“It doesn’t hurt,” he whispered. His skin wanted only for the hunger to overtake him and lift him away from his legs and the painful clutch of the bed, the sheets, the pillows, and the unending sameness of the red wallpaper. The uneasiness was the question of whether he loved Lavinia, but later it felt like the foreknowledge of his father’s death and the moment when Neva walked up the aisle of the church wearing not the red velvet headband (which she slipped off while Ida was fussing with her own hat) but a hand-knit cream-colored beret, about which a sobbing Neva would only say afterward, when Charlotte asked furiously what possessed her, that she just thought it would be nice to wear it in case Miss McKenna showed up.
He got it all much later: the story of the beret, the lingering of Bart Crandall at the door of the Practice House, so slow in leaving and so glum in the face that finally his mother walked over and asked if Florrie would like to take one of the centerpieces home, and that was when Bart took the cable out of his pocket and handed it over, “his eyes all teary,” said Ida, who was standing nearby.
109
Aldine couldn’t decide if she was glad or sorry about the deception everyone in Emporia, including Sonia Odekirk, agreed to practice: that the Price family would never be told about the baby or Aldine’s presence in the house when he died. They knew Ansel died on the tractor, in a field, of a natural disaster. He was alone. He had tuberculosis. Nothing about these circumstances required her to be mentioned. She couldn’t argue with it, really, as a means of causing less pain. But when Dr. Stober prepared a birth certificate for Vivien, he listed the father as Unknown. They buried Ansel in Kansas to bury the tuberculosis, and they wouldn’t let her and Vivien leave until they were tested. For two weeks, they waited. The doctor thought she would surely have it, but she didn’t.
After the train ride with Will, to whom she said nothing for hours and hours, she was kindly received in the Sugar House 4th Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (which met in a church made of solid pink stone) as the widowed sister of Leenie Cooper, a view they held of her without asking. She took her baby to church, as Leenie did, and the young girls of the ward liked to hold Vivien during the meetings. She took her baby to the park, as Leenie did, and watched her crawl on dry swards of grass.
It was the following August that Will drove them all to the Great Salt Lake, and she stood in the photo that was the last thing they sent to Aunt Sedgewick before she died, a photo in which you could not see the tin ring she wore on her index finger, inscribed with the name of Tom Mix, or smell the water ten times as dense with killing salt as the ocean. She stood by the water but she didn’t wade into it. She did something she now did habitually. She smelled Vivien’s soft, dry hair and neck. She wondered if someday her daughter would do as Leenie and Will did, like all the other Saints, and stand in the stone-white fountain in the stone-gray temple at the center of the wide, wide streets of Salt Lake City, and be baptized for the numberless dead, her head dipped back, her face full of hope. You could never tell who would be a believer, and who wouldn’t. When Dr. O’Malley’s will had finally been settled, bequeathing to Aldine a small amount of money, she’d sent it to Dr. Stober as compensation for his trouble, but he returned the bank check with a note saying he believed she’d paid quite enough already. He wished her Godspeed. He signed it Sincerely.
EPILOGUE
Fallbrook, California, 1957
Clare Price, the druggist, likes to eat at the counter of his sister’s café. His legs, one of them lame, can slide into its shadows while his smooth-shaven face, trim haircut, and robust arms (at forty, he can still walk on his hands) absorb what little attention might come his way. He’s eating what his sister calls the divorced man’s dinner—French apple pie topped with Tillamook cheese—while he combs the back pages of the Los Angeles Times sports section in search of a score for the KU-Oklahoma basketball game. Things are looking up for the Jayhawks. They have a kid named Chamberlain.
Torkelsen had been sitting at the counter when Clare came in, but this is late afternoon, when people come to the café more for retreat than society, so he’d kept three stools between him and Torkelsen, the better to spread out his paper.
His sister Geneva, passing by with plates spread along each arm, says, “Another day in paradise.”
She means this to be wry but he can’t help saying: “It is, in its own way, isn’t it?” Sometimes wanting to believe a sentiment like that was the best you could do, and was, besides, about the only thing standing between you and real gloom.
“You just missed your old flame,” Torkelsen says.
This was not news. Geneva had telephoned the drugstore to warn Clare that Lavinia and one of her girls were at the café, and had called again when they left. “Coast is clear,” she said, and hung up.
“So I heard,” Clare says.
“That oldest girl of hers is going to law school,” Torkelsen says.
Clare thinks of saying he’d heard that, too, but instead just murmurs and keeps to the paper. He’s found the scoring line. KU by 20. Chamberlain with 41. 19 rebounds.
But Lavinia. Her girl going to Boalt School of Law and here to throw the news around, as if to say, Look how well I’ve done without you. It isn’t the girl’s success that’s a disappointment to Clare. The truth is, he’s less unhappy living alone, going about his routines, filling prescriptions, exchanging everyday pleasantries with everyday faces, watching Jackie Gleason and Gunsmoke on Saturday night.
He takes from the pocket of his shirt a ballpoint pen and a business card. On its back, he keeps Wilt’s running totals in minute figures. With 41 points yesterday, that’s—he does the math in his head—536 on the season. 339 rebounds. Clare is bent over the card entering these updated totals when the bell over the door jangles.
A young woman carrying a satchel has stepped in. Somebody lost on her way to somewhere else, Clare supposes, which might explain her off-balance manner, that and the fact that he, Torkelsen, and the other few customers are all staring at her. But she isn’t lost. She says she’s looking for Geneva Price.
“Come to the right place,” Clare says, smiling.
The girl might be twenty or a little older—it’s hard to tell, because she has dark hair coiled up severely and she’s wearing a skirt and jacket like this is a business stop or she’s looking for a job she fears she won’t get. She’s leaning awkwardly on one high heel when she says, “I understand her parents came out from Oklahoma during the dirty thirties.”
Geneva has emerged, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Kansas,” she says. “Our parents came from Kansas.” She glances at Clare. “That galoot is my big brother, Clare.”
He gives a confirming nod. “Both our parents came out, but only our mother stayed.”
The girl doesn’t move. She says she’s doing her dissertation on the economic effects of families migrating to California from the Plains states during the 1930s.
Clare grins past the girl toward Torkelsen and says, “That’s a mouthful.”
“I guess it is,” the girl says, her face turning pink, and Clare feels a little ashamed of himself for making sport. “Anyway,” she says, “that’s why I’m here. I’d like to interview you and your sister, if I could. Your mother, too, if she’s alive.”