Payback Page 9

  She has to wait in the rain for a taxi, because she has no idea how to get to Penn Station, because she doesn’t know exactly where she is. There is one mercy: she will be able to get a train soon; her ticket is good, and she will be home before dark.

  She chooses a seat far from any other person, because she is still terrified that her stink will cause anyone who comes near her visibly to shun her. The army jacket now smells of age…mildew, perhaps, or mothballs, or the stink of whoever owned it. It is soaked through; her mohair sweater clings to her body like a sick wet animal. She curls up against the window and tries to sleep, but sleep will not come.

  How can this have happened? How can this man whom she thought of as the figure of her dreams, so elegant, so romantic, have turned into a monster? Was he right—had she been asking for it? She thought she was asking for a few ardent kisses…hadn’t he understood that…or was it she who had not understood?

  She needs someone to tell her how to understand this. But who was there for her to go to? If Edwina were still around, she would have been able to tell her. But when Heidi wrote to her she never wrote back. So maybe she’d changed addresses…there was no way of knowing where she was, and Heidi understood that Edwina was finished with her; she had no need of her mascot, her Scotty…she was on to other things. Heidi had decided she would never write Edwina again, and she was angry that she had even allowed the thought of her into her mind.

  It’s unthinkable that she would go to her parents, and anyway they were in Switzerland, on one of their secret trips, from which her mother would come home with a new, young face. Elsie and Hans—they were her enemies, as she had allowed them to understand that she knew they were stealing from her parents; they would probably be pleased at her misfortune. The people she had met at the Mensa meetings…she didn’t even know how to get in touch with them from meeting to meeting. And there was not one person at the Lydia Farnsworth School whom she did not despise.

  But that isn’t true. There is one. Miss Vaughan. Miss Agnes Vaughan.

  Heidi knows where she lives; she has driven around her house…had it been curiosity or a hope that she would appear and Heidi could pretend to just be in the neighborhood and they would chat outside of school, two equals, on a street like any other?

  For the first time since Henry Smith told her she stank, there is a chink in the black wall of her misery. She would go to Miss Vaughan. Miss Vaughan would tell her how to understand what had happened.

  She parks the car in front of Miss Vaughan’s house. She walks up the brick path. She is shivering; she is still wet, although it wasn’t raining now in New Canterbury. The moon, a thin crescent, allows a sliver of light on the dark approach to the front door. There is a knocker in the shape of a dolphin. Also a doorbell. She chooses the bell.

  For a while, there is no response, and Heidi is afraid no one is home, although she can see a light through the closed curtains. Finally someone opens the door. A woman; probably Miss Vaughan’s mother, of course she is, they look almost alike, although Mrs. Vaughan’s posture is stooped and she looks weak, unhealthy.

  “I need to see Miss Vaughan,” Heidi says.

  “Yes, come in. You look cold.”

  “I’m all right. I just need to see her.”

  “I’ll be a moment. She’s upstairs. It takes me a moment.”

  Heidi nods but says nothing.

  “Please, come in and sit down?”

  So this is Mrs. Vaughan’s mother. She seems to have a bad cough; her shoulders are stooped and she leans heavily on the banister, but Heidi doesn’t want to start feeling sorry for her.

  This is Miss Vaughan’s house. There is nothing special, nothing memorable about it. Comfortable, comfortable places to read books, to talk quietly. The couch and the chairs are a rose-colored chintz; she can’t see what pictures are on the walls; there is a fireplace; one beam from a standing lamp falls on the knob of one of the brass andirons.

  She watches Mrs. Vaughan make her way, with difficulty, up the stairs. She would like to say, “I’ll go, I’ll go and get her,” but she knows that’s impossible.

  She hears soft voices, a few words, and then Mrs. Vaughan makes her way slowly back down.

