The Age of Miracles (25 page)

Brenda drove slowly up the gravel road in third gear. She had a recurring nightmare that she was driving her old Toyota up a hill and it wouldn't go. It was her punishment for buying a car with a standard transmission. She had always liked the idea of shifting gears for herself. Now she had to pay for it with this stupid dream. The dream took many forms. In its most terrible form she was trying to get to a seven o'clock movie at Fiesta Square and the car wouldn't go up Township Road. She would be trying to get to the last showing of something she really wanted to see.

She pulled into the parking space before Professor Wheeler's house and saw the chair with her purse hanging on it. She got out of the car and walked up onto the porch and retrieved her purse and put the strap over her shoulder. The door was open. She looked through the screen and saw him lying there. The cigarette was still smoking. It was a few inches away from the day-old
New York Times
and it was smoking.

The sounds of the earth were deafening. A billion cicadas seemed to be singing a dirge. From the maple trees across the road and the gardens and the grasses the small creatures of the earth were singing and calling, mourning a man who had believed in dharma, in dialogue and metaphor, in justice and peace. A man who had outgrown evil. Who had never stopped to have an unkind thought.

Brenda knelt beside her friend and searched for a pulse but the pulse was gone. She ran around the house and found the phone on a shelf in the kitchen. The pulse of the earth kept on beating until it was joined by the sound of sirens.

The Divorce

T
HE FINLEYS' DIVORCE has become a legend in this town. Who would have thought a diabetic insurance agent only five feet six inches tall could have soared to such flights of imagination. You should listen to this story. In case someone you trusted and had children with decides to dump you and go on to another life.

You think men have to put up with that, don't you? You think a man has to sit on his hands and keep his mouth shut and let his wife break up his home and send him off to live in a hovel? The moment she wants to, a woman thinks she can quit and expects you to take it like a man. Well, Bobby Lee Finley didn't take it like a man. He fought back. He became a whole new thing, a lesson to us all. Bobby Lee, who couldn't even make the football team, who had to be a cheerleader in junior high, who played saxophone in the high school band. More about the saxophone later. It's going to play a part in this story.

When the divorce began Bobby Lee and Ginger had been living here in Harrisburg, Illinois, for fifteen years, seemingly at peace. She was from Marion, which is only twenty miles away. Bobby Lee met her when they were at Carbondale in business school. She was too pretty for him really, but her father had just died and her mother wasn't well, so when he offered to marry her, she did it. I guess she thought moving to Harrisburg was a pretty big deal. At least it wasn't Marion. Anyway, she married him and two years later they had a baby girl named Little Ginger. Three years after that they had another baby girl. They named this one Roberta, signaling to anyone who was interested that this was going to be
it
for babies for the Finleys.

Little Ginger was an ordinary, normal child, selling Girl Scout cookies to the neighbors, singing in the children's choir, riding her bicycle around the square on sunny Saturdays. But Roberta wasn't well. She was a sickly baby and she grew up to be a sickly child. Nothing anyone could put their finger on. She was just delicate. As soon as Roberta was two years old, Ginger started working as a secretary in a law firm and a lot of people thought she neglected the little girl. If she did, Bobby Lee more than made up for it. He doted on that child. He carried her around. He took her everywhere with him.

So fourteen years went by and no one paid much attention to the Finleys, except to worry occasionally about Roberta, who was wearing thick bifocal glasses by the time she was ten, or to think how nice it was to do business with Bobby, or to wave at Ginger at the grocery store. She always dressed up in high heels to go to work and would come tearing into the IGA at five-thirty every afternoon trying to find something to cook for dinner.

Then the divorce began. It was the year the hospital built the health club in the parking lot by the replica of the Statue of Liberty. Ginger's boss at the law firm had offered bonuses to anyone who would go down there and exercise on their lunch hour three days a week. He got a rebate on their health insurance for convincing them to do it, so Ginger, ever law-abiding and obliging, signed up for an aerobics class. After the divorce began, several people commented on how good she looked and no wonder it ended in divorce.

