The Last Time They Met (33 page)

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Adult

BOOK: The Last Time They Met
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He had missed the central drama.
In the end
—
strangely, but perhaps to be expected
—
it came down to his soul. He who thought he did not have one. A concept he could not even name. It was elegantly simple: he couldn’t let Regina lose the child.
Regina’s wail rose on the street; and in the car, she threw herself from side to side, battering herself against the door, asking, demanding to know: Did you sleep with her? And, How often? Screaming at the answers and the silences alike. Wanting dates and details, horrendous details he would not give her. In the cottage, she hurled herself against a wall. He tried to calm her, to touch her, but she was wild, having had, despite her news, her own goodly amount to drink. She vomited in the bathroom and wanted him to help her just as much as she wanted him to die. And all the time he was thinking: I cannot let her lose the baby.
He shook his wife to stop the hysteria. Telling her, as one would tell a child, to go to bed. She whimpered and begged for him to hold her and he did, dozing for seconds only, waking to fresh wails. Waking to fury and accusations and threats. She would kill herself, she said, and he would have two lives on his conscience. She kept this up for hours, seemingly beyond endurance
—
his or hers
—
astounding him with the depth of her anger. Till finally she fell asleep, and for a time
—
blessed hours
—
there was silence.
______
In the morning Thomas dressed, thinking that he had to go in person, that this could not be done by letter. His only theatrical gesture was to take the letters and put them in his pocket.
It was the saddest drive of his life. She was sitting at a table when he arrived. She might have been there for hours. Just waiting. Just smoking. A chaste cup of tea in front of her. Her skin was blotchy, her hair and face unwashed. Doubtless fresh from personal horrors of her own.
—
Why?
he asked in the nearly empty café.
She couldn’t answer him.
—
It has to end,
he said.
I have no choice.
No need to mention that Regina was pregnant, for that had been revealed to Linda, out of his hearing, the night before. No need for Linda to say she loved him, for that, too, had been said to Regina the night before. Out of his hearing. Though he’d heard the words repeated often enough in Regina’s shrill voice as she’d hurtled around the room.
—
I’ll always . . .
Thomas began. But he couldn’t finish the sentence.
There was a great clap of thunder then
—
the clap of a jester at a royal performance (pay attention now!)
—
and the rains began, a sudden deluge that released a thousand
—
no, a hundred thousand
—
knots of tension in an instant. The rain was warm, nearly hot, the café umbrella furled and not giving them any protection. Linda was crying with no shame. He put the letters on the table, tucked them under her hand.
He made himself walk away, thinking as he walked: this would be the worst he’d ever know; nothing would ever hurt this much again.
PART THREE
S
he stands at the edge of the pier in the October cold. The moon is high and so bright that she could read a book. The boys are silent behind her, not believing their luck. One of them says, “Don’t,” but she knows that he wants her to, that he can’t help himself. The water twitches in a cone of light, and, briefly, she has an image of swimming to the horizon. She steps to the edge, and in the next instant, she is out over the water in a perfect dive.
The ocean closes over her head, the water like silk along her body, a phrase she will later give to the boy who said
Don’t.
The sea is briny in her sinuses and eyes. She swims out and away from the pier before surfacing, enjoying the perfect clean of the water, though she knows that at the bottom there might be old shoes and broken bottles and used tires and saggy bits of underwear.
In a moment, she will have to break the surface, and she will hear, as though distantly, the hoots and awed cries of the boys who will be calling to her. But for now there is just the clean and the dark, a perfect combination.
______
She is sent away for years. The word
slut
flung across a room and hitting her like a thrust stone. An aunt returning too soon and shrieking at the girl and the man, who scuttles away like a beetle. The aunt approaching, arms flailing, all fury and righteousness, shouting
whore
and then
slut
again, and then
ungrateful
and then
bitch.
Words that ring in the air like notes from a bell.
