Prize Women, page 28
And, over her shoulder, she calls, “I don’t have to listen to you at all.”
Part Three
I guess mercy is a muscle like any other. You got to exercise it, or it just cramp right up.
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
36
Mae, January 1938
Each morning Mae wakes in the new, bigger house, with a heaviness in her chest, the sensation that something has been squatting on her rib cage in the night. She feels bruised. As she watches the new housemaid, Agnes, preparing the dough for the bread, as she buys new coats for the children, new furniture for the living room, new pictures for the walls, she cannot stop imagining that some shadow haunts her, some creature that creeps through the darkness while she is sleeping and takes up residence around her lungs, squeezing them. It is an effort to get up in the mornings, an effort to fix a smile upon her face, but she must, because this is the life she wanted, isn’t it? This is the life she paid for.
The new house is near to their old neighborhood. Like the big house they owned before the Crash, it has running water and electricity and an indoor water closet. The walls are clean and bright. The floor gleams. The younger children try to run along the corridors in their excitement, then slip over and smack their heads on the polished stone. They cry and say that they hate this new floor, that they want to go home.
“This is your home now,” Mae says, trying to jolly them along.
Still, they refuse to sleep in their separate beds: instead, they pile into one room, or sometimes two. Mae finds them in the mornings, huddled together like animals, their bodies warm and slack with sleep. As soon as she wakes them, their arms and legs tense, as if they are wary of her, as if they are strangers to her.
The child who is most real to her is Robert. When he is not in the hospital, he sleeps in his own room, away from his siblings. He wants to lock the door, but she protests, scared that he will seize on the floor, alone; that he will bite his tongue and choke on his blood; that he will inhale his vomit and she will not find him until the next day, when she will have to ask Leonard to break the door down. The doctors have tried different drugs and therapies: phenobarbital and potassium bromide have left him sleepy and confused. The doctor wants to perform more surgeries, suggesting something called the Montréal procedure, which will involve removing part of Robert’s skull while he is awake, then probing his brain, while he tells the surgeon what he feels. The idea horrifies Mae, but Robert, in a passive fashion that is typical of him these days, says he is willing to try it and then, with a rare touch of his old sarcasm, he says, “Really, a bullet would be more effective. That’d stop the seizures for good.”
Leonard, who sits in his chair in the big drawing room for hours, staring at the wall, is thinner all the time, as if he is slowly disappearing. Mae had hoped the security of the money and a better house might restore him, but he retreats further into himself each day. Mae can’t help feeling that God, or some other force in the universe, is punishing her, somehow, for not speaking out on Lily’s behalf, for simply sitting in that courtroom, too paralyzed by indecision to do anything other than watch as the lawyer ripped into Lily. She hadn’t known what he was going to do, and then it was too late to stop him. They wouldn’t have listened to her, even if she’d tried to speak up. This is what she tells herself. Perhaps if Leonard had been there, if she’d been able to persuade him to speak out for Lily . . . But she knows he wouldn’t have said a word.
When Mae says she is worried about Robert, and tries to coax Leonard out of his silence by asking him what they should do, he blinks wearily. “The doctors will fix him. He’ll be fine.” And he pats her head gently, as if consoling a child.
But Robert is not fine. He is growing thinner, the shape of his skull showing beneath his skin, as if his flesh is shrinking on his bones. His eyes have a haunted glitter and his skin is hot, feverish, although he won’t let her touch him often, ducking out of reach of her hand. He forgets his siblings’ names. Sometimes he looks at Mae as though he doesn’t know who she is. And though Mae visits the hospital every few days, demanding more investigations, better treatments, more therapies, she sees the uncertainty in the doctor’s expression when he looks at her son and says to her, “Well, we could try more surgery.” She doesn’t want her child to be an experiment and she feels cheated: the money felt like a promise of something that is slipping away.
At least once a week, Mae walks the distance to Lily’s house. She doesn’t catch a streetcar or call a cab—during the daytime, at least, Lily’s neighborhood doesn’t frighten her as it once would have. She looks at the homeless men on the streets, the ragged children playing in puddles of filthy water, and she feels sadness for them, and guilt, but she doesn’t feel fear anymore. Always, she carries a bag of food—she took bread at first, but then she realized that the children really wanted candy, so she passes out the sweets as she walks. And she sees the hope and excitement in their eyes. And she doesn’t know if this is better or worse than doing nothing at all.
Lily’s door is always shut. Mae visits her during the day, when she knows Tony will be at work. At first, when Mae knocked, the day after the court verdict, Lily had opened the door slowly. Her face had been bruised, her lips cracked and puffy. One eye had been swollen shut.
She’d seen Mae, her expression had darkened, and she’d slammed the door in her face. Mae had called apologies in the street, had tried to explain, but the door remained shut, and a crowd gathered, watching.
“Aren’t you that Stork Derby lady?” a small boy had asked—he could have been any age from ten to fifteen, his limbs scrawny, his face filthy.
Mae had nodded, smiling at the way his eyes had lit up, as though there was some part of him that his poverty and hopelessness hadn’t touched.
