Part Three 4 page

"Oh, but that was all his fault! I remember it very clearly. I asked him if the Green Dog had ever been another color. He said that before the book was written he had been blue, but that I mustn't ever tell anyone because it was a big secret." She rubbed her hand lovingly over the blue body as if she was trying to pet either the dog or her father's memory.

I looked at her and tried to figure out what was going to happen with us. She was thirty-six (I had finally gotten up the nerve one day to ask, and she told me without batting an eye), and I was thirty-one, not that that made any difference. If I wanted her, then I would have to spend the rest of my life in Galen. But was that so bad? I could write books – maybe my father's book next – teach English at Galen High School, travel once in a while. We would always have to come back here, but that wasn't such a terrible thought. Live in my hero's house, make love to his daughter, be someone to the Galeners because in a funny way I might end up being their savior.

"You know that Saxony will have to leave soon, Thomas."

I came up out of my thought-fog and coughed. The cellar was damp and cold, and I had left my heavy sweater upstairs in the bedroom.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"I said that she will have to leave soon. Now that you know everything about us here in Galen, you'll stay and write the book, but she has nothing to do with it anymore. She has to go."

Her voice was so calm and indifferent. She said all this while she flipped through the pages of the coloring book.

"Why, Anna?" I whined. What the hell was I whining for? I snatched it back and replaced it with some good, strong indignation. "What are you talking about?" I tossed the doll that I was holding back into the box.

"I told you before, Thomas: no one lives here but Father's people. It's all right now for you to stay, but not Saxony. She doesn't belong here anymore."

I gave my head a dramatic slap and tried to laugh it off. "Come on, Anna, you're beginning to sound like Bette Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte." I slipped into a stupid Southern belle accent. "'I'm sorry, Gilbert, but it's time now for Jeanette to go.'" I laughed again and made a face like a nut. Anna smiled back sweetly.

"Come on, Anna! What are you talking about? You're just kidding me, right? Huh? Well, come on, why? What the hell difference does it make if she's here or not? I haven't told her anything. You know that."

She put the coloring book in the box and stood up. She closed the top and sealed it with some brown tape she had brought down with her. She started to shove the box back into the corner with her foot, but I grabbed her wrist and made her look at me.

"Why?"

"You know why, Thomas. Don't waste my time asking." The same anger flashed at me that I'd seen that day in the woods with Richard Lee.

She iced the cake ten minutes later by telling me that I had to leave because she had to go see Richard.

As soon as I got home that night Saxony and I had a huge fight. It centered around an idiotic errand that I had forgotten to do for her. Naturally the crazy anger that reared up out of both of us stemmed from everything that we had been suppressing all along. A few minutes into it she had turned poppy-red, and I caught myself clenching and unclenching my fists like an exasperated husband in a situation comedy.

"I keep saying this to you, Thomas, but if it's so bad around here, then why don't you just go?"

"Saxony, will you please take it easy? I didn't say –"

"Yes you did. If everything is so great over there, then go! Do you think I love your little soft-shoe back and forth from her to me?"

I tried to stare her down, but at the moment I didn't have the guts to go one-on-one with her for very long. I looked away and then back. She was still smoldering.

"What do you want me to do, Sax?"

"Stop asking me that question! You sound so helpless. You want me to answer it for you, and I refuse to. You want me to order you out or to tell you to leave her and come back to me. But I won't, Thomas. You're the one who has caused all of this. You're the one who wanted it, so now you can decide how you're going to handle it. I love you, and you know that very well. But, I'm not going to be able to put up with it for much longer. I think that you had better decide something fast." Her voice was almost a whisper when she finished, and I had to lean forward to catch the last words. The next ones came out in a blast, and I jumped back. "I can't get over how damned stupid you are, Thomas! You make me want to strangle you. How dumb can you be? Don't you know what a great time we would have together? Once you finish this book, we could go off somewhere and live a hundred different, wonderful lives. Can't you see what Anna is doing to you? She's pulling you down to worship in front of her horrible little altar to her father –"

"Hey, look, Saxony, what about your interest in Fr –"

"I know, I know, me too. But I don't want Marshall France anymore, Thomas. I don't want to be lovers with a book or a puppet now. I want to be lovers with you. All of those other things, we can do in our spare time, but the rest is for us. Wait! Wait a minute!" She got up from her chair and limped off to the kitchen. She was back in two seconds with a few marionettes in her hand. "Do you see these? Do you know why I carved them? To take my mind off everything. That's right, it's the truth. It's so pathetic the way I dig-dig-dig at the wood all afternoon, trying not to think too hard about where you are or what you're doing. When we were driving out here in the car, that was the first time in my life that I haven't worked every single day. And I loved it! I didn't care about these things. There was too much to do with you. I know how important your book is to you, Thomas. I know how important it is that you finish it…."

