Dolores Claiborne

Helga, said she wanted a car, too. Vera—Mrs. Donovan—apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver’s license and she couldn’t get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn’t the case in Maine—that she could get one there at fourteen… which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?”

“It was true back then,” I says, “although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr. Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday… was it a Corvette?”

“Yes,” he says, “it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?”

“I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime,” I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera’s. “I’m tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight,” she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. “Tired of seein how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side.”

“I’m surprised she kept a picture of it around,” Greenbush said. “Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving.”

He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy—I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead… somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they’d been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better’n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob’ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.

He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.

Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she’d always known that the argument they had that summer didn’t have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver’s license; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people’s arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what’s on the bottom, I’ve noticed, and it could be that what they were really arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.

She and the hunky killed the man, Andy—she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there’s people inside of families who’ve got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance… n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I’ve tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena’s when she looked at me, n I just can’t do it. P’raps I will in time, but that ain’t nothing I’m really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.

I do know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver’s license—too damned young—and when you add in that hot car, why, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga‘s, too, as it turned out, when he wasn’t but a junior in high school n prob’ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think it was just that because I don’t like to think there was fear mixed in with it, that maybe a couple of rich kids like them could blackmail their mother for the things they wanted over the death of their father. I don’t really think it… but it’s possible, you know; it is possible. In a world where a man can spend months tryin to take his own daughter to bed, I believe anything is possible.

“They’re dead,” I said to Greenbush. “That’s what you’re telling me.”

“Yes,” he says.

“They’ve been dead, thirty years n more,” I says.

“Yes,” he says again.

“And everything she told me about em,” I says, “it was a lie.”

He cleared his throat again—that man’s one of the world’s greatest throat-clearers, if my talk with him today’s any example—and when he spoke up, he sounded damned near human. “What did she tell you about them, Miz Claiborne?” he ast.

And when I thought about it, Andy, I realized she’d told me a hell of a lot, startin in the summer of ’62, when she showed up lookin ten years older n twenty pounds lighter’n the year before. I remember her tellin me that Donald n Helga might be spendin August at the house n for me to check n make sure we had enough Quaker Rolled Oats, which was all they’d eat for breakfast. I remember her comin back up in October—that was the fall when Kennedy n Khrushchev were decidin whether or not they was gonna blow up the whole shootin match—and tellin me I’d be seein a lot more of her in the future. “I hope you’ll be seein the kids, too,” she’d said, but there was somethin in her voice, Andy… and in her eyes…

Mostly it was her eyes I thought of as I stood there with the phone in my hand. She told me all sorts of things with her mouth over the years, about where they went to school, what they were doin, who they were seein (Donald got married n had two kids, accordin to Vera; Helga got married n divorced), but I realized that ever since the summer of 1962, her eyes’d been tellin me just one thing, over n over again: they were dead. Ayuh… but maybe not completely dead. Not as long as there was one scrawny, plain-faced housekeeper on an island off the coast of Maine who still believed they were alive.

From there my mind jumped forward to the summer of 1963—the summer I killed Joe, the summer of the eclipse. She’d been fascinated by the eclipse, but not just because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Nossir. She was in love with it because she thought it was the thing that’d bring Donald n Helga back to Pinewood. She told me so again n again n again. And that thing in her eyes, the thing that knew they were dead, went away for awhile in the spring n early summer of that year.

You know what I think? I think that between March or April of 1963 and the middle of July, Vera Donovan was crazy; I think for those few months she really did believe they were alive. She wiped the sight of that Corvette comin outta the quarry where it’d fetched up from her memory; she believed em back to life by sheer force of will. Believed em back to life? Nope, that ain’t quite right. She eclipsed em back to life.

She went crazy n I believe she wanted to stay crazy—maybe so she could have em back, maybe to punish herself, maybe both at the same time—but in the end, there was too much bedrock sanity in her n she couldn’t do it. In the last week or ten days before the eclipse, it all started to break down. I remember that time, when us who worked for her was gettin ready for that Christless eclipse expedition n the party to follow, like it was yesterday. She’d been in a good mood all through June and early July, but around the time I sent my kids off, everythin just went to hell. That was when Vera started actin like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, yellin at people if they s’much as looked at her crosseyed, n firin house-help left n right. I think that was when her last try at wishin em back to life fell apart. She knew they were dead then and ever after, but she went ahead with the party she’d planned, just the same. Can you imagine the courage that took? The flat- out coarse-grained down-in-your-belly guts?

I remembered somethin she said, too—this was after I’d stood up to her about firin the Jolander girl. When Vera come up to me later, I thought sure she was gonna fire me. Instead she give me a bagful of eclipse-watchin stuff n made what was —to Vera Donovan, at least—an apology. She said that sometimes a woman had to be a high-ridin bitch. “Sometimes,” she told me, “being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

Ayuh, I thought. When there’s nothin else left, there’s that. There’s always that.

“Miz Claiborne?” a voice said in my ear, and that’s when I remembered he was still on the line; I’d gone away from him completely. “Miz Claiborne, are you still there?”

“Still here,” I sez. He’d ast me what she told me about em, n that was all it took to set me off thinkin about those sad old times… but I didn’t see how I could tell him all that, not some man from New York who didn’t know nothin about how we live up here on Little Tall. How she lived up on Little Tall. Puttin it another way, he knew an almighty lot about Upjohn and Mississippi Valley Light n Power, but not bugger-all about the wires in the corners.

Or the dust bunnies.

He starts off, “I asked what she told you—”

“She told me to keep their beds made up n plenty of Quaker Rolled Oats in the pantry,” I says. “She said she