The Story of Beautiful Girl Read online

  She stopped the car in the muddy parking lot and could see the river across the campsite. The water was brown and rushing fast and had swelled far up the banks.

  Martha reached into the basket and took the crying baby in her arms. The girl’s face was red and her cries pitiful. At least Martha now had a better sense of how to translate this particular sound; the makeshift diaper was not wet.

  With the baby in one arm, Martha opened the back door, maneuvered the suitcase, and removed a bottle of formula. She sat down in the car and, with the experience of last night instructing her, figured out how to hold the baby; the cries, however, persisted, and the baby would not open her mouth to receive the nipple. After a few moments of terror, Martha did the only thing she could think of. Baby in her arms, bottle in one hand, Martha stood and walked slowly.

  The effect was swift. By the first patch of bunks, the baby had hushed. By the second, she’d begun taking the bottle.

  Martha decided not to turn back until the child was finished. Besides, it felt good to be under the sky, even if it was obscured by trees. It felt good to take in fresh air. The scent of sap and fir and wet soil, the sound of the baby sucking, helped Martha’s heart beat more evenly.

  Soon she came near a swimming dock. Built out from higher ground, it remained barely above the water. Perhaps as she enjoyed this respite from her worries, she might take a step onto it to see the swirling water below. The baby swallowed, making noises of contentment, and as Martha neared the dock, something atop a post at the far end caught her eye. She tested the planks with her feet and moved out over the water. As she and the baby neared, she saw that it was a hat. No, a cap, just like the one her husband used to wear.

  Just like the one she’d given to Number Forty-two.

  She stopped. She could see it clearly. The brown wool. The moth-eaten hole.

  She looked behind her. The bunks responded with silence. She almost called out, then remembered he couldn’t hear.

  She went to the edge of the dock and retrieved the cap with her free hand. She held it up to her face. It smelled like Earl, and she closed her eyes and felt him beside her on the bed, felt herself longing to reach over and rest her hands on his chest and look into his eyes with such love that he would see through his haze of sadness and find her again, right in front of him. Then he would touch her face, and forgive the universe its chaos, and forgive her their broken child.

  She opened her eyes. Where was the man?

  Maybe he’d slept on one of the shores or climbed one of the trees to avoid the water. She scanned the river. The streaming water was the color of earth. She saw nothing but far more water than the banks ahead could hold, rushing toward the net that marked the swimming boundaries of the camp, then onto the edge of the low-head dam. She hadn’t noticed the roar from the dam but heard it now. Surely Old Creamery Bridge would be closed all day. Everyone on this side of the river would have to remain here.

  She turned and looked upstream. The view was similar, though a huge branch was in the water, racing toward the campsite. The currents were so swift, the branch passed beneath the dock within seconds, then sped on. It will get caught in the net, she thought. When it didn’t, she realized the net had torn. She watched the branch tumble over the edge of the dam.

  She fingered the hat, looking to both shores for traces of the man. Still feeding the baby, she left the dock and picked her way down the western bank. She saw nothing except debris streaming along in the river: past the final float for swimmers, past the torn net, past the signs that read, NO BOATING BEYOND THIS POINT. She walked until she reached the vertical face of the dam. As she’d expected, in the churning water beneath, the branch and debris bobbed on the surface, got sucked under, then returned to the surface, over and over, stuck in the cycling water. Then something captured her gaze. Rising to the surface was a piece of dark clothing. Her husband’s jacket—which she’d given the man. It went under, and her husband’s shirt rose.

  She went cold. Number Forty-two must have come to the dock in the rain, hoping to swim across the river to make his way back to Lynnie. He must have taken off the cap and set it on the dock. He must have dived into the water in the night. But he’d been swept downstream and over the dam. The backwash had caught him and sucked his clothes from his body.

  The net had been put up because canoeists had been lost. Some had never been found.

  Martha’s heart pounded as she drove the only way she could: west on Old Creamery Road. It was impossible—the man could not have drowned. She had only just met him. She had watched him look at this baby with a care that could conquer all the trouble he and Lynnie must have endured to reach the farm. Yet his strength had been no match for the current and the spinning water.

