Chapter Three

John Tracker’s grandmother, Vera Tracker, was a woman whose power was inherited from the past. John’s memory, nourished on childhood fears, had distorted and strengthened Vera’s power. If he had known its source he might have understood it better. Vera’s power went back at least three generations.

John Tracker’s great great grandmother, on his father’s mother’s mother’s side, was a woman named Judith who was a witch. Judith was the mother of Maggie. Maggie was the mother of Vera.

Witchcraft traditionally dealt in sex and mutilation, and although witch trials disappeared in America during the eighteenth century, witchcraft did not. Judith’s skills were rare, but they were not out of place in the south and middle-west. They fitted well with the voodoo traditions of some former slaves, and with the fading ghosts, man-killers and dark haunts of Cherokee, Creek, Iroquois and Huron.

Judith bore the illegitimate Maggie, and kept the girl at her side until Maggie was fourteen and felt old enough to run away. Maggie received enough instruction to later pass on a distorted inheritance of knowledge. Judith died shortly after Maggie left, killed amid fire and steam in a boat explosion on the Mississippi while making passage to New Orleans. Tracker history contained a large number of tough and unique women. Being a Tracker woman had never been easy.

Amy Griffith lay half hugging a pillow as if it might become a dear friend. The pillow blocked a view of anything from her right eye, but with her left she stared critically at snow which whirled before the hotel window. She was not a Tracker woman. She was not even sure that she wanted to become one.

She had never had a house. Not ever. Now John was talking about tearing one down.

She felt pleasantly sore, her muscles stretched from having moved against and with John’s weight. When he’d left to attend to the business of the house, about which he seemed awfully close-mouthed, she’d remained in bed for more than an hour. She thought there was nothing wrong with small luxuries as long as you did not make them a habit.

Almost she felt guilty about feeling so good. Tracker was not the very best lover in the world, but he would learn. So few men were in her experience that she really could not set standards. For her, Tracker was best, except one. She rubbed her belly, the inside of her legs; stretched her legs and wiggled her toes. She was glad because her legs really and truly were quite beautiful.

There was work to do. John was not sure how long he would be gone, but there was lots of time. She decided to do the work and then go to a movie. The newspaper was somewhere. She stretched comfortable and happy in the warm bed, then told herself it was time to move. If she stayed any longer the luxury would turn into indulgence.

She rose to walk naked across the room and look from the high window into winter streets. A lot of traffic. A terrible winter. The winter was easier to take because you had an excuse to get all gussied up and dressy. She had a new coat.

She found the newspapers. Plenty of movies, plus the usual war, politics, violence and sporting events. There were Hoosier debutantes, which was pretty funny. There were marriages, divorces, want ads, sales on mattresses and clothing guaranteed to increase men’s lust if you followed a particular commercial flag. Amy had been trying to fly her personal banner for a long time, but often admitted to herself that the results were not flamboyant. She was thirty years old, and though she could tell herself with reason that she looked more like twenty-five, even that age was bad enough.

You had to admire John Tracker, whether he was highly skilled as a lover or not. John Tracker was already a success. He was even young. Age was different when you were a man.

Well, she thought, she could have done just as well if she were a man, if there were no bad streaks of luck that came like punishments. As it was, she had a high paying job and she was respectable.

It was nice to be naked. There really and truly had not been many men. This kind of nakedness did not happen often. Thinking of nakedness, Amy did not think of naked expression. Her experience with that was mixed. She figured that experience was best forgotten.

If she wanted a lot of men it would be easy, but it was better to be a little bit lonely than promiscuous. She told herself she did not need a man, and that was proved.

Why then, did she feel so good? She was not even sure she was in love with John Tracker, although she surely did admire him.

She could almost count the reasons, like you added figures in a ledger. First, John Tracker was a good, quiet man and she was used to him. Second, he was respectable. She would not have gone to bed with a bum, because she already tried that and it didn’t work. Third, he did not make her afraid. Men, being the way they were, often did make you afraid.

Dictated letters were in the open steno book on the desk. Her shorthand was impeccable. Her skills were complete. She could even read two-day-old, cold notes. When she and John occasionally argued about a letter, it was always his memory that was wrong. It had to be. She did not make mistakes like that.

She stood watching the winter streets, so far away down there, then picked up the steno book and flipped through to estimate work time. They were all pretty standard letters: “J. Lincoln, Manager, Bargain Dist TransAm, Dear Jim—expect two hundred cases of interior paint, seven hundred glazed aluminum sash, assorted kitchen furnitures (322 count) and about two thousand sheets of Jap panel this week. The drivers will be running splits for K.C. Riffle your inventory and top off their loads. Consigner is a construction supply in Medford, Mass. Cost sheets with the inventory. Have you solved your warehousing problem, yet? John Tracker.”

