“Ashamed—”
“You think nobody knows what you’re doing with this food you buy? It’s no secret. Greg Morrow told me.”
Nancy stood up slowly.
“What did Greg Morrow tell you?”
Susan smiled. “That’s for me to know and—”
“This is not a game!” She was shouting, but she could not restrain herself. She had passed some critical border into a new and strange country. “It’s important!”
Susan’s smile evaporated. “Well, all right! Don’t wake up Mr. Lawrence, please! You want to know what Greg Morrow told me? Only the truth, Nancy dear. That you are still carrying on with that farm-boy, Travis Fisher. That he’s living like a tramp with the other tramps under the railway bridge, and that you bring him food, and that you and him—out there in the mud and the cold—that you, you—”
Nancy nodded curtly. “All right.” No need to force that obscenity past Susan’s sensitive lips. It was a lie, but not a particularly invidious one,- the lie concealed, after all, a far stranger and less comprehensible truth.
Nancy tucked her inadequate coinage back into the tin pastille box. She thought of what Anna Blaise had told her. A different place. Connected to here, but not here. We have always been among you. And she suppressed a surge of hysterical laughter. “Anyway” Susan went on, “I did not shortchange you,” adding, in a paroxysm of petulance: “It was only a lousy dime!”
Nancy took her bread and went to the door. The rain was coming down harder than ever. She tucked the paper bag under her coat. A phrase of her father’s reverberated in her mind. She could not recall when he had said it; perhaps he had not, perhaps it was a false memory. But she could hear his voice quite clearly inside her.
Don’t love anything too much. They’ll take it away from you.
But only if they know, Nancy thought. Only if they know.
Hooded and sopping, she trudged north along The Spur. It had occurred to her to wonder why she was doing this, whether she might be mad to pursue so single-mindedly so strange a thing. She passed a newspaper box and the headline in the Courier leaped out at her: HOBO KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. There were dangers involved, yes.
Tim Norbloom passed her in one of the town’s two police cars. A block ahead he slowed, and when she was abreast of the car he paced her a while. Nancy counted out forty steps and then stood quite still, teeth clenched, staring through the rain-blurred window. Defying him. Norbloom gazed back at her impassively—warm and dry inside there—and then stepped on the gas.
She understood. A pattern was emerging. The Courier, Susan Farris, the police, even her mother: all knitted together. They were the Conestoga wagons, circling, and Nancy had been elected Indian.
Abruptly the sidewalk under her feet was cold, foreign. The storefronts were drab beneath their awnings; the rainwater sang in a minor key in the sewer gratings.
Understanding stabbed like a knife. She thought: J don’t live here anymore.
At 1:15 p.m. Helena Baxter, the acting chairwoman, called to order the meeting of the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne. This was unorthodox: but Faye Wilcox, who should have held the chair, was unconscionably late—even though it was Speech Day.
Liza Burack permitted herself a brief smile that lingered throughout the reading of the minutes and the tabling of the unfinished business.
The church meeting hall was crowded, though not uncommonly so for Speech Day. Liza had been given a chair on the platform behind the podium and she was able to see the faces of the members. There were twenty-five or thirty women altogether… not a startling number; significant, she thought, only when you assigned them names. Haute Montagne was (she had heard Creath use the phrase) a Good Plain Town, and it was ruled by Good Plain People. The Baptist Church was a Good Plain Church, too, and friendly with the Methodists and the Episcopalians, though it was generally acknowledged that the Baptists were a little—well, Plainer.
It was a small elite of businessmen who controlled the town, a city council that constituted also, in large part, the executive committee of the Rotarians,- there was Jacob Bingham who owned the hardware store, Bob Clawson the high-school principal, Tim Norbloom of the police department, a handful of lawyers. It had been a clique all but closed to Liza and to Creath, especially since the ice business had fallen on hard times. And Creath’s surliness had presented a problem. But now Creath was back on track (though strangely subdued); she envisioned him pursuing a deaconship, which would better his connections.
And there were the Baptist Women. That significant congregation of wives: Phil McDonnel’s wife, Bob Clawson’s wife, Tim Norbloom’s wife: every important wife, in fact, who had not been sequestered by the Methodists or the Episcopalians, all here today, all staring up at the podium. It would be difficult, Liza thought, but here was an important nexus of power; if she and Creath were to climb back to respectability they would have to begin here.
Faye Wilcox did enter at last, toward the end of the business meeting; head bowed, she unfolded a chair at the back. Helena Baxter offered to give over the podium but Faye only shook her head no. Poor Faye. She had neglected to wear a belt, Liza observed; her dress depended from her immense bosom like a sultan’s tent.
The business meeting ended. Helena Baxter, somewhat daunted—she was a Faye Wilcox partisan—announced the candidates’ speeches. The assembly applauded. Faye Wilcox, as incumbent, was scheduled to speak first.
She trudged to the podium with a visible weariness, and there were whispers of dismay. Liza herself felt a surge of sympathy… dear Lord, this was how she must have looked, those long years when her husband’s indiscretions had sapped so much of her strength and attention. Depleted. Well, she thought. Sympathy is all right. But it was only the natural order of things that was being restored. Faye, after all, was the usurper. Here was her comeuppance.
Her speech was brief and mechanical. She read it from typed pages of Hammermill Bond: “Woman, Helpmate in Troubled Times.” It called for a return to traditional virtues. The speech was a morass of pieties without much life or enthusiasm in it, Liza thought, and when Faye climbed down from the platform, the applause was scattered and contained.
Helena Baxter, frowning now, introduced Liza.
Liza took up the recipe cards on which she had written her speech cues and assumed the podium.
There was the sound of rain washing down the high mullioned windows, the musty smell of leather-bound hymnals stored in the next room. How long since she had done this! The thought of it made her a little afraid. She had chosen a stark theme: “Haute Montagne Must Awaken from Its Long Sleep.”
She cleared her throat.
“Difficult times,” she said, “are upon us.”
She let the words simmer a moment in the dusty air of the church.
“There is no doubt about it. Every woman in Haute Montagne must surely be aware of it. A glance at the headlines is enough. Hard times. Murders. Rebellion. Immorality of an indescribable nature. And we are not safe from it. We must not think we are. But the question is: What can we, as women, do?”
She was surprised at how easy it was. She ignored the cards. The words came fluently. All this had been pent up inside her, stifled in a misplaced propriety: she had lived too long in her glass house. Now she alluded freely to the past: “I have seen the effects of loose morality, as many of you know, on my own sister’s child, blood of my blood,” acknowledging and dismissing it (Travis is gone away); “and I have seen, too, the power of spiritual revival,” thinking of Creath at the altar, Creath born again. And she alluded similarly—delicately—to Nancy Wilcox: “Our own sons, our own daughters,” the emphasis hardly more than a caress, “are not immune to the spirit of the times,” and it was enough, yes; heads nodded; Faye sat pale and unblinking at the back of the hall.