Whisper Hollow (11 page)

Myrthen was yanked from her stupor. “No!” she said, jarring them all with the sharp edge of her voice. She released Alta from her immobilizing stare and spun around. In almost no time, Myrthen overtook her mother and lunged toward the wreath.

“Was soll das?”
Rachel’s hands flew up by her shoulders, palms out, as Myrthen passed.

Myrthen quickly bundled the braided myrtle branches inside the attached veil and clutched it to her chest. “Nothing,” she said, bending her head. “It’s nothing.” She didn’t want Rachel to know that the day before, when she’d sent Myrthen to collect the myrtle branches, Myrthen had also picked some roses for her crown. But it wasn’t the blossoms she wanted. She pulled those off, and later, after her mother had gone to bed, she added the thorny stems to the inside of the wreath.

Rachel recovered her composure. “Well, then. You should put it on. It’s nearly time.” She reached out as though to take the wreath from her. “I’ll help you.”

“No,” Myrthen said again, but more quietly this time. She turned away, out of Rachel’s reach. “It’s all right, Mama. I can put it on.”

“Go. Use the mirror in Father Timothy’s lavatory.”

When she had left to do so, Rachel turned to Alta. “Thank you for putting the ivy,” she said, looking at her with the same intensity her daughter had, and only slightly more interest. “I hope you and your husband walk together in the happy ways of love.”

Alta stared back until she recalled her manners. “Thank you.” Then she turned and yanked open the door. “I wish her well, too,” she said. Then she slipped outside and was gone.

The wedding day and evening were spent dancing and drinking and eating at Myrthen’s parents’ house. Myrthen wore the wreath for the duration of the event. Only a few guests showed up, but nonetheless, Rachel had rolled up the living room rugs and engaged their neighbor’s brothers to play the accordion and clarinet while Myrthen dutifully, though unhappily, danced with the male guests. Each one paid a dollar a turn, a gift to the newlyweds. But if they counted the gifts against the cost to entertain, the deficit would have been staggering. Passage to the New World was a bargain compared with the price of a dress and ceremony for their only child.

“Your mama and I were married on the ship coming to America,” her father said to her at the end of the night. “No money, no church. I said to myself, in America, it will be better. There I will make money enough to give proper weddings for all the daughters I will have.” He patted her hand and looked at her with seeping rheumy-gray eyes that hadn’t seemed happy in as long as she could remember. “But I only have one daughter,
Liebchen.
So I don’t mind spending extra for yours.”

At long last, the guests retired. John took his bride by the hand, and he bid farewell to her parents and his while she stared at the floor. A friend of his had offered to drive them to their new home, a company house that had been recently vacated.

A week before the wedding, in a rare moment of lightness, Rachel had used some savings to buy two sets of lingerie. “Perhaps some good would come of this coupling after all,” she’d said. “Grandchildren, at least.”

But when John’s friend dropped the couple off at their front step in the middle of the night, Myrthen had only one hope: that her unwelcome husband had had too much to drink
and might possibly abandon any intent to consummate the marriage.

John — who’d drunk only enough to overlook his wife’s obvious unhappiness — unpacked her trousseau. He found the lingerie that Rachel had bought: a sheer yellow nightgown, and a peach-colored silk negligee. “Which will it be?” he teased, dancing into the living room and holding them both up for her to see.

“Excuse me,” she said. She picked up her small valise and passed him, allowing a wide berth, and shut the bedroom door behind her. With slow, deliberate care — much more than was due the gown she detested — she disrobed. She hung her wedding dress on a hanger and suspended it from one of the three hooks on the wall. Later, she would put it away where she wouldn’t have to see it. On the tiny nightstand, she laid her wreath, its veil floating down.

Minutes passed. A half hour. Finally, John knocked on the bedroom door. “Myrthen?” She didn’t answer. “Myrthen?” he said again, singsong, pressing his mouth against the jamb. When there was no reply, he turned the knob and pushed the door. The room was dark but for the starlight. He blinked to adjust.

She was in bed, with the coverlet up to her chin. Her eyes were closed.

