Nearly a year later, Mary Kerr, on a spring afternoon, was working in the garden at Grace Episcopal Church. It was a student group project, but she had come much too late to join the others, because of her dance class. There was still a lot to do, and she was down on her knees with a trowel, working the soil, turning the mulch for the roses. Getting hotter. Working alone.
She straightened to look around her, and there around the corner of the church came Jeff Blaise. He was carrying a spade he must have just found leaning against the wall of the church offices, which were tacked on to the back of the main structure. Seeing her, he gave a grin he couldn’t help.
How to act around him? He had been in jail once, for blocking the campus appearance of somebody high in the Department of Defense. So she just said before she thought, “Out of jail?”
“Obviously.” He lifted the spade. “Thought I’d help.”
Again she said the first thing she thought of. “But you’re a Catholic.” Later she wondered why she’d said it. She knew next to nothing about Catholics, there were so few around. It was just the differences between them that she was hitting on. The gaps there were no bridges for.
“Maybe you can convert me.”
Long ago she’d told herself it was mainly just attraction she’d felt for him. Nobody else had made her feel excited the way he did. She turned away now because she was feeling like that again. Sex was making its crazy attack. Of course, he’d come there to find her.
“Mary?”
The slant of his tone told her that he was into some need that wasn’t about sex at all. She listened.
“I—I finished my dissertation yesterday, turned it in. The dissertation … you remember. It’s done.”
“Then you’ll be Dr. Blaise.” It had a strange sound, said aloud.
“Ethan’s the director, backing it, of course. I’m afraid that will be a strike against it these days.”
She tried remembering what he’d told her. The subject was something about U.S. policy involving Germans after the war. Secret documents withheld, but others found. Ethan working hard at getting crucial material declassified. Walking a tightrope. Danger.
She realized something. “He told you I was here.” Ethan was a sometime friend and confidant of Reverend Ashley. Ideas exchanged … religious biases. “No organized church will take any stand at all worth taking … you realize that.” She’d been present when Ethan had said that, speaking of Reverend Ashley.
“I’ve been wanting to track you down anyway. Just to touch base, I guess…. I’m sorry if you mind.”
“I don’t guess I do.” She sat down beside him on a large granite memorial stone, something with a brass plaque with an inscription on its side.
Jeff looked at what he carried. “I even found a shovel.” He didn’t seem to find it real.
“Well, use it,” said Mary, and went back to work. “Pile the straw around. Here.”
Spadeful at a time, he dutifully heaped straw where she told him to. Farther on, there were irises to be thinned, bloomed out and withered on their stalks. Flats of verbena sat waiting to be turned out and planted. It would take another day or so.
“When’d you get so religious? I never knew—”
“Being good these days, I guess. Work … I like it, though. Something besides dance practice.”
What were they talking about? Nothing seemed to the point. Looking up at him was like stepping on quicksand, so she didn’t. Then she did. His face looked strained under the sweat the sun was drawing out of him. “Mary….” He touched her hair. It had turned darker brown from the hot work, the sweat. Hand on her arm. Currents running. She pulled off. “I’m not going back to you. Just not.”
He spaded fiercely at some azalea roots. “I heard you got engaged.”
“Don’t be silly. Just dated Ron Bower for a while.”
“I guess.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. He couldn’t dance.” She just said that on impulse.
“Unforgivable sin. Neither could I. Did you sleep with him?”
“No.” She trampled the mixed dirt around the roses. Why didn’t I like him? she wondered. Maybe he wasn’t strange enough.
“Doing our gardening,” Jeff said, “just like Adam and Eve.”
“Natural thing to do,” said Mary.
“They’ll put us in a stained-glass window. Next we can grind corn and grow sweet potatoes. You can have a little papoose strapped to your back. Hiccups if you dance.”
“Dig over there.” She pointed, laughing in spite of herself. He was funny when he could forget all those causes.
Along the border of the flagstone walk that led from the back of the church toward the border of dark cedars some few yards away, Jeff forced the spade into ground that yielded from last year’s planting. The annuals would go there. When the path reached the cedars that bordered the cemetery back of the church, it divided, spreading out into a maze, wandering every which way among the gravestones.
“If I wasn’t here,” said Jeff, “I’d be gnawing my nails and counting off calendar days, waiting.”
“I’m sure it’ll be okay. Doesn’t Ethan think so?”
“Ethan’s just the trouble. You know how radical they consider him.”
“Then why did you—” She stopped. She couldn’t probe into that relationship. Her body hummed with his presence. It wasn’t fair.
