Loe raamatut: «The Dearly Departed»

CHAPTER 2 Meet you at the Lake

Actress” in the obituary’s headline, especially without the modifier “amateur,” would have delighted Margaret Batten, who’d been stagestruck in middle age, recruited at the beauty parlor by the wife of the superintendent of schools. Might Margaret, she asked, consider a tiny but vital role in the King George Community Players’ fall production of The Bad Seed? Duly flattered and only briefly deflated to learn that she had no lines, Margaret threw herself into her first production—understudying, baking for the bake sale, and embracing the subculture that was the King George Community Players. She was a woman alone, a divorcee looking for a social life in a town of 1,008 year-round residents.

Sunny was in high school when the acting bug burrowed under her mother’s skin. They lived on the edge of the King George Links, a semi-private golf course, in a small house with rotting trellises, leased for a pittance under an odd historical footnote concerning a runaway slave and a host abolitionist, now moot and inapplicable. Still, it carried with it a legacy and the taint of a scholarship awarded on the basis of need. Historically, poor people lived in the gray bungalow, visible from the seventeenth fairway; their underprivileged children fished waylaid golf balls out of the course’s water traps. Margaret had qualified as a lessee under the unwritten widow-with-child clause: Sunny’s father was dead, or so the tale on the application went.

Margaret was not a habitual liar, but the little house had been vacant when she moved to King George. A real estate agent, sizing her up correctly as a single mother without means, said, “I know I’m shooting myself in the foot to let you in on this, but there’s this little house that belongs to the town …” Margaret asked to see it. The pine floors had been stripped of linoleum and left a tarry black; instead of doors, faded blue burlap hung from curtain rods between rooms, and the kitchen sink was a soapstone trough. But Margaret was a great believer in soap, water, ammonia, bleach, lemon oil, paint, shellac, wallpaper, and fresh flowers. She could see the small provincial print she’d choose for fabrics and the museum posters of lily pads and haystacks she’d frame for the walls. “How much?” she whispered.

“A dollar a day—and that includes utilities.”

“And you think I could get it?”

The agent confided, “They don’t check, so lay it on a little thick in the application. They like widows and orphans—the more the better.”

“I only have Sunny.”

The agent said, “I happen to know from personal experience that if they like you, they’re not sticklers.”

The truth would have been nowhere near good enough: Margaret had lost a husband in the most prosaic fashion, to nothing more tragic than an uncharacteristic slip—hers. She still couldn’t believe she had sinned and that the perfectly decent John Batten, who updated kitchen cabinets with laminates, had not forgiven her. It hadn’t even been a love affair but a temp job, a professional courtesy: The lawyers for whom she worked had loaned her and her shorthand skills to an out-of-town client running for Congress. He hadn’t announced yet; he told the newspaper that he was visiting primarily on business and, yes, maybe to shake a few hands along the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade route. And when he did, as Margaret would observe, it was with such penetrating eye contact and warm, two-fisted handshakes that the woman in his grip felt more attractive and interesting than she knew herself to be.

Pretty in a round-faced, wholesome way; short, with a generous bust and small waist, Margaret was in her mid-twenties and looked eighteen. Safe, her employers thought. Not bait. Harmless as a secretarial loan to a reputed womanizer. At the end of Miles Finn’s visit, after two days of depositions, he invited her to dinner, in a hotel dining room famous for its Caesar salads prepared at the table.

Thank you, but she couldn’t, Margaret said.

“A previous engagement?”

“I’m married.”

“I am too! This isn’t a date. I’m so sorry that’s what you thought. This is a thank-you for a job well done and a grueling two days of boring testimony. Dinner seems the least I could do.… Perhaps your husband would like to come along.”

“He’s on a job,” she said.

“Out of town?”

“Camden,” she said. “A school renovation. It’s supposed to open the day after Labor Day.”

She seemed torn, concerned about something other than the appearance of social impropriety. Her hands ran down the sides of her brown cotton A-line skirt.

“What if we made it for seven or eight?” he prompted. “That way you can go home and change into something for evening.”

She nearly curtsied with relief, and said, “I do have something new I was saving for a special occasion.”

“How old are you?” he asked. “I only ask because I’d like to toast my campaign.”

“I’m twenty-six!”

“Twenty-six.” He smiled.

He asked for a quiet table, away from other diners. Margaret arrived in what his wife would call a little black dress, poofy and crisscrossed with chiffon at the bosom, in very high heels that looked a size too big, and carrying a long, thin clutch purse with a rhinestone clasp; a heart-shaped barrette held her brown hair off her shiny forehead. She ate her Caesar salad and her veal rollatini with such earnestly exquisite shopgirl manners, refusing to speak until she had chewed and swallowed every morsel of food and washed it down with a ladylike sip from her water goblet, that he felt chivalrous, which, in turn, impelled him to invite her upstairs to have Kahlùa on his balcony. He wanted to flatter her; wanted this sweet-faced girl to feel that she had been an excellent dinner partner and that Miles Finn enjoyed her company. If he needed a secretarial pinch-hitter again—say, next month?—could she get away?