  She touched the cap, which lay on the seat beside her, in that way touching both Earl and the man. Then she raised her hand to her lips and breathed in the scent of the two men who were no more.

  Thank goodness the baby was asleep again. Thank goodness she might never know what happened to this man. Yet Number Forty-two had helped this baby escape into the world; and could there be a tale more worthy of remembrance? Maybe Martha should write it down when they reached wherever they were going tonight. Maybe she should place this sad story inside the hat and make every effort to ensure that whatever happened, both remained with the baby.

  Martha turned the radio back on. Surely she would hear about a body found in the river. Though the authorities would probably keep it quiet until they knew the man’s identity—and since he’d be wearing nothing except her husband’s trousers, if even that, they would not be able to identify him. He would just be a man who, if found at all, would be buried as John Doe.

  Martha kept looking at the baby, then pulling her gaze back to the road. Everything was going wrong. Lynnie had been apprehended. Number Forty-two had drowned. Martha herself was driving in the opposite direction from Well’s Bottom. It was already nine o’clock.

  She should return to the farm.

  She had a barn, a springhouse. She could hide the baby in one of them. She was heading that way anyhow, unless she took Scheier Pike—which would only deposit her at the distant bridge. What if that was out, too?

  She could not think. She could barely see. She felt like an egg dropped from up high, shattered into pieces that skittered to faraway corners.

  The intersection was near. She thought of Robert Frost, coming upon two roads diverging in the woods. One wanted wear, and although he longed to take the other, he took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.

  She was not a poet. She was not an adventurer. She was not even a mother. She was only someone who had given her word to a request she had not understood. For the first time, she wondered: What would happen if the baby was found?

  But how could Martha take that chance?

  There it was, up ahead: two small signs. One pointed the way home, west on Old Creamery Road. The other pointed north, Scheier Pike, the way she never needed to go. How she ached to return to her house, with everything she knew, with walls so unbroken by windows that they’d protect her—though not the baby. And now, fingering the brim of the hat, she felt more obliged than ever to do as Lynnie had asked.

  She took the road north.

  The Well’s Bottom of 1968 bore a remarkable resemblance to the Well’s Bottom of 1918, when Martha and Earl drove off from the church where they’d just wed to his farm out in the country. Mom-and-pop stores reigned, the local theater bore a grand chandelier, Independence Day was celebrated on the town green, freight trains carried coal and steel, and the number of births approximated the number of deaths. A few differences did distinguish 1968. There was talk of a new bypass that would siphon trucks away from Main Street. A Chinese family had opened a restaurant. A few people owned color consoles, with wavy green television pictures. But the riots of Detroit and Newark and Los Angeles, and the marches in Washington, were distant news. Change was not screaming in Well’s Bottom. Change was barely
a whisper.

  Yet when Martha reached town, she imagined she heard that whisper. She pulled into the most inconspicuous place she could find, an old stable in one of the many alleys that paralleled the main streets. It was noon, and except for two stops for feeding and changing, the child’s eyes had been closed. Though as Martha lifted the basket, she felt her own vision open, as she took in what she’d always seen and suddenly found different.

  Arm encircling the basket, Martha passed two children as she hurried the block to Eva’s back door. Dressed in yellow raincoats and galoshes, they were laughing at a puppy jumping through puddles, and for the first time in her life, Martha was struck by the ease with which they played right out in the open. Martha looked up to the silver blue sky. Somewhere under that sky was Lynnie, somewhere else the body of the man. Martha had seen none like them playing in puddles. She had never noticed that before.

  The back door said, HANSBERRY PHARMACY—DELIVERIES. Martha stepped onto the wooden stoop and pressed the bell. She could hear voices on the other side of the door. It felt like the first day of school, as she stood outside her classroom and heard, at the far end of the schoolhouse, children enter the building. Though today there would be no “Good morning, class,” or even “Welcome to fifth grade.” She felt as bereft of vocabulary as Lynnie was.

  The door opened.

  Eva was pushing her brown hair back toward her ponytail as she took in the figure at the door. Her round face was as flushed as ever, and for a moment it seemed she was so caught up in her responsibilities, she could not make sense of the face into which she was gazing. Then she caught herself. “Mrs. Zimmer?” she asked.

