The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 7

  “He met Truman Capote, didn’t he?”

  “Hated him on sight and the feeling was mutual. Had nothing to do with the trial. They were both little squirts, around the same stature, and this made them so peeved with each other there was no remedy but to square off and fight.”

  “They had a fistfight?” Doro supplied the line he waited for.

  “Venomous-look fight. But a damned bloody business. Two bantams.”

  When they passed a Harbor Freight Tools store Abel considered a stop to buy his daughter a miniature flashlight or a lady’s set of screwdrivers to reward her for her loyalty, but decided against the plan—it was late and Hattie would have dinner waiting. His wife could be angry, she could hold a grudge, but night after night for more than sixty years she had laid a fine table. Eagerly, he resumed speed.

  Doro looked out the window as the fields and farms of the countryside appeared. There was a bridge, she saw, from the topic of their conversation to her telling him—or at least alluding to—the truth of her being, the half closet she could not bring herself to come out of, not even to Billy. It had gotten too late to tell her brother. So many years she’d failed to tell the truth that to do so now would be like admitting a lie she’d been telling for years, which would make it worse. And would her silence be a rebuke of his choices? Would her telling? It was confusing. At the bottom of it all she felt as if she were betraying him.

  As for her father, she wasn’t sure how she would sound saying it, what words she would use, how he would react. He wouldn’t like it, that much was certain. Would he pretend equanimity but secretly judge, and would this add yet another layer to the strangeness between them? To come out and say it now would be a mark of honor, she supposed, an acknowledgment more in keeping with the principles she wanted to live by, at least in the abstract sense, of honesty and disclosure. But in the walkabout world things weren’t always so clear.

  Too much time had gone by, she decided. Her father was too old to hear it. Her mother too. It would only hurt them. And what would they do with the knowledge anyway? And what did she have to prove? She should have done it long before, but the truth was also that she hadn’t really known who she was until she was well into her fifties and finally came into herself, safely away from her family. She lived a quiet, celibate life, happy with friends, happy with work. Her children knew; she had told them. But the Amicus family? Nobody had asked. It was as though what constituted her innermost self was immaterial to her existence, at least in their minds. Still, she couldn’t blame them. To them she was Doro, big sister, who tried with all her might to be perfect but always fell short.

  To keep her father on subject, she said, “So was it a fair trial, eventually?”

  He took a long time considering. “No,” he said, “probably not. But it was a fair hanging.”

  Dusk was coming on when they reached the driveway. The porch light was off. Inside, Hattie sat at the barren kitchen table, mending one of Billy’s shirts. “What’s for dinner?” Abel asked, casing the open refrigerator. “Where’d you hide all that ham?”

  Hattie smiled grimly. “Frozen. Rock-solid. But there’s tomato soup”—she nodded toward the counter—“in that can.” She bit off a thread. “You know where the can opener is. And there are sheets on the couch. For you.”

  In the middle of the night Doro woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. She drew on her robe and crept down the hall to snag a Maverick from Billy’s spare pack. She found a book of matches and then slipped outside. The night was chilly, the heavens clear. In a few days she would board a plane back to the life she’d made, a life unclouded by messes legal or moral, a life that fit her better, where she didn’t have to pretend to be something she wasn’t. Still, the day, for all its tensions, had had its moments. Seeing, in the midst of addiction, the ghost of her brother’s old dignity. The companionable ride home with her father, and the absence, for just a moment, of the shadow that sometimes clouded their interactions, the shadow that made it hard to meet his gaze. Being of use, doing right.

  Standing behind the armillary sphere her father had welded, its iron arrow pointing toward Polaris, she tried to remember the explanation he’d given when she was twelve of the difference between true north and magnetic north. Then she wondered what he had meant about fair trials and fair hangings. Failing at both mysteries, she resolved to think large thoughts about families, about fathers and daughters and mothers and sons, the secrets they kept from each other and the impossibility of knowing each other, but her mind was running on fumes and eventually she gave up, lit the cigarette, and smoked, enjoying it as if no time at all had passed since her last one, seeing stars. Words that had stirred her when she first read them came into her mind. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? She tried to blow a smoke ring but a breeze came up and tore it away.