At that point the back door of the church, which led to the rector’s office and the Sunday school rooms, opened. The rector himself, Mr. Ashley, came out and stood on the steps. He seemed to be looking out at them but not seeing them. It was known to some but not all the congregation that in the years just past he had marched in Georgia, ridden a Freedom Riders’ bus through Mississippi, gotten thrown in jail in Montgomery. But now, having settled down to pastoral work, he did not find it necessary to discuss such things. No need, either, to talk about his wife, who had recently left him, run off, the gossip went, with another woman. Mr. Ashley was “not well.” His face seemed a covering for his whole life; but more than a barricade, it often became a plea for understanding in spite of it all. Mrs. Ashley, he had explained, had not “been well,” either; she needed a rest.
Mary Kerr, since the spring term began, had her own room now, out near the university. It was what all her age group were doing. Several lived in the same house, girls away from parents. Once, back in February, she had come home unannounced for some books. Her mother’s car was there. When she entered, a door closed out back. Who had just left? Who was walking rapidly out past the garage, entering the next property, hurrying out a neighbor’s driveway to another street where (maybe) a car stood parked? Important enough for Kate to steal an hour or so from work to meet … who? Did it have to matter who?
Mary Kerr could have remarked now that the roses were looking better satisfied. She mixed earth and straw while Mr. Ashley stood watching.
“What’s he doing?” Jeff asked, noting the smooth cut of the shovel blade in the earth, the fall of the soil.
“I guess he’s thinking,” Mary Kerr said.
“If he can stand to,” Jeff said, one of his puzzle remarks. Whether he knew about Mr. Ashley’s problems or had church people in general in mind, she didn’t know.
The rector seemed to come to himself, emerge from a private reverie. He was coming toward them.
He was thin, stooped a little, neither young nor old, just strained-looking with a hesitant, groping sort of hopefulness. Would they, in addition to doing something good, also be good?
“I can’t tell you how much it’s appreciated, this volunteer effort you’re putting out for us.”
The two young people—so trim, compact, their every motion a realized lyric or phrase of music—straightened to regard him. Hair long, male but long, worn as a proud badge of a singular moment. (Had not Mr. Ashley, too, gone bearded and shouting down a street toward leering men with bats and truncheons waiting? What had it come to? Some positive good, a step along the way?) He thought they had not heard him.
The young man said, “It’s fucking hot work, you know, Reverend.”
The girl’s sidelong glance let it out that nobody talked like that to a minister.
But Mr. Ashley had often heard the like before. “I’m sure,” he answered mildly. He came toward them, reaching out. “Here,” he said to Jeff. “I’ll just spell you for a while.”
Mary was kneeling again. She separated the verbena plants by pulling them gently apart, setting them upright on the lawn by the flagstone walk to the cemetery.
Jeff, with a comical little bow, handed the spade to Mr. Ashley.
The sun bore down. A band of sweat nudged past Jeff’s cheekbone, then trickled slowly down to his chin. He sat down on the stone bench and lit a cigarette. Mary knew that if he had had a joint he would have lit that—that he had thought of it, would have dared. Glitter that was more than half desire swam before her eyes, calling persistently to mind the performances that waited behind lofty velvet curtains, in halls like gleaming showcases, while jewelled women and men in dress suits searched out their seats. Mary Harbison, a promising new recruit from, et cetera, danced a brief but enchanting solo…. Her mind halted there, pointu.
It was then that the Reverend Mr. Ashley collapsed on the grass.
The terrified call from the parish office to the hospital, the ambulance, the arrival at the emergency room…. Later, Mary and Jeff waited, and at last the doctor entered. “Are you his relatives?”
“Why, no, just up there at the church garden when he fell. We were planting some flowers.”
“It was nothing but a heatstroke. First hot day. He seems pretty stressed, anyway … something personal. You could have just taken him into the vestry. Anywhere to lie down awhile.”
“I said that,” Jeff said, “but she’d called you by then.” He shrugged.
“I got scared,” said Mary. “Because my father—he died with a stroke. A hot day like this brought it on.”
“He’s dressing,” said the doctor. “Can you take him home?”
Jeff got up suddenly. “My car isn’t fit for that. Call him a taxi.” He pulled Mary to her feet. “We’ll just go on.”
Their route took them by her mother’s house, still far from where he lived.
“Let me out,” she told him. He had her hand.
He drove to the curb, stopping, but held on to her. “Come with me, Mary. I never wanted you to go, not ever. Make it just today. I need you.”
She wanted to. Too much. Everything in her head was scrambling up. Everything had red in it. In one twisting pull, intensely strong, she broke his hold. She jumped like a squirrel, cleared free of the car, landed, and ran toward the house.
Poppy. She was thinking of him, and that awesome day. Poppies were red like blood, and he’d turned fiery red, not chalky pale like Mr. Ashley.
