Hilda titles this chapter “Abby in Love,” and is for once right about something. Conrad Lowe was Abigail’s first true love.
The mature Abigail, that is. When she was sixteen, Abigail thought she was in love with Everett Esser. They kept steady company for a month or so, long enough for her to get pregnant, anyway. He was a sandy-haired boy with glasses and a dimpled chin, a bright kid with a weak character. A romantic. He used to call her his “woman,” and Abigail told me he had forgiven her her past indiscretions.
I watched them together once, in a crowd of kids at Scarborough Beach, and she was unpacking the sandwiches and he was pouring the punch; and they were encapsulated in that aura of intimacy and exclusivity that young couples cast about themselves like a toreador’s flashy cape. She was playing wife, he was playing husband, and they were both full of shit. Had Everett lived he would have clung to his illusions for, perhaps, a couple of years. I’ll give him credit for that. He was very young. But Abigail, she was just trying the whole thing on for size. When she got the news of his ridiculous death there was a moment of genuine pity, but that was it. What followed at the funeral was of course theatrics. Her farewell performance. Love, for Abigail at sixteen, was a big hog wallow, and when he died—and not a moment too soon—she went to the showers.
She had a sentimental streak, especially when drunk, and she’s always been good-natured. So most of her relationships have been amiable, many lastingly affectionate. She loved it when one of them fell in love with her, which happened often. She never lost interest in the drama of that. At such times our house would fill with flowers (which I had to put in water), the telephone would ring off the hook, and the big ham would shuffle around wearing a faraway expression. “Poor X,” she would sigh. “He’s got it bad.” As she aged, X tended to get younger. She was the first big romance for an awful lot of young men. But sometimes an older one would fall, and more than once a marriage disintegrated while Abigail sighed and shook her head in fond exasperation at the crazy devotion, the total loss of perspective, of X.
She would try to dissuade these kamikazes. I think her efforts were genuine. I heard her once on the telephone, talking down some poor sap with four kids, and I remember her saying, “No, Jack. You go out that door now and I’ll never open mine to you again.” Of course, she had allowed Jack to get to this point: to frighten his children, to wound his wife. She hadn’t lowered the boom until he stood there in his foyer with his hat on and his suitcase all packed, with shirtcuffs and pieces of sock sticking out of it, and his hysterical family clinging to his knees.
The worst case was Big Bob Flynn, who used to be our tax assessor. He was twenty years older than Abigail, with children grown up and a grandchild on the way. A big man with a ruddy face, who told the world’s best jokes and knew half of the citizens of Frome by their first names. We got along terrifically well. Like me, he thought most people were horses’ patoots, but he liked them anyway, a lot better than I did.
Anyway, he fell for Abigail, the old dope. It hurt me to see them together. He would come by to pick her up and always look sheepishly at me, because of his family, because he knew I didn’t approve. They never slept together here, in the house, and I think this was at his insistence. He used to send her singing telegrams, though, and balloon-o-grams. They started off funny. I got a song once by mistake, when I answered to “Miss Mather” without thinking to qualify. A nervous, tuneless young man sang three stanzas of “Let’s Do It” before I plugged him with a tip. Big Bob sent her helium balloons with silly faces on them, a Swissy Mouse balloon, a Harpo Marx balloon, a balloon that said BALLOON.
But he fell, eventually, hardest of all. He did leave his wife and disgrace himself, for good, with his children. Abigail tried to stop him, but he was older and more stubborn than the others and, I think, more desperate for happiness. In the end he left Frome, financially broken, drinking too much, a ruin.
