the heavyset man last year… the thing Ralph hadn’t been able to remember earlier this evening. He, Ralph, had been holding Ed back, trying to keep him pinned against the bent hood of his car long enough for reason to reassert itself, and Dorrance had said “I wouldn’t) that Ralph ought to stop touching him.
“He said he couldn’t see my hands anymore,” Ralph muttered, swinging his feet out of bed. “That was it.”
He sat where he was for a little while, head down, hair frizzed up wildly in back, his fingers laced loosely together between his thighs.
At last he stepped into his slippers and shuffled into the living room.
It was time to start waiting for the sun to come up.
CHAPTER 4
Although cynics always sounded more plausible than the cockeyed optimists of the world, Ralph’s experience had been that they were wrong at least as much of the time, if not more, and he was delighted to find that McGovern was wrong about Helen Deepneau-in her case, a single verse of “The Beaten-Up, Broken-Hearted Blues” seemed to have been enough.
On Wednesday of the following week, just as Ralph was deciding he’d better track down the woman Helen had spoken with in the hospital (Tillbury, her name had been-Gretchen Tillbury) and try to make sure Helen was okay, he received a letter from her. The return address was simple-)just Helen and Nat, High Ridge-but it,A,as enough to relieve Ralph’s mind considerably. He sat down in his chair on the porch, tore the end off the envelope, and shook out two sheets of lined paper crammed with Helen’s back-slanted handwriting.
Dear Ralph [the letter began], I suppose by now you must be thinking I decided to be mad at you after all, but I really didn’t.
It’s just that we’re supposed to stay out of contact with everyone-by phone and letter-for the first few days. Rules of the house. I like this place very much, and so does Nat. Of course she does; there are at least six kids her age to crawl around with. As for me, I am finding more women who know what I’ve been through than I ever would have believed. I mean, you see the TV showsOprah Talks with Women Who Love Men Who Use Them for Punching Bags-but when it happens to you, you can’t help feeling that it’s happening in a way it’s never happened to anyone else, in a way that’s brand new to the world. The relief of knowing that’s not true is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time…
She talked about the chores to which she had been assignedworking in the garden, helping to repaint an equipment shed, washing the storm windows with vinegar and water-and about Nat’s adventures in learning to walk.
The rest of the letter was about what had happened and what she intended to do about it, and it was here that Ralph for the first time really sensed the emotional turmoil Helen must be feeling, her worries about the future, and, counterbalancing these things, a formidable determination to do what was right for Nat… and for herself, too. Helen seemed to be just discovering that she also had a right to the right thing. Ralph was happy she had found out, but sad when he thought of all the dark times she must have trudged through in order to reach that simple insight.
I’m going to divorce him [she wrote]. Part of my mind (it sounds like my mother when it talks) just about howls when I put it that bluntly, but I’m tired of fooling myself about My situation, There’s a lot of therapy out here, the kind of thing where people sit around in a circle and use up about four boxes of Kleenex an hour, but it all seems to come back to seeing things plain. in my case, the plain fact is that the man I married has been replaced by a dangerous paranoid. That he can sometimes be loving and sweet isn’t the point but a distraction.
I need to remember that the man who used to bring me hand-picked flowers now sometimes sits on the porch and talks to someone who isn’t there, a man he calls “the little bald doctor.” Isn’t that a beaut? I think I have an idea of how all this started, Ralph, and when I see you I’ll tell You, if you really want to hear.
I should be back at the house on Harris Avenue (for awhile, anyway) by mid-September, if only to look for a job… but no more about that now, the whole subject scares me to death! I had a note from Ed-just a paragraph, but a great relief just the same-saying that he was staying at one of the cottages at the Hawking Labs compound in Fresh Harbor, and that he would honor the noncontact clause in the bail agreement. He said he was sorry for everything, but I didn’t get any real sense of it, if he was. It’s not that I was expecting tear-stains on the letter or a package with his ear in it, but… I don’t know.
It was as if he wasn’t really apologizing at all, but Just getting on the record. Does that make sense? He also included a $750 check, which seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities. That’s good, but I think I’d have been happier to hear he was getting help with his mental problems.
That should be his sentence, you know: eighteen months at hard therapy. I said that in group and several people laughed as if they thought I was joking. I wasn’t.
Sometimes I get these scary pictures in my head when I try to think of the future. I see us standing in line at Manna for a free meal, or me walking into the Third Street homeless shelter with Nat in my arms, wrapped in a blanket.
When I think of that stuff I start to shake, and sometimes I cry.
I know it’s stupid; I’ve got a graduate degree in Library Science, for God’s sake, but I can’t help it. And do you know what I hold on to when those bad pictures come? What you said after you took me behind the counter in the Red Apple and sat me down. You told me that I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and I was going to get through this. I
know I have one friend, at least. One very true friend.
The letter was signed Love, Helen.