  “She’ll be right with you,” Mrs. Vaughan says. “Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  How odd, Heidi thinks, she has no idea who I am, and she lets me into her house, offers me tea. She feels she has entered a foreign country, a country of kind children who have no idea that danger might be in the world in the person of a stranger. She feels older than Mrs. Vaughan, and a bit contemptuous with her new knowledge, hours old. She had trusted a stranger…and what had happened, had happened, this thing, which she didn’t yet know what to name, since she didn’t yet understand it. This is why she was here. Because Miss Vaughan would help her understand.

  Miss Vaughan is coming down the stairs. This is not what Heidi had been expecting; Miss Vaughan had been sleeping; she rubs her eyes, she ties the sash of her pink chenille robe. Ugly, Heidi thought. Why does she have such an ugly robe?

  “Heidi, are you okay?”

  “I was raped. I went to the lecture in New York and I met this man and he invited me to his apartment for lunch and then he raped me.”

  Agnes Vaughan puts her hand to her mouth, as if, Heidi thought, she were holding back vomit.

  “You went to a strange man’s apartment? How could you have done that? How could you have let that happen? You knew better than that.”

  The words rise up and crash against them, an ice-cold wave that covers them, then disappears, and leave them frozen where they stand. Where did those words come from? The minute they are out of her mouth, Agnes wants to take them back…they aren’t what she meant, they aren’t her words, they have nothing to do with her. But she doesn’t have even a moment to take them back. Heidi looks at her, and the look changes in an instant, from crushed disappointment to the clear bolt of pure hate.

  And then Heidi turns and runs, runs, down the brick path, runs down the three stone steps and into her car. Agnes runs after her, but she’s wearing bedroom slippers and the path is slippery from the morning’s rain. She falls forward on her face, and she feels her teeth cut through her lip, tastes blood, and as she stands up, she hears Heidi’s car engine start and the sound of the car racing down the road.

  Agnes’s mother is standing at the door.

  “You’re bleeding. Come in, come under the light.”

  “I can’t. I need to go after her.”

  “You’re bleeding, you can’t drive like that.”

  “I have to.”

  Agnes puts her coat on, grabs her keys from her purse, and runs to the garage where her car is parked. She backs down the driveway, drives as fast as she can down the street. And then she realizes: she doesn’t know where she’s going.

  She doesn’t know where Heidi lives. It was part of school life: in school, you were not a part of a family; you were on your own, and teachers made a point of separating school from home life.

  She drives in the direction that Heidi went, as fast as she can. Her mouth is bleeding and she cups her hand under her chin to catch the blood.

  She will not find Heidi, not tonight. Tomorrow. She would call Letitia Barnes, get Heidi’s address, drive to her house, and express her sorrow, her shame, offer to do anything to make it up to the poor wounded girl, whom she had just wounded further.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi drives dangerously fast down the small decorous streets of New Canterbury. The dull misery that had been the climate of her mind lifts, and her mind is cleansed, as if she had withstood a violent storm, with lightning that struck down the obscuring trees, leaving behind a bare and flattened plain. She had thought that she could rely on Miss Vaughan, that Miss Vaughan could understand, that Miss Vaughan cared about her. She had even thought it possible that Miss Vau
ghan loved her.

  But now she knows, and her new understanding makes her feel valorous to herself. You could not count on anyone to understand. This need for understanding was a weakness. She would not indulge in it again.

  Before she gets home, her plan is settled in her mind. Elsie and Hans would not be home yet. She would go directly to her bedroom, take off her wet clothes, and bathe…she would scrub herself hard, hard, as if she were shedding an old, diseased skin. And then she would go into her parents’ room.

  She knows where everything is kept. In all the time she has been alone in her house, she has explored, carefully, her parents’ bedroom. She knew where her father kept a thousand dollars in cash. She knew which of her mother’s jewels were real and which were cheap paste copies. She would take the money and the jewelry. Then she would disappear.

  They wouldn’t be able to find her. And they would blame themselves. Her parents. Miss Vaughan. Miss Vaughan would never be able to forgive herself. Miss Vaughan would never forget her.

