Yours, Jean, page 20
He made a check mark by that note with his fountain pen and waited, one eyebrow lifted, for Mary Ellen to answer.
But what came instead was a voice from the back of the auditorium, a voice Mary Ellen immediately recognized as Robbie’s.
“I didn’t mean it,” she called out, and Mary Ellen turned and saw her there, looking so small at the end of the aisle. She was wearing the pale blue swagger jacket that she wore to church, the one with the black mohair collar, and the three-quarter length sleeves that flared at her elbows. She had on a white blouse and a black pencil skirt, and Mary Ellen’s knew she was doing her best to look grown up and responsible. “I said a silly thing.” Robbie was walking down the aisle toward the stage. “It wasn’t true.” The men on the stage sat there, looking down on her, their faces severe. Even though Mary Ellen had told her not to come, here she was, and Mary Ellen thought how brave she was to face these men who sat in judgment.
Mr. Heath was the first to speak to her. “Robbie, this is hardly the place for you tonight.”
“It’s exactly the place for me,” Robbie said, and Mary Ellen was proud of the clarity of her voice. “This is my mother you’re talking about. I won’t let you make something of her that she’s not. She’s a good teacher is what she is.” Robbie caught Mary Ellen’s eye and held it for a moment. “She’s a good mother, too,” she said.
Mary Ellen wanted to go to her and wrap her up in her arms, but she knew this wasn’t the time to show how much she admired her, how much she loved her, how sorry she was for the years of distance between them. This was a time for strength. Mary Ellen knew that, and she could tell that Robbie did, too.
Mr. Heath said, “Are you saying that you lied? Young lady, are you saying we can’t trust anything that you say?”
Mary Ellen knew that Mr. Heath was trying to twist logic and catch Robbie in its snare.
“Mr. Heath,” Mary Ellen said with indignation—but she soon saw she needn’t worry about Robbie, for Robbie said, “Mr. Heath, if you want to talk about trust, perhaps we should begin with your son.”
Mary Ellen saw Mr. Heath take in a breath. He seemed to hold it. Then he let it out with a sigh, and it was like the air was going out of him. His shoulders slumped. His chest deflated. He could no longer look at Robbie. He looked at Mr. Pomeroy instead, and Mr. Pomeroy said, “Thank you for coming, Robbie. I’m sure your love for your mother is very great. But we now have business to finish, and this is a closed session. I’m sure you understand.”
“I do,” said Robbie. “I’ve said what I came to say. There’s not a word of truth to these rumors. I was a silly girl for a long time, but I’m not now. I’m telling you straight out. The students of this school need my mother. You’ll be hurting them if you let her go.”
With that, Robbie did an elegant turn, the skirted swagger coat swirling about her legs, and with her shoulders back and her spine straight, she left the auditorium.
“We have one more testimony to investigate,” Mr. Heath said. “The testimony of...” Again, he glanced down at his notes. “Etta Lawless.”
At first, Mary Ellen didn’t know who he meant. Then it came to her. Etta, the girl who’d said that odd thing at the homecoming dance, that thing about seeing Mary Ellen and Jean that morning in the library.
“Now you’re taking the word of odd ducks like her?” Mary Ellen said.
She knew right away she’d been wrong to say it. She seemed defensive and insensitive to students like Etta. She wanted to take it back, but it was too late.
Mr. Pomeroy gave her a stern look over the tops of his spectacles. “We have to remember,” he said, “that not all of our students have had the same advantages. Surely, you’d agree with that, Mary Ellen.”
Mary Ellen had no response. She folded her hands in her lap and sat there, chastised.
Mr. Heath went on, reading from his notes. “Miss Lawless reports that on the morning of September 3, the first day of classes, she saw you kiss Miss De Belle in the library.”
“On the cheek,” Mary Ellen said. “A friendly kiss on the cheek for good luck.”