  The next morning when the telephone rang, Hattie answered. “Oh!” she said, covering the mouthpiece to tell Doro that Billy had been released from jail. Into the phone she said, “Oh, honey, honey, honey! That’s just wonderful news!”

  Doro smiled weakly, smiled falsely. She took her coffee to the couch to brood, the couch newly vacated by her father, who had moved to his den. Why had they gone through the painful charade only to see Billy released the next day? Once again she’d been lured into trying to help. Next time she would heed her daughter’s warning: “Mother, give up. It’s Amicus. It’s your family. Where two’s company and three turns into an intervention.”

  So, okay, she knew this, and maybe the quip was funny, but at the next crisis her drunken, enabling, junkie, jailbird kin could deal with themselves on their own. To think she could help them was folly. And why was she the only one not mired in drink or drugs or criminal behavior? It beggared reason and it beggared chance. And if she lived to be a hundred, she would not know why she was not the favorite. Quickly, she brushed away this last thought. It was juvenile. Favoritehood was ClairBell’s bailiwick, her life’s song. But, really, she was weary of being the only halfway-adjusted one. Sneaking a smoke? That was bush league. Back east, when she spoke of her family, people thought she was embellishing, casting them as colorful misfits. She’d begun to hide the truth that all three of her living brothers as well as her dead one were felons and that her sister was an opium-eating professional plaintiff who claimed, in utter seriousness, to breed rabbits with cats. Cabbits. Doro still couldn’t get over that one. The stuff of their lives was too crazy to be made up, too comic if it weren’t so heartbreakingly true. But nobody laughed, except for her, sometimes, when she tried to get through a tale so low-rent and ridiculous it would actually hurt if she couldn’t bend it toward farce. The time ClairBell’s tract house collapsed onto the warren of rabbit tunnels beneath it. The time Gid, tanked up on tallboys, ran his hoopty into a snowbank and in fear of cops finding his stash began hurling the beers into snowdrifts, accidentally hurling his car keys as well, not to be found until thaw. The time Jesse, drunk-jealous, broke into a romantic rival’s house and installed a spavined old buckskin gelding in the other man’s bedroom. Her father blowing hot and cold, her father and his on-again, off-again grudges, prototype for ClairBell though no one would say this aloud, her father with his sliding scale of crime, declaring no one above the law and then handspringing over it as though it were a vaulting horse. Her father, talking of how to get around the law, of knowing the law so you knew how to break it. No wonder his children were messed up. And the everlasting adventures of Billy, free spirit and freelance masseur, and his church-lady sidekick, her mother. What else was it but farce? She’d tried for years to figure out how her family had gone so wrong. And then she felt guilty for holding herself apart. The fact was that there was simply no way to be in any of it. Except maybe absent. Part of their troubles she blamed on crackpot ancestry, an amalgam of outlaws and saints, libertines bred with teetotalers, evangelists with madmen. Part she blamed on the town, on scrappy
little hardscrabble Amicus, a town that had never figured out what it wanted to be when it grew up, and part she blamed on ordinary bad luck. But fault didn’t matter; they were who they were and nobody changed.

  And maybe the worst of all of it was that she knew she was as bad as the rest for not changing. At the next sign of trouble she would mount her white horse and take to the skies, touch down again on the plains, her same sorry, duty-bound self, clan member as cracked as the next come to save their small world from itself, that worry—and not only worry but need, specifically the need to be good—no, it was worse, the need to be seen as good—would see her trolling Orbitz late of a sleepless night, paying too high a price for a too-crowded flight to a place where the most unchanging truth of all was that the darker her brothers’ and sister’s deeds the brighter her gleam. No, she didn’t just have to be good; she had to be better. Even worse, she had to be best.

  This sudden sad truth scalded her up off the couch. What was this old need? Where had it come from? What did any of them want but to be loved and how was she any different? She went into the kitchen to try to atone.

  Her mother hung up the phone. “Billy needs a ride from the bus stop,” she said, reaching for her handbag and trying to tuck wayward strands into her French twist. “I won’t be long.”

