Unsheltered Read online

  She laughed. “You sound like poor Mr. Lincoln. Apart from the slavery question, what would divide a house against itself?”

  “A mistake of construction. I’m sorry, Rose, I’m afraid it’s very serious. They said it will eventually pull itself apart down the middle.”

  She took her hands quickly from his. “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “It was a terrible thing to learn, I promise you.”

  “But it can’t be true. My father had every faith in this house.” She walked quick steps away from him, pacing the length of the parlor and stopping by the cold hearth. With her back to Thatcher she began rearranging the tiny glass and porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece. This menagerie of china pets had survived being moved twice: once for the precipitous relocation to Boston when her father’s death left a widow and two young daughters without means. And now back here, under Thatcher’s keeping, to the very marble slab where the glass pups had spent their formative years.

  “I hate to upset you, dear. It isn’t a judgment against your father.”

  “Those horrible men! They gave me a headache tramping up and down the stairs.”

  “They wanted to be thorough. This is not what any of us expected. It isn’t the best news for the builders either, if you consider it. I’m impressed with the man’s honesty. He admitted we would be wasting our funds if we hired him to repair one crack at a time.”

  Rose said nothing, devoting herself to her small porcelain friends.

  “Darling. It’s only a house. Vineland has fine houses on every street, and many are for sale. Or we could build something new to suit us. If the Weekly can be believed, Captain Landis is still giving away building lots for the price of a bushel of strawberries.”

  She turned to face him with every feature sharpened. “Build with what money, Thatcher? If this one can’t be sold or salvaged, what do we have?”

  Finally the change in her weather was here. Rose’s calms were sweetly obdurate, but when they gave way to the storm, it was cruel.

  “I have a good situation. We’re young. We care for one another. We can find our way to a new home, I’m sure.” He hated the pleading tone in his voice. “For all of us, of course. Your mother and Polly as well. Is it so terrible to think of beginning again?”

  “How can you even ask? Poor Mother has been thrown from rack to rails in all this. Boston was beginning again! You don’t know how it was for her, losing Father and having to pick us all up and go there.”

  “I’m sure it was devastating.”

  “Yes! At a time when a woman should be settling in for the rest of life with the comfort of friends and grocers and … and dressmakers! Forced to grope her way around strange, filthy streets, with Polly hardly more than a baby, dragged into a stranger’s home. Look what your new beginnings did for her. Polly is wild and uncultured.”

  “Boston can hardly be called uncivilized, Rose. It’s true I didn’t see your troubles then. But your aunt was not a stranger. Taking in a sister and nieces in your circumstances was an ordinary kindness.”

  “We were an imposition. Uncle Fred never let Mother feel welcome entirely, he complained over everything. Even the expense of our mourning clothes.”

  Could Rose really have grown into womanhood feeling humiliated in her aunt’s household? It hadn’t been apparent when he met her, with admirers panting after her like hounds. He knew of the embarrassing debts, of course. Rose’s father had died suddenly and left them worse than destitute. It wasn’t a subject they opened. “You never mentioned it before,” he said.

  “You never threatened to reduce us to all that again!”

  He took a breath, disoriented. He was often overwhelmed by how right Rose seemed, even in a wholly foolish position, when so convinced of her own righteousness.

  “I can’t think what your father’s death has cost you all. Especially Polly, who had so little time with him. But those were separate troubles from this. This house.”

  “I will never think of this house and my father as separate. We were happy under his roof. And would be happy still, had we never been forced to leave it.”

  Thatcher met her bitter gaze and had to look away. Something precious he’d possessed when he entered this room was now lost. He turned to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and pretended to look out, though he saw nothing—or worse, a nothing magnified by a hundred prismatic edges on leaded panes. The glaze of daylight blinded him. How could a man tell the truth and be reviled for it? Old wounds of a father’s lickings made his ears roar with primordial dread. A wandering boy without shelter.