I won’t say Abigail was unmoved, or that she never grieved for him, or even that she was incapable of feeling guilt. All I know is that one of the last balloons she got from Bob Flynn remained aloft through some fluke for over three months, growing imperceptibly smaller every day, gathering dust, in the dark northeast corner of the living room. It said I LOVE YOU. I could have pulled it down and disposed of it, but it wasn’t my job. And she knew it was there. One night when we were sitting in the living room and had just turned off Johnny Carson, I broke down and demanded, “Doesn’t that depress you?” pointing at the little puckered dull-skinned balloon, and “Why don’t you get rid of it, for God’s sake.” And she said, “Yeah, it’s sad.” And chewed her lip. “I just wanted to see how long it would stay up.”
Before Conrad Lowe, sentiment played second fiddle even to the transient spirit of scientific inquiry.
But that was B.C. A.C. was a brand-new day.
Abigail went off her feed immediately. Starting the day after their meeting at the DeVilbisses’, she jumped whenever the phone rang, and mooned around the house like a teenager who’s two weeks late. Her appetite dwindled and I caught her more than once staring at herself in the full-length bathroom mirror as though looking at some pathetic stranger, some down-and-out dame glimpsed on a bus, whose history you try to determine from visible clues.
“You’re too old for this,” I told her.
“I know it.”
At this point she still had too much pride to pump Guy and Hilda for information about his whereabouts. But, she admitted to me, every time she approached their house with the mail she got so excited she could hardly breathe, knowing it was just possible that He could open the door.
Then she read the newspaper interview, and took to driving by the Howard Johns in the early evening, afraid to stop and stake out the place, afraid that he would catch her out.
One evening, when Anna was staying overnight at a friend’s house, I sat Abigail down for a talk. She was beginning to worry me. “Look at me,” I said to her. “That man is the most objectionable person I have ever met. He’s a sadist. He’s a manipulator. He likes to hurt people, and he especially likes to hurt women.”
Abigail nodded like a cow, her eyes luminous and large. Just talking about him made her bovine.
“He may even be a psychopath. He made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and quiver.”
“I know.”
“You know? Abigail, what I’m saying here is dead serious. The only thing confining him to merely emotional destruction is self-preservation. If he thought he could get away with it he’d kill people.” I heard myself and this sounded a bit much. “I don’t mean that. I just got carried away.”
“No,” Abigail said. “I think you may be right.”
“Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you all of a sudden? You’re no masochist! You’re no martyr! Why, the very idea—”
“I know,” she said. “It’s going to be horrible.” She doubled up in some kind of pain and bowled over on her side of the divan, clutching her middle, her face screwed up and unrecognizable. “Oh, Dorcas,” she said, shamelessly crying.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I’ve got to have him! I can’t stand it! I want him so bad!” The precise nature of her want would have been obvious to a Martian. She was jacknifed and keening in a rhythmic, hopeless way.
“Abigail, stop it. Stop it this instant.” She keened louder. I lost control then, so awful was this spectacle, and degrading, to both of us. Especially to me. If she had smeared herself with wolf dung and sacrificed some helpless creature to a gibbous moon I would not have been more dismayed. She had always had pride. Pride alone, I could see now, had kept her from this bestial state. She was mindless now and desperate with need, where once her sexual confidence had been, and the sight was more than ugly and degrading. It was frightening, and in a way I have never been able to explain.
All I know is that watching her so out of control, so frustrated, so empty, made me feel that something was terribly wrong, on a scale which dwarfed us both. The spectacle was unnatural. It made me mindless, too, it made me panic, and I couldn’t shake the conviction that this was wrong, that my sister must not be denied, that her present unnatural state was a piece of cosmic bad news; and I became frantic, and for a crystalline moment I considered how best to satisfy her, I imagined going to Conrad Lowe as a supplicant, begging him to come, or in a threatening posture, kidnapping him, bringing him here, trussed and in prime condition, to my sister, pimping for my sister. In just the way that the screams of a newborn in pain will bring strangers running, covering their ears, ready to sacrifice anything to save it, so the sight and sound of my needful sister aroused in me the subhuman instincts of a pimp.
