At times during the winter after Kathy was born it would seem we were doing nothing so much as hurting other people. Jeff had his calling, but suppose I didn’t? That was always the trouble.
Before she was born, he went down to Chicago to the convention the Democrats had. There were riots from the first day on. The police were awful to them, was their story. There were riot squads, beatings, arrests. Jeff got pulled in with the rest. “Crossing the state line with intent to riot.” Next thing I knew he was out on bail. Five thousand dollars. You’d say right away the Movement would find the money to get him out. He was important to them, lots of ways.
But no, it was Fred Davis. Went out there and put up the money. How did he even find out? We couldn’t figure that. My own guess was that Ethan told Aunt Jane and she told Mother. It was like the Greek legend. If you cut off one head of the monster, it just grew five more.
But was it a monster? I never was sure.
Kathy was with us now, but too little to talk things over with, and Jeff had to go back to the States. I was alone.
I thought for the longest time he was reporting for trial. But he’d no idea of doing that.
“Then Fred will lose his money,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, not even looking up to debate it. He’d never intended anything else. “What’s five grand to him?” he asked. “A fucking leak in a back alley. Forgotten already.”
But he’d left me alone, to think about it. Just with her, my baby.
How beautiful she was. Jeff’s light hair and his blue eyes, at first, though changing now to gray. How helpless she was. I was helpless, too. I tried to stay on in the apartment Jeff and I had rented, but sometimes the money he sent didn’t come through or wasn’t enough. I’d no way to call him. I’d no way, either, to shake off the other exiles who knew the address. They thought of it as a pad they could hole up in whenever they needed to. They promised me money, more than enough, for passing on hash, coke, and acid, keeping needles, and all that stuff, but that meant when they came they wouldn’t leave. I’d be stepping over them to get out the door. I’d get busted next, I told them. They cared, but not enough. There were the serious ones, who had wanted Jeff for starting a paper out West, his talents needed, and wanted him to go speak in Toronto or fly out to Edmonton. Growing, growing, was all they wound up saying, but did they have to grow all over Kathy and me? I found a place to go and slipped out in the night so nobody would know.
It was Gordon Stewart’s house I came to. The room was large and airy, even if the house was run-down, but I could sit there alone with Kathy and think about it all.
Gradually it dawned on me that the only answer to the trouble I was in was myself. The one wrong was me. With me gone, she could go back to the family: Mother had been awful with me, but maybe I had caused it, being awful to her. Aunt Jane was back there, with money. Aunt Sally was always sending things: bootees, little knitted sweaters, funny embroidered romp suits. They were thinking all the time about Vietnam, how it was bound to end sometime. Mother could never be the way she was twice. The only one was me. I was wrong. Then I thought again of vanishing, the way I had thought of it on the shore above Lake Champlain the night I told Jeff we were going to have her if we didn’t stop her. Whether I was glad or sorry, she was here.
I was alone a lot. All those gypsying friends we’d gotten to know along the way—in Burlington in the trailer, out from Montreal on the Lake of Two Mountains, living with a Hungarian couple who played violin music and drank gallons of red wine so dark it was almost black. Then in our first apartment waiting for Kathy, the rental woman’s friendship, the other defectors, the women in the clinic waiting room, with their friendly talk, comparing symptoms. All gone. My fault? It must be. Other people had friends.
Vanishing. How did you do it?
I knew a woman upstairs in the rooming house, a retired nurse, living on a pension, alone, but not unhappy about it. She used to take care of Kathy when I went out. She didn’t know when I went out one afternoon, into the snow, that I was going to the library to read up on suicide. I had to do it while Kathy couldn’t know about it, wasn’t old enough to feel all that trouble and loss. It would just be a blur to her.
I’d leave a note to the Stewarts, Gordon and Gerda: Take her back to Philadelphia, this address; or Kingsbury, North Carolina, this address. They would always do the right thing.
Could I stand the thought of Kathy with Mother and Fred? I wouldn’t be there to stand it or not stand it. The one that was wrong was me. Kathy could be the one who was right. It was possible.
I had blundered into a current in a strong swift river I had never known about before. The things around me—Kathy’s formula and changing, dressing, diapers, walks outside; the run to the grocery, the plants on the windowsills, food cooked on a hot plate, eaten on a card table in the corner; snow one day, no snow another—all became like dream objects and motions in a dream, moving in the current with a dreamy rhythm. I couldn’t shake my head and get the current to go away. It kept pulling anyway, numbing and cold, not able to hear what I was asking it. I couldn’t fight the current. I can’t go back to Kate and Fred. To me it’s the land of the dead. I’d rather die.
At Bryn Mawr I’d studied anthropology, chosen it, since I had to choose something, because of a picture I had once seen long ago. It had grown on me, become like a vision, not to be lost. It was a picture in one of Mother’s science texts at home in Kingsbury. A group, a family, imagined as having lived long before any history began to be written down or even remembered. Three were in it: a mother seated by the fire, the child on her lap, the father just standing from having built up the fire, just turning from looking out into the dark to reassure their safety, just about to turn back to them. He was holding a club. They were all wearing skins. While Jeff was there, from Burlington onward, I would think, This is the way we feel about ourselves, the three of us, the way it has been and will be.
If only he had stayed. He thinks they are getting money to me, but sometimes it doesn’t work.
Outside, on a milder day, through a crack in the window I heard singing out in the street, something like a children’s song I used to hear in Kingsbury as a child, only the street was frozen stiff, snowed in, only half cleared, with one pair of twisting car tracks down the center, so I couldn’t be hearing Southern children jumping rope and singing. Yet I thought, Kathy has a right to hear that, too. Maybe Mother will take her home and she’ll hear it, the way I did. Maybe Aunt Sally will get her, make her pretty little clothes. Maybe Aunt Jane will take her sometimes, and teach her how to wear them.
As I wrote the note, the snow began to fall again, monotonously, unchangingly, as though it had never stopped. I tore the sheet up and knotted it. The night we first came across the border (we had spent so much time filling out forms to make us “landed immigrants” it had gotten dark), it was raining, and in the slant of wind the rain kept slanting into the headlights, materializing white and steady, never stopping. So I asked if it could be snowing. It was only July. They laughed, the people driving us. “No, it stops sometime. Maybe for two months.” It was only rain, coming white at night on people travelling at night into a land not their own.
I carried Kathy to the nurse upstairs. On the way up I said to her little face, “I love you forever.” I had put it in the note, too. She was half asleep and didn’t even gurgle—just as well.
I went downstairs and tried to do what I thought was necessary, a sort of getting rid of my unwanted self, like putting something away in a drawer you’d never have to open. But I couldn’t make it work. I failed.