The Fires Page 13

“Sue, bring me my book,” Emily said. “I’ve got Hanna’s address in there somewhere.”

  When the nurse came back with it, Emily opened it up for me.

  “Oh, yes, here.” She pointed. “Right there, honey,” she said. There were three written in Emily’s spindly writing: one in Sunnyside, California with a pencil mark over it that looked unintentional, but it was hard to tell, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Indianapolis.

  “Which one is it?”

  She looked bewildered as she studied the crowded page and pointed again. “Right there.”

  “There’s three, Emily,” said the nurse. “Three addresses.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, shaking her head, “I didn’t realize.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll try them all,” I said.

  When Emily lay down for her nap, I got ready to leave. As I was putting on my jacket, the nurse said, “Tell her to come visit more. And you, too. Don’t be a stranger.” Her voice was eerily 126 / RENÉ STEINKE

  intimate. I looked at this wiry woman in her uniform, the moles starring the hollow of her neck and her chin, someone’s daughter, someone’s niece.

  W atching Marietta in front of the mirror, I got the idea. She was fixing her curls, and the hair spray smelled like wet, bottled smoke. I sprayed it around the electrical outlets, or near exposed wires, so the fire looked accidental, the result of some malfunction.

  And there was a kind of glue I’d sometimes sniff first. It gave me an airy headache, made my body move one step ahead of the directions I gave it. I’d dab the glue onto some old wood. I wrote words: PARIS, LOOSE, and lit the glue so the words blazed up for a minute like a marquee.

  And there were more ways to look accidental than I’d used—a candle near a curtain, a piece of fat in the oven, a mouse and a peanut-butter-coated electrical cord. I could harness chance and stay as unseen as something forgotten, something misplaced.

  W e were sitting in Marietta’s living room. “They saw the smoke, thank goodness,” said Erma. “We might have lost the entire house, all the clocks, the piano, the boys’ pictures.”

  A finger of sunlight shot through the window. I took one of the peacock feathers from the tall vase beside me, separated the wet-looking strands, and spread them in my palm. Because I was afraid they might find out some other way, I’d told them that I’d been the one to show the counter girl where the fire was.

  “Why didn’t you say that before? You weren’t working that night?” said Marietta.

  THE FIRES / 127

  “It was just before my shift,” I said. “And I’d gone for a walk.

  I thought I told you.”

  Marietta sucked in her breath and shook her head, an embarrassed pull at the corner of her mouth.

  Erma smoothed the arm of her chair as if she were petting a dog. “It was so unlike Fred to leave the saw plugged in like that, but his mind hasn’t been on work lately, you know, since Henry’s been gone. He doesn’t talk about it, but he misses him.” Her mouth twitched.

  Marietta clicked the back of her house slipper against her heel, still smiling slightly as if she hadn’t noticed the mention of his death.

  “We miss him, too,” I said, thinking of the powder lacing the saucer’s rim, his stiff clenched hand, the torn envelope with his hastily erased note. I understood better now why he needed to escape. “I keep thinking about his stories. What was that one about the man in the burlap suit?” The walls seemed to tilt in slightly, distorting my voice as if I were talking into a tunnel. It was a shaggy-dog story about a man who couldn’t hold on to anything, not even the clothes on his back, but it was funny and had a happy ending.

  “I sure don’t remember.” Erma laughed, but her smile lingered a little too long with her gaze.

  Marietta shrugged. “He had a lot of those.”

  Erma was still smiling. She leaned forward, fiddling with her clip earring. “All those good speakers used to come to our meet-ings, remember, Marietta?”

  Marietta faked a laugh. “Oh, not that old stuff again. Don’t start with that.”

  Erma went on. “I still never thought I’d see the day we’d have a Catholic president, did you? If they would’ve known that was 128 / RENÉ STEINKE

  coming, it would have made the best story in the world. Forget what they said about the Pope.”

