A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [85]
At first Alice wrote us several times a week. She wondered about common things, things which surprised me. She wondered if the church ladies were bringing casseroles and cakes and nut breads. I assumed she was joking. We were not churchgoers and yet I knew if ours had been different circumstances the ladies would have come to our aid. They would have brought the kind of food my mother can turn out with factory precision for the needy.
I guess it was both on the telephone with Nellie and in my letters to Alice, that I began to learn the fine art of dissembling. I labored over the words as I wrote. Without telling her the truthful details that were frightening, I wanted to provoke Alice to fight for herself. Each day I woke freshly shocked at what had seemed, in the few minutes I had seen her, like the strangest acceptance on her part of a flagrant obstruction of justice. She was remote from her own tragedy. It hadn’t seemed to affect her much more than an oil spill off the coast of Guam would have. If only she’d beat her wings inside her iron cage, I thought, she might have a chance of getting away. Sometimes I wanted to have her in my hands, to shake her. I wanted her to understand that everyone had turned us out. It had been impossible to talk with the vet about the white muscle disease running through the sheep flock. He had put me on hold and never come back. Because I meant to be kind and because I wanted to arouse her indignation, I never said much of anything in my letters.
When my mother finally got through again on that first Sunday, I did not answer a single question honestly. “Howie,” she said, “I’ve had such trouble getting a hold of you. How are you? Are the girls all right?”
“We’re okay, Mom.”
“Did they clear up the problem?”
It was a fine question. My mother seemed to know not to ask about specifics. The “they” could stand for our collection of friends and enemies. “The problem” was so beautifully general either a yes or a no would suffice. Rafferty himself had said he’d found a simple way into the case. “It’s coming along,” I said. “I’m going to need some money for the lawyer’s fee. What I really need right now is bail money—to get Alice out. To pay her bond.”
“I don’t see why you should have to pay when it was a mistake. I’m very short on reserves right now, Howard.” She called me Howard whenever we talked about finances. “What do you need?”
I tried to come right out with it. One hundred thousand. “Ninety,” I said. “Ninety thousand.”
“How many thousands? Good land, did you say nineteen?” She sighed. I could hear that sigh across two continents and an ocean. She sighed again. It is remarkable that a sigh is substantive enough to get picked up by a receiver, beamed up as an electronic impulse to a satellite, and transmitted back down to earth. “Howard,” she said, “you know I’d do anything for you. I was perfectly happy to lend you money toward your farm. Not that that way of life doesn’t worry me. It’s not stable, doesn’t bring in enough to provide the things you ought to have. Your father and I worked hard all our lives and we saved a fair amount. I lent you a good portion of our nest egg. Maybe you don’t understand, honey, that—”
“I’ve got the girls in the tub, Mom. I need to check them, so I’ll sign off. We’re over the hump on this, so you don’t need to worry.”
It was eleven o’clock at night. The girls were asleep. If I stayed on the line my mother would continue on with the speech I knew from memory. She’d catalog the things she’d done for us. Alice had once made the harsh comment that Nellie was a testament to the fact that insipid people