Sarah was number one on Faith’s current list of calls. Sarah had had a bad case of pneumonia last winter but had returned to church in late March.
On Sunday, her usual spot had been empty—left side, right-front pew, the same seat she’d occupied since leaving Sunday school over sixty years ago. Her parents and siblings were long gone, leaving her the last Winslow in Aleford.
Tom had phoned immediately after church and she had said it was nothing to be concerned about; she’d been a bit tired. That was all. Yet Sarah didn’t get tired without a reason, and no matter what else came up, Faith told herself, she’d see Sarah tomorrow.
One of the pleasures of visiting the retired librarian was talking about books. Her house was bursting at the seams with volumes, many of them valuable first editions, lovingly collected over the years. There were books on shelves, books on chairs, books stacked neatly on the floor. Some who never married regarded their pets as children. Sarah felt that way about her books. The love of her life was reading.
“I’ll start with Sarah Winslow, then go down the list,” Faith said, standing up and stretching.
“Are you hungry? I could make you a sandwich.
I’ve got pastrami and some good dark rye. Or do you want to go to bed?”
Tom stood up and held his wife close. He could rest his chin on her smooth blond hair. He loved the way she smelled, Guerlain mixed with something reminiscent of freshly baked bread.
“Now, what do you think?” he whispered in her ear.
Before she let herself slip into sleep, Faith recalled the other reason she always liked seeing Sarah Winslow. Sarah didn’t make her feel like the outsider Faith, in fact, was. And it had been this way since Faith had first arrived in Aleford. While others had looked askance at the minister’s new wife with her fashionable haircut and a wardrobe that did not contain even one Fair Isle sweater with matching wool skirt, Sarah had been openly appreciative of Faith’s New York edge, poking gentle fun at the others. Even Tom, despite protestations to the contrary, maintained deep down the typical New Englander’s view that the Dutch had been taken to the cleaners. And why hadn’t they wanted to hold on to those beads anyway? You never know, they could have come in handy sometime—like short pieces of string and rumpled tissue paper, both neatly stored away in many a local dwelling. If the Dutch had kept their shiny objects, they just might have been able to trade them for a really great island—say, Nantucket. But they lost their chance.
Sarah reveled in Faith’s descriptions of growing up and living in the city. Unlike some of her fellow New Englanders, she was aware that Manhattan was inhabited by more than commuters and tourists. She’d read so many books set there that she was even more familiar with some parts of the city than Faith was. Sarah traveled far and wide from the confines of her small clapboard house. Travel. Faith was almost asleep. It was time for a visit home. Aleford was her home now, but New York would always be home, home. So dangerous, people said when she mentioned an upcoming trip. The truth was, she felt safer there than here. Something about New England. The Salem witch trials, closed shutters, Lizzie Borden, dark woods. Things seemed pretty innocuous on the surface of a place like Aleford, yet you were never sure what the stick you poked into this particular pond might dredge up. She drew close to Tom. She felt his warmth steal over her, and with a slight shudder at her last thoughts, she let them melt away into unconsciousness.
Over on Maple Street, Patsy Avery wasn’t even trying to sleep, despite the lateness of the hour.
After a futile attempt, she’d slipped out of bed, leaving her husband, Will, snoring slightly—a good-sized mound under the bedclothes—and gone down to the kitchen for something to eat.
Most of the time, she slept just fine in the new house; then there would be a run of exasperating nights when sleep eluded her. It was so damn quiet in the suburbs. She couldn’t get used to it—and “quiet” was one of the reasons why they’d moved from Boston.
Not that there wasn’t noise in Aleford. More birds than she thought could possibly find room for nests in one place currently greeted the dawn with a cacophony of screeches, some holdout usually continuing for hours. At dusk, and on into the darkness, insects she didn’t even want to think about made odd belching and sawing sounds.