  Marietta pointed her toes and slapped her slipper against her heel. “It never made sense to me. In the beginning, all we had were the Catholics. Now, Fred would be glad if we just had them.”

  “Well,” said Erma, “that was before they moved a black family in here in a makeshift house on a street that didn’t even have a curb.”

  “Erma, those were church people,” said Marietta. “It was Christian charity to get them out of that slum in the city.”

  Like sharp rocks crowding up against me, their talk trapped me in a place I couldn’t stand. “How could you belong to the church and also the Klan?” I said, my heart pounding. “Wasn’t there a rule against that?”

  Erma was shaking her head and pressing her lips together. My grandmother moved to the edge of her seat. “Why, no. See, we didn’t work back then. There wasn’t any Ladies’ Guild.” For Marietta, a club was a necessity.

  “We had a lot of oomph for a bunch of women, though,” said Erma. “And—”

  Marietta interrupted her. “It wasn’t anything serious. That was for the men. We just got dressed up, had baptisms, showers, gossip. We needed a reason to get together.” It was the cheerful-ness of the group that was its measure, even if that meant spreading hatred for people you didn’t know here and there, even if that cheeriness was a cover for a violence only the men were allowed.

  Marietta had to keep telling herself that it was only a club, only play, not real enough to hurt anything. That stunned fear on her face in the photograph and the one burning cross I’d seen kept fusing in my mind like a holograph card. Were the fires I’d set some kind of legacy, some fear passed down in the genes?

  “Grandma, how could you?”

  THE FIRES / 129

  Acid raked up in my throat. Marietta and Erma sat woodenly, each staring at the space between her feet on the floor. Erma started shuffling her clunky orthopedic shoes, and Marietta’s long fingers fluffed at her hair. Their faces turned worn and yellow, as if they’d suddenly become ill, and I realized that was exactly what I’d wanted. The clock that played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on the hour clicked into its tune.

  Erma raised her head to the ceiling. “Pfish. You talk some sense into her. Those hippie professors did it to her. You can’t send girls to college anymore, or they come back like this.” And she marched out of the living room, slamming the kitchen door behind her.

  Marietta gave me this weird, compromised frog smile. “Honey, we only had our mothers and fathers to teach us. Erma’s own father believed the Klan was called for in the Bible. We did what we were taught.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said.

  “No. But we were poor. A disease could sweep through town and kill a whole family of children.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “We did what we were told because that was how people got along. And we had to. People need others around to help, especially when you don’t have much.” She muted her voice and looked at me again with that frog smile. “Later on when I got married it was different. I started with the Ladies’ Guild, but you know what, we still wore white dresses. We still wore long white dresses because we liked them, and I tell you, it wasn’t much different from the way it was before. Just no more parades. No men around. I had this pretty white dress I remember with French lace on the skirt—Emily gave it to me—and it looked a little too much like a wedding dress, people said, but I didn’t care.”

  The dream of my grandmother’s lost, fragile beauty had often 130 / RENÉ STEINKE

  made me sad, but now it irked me and somehow fed my fury at her.

  “Do you think that just because someone looks different f
rom you they’re any less?” I yanked back my shirtsleeves. “Look, my skin’s not the same as yours.”

  Her mouth tightened. Her blue eyes rounded under her pink, wrinkled lids, and I caught a glimpse of her younger self. Of course, there was nothing for her to say, because she had believed she was better than other women, and the gaze of everyone around had confirmed that. “Honey, you are special,” she said, grazing my knee with her hand. “Anyone with half an eye can see the beauty in you.” I couldn’t let her get away so easily. The rocks were too sharp, and I was losing my footing.

  “How can you be friends with a bigot?” I said.

  “Of course she doesn’t think of you in the same way as those others.”

  “Maybe she should.”

  “Oh, she just gets going sometimes,” said Marietta. “You can’t listen to half of what she says. Even she knows that. She used to tell me your grandfather was a coward because he wouldn’t join the men.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I said that was one of the reasons I married him.” She shook her head, rearranging the candy dish on the end table. “Look, maybe back then I didn’t think for myself, but later I did. I changed with the times.”

