Over the river and through the woods
—LYDIA MARIA CHILD
THANKSGIVING TURNED OUT TO BE a turkey—emotionally as well as gastronomically. It started at supper on Wednesday night with Amanda, as she sat down at our kitchen table. “Remember on the phone the other day I told you I had plans for the holiday weekend?” she asked. Tall and slim, with cropped brown hair and dark-lashed hazel eyes, Amanda was garbed in her usual jeans and sweater. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, and she looked wonderful but exhausted, having just fifteen minutes earlier pulled her little red Volkswagen Rabbit into the driveway after an exam in the morning, and then a seven-hour drive home from school. She also looked nervous. This was not at all characteristic of my usually fearless daughter.
“Yeah?” I set a pasta-and-bean casserole on a castiron trivet and plunged a serving spoon into the cheddary topping. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about something for a long time.” She twisted the spoon in the steaming casserole. “And I’m afraid you’re gonna hate it—what I want to do, I mean. I’ve been terrified to mention it to you.…” I had just slathered a cheese biscuit with butter when Amanda dropped this daughterly bombshell.
I let the biscuit fall back onto my plate untasted. “What?”
“Because I’m afraid you’ll be devastated.…” She dug out an oversize spoonful of pasta and beans, plopped it on her plate, went back for more. This seemed to require an enormous amount of concentration, so much that she was unable to look at me.
“What!” I demanded. Ohmigod—she’s going to become a Hare Krishna. Or—Ohmigod—she’s going to have transsexual surgery. Or—Ohmigod—she’s going to take a job as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. “Tell me!” Or—Ohmigod—even worse—she’s decided to go into law enforcement, like Tony.
“And if I go ahead and do it, that doesn’t mean I don’t love you—” Her eyes remained focused on the gooey mess on her plate.
Oh! My! God! “Amanda! What is it? Tell me! Now!”
Amanda dropped her fork with a clatter, sat back in her chair, took a deep breath, and looked directly at me for the first time in what seemed like millennia. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Now don’t freak out, Mom, okay? It’s just that … I’m going to try to find my father.”
If she’d socked me in the gut, she couldn’t have hurt me more. I’d raised Amanda completely on my own from the time she was three years old. We hadn’t heard from Fred in seventeen years. Neither of us. Not a word. Never a birthday card for Amanda. Not a single phone call or check. And now my daughter was going to search for this man who’d resented her from the moment of her conception and who had completely disavowed her since I’d walked out on him after three-and-a-half years of calamitous marriage.
“Sweetie,” I said to her, “Honey. Don’t do it. You knew your father was bad news when you were a tot. Don’t set yourself up for heartbreak.”
Immediately after our hasty wedding, Fred and I had moved from the factory town of Lowell to the factory town of North Adams, clear on the other end of the state. Then he’d taken his truck back on the road, driving longdistance hauls for Eaton Paper. Fred’s occasional layovers quickly convinced me that his extended road trips were the best part of our marriage. At first I took abuse passively; given my family background, I thought that’s what marriage was. I stayed with Fred, because what else was I going to do? I was nineteen; I had no job skills; I had no education; I had no place else to go. But, on Amanda’s third birthday, when her father called her a “smart-mouthed brat who was gonna get hers,” I grabbed my daughter and my nearly empty wallet, and slammed out of the house. And that was it.
“If my father is ‘bad news,’ what does that say about me?” twenty-year-old Amanda said now. “I want to find him, talk to him, because I have to know.” For the first time I allowed myself to notice that her long, delicate jaw could take on the same truculent line as her father’s. “First thing Friday, I’m going to Lowell, and I—”
“Lowell?” The very name of the town made me queasy. “What’s taking you there? Is your fa—Is Fred back in Lowell? Have you heard from him?”
“No.” She sounded impatient. “At least, I don’t know if he’s there or not. And you don’t have to sound so freaked out. I know you think he’s a creep. You’ve made that clear enough. But I’ve got to meet him—at least once. I’ve got to know where I come from.”
“Oh, Amanda.”
“I know you don’t like it, Mom, but you can’t stop me.”
“I know that, Sweetie. I just can’t bear to see you get hurt.”
That was the end of the discussion, but her father’s stubborn jaw remained in evidence for the rest of the evening.
And this announcement was only the beginning of the holiday stresses.
Thanksgiving afternoon, Earlene started in on me. The kitchen was redolent with the scent of roasting turkey, and the table was heaped with pies, towel-covered pans of rising dinner rolls, and a pile of yams, scrubbed and ready for the oven. Our appetites were whetted by the holiday aromas, the irresistible intimacy of kitchen talk had overcome discretion, and Earlene had decided I needed a man in my life. She didn’t realize how bad her timing was. The threat of Amanda’s reunion with Fred polluted my holiday like a noxious cloud; the last thing I wanted to think about was a man—any man. But I keep the disasters of my early life to myself, so, even though it was nagging at me like an abscessed tooth, I wasn’t about to tell Earlene about Amanda’s determination to search for her father.
