The Day's Heat Page 4

  Although in the long afternoon hours while she sewed and the girls slept, it was hard not to go over the history of their marriage. She’d lose track of the soap operas and trace back over her married life, looking for clues, for reasons. He’d been happy when she got pregnant with Cassie, their first, but the second pregnancy had caused a totally different reaction, and now, after only seven years, she and Charles were like all the other couples they knew: their friends, their parents, people she saw in the grocery store—glumly silent or snapping at each other.

  She tried to remember why she’d loved him so, at her wedding when she did love him. There was a sweetness, a gentleness about him then that had drawn her in. She tried to remember the girl, who, beyond happiness, in a ballerina-length, white tulle dress, had walked down the aisle toward a young man, golden and muscular in a pale-blue tuxedo. Above the altar, chiseled in black and gray marble, were the words: “I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.”

  Asleep, Cassie and Lill leaned against Lee so that she was almost dozing over the third skirt when the phone rang.

  “It’s Father Palmer, Mrs. Bettlemain,” the voice explained on the other end of the line, not bothering with hello. “I’ve called Dr. Obermon about my wisdom teeth.”

  The priest’s voice sounded hesitant and to Lee, still sleepy, a long way off. He was telling her he didn’t want to have the wisdom teeth out, but that the dentist insisted. “I’ll see him tomorrow about this front tooth, to have it cemented in, but next Monday when I have the wisdom teeth out ….”

  There was a long pause, in which Lee wanted to say, “Well, what?” but she waited.

  “Would it be possible for you to drive me, Mrs. Bettlemain? Dr. Obermon says I’ll be groggy afterwards, worse than I was this morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lee answered. She didn’t remind him that she’d made the appointment herself, had promised the dentist: next week for the wisdom teeth. She used her efficient, no-nonsense voice; her I-didn’t-sit-in-a-thin-nightgown-and-show-you-my-breasts-on-purpose voice. “Tell me when exactly.”

  “Next Monday at one o’clock.”

  “Okay, I’ll pick you up at 12:30 at the rectory.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bettlemain.”

  “You’re welcome, Father Palmer.”

  Chapter 3

  The House of Marriage, it’s the scariest house on the block, to be sure.

  Erin Hanusa, The House of Marriage.

  Lee hung up the phone, puffed her cheeks and blew out slowly. “What’s going on?” she whispered in amazement and then in elation. The priest had called. She would see him again. The two emotions mixed together took over. She couldn’t resist making a foolish little rhyme out of the question that she sang out loud.

  What’s going on?

  What’s it leading to?

  Why am I so silly?

  Why’s the sky so blue?

  What’s going on?

  It was a question she often put to herself on other subjects, part of her “devious nature,” her mother would have said.

  Charles never seemed to wonder what was under the surface. “What’s it matter that the Baker woman wants all new plumbing when nothing’s wrong with the old?” he’d once asked in irritation at Lee’s persistence in questioning him. “Just means more business for the shop.” And later, when it came out that Mrs. Baker had run up bills that her husband would have to pay before the divorce, Charles’s attitude was still, “Well, so what?” Charles, who could speculate with his brother, Brother—his real name on his birth certificate—for twenty minutes on why a wide receiver had missed a certain pass, found nothing particularly interesting about people, nothing to come home and tell Lee about. She, on the other hand, found everything curious, fascinating, spent hours while doing housework or sewing, musing on the why of a phrase or a look.

  Why hadn’t Father Palmer called Sister Ellen, principal of St. Anthony’s School, who did all the driving for the other nuns and for old Father Kennedy, too, when he was ill? Or why hadn’t he called that deliciously-blonde Erica Fleming, who for three years had looked willing to sacrifice herself bodily on the altar for the new priest? Why not one of a small select group of people who he should have gathered around himself by now?

  It was an understanding in the parish that each priest and each nun would have a circle of friends that made themselves available, who belonged to them, in the way that old Father Kennedy belonged to Lee.

  True, Sister Ellen drove the old priest to the doctor in an emergency, and he stayed with the Simms on Jekyll Island two weeks every summer, but it was to Lee’s house that he came every Saturday evening after Confession. And about once a month, Father Kennedy took Lee to a Sunday matinee when he found out that Charles preferred television and didn’t mind babysitting since Cassie and Lill were usually taking their naps.

