Mockingbird

marry a “fallen woman” of the kind that Gloria Swanson often was—but I had not thought a widow was spoken of as “fallen.” Still, all such masters were basically alien to my education. I had been taught “Quick sex is best.” I was only beginning to realize that the world might be full of people who had not received the education I had.

It was in the middle of the morning when we had that conversation, and I remember now that was the first time I felt a sexual attraction toward Annabel. She was sitting there quietly, her face melancholy, holding one of the big ceramic coffee mugs that she had let me watch her make in the pottery shed that sat on the other side of the rose garden. I had watched her then at the wheel with awe, amazed at the sureness of her movements as she shaped wet clay into a flawless cylinder, her hands and wrists wet with gray and clayey water, and her eyes focused in complete, intelligent attention on her work. My respect and admiration for her at that time had been great; but I had felt nothing physical.

But now, sitting alone at the big table with her, I realized that I was becoming aroused. I had changed. Mary Lou had changed me; and the films and the books and prison and afterward had changed me too. The last thing I wanted with Annabel was quick sex. I wanted to make love to her; but more importantly I wanted to touch her, and to comfort her from the sadness that seemed to . hold her spirit.

She had set her coffee cup down and was staring toward the windows. I reached my hand out and laid it gently on her forearm.

She jerked her arm away immediately, spilling the rest of her coffee. “No,” she said, not looking at me. “You mustn’t.”

She got a cloth from the sink and wiped up what she had spilled.

During the next several weeks Annabel remained pleasant, but distant. She taught me to make corn pudding from the frozen corn in the refrigerators, and cheesecake and dill pickles and ice cream and soup and chili. I would set the table for lunch and dinner, and prepare the soups and help with the cleaning up. Some of the Baleen men looked at me strangely for doing such work, but none of them spoke aloud of it and I did not really care what they thought. I enjoyed it well enough, although it grieved me to see how sad the repeated work made Annabel feel. I would praise her cooking occasionally, and that seemed to help a little.

Once, when we were alone, I asked her about her sadness. Even though there was nothing physical between us, I had come to feel an intimacy with her from the work we did together and from the feeling I sensed we both had that we would never be like the Baleen family.

“Have you always been unhappy?” I said, once, when we were putting a stack of coffee cakes into irradiation bags for storage. I was wrapping the cakes in the plastic bags and she was working the Sears machine that sealed them and shone the yellow preserving light on them.

At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. But then she said, “I was a very happy young girl. I used to sing often. And I loved to hear my mother tell me stories. There was a lot more of that within Swisher House than there is here.” She gestured with her arm, talcing in the big, empty kitchen.

“Would you like to go back?” I said.

“It wouldn’t be any good,” she said. “They’re all too old now.”

“You should let me teach you to read,” I said. We had talked about that before.

“No,” she said. “I’m too busy. And I don’t think I could make the effort.” She smiled shyly. “But I love to hear you read. It sounds like… another world.”

I finished wrapping the last of the coffee cakes, handed it to her, and poured myself a cup of coffee. I looked out toward the garden and the chicken house. “Is it your husband’s death that makes you sad?”

“No,” she said. “My husband was never… important to me. Not after I found that I wouldn’t have any children. I always wanted very much to have children. I would have been a good mother.”

I thought about that before I spoke. “If you quit using pills…” I had told her about the label on the Valium box.

“No,” she said. “It’s too late. I’m really… really worn out with it all. And I don’t think I could live around here without the pills.”

“Annabel,” I said, “you and I could leave here together. And if you didn’t take pills for a yellow you might be able to have a baby. My baby.”

She looked at me strangely, and I could not tell what she was thinking. She said nothing.

I took a step over toward her and then reached out and gently took her shoulders in my hands, feeling the bones beneath the cloth of her shirt. She did not pull away from me this time. “We’re different from these people. We could be together, and we might be able to have children.”

And then she looked me in the face and I could see that she was crying. “Paul,” she said, “I could not go with you unless Edgar Baleen gave me to you and married us in church.”

I looked at her, not knowing what to say and upset by her tears. “Church,” I knew, was the Sears store. It was used for weddings and funerals. In the old days children had been baptized there, in the same fountain that I had been baptized in.

Finally I thought of something to say. “I’m not a Baleen. And you aren’t either.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But I could never live in sin with a man. It would be… immoral.”

The way she said that last sentence had more feeling in it than I knew how to deal with. I knew about “living in sin”; I had learned about it from silent films. But I had had no idea that she would have possessed such a notion.

“It wouldn’t have to be ‘sin,’” I said. “We could have our own ceremony—over at the Mall at night, if you wanted it.”

“No, Paul,” she said, and then she wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron. My heart went out to her at the gesture. For that moment I was in love with her.

“What is it, Annabel?” I said.

“Paul,” she said, “I have heard of women who enjoy… making love.” She looked down toward the floor. “That may be right for them to… to fornicate. To commit adultery. But we women from the Plain are Christian.”

I did not know what to make of it. I knew the word “Christian”; it was used for people who believed that Jesus was a God. But Jesus, as far as I could understand what I had read about him in the Bible, had seemed very tolerant of sexual behavior. I remembered some people called “scribes” and “Pharisees” who had wanted to punish women who had committed adultery. But Jesus had disagreed with them.

I did not pursue that with her, though. Possibly it was something final about the way she pronounced the word “Christian.” Instead I said, “I don’t know that I understand.”

She looked at me, half pleadingly and half angrily. Then she said, “I don’t like sex, Paul. I hate it.”

I did not know what to say.

It remained at that between Annabel and me for the rest of that spring; we did not discuss it again. But we worked together and got to know each other’s ways very well and I came to feel closer to her than I have to anyone else in my life—closer even than to Mary Lou, with whom I had made love many times with a great and deep pleasure for both of us. She was such a good person. I can cry to remember how good she was—and how melancholy. And how competent at what she did. I can see her standing by her potter’s wheel, or at the stove, or feeding the chickens with her blue apron blowing in the wind, or just pushing a light-colored wisp of hair back off her forehead. And I can see her as she stood facing me that day with tears streaming down her cheeks, telling me that she could not live with me.

And it was she who got rid of Biff’s fleas, and she who always prepared breakfast for me when I came downstairs in the early mornings. It was she who told me that I should consider fixing up this old house to live in. She was the first to take me to see it, a mile from the Maugre obelisk and on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

It was a house she had known of when she was a girl, one that had been lived in by some recluse who had died years before. The children from the Cities had thought of it as “haunted.” She told me she had sneaked into it once on a dare, but had been too frightened to stay for more than a minute.

I think of Annabel as a little girl when I look around me now at my living room, as though she were standing there now as a frightened child. If the place is haunted, it is she who haunts it. A beautiful shy child, who loved to sing.

I loved Annabel. What I felt for her was different from what I felt—and, to some degree, still feel—about