Fall from Grace (24 page)

Hetty Willis sat on one of the love seats in her sitting room with the scrapbook open on her lap, waiting for her lawyer. But when somebody knocked on her door, it turned out to be the policeman.

“Miss Willis,” he said, with another of his smiles. “I wonder if I could ask you to take a look at a photograph?”

She nodded, curious, and he opened a large envelope and pulled out a picture.

It was a photograph of her and Bobby, and it made her smile to see it, and then her smile faded and she grew puzzled, for wherever had it come from?

“Have you seen it before?” said the policeman; Alberg, his name was.

And Hetty's heart was pounding as she shook her head. How on earth had this policeman come upon a photograph of her and her nephew?

“Do you remember when it was taken?”

She stared at it, thinking. “Younger.” She thought some more. She nodded, and pointed to Bobby. “Gradation.” She shook her head impatiently, tapping the photo. “Grrradation.” Finally she hurried into the sitting room for her notebook. “Nephew's graduation,” she wrote, and tore off the paper, and gave it to Alberg.

“Is this your nephew? Bobby Ransome?”

Hetty nodded vigorously.

“Do you know who took the picture?”

She kept her head ducked down, looking hard at the photograph. “Donknow. Dinsee.” She glanced away; her heart was beating very fast. “Where? Wasit?”

“You mean, where did I find it?”

She nodded.

“Well, I think it was taken by a young man named Steven Grayson,” said Alberg. “He died, last Saturday. This was with some other pictures that a friend was keeping for him.”

Hetty's mouth dried up. She tried several times to speak. The policeman waited politely. Hetty didn't want to speak, didn't want to know. But she asked it anyway. “How?”

“I'm afraid somebody killed him,” said Alberg.

Tears filled Hetty's eyes with the suddenness of pain. She waved off Alberg's hand, raised instinctively to protect or comfort her. She felt centuries old as she stood and walked uncertainly to the front door. She opened the door and waited with her head bowed until he had passed through onto the porch. She thought he was saying something but she wasn't sure. She closed the door gently in his face, and hoped he would overlook her discourtesy.

H
ERMAN WENT AWAY right afterward.

Then Annabelle called out from the bedroom, lightly, “Go ahead with dinner, girls, call Arnold and go ahead, I want to have a bath before I eat.”

They didn't argue or protest because there were things they understood, young as they were, and that was awful, but good.

Annabelle slipped quietly into the bathroom and soaked for a long time, holding a cold washcloth against the side of her face. She lay in warm water and pressed coldness against her face; it was an interesting sensation, and seemed likely to completely dispel the pain. She felt a blitheness of spirit growing inside her and it brought tears to her eyes; this was what was called a paradox, but she understood it very well. She lay in the bath in pain, and yet felt happiness grow, or relief; they were the same thing after all, weren't they? Because Herman would stay away all night, and all the next day. And when he came home for dinner tomorrow he would arrive in the yard quietly, and sit quietly at the table, and speak kindly to the children, and in the night, in the warm moistness of their bed, he would quietly apologize, and he would not insist on having sex. So Annabelle had at least thirty-six hours of happiness to look forward to, and she was grateful for that.

She was also relieved to have learned that Herman hadn't meant anything specific by the writing on the window wall. If he'd known anything for sure he would have given her a lot worse beating than she'd gotten, and he would have said something, too. So it was as usual. Time had passed since the last time he'd gotten jealous, enough time so that he'd gotten jealous again. He had some weird clock in him, Herman did, and it kept better time than he knew.

Annabelle sat up, wincing, and wet the washcloth again under the cold-water tap. She wrung it out and settled back in the tub, pressing the cloth cautiously against the right side of her face.

After her bath she brushed her hair and put on clean clothes and went out to the kitchen, where Camellia was doing the dishes. And maybe it was that, the sight of her smallest child doing the dishes, or maybe it was Arnold out in the yard feeding and watering the animals, or maybe it was Rose-Iris sitting in a lawn chair in the room with the window wall, staring out through the window at nothing… whatever it was, Annabelle was suddenly bursting with energy.