"I don't know what you're saying, Sax."

"Okay, all right. Look, do you remember that first day that we got here? The barbecue that they were having downtown?"

I bit my top lip in and nodded.

"Do you remember that the first thing I did when I started talking to Goosey was to tell her about the book?"

"You're damn right I remember! I wanted to kill you. Why did you do that after all we'd talked about?"

She put the puppets down on the couch and ran both hands through her hair. I realized from the gesture how much longer it had grown. I had never told her how nice it looked. "Do you know about women's intuition? Don't start making faces, Thomas, because it's true. There is something there a lot of the time. Another sense or something. Remember I told you that I knew when you and Anna started sleeping together? Anyway, whether you believe me or not, I was sure almost from the moment that we got here that somehow things between us were going to go wrong if you started to do that book. I was trying to get them to throw us out of here that day. I'm sorry, but I was. I thought that if I told them what we wanted to do, they wouldn't let us get within three feet of Anna France."

"Sabotage."

"Yes, that's right. I was trying to sabotage this whole thing. I didn't want it to happen after how strong we'd become in just those few days together. I knew that once you got involved here, everything would go bad. And I was right, wasn't I?" She picked up her puppets and walked out of the room. We didn't talk any more that night.

Two days later I bumped into Mrs. Fletcher outside the market. Her metal cart was filled with a fifty-pound bag of potatoes and about ten quart bottles of prune juice.

"Well, hello there, stranger. I haven't seen much of you lately. Working hard?"

"Hi, Mrs. Fletcher. Yes, pretty hard."

"Anna tells me that the book is going along fine now."

"Yes, it's good." My mind was on a million things, and I had no desire to shoot the breeze with her.

"You've got to get Saxony out of here soon, Tom. You know that?"

A dog barked, and I heard a car start up. The cold air filled with exhaust smoke.

A chunk of anger and despair moved up through me and stopped in my chest. "What the hell difference does it make if she stays or goes? Christ almighty, I'm getting goddamned tired of being told what to do. What the hell difference does it make if Saxony stays?"

Her smile fell. "Anna didn't tell you?" She put her hand on my shoulder. "She really didn't tell you anything?"

Her tone of voice scared me. "No, nothing. What is it? Come on, what are you talking about?" Cars and people moved around us like fish in an aquarium.

"Did you see… ? No, you couldn't have. Look, Tom, if I really say anything to you about this, I could get into some real trouble. I'm not kidding. All of this is very dangerous. I'll tell you this much, though…" She pretended to straighten some things in her cart while she spoke. "I'll tell you this – if you don't get your Saxony out of here, she'll get sick. She'll get so sick that she dies. That was part of the journals. That was how Marshall kept Galen away from everything else."

"But what about me? Why won't I get sick too? I'm from the outside."

"You're the biographer. You're protected. That's the way Marshall wrote it. There's no way to change it."

"But, Mrs. Fletcher, what about the journals? The things in them haven't been happening for a long time. Everything is out of whack here."

"No, you're wrong, Tom. Ever since you started writing, everything's gone right again, that's the point." She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. "You have to get her out, Tom. You listen to me. Even if the journals are screwed up and she doesn't get sick, Anna don't want her around. That's what you've got to worry about most of all. Anna is a strong woman, Tom. You don't ever want to play games with her." She hurried away, and I heard the shivering rattle of her metal cart as it moved away across the parking lot.

"Do you have a minute?"

She was chopping celery on a small wooden butcher-block square I'd bought her.

"You look like you're sick, Thomas. Are you feeling all right?"

"Yeah, sure, I'm fine, Sax. Look, I don't want to lie to you anymore, okay? I want to tell you exactly how I feel about all of this and then let you decide."

She put her knife down and walked to the sink to wash her hands. She came back to the table drying them on a yellow dish towel I had never seen before.

"All right. Go ahead."

"Sax, you are incredibly important to me. You're the only person that I've ever been with who sees the world almost exactly the same way that I do. I've never experienced that before."

"What about Anna? Doesn't she see things your way?"

"No, she's totally different. My relationship with her is totally different. I think I pretty much know what would happen if you and I stayed together."

She dried her hands slowly, carefully. "And is that what you want?"

"That's what I don't know, Sax. I think I do, but I don't know yet. What I am sure of is that I want to finish this book. It's amazing that at the same time of my life I've come across two things that are so important to me. I wish that it could have happened a different way, but it hasn't. So now I've got to try to do it the right way, even though it will probably end up stupid and wrong.

