Vida (10 page)

Vida hated the storytelling. Rena was nice. Her face was unassumedly pleasant, her manner was gentle, she was a comfortable companion. She debated telling Rena that she was missing Eva, but she could not. It was true and false at once. So fresh from Leigh she could not play the complete lesbian. “But I’ve had relationships with men a lot too.”

“You don’t have to be defensive with me” Rena smiled, placing her hand tentatively on Vida’s shoulder.

While it was true she missed Eva, she missed her as an old and close friend, as a comrade, a fellow soldier. She was not in love with Eva. Except for Leigh, she had not been sexually besotted, fully engaged with anyone in years, since the stinking end with Kevin.

Rena was saying, “If we’re nice to each other, it doesn’t take anything away from your love at home.”

Vida stepped back a small step. She couldn’t make love in a situation like this, for the distance she had to maintain was too great. “Rena, I wouldn’t feel right … I like you a lot and I like being here with you. But I came to look for Billy. If I get romantically involved with somebody else, I won’t find her, and I think maybe she needs me” Violins, please. She was such a fraud. Damn the stories. She started out with a small lie and then she had to build a city of lies. The more involved she got with somebody, the more elaborately she had to build. Then the farther she felt from them, walled in her own creation. It was the opposite of intimacy, and she could not endure it.

“You could work in the store for a while … stay here.”

She was tempted: near Natalie, catching up on rest, not lonely; and lying day in and day out. “I can’t, Rena. I just can’t.”

Rena looked hurt, blinking as she turned away. “I better see about making up a bed for you.”

Vida took the sheets from her and made up the couch, aware she had hurt Rena, turned her generosity back on her. For a moment she despised her life, staying with strangers who had to remain strangers, who never knew how strange she was.

The next morning she helped Rena open the store and hung out until it was nearly time for her call. Then she set out to find a good phone booth. Ten on the dot. She dialed the first number. It was picked up on the second ring. “Hello?” a funny voice said, not Natalie’s. Vida started to hang up. “Hello. Vinnie?”

She started with fear, looking quickly around. “Who is this?”

“This is the son of Emma, calling for Emma to Vinnie”

It was Sam. Natalie’s son. Emma Goldman was one of Natalie’s old pseudonyms. She remembered them signing in and out of university buildings, where she would sign Rosa Luxemburg and Nattie would sign Emma Goldman. “Is this the oldest son of Emma?”

Sam giggled. His voice was cracking. “Yeah. Now let me say this straight. She had me memorize it. It’s too hot to meet her but I’m clean. Do you need money?”

“Sam, is anybody near you? Anybody listening? Do you know if you were followed?”

“Nobody. I was super careful.”

“Okay. Then talk normally. Just remember to call me Vinnie. Now what kind of heat? What’s going on around here?”

“Mom thinks it’s the Irish problem. Anyhow, we’ve been visited, and Mom was followed yesterday morning. So she didn’t go to the booth.”

”Tell her I’m not surprised that it stirred things up.”

“Do you want to meet me? I’m supposed to ask, do you want any money?”

“I have enough for a while. Should we try next week?”

“She says, Yes, keep trying. She has a task for you.”

“Good! Listen, Sam, tell her Mondays and then Tuesdays at the numbers next week, then on to the next week if she can’t make it. Thanks for coming to talk to me. You know not to mention me to anybody except Natalie. Nobody!”

“I understand, Vinnie, don’t worry! I grew up with all of this, I know how to take care.” Sam sounded funny, reassuring her in his changing voice that broke deep and then high. “Peezie and Frankie are too little, and we don’t tell Dad.”

“Sam, I want to see you real bad. Maybe you can come with Natalie when we finally make it. I’m just a wee bit scared. I may have to keep away from here for a while. Kiss your mother for me.”

He cleared his throat. “You be careful.”

“You too, Sam. You’re wonderful. I wish I could be a real aunt to you.”

“Aw, come on, everybody has aunts. Mostly all they do is pat you and give you sweaters that don’t fit and say, ‘My, how you’ve grown,’” he mimicked in falsetto.