  Rose’s temper had stung him before, but the renunciation of Boston was new. He hadn’t been glad to leave that city and come here, even if the position was a good one, and fortuitous, given his engagement. Their return was a social triumph for Rose’s mother after having been cast out of the Garden. But for Thatcher, Boston was everything: emancipation from rural childhood drudgery, his apprenticeship and education, the world of ideas, his heartiest friendships. All his best days were lived in Boston. Happiest of all were those when he’d courted and married Rose, a woman who would not have given him a glance had her fortunes in Vineland remained intact. A woman now standing on the hearth she wished she had never left. She’d said this. Her contempt for Boston included him. She’d reduced him to a child, and the whole of it appalled him, her part in this and his own. As if he were still a beginner, begging for love and purpose.

  His eyes accommodated to the shapes outside, one by one: a passing carriage, the neighbors’ good brick house and dark yew hedges, their expansive lot occupying the corner of Sixth and Plum. The two saplings in his own yard that framed their view. Those trees had been planted by Rose’s father to honor his daughters, the beech for Rose, the oak for Polly. Not a rose and a hollyhock but trees that now reached for the sky, years after his death. No wonder they worshipped this sentimental man, exactly the type to be lured here by Landis’s elysian visions. The tale of two trees was a household favorite, and Thatcher always tolerated the words “planted by Father” without comment. He’d dug many holes in his early life, irrigation ditches, even graves; he knew how it was done and by whom. Rose’s father would have stood on the grass in a clean frock coat, his pink hand pointing, directing the labor of others—a platoon of Italian boys probably, like those he’d seen this morning trenching earthworks along the rail line. If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top. He had managed to rise a little and Rose to fall, arriving accidentally on a plane that accommodated their marriage. But the weight of their separate histories held the plane in uneasy balance.

  Beyond the trees and the carriage house he could now make out the slim, recumbent shape of Mrs. Treat, still prone, her chin resting on her hands. She seemed to be watching some minuscule state of affairs playing out in the grass, as fully absorbed in that as Rose was now with her damned china dogs. Thatcher wondered if Dr. Treat had fled to New York in baffled isolation, shut out from his wife’s fascinations.

  And as before, Thatcher’s loyalties slid straight away from Dr. Treat toward his enigmatic other half. Here was mystery of the highest order: Mrs. Treat peering into the grass. Thatcher wanted to know what was holding her at attention on a hot August day. This woman belonged to his flank of humanity, those who would pick up the scalpel and cut open the pig. Investigators.

  3

  Investigators

  The view from Willa’s window turned out to be a maddening distraction. The article she was trying to write on health insurance exchanges was interesting in principle, and if she could submit and invoice the thing this week she would feel less like a deadbeat in the garret. But her concentration was kaput, constricted to death between a screaming baby downstairs and the steady pounding overhead.

  She’d been away in Boston only two weeks. How was that long enough for a hostile takeover at home? Iano and his new frie
nd Pete Petrofaccio had cooked up a scheme of stopgap repairs to preserve what was left of their home’s integrity. Replacing the whole roof was pointless given the state of things, and wildly beyond their means, so they’d settled on a banged-together tin patch to close the widening rift.

  Banged-together plans were Iano’s forte. The surprise was the role he and Pete had devised for Willa: she would secure the funds to underwrite a full repair that involved jacking up the addition and pouring a new cement foundation. Pete claimed this was possible, a very big job, but he’d seen it work. The two men had hashed it out at their first meeting and Willa, in absentia, was their star player. Pete had told Iano about the government grants she’d brought to his attention, available for this kind of historic preservation. Iano had assured Pete his wife was an ace investigator and would get her hands on all such monies to be had.

  Willa explained to Iano that she had only asked about preservation grants, and accepted Pete’s guess that Vineland’s pockets were empty. But Iano’s faith in her ability to save the day was preternatural. Occasionally in the course of their marriage his confidence had infected Willa. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer he’d been so sure Willa could find the right doctors to work a cure, she’d started believing it too. She was still reeling from that brief romance with delusion. It wouldn’t happen again. She had no expectation of finding the right bureaucrats to save their structure. Once while walking Dixie she’d discovered the Vineland Historical Society but felt no desire to step inside and ask if her flawed house had a good backstory. Why torture herself?

