Chapter Twenty
And what of Margaret Salt? Who’d vanished from Bonhomie—some said into thin air, meaning something immediate had happened that no doubt involved a scandal.
She’d left her husband for someone else and hadn’t taken the child.
Her husband had thrown her out and wouldn’t let her take the child (was that even legal?).
She had a dark side. A mental breakdown.
She was getting shock treatment in Cincinnati.
Have the police questioned the husband?
Was she a missing person?
But all of that was within the first couple of weeks, and it turned out there was nothing in any of the stories to sink your teeth into.
The neighbor across the street had seen Margaret that afternoon, putting things into the trunk of her car, then had seen her drive off with her child standing right there.
Her friends at the dance studio caught wind and were back and forth on the phone for an hour or so, until finally Ruth Mitchell called Felix, and nothing about what he said sounded at all suspicious, just horrible: Margaret had decided she’d be happier living in Columbus, alone, and that’s where she’d gone.
They felt sorry for the boy, but maybe good riddance to her?
The handsome husband could always remarry.
The handsome husband had every unmarried woman on the block—and some of the married ones—knocking on his door, dropping off baked goods, meatloaves, lasagna, coming back to reclaim their Tupperware and see how he was doing.
He held his cards close to his chest, that one.
Scarred, no doubt, and not just by the war he’d fought in.
Over time, the collective memory of Margaret Salt molted most of its details, and what emerged was a portrait of a heartless, clothes-loving snob who’d always made sure everyone knew she was from Columbus, and who’d given up her family to return to her Big City ways.
—
She lived on the third floor of a three-story nineteenth-century apartment building with eighteen units, a streetcar ride away from downtown. Her block was wide and busy with traffic, but her windows looked down onto a side street lined with dogwoods and brick sidewalks.
There was a very old woman who lived across from her and who walked the landing for exercise.
Her hair was short, like dandelion fluff, and she spidered a hand against the wall as she walked, her white housecoat hiding her feet, so that she seemed to be floating and pulling herself along with her fingertips.
She had many aches and ailments and in a soft, weak voice asked Margaret to open all her pill bottles the pharmacy delivered each month, then kept them out on her dining table, caps resting loosely.
She frustrated the landlord by using her oven for heat when she was cold.
On the second floor lived a thick little man with hair that sometimes sat askew on his head.
His face was pale and sagged so much that parts of it seemed to be resting on other parts.
His hands were swollen and the color of an eggplant.
When Margaret passed him on the stairs, he smelled of rum and sometimes sauerkraut.
One morning, six months after moving in, she was heading to work as he was coming into the building, wearing a pea coat and a black ushanka hat.
At the foot of the stairs, he turned decisively and spoke to her for the first time. “How are you holding up?” he asked.
Was he mistaking her for someone else? Did she look like someone who’d been through an ordeal? “Fine,” she said. “How are you?”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” He laid one of his swollen hands on the newel post. “A person can get whiplash just walking through life. They love your allegro but loathe your troppo. They invite you to lunch, then shit in your soup. Know what I mean?”
Better to lie or suffer the explanation? “Yes,” Margaret said.
She never saw him again. A month later, she came home in the evening and found the door to his apartment standing open and the landlord inside, mopping the empty rooms. Margaret asked if the man who’d lived there had moved away.
“Died in his sleep,” the landlord said. “A nephew found him, thank God. Let me know if you see a parakeet, will you?”
—
The apartment had come furnished. The smell of cigarettes that lingered in all the cushions was the same as the one she’d hated in the furnished place she and Felix had first shared; now it reminded her of him.
She didn’t mind; coming home to it was almost comforting.
The trim and doors were exposed wood. The kitchen was large enough for a small table.
The bedroom was quiet, save for the pipes. The parquet floor crackled underfoot.
She’d landed on her feet only with Felix’s help, and for that she was grateful.
He’d honored the dozen or so checks she’d taken with her—once they’d agreed on the amounts she would fill them in for, and when she would cash them.
The jewelry she sold at a pawn shop. The tan Packard—her third in a series of them, a Patrician purchased while Felix was still at the foundry—she traded in for a dinged-up Ford Victoria that sounded asthmatic and was the color of a Hershey Bar inside and out.
The landlord was a blond, twitchy Dan Duryea type whose face was always clenched for bad news.
His wife smacked his shoulder if the three of them were ever on the landing together (though she was always polite to Margaret).
Since he was hardly permitted to look at her, much less flirt with her, Margaret was able to get him to do things, like install a chain and an extra lock on the front door and have dowels cut to keep the windows from being opened on the outside.
She found a kilim at a porch sale and put it down in the living room.
Bought some paintings of street scenes from street painters and put them up over the sofa.
Above the fireplace, on her own, she hung the Dolice.
When the landlord was dropping off the dowels, she showed him the painting and asked him if it looked like dawn or dusk.
The question seemed to needle him a little—maybe because he hadn’t factored it into his day.
He bared his teeth slightly as he squinted at the Dolice, then said with what seemed to be apprehension, “Well, you can’t tell, because it’s blurry. ” She thanked him for the dowels.
She saw something new in her face, in that apartment.
Along with the emergence of crow’s feet and the faint lines surfacing on her chin, and the gray she dyed away on a regular basis, there was a density, an opaqueness in her eyes.
As if they were done receiving and projecting.
It was the same look Lydia had each time she had to let go of one of the girls.
The look she’d had for the last month Margaret lived at Open Arms, when they were preparing for her departure: a preemptive, numbing No to whatever the world wanted to show her next.
Had Lydia’s been a lonely death, like her downstairs neighbor’s?
Had there ever been a death that wasn’t?
She wondered if the nephew had held some kind of funeral.
She wondered morbid things, like was he buried with his toupee?
She would have gone to the service. Would have said, if asked, that he was quiet, respectful.
She hadn’t even known his last name, though.
The next time she looked at his mailbox, the name had been removed.
Part of what had appealed to her about Columbus, when she was eighteen, was its vastness—all there was to see and do, and the chance to be a part of it.
What appealed now was its vast anonymity, its ability to cloak people in its density, so that you could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations.
Right up to your last moments, if you wanted, so that the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.
—
How could she explain herself to Tom? She couldn’t tell him any of the reasons she’d left, couldn’t tell him about Felix, or her affair, or Cal.
Plus, the more time that passed without calling or writing, the harder it was, because she knew she’d also have to explain that.
So she put it off, and put it off—until it seemed impossible.
She kept his photo, along with Felix’s, in its hinged frame, closed, in her nightstand drawer. She took it out from time to time and opened it, like a book.
Even if she wrote instead of calling, she was terrified of what Tom would write back.
She was terrified he would ask her, over the phone or in a letter, when—or if—she was coming home.
She was terrified of every single question she could think of that Tom might ask.
—
Throughout that first year, she was in touch with Felix when necessary, until they were finally able to square away a divorce.
A reason had to be given, and the options they gave you were ugly.
She was prepared to go with Adultery (noticing that Mutual Adultery wasn’t an option), but after Felix couldn’t convince her to talk to Tom, after he understood that she wasn’t going to do any more than send the boy a card on the holidays, he wanted to choose Abandonment.
It turned a little knife in her—but when it was finally done, she couldn’t see what difference it made.
Neither of them wanted anything else from the other anymore. All the wanting was over.
—