March 20, 1951, Dordas Strathe laid out the eyes and eyelashes in rows on a white cloth on the table. This day, the Spring Equinox, is the day of half and half, thinks Dordas, longing for a glass of half milk, half cream. On this day, light equals dark. Like a cup of coffee used to be before she went cold turkey on tasty calories. Was a time she was the fattest woman at church, but she has lost weight equal to half her former self. Good for me. My personal equinox, she jokes. In private, she wonders which half she likes best—her present self, a size 10, or the cheerful chubby housewife she starved to death.
Using forceps, Dordas deftly sorts the glass eyes and cat-hair lashes by color—blue eyes for the tan ones, brown eyes for the black. Seven years into her marriage, the doctors told her she was too fat to bear children, and she feared her husband might divorce her. She changed her tight perm to a fashionable bob and spent the next three years shedding 140 pounds. Should he stray from their marriage now and dump her, she’d be left with little more than a baggy wardrobe, plus a boxy starter house she no longer likes. And her collection of china dolls—the lot of them, all dressed up with nowhere to go in the small town of Upton, North Carolina.
Dordas might like to swap out her grey eyes for baby-doll blue, but she doesn’t miss her big belly or serial chins. She welcomes her lighter step and freer elbow room, but she’s not sure her present path is more sanctified than her past trudge. Still childless, she has filled the space reclaimed from her former self with china dolls. They never gain weight but, without constant upkeep, they do lose details of beauty critical to their shelf worth. As distinct from self-worth or shelf-life.
What is her shelf worth in the sight of the Lord? Dordas prefers dolls with bold eyes that open and close. She willingly undertakes the painstaking maintenance of antique eyelashes with replacement hairs. Today, sitting in her sewing room off the kitchen, she uses a needle to sort the short hairs from the long. She prefers to work with a high-quality embroidery needle plated with a platinum-titanium alloy. Can’t be too careful. Like prayer, the Devil is in the details.
Thunk!
Something has hit the window glass. What?
Darn, if the glass don’t need washing. Winds and rain have mixed pine pollen and ash from lightning fires in the Piedmont. Dordas opens the window for the first time since Thanksgiving. Baggy arm skin hangs from her fat days, but, oh, my, is she ever proud of her reach. Running an index finger across the outside of the glass, she writes a big goofy Hi! From high-school habit, she circles the dots over the letter i and under the exclamation point.
Her old brick high school still stands, but downtown Upton is little more than a Main Street of marginally profitable family businesses. The town is losing its sons, the next generation of fathers and merchants, to the Gooks. Too many white boys, what’s left of them, have come home in flag-draped coffins. The former workforce, young blacks, are migrating north in droves. Dordas doesn’t care. Let the Yankees deal with urban unrest and the dole. Slimmed down, she can climb a stepladder and, thank you very much, suds her own grimy windows.
Through the open window, she sees the maples, trees her husband planted as saplings the first year they moved into the house. The new pinkish leaves vibrate with flocks of redwings returning from somewhere. Thousands of them. A few birds, dead tired, have dropped on the sidewalk. One of them must have hit the window. Like Moses, Dordas thinks, allowed to see the Promised Land, but not to dwell there. Plenty of space, but no shelf-life.
But who decides the keepers? Who keeps the lights on above the Righteous? She knows the Bible verse she’s supposed to reply, but she’s changed her ideas of the long and the short, the fat and the lean, the wise and the foolish. Heck, even virgins aren’t what they used to be. Not to mention their lamps. Everything has become so technical.
Flicking the last of the eyelash hairs, she returns the dolls to their case and opens all eyes. She would like a new and ample Promised Land where milk and honey aren’t fattening. Her husband Leonard, a prosperous dentist, paid off the mortgage years ago. No worries there. A big fish in a small pond, he has a steady practice as long as kids keep sneaking candy and falling down stairs. His is the profit of small replacement parts, she thinks, as she puts away her tweezers and probe in the slots of the small velvet-lined étui and closes the drawer.
During her fat years, she never missed the touted joys of motherhood—colic, diaper rash, teething. She had her own big body to tend to, but she knew, heck, the whole town knew her husband Leonard longed for a son, a boy to take duck hunting. In the sewing room, his rack of guns shares hobby space with her antique doll collection. The one side keeping tabs on the other, she thinks, with a wry smile.
The dolls, well-appointed with such pretty old-fashioned names as Ursula, Iona, and Omerea, offer a fair showing of womanhood from chubby baby and girl with sausage curls to cloaked governess with valise. Dordas knows the granny doll with wire glasses could use a new set of teeth. Maybe Leonard can make her dolly dentures, ha, ha. Of course, on this shelf, there are no plus-size housewife dolls. Who wants the care of a china fatso in curlers and a housedress?
At the start of her diet, Dordas wondered if her body fat had been her own to lose. Did her husband have an investment in her heft? He had married her fat, and they maintained a joint account for groceries, clothes, and other necessities. She places her hand over half her gown in a wedding photo. Which half was the wife to love and cherish, which half the fatted calf to offer to the Lord?