  For lack of other options she’d accepted the stopgap tin patch, and that decision alone might drive her to the streets. A maddening rhythm made the hammers impossible to tune out: BANG bang BANG bang, pause. BANG bang BANG bang, pause. Did a roofing nail require four strikes exactly? Or were there two men, BIG BANGER and little banger, working side by side? Did each pause represent a new nail set in position? Were her ears staying alert for some eventual misstep, the rare and calamitous fifth bang?

  She got up from her desk and pawed through a cardboard box for her noise-canceling headphones. She found tissue-wrapped framed photos of the kids, coffee mugs jammed full of half-dead pens and emery boards, and no headphones. Of course. This box was labeled “desk stuff.” When she’d packed it, her desk was in a house in a tiny college town that probably had never in its history produced any noise worth canceling.

  Back at the window, she peered down through the branches into the neighboring yard. This time she didn’t even bother rolling over in her desk chair, pretending to take a break. She stood like a sentry. Today for the first time in many weeks, she’d declared to herself and the family that she was still a journalist, with deadlines pending. She was withdrawing from diaper duty to her office, for the whole afternoon. And her new job turned out to be this, keeping watch over the feet sticking out from under the cars in the neighbors’ yard. Two sets wore plastic shower shoes. It was the third pair that held interest: red Converse sneakers, adult size 5-ish or boy’s 12. She wasn’t going to believe this until she viewed the body. The idea of her daughter over there underneath a car was improbable for many reasons. When did Tig befriend those young men? What did she know how to do to the chassis of a Ford? And wasn’t she supposed to be at work?

  Actually Willa had little idea of Tig’s schedule or whereabouts most of the time, and had to surmise that was a normal relationship with a twenty-six-year-old. “Normal” fell outside Willa’s experience. She’d had a first child who resigned himself to adult worries around the time he entered kindergarten, and a second who seemed likely to carry the terrible twos into old age. With both now living under her roof, Willa needed some rules for life with the oxymoronic adult child.

  Tig’s latest defiance was her refusal to own a cell phone, one of several extreme habits she’d brought back from her stint in Cuba along with the dreads that still startled her family. Willa hadn’t envisioned dreadlocks as an option for white girls, although Tig’s kinked, unruly mane was deemed “bad” even by the swarthier Greek relatives. Willa could only guess that Cubans with their spicy history of racial mélange must have every ethnic variety of hair, and time on their hands for developing its potential.

  She watched as Tig and the two young mechanics finally wriggled out from under the vehicles bringing some commotion with them into the daylight. The guys brushed off their legs and Tig did an odd little stomping hand-waving dance, animating some story that made her audience double over laughing. The two tall, heavily inked young men in low-slung gym shorts were enchanted by the wild-haired, Spanish-fluent pixie next door, and Willa couldn’t call it a surprise. Tig’s life always brimmed with comrades and boyfriends, and her parents invariably guessed wrong about which would rise to first place. It could be anyone. Tig was a unique element with all valences open.

  Willa’s mother had always promised Tig would “settle out,” but she hadn’t survived to see it, and now Willa wondered who among them would live long enough to stop being flabbergasted by the girl. Her return from Cuba was a complete surprise: Willa opened the door and there stood Tig, after no update on her whereabouts for nearly a year, nor any indication she meant to come back at all. Iano suspected visa problems but Willa was pretty sure Tig’s status there was wholly illegal; her hunch was a breakup with the man Tig had been living with. Probably they would never know. She’d shown up in Virginia two days before the bomb fell, news of the college closure that arrived without warning and reached them, crushingly, the same day it reached distant friends via national news. What with all the calamity and humiliation, they never found the right moment to sit down and extract the Cuba story.