  Martha opened her mouth, but nothing emerged.

  “What are you…,” Eva began, and then asked, “Is everything all right?”

  No, Martha wanted to say. There was so much that was not all right—so much about which she knew too little—so much she should have known—that she just stood, her mouth a stone.

  In the silence between them, Eva’s expression darkened with worry. Now her gaze went down, apparently trying to determine the problem that brought her old teacher to the store—a scraped elbow? cut finger? Her gaze lit on the basket. Her eyes widened.

  She looked up at her old teacher. “Please,” Eva said. “Come in.”

  Eva offered Martha a seat at a Formica table in the stockroom, where Eva’s teenage son, Oliver, often did homework, and where a compact kitchen allowed her to serve dinner without going to the apartment upstairs. She put on a kettle, and Martha, forcing words out, told her about the night before. Eva’s eyes were kind, and when she heard a customer enter the store and disappeared through the swinging door, Martha remembered why Eva had been the confidante of many girls in eighth grade: She had a gentle way about her and listened without judgment.

  Martha heard the bells on the front door, and then Eva returned. “I put up the CLOSED sign,” she said, and, sensing Martha’s needs, took the baby from her hands. Looking into the tiny face, she explained that Don was delivering a prescription to an elderly couple across town and would return momentarily; did Martha need to hide the baby from him?

  “He can know,” Martha said.

  “Then may I bathe her?” Eva asked, and Martha, for the first time since the knock on her door last night, started to cry.

  Eva did not press for Martha’s grander plan, as she found a bathing basin, placed it in the sink, and filled it with water. She did not ask Martha for a next step as she tenderly washed the last remnants of the birth. She simply described what she was doing and invited Martha’s hands into the water, and the tears receded as the baby grew clean.

  Then, after producing diapers, flannel infant clothes, and formula, Eva rocked the baby in her arms. “I don’t know what I’d have done in your shoes, Mrs. Zimmer.”

  Martha wanted to say she was just doing what seemed right. But the back door opened then, and Don came in. Tall, bearded Don, with his blondish red hair. He gave Eva a confused look, and she asked him to sit, and as Martha listened to Eva tell Don what happened the night before, Martha thought, I am not alone in this. Only then, as relief spread, did she realize how tense she’d been.

  “Actually,” Don said, leaning forward, “I’ve had some experience with the School.”

  Martha started.

  “You might remember that I attended seminary. Well”—he shook his head—“right after I finished, I worked at the School as a chaplain.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I held services, but the staff rarely brought anyone, so after a while I just went to the cottages to talk to the residents. That was eye-opening… and troubling. Finally, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I told Eva I’d rather take over the store.”

  “It wasn’t an easy decision for us,” Eva said. “But it was the right decision.”

  “So here’s an educated guess about why Lynnie wants you to hide her baby. Sometimes the state takes kids away from parents who are doing a bad job raising them, and the kids get placed in the School. They’re treated just like any other resident—which, I’m afraid, is miserably. Lynnie was probably worried about that happening to her child.”

  Martha said, “Lynnie would have been there to keep an eye out for her.”

  “I doubt it. Babies are isolated from the adults. She might never have seen her again.”

  Never see her baby again, Martha thought. A long silence passed. Martha held the baby close to her chest, cradling her head the way Eva had showed her. She felt the body, so light in her arms, so warm against her sweater. She felt the breath against her chest.

  Finally Martha said, “I’m too old to care for a child. Should I go to the School and try to get Lynnie out?”

  Eva and Don looked at each other and then down at the table. “They’d never release her to you,” Don said. He looked back up. “You’re not related to her, you’re not an official. You don’t have any connection to her.”

  Martha said, “But I obviously can’t leave the baby in the care of anyone around here. Whatever will I do?”

  For endless minutes, no one spoke. Then Eva stood up and walked across the kitchen, her arms folded over her chest. Looking out the window, she said, “Do you remember what you used to teach us in arts and crafts? You’d say, ‘Follow your inclination. It will take you to thoughts you’d never known you’d had.’ ”

  Martha remembered saying that, year after year, to her classes. It was the opposite of planning. It was the path less traveled.

