The Amateur Marriage Page 14

  “Oh, maybe . . . how many, Michael? Five? Six?”

  “And she stays out all night with these boys?”

  “Oh, goodness, no! She does have a certain hour to be home. And it isn’t just boys. Is it, Karen? No, there are other girls, too, of course. This is a group, officer; an ordinary group of boys and girls together. It isn’t only boys.”

  “Do you know if she drinks, Mrs. Anton?”

  “Drinks . . . alcohol? Well, of course not! She’s seventeen years old! And up till sophomore year, she was always on the honor roll!”

  “Till sophomore year,” the older man said. He and the younger man exchanged another glance. Then he said, “Tell me this: does she have any favorite hangouts? Any bars or night spots where the customers might remember her?”

  “Bars!” Karen’s mother said, at the same time that her father said, “Sir, I think you may have gotten the wrong idea, here.”

  Both men looked over at him, the younger one clicking his pen shut to show he was paying attention.

  “Our daughter may be a little bit rebellious,” her father said, “a little late getting home some nights, maybe; a little critical of the older generation. But she is not out carousing in bars with a bunch of lowlifes. She isn’t some sort of gang moll. She isn’t . . . trash, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the older one said. But the two men’s faces didn’t change. They stayed coolly, blankly polite.

  Now it was the Antons’ turn to trade glances. All around the room they looked at each other—the parents on the couch, George in the armchair, and Karen perched on the ottoman in front of it. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t even move; but Karen had the feeling they had somehow drawn closer together.

  Ordinarily on Sundays they ate an extra-early supper, but no one had had any appetite while they were waiting for the police to be called. After the two men had left, though, Karen’s mother said, “I’m starving!” and her father said, “Me too. Why don’t I fix grilled cheese sandwiches?”—his one and only specialty, served just a few times a year.

  So they all went out to the kitchen, where he brought forth the big square griddle pan and the giant brick of Velveeta, and in minutes the room took on a delicious browned-butter smell that made Karen start feeling festive. Oh, that weight still dragged at her stomach, and part of her still listened alertly for any sound at the door. (“My prediction is, your daughter will be home tonight with her tail between her legs,” the older policeman had said.) But even so, she was filled with an odd sense of celebration. Maybe it was relief at having the house to themselves again—those two thickheaded men finally gone, the occasional startling, painful crackle of the older one’s radio finally silenced. And the rest of the family appeared to feel the same way. Her father clowned around at the stove, brandishing his spatula and putting on a French-chef accent. Her mother grew loose and chuckly. Her brother lounged in a kitchen chair, uncharacteristically social.

  “Zees ees zee ra-r-r-re one,” her father said, removing a pale-beige sandwich from the pan, “for zee young man who dislikes zee browned toast,” and he set it on a plate and presented the plate to Karen, who was nearest. Karen curtsied and accepted the plate on the flat of both hands as if she were a waitress.

  “‘Tail between her legs,’” her mother said. “I hate that expression, don’t you?”

  “Ah, what do they know?” her father said. “And how that one guy ever made it onto the force! Don’t they have any weight limit? Whatever happened to physical fitness?”

  Turning to give George his sandwich, Karen saw that he was the only one not smiling. He wore a grim, disapproving expression, and for an instant she wondered what could possibly be troubling him. Then she remembered. Oh, she thought. Lindy. It came to her with a thud.

  She pictured Lindy pulling on her long black skinny tights, Lindy slamming her bedroom door so violently that the frame came loose, Lindy doubling over with glee as she described jumping into that stranger’s car. Every image was full of movement; always Lindy was shaking her fists or shouting or sobbing or laughing. She was the household’s spark and color, the spunky one, the adventurer.

  Karen felt her heart was breaking, but she set George’s plate in front of him and said, “Your sand-weech, monsieur.”

  For a moment, he seemed to be deciding something. Then his face relaxed and he said, “Merci beaucoup, mademoiselle,” and he smiled.

