When she walked through the door, her mother was awake, doing laundry, wearing pearls. “There was a phone message for you,” Kay said. “John someone. He didn’t leave a number. It’s on the machine if you want to hear it.” She didn’t say why she hadn’t picked up the phone when it rang.
“Thanks,” Molly said impassively. She went upstairs to her mother’s bedroom, played the message back, and let it erase itself.
For the next week, in fact, the phone never rang at all in the Howe household unless it was John calling. All their old friends, or those still left in town, were apparently scared off by the family’s new level of misfortune. Kay let the machine record every call, and so did Molly. The pitch of John’s voice rose incrementally with each unanswered message; he begged for some confirmation that Molly was all right, that she had arrived there at all. Molly played back and erased the messages on the machine in her parents’ bedroom when she was sure Kay was out of earshot. She could hear, in John’s voice, the strong suspicion that she was there, standing by the phone, that she was fine, and was thus not speaking to him by choice, a choice which was a complete mystery to him. But he would not accuse her out loud.
In the dayroom, her father made small talk as his fellow mental patients muttered grievously against the shadowed walls all around them. In fact, it was the normality of his own demeanor, compared to theirs, that made the dayroom a comfortable place for him. He wanted to know about Molly’s year in Berkeley, all about how her brother was doing; drawn into some vortex of dishonesty, Molly revealed to him only the most salutary aspects of her and Richard’s lives, such as her attendance of classes on art and literature. He admired her pluck without once broaching the matter of why she didn’t, or couldn’t, just enroll in the college in the first place. Most days she was engrossed in keeping him happy; but one morning, more out of curiosity than antagonism, she couldn’t resist asking him, “Dad, do you know why we’re here?”
He laughed, an embarrassed laugh, and then, holding together the lapels of the robe Molly had brought from his closet at home — the nurses had taken the belt away — he blushed.
“I feel so foolish,” he said.
Molly waited.
“I just didn’t read the label,” he said, holding up his hands. “How stupid is that? I was having trouble sleeping, so I got some of your mother’s medicine out of the bathroom cabinet. It was late, and I was too lazy to go downstairs and get my glasses, so I just took a couple. I got the dosage wrong.”
Molly started crying, silently. Roger didn’t seem to notice.
“And now all this,” he said. “So much trouble for everyone. You had to interrupt your studies and fly all the way across the country. I just feel so stupid. Can you ever forgive me?”
That evening Molly sat with her mother in the living room. The TV was on; they were watching Cheers. It was dull, thought Molly, but it served its purpose, which was to spare them from having to talk to one another. Then Kay said, “That John Wheelwright called again. I saved the message for you.”
“Thanks,” Molly said.
At the next commercial break, Kay said, “So who is he, anyway?”
“Sorry?”
“This John. He likes you?”
Molly ran her hand through her hair. “I guess so, yeah,” she said.
“Nice boy?”
“Yes,” Molly said.
There was a silence. “Well,” Kay said, “if you’re not interested in him, he’s obviously not getting the picture. Why not just call him back and tell him to leave you alone?”
The first time she had left Ulster, it was understood that, in however characteristically passive a fashion, her parents were throwing her out. Leaving a second time, Molly knew, was going to mean abandoning them, giving them up to the monstrosity of their marriage. Without a third person there, as a kind of emotional groundwire, the general air of psychopathology was going to thicken until at least one of them wound up dead. The transparently phony aspect of normality that her father had always maintained — and which, in his absence, her mother now seemed committed to — was now, even with one of them in the mental ward and the other at home watching Cheers, all that stood between them and a wholly genuine life of terror and hatred; Molly, for one, wished only that that false front might somehow still be preserved. She understood how smart her brother was not to come back here, never mind how elaborate and confining the mindset he needed to construct in order to permit himself to stay away. She also understood that she had never had any real idea, as a child in this house, of the true range of self-deception — the role of lying in survival.
Upstairs, in Kay’s bedroom, the laugh track still audible below, Molly played back John’s message.
“It’s me again. Mrs Howe, if you’re picking up these messages, please, maybe you don’t know who I am, but I’m begging you, let Molly hear them, or let her know I called. Molly, I can’t sleep, I won’t leave the apartment in case you call. What is happening? I don’t understand it but I can let it all go if I just could hear that you’re all right. Please. Please. If there’s something I’ve done to make you angry with me … I’ve thought and thought and I can’t think what it could be. I’m just at a loss, I’m at a loss. Please get in touch with me somehow. I don’t have your address out there but I’m thinking of coming anyway. Have pity on me. I’m so in love with you, and until I can figure out what’s happened to you I’m in agony. I love you. Please call. Please call home.”
Still on the bureau in Molly’s room was the bag from the drugstore. She took it into the bathroom the next morning, and when she came out again she had a simple, symbolic confirmation of what she already knew, which was that she was pregnant.
IN THE BASEMENT pool room, or waiting for lunch on the stools beside the pantry, or walking together on the brick path through the orchard — as if afraid of being overheard — some of Osbourne’s employees stalled for time by trying to guess the nature of the client whose identity he was withholding from them. Elaine said an eight-page print insert could only mean a fashion concern of some kind; I mean, she said, can you ever remember seeing anything like that that wasn’t about fashion? Daniel, though, insisted there had to be more to it than that, there had to be something objectionable or controversial about the mystery client, or else where was the benefit in keeping the name from them? The agency wasn’t thriving, and Osbourne felt forced to make some sort of compromise in order to bring in some money — it was easy enough to understand. But John, though he was feeling sure about less and less, knew Daniel was wrong; he himself accepted with no skepticism at all Osbourne’s definition of his motives as purely on the level of aesthetic experiment. He wanted the issue of influence taken off the table, so to speak; he wanted their next efforts shaped by no sensibility other than their own. John defended this idea — or not the idea, exactly, but the transparency of the motives behind it — with such unconscious vigor that by the time he finished they were all nodding sagely at him, as if he were only confirming what they already knew.