Chapter 40

Two days later, Lillian struggled up the stairs with a burlap bag of groceries and Marie in tow. She had been able to convince Marie to carry a small sack of potatoes by pretending it was a hat Marie could wear. But midway up the first flight, Marie tired of her hat and threw the sack down on the landing. Lillian tried not to think about how bruised the potatoes would be and made a mental note to go pick them up after she got the other groceries into the kitchen.

Now that she wasn’t working, she had plenty of time for things like going to the grocer, which was good because now that she had to take Marie with her everywhere, everything took twice as long. Even so, there were long stretches of time with Marie in the apartment where Lillian learned the true nature of boredom. She had plenty of time to reflect on the brinkmanship between Solomon and Dr. Bauer, how many things could have gone wrong that didn’t, the giddy aftermath. She recalled how they relayed the whole experience to Michael, blow by blow, after they had made their way back from Dr. Bauer’s that night.

“So when you said, ‘the girl at Presbyterian,’ what exactly happened?,” asked Michael.

“My heart stopped,” said Solomon.

“You looked as relaxed as a summer’s day,” said Lillian.

“All right,” said Michael, “Let’s allow that Solomon was masterful, but what did Bauer do?”

“It took a few moments, but he folded, asked us what we wanted him to do. Lillian, you couldn’t have been more right,” said Solomon.

“I told you that I couldn’t have been the only girl. He was too smooth. He’d done that sort of thing before.”

“Still,” said Michael, “if you had been the first and only, or even if there was another girl but not at Presbyterian, all the rest of it added up wouldn’t have been enough.”

“But it was enough,” said Solomon. He smiled at Lillian, and her pulse quickened.

Thinking about that smile now as she put away sacks of beans and cornmeal, she made a plan to send him a note. But what would she say? Yet another “thank you”? She would have to think of something more clever than that.

Just then, she heard a knock at the front door. Maybe he had come to check up on her! She threw the door open to see her mother with the sack of potatoes in her hands.

“I think you dropped these,” she said softly, holding them out to Lillian.

They stood there for a while, Lillian in shock that her mother was here, that there was no time to prepare her anger, her arguments. In all the tumult of the past few days, she had forgotten that this was inevitable now that her mother knew where they lived.

Finally, Helen placed the potatoes in Lillian’s arms and walked past her, sitting down gingerly on a kitchen chair, her hat and coat still on. Before Lillian could gather her thoughts, Marie came charging out of the bedroom, and the happy reunion was more than Lillian could bear. She tossed the potatoes on the counter, went into the bedroom and closed the door. She stood by the window, looking at the brick wall of the next building, fuming. She could feel a flush creeping up her neck, igniting her.

After a minute or so, Marie burst into the bedroom and plunked herself on the bed with a set of beads and string Lillian had not seen before. When she sat down across from Helen in the kitchen, the bedroom door firmly closed, Helen said, “A little gift to distract. I knew you would want to be alone when we talked.”

“Why would you think I would want to talk to you? How dare you come here!”

“We never talked. You just left. You never heard my side of it.”

“There is no other side!”

“There is always another side.”

Lillian saw with satisfaction that Helen looked older than she did months ago. Her hair, the same shade of brown as Lillian’s, now had a few more gray strands. There were shadows beneath her eyes that Lillian didn’t remember. But the rest was the same: her voice with its faint trace of a French accent, her wide jaw, her unblinking gaze.

“The worst part of you being here,” said Lillian, “is that you are making me remember it all over again.”

She had done a good job of forgetting that night when she thought Marie was eating Lillian’s peppermints. Marie always gobbled up her Friday night treats as fast as she could, but Lillian often saved some for another night. Helen had brought home a small bag of broken peppermints; she was friendly with the penny candy owner and he dug to the bottom of the bin for the broken bits to sell her at a discount. Lillian had eaten exactly half of hers and hidden the other half under her pillow.

