The Divorce

THE FINLEYS’ DIVORCE has become a legend in this town. Who would have thought a diabetic insurance agent only five feet six inches tall could have soared to such flights of imagination. You should listen to this story. In case someone you trusted and had children with decides to dump you and go on to another life.

You think men have to put up with that, don’t you? You think a man has to sit on his hands and keep his mouth shut and let his wife break up his home and send him off to live in a hovel? The moment she wants to, a woman thinks she can quit and expects you to take it like a man. Well, Bobby Lee Finley didn’t take it like a man. He fought back. He became a whole new thing, a lesson to us all. Bobby Lee, who couldn’t even make the football team, who had to be a cheerleader in junior high, who played saxophone in the high school band. More about the saxophone later. It’s going to play a part in this story.

When the divorce began Bobby Lee and Ginger had been living here in Harrisburg, Illinois, for fifteen years, seemingly at peace. She was from Marion, which is only twenty miles away. Bobby Lee met her when they were at Carbondale in business school. She was too pretty for him really, but her father had just died and her mother wasn’t well, so when he offered to marry her, she did it. I guess she thought moving to Harrisburg was a pretty big deal. At least it wasn’t Marion. Anyway, she married him and two years later they had a baby girl named Little Ginger. Three years after that they had another baby girl. They named this one Roberta, signaling to anyone who was interested that this was going to be it for babies for the Finleys.

Little Ginger was an ordinary, normal child, selling Girl Scout cookies to the neighbors, singing in the children’s choir, riding her bicycle around the square on sunny Saturdays. But Roberta wasn’t well. She was a sickly baby and she grew up to be a sickly child. Nothing anyone could put their finger on. She was just delicate. As soon as Roberta was two years old, Ginger started working as a secretary in a law firm and a lot of people thought she neglected the little girl. If she did, Bobby Lee more than made up for it. He doted on that child. He carried her around. He took her everywhere with him.

So fourteen years went by and no one paid much attention to the Finleys, except to worry occasionally about Roberta, who was wearing thick bifocal glasses by the time she was ten, or to think how nice it was to do business with Bobby, or to wave at Ginger at the grocery store. She always dressed up in high heels to go to work and would come tearing into the IGA at five-thirty every afternoon trying to find something to cook for dinner.

Then the divorce began. It was the year the hospital built the health club in the parking lot by the replica of the Statue of Liberty. Ginger’s boss at the law firm had offered bonuses to anyone who would go down there and exercise on their lunch hour three days a week. He got a rebate on their health insurance for convincing them to do it, so Ginger, ever law-abiding and obliging, signed up for an aerobics class. After the divorce began, several people commented on how good she looked and no wonder it ended in divorce.

I want it understood that this is not gossip. I never gossip. I just want to get the facts straight and explain why I am serving fifty hours of community service for contempt of court. People in Harrisburg know how I got caught up in this. But outsiders might not understand, so I have decided to set this down while it’s fresh in my mind.

In the first place I work across the hall from Ginger. Also, I have known Bobby Lee since he was a year behind me in Horace Mann Elementary School. I know what happened in this divorce. There may be bigger towns than this, with more excitement and bigger malls, but no one in the United States can boast a more eventful divorce or one more tailored to the expanding horizons of the nineties. Beware the fin de siècle, my German grandfather used to say. It is always a time of decadence.

The divorce started off simply enough. One weekend Ginger went off to Marion to meet her two best friends from high school. That’s a normal thing to do. Lots of wives around here do that sort of thing, go home and visit and leave the children with the father.

The first thing I knew about it Bobby Lee called me at ten o’clock on Saturday night and asked if I had the number of Ginger’s boss. It’s unlisted. I did happen to have it in my address book and I gave it to him. “What’s wrong?” I asked, just trying to be polite. You could tell Bobby Lee was mad. Beware a short man when he is angry, my mother always said. Banty rooster syndrome and all that.

“I’m looking for my wife,” he answered. “She was dancing at the Krazy Cat last night with Eugene Holcomb. How do you like that, Letitia? I’m baby-sitting and my wife’s in Marion dancing with her boss.”

“I don’t believe it,” I answered. “Calm down, Bobby. Ginger isn’t having an affair with Eugene Holcomb. Eugene weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He’s too fat to have an affair. Why are you calling him? You’ll be sorry you did this in the morning. Call Ginger at her mother’s.”

“I tried that. Her mother said they’d gone out again. That’s two nights in a row. I bet they’re back at the Krazy Cat.”

“Bobby, are you drinking? This doesn’t sound like you.”

“I am not drinking. I’m trying to find my wife. Last night she was dancing with Eugene Holcomb. Tonight they’ve gone out again.”

