A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 15
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said very quietly.
I stared at him. I believed nothing.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ Then for the first time he said, ‘I love you, Nick.’ But he said it in his ‘calming’ tone, professional and even. He put his arms around me, to cancel out that voice. I shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t hurt you for the world,’ he whispered. And I began to warm. I located myself correctly in the day and scene. Weak daylight was sliding from behind drawn curtains. This was my Cully.
‘I care for you,’ he said. He kissed me on the neck. I stared at the ceiling over his shoulder. Very slowly, he began to caress me again. I responded as best I could. I was trying very hard not to disappoint him, not to disappoint myself. When we finished, it had only been an exercise to me; to prove to myself I could still do it. I hadn’t had a problem with sex before, and had counted myself lucky. The nightmarish flashback had been triggered by something as small as his hand over my mouth.
Cully kissed me very gently and adjourned to the bathroom. I lay wondering how many more such incidents were lying in wait for me. After a while, Cully came out and got dressed without talking. We both had a lot to think about. He sat on the side of the bed.
‘Cully, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,’ I said bleakly when I saw he was waiting for me to speak. Then I was furious with myself. I’d cried for help, knowing he couldn’t resist that. I would not become an object of pity to my lover.
He had been badly frightened, too, so now he was ill at ease with me. ‘I wish I could stay here with you now,’ he said to me directly. I searched his eyes. ‘I can’t. I have appointments this morning I can’t break.’ And he hadn’t had his morning run, either. ‘But you’re not alone, Nick. I’m with you.’
‘You’re with a lot of raped women right now,’ I said as lightly as I could. Underneath the blanket, I dug my nails into my palm. Maybe you’re pretty sick of coming home to another one, Cully.
‘Nick,’ he said, and pulled me up and put his arms around me. We sat like that until he felt me relax against him. ‘I’ll be thinking about you all day,’ he told me.
I thought he meant it. Those were good words to leave me with. They infused some warmth into the outer edges, the area where I dealt with other people; and some of that warmth seeped a few layers deeper, to where I dealt with people I cared about very much. But my core, in which I lived as a solitary homo sapiens – that was still cold, still alone, and would be for an incalculable length of time. I had a mission to accomplish.
In that silent chilly room, I knew for the first time I would never be the same woman I’d been. Unconsciously, I’d been expecting to feel a ‘click’ someday; after the police caught the rapist, when I was sure Cully loved me, or just any old time. And I’d imagined that after I felt that click I’d be just the same as I had been before that dark night. I’d forgotten what had frightened me so much when Barbara got raped: my conviction that what had happened to her was irreparable. Until this moment, I hadn’t applied that to myself. ‘Dumb old Nick,’ I said out loud and with immense sarcasm. And I slapped myself hard.
At that instant I quit waiting for the click.
Before I could brood any longer, I jumped out of bed. I moved briskly as I dressed and gathered the books I’d need. Just feeling my body moving and working revived that incredible wonder at being alive. As always, I outlined my day while I brushed my hair. A 9:45 class. Out at 11:15 for the day. A meeting with Barbara. A paper due in – I squinted at the calendar by the dresser – a little over a week, right before Thanksgiving. And all my midterms were over except the one a dilatory professor had scheduled for Tuesday. So I needed to spend some time in the library studying before Mimi and I went to tea at Sarah Chase Cochran’s in the afternoon. Also time to write my mother a letter, another fabrication that would omit all the important things. She’d sent me a thank-you note for the birthday present I’d mailed her, a sweater and blouse, and in it she mentioned that she’d gone out to dinner with some friends of my father’s to celebrate. And again she hadn’t mentioned Jay. Instinctively I throttled the rising hope, as I had for the past month. No point in dreaming about a sober mother, a mother without Jay.
Jay would just love it if he knew someone had ‘gotten’ me. What I should have done all those years ago, I decided, was rocket out of that bathroom with . . . well, no, not a plunger, not heavy enough . . . but something . . . and bam! Beat the tar out of him!