“Myrthen?” He tiptoed to the edge of the bed and leaned over. Then he pulled his loosened tie off, unbuttoned his shirt and dropped it onto the floor. He undid his belt and pants and wriggled out of them. Underwear. Socks. Once naked, he stretched and yawned, loud, extending it into the “aaarwwh!” of a coal car passing by the station without stopping.

Myrthen opened her eyes and beheld her husband and that part of him that only weeks before had ruined her life. “You don’t want this any more than I do,” she said, her voice a low
growl. “We don’t need to play our roles now. Nobody’s watching.” She closed her eyes again and shifted onto her side for sleep.

John pulled back the sheets, and she rolled unwittingly toward the center of the weak mattress when he climbed into the bed. He moved toward her and reached out to touch her face. As he looked at her, she noticed the way his eyes crinkled when his mouth spread into a slow smile. That mole on his cheek. For a moment, just a flickering moment, she remembered the pleasure that had passed briefly between them. Then she turned her face away. She had slipped that night, let herself indulge a low desire, and look where it led her. Never again.

“We’re married now,” he said. “We might as well make the best of it.” He touched her neck. “What do you say?” Sliding his hand down her throat, he felt a thick flannel ruffle at the hollow there. “You’re all covered up.”

He moved his hand farther down, brushing her breasts. Instantly, like a flinch, her arms flew up to protect herself. As they did, she elbowed him in the jaw.

“Damn!”

“Sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t, not entirely.

He reached over and pulled her toward him by the shoulder. “You don’t have to be sorry. Just come over here. I won’t hurt you.”

She lay still, staring at the wreath on the table.

“Come on, Myrthen.” He pulled, and she snatched herself back.

John heaved himself up and yanked back the covers and lifted her a few inches to move her to the center of the bed. Then he straddled her and leaned down into her face. She squeezed her eyes against the sight of him, the smell of Prohibition liquor on his breath. Her parents, who never touched it as far as she knew, had procured it for the celebration. Rough and
forbidden, it wasn’t something people knew instinctively how to hold.

He fumbled with the thousands of buttons down the front of her warm, dull nightgown, the one she’d worn every night for the past several years, regardless of the season. She pushed at him briefly but realized it was futile, so instead she rolled her face away and looked at the wreath and the veil, and her eyes went blank as a doll’s.

“You liked it before. I know you did,” he said, pressing himself against her.

She knew then that she would never let herself enjoy intimacy with him again. Or let herself slide into some banal form of domestic bliss. No, she would save herself for God.

He reached down behind and between his strong legs and grabbed the hem of her gown, working it up from her ankles to her knees, her dead weight no aid, and then past her white thighs that made him gasp in the moonlight, and up higher. Then he reversed the direction with her undergarments, exposing a triangle of dark against the pale skin. She lay, unmoving, white and cool and passive as a corpse as he pulled her underthings off and tossed them on the hardwood floor with a whispery thud.

His weight on her was like the weight of sin, and she felt the loneliness and sense of abandonment that sin always produces. He bent down and tried to kiss her, but she pressed her face farther into the pillow. Below, something feathery and savage was taking place. It was different now that she didn’t want it. She thought of the roosters her mother kept in the henhouse to defend the flock. How they chased down and violated the hens they were meant to protect.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Back and forth, back and forth, like a ship rocking over unknown seas. Against her will, she began to enjoy the sensation.
But she forced herself, as she thereafter would, not to, and to think of God instead, to keep her thoughts, if not her body, pure. She reached out with her left hand and grasped the wreath that lay nearby. John saw her. “What are you doing with that?”

“Just get it over with,” Myrthen muttered.

While her husband chiseled drunkenly at her, she lifted her head and placed the wreath around it, then let her head fall back against the pillow. She pulled the veil down over her face, and closed her eyes.

Thy will be done, God. If this is what you want for me, then I will endure it.

Back and forth, the weight of sin ruthlessly crushed crushed crushed her into the bed and soon the thorns dug into her temples and she began to bleed.

Alta paced the bottom floor of her small house with a new gait: a cross between a skip and a trot that instinct told her would calm the screaming baby. Without her own mother to help her navigate these early days, instinct was the only thing she had.