“Then drive over to Marion and find her. It’s only fifteen minutes away on the bypass. Calm down, Bobby Lee. I’ve never heard you sound this way.”

“I’ve never been left to baby-sit while my wife dances in a road-house with her boss. I’ve never been left alone while she flaunts herself all over Marion, Illinois.”

“Go over there and find her. It won’t be what you think.”

“I can’t leave the kids.”

“Bring them to me. I’ll take care of them.”

“Little Ginger’s at a movie with her friend. She isn’t home yet.”

So he raved some more and then he hung up and I made a peanut butter sandwich and went to bed with a book. I’ve been reading about the twelfth century in England and in France. A biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Back then no one thought a thing about adultery. No one expected people to be faithful if they had any power in the world. They didn’t act all shocked if the king had a girlfriend in every hamlet or the queen ran in some poets to shore her up as she grew old.

I didn’t expect to hear any more about Ginger and Bobby Lee, but by noon the next day Ginger had me on the phone. “What did Bobby tell you?” she wanted to know. “He told me he called you for Eugene’s number. I’m mortified, Letitia. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.”

“What happened?”

“He came over to Marion in the middle of the night and dragged me home. He came to the Krazy Cat at eleven-thirty at night with my girls and made me leave with him. He wouldn’t even let me go by Mother’s and get my clothes. Who else did he call? Who else knows about all this?”

“I don’t know about it. All I was doing was reading a book when the phone rang. What’s going on, Ginger? Were you and Eugene dancing at the Krazy Cat?”

“His wife was there. Janet Holcomb was right there with us. We were all there together. Then Bobby came barging in with Little Ginger and Roberta and dragged me home. I will never forgive him, Letitia. I will never forget this as long as I live. I shouldn’t have married him in the first place. Never marry anyone who can’t make the football team. My daddy taught me that.” She had this icy tone in her voice, like whatever she had been keeping inside for years had finally found an outlet.

We hung up and I was left trying to decide how I’d been dragged into this domestic crisis. I’m the director of the Harrisburg EOA and president of the Literacy Council. I don’t get involved in people’s lives. I have all of that I want at the office.

The next thing that happened was that Ginger took the girls out of school and went to Marion to stay. She left her job and kept them out of school for seven days until Bobby Lee agreed to vacate the house and let them move back in alone. It was the last concession that he made. What happened to him between the time he moved out of the house into a messy little apartment near the railroad tracks and a week later when he went on the offensive is something we will never know. I think he went to Chicago to see a psychiatrist or a marriage counselor, but other people think it was a witch doctor or some dark, demonic force. The Bobby Lee who emerged from hiding that third week was someone we didn’t know. In the first place he was letting his hair grow. It was down to his collar by the time Ginger returned to town. In the second place he changed his hours of business. From now on, if you wanted to talk to Bobby about insurance you had to call before two in the afternoon. After two, all you got was voice mail.

“He’s completely nuts,” Ginger said. She was out in the hall when I got to work on Monday. “He’s supposed to take the girls to dinner tonight. He’d better behave. This is his chance to show he’s going to be civilized.”

“He’ll be fine,” I answered. “He’s always been a model citizen. What makes you think he won’t be fine?”

“He says he’s going to start a soup kitchen.” She giggled. How could she help it? “He says now that he knows what loneliness is he wants to stop it for other people. He says he’s going to turn his apartment into a place where anyone who’s lonely can find someone to talk to and have something to eat. What if he does it? What if he takes Ginger and Roberta to his house and there are homeless people there?”

“We only have two homeless people. That man who stays on Hill Street and the one who walks around the park.”

“He’s picking the girls up after school. They’re going to spend the night with him.”

That evening went all right, Ginger reported the next day. The girls helped him cook dinner and the only funny business he tried to pull was questioning them about their mother’s whereabouts. “He isn’t supposed to talk to them about me,” Ginger complained. “My lawyer said he would cite him for contempt of court if he asked them questions about me.”

“That might be hard to prove.” We were out in the hall, balancing coffee cups on our break. Everyone in our building used to hang out there when it was too cold to go outside. That was before we had the new café.

“He let me have the good car,” Ginger continued. She smiled and licked her lips. To tell the truth she was acting like a schoolgirl who was delighting in the pain she was causing some poor boy who had a crush on her. I couldn’t help thinking she was enjoying it. And why not? What excitement had she had for the last fifteen years? Typing up Eugene’s briefs? Throwing away junk mail? Trying to figure out why Roberta caught every cold that came along?

“Bobby’s a nice man. You better think twice before you let him go.”

“After what he did to me? I’m afraid of him, Letitia. I changed the locks on the doors. You didn’t see him that night in Marion. He’s lost his mind. His hair is down to his collar. Have you seen his hair? He’s taking the girls this weekend. I’m worried sick about it.”

