Cold Rain

Chapter 10

When she was fifteen, Molly fell in love with Luke Sloan. Luke was seventeen. She was the daughter of a prominent surgeon, the belle of the debutantes. He was a cowboy, his best days already starting to fade.

Even eighteen years later, Molly didn’t like to talk about the romance. I expect she still cherished that part of the relationship, though she pretended otherwise.

I know this much. Luke Sloan was a handsome kid.

I had seen enough action photographs of him on a horse at the Sloan house to know that. From what I could put together, Luke was a lot like his father, a good decent man, the sort Tubs used to call salt of the earth. The difference was Luke had to make some tough choices when he was seventeen. I had never been given the whole story in one sitting, but I was under the impression that Doc and Olga had forbidden Molly to see Luke. These are the kinds of things families talk about in shorthand and never quite explicate for the benefit of the in-laws. Molly told me one time they knew she was seeing him and pretended not to notice.

Olga says otherwise.

According to Olga, Luke Sloan would have been invisible to a girl like Molly only a couple of years later. That meant of course he hadn’t enough money to satisfy the country club set, nor the kind of ambition that would overcome its prejudices. I had seen his type a hundred times over. Lucy raced against them every weekend. I found myself in grudging agreement with Olga McBride: some men are just too attached to the clay. At fifteen those things are romantic. Of course at fifteen we judge people by a different standard. We see cockiness and think it is confidence. We mistake silence for depth.

Whenever I notice the young Romeos and Juliets of modern-day suburbia cluttering the mall or close against the shadows at a high school game, the kids really in love and not just on a date, I wonder if it was like that for Molly and Luke. It’s hard for me to imagine Molly at fifteen. By the time I met her she was twenty-one. The six years between constituted a lifetime of experience, more for Molly than for most.

She was not a moon-eyed romantic at twenty-one, and I have trouble imagining her without her endearing streak of hard-nosed practicality. The pregnancy, according to Molly, was an accident. She was taking precautions but just forgot her pill one morning.

Sometimes forgetting is a decision, too.

Doc and Olga handled it badly, of course. They pre-empted Molly’s right to choose, telling her they knew what was best. I’ve seen Molly play the same game with Lucy, watched the fireworks afterwards. But never with those stakes. Molly saw her duty to her child, just as Olga did. Neither could understand the stubbornness of the other.

The Sloans went along with the McBrides’ decision.

They told Molly years later they understood from the McBrides Molly wanted an abortion. If they had known she wanted to keep the child they would have done anything to help.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s only what they believe now. For Molly and to a lesser extent for Luke, I expect, the parents appeared to stand together. Molly would see a doctor. Afterwards, they would go on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

Molly and Luke took off hitchhiking toward Chicago instead. They thought they could get an apartment and Luke could get a job. In the abstract it didn’t seem improbable. Luke was a big strapping kid, capable of giving a day’s work to anyone. They had a couple of hundred dollars and Doc’s. 22 Magnum for protection, the only thing Molly took when she left, other than the clothes on her back.

They lived together for a week in a cheap motel applying for different jobs, then they managed for a couple of nights without a room as they clung desperately to the last few dollars. Then the rain came. Luke stayed with Molly four days more. They huddled together at night under bridges and close to buildings off the beaten track unable to sleep. By day they walked the streets asking for work and panhandling bits of money. One afternoon Molly looked around to say something and Luke wasn’t there.

Molly knew where he had gone. He’d been trying to talk her back from the moment it was clear the money wasn’t going to last. It wasn’t the end of the world, he said. All they had to do was just go along with her folks. They could keep on seeing each other just like before. It didn’t matter what her parents said, they could be together and it wouldn’t be like this.

This, Luke said, wasn’t going to work.

And their baby? Molly asked. There would be other babies, he said.

Molly called her parents a few weeks after Lucy was born to tell them they had a granddaughter. When they asked if she was coming home Molly told them she was never coming home. Did she want them to tell Luke? She said she didn’t care.

The McBrides told the Sloans they were grandparents, if only to share their grief with someone. Luke’s parents told Molly later Luke was happy about it and only sorry he couldn’t find her and help out. He wanted that more than anything. That was what they said.

The truth was probably something else. A year after Lucy was born Luke drove into a tree. He was drunk.

He had been drunk since he had come back home. It went down as an accident, but everyone except the Sloans knew it wasn’t that. It was the shame of his betrayal finally catching up.

After Molly and I were married I persuaded her to contact Doc and Olga and the Sloans. For Lucy’s sake, I said. Molly already owned three houses and had a good deal of cash in the bank. We had been up to DeKalb a couple of times. If I could put up with Tubs, she could spend the occasional weekend visiting Doc and Olga. She knew from a friend she had called one time that Luke had died. She also knew the Sloans and her own parents had no one else. She wasn’t going to have to face Luke or even an I-told-you-so. She could go home knowing she had done the right thing.

Lucy was proof of that, and I think she was almost relieved when we finally made contact.

For a long time, Molly wouldn’t tell Lucy the whole story. She said simply that things had not worked out.

In a world of broken families this was something Lucy could understand. Lucy of course wanted to know everything about her father. Molly could satisfy her to a point, but as she got older she asked more penetrating questions. Shortly after Lucy’s twelfth birthday, Molly told her everything. She made no apologies for Lucy’s father. She said only that he was a kid, seventeen years old. They didn’t have any money. They didn’t have a place to stay. It was cold and it had been raining for four days in a row. ‘Luke went home,’ she said, ‘because he could. Anyone would have.’