It pleased me so much to picture Jay cowering (or even quite battered) that I wished passionately I’d had the guts at seventeen to do it. The fantasy was so vivid and satisfying that for a few happy minutes I felt I had done it. Even the bite of the November wind couldn’t diminish my smile. It was the first time in ages I’d gone to class with a real smile on my face.
Despite the morning’s humiliation, despite the beast still at large, in spite of everything, I suddenly knew that in some mysterious way I was going to win.
* * * *
‘You take – let’s see . . .’ out came the ragged list, which never seemed to leave Barbara’s purse. ‘Um. Don Houghton, that’ll be easier for you. Charles, likewise. I have Jeff Simmons and Theo. I don’t know what to do about John Tendall.’
‘That’ll be the hard one,’ I said soberly.
‘I don’t know. I think Jeff Simmons is worse. I spent fifteen minutes this morning, when I was supposed to be grading papers, trying to think of a way to ask the Houghton College president what his blood type is.’ Barbara wrinkled her nose and her glasses slid. I pushed them back up before her hand could reach her nose. She looked at me comically, and we both laughed.
‘I feel good,’ I confessed.
‘Me too.’ Barbara took a bite from a cookie. ‘I don’t know why. What we’re doing is dangerous.’
‘Not unless he knows about semen containing blood secretions,’ I pointed out. ‘Not the world’s best-known fact. Out of all of them, only Tendall will be aware of that, I imagine.’
‘It would have to be the most common blood type,’ Barbara said ruefully. ‘I’m O positive myself.’
‘I’m A negative.’
‘The school has a blood drive every year. A mobile van comes by. Stan went with me last year to give. His type is O negative.’
‘Even though he was never on the list, I’m glad,’ I said after a moment. ‘That would have been too horrible.’ It had gone without saying that Stan couldn’t have leaped out of his car and beaten Barbara to her apartment.
Barbara looked straight ahead. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So we work on our five.’
‘You think the blood van went to the police department?’ I asked.
She thought. ‘I seem to remember that it did,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Stay here a second.’ I fished a dime out of my purse and went to the phone booth in the student-center lobby. I flipped through the tiny Knolls phone book.
‘Police Department,’ said a bored voice.
‘Detective John Tendall, please.’
Click click. Buzz. ‘John Tendall speaking.’
That flat voice called to mind some unpleasant memories. I screwed my eyelids tightly shut. ‘This is Elsie Smith from the blood bank, Mr Tendall,’ I said rapidly and nasally. ‘We have an urgent call for B negative blood. Can you come in and donate?’
‘There must be some kind of mix-up,’ Detective Tendall said. ‘You people need to get your records straight. My blood type is O positive.’
‘Oh. Oh, my goodness,’ I fluttered, ‘I’ve pulled the wrong card. Thanks anyway.’
‘All right,’ Tendall said, and hung up.
I returned to our table and reported to Barbara in triumph.
‘Good for you!’ she said, and grinned.
‘But he’s still on the list.’
‘What if he’d said, “Okay, I’ll be right down”?’
We laughed before we simultaneously realized that if Tendall was the guilty man, his discovery that the blood bank call was phony would’ve put him on the alert.
‘But I’ll take my laughs where I can find them, nowadays,’ Barbara remarked, and I had to agree with her.
‘What if they’re all O positive?’ I said dismally.
‘Then it’ll be my turn to think of something,’ Barbara said. She folded her list. ‘Having worked down from a few hundred to five, I’m not about to give up.’
‘That’s the spirit. Yea, team!’
We clumsily punched each other on the shoulder like hearty men, and went our separate ways.
* * * *
‘White gloves, do you remember?’ Mimi smoothed back her mane and smiled at me before she returned her attention to driving. The Cochrans lived close to the college, she’d told me, but on a little suburban loop behind the big houses that faced the college.
‘But we carried them, we didn’t wear them.’
‘I still have four pair tucked away under my nightgowns,’ she confessed. ‘One pair has little pink rosebuds at the wrists. I can’t imagine when I’ll ever use them, but I just can’t bring myself to throw them away.’