______
The place that she is sent to is beautiful and harsh. A house stands above the ocean. The surf is constant and comforting, a whisper-rumble of indifference. The house is cavernous and is filled with other girls who have been called
whore
and
slut
as well. They live in small bedrooms and go to a Catholic girls’ school around the corner, but the center of their lives is the laundry. In the basement of the house are a hundred tubs and washing machines and whenever the girls aren’t otherwise engaged
—
with school or with studying or with sleeping or with eating or, on rare occasions, watching television
—
they do the laundry. Girls, like herself, with hot faces and reddened hands from the water and the bleach, wash the laundry of the rich and the merely harried: linen sheets and oblong tablecloths; Oxford shirts and belted dresses; babies’ sleepers and soiled diapers. It gets so that Linda can guess the story of any family who has left their laundry. Men’s and boys’ overalls and corduroy shirts speak of a household without a woman. Sheets stained from a birth speak for themselves. Boxer shorts with stiffened crotches suggest furtive pleasures, and women’s underpants with blood on them tell them no more than they already know. A household that quite abruptly ceases to send the baby sleepers suggests a tragedy that requires silence.
______
The hands of the girls will always be red, the damage too deep to be salved with ointments. They will remain chapped for years, the nuns repeatedly tell them, a reminder of their lot, as if it had been planned. The hands will be, for years, a badge of shame.
______
Good drying weather.
The phrase is a clarion call. The damp laundry that never dries properly inside the basement is pinned to ropes with wooden clothespins, then left to furl in the breezes, smelling of the sun when the wash is brought inside in wicker baskets.
Coming back from her classes, rounding a corner, Linda sees the wash on the line: acres of white and colored shapes moving in the wind. It takes the breath away, the sight of all that wash, and seems like fields of crisp flowers, a strange, enchanting crop. The bloodied sheets are clean, the labor pains forgotten, the stains of all that lust rinsed away. Shirts fill with air and move, so that she can believe that they are occupied. Overalls kick out sturdy legs, and nightgowns drift fetchingly in the air. Sheets billow and snap and seem to have a life of their own, defying their owners and the girls alike.
______
The house is called Magdalene, as are all the establishments that take in wayward girls for sins committed or imagined. There seems to be little difference: the parents wish them there and pay. Insurance money that cannot be used elsewhere is sent by a bank to settle Linda Fallon’s bills.
Occasionally one of the nuns refers to the Home as a boarding school for young Catholic women. But nobody is ever fooled.
______
Sometimes a girl runs away, and who can say where she has gone? Other girls give birth, and the babies are taken from them. Sometimes
—
rarely
—
a family whose wash has been laundered and delivered repeatedly by a certain girl asks if she can come to live with them.
None of this happens to Linda.
And, actually, she has no desire to run away. She cannot see the point. She endures the school, but likes the sight of the wash on the line. She has learned to count on the white noise of the surf and the front porch and a nun who is kind and befriends her.
______
In the beginning, there are letters from the aunt. Blunt missives with bulletins of news, mere notes of discreet pretending that nothing serious has ever happened. A month before Linda turns seventeen, however, a different sort of letter arrives at the house for wayward girls. Linda is to return home. Linda Fallon is going home. She protests to the nuns that she has no home, that she will be a stranger there, that she has less than a year to go before she graduates from the Catholic girls’ school. The sisters merely look at her.
You have to go, they say, consulting their bookkeeping. The money has run out.
______
Linda has only indistinct memories of her mother and no real ones of her father. Her mother, she is certain, had long brunette hair folded into waves. When she laughed, she held her hand in front of her mouth. She wore slender woolen dresses with jewel necks, or she was a woman in a fur coat clutching the hand of a small child as they walked along the street. She had perfectly shaped brown pumps and tiny feet.
In the photographs, her father is tall and despite his crooked teeth, resembles, in an anemic sort of way, a movie star. Leslie Howard, say. In the photographs, her father always wears a fedora and is smiling.
______
In the upstairs bedrooms of the home for wayward girls, Linda cries with the other girls who live in the house. Hysterically, as teenage girls will do in the face of calamity. She promises to write and smiles bravely through her tears, as she has learned to do from the occasional uplifting movie they have been allowed to see.