  “I never heard you contradict Grandpa.”

  “I did, a little, at home. I couldn’t tell him anything, though.

  He didn’t listen to me.” She looked down, and her mouth trembled. I thought how easily inertia could rot a person’s integrity, but I wanted to believe her. To do that though, I had to fill in the story, imagining she and her friends had made their white Ladies’

  THE FIRES / 131

  Guild gowns out of silk instead of cotton sheets, that they burned those awful masks at a party, and after that, sabotaged the Klansmen’s efforts, and finally withheld sex and hot meals to help persuade the men out of their fervor.

  “And what about Cornell?”

  “We never even met that man.”

  “Did you tell anyone he was Jewish?”

  She lifted her chin and said incredulously, “We didn’t know that.”

  “She never married him. I went to see him in September to see if he knew where she was.”

  Marietta stood up and circled herself with her arms around her waist, began to pace. “Well, then, he was a common-law husband anyway.” She looked at the ceiling. “Thank God Henry never knew that. That would have been all we needed….” She bumped into the mantel and stopped herself, not looking up.

  “He seemed to be a good person,” I said. “A piano player.” It didn’t really describe him, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.

  When Marietta turned around, her face was composed again—it was amazing how deliberately she could do this, as if she were arranging her features on a plate. “So you reported that fire? Why did the newspaper say it was that girl at the drive-in then?”

  Gratefully, I noticed it was already five o’clock, and I had to be at work by six. “I told her,” I said, feeling exhausted when I got to my feet.

  J o sat beside me at the desk, finishing up with the books. I swiped the polished dark wood with a rag and tried to speak calmly with a man who was complaining about the lack of heat in his room. It was an old hotel, and the radiator heat was temperamental, but he seemed one of those people so beaten down 132 / RENÉ STEINKE

  and sad that they took complaining seriously because it was the only way anyone would listen.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” I said, in my best night-clerk’s voice. “I’ll have to call our maintenance people about it. In the meantime, would you like to move to another room?” He shook his small head uncertainly. His hair had thinned in patches, and he had a wrinkled brown circle in the middle of his forehead, a dull parody of the bright red dot Indian women wear. “Or can we bring you more blankets?”

  “More blankets, yes.” He nodded, looking relieved and a little guilty.

  “We’ll bring them right away.”

  When I came out of the back closet holding two neatly folded and stacked wool blankets, Jo said, “David put money down on a house.” She shrugged. “It’s nothing special.”

  I looked at her diamond-shaped face in profile and thought of her mother, singing at that nightclub, Blue, in New York. The color rose in the apples of her cheeks like the blush on peaches.

  “You don’t have to do it,” I said. There was a small scratch on her cheek.

  She shook her head, so her short hair fringed out around her face. “It’s an ugly green one on Washington Street, but we’re going to paint it.” She slid the books into the drawer, took her little key from her skirt pocket, and turned it in the lock.

  “I have to take these upstairs,” I said. “But don’t leave yet, okay?” I carried the blankets up to 9, and when the man answered, he was already in his pajamas.

  “Thanks much,” he said, taking the blankets from me. The tiny diamonds on his pajamas reminded me of Jo and her mother, both diamond-faced women.

  “Do you need anything else?” He looked away and shook his head.

  THE FIRES / 133

  When I got back downstairs, Jo was staring into the desk with her arms folded in front of her. She didn’t look happy.

  “What happened at your grandmother’s today?” she said, sticking her pencil behind her ear.

  I’d already told her about Erma’s photo album and those pictures of Marietta and her friends in Klan uniforms, and I was surprised how lightly she’d taken it, saying, they probably just needed an excuse to get away from their husbands once in a while.

  “I found out you were probably right. At least that’s what she claims,” I said. “But my grandfather didn’t have anything to do with it, I guess. He wasn’t a joiner.”