In the church office Mr. Ashley had listened when she went to talk to him one day. “I’ll be a father to you, as much as you’ll let me, Mary Kerr. But can’t we risk talking with your mother, too? You worry that her work is ‘horrible,’ as you put it, but don’t these findings help us all? Disease must go, don’t you think? She may be saying nothing but the truth. Can’t we all just talk about it?”
Later Mary Kerr ventured to ask. But Kate refused. “What does he know? Of course I’m telling the truth. I’m tired of telling you so. Go on and think a lot of lies.”
Mary Kerr came slowly up the steps to the door. Looking up the street, she could see where their old house stood, the walk where she had danced up the grassy slope on the side, the steps he had stumbled to. She opened the door.
“Mary Kerr?” The voice, silvery and inquiring, floated down from the second floor. “Mary Kerr, is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me. Something at the church. I was helping out in the garden and…”
Her mother appeared in a long, loose robe at the top of the stairs. The white banister, the fall of the stair carpet, like something royally laid down for her. A dramatic woman. Her hair loose and the silver-mounted brush in one loose-skinned white hand where the blue vein snaked upward. She had been brushing, loving her hair, seated at her mirror. “I hear the rector took a tumble.” She laughed, a hoarse little chuckle. Around hospitals and labs—backstage, you might call it—injuries and alarms, chronic sufferers, carved-up dogs, crucified cats, all might just cause some little joking.
“Yes, he did.” But how did Kate know about it? She couldn’t be everywhere.
“Betty Mason was up at the church, working in the kitchen. She saw the ambulance. He’s back now. False alarm.”
“Well, I know. I got frightened about it. Took fright too soon, I guess.”
Kate was turning back to her own room. Mary Kerr began to mount the stairs. Kate moved toward her own bedroom, the perfumed dressing alcove, the mirror.
“Guess you thought you’d killed another one.”
Silvery, the voice floated back to Mary Kerr. Like a chill silver blade, it went straight through her, heart and all. Her feet froze heavy as ice to the floor. Had this been said? She said “What?” but only a whisper came out, and that a faint one. “What did you say?”
“I said I guess you thought it was serious.”
“No … you said something else. I heard you.”
But she believed she had heard that other thing—she knew it. What right does she have to say that?
Kate came out once more, no brush in hand, reaching back over her shoulder, gathering her hair in one hand, swirling it with the other. “So that boy is back, is he? Betty didn’t know who it was, but when she described him, I knew it must be—”
“Jeff, you mean. I don’t see him.” She stood there, slight but planted, flexible legs bowed back, stubbornly set. “He came there himself. I don’t see him anymore. I told you.”
A toss of Kate’s hair with an unbelieving hand.
“Mother! I don’t!”
No answer. She was not believed.
Then: “I’m going out to dinner. If you want to stay here, there’s some cold shrimp in the fridge. A salad, some Jell-O whip…. I don’t know what you want.” Turning back. “Your sheets are fresh.”
“Mother, why—”
“Why what?”
“You’ll never admit that I say anything that’s true, that I tell what’s so.”
“How can I know, darlin’?”
“Because I say so.”
No answer. Do I plead, beg, lie on the floor until she steps over me on her way to get out her dress before she heads out to be greeted, take drinks, be complimented, settle in to discussing the real business of life with people who matter? “Oh yes Mary Kerr is still dancing you think she’s talented, well, I suppose so if they all say so….” Talented, but what does she matter, except to be a credit or a worry to them? They matter.
“Now, you listen, Mary Kerr….” The voice came floating out to her. No nonsense out of you, Mary Kerr.
Mary Kerr never reached her own room. She knew, standing there in the hall, that her feet would not move her forward. Her feet, so quick and accurate, leading and leaping, rising and falling, bending, pointing, flexing—now they were talking to her: They were saying what they would not do. Don’t forget before you go, Mary Kerr thought, I’ve been struck with that very silver hairbrush. I’ve been locked up with no shrimp or Jell-0 whip or clean sheets, either, but we papered over it, but just now you tore all that paper off, you left the raw wall bare and ugly, and you’re going to sit there purring like a crouched silky silvery pale blue-gray cat, waiting for the next live animal—poor little white mouse or daughter—to come squirming up out of the cage into your hands, you poised and ready, winding up for a year two years or half a lifetime just to say again what you said just now, that I was the one who killed him, when he was all I loved.
Time to find the Reverend Mr. Ashley, right away, and say, I know, I understand what’s meant by eternity. It’s what goes on forever, can’t ever unhappen. She’ll go on with the same idea forever because she can’t undo the what-was of Poppy and me, the way we loved each other, the way we were the same kind. But then she realized: It’s no use talking to Mr. Ashley. Not anymore.
