But he followed her. He stood watching as she banged copper and tin pots around mindlessly. She wasn’t a cryer, but the first droplets of grief and fear were wringing from the winepress of her mind.
“I can’t cook with you staring at me like that,” she finally hissed over her shoulder.
“Maryleen,” he said. “Do you think we all eventually get the punishment we deserve?”
“What?” she snapped.
“I mean, if God doesn’t exist, then he can’t punish anyone. I guess we have to do it ourselves,” he said. “See, man actually is the measure of all things. Man wrote all the books, so he’s the measure even if he says he isn’t. We invented God to tell us to do what we already wanted to do. That’s what I think.”
“Punishment? You mean men? What?” She had no idea what he was talking about, what he was trying to riddle out to her, but her body made its own interpretation, a trace of cold wending its way down from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, and the sudden feeling that she had to pee.
“I heard you say Filip did something,” he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was the thing that frightened her most of all, the queer way he sounded like a little boy when he said it. When she turned, his eyes were enormous and febrile, and she couldn’t stop the words as they rose up from her very belly, passing through the esophagus constricted by fear and then through the ashes in her mouth: “What have you done?”
He reared back, a look of injury on his face. When he spoke, she could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “Nothing. I was trying to do the right thing. All I want is to grow up.”
“I said”—she hissed—“what have you done.”
“I didn’t do anything! I just told Father what you said.”
Maryleen’s brow crumpled up in bewilderment. “What I said?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
She stared at him without a word, waiting.
“You said Filip touched Mother. I heard you.”
She gasped. “Oh my God.”
“Maryleen—”
Her finger was trembling when it punctuated the air between them. “You are evil.”
Sudden rage blasted through him like fire. “No, I’m not! He touched Mother!”
Maryleen’s eyes grew impossibly wide. “He touched your whore mother,” she said, and then leaned so far over the butcher block, she was practically lying on it to yell into his face, “BECAUSE SHE WANTED IT!”
Henry reached out and swept the bowl with its eggs onto the floor, fury undoing what was left of his reserve. “Get out of my house, Maryleen!” he screamed. “Get out now!”
Only later would she look back furiously and think of herself as some slave ordered about by a little boy who had just discovered he would be master someday, talking big at the kitchen girl, who obeyed him, not even stopping to snuff out the candle, just grabbing her jacket and a black goatskin purse she’d spent a week’s wages on. The door spun a draft that gutted the candle and left Henry in the darkness behind her.
Maryleen raced down the drive in a flat-out panic and onto the road toward Paris; it was only six fifteen; there was no one about and still no play of light on the eastern horizon. A sense of unreality enveloped her now as she hastened along; had those words really passed between them, had she just imagined the absence of Filip? But no, there’d been no egg bowl waiting, this was real and actually happening. Yet, surely she was overreacting; she tried to calm her mind, she didn’t really think anyone was coming after her, not really, there was no lynch mob waiting for the girl cook, though she glanced fearfully over her shoulder for headlights; yes, the boy was just messing with her, she was turning this into something it wasn’t, she just needed to calm down. But by the time she was approaching the outskirts of town, sweating through her blouse, she could almost see Filip hanging from a tree right before her eyes, and her decision was made. Later, she would realize there had been a sneaky joy smuggled into her fear, that she hadn’t been quite as afraid as she remembered, that she had forced her own panic like a hothouse flower to compel her stubborn spirit to the action for which it had always — always — been intended. What had she been thinking, turning down colleges and ending up in a white kitchen like that? What exactly had she been trying to prove? Or avoid?
Her own house was empty, her mother and father both at work. In the wallpapered room where she had grown up — odd how the ugly trellised pea-blossom paper would soon be a thing she remembered fondly — she shoved two outfits and her spare pair of shoes into an old fabric traveling bag, but then eyed the single line of mysteries on her shelf and removed the extra shoes, returning them to her nearly empty closet. Nine mysteries and her pocket Shakespeare fitted snugly into the bag, all that the space would allow. Quickly, she removed her sweaty clothing and shrugged into a loose-fitting black blouse and a rayon skirt that fell below her knees, identical to the other three sets she owned and under which no hint of a figure could be discovered. With that final task complete, she was down the steps and out of the old house, site of her father’s Bible reading, of her mother’s weariness, of her own bad-tempered childhood. She didn’t leave a note, she would call them from Lexington — no, Cincinnati; first she would leave this bloody borderland behind. She intended to apologize to Miss Martin for hanging up on her, but Miss Martin would understand — she loved her like a daughter; Maryleen knew that. Then as she was shutting the old walnut front door, bag in hand, she suddenly stopped, her swarming thoughts stilled, and she stood at her fullest height, fear vanishing. She didn’t know where the certainty came from or why, but she suddenly knew she was going to New York City, that she’d find a job in a restaurant and then figure it out from there, and she felt now that she didn’t have a moment to lose, that her very life depended on it.
* * *
Oh, Mr. Forge, is your son ill?
Yes, yes, he is.
When did he take ill?
Over the holidays. There was a fever in the house.
* * *
John Henry picked up his wife at the Paris train station. He waited on the platform, an utterly motionless figure. His affectless face was outperformed by the fine details of his wool pin-striped suit, his black silk overcoat, gold cuff links, and houndstooth handkerchief, his wedding band, which winked dully. Every hair on his graying head was arranged into a still life, and his absolute stillness was betrayed only by the redness of his ears. It was very cold out.
When the train arrived, it came without urgency, its whistle distorted by the distance, its black flashing brokenly through the trees; then came the falling rhythm of its deceleration, the whine and hush of brakes. When it finally stopped, John Henry half wanted it to roll on, carry her away and fail its engine somewhere else. His head turned abruptly, found the straight black tail of the locomotive and the people who poured from it. They were all embracing. Someone kissed someone. He found their displays vulgar and invasive and turned away. Then she was there, standing hesitantly on the last step, blonde and pale, looking at him with all the native shyness he remembered from when they first met eighteen years ago. The wife of his youth, looking no worse for her obvious wear. He stepped forward, his cold hands helping her to navigate the last step onto the platform. He grasped up her suitcase. His other hand made a small, solicitous gesture at the small of her back. His father, Jacob Ellison Forge, had told him that a woman’s bones were lighter than a man’s — and may my words alone be a lesson to you in that regard. Only an animal visibly damages its mate.