“What will you do while they’re gone?”

“Oh, I’ll be busy. Little Ginger’s coming back on Saturday afternoon to get dressed for her freshman-sophomore dance. I’m going to chaperone. I’ll be plenty busy.” She swished back into Eugene’s office and I watched her swish. She’s lost ten pounds since this began. I’ve never seen her look better.

 

At five-thirty on Saturday afternoon she called me. “I have to talk to someone. You won’t believe what he’s done to me.”

“What did he do?”

“He rented a tuxedo. He’s going to the dance with us. He had Little Ginger call and tell me. I got him on the phone. I said, ‘Bobby, if you go, I’m not going.’ So he’s going anyway. Ginger’s going to be so disappointed. My oldest daughter’s first dance and I can’t go.”

I didn’t say a word to that. I didn’t say, She’s his oldest daughter too. I didn’t say, Leave me out of this. Perhaps I didn’t want out. There isn’t much going on in Harrisburg that time of year. I guess I liked the excitement of being the first to know each new development.

“You better not go,” I said. “That’s playing into his hands. That’s what he wants you to do.”

“But what about Little Ginger? She’ll die if I’m not there. I’m supposed to chaperone.”

“Do what you want to then.”

“I might go and then I might not.”

I hung up and went back to my reading. I had finished the twelfth century and started in on Little House on the Prairie, which my book club is reviewing. I read it straight through without stopping and went to sleep and dreamed of pioneers and men fording rivers with Christmas presents for little girls on their heads.

At nine the next night Ginger called me in a rage. “You sound terrible,” I said. “What happened? What’s going on?”

“He bought them a dog,” she screamed. “He delivered them home with a half-grown collie he bought from some white trash in Shawneetown. He dropped them off outside the house in the rain with this dog. I don’t even have a fenced-in yard. The gate’s been gone for years.”

“That’s brilliant,” I couldn’t help saying. “A dog. My God, that’s a move by a master. I didn’t know Bobby Lee had that in him.”

“It isn’t funny, Letitia. I’m going to call my lawyer in the morning and have him cited. This wet dog in my kitchen. What will I do with it?”

“Find out where he got it and take it back.”

“But Roberta loves it. She’s been hugging it ever since she got home. I’ve never seen her so happy. She loves this dog.”

“Then keep the dog.”

“I haven’t told you what he did to me at the dance, have I?”

“You went to the dance?”

“I had to go. I couldn’t let Ginger down.”

“Where was Roberta while you were all at the dance?”

“With the dog. It’s Roberta’s dog. When I got to the dance he was standing there in his tuxedo with a video camera. He videotaped me. Every time I looked his way he had this camera turned on me. I don’t know what to do. Do you think I should call my lawyer now or wait until the morning?”

“It’s clear he doesn’t want this divorce.”

“Well, he’s going to get it. I’m not going to put up with his jealous rages. I’ll never forget that night.”

I hung up. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe all of this was lost on Ginger. Maybe she didn’t have a high enough IQ to understand what was being lavished on her. Didn’t she know she was going to start wanting to see that videotape?

On Wednesday of the following week she filed formal charges and a date was set for the divorce proceedings. On that same day an ad appeared in the Harrisburg Sentinel. Opening November 1st. ONLY THE LONELY CAFE. Modeled on the famous coffee shops of San Francisco. We will feature Cappuccino, Espresso, Latte, Café Au Lait and cakes of many kinds. Homemade cakes, cookies, muffins, scones, and Southern sweet rolls. Bookstore and Art Gallery opening soon. Dance Floor and Band to follow. Twelve Seventy-Five Maple Street. BOBBY LEE FINLEY welcomes you to a New Highlight in Harrisburg History. Free Refills.

I should stop a minute and describe our town to you. It’s a sweet-smelling town, situated in the bootheel of Illinois, thirty miles west of the Ohio River and twenty-five miles north of the Shawnee National Forest, home of Mammoth Cave. It is the county seat of Saline County, a clean, simple city of maple trees and sycamores, brick buildings and neat lawns. We boast a Carnegie Library that looks like a temple. We are twenty thousand souls, give or take a hundred. Our streets meander up gentle hills. Glaciers crossed this country. There are limestone formations outside town and abandoned strip mines. There are pastures with neat fences and houses where the James gang holed up one winter. Our high school has a thousand students. We are law-abiding church-going people who like hobbies and hard work and minding our own business. I used to mind mine. Until I got sucked into the vortex of Bobby Lee and Ginger’s divorce.