After Helen had dragged out the tin tub to the center of their bedroom and heated the water on the stove, she managed to get Marie settled in her bath. Helen and Lillian began the week’s mending in the parlor when Lillian thought the splashing she heard sounded like Marie getting out of her bath. To steal my peppermints!, Lillian thought, and she tossed aside her mending, aware of her pettiness but unmotivated to curb her childish attitude. As she reached for the doorknob—why was the door closed, anyway?—she felt her mother’s grip on her wrist.

“She’s taking my peppermints!” Lillian said.

“Leave her alone now,” said Helen.

“You always take her side—you let her get away with murder!” Lillian wrenched herself free from Helen and barged into the room.

Contrary to what Lillian’s imagination told her, Marie had not left the bathtub, nor was she eating peppermints. But what Lillian could see all too clearly was that the window shade was open, and a man gazed down intently from the building next door with unobstructed view of her sister in the bath.

“That man is looking at her!” cried Lillian, and she moved to pull the shade. But Helen grabbed her and pulled her out of the room, to Lillian’s shock and, moments later, horror. Because she could see that Helen knew. It even looked like she had arranged it.

Now, looking at her mother sitting across from her, Lillian felt that revulsion and anger come rushing back to her. “I want you to leave.”

“You don’t have any curiosity? Why I would do such a thing?”

Lillian hesitated. The problem was, beneath all the rage, she did have curiosity, if it could be called that. Because as much as she hated to admit it right now, Helen had been a good mother up until that point. Which is why that night was so devastating.

“Fine. If it will get you to leave, say whatever you want.” Lillian crossed her arms, feigning impatience for Helen’s departure, but in truth now she tingled with dread and anticipation in equal measure for what would be said next in this room.

Helen unpinned her hat and lay it carefully in her lap before she began. “The landlord, he manages both buildings. We were behind on rent. Not a little. Many months. Finally he tells me we have to go. But we have nowhere to go. A week before we need to leave, he is in the apartment across from us, a floor higher. It is vacant and he is fixing something there. I’m putting Marie in the bath and I look up and see him looking at us. I pull the shade. Disgusting, the look on his face. The next day, he makes me an offer. A disgusting offer. But I take it. He thinks this will go on and on, every week, but I count out how many times until I can save enough that we can leave, and not for the poorhouse.”

Lillian has so many questions that she doesn’t know which to ask first, but strangely what came out of her mouth was, “How could you have gotten so far behind on the rent?”

Helen looked down at the hat in her lap. “It was Dr. Pratt. When you were sick, after Marie had been so sick… I thought I was going to lose you. Someone told me that Dr. Pratt was the best. Very expensive. But I needed the best for you. You have to understand, I could not lose you, there was no price I would not pay. I have no regrets about Dr. Pratt. You lived, you recovered with perfect health. But paying off that debt and the rent and everything else, it was too much.”

“But your own daughter! She is innocent!” Tears burning the corners of Lillian’s eyes.

“She is still innocent,” said Helen, as her own tears pooled. “She never knew. I would never do anything to hurt her. She never knew.”

All these months, Lillian had an unchanging response in her mind whenever it veered toward that night. She turned away from what she had witnessed, labeled Helen a terrible person, and an iron door slammed shut to lock away that part of the past. She had been steadfast in her refusal to think about it. But now Helen had pried that door open, and Lillian found that she could not look at what was inside in exactly the same way. She had always been sure that she would never have done what Helen did to Marie. But Lillian could not push away the facts of her life since then. That she had ended another person’s life. And concocted a charade to get away with it. That she had, even momentarily, contemplated going along with a man’s perversions to save herself from facing justice. The moral ground on which she stood to judge her mother did not seem as solid as it once did.

“It was a terrible thing,” Lillian stated, as if for the record.

“It was a terrible thing,” Helen agreed.

Neither elaborated on their statement. Lillian went to fill the kettle with water.