The Patron Saint of Liars (43 page)

Now that he said it, I could see that it did make perfect sense for me to think he was a monster. That he'd been cruel to her, made her the way she was. It occurred to me that here was a person you could blame anything on and he'd accept it, just because you told him to. But I knew my mother. I knew how she stood and how she walked. She wasn't the person who was afraid. This man sitting at the kitchen table, saying he was her husband, seemed as frightened as anyone I'd met. "My mother wasn't a big one for explaining things," I said. I didn't want to pass it off right away. I'd need to think about this, about everything, before I figured it all out.

"Maybe I shouldn't have written," he said. "But that seemed wrong, after all this time. It took me a long time to drive. I have a problem," he said. "With my inner ear. I can't fly anymore. It was a long drive."

I just kept staring at him. I really couldn't help myself. He had been married to my mother. He had seen her as a young girl. He had held her. He knew my grandmother. He had been to the house where they lived. Time was going so slowly. Lorraine had been gone forever. Every sound in the kitchen became louder, the refrigerator kicking in and out, the slight, tapping noise of the wind blowing at the screen door. I kept wanting to ask him if he heard these things, or if it was just me. "Do you want some more coffee?" I said.

He looked carefully at the contents of his cup and then shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know this must be very hard for you."

But the person who it would be hard on was coming through the door with Lorraine. I could tell by my father's face that she had told him everything on the way over. He was sunburned and tan all at the same time. His overalls were soaked in sweat and there was green paint on his hands and shirt from the shutters. The scar on his forehead was frightening somehow, dangerous. He was twenty years older than Thomas Clinton and twice his size. My father looked afraid. He looked scared to death. It didn't strike me until that minute that it wasn't just that my mother used to be married to both of them, she was still married to both of them, and God knew where she was now.

"Wilson Abbott," my father said, and reached out his hand to the stranger who was standing now, coming toward him like a shadow.

"Thomas Clinton," he said, and took his hand.

6

W
E ALL STOOD THERE
, sizing each other up. This wasn't one of those moments in life you're ever really prepared for. My father was stone silent. Usually I knew what he was thinking, but on this one I didn't have a clue.

"I apologize for this—" Thomas Clinton stopped to search for his words—"intrusion," he said. "If I had known—" But he didn't finish his sentence.

"I understand," my father said, though I could not possibly imagine that he did.

"It was Helen's death," Thomas Clinton said.

"No, of course," my father said. "Anyone would have done the same thing."

After that we just lapsed into silence. Not even Lorraine could come up with something to say. It had taken Thomas Clinton more than a week to drive from California to Kentucky. When he got there he found out his wife had married someone else, had a grown daughter, and had left them, too. He was tired. As tired as a person could possibly be.

"Why don't you stay the night?" I said to him, as much just to talk as anything. There were things that needed to be got at, stories to compare and piece together. But it clearly wasn't in him to do it now. "You can stay in my mother's house. You'll have a lot of privacy."

My father looked just slightly uncomfortable, but I knew him. He'd take anybody in. Thomas Clinton put up his hands politely, as if it were a tea party and I was trying to press the last slice of cake on him. "No, no," he said. "I've taken up enough of your time as it is. I'll stay in a hotel, if you could recommend one to me. I would like to get some rest before I start heading back."

"This is a hotel," I said. I realized that I wasn't just being polite. I wanted him to stay. I didn't have any relatives, no cousins or uncles dropping in for holidays. Even though I knew that being my mother's first husband didn't exactly make him part of the family, it was the closest thing I'd seen. "Just stay the night," I said. "Get some rest now and then come back and have dinner with us."

My father nodded at Thomas Clinton. He wasn't smiling exactly, but everything about him was reassuring. He was telling this man it was all right. He should stay.

Thomas Clinton ran his hand over the back of his neck. "All right," he said.

"Good. I'll take you over there," I said. "Do you have bags in the car?"

"Let Lorraine go," my father said. "I need your help with the shutters for a minute."

"The shutters?"

"I need you to help me pick the paint out," he said.

Thomas Clinton shook my hand again, and then my father's. "We'll talk more later," he said to my father.

"Sure," my father said.

Then Thomas Clinton left with Lorraine so she could settle him into my mother's house. I was thinking how glad I was I'd taken her clothes out of the closet.

"What about paint?" I said to my father once we were alone.

"Come on outside," my father said.

