile out on the floor and measured the fabric against the markings on the stick. I added the length of my thumb to make room for the hem and a very narrow pocket for the rod. I cut each panel and marked the fold and then doubled that and turned the hem under. I threaded a needle and sat and sewed each curtain by hand. It took me three days to finish but eventually I had six panels. I walked from room to room and held the curtains to the windows, imagining how nice they would look once they were hung.

I looked out over the yard and watched Bertha drag a fruit tree on a piece of burlap sack over her grass. A man walked along behind the tree with a shovel over his shoulder. She stopped near the front walk and fished a handkerchief from her pocket. She blotted her forehead and gestured at a piece of ground. The man used the blade of the shovel to mark out a place in the grass, where he began to dig.

My stomach growled. I was hungry but there was nothing in the house to eat. This was the way of things. At first, I thought that August had merely forgotten to give me money for food and he would remember and I would not have to ask. I thought it was his job to take care of me. I thought I should not have to put my hand out like a beggar with a tin cup. In those first days, hunger had even been exhilarating, filling me with a strange lightness, convincing me that I would be pared to bone and in that disappearance I would become the bone that August would always want. But as time went on and still he gave me nothing, or sometimes just a dollar or two, when all we kept in the house might be a bag of oatmeal so I could cook his breakfast, I saw that August meant for me to live on very little. I could tell that he would rather sit on the edge of our bed at night, counting the cash in his wallet, than hand any money over to me. That was when hunger became painful. Without food, my belly was a gnawing jaw and I walked hunched over, as if the rings of my spine were ready to unlatch. When I could get one, I ate an apple, core and all. Once I ate a peach that Bertha gave me and sucked on the pit for the rest of the day. I sucked on pebbles I picked up from our drive, to make myself think that I was eating. That I was full.

But I could not bring myself to believe that August would put his regard for money ahead of me. I told myself that he loved me. That he had promised to take care of me. That he had only forgotten. That my hunger must be some kind of mistake and I just had to wait for him to fix it. Even now, I am amazed at the things I told myself so I would not have to look at him and the way he really was.

Outside, the air was soft and hot. Bees hummed in Bertha’s raspberry patch. She saw me and called my name but I just smiled and waved and walked down the driveway. She looked perfect in her perfect yard, as if she had never once been manhandled or turned by the desires of men, taken from herself and turned into something they wanted. It did not seem possible that a girl could walk through life the way that Bertha did, but here was Bertha, doing just that. It was hard to understand.

When I went to her house, she served cake and tea. She never talked about my unraveling dress. She never mentioned my poor shoes. She did not pry about my family. She just sat me down on her porch or in her kitchen and gave me something to eat, a wedge of pie, a slice of strudel. She said they had too much but I knew she thought that I did not have enough. I believe she had taken it upon herself to worry about me, about my shrinking belly, my droopy clothes.

Say what you want, she always said. Don’t say what August wants. Say what you want. Above all else.

Her voice was very tender when she spoke. She fed me and told me things that felt like riddles, so surprising to me were they, so filled with ideas that made me blink.

I found a footpath that rose uphill under the pines. No wind moved but the air seemed cooler in the shade. I carried my hunger like an empty bucket. I thought if I kept moving it would not echo and I could ignore the aching bite, the whirlpool that sucked at me no matter what I did.

The trees thinned out near the top. A shallow slope spread out below me. A lone turkey vulture circled slowly and evenly on the updrafts, riding down and then up. I sat under an oak. I drew in the dirt with a stick. I batted flies away from my hair. I collected pine needles and twigs and acorn caps and old burrs and a few small stones—granite, quartz glinting. I lay on my stomach and built a little house and then another. Finally I had a fairy village just like the fairy villages that Martha and I built when we were little.

The turkey vulture disappeared. I rolled over on my side and pillowed my head on my arms. I lay very still. I let myself believe that the emptiness I felt was only a way to get ready for August, who would come home and lie down with me in the dark. I closed my eyes. I let the emptiness be August. I let the dark close over me. After a time, I fell asleep. If birds flew overhead or deer passed behind me on the silent traces in the woods or bears came up from the river or dwarves came out of the ground, I saw none of them.

I dreamt of a ship on the water that came through a silvery mist from a land I could not see and sailed over open water toward a land I could not identify. As the ship sailed, it cast a black shadow on the dark blue water. All around me was the sound of creaking wood and the rippling shudder of the sails. Then there were smokestacks and open decks and no sails at all and the ship was entirely different but in the manner of dreams was still the same and still carried the same cargo. I saw a woman in a dark red dress at the forward rail but it could not be a woman in a dark red dress for the dress was white and the red had come from her and then she and the ship disappeared. I woke with my heart pounding and my breath gone and a sense that I was in danger but of course I was not.

