“Mother—”
“Yes, sweetikins?”
“Nothing,” Mary Martha said. “Nothing.”
As soon as Kate Oakley heard Mary Martha’s bedroom door slam shut, she rushed out to the telephone in the front hall. With the child out of the way she no longer had to exercise such rigid control over her body. It was almost a relief to let her hands tremble and her shoulders sag as they wanted to.
She dialed a number. It rang ten, twelve, fifteen times and no one answered. She was sure, then, that her suspicions were correct.
She dialed another number, her mouth moving in a silent prayer that Mac would still be in his office, detained by a client or finishing a brief. She thought of how many times she had been the one who detained him, and how many tears she had shed sitting across the desk from him. If they had been allowed to collect, Mac’s office would be knee-deep in brine, yet they had all been in vain. She had been weeping for yesterday as though it were a person and would be moved to pity by her tears and would promise to return... Don’t cry, Kate. You will be loved and cherished forever, and forever young. Nothing will change for you.
Mac’s secretary answered, sounding as she always did, cool on the hottest day, dry on the wettest. “Rhodes and MacPherson. Miss Edgeworth speaking.”
“This is Mrs. Oakley. Is Mr. MacPherson in?”
“He’s just going out the door now, Mrs. Oakley.”
“Call him back, will you? Please.”
“I’ll try. Hold on.”
A minute later Mac came on the line, speaking in the brisk, confident voice that had been familiar to her since she was Mary Martha’s age and her father had died. “Hello, Kate. Anything the matter?”
“Sheridan’s here.”
“In the house? That’s a violation of the injunction.”
“Not in the house. He’s parked across the street, in an old green car he probably borrowed from one of his so-called pals. He won’t use his own, naturally.”
“How do you know it’s Sheridan? Did you see him?”
“No, he’s got the windows closed. But it couldn’t be anyone else. There’s nothing across the street except a vacant lot. Also, I called his apartment and he wasn’t home. When you add two and two, you get four.”
“Let’s just add one and one first,” Mac said. “Do you see anybody in the car?”
“No. I told you, the windows are closed—”
“So you’re not sure that there’s even anyone in it?”
“I am sure. I know—”
“It’s possible the car stalled or ran out of gas and was simply abandoned there.”
“No. I saw it at noon, too.” Her voice broke, and when she spoke again, it sounded as if it had been pasted together by an amateur and the pieces didn’t fit. “He’s spying on me again, trying to get something on me. What does he hope to gain by all this?”
“You know as well as I do,” Mac said. “Mary Martha.”
“He can’t possibly prove I’m an unfit mother.”
“I’m aware of that, but apparently he’s not. Divorces can get pretty dirty, Kate, especially if there’s a child involved. When money enters the picture too, even nice civilized people often forget every rule of decency they ever knew.”
Kate said coldly, “You’re speaking, I hope, of Sheridan.”
“I’m speaking of what happens when people refuse to admit their own mistakes and take cover behind self-righteousness.”
“You’ve never talked to me like this before.”
“It’s been a long day and I’m tired. Perhaps fatigue works on me like wine. You and Sheridan have been separated for two years and you’re still bickering over a financial settlement, you haven’t come to an agreement about Mary Martha, there have been suits, countersuits—”
“Please, Mac. Don’t be unkind to me. I’m distracted, I’m truly distracted.”
“Yes, I guess you truly are,” Mac said slowly. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Tell Sheridan to get out of town and I’ll settle for eight hundred dollars a month.”
“What about Mary Martha? He insists on seeing her.”
“He’ll see her over my dead body and no sooner. I won’t change my mind about that.”
“Look, Kate, I can’t tell a man that simply because his wife no longer loves him he has to quit his job, leave the city he was born and brought up in and give up all rights to his only child.”
“He’s always loathed this town and said so. As for that silly little job, he only took it to get out of the house. He has enough money from his mother’s trust fund. He can well afford to pay me a thousand dollars—”
“His lawyer says he can’t.”
“Naturally. His lawyer’s on his side.” She added bitterly, “I only wish to God my lawyer were on mine.”
“I can be on your side without believing everything you do is right.”
“You don’t know, you don’t know what I’ve gone through with that man. He’s tried everything — hounding me, holding back on support money so I’ve had to sell half the things in the house to keep from starving, following me around town, standing outside the door and ringing the bell until my nerves were shattered—”
“That’s all over now. He’s under a court order not to harass you.”
“Then what’s he doing parked outside right this minute? Waiting to see one of my dozens of lovers arrive?”
“Now don’t work yourself up, Kate.”
“Why can’t he leave us alone? He’s got what he wanted, that fat old gin-swilling whore who treats him like little Jesus. Does he actually expect me to allow Mary Martha to associate with that?”
Lying on her stomach on the floor of the upstairs hall, Mary Martha suddenly pressed her hands against her ears. She had eavesdropped on dozens of her mother’s conversations with Mac and this was no different from the others. She knew from experience that it was going to last a long time and she didn’t want to hear any more.
She thought of slipping down the back stairs and going over to Jessie’s house, but the steps creaked very badly. She got to her feet and tiptoed down the hall to her mother’s room.
To Mary Martha it was a beautiful room, all white and pink and frilly, with French doors opening onto a little balcony. Beside the balcony grew a sycamore tree where she had once found a hummingbird’s tiny nest lined with down gathered from the underside of the leaves and filled with eggs smaller than jelly beans.
It was the cat, Pudding, who had alerted Mary Martha to the possibilities of the sycamore tree. Frightened by a stray dog, he had leaped to the first limb, climbed right up on the balcony and sat on the railing, looking smugly down on his enemy. Mary Martha wasn’t as fearless and adept a climber as either Pudding or Jessie, but in emergencies she used the tree and so far her mother hadn’t caught her at it.
She stepped out on the balcony and began the slow difficult descent, trying not to look at the ground. The gray mottled bark of the tree, which appeared so smooth from a distance, scratched her hands and arms like sandpaper. She passed the kitchen window. The hamburger was thawing on the sink and the sight of it made her aware of her hunger but she kept on going.
She dropped onto the grass in the backyard and crossed the dry creek bed, being careful to avoid the reddening runners of poison oak. A scrub jay squawked in protest at her intrusion. Mary Martha had learned from her father how to imitate the bird, and ordinarily she would have squawked back at him and there would have been a lively contest between the two of them. But this time she didn’t even hear the jay. Her ears were still filled with her mother’s voice: “He’s got what he wanted, that fat old gin-swilling whore who treats him like little Jesus.” The sentence bewildered her. Little Jesus was a baby in a manger and her father was a grown-up man with a mustache. She didn’t know what a whore was, but she assumed, since her father was interested in birds, that it was an owl. Owls said, “Whoo,” and were fat and lived to be quite old.