A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [74]
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
Emma shot me an anguished look, calculated, I suppose, to make me feel worse than I already did. I had talked myself into believing that Miss Bowman’s house was a safe and wholesome place for children. “Demented” appropriately described our neighbor. It would upset Alice, when she’d found that I’d given the girls over to the egg lady. I got in the car and left them. I drove past the covered bridge to Vermont Acres. By now everyone up in the subdivision would have discussed the trouble. I went past the single new home in the middle of what used to be Clarence Holland’s horse pasture. It’s a formidable Southern-type plantation house with pillars and shutters, a verandah, and no shade trees. I guess the homestead is supposed to be imposing out there by itself, all dressed up and no place to go. Alice imagined that the owners, the doctor and his wife, spoke in Southern accents, that the wife wore a corset and a hoop skirt, that their servants cooked grits over an open fire. Dr. Miller might have already examined some of the schoolchildren, to see if they’d been hurt. I turned on Highway P, the road to the city center. Past the old Sinclair Station that had been the library since the Super America Station opened out by the racetrack three years before. The librarian, Mr. Benchler, was a retired history teacher with a hook for a hand. Alice said she couldn’t help thinking he was wicked, like Captain Hook, not only because of his infirmity, but because he was cranky and unhelpful. I’d found out some interesting things from him about burial mounds in the area and never even noticed his hand.
On that windy Sunday afternoon, the dust from the wide street was blowing up at the library and next door, at Del’s. The diner was the backbone of the community. I used to think that when I reached middle age I’d go down to Del’s for my breakfast, or for coffee. In twenty years or so I’d become an honorary old guy. They served you coffee in large white pots that you got to keep at your table. It was pretty weak and usually not very hot. Alice liked the idea of sitting long enough to drink a whole pot. Del himself, a large man, literally took up three stools at the counter while he read his paper all morning. Every now and then we used to stop in for cherry pie. The girls had cocoa for their beverage. I waited for the day Lavelle would ask me if we were having the usual.
I went on past the fire station, the town hall, the Dog ’N Suds, the mini-storage units, and the branch bank that had recently been held up. Alice had been so relieved to find that every branch bank was vulnerable to raids, that a scheming thief had not pored over county maps to discover the single assailable town in southeastern Wisconsin. She used to say that when archeologists dug up our civilization they would find nothing but branch banks and master bathrooms and mini-storage units. I heard Alice at every turn through the cluttered countryside. She wasn’t going to survive in jail. She had been fragile, the last few weeks. I knew enough about what happened in prisons, knew enough not to dare to consider the possibilities. She might be lying on the floor as I drove, beaten or sick. Everything about that summer, even as it happened, was like a dream that is hardly remembered, a fragment a person is afraid to recall: the drought, Lizzy, Alice’s sickness, the policemen, Suzannah Brooks and her Scripture, Miss Bowman.
I passed under the interstate, into the new land of car dealerships, the outlet rug stores, the adobe Mexican restaurant, the Wisconsin Cheese Palace. I’d always had affection for Racine, a manufacturing town that got shoved out of the limelight in the 1800s by Chicago and Milwaukee. By the turn of the century it had come into its own because of a few solid entrepreneurs. One of my boyhood heroes was J. I. Case, the man who made threshing machines and farm implements. When I was in eighth grade in Minneapolis, I did a report on Racine with the