Then there was the house itself. It creaked. It moaned. The radiator covers occasionally fell open, hitting the floor with sharp retorts like gun-fire, or—more likely here—backfire. The furnace itself hummed, the refrigerator was a candidate for
But in essence, it was as quiet as the grave. No sounds of traffic, no sirens, no music from car radios or other apartments, no people talking as they passed by under the apartment windows—talking and sometimes shouting, but signs of life.
Patsy had never heard a single voice from inside her new house. A dog barked every once in a while from a few yards away, but nothing that could be called human. She pulled the drapes shut at night, more as a ritual. No one could see in, and there wasn’t a streetlight poised directly outside, as there had been in the South End. There they’d had to get heavy shades and drapes to keep the orange glow from their bedroom.
She opened the refrigerator, which had re-verted to a single monotonous note, took out the milk, and poured herself a glass. She put a brownie on a plate, then added another. A new friend, Faith Fairchild, a caterer, had dropped a batch off. Brownies, Patsy thought, as she bit into the dense chocolate appreciatively. What are we brownies doing out here in white-bread land?
Out here in the stillness of the night, stuck in the heart of Boston’s secluded western suburbs—a heart that beat so slowly at times that it was in desperate need of CPR? She laughed softly at the image.
It had been Will’s idea. “We should invest in a house now in a good location, before we have kids. Get everything the way we want it. With our salaries, we can do it.”
“With yours, you mean,” she’d countered. Both of them were lawyers. They’d met at Harvard Law, southerners, from New Orleans, though their paths had never crossed in Louisiana. After graduation, Will had risen fast in his firm, and there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t keep on going up. Patsy was a public defender, specializing in juvenile cases. Will’s job allowed her to do what she had always wanted to do. Had always intended to do, since . . . She shook her head. Don’t you be thinking about all that now, child. Not at this hour. She finished the second brownie and put the plate in the sink. Holding the glass of milk, she went to the window and switched on the porch light. The trees in the large backyard sprang out of the darkness. Will was right: Aleford was a good place for kids. She could see them running around the yard here, a swing set by the back fence. She planned to put in a vegetable garden as soon as this Yankee soil warmed up. Maybe she’d have some decent tomatoes and peppers by the fall.
Yes, they’d come to Aleford for the schools, the peace and quiet. Security. She drank her milk.
When her mother—up on her first visit to the house—had walked through Aleford center, she’d told Patsy it looked like a movie set. “The one about those Stepford ladies. You’d better watch out, honey,” she’d teased. And Patsy had laughed, yet the thought had stayed with her. It wasn’t that people were unfriendly. No, that had been worse in Boston. She’d never forget the sweet-looking white-haired old lady on the MBTA who had angrily shouted at her, “Why don’t you people stay in the projects, where you belong?” It had been her first year at law school and she had seriously thought of transferring to Tulane. Will had pointed out that there were plenty of crackers who’d say the same thing if she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she well knew the geography of hatred and stupidity crossed all state lines. So she’d stayed and toughened—a bit. But you never got used to it —Red Sox games with Will—they both loved baseball—the only people of color for rows and rows. A drunken man’s angry slurred epithet as they left.
No one had shouted anything at them in Aleford, but she wasn’t fool enough to think all Aleford welcomed the Averys’ coming, an act that gave a mighty boost to the percentage of minorities in town. Subtle racism was usually more hurtful for its insidiousness than the kind that smacked you right in the face. What kind of a choice was this called? She was tired and her brain wasn’t working at its usual speed. Anyway, it was for sure between a rock and a hard place.
Hard places. She remembered that guy in Greek mythology who was punished by perpetual hunger and thirst. When he bent down to take a drink of water, it would recede. When he reached up for some fruit, it would be jerked just out of his grasp. Will and she had managed to grab some sustenance—look at this house, a dream house—yet there were so many others who would never have any kind of house, forget the dream part. . . . These were her night thoughts.
Her sleepless night thoughts.
She opened the back door and strained her ears. Not a sound. Not even the damn bugs. The whole town was
