Chapter 11 #2
She’d been busy thinking, coming up with plans for correspondence.
She’d collect my assignments from my teachers, and I could send them back to her completed.
She was sure that Bobby and Janet would want to hear from me, and my friends would expect letters, too.
I would have to give everyone her mother’s address in Arkansas.
Her mother would forward all mail to me in New Jersey.
My letters home would also have to go through Mae’s mother, so she could send them on with an Arkansas postmark.
Mae said I would need to include envelopes already addressed in my handwriting.
“You told your mother?” I asked. “She knows?” I’d only met Mae’s mother at the wedding, when I was fourteen. I could hardly bring her face to memory. And now she knew this about me.
“She’ll keep it to herself,” Mae said. She rolled my toothbrush into a dish towel and tucked it into the suitcase. “Arkansas City is a little town. Probably nobody here will know it. But I’ll tell you what you’d need to know, just in case somebody asks.”
I knew I shouldn’t argue. She was saving me, or she was trying to. But I doubted that anyone, even Bobby and Janet, would believe that after missing three days of school on account of sickness, I’d suddenly been called away to a medical emergency in Arkansas.
“People believe all kinds of things.” Mae glanced at the open window, then lowered her voice.
“Listen. I’m going to tell you something.
Don’t tell anyone else. If you do, I’ll know.
But Janet’s father is still very much alive, okay?
He’s living in Virginia with the German woman he brought back.
Okay? We were married when he left, and I was expecting.
Janet was just born when I got the letter saying he was so sorry, but he’d gone over there and fallen in love with a German girl, like he’d fallen in a well or something. Whoops, not his fault.”
I stared at her, stunned.
“I know,” she said. “I thought he was supposed to be over there fighting the Germans.”
“Does Dad know?”
She looked insulted. “You think I’d tell you if he didn’t?
My mother knows, too, and people from home.
But nobody in Rolla needed to know. And nobody here does, either.
People think different about a widow than they do a divorced lady.
I don’t care whose fault. And he’s as good as dead to me, and good as dead to Janet. ”
“Does she know?”
“No. And don’t you tell her.” Her eyes turned threatening. “I’ll tell her when she’s older, when she can understand.” She frowned at the coat I was packing. “Is that your only coat?”
I told her it was.
“That’s a Florida coat. You’ll need a real coat.” Her voice wavered. “Do you remember snow? New Jersey is far north. It’s going to be even colder than Missouri. You should have a warm hat. And mittens.”
My father came home at noon. He put his car keys on the hook and went straight back to their room, and he stayed in there, the door closed. Mae told me she would drive me to the station, and I realized that he’d only come home early so she could have the car. My face must have shown my hurt.
“He’ll say hello when you come back,” she whispered. “I’ll see to it, okay? But right now, just let him alone. He’s doing the best he can.”
I knew what she meant, what she didn’t say: Given the circumstances, my father was showing restraint.
He hadn’t screamed at me, or called me names, or shamed me in front of my siblings.
He’d not reminded me how hard he worked, how hard he’d always worked, so his children could be on solid footing to reach for whatever they wanted, and that I’d thanked him with the humiliation of making him sit in the Liftons’ spacious living room and hear what they thought of me, and why.
He’d had to take their money because he had no choice, even as they called me a liar, and insinuated worse.
I had no grounds to expect that he might show me love, or caring, or even pity, not when he was still reeling.
And yet, even then, I knew I would have preferred my father screaming at me, or calling me names, or almost any outright burst of emotion over the cold repugnance he showed me those awful days before I left.
It frightened me more than being sent away, more than the idea of giving birth among strangers.
My father had often said I reminded him of my mother, which for him, was the greatest of compliments.
I had her general decency, he liked to say.
Packing my suitcase for New Jersey, I understood he might not ever say this again.
Mae worried that the suitcase, with four of my schoolbooks inside, would be a strain for me to lift in my condition. But I carried it out to the front room and showed her I could heft it to my shoulders. She handed me a peanut butter and honey sandwich she wanted me to keep in my purse.
“I’m going to check the mail,” I said.
I said this casually, like I wasn’t really thinking about it, but she looked at me with exhaustion. I could see myself in her eyes, how pathetic I seemed.
“I already got it,” she said. “There was nothing that would interest you.”
I nodded. I’d gotten better with the disappointment, or more practiced with it, at least. “You’ll tell me when you hear from the Liftons?” I asked. “When they hear back from him?”
“Sure.”
“Do you promise, Mae? You have to write to me right away. Or if he sends a letter here.”
“Promise.” She looked at her watch. “We should leave.”
I didn’t follow. It was just past two o’clock. My train wouldn’t leave until four.
“Before the kids get home,” she said.
When I protested, saying I wanted to tell them goodbye, she gave me a wary look.
“You’re going to tell them you’re going to Arkansas? You’ve got to be convincing, Nora. If you can’t manage that yet, we should go before they get home.”
I knew she was sick of my crying. I lowered my head as I pulled on my gloves. They were thin and white, dainty things, appropriate for train travel.
“We can go now,” I said. “Thank you.”
In the car, she said she would tell them I’d wanted to say goodbye, but I’d understood her mother was in urgent need, being so injured and all alone.
Bobby and Janet would be upset of course, and perhaps bewildered.
But she would tell them they could write to me in Arkansas whenever they wanted; and that she was just so grateful to me for agreeing to go help her mother get through these next few months.
If it weren’t for me, she would tell them, she didn’t know what she would do.