  PART III

  Rome

  April 2015

  She said no to everyone who offered her a ride to the airport. She wanted to leave as she’d arrived, to end as she’d begun, but she knew that was foolish, it wasn’t an end really. She would be back.

  But she didn’t know how and when.

  It would never be her home again. She would always be a guest…staying at the house of someone who would empty a drawer or two for her, make a place in their wardrobe. She’d have to start buying things like a ribbed plastic coffin for her toothbrush, small plastic pots for moisturizer and eye cream. In one of the cavernous American drugstores that would soon be familiar to her, she’d head for shelves marked TRAVEL SIZES, and stock up on mouthwash, shampoo, conditioner. She would never again have the familiar bed, the familiar pillow, the mirror that gave back her reflection with all its changes, containing them somehow behind its transparent front. Now when she looks in the mirror she sees a woman past middle age, say it, she tells herself each morning, an old woman. She came to Rome a young woman, unmarried, and leaves a grandmother. Not quite a crone but closer to that than any other noun. There is no word for men, she thinks, that corresponds to crone.

  She waits at the Piazza Belli for the H bus, paradise of pickpockets. She will take it to the Stazione Termini and then take the new fast train to the airport. The Leonardo Express, she found it funny to link the two words…Leonardo and express. But maybe, she thinks, that’s right, the past and present should be linked, even in ways that seem incongruous, or else what is left…an emptiness, a rootlessness. It is important not to lose the thread. She has to believe that her life has a line…thin, nearly invisible, sometimes, sometimes hidden by a pattern: fruit, flowers, stains, but always there if you look closely enough. A life like a bolt of cloth, rolled up on itself like those bolts of cloth that fascinated her when she went with her mother to the fabric shop. The saleswoman she and her mother made fun of, Mrs. Wilberforce, her endless supplies of smocks, each one with a ridiculous print: somersaulting babies, monkeys, gingerbread men, Martians. “What a serious name for such a silly woman,” Agnes’s mother would say.

  Mrs. Wilberforce would throw the bolt of cloth onto the counter, unrolling it, turn after turn, measuring it out with a device Agnes thought magical: it was clamped to the table; the top half a dial, the bottom half invisible. The fabric was fed between the top half and the table and the dial registered the length of fabric. At the right moment, her mother would say “Stop” and Mrs. Wilberforce would cut the fabric with pinking shears, and then fold it in tissue.

  * * *

  —

  She has only one small bag; everything else has been shipped ahead. Her nephew Paolo arranged for the sale of the furniture; she told him he could keep whatever money it produced.

  The bus lumbers over the Garibaldi Bridge. St. Peter’s is to her left, but she has never liked the sight of it, and preferred looking to the right, at the glass-roofed synagogue, the Byzantine cupola of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Lurching like a clumsy rhino, the bus heads down the busy Arenula, past the Largo Argentina (Mussolini’s Disneyland, Pietro had always said). Her eye rests with loving sorrow on the buildings’ walls, the tender colors of Roman stucco, blue-gray, pink. The more expected ochre and burnt sienna. When she first arrived, she was amused that colors she had known only from her childhood Crayola box were real, a commonplace here. She knows these walls well; she has known them in different lights, in different seasons. She feels she has a right to call them hers. Will she feel the same right when she no longer lives here? This is what she will miss most: the light on a wall, the sound of her heels on the cobblestones, the refreshment of the fountains with their endlessly replenished outpouring.

  She’s glad she has a seat to herself because she knows she is whispering nonsensical words, words she wouldn’t want overheard. “Goodbye, my life.” Absurd, not even true because she had a life before she came here. A happy one, intact before it was shattered…but she will not allow herself to use the passive verb, because she knows she was the one who shattered it.

  And she has more life to live, but she can’t believe that it will consist of anything but diminishments.

