Sweep Out the Ashes, page 16
She must have slept again, because she woke to the faraway crash from the railroad yards of freight cars coupling in the near-daylight of northern winter. She pulled the afghan around her and made coffee in the presence of electrical appliances and the electric clock with its unrelenting hands. Poured herself coffee, willed herself to focus on the day ahead, and prayed her MG would start.
*
By five o’clock, when Diana collected the stack of final papers from the Westward Movement students and returned to her office, darkness had fallen again and the window in her office was a black mirror that she turned her back on. Instead she contemplated the stack of papers on her desk.
The stack was a good foot high, she thought. Maybe she’d take the ruler from her drawer and measure, to be certain. Maybe she wouldn’t.
Had she managed a credible seminar? Except for Cheryl, the students had seemed much the same as usual. Cheryl had spoken minimally during discussion, and after class she slipped out of the room without making eye contact with Diana and disappeared. Diana supposed Jake had talked to her.
A tap at her door, and Diana looked up as Ramona let herself in. Ramona was rattling about something, about getting through another week, about Douglas becoming downright paranoid about Con, about the Stockman’s and meeting tonight for a drink, before she interrupted herself—“Diana! What’s the matter?”
It was a last straw. Diana had bathed her face with cold water before the Westward Movement seminar and after, but she knew she looked awful, her face colorless, her eyes swollen. And now hearing Ramona’s sympathy. She laid her head down on her desk and cried.
In a parallel universe she heard Ramona close her office door and snap it locked, heard Ramona drag the students’ chair around to Diana’s side of the desk, felt Ramona take her hand.
“Can you tell me about it?” asked Ramona after a time.
“No. Maybe.”
They both froze at the sound of footsteps in the corridor. The footsteps paused, then passed by.
“I’ve got to get you out of here, with that slimeball oozing his way around the halls.”
“Not the Stockman’s!”
“No,” said Ramona. She thought for a minute. “Too many kids at my house. Too many people. What if I follow you back to the mansion? Do you think you’re all right to drive?”
“Y-yes.”
“I’ve got to fetch my coat and bag from my office. You wait here and keep your door locked. I’ll tap twice, wait a beat, and tap once more so you’ll know it’s me. I’ll walk you to your car and see you off before I leave.”
In another lifetime Diana would have found Ramona’s cloak-and-dagger planning ridiculous. Now she just nodded and locked the door behind Ramona as she was told.
Alone again, Diana sat drained. She had cried more in the last day and a half than in the whole of her life. For now she couldn’t think of the next two weeks. The last week of classes, the finals week. Then the long Christmas break alone in the mansion.
Time to relearn how to depend on herself.
Two taps on her door, a pause, a third tap.
*
Ramona arrived at the mansion about fifteen minutes after Diana and found her huddled in her coat in front of the cold fireplace.
“Sorry,” Ramona said. She was carrying a narrow paper bag. “I made a wine stop. It’s the weekend, after all, and I called home about Nicky, so I can stay. But brrr, it’s cold in here. Your furnace didn’t go out, did it?”
She glanced at the fireplace, which contained the ashes of Jake’s fire.
“No.”
“Well. This house is like a barn to heat. I’m certain I remember the old president kept a couple of space heaters up here. I’ll take a look.”
Ramona set down her wine bottle and began a search of closets. “Aha!” she called back after checking the closet in the hallway, and reemerged carrying a squat silver-colored heater with a dangling cord.
“Let’s see, yes, there’s an outlet!”
Sure enough, the heater hummed and its bars reddened, and Ramona poured two glasses of wine and came to sit by Diana.
“Now, then.”
Where to start. Diana didn’t know if she had enough left in her to edit details from what she told Ramona, but she tried. Her mentoring of Cheryl LeTellier, which Ramona knew about. Her interest in Cheryl’s story, their cautious friendship.
“And then Jake—”
“Jake.”