  It was true that Lindy was still missing, but Karen all at once felt filled with hope, almost lightheaded. It seemed to her that maybe now, at long last, their family could be happy.

  5. Heidi’s Grandfather

  Michael had one childhood memory that wouldn’t go away.

  He was walking down Boston Street with his mother and his brother. He was probably about eight years old, which meant that Danny would have been twelve. They were shopping for something, but he couldn’t remember now what—some household necessity or other. It was an errand that made him feel tired and cross even before they reached whatever store they were heading for, and he lagged farther and farther behind, squinting under the blaze of the sun, wrinkling his nose against the disgusting smell of hot tomatoes from the cannery. “Pick up your feet,” his mother told him, and all at once, Danny crumpled to the sidewalk. Michael started laughing. He assumed that Danny—the family comic—was teasing their humorless mother by picking up both feet and therefore toppling over. “Hee-hee!” he said, covering his mouth with one hand, but then he saw Danny’s face and he took a sharp step backward.

  “Danny?” their mother cried. “Danny!”

  “I don’t know what’s happened,” Danny said.

  Just then, still backing away, hand still covering his mouth, Michael caught sight of Johnny Dymski and Johnny Ganek half a block ahead—the two best baseball players in St. Cassian Elementary. And his immediate thought was Please, God, don’t let them see this.

  After that day, Danny could sometimes walk just fine but sometimes not. He could sometimes raise a glass of milk to his lips but sometimes he’d let it drop. You just never could be sure anymore.

  Of course they consulted a doctor—several doctors, in fact—and Michael’s parents must have discussed the problem with the neighbors. But during those first few months, when the symptoms were on-again-off-again, Michael thought of Danny’s illness as something to be concealed. In public situations he stayed rigid with anxiety, every one of his muscles tensed, willing Danny’s muscles not to fail. It would be so humiliating if outsiders guessed the family’s secret!

  His memories of the later, harder stages were dimmer. He retained only sketchy impressions of Danny in a wheelchair, Danny flat in bed, Danny sipping through a straw while their mother held the glass. And mercifully, Michael had been sound asleep when Danny died one winter night shortly before Danny’s nineteenth birthday. Michael woke up in the morning and Danny was gone. In time, the sound of his voice was gone too, and the wry little twist he used to give to his mouth just before he said something funny. But the memory of that day on Boston Street stayed on.

  The boring, comforting ordinariness suddenly yanked away. The horrified realization. The sideways glance to find out whether anyone else had noticed that something was wrong with the Antons.

  Now he thought that his whole life was a version of that walk down Boston Street. He would always have something to hide. Surely other people’s marriages were not so ragged and uneven! Other people’s daughters were not so difficult! He studied his neighbors, hoping for flaws. He never saw anything serious. If Mimi Drew snapped at her husband, why, the very next moment she looped an arm affectionately through his. If the Brians’ daughter came home late from a date, she was grounded and she accepted it, matter-of-factly if not graciously.

  And she had come home, after all.

  After Lindy’s first disappearance, it seemed she got into the habit. It seemed she couldn’t be contained; she popped out of her parents’ hands any time they tightened their grip. The police grew wearier and less i
nterested with every call. The school principal asked insulting questions about the Antons’ home life.

  The fall of her senior year, she was suspended twice. (Cutting class, the first time, and smoking, the second—one day’s suspension for each.) Over Christmas vacation she disappeared, was gone three days and returned with no explanation. They took her to a psychologist recommended by the school counselor. She slouched in his office with her chin on her chest and refused to say a word.

  Spring semester, she was kicked out of school a full week for bringing a six-pack of beer to phys ed. The principal suggested a facility for troubled girls in West Virginia, but neither Michael nor Pauline could bear the thought of shipping her off like that. They didn’t know what to do. They felt they were in way over their heads. Lindy spent her week of suspension watching TV in the rec room—a jagged dark knife of a person sending out billows of discontent from her father’s La-Z-Boy. Pauline told Michael that when she vacuumed, Lindy kept a stubborn silence and stared straight through her at Dave Garroway, although she’d always derided television as “pablum for the masses.”