“See you soon.” She hung up. She hated ending phone conversations with people she loved. Sam was an amazing kid. She walked toward the station, shifting the pack for comfort. At half past ten she had a call arranged to the “Studio” important because of Kevin’s arrest and Sam’s news. It was dangerous to hang around Natalie’s part of Long Island with surveillance active, and she went straight to the train station to find out the schedule. It wasn’t a very long wait. If the train ran late, she would have time to make the call; if not, she would have to skip it. At ten thirty she was waiting on the platform for the train to finish backing and filling and got onto the phone there. It was not in a closed booth, but nobody was near enough to listen.

“Peregrine here,” she said. Her political pseudonym.

“This is Birdman broadcasting. Where’re you?” A familiar male voice spread warmth through her. A slight flat drawl to it, Midwestern. Familiar, dear.

It was Larkin. What was he doing in Minneapolis? “I’m in Long Island, old dear, but I’m getting out any second, when I can. A lot of heat here. Some suspicion it has to do with events around”—for a moment she blanked out Kevin’s old pseudonym—”around Jesse.”

“Hmmm. More trouble than he ever was worth,” Larkin said sourly, he too had not forgiven Kevin. “Maybe you better go to ground for a spell.”

”I’d like that.”

“Go to Lady Doc in Bulltown. You know Lady Doc?”

“Mmmm. Is she in the phone book?”

“How else would she practice, Perry? She’ll luck you in for a spell. Now, if she fails somehow—”

The train was loading. “Bye, Birdman. I’ll ground myself if she can’t” She hung up and ran for the car, feeling as if she were dragging an umbilical cord from the phone. On her own now. She gripped her ticket and found a seat alone at a window. She was off to Boston, where she hoped Laura Kearney would shelter her for a week or two.

Larkin. If she came East permanently, she would have to make up her mind about him—something she had been avoiding for four years, since she had parted finally with Kevin. She felt Lark’s frail wiriness and spun-steel will and experienced that mixture of compassion, attraction and uneasiness he always stirred up in her. He had been in Cincinnati just before her, but they had missed each other by a day. She would see him soon enough, since there was work to do before the Board met. She sighed. Could she get Leigh to come up to Boston? It was only slightly farther than Philadelphia. Except for the weekend with Leigh she had been emotionally alone since the summer, and she was tired, with a deep and pervasive hunger of the senses and the heart that must stay unfed. Two people down the coach were reading newspapers: touch of danger. She retired her face behind her own.

So Natalie had a task for her: excellent. An immediate political task would lighten her mood, till she could connect with the Network again, and do her much more good than hanging around libraries doing research on capital flow. Not that she did not enjoy libraries: they soothed and stimulated her at once, like one of Natalie’s good tisanes. But she could have become a scholar by staying in the university instead of running off to marry Vasos, and a fugitive scholar was a bizarre notion. She needed a job to do, not set by herself, to feel part of the world of working people.

5

Laura Kearney, a divorced pediatrician whose son had died of leukemia she blamed on radiation, sheltered fugitives for a set period of up to two weeks per visit, as long as they were political. Vida had once lived for a week in her basement in Newton, in a former coal bin fixed up as a sub rosa guest room. She expected to be put up, or down, there again.

Instead Laura drove her out to Cape Cod. “I’m taking you to my summer home.”

“I’m nervous about off-season places. Berrigan got caught on Block Island.”

“He was living pretty openly, wasn’t he? You’re safe at my house, just don’t hang around town. It’s a couple of miles. I’ve stocked the place with food, and I’m leaving more with you. Oh, you’ll have a housemate.”

“Who?” She felt a rush of anxiety, huddling against her side of the car staring at the headlights eating into the dark highway.

“A very nice young man. I didn’t ask his name any more than I ask yours”

It could be anyone she knew or anyone she didn’t, a plant, an agent. Did the Network know he was here? She balked at the idea of being dumped in the woods with some strange man and left to manage as best she could. “Why can’t I just stay in the city?”