She started cleaning the house. She cleaned vigorously, without stopping, for three hours. By the time she'd finished, the sun had lowered itself so far in the western sky that the day was teetering on the brink of night.

The children had trailed along after her for a while, whining with dismay, but Annabelle, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as she worked, ignored them except to tell them cheerfully to get out of her way or stop bothering her.

She cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen. She cleaned the big bedroom and the girls' bedroom. She would have cleaned Arnold's bedroom, too, except that he flung himself past her and stood in front of his door with arms and legs outstretched, barring her passage, and there was a look of frantic pleading on his face, so Annabelle laughed and turned away.

She washed floors and polished windows. She wiped out the fridge and the cupboards, and cleaned the top of the stove, though not the oven, and went around the house with a spray bottle of Mr. Clean rubbing at dirt on walls and window ledges.

She was doing the inside of the window wall, a task that took almost half an hour all by itself, when she said to Rose-Iris, “Heat me up some of that hamburger stuff, will you? And maybe make a pot of tea.”

When she finally finished she was tired and sweaty and filled with satisfaction. I'll have to have me another bath before I go to bed, she thought, and that reminded her of another chore. She hurried into the bedroom, stripped the bed and remade it with clean sheets.

“Come on, Ma,” said Rose-Iris. “It's ready.”

Annabelle sat at the kitchen table and ate hungrily. She had a plateful of Hamburger Helper, a mug of sweetened tea and two pieces of white bread. She always bought whole-wheat bread for the rest of the family, because it was good for them, but she got white bread for herself because she preferred it. Annabelle loved real butter, too, but seldom bought it because margarine was cheaper. She had been very happy when for her birthday last March Rose-Iris and Camellia had given her a pound of real butter. It was a joke present, but it was a very good present.

Arnold had gone off into the living room to watch TV and Rose-Iris was in her room, getting ready for bed. Camellia sat at the table, her chin in her hand, watching Annabelle eat. “The house sure is clean,” she said.

Annabelle nodded. “It's so clean I won't have a thing to do tomorrow. I can spend hours in my garden.”

And hours with Bobby, she thought.

Camellia pushed some bread crumbs around on the surface of the kitchen table. “What did those words mean, Ma? The ones we took off the window wall.”

Annabelle swallowed what was in her mouth and took a long drink of tea. She stood, and picked up her dishes. “They're words from the Bible,” she said calmly, putting her plate and mug in the sink. “Somebody's mind dredged them up from the Bible, and smeared them all over the glass. It's a good thing they were put on glass, I can tell you,” she said, squirting dish detergent into the sink. “It would have been a darn sight harder to get them off wood, for instance.” She turned on the hot-water tap. “It's time you were in bed, Camellia. It's getting late.”

“Tell me a story about when you were a little girl,” said Camellia. “Please?”

Annabelle sighed, and flicked water at her.

Camellia ducked. “Please?”

“Get yourself into bed,” said Annabelle. “Then maybe I'll tell you a story.”

She was washing her dishes when Arnold wandered into the kitchen.

“Is Dad coming back tonight?” he said.

Annabelle kept her back to him. It was in the presence of her son that she felt most troubled, as though this was where her greatest failure lay. Which was very odd, under the circumstances.

She put her plate in the drainer and began washing the saucepan in which Rose-Iris had heated her dinner.

“Because if he isn't,” said Arnold, “I could get up in the night, and check on the animals.”

“I don't think you need to worry about the animals,” said Annabelle.

“But Dad worries about them,” said Arnold.

She heard chair legs scrape across the floor, heard him sit down. He was probably straddling the chair, like his father liked to do.

Annabelle rinsed out the saucepan and set it in the drainer. She let the water out of the sink, wrung out the dishcloth and wiped the counters, sluiced clean water around in the sink. She folded the dishcloth and then she turned around.

She saw a tiny flinch occur in Arnold's face when he got a good look at the bruise on her cheek. His eyes slid away from her. She'd have to put makeup on that bruise, tomorrow.

