Criminals (29 page)

Laura never read about polio in the encyclopedia, or knew what really happened to nerves and muscles if you got it, what had happened to James. She knew nothing. I had passed beyond everything that concerned her.

In August the bodies were found. A week later they caught the murderer. It was not Mr. Ott, it was a big ugly man—even the paper quoted a neighbor saying “ugly”—with a similar car who did not work at Boeing. One of the women had lived in his building.

Mr. Ott did not kill anyone.

One day we saw Audrey, who didn't come over any more now that she worked at the Safeway, out digging in the old bare ivy field. My mother rushed out. “What are you doing, Audrey?” she said. “Are you planting?”

“I'm burying Mosquito,” Audrey said. “I think something ruptured when Gil tripped over him.”

“Oh, no,” said my mother. She went close to Audrey. “Oh, Audrey. He was so old and brittle.”

“He was barking at I don't know what and Gil tripped over him, coming off the bed. He had his shoes on, he was lying down with them
on,” said Audrey Ott, as if she had caught from Mary Catherine the requirement of leaving nothing out. “With the pregnancy I get sick thinking about it. But Billie, he didn't mean to. He was half asleep. He loved that dog. I don't know what to do for him. He feels so awful.”

“I know that,” said my mother. I knew it, too, when I heard her say it.

“It was the headache. And now he feels worse than ever,” Audrey said, still talking in that odd, practical voice. “Billie, I don't know how that man is going to keep going. I don't know what's going to happen. But at least”—she started digging with the trowel again—“he has the baby to look forward to.”

“He does,” my mother said tenderly. “Oh, Audrey, I'm so sorry about everything.”

“I know you are,” said Audrey.

I said, “Me too.”

“Girls, go on, go on,” said my mother, flinging out her hand as if we were cats. “You don't need to be here.”

“Oh, let them,” said Audrey. “They always liked Mosquito.” She threw her ponytail back and continued to dig the grave. “Mary Catherine was so careful. She brushed him, she wrapped him.” He was wrapped in Audrey's chenille bathrobe. Owen and Mary Catherine and Clark filed out and stood there. “Annie won't come,” Owen said. “She's in there. She won't stop crying.”

“Well, that's all right,” said my mother, as if she were part of it and had some authority to judge. Mary Catherine knelt and laid the blue package in the shallow hole. “I wish we had the ivy,” she said as she turned the dirt in with her hands.

She and my mother were the ones who cried. “Oh, Audrey, are you really going to move now?” my mother said, with tears not in neat lines but all over her cheeks, and the skin around her mouth getting red.

“I don't think so,” said Audrey. “It's close to work. And I think he can go back to his job. I don't know if he will. You know how he is. I just don't know, Billie.”

“Oh Audrey,” my mother said again. “At least you're not going to move. And the baby . . .”

At the end of the summer my father got a promotion and we were the ones who moved, up to Seattle where the company offices were. Audrey had no car so if my mother ever saw the baby she would have had to drive down to see Audrey. Most people took moving, in those days, in a less qualified way. You said good-bye, you moved; you did not expect the reprieve of visiting.

Laura and I were busy getting used to a new school, we forgot a baby was going to be born.

Our parents began to fight, to the extent that my father could fight when he saw no need for it. Our stories at the dinner table were not so lively; the ground at our new school was not yet firm enough for jokes. We egged my father on as he sank into a confusion of stories about his new office. My mother sat like a driver in the left lane waiting to turn. Laura and I strained to show her how to be interested, how to resume where we had left off early in the summer before there had been any murders. At night she sometimes stood in the doorway of my room or Laura's while we were doing our homework. She might have tried to say what she was getting ready to do. We shut our ears.

But she had done them anyway, my father had abased himself with tears, and Laura had screamed her wish to move away with him by the time I went up the steps of the high school and saw a way to blot them all out in loves of my own.

I know my mother never offered to take us to see Mary Catherine. I can't be sure whether we asked. Years later, in the apartment where she lived, I asked her about the Otts' baby and she said yes, she had seen her. A girl. “But with Audrey, I had to be close by, for us to be friends. We had to be living the same life.”

That stopped me, at the time. The incomprehensible belief that we were leading the same life as the Otts.

“Audrey Ott,” she said sadly.

Mr. Ott did not come out of the house for the burial of Mosquito. Probably he had gone up to James's room. Especially since his son was there so much of the time now, he liked to lie on the other bunk with his headache and his sadness, the kind that leads to the death of something, resembling some kinds of happiness in that way.

novel of rose

T
his would be the novel of Rose. First, two stone houses on adjacent hills, in the long pause after the war when everyone in Virginia was raising children. Five chimneys between them. Seven children, four parents, two dogs, the same cat seen in the grass and moving from window to window in both houses, old walnut trees dropping black fruit, locust trees in the fencerows, with groundhog tunnels in their roots. Innumerable empty shells of the real locust, the insect, a wheat-spun-to-glass color, clinging to bark and fencepost one particular year, the year Varden first unsparingly, despairingly loved Rose.

Anne and Sarah—the Montgomery girls. Their younger brothers Roger, known as Mont, and Varden. At the time Rose's family arrived, Varden Montgomery was seven.

Will, David, Rose. Two boys and a rose. The Chestons. Rose, also seven, was an Indian, a Tamil, the Chestons said, though as she grew everybody saw that at the same time she was so dark, she looked like Mary Cheston. She had the same gravelly voice her brothers had from their mother, as well. The Chestons had gone away to India and stayed years. They had gone with two children and come back with
three. The novel of Rose would go into the trouble a Virginia grade school made about her color.