I drew back, at the brink of what I don’t know, and slapped my sister across the face for the first time in our adult lives. This had no effect on her, nor did the second slap, nor the great shake I gave her so that her body wobbled bonelessly like a thawed carcass. And in the end I went to the kitchen and filled my biggest pot, my old pressure cooker, with cold water, and threw it on her as if she were a tantrumming child or a dog in the street; and this slowed her down some, but did not stop her, so that I had to refill the pan again and again, and by the time I had won, the divan was sodden and wrecked and there was water standing halfway across the living room rug. At which point we both came to, and stared at each other, and the telephone rang, and I picked it up. “Surprise!” said Conrad Lowe.
Wordlessly I handed the telephone to dripping Abigail, who listened for a second and handed it back to me. She whispered, “It’s you he wants.”
I brought the receiver to my ear. “…wrong foot,” he was saying, “and I was wondering if I could take you someplace for dinner tonight. The restaurant of your choice?” His voice was distorted. It sounded as if he were applying a toothpick between some late molars. It sounded as if he were flat on his back in bed with the receiver cradled between ear and pillow. It sounded as if his bed were unmade. “…surf and turf? What is that? Boiled kelp?”
I couldn’t speak. I was staring at Abigail, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to speak up: to let him know I could see his game. He was trying to play us off each other, just for the hell of it, the way certain little girls enjoy breaking up friendships. Conrad Lowe had a feminine appetite for social mischief. He was calculating in just the sort of way a particular sort of amoral female is calculating. I thought of this, while he spoke, and wondered how to use it as a weapon against him, and saw that I could not. That this female side of his nature made him even more formidable.
“Come on, Dorcas,” he was saying now. “I’m going nuts in this burg. Just give me one evening. A few hours of your time. If you still don’t want anything to do with me, you could point me in the direction of some interesting people. What say?”
“No, thank you.”
Abigail snatched the receiver from my hand and buried the mouthpiece in a sodden cushion. She hissed, inches from my face, “It’s going to kill me. But if you don’t go I’ll never forgive you.”
“But I don’t want—”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me!”
“This has nothing to do with you. I just don’t want—”
“Tell him! Tell him you’ll go!” She thrust the receiver into my face with such force that she almost chipped a tooth. She had never in all our lives used her superior size and strength against me. I had never before been physically afraid of her. She was not in her right mind.
“Mr. Lowe?”
“Yes?”
“I’ll see you. But just this—”
“I’ll come by at seven.”
“No! No, I’ll meet you.”
“Where?”
We settled in the end on Lobsterama, a South County bayside place. I insisted on meeting him there, even though this would mean identical twenty-five-minute drives for each of us. We’d probably chase each other down the highway. He didn’t argue. He was laughing when he hung up.
So it came to pass that I had the first “date” of my entire life, with Conrad Lowe, a man I feared and despised, and at the insistence of my deranged, lovesick sister.
When I was halfway out the door—I have a real thing about being late, and it was already six thirty—she shouted at me. “Where do you think you’re going, looking like that?” I was wearing my best suit, my only suit, and I had shined my shoes. She said I looked terrible. I said I had always looked terrible, if by “terrible” she meant “sexually unappealing.” She said something could still be done about that. Grimly, over my weak protests, she did something with my short thin hair to give it “body” and rouged my cheekbones so roughly that even after I wiped them off they remained pink and glowing, from the abrasion.
First he had turned me into a pimp, and now he was doing the same for my sister. “Take off that hideous suit,” she ordered. “I’ve got a dress that might fit you, if I can find that wide belt,” and she started to wrench the jacket back off my shoulders, whereupon I did finally, like the old hand which I by now was, give her a smart clop in the chops. This was all it took. She started sobbing and collapsed into a chair.
I lectured her for five minutes before leaving. I said she was to pull herself together, stop being disgusting, show some respect for herself, try self-discipline for a change. I said I was ashamed to have her in the family. I promised to do my best to steer Conrad Lowe in her direction.