“But how can I?” Myrtle pleaded. “How can I take your word, when you don’t give me any words? Mother, I’ve always tried to be a good daughter, I’ve always—”
“You have,” Edna said, suddenly quieter, less agitated. Myrtle risked a quick sidelong glance, and Edna was now brooding at the dashboard, as though the words mene mene tekel upharsin had suddenly appeared there. Myrtle was surprised and touched to see this softening of her mother’s features. Imperfectly seen though her face might be in the light of dusk, some harsh level of reserve or defense was abruptly gone.
And abruptly back: “Watch the road!”
Myrtle’s eyes snapped forward. The two-lane blacktop road was now bringing them past the Mexican restaurant at the edge of Dudson Center; they were less than fifteen minutes from home.
Myrtle hadn’t at all wanted to give up the pursuit. It was true the people in the backseat of the Cadillac kept turning around to look at her, it was true the Cadillac was driving in circles around the countryside, it was true these things suggested they’d realized they were being followed and therefore had no intention of going on to their original destination until she stopped following them, but what did any of that matter? She didn’t care where they were going, she cared only about who they were. Or not even all of them, only the one: her father. To her way of thinking, if she followed them long enough, if she made her presence both obvious and inevitable, sooner or later wouldn’t they have to either arrive somewhere, or at least stop somewhere, so that she could get out of her car and go look at them, see them, talk to them? Talk to him?
But Edna had said no. “They’re on to us,” she snarled out of the side of her mouth, displaying another previously unknown side to her personality. “Forget it, Myrtle. We’ll go home.”
“But we’re so close! If we lose them—”
“We won’t lose that son of a bitch,” Edna had said grimly. “If he’s back—and he’s back, all right, damn his eyes—one of these black days he’ll come around, you see if he doesn’t. It’s only a matter of time. Myrtle, if they take that goddamn left again up there, you don’t follow them! You go straight ahead!”
And the Cadillac had taken the g——left, and obedient Myrtle, the good daughter, had gone straight ahead. And now they were almost home, the adventure almost finished, long before it had ever really begun. Myrtle had no faith in her mother’s conviction that her father would “come around” one of these days, black or otherwise; after all these years, why should he?
And he’d been so close!
Once Mother gets out of this car, Myrtle thought, I’ve lost the truth forever. “Please,” she said, so faintly she wasn’t sure Edna would be able to hear her at all.
The answer was a sigh; another surprising example of softness. In a voice so gentle as to be almost unrecognizable, Edna said, “Don’t ask me these things, Myrtle.”
Her own voice as soft as her mother’s, Myrtle said, “But it hurts not to know.”
“It never used to,” Edna said with a return of her normal tartness.
“Well, it does now,” Myrtle said. “Knowing you just won’t talk about it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Myrtle,” Edna cried, “don’t you think it hurts me? Don’t you think that’s why I don’t want to talk about the goddamn man?”
“You must have loved him very much,” Myrtle said, gently and consolingly, the way they do such scenes in the movies. She’d never imagined the day would come when she’d play such a scene herself.
“God knows,” Edna answered bitterly. “I suppose, at the time, I must have thought I…” But then she shook her head, eyes flashing. Sharply she said, “And what did I get out of it?”
“Well, me,” Myrtle reminded her, and tried a little smile, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“At the time?” Edna’s answering smile was twisted and lived only on one side of her face. “It wasn’t so wonderful, either, back then. Not in North Dudson.”
“I can’t even imagine it.”
Edna cocked an eye at her as Myrtle stopped for a red light on Main Street. Ahead, the windows of the library gleamed yellow in the gloaming. “No, I don’t suppose you can imagine it,” Edna said. “Did I do that to you? Well, I guess I did.”
“Do what to me?”
“The light’s green,” Edna said.
Myrtle, feeling an impatience and an irritation that were rare in her, looked out at the green light and tromped down on the accelerator. The Ford bucked across the intersection, not quite stalling, but then Myrtle settled down to her normal way of driving.
Musingly, not even having noticed Myrtle’s jack rabbit start—which is what she would have called it, with withering disapproval, under normal circumstances—Edna said, “I brought you up to be careful, cautious, obedient, mild…”
Laughing, but awkward and self-conscious, Myrtle said, “You make me sound like a Girl Scout.”
“You are a Girl Scout,” her mother told her, without pleasure. “I wasn’t brought up that way,” she went on. “I was brought up to be independent, make up my own mind, take my own chances. And what did it get me? Tom Jimson. That’s why I went the other way with you.”
Excited, Myrtle said, “Tom Jimson? Is that his name?”
“I’m not even sure of that much,” Edna said. “It’s one of the names he told me. The one he told me most often, so maybe it’s his.”
“What was he like?” Myrtle asked.
“Satan,” Edna said.
“Oh, Mother,” Myrtle said, and smiled in condescension. She knew this story. Edna had been madly in love with… Tom Jimson… and he’d abandoned her, pregnant and unwed, and the hurt was still there. Now Edna thought he was Satan. Then she’d loved him. So how bad, really, could he be?
Myrtle made the turn onto Elm Street, and then the turn onto Albany Street. Ahead lay Spring Street, and beyond that Myrtle Street. “Myrtle Jimson,” she said softly, testing the sound of it.
“Hah!” Edna snorted. “That was never in it, believe me!”
“I wonder where they were going,” Myrtle said.
“Well, not to church,” Edna told her. “I can tell you that much.”
TWENTY-TWO
The church was beautiful in the waning light of day. A small white clapboard structure with a graceful steeple, it nestled into its rustic setting like a diamond in a fold of green felt. The hillside behind it was a rich tumble of evergreens mixed with stands of beech and birch and oak, falling away to well-manicured lawn that swept like a thick-piled carpet around the tidy white building with its oval-topped stained-glass windows well spaced along both side walls.
The road outside, Church Lane, curving up into these foothills from State Highway 112, came nowhere but here, to the Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township. (Five different churches, and five separate congregations, had been combined down to this one, absorbing the remnants of churches flooded by the reservoir or emptied by shrinking attendance.) Since Church Lane ended here, the road simply ballooned at its terminus into a large parking area, from which the asphalt path ran straight up the slight incline to the church front door. The white of the church, the rich indigos and maroons and golds and olives of the stained-glass windows, the varied greens of the surrounding lawn and hillside, the bottomless black of the asphalt, were never more beautiful than now, in the fading light at the end of another perfect day.
And even more beautiful than the church and its setting was the bride, blushing pink in her swaths of organdy white, climbing from the family station wagon with her parents and baby sister. They were the first arrivals, half an hour before the scheduled ceremony, father looking uncomfortable and thick-fingered in his awkwardly fitting dark suit and badly knotted red tie, baby sister an excited bonbon in puffy peach, mother beribboned and bowed in lavender, dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lavender hankie and saying, “I told you not to go all the way, you little tramp. Just get him off with your hand, for heaven’s sake! Oh, I so wanted a June wedding!”