‘I threw mine in the fire one night when I was trying to liberate myself from southernness.’
‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’
‘Now, Mimi, you know there was a lot of garbage we had fed us along with our grits and pralines.’ A figure of speech – neither Mimi nor I would touch grits with a tenfoot pole; though pralines were another matter.
Mimi pursed her lips thoughtfully as she mulled this over. ‘Oh, sure,’ she admitted. ‘But you know, we’re a dying breed. We’ve got to preserve what we are. You never hear a real heavy accent anymore, except every now and then, like Alicia’s. You never heard anything like the way Grandmother said “water.” Six syllables, at least. It’s Johnny Carson’s fault.’
‘The Tonight Show? Johnny Carson is responsible for the decline of southern accents?’
‘Sho ’nuff,’ Mimi said with a wild grin. ‘Have you ever heard Johnny Carson say “water”? Nothing to it!’
Mimi was still expounding on her latest theory when we pulled into the driveway of a very modest ranch-suburban house, the kind you don’t even have to enter to know the floor plan. She stopped in midsentence to glare at a stamped metal eagle, her particular abomination, which was nailed above the front door.
Sarah Chase Cochran met us at the door with a kind of subdued frenzy of hospitality. Over her shoulder, I glimpsed Barbara looking rather relieved to see us. I was surprised to see her until I remembered she didn’t have any Thursday afternoon classes to teach.
Mimi was playing hooky from her job. She’d told me that she put in so much phone time and committee work at night and on weekends that she felt perfectly justified in leaving her office a couple of hours early every now and then.
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ Sarah Chase was saying. ‘It seems like I never get to see you all anymore, so I just thought well, I’ll have Mimi and her friend over to tea so I can get to sit down and talk to them.’
I perched on the lumpy plaid couch beside Barbara and answered the usual questions, posed to me in a gracious stream – how I liked Knolls, did I miss New York, how I felt about coming back ‘home,’ how wonderful it was that I was living with Mimi.
Then Sarah Chase began catching up on Mimi’s activities – she must have already covered Barbara – and I had time to look around me.
It was the kind of house only a strong personality can vanquish. Sarah Chase’s wasn’t strong enough. From the green shag rug to the smell of polish and cooking, from the decent bargain furniture interspersed with inherited antiques to the truly beautiful silver tea service that Sarah Chase lugged in presently with considerable effort, it was the kind of milieu that hopes to state, ‘Just here temporarily, soon moving up.’
But Sarah Chase and Theo were somewhat beyond the age at which they should have moved up. The Cochrans were a few rungs behind on that invisible ladder, and Sarah Chase knew it. She was facing it with dignity. I wondered if it was their daughter’s awful illness that had kept the Cochrans down, that had given Sarah Chase the look of someone who’s beaten but won’t leave the ring.
On the fake mantel stood a picture of a girl I assumed was Nell. She was a plain child but had a liveliness about her face that made her attractive. I wondered if Nell was in the house. I recalled the frozen look on Theo’s face when Barbara had mentioned Nell’s illness at the party, and decided not to risk asking.
But Mimi braved it. Mimi is awfully good at expressing grave concern. She has a special look for it that isn’t insincere though it’s predetermined. I have accidentally glimpsed the same expression on my own face, in mirrors. So I guess we learned it. The brows draw in to form a pucker above the nose, the mouth assumes a sober line, and one looks directly into the eyes of the object of concern.
‘She’s back in the hospital,’ our hostess said with a tiny shake of her head. ‘St Jude’s, in Memphis. Of course, we don’t expect . . .’ Her voice trailed off.
Didn’t expect Nell to live? Didn’t expect miracles? Didn’t expect Nell would ever come home again?
With my new empathy for suffering, I felt a fraction of what Sarah Chase and Theo must have been enduring. Their only child was in the process of dying and they were helpless. I glanced at Barbara and saw from her expression that the same thing was crossing her mind. We had a raw surface for pain. We understood helplessness. In a minute, Sarah Chase would see that empathy too. Though I barely knew the woman, that silver service somehow told me that she’d hate to be the object of raw emotion.
