Drowning Ruth (12 page)

He'd been hoping to see her again, obviously. How else explain what he'd done, convincing Theresa that this particular lake near this particular town was the only possible place to build a summer house? Why a summer house at all, for that matter? He swallowed some coffee and winced at the bitterness.

Of course, it hadn't been like that exactly, he reminded himself, spooning sugar into his cup. He wasn't such a fool as that. He had simply gone to Nagawaukee one day out of idle curiosity, or so he told himself, thinking he would take a look at the place she'd told him so much about. Nothing wrong with looking, was there? And then, well, anyone with imagination could see the possibilities. Advertising copy had run through his head—the pretty lakes strung together like sapphires, or nestled like robin's eggs among the green hills. In a nearby town there was even a spa.

Clement checked his toast, toffee-colored on one side, perfect. He turned the slices over and shut the oven door, careful not
to make noise. The Schumachers had bought a place out there and so had the Koches and the Steinmans. Brewers and bankers and lumber barons were buying and building all over the area. Once he'd shown Theresa the fieldstone mansion the Schumachers had built on Lake La Belle, she was willing to let him have the money for several choice plots, long stretches of lakefront property that up until now had been wasted on cows. Reselling this land to people who liked the idea of owning an “estate,” a place where they could be connected to the salt of the earth, the fresh, open air, and an aquatic playground, would be simple. He would keep some of it, some to develop, some to rent—there was no reason why only those who could afford to buy should have access to such a paradise—and he had chosen one twelve-acre plot for his family.

He'd got a deal on that particular site, since the slope on the property that bordered the lake was alarmingly steep and the only spot for a house was a little too close to the water. And then, too, there were more fashionable lakes and more desirable locations even on Nagawaukee itself. But those drawbacks pleased him—it never made sense to buy at the top. You made money only when you could see what others couldn't. And he could see that spread. He would put the land to work—which was another reason not to pick the sort of neighborhood where enterprise was frowned upon. He planned to do some farming, maybe produce cheese—some people in Janesville were having excellent luck with a white cheddar—or raise angora goats. And he planned to build an impressive house.

His idea was a sort of Greek temple, with white pillars rising from the wide front porch to the roof. Because of the hill, the house would have to be narrow, but that was no matter since no one would see it from the side anyway. It was the facade that counted, and the facade would be grand. He would put a white lattice gazebo on the front lawn, and friends would gather there—men in
cream-colored suits and women with parasols, their gauzy summer dresses rippling in the breeze off the lake.

The architect had tried to talk him into something more modest, something retiring in browns and greens, a Swiss chalet set back in the woods, furnished in rustic pine. “Perhaps,” the architect had suggested, “you might make some of the furniture yourself.” Clement was not one to scoff at a suggestion. He liked the notion of himself sawing through the sweet-smelling wood, building fine, sturdy pieces his family would wear smooth for generations. He even went so far as to consult a man at the lumberyard, who sketched a small chest and made him a list of wood and tools. And then one afternoon he took his youngest son, Arthur, into the backyard for company, and managed to cut the bottom of the chest and two sides, before ruining three boards and gashing his index finger.

He told the architect he would not be making his own furniture and insisted on his original plan. What good was a house people couldn't see? Theresa agreed. In fact, she'd had ideas far better than the architect's to Clement's mind. She understood the purpose of the house, the way the wind had to sing through it from end to end, the way the porch had to invite picnickers in off the lake at noon and command the sunset at the cocktail hour. She'd suggested the house be three stories, with spacious attics, as well. She sketched the kitchen in a separate building, connected to the dining room by a breezeway to keep the main house cool. She insisted they also buy two lots to the east, so as to have plenty of space for a boathouse and land for Maynard or Avis or Arthur, maybe all three, to build houses for themselves. That was the way people did it, she said. He knew what she meant by “people”—the kind of people who would be putting him up for their clubs.

Well, all's well that ends well, Clement assured himself, spreading a thick layer of butter on his toast. If he'd never known Amanda, he'd never have found this place, this new setting that
had invigorated him, made him feel like a young man, full of promise all over again.