I want it understood that this is not gossip. I never gossip. I just want to get the facts straight and explain why I am serving fifty hours of community service for contempt of court. People in Harrisburg know how I got caught up in this. But outsiders might not understand, so I have decided to set this down while it's fresh in my mind.

In the first place I work across the hall from Ginger. Also, I have known Bobby Lee since he was a year behind me in Horace Mann Elementary School. I know what happened in this divorce. There may be bigger towns than this, with more excitement and bigger malls, but no one in the United States can boast a more eventful divorce or one more tailored to the expanding horizons of the nineties. Beware the fin de siècle, my German grandfather used to say. It is always a time of decadence.

The divorce started off simply enough. One weekend Ginger went off to Marion to meet her two best friends from high school. That's a normal thing to do. Lots of wives around here do that sort of thing, go home and visit and leave the children with the father.

The first thing I knew about it Bobby Lee called me at ten o'clock on Saturday night and asked if I had the number of Ginger's boss. It's unlisted. I did happen to have it in my address book and I gave it to him. “What's wrong?” I asked, just trying to be polite. You could tell Bobby Lee was mad. Beware a short man when he is angry, my mother always said. Banty rooster syndrome and all that.

“I'm looking for my wife,” he answered. “She was dancing at the Krazy Cat last night with Eugene Holcomb. How do you like that, Letitia? I'm baby-sitting and my wife's in Marion dancing with her boss.”

“I don't believe it,” I answered. “Calm down, Bobby. Ginger isn't having an affair with Eugene Holcomb. Eugene weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He's too fat to have an affair. Why are you calling him? You'll be sorry you did this in the morning. Call Ginger at her mother's.”

“I tried that. Her mother said they'd gone out again. That's two nights in a row. I bet they're back at the Krazy Cat.”

“Bobby, are you drinking? This doesn't sound like you.”

“I am not drinking. I'm trying to find my wife. Last night she was dancing with Eugene Holcomb. Tonight they've gone out again.”

“Then drive over to Marion and find her. It's only fifteen minutes away on the bypass. Calm down, Bobby Lee. I've never heard you sound this way.”

“I've never been left to baby-sit while my wife dances in a road-house with her boss. I've never been left alone while she flaunts herself all over Marion, Illinois.”

“Go over there and find her. It won't be what you think.”

“I can't leave the kids.”

“Bring them to me. I'll take care of them.”

“Little Ginger's at a movie with her friend. She isn't home yet.”

So he raved some more and then he hung up and I made a peanut butter sandwich and went to bed with a book. I've been reading about the twelfth century in England and in France. A biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Back then no one thought a thing about adultery. No one expected people to be faithful if they had any power in the world. They didn't act all shocked if the king had a girlfriend in every hamlet or the queen ran in some poets to shore her up as she grew old.

I didn't expect to hear any more about Ginger and Bobby Lee, but by noon the next day Ginger had me on the phone. “What did Bobby tell you?” she wanted to know. “He told me he called you for Eugene's number. I'm mortified, Letitia. I've never been so embarrassed in my life.”

“What happened?”

“He came over to Marion in the middle of the night and dragged me home. He came to the Krazy Cat at eleven-thirty at night with my girls and made me leave with him. He wouldn't even let me go by Mother's and get my clothes. Who else did he call? Who else knows about all this?”

“I don't know about it. All I was doing was reading a book when the phone rang. What's going on, Ginger? Were you and Eugene dancing at the Krazy Cat?”

“His wife was there. Janet Holcomb was right there with us. We were all there together. Then Bobby came barging in with Little Ginger and Roberta and dragged me home. I will never forgive him, Letitia. I will never forget this as long as I live. I shouldn't have married him in the first place. Never marry anyone who can't make the football team. My daddy taught me that.” She had this icy tone in her voice, like whatever she had been keeping inside for years had finally found an outlet.

