All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 9
* * *
—
When I died, they made me a saint. The newspapers all said I was docile and simple and pretty and sweet—a lamb to slaughter. None of it was true, at least no more or less than it is true of you.
A few were not as kind. They said: Why would she ever have married this monster? How could she not have seen the murderer inside him? Isn’t this whole thing partly her own fault, really, for putting herself in harm’s way? For being naive or stupid, for misjudging this evil man. For staying with him despite the signs that must have been there.
Listen, there were no signs. When I met Danny Larkin at Brookline High School in 1952, he was a sweet, smart, nerdy sixteen-year-old boy. He wore sweater-vests and khakis pressed by his mother’s housekeeper. He sometimes wore a blue-and-red band on his upper arm to show he was a class marshal—one of the kids who told us not to run in the hallways. He was skinny; his watch flopped around on his wrist, the seat of his pants bagged where his flat butt did not fill it out. His hairline was too high, which made his forehead too prominent for a teenage boy. He was also smart and the most self-assured person I had ever met. He was different, not like the other boys. But believe me, he was just a kid—about as far from being a monster as any of us.
I understand why people want to blame me. You want to reassure yourself about the man beside you, staring at the TV or snoring in bed. But I was not stupid or naive about Dan.
* * *
—
I suppose I must have known who Danny Larkin was during our freshman and sophomore years at Brookline High. Our class was not that big, everybody knew everybody. But I did not really meet him until we were juniors.
That fall there was a little controversy. To celebrate Armistice Day, the school showed a short movie called A Time for Greatness. It was about the evil of war, and it suggested that America take a more pacifist, diplomatic approach to settling our quarrels with other countries. The film was produced by the Quakers, which did not help. Well, it seems quaint now, but you can imagine the reaction. Was this an appropriate movie to show for Armistice Day, which was meant to honor our soldiers who had sacrificed so much? Didn’t A Time for Greatness insult our boys by questioning the cause for which they had fought? Or the way they had fought it, or the act of fighting itself—or something? The exact complaint about this movie was never completely clear. There were earnest, endless, patriotic, ridiculous discussions about all this for a couple of weeks. I know—crazy, right? Mostly it was our parents who were upset. I got so fed up with the stupidity, I sat down and wrote a letter to the school newspaper, The Sagamore. I wrote that it was a sad day when we could not all agree that war was bad, and that Brookline High School was no less patriotic for having shown this innocent movie and debated this important topic. With all that, I was still careful to say that my uncle Charlie had served in the Pacific during the war. (Uncle Charlie used to tell us kids that he had fought “the battle of San Diego” and he had not killed anyone but the defenseless potatoes he’d peeled to death. I left that part out of my letter.)
My sister, Katie, had been the editor in chief of The Sagamore the year before. (Katie was a star at everything she ever did. Nobody was better than my big sister. I mean, of course she was editor in chief. What else would she be? Katie was perfect.) I think that is why the paper decided to print my letter—because Katie’s sister wrote it. I was told that the letter would have to be edited for length, and that the copy editor assigned to the job was Danny Larkin. Later, Dan told me that he volunteered to edit my stupid letter to the editor just so he could meet me. I believe it; for someone who ended up talking for a living in court, Dan never liked to just come out and say what he wanted.
We met at the Sagamore office after school one day. Empty room. Just the two of us. A few typewriters and wire baskets on desks, piles of paper everywhere. A calendar on the wall with the next pub date circled in red (the newspaper came out every three weeks).
Danny presented my letter to me, marked up in ink. The crinkly onionskin typing paper was curled and wavy from the pressure of Dan’s pen. He had not made many real changes. Mostly he just sprinkled my sentences with a lot of commas, like a chef grinding pepper onto a plate. The commas were mostly unnecessary, but Danny seemed very sure of his editing, and I understood that all those commas were his way of showing off for me.
“It’s really good, Jane,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll just—most of what I wrote there—why don’t you just go ahead and read it. I’ll just wait. I’ll, uh, okay.”
I started to read but he could not keep quiet.
“Why didn’t you come out for The Sagamore?”
“Danny, I can’t read it if you keep talking.”
“Right, sorry. I’ll let you read.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just, your sister could have got you in.”
“Katie’s the writer in our family.”
“I’m not so sure.”
I squirmed. My impression of Danny was that he was very confident, a little contentious—always talking in class, always raising his hand, knowing the answer, never changing his mind even when teachers corrected him. It was cute to see him bumble trying to talk to a girl.
“Could I make one little suggestion? Maybe you could add a sentence about how sometimes war is necessary. Because, you know, if we’d left it up to the Quakers, then maybe we’d all be speaking German now, y’know? I mean, nobody likes war, but sometimes you have to do it. It’s like going to the dentist.”
“Do I really need to say that? Seems pretty obvious.”
“Not to some people.”
“It is to me.”