  To reset her good-daughter button, Doro stepped forward. “Would you like me to go, Mom? I’m happy to.” Appallingly, appallingly, this last was true.

  Her mother’s smile was radiant. “Oh, no, I want to.” Her look darkened. “Besides,” she said flatly, “you’ve done enough.”

  Hattie had set aside the brisket she was trimming, but before she got on the road she decided to take Abel a conciliatory treat, some V8 juice in his favorite drinking vessel, a squat iridescent green salmon can he’d rescued from the recycle bin. “Much good use left in this worthy little can,” he’d said. He’d buffed the can’s rim to perfection and soldered his initials onto the side, and he maintained that the can held the cold better than any juice glass. The ridiculous can irritated her and she hid it in a high cupboard so he couldn’t find it, but now she fished it out with a wire hanger, washed it, and filled it. She went to his den and kissed his temple. “Thank you, Abel,” she told him, patting his arm.

  “Thank you,” he said, pleased. Tears welled, the easy tears of old age, he knew. His wife wasn’t given to showing affection and the truth was that for all the years of their marriage, no matter how bristly or cantankerously he’d behaved, he had craved it. He smiled and reached for her hand. “To what do I owe this heartwarming change?”

  She was too happy to draw back her hand. “He has a new court date! He’s free. His bail was only a dollar!”

  Dimly Abel recollected the day before. “But I didn’t…” His voice trailed off along with his vanished thought. He meant to say that he’d done nothing to tamper with justice but then he wasn’t certain he hadn’t. He thought he’d told B. Gerald he wanted no special treatment. Maybe his old colleague hadn’t paid attention, or had assumed he was angling for clemency. Hell, if he had done something to fix the outcome and his bride was this happy, he’d wear that laurel wreath gladly. He would sooner perish than let her know the power she held, but his most guarded secret was that despite his bravado, despite his insistence on cock-of-the-walk, he had lived all the years of their marriage—he lived still and he would to the end—to be large in her eyes.

  “You didn’t what?” Hattie searched his face for a clue as to how he’d meant to finish his sentence but saw only a look that was part pride and part puzzlement, a lost, yearning look, his eyes hooded, confused. A memory lapse. She’d been watching him for signs, had seen many in the past years, but this was the first one that moved her to pity. To cover the sudden sharp ache in her chest, she gave a bright, brush-it-off look and said, knowing it cost her nothing to let him save face, and feeling, in the moment, like the most blessed of peacemakers and all’s right with the world, “You can’t fool me, Mister Fox. You knew all along it would turn out just fine!”

  Abel beamed.

  Later that morning as Hattie settled Billy in the guest bedroom, she hummed a low song whose words only she knew. They had to do with her devotion and its wellspring. Her last-born was more than her child. He’d been her companion, her joy. Not once in his life had he spoken an unkind word. With his bright ways and lighthearted wit he alone made her laugh. Truly laugh. He teased. With easy affection he could sling his arm over her shoulders, pull her toward him like a boon companion. With him she forgot to be stern and contained, but rather returned to herself as a girl, her lost self. And somehow he drew from her the love she’d prayed all her life to be filled with, helped her know that such love was made not from sacrifice but from grace, the mirror of heavenly love she’d pledged as a girl to live by. For such beauty what else could she give but her all? It was true that he was an accident, a slip, and she had brought him into the world against her better judgment, but it wasn’t guilt that led her to soften his falls. It was love, and it bore all, believed all, it hoped all, endured all. Her self-help-book daughters could talk of tough love until heaven fell down; hers was tougher. She had guarded his birth; she would be there for his death, whenever, however, it came. She hoped she would be forgiven for praying that it would come soon, as a mercy, for he would never be—never be—well. She would not again stand in his way. He could take what he wanted, he could do what he wanted, no matter the cost and no matter how wrong. His death she would bear as her troth. She was that weak and that strong, called to one purpose, one only, and this was to be his mother, not his counselor, not his conscience, not his judge.