You probably wouldn’t think a town like the one I have described would be a good place to open a San Francisco–style coffee shop, but you would be wrong. From the first day it was packed and it stayed packed. Bobby had torn out the insides of his grandfather’s old law office beside the Quorum Court Building off the square and completely rebuilt it. It looked like something from old Vienna, with wrought-iron tables and chairs he ordered from California and a curved wooden counter he salvaged from an old hotel in Eldorado. The inside was painted white and green. There were green and white tiles on the floor and a baker’s rack holding copies of exotic newspapers and magazines. (He had a friend in Chicago who sent them down.) Harper’s magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, the Village Voice, the Prairie Schooner, the New York Times. Every week a bundle arrived from Chicago with new magazines and newspapers you can’t get in Harrisburg. A certain segment of his clientele was coming in just to read the papers. That was my excuse when Ginger cornered me and suggested it was disloyal of me to spend so much time at the Lonely, as it was being called in Harrisburg. Of course, she couldn’t keep her kids away. Little Ginger and Roberta were there every day after school, helping out their father and eating cake.

It was a complete success from the word go. In the first place the food was good, always an important consideration in southern Illinois, where people make no bones about their appetites. At first Bobby Lee had Mrs. Saxocorn baking for him, but the demand outgrew the supply and he began to spend his evenings baking.

He bought a copy of the Garden Club cookbook and called up the contributors for tips. Pretty soon the glass windows of the stand by the cash register were filled with pieces of Mrs. Hancock’s Poppy Seed Cake and Mrs. Kalicha’s Pecan and Marble Delight. He was selling slices of cake for one dollar and fifty cents apiece, and the young people of Harrisburg were forking over their allowances with abandon. Bobby Lee stood behind the counter in an apron, serving Cafe Au Lait and Hawaiian Mocha Dreams and Sports Tea and Cappuccino. He soon had two or three of the young people working for him. He spent from eight to two in the insurance office and the afternoon in the cafe and the evenings baking. He wasn’t sleeping much, I heard.

“He drives by our house every morning and puts the paper on the porch,” Ginger told me. “Eugene said I could cite him for contempt if I wanted to but it probably isn’t worth the trouble. At least he hasn’t gotten them any more animals.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“Oh, we still have it. Roberta is so attached to it. It isn’t a bad dog. I don’t let it in the house, of course, but I let her keep it in the yard. They’re building it a doghouse.”

“Who is?”

“Bobby and the girls. They work on it in his backyard when they go over for the weekend.”

“Where is the dog sleeping now?”

“In the kitchen. Just until the doghouse is finished. It’s still cold at night, Letitia. I can’t let it stay outside and freeze.”

The next thing Bobby started were poetry readings. He started paying people to come down on Wednesday afternoons and read their poetry. He brought in a poet from the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale to start things off. After that they were mostly local people. Even old Mr. Aaron, who is eighty years old and used to be in a group of poets in Chicago, came down. No one has seen him in years. We all thought he was dead and all of a sudden he shows up at the coffee shop wearing a tweed suit and a lovely new tie and reading his poetry out loud. Most of the poems were about when he was overseas during the Second World War. Several were about going to Italy after the war and falling in love with a beautiful young girl he couldn’t marry.

I had a talk with Bobby Lee around that time that surprised me. I ran into him in the post office a few days after the poetry readings got started. We were waiting in line to get our packages mailed. He had three manila folders in his hands. I was holding a large package containing a pocketbook I was mailing to St. Louis to have restored.

“Let me hold that for you,” he said.

“It’s not heavy. It’s a frivolous mailing, to tell the truth. I’d hate for anyone to know how I was wasting time.”

“I’m sending poems to a magazine.” He laughed and smiled a truly childlike smile, charming, unashamed. His hair had grown so long he was tying it back with a leather thong. I have to admit he has pretty hair for a man, soft and brown and wavy. His mother was a pretty girl, rest her soul, dead in an automobile accident about the time Bobby finished high school.

“Good for you,” I said. “I used to write some poems now and again. I heard the young people read last Wednesday, Bobby. That’s a fine thing you have going down there. Keeping them out of bars and pool halls.” I lowered my eyes. I didn’t want to imply I was thinking about the Krazy Cat in Marion.

“Oh, that isn’t why I’m doing it.” He laughed again. “I have darker designs than that.” The man in front of me finished his business at the window and I stepped up to mail my pocketbook. Darker designs? Was Ginger right? Was all this just to get her back? Is everything we do on earth about love and only love? I have hit on this idea before and pondered it. Not the electric light, I always tell myself. Benjamin Franklin didn’t go out in the backyard and attach himself to lightning by a kite string just to get some woman to like him better, did he? I think not. I am of the school of thought that says we are more complicated than that.