The cook came into the kitchen, tying her apron around her waist. “Up early again, Mr. Owens?”

“The early bird gets the worm, Trudy.” Clement took a large bite from his buttered toast, as if to prove his point. Then he poured her a cup of coffee from the pot and added some to his own.

“Well, if it's worms you want, you'd better get out in the yard,” Trudy said, pulling out the flour bin. “I'm making popovers.”

“One of these days I just might do that,” Clement said. Carrying his coffee with him, he went upstairs to bathe.

It was that damn vacuum box, he thought, while the water rushed into the tub. If that had been a success, his thoughts would never have gone back to Amanda. You'd think he'd never failed before, the way that disaster had got under his skin. And Theresa—he frowned at himself in the mirror, was his hair getting thin at the temples?—a wife was supposed to support you, not continually remind you with patronizing sighs that it was her money you were spending and that she'd always said this or that was a foolish risk. Amanda had not thought the vacuum box was foolish. She understood its potential, and she was a nurse, which ought to count for something. She appreciated his other projects, too. He remembered her asking about the lead mines. Did they use canaries there? she wanted to know. That was the night she squealed when the waiter brought the caviar to the table. But she'd tried it when he urged her, and she'd liked it when he said she should. He eased himself into the hot water, thinking what a pleasant thing it was to spend an evening with a woman like that, a woman who really believed in you.

But in that dim post office, she was not at all as he'd remembered her. He would never have imagined she'd still be angry, not after more than a year, but there wasn't an ounce of friendship in the way she looked at him. She'd looked older, too, and thin in the
cheeks, which was not, as he considered it now, unattractive on her. If he could've touched her face, he thought, or even her hand, it would have been better, it would have brought her back to him, but that was impossible with Theresa in the car just outside and that woman watching from behind the counter.

And what was Amy doing with that little girl? In his mind, Amanda still wore her tidy nurse's apron all day and sat demurely on the glider of the nurses' residence at night.

Through the door, Clement could hear his wife, sliding the chair back from her dressing table, opening the drawer in which she kept her combs and her hatpins, preparing for morning Mass. He knew just how Theresa looked, holding her back very straight as she sat before the mirror, brushing her hair deliberately.

“Theresa! I'm out of soap!” he called, wrapping the bar he'd been about to use in the washcloth and pushing it under his knee.

“In the little table,” she said, and he heard the dressing-room door close behind her. Did she expect him to stand shivering and dripping in the middle of the bathroom, searching through drawers? What if he really had been out of soap?

But it would serve him right if she never wanted to do anything for him again, wouldn't it? Clement began to scrub himself. The idea that he'd been chasing a woman who turned out to be a lunatic scared him a little. Well, it was over now, all of that. Theresa would see that from now on things would again be the way they'd once been between them.

This is a lesson for me, he told himself, a warning. From now on I'm faithful to my wife.

Saying that always made him feel optimistic. He sighed and lay back in the soothing warm water. He closed his eyes and draped a wet washcloth over his face to soften his beard. He began to think about that camera that took pictures of bones right through the skin. Couldn't that be used somehow in mining?

Avis Owens, sixteen years old, padded down the hall wearing
the robe and slippers in which Clement had, on one recent uncomfortable morning, mistaken her for a woman. Maynard, eighteen, groaned, stuffed his face in his pillow and then, in one dramatic desperate movement, threw off his blankets and swung his bare feet onto the floor.

Arthur, six, came to full wakefulness as the water splashed into the washstand that stood against one wall of the room he shared with his brother. He stayed still with his eyes closed, listening to the hangers scraping along the rod and the dresser drawers sliding open and not being banged shut. When Maynard left the room, Arthur got out of bed and went in his pajamas to squat beside his city of blocks. He did his best work in the morning, while the bolt on the bathroom door slid open and shut, open and shut, the water rushed through the pipes, feet galloped down and up and down the stairs, china clinked in the kitchen, and finally the front door slammed and slammed and slammed.