“Gimme some money, rich bitch!” he had shouted, and although he’d giggled with the other children, there had been a sudden hard gleam in his eye that had made Mae take a step back. Then the boy had run off with his friends, hooting, and Mae had stood for a moment, undecided and scared, hoping Lily would let her in.
The door stayed shut.
The next time, two days later, Mae was ready, and, when Lily opened the door, she stuck her foot in the crack, the wood bouncing painfully off her boot.
“Please,” Mae said. “I want to explain.”
Lily’s bruises were fading, but there were new dark finger marks on her neck, as if he’d held her by the throat.
“I’m tired of your excuses,” Lily said, her voice raspy. “Leave me alone.”
“But I need you to understand. I didn’t know what the lawyer was going to do, I promise.”
“But you didn’t say anything. Why didn’t you stop him? You just sat there and watched, while he . . .” Lily’s eyes burned into her and Mae had to look away.
“I didn’t think the judge would listen to me.”
“You didn’t try.”
“I . . .” Mae swallowed and then admitted, “. . . I needed the money for Robert.”
“So you did know what the lawyer was going to do? You planned it.”
“No! I had no idea. But when he started asking you those questions, I knew they wouldn’t listen to me. And I kept thinking about Robert. I’d give up anything for him.”
“What about my children?”
“Oh, Lily. If you’d had the money, Tony would just have spent it. But I can give you money now. Without him knowing. I can give you money for food for the children. That’s why I came here. I can help you.” She dug into her bag and held out a handful of banknotes.
Lily looked at her with such hatred it felt like a slap. And Mae wanted to say to her, Wouldn’t you have done the same? Wouldn’t you have done anything to save Sebastian? Would you have spoken out for me, if you knew it would do no good at all, but staying silent would save your child?
Mae stood with the banknotes in her outstretched hand. “Take them. Please.”
Lily’s mouth trembled. Behind the closed door, one of the children gave a faint cry. Slowly, Lily reached out and plucked the money from Mae’s hand. Mae felt a wash of relief, but Lily’s gaze was still hard, her face still set. “Now get out of my doorway,” she snarls. “And leave me alone.”
“I don’t want to leave you like this. I can send the police around for Tony.”
Lily gave a bitter laugh. “And what will they do? Move your foot.”
“Please, Lily—”
“Please what? Forgive you? You’ve taken everything from me, and now you want me to forgive you as well?” Her mouth compressed and, for a dreadful moment, Mae thought Lily might spit on her. But then she said, “Get out of my doorway and leave me alone.”
When Mae didn’t move, another hand appeared on the door—a man’s hand—although when he pulled the door back, Mae saw it was Matteo, but taller and broader than she remembered him. His face, too, was bruised. He had a cut above his left eyelid and his cheekbone was the swollen purple of a ripe eggplant.
Oh, God, Mae thought. It’s unbearable, what she’s done.
“You need to go,” he said.
“But—”
“You need to go now.” His voice was deep, and there was a threatening rage in the carefully clipped words that made Mae step away from the door and turn her back to walk away.
Every time she returns, she knocks and waits. Lily never answers.
And every time Mae pushes the banknotes under the door. Sometimes, as she turns away, she feels better. The weight in her chest lifts; she can breathe more easily. But the relief doesn’t last long. As she walks back through the dirty, noisy neighborhood, with its screaming children, its exhausted, dead-eyed women and angry, hopeless men, Mae feels the load settling back on her rib cage. And by the time she has reached her own clean street, with the big houses, full of people for whom the Crash has meant years of everything becoming easier—cheaper food, affordable clothes, everything within reach—the pressure on Mae’s lungs makes it hard to breathe.
The children don’t greet her when she returns. Mae checks on Robert, knocking before opening his door a crack. He is lying very still on his bed, with his back to her, pretending to be asleep. Mae stays long enough to reassure herself that he is breathing.
“I love you,” she whispers.
He never replies.
Then Mae goes into the drawing room to take Leonard his food on a tray.
“Thank you,” he says, and gives her a momentary smile, but as soon as she turns away, the smile is gone, as if she’d imagined it.
When she’d first told Leonard about the judge’s decision, when she’d told him how much they’d won, he’d nodded, but hadn’t looked relieved or pleased, hadn’t said anything at all.
He’s in shock, she had told herself at first. He never imagined winning this much.
“I’ll need to pay the lawyer,” Mae said, “and there are the medical bills for Robert. But it’s still so much money. We can get a new house. The children won’t be hungry anymore. They can go to a good school. And I’m sure the doctors can try different treatments for Robert.”
“That’s good,” he’d said flatly. That smile again. “That’s really good.”
“You can stop looking for a job because we won’t need it.”
He’d said nothing and, for a moment, in his eyes, she’d thought she’d seen a flash of anger and it had confused her. Surely he should be relieved. But in the new house, he sits and stares at the wall, just as he did nearly every day in the old house. He doesn’t even ask, as he used to, if she has seen Lily.
Now, after she returns from trying to talk to Lily, she gives Leonard his lunch and suggests that he might like to go out somewhere.
“Where?” he says.
“Well, you could meet some of your old friends. People you knew through work.”
