A Cry In The Night

26

When Erich was leaving for San Francisco he decided to drive the Cadillac to the airport and leave it there. “Unless you particularly want to use it, darling?”

Was there an edge to the question? The last time he’d been away she’d used the car to meet Kevin. “I don’t want it,” she said quietly. “Elsa can pick up anything I need.”

“You have your vitamins.”

“Plenty of them.”

“If you don’t feel well, Clyde will drive you to the doctor.” They were at the door. “Girls,” Erich called, “come give Daddy a kiss.”

They ran to him. “Bring me a present,” Beth begged.

“Me too,” Tina chimed in.

“Oh, Erich, before you go, tell the girls that you don’t want them on the ponies until you get back.”

“Daddy!” There were two wails of protest.

“Oh, I don’t know. Joe came to apologize to me. Says he knows he’s been off-base. He’s even going to move back in with his mother. I think it’s all right to let him take the girls out. You just be sure to be with them every minute, Jen.”

“I’d rather not,” she said evenly.

“Any reason?” His eyebrows quirked.

She thought of what Mark had told her. But there was no way she could discuss that with Erich. “If you’re sure it’s safe.”

His arms were around her. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too.”

She walked with him to the car. Clyde had driven it out of the garage. Joe was polishing it with a soft cloth. Rooney was standing by it, ready to come in and sew with Jenny. Mark had come over to say good-bye.

“I’ll call you as soon as I get to the hotel,” Erich told Jenny. “That will be ten your time.”

That night she lay in bed waiting for the phone to ring. This house is too large, she thought. Anyone could come in the front door, the west door, the back door, come up the back staircase and I’d never hear him or her. The keys were hanging in the office. They were locked up at night but often during the day the office was empty. Suppose someone took a house key, made a copy and returned the first key to the office? No one would ever know.

Why am I worrying about that now? she wondered.

It was just that dream, that recurring dream of touching flesh, of her fingers grazing a cheek, an ear, hair. It was happening almost nightly now. And always the same. The heavy scent of pine, the feeling of a presence, the touching, and then a faint sighing sound. And always when she turned on the light the room was empty.

If only she could talk to someone about it. But who? Dr. Elmendorf would suggest she see a psychiatrist. She was sure of that. That’s all Granite Place would need, she thought. Now that Krueger woman is going to have her head examined.

It was not quite ten o’clock. The phone rang. Quickly she picked it up. “Hello.”

The line was dead. No, she could hear something. Not breathing but something.

“Hello.” She felt herself start to tremble.

“Jenny.” The voice was a whisper.

“Who is this?”

“Jenny, are you alone?”

“Who is this?”

“Have you got another boyfriend from New York with you yet, Jenny? Does he like to swim?”

“What are you talking about?”

Now the voice burst forth, a shriek, a scream, half-laugh, half-sob, unrecognizable. “Whore. Murderer. Get out of Caroline’s bed. Get out of it now.”

She slammed the phone down. Oh, God, help me. She held her hands against her cheek feeling a tic under her eye. Oh, God.

The phone rang. I won’t pick it up. I won’t.

Four times, five times, six times. It stopped. It began to ring again. Erich, she thought. It was after ten o’clock. She grabbed the receiver.

“Jenny,” Erich’s voice was concerned, “what’s the matter? I called a few minutes ago and the line was busy. Then no answer. Are you all right? Who was on the phone?”

“I don’t know. It was just a voice.” Her own voice was near hysteria.

“You sound upset. What did whoever called you say?”

“I… I couldn’t make out the words.” She couldn’t tell him.

“I see.” A long pause, then in a resigned tone, Erich said, “We won’t discuss it now.”

“What do you mean we won’t discuss it?” Shocked, Jenny heard the shriek in her own voice. She sounded exactly like the caller. “I want to discuss it. Listen, listen to what they said.” Sobbing, she told him. “Who would accuse me like that? Who could hate me so much?”

“Darling, calm yourself, please.”

“But, Erich, who?”

“Darling, think. It was Rooney, of course.”

“But why? Rooney likes me.”

“She may like you but she loved Caroline. She wants Caroline back and when she gets upset she sees you as an intruder. Darling, I warned you about her. Jenny, please don’t cry. It’s going to be all right. I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”

Sometime during the long, sleepless night the cramps began. First they were shooting pains in her abdomen. Then they settled into a steady off-on pattern. At eight she phoned Dr. Elmendorf. “You’d better come in,” he told her.