Stay in the present, she reminds herself. Maintain appearances. Tend to upkeep—china heads with better wigs of real hair, mended collars of fine lace and silk thread. She’s taught herself to stitch small red dancing slippers and cordovan button-hook boots with strap-on blades for ice skating. The little darlings don’t need real ice. She can pretend the glass shelf is a frozen pond with a swept rink. Dordas closes her eyes. As a kid, she was too fat to skate. But how divine that swing and sway on a partner’s sure arm.
Alas, her pretty girls have no takers for the ice. Problem is the shortage of male dolls, another war casualty. A middling to good quality German-made boy in a spiffy blue and white sailor suit is a rare find. A soldier in dress uniform or a beau in tweeds is beyond her budget. Dordas suspects some girl dolls have been redressed as boys to satisfy an overpriced American market. Catch as catch can. So much for supply and demand. Anyway, who checks out the underpants? A china-doll cop, ha, ha.
How surprised Dordas is when her husband removes his raincoat and galoshes in the pantry and announces they can parent a baby boy. He shows her the adoption papers. His distant niece, an unmarried beatnik, is pregnant, almost due. Hoping to start a new life on the West Coast, she’s looking to give up the baby—white, she assured him, not mixed race. She’s willing to travel to Mississippi to give birth.
Dordas wants to put her foot down and say no. Instead, she serves supper.
As they finalize the adoption, she reluctantly makes room for the baby. The granny doll also needs a knee replacement, but Dordas tucks away this repair job with other details of dolly life—the odd glass eye, braid extensions, tiny insole. She will later recall the road to Hell she and her husband paved with good intentions. They really tried, despite the brimstone, fallen angels, broken wings, and living torment.
Leonard chooses to name the child Enoch for the venerable ancestor of Noah, and they have the infant boy baptized on delivery. Dordas has selected the middle name Bistle. No one, not even her husband, questions her choice. Everybody assumes Bistle is a name on her side of the family, but, no, Dordas likes the rhyme with bristle, thistle, pistol.
She will do her duty, but she cannot open her heart to this wet bundle of snot with fuzzy ginger hair. The name Bistle serves as a caveat. For protection, she needs the stiffness of bristle, prickly silence of thistle, and self-defense of pistol, a pearl-handled derringer in the bed stand. Most of all, she longs to read romance novels in bed. But the baby bawls and spoils the ending. Even a sugar tit won’t pacify the brat.
The kid proves to be an ankle-biter, but Leonard dotes on him. As soon as the crybaby can crawl, the enthusiastic father turns the nursery into a toy showcase. Enoch doesn’t push or pull his toys as he learns to walk. He smashes them. He really kicks the rubber ball. He hurls expensive Tonka trucks into elaborate Erector Set stockades Leonard builds and rebuilds for him. In the bathtub, he holds the teddy bear underwater till it sinks.
Dordas cooks, washes, and cleans, but she won’t play paddy cake or any other game with the child. His evil gleam scares her. She’d like to roll over his eye, re-lash, or swap out for the blank backside of a doll’s china eye.
By the time Enoch is old enough for kindergarten, his Howdy Doody puppet has a filthy mouth. Dordas cringes at hard-on and boner, and, square as she is, she gets the gist of beef flaps, hippo’s yawn, beaver. The shameless boy waves his pizzle and pees a yellow arc in public—supermarket aisle, ice-cream truck, Sunday-school teeter-totter, you name it. Laughing, cunning, cruel, he stomps stray kittens and sets a neighbor’s puppy on fire. How to apologize to the children, how to explain?
Too terrified to take the boy duck hunting, Leonard unloads his 16-gauge shotguns and discards the ammunition. Dordas hides the kitchen knives after third-grader Enoch cuts off the fingers of one of her dolls and pokes out the eyes of another. Dordas can repair the wounded dolls but, for the time being, she bandages Ursula’s mutilated hands and pulls down blind Iona’s bonnet. She locks the sewing room window and pushes in the button of the door to lock it. Her joys are now inmates doing time with her husband’s empty firearms. Some Promised Land.
By sixth grade, Enoch is a truant. The boy mocks pastoral counsel and ignores Scout honor code. By seventh grade, the twelve-year-old is a repeat offender, picked up for shoplifting, trespass, peeping tom…the list is endless. Caught, he brown-noses the principal, who also teaches science. Enoch aces the State Fair with a project on bird nests and eggs. Like the brat is an expert on new beginnings and care.
Dordas has lost another thirty pounds. Now a skinny woman, she knows the boy is downing dicky birds with a home-made slingshot. His aim is deadly.
Thunk!
At thirty feet, he can fell the top scoop off a sucker’s ice cream cone. Fledglings are easy targets. Too easy. Like everything else.
Boys will be boys, she says to the meter man, as she sweeps sidewalk feathers and eggshells. She is spouting excuses, but she doesn’t know, doesn’t wish to learn, trendy Dr. Spock lingo for Problem Child.
Leonard, too, covers up. Lost sheep, he says reviewing disastrous situations, or coat of many colors or late-filled lamp—ible code for care, forgiveness, recovery.