 

As soon as the poetry readings were established, Bobby started his jazz band. Remember I told you he played a saxophone in high school? Well, it turned out he had never forgotten how. He had kept that old saxophone all those years while he worked to make a living for his family. Now he got it out and polished it up and started practicing. In a month’s time he had a band together, two electric guitars, a bass player, a drummer, a keyboard player, and himself. On Friday and Saturday afternoons they started having Happy Hour at the coffee shop and playing music. When spring arrived Bobby closed the shop for three days and built a patio in the empty lot behind the building. As soon as the concrete was poured he drove to the Wal-Mart in Carbondale and brought back six large white canvas umbrellas and set them up on tables around the dance floor. Mr. Aaron was advising him by now and you could see the Italian influence. That Friday afternoon, with the concrete barely dry, they started the outdoor concerts. Fifty people came the first afternoon. By the next afternoon two hundred were there. It had snowballed. The height of the weekend here in Harrisburg became going to the Lonely to hear music.

They named the band Father Bobby’s Raiders and they had these outfits that looked like the undershirts of priests and nuns. Oh, yes, there was a woman in the band. A woman dentist who moved here from St. Louis. A beautiful unmarried girl who plays bass guitar.

Nothing this sacrilegious had ever been done in Harrisburg before, but no one complained. Bobby Lee’s refusal to take his divorce lying down had caught the imagination of the people. The men liked it, of course, but why did the women like it? Well, to begin with, Ginger. A new divorcee in a town this small is always a danger. Plus, the children start goofing up. It makes extra work for teachers, work for school counselors, the bills don’t get paid. There are reasons society is on the side of order.

The Raiders also played concerts in the park. They played for the Half-Centennial in June, they played at the high school for the Halloween dance. They played old favorites at first, “My Girl,” “Earth Angel,” “All You Want to Do Is Ride Around, Sally,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Harrisburg Fight Song.”

Then they moved on to real jazz, with Bobby Lee doing solos on “The Old Rugged Cross,” “If I Loved You,” and “The Entertainer.” We had never had music like this in Harrisburg and the Harrisburg Sentinel did a special section on the cafe, calling it a Renaissance and Bobby Lee a Renaissance man.

Shortly after the band began, Little Ginger and Roberta started to show an interest in music. Instead of goofing them up, this divorce had opened new horizons for them. Little Ginger started playing the piano and clarinet and Roberta turned out to be some sort of undiscovered instant genius on the trumpet. By the time the second spring arrived and the outdoor bandstand reopened, Bobby Lee was letting them play with the band anytime they wanted to. Little Ginger only played with them occasionally. She was sticking to classical music, but you couldn’t keep Roberta off the stage. Bobby bought her a pair of cowboy boots and a fringed and beaded skirt and blouse and she would get up on that stage and play her little heart out. You would never believe she had been a sickly child to hear the power her twelve-year-old lungs could muster. She took the band to new levels. She could play “How High the Moon” or “Chase the Clouds Away” to break your heart, holding the high notes until the crowd would scream for mercy.

The woman dentist began to take an interest in Roberta. You could see the two of them with their heads together before performances, planning new assaults on our senses.

What was going on with the divorce at this point, you well might ask. Well, Ginger kept changing lawyers. Finally she settled on a lawyer in Marion who was said to be the meanest man around. Not that he was having much success. Bobby Lee was into delaying tactics. He wanted his home back. Even though he was creating a perfectly grand new life, he still wanted the one Ginger had taken from him. Of course, she was in a bad mood all the time now. In the first place she had no one to talk to on coffee breaks. Everyone in our building went to the Lonely.

I tried once or twice to get her to go with us. “You ought to at least go look at it and see what he’s done,” I said.

“Absolutely not.”

“Ginger, what is this divorce about? It’s been two years since you started this. Do you remember what you were mad about?”

“It’s about him being jealous of me. Dragging me out of the Krazy Cat. Don’t you remember? It’s because he’s crazy. He’s crazy as a loon. Have you seen his hair?”

“Ginger.” It was her boss, Eugene, calling her. “Ginger, come on in. I need you right away.”

“I have to go.” She snuffed out the half-smoked cigarette in a little tin ashtray on the windowsill and tossed her head and sighed. “I have to type a brief.” She turned on her heels and went into the law office, and, I suppose, spent the afternoon typing up things Eugene had marked for her in law books.

As for me, it was Friday afternoon. At five o’clock Happy Hour started at the Lonely and I wanted to go home and put on my long cotton skirt and sandals. It is hard getting one of the umbrella-covered tables on weekend afternoons. I have a group of friends who take turns getting to the Lonely early to grab a table and today it was my turn.

I told my assistant to close up and walked out of the building into the March day. Harrisburg was getting ready for spring. The grime of winter had been washed off the streets by spring rains. Window washers were at work on ladders at the courthouse. The baseball diamond behind the high school was loud with batting practice. Down at the Lonely Bobby Lee would be wiping off the tables, straightening up the bandstand, making fresh coffee and Sports Tea.