  One afternoon she had visitors. Three boys and a girl, all in all-black, trooped purposefully down to the basement single file. Things had come to such a pass that Pauline actually welcomed these people. She brought them a tray of Cokes and a Tupperware bowl full of pretzels. They stopped talking when she entered, but at least they mumbled their thanks and shuffled their feet a bit. “It’s such a pretty day,” she told them. “Why not sit out on the patio?”

  “Mom,” Lindy said, “do you mind?”

  Pauline said, “Well. I only thought.”

  When she reported this later to Michael, she said that one of the boys—the skinniest and tallest, the unhealthy-looking one with a scribble of beard on his chin—had seemed to be the leader. At any rate, it was his voice she’d heard steadily murmuring when she listened from upstairs. He’d been sitting on an arm of the La-Z-Boy, she said, more or less draped around Lindy. Michael was shocked by his gratification at hearing that his daughter was the one the leader favored.

  That was on a Friday. Monday Lindy went back to school, docile and unprotesting, lugging her three-ring notebook and her striped beige canvas gym bag. Pauline told Michael later (telephoning him at the store once the other two had left) that she honestly thought this latest suspension might have done the trick. “I mean, a week’s an awfully long time to loll around on your backside,” she said. “For once I didn’t have to nag her to get ready this morning. She seemed almost glad to go. I believe she’s learned her lesson.”

  Michael went through the day feeling blessedly free. Apparently he’d been laboring under a sense of dread for months, although he hadn’t been fully aware of it till it was lifted.

  Karen returned from school at three, bringing her friend Maureen in for milk and cookies. George got home about four-thirty. Lindy didn’t appear.

  At six o’clock, when Michael arrived, Pauline was beside herself. “What are we going to do?” she asked, pouncing on him first thing at the door the way he wished she wouldn’t. “We can’t telephone the school! They’ll think something must be wrong.”

  “Maybe she’s catching up on her work,” Michael suggested. “Meeting with her teachers about missed assignments and such. She did lose a full week of classes, remember.”

  “Teachers don’t meet students at six!”

  “Or maybe . . .”

  “And she’s not allowed to make up missed assignments. That’s the whole point of suspension.”

  “Pauline. Let’s take stock here. It’s early yet. Seniors in high school often stay on for . . . whatnot. For extracurricular activities and such.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Michael, do you imagine she’s rehearsing the lead role in the senior play?”

  He hated it when she adopted that tone—so biting and sarcastic.

  They put off supper till seven-thirty and then ate without conversation, the younger two hunching over their plates and keeping their thoughts to themselves. Michael had trouble swallowing. The sense of dread had returned.

  Had he realized, even then, that this time Lindy was gone for good? Later he seemed to remember he had, but that could have been mere hindsight. He could summon up so distinctly the picture of Lindy leaving for school that morning, as described for him by Pauline, and it seemed to him that he himself would have suspected something, that the visible weight of her gym bag or the absence of any textbooks or—most telling of all—a certain defensiveness in her shoulders would have warned him. Shouldn’t Pauline have guessed, somehow? She was supposed to be the intuitive one! Inwardly, he held her responsible. During the days and days of interviews with policemen, school authorities, neighbors, classmates, other parents, he said almost nothing and watched with critical eyes while Pauline fluttered and babbled and buried her head in her hands and wept and carried on. It occurred to him for the first time that she wasn’t very bright. Always it had been assumed that he was slower-witted than she, but look at her! Just look!