  “I never forgot that,” Eva said, turning around. “Not that it helped me with tests.” She smiled. “But when I was sitting in front of a pile of construction paper and glitter, it reassured me that I’d be able to do something beautiful with it.”

  Martha smiled, pressing her cheek to the baby’s soft stomach, inhaling the sweet scent. It was so like milk and honey. So beautiful.

  She looked up. “I just wish I knew my first step.”

  Eva glanced at her husband and back at Martha. “We can help you with that,” she said.

  They set out at dusk. Don was driving the first car—Martha’s Buick. Martha and the baby were next, in the used Dodge that Don had purchased that afternoon. The car dealer had lost his signs in the storm, and along with the road closings, he’d thought he might not get business for days. So he was glad to strike a deal with Don, especially once he found out the car was for a young family fifty miles off. Taking up the rear of the caravan was Eva, in the Hansberrys’ Ford wagon, with teenage Oliver. He’d agreed to help out at Martha’s farm until she returned.

  “When will that be?” Oliver had asked, putting on a coat over his football jersey.

  “Soon,” Don said.

  “A while,” Eva said.

  “I have no idea,” Martha said.

  And then they all laughed.

  While Don was buying the used car, Eva copied down the listings in Martha’s address book. She also gave Martha a crash course in child care. Then she dashed off to the florist;
they’d decided they needed four flowers.

  The sun was down by the time their chain of cars had reached the borough limits; the moon was high by the time they reached Old Creamery Bridge, which had reopened late in the day. After they crossed the bridge, they turned into the campsite.

  The river still overran its banks. With Oliver holding a flashlight, they went out to the dock, where Don, putting to use his clerical training for the first time in years, led them in the Twenty-third Psalm, paying respects to a man whose body might never be found.

  Martha felt the baby’s heart again beside hers as they all said, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” She understood that for Eva and Don, these words mattered. Yet she could not help but wonder how there could be a God if people treated this man as they had, and Lynnie was forced to live in a place like the School—and this child could be doomed to a life of desolation.

  As the prayer settled over the night, Eva produced the four chrysanthemums, and Don, Oliver, Martha, and Eva each tossed one into the water.

  They embraced by the cars, then drove out of the camp in single file. Martha felt oddly different and knew it was the whisper of change again: She was not the person she’d thought herself to be only last night.

  She clicked on her turn signal, and at the intersection she turned north. The others continued straight ahead, palms lifted, waving good-bye and good luck.

  The Hand Speaker

  NUMBER FORTY-TWO

  1968

  Number Forty-two did not know that prayers were uttered on his behalf that November night, when Martha and the baby stood on the dock with the Hansberrys and sanctified his death with a psalm and flowers. But this was not because he couldn’t hear.

  It was because of the night before, when he’d embarked on a trail now followed by the chrysanthemums that had just been cast into the water and begun voyaging downstream, twirling like the ladies’ hats he and his big brother Blue had once watched from a pecan tree at a church revival. Ahead of the flowers, the dam waited to catch them in its spin, just like it had caught Number Forty-two, as Martha had surmised. But she couldn’t know that he’d once seen what dams could do, when Blue took him fishing and they saw a raccoon bobbing beneath one, unable to escape. Nor could she know that last night, as the water plunged him down the concrete wall of the dam and he was sucked into a spin, his blood went electric with panic—and purpose. With how fully Beautiful Girl had opened his heart and how perfect Little One had felt in his arms and how frantically he needed to return to them both. He went into a frenzy of kicks and elbows, but he was already spinning a second time, the coat leaving his body, the shirt buttons popping, the sleeves drawing away from him like a departing spirit. Chest screaming in a plea for breath, he looped a third time, thinking of all he’d survived to get so close to freedom, raging at the cruelty of going down like this. And then he seized hold of the raccoon memory: He and Blue had made a guess at what men would do in similar straits, and he followed the guess. He tucked his chin, drew his knees to his chest, hugged himself—and the water shot him forward like a man from a cannon. He flew along the bed of the river, arms at his sides, legs behind him, heart lifting, until he finally broke the surface—in the same spot where the three remaining flowers now rose from the depths.