  Father Kennedy had been pastor of St. Anthony’s parish for twenty-three years, and when he was finally, really old—eighty—Bishop Payne had asked for a partial retirement and sent Father Palmer to be head pastor. In the first year, the new priest moved the rectory from the third floor of the old school into the vacated two-story convent house beside the church.

  “It’s unseemly,” Father Palmer had said at all the Masses, “for your parish priests to live in four rooms, in a third story above a falling-down schoolhouse, especially now that the lower floors are empty.”

  With the building of the new school and convent, the Sisters of St. Joseph had moved out to Anthony’s Acres in the northwest section—the upper middle-class section—of Strickland.

  Father Kennedy had surprised everyone by not following Father Palmer across the street to the new rectory, but instead, insisted on living out his retirement above the abandoned school. “I’m used to it up there,” he’d said. “Sometimes at night I can still hear the children underneath reciting lessons, the nuns calling roll.”

  Before seeing Father Palmer’s tall straight form and striking features, before the embarrassment in the hospital and the morning electricity between them, Lee had thought she didn’t want a new priest. She and Father Kennedy had worked it all out between themselves. After she stopped nursing Cassie, she could use birth control because she’d had a child the first year of her marriage, because it was a matter of conscience, and because Charles wasn’t Catholic.

  “We must not burden your young husband unduly,” Father Kennedy had wheezed from behind the grill in the confessional. It was not the old priest’s fault that the diaphragm didn’t work.

  Yet Father Kennedy was like a family doctor, someone who knew where the aches were, what the last operation was, or the family lawyer who knew who almost had a divorce, where the deed to the house was kept. For Bishop Payne to say start all over again with a new pastor was almost funny, almost impossible.

  “Well, and what do you think of the new man, love?” Father Kennedy had asked Lee in his thick Irish accent, after Father Palmer’s first Mass, the old priest’s deep-set glinting eyes glanced to the side, not meeting hers. Questions hung in the air. Will you like him better than me? Will you ask him to dinner? To the movies?

  “Just another pretty face,” Lee said, keeping her own face deadpan, noncommittal. The old priest loved her wisecracks.

  Father Kennedy’s grizzled head, the white mustache and beard, nicotine-stained from the cigarette that always sat in the corner of his mouth, trembled with laughter. Yet in his thick shoulders, the high cheekbones and fierce eyes, it was easy to see that once Father Kennedy, himself, had been handsome and virile—a lot like Father Palmer; the kind of priest who made people wonder why they had chosen that life, a life of celibacy.

  Well, Lee thought, at least she had something to focus on until next Monday. If she thought about this tall interesting priest and why he had called her instead of Erica Flemming, she wouldn’t have to think about paying hospital bills or about the Bettlemains paying them; not have to think about Charles’s silence, about the delivery, the pain
and everything else connected with childbirth. In a few months, the small round lump riding the top of her pubic bone would turn into a full, moving belly. The child she could picture now only in terms of bills and dirty diapers would be a knocking of elbows and knees, a pushing of tiny hands and feet, a hiccupping inside that could be soothed by a low crooning and her hand patting the taut skin of her abdomen. She only had to look at Cassie and Lill asleep on the couch, alike as two alabaster dolls, to know it was better not to think. So she began to map out her plan.

  On Monday, right after getting Cassie from kindergarten, she’d pick up Willie Mae, her mother-in-law’s maid. Claire was always telling Lee to use the colored woman for an afternoon. “That darky don’t have near enough to do around here; she could keep both our houses.”

  Lee had employed Willie Mae a few times while she played bridge with Claire and her friends, and it was a miracle to come home to clean floors, an empty sink, and the clothes off the lines, folded, and put away. She wondered how the fat dark woman managed to care for the girls and do all the housework. By comparison, the long afternoon at the bridge table, the continuous rounds of cards and coffee, seemed unworthy.

  Willie Mae always asked, “You have a good time, Miss Lee?”