Clyde had left early for a cattle auction and had taken Rooney with him. She didn’t dare ask Joe to drive her. There were a half-dozen other men on the farm, the daily help who came in the morning and went to their own homes at night. She knew their names and faces but Erich had always cautioned her “not to get familiar.”

She didn’t want to ask one of them. She called Mark and explained. “By any chance…?”

His answer was prompt. “No problem. If you don’t mind waiting until after office hours for me to drive you back. Or better still my dad can do it. He just got up from Florida. He’ll stay most of the summer with me.”

Mark’s father, Luke Garrett. Jenny was anxious to meet him.

Mark came for her at nine-fifteen. The morning was warm and hazy. It would be a hot day. Jenny had gone to her closet for something to wear and realized that all the new clothes Erich bought her when they were married were for cool weather. She’d had to rummage to find a summer cotton from last year in New York. Putting it on she’d felt peculiarly herself again. The two-piece pink-checked dress was an Albert Capraro, one she’d bought at an end-of-the-season sale. The soft, wide skirt was only a little tight at the waist; the blouson top concealed her thinness.

Mark’s car was a four-year-old Chrysler station wagon. His bag was tossed in the back. A stack of books was scattered next to it on the seat. The car had an air of comfortable untidiness.

It was the first time she’d ever really been alone with Mark. I’ll bet even the animals know instinctively he’ll make things better when he’s around, she thought. She told him that.

He glanced over at her. “I’d like to think so. And I hope Elmendorf is having the same effect on you. He’s a good doctor, Jenny. You can trust him.”

“I do.”

They drove down the dirt road that led past the farm into Granite Place. Acre on acre of Krueger land, she thought. All those animals grazing on the fields. Krueger prize cattle. And I really had visualized a pleasant farmhouse and some cornfields. I never understood.

Mark said, “I don’t know whether you heard that Joe is moving back in with his mother.”

“Erich told me.”

“The best possible situation. Maude is a smart woman. Drink runs in that family. She’ll keep a tight rein on Joe.”

“I thought her brother started drinking because of the accident?”

“I wonder. I heard my father and John Krueger talk about it afterward. John always said that Josh Brothers had been drinking that day. Maybe the accident was his excuse for coming out in the open with his boozing.”

“Will Erich ever forgive me for all this gossip? It’s destroying our marriage.” She hadn’t expected to ask the question. She heard it come from her flat and lifeless. Did she dare tell Mark about the phone call, about Erich’s response to it?

“Jenny.” There was a long silence then Mark began to speak. She’d already noticed that his voice had a tendency to deepen when he was particularly intent on what he was saying. “Jenny, I can’t tell you what a different person Erich is since the first day he came back here after meeting you. He’s always been a loner. He’s always spent a lot of time in that cabin. Now of course we understand why. But even so… picture it. I doubt whether John Krueger ever so much as kissed Erich when he was a child. Caroline was the kind who’d scoop you up, hug you when you came in, run her fingers through your hair when she talked to you. People around here aren’t like that. We’re not outwardly expressive. Caroline was half-Italian, as you know. I remember my father teasing her about that Latin warmth in her. Can you imagine what it must have been like for Erich to know she was planning to leave him? No wonder he was so upset about your former husband. Just give him time. The gossip will die down. By next month people will have something else to chew on.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Not easy, but maybe not as bad as you think.”

He dropped her at the doctor’s office. “I’ll just sit out here and catch up on some reading. You shouldn’t be too long.”

The obstetrician did not mince words. “You’ve had false labor and I certainly don’t like it at this stage. You haven’t been exerting yourself?”

“No.”

“You’ve lost more weight.”

“I just can’t eat.”

“For the sake of the baby, you’ve got to try. Malted milks, ice cream, just get something down. And stay off your feet as much as possible. Are you worried about anything?”

Yes, Doctor, she wanted to say. I’m worried because I don’t know who calls me when my husband is away. Is Rooney sicker than I realize? How about Maude? She resents the Kruegers, particularly resents me. Who else knows so much about when Erich is away?

“Are you worried about anything, Mrs. Krueger?” he repeated.

“Not really.”

She told Mark what the doctor had said. His arm was slung around the back of the seat. He’s so big, she thought, so overpoweringly, comfortably male. She could not imagine him exploding in fury. He had been reading. Now he tossed the book in the backseat, and started the car. “Jenny,” he suggested, “don’t you have a friend or a cousin or someone who could come out and spend a couple of months with you? You seem so alone here. I think that might help to take your mind off things.”