Dordas is less certain. After fourteen-year-old Enoch comes home with wadded twenty-dollar bills, she suspects he’s hustling sex, scoring with older men cruising the outskirts of town. For the first time in her life, she begins to curse the light. Fuck the candles, she thinks, looking at a less than perfect birthday cake. The days of begeesus, Jiminy Cricket, and oh, fudge are over.
By junior high, Enoch is baiting Dordas. He stuffs nasty between books, under rugs, in drawers. Always something dirty, something stolen, something dead. Where the hell does he filch stinky pink panties, fingernail clippings, treadmill with maggot-ridden hamster? What dickhead parent or asshole classmate will own up to this crap?
Gossip rules small-town Upton, but Dordas knows most folks at P.T.A. and church functions assume she’s Enoch’s birth mother. Because she was immense for so long, these mothers of the many forgot she never was with child. Jesus fucking Christ, she can’t use adoption as a cop-out for Enoch’s vile behavior. Up to here with shit-face milk and honey of redemption, she’d rather be fat. And without child.
Bastard Enoch has turned her household—her hearth and her heart—into a goddam coping zone. Can’t blame bad parenting. Leonard has been a giving father, kind and generous to a fault. He’s tried to raise the boy right. But the shitty kid sinks back to the slime.
She would like to blame Enoch’s genes and dismiss him as a defective package. A college physiology textbook belonging to her husband illustrates genetic syndromes. No-nonsense frontal photographs of nude people, white and black, male and female. The text confirms what her crowd already knew: black males, prone to violence, carried too many Y male chromosomes.
In trying times, Dordas returns for sneak peeks. She has never seen a naked black man, and this youth, arms at his sides, stares out from the page without embarrassment. Hung like a donkey, he stands at ease—no threatening boner, no belligerent arms akimbo. She likes his stance. She imagines him in street clothes, waiting for the bus. Or, in a striped jumpsuit, holding the STOP/GO sign at a chain-gang road worksite.
Of course, she prefers him in the nude, with his smooth skin and, yes, gorgeous dark package, which she touches time and again. Just a little tap, like testing the tender center of a freshly baked cake. No harm done, she tells herself. Close the book gently as an oven door and slip it back on Leonard’s shelf.
The Lord works in mysterious ways. Enoch, with or without an extra Y chromosome, is a mean white cuss. Period.
When Enoch is five, Dordas refuses to pay for swimming lessons. She doesn’t want him to know how to swim, how to float. She also finds herself unable to submerge the brat and drown him in the bathtub.
She should have left the brat on a mountain for birdwatchers or hikers to find. That is, if the little sweetheart hadn’t set the forest on fire.
The Big Vanish is the fantasy that has kept her going. But what to tell her husband? That Enoch dissolved in the shower, flushed himself down the toilet, evaporated during a summer scorcher? She wishes Enoch would jump a train to Juno, Alaska, and fall off the ice. Every time she hears the locomotive whistle, she longs to lose the child to save a marriage.
To her surprise, Dordas realizes she is newly in love with Leonard. Not quite cloud nine, but filthy words have expanded her imagination with desire. She is better in the sack, and the failed father seems a better man. She watches him rake leaves, wash the car, hose down the walkway—chores he can’t pay the live-in monster to do. Enoch is beyond allowance.
One October evening, Leonard calls to say he’s been delayed, no need to wait on supper. Dordas keeps the casserole on warm, but neither father nor son show up. Later that evening, Leonard collapses at the kitchen table, covers his face with his hands, and sobs. Enoch and an older delinquent, he tells her, picked up a couple of teen-age girls with a car. After hamburgers and milkshakes, they beat up the girls and stole the vehicle, which the cops later found totaled. Leonard doesn’t mention the charges of attempted kidnap with sexual assault. He doesn’t have to.
Both he and Dordas are grateful Enoch is sentenced to a lockdown facility for violent minors in faraway Chillicothe, Ohio. The drive is more than fifteen hours—one hour for each ugly year of the youth’s life. Let him cool his nuts in prison, thinks Dordas. No way will she and Leonard make that long trip to the slammer. She breathes deep. The Big Vanish has arrived, but she feels sick with sorrow for the victims, two teen girls.
During the next months, husband and wife embrace a new normal. Dordas unlocks the sewing room door and rearranges the dolls. Leonard cleans and oils his guns, but the man has lost his stomach for the kill. He can’t bring himself to sit in the marsh behind the blind, aim at the ducks, and shoot the bag limit.
Instead, he spends his Saturdays at a dental clinic for the needy in a nearby township. There, he caps the teeth of the two molested girls. Their yearbook smiles look pretty enough, but the one girl has a permanent limp, all too evident as she hobbles across the stage to receive her diploma. Cheering P.T.A. members stand up and applaud. Dordas, too, claps, but she no longer feels like a parent. She feels like a cunt.
After the graduation ceremonies, she’s approached by the mother of the limping girl. The daughter is pregnant. Dordas doesn’t dicker. She contacts a dealer in Atlanta, Georgia, and sells her three best dolls. Dordas meets the girl’s mother in a strip mall at the edge of town and gives the woman $850 in cash for an abortion. Mother and daughter leave town. Dordas never hears from them again.