She shouldn’t have spent the night, shouldn’t have assumed that her heretofore nonpregnant state was her failing and not her husband’s; should have checked her good black dress for the long, prematurely silver hairs that John removed with tweezers and saved in an amber pill bottle. He filed for divorce, gallantly characterizing it as no-fault. Their two lawyers privately agreed upon a paltry monthly payment in lieu of a paternity test.

When no one had a good word for John Batten, the brute who divorced his sweet, pregnant wife, Margaret told her family, “It’s not what it appears to be. Don’t blame John. That’s all I’ll say,” and took her wispy-haired baby girl to King George, a town in the shadow of the White Mountains. Candidate Finn had recommended it unwittingly as the site of idyllic boyhood summers and a future retirement. John Batten moved his laminating business to a booming Phoenix and sent Margaret a wedding announcement ten months later. “She’s a keeper,” he wrote in one ecru corner.

Believing that the bungalow on the golf course would provide a month or two’s shelter, Margaret typed in the space allowed that she had been briefly married to a wonderful man, who had died an accidental death in a helicopter crash. In parentheses, she wrote that her late husband flew critically ill people, or sometimes just their hearts and kidneys, from the scenes of accidents to hospitals, from country to city, where teams of specialists met him atop hospital helipads. He had died in the line of duty, whereupon his organs and corneas were harvested and transplanted into no fewer than five near-death breadwinners. The committee for the Abel Cotton House had considered the poorly punctuated appeals of too many teenage mothers who came to interviews in cutoff jeans. Times had changed. Runaway slaves had given way to war widows, who’d given way to church-sponsored refugees with extended families. English-speaking applicants were scarce; people who would fit in were scarcer. With a house in suburban Philadelphia as her last address, an associate’s degree, a dented Pinto, a thin, sad gold band and diamond chip on her widowed left hand, and a little blond daughter, the soft-spoken Margaret Batten was the happy choice of every philanthropist on the committee.

The invitation to act with the Community Players brought changes for the better for Sunny: Her mother took her to the movies now that she had techniques to study, gestures to borrow, dresses to copy. Dusty blues and greens accented her eyelids, and her fingernails went pink. She began squirting hand cream into new rubber gloves by day and massaging her heels at night. Various upstanding professionals, including an optometrist and a pharmacist, took Margaret out for bites to eat after Thursday rehearsals.

Her fellow thespians uncovered a talent Margaret didn’t know she had, the ability to memorize lines more quickly than anyone else—not just her own, but the whole cast’s. “Photographic memory,” she’d apologize, unable to swallow the prompts when her fellow actors missed their cues. She understudied both leading ladies and ingenues, and finally had her break when the woman playing Mrs. Winemiller in Summer and Smoke needed emergency disk surgery. Sunny ushered at her mother’s opening night, and was both pleasantly surprised and disconcerted. Margaret became someone else onstage, gesticulating, enunciating, and projecting, in an accent that was all Blanche DuBois. Sunny thought she looked pretty at a distance with her face painted and her taffeta church outfit rustling, prettier than she looked in real life. The Bulletin’s freelance drama critic, who taught at King George Regional and had Sunny in driver’s ed, reported that “newcomer Margaret Batten brings an understated ardor and energy to the role of the minister’s wife.” It was a gift to an unattached, shy, forty-three-year-old woman in a town where everyone read the same newspaper. Men in the KGCP teased her. The crème de la crème of King George society, she liked to say, was opening its circle to her. The bachelor Players called her at home, asking for “Maggie.” Confidence changed the way she dressed, the way she drove—with a chiffon scarf tied around her neck, in Grace Kelly fashion—and the way she entertained. She rented a floor sander, polyurethaned the pine boards to a high gloss, and painted the front room in a color called Caviar. When the KGCP needed sites for their annual progressive dinner, Margaret energetically volunteered what she now was calling the Cotton homestead for the canapé course.

Confined to the stage, Margaret’s mild airs and new self-esteem were bearable, even lovable. Sunny knew what play was running on which nights and how to stay out of the refracted limelight. She would baby-sit costars’ kids; would paint scenery and post flyers on two dozen bulletin boards around town. But she refused to act—refused to answer even the desperate call for teenage daughters in Fiddler on the Roof and Cheaper by the Dozen. She studied, she caddied at the golf course that was her backyard, fished golf balls out of the brook that divided the eighth and ninth fairways and sold them back to the original owners at half price. Her mother allowed her to golf as long as she wore culottes and an ironed blouse and didn’t look like one of the ragamuffins who had preceded them in the peeling gray house. Margaret frowned on her daughter’s carrying other people’s golf bags—like a bellhop, she said; like beggars who dived off Acapulco cliffs for coins. Sunny helped her own cause by describing the nice doctors and lawyers, owners of the big houses on Baldwin Avenue, who let her play through and admired her swing.