  She traced a finger over the desk. “That was all such a long time ago. Who knows what people really thought? It was all crazy.”

  “I want to know,” I said.

  She tapped her knee against the side of the desk. “Sometimes you just have to let things go.” She was turning the tables on me, wanting to give me advice so I wouldn’t think anymore about what she might be about to let go. “For example,” she said,

  “there’s a reason, and you may never know it, why no one knows where your aunt Hanna is.”

  “But what if I think I can find her?”

  She sighed through her teeth. “And then what? She’s just a person like anyone else. She’s not a princess. She’s not wanted by the FBI.”

  “She should know her father died.”

  “Believe me,” Jo said, scratching her nose, “she’ll find out when she needs to.” She was determined to undo what her mother had done, move into a home instead of abandoning one, marry a man she wasn’t sure she loved instead of leaving him. She wasn’t a leaver, like her mother; she was a stayer, and stayers had certain beliefs that helped them remain in a place: Let things go. Be real-134 / RENÉ STEINKE

  istic. Don’t expect too much. For all her pessimism, there was a tenacity in it I admired.

  Hanna had once said to my mother, “I don’t know why anyone would want to live in Porter.” She hadn’t meant to be cruel, but the ineptness of her words didn’t seem to occur to her until my mother’s mouth clamped down, suddenly the little sister, dutiful, a stayer.

  Jo ruffled her hair in the back. “Remember when we found all that stuff under the train platform?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not knowing where this would lead. We’d discovered these objects we hadn’t even known we’d wanted until we held them in our hands: a Zippo cigarette lighter, a miniature scissors, a jade-and-pearl earring.

  “That doesn’t usually happen,” she said in a clipped voice.

  “You have to accept things as they are and make the best of them.

  Things don’t usually just come to you by accident or because you’re looking for them.”

  How had she become so dark-spirited? Did she really believe that? I decided she had to be just trying to convince herself that she would make the best of marrying David an
d all he had to offer her. My grandfather had been a stayer too, though, leaving finally the only way he could, and this made me frightened for her. That fear must have made me blurt it out, “My grandfather didn’t die of a heart attack. He killed himself. He put arsenic in his coffee.”

  The pencil fell out of her hair and bounced onto the desk. She covered her mouth.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. I barely believed it, we’d lied to so many people.”

  “Why?”

  I gazed at the scratched and ink-stained blotter on the desk, crazy cacophonous marks. “We just did.”

  THE FIRES / 135

  She nodded, so her eyes enlarged. “Why do you think he did it?” The real question. The chasm in the ground we’d been cau-tiously stepping around with our lie.

  “You saw how he kept to himself.” Though if I’d been braver, I might have been able to draw him out, keep the bitterness in him from turning to poison. “That’s why I want to find Hanna. I thought she might know.”

  Jo’s stricken face was white, and the cords in her neck stood out. “It’s awful,” she said, pressing her hands together almost as if she were praying, with her thumbs touching her chin and her eyes lowered. “Who knows why people do things?”

  T he first time it happened I was sitting in a restaurant eating a piece of lemon pie. A man with a high forehead and little curls by his ears sat down across from me at the table and asked how old I was.

  “Fifteen,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of strangers anymore. I wanted to know the places they were from.

  He puckered his lips in a fake whistle. “Too bad,” he said. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  He licked his lips and shook his head. “They must grow pretty cute fifteen-year-olds around here,” he said. “Something in the water.” He put his hands on the table and pushed himself up, went back to his stool at the counter, glancing coyly over his shoulder at me, and paid his check.

  I was stunned, and felt myself blush deeply. This had happened before to Jo, and she’d giggled and posed like a movie star when she’d told me about it. But I thought it had only happened because he was a stranger, someone who didn’t know me well enough to know I was scarred. I looked down at my navy skirt and white 136 / RENÉ STEINKE