She had a reasonably interesting, well-paid job and she did admire John Tracker. When you knew a man’s business, you could guess a good deal of his history. When that man hired business managers who loved to talk, you could learn a lot more. It paid to give attention to the way John Tracker had built his business, especially if it looked like something really good was beginning to happen between you and the man.

Men were the worst gossips in the world. Amy recalled talking to the business manager who had worked longest for John Tracker. He’d told her that John had only a few thousand dollars when he left college. His stepfather at that time had been a banker. The banker guaranteed some loans, and then, the gossipy manager said, Tracker avoided the banker and the banking business. He paid back the loans, of course.

The gossip also said that John Tracker had had so many stepfathers that it was hard to keep track of them. By the time the loans were paid back, that banker was no more than a memory. Next, an auctioneer won John’s respect—sometimes John still referred to the man when he was making a business decision—and John got a job with him and watched and learned and worked hard. The auctioneer came and went pretty much as he pleased, selling things for other people, taking title to nothing. His capital risk was small. When times were good his sales were high. When the market was off the price structure broke, but he had more to sell. Another thing John learned was that men made mistakes. Small firm or large corporation, men made overpurchases or bought stock that did not move. There was plenty of insurance stock around …Amy smiled and thought of one of their private business jokes. The saying went that sometimes the customers had to bat down the flames of somebody’s successful insurance fire before they could buy the goods. Tracker opened a discount consignment house to handle other men’s mistakes. He rarely took title, charged a twenty percent commission and business flourished. After a few years of hustling he had established warehouses in eleven cities. That way he could ship back and forth between warehouses to keep the merchandise moving, and could bump the load for shipping charges each time.

She could certainly admire that.

Bananas, paint, potato chips, drums of pickled frogs, china, clothing, furniture, medical instruments, construction supplies, guitars, bulldozers, plumbing, hymn books, office machines, automobile parts—finally all of it came his way; his warehouses were like museums of modern industrial foul-ups.

Then, three years ago, about the time she came to work for him, Tracker went into the landscaping business. That was the part of John Tracker she did not understand. He lied to himself about that business. He never did that about the consignment business. His overhead was high, which was okay if you figured it into your bids. Somehow, though, the landscaping never much more than paid for itself. The lie Tracker told, and believed, was that it made money. The books showed the opposite, showed also that he was putting more material, or higher-priced material, into the jobs than was required by the specs. It was amazing to see someone as sharp as John Tracker fool himself over a business that was only a sideline.

She would have to speak to him. If she dared. When you went to bed with a person, life mostly got better, but in a way it got worse. When you went to bed with a person you could talk about things you would not have talked about before. On the other hand, things like this landscape business might well sound like nagging.

Amy paused, ran her hands across her naked belly, looked at her slender arms and smiled. She was much prettier naked than dressed, if only anybody knew it; well, she guessed John Tracker knew it now. No, she thought again, it really wasn’t like him to fool himself. He had a job in Council Bluffs next spring, the biggest landscape job his company had ever done. He was so excited about that job, and planning for it, that he was already wasting time that could be put to other business. Then there was this matter of the house. He shouldn’t be so reluctant to talk to her about it. All she knew was that there was a big old house downstate that belonged to his family. Period.

She paused. Her mouth, which had been lax, became a firm, disapproving line. She went to the bathroom and began running water in the tub. Somehow it seemed like a bad sign to make love to somebody, and then start tearing down a house.

The tub filled rapidly, and Amy stood for a moment before entering it. Her worst worry, the one she had not allowed herself to think of yet, splashed over her the way the water splashed in the tub. Was she only a trip mistress? Was that what he wanted? Just somebody to type letters and sleep with but not someone to be a part of his life? That would be bad, that would be really really wrong. She couldn’t handle that.

She turned to look in the mirror. When you stood erect and pushed your kind of skinny chest forward it helped draw attention from your big nose. It seemed like she could remember every single one of the naked times. When you had a past that could be told in two minutes, you needed to hang on to all of it.