I came down the hillside in the late afternoon, the sun still well above the horizon. I carried acorns in my pocket and a handful of pure white stones. When I got to the road, a man saw me and stopped dead in his tracks. He had a length of rope coiled over his shoulder and a hatchet tucked into his belt. He put his hand to his mouth and backed away and then turned and ran down the road. I looked around and saw nothing. I realized he was afraid of me.

I touched my hair and smoothed the front of my dress. I knew why he ran. But I was no spirit of the woods, no sylph or sprite, no bewitching girl with her hands full of spells. I was a married woman. Still, my dress was soiled and wrinkled and rank. My shoes were dirty. My hair had come undone. I shed pine needles and twigs as I walked. He must have thought I was no good, come to haunt him, the terrible girl who took men into the woods.

But I was not that girl and never had been. I was only myself, hungry and tired and hot and alone.

When I got home, I sat on the back steps and took my shoes off. I heard the sound of creaking bedsprings and then August stood in the doorway. He wore his work clothes. He held his hand out to me, his fingers knotted into a fist. “I have something for you,” he said.

He turned his hand over and I pried his fingers open, one by one. A plain gold band rested in his palm.

“Put it on,” he said. He smiled. “It is not going to bite you.” When I did, a light came into his eyes. He kissed the band on my finger. He said he wanted to prove to me that he could be a good husband. He wanted to show me that he could do the right thing. “Now,” he said. “I am going to take care of your bath.”

He had already started the water on the stove. He lifted the pot and carried it over to the washtub and filled the tub. He tested the temperature with his hand. He told me to get in.

My hunger disappeared as his words moved through me. I left my dress in a heap and walked naked in the bare end of daylight. I let him watch me, his gaze as if the touch of his hand, as if he had already reached for me. I stepped into the tub and lowered myself into the water. He soaped a washrag. He began to suds my back. I turned to take the rag from him but he laughed and said, “Let me.” His voice soft and low and full of wonderment, as if I was something he could not believe he was permitted to touch. Water sloshed onto the floor and he laughed again but his hand stilled on my hip. I heard his breath catch. I knew what would come next. He touched my breasts with his soapy rag and told me to turn and face him. “So I can wash you,” he said. I turned.

He took me to a restaurant near the courthouse where the tables were laid with white tablecloths and thick glass goblets and heavy silverware. He liked to hold forth and tell stories about the escapades he and his brother had survived when they were children. He had jumped off a roof on a dare and had broken his arm but that did not matter. What mattered was that he had done it. He had jumped when everyone said he could not. This kind of thing had set him up to be the man he was. He saw himself as fearless and in charge. I saw him that way, too. As we had walked along the street toward the restaurant, we had passed a flower vendor and August had leaned over the crocks of blossoms until he found a tiny bunch of soft pink roses. He told the flower girl to fix them with a pin so he could pin the flowers to my dress. She did not have a pin but he just stood there, staring at her, until she fashioned something with a hairpin she took from her head. She clipped the flowers to my dress. He was not entirely satisfied but she had done what he had asked and so he agreed that it was fine. He paid her a little bit less than the price she suggested and she did not argue with him. I could feel her eyes on our backs as we went up the street. August had taken something from her and it was not just the flowers. It was not just that business with the pin. He had made her feel his power. At dinner he eyed me and said he thought I needed some new clothes. But then he let it go, as if he was determined to have a good time. He took my hand in his and turned it this way and that. He smiled and appreciated the ring he had purchased. He held his left hand out to me and showed me that our rings matched. He told me that the rings were the best he could afford. Even if they were not the absolute best, they were better than the prize that came in a box of Cracker Jack. He smiled again and I smiled at him. I loved our rings. I loved the way they let the world know that I belonged to him.

He had ordered steaks for us and he made sure we had chocolate cake for dessert. A man in a plain blue jacket and black pants sat at an upright piano. He played some soft small song. August pressed his knee against mine under the table and told me I was beautiful. “I can see that others would think you are not so pretty,” he said. “But to me, you are.” He smiled. I felt tears sharp in my eyes.

Some nights he hit me for no reason. Other nights I seemed to be the cause. One morning he took a razor from his kit and stropped it and then held it next to my face. One night he flicked a knife at me. Afterward, he always said he was wrong. He always said it was his fault. He always said he wanted to do the right thing. I often thought that if August were president, he could enact a hundred laws against the things he did, but still, he would do them. A hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, I would read newspaper stories about girls who disappeared at the hand of some man. And August would be the same. Law or no law. This I believed to be love.

In the morning he left before breakfast. I opened the sack of oatmeal and saw black things moving. I closed the bag and carried it outside and threw it in the trash barrel in the yard.