  Lee would search the smooth brown face under a kerchief or the tied end of a nylon hose for some malice, some resentment, some of what had shown in her mother’s maids’ faces. It became a need, a point of honor, on the drive to take Willie Mae back to South Troupe Street, for Lee to slip three dollars—pay for turning one hem—rolled into a thin green cylinder into the maid’s hand, a brown hand that stayed clasped over the money throughout the ride, hands edged on the sides in pink flesh, as light as Lee’s in the palms.

  “Thank you, Miss Lee,” Willie Mae would say without inflection, as she got out of the car in front of an unpainted shotgun house, one room wide, three rooms deep. Her “thank-you” exactly the same whether Lee paid extra or not.

  I don’t like her working for me, Lee thought every time she took Willie Mae home. It turns me into my mother. To pick the maid up and to take the maid home was the border that framed Darcy’s day. To complain about how the maid didn’t clean, how the maid stole, how the maid quit without notice was Darcy’s conversation.

  At home, Lee told her daughters, “If I were colored, I’d be a Mau-Mau.” She rumpled her hair up into frizzy black coils, put on a wild look, and began a lumbering walk that was pure Frankenstein monster. “And you two little white gals would be the first to go.”

  Cassie and Lill shrieked and ran, for there was some truth in their mother’s pretense, something that truly frightened. When she caught them, Lee nibbled on their arms and their shoulders, pulled their hair, and gently slapped them all over, even their faces. There was a bit of sharpness in the bites and a sting in the hair pulling and slaps. But the girls were used to their mother’s boisterous playacting and were equally rowdy, pinching back, shrieking at the tops of their voices.

  “You’re tough for a female,” Charles had half-way-complimented Lee in the first rough-housing days of their marriage, but after those first sweet honeymoon years, their games had turned into contests of real strength, which Charles always won. Lee would be red-faced and close to tears, her wrists and arms smarting from where he’d held her down. “If you’d just say ‘uncle’ and get it over with,” he’d complain, “I wouldn’t have to hurt you.” But these days, he hollered, “Don’t run through the house, Lee. For god’s sake, you’re worse than the kids. Leave ’em alone.” And when Lee tried to pull him into a game, into playing tag, touching him as she ran past, he fussed, “Cut it out. I’m too damn tired.”

  And no wonder, Lee explained to herself. Charles left every morning at 5:00 with Brother, who, in the Bettlemain & Sons truck, picked him up, honking the horn again and again. Lee made two egg sandwiches and a thermos of coffee for Charles to eat on the way to the job. It let him sleep thirty minutes longer.

  “What law says the plumbing business has to start at 5:00?” Lee asked, almost every morning, sometimes out loud.

  “Dad and Brother are the ones,” was Charles’s answer. Brother was out at 4:30 a.m. to get the truck, and their father, Lon, was already on the job site at 4:00.

  That night, Lee told Charles that her sister, Ray, had stopped by.

  “For about twenty minutes, right?” was his half-interested reply.

  “Yes,” Lee agreed, but then was silent.

  Usually she told her husband everything that happened in a day, would have started with Father Palmer’s tooth and gone detail by detail through Dr. Obermon’s office to Ray’s visit, but not this evening. The priest’s phone call sat like a cool smooth marble in her mouth, and she kept turning it over and over, trying to catch a reason somewhere in its taste.

  She’d hummed softly, “Lee-ee James to the rescue” all evening, while she cooked macaroni and cheese, two kinds of flat green pole beans—her mother-in-law’s way with large chunks of ham and the Lebanese way with tomatoes, onions, and garlic. Charles hated garlic.

  And all the while, the question—Why had the priest called her?—floated in her brain with other questions. Had Father Kennedy seen her in the rectory driveway? The empty school sat directly across the street, and it would be easy for the old priest to spy from his third-story window. Should she tell him? Surely he would hear of the knocked-out tooth before the week was past. Every incident made the rounds at St. Anthony’s parish, usually several times over. The janitor, Ralph, a tattletale gossip, had probably already reported the accident to the principal, Sister Ellen, even before Lee and Father Palmer reached the dentist’s office.