James Cheston was a doctor but not a rich one. With money from Mary Cheston's family they bought the house next to the Montgomerys, out of shouting distance but always seen as an offspring of the big old Montgomery place. In actuality it had been the original barn, a stone structure on the lower hill, accumulating dignity because of its years in county memory, and the time and labor that had gone into its conversion—the carving out of windows, for one thing, in stone walls two feet thick. And then it was a house, an immediate landmark, facing half away from the main house onto vistas of its own.

By the time the Chestons bought it the house itself was old, and grown shabby inside, with a remnant of rat society, descendants of the barn-raiders of the century before, still holding certain passages in the walls.

Seven children pounded up the steep front steps and landed against the screen door, where, if they yelled a password in time, they were safe. The screen hung ruined. If it was a Saturday and James Cheston was not out on a house call, he would speak quietly to the winner, who when she reappeared—for Rose, though the youngest, was the fastest—would tear unredeemed down the steps into the pack and down the hill.

At that time their ages ranged from seven to eleven, and for a year or two the older girls, Anne and Sarah Montgomery, played as wildly as any of them, wearing necklaces of locust shells they never would have touched had not Rose been the one who strung them.

They always played on the Chestons' hill. The Chestons were the newcomers but they held the power. Partly because of their foreignness, their greater indifference to risk, but more the result of their deep voices, they prevailed over the Montgomerys. Their courage, passed to each one like an allowance from the father, who after fighting in the war had gone into the hills of India to fight malaria, led them into proud dangers. It was nothing to them to climb out onto roofs and use the chimneys as base, squeeze into laundry chutes, excavate groundhog holes to make caves, creep up on the neighbor's
bull, play on tractors parked out of sight of either house. Their innocence, another gift of the father, kept them from cruelty, from the clever reprisals Mont Montgomery was known for at school. As it was, Mont gave up some of his own ambitions in order to be with the Chestons, though to his sisters he made fun of the Hindi patois they could chatter in their odd, deep voices. “Abela-babela,” the Montgomerys, except Varden, called it. In time Will Cheston, oldest of the boys, held them all in a willing servitude. His rule developed without any intention on his part, because like his father he was half shy when not outdoors, where his daring carried him away.

The other factor in the ascendancy of the Chestons was Rose.

Like her mother and father, Rose had a sweet nature to go with her beauty. At the thought of her, of something she had said, Varden would stumble as easily as at the sight of her, streaking downhill with the dogs to the fort in the locust trees. She always beat him. Her speed and relentlessness in a race gave way to appeasement and little gifts—dandelions and violets out of the grass—for him. But she gave them to the others, too.

When Anne Montgomery faded into her teens, she tried to get her sister Sarah and Rose indoors and upstairs, where on one occasion Rose was induced to have her heavy hair put up in bobby pins.

By then Varden Montgomery was far gone. He hung in the doorway when the dampened hair was being rolled into black coins. The effort to make any movement casual set his face in a spasm. Now he was ten, with no foreknowledge that his voice would not change until he was fourteen. In his bed at night he tried to pitch it to the low enchanting hoarseness of the Cheston boys, and Rose, Rose too—all of them had the mother's soft growl. Varden loved the mother, too, Mary Cheston, who seemed to know his feelings and even to expect them, who gave off a faint scent his mother said was curry powder, and whose eyebrows tapered like Rose's, though not so dark, in long arches his mother told his sister Anne not to attempt on herself with an eyebrow pencil.

Now Anne wore lipstick and kept to her room reading
Silver Screen
with the cat in her lap, though she sat by the open window and looked
out when they were running. Now they were six, four boys and two girls. The fort was a castle in India. The boys and Sarah were defenders of the perimeter, Rose the queen.

In the novel of Rose, this would be the childhood in which some secret was embedded, to be unraveled in later life and serve as evidence that things proceed from a cause.

Varden Montgomery's love twisted his insides, he thrashed in his sheets to get at the root of it. A kiss, his shut lips on the open laughing ones of Rose, burned his inexpert mind at Scout campfires. Eventually he would surprise himself with success in sports, reach high school, Yale, and so on, and practice law like his father and brother Mont, though milder than either in a courtroom. He would marry and have two children.

Before his marriage he bought out his siblings to own the house where they had grown up and where the dog and cat were buried, and at his insistence the Chestons' dog. He did not live there, and in time he let it go and had a rough likeness of it built elsewhere out of lighter materials.

It was long before this that Will Cheston, seated at the dinner table, saw a tear drip from his father's jaw.

Mary Cheston went back to India, taking Rose.

Sarah Montgomery got a Fulbright to India and found Rose. The two of them came back and lived years together in New York. In the novel, these years would have the figure of a dance, a kind of reel. Rose would dance first with Sarah and then with others, and then, keeping to the nature of dance, with a final partner entering from the dark of the scenery.

Will Cheston died in Vietnam. Varden's children never knew their aunt Sarah, who stayed in New York, pursuing Rose for many years. Rose slowed her speed. A still point was coming. Resolution. The novel must end in a satisfaction of sorts. The ones who follow instead a logic of their own, succumb to it and end in the ground.

In India, Mary Cheston is speaking of her dead son Will to someone who listens with his hands clasped. The younger son, named David, the other brother of Rose: Did everyone forget him? What happened
to him? And so on. The novel would have gone into this. Though the novel might not linger over the house in India as it did the ones in Virginia, in the novel we would see the man. He would be in some contrast to the soldier's mustache and doctor's kindness of James Cheston. What could he be like, to exceed these things? The novel would have told us. We will never know.