s — how the evening had gone with her girlfriends, if they had had a good time. Why was she shivering? She said the girls had been just fine but she was cold now. She didn’t know that someone had gotten her license plate number, but somebody had, as her dark blue Mercedes-Benz sped away. A man out walking his dog on a nearby sidewalk wrote it down. God put him there — the dog, too.
Meanwhile, right after that, the police arrived at our house. I remember first the phone call and then the doorbell that woke my son, Wesley, in the crib that he was beginning to outgrow. He could climb right out of it but rarely did. Wesley began crying upstairs, while in the living room the police, who would not sit down on the sofa, gave me the bad news. My husband, Mike, they told me, was laid out in the morgue, alone, and I would have to identify him the next day. They were quite courteous, those two men, bearing their news. They spoke in low tones, hushed, which is hard for men. One of them wore old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses. They warned me that I might not recognize my husband right away. But the next morning I did recognize him because of what he was wearing, a blue patterned sport shirt I had bought at Dayton’s on sale and had wrapped up for him at Christmas. He had thanked me with a kiss on the lips Christmas morning after he opened it. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” was playing on the radio when he did that. So of course I remembered the shirt.
The socialite testified that she didn’t know she had hit anything or anybody. Or that she didn’t remember hitting anything or anybody. There was some question — I heard about this — whether she had asked her stepson to take the rap for her. She wanted him to go straight to police headquarters and to say he had been driving his stepmother’s car, drunk, at the age of seventeen, and therefore he would be tried as a minor and let off scot-free. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t lie. The socialite’s out of prison now, but my husband is still under the ground in Lakewood Cemetery.
I await the resurrection of the dead the way other people await weekend football. I’m old now, and the glory will all be revealed to me soon enough. I can feel it coming. Glory will rain down, soaking me to the skin.
If the socialite hadn’t gone to prison, I imagined buying a handgun and going over there to her mansion and shooting her in cold blood if she answered the door. But, no, that’s wrong: I had Wesley to raise, so I don’t suppose I would have actually committed murder, though to kill her was extremely tempting, and the temptation did not come from Satan but from somewhere else inside me. It was mine. I dreamed of murder like a teenager dreaming of love. Peaceful and calm though I usually am, my husband’s death and my wish for revenge changed me. Murder dwelt in my heart. Imagine that! It came as a surprise to me as I did the laundry or cooked dinner or washed dishes. Sometimes I wish I were more Christian: even now, at my age, with knees that hurt from arthritis and a memory that sometimes fails me, I still think certain people should be wiped off the face of the Earth, which is counter to the teachings of Jesus.
But what I’m saying is that Jesus intervened with me. He came to me one night and said, in that loving way He has, “Dolores, what good would it do if you murdered that foolish woman? It would do you and the world no good at all. It wouldn’t bring Mike back. Turn that cheek,” He said to me as I was praying, and of course I could see He was right. So I forgave that woman, or tried to. On my knees, I turned the other cheek as I wept. I turned it back and forth.
I believe that humanity is divided into two camps: those who have killed others, or can imagine themselves doing so; and those for whom the act and the thought are inconceivable. Looking at me, you would probably not think me capable of murder, but I found that black coal in my soul, and it burned fiercely. I loved having it there.
All my life, I worked as a librarian in the uptown branch. A librarian with the heart of a murderer! No one guessed.
—
Months after Mike’s death, I’d go into Wesley’s room to tuck him in at night. By then he was talking. “Where’s Daddy?” he would ask me. Gone to heaven, I’d tell him, and he’d ask, “Where’s that?” and I wanted to say, “Right here,” but such an answer would be confusing to a child, so I just hummed a little tune, a lullaby to calm him. But my son knew there was something wrong with my face in those days, because of the hard labor of my grief. I didn’t smile when I put my son to bed, and probably I didn’t smile in the morning, either. I couldn’t smile on my own. So there, at night, in his bed, he would get out from under the sheet, stand up in his rocket-ship-pattern pajamas, and he would raise his hand with his two fingers, the index finger and the middle finger outstretched in a V-for-victory sign. He would raise those fingers to the sides of my mouth, lifting them up, trying to get me to smile. He held his fingers there until I agreed to look cheerful for his sake. He was only a little boy, after all.
—
Time passes. The socialite, as I said, is out of jail, and Wesley has grown up and has two children of his own, my dear grandchildren, Jeremy and Lucy. Corinne gave birth to Jeremy before she fled the marriage, and Astrid, Wesley’s second wife, gave birth to Lucy. But I still think of that woman, that socialite, driving away from my dying husband, and of what was going through her head, and what I’ve decided is that (1) she couldn’t take responsibility for her actions, and (2) if she did, she would lose the blue Mercedes, and the big house in the suburbs, and the Royal Copenhagen china, and the Waterford crystal, and the swimming pool in back, and the health club membership, and the closet full of Manolo Blahnik shoes. All the money in the bank, boiling with possibility, she’d lose all that, and the equities upping and downing on the stock exchange. How she was invested! How she must have loved her things, as we all do. God has a name for this love: avarice. We Americans are running a laboratory for it, and we are the mice and rats, being tested, to see how much of it we can stand.
God’s son despised riches. His contempt for riches sprouts everywhere in the Gospels. He believed that riches were distractions. Listen to Jesus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If that isn’t wisdom, I don’t know what is. And remember this, about those who are cursed? “For I was hungry, and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me.”
Anyway, that’s why Corinne is here. We have to feed and clothe her. Jesus doesn’t believe in those glittering objects that hypnotize you. Hypnotized, you drive away from a dying man stretched out bleeding on the pavement.
—
I go into Corinne’s room. She sits near the window with sunlight streaming in on her hair, which looks greasy, and she’s talking before she even sees me. Apparently she’s psychic and knows I’m coming. Since I’m not about to waste a beautiful morning like this one by brooding about breast cancer, I ask her, “Do you want to take a walk?” The question interrupts her monologue. “I’ve got to exercise these old bones,” I tell her. Actually, I’m not that old. I’m in my seventies. It’s just an expression.