Ralph wiped tears from the corners of his eyes-he cried at the drop of a hat just lately, it seemed, it probably came from being so goddam tired-and read the P.S. she had crammed in at the bottom in: of the sheet and up the right-hand marg’ I’d love to have you come and visit, but men are off limits” out here for reasons I’m sure you will understand.
They even want us to be quiet about the exact location! H.
Ralph sat for a minute or two with Helen’s letter in his lap, looking out over Harris Avenue. It was the tag end of August now, still summer but the leaves of the poplars had begun to gleam silver when the wind stroked them and there was the first touch of coolness in the air. The sign in the window of the Red Apple said SCHOOL SUPPLIES OF ALL TYPES! CHECK HERE FIRST! And, out by the Newport town line, in some big old farmhouse where battered women went to try and start putting their lives back together, Helen Deepneau was washing storm windows, getting them ready for another long winter.
He slid the letter carefully back into its envelope, trying to remember how long Ed and Helen had been married. Six or seven years, he thought. Carolyn would have known for sure. Ho much courage does it take to fire UP your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? he asked himself. How much courage to go on and do that after you’ve spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, “I have to quit these peas-, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans,”
“A lo)t,” he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. “A damn let, that’s what I think.”
Suddenly he wanted very badly to see Helen, to repeat what she so well remembered hearing and what he could barely remember saying: You’ll be okay, you’ll get through this, you have a lot of friends in the neighborhood.
“Take it to the bank,” Ralph said. Hearing from Helen seemed to have taken a great weight off his shoulders. He got up, put her letter in his back pocket, and started up Harris Avenue toward the picnic area on the Extension. If he was lucky, he could find Faye Chapin or Don Veazie and play a little chess.
His relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph’s insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m. By the tenth of September rrested again, this time along with the day when Ed Deepneau was a fifteen others-Ralph’s average night’s sleep had shrunk to roughly ad begun to feel quite a little bit like something three hours and he had just a lonely little protozoa, that’s me, on a slide under a microscope. J g-back chair, staring out at Harris he thought as he sat in the win Avenue, and wished he could laugh. es continued to grow, His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies.
It had occurred to him more than once that he could write an and if, that was, he ever got enough amusing little book on the subjec g possible again.
This late summer sleep to make organized thinking matching socks each day, and his he was doing well to slide into mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup and Helen had been beaten.
There had in the kitchen cabinet on the d e had managed at least been no return to that level since, because hight, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive some sleep every n didn’t ’ there again-and perhaps places beyond there-if things improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at morning) when he swore he could actually feel his four-thirty in the brains draining. from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best The remedies ranged from full-color brochure advertising the wonexample of the former was a Studies in St. Paul. A fair ders of The Minnesota Institute for Sleep amulet sold example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose and Inside through supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer no el these ewSue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought o vi a presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the an. g up at him from the medallion (which badly painted blue eye starin rted life as a poker-chip) and felt wild he believed had probably sta how managed to suppress laughter bubbling up inside him.
He some regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment it until he had y grateful. The gravity with across the street, and for that he was ver c)oking gold which Sue had given it to him-and the expensive chain she had threaded through the eyelet on top-suggested it had cost her a fair amount of money. She had regarded Ralph with something close to awe since the day the two of them had rescued Helen.
This made Ralph uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to do about it. In the meantime, he supposed it didn’t hurt to wear the medallion so she could see the shape of it under his shirt. It didn’t help him sleep, though.
After taking his statement on Ralph’s part in the Deepneaus’ domestic problems, Detective John Leydecker had pushed back his desk chair, laced his fingers together behind his not inconsiderable breadth of neck, and said that McGovern had told him Ralph suffered from insomnia.
Ralph allowed that he did. Leydecker nodded, rolled his chair forward again, clasped his hands atop the litter of paperwork beneath which the surface of his desk was mostly buried, and looked at Ralph seriously.
“Honeycomb, he said. His tone of voice reminded Ralph of McGovern’s tone when he had suggested that whiskey was the answer, and his reply now was exactly the same.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My grandfather swore by it,” Leydecker said. “Little piece of honeycomb just before bedtime. Suck the honey out of the comb, chew the wax a little-like you would a wad of gum-then spit it out. Bees secrete some sort of natural sedative when they make honey. Put you right out.”
“No kidding,” Ralph said, simultaneously believing it was utter crap and believing every word. “Where would a person get honeycomb, do you think”
“Nutra-the health food store out at the mall. Try it. By next week this time, your troubles are going to be over.”
Ralph enjoyed the experiment-the comb honey was so sweetly powerful it seemed to surprise his whole being-but he still woke at 3:10 a.m. after the first dosage, at 3:08 after the second, and at 3:07 after the third. By then the small piece of honeycomb he’d purchased was gone, and he went out to Nutra right away for another one. Its value as a sedative might be nil, but it made a wonderful snack; he He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him someonly wished he had discovered it earlier. thing called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue-you put it is around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthrit’ as well as help you sleep (it did neither for Ralph, but he had only the mildest case of arthritis to begin