We hung up and I was left trying to decide how I'd been dragged into this domestic crisis. I'm the director of the Harrisburg EOA and president of the Literacy Council. I don't get involved in people's lives. I have all of that I want at the office.

The next thing that happened was that Ginger took the girls out of school and went to Marion to stay. She left her job and kept them out of school for seven days until Bobby Lee agreed to vacate the house and let them move back in alone. It was the last concession that he made. What happened to him between the time he moved out of the house into a messy little apartment near the railroad tracks and a week later when he went on the offensive is something we will never know. I think he went to Chicago to see a psychiatrist or a marriage counselor, but other people think it was a witch doctor or some dark, demonic force. The Bobby Lee who emerged from hiding that third week was someone we didn't know. In the first place he was letting his hair grow. It was down to his collar by the time Ginger returned to town. In the second place he changed his hours of business. From now on, if you wanted to talk to Bobby about insurance you had to call before two in the afternoon. After two, all you got was voice mail.

“He's completely nuts,” Ginger said. She was out in the hall when I got to work on Monday. “He's supposed to take the girls to dinner tonight. He'd better behave. This is his chance to show he's going to be civilized.”

“He'll be fine,” I answered. “He's always been a model citizen. What makes you think he won't be fine?”

“He says he's going to start a soup kitchen.” She giggled. How could she help it? “He says now that he knows what loneliness is he wants to stop it for other people. He says he's going to turn his apartment into a place where anyone who's lonely can find someone to talk to and have something to eat. What if he does it? What if he takes Ginger and Roberta to his house and there are homeless people there?”

“We only have two homeless people. That man who stays on Hill Street and the one who walks around the park.”

“He's picking the girls up after school. They're going to spend the night with him.”

That evening went all right, Ginger reported the next day. The girls helped him cook dinner and the only funny business he tried to pull was questioning them about their mother's whereabouts. “He isn't supposed to talk to them about me,” Ginger complained. “My lawyer said he would cite him for contempt of court if he asked them questions about me.”

“That might be hard to prove.” We were out in the hall, balancing coffee cups on our break. Everyone in our building used to hang out there when it was too cold to go outside. That was before we had the new café.

“He let me have the good car,” Ginger continued. She smiled and licked her lips. To tell the truth she was acting like a schoolgirl who was delighting in the pain she was causing some poor boy who had a crush on her. I couldn't help thinking she was enjoying it. And why not? What excitement had she had for the last fifteen years? Typing up Eugene's briefs? Throwing away junk mail? Trying to figure out why Roberta caught every cold that came along?

“Bobby's a nice man. You better think twice before you let him go.”

“After what he did to me? I'm afraid of him, Letitia. I changed the locks on the doors. You didn't see him that night in Marion. He's lost his mind. His hair is down to his collar. Have you seen his hair? He's taking the girls this weekend. I'm worried sick about it.”

“What will you do while they're gone?”

“Oh, I'll be busy. Little Ginger's coming back on Saturday afternoon to get dressed for her freshman-sophomore dance. I'm going to chaperone. I'll be plenty busy.” She swished back into Eugene's office and I watched her swish. She's lost ten pounds since this began. I've never seen her look better.

 

At five-thirty on Saturday afternoon she called me. “I have to talk to someone. You won't believe what he's done to me.”

“What did he do?”

“He rented a tuxedo. He's going to the dance with us. He had Little Ginger call and tell me. I got him on the phone. I said, ‘Bobby, if you go, I'm not going.' So he's going anyway. Ginger's going to be so disappointed. My oldest daughter's first dance and I can't go.”

I didn't say a word to that. I didn't say, She's his oldest daughter too. I didn't say, Leave me out of this. Perhaps I didn't want out. There isn't much going on in Harrisburg that time of year. I guess I liked the excitement of being the first to know each new development.

“You better not go,” I said. “That's playing into his hands. That's what he wants you to do.”

“But what about Little Ginger? She'll die if I'm not there. I'm supposed to chaperone.”