Earlene is a slender woman, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, a long, thin, arched nose and high cheekbones. I don’t know how old she is. Mid-fifties, maybe, and gorgeous in that world-weary been-there-done-that-loved-every-minute-of-it way of certain mature women. She has two grown children and is long-divorced from their father, but never seems to suffer any dearth of male company. We are good friends. We share similar impoverished backgrounds, out of which has sprung a knee-jerk intolerance of pretension and wacky iconoclastic senses of humor understood by very few others at our prestigious institution. I know Earlene as well as anyone at Enfield does. With most faculty members she is pleasant, but reserved. I can understand that; she’s black at a white college—a college that waffled on abolition in the nineteenth century and jumped on the Civil Rights bandwagon only when it became imperative to do so in the 1960’s. Of course there are black professors now, and a carefully recruited population of minority students. Earlene is in an awkward position, however, as liaison between the students, faculty, and administration, but our joint concern for Sophia Warzek brought us together a couple of years earlier, and a friendship has grown.
“You ever hear from that big cop?” Earlene asked, as we peeled Idaho potatoes for mashing.
“Tony?” I replied, absently. “No. He’s married now.” I plucked the last remaining spud from the plastic five-pound bag, held it under running water, applied the peeler.
From the living room I could hear cheers and groans as Amanda, Sophia, and Jill won huge fortunes at Monopoly, then squandered them recklessly. Agata Warzek, Sophia’s mother, had perched herself in front of the television upon arrival, and hadn’t been heard from since. Eloise slept soundly in her infant seat, oblivious to the pungent scent of a feast in the air.
“I don’t mean Tony. I know that’s over.” Earlene plopped her potato in the huge green-and-white-striped plastic bowl. Salted water splashed over the side onto the Formica countertop. “I’m talking about that homicide guy. You know? That lieutenant who hung around so much last summer?” She ripped a wad of paper towels off the roll and mopped up the water.
“Piotrowski?” I was paying only minimal attention: Amanda’s ill-advised wild-goose chase still preoccupied my thoughts. “Why would I hear from him? The Hart case is now in the hands of the lawyers.” I dropped the final potato in the big bowl, causing another tidal wave. “And besides, he didn’t hang around. He was working.”
Earlene secured more paper towels. “Well,” she replied, drawing the word out coyly. “I always thought that big dude had a bit of a thing for you.”
“For me?” Then I narrowed my eyes, remembering. “Earlene, are you and Jill up to something?”
“Up to something? Uh, uhh.” Her dark eyes were so innocent you could have bathed a cherub in them. I wasn’t convinced, and concentrated on wiping the paring knife. “And besides, Piotrowski thinks I’m a pain in the ass.”
“That’s the first step, isn’t it?” Earlene took a large pot from the cupboard next to the stove, placed it in the sink, and began filling it with water.
“Earlene, you are so wrong.” Fragmented images of the lieutenant’s broad shoulders, his shapely lips, flickered through my consciousness. He was a man, all right. I stuck the knife ruthlessly in its block. I didn’t know why I was protesting so vigorously. “And, besides, I don’t want to have anything to do with cops, ever again. Living with a cop is hell: You never know when they’re coming home. You never know if they’re coming home. I can’t take any more of that.”
“Who said you had to live with him?” Earlene grinned at me slyly. “How about just a teensy-weensy little fling? It’s not natural for a woman your age to live like a nun.”
“Who says I’m living like a nun?” I ripped open the bag of parsnips, thrust a fat one in her hand, plucked the paring knife from the block again, slapped it in front of her. “You don’t know everything about me!”
This time I got the age-old, infinitely wise, African-American-woman-understands-the-blues look. The trouble was, although I hadn’t ever told her about my daughter’s father, Earlene really did know a hell of a lot about me. I was living like a nun.
Earlene proved to be a lively dinner companion, relating hilarious accounts of Thanksgivings with nutsy relatives in her large family in the Cleveland projects. She even got Agata Warzek to reminisce haltingly about holiday traditions when she was a child in Poland. And I did my part, with holiday-cooking disaster tales. Having lived with a cop for years, I had all too many of those to tell; so, there, Earlene, I longed to say.