Diana took a long sip of wine and began. Her ideas about the historical narrative—no, the historical narratives, plural, the threads that made a weave—and how she had longed for someone to discuss them with, and there was Jake, interested in the topic and willing to talk about it.
Ramona listened, sipped her wine, and said nothing.
How Diana had begun to think of Jake as her friend.
“And now I’ve hurt him. I hurt him once before, insulted him, and I apologized to him, and it was all right. It won’t be all right this time, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Diana said nothing.
Ramona swirled the wine in her glass. “Diana. Forget for the moment your historical narrative. Or narratives, however many you think there are. Those old women who raised you. Didn’t you, as a teenager, ever want to rebel? To do what other teenagers did?”
Diana wondered about the change of subject. “How could I rebel? I had nowhere else to go. The great-aunts were all I had. And they were stuck with me. They paid for what I needed, they paid my school tuition—I had nothing of my own, still don’t, except what I can earn.”
“I think marrying Con when I was so young was my rebellion,” said Ramona. “I knew my parents wouldn’t like it, and they didn’t, but they got over it. Better than I did, I think.”
“Tatiana and Maria wouldn’t have gotten over it.”
“You went to the University of Texas for your graduate program, and they didn’t like that. You took this job in Versailles, and they didn’t like that, but they haven’t disowned you, as far as I can see.”
“No. They’re trying to reel me back in.”
“What does that tell you?”
Diana shook her head, and Ramona set down her wine glass and threw up her hands.
“Diana, it’s like you were never socialized. You might as well have been raised by wolves, except, I suppose, for having table manners and wearing clothes in public.”
Ramona paused and considered. “Sexless wolves, anyway. And highly educated wolves, although it doesn’t sound as though they put their educations to much use. A lawyer who never practiced law, a politician who never achieved public office. Just the way they permitted you to get an education but drew the line at your using it.
“But about Jake,” she went on. “What you told Abe that day in your office. You didn’t answer when I asked if it was true. Was it?”
“It was when I told Abe that.”
“I see.”
Ramona kept her eyes on Diana, but she took a serious drink of wine before she went on. “I’ve seen how Jake feels about you, Diana. I’ve seen it in his face. What I don’t know is how you feel about him. You’re not—well, some families would object pretty strongly to his Indian blood. My parents would have been horrified. Con says that down in Fort Maginnis they call Jake’s people the breeds.”
Diana couldn’t speak. Her head was spinning. Jake. What he had asked her. How might she have answered, if she had answered for herself and not as a Karnov woman?
“It’s clear you’re devastated, but don’t go back to Seattle in the shape you’re in. And don’t shut yourself up in this—barn—until classes start again. You can come to us for Christmas. We usually go out to the farm, and you can stay as long as you like.”
“Thanks,” Diana managed. Just as she had undervalued Jake, she had undervalued Ramona for living in her own soap opera. One more mistake to add to her growing list.
Ramona finished her wine and patted Diana’s shoulder. “Jake will be all right. He won’t let go of what he wants. You eat something tonight and keep warm. And call me if you need me.”
24
Diana listened as the sound of Ramona’s car faded into the night. She looked down at herself. She was still wearing the suit and white blouse she had worn to campus. She was holding her glass with the wine Ramona had poured for her and she hadn’t finished.
What Ramona had said about socialization. Oh, Tatiana and Maria had socialized her, all right. In their own way.
Turn the page, she told herself.
She set down the glass of wine and stood, getting her bearings in the cavernous living room after what seemed like a long sojourn in strange territory. Then she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, where she changed into a robe and carefully hung up her suit and blouse. Back downstairs, barefoot, she turned on a kitchen light and opened the refrigerator.
Two white plastic containers sat side by side on a middle shelf. Her leftovers and Jake’s from last night’s dinner at the steakhouse.