Fran, Jenny thought. With absolute longing she wanted Fran to come and visit. She thought of the amusing evenings they had spent together while Fran expounded on her latest boyfriend. But Erich disliked Fran intensely. He’d told her to make sure that Fran didn’t visit. Jenny thought of some of her other friends. None of them could spend nearly four hundred dollars to fly out for a weekend visit. They had jobs and families. “No,” she said, “I don’t have anyone who can come.”

The Garrett farm was on the north end of Granite Place. “We’re small potatoes next to Erich,” Mark said. “We have a section, six hundred and forty acres. I have my clinic right on the property.”

The farmhouse was like the one she’d pictured Erich would have. Large and white, black-shuttered, with a wide front porch.

The parlor was lined with bookshelves. Mark’s father was reading in an easy chair there. He looked up when they came in. Jenny watched as a startled expression came over his face.

He was a big man too, with rangy shoulders. The thick hair was pure white but the part broke at the same place as his son’s. His reading glasses enhanced his blue-gray eyes, and his lashes were gray-white. Mark’s were dark. But Luke’s eyes had that same quizzical expression.

“You have to be Jenny Krueger.”

“Yes, I am.” Jenny liked him at once.

“No wonder Erich…” He stopped. “I’ve been anxious to meet you. I’d hoped to get the chance when I was here in late February.”

“You were here in February?” Jenny turned to Mark. “Why didn’t you bring your father over?”

Mark shrugged. “Erich pretty well sent out signals you two were doing an at-home honeymoon. Jenny, I’ve got ten minutes before the clinic opens. What would you like? Tea? Coffee?”

Mark disappeared into the kitchen and she was alone with Luke Garrett. She felt as though she were being looked over by the school counselor, as though any minute he’d ask, “And how do you like your courses? Are you comfortable with your teachers?”

She told him that.

He smiled. “Maybe I am analyzing. How is it going?”

“How much have you heard?”

“The accident? The inquest?”

“You’ve heard.” She raised her hands as though pushing away a weight that was closing in on her. “I can’t blame people for thinking the worst. My coat was in the car. A woman did call the Guthrie Theater from our telephone that afternoon.

“I keep thinking there’s a reasonable explanation and once I find it out, everything will be all right again.”

She hesitated, then decided against discussing Rooney with him. If Rooney had made that call last night in one of her spells, she’d probably have forgotten it by now. And Jenny did not want to repeat what the caller had said to her.

Mark came in followed by a short, stocky woman carrying a tray. The warm, enticing scent of coffee cake reminded Jenny of Nana’s one great baking success, a Bisquick coffee cake. A wave of nostalgia made her blink back tears.

“You’re not very happy here, are you, Jenny?” Luke asked.

“I expected to be. I could be,” she replied honestly.

“That’s exactly what Caroline said,” Luke commented softly. “Remember, Mark, when I was putting her bags in the car that last afternoon?”

A few minutes later Mark left for the clinic and Luke drove her home. He seemed quiet and distracted and after a few efforts at conversation, Jenny became quiet too.

Luke steered the station wagon through the main gate. They circled around to the west entrance. She saw Luke’s eyes rest on the porch swing. “The problem,” he said suddenly, “is that this place doesn’t change. If you took a picture of this house and compared it to one that was thirty years old, it would be the same. Nothing is added, nothing is renovated, nothing is moved. Maybe that’s why everyone here has that same feeling of her presence, as though the door might fling open and she’d come running out, always glad to see you, always urging you to stay for dinner. After Mark’s mother and I were divorced she had Mark here so much. Caroline was a second mother to him.”

“And to you?” Jenny asked. “What was she to you?”

Luke looked at her through eyes that were suddenly anguished. “Everything I ever wanted in a woman.” He cleared his throat abruptly as though fearing he had revealed too much of himself. As she got out of the car Jenny said, “When Erich comes back, promise you’ll come for dinner with Mark.”

“I’d enjoy that, Jenny. Sure you have everything?”

“Yes.” She started to walk toward the house.

“Jenny,” he called.

She turned. Luke’s face was filled with pain. “Forgive me. It’s just that you resemble Caroline so strongly. It’s rather frightening. Jenny, be careful. Be careful of accidents.”