  So after the girls were in bed, instead of gushing with words, as she often felt herself doing, asking Charles about his day, commenting on the television shows, telling what the girls had been up to—exaggerating to make things funnier and more interesting—Lee sat, sewing, silent. The needle slipped a half inch at a time inside the fold of the coat, Charles leaned back in his recliner, and the television’s gray noise crackled in the background.

  But right in the middle of Sea Hunt, her husband asked, “Why’d you let Lill stay in kindergarten this morning?”

  Lee had thought Charles oblivious to his daughters’ talk at the dinner table, Lill’s excited report on getting to stay in kindergarten, of doing Ls, a whole page of them for Mrs. Thornton.

  “Oh,” Lee said, hardly pausing before the lie, “She’s been wanting to stay with Cassie, and today Mrs. Thornton said she could.” Lee felt her lips touch together, her tongue against the backs of her teeth, the falsehood something bitter going out instead of going down.

  Charles had turned his wide serious face toward her for a second, but as Lee answered, he was already looking back to the television set.

  In seven years, she said to him silently, the one thing I omit, you ask me about.

  “Dad wants to put up a new building, a bigger shed for equipment,” Charles continued, not taking his eyes from the TV screen and scratching the beginnings of a paunch exactly like his father’s.

  Lee didn’t look up from her needle but said, “You and Brother need a raise, instead of a bigger place to work.” But she uttered the words softly. This time, the bid for more money from Lon Bettlemain held no bitterness. She’d made the request so often before, the way one sings the refrain in a song, over and over. She’d even made a rhyme out of that petition, too. Now, she sang the words under her breath.

  How ’bout a raise? How ’bout a raise?

  I’m not asking for a limo or a chain of gold.

  But how ’bout a dryer, hanging clothes is getting old.

  How ’bout a raise? How ’bout a raise?

  Charles said, “We need a warehouse bad. Too much of our rig sits out in the weather.”

  Lee didn’t sing her song louder or point out that a new building and expensive equipment were just other signs that Lon Bettlemain could afford to pay more than sixty dollars a week to Charles and seventy to Brothe
r because he drove the truck. She knew what she could say and usually did say, but now she was afraid of stopping the flow of words coming from her husband.

  “We dug line all day today, when we wasn’t under a house,” Charles went on. “The backhoe can’t grade or level on a slant, so somebody’s gotta get in and dig. I hate it when the ground’s wet. Never dig line what I don’t think of R.J. in that sand over in Homerville.”

  It was one of her husband’s few stories. R.J., a plumber’s helper, crushed when a ditch he was digging caved in. Charles, Brother, and their father Lon trying to dig R.J. out, trying to keep the sand and clay from covering his mouth, his head, but as Charles always finished, “It weren’t no use.”

  Lee could imagine Charles, teenager-thin, frantic, with a shovel and then with his hands, the long drive for help that came too late. It was a scene she tried not to see. The story always brought the realization that the plumbing business was not only early mornings and long hours, but like every human activity carried the seeds of death within it. The fact that Charles, her husband, could be lost …. His silence or bad moods wouldn’t matter then.

  Lee put the coat down and went to sit on the floor beside her husband. Ignoring the stiff dirt smell of his pants leg, she put her head on his knee, and he smoothed the back of her neck, his work-scarred hand catching in her hair.

  I could tell him about the baby now, she thought, yet at the same time knew she wouldn’t.

  It was the mistake she’d made when first pregnant with Lill, a mistake advised in Redbook, in an article called, “How to be Closer to Your Husband.” The article said, “Be romantic, cook his favorite meal, wear something seductive, light candles.” Lee had worn a pale-yellow sundress that Charles had liked when they were dating, brought him a beer as he sat on the carport taking off his muddy boots, made his favorite dinner—fried chicken and mayonnaisey potato salad—lit candles, and put Cassie to bed early. But the promised closeness didn’t come. “Why’s it so damn dark in here?” Charles had asked, turning on the overhead light. And later, after he’d started eating, when she told him, “We’re going to have another baby,” he’d slammed the chicken breast down, showering the table with greasy golden flakes. “I thought we agreed on no more children for a while,” he’d said, and then left and stayed at his folks for two days and two nights.