She was raised in religious schools—her family almost always had enough money for that. She came from the discipline of school to a home where her father was an amiable drunk, though he liked an occasional fist-fight in bars. He went to Mass because, as he said, “They need the money.” If her father was an amiable cynic, and alcoholic, it was largely because nothing was ever asked of Jefferson Griffith except that he defend the Pope and the Cincinnati Reds against all comers. Her mother was worse. Her mother was so selfish that when the family broke up, her mother did not even want Amy to live with her. So Amy sought her consolation in the known. What was known in her childhood was the firm regimen of the Church. That pretty well preserved her for the first eighteen years. She spent her time all the way through high school with her father, checking for him in bars as if she were acting in a play written for the temperance league. Sometimes Jefferson Griffith brought a woman home with him. There would be laughter and thumps heard through thin walls. Against this, Amy had church or the streets. Church was more certain.

The first of the naked times was best. Until she was eighteen she’d considered a convent, but then she joined a theater, where the best man in the company was also a fair actor. Jim Randall deceived no one but himself, and seeing this, Amy trusted him and perhaps loved him. The convent was forgotten. They lived together for two years, then parted. Randall wanted to go to Europe to study acting, and Amy refused to go because they didn’t have enough money. Randall was not practical, going off in spite of her good arguments.

Then there was the time with the bum. That was at twenty-four when she was so lonesome. His name was not important and she made herself forget it. He was not important, except she got pregnant, quit the theater, and was so nervous that she lost the baby. She had no interest in where the man went when he left.

Jim Randall wondered, though. To him it was important. He felt that he had loved and lost and had to leave. Randall was entranced by memory, and as the years passed, Amy received occasional letters that dropped like faint astonishments into her mail. The envelopes bore stamps from all across Europe. When a hotel was especially bad and the loneliness surfaced, a letter would arrive for Amy. And, impractical or not, Randall’s letters were welcome. Her answers were vague, but somehow encouraging. She didn’t exactly want Randall, but she didn’t want to lose him either. His letters brought fantasies of youth and love. She liked the fantasies, but avoided encouraging reality.

Sometimes Amy felt that she was too practical, not quite realizing that practicality was her defense to protect her innocence. When wrong-doing brushed past her she took a direct approach in her advice: “Sober up. Buy a new suit.” Her picture of herself was of a responsible career woman. She held to it as well as she could.

There were other pictures in her history, if not in her memory. They were in her mother’s attic in Cincinnati. She told herself that she would not think of the past, and then went right on thinking about it. The picture taken at the time of her first communion was best, her long dress revealing the slight slump of her shoulders and the contrast of thin arms and hands with the overpuffed dress material. She was obviously taller and thinner than most other girls her age, with not a trace of baby fat. Her lips were neither thin nor full. Her cheeks and forehead dominated her face; this and a look of both self-consciousness and quick intelligence. Her hair was abundant, and worn to her shoulders, rich and thick and dark brown.

Two other pictures were important, not only because they showed her, but because they told something of her past. Her family’s fortune was not money but tradition. It was the tradition of black Irish poverty. Amy could never, would never, admit that her father was a failed and badly spoiled child who was good at nothing but drinking. Since he had little money the only picture of Amy’s graduation was of a group of students, she standing in the back row of uniformed girls, still slumping a bit, and half-obscured by a heavy, grinning girl who displayed the sureness of ignorance. One of her thin shoulders, she recalled, was visible. Her face was still intelligent, but now it held both withdrawal from her surroundings, and confusion. It was a relief to turn to the last important picture. Amy on stage. She was twenty in this photo, working ten hours a day on a job that was advertised as thirty hours a week. Her youth and hope gave her the energy to work and still attend long evening rehearsals and performances of little theater. In the glossy photo she was shown as Miranda, a part she played to considerable acclaim. The performance ran for thirty weeks, a record for both Shakespeare and little theater in Cincinnati. Amy was a great beauty. The dress was long and cut to display the swell of adequate if not large breasts. The curve of the neck accented its length. There was a gentle line of shoulders and arms. Her hair was piled high, which pushed her dramatic cheeks, forehead and nose forward. She mourned that big nose for years, but it was thin and aristocratic, well-suited to the particular play.

Amy at thirty. She toweled down and again passed the mirror. She hesitated, looked for the imperfections that had to be there if you were a woman who was thirty. She looked carefully, searching, testing first for detail and then for overall effect. The age seemed to crawl beneath the smooth skin. Surely she could see it if she looked hard enough. Her high forehead wrinkled with traces of some old confusion, then smoothed above high cheeks. Her hands rose to touch her long hair, worn long because John Tracker at one time indicated that he liked it that way.

She smiled and for the moment imagined that she really was beautiful, although for years it had been her private pain to believe she was not. She dressed and turned to the work. Get it done, and then to the movies to cast herself in parts owned by other actresses.