Dordas does not mention this transaction to her husband. Three china dolls have saved her, them, their marriage. And a crippled girl with too much hurt. Dordas now wishes she had sold the dolls years ago and paid for Enoch’s mother, the happy-go-lucky chick, to have an abortion. Dordas once viewed ending a pregnancy as a ruination of Creation. No more.
In the past, she had no skin in the game. Her Purex crowd discussed abortion as the last ditch for white females raped by black males. What a pile of bull. Like lily-white Christian boys didn’t force girls in backseat bingo.
Content in their routines, she and Leonard do not discuss Enoch. Songbirds again nest on their property. Kittens mew at the back door, and children scamper with their puppies down the sidewalk in front of the house. Maple trees drop leaves yellow as storybook stars. Snow melt clarifies local ponds. Ducks circle over open waters.
The first day of spring, Monday, March 20, 1967, notice of Enoch’s pending release from the Chillicothe facility arrives late in the day by certified mail. When the doorbell rings, Dordas is sizing doll irises on the white cloth on the table. The postman hands her a return registered receipt, but she can’t steady her hand to write her name above the signature line. Leonard, home early, signs for them both. As legal guardians, they have ninety days to reclaim Enoch.
That night, Dordas dreams of a pond of dark blood turgid with bloated bobby socks. No, she screams, sitting up in bed. No.
Gaunt and sleepless, Leonard agrees to rehome the bad seed with his biological mother.
Ridding themselves of custody proves difficult. Enoch’s mother, thriving on a strawberry collective in Oregon, refuses to cooperate. A Taoist, she tells Leonard over the phone, she’s had her tubes tied and turned over a new leaf. But, hey, maybe her older son Merwin might help.
Merwin? Enoch has an older brother, who knew?
The big reveal, Merwin Crawford proves to be a well-spoken graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. On a warm afternoon in May, Dordas and Leonard meet him, as arranged, at their home in Upton. In his mid-twenties, Merwin possesses the quiet intellect of a scholar and the calm of a snake handler.
Part of me, he tells them, is curious about a wild-child, the half-brother I have never seen.
Yes, yes to impulsive curiosity, thinks Dordas. She is delighted Merwin seems willing to take on Enoch as a project. Like a theme paper. Well, good luck with that shitty ball of wax.
Merwin, they learn, has accepted a temporary teaching post at a posh boys’ boarding school up north in New England. His contract starts in August. Good. The sooner the better, thinks Dordas.
Delighted, Leonard hands Merwin a one-way bus ticket to Chillicothe, Ohio, and $8000 in cash, no strings attached. There is, however, one condition: Merwin must never again contact him and Dordas. Never, not for any reason.
Merwin solemnly agrees, and the two men shake hands. Leonard shows him out the door. Redwings in the maple trees litter the path with whirligig seeds. The birds, too, are headed north. Dordas sighs with relief as Leonard closes the front door with a firm shove.
The following Saturday, a church lady flags down Dordas outside the beauty parlor. Sorry, so sorry. Enoch, she’s heard, recently died of meningitis at reform school.
Aghast, Dordas begins to wail. The woman hurries on. Dordas sheds tears of joy.
Hell’s bells, without a word to her, Leonard, she realizes, has started a rumor to banish Enoch from their lives. The best dentist in town, he always has a full waiting room. From the other end of a drill, he must have told the gabby church vestryman or an altar guild lady that Enoch had passed over. Bless him, Leonard trusts fellow parishioners to embellish the retelling.
And he trusted her, the good wife, to grieve in public.
Yes, she will wear black clothes and weep over the many variations on Enoch’s death—fatal food poisoning, deadly well accident, killer influenza. Morbid gossip is so creative, the stuff of horror movies.
In the supermarket, at the dry cleaner, outside the drug store, folks offer Dordas their condolences. Keeping up appearances, she sobs and laments the lost years. Tears are tough on the mascara, but who gives a crap? Her convulsions feel good, cathartic as a good b.m.
May he rest in peace, the good townspeople say, but no one suggests a memorial marker for Enoch. Why would they? The congregation needs no reassurance of his death, but she and Leonard need the lie. Mostly, they need, hey, deserve the distance, the bristle. Dordas tells folks he is being buried in her family plot in Cave Hill, Kentucky.
In the following weeks, husband and wife clear out Enoch’s bedroom. Leonard plasters walls gouged with foul words and obscene drawings. Dordas chooses a cheery robin’s egg blue to repaint the room. A nursery color, she thinks. But, other than the occasional sleepover cousin and guest preacher from church, the room remains empty.
Husband and wife treasure the vacant space. In private moments, each enjoys the play of the light on the refinished floor and the sight of treetops against castle-high clouds. They leave the door open. The hallway, the passageway of their marriage, once again is sunny, bright, blessed. They have regained their home.
Never again do they hear from Merwin, but ensuing events flummox Dordas Strathe. This is the glorious Summer of Love, and more than 100,000 flower children converge in California at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Dordas watches the rock bands, ponytails, and dope on television. Friggin’ End Time, she thinks. She turns the dolls to the wall with velvet collars pulled up over small china ears.