Too many male caddies were impatient and contemptuous of the ladies’ league, but its members finally had an alternative. Sunny took them seriously. She knew the course, and dispensed tips that she’d picked up on loops with the assistant pro. When their husbands surprised them with new clubs for Christmas, the ladies offered their perfectly good woods and irons to Sunny.

It was a small town, but big enough for the theater fanatic and her mildly mortified daughter to coexist until Margaret played the president’s wife in Of Thee I Sing and came away with an idea for a moonlighting job: impersonating first ladies at private parties, trade shows, or ribbon-cuttings. Since the cameo sideline began, she had dressed as Mmes. Carter, Reagan, and Bush; had added Sandra Day O’Connor and Queen Elizabeth as the occasion warranted. Her appearance at an event injected a guessing game into the dull photo opportunity—this faux-pearled and eagle-brooched character was which woman in Margaret Batten’s repertoire?

“Please don’t do it,” Sunny would plead. “Please don’t let them put your picture in the Bulletin again.”

“But that’s exactly why they hire me—so someone reading about the event will say, ‘Oh my goodness. Look! A famous person came to the ground-breaking of the new branch. Isn’t that Barbara, hon?’”

“It doesn’t fool anyone. It’s not being an actress. It’s a sight gag. And then you leave and go to the supermarket, and my friends say, ‘I saw your mother yesterday at Foodland in a gray wig.’ Or, ‘She was wearing a necklace of shellacked peanuts. Must have been Rosalyn’s turn,’ with this look that says, Is she mental?”

“It’s theater,” her mother would say, “an acting job that pays—which makes me a professional. It’s your college fund. Besides, you of all people know I don’t care what the neighbors think.”

Sunny wrote to the long-absent John Batten every few months, and he wrote back. “Sincerely, John,” he signed his dull, typed letters on the firm’s letterhead. Neither correspondent invoked the terms father or daughter; Sunny did not accuse him of abandoning or failing her, because she understood without being told that there were complications that no one liked to discuss. Sunny studied her mother’s wedding pictures and puzzled over the groom’s dominant brown eyes and dark wavy hair, his short arms and thick neck. Artificial insemination, she guessed after reading a cover story on the subject in Time.

John’s wife and office manager, Bonnie, added a banal postscript to every letter—“8 straight days of temps over 100!” or “driving to San Diego to see the pandas,” which Sunny interpreted to mean: John and I have no secrets. I know whenever he writes to you. I protect him. Mostly, Sunny and John corresponded about golf, which he’d taken up in the Sun Belt. He hoped she was taking lessons, and Sunny told him no, but that she took illustrated books by Sam Snead and Ben Hogan out of the library and closely watched the best players at the club. He advised her which hand-me-down clubs, which compounds of steel and new alloys, she should keep and which she should put on consignment. He told her not to ignore her short game. She wrote back and said she was trying to spend an hour a day on the putting green. Was that, in his opinion, enough? “If you’re sinking those three-foot white-knucklers with some consistency, it is,” he answered. He never asked about Margaret, and Sunny didn’t ask about his wife. He didn’t call or send gifts or ask for custodial visits. “I never really knew him,” she’d explain to friends who asked about a father. Or, to close the subject: “He died before I was born.”

From Pennsylvania, Miles Finn continued to pay taxes on his New Hampshire property, an unheated Depression-era cottage with three dark rooms and outdoor plumbing. It was on a minor lake so ordinary and unscenic that one would wonder what inspired him to travel six hours to swim in black water and pee into a fetid hole. The crawl space housed an ancient canoe and an antique archery set; inside, there were moldy jigsaw puzzles, scratchy wool blankets, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed canvas chairs, mouse droppings, the occasional bat, and the empty gin and beer bottles frequently found in near-forsaken cabins.

Margaret aired out the place every spring, defrosted the shoebox-sized freezer as needed, kept clean linens on the bigger bed. If it was a quick trip to close a window before rain or to leave a welcome casserole, Sunny would wait in the car. The cottage, Margaret explained, belonged to friends from Philadelphia—“Finn,” according to slapdash strokes of white paint on a slat—who’d been coming to King George forever.

“Do they have any kids?” Sunny asked hopefully.

“It’s just one person,” Margaret said. “An attorney. I worked for him before you were born.”

It sounded right to Sunny that her mother would bring casseroles to an old, childless man who could afford nothing better than vacations at Boot Lake. Over the years, as Margaret headed off alone with her pail and sponges and a flush particular to this mission, Sunny adjusted her view of Mr. Finn. She sensed that the former boss had become a boyfriend—so typically charitable of her mother. Not that sex was involved, Sunny thought. Sex didn’t fit Margaret. It had to be a crush, durable yes, but no more fertile or reciprocated than the ones Sunny herself had on teachers at King George Regional or on golfers on TV.