  When she returned from the kitchen she saw that he’d dry-swallowed the pills and was at rest, breathing slowly and deeply, his hands folded over his narrow chest. His cheeks were sunken and there was new gray in the stubble on his jaw. She placed the water glass on his bedside table and then took a long time neatening the prescription bottles, lining them up like watchmen at vigil, like bearers of myrrh at the tomb, and quietly closed the door.

  As she passed Abel’s den on her way back to the kitchen, she heard him call out to her, “Hattie.”

  She stood in his doorway. “What is it? Are you hungry? Can I fix you something to eat?”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Her heart seemed to jump in her throat. “You do?”

  He flicked off the television set and the picture died. “I do.” He looked at her over his glasses, the better to frown on her plan. “And he can’t stay here.”

  Four

  Many years before he was diagnosed with the disease that would take him from the world, Abel had made a plan to end his life. If Hattie went first, or when he’d lost enough of himself to see no other way, he would go out on his own terms—Brahms on the machine barn radio, his Sig Sauer P238’s chamber loaded, 8-mil polyvinyl sheeting laid out on the concrete floor. Instead, on a snowy Sunday morning in his ninetieth year, he lay bed-bound in the ICU of the Robert J. Dole Memorial Veterans Administration Medical Center, too weak and confused to do away with himself.

  No one imagined he would have lived so long; he’d been a sickly child. When he was ten he’d come down with pneumonia, for which there was no cure. He was put to bed in the farmhouse kitchen, next to the stove, tucked in with an ailing Poland China piglet his older sisters had named Lizzie Glutz. Boy and pig had lived, and the illness hadn’t stopped him as a youth from acts of daring or as a man from taking risks. Twice he’d broken his back, once on Saipan during the war and once years later when he’d brought a little Cessna to a soft crash landing in a Mississippi cotton field but had then pinwheeled into a levee. He’d survived strafing from Zeroes, septic shock from a chainsaw gash. Walked five country miles with an appendix near rupture. Screaming a 650 BSA with a wide-open throttle down a macadam road, he’d hit an armadillo and gone flying, his leathers scraped to lining but not one broken bone. He’d been a rakehell, to his family larger than life, but now he lay s
tricken by myasthenia gravis, a disease that a few months before he’d not known existed, and felled by the pneumonia bacterium that had nearly claimed him as a boy.

  Doro and ClairBell sat quietly beside his bed, a temporary truce called in their long war to win his regard. Hattie, too worried and fretful to sit down, tried to aim herself in two directions at once—to fetch a box of tissues and to turn off the glaring overhead light. She couldn’t make up her mind and so she rocked in place, her skirt swaying about her still-trim knees as if the bluebirds printed on the fabric might carry her away.

  In the high-ceilinged hospital room, with its frosted glass and wire-mesh window, the anticlot stanchions around his legs gasped and wheezed, their rhythm seeming to close in on him in a way that felt urgent, imparting the sense that before he died something monumental needed to be said. Of his four sons, three were still living, and he wanted to make things right with the two who weren’t yet lost to him, and so he sent away the women and called for the boys, who waited down the hall, engaged in the dependably satisfying pastime of cataloging his faults.

  Jesse and Gideon had become old men themselves, not quite retirement age but closing in. Of the two, Jesse was the smaller. Some of his stature had to do with legs that had bowed from years of breaking horses, but most had come through heredity; in his youth Abel had been a wiry, compact customer. Jesse’s thick hair and beard had gone salt-and-pepper, mostly salt. Gideon was longer-boned and had more girth. He had surrendered to the monk-tonsure baldness of the men of Hattie’s side by shaving the rest of his head. Both men wore glasses in an aviator style popular some decades before. Tipped back in their chairs, boots on the radiator, and drinking hospital coffee from Styrofoam cups—Gid had doctored his with vodka from a flask but Jesse had been sober almost three years and would take no chances, as the court-ordered blow and go had just been removed from his truck and his driving restrictions had at last been lifted—they groused companionably about their father’s failings. Speaking of the Danish-designed tractor sitting in ruin in Abel’s barn, they discussed ways this Jacobsen might be redeemed and used to scrape the driveway so their mother’s Skylark could get in and out during the long Great Plains winter.