Like millions of Americans, Dordas stays glued to the set. She is fascinated and disgusted in turns. Chanting crowds of hippies and bedraggled rockers wear little more than hair and beads, hippo yawns and hard-ons. Was a time she’d wash out her own mouth with soap, but she knows what she’s seeing.
Worse is right around the corner after 45,000 U.S. troops depart to fight the Viet Cong. Didn’t the boys just come back from Korea? She clusters the dolls closer to the guns in the sewing room. She’s prepared for the Reckoning.
But Frisco happenings and Asian landmines do not end Earth. Dordas watches the grim evening news of racial unrest in Southern cities as close and as far away as Durham and Memphis. In conversations after church, Dordas dodges the topic. She doesn’t want to debate integration and Civil Rights. Mostly, she doesn’t want to care, to feel sorrow in her heart.
And, no, she tells the Atlanta doll dealer on the phone, she doesn’t wish to make a silent bid on a rare German-made Negress doll with bendable fingers. Or a numbered French bisque Geisha in silk kimono with bamboo parasol. Japan, China, big diff. She’s sticking to white girls with clean ways and names she can pronounce.
Dordas returns to her sewing room. Squirrels scamper. Their old nests fall from the trees. Ducks migrate in formations. The mild winter of 1967/68 yields to a numbing season of death, beginning with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. After a kooky bitch takes aim at the soup can artist Andy Warhol, Dordas adds tiny cloth blossoms to dolly bonnets. Too late for the Easter parade, but what the fuck. And then, a week before Flag Day, some foreign weirdo shoots Robert F. Kennedy. What was the rich boy thinking glad-handing the help in a hotel kitchen?
Guns, thinks Dardas, her china dolls live with guns, but they don’t show out. Assassins must be heedless of consequences. Like Enoch.
That June, on the long day of the summer solstice, the postman hands Dordas an envelope addressed to Mrs. Strathe, c/o General Delivery, Upton, N.C. Dordas notices a small water stain in the corner. Inside, she finds a folded newspaper clipping, a death notice of a drowning victim—Enoch Bistle Strathe, auto mechanic, born in Mississippi and pronounced dead the previous Sunday morning at Hayworth Hospital. The clipping is dated June 3, 1968, a Monday. Praise God.
On closer look, the envelope is postmarked Massachusetts. From Merwin, she first assumes, but he would have used her husband’s name and their street address. No, the sender is a stranger, a female with schooling, she thinks, judging by the graceful cursive script…a secretary closing the books with a small kindness, woman to woman.
Dry-eyed, Dordas sets the table for a light summer supper with Leonard. She slips the clipping into the envelope, which she places by his napkin, but why spoil the evening? On second thought, she tucks the envelope in her sewing drawer with the extra glass eyes. Let them keep watch.
The truth has caught up with the lie. Enoch Bistle Strathe is really dead.
Friday, May 31, 1968. Molly Little glances at herself in the mirror, then parts the curtains of the second-story window and looks down on the Old Campus of Lofton, a boys’ prep school in western Massachusetts. Wild ducks land in a bustle on the central pond. She loves the way they shake their tails. Like water isn’t wet. Feeling dizzy, she leans against the wall and touches her belly. Expecting her first child, she is not used to the extra pounds. She watches more ducks wing their way overhead. From where? she wonders. To where?
Wife of the Senior Class Tutor, Molly functions as de facto dorm mother in the senior residence hall. Freedom is soon at hand. Today, Memorial Day, marks the beginning of Graduation Weekend at Lofton, a festive affair of prizes and accolades. Her pampered charges are soon to be off and away, and she can’t wait to vacate this bastion of privilege.
Noisy red-winged blackbirds fill trees in new leaf against hard blue skies. Their crimson epaulettes flash like the bright badges on class blazers. The printed program lists Merwin Crawford as Teacher of the Year. Molly knows her husband Sil is disappointed. He’d hoped for the award, and she determines to make Commencement, their last official duty at the school, a pleasant occasion.
Molly and her husband first met Merwin last August at the new faculty picnic. A temp hire in language arts, he spoke with a Southern drawl so thick that his perfect French accent seemed impossible. She assumed soft-spoken Crawford was gay, and she took his so-called ward, a sullen ginger-haired youth called Sippy, to be his boyfriend.
Sil, too, was a temp hire. As part of his employment package, she and he lived in a furnished apartment in the senior dorm on campus. Crawford had to find bachelor digs in town, a small community that supplies the school with help—from dumpster drivers to the men who powder sacred white lines on the school athletic fields.
Through the grapevine, Molly learned Sippy had served time as a violent juvenile offender in an Ohio institution euphemistically referred to as reform school. There, he earned the nickname Sippy, as in Dixie Cup, Southern white trash. Molly never learned his real name, and, on this afternoon, she doesn’t care. Her pregnancy, unplanned, has not been easy. She feels like the morning sickness queen, bent over the toilet. For weeks, her hair has smelled of puke. Sil was supportive, but there is no way for a man to share the discomforts of pregnancy.