I stopped by the courthouse and thought it over. I was trying to decide what blouse to wear. The past Friday Judge Watts and I had done a mean jitterbug to “All You Want to Do Is Ride Around, Sally.” If he was there again this week I had resolved to really cut loose. I believe it is good for young people to see old people having fun. It keeps them from believing that hard work makes everyone as sad as their parents.

I decided on a white peasant’s blouse. And of course Judge Watts was there. As soon as he spotted me he came over and took a seat beside me underneath the umbrella. “You ready to teach them how to dance?” he asked.

“That’s why I’m here,” I answered, and we went out onto the dance floor and began showing off. We had the floor to ourselves for a few minutes. Then a good-looking carpenter led his partner out onto the space beside us. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said OFF DUTY, and his hips were moving like he meant it. I started copying everything he did and the judge copied me. To be a good dancer at the Lonely you have to move into the zeitgeist of the afternoon. If someone hot comes on the floor, move into their energy. Anyway, that’s the theory Judge Watts and I were working on that afternoon.

We had not been dancing ten minutes when Ginger appeared in the door. She still had on her suit and heels and she just sort of stood there, looking around and trying to take it in. “That’s Bobby’s wife,” I whispered to Judge Watts, and we started in her direction. Bobby beat us to it. He laid his saxophone down on the stage and climbed down off the bandstand and started walking toward her. The crowd of dancers let him through. Behind him Roberta stepped up to the mike and raised her horn. She broke into her famous rendition of “Chase the Clouds Away.” The audience cheered. A few people were staring at Ginger and Bobby Lee but most of them pretended not to notice. This is a polite town. A town this size has to be.

“You’ll have to recuse yourself if the divorce ever gets to your court,” I told the judge, thinking I was joking.

“You know I can’t talk about that,” he answered, and we broke into “The Statue of Liberty,” a special dance we have created here in Harrisburg for Friday afternoons at the Lonely.

You put one arm up into the air and try to stay as straight as you can from the waist up and only let your hips and legs move.

The next week new evil began. Ginger’s trip to the Lonely had only served to make her madder. In the first place she was annoyed to see how well Bobby Lee was doing and it made her greedy. In the second place she had only gone down there, she said, to ask him to sign the divorce decree. When he refused on the grounds that he still loved her, she went into attack mode. She decided to draw blood. She got her mean lawyer to draw up papers demanding twice as much alimony as before and complete custody of the children, including the right to take them out of the state without asking permission.

“Has she gone insane?” my best friend, Cynthia, asked me when she heard about it. “Everyone knows she’s sleeping with half the men in southern Illinois. If she drags this into court, she’s the one who will suffer.”

“Who is she sleeping with? How could she be sleeping with anyone? Oh, well, the girls are gone every weekend, aren’t they?” We were transplanting daisies in my backyard beds. Cynthia was squatting beside the new-turned earth, looking up at me. The sun beat down. Nature was by our side on this clear spring day and here I was, being surprised by nature.

“She’s sleeping with her boss, everyone knows that. And she’s sleeping with Harlon Davis over in Marion. He was in her class in high school.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I saw them in Marion a couple of weeks ago. They were out at the mall together. They were holding hands in the B. Dalton Bookstore. They kept on holding hands the whole time I talked to them.”

“Cynthia! Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Now look here, Letitia. Either we have to bunch these up or we have to make another bed. There’s not enough room for all of these. Where did you get all these daisies?”

“I started them in the kitchen during that snowstorm. How many people know this, Cynthia? About Ginger and Harlon Davies?”

“How would I know? Well, now you know.”

Yes, now I knew and I would live to regret knowing it. Even as we put those daisies in the ground I was regretting knowing it. My mother’s warnings about gossip all came back to haunt me. Mind your own business. Stay out of other people’s lives.

“Not to mention she’s flirting with every man in town,” Cynthia continued. “I wouldn’t let her near my husband. I can tell you that.”

 

Ginger’s new demands were the last straw for Bobby Lee. Now he changed lawyers. Fired darling Mr. Harrison, whom we all adore, and hired a slick young lawyer who had just come to Harrisburg from Chicago. His name was Mr. Petronilla and it turned out he was even meaner than Ginger’s lawyer. If Ginger wanted blood, there would be blood. Bobby Lee counterfiled, charging Ginger with adultery, and we were all subpoenaed. Every single person she had talked to about the divorce. How I regretted that conversation with Cynthia. How I regretted everything I had heard. With the threat of being sworn in under penalty of perjury hanging over my head, I began to regret every word.