  Iano and Willa had been destroyed overnight, losing not just his tenured job and pension but also their home. Through a contract with the college they’d owned their house, not the land underneath it. The arrangement looked feudal in retrospect, but nearly all the tenured faculty had been in the same boat. These houses on college property were the town’s elite housing, taken by families with most seniority. When anyone moved away, an endless stream of young faculty families had always lined up to buy the vacant house. If rumors about the college’s solvency had circulated, they were muted by the 165-year history touted on linen-bond letterhead. A scenario in which the college was shuttered, jobs evaporated, and homes had zero market value was beyond imagining. They would sooner have believed in the Rapture.

  By April they were desperate. The job offer from Chancel materialized in May and the move to New Jersey became a foregone conclusion, with Nick in tow, and Dixie on antianxiety meds, but a tagalong daughter had been no part of the plan. Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she’d already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere.

  The latter was no news to Willa, who’d seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any of her friends, even the history majors. Through semesters of oceanography and forest ecology she’d grown increasingly distraught until, one and a half semesters shy of graduation, Tig had slung a backpack over her shoulder and set off to Occupy Wall Street. A sizable chunk of Ivins’s class of 2012 went with her, leaving behind dorm rooms Willa imagined looking like a collegiate Pompeii: the dirty clothes tangled on the floor, the ramen noodles still in the hot pot. When the makeshift shelters and demands for a new world order were eventually drummed out of Zuccotti Park, Tig drifted to an organizing project in Colorado where her years of college Spanish were useful in helping farm workers secure better living conditions. Willa thought the migrant labor force would thin out in winter, but no, there were Christmas tree farms. The family had seen little of Tig in recent years, even before she left for Cuba.

  Willa now found herself listening hard to make out threads of conversation, her forehead pressed agains
t the window, and shame sent her back to her computer. She sat listlessly, changing a word here, there, hitting Undo, then Redo, stuck in dawdle mode. She cocked an ear for the baby and didn’t hear him now. Aldus. They’d all been calling him “Buddy” and “Little Man,” finding his name untouchable, not just due to the Helene implications. Baby names typically wore in with a few weeks of use, but “Aldus” continued to call up the image of an old man in tweeds. Willa wasn’t about to overrule a dead mother, but she had been relieved yesterday to hear Zeke call him Dusty. That might be workable, even with its ashes-to-ashes connotation.

  She turned to the pile of bills burgeoning like fungus on her desk: the moving-in utility double jeopardy, the harrowing new family-size insurance policy. The pediatric visit they’d had to schedule before the new policy kicked in. Some of these bills could wait until Iano’s paycheck went into the bank, some could not. Property taxes were low here, especially on a house with a terminal diagnosis, but it was hard to call that good news. The roof repair wasn’t even in the mix yet, and she was pretty sure applying for coverage through their homeowners’ insurance would result in its cancellation. For the thousandth time in a year she made an unthinking movement toward her phone to call her mother. The dead one. Willa believed in no ethereal realm but still put her face on her desk, thought of her mother, and asked quietly, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Nothing presented.

  One underemployed breadwinner, five dependents. Iano was making what adjuncts made, barely $25,000, and given the state of academia, probably looking toward nothing better ahead. Willa recorded her freelance income in an Excel file, but was too embarrassed to hit the sigma function and learn her year-to-date total. In her college days she’d waitressed; theoretically she could follow Tig’s lead into one of the restaurants on Landis where she’d seen Help Wanted signs. But two minimum wages weren’t noticeably better than one. She’d probably written lines like that in her better-paid journalist days, believing herself savvy to working-class woes. In some sheltered life she could barely see from this one. Ticking down the list, her father-in-law was a liability, not an asset. Stunningly, her Harvard-educated son fell into the same category. It made no sense but there it was. Zeke had mind-blowing debts and an infant in his care. If forced to leave this rent-free house, they would disperse to various refuges she could not make herself think about. And yet. How were they not just a normal family?