Molly mops her brow. The air seems too warm for western Massachusetts. Several teachers have loosened their ties in breach with protocol. Parents and chauffeurs have parked cars on the grass—a no-no any other time of year. Cocky students openly puff cigarettes—another no-no. But no one frowns. Slender mothers sigh and freshen their makeup. Dapper fathers eye the crowd and plan exits. These impatient parents, impeccably dressed, are peeved in the offing—the Rector’s Convocation scheduled in the school chapel at five o’clock. Will the day never end?
The silverbacks in this crowd are legacy, scions of families that control the Northeast, but, as troubadour Pete Seeger sings, the times, they are a-changin. Molly smiles. Civil Rights, Peaceniks, and Woman’s Lib threaten an Old Guard determined to keep their Alma Mater all-white, all-male, all-commissioned. They dismiss as passing fads Peaceniks, Acid Rock, and long hairs of last year’s Summer of Love.
Boys will be boys, they maintain, jutting their chins, raising toddy glasses in mutual understanding of the weaker sex.
Meaning me, thinks Molly.
From habit, she sees them step brightly over the white lines bounding the athletic fields. But, mottos aside, few remember their school Latin, let alone the plot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Their dining clubs do not admit Jews or other Old Testament tribes—bearded Armenians, mercantile Lebanese, snide Ethiopians. Forget Hindus and Hong Kong businessmen. Money isn’t everything, they joke, meaning New Money. They can laugh because they’re loaded.
Closing the curtain, Molly knows she’s sleeping too much to be a proper asset to her husband, but the past nine months have been exhausting. She feels like the canary that survived the coal mine—senior year at a prep school. Besides bathroom checks, laundry claims, and the occasional fire drill, her dorm duties have included Thursday night pizza feeds. As if the big rush is on to return to Study Hall, the boys fold over big slices of tomato pie like Caesar’s Gaul divided into parts, chug down sodas, and belch. They never say Thanks, Ms. Little, or offer to clean up. Oh, no, they take no responsibility for the mess.
As math tutor, Sil performs a critical sub-rosa task to circumvent the awkward consequences of failure. Again, these kids never say Thank you, Mr. Little, after they squeak by in Trig or Analytic Geometry with a generous B-. To the contrary, they resent the extra time spent on logarithms and conic sections. This Class of 1968 will walk away from cosine curves like wet towels on the locker-room floor. Many will enjoy the first two years of college as a drunken cruise of content they already know, thanks to tutors like Sil.
The grandfather clock chimes in the hallway. Molly, too, is counting the minutes. She and Sil have been minders to a thankless lot leaving adolescent snickers for a new world of protest, draft-dodging, and consumer rights. In her state, she feels awkward around these smug young men. Imminent motherhood doesn’t elevate her. No, she feels naked in their collective hormonal compass.
Soon she and Sil, to her relief, will depart the ivy walls of Lofton School and return to the outside world—the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She looks around the room at all his mathematical paraphernalia. He can finally finish his doctorate on HP Holomorphic Boundaries. Molly laughs when Sil explains Hardy Spaces as well-behaved subsets. Bring them on!
Today, she looks down a dormitory hall littered with hi-fis, typewriters, skis, lacrosse sticks, hockey skates, and, yes, butterfly net and insect cases of the singular boy, Tom Cotter. He was the only senior who offered to lug the discarded pizza boxes to the dumpster. But only after he received early admission to Harvard College.
Will her child join their ranks and become a spoiled brat? Hearing the news of Dr. King’s assassination in April, these smug schoolboys, young immortals, shrugged and blamed the Ku Klux Klan—Southern roughnecks lacking Lofton values of tomorrow’s leaders. Fools, these kids think they are the fast track. Talk about tomorrow, whose tomorrow? They have never been to school with Blacks or rednecks. They deem themselves above all that. Heck, this school admits no girl students. What stay?
Molly doesn’t pretend she won’t miss the school’s beautiful Old Campus, especially the beaver pond visited by so many birds. She daily marvels over the underwater lodge and dam. Out of sight, what a busy world of repair. Secure, the industrious beavers barely disturb the surface. The overflow simply spills across the sturdy log dam into rocky shallows below. Lovely, that sound of falling water.
The first bell tolls for Friday Convocation, and the Old Campus empties as students and parents head for the chapel. Molly’s feet are swelling, but the vertigo has passed. To please Sil, she’ll fasten her maternity skirt, tie up her hair, and make a showing.
Molly follows the gravel path by the beaver pond. The ducks have departed, and shirts and slacks litter the grassy edge. A group of seniors is playing water Frisbee in their briefs. Laughing, they toss the plastic discus in graceful arcs. Each swellhead an Adonis, Molly thinks, flaunting rules on this his final afternoon before Graduation.
A pale wiry youth races in and crashes with a belly flop. Splash! The contest changes from graceful throw and catch. The boys pull, punch, and shove each other underwater. Not to worry, thinks Molly, hurrying along. The students have passed a rigorous swim test in the school’s Olympic-size pool.
Suddenly, she does a double-take. The game-changer with dingy red hair is Sippy, Merwin Crawford’s ward. What’s he doing here? On campus. Rough-housing with students before Convocation. Ignoring Lofton’s strict town-and-gown boundaries. Has he come for the presentation of Merwin’s award?