Her feet were already taking her on.
The feet were walking precisely, rhythmically, surely, knowing things. Left and right, heel barely to touch, weight passed to arch, then ball, the angle a barely visible spread, the rhythm passing left to right and back, out of her mother’s house, taking her to the steps and porch of the house where the room she lived in was: upstairs— a quiet privacy of bed and closet, books and barre.
There was a letter in the hall, her name on it:
I waited for you to come but had to go out. I had to call your mother again about the rent. She says she can’t keep the room on for you. You can stay awhile if you want to. She wants you to call her.
Sylvia Peters.
P.S. I’m sorry if you wanted to stay.
The landlady. Oh, I know it’s the second or third time I spent the rent money, but this time I needed point shoes and she just let me have this room anyway because she thought Ron Bower and I were pairing off. But now that she thinks that Jeff is back—
I can’t go back there. I cannot go back where she is.
She looked down at her feet. Where do you want to go? she all but asked aloud.
They knew already, and they went.
Jeff Blaise had a room high up, two flights of stairs, an old building turned graduate residence, chopped up into makeshift apartments. General shabbiness, but a good view. Jeff seldom stayed in it and might have gone to any number of places that day after she jumped out of his car.
Demonstrations. They had been springing up from one corner of the city to another, bursting out on the main streets, hampering traffic, delaying schedules on both campuses. The waiters in the cafeteria had struck, out at the university. At Royal’s, the office help turned out with placards, to be photographed as against the war in Vietnam. Who was stirring up these things? “Outside agitators”? A question in Harbison circles. But, it was said now, they didn’t have to come from outside—not anymore.
Jeff Blaise was usually at work. He had come home that day to be in full concourse with the chill hand now insistently closing. The committee judging his dissertation was no pushover for political protest. His work was at that moment hitting a stone wall. The boomerang from it would strike Ethan. They would mean it to do just that.
He could have taken an innocuous subject, evoking dispassionate judgment, certain approval. Then moved with a calm step toward high employment, openings abounding, straight A’s and solid recommendations leading to a real “career.” How much could anyone afford to scorn? His loyalty at stake for the one man who mattered to him—that very loyalty had done him in. But his own convictions, too. They were bound to surface sometime. He couldn’t welsh on them.
Distracted, he hadn’t closed his door. It stood ajar. He heard a running step on the stair and turned. A girl he knew from the ground floor frequently came up to his room unannounced, but never ran.
Then she was standing there. Mary.
“Why, baby!”
She looked pale, out of breath. “I can’t go back to her. I can’t.”
Stopwatch. The game, so long going on, was done. They both knew it. He circled her quietly, not touching her. Closing the door.
She stepped right into his arms, pulled close, held. “About you? Thought about you? I’ve thought myself blind. I’ve done nothing but think.”
She was pulling at him, urgent. They fell across the tumbled bed.
“Wait now.” He soothed her, stroking her hair. The many times he’d wanted her there now seemed like echoes, long distant, even the “her” someone else. Every path seemed uncertain now, losing itself in undergrowth. “I may not pass,” he said.
“Pass? Oh, that. I was just thinking of us. You told me once that’s all I needed—”
“I know. Right now, it might be different.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing sure for me ahead. You’ll have to be my girl, just that. Only that. Nothing more, for now. Girls like you think about marrying. It can’t be that way.”
She struggled with his shirt and broke a button. “It’s okay. It’s good enough.”
His voice seemed to come from far off. Her blouse, stained with dirt from the churchyard, was open, fallen back, and there lay the small braless breasts, biscuit flat, then tightening, vulnerable as two small woods creatures, exposed to sudden light.
She looked down, as though newly seeing herself, ribs lean as a dancer’s would have to be, knowing that he knew them already from moving hands so surely when they kissed, and kissing almost the same now, but hands moving down farther than ever before, finally touching her, herself: the center of desire.
Then, in a strained whisper, he said, “You want to, don’t you?”
“Yes.” With deliberate care he ran a thumb across where the bruise had been, that long time ago by the creek. Did he remember? How could he not? “Oh, yes!”
He was skillful and quick. Clothes going off. Then there and near above her, with all the strangeness about him. One hand with its slight endearing tremor stroked dark hair back from her brow. Kissing her mouth in the old, wet, tender way, then her eyelids, something new.
“Just be still, relax … right … yes. You know already, sure you do, baby. Right … good….”
The curious motion, odd pain driving slowly in, then harder, building.
Like a green leaf torn from its bough, she was clinging to what drove her, clinging and trembling, losing the trembling but not the clinging, wrapped around and holding, wanting never to drop away.