6
Jane sat on the couch and stared around her at the baseboards in the living room. There were nicks that her father had patched with the best synthetic wood mixtures they had sold at the time, then painted over, but she knew where they were twenty years later. The one by the kitchen door was from the new refrigerator he had bought as a surprise for her mother, which was still on the other side of the door running right now. Jane remembered seeing the man pushing the two-wheel hand truck it was strapped to miscalculate and nick the doorway. The man who was supposed to be guiding him saw it, spit on his finger, and rubbed the spot, trying to believe it was just a dirt mark but feeling the groove.
The imperfections in the surfaces were events. Her great-grandfather had built most of the house himself, and her grandfather and father had painted and varnished it, and her grandmother and her mother had rubbed every square inch of it clean a thousand times, so if she put her hand here, or here, she was touching their hands.
She said aloud, “I got married yesterday,” as a test, and it failed. The words didn’t sound convincing, because they didn’t have behind them the resonance of wonder. All of the people who would have come rushing in from the kitchen and the dining room, making noise and smiling—or maybe looking worried—were just memories now. Birth, marriage, death. That was all they put on tombstones, and that seemed to be about all anyone wanted to know unless you were pretty remarkable. Jane Whitefield had spent the past twelve years straining every nerve to keep from being remarkable, because attracting attention was dangerous. It seemed she had succeeded, and now she would have to succeed some more, because she had Carey.
Jane turned her attention to the pile of mail that Jake had left for her, setting the bills beside her and the advertisements on the floor for the wastebasket. She came to a stiff white envelope with no return address. Probably it was another wedding card. It would have the usual flowered bower with bells, and beneath it would be the archetypal stiff little people, one in white and the other in black. There was no way anybody could be expected to obtain one that was remotely evocative of a marriage between actual human beings. For some reason there was no market for such a thing. But this mail was old. It had come while she was in Las Vegas, and she had forgotten about it in the rush and excitement of getting married. This couldn’t be a wedding card.
She tore it open and saw that it was a plain white folded sheet. Printed in ballpoint pen was “You told me I would be thinking of you just about now. So here’s a present. Chris.” Inside was a cashier’s check with the purchaser listed as Christine McRea. The stub attached to it said “Repayment of Principal.” Jane glanced at the machine printing on the check: one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars.
Christine McRea had come a long way since the night when she had knocked on the door of this house. Her name had been Rebecca Solomon then, and she had made the mistake of assuming that when a judge said the names of people serving on a jury were confidential, that meant an enterprising reporter wouldn’t be able to find hers and print it later. When Jane had met her, she had already used all the money she had saved on her secretary’s salary just to get as far as Cleveland, and had hitched a ride the rest of the way with a pair of itinerant heavy-equipment operators who had begun to hint at things she could do to repay their kindness.
Jane tore up the note, slipped the check into the pile of bills, and got up off the couch, determined to accomplish something before Carey got here. She would need the address book in her office for the thank-you notes. A few of the people Carey had invited were reachable only through his secretary’s computer, but almost everybody else was in her old book. She had known him for so long that their friends were nearly all shared. Most of Jane’s relatives lived on the roads along Tonawanda Creek—Sandy Hill Road, Sky Road, a few on Judge Road. She could have sent all of those notes in care of the reservation, but the older ladies would not have approved. She set the floppy old leather book by the door and went upstairs.
She took a few favorite outfits and laid them carefully on the bed, then heard the front door open and close. “Carey?” she called. “I’m upstairs.”
Jake’s voice called, “Are you decent?”
Jane laughed. “No, Jake. But I’m married now, so I can be as indecent as I want.”
“I mean am I invited up?”
“If you can make it up the stairs.”
Jake came along the hallway toward her room. “It was a near thing, but I rested frequently and phoned my doctor for advice on the landing. Where is that quack, anyway?”
“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He’s helping me move a few things, so I thought we’d need both cars. Now that I look at it, I don’t think we will.”
“I wanted to tell you that I had a good time at the wedding.”
“That’s because your daughters came. Thanks for giving me away, though, Jake. There was never a man who looked as relieved to get rid of anybody as you did. Everybody make it to the airport on time?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Jake. “The kids will make it to their final exams and the husbands will be at work Monday morning to keep my girls wearing the latest fashions and a bit too broad in the beam to fit them. The reception reminded me of when your parents got married. All the food and everything, a lot of the same faces, too, but of course we’re all a bit the worse for wear.”
Jane selected some of her shoes and set them in a cardboard box. “Last night wasn’t really a reception. It was another wedding. In the old days you just asked the two clan mothers if it was okay, and then everybody had a feast.”
“I wish your parents could have seen it. God, I remember your mother in her white gown. She was probably the most beautiful woman I ever saw, close up. You’re a pleasant-looking female citizen from a thousand yards out on a cloudy evening. But she could knock a rooster off a full henhouse with a veil over her face. She could have been an actress.”
“She was an actress,” said Jane. “She made herself up.”
Jake was silent for a moment. Little Janie had gotten those arctic-blue eyes from her mother, but that penchant for saying the unexpected, like dumping a bushel of apples in your lap to show you what the bottom ones looked like, that came from Henry Whitefield without any dilution. He backed away from that part of it. “She was a wonderful woman.”
He had never figured out how much Jane could have known about her mother’s past. She had somehow found herself at the age of nineteen in New York City without visible means of support. No, that was exactly the wrong term. Spectacular, sure-fire means of support were still visible on her, well into her forties. Jake had never heard anything specific about how she had spent the years from one to nineteen, or even what part of the country she had started in. Maybe that was the deepest secret of all, and maybe his wife, Margaret, had heard all of that from her too, and found it too ordinary to repeat to her husband.
But she had spent the next few years downstate in the company of a succession of men who were accustomed to having their pictures taken twice—head-on and in profile. Maybe she had not made a choice. Women had a way of dancing with the man who asked, and a lot of the natural-selection business that determined who was first in line, or even who considered himself worthy, got settled among the men themselves.
Jane smiled. “She was a very smart woman. She had figured out that your life is pretty much what you decide it is. She picked the right person to be and spent the rest of her life being that person as hard as she could.”
It was true. Whatever had happened to Jane’s mother in the first years of her life, it had taught her something she never forgot. Whatever decisions she needed to make were all behind her before Jake had met her. Henry had a wife and Jane had a mother who could have come out of the television shows of the time—house neat and clean, something hot bubbling on the stove, and her looking fresh and crisp and reassuring.
Jake watched her daughter bustling around in the same house, and he unexpectedly had a vision of the future. It wasn’t a vision he could take credit for. It was more like a prophecy that he had merely overheard. She was busy inventing Mrs. Carey McKinnon, the way her mother had invented Mrs. Henry Whitefield. He guessed the perfect wife wouldn’t act the same these days as she had thirty years ago.
On that score alone, he expected that watching Jane over the next year or two would provide a supplement to his education. And Jane wasn’t the same woman as her mother. Henry had made sure she got raised in the old Seneca way, where you didn’t waste much breath telling kids what to do, so their self-reliance didn’t get stifled. God knew the Whitefields had gotten a whopping return on that investment.
And Janie had a different order of determination entirely. She had consciously chosen to do something with the first part of her life that was more than heroic, because if you saved somebody’s life once, that was bravery. When you did it a hundred times, that was pure stubbornness. If she had now chosen to be somebody else, the