Surprisingly, the younger women at the table were no fun. I knew exactly what was on Amanda’s mind, and Jill was preoccupied with Eloise, who, after sleeping like a hibernating bear cub all afternoon, had begun to whimper the instant I finally got everyone gathered around the laden table. But I didn’t know what was keeping Sophia so quiet, and that bothered me. Even though she was habitually reticent, my former student usually allowed herself to be drawn out in congenial company. But today—flat monosyllables greeted any query. And when I complimented her on the poems she’d read at the library on Sunday, Sophia went bone-pale and practically choked on her mashed potatoes. After that she didn’t eat much of anything, just pushed food around on her plate, and I realized I’d better leave her alone with her distress—whatever it was. I realized this particularly strongly when Amanda kicked me under the table. A Doc Marten is a big boot, and it makes an impression.
So I resorted to gossip. That never fails to liven things up. “Earlene, you know Elliot Corbin, of course. What’s the buzz about him? I was at his house for a meeting the other night, and he was going on and on about the Palaver Chair—you know, that prestigious position we’re hiring for in the English Department—and what he’s going to do when he gets it. Not if he gets it, but when he gets it—”
“Is that a sure thing? That he’ll get it?” Earlene looked troubled.
“He seems to think so.”
“Too bad. I think I mentioned to you how many students have—” Earlene glanced over at Sophia, who was, after all, still an Enfield student. She let her words trail off. As Dean of Students, Earlene was privy to all sorts of information about both faculty and students, but much of it was confidential.
“Isn’t Harriet Person expecting to get that job?” Jill had silenced Eloise by opening her loose-fitting pumpkin-orange blouse and popping a nipple in the baby’s mouth. That was good for about five minutes of peace. “At the last Women’s Studies meeting, she seemed really confident. She was promising great advances for feminism on the Enfield campus—a new ‘wimmin’s’ center, a sexual diversity initiative, safe rooms in every dorm.”
“I was kind of hoping we’d hire a poet.” Sophia said the word poet reverently, as another person might say saint. This was her first voluntary contribution to the conversation, and I immediately turned to her. She had dressed up for the day, wearing the sky-blue sweater I had given her the previous Christmas and a long navy-blue wool skirt. Her blue-gray eyes shone briefly, like a spring sky between showers.
“Who’d you have in mind?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. I loaded more stuffing on my plate, pulled the gravy boat in my direction.
“Well, Professor Birdwort, of course. She’s so accomplished.…” Sophia actually took a bite of cranberry sauce—to celebrate the thought, I assumed: Saint Jane. Then I noted the snideness. Was I just a little jealous? I’d always been Sophia’s hero.
“Doesn’t Jane Birdwort have some connection to Corbin?” Earlene asked, loading her fork with peas. “It seems to me I heard something.… What was it?” She slapped her head with the heel of her hand, but didn’t knock any information loose. She shrugged, and said, “Old age! It’s pretty bad when you can’t even recall the juicier bits of scandal.”
“Scandal?” I replied. “Oh Earlene, do try to remember.”
Amanda laughed, for a moment her usual lively self. “Mom, Enfield College must be the scandal center of the universe. I’ve never heard so much downright salacious gossip as you’ve passed on to me since you’ve been on this quiet little campus.”
“Salacious!” I exclaimed.
“Good Lord, girl!” Earlene joked. “What kind of education are they giving you there at Georgetown? What’s the next tidbit of expanded vocabulary you’re gonna run by us: concupiscent?”
“No,” Amanda replied. “But try this one on for size: There’s a woman in one of my classes called Chastity.”
“Oh,” said Earlene, grinning at me wickedly. “Your mother knows all about that.”
Just as Sophia was about to set the pumpkin pie in the center of the table, between the apple crumb pie and the vanilla Häagen-Dazs, the doorbell rang. Sophia jumped and let the pie plop onto the table. “Who on earth?…” I said, mystified, and hefted myself up off the suddenly gravity-intensive chair. I reached the door as the bell gave a second peremptory jangle. Who could it be? On Thanksgiving Day? An image of Tony’s battered Irish face came immediately to mind. We’d been together so long that no holiday seemed complete without him. As I threw the door open, I saw immediately, of course, that my former boyfriend was nowhere in sight. But I stared in astonishment at the bulky figure who was framed there in the doorway. Broad shoulders, nicely contoured lips, just as I’d recalled. As horrified as I should have been about the presence of this particular man on my doorstep at—let’s see—6:47 Thanksgiving evening, Earlene’s speculations momentarily blocked out all other conjectures, and I simply gaped at him, like an adolescent with a precipitous crush.
“Doctor Pelletier.” Lieutenant Piotrowski cleared his throat twice. He looked extremely solemn. “I am terribly sorry to interrupt your holiday meal.” He peered over my shoulder at the guests gathered around the table, and I knew each one would be indelibly registered in his memory. “And I wouldn’t do it unless it was absolutely necessary. But something real nasty has just come up, and I gotta talk to you. I believe you know a man named Elliot Corbin.”