Instinct, and a dog-eared copy of
Infant Care
put out by the Children’s Bureau that Renata had lent her. Alta had read it cover to cover during one of the almost-sleepless nights, while Abel slept against her, snug in the curve of her arm, wrapped in a blanket she’d crocheted for him before he was born. The book emphasized the “absolute regularity and consistency in the formation of habits,” and suggested the mother create a strict schedule for the baby’s daily program and habit training. But her heart ached and her breasts leaked and her instinct admonished her whenever she put him down for a nap just because the grandfather clock at the base of the stairs told her it was time to do so.

So instead she held him, and rocked him, and nursed him whenever he wanted, which was nearly all the time. When he fell into that warm sleep that only babies can, she cradled him in her arms, breathing in his milky scent, watching his rosebud
mouth pantomime a suckle. Tired as she was, she sometimes refused sleep just so she could stare at him and wonder at the depth of love that had been discovered deep within her.

It was at times like these that she longed for her mother the most.

One midmorning toward the end of winter in 1926, two months after Alta’s fourteenth birthday, her mother put down her dishtowel and took off the apron that she’d worn from dawn to dusk every day that Alta could remember. She pressed her hands against the kitchen sink and dropped her head. Alta looked up from the piecrust she was rolling out on the kitchen table.

“Mama?”

A tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head.

“Mama!”

Alta dropped her rolling pin and rushed to her mother. Her mother’s back felt as if she’d been standing too close to the Glenwood C stove. “Help me lie down, Alta,” she said. “My head hurts something awful.”

Her mother lay in bed for a full day with fever and chills before the real illness set in. The company doctor was called. He examined her while she shivered in her nightgown, and jotted her symptoms down in a notebook: flush, photophobia, conjunctivitis, diffuse pharyngitis. He diagnosed influenza, rinsed her sinuses with Ringer’s solution, and told her to rest. Then he said to Alta, “Young lady, you’ll take care of your father and brothers so your mama can get well, now, hear?” She nodded. She’d already helped cook and clean for years.

Her mother died in her bed eight days later.

Then her grandmother, crumpled by then to a ninety-degree angle, died a little over a month later. From that point on, even surrounded as she was by the men in her family and
all the responsibilities that her mother had left behind, Alta felt utterly invisible. Utterly alone.

Now, five years later, with her own child nestled against her for nourishment and comfort, she began to feel again a sense of deep connection to another human being. She whispered lullabies to her sleeping Abel, kissed him gently on his velvet cheeks. She loved him like she’d never loved anyone, not even her mother. Nor her father or brothers. Nor Walter Pulaski, her hardworking husband of one fragile year.

Abel finally released a loud burp and fell asleep after several patting, bouncing laps around the house. Placing him carefully in the kitchen cradle her uncle had made, Alta tucked his blanket in around him. She would have liked to lie down for a rest herself, but the breakfast dishes hadn’t yet been done, nor the washing, and she needed to start thinking about dinner.

She tied an apron around her waist, which she noticed was steadily shrinking back down to normal size, then rolled up her sleeves and filled the sink with soap and water. As she scrubbed, she watched a gray-eared rabbit hopping along the fenced-off garden, which she could see from her kitchen window. She wondered if it was a mama rabbit, looking for food for her babies. Knowing now how exhausting it was to care for a newborn, Alta had an urge to go pull up some arugula and kale and offer it to her.

She was so tired and lost in thought, she didn’t hear Walter, who was quiet anyway in spite of his bulk, come in through the back screen door.

He saw her there at the kitchen sink, her strong, graceful hands working in the soapy water. Seeing the curve of her hips and the swell of her full breasts moved him. She looked beautiful, ethereal in that mysterious way of hers that made him wish
he were a man of words so he could tell her what he saw, but his ineloquence made him shy. He stepped up behind her, wanting only to be closer to her, to understand his unnamable desire — not just to be intimate with her but to know her. Her thoughts, her secrets. Underneath her plain beauty and dutiful habits, he could sense that something far more passionate coursed through her veins. He reached out and placed one hand on her waist.