  Impossible to say that leaving Rome is not a loss, Rome that had nursed her, healed her, brought her back to life. She arrived forty-three years before, broken, or more correctly scalded, like the victim of a fire, disfigured, the slightest touch a torment. So covered in self-loathing that she once picked up half a pastry from the gutter and ate it, as though some voice had told her: This is your due. This is what you deserve.

  * * *

  —

  It was a long time before she was able to take in the famous beauties. They were too strong at first…she was ready only for the colors of the walls, the markets, the fountains. And Jasper, who took her in as if she were a heroine from a nineteenth-century novel, fleeing scandal. Fleeing to Jasper. Who saved her. He and Rome.

  But there had always been someone to save her from the ultimate crash; her falls have always been of the nonfatal sort, the kind from which you are able to raise yourself, shocked, looking around, surprised that you are on hard ground, that you are not alone. If you looked around to find no one, that would be desolation. And she has never been entirely desolate. She has never been abandoned.

  She was the one doing the abandoning.

  She was marked, but not destroyed.

  The only prayer she has ever really prayed: Please let Heidi not be destroyed. Please let me not have destroyed her.

  She doesn’t even know if Heidi is alive.

  Heidi.

  * * *

  —

  She’d hardly slept for weeks after Heidi ran down the path in front of her house, running in the red boots Agnes had given her…she had tried hard to follow her, to find her, but failed. The summer nights were long and bright; this was a curse and not a blessing. The picture would not leave the stretched canvas of her eyelids. The words would not stop repeating themselves on the stretched skin of her eardrums. “I met this man in the museum. He was English. He invited me to his apartment for lunch. He raped me.”

  And her response: “How could you have let that happen?”

  Words impossible to take back…and the running girl, impossible to catch or stop.

  It upset her parents that she wasn’t eating. And the dramatic flare-up of her eczema, which she’d been prone to as a child, mostly in winter, always in times of stress. But now every inch of her body was covered with angry red skin that flared and flecked. She let her nails grow long because long nails were better for scratching. She raked her forearms raw; it was the only thing she allowed herself—the momentary or less than momentary assuagement of the constant itch, leaving behind it a burning, satisfying, preferable to the itching.

  * * *

  —

  One night her mother lifted
Agnes’s shirt sleeve and said, “My God, Agnes, this has to stop,” and insisted on taking her to the doctor, kind Dr. Boyle, who had treated her all her life and was familiar with her eczema. But this, he said, this was something quite different.

  “Are you eating properly? You’re very thin. And sleeping? Not boyfriend trouble, I hope…I thought you were all set up with that nice archaeologist. I was so taken with him at your engagement party.”

  It was only when the doctor said those words that she realized she hadn’t thought of Roger at all. Even the word archaeologist was a shock, as if someone had reminded her of a country she once visited but of which she had completely lost track. She could hardly believe that Dr. Boyle didn’t know about Heidi…she could hardly believe that there was anyone in the world who didn’t know. But, in fact, the interest was much more limited than she could have imagined…extending only to the Lydia Farnsworth School and Heidi’s parents…although the meagerness of their concern was shocking to Agnes. Their decision not to postpone their trip to Chile for summer skiing.

  The Stolzes had hired a private detective, someone recommended by their lawyer, to find Heidi. Rupert Longman. Agnes was convinced that Rupert Longman wasn’t his name at all.

  The Stolzes had hired the cheapest detective their lawyer could find. He was an absolute cliché of the seedy private detective: a dirty raincoat, a greasy comb-over, loafers with a chain across the instep, the office in Providence on the third floor of a building with other dubious-looking enterprises: check-cashing services, medical supplies, a bail bondsman. For a month, she went back and back to that office, and in all that time, she never saw anyone go in and out of any of the other offices, nor did she ever see anyone entering or leaving Rupert Longman’s office. She would hesitate at the door, his name painted onto a glass obscurity, the misleadingly elegant lettering: RUPERT LONGMAN. She had never seen such an ugly room: dusty manila folders in piles that looked always about to topple, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and a lingering miasma of anxiety and shame left by the clients she never encountered.