"Anyway, what I've been thinking of is this, if it's all right with you. If I could have it my way right now, I'd have you go away for a while. Until I finish this draft and get through whatever is going on between Anna and me."

She smirked and dropped the dish towel on the table. "And what happens if you don't 'get through' with Anna? Huh? What then, Thomas?"

"You're right, Sax. I honestly don't know what then. The only thing that I'm sure of is that this way stinks. Nobody likes what's going on now, and all of the hurt and worry and confusion is totally fucking everybody up. I know that it's my fault. I know it, but it's something that has to happen, or else…" I picked up the towel and wrapped it around my fist. It was still damp.

"Or else what? What has to happen – writing your book or going to bed with Anna?"

"Yes, all right, both. Both have to happen if –"

She stood up. She picked up a small block of celery and popped it into her mouth. "You want me to go away so that you can finish your draft and supposedly get through your 'thing' with Anna. That's what you want, right? Okay. I'll go, Thomas. I'll go up to St. Louis and I'll wait there for three months. You'll have to give me some money, because I don't have any left. But after those three months, I'm going to leave. Whether you're there or not, I'll be leaving." She started out of the room. "I owe you that much, but you've been a shit about all of this, Thomas. I'm just glad that you could finally make up your mind about something."

The day she left, it snowed. I woke up about seven and groggily looked out the window. The sun hadn't risen yet, but it had grown light enough to paint everything outside blue-gray. When I realized what was going on, I didn't know if I was happy or sad that we might be snowed in and Saxony wouldn't be able to leave. I stumbled over to the window for a better look and saw how high it had drifted up on the porch. It was still falling, but the flakes were big and slow and falling vertically, and I remembered somewhere that that meant it would stop soon. The house hadn't betrayed the snow's secret yet – the floors were warm under my bare feet, and although I wore only a pajama top and underpants, I wasn't cold.

Snow. My father hated it. He once had to make a movie in Switzerland in the winter, and he never got over the shock. He liked warm tropical places. The swimming pool in our backyard was heated to about three hundred degrees for him. His idea of heaven was heat stroke in the Amazon jungle.

Saxony was only taking one suitcase this time; all of her other things – the notes, the marionettes, and her books – were being left with me in Galen. She wouldn't tell me what she planned on doing in St. Louis, but I was worried because she hadn't packed any of her puppets or her tools. Her bag was on the floor near the window. I went over and pushed it a couple of inches with my bare foot. What would be happening in three months? Where would I be? The book? Everything? No, not everything – the Galeners would be in Galen, and so would Anna.

Saxony was still sleeping when I sneaked my clothes off a chair and tiptoed into the bathroom to get dressed. I wanted to make a really nice going-away breakfast for her, so I'd gotten a fat Florida grapefruit for the occasion.

Sausage, scrambled eggs with sour cream, fresh whole-wheat bread, and a grapefruit. I got them all out of the refrigerator and lined them up like soldiers on the Formica counter. Sax's breakfast. By noon she would probably be gone. No more hairs in the sink, no more fights about Anna, no more Rocky and Bullwinkle on television at four in the afternoon. Christ, enough of that. I started to work on the meal like the mad chef, because I was already starting to miss her and she wasn't even out of bed. When she came into the kitchen, she was wearing the same clothes that she'd worn the first day we met. I ended up burning three sausages.

She asked if I would call the bus station and find out if the bus to St. Louis was still running in the snow. I called on the phone in the downstairs hall. I gazed at the snow through the half-window in the front door. The flakes had stopped.

"The snow's stopped!"

"I see from here. Aren't you delighted?"

I grimaced and tapped my foot.

"Galen Bus."

"Hi, yes, uh, I'd like to know if your nine-twenty-eight to St. Louis will still be going today?"

"Why wouldn't it?" Whoever it was sounded like a cigar-store Indian.

"Well, you know, the snow and everything."

"He's got chains on it. That bus don't stop running for nothin', friend. Sometimes he's late, but he doesn't stop running."

Saxony came out into the hall with half a grapefruit in one hand and a spoon in the other. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told her that it was going. She walked to the front door and looked at the snow.

I hung up and couldn't decide whether to go back into the kitchen or go to her and see what she would do. I chickened out and went back to the kitchen.

My eggs were still warm, so I scooped some sour cream onto the side of my plate and ate quickly.

"Sax, aren't you going to finish your breakfast? That's a long bus ride to St. Louis."

When she didn't answer, I thought it best just to leave her alone. While I ate, I envisioned her eating her grapefruit at the front door, watching the snow end.

