She was thinking of her mother Anna. Her mother trapped in that house.
For how could Rebecca not enter, knowing that her mother was inside, trapped.
Ask God why: why such things are allowed. Not me.
In that spring, that season of desultory and defiant wandering. Like a stray dog she wandered. Reluctant to return to the stone house in the cemetery which she would one day recall having been built into the side of a massive hill like a cellar or a sepulchre though in fact it was neither, only just a weatherworn stone-and-stucco dwelling with few windows, and those windows small, and square, and coated on the outside with a near-opaque winter grime.
Hating to return to the house though she knew her mother was waiting for her. Hating to return since Herschel had left, since Gus had left hitching a ride with a trucker bound for somewhere west. Both her brothers had left without a word, not a word of affection or regret or explanation or even farewell for their sister who’d loved them. Now in fury thinking I hate them, both of them. Fuckers!
This angry language she was beginning to savor. At first under her breath, and then aloud. A pulse beat hard and hot in her throat in the angry joy of hating her brothers who’d abandoned her and their mother to the madman Jacob Schwart.
She knew: her father was mad. Yet not raving-mad, not helpless-mad, so that someone in authority might come to help them.
Yet: they know, but they don’t care. Even that he has bought a shotgun, they don’t care. For why should they think of us, who are but jokes to them.
One day soon, Rebecca would run away, too. She didn’t require Katy Greb to take her in. Didn’t require anyone to take her in or feel sorry for her. Fuckers they were all of them, she turned from them in scorn.
After the spring thaw it became increasingly difficult for Rebecca to stay in school for a full day. More and more she found herself abruptly walking out. Scarcely knowing what she did only that she could not bear the stifling classrooms, the cafeteria that smelled of milk and scorched and greasy food, the corridors in which her classmates passed jostling one another like brainless, blind animals rushing through a chute. She walked out a rear exit not caring who might be watching and would report her. If an adult voice called after her stern and admonishing-Rebecca! Rebecca Schwart where are you going!-she didn’t trouble even to glance back but broke into a run.
Her grades were mostly C’s and D’s now. Even in English, that had been her best subject. Her teachers had grown wary of her as you’d be wary of a cornered rat.
Like her brothers, Rebecca Schwart was becoming. This girl who’d once been so promising…
Run, run! Through the weedy vacant lot adjacent to the school, along a street of brownstone row houses and small shops, into an alley, and so to an open field and the Buffalo & Chautauqua railroad embankment which she would follow downtown to Canal Street. The Canal Street bridge, off South Main, was so wide that parking was allowed on it. Where the taverns were. A block away on its peak of a hill was the General Washington Hotel. Several streets including South Main converged here at the bridge. In Milburn, all hills sloped down to the Erie Barge Canal and the canal itself had been out through bedrock, into the interior of the earth. At the bridge idle men leaned on the railings thirty feet above the rushing water, smoking, sometimes sipping from bottles hidden inside paper bags. This was a slipping-down place, a place inclined to muteness, like a cemetery where things came to rest.
Why Rebecca was drawn here, she could not have said. She kept her distance from strangers.
Some of the men were war veterans. There was a man of about Jacob Schwart’s age on crutches, with a melted-away face. Another wore thick glasses with one of the lenses blacked out, so you knew he was missing an eye. Others had faces that were not-old and yet deeply lined, ravaged. There were tremulous hands, stiffened necks and legs. An obese man with a stump-knee sometimes sprawled on a concrete ledge in good weather, sunning himself like a reptile, repulsive and yet fascinating to observe. His hair was gray-grizzled and thin as Jacob Schwart’s hair and if Rebecca dared to draw close she could hear the man’s hoarse, moist breathing that was like her father’s breathing when he was agitated. Once, she saw that the reptile-man had wakened from his slumber and was observing her, with a sly little smile, through quivering eyelids. She wanted to turn quickly away, but could not. She believed that, if she ran, the reptile-man would become angry and call after her and everyone would see.
There were no more than twelve feet separating them. Rebecca could not comprehend how she’d dared to come so close.
“No school today, girlie? Eh? ”Sa holiday, eh?“
He was teasing, though with an air of threat. As if he might report her for truancy.
Rebecca said nothing. She was leaning against the bridge railing, staring down at the water far below. In the countryside, the canal was flat and placid-seeming; here at the forty-foot lock, the current was swift and perilous, rushing over the lock in ceaseless agitation, churning, frothy, making a noise like wildfire. Almost, you could not hear the sound of traffic on the bridge. You could not hear the metallic chiming of the hour from the bell tower at the First Bank of Chautauqua. You could not hear another’s voice unless he spoke loudly, provocatively.
“I’m talkin to you, girlie. ”Sa holiday is it?“
Still Rebecca did not reply. Nor did she turn away. In the corner of her eye she saw him, sprawled in the sun, panting. He chuckled and rubbed his hands over his groin that looked fattish, like a goiter.
“I see you, girlie! And you see me.”
Run, run! That spring of 1949.
Always Milburn had been an old country town, you could see where post-war newness was taking hold. The gaunt red-brick facades of Main Street were being replaced by sleek modern buildings with plate glass windows. In some of the newer buildings were revolving doors, elevators. The old Milburn post office, cabin-sized, would be replaced by a beige-brick post office that shared its quarters with the YM-YWCA. Grovers Feed Mill, Midtown Lumber, Jos. Miller Dry Goods were being crowded out by Montgomery Ward, Woolworth’s, Norban’s, a new A & P with its own asphalt parking lot. (Jos. Miller Dry Goods had been the store to which Rebecca had come with her mother, to select material for the curtains Anna Schwart sewed in preparation for the Morgensterns’ visit nearly eight years before. Rebecca’s father had driven them into town in the caretaker’s pickup truck. It had been a rare outing for Anna Schwart, and her last. It had been the only time that Rebecca had been brought into town with her mother and she would afterward recall that trip and the excitement of that trip with faint disbelief even as, staring at the site of the old store, replaced now by another, she was having difficulty recalling it.)
Only just recently, Adams Bros. Haberdashery had been replaced by Thom McAn Shoes. An impressive new bank had been built kitty-corner from the First Bank of Chautauqua, calling itself New Milburn Savings & Loan. The General Washington Hotel had begun expansion and renovation. There was a newly refurbished Capitol Theater with its splendid marquee that gleamed and glittered by night. A five-storey office building (doctors, dentists, lawyers) was erected at Main and Seneca streets, the first of its kind in Milburn.
(To this building Jacob Schwart had allegedly come, in the spring of 1949. It would be told of how he’d entered a lawyer’s office on the ground floor without an appointment and insisted upon “presenting his case” to the astonished young lawyer; Mr. Schwart had been rambling, incoherent, alternately incensed and resigned, claiming that he had been cheated for twelve years of his “due merit” by the Milburn Township which refused to pay him decent wages and had rejected others of his requests.)