I plunged clumsily into school reminiscences. Soon we were dredging up little anecdotes from our years at Miss Beacham’s. Sarah Chase told us, with more sparkle than she’d yet shown, how it felt to be a student there and at the same time be related to the founder. The Founder.
‘I remember taking Theo to meet Aunt Martha for the first time,’ she said with a little smile as she handed around the cookies and nuts again. ‘My Lord, was he scared! And in awe, too. Of course, my whole family talks about Aunt Martha like she was God Almighty. I think we nieces and nephews thought she was, when we were little.’
‘How did you meet Theo?’ Mimi asked smoothly. She was determined to keep up this line of talk, since it was obviously cheering to Sarah Chase.
‘Well, we were at college together. My whole family is in education, so naturally,’ she said, with a deprecating wave of her hands, ‘I was going to be a teacher too. And Theo wanted to be in the administrative part of education . . . we were in a lot of the same classes. It just kind of happened.’ She shrugged and smiled and looked almost pretty.
‘Is Theo’s family in education, too?’ Barbara asked gamely.
‘No, he’s a first,’ Sarah Chase responded a little too brightly; so I knew that Theo had pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
I began to admire Theo Cochran. I knew what it was like to start out at the bottom, unknown, in a profession that depended a great deal on grace and favor and contacts. Mimi was fond of Theo, though she thought him a fuss-budget. He’d modernized Houghton’s record system thoroughly, and was adored by the ladies who worked for him.
There are lots of good people in the world, I told myself. That was all too easy to forget nowadays. I compared my grievance against fate to the one Theo and Sarah Chase bore. For once, the violence that had been done to me seemed petty. After all, I’d survived it, and it had been over in maybe fifteen minutes. The Cochrans’ ordeal might drag on for years.
‘I tried to call you Saturday morning about the faculty Christmas party,’ our hostess was telling Barbara. Mimi looked startled; then she gave a shrug and turned her attention back to the conversation. It did seem a little early to start planning for Christmas. We hadn’t even had Thanksgiving yet. But when a large party was being planned, which had to take place before the faculty scattered for vacation, I supposed you couldn’t start too soon.
Barbara was explaining she’d been out shopping. ‘Where’s it going to be this year?’ she asked. There followed a logistics debate on the amount of food, liquor, and tables necessary, which degenerated into a discussion of the character of the faculty wife who’d planned the party the year before.
Theo came in just as they’d settled the whole thing. I was wondering what the other committee members were going to say when Sarah Chase and Barbara presented them with a fait accompli. Mimi, forgetting to mind her expression, was looking faintly bored and stealing glances at her watch.
‘Good afternoon, ladies!’ Theo said cheerfully. He kissed Sarah Chase with surprising vigor and looked at us (grouped graciously around the silver) with considerable satisfaction. Whatever else we were – Mimi, Barbara, Sarah Chase, and I – we were bona fide ladies, modern version; and there we were, sitting properly around Theo’s living room chattering. I understood his pleasure now that I’d seen his home and knew more about him; but that obvious satisfaction made me want to say something shocking or sit with my knees askew. I pinched myself surreptitiously for penance.
‘All quiet at the college?’ Mimi asked too brightly. She had been getting ready to leave and now felt obliged to stay a few more minutes.
‘Yes. Even if Mimi Houghton played hooky this afternoon, the walls were still standing when I left.’ Theo filched a cookie off the plate, and Sarah Chase smiled at him and shook her head in mock admonishment. The affection between them was alive and touching.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Theo told Mimi, ‘I checked this afternoon, and Heidi Edmonds didn’t go to Miss Beacham’s.’
Mimi and I absorbed this without surprise or comment. Barbara looked bewildered. I made a sign to her that I’d explain later. She responded with a look indicating she had something to tell me. I wondered if she’d extracted Theo’s blood type from Sarah Chase.
‘Oh, I’m so relieved these awful things aren’t related to Aunt Martha’s school in any way. Theo had thought of it, and he told me you’d thought of it too,’ Sarah Chase said.