I had finished my second cup of coffee when I started to get a little nervous about her. Her plate was filled with food and her teacup was up to the top.

"Sax?"

I threw my napkin on the table and got up. She wasn't in the hall, and neither was her coat or her suitcase. She had left the hollowed-out grapefruit rind and spoon on the radiator near the door. I unhooked my coat from the rack and moved toward the door. The phone rang. I cursed and snatched it up.

"Yeah? What?"

"Thomas?" It was Anna.

"Look, Anna, I can't talk to you now, okay? Saxony just left, and I've got to catch her before she's gone."

"What? Don't be ridiculous, Thomas. Obviously if she left without telling you, she doesn't want you with her. Leave her alone. She doesn't want to say good-bye to you. You can understand that."

That made me mad. I had had enough of Anna's gems of wisdom, and there were things that I wanted to say to Saxony before she took off. I told Anna that I would call her later and hung up.

The cold sucked away all the heat from my body before I had left the porch, and my teeth were chattering as I went through the front gate. A car went slowly by, its chains ka-chunking and throwing snow out from beneath the wheel wells. I knew that the bus didn't leave for another hour, but I started running anyway. I had on heavy insulated work boots that the man in the shoe store had guaranteed against frostbite down to thirty degrees below zero. But running in them was a slow-motion jog. I didn't have my gloves, either, so I ran with my hands stuffed into my pockets; I didn't have my wool hat, so my ears and even my cheeks began to ache.

When I finally saw her, I stopped running. I didnt know what I wanted to say, but I had to say something to her before she left.

She must have heard me coming, because she turned and faced me just as I was about to catch up with her. "I wish you hadn't, Thomas."

I was out of breath, and my eyes were watering from the cold. "But why did you just go off like that, Sax? Why didn't you wait for me?"

"Am I allowed to do something my own way for a change? Is it okay if I leave this place the way I want to?"

"Come on, Sax…"

The anger fell away from her eyes and she closed them for several seconds. She began speaking while they were still closed. "This is all hard enough for me, Thomas. Please don't make it any harder. Go back to the house and go to work. I'll be all right. I've got my book with me and I can sit in the station and read until the bus comes. Okay? I'll call you at the end of the week. Okay?"

She gave me a quick smile and reached down for her bag. I didn't even try to take my hands out of my pockets. She took a couple of crunching steps and then hefted the suitcase for a better grip.

But she didn't call at the end of the week. I made a point of staying home from Wednesday night on, but she didn't call. I didn't know if that was good or bad, nasty or forgetful or what. Since she wasn't the kind of person who normally forgets to do things like that, I was nervous. In my fantasies I saw her tiredly trudging up the stairs of a dingy building that had a curling brown sign in a downstairs window advertising rooms for rent. She knocked on the door and the mad rapist or butcher-knife murderer welcomed her and invited her in for a cup of tea.

Or else, what was worse was a shiny new building where the landlord was six foot two, ash blond, and sexy as hell. I was hopeless. If I spent the night in our apartment, the bed felt as big and as cold as the ocean. If I spent the night at Anna's, then I thought about Saxony all the time. Naturally I knew that if Sax was there, my desire for her would have been less and we'd be fighting again, but she wasn't there and I missed her. I missed her very much.

She called on Tuesday night. She sounded ebullient and excited and was full of news. She knew an old friend from college who used to live in St. Louis. It turned out that he still lived there. She had even found a job working part-time at a children's day-care center. She had gone to the movies twice and seen the new Robert Altman. Her friend's name was Geoff Wiggins.

I tried not to swallow my tongue too fast. I smiled sickly at the receiver, half-thinking that it was Saxony. I asked her who this Geoff was. A professor of architecture at Washington University. Was she living… uh… staying with him until she found a place? No, no, that was what was so great – – she didn't have to look now because Geoff had invited her to stay there with himmmm..

I got the address and telephone number of old Geoff from her and then tried to finish our conversation with as much cool as possible, but I know that I came across sounding like a cross between Hal the Computer and Woody Woodpecker. When I hung up I felt totally miserable.

I got a letter from one of my students. Seeing the kid's name on the return address was a shock in itself, but the contents of the damned thing knocked me for a loop.

Dear Mr. Abbey,

How are you? I guess you're pretty glad to be away from here this year. I don't know what that feeling is like yet, but I will in June, when, believe it or not, I'll be graduating. I got into Hobart early decision, so I'm pretty much taking it easy these days. I go over to the Senior House a lot to watch television, and I've even been reading some of the books on that list that you gave us last year that you said we'd like.