Also, I was appalled at how well I remembered every conversation and who said what to me. So powerful and wicked is gossip. So fertile and unforgettable is rumor.

My subpoena was delivered to my office on Monday morning. The trial was set for the third of May. I had planned on taking that week off to work in my gardens. Now, instead, I would be down at the courthouse, locked into the witness stand, with mean lawyers making me repeat things said to me in privacy by people that I liked.

The worst divorce in the history of Harrisburg, Illinois, was about to commence.

The day after everyone was subpoenaed I saw Little Ginger and Roberta riding their bikes down Maple Street. There was a pall around them. They looked like girls no one would want to know. The bloom had left their cheeks.

The trial drew near. Those of us who had been subpoenaed were afraid to discuss it even among ourselves. I was afraid even to talk to Cynthia. At any moment I was going to have to drag her name into court or go to jail. Who told you that? the lawyers would ask. My best friend, Cynthia, I would be forced to reply. We were transplanting daisies.

To add to the complications, the court responsible for divorces in Saline County is Judge Watts’s court. My dancing partner at the café of one of the litigants. In my worst fantasies Ginger’s lawyer would be leaning over me, his foul breath breathing cold germs down into my face, the dust in the courtroom making me sneeze. “Are you the woman who has been seen doing immoral dances with the judge? Immoral and unpatriotic, I might add?”

“The Statue of Liberty is not unpatriotic,” I would defend myself. “It is a paean to liberty. Land of the free, home of the brave.”

Well, of course that part didn’t come true. Judge Watts recused himself and a judge from Centralia was brought in. Judge William Watson, who is a first cousin of our beloved Judge Watson, whose daughter is my best friend. I gave my depositions to both lawyers, mumbling and saying yes and no and I don’t remember and pretending to have to blow my nose every time they made me mad.

The day for the trial came. We all assembled in the smaller courtroom at the courthouse. Judge Watson presiding. I was sitting with my hands in my lap. Outside the sun was shining. A fine day for anything but what we were doing.

“Call your first witness,” the judge said.

“Miss Letitia Scofield,” Bobby Lee’s lawyer said.

I got up and walked slowly to the witness chair. I sat down. “Raise your right hand and swear after me,” the bailiff said.

“No,” I answered.

“What?” said the judge.

“No,” I answered. “I am a tax-paying citizen of the United States of America, the state of Illinois and the county of Saline. This is my courtroom. Your salary is paid by me. I have a right to speak in this court of law and I demand that right.”

The judge only nodded, his gavel in his hand. I had caught him off guard.

“I am acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Finley,” I began. “But I don’t know what is going on in their minds that they would drag us all down here to be involved in this.

“What is this trial about, Your Honor? If I thought it was about the welfare of their little daughters who they brought into the world, I would agree to waste a day of my vacation helping them decide what to do. But this isn’t about the welfare of children. This is about ego and money. About greed and cruelty and revenge. About two people who want to make each other do things. About a woman who likes money and wants to make a man give it to her. About a man who is jealous and will do anything, no matter how insane, to make the object of his jealousy uncomfortable and unhappy.

“Yes, I know about this divorce. And I am guilty of gossiping about it and listening to the gossip. But I will not lay my hand on a Bible and agree to repeat that gossip in this court. Bring out the handcuffs. I will not be part of this.”

I stood up, clutching my pocketbook. I looked from Ginger to Bobby Lee. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” I added. “How dare you do this to all of us. I was supposed to be putting in tomato plants this morning.”

So the court was recessed and I was taken into Judge Watson’s chambers and given fifty hours of community service, which he is allowing me to serve in my capacity as head of the Literacy Council.

Of course, my leaving would not have stopped the trial. It took an act of karmic retribution to do that. While we were in the judge’s chambers Ginger’s baby-sitter called the bailiff to say that Roberta was having trouble breathing. Bobby Lee beat Ginger out the door but she was right behind him, with half the courtroom trailing in their wake. Bobby Lee and Ginger jumped into his Isuzu and took off for the hospital emergency room. Everything that happened that afternoon I had to hear over the phone later in the day. Roberta’s asthma had returned. She was so dismayed over thinking about what was going on down at the courtroom in front of everyone in town (those people she had striven so hard to win on Friday afternoons blowing her little lungs out on that trumpet) that her breathing apparatus had seized up like a fist. She had been at home with a baby-sitter because she was too upset to go to school. As soon as she decided the trial had begun she had started wheezing until she could not talk. The baby-sitter had called an ambulance and then the courtroom.

Bobby Lee and Ginger stood beside her bed (so Cynthia told me—she is head nurse on that ward and was right there for every minute of it), looking down on their daughter but not at each other. Ginger was not going to back down, even if her daughter died to punish her. It was Greek tragedy, Cynthia said. (She is an actress with the Harrisburg Little Theater and this is not the first time I have heard her say something right here in Harrisburg was Greek tragedy.) “It is tragedy because Ginger refuses to compromise,” she went on. “Bobby would have been on his knees in an instant but she just coldly looked from Roberta to the wall.”