“No,” she said aloud, and then she reconsidered. If dinner last night was supposed to be a celebration of her successful stalls, let the leftovers be a requiem. She forked her steak and french fries on a plate to warm in the microwave oven and poured herself a little more wine. When the microwave pinged, she carried plate and wine into the living room and sat by the radiant space heater to eat.
Her intention was to plan how best to use the evening and coming weekend to be ready for Monday, but she found her mind wandering, inevitably, to the Karnov house in Seattle. She had been so small—but surely she remembered crying for Sister Holman after being dropped off with the great-aunts. Surely she remembered how strange the gray Seattle drizzle had seemed to her after the sun that beat down on Texas. Surely she remembered wandering the corridors of the Karnov house, a little red-haired ghost searching for what she had lost?
Had she ever been held on a lap after Sister Holman dropped her off? Been kissed? Comforted? Touched, even, until Annabel decided to seduce her? And she had gone with Annabel as much from curiosity as any other reason—well, trying to fit in was a reason, she supposed.
You’re flinchin like a colt that’s never felt a human hand.
Think of something else, she instructed herself. Done is done.
But her mind only turned to another unwelcome question. If she looked under H in a Rockdale, Texas, phone book, would she find a Holman? As Jake had shown her Victor Wheeler’s name in the Versailles phone book?
She remembered a moment—how many years ago? Herself, maybe at thirteen. Her red hair clipped close, hardly longer than a crewcut. Lingering on the sidewalk in front of the Karnov house in thin Seattle sunshine. Playing a skipping game by herself, skipping over cracks in the sidewalk, step on a crack, break your mother’s back, when the red-haired boy from down the street rode past on his bicycle, saw her, and did a wheelie.
Hey Red!
The door behind Diana opening. Tatiana gripping her by her upper arm and hissing through her bared teeth: Get in the house! Don’t you know you’re a Karnov woman?
Diana finished her wine and unplugged the space heater and carried her plate to the kitchen. She would take a couple of the senior seminar papers to bed with her, she decided, and give them a first reading. Cheryl’s, of course. And also the Blackfeet student’s. Just to see how they had done. Just to get her mind off the Karnov women.
*
Thanks to her new subscription to the Versailles Daily News, Diana could follow the police blotter, where she read of lost dogs, biting dogs, cats in trees, fender-benders, neighborly assaults, forged checks, public drunkenness, and shoplifting. Also she could follow the public announcements, which was where she learned that Senator Victor Wheeler would be holding a question-and-answer session the coming Wednesday in a conference room at the Bellevue Lodge, which passed for an upscale motel in Versailles.
She laid the newspaper on the kitchen table, where she’d been drinking her morning coffee, and thought about the Q&A session. She could spare the evening, she was making good progress on the senior seminar papers, and maybe a break from stumbling through the last week of classes would refresh her enough to face finals week and the seniors’ oral reports.
Yes, she had vowed to put Victor Wheeler out of her mind, but that was before, well, Jake. Before she left a message for Chris Beaudry canceling her flying lessons. She had laughed at herself when she imagined stalking the senator, but attending one public meeting hardly counted as stalking. And—it was hard to admit to herself, but she yearned to lay eyes on the man who almost certainly was her father. To sit for an hour in the same room with him, even if it was in the company of a hundred strangers.
*
Victor Wheeler’s audience turned out to be nowhere near a hundred people, closer to forty, Diana estimated, seated on folding chairs in a windowless room with a raised platform and a podium with an attached microphone at the front and a table at the back where leaflets were displayed.
Diana hadn’t changed from the navy suit and white blouse she had worn to campus that day. She found herself an aisle seat toward the back of the rows of seating where she could observe the other attendees. Judging from their stockman’s suits and hats and boots, many of the men had driven in from farms or ranches with wives in wool coats that trailed whiffs of snow. Most looked to be in late middle age, perhaps close to the age of the senator himself. Diana, who was curious about the Stillingers’ politics, thought Con might come to hear the senator, and she watched for him but didn’t see him.
