The Fires (17 page)

“You didn’t have to,” I said.

“No. But we were poor. A disease could sweep through town and kill a whole family of children.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“We did what we were told because that was how people got along. And we had to. People need others around to help, especially when you don’t have much.” She muted her voice and looked at me again with that frog smile. “Later on when I got married it was different. I started with the Ladies’ Guild, but you know what, we still wore white dresses. We still wore long white dresses because we liked them, and I tell you, it wasn’t much different from the way it was before. Just no more parades. No men around. I had this pretty white dress I remember with French lace on the skirt—Emily gave it to me—and it looked a little too much like a wedding dress, people said, but I didn’t care.”

The dream of my grandmother’s lost, fragile beauty had often 130 / RENÉ STEINKE

made me sad, but now it irked me and somehow fed my fury at her.

“Do you think that just because someone looks different from you they’re any less?” I yanked back my shirtsleeves. “Look, my skin’s not the same as yours.”

Her mouth tightened. Her blue eyes rounded under her pink, wrinkled lids, and I caught a glimpse of her younger self. Of course, there was nothing for her to say, because she had believed she was better than other women, and the gaze of everyone around had confirmed that. “Honey, you are special,” she said, grazing my knee with her hand. “Anyone with half an eye can see the beauty in you.” I couldn’t let her get away so easily. The rocks were too sharp, and I was losing my footing.

“How can you be friends with a bigot?” I said.

“Of course she doesn’t think of you in the same way as those others.”

“Maybe she should.”

“Oh, she just gets going sometimes,” said Marietta. “You can’t listen to half of what she says. Even she knows that. She used to tell me your grandfather was a coward because he wouldn’t join the men.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I said that was one of the reasons I married him.” She shook her head, rearranging the candy dish on the end table. “Look, maybe back then I didn’t think for myself, but later I did. I changed with the times.”

“I never heard you contradict Grandpa.”

“I did, a little, at home. I couldn’t tell him anything, though.

He didn’t listen to me.” She looked down, and her mouth trembled. I thought how easily inertia could rot a person’s integrity, but I wanted to believe her. To do that though, I had to fill in the story, imagining she and her friends had made their white Ladies’

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Guild gowns out of silk instead of cotton sheets, that they burned those awful masks at a party, and after that, sabotaged the Klansmen’s efforts, and finally withheld sex and hot meals to help persuade the men out of their fervor.

“And what about Cornell?”

“We never even met that man.”

“Did you tell anyone he was Jewish?”

She lifted her chin and said incredulously, “We didn’t know that.”

“She never married him. I went to see him in September to see if he knew where she was.”

Marietta stood up and circled herself with her arms around her waist, began to pace. “Well, then, he was a common-law husband anyway.” She looked at the ceiling. “Thank God Henry never knew that. That would have been all we needed….” She bumped into the mantel and stopped herself, not looking up.

“He seemed to be a good person,” I said. “A piano player.” It didn’t really describe him, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.

When Marietta turned around, her face was composed again—it was amazing how deliberately she could do this, as if she were arranging her features on a plate. “So you reported that fire? Why did the newspaper say it was that girl at the drive-in then?”

Gratefully, I noticed it was already five o’clock, and I had to be at work by six. “I told her,” I said, feeling exhausted when I got to my feet.

J
o sat beside me at the desk, finishing up with the books. I swiped the polished dark wood with a rag and tried to speak calmly with a man who was complaining about the lack of heat in his room. It was an old hotel, and the radiator heat was temperamental, but he seemed one of those people so beaten down 132 / RENÉ STEINKE

and sad that they took complaining seriously because it was the only way anyone would listen.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” I said, in my best night-clerk’s voice. “I’ll have to call our maintenance people about it. In the meantime, would you like to move to another room?” He shook his small head uncertainly. His hair had thinned in patches, and he had a wrinkled brown circle in the middle of his forehead, a dull parody of the bright red dot Indian women wear. “Or can we bring you more blankets?”

“More blankets, yes.” He nodded, looking relieved and a little guilty.

“We’ll bring them right away.”

