Riggs Park Part 16

CHAPTER 16.

Beginnings Fifteen hours later I jerked awake, aching all over, a sharp point of pain throbbing in the center of my head.

"Hey, you're all right. Just a little banged up." Jon's voice. Then Jon himself, his shirt wrinkled, face stubbled beneath the white mop of his head. He laid a cool hand on my arm to calm me. My eyes slid across the shadow of his beard to a clock on a strange night table. Ten twenty-three.

"A.m. or p.m.?" My voice hoa.r.s.e, as if I had a cold. "Where are we?"

"A motel." Jon pulled back heavy curtains to reveal a bright sky outside. "A.m. You slept late because they gave you a sleeping pill before we left the hospital."

"Hospital?"

"The accident yesterday. Remember?"

Then I did. The Blazer first, the chain reaction. Cars skidding through the rain. Screeching brakes and clashing metal. In the end, dents and a few cuts, but amazingly, no one seriously hurt.

"Are you all right?" a policeman had asked.

"Yes. Fine." In the strobe effect of police cars and ambulances, I had stood dumbly, shivering with shock and disbelief.

"Is there someone we can call?"

Without thinking, I'd given him my number at home.

They'd made all of us go to the hospital. In the emergency room, I'd sat in the waiting area among the crowd, a bunch of b.u.mped, bruised motorists, dazed and mute in varying stages of shock. That had been where Jon had found me four hours later. He'd gotten off his plane from Kansas City, driven to our house at the beach, and opened the door just as the phone had begun to ring. Without changing clothes, he'd left immediately for Richmond, where he found me at the hospital and brought me to this motel. I didn't remember the pain pills, but I felt too hungover not to believe I'd swallowed one. Maybe two.

"They took your car to a shop," Jon said.

"Bad, huh?"

"The back driver's side is pretty bashed in. And the pa.s.senger side in front."

I nodded. Jon looked awful. "You didn't get any sleep," I said.

"I did." He pointed to the other side of my bed. Rumpled. "A couple of hours."

I reached up, about to run my hand across his sandpapery chin when I remembered my purpose in making this particular trip. I drew my hand back as if it had been burned.

"You'll feel better after you take a shower," Jon said. "Then get dressed and I'll drive us home. They won't know more about your car for a day or two."

"You got off the plane and weren't in the house five minutes before you had to leave," I realized.

"I didn't mind." He touched what I discovered later was a purple b.u.mp on my forehead. "You're lucky you weren't hurt more. We're both lucky."

Were we? My limbs creaky and slow, I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed. When Jon took my arm, I hadn't the strength to shake him off. "Not even sixty years old, and in need of a.s.sisted living," he joked.

I didn't smile. What I lacked, perhaps what I had always lacked, was a quality of mercy. I was annoyed that he was being so considerate, irritated at being beholden to him. I hated knowing I'd have to lean on him, at least until they fixed my car.

But by the time Jon had settled me in for the ride back to Wrightsville Beach, my bravado had vanished. I'd pushed around the food he insisted we have for brunch and swallowed the pain pills the emergency room doctor prescribed. "He knew you were going to be sore," Jon told me. But I wasn't sure whether it was my battered physical state or the medicine that made me feel so weak and confused and dependent. Lulled by the moving car and the warm sunlight coming in the window, I dozed and woke with a panicky start.

"It's okay," Jon said. "We just pa.s.sed Roanoke Rapids. Go back to sleep."

When I opened my eyes again, we were another sixty miles down the road, and I was still so far into the twilight zone that it took me long seconds to adjust to the pa.s.sing landscape. Then a more lucid moment came, when I registered a clear vision of Jon's profile as he concentrated on a nearly empty stretch of Interstate 40. He smiled wearily and reached over to pat my arm.

"Feeling better?"

"A little."

"Don't worry. Doctor Jon will take good care of you. Whisk you home and get you fixed up in no time."