“They’ll want to argue with you. Especially ’cause you’re a girl.”
“Let ’em. I don’t care. I hate arguing.”
“Then you shouldn’t have written this letter. It’s gonna make people argue.”
“Maybe. I don’t know why I even wrote the stupid thing.”
“It’s not stupid. Someone had to say it. Someone smart like you.”
This may have been flirting, too, but a different kind than I was used to.
“I’m glad you wrote it.”
“Why didn’t you write it, then?”
“You beat me to it, I guess.”
“Write it now. It’ll be better coming from you.”
“No. Nobody would listen if it came from me.”
“Why not?”
“I argue too much already.”
“You think they’ll listen to me?”
“Of course they will. Everybody knows you, Jane. They’ll read it just because you wrote it.”
“Yeah? And then what? It’s a letter in a high school newspaper. Nobody cares.”
“I do. Don’t back down, Jane. That’s the important thing.”
He seemed to relish saying my name, the feeling of it in his mouth.
“Why is that important?”
“Because if you back down, they win.”
“Who wins? Who’s they?”
He thought it over. “I don’t know.”
And we both laughed. And that was the beginning.
My little letter did run in The Sagamore, peppered with Danny’s commas but otherwise essentially as I wrote it. My girlfriends and my parents and even Katie were impressed with it, but no one else seemed to notice, and the Quaker movie was soon forgotten.
But now Danny Larkin had his hooks in me, and one afternoon he stopped by my locker as I was gathering up my things to go home. He said, “Can I ask you something? Are you going to that Carousel dance?”
This was a dance in the school gym that had a Carousel theme, after the Broadway show.
“I think so. I’m sorry, Danny.”
“You think you’re going? Or you are going?”
“I think so.”
“With who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How can you not know?”
“I mean, I’m not sure. Why are you giving me the third degree?”
“It’s ________, isn’t it?”
I will leave out this boy’s name. I suspect that, like most of us, he would not like to be judged by what he was in high school.
I made a face: What?
“What’s the big secret?”
“Danny, you really— Look, not that it’s any of your business, but he hasn’t asked me yet.”
“Yet. So you think he’s going to?”
I shrugged.
“You hope he’s going to.”
“Why are you grilling me about this?”
“I’m not grilling you, we’re just talking.”
“This is just talking? It feels like arguing to me.”
“Don’t be so sensitive.”
“Okay, well, thank you for the invitation. I really appreciate it, Danny, it was very nice of you. But I guess I’ll just see you there.”
He shrugged and shook his head.
“I won’t see you there?”
“I doubt it. I don’t really want to go.”
“You don’t want to go? But you just asked me to go with you.”
Shrug.
“Danny, why don’t you just ask someone else? You don’t even need a date—just go. Lots of kids go without dates.”
“Eh, it’s not for me.”
“But you want to go!”
“Not really.”
“You just said you want to go!”
“No, I said I want to go with you.”
At that moment, for just a moment, I thought I had made the wrong choice. I didn’t want to go either; I wanted to go with him. Or at least I wanted to go with a boy who wanted to go with me.
I didn’t, of course. This wasn’t a Doris Day movie, it was high school. I went to the Carousel dance with ________. He was the sort of boy I used to attract and be attracted to. Danny Larkin was not. You would have chosen ________ too. He played on the football and baseball teams. He was popular and handsome. My friends all thought he was to die for. But he never read The Sagamore, not even my letter about the Quaker movie. He never even asked me about it. He was much more concerned with what was in my sweater than what was in my mind. I don’t mean he was a bad guy; he wasn’t. It’s just that he and Danny Larkin were different types. And in high school, well, Danny was the wrong type.
But when the next big dance came around, the junior prom in the spring, I was not with ________ anymore, and Danny did ask me properly, and though my friends thought I could do better (“Why would you go with him? You’re so pretty”), I said yes. The theme this time was Moon over Miami. The walls of the gym were decorated with cardboard palm trees and a big gold moon. The boys wore rented white dinner jackets with shawl collars, the girls wore puffy skirts and silky tops with spaghetti straps. Danny was an atrocious dancer, but he did not seem to realize it or care, he was so happy to be there with me. Afterward, we drove in his father’s car to Jack and Marion’s, a deli where we had sandwiches and gabbed until it was very late. When we finally got home to my house, near the top of the hill on Summit Avenue, we parked out front and I sat in the front seat for a long time waiting for him to get up the courage to kiss me. Come on, already! Later, he said he already knew he was going to marry me.
Now, tell me: does that sound like a monster to you?