The men sat there for a good while, none of them saying a word. Lily Wagner kept looking down at her steno pad, a blush creeping up her neck to her cheeks.
Mary Ellen knew how it all looked, if that’s what someone was indeed hoping to find. The note left in Jean’s purse, the number of times the two of them had been seen together uptown or on the porch swing at the house, the kiss in the library. Mary Ellen had no idea that Etta Lawless had seen that kiss, and even though there was absolutely nothing for Mary Ellen to feel guilty about, she couldn’t help but feel, here in the presence of these men, that the girl had seen something she shouldn’t have. And why had she come forward? The kiss should have meant nothing to her at all, but obviously it was something that she kept worrying and worrying until she felt she had to tell someone.
Finally, Mr. Heath spoke. “Do you deny the kiss?”
It had happened. To say it hadn’t would be to deny all that she’d felt for Jean—all that she felt still—and more than that, it would feel like a betrayal of this young woman who had come so briefly into her life at exactly the time she needed her youth, her enthusiasm, her blessing.
“No, I don’t deny it,” Mary Ellen said.
“I didn’t think so,” said Mr. Heath.
A few more uncomfortable moments of silence went by. Then Mr. Pomeroy said to Mr. Heath, “Do you have everything you need?”
Mr. Heath glanced around the table. “Gentlemen, are we all satisfied?”
One by one, the men nodded their heads.
And with that, Mary Ellen was free to go—free to wait, she knew, for Mr. Pomeroy to call and let her know what the board had decided.
“You’re making a mistake,” she said. Then she gathered up her coat and her purse and left the auditorium.
Robbie was standing outside the doors. “What now?” she said.
Mary Ellen gathered her into her arms. “Now, we go home,” she said.
23
THAT RAINY NIGHT, THE VERY night that Grinny Haines came close to dying but didn’t, Norville went to Lorene and said, “It doesn’t matter what you did in the past. None of it matters to me. Lorene, I love you, and I’m ready for us to have the life we both deserve.”
They were standing in her living room. He’d caught her about to go to bed. Her hair was in curlers. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe. Her glass held the last swallow of a Schlitz. She put it down on the coffee table.
“Are you asking me to marry you?” She reached up and took one curler from her hair. The lock it had been holding sprang out wildly over her forehead. She started to reach for another curler and stopped, her hand in the air. “Surely you’re not,” she said. “What would you want with someone like me?”
The living room was neat and cozy. Old quilts hung from the walls and on wooden racks. A Bible with a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses on top of it—her father’s—lay on the fireplace mantle. Oil lamps with their tall glass chimneys sat at either end. A blue wicker sewing basket sat on the floor by Lorene’s armchair. The basket’s lid was open, and Norville could see a skein of red yarn and two knitting needles.
He wanted to lose no more time. He wanted to be able to switch off the tea lamp on the table by the window and take Lorene’s hand and lead her off to bed. He wanted to sleep beside her all the night through, comforted by the steady rhythm of her breath, the warmth of her body. He wanted to have this life with her in this home where he felt at ease.
“That is what I’m asking.” He got down on one knee—so many times he’d dreamed this moment—and he took her hand. He didn’t have a ring to offer her, but he was determined to wait no longer. Something about his experience at Grinny’s house, the ugliness of the loud voices inside, had left him impatient with loneliness. “It’s exactly what I’m asking. Lorene Devereux, will you do me the honor of being my bride?”
She let her free arm drop to her side. Her voice was barely a whisper. “I never thought,” she said, and then for a moment, she couldn’t go on. Norville squeezed her hand. “I never thought anyone would want me,” she said. “Not after what I did. I never believed I’d find love, and now here you are.”
“Here I am, Lorene.”
“Aren’t we a pair?”