Why did he have to be so kind? I closed my eyes to hide the tears that welled. Remember how you began once, and how it ended, Essie had said. Think if you want it to happen again. We had begun so many times. Which one was I supposed to remember? Then drugged oblivion claimed me again, dragged me back through the miles and years. Where had we begun, really? Which time?

It had been one o'clock on the afternoon of Penny's father's funeral-I could see the clock as clearly as if it were before my eyes-and Wish and I had been studying cat muscles in our zoology lab at the George Washington University in downtown D.C. Wish and I stood with our heads bent, pretending to be absorbed in our work, when uppermost in our minds was the fact that Sid Weinberg was about to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery and we'd better get going.

Our lab exam was the next day, and we were studying this extra hour because we'd skipped most of our cla.s.ses while divers were searching for Sid Weinberg's body. Penny's father was one of nineteen navy bandsmen killed when their plane collided with a Brazilian airliner over Rio de Janeiro harbor, an event that seemed almost too distant and exotic to grasp. The band had been on a South American tour, flying to Rio to play at President Eisenhower's reception for the Brazilian president.

My hands trembled and my stomach hurt. I hated the idea of going to the cemetery with just Wish. Ever since we'd started school at G.W. the previous fall, I'd had another boyfriend, Sandy. Wish and I carpooled to school with Marilyn and Bernie and Penny, and we took some of our cla.s.ses together, but we didn't see each other socially. Sandy would have driven me to the cemetery except that he had to work.

"We're going to have to get out of here," Wish said. "We'll be late." We'd skipped the service at Danzansky's funeral home, reasoning it would be a mob scene where we couldn't do Penny any good. We'd spent most of the last two weeks sitting in Penny's living room, where family and friends kept vigil, waiting for the bodies to be recovered.

"The ironic thing is, Sid didn't even want to go," Helen Weinberg sobbed day after day, dabbing at her nose with a flowered hankie. "None of them wanted to go." She had become too pathetic to hate.

Penny spent her days looking out the front window, her face as expressionless as if it had been shot full of novocaine. When the bodies were finally found, word came that the divers had recovered only parts. Helen sobbed so hysterically, and her three older daughters surrounded her with such tender ministrations, that you would have thought she was Mother of the Year. Penny kept looking out the window. "Parts," she said in a flat deadpan. "I wonder which parts."

In the zoology building, Dave Hochman came over, the lab instructor, short but handsome, with thick-lashed blue eyes. "You about finished?"

"Yeah, I'm afraid finished might be the word," I said, aware that Hochman had let us stay late so he could ogle me. He was going to the University of Virginia medical school in Charlottesville next year, which made him something of a catch. I pushed out my chest. My sweater was a bit tight, the only black sweater I owned.

"Come on," Wish urged. He shoved my book bag at me and more or less pushed me out the door. "You act like such a bubblehead around Hochman," he said.

"That doesn't stop you from using the extra lab time he lets me have."

"You know what? You're the smartest girl I know, and I doubt either Hochman or Sandy knows you have a brain in your head."

We came outside into cold sunshine-the pretty, deceptive cold of Washington in March. My dark skirt and sweater were too thin, my good coat was flimsy, and I had on high heels instead of my usual loafers, which let the wind wash over my feet. We walked west on G Street past G.W.'s parking lot, then down two blocks toward the river, to the construction site where Wish liked to park. I was shivering.

"I've never been to a burial at Arlington National Cemetery," I said. "We usually just take company there to see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

"Yeah, us, too." Wish had on his winter jacket and gloves. It had snowed the week before, and little patches of ice still clung to the gra.s.s by the river.

"Sandy can't make it to the cemetery at all," I said. "He's meeting us at Penny's house after."

"Yeah, well, thanks for telling me. That's a piece of information I especially needed to hear." Sandy was six years older than we were. A law student. An Episcopalian. I might never have met him if his father hadn't come to speak to my history cla.s.s. Cornell Williams was one of the congressmen often asked to lecture at the university because their children were students. Sandy had come to hear his father talk.