* * *
—
A year after I went missing, almost to the day—he waited for the anniversary, a decent interval, until he thought no one would notice—Dan took his new girlfriend to Bermuda on vacation. It was a vacation we were supposed to take together. I had already arranged it all through the travel agent. They took the same flights I had picked, they stayed at the same hotel, the Southampton Princess. They walked on the beach and dressed up for dinner at expensive restaurants. They tried scuba diving, exploring the sunken wrecks in the shallow reefs near the shore, something I never would have been brave enough to do. She looked so lovely and glamorous, so much taller and thinner than me. I looked like a plow horse next to Dan’s girlfriend. At the pool she wore this diaphanous cover-up over her bathing suit, and elegant dresses at night. She had good skinny legs and arms, and beautiful bony shoulders. Beside her, Dan marched around with his little bantam strut, the way he used to after sex or after he won a big case, like a little boy swaggering around in a Superman costume, so proud and happy. They belonged together, anybody could see that. They just fit. They were a couple, more so than Dan and I ever were, though we got along fine for a while, even loved each other. This was different. Dan never used to touch me, but when he lay beside her at the pool, he always had a hand on her somewhere, clamped around her ankle or laid upon her slim derriere, a presumption that she accepted comfortably, though she did not look like the type.
I read once, in some magazine, that “love thrives on impediment”—on wanting, not having. On yearning. Killing me had kept them apart for a while, which actually made them want each other more. Now, finally, the wait was over. The impediment was removed. I was the impediment.
* * *
—
It was around this time, too, that Miranda saw a vision.
In the year since I’d gone, Miranda’s appearance had changed. She was eleven, almost twelve. She was thinning out, beginning to look like the woman she would become. Her manner was different, too, I think, though it might be just a mother’s imagination. She looked weary. I know it is strange to describe such a young girl as weary, but that is how she seemed to me. A light had gone out of her.
Oh, my poor motherless little girl. I know that my death is not the only cause of everything that happened to Miranda. Some people are just born with a melancholy nature, and adolescence is when it often shows up. Another child might have survived this whole thing. Another child might have grieved then recovered. Miranda could not. Her sadness arrived with all its furniture, intending to stay. When I see that little girl a year after my going, I feel such guilt. What if I had not disappeared? How would she be different today? It was not my fault, but the fact remains: I was not there for my daughter when she needed me.
So, picture Miranda. She is hanging out on the sidewalk outside the little market in Newton Highlands, on Lincoln Street. October 1976. Mid afternoon. She did not like to go home after school anymore, so in the afternoons she would hang around at a favorite park or at the public library, reading. She had a friend named Marybeth, a little brunette with a swinging ponytail, and the two of them sometimes spent the afternoon together. But generally Miranda preferred to be alone in the quiet time after school, and on this day she was standing by herself on the sidewalk when she saw me.
She first caught sight of me as I walked nearly a block away, coming straight toward her. She gaped as the vision shimmered into focus. Miranda’s body went rigid.
She did look like me, this woman. Especially at a distance, at a glance, when all Miranda could see was her shape, the way she carried herself, her posture.
And as the ghost came closer, more details: the right coloring, the right height. Some things were wrong, of course, but Miranda seemed to ignore the bits that were off—the nose was wrong, the face was too thin—and she saw instead something deeper, something in the woman’s expression that could only be Miranda’s mother.
You see, don’t you? To Miranda this was not a woman who looked like her mother; this was her mother. For a moment.
Then it dissolved. She knew it could not be. It was impossible. And the vision was gone.
Yet the illusion was so intoxicating, so warm, that she chose to robe herself in it and stay there, feeling her mother’s presence.
The woman finally reached the store. She noticed Miranda, gave her a nod and a smile, and went inside. If she thought there was anything strange about the little girl’s stoned expression, she gave no sign of it.
After a moment, Miranda trailed her into the little market. It was just a tiny storefront in a century-old building. Inside was a small room with refrigerator cases in the back and shelves along the right-hand wall. To the left was a counter where a man stood on a raised platform at a cash register, tiers of candy and cigarettes behind him. This man saw the little girl come in and said hello.
Miranda did not answer him. She stayed near the entrance, watching the woman who was and was not her mother, studying her, until she worried that the woman would notice and she retreated to the sidewalk.
She did not know what to call the excitement she was feeling, her beating heart, the happy thrill that followed a year of deadness, but I know what it was: it was love. Love of a strange kind, it is true, but then they are all strange, no two loves are exactly alike. Of course she knew by this point, only a couple of minutes into the encounter, that this woman was not me. The dream could not last, reality smashed it up. If the woman had really been me, then the only possible explanation for my appearing here would be that I had willingly run out on my family but chosen to stay in the area, in plain sight, shopping only a few blocks from my old home, then looked my own daughter in the eye and did not react at all. No. And yet, something had happened, some switch inside Miranda had been thrown, and she felt it would be a blow, a second abandonment, if this woman simply vanished as I had.
So when the woman came out of the store hugging a brown paper bag, Miranda said to her, trying to mask the urgency she was feeling, “Excuse me?”
“Yes. Oh, hello.”