The Frisbee soars, red circle against blue, whoops, over the beaver dam and into the dark shadows below. Sippy has spoiled the game with a foul toss downstream. Molly sees him crawl up the wet logs of the dam and stand on the top. To spot and retrieve the Frisbee, she thinks.
Jump! Jump! yell the boys in unison.
Arms raised, Sippy dives head-first into the rocky shallows, and the other boys bolt into action. Two flee the scene, four come to the rescue. They pull Sippy’s tee-shirt over his bleeding head, flag down a passing car, and load Sippy into the trunk. That fast, they wash their arms in the stream and pull on their pants.
Tossing the Frisbee back and forth, they saunter back to the dorm.
Molly pauses, stunned by their speed and confident teamwork. If the boys have noticed her, they pay her no heed. She hastens on. People have assembled in front of the chapel, and she mingles with faculty wives. The Frisbee boys have less than seven minutes to get presentable and march with their class for Convocation.
True to form, they join the line on time with wet hair slicked back and shirts tucked into dress slacks under school blazers. Only curly-haired Cotter hasn’t managed to find his socks. Forty minutes later, the Rector’s oratory is still buoyant as a hot-air balloon. The crowded chapel is stuffy. Molly feels the baby kick. Sil smiles and touches her hand. Sippy, out of sight, is out of mind.
The pomp ends Saturday at noon. Faculty and wives form a receiving line to shake hands with the matriculated Class of ‘68 and their beaming parents. Molly finds herself standing beside the Headmaster. How? He greets five of the boys Molly saw in the pond. She sees their wide grins. They can’t wait to drive home in sporty new cars, graduation gifts.
Shaking hands with the sixth boy, Tom Cotter, now in socks and bow tie, the Headmaster leans in with closed teeth. Molly hears him whisper Zippy tie in a backhanded compliment. Cotter doesn’t miss a beat, and he and his parents move right along.
The next day, Molly takes her morning walk across the Old Campus. A few leaves float across the glassy surface of the pond. A beaver dives. The ripples expand in circles. Grounds men, Molly sees, are out in full force. Paper cups stuffed with napkins, butts, and commencement programs litter the lawn. Workers push rollers over tire tread marks. Molly spies the red Frisbee. A worker kicks it with his toe and deftly catches it. He’s done that stunt before.
A few of the men nod and tip their caps to her in greeting. She knows their wives count on the graduation booty. As in years past, this summer, town children will wear odd crew socks, discarded sneakers, and almost new sweatshirts with the Lofton school colors. The boys will divide their bedrooms with dorm room throw rugs and crash with Marvel comic books on abandoned plaid bedspreads. Their sisters will stand mugs on shelves with other salvaged treasures—a black light, Latin flashcards, a dented celestial globe.
That Monday morning over coffee, Molly glances through the town paper—local prom photos, wedding news, maple syrup forecast for New England. She pauses over the back page. Enoch Bistle Strathe was pronounced dead at the county hospital after a drowning incident; survivors include Merwin Crawford…Sippy died, she realizes, that’s what the Headmaster said to Cotter. Not zippy tie. Meaning the Headmaster knew about the incident. How? From whom?
She tucks the notice in her copy of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a novel she’s never liked. So dated, those 19th-century variations on British class structure—hayseed and silk hat, providential ending. She keeps the book for its title and the illustrations by Helen Allingham, an artist whom academics criticized for being overly sentimental to sell her work. And Hardy’s. Ah, the weaker sex.
Molly mulls over recent events. As the Headmaster crossed the Old Campus for Convocation in the chapel, he’d seen her pass the pond. How could he miss a tall woman who looked like she’d swallowed a watermelon? The next day, he made sure to stand next to her on the receiving line. And why? She was the sole adult witness to Sippy’s accident. He feared she of the weaker sex might have a fit of the vapors and babble. He singled out Tom Cotter, as an example, to show her the Lofton way, the zippy way, to navigate a troublesome incident.
That afternoon, Molly is packing when Sil takes a phone call. Oh, yes, she hears him say with obvious delight.
The upshot? The Headmaster wants to extend Sil’s contract and won’t take no for an answer. He ups the salary for a proud father-to-be. Within five minutes, Sil relents. Molly unpacks their books and lines them up on the headboard shelf. She stands Hardy’s novel on her side of the bed to keep track of Sippy’s death notice.
On the late-night news, Molly hears that a woman named Valerie Solanas shot Pop artist Andy Warhol. Solanas, a writer, claims Warhol stole her ideas. So why shoot the celebrity? thinks Molly. Do the Lofton way. Join him in a mutual admiration society.
Tuesday, Molly doesn’t feel up to her morning walk. Anyway, it’s rainy. She closes the curtain so she won’t have to look at the beaver pond and think of the boys and Sippy. She’d like to sink into her bed and sleep for a week.
Wednesday, shortly after midnight, Presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy is shot dead shaking hands with a busboy in an L.A. hotel. Learning the news, Molly feels too upset to eat breakfast. From habit or maybe deep sadness, Sil invites Merwin over for a Thursday supper of pizza. The three of them talk about RFK.
The end of Camelot, Molly murmurs.
But why was Bobby pressing the flesh with the kitchen help? Merwin asks.