But of course Molly hadn’t.

I think Molly had always wanted to believe I wouldn’t have either. That was important to her. Molly didn’t love by half-measures. She loved with all of her heart and expected the same. When things got really bad, she knew most men would just turn back and go home. But not the man she loved.

That was the deal in Molly’s world. No matter how safe things got for her, she still understood love in this way: in a you were either there or you weren’t.

Walt showed up at his apartment around eight that evening. I met him in the parking lot. He seemed surprised to see me, but helped me bring my gear in.

Once inside, he caught a good look at my face. The way his expression changed, the mix of perplexity and concern, was almost touching. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Didn’t you wonder why I didn’t come back last night?’

‘Last night? What was last night?’

Such are the joys of a good bottle of Scotch. I went through the whole thing again. When I had finished my narrative, executed with a gentle soft-shoe, I got it all a second time. ‘You and Molly breaking up?’

Around ten o’clock, I set my sleeping bag in Walt’s bedroom and went to sleep. As near as I could tell, he came ‘to bed’ around one o’clock and was still reading at four.

The next morning Walt suggested I go to the hospital.

I couldn’t look that bad and not have some kind internal damage, broken bones, ruptured spleen, some damn thing. I asked him where the spleen was and we went off on that for a while.

On Sunday I gave the hospital serious consideration. The bruise in my side was tender and hot. My face looked almost as bad as it felt. Walt’s home-remedy medicine helped, though, and by midnight I slept without pain.

I got to the university around eight-fifteen on Monday, quite a bit earlier than usual, and I was feeling very satisfied with myself until I found a note on my office door from Dean Lintz. My presence was required in his office immediately. The nastiness of phrase was no accident. As a tenured professor I decided I could ignore the note, claim I hadn’t seen it when he finally caught up with me, and that’s what I would have done, except that the lock to my office had been changed.

When I entered his office, Dean Lintz told me Leslie Blackwell in Affirmative Action had called him Friday afternoon. Apparently, I had not only attempted to discuss the investigation with one of the witnesses, I had actually assaulted him. That was not true, I said.

I’d been arrested for assault, but the judge dropped the charges. As far as talking, I hadn’t spoken so much as a single phrase to Buddy Elder Thursday evening.

Dean Lintz sighed and shook his head sadly. He liked me, he said, but he had no choice. He was going to have to suspend me.

‘What about my classes?’

‘I’ve already instructed your chair to find replacements. We’ll need your grade book and syllabi, David.

As soon as you’ve taken care of that, I want you off campus. I have no idea if the vice president will want to bring additional disciplinary action against you for this, but I do know it’s likely you’ll be looking at additional charges once Dr Blackwell has finished her investigation.’

I was confused. ‘What kind of charges?’

Dean Lintz grimaced. ‘Sexual misconduct. According to Leslie Blackwell you’ve been having sex with one of your freshmen students in your office. I mean really, David! Couldn’t you at least have taken her off campus?’

‘Is it against the rules to have sex in our offices?’

‘Smoking in your office is against the rules, David!

Of course it’s against the rules! You know that, as well as I do! Tenure can only protect you so far. This kind of behaviour… it’s an embarrassment for the whole university.’

The dean ended our meeting on a more conciliatory note. The suspension was with pay and benefits.

I still had options. I was free to appeal any action taken against me. I was entitled to a faculty adviser and of course free to hire an attorney if I thought I needed one. ‘The thing is Affirmative Action has let too much of this kind of crap get by for too long.

Leslie Blackwell was brought in to change that, and you just happened to be her first. She needs to let everyone know there’s a new sheriff in town, David.

I tried to warn you!’

I cleared out my desk under the supervision of the department secretary. She was close to tears the whole time. I left most of my books in my office, as I had for my sabbatical. I had every intention of returning.

On the last trip to my truck, I met Buddy Elder in the hallway. He made a show of making room for me.

I had a box in my arms. He understood what it meant.

Not a word from him, of course, just the same lazy smile and sleepy brown eyes.

I called Molly to tell her I had been suspended and was bringing some stuff from my office out to the farm. ‘Sorry to do it,’ I said to her answering machine, ‘but I can’t unload this in Walt’s apartment.’

I hesitated at the end of my message. I wanted to tell her that Buddy Elder had delivered a copy of the diary to Leslie Blackwell Friday morning, but I realized that would not seem especially diabolical to her. I was banging a stripper in my office. Maybe the university should know about it. After several seconds of dead space on the tape, I said, ‘I’d like to see you, Molly.’

I finished by saying I loved her.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys talking to a machine. Emotional pitches are especially difficult.

You make the speech in the belief that you’re talking to a person. After you hang up you are haunted by your own words. You imagine you have said too much or that you sounded as mechanical as the machine you have spoken to. I didn’t remember the drive out to the farm. I was too busy imagining what I should have said and worrying about the words I had actually delivered. I was rolling along an empty pavement doubting everything, looking at cornfields and patches of woods here and there, and suddenly I was home.

Except it was not home. Not anymore. The horses were in the pasture. The dogs circled my legs howling and growling, a few of them even wagging their tails.

Molly leaned out the window from the third floor.

But her tone left no doubt: I was not welcome. ‘Put everything in your office,’ she called. She retreated at once. I guess she could still see me looking up at the place where she had been, because after a moment she appeared again. ‘I’m sorry about the suspension, David. I really am.’ And that was it. A couple of minutes later I heard the familiar whine of her table saw.