She got down on her knees in front of him. She took his face in her hands and brought her lips to his. He thought of the September morning when Charlie Camplain had checked out of the Grand and he’d dropped that picture of Jean De Belle. He said he had a ring for her. He said he was going to change her life. Norville hadn’t known the long path he was about to go down because he’d bumped up against Charlie Camplain. He hadn’t known where he was going, but he did now. No one was there to stand as witness, but here they were—he, a man of a certain age; she, a woman of like years—and though Norville knew it was insignificant really, in light of all the suffering that people endured, just a speck in the dust of the universe, he still felt himself tremble here on the verge of the rest of his life. He’d dreamed it so long—this moment, this surrender, this love.
“Are you saying yes, Lorene?”
Her arms were around his neck, and she was holding him as if she never wanted to let go. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m saying yes.”
Norville received the subpoena that Monday. It arrived by certified mail. An order to appear before the state’s attorney in Lawrenceville in the matter of the murder of Jean De Belle.
“It’s starting,” he told Lorene that evening, when they were having supper at her house. She’d been talking to him about wedding plans. She’d been saying that she wanted to get married at the Old Cathedral, and, yes, she wanted a white wedding dress, because she’d never walked down the aisle before and she meant to do it up in style.
Then he said, “It’s starting,” and she said, “Well, forgive me for acting like a love-struck girl. I thought you’d be happy.”
“I am happy,” he said. “I’m ecstatic.”
Then he showed her the subpoena.
“What’s this mean?” She laid the subpoena on the table by her dinner plate and tapped it with a fingernail. “Norville?”
“I’ll have to give a deposition.” He sat with his fists on the table, his fork in his right hand, his knife in his left. “They’ll want to know what I remember from that morning in September.” He turned his head so he could see out the dining room window. The days were growing shorter. Already dusk was coming on. The temperature had only been fifty-three that afternoon, and now a cold front had moved through. He could see the wind moving through the holly bushes outside. On his walk from his house to Lorene’s, he’d felt the cold, and now he swore he saw a few spits of snow in the air. “It’s starting,” he said again. “They’re getting ready for Charlie Camplain’s trial. I’ll have to testify.”
He laid down his knife and fork and got up from the table. He walked over to the window and stood there feeling the cold air that was leaking in around the frame. He’d have to remember to run a bead of caulk around it. It was time to get ready for winter.
Lorene came to him, and she put her arm across his back and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Is that a bad thing?” she said. “You seem so sad.”
“That morning,” he said. “I remember everything about it. I remember Camplain checking out and how he showed me the ring he had for her, for Miss De Belle, and how it gave me the nudge I needed to ask you to marry me.”
“You never told me that.”
“I got off work, and I walked straight over to Raymond Hardy’s to tell him to leave you alone, to tell him you and I were going to be a permanent couple.” Here, he stopped, and he moved away from Lorene so that she wasn’t touching him anymore. “That’s why I don’t like remembering that morning. Not because of Camplain and what he did. Because that was the day I found out that all along you’d been with Raymond.”
“It was a stupid thing.” She sighed. “It was always you I loved, Norville. I swear.”
“I’m just saying it still hurts to know what I know.” He stuck his hands in his trousers pockets and rocked up on the balls of his feet. He shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry. Can’t help it. That subpoena called it all up in me.”
She was beside him again. She touched his face. “That’s all behind us now,” she said. “You know that, don’t you. I’m going to marry you.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
“You’ll do what you have to do at that trial, and our life together will go on. It’ll be glorious, Norville. I’ve dreamed of it for so long.”
“I just want you to know that sometimes it comes up on me unexpected, and I’m standing at Raymond’s door again, and I’m hearing the shower running, and then you ask him to bring you a towel, and...well, it’s all too much for me.”
“Me, too,” she said. “I wonder, though, if we have to remember those times to remind ourselves how lucky we are. We lived through all of that, and here we are, still in love.”
“More than ever?” he asked.
“More than ever,” she said. “You know it to be true, don’t you?”
For a good while, he looked at her, saw the hint of a grimace at the corners of her mouth, took note of the pleading in her eyes, urging him to say yes, to please say yes, understood that she was afraid he might turn away from her.