Afterward, I went up to ask a question, not so much because I cared about politics as because Sandy was standing by the window with a bar of sunlight illuminating his blond hair-the same color hair as my own. He looked so handsome that I was drawn forward. He looked completely different from Wish.

Sandy said, "Is it anything I can answer?" and moved me away from the clutch of students around his father.

I was attracted to his sheer difference. In the first months of my freshman year, I'd gone out with Wish only once, in the safe company of Bernie and Marilyn, and then decided I was tired of being cautious because of Wish's father's expectations. Who cared? I dated two boys from the undergraduate Jewish fraternities and went to a few movies with my old pal Barry Levin, who was attending American University. All of these boys were Jewish. Before Sandy, I had never been out with a boy who wasn't. His Christian faith was part of his attraction. I expected my parents to object. My mother didn't disappoint.

"We sc.r.a.ped and saved so you could go to college," she said in a tone of uncharacteristic bitterness. "We were so proud of you. And the first thing you do is fall in love with a goy."

"Who said I'm in love? I'm going out with him, that's all. It's no big deal."

"No, and next week we'll see the engagement ring."

"Oh, mother."

"Tikkun Olam, Barbara."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means an obligation. Repair the world. Fix the world. Improve the world. If you marry him, are you going to teach your children that? Oh, you might raise them Jewish, send them to shul-"

"When did we ever go to shul?"

"-but it won't take. Mark my words. What about your children's children? They won't know a thing about it."

It was a ludicrous battle. If Sandy became a congressman like his father, I argued, who was to say he wouldn't be engaging in Tikkun Olam himself?

"That's not the point!"

"Then what is the point, Mother? For heaven's sake!"

We shouted at each other for an hour, two non.o.bservant Jewish women acting as if I were about to elope any moment with a young man I hadn't much cared about until my mother made him a challenge. We argued until we were both too exhausted to continue, and though no one won, we hugged and felt purged.

After that, my parents acknowledged Sandy's existence with grudging silence. Wish said my parents tolerated the guy because they admired Congressman Williams's politics. Sandy was going to spend the summer helping his father campaign for reelection. I announced to my friends-but not my parents-that I thought Sandy would ask me to join him.

"A summer in New England. It would be great, don't you think?" I had been in the back seat of Bernie's car on the way to school, crunched between Marilyn and Penny.

"Great," agreed Marilyn, to whom this was news.

"I wish it was me," said Penny.

Wish turned around from the front pa.s.senger seat to face me. "You know the first thing I noticed about Sandy? I noticed that the minute he opens his mouth, people know he started boarding school when he was five."

"Jealous?" I'd said, smiling.

Now, walking down G Street after studying, I blew into my hands to warm them. They smelled of formaldehyde, sweet but pungent. In the open air my queasiness was gone. Wish moved closer. For a minute I thought he'd put his arm around me, make me stop shivering, but he didn't. For months he hadn't touched me.

At the cemetery, cars were already parked all along the roadway. A huge crowd had gathered at the burial site-families of all the men, friends, the other hundred-odd members of the navy band who hadn't been on the South American tour. Wish drove up one hill and down another before he found a parking s.p.a.ce.

The navy-band widows were seated in chairs by the caskets. So many caskets, draped with flags. Probably only part of Sid Weinberg was in there, and parts of the other men in the other caskets. I recalled our hours in Penny's living room, where every day we brought her a.s.signments and pretended she was going to do them, to take her mind off things. She rarely did homework even when there was no crisis. Mostly, ever since we'd started college, she spent her spare time with Steve, unless he was off somewhere with his band. But this last two weeks, an occasional boy that none of us knew showed up at Penny's house, and if Steve wasn't around, Penny would go off with the boy for an hour and then return alone. It was sad to watch, but hard to blame her. Sitting around on furniture that had been placed into a circle for the guests, the dining-room chairs as well as the upholstered pieces, it was as if we were already sitting shivah.