He stares at her for a moment and his expression is incredulous. “How? They’ve all either lost everything and are living somewhere in the slums, or they kept everything, and they won’t want to know me.”
“Of course they’ll want to know you,” she says, but with more certainty than she feels. He looks different from the man who went out to work every day. Older, smaller, his movements more hesitant. “Of course they’ll want to,” she says again.
“And what would we talk about?” he asks, his voice hard. “Should I ask the friends who’ve lost everything whether they’d like a game of cards? We can play to win food for their children. Or should I ask the friends who lost nothing—who stayed in their fancy houses—why they didn’t bother to see me even once?”
“I . . .” She picks up his plate and unfinished bread roll. She can’t bear to throw it away. Perhaps she will eat it herself later, when she doesn’t feel so sick.
“I’ve been humiliated, Mae,” Leonard says, his voice still dull and toneless, as if he is tired of explaining. “I’m nothing. In this neighborhood, I’m nothing, and in the place we used to live, I’m nothing.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is. And it’s true for you too. We might have money, but we’re a laughingstock.”
“We’re not!”
“Well, I am.” His voice is petulant.
“You’re wrong.”
The gaze he turns on her is so furious that she takes a step backward. “The problem with you, Mae, is that you don’t understand anyone’s feelings except your own. You never have. You’ve never even tried.”
Then he closes his eyes, as if he wants to sleep, right there in the chair, but it’s just a way of shutting her out. She stands there for a full minute, with his plate in her hands. When he doesn’t move, when he doesn’t look at her, she turns and walks into the large kitchen, with its bright lights and its shining metal and its polished wooden table.
And she leans against the big stove, with the weight pressing down on her chest, harder than ever, and she cries. But even as she weeps for herself, for Leonard, for Robert, for Lily and for Matteo, she knows she couldn’t have done anything differently.
37
Lily, January 1938
The light drops earlier than it used to in Lily’s part of the city, in Skid Row, or what is now simply referred to as “the slums.” The wind pushes against the walls, funneling down the street and over the roof, so that the loose tiles shift like tiny bones, and whenever Lily looks up from her endless sewing and cooking, cleaning and more sewing, it seems to be night. She knows that it can’t be true that the day ends sooner here, knows that the darkness drains from the sky at the same time everywhere, but it seems to her that, whenever she looks up from washing, or cooking, or scrubbing, it is already and always dark.
Perhaps this is because she looks up so rarely when Tony is around. He isn’t in the house often—he’s there for a short time in the morning, before leaving for work, and most nights to sleep, although he returns later and later, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes, he goes out to work in the morning and she won’t see him for days. When he does return, smelling of old alcohol and something darker, something that makes her think of rot, she doesn’t ask where he’s been.
At first, when she came home from court, Tony had threatened to kill her. He hadn’t even seemed angry as he’d said it: he’d held her against the wall by her throat and said, I should kill you. His voice flat, his face impassive.
Lily lets the days drift by, giving all the food she can to the children, seeing her own ribs appear from under her skin, feeling her hip bones ache when she lies down on the thin mattress. At night, she sleeps poorly, watching silver moonlight slew in between the thin curtains, or listening to the wind rattling rubbish in the street, or hearing the cries and moans of her neighbors.
The first time Mae knocks on the door, Lily envisages slapping her face, ripping the hair from her head. She’s never been violent before, and the intensity of her hatred frightens her. She loathes Mae more because she loved her—or perhaps loves her still, but she won’t allow herself to linger on that.
“Go away,” she says, fighting to keep her voice calm. After Mae has gone, she breathes more easily, but that night, her dreams are sweat-soaked. She wakes up crying out from a nightmare in which she is Tony, somehow, and Mae has become her. She is pounding Mae’s head against a brick wall and then, when Mae is silent and unmoving, she is filled with regret, kissing Mae’s bloodied mouth, begging her to come back, though she won’t. Lily weeps in the darkness, unable to sleep.
Part of her hates taking the money that Mae stuffs under the door, even as she is grateful for it—even as she loathes the feeling of gratitude. But Lily can’t listen to the children crying from hunger anymore. She can’t keep boiling down bones to make a stew, then padding out the liquid with old onions and sawdust.
So Lily accepts the money. Each time Mae puts cash under the door, she calls, “I’m sorry,” but forgiveness feels impossible.
Rich people, Lily thinks bitterly, accuse the poor of being a drain on society, but they’re the ones who take everything. They’re the ones who shoulder everyone else out of the way, who put their needs first. Mae has won; she owns it all, but she still wants more from Lily. She still wants forgiveness. She wants friendship and love, but all Lily can find is anger. Rage keeps her going. Without it, she is frightened that she might just lie down and let Tony kick her into darkness.
Now, a clatter from outside. A footstep. The scrape of a boot, then the thud of a shoulder against the door.
Tony. Her blood jolts and she hears the children’s breathing catch, all of them jerking awake as he stumbles into the room. Only the youngest twins, Roberto and Antonio, drowse on, although they all pretend to be asleep still.
Lily waits, dreading the sensation of the mattress dipping as Tony collapses into bed, but hoping for it at the same time. If he comes to bed, he will leave Matteo in peace. Amorous is better than violent.