And then, for a time, the morning's noises lulled and the only sound in the house, as the shaft of sunlight across the bedroom floor headed steadily toward the closet, was Arthur's faintly adenoidal breathing and the dense click of the wooden blocks. Just after eight chimes on the front-room clock, his mother's slippers shuffled along the hallway floor, and then she would be standing over him, stretching her arms like a cat and afterward retying the belt on her housecoat. Hiking the housecoat up, she'd sit on her heels beside Arthur on the floor and move blocks purposefully about, as if she knew where they were supposed to go. He let her put them wherever she wished, although of course he had to move them later. Finally, when she was bored with her efforts at play, she swooped over him with a kiss. He smelled her coffee-laced breath and her sweetly lotioned hands. At last, their day would truly begin.

Theresa had left the raising of Maynard and Avis when they were young and uninteresting to nursemaids, but Arthur was different,
or perhaps she was, and she dreaded September when he would start school, and she would no longer be able to have him with her all day.

This morning, after church, they were going to pay a call on a Mrs. Herman Kessler, who'd promised to make a contribution toward the new public library. Theresa knew that people who gave money liked to see a thankful recipient rather than send their check through the anonymous post. At 62 Newberry Street, they were shown into a bright parlor where Mrs. Kessler and her friend Mrs. Jones were leafing through a sheaf of watercolors.

“Look at this one!” Mrs. Kessler commanded, holding for Theresa to admire a roiling seascape, in which blues, greens and grays had been mingled to form a sort of mud. “I don't know where my Charlotte gets her talent. I can't draw worth a stick and Herman can hardly sign his name.”

“It's lovely,” Theresa said.

“Remarkable,” Mrs. Jones concurred.

“The way she's captured the feeling!” Mrs. Kessler said, holding the painting at arm's length and squinting in an attempt to bring some aspect, any aspect, of the picture into focus. “That's the mark of a true artist.”

Theresa politely agreed. And then, since she'd met Mrs. Kessler and Mrs. Jones when they were serving on several Red Cross committees during the war, they discussed when they'd last seen and what they'd last heard about this woman and that, and laughed about the day they'd shoveled three hundred pounds of peach pits for the gas masks, while Arthur had nothing to do but take a cookie whenever it was offered and turn the pages of a picture book he'd brought along.

“You know, I think we saw your daughter last week at the Milwaukee Turners,” Mrs. Jones said finally to Theresa. “Do I remember rightly that her name is Avis?”

Arthur began to listen then. It always seemed strange to him
that people he'd never seen before should know his sister and brother.

“How good of you to remember,” Theresa said.

“She was with another young lady,” Mrs. Kessler said. “A girl with an unfortunate nose.”

“Meta Kunkel. Yes, it's really too bad about her nose.”

“I'm sure she's a lovely girl,” Mrs. Kessler said, with the complacency of one whose daughter's nose was straight and neat.

“She's not a girl I would choose as a friend for Avis, but one's children don't always do just what one would like, do they?”

Theresa thought Meta was awkward, loud and humorless, and unlikely to attract the sort of people she wished Avis would associate with. In particular, she wanted Avis to show more interest in the young men of her social circle. It upset her to see her daughter—with so many opportunities and so much talent (although Avis had never seen a body of water larger than Lake Michigan,
her
seascapes really did capture the sense of the ocean)—squander her chances for happiness. Still, Theresa comforted herself, Avis could be quite pretty when she got herself up. Surely she would grow into a more appropriate attitude.

Mrs. Kessler sipped her tea and didn't answer, but her look above her teacup was pitying and smug.

“Maynard,” Theresa said, “my older son, has got a very good position. He's with the First Bank, you know. And the things they have him do! Really, it makes me nervous sometimes to think of all that money.”

Of course, Maynard did not yet have any real responsibility. He mostly carried papers from one office to another for bank officers to sign. But they were very important papers. And the vice-president was always assuring him that he would go far.

“So he's not going to college?” Mrs. Kessler said, biting a lady's finger carefully so the powdered sugar wouldn't fly.