Our friends from the neighborhood tried to lighten the mood by telling stories about our years at Coolidge High. We had graduated less than a year before, but it seemed longer now that some of us were at different colleges, making different friends. One evening, we were all laughing over one story, but when we turned to Penny her face was completely blank, and in the background Helen was crying.

Penny looked up as if she hadn't heard a word and said, "I'll probably drop out of school. It's been almost two weeks already."

"You don't have to drop out," Marilyn told her. "We'll help you make everything up." In a way, we missed tutoring Steve now that we were out of high school. We would have looked forward to tutoring Penny. We wouldn't have minded.

"I'm not sure I want to make everything up," Penny told us.

A man began to walk along the line of widows, greeting each of them, the back of his dark head and black overcoat toward the crowd. When he reached Helen, she shook hands with him in a mechanical way. I recognized the jowls and the ridiculous slope of nose.

"Oh, no...not Nixon," I said. I leaned on Wish. He put his arm around me and held me against the cold.

"Eisenhower should have come to the funeral himself," I whispered. He'd gotten Sid Weinberg killed, but apparently didn't think navy bandsmen rated a presidential visit. Musicians weren't crucial to the running of the country; they were just background, just servants. I had always hated Sid Weinberg on Penny's behalf, because he'd wanted sons instead of daughters, but I didn't hate him then.

Nixon finished shaking hands, then moved away with his contingent of Secret Service men. He had a mean, mournful look on his face, like a parody of someone being serious, someone who really didn't care.

They folded the flags and handed them to the widows. The twenty-one-gun salute began. The crack of shots into the cold air made me jump. Wish let go of me. The guns were shooting and they were lowering caskets into the graves. Penny was clenching her teeth. Helen was crying and I was crying, too. I would never hate Helen again.

Afterward, I meant to ask my mother or Bernie for a ride back to Penny's house, but somehow I stayed with Wish. He'd also offered a ride to Paul Siegel, a boy I'd never liked. On the wet road going down the hill to Wish's car, my shoes were soaked through and I kept slipping. I could hardly feel my feet. Paul Siegel watched me with a menacing half smile on his face. I knew he'd love to see me go down on my can.

"Let me sit in the back," I said when we got to the car. "My feet are all frostbitten. I can't even feel them. I need a little room to stretch."

Paul slid into the front seat next to Wish.

I pulled off my shoes and started rubbing my feet.

"So where's the lawyer?" Paul asked, referring to Sandy.

"Sandy won't be a lawyer until he graduates in June." With Paul it was always the lawyer this, the lawyer that, like I was dating some octogenarian. Under my stockings, my feet were an unnatural white.

"He'll never practice law. He'll go right into politics." Paul made politics sound obscene. Even Essie Berman said, "People like Sandy have nothing to do with people like us. We work for the government and they come down here to be the government."

In the rearview mirror, Wish looked at me rubbing my feet. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I guess." A little sensation was coming back into my toes, the feeling of pins and needles.

"You should've worn boots," Wish said. "A heavier coat, too."

At Penny's house, Paul got out of the car, but didn't push his seat release to let me out of the back. As I leaned forward to do it myself, Wish said, "Here, get out my side," and offered his hand.

I started to put my foot onto the street. When it touched the ground, I couldn't feel a thing. I might have been trying to stand on a pile of marshmallows. My knee buckled and Wish caught me.

"I don't think I can stand up," I said.

"It's okay, probably just frostbite." He motioned me to sit down in the car again, and he got back behind the wheel.

"Hey, where're you going?" Paul yelled from the sidewalk.

"She forgot something," Wish said, and drove up the block to my house.

My heart was pounding fast. I had a picture in my mind of white hospitals, white ice, my white toes.