My favorite so far has been The Young Lions (by Irwin Shaw), but I really also liked The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) and Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe). I guess talking about books is the best way to tell you why I'm writing this letter. I've been here for almost six years now (and you can believe me when I say that they've been six long ones!) and I've had every teacher in the school at one time or another (or just about). Anyway, I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized that you were the best one. I wasn't any big "A" student in your class and I know that I fooled around a lot in your class with Romero, but believe it or not, I got more out of that English class last year than any other course I took. Whenever we had a discussion they were always interesting, and I know that more than once I'd read something you had assigned and not really liked it, but after you had finished talking about it in class, I either did like it or at least I understood what the writer was trying to say. You always asked us for examples on our essays to support what we said, so the one I'm thinking about here is when we read Walden and most of us thought it was bad, no offense. After you had gone through it, though, I could see what Thoreau was trying to say even though I never did end up liking the whole book.

I have Stevenson this year for Senior English (we're right in the middle of King Lear), and since you're not here, I guess I'm allowed to say that compared to you, he's bad news. Half of the time we fall asleep in his class and the other half I spend doodling in my notebook. I know that I doodled in your class too, but I want you to know that I was always listening and that even though I only got C's from you, it was the best class that I've had here, bar none.

I hope that everything is going well for you out there. Maybe you'll be back in time for graduation and you can laugh when I go up to get my diploma. Ha Ha!

Tom

Rankin

Tom Rankin was one of those boys who look like something out of a jar of eels. Thin and hunched, greasy long hair, rumpled clothes, big thick smudged glasses. I had always known that he wasn't any dummy, just totally unmotivated. One of those students who are able to skim a book the night before a test and still squeeze out some kind of C or C –.

Another dream-vision of "Abbey's Future" floated up through my mind: finish the biography and then go back East with Saxony. Teach part-time at some school (maybe even at the old one, after Rankin's letter!) and write the rest of the time. Buy an old house with bay windows and brass door plates, with room enough for each of us to have separate studies. I don't know if it was Geoff Wiggins' doing, but after that phone call, I thought about Saxony a hell of a lot.

"Mrs. Fletcher, has anyone ever left Galen? Any of Marshall's people?"

She had asked me up to her apartment one night for a cup of organic cocoa, whatever that was. It tasted all right.

"Left? How far have you read in the journals?"

"I'm up to January of nineteen sixty-four."

"Nineteen sixty-four? Well, there was one girl, Susy Dagenais, but you'll be reading about her in the nineteen sixty-five book. I can tell you about her anyway if you'd like."

"Please."

"Susy Dagenais was a real pistol. She was one of those people that you were asking about before – one of the ones who didn't want to know her fate? The whole time she lived here she hated being one of us. She said it made her feel like a freak in the circus and that one day she would leave because she didn't believe where she'd come from. You know all about that, don't you, Tom? As soon as a child can understand things, their parents tell them who they are and why they're so special. They don't tell them anything else until the kid's eighteen, but some things got to be explained early so that they don't go do something foolish like run away from home."

"Yes, I know about that, but what was Susy like?"

"Oh, she was a great gal – pretty, real smart. We all loved her around here, but there wasn't anything we could do to stop her. She packed a bag, got on the bus to New York, and was gone. Poor thing – she'd just been in New York a couple of days when she died."

"But Marshall was alive then. Why didn't he stop her? He could have done it if he wanted to."

"Tom, Tom, you're not thinkin'. Yes, Marshall was alive, and sure he could have stopped her."

"But he didn't!"

"No, he didn't. Think, Tom. Why do you think he didn't?"

"The only thing I can imagine was to show people that he meant what he said. He used her as a kind of hideous example."

"Right. You hit it on the head. But I wouldn't use the word 'hideous.'"

"Of course it's hideous! He wrote this poor character so that from the beginning she didn't want to know, then he wrote that she would leave Galen and die in a week? That's not hideous?"

"Nobody else has ever tried to leave since then, Tom. And she was happy – she thought she was getting away. She did get away."

"But he wrote it that way! She had no choice!"

"She died doing what she wanted, Tom."

Phil Moon and Larry Stone worked together in the Galen post office. They were friends long before they married the Chandler sisters, but the marriages brought them closer.

Their passion was bowling. Both of them owned expensive custom Brunswick balls and matching bags, and if they had been a little better, they might have been pro material. As it was, they bowled every Wednesday and Friday night at Scappy's Harmony Lanes in Frederick, the next town over. They alternated cars and split the cost of gasoline. Once in a while their wives went with them, but the girls knew how much their husbands appreciated their Boys' Night Out, so they often splurged on their own Wednesdays and Fridays and went to the movies or dinner and shopping afterward at the Frederick Town Mall.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 578