______
When Linda arrives home, she discovers that the aunt’s boyfriend has gone off with another woman, abandoning the aunt with six children of her own from a failed marriage and a niece in a school for wayward girls. As a result of this defection, the aunt and her cousins have had to move to a succession of smaller and smaller apartments, settling like a tumble of blocks down a flight of stairs. So that when Linda returns to the fold, the aunt and the cousins are living on the top floor of a triple-decker in an undesirable neighborhood in a working-class town.
______
The apartment into which Linda moves is a warren of tiny rooms smelling of Johnson’s baby oil and onions. She shares a room with two of her cousins, Patty and Erin, girls whom she hasn’t seen in over three years and who hardly know her now. Linda will wear Eileen’s clothes, the aunt decrees; there will be no money for new ones. The clothes that once fit Eileen, who has gone to New York to seek her fortune, are, however, just slightly too small on Linda, since she is taller than Eileen. The clothes are skirts as short as the public school will allow and tight sweaters with low V-necks. For years, Linda has worn a uniform, and so the clothes are strange to her and oddly exciting, as if they were a costume she were trying on. She can theoretically become a different person.
Faint echoes of the word
slut
still ping against the walls. Linda wears bright shades of lipstick that Patty lends her, and she learns to tease her hair. Linda’s aunt remains tight-lipped in the face of Linda’s youth and presence.
The cousins, variously, resent Linda or are solicitous. It is understood that she is damaged, though they do not know, and will never know, the specific crime that caused her to be banished. It is a secret between the aunt and Linda.
______
The aunt is now the unimaginable age of fifty. She has papery skin with fan wrinkles, eyebrows dotted with bits of gray. Her mouth has puckered, creasing her upper lip. To make herself look younger, the aunt has dyed her hair blond, the result a strange alloy of brassy gold with dark silver roots. Despite the difference in age, however, it does not escape Linda’s notice that, in certain lights, she resembles her aunt. In fact, she looks more like her aunt than some of the cousins do
—
an intimate connection that makes none of them very happy.
Every day, the aunt goes to Mass. Her missal sits like a bomb on the arm of the sofa in the den
—
a bomb about to explode with liturgy and dire predictions of the aftermath of sin.
______
Linda begins her senior year at the public high school during the first week of October. She dresses in a charcoal skirt and a white blouse of Eileen’s, but she refuses Patty’s offer to paint her nails, being self-conscious about her hands.
The school is located at the end of a long peninsula. It appears, at first glance, to be a prison. The low brick building is flat-roofed and is bordered by chain-link fencing to keep the students away from the water. There are no trees and only an asphalt parking lot. It is the sort of building that suggests guards in towers.
The high school seems to have little to do with its surroundings, as though it purposefully ignored them. On that particular October morning, the ocean dazzles, and the sky is an unblemished blue. In the distance, Linda can see Boston. The school is, like the town itself, anomalous: as if a working-class community had been transplanted onto what might have been, had things turned out differently, the most expensive real estate south of Boston.
Inside the high school, the windows are opaque with sea salt and wire netting, protection from the gulls that periodically try to batter the glass to get in. They want the students’ lunches. High on the list of school rules is this one: Never feed the gulls.
The cousins have not been discreet, and rumors have flown before Linda has even arrived. The vice principal regards her warily, making note already of infringements. “Get rid of the skirt,” he says.
Putting Linda in her place. Just in case she has ideas.
______
Linda follows corridors and stands before an orange door with a narrow slit of glass. Through the slit, she can see a teacher and a group of students
—
the boys in colored sport shirts, the girls with curled hair. When she opens the door, the teacher stops talking. The faces of the students are a blur. There is a long silence, longer than it should be
—
seeming to stretch beyond endurance, though it cannot be more than ten or twelve seconds at the most. The teacher, who wears black-framed glasses, asks her her name.
“Linda,” she has to say, wishing she were a Gabrielle or a Jacqueline. Anything but a Linda.

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