When I came out of the back closet holding two neatly folded and stacked wool blankets, Jo said, “David put money down on a house.” She shrugged. “It’s nothing special.”

I looked at her diamond-shaped face in profile and thought of her mother, singing at that nightclub, Blue, in New York. The color rose in the apples of her cheeks like the blush on peaches.

“You don’t have to do it,” I said. There was a small scratch on her cheek.

She shook her head, so her short hair fringed out around her face. “It’s an ugly green one on Washington Street, but we’re going to paint it.” She slid the books into the drawer, took her little key from her skirt pocket, and turned it in the lock.

“I have to take these upstairs,” I said. “But don’t leave yet, okay?” I carried the blankets up to 9, and when the man answered, he was already in his pajamas.

“Thanks much,” he said, taking the blankets from me. The tiny diamonds on his pajamas reminded me of Jo and her mother, both diamond-faced women.

“Do you need anything else?” He looked away and shook his head.

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When I got back downstairs, Jo was staring into the desk with her arms folded in front of her. She didn’t look happy.

“What happened at your grandmother’s today?” she said, sticking her pencil behind her ear.

I’d already told her about Erma’s photo album and those pictures of Marietta and her friends in Klan uniforms, and I was surprised how lightly she’d taken it, saying, they probably just needed an excuse to get away from their husbands once in a while.

“I found out you were probably right. At least that’s what she claims,” I said. “But my grandfather didn’t have anything to do with it, I guess. He wasn’t a joiner.”

She traced a finger over the desk. “That was all such a long time ago. Who knows what people really thought? It was all crazy.”

“I want to know,” I said.

She tapped her knee against the side of the desk. “Sometimes you just have to let things go.” She was turning the tables on me, wanting to give me advice so I wouldn’t think anymore about what she might be about to let go. “For example,” she said,

“there’s a reason, and you may never know it, why no one knows where your aunt Hanna is.”

“But what if I think I can find her?”

She sighed through her teeth. “And then what? She’s just a person like anyone else. She’s not a princess. She’s not wanted by the FBI.”

“She should know her father died.”

“Believe me,” Jo said, scratching her nose, “she’ll find out when she needs to.” She was determined to undo what her mother had done, move into a home instead of abandoning one, marry a man she wasn’t sure she loved instead of leaving him. She wasn’t a leaver, like her mother; she was a stayer, and stayers had certain beliefs that helped them remain in a place:
Let things go. Be real-134 / RENÉ STEINKE

istic. Don’t expect too much.
For all her pessimism, there was a tenacity in it I admired.

Hanna had once said to my mother, “I don’t know why anyone would want to live in Porter.” She hadn’t meant to be cruel, but the ineptness of her words didn’t seem to occur to her until my mother’s mouth clamped down, suddenly the little sister, dutiful, a stayer.

Jo ruffled her hair in the back. “Remember when we found all that stuff under the train platform?”

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing where this would lead. We’d discovered these objects we hadn’t even known we’d wanted until we held them in our hands: a Zippo cigarette lighter, a miniature scissors, a jade-and-pearl earring.

“That doesn’t usually happen,” she said in a clipped voice.

“You have to accept things as they are and make the best of them.

Things don’t usually just come to you by accident or because you’re looking for them.”

How had she become so dark-spirited? Did she really believe that? I decided she had to be just trying to convince herself that she would make the best of marrying David and all he had to offer her. My grandfather had been a stayer too, though, leaving finally the only way he could, and this made me frightened for her. That fear must have made me blurt it out, “My grandfather didn’t die of a heart attack. He killed himself. He put arsenic in his coffee.”

The pencil fell out of her hair and bounced onto the desk. She covered her mouth.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. I barely believed it, we’d lied to so many people.”

“Why?”

I gazed at the scratched and ink-stained blotter on the desk, crazy cacophonous marks. “We just did.”

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She nodded, so her eyes enlarged. “Why do you think he did it?” The real question. The chasm in the ground we’d been cau-tiously stepping around with our lie.

“You saw how he kept to himself.”
Though if I’d been braver, I
might have been able to draw him out, keep the bitterness in him from
turning to poison.
“That’s why I want to find Hanna. I thought she might know.”