Off-script, Sil agrees. Should have left through the front lobby flanked by bodyguards.
Or, dressed like a woman, one of his groupies, Molly blurts to her own amazement.
Merwin looks up. Deftly changing the subject, he mentions he’s scheduled to leave on Saturday.
Where to? asks Sil, trying to hide his envy of Merwin’s commencement accolade and standing ovation.
Molly knows Sil is jealous of Merwin. She is, too. Merwin is leaving Lofton.
Sensing the moment he has created, Merwin pauses and turns to Molly. Boy or girl, he asks gently.
Girl, replies Sil, trying to regain control of the conversation.
Yes, says Molly, we have a list of names—Violetta, Ursula, Iona.
Lovely names from novels, says Merwin, perfect for a Lofton infant.
Molly, uncertain of this remark, offers her condolences for Sippy. She doesn’t mention the pond. She hasn’t discussed the accident with Sil, and she isn’t sure how much of the truth Merwin knows. Or wants to hear.
Death has finally claimed him, Merwin says. Sippy never learned to swim.
Molly’s eyes well with tears.
Molly, don’t mourn. The past is the past, says Merwin. The kid understood the rules. Messing with preppies, he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Like RFK, thinks Molly, but says nothing.
Sippy was my half-brother, Merwin explains. Our mother gave him up at birth to childless kin in Upton, North Carolina. The adoptive couple, a dentist and his doll collector wife, meant well, but Enoch was trouble from the get-go, a violent repeat offender.
Sil nods.
Our mother was a rebel, not a racist, but Sippy, Enoch, raised in Dixie, was a…
Bigot, suggests Sil.
Worse. Hatred turned his brain inside out. A puny kid, he tortured animals. Sent up for rape and battery, he’d brutalized a young girl, a white girl. Left her with a life-long limp.
Molly shivers.
When Enoch aged out of juvenile, Merwin continues, Mom begged me to step in and help. The dentist paid me to take Sippy off their hands. I haven’t notified him or his wife, don’t intend to. I honor our agreement.
Sil shifts in his chair as Molly asks about Enoch’s remains.
Merwin’s reply startles her. Cremated in a big hurry. The school took care of it, Tuesday. Despite the downpour, the Rector gathered the few faculty still around and scattered the ashes on the pond. Didn’t Sil tell you?
What else hasn’t her husband told her? Molly feigns a yawn and excuses herself. She feels trapped. Sil accepted the Headmaster’s offer because he couldn’t say no to the money. Soon enough, he’ll be coaching math, and she’ll be changing diapers, pushing the stroller, and stacking soggy pizza boxes by the dumpster. But good mommy will be damn sure she doesn’t get pregnant again. She also won’t tarry at the beaver pond and see things she’s not supposed to see.
As Molly undresses for bed in the next room, she hears the two men speak in lowered voices.
So, Southeast cover-up about reform school required Northeast cover-up at prep school, Sil says with algebraic logic.
Yes, Merwin answers, Enoch was vicious to the bone.
All the more congratulations to you for your teaching prize.
Molly hears footsteps in the kitchen area. She guesses Sil is reheating the pizza.
She hears Merwin ask, Hey, Sil, how’s the big jump to fatherhood?
Jump! Jump! The boys’ cries echo in Molly’s head. Were they baiting Sippy to jump from the dam? Or, telling him to jump feet first, not dive?
Given the rocks, a distinction of importance, but tired Molly has drifted from the beaver pond beyond the dam to Sippy’s body, snow-white against the rocky stream bottom. Crimson ribbons eddy from his ears—he’s bleeding out.
Molly stirs. Half-asleep she hears Merwin cajole her husband about professional chops. She sees a beaver with big chew building a grand safety lodge. Ha, ha, Big Chops is the unctuous Headmaster. Ha, ha, the Upton dentist walks away from perfidy, a free man. Ha, ha, his nervous wife, clacking doll dentures, looks back.
A paper cup bobs downstream. Mayflies edge the mud in iffy prisms. Hardy Spaces, thinks Molly, wet to the waist. Is my water breaking?
Awake, she sits up with a jolt. The other boys won’t rat. Team players, they won’t allow Sippy to spoil their Commencement Day. They see themselves as heroes, untroubled by a bothersome death. If she speaks out, the Headmaster will dismiss Sil under a dark cloud that will destroy his career. And their marriage.
Molly doesn’t want to raise her child alone as a single mom. Ha, ha, the joke’s on her. Sil’s new contract has extended her shelf-life as wife. Will her little family ever leave the ivy halls of Lofton? The dentist paid Merwin to keep quiet, just as the Headmaster is paying Sil for her silence. Merwin, happy with his prize, has gained freedom. Sil flatters himself that the Headmaster is setting him up for next year’s award. Will another boy have to die?
Molly knows what she must do. She reaches for the Thomas Hardy novel, removes Enoch’s death notice, and seals it in an envelope. She blots a wet drop on the corner. She’s leaking…from her eye, her mouth, her breast? No need to apologize. She’s about to have a baby.
Afterwards, she’ll mail the notice in care of the Upton post office. Even a temp mom deserves a death notice.