Mercy Street(49)

AT NOON CLAUDIA STEPPED OUT FOR A SANDWICH. OUTSIDE, the sky had darkened, storm clouds gathering. At twelve thirty in the afternoon, the streetlamps were bright.

When she returned to Mercy Street, the wind had kicked up. A woman stood in the shelter of the building, trying to light a cigarette. She looked very cold, underdressed in her chic leather jacket. It took Claudia a moment to recognize Julia Ramsey, Hannah’s mother. The cigarette confused her. It seemed at odds with the vitamins-and-yogurt thing.

“Here.” Claudia approached and stood with her back to the wind. “Let me block you.”

Julia tried again: scratch, pause, inhale. “Got it. Thank you. God, that’s good.” She studied the cigarette in her hand, as if unsure how it had gotten there. “I never smoke. Honestly, I haven’t had one in twenty years.”

“No worries,” said Claudia—an expression she loathed. What exactly did it mean? Nothing, which was why people said it, an innocuous filler for an awkward pause. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better. This day has been—unbelievable.” Julia closed her eyes as if the subject pained her. “I just want it to be over.”

“Hannah said the same thing.” Claudia studied her. “She’s a lovely girl. I enjoyed meeting her, despite the circumstances.”

“She’s a good kid.” Julia smiled wanly. “Kind, thoughtful, straight As at school. She’s never been in trouble. Honestly, I never saw this coming.”

A garbage truck roared past, dieseling loudly.

Julia took a long final drag. “Three puffs. That’s all I need.” She dropped the cigarette and squashed it beneath her heel. “I had one.”

It took Claudia one second to grasp her meaning. In her line of work, such confessions were common. One in four American women would, at some point, terminate a pregnancy. Most, it seemed, carried the secret for the rest of their lives.

“A hundred years ago, when I was in college.” Julia blinked rapidly, her eyes tearing. “I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Have you told Hannah?”

“No.” She seemed startled by the question. “I mean, would you?”

Claudia considered this.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I think I would.”





11


His earliest memory was of his mother. Victor must have been very small. They were in the kitchen of the old house and she was giving him a bath in the sink. A flicker of memory, fleeting, strobelike: the warm water running over him like a blessing, the porcelain cold against his back.

His mother was a whore named Audrey, a name his father would not speak.

After she left, father and son lived in three rooms above a pool hall. When his father worked Hoot Owl, the boy was alone all night in the apartment. He lay awake thinking of the loaded shotgun in the kitchen closet, and waited for an intruder to come.

His mother was a whore because what other kind of woman would leave her child?

Her blonde hair dark at the ends where it dipped into the sink.

His father switched to day shift and in the evenings went out prowling. Victor witnessed adult behavior, drunkenness and fornication. Later he understood that this had warped him, shaped his character in ruinous ways.

He was nine when his father married Junie Thibodeaux. She was not a virtuous woman, which was to be expected. What virtuous woman would have anything to do with his father?

Junie was not virtuous, but she was kind. She approached little Victor cautiously, like a feral cat she meant to tame. Naturally he resisted. In the rooms above the pool hall he’d bathed when he felt like it, which was never. If he got hungry he boiled up a hot dog from the fridge. At Junie’s house—a tin-roof shack out in the sticks—the food wasn’t much different, but they ate it together at a table. There was mustard and ketchup and a slice of Wonder bread to wrap around the hot dog.

Junie had a son his own age, a shy, undersized kid who stuttered when nervous, a choke chain of consonants jammed in his mouth. Randy was born small and had stayed small—not the worst thing that could happen to a child, but in the mid-1960s, in the public schools of northern Appalachia, it opened the door to the worst things. Randy Thibodeaux—technically Victor’s stepbrother—was a runt, it was true. But holding his head in the toilet bowl—the accepted and time-honored punishment for runthood—seemed excessive. As the biggest boy in his class, Victor felt a certain responsibility for maintaining order, like a junior county sheriff. When his stepbrother’s head was held in the toilet bowl, he did not let it stand.

After the incident in the boys’ washroom, Randy didn’t say thank you. He thanked Victor silently, wordlessly, for the rest of his life.

Junie was not virtuous, but Victor was fond of her and sorry when she died. Her days had begun, always, with five minutes of convulsive hacking that woke the household. The cough was a part of her, like her choking laugh and sandpaper voice and the beaded vinyl case that held her Virginia Slims, the brand advertised on the back of Cosmopolitan magazine. Junie kept a stack of back issues in the family’s one bathroom—a convenient arrangement for young Victor, who for one fevered youthful summer masturbated over them twice a day. He was just a boy; he knew nothing of sex. Without the young whores leering out from the pages of Cosmopolitan, he might never have found his own cock.