Jo’s stricken face was white, and the cords in her neck stood out. “It’s awful,” she said, pressing her hands together almost as if she were praying, with her thumbs touching her chin and her eyes lowered. “Who knows why people do things?”

T
he first time it happened I was sitting in a restaurant eating a piece of lemon pie. A man with a high forehead and little curls by his ears sat down across from me at the table and asked how old I was.

“Fifteen,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of strangers anymore. I wanted to know the places they were from.

He puckered his lips in a fake whistle. “Too bad,” he said. “Are you sure?”

I nodded.

He licked his lips and shook his head. “They must grow pretty cute fifteen-year-olds around here,” he said. “Something in the water.” He put his hands on the table and pushed himself up, went back to his stool at the counter, glancing coyly over his shoulder at me, and paid his check.

I was stunned, and felt myself blush deeply. This had happened before to Jo, and she’d giggled and posed like a movie star when she’d told me about it. But I thought it had only happened because he was a stranger, someone who didn’t know me well enough to know I was scarred. I looked down at my navy skirt and white 136 / RENÉ STEINKE

blouse and realized he’d seen just enough: long, shiny hair, pretty eyes or mouth.

I followed him out to his car, and he opened the passenger door. When he kissed me, that flowery, tannic fume of booze overwhelmed me, and I thought to myself,
That’s right. There’s
not any reason he should know.

P
aul circled the hotel on the hour, careful to give space to the talks Jo and I had. Sometimes he sang songs to himself in Polish, and sometimes I caught him talking to himself, usually going over in his head what he had to do. He wore these heavy, steel-toed boots he’d bought at Orion’s, the farm-equipment store, and his footsteps were so loud you could hear him everywhere he went, except when he was closest to me, in the lobby. I thought he wore the boots to feel stronger—he was tall, but not muscular, not the sort of man a criminal would fear. His uniform was a pressed dark-blue twill. LINDEN in bold black letters marched across the back.

IX

M
arietta came to see me at the hotel. She was sitting in the lobby in her suit, her pocketbook on her lap and her hair curled into little springs at her ears and neck. She’d had her house painted purple. It stood out on the street of white porches like a wound, and against the purple paint, the pale-green curtains in the picture window looked sick. The three or four times I’d stopped by to visit she hadn’t been there. When one day I noticed the newspapers piling up in the driveway and the lawn and rosebushes gone ragged, I knocked and even kicked at the front door and, not seeing any light beyond the curtains, imagined that the entire house had been filled in with cement. She was twittery now, batting her thickly mascaraed eyes and demurely tucking in her chin. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Well, here I am,” I said, taking my coffee behind the desk. She chatted while I counted the change into the money box and looked over the guest registry.

It was as if she wanted to make up with small talk for her frankness the last time I’d seen her. She told me Erma had chosen the most beautiful wallpaper, a design with little hummingbirds; there was a squabble in the Ladies’ Guild around a woman who claimed that she spoke in tongues (“Lutherans don’t do that,”

137

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Marietta told her. “No one will know what you’re saying”). She’d bought apple strudel with nuts, for a change, almonds. The woman who did her nails was pregnant. She was considering painting the living room lavender, too, and what did I think of that?

It was flashing behind her chatter and gestures—what she’d come to ask me. I could see the glint of it, the sharp edge. I had to keep my hands busy so I wouldn’t have to look. I paper-clipped two weeks together in the guest registry. I polished the numbered disks attached to the room keys. It was coming, I knew it.

She’d seen a robin, though it was usually too cold for them in February; Harry Wise fell down drunk at his wife’s birthday party; Bertha Raddis had to give up her Sunday-school class; and she was thinking of painting the living-room walls lavender. Her pocketbook strap flipped like the wing of an injured bird, and she looked guiltily around the room. The velvet curtains had ripped clear up one side; the man who owned the new ice-cream store on Lincolnway was from Hammond, and he knew the Muellers; they’d caught a Peeping Tom around the girls’ dormit-ories—you had to be careful about your windows. The living-room walls really needed painting. Was lavender a good color?