anywhere this time of year. Especially when you’re not exactly sure where you’re going.”
She pawed the air, just the way I do. “Don’t I know it,” she said.
We found Eric in the boot department. We headed for his truck. I sat in the middle. We drove to her house on the bluffs east of downtown. It was a modest Cape Cod surrounded by unruly shrubs. She gave us the nickel tour and then sat us down at the kitchen table. Before leaving for work, she’d put on a crock pot of beef stew. She ladled out three big bowls, tore apart a loaf of rye bread, and put on a kettle of water for our tea. She gave Eric a fancy goblet for his fresh bottle of Mountain Dew.
I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to compare notes with her about Lawrence. But that’s exactly what we both started to do, before we could swallow our first spoonfuls of stew.
I told her how I’d met Lawrence at Hemphill College, in a freshman English class. How it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but a long friendship that eventually soured into romance. She loved that.
She told me how she’d met him, in Pittsburgh, in a community college cooking class for singles. How their mutual difficulty mincing garlic evolved into something more.
We discovered that we’d both been married to Lawrence the same number of years-six. We discovered that neither of us had taken the time to find another man.
For a long while we howled about the quirky little things we couldn’t stand about our mutual husband-his annoying habit of singing at the breakfast table, the way he clipped his toenails in the living room, how he’d leave his ashtrays on the floor in front of the toilet. It was finally Dory who got down to brass tacks: “He told me he’d been a skunk with you,” she said. “And the two wives after you.”
“You knew about all that and you married him anyway?”
She laughed at her stupidity. “Yes, I did. And he was a skunk with me, too. Until his angina got so bad he couldn’t climb our bedroom stairs let alone somebody else’s.”
I could see in her eyes that she’d loved him. And I suppose she saw that same weakness in mine. “He did have his good points,” I said.
“Yes, he did,” she agreed.
When neither of us could think of any, we turned to the reason I’d come. “Like I said on the phone, Dory, there’s been a murder at the college. A very popular professor. And there’s a chance-a very small chance-that his murder is related to another murder. Back in the fifties. When Lawrence and I were seniors. I thought there might be something helpful in his old college clippings.”
She pointed to a big blue Rubbermaid storage tub on the kitchen counter. “Help yourself.”
My stew was already getting cold but I went straight for the tub. I peeled off the lid and ran my fingers across the tops of the folders stuffed inside. The air around me was immediately thick with the beautiful stench of old newsprint. “This is so good of you. Eric and I can get them copied and back to you in a couple of hours, I’m sure.”
She pointed at me and then my bowl. “Finish your stew. You can take Lawrence’s folders with you. And keep them.”
“Keep them? You sure?”
Again she jabbed her finger at my bowl. I obediently tiptoed back to the table. “Those years belong to you,” she said. “I’ve got lots of other tubs that belong to me.”
We finished our stew. Eric put the Rubbermaid tub in the back of his truck. We drove Dory back to the shoe store. I went inside with her and bought two pairs of those darling six-dollar moccasins.
Then Eric made me go with him to Daffin’s, supposedly, as I said before, the world’s largest candy store. We ogled the chocolate animals on display-the 400-pound turtle, the quarter-ton rhinoceros-and then stocked up on leftover Easter candy. We headed for home.
Eric had one hand on the steering wheel and the other around the neck of a huge milk-chocolate rabbit. He’d already eaten one ear and was making quick work of the other. “She was nice, wasn’t she?” he said.
I was nibbling on a marshmallow peep. “Yes, she was.” I just love those marshmallow peeps, especially when they’re stale and chewy. This one, unfortunately, was still fresh. But I knew that wasn’t going to stop me from eating ten or twelve of the damn things before we got back to Hannawa.
Eric finished the other ear. “No offense, but she reminded me of you.”
I had to agree. “Spooky wasn’t it-almost like Lawrence came back to me after all those years of flopping around.”
The rabbit’s entire head now disappeared into his mouth. “Feel vindicated, do you?”
“Vindicated? It made me feel like shit.”
And it did make me feel like shit. Lawrence, I’m sure, had loved me well enough. But he threw it away for better sex. For twenty-five years he hopped from one anatomically advantaged woman to another, marrying some of them, not marrying most. Then in middle age-older and wiser, his body parts apparently starting to wear out-he married me again. Or at least he married a woman exactly like me. And then the bastard cheated on me all over again! By proxy!
Meanwhile, I’d holed myself up in that damn little convent of mine on Brambriar Court. Pitying myself for the way I was. Pitying Lawrence for the way he was. Romanticizing that nano second of a marriage we had until it was right up there with Romeo and Juliet. In all those years the only man I’d been intimate with was Dale Marabout. He was just an awkward horny kid at the time, twenty years my junior. As nice as it was-and it was nice-it was only a brief sexual vacation. Dale moved on to a woman his own age. I slinked back into my emotional exile, into my martyrdom, into my Morgue Mama-ness.
And now, thanks to the beast who put that bullet in Sweet Gordon’s head, I was being forced to fall in love with Lawrence Sprowls all over again. To dream about a future with him all over again. To have my soul shattered by his infidelities all over again. One thing was clear-I was going to get the sonofabitch who killed Gordon if it killed me.
I made Eric stop his truck, right in the middle of the road. I slid out and went to the back. I pulled out the plastic tub and lugged it back to the cab. I squeezed in next to it. I ordered Eric to “Drive!” I put an entire marshmallow chick in my mouth. I pulled out a folder full of Lawrence’s clippings and started to dig.
Every clipping I read dislodged a memory. Every memory stirred an emotion:
There was Lawrence’s story on Adlai Stevenson’s suffocating speech at the college in the fall of 1955. I remember Effie leading us in a hilarious fake prayer afterward at Mopey’s. “Good and merciful God,” she implored, “please do not let the Democrats nominate Adlai again in fifty-six. Eisenhower will surely humiliate him again, and we beats are already as beat as our beatness can bear.”
There was Lawrence’s story on the controversial decision by the college to put television sets in the dormitory lounges. I showed it to Eric. “Believe it or not,” I said, “I was one of the forty-seven snobs who signed the petition to have them removed.”
“You’d still sign it today, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“In a heartbeat,” I said.
There were oodles of sports stories-Lawrence absolutely hated writing sports-and oodles of stories on the useless projects undertaken by the college’s fraternities and sororities. There were also lots of those inane “man on the street” stories asking students what they thought of the latest world events. I found one where he’d actually quoted me. It was about the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott: “Negroes should be able to sit wherever they darn well please,” opines sophomore library science major Dolly Madison. I remembered how upset I was that he’d quoted me saying darn well instead of damn well. I remembered how I’d ranted on and on about censorship and the need for journalistic courage at such a crucial time in history. I remembered refusing to kiss him for a week.
There was a story on the debate team winning the state championship. DEBATERS TALK THEIR WAY TO THE TOP, the headline read. Above the story was a photograph showing Rollie and his three equally nerdy debating partners-Don Rodino, Herbert Giffels and Elgin “Bud” Wetzel-standing stiffly in front of the Ohio State capitol with their big first-place trophies. Lawrence had taken the photo, too. I recalled how angry Lawrence had been when the editor sent him to Columbus to cover the debate tournament. It was Easter vacation, after all, and the Baked Bean Society had planned a week’s worth of sleepless celebrating. I remembered seeing him off at the bus stop. He had his ugly plaid suitcase, his portable typewriter and The Harbinger ’s big clunky camera around his neck. I could still