“Really, the accommodations here are much pleasanter than in my cellar. Don’t worry about that young man. He seems quite well mannered. I’m sure he won’t bother you. The house is big enough so that you needn’t get in each other’s way.”

At a little after 9, Laura turned off the highway and began driving on a pair of sand ruts through pine and oak woods. The road was dark and bumpy. The Datsun slithered into dips and thunked its muffler on exposed roots. The sky had clouded over, and the woods pushed in on the narrow road, black and uninviting. They passed an occasional cabin, dark too. To their right she saw faint sky shine reflecting off the waters of a pond. The Datsun labored up a steep hill and over a bump. Then she saw another pond to their left. They drove along it high on a wooded bluff. One house showed its lights at each end of the oval pond. Laura gestured at the far lights. “That’s my house.”

“Doesn’t it seem conspicuous?”

“A burglar wouldn’t turn the lights on. I told the local police I’d be using my house all fall, so they won’t be excited at someone being there.”

“Who’s at this end?”

“She teaches the second grade. He’s a carpenter. They have three kids, name of Kensington. They live here year round. They won’t bother you” Laura turned sharply left and they bumped along a road in even worse shape, the bottom of the car scraping on the overgrown middle as the wheels struggled in the deeply eroded ruts. “We’re almost there.”

“Do you ever get stuck?”

“Oh, in the winter. I’ve ruined a muffler or two” Laura sounded cheerful. Vida could see the lights again through the trees. Suddenly they went out. Laura pulled into a driveway to park. “We need to walk down to the house—it’s on the water. Could you take a bag of groceries?”

Laura strode ahead whistling and swinging her keys by a finger. Vida, carrying two sacks and her pack on her back, clambered awkwardly down the rough stairs of railway ties and sand after her. The house was a log cabin with a wide deck around it, the pond glimmering dully like pewter just beyond.

“Hello, hello!” Laura was calling. The man must be hiding. “It’s me, Laura,” she shouted, sounding amused. How our precautions amuse them; Leigh was the same way. Forgetting to call me Vinnie, as if it were an arbitrary demand without foundation, yet they’d be furious if we endangered them. He, whoever he is, must be frightened in the dark watching us.

Laura went into the house turning on lights, switching on the outdoor floodlights, calling in the tone of voice she might use to a child, a patient, “It’s all right. Hello there, wherever you are. It’s me, Laura, and a friend who’s come here to stay. Hello?”

Vida felt wary about walking into the light but the bags were heavy, and finally she lurched forward to rest them on the kitchen counter. A man came out of the woods and shambled toward them. He was not tall, perhaps exactly her height with dark hair. He was wearing a black T-shirt underneath a denim jacket and jeans with his hands shoved in the pockets. Slowly he came toward them, climbed the deck, and pushed open the sliding glass door.

“Hi’’ he said with a small gritted smile. He stared at Vida. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

”Sorry to surprise you, but with the phone disconnected, there’s no way to get in touch. She’s in the same boat you are. She’ll be staying here.” Laura turned, not bothering to take off her coat or gloves. “You should both come out to the car with me to carry the groceries. I want you to have enough food. Then I must be off!’

They stumbled up the log steps from the squares of light thrown by the house, into the darkness beyond where the car waited. Then Laura gave Vida a key to the house, instructions for returning it if she left in a hurry. At once Laura drove back along the road. In a few minutes, they could see the headlights touching the trees across the lake as they stood side by side, the groceries at their feet, before he led the way back to the house.

First they put away the food. “Aw, coffee, that’s good. Didn’t have none” he said appreciatively. He had a pleasant voice—not butterscotch like Leigh’s, but warm. Not Eastern. Not Midwestern either. What? She wasn’t sure yet. “Sardines, canned chicken, ham. She ain’t exactly the warmest woman I ever met, but she does right by you. There’s still veggies out in the garden, too.” He turned and looked her in the eyes.

“You have green eyes too!” she said in surprise, and then was angry at herself because it sounded flirtatious. “It’s cold in here,” she added irritably. “I don’t suppose you’re cold?”