eleven
The Donnerbauers lived in a house in an old-fashioned St. Paul neighborhood that harkened back to the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and bootleg booze. But the house itself wasn’t old-fashioned, merely old, with a spotty lawn and crumbling sidewalk. Mrs. Donnerbauer greeted me at the door, waving frantically. “Come in, come in,” she urged, as if she were afraid the neighbors might see me.
I had called the Donnerbauers from a pay phone before leaving Deer Lake and asked if I could visit. They agreed. But it was well after ten when I arrived, and no visible lights burned in the house as I stood on the porch and stared at the front door, deciding whether I should knock or not. I figured they must have gone to bed until Mrs. Donnerbauer opened the door just as I was about to leave.
I stepped across the threshold into virtual darkness. An ancient floor lamp burned in the far corner of the living room, but the dim light it cast was supressed by a burnt-orange lampshade and didn’t reach the door. The only other light in the room came from a seventeen-inch television mounted on a metal TV tray, also in the far corner; its flickering shadows gave the plastic-covered furniture an eerie sense of movement. A man that I assumed was Alison’s father sat under the floor lamp in a chair facing the TV screen, his bifocals balanced on his nose. He was either watching the Entertainment channel or reading the People magazine that was opened across his knee. Mrs. Donnerbauer introduced me, saying, “The detective person is here.” Mr. Donnerbauer didn’t reply. Maybe, in fact, he was sleeping.
Alison’s mother led me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where a single bare lightbulb burned overhead. She offered me a chair after first removing a large cardboard box from the seat. The box was at least fifteen inches square and filled with the small rubber bands that the delivery kids wrap around your newspaper. She set the box on the counter next to an impressive stack of wrinkled aluminum foil. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. When I said I did, she filled a tall juice glass and handed it to me.
“Would you like some fish sticks?”
“Fish sticks?” I replied.
“We have plenty,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said, confessing that she worked as a food demonstrator, enticing supermarket shoppers with free samples as they pushed their carts up and down the aisles. She always brought the leftovers home to feed her family, which now consisted only of herself and her silent husband.
I declined the fish sticks.
“That woman in the paper, are they going to make her pay for hurting my little girl?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked abruptly.
“I don’t know. There’s not much physical evidence,” I answered.
“It ain’t fair,” she insisted.
I agreed with her.
Mrs. Donnerbauer was a small woman on the downside of fifty, an age she hadn’t reached without hard struggle. Any resemblance to the young woman in my photographs had been eroded by time. Without prodding, Mrs. Donnerbauer began speaking of her Alison—only not with the hallowed devotion you would expect from a grieving mother. Rather, she spoke of Alison as if she were the wayward daughter of an unpopular neighbor.
“Very peculiar child,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said.
“How so?”
“Well, she wasn’t like the other children.”
“How so?” I repeated.
“For one thing, she was always reading,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said as if she had caught her daughter drinking three-two beer behind the garage. “Reading at the dinner table. Reading in the car. Reading in front of the TV. Reading at night under the covers with a flashlight.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I suggested. “I did much the same thing when I was a kid.”
“War and Peace?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked. “The Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill? Canterbury Tales? In old English! Once I caught her reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was eight years old. Imagine.”
Imagine, indeed.
“And she would never answer when I spoke to her,” the woman added from across the kitchen table. “I would chant her name: Alison, Alison, Alison. Nothing. At first I thought she was deaf or something. Then I thought it was because Alison hadn’t been named until after she was three months old because of a family disagreement.… His mother,” she mouthed silently, gesturing toward the living room. “I thought maybe she didn’t realize that Alison was her name. Of course, I now know that she was just ignoring me, like her father. Isn’t that right, dear?” she asked the man in the living room. When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. “See?”
“Maybe he didn’t hear you.”
“Oh, he heard me fine; he just doesn’t want to say anything.” Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed dramatically. “It’s the cross I bear.”
I didn’t say anything, either. After a moment, Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed again. I took that as a cue.
“It must have been difficult raising a girl who was so intelligent,” I said.
“Very difficult. And a little bit”—Mrs. Donnerbauer searched for a word, settled on—“frightening. Imagine trying to raise a child who’s smarter than you. It was bad enough when she merely thought she was smarter. But then the teachers at the school told us Alison should be in special classes because she was a genius. They tested her—they never asked me if they could, but I guess they test everybody. Anyway, they tested her, and the tests results said Alison was a genius. A genius,” she repeated as if the word made her nauseous. “It gave Alison a reason to ignore me. Suddenly I wasn’t smart enough to tell her when to go to bed or to eat her vegetables or what clothes to wear. I wasn’t smart enough to be her mother. ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ Everyday it was the same thing until finally I just threw up my hands and did leave her alone.”
Mrs. Donnerbauer took time out to stare at something way above my left shoulder. I sipped coffee from the juice glass. At last she said, “I guess Alison found out what happens when you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”
I was amazed by the statement and flashed again on the photograph in my car. In the end, Alison couldn’t even depend on her mother.
“She used to say she was blessed,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “Well, I didn’t see it. Where’s the blessing in being so different from everyone else? You tell me. I remember when she was graduated from high school—graduated three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. I was so embarrassed.…”
“Really? I would have thought you would’ve been proud.”
Mrs. Donnerbauer shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like, having people look at you, stare at you. Having people ask you questions because your daughter is so … different. People asking how she was around the house, like if she ate strange food or something. People asking if I—if I—took vitamins or something when I was carrying her; if I listened to Mozart of something in the delivery room. Imagine! People. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.”
“Sometimes I don’t know what to think, either,” I agreed.
“And of course, she didn’t have any time for boys,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “She was too busy doing genius things.”
“What about Stephen Emerton?”
“That was the one time I put my foot down,” she answered proudly. “Stephen was such a good-looking boy and smart, too. But the way Alison treated him … Well, I practically forced her down the aisle.”
“Alison didn’t want to get married?”
“Oh, of course not. That’s what normal people did. But I knew marriage was the best thing for her. And so …”
“Was she happy do you think?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Was she happily married?”
Mrs. Donnerbauer stared at me as if she had never heard the expression before.