About fifteen minutes after the advertised hour, a stir rippled the audience. A bald man in a brown business suit had gone to the microphone and tapped on it.
“Who is he?” Diana whispered to the man next to her.
“That’s Mayor Tollefson.”
The mayor glanced nervously around the audience, welcomed everyone, and began his introduction of the senator. Diana hardly listened. She wound her fingers, wondering at her growing anticipation. Already the mayor was finishing his introduction and stepping back from the podium to a little polite applause. Suddenly everyone in the audience rose to their feet, with Diana a little late in rising because she hadn’t anticipated the protocol, and the applause was warmer now, because the silver-haired man of the photograph was striding to the podium, flanked by two very young men in dark suits.
Senator Wheeler spoke into the microphone, thanking the mayor and the county Republicans, but Diana was too busy absorbing details to listen. The senator was a lean man who obviously kept himself fit. He spoke in a deep, unhurried tone. His eyes swept his audience with a long-sighted attentiveness that reminded her of the eyes of pilots, always mindful of their perimeters. As in his photograph, she could see no trace of a physical resemblance that might warn an observer that she was the senator’s daughter. But she felt an attraction she hadn’t expected. To brush it away, she began to concentrate on what he was saying.
The format of the Q&A, she gathered, was that the senator would lead with a few remarks about legislative work and special concerns and pitfalls, and then he would welcome questions—“You got a question, just stand up, and Jeff or Zane, here, will bring you the hand mike.”
Five minutes into the senator’s remarks, Diana knew what she already suspected, that Victor Wheeler’s politics would infuriate Tatiana if she weren’t already infuriated with him. Diana herself wouldn’t vote for him, supposing she still was living in Versailles when the next election came around. She watched as a burly man in a plaid mackinaw rose, accepted a hand mike from Jeff or Zane to ask the first question, and instead launched into a lengthy jeremiad on the harm done by regulations on agriculture, while the senator nodded and commiserated with him and promised legislation to loosen the regulations. The next questioner was worried about taxes, which the senator promised legislation to lower, and Diana stifled a yawn.
About forty-five minutes into the Q&A, however, the tenor of the meeting took a sudden swerve when an elderly man near the front of the seating spoke into the hand mike.
“Senator, where do you stand on this here Equal Rights Amendment I hear talk about? You wanna see women prison guards? You wanna see little girls on wrestling teams with boys?”
Before the senator could disavow women prison guards or girls on wrestling teams, an uproar in the back row brought every head swiveling to see what was going on.
“E! R! A! E! R! A!” Clap clap clap. “E! R! A! E! R! A!” Clap clap clap. “E! R! A! E! R! A!”
Diana, who had turned to stare with everyone else, recognized one or two faces among the chanting, clapping women whom she had seen on campus, probably students. Most were strangers, and when she chanced a look back over her shoulder, she saw the senator looked unsurprised at the demonstration.
Not so his audience, which rose in rage.
“Shaddup and siddown!”
“Missoula agitators! Go back to Missoula!”
“Go home and tend to your knittin!”
“A woman’s place is in the house,” screamed one of the demonstrators. “And in the senate, too!”
Now the chanting women were leaving their seats to file up the aisle toward the senator, while Diana, torn between keeping her anonymity and wanting to join the protestors for the sheer hell-raising pleasure of it, stared in disbelief as a man confronted the woman at the head of the demonstration by grabbing her arm and twisting it until she screamed and sank to her knees.
As more scuffling broke out, Diana saw the senator speak an aside to one of his aides. The next moment uniformed Versailles police burst into the conference room to separate the combatants. The man who had twisted the woman’s arm made the mistake of throwing a punch at the intervening policeman and found himself under arrest along with two or three of the women and several more men from the audience.
As one of the policemen led a handcuffed woman back down the aisle, he glanced at Diana and paused. It was Jake’s friend Saylor. He seemed to struggle for what he wanted to say.