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
She threw her arms around his neck, and he held onto her, held her there while the last of the daylight faded, pressed his face into her hair and breathed in the scent of her Aqua Net, held her while she cried a little, and he said, “Shh, shh, shh. There’s nothing to cry about. Everything will be just fine.”
24
GRINNY WASN’T SO SURE, EVEN though he and Mr. Heath had come to an agreement. Millie would have the baby, and the Heaths would adopt it. They’d allow Millie and Grinny and Peg the opportunity to visit and to be a part of the child’s life. They’d take care of all of Millie’s doctors’ bills.
“But the baby will be yours,” Grinny said. He sat in Mr. Heath’s den in a club chair of tufted leather. Mr. Heath paced back and forth behind his desk. He picked up a glass paperweight the size of a softball—crystal, Grinny decided—and tossed it into the air and let it smack against his waiting palm. The ease with which he did that shamed Grinny. An object so fine and surely expensive, tossed and caught with confidence, no thought at all that it might drop and shatter. Grinny understood that he’d never know what it was like to have that kind of hold on things.
“It’s only right,” said Mr. Heath. “My wife and I are younger...” Then his voice trailed off, and he looked down at his feet for just a split second before lifting his head and smiling at Grinny. “Well, you see what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Grinny knew exactly what he was saying—that he and Mrs. Heath would give the child a better home than a cab driver and his aging wife. Grinny bristled now over all he’d agreed to when he’d accepted Mr. Heath’s offer. Not only had he given over Millie’s baby, he’d admitted, in so doing, that his life had always been the wrong kind of life, not the kind of life that gave them a right to the child.
Mr. Heath was right. Already, they were stretched thin. What sort of life would they be able to give that baby?
One of love. That was something that Grinny knew for sure, and it was what kept him going back to the moment he’d shaken Mr. Heath’s hand and said, “All right, then.”
He wished he could go back and change his mind. He wished he’d never given Millie’s baby away. He knew, no matter how willing the Heaths were to share the child, he and Peg and Millie would never be able to give him or her the advantages that the Heaths could. Grinny imagined he and Peg and Millie showing up at their grand house for a visit: Peg in her plain cotton dress or the wool coat with the frayed sleeve and the worn lapels, Millie looking so tiny and afraid, and him with his porkpie hat in his hands and his toothless grin. What could they offer that would ever be enough? How would they ever avoid seeming poor and wanting?
Still, the arrangement was one that would save the child. Grinny was looking forward to returning the five hundred dollars to Raymond Hardy, along with the interest he requested—provided, of course, by Mr. Heath, but still, it would give Grinny great satisfaction to know he’d resisted that sin, to be able to tell Raymond that he wouldn’t be needing Dr. Claridge’s help after all.
“You’re going to have the baby,” Grinny said to Millie when he came back from Lawrenceville that evening.
She was curled up on her bed, her cheeks still wet with tears. “You mean...”
Grinny didn’t want to hear her say the word, so he cut her off. “Mr. Heath and I struck a deal.”
He went on to explain that the Heaths would raise the child, but that Millie would be able to be a part of its life.
“I don’t want to have to see him,” she said.
“Him?”
“Tom. I don’t ever want to see him again.”
Grinny nodded. “I’ll see what I can do about that.” He went to her then, and sat on the edge of her bed and laid his hand to her face, the way he’d done so many times when she’d been a child herself. “It’s the best I could do,” he said to her. “If I had the money, I’d give you and the baby the moon and the stars.”
“I know you would, Papa,” she said, and then she put her hand on top of his, and like that they went on.
It was a Monday when Grinny came home from work and found the envelope from the Lawrence County state’s attorney waiting for him.
“I didn’t dare open it,” Peg said.
She was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. The envelope was on the table. Grinny looked at it for a long time. He was afraid to open it, too.
“You have to,” Peg said.