I got my first report at six in the evening. That night Roberta grew worse. What had started off as a simple asthma attack became critical. They moved her into the intensive care unit, hooked her up to the heart-lung machine. She had a weak heart when she was born but Bobby Lee and Ginger had kept that quiet, thinking someday a boy might not marry her for fear she could never bear him children.

By eleven o’clock the news was all over town. Preachers were writing sermons. Kind heads were bowed in prayer. I was watching the Tonight Show when Cynthia called me back. “The joke is over,” she said. “They have killed their child. I heard Judge Watson ruled a mistrial.”

“Does that mean I don’t have to serve my community service?”

“This is serious, Letitia. There were four doctors in conference when I left the hospital. They aren’t sure what to do.”

“What do they think is wrong?”

“She’s lost the will to live. I’ve seen it before but never in a little girl. She’s always been fragile, more fragile than we know.”

“Where is Bobby Lee?”

“They’re both there. Sitting in the waiting room.”

“I’m going there. I can miss work tomorrow if I need to.”

“Then go if you think you should. What harm can it do. I’ve got to get to bed. I’m beat. I’m going back in at seven.”

I put on my shoes and found my pocketbook and drove down to the hospital and went up on the elevator and found them there, in the hall outside her door. They looked like hurricane survivors, like people who had been through a flood.

“What can I do?” I asked. “Is Little Ginger in good hands?”

“She’s with Ginger’s mother.” Bobby Lee stood up straighter, took my hands. “Thank you for coming down, Letitia. Stay with us awhile. You were magnificent this morning,” he added. “I was so proud of you.”

“I have to serve fifty hours of community service thanks to you. Why did you do this to all of us? Subpoena us like that.”

“I don’t know,” Ginger said. “Something just came over me.”

“And me,” Bobby added.

“We told her we’d make up if she’d start breathing,” Ginger added. “But she won’t start. Maybe she’s forgotten how.” She began to weep. It was not the first time she had cried today, that much was clear. The front of her sweater was stained with tears. Tracks of my tears, I was thinking. It is a song the band has been playing.

“Play music for her,” I said at once. “Go get a tape player and some music. What does she like to hear?”

“She loves Miles Davis,” Bobby said. “It’s all she’s been listening to for weeks.”

“Where’s a tape player? I’ll go get it. You can’t leave.”

“Will you?”

“Sure. Tell me where to go.”

Bobby gave me a key to his house and I tore out of the hospital and drove over there. A little blue house on the wrong side of the tracks. At least it wasn’t that filthy apartment he had at first. I opened the door with the key and found the tape player. It was one of those big heavy things teenagers carry around. I think its called a Bomb Box or something like that. I found the Miles Davis tapes and some of Gato Barbieri and John Coltrane and took them to the hospital as fast as I could go.

It was one-thirty when I got there but of course time has no meaning in an intensive care ward when a child has decided to stop breathing.

Bobby plugged in the Bomb Box and turned it on. We all stood around the bed watching to see if Roberta’s eyes would open or her hands move. Nothing happened that you could see, but the music seemed to lighten up the room and the sickbed with it.

“You go on home, Letitia,” Bobby said. “Take Ginger home too. I’ll stay tonight. I’ll sit here and change the tapes.”

Which is what he did. In the morning Roberta began to listen to the music. In a week she was home. In ten days she was back in school. The doctors told her not to play the trumpet for a while but Ginger told me in the hall one day that she was playing it anyway. “How High the Moon,” “Viva Emiliano Zapata,” “My Funny Valentine.” Her breathing is doubly precious to me, since she may be the only child her age in the United States interested in preserving the great jazz music of the past.

Nothing much has changed in Harrisburg since then. Except that people have gone back to taking marriage very, very seriously. If it’s going to be that hard to get out of marriages we are going to have to be more careful about getting into them.

Remember Ginger and Bobby Lee. That’s what parents around here are telling their children. Leda and the swan, Romeo and Juliet, Burt and Loni, Woody and Mia, Prince Charles and Princess Di, Bobby Lee and Ginger, whatever it takes to get the point across.

Aside from that, summer is here. The woman dentist has taken up with the carpenter in the OFF DUTY shirt. We all go down to the Lonely and read foreign newspapers and eat cake. The band plays on. As for me, I’m a heroine in certain circles now and will always be. I wish my mother could have seen me at that trial. She was the newspaper editor in this town and a free-thinker from the word go. I think she would have been proud of me. And the first to warn me about pride.