“If I happen to wake up,” he said, “I'll go out and have a look around.”

Annabelle nodded. She wanted to reach out and touch his face, and pull him close to her for a big hug. But she was afraid that he would draw away from her, out of contempt, the worst kind of contempt, the kind that grew reluctantly out of love.

“You're a good person, Arnold,” she said.

He shuffled awkwardly to his feet. “I'm gonna go watch TV.”

Camellia called out from the girls' bedroom.

Annabelle found them both in bed. Rose-Iris was reading a book and Camellia was lying down, the sheet up to her chin, the rest of the covers folded neatly at the bottom of her bed. Annabelle, standing in the doorway, gazing upon her daughters, realized that she was smiling.

“Tell me a story,” said Camellia.

“A story about what?”

“Tell me about Sunday dinners,” said Camellia. She patted the edge of her bed, and Annabelle sat down.

“Sunday dinners. The ones you mean, that was when I was just about Arnold's age, and we lived not far from my grandparents.”

“Your mother's mother and your mother's father,” said Camellia.

“Yes,” said Annabelle. “That's right.”

“And Uncle Warren was just a bitty baby,” said Camellia.

“Yes,” said Annabelle.

“And your grandma and grandpa were very old,” said Camellia.

“Not so very old,” said Annabelle. “They were about sixty, I guess.”

“Your grandpa was tall and skinny,” said Camellia.

“Let Ma tell it,” said Rose-Iris irritably. She'd put her book down, with a bookmark in it, and had linked her hands behind her head.

“Yes, my grandfather was tall and skinny,” said Annabelle. “He wore round eyeglasses, and his hair, which was white, was combed straight back from his forehead. He always seemed to be wearing a suit, although he must have worn other things some of the time.”

“At night,” said Camellia, giggling. “He must have worn pajamas at night.”

“And the suit was always gray,” said Annabelle, smoothing her skirt. She leaned back on her hands and crossed her ankles. “I remember that his pants had belt loops but he never wore a belt, he used suspenders instead. And he'd have on a white shirt, and a tie that was mostly gray.”

“What about his shoes?” said Camellia.

“Black,” said Annabelle promptly.

“And tell me about your grandma,” said Camellia.

“She was a little person,” said Annabelle, and Camellia giggled again. “She sat very straight and some of the chairs, like the dining room chairs, were a little bit high, I guess, because when she sat on them her feet didn't quite touch the floor. She wore dresses all the time, all the time, and a round brooch at the neck, and black shoes with sensible heels, that laced up. She had white hair, too, and it had lots of little waves in it. She grew African violets,” said Annabelle. “My grandfather built a little greenhouse for her, in their back yard, and it was jam-packed with African violets.”

“And they'd come for dinner on Sundays,” said Rose-Iris, being helpful.

“That's right. And it seems to me—” Annabelle leaned forward, her hands loose in her lap. “Memories are very funny things. You can be absolutely sure of something and then find out that you were wrong about it. It's very disconcerting.”

“What's ‘disconcerting'?” said Camellia.

“Annoying,” said Rose-Iris. “Confusing. Like that. Go on, Ma.”

“Well,” said Annabelle, “in my memory we had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding every single time my grandparents came for dinner. But we probably didn't. But that's the way I remember it.”

“And you'd have to set the table,” said Camellia.

“Yes. But I didn't mind. I liked setting the table.”

“First you put on the tablecloth,” said Camellia.

“First she put on the silence cloth,” said Arnold.

They all three turned and saw him lounging against the door frame.

“Well,” he said defensively, “I can be here if I like.”

“Of course you can,” said Annabelle. “Yes, that's right, first the silence cloth. And then the tablecloth. And then the silverware and the china.”

“And the napkins,” said Rose-Iris. “In the napkin holders.”

“That's right,” said Annabelle.

“Then you'd have to peel the potatoes,” said Camellia.

“And put the pickles in the pickle dish,” said Rose-Iris.

“And you'd have roast beef,” said Arnold, “and Yorkshire pudding.”

“And maybe carrots,” said Camellia.