  “I want you to understand that my daughter is a decent girl,” she told a police detective. “This is not some juvenile delinquent you’re hunting down. She doesn’t come from a broken home. She’s never committed a crime. She’s just . . . young! She’s just . . . Oh, I don’t know what she is! I’m so surprised by this! I never saw it coming! Growing up, I swear, she was no different from any other child. Perfectly average behavior, nothing you would think twice about. Of course, she’s always been strong-willed. Definitely a handful. But I never would have foretold that she’d do something so extreme. It’s like she took a . . . leap of some kind! A leap past any logical progression! Well, you must have children. You know how they can be. So contrary and perverse, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean they’ll vanish, does it? So why has Lindy vanished? Why? Till now I blamed the class of people she hung out with, but yesterday, when Leila Brand came to see me . . . Have you spoken with Mrs. Brand? Howard Brand’s mother; they call him Smoke; he’s one of the other two that are missing? Why, Leila turned out to be the most regular, most normal, most nicely brought-up person. She was wearing the same identical jumper I bought last month at Penney’s—we had a good laugh about that—and this soft, short, pretty hairdo. With a son so scraggy-bearded and strange, who would ever have guessed it? And I bet she looked at me the same way. I was the mother of that wicked Lindy Anton who led her innocent boy astray, she must have thought. She must have thought I was terrible!”

  Then she couldn’t go on because she started crying again, but Michael made no move to comfort her. He continued sitting erect, hands clamping his knees, eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the detective. It occurred to him that not once had Pauline said “we,” or referred to Lindy as “ours.” Everything had been “I” and “my,” as if this drama were hers alone. He felt himself hardening toward her. He hoped the detective understood that the two of them were not the least bit alike.

  At first he supposed that Lindy would show up at any moment, today or tomorrow or day after tomorrow. Weeks passed where every time the telephone rang at work, it might be Pauline calling to say that Lindy had just walked in. Or she might slip into the house overnight; she might be found the following morning peacefully asleep in her bed. Every day when he woke up, Michael would check her room. He supposed that Pauline did the same. The door of the room stayed wide open now—significant, and sad, when you considered how ferociously Lindy had once guarded her privacy.

  Then, as the weeks stretched into months, they both lost hope. They no longer badgered the police or lay in bed at night discussing the what-ifs. (“Do you remember that friend of hers who moved away to Maine in sixth grade? What if that’s who she’s gone to? Do you remember her name?”) Amazingly, Michael began to have mornings when Lindy’s absence was not his first thought upon waking. Instead he would travel toward the realization in a kind of two-step process, floating contentedly upward into the warmth of the summer sunlight, the chug-chug of a neighbor’s car sta
rting, the musical murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, until all at once—Somethings wrong. And his eyes would fly open and he would know: Lindy’s missing.

  How could he have forgotten that, even for a split second?

  He knew that Pauline never forgot. He saw how she carried the knowledge constantly at the front of her mind; he saw how it aged her and wore her away. Two horizontal seams were deepening in her forehead, and her perkily swaybacked stance had sagged into a middle-aged stoop. Even when she was smiling at one of George’s corny jokes or listening to Karen’s schoolgirl gossip, she had the look of someone just barely managing to rise above her grief.

  Yet it didn’t bring them closer together. You certainly couldn’t say that. Sometimes Michael thought it might very well be the end of them. Lindy’s defection, he imagined, was a pronouncement upon their marriage: You two are putting on an act. You’re not really a couple at all. And this is not really a family. Maybe that was why he hated talking about it with outsiders—with new neighbors who by some miracle had not already heard. (And wasn’t it incredible that by now there were several neighbors Lindy had never laid eyes on?) Pauline would volunteer every last detail at the drop of a hat—it appeared to be a compulsion—but when people asked Michael how many children he had, he would tell them, “Two. A boy sixteen, a girl twelve.” Pauline had a fit when he did that. “How can you deny your own daughter?” she would ask later, and he would say, “They only wanted to know if we have any kids at home the right age for their kids. I was only being practical.”

  “Practical! I call it disloyal. You’re ashamed, is what it is.”

  “Some might say ashamed; some might say discreet. I’ve never seen the point in spilling our business to all and sundry.”