We walked around back to the toolshed, where the shutters for the whole hotel were lined up on the grass like doors into the center of the earth. My father was always careful about not leaving them down too long in the same place and stacking them all upright in the evenings when he was finished. He was afraid of killing the grass.

"You okay?" he said. "With Mr. Clinton and all." He raised up the corner of a shutter with his foot and checked beneath it.

"It's a shock, I'll say that much." But not a bad shock for some reason. I was perversely excited about the whole thing. I thought that maybe, finally, I'd found someone who would tell me about my mother. "Did you know about him?" I said.

He shook his head. "We should have talked more, your mother and I. But this ... no, this surprised me. Maybe I didn't know her." My father paced down to the end of the row of shutters and then back up again. The shadow he threw down in the late afternoon sun was bigger than some of the trees. I guess it was a lot harder for him than it was for me. Maybe he and my mother were never legally married. Maybe you couldn't be, if you were married to someone else.

"He seems nice enough," I said tentatively. "Pretty depressed, but okay."

"Sure," my father said. He stopped then and looked at me. "Your mother and I," he said slowly. "We were married pretty much right away, right after she came here. Right after we met. And then we had you. It was all pretty quick."

"I didn't know that," I said, not getting his point exactly.

"All I'm saying is, maybe we shouldn't tell Mr. Clinton that. It might make it harder for him, to think she got married again right away."

"How could I have told him if I didn't even know?"

My father looked over his shutters. "Tell him you're fourteen, just if he asks."

"What?"

He turned to me. Everything about him was nervous. He put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed little circles on my collarbone with his thumbs, like I was a prizefighter going in for another round. "Don't you see?" he said. "If he knows how old you are, he'll know that your mother and I were married right away. I think that would be wrong."

There was only one reason he wouldn't want Thomas Clinton to know how old I was. She must have gotten pregnant before she and Dad got married. She must have had to get married. My head was spinning. It was possible, I guess, that she had left Thomas Clinton for my father. I tried to figure out how the distance between California and Kentucky came into all of this. Someone wasn't telling me the truth, not by a long shot. "You and Mom had to get married," I said. "Because of me. That's what you're saying."

My father looked at me with panic in his eyes. "No," he said. "Sissy, that's not what I mean. Don't make so much out of this. All I'm saying is it looks like Mr. Clinton has enough to feel bad about right now."

But it was my father who had enough to feel bad about right now. He wasn't going to tell me anything, that was for sure. "Okay, Dad," I said, because it was important to him. "If he asks, I'll tell him I'm fourteen."

"I'm sure he won't ask," my father said.

I went back to the kitchen and told Lorraine my theory. "Why else would he want me to pretend I was younger?"

"Maybe it's the reason he gave you," she said. "Maybe it was just close is all. You know Son, he lives in fear of hurting anybody's feelings. He's just trying to spare the guy a little grief."

"But think about it, my mother blowing her whole life for one passionate moment. She marries someone she doesn't love because she has to."

"Really," Lorraine said, twisting her hair up to the back of her head and tying it in a knot. "I don't think your mother did a whole lot in her life that she didn't want to do. She was mysterious, I'll grant you that, but I don't think you should be making a major case out of this. There's too much going on right in front of you."

"Like the fact she has two husbands," I said.

"Married to two men," Lorraine said, and sighed. "My God, not even I could have come up with that one."

"It's pretty unbelievable."

"Poor Mr. Clinton," Lorraine said. "The way he looked around when we went inside her house. It would have broken your heart. If somebody just told me this story, and I didn't know any of the people, I'd say he'd done something to her, hit her or run around or something. But not him. I think he's still in love with her." Lorraine put her head down on the kitchen table. "It makes you wonder if there are any others."

Other husbands? Leave it to Lorraine to give me something new to worry about.

All afternoon I thought about Thomas Clinton, lying in the bed that a week before his wife had slept in. Was he going from room to room, touching the things he knew she must have touched? Where had he met her and where had they gone together? I didn't need to ask him if he still loved her, because that was implicit in everything about him. Just the fact that he was here. Even though she walked out on him without a word, he still couldn't bear the thought of her getting the news of her mother's death alone. He would rather drive cross-country in the middle of the summer to tell her himself, put his arm around her shoulder, give her his handkerchief. Then he would have gotten in his car and gone home, if that was what she wanted, and stayed on if she wanted that instead. He was in love with her. No one was questioning that. You had to wonder what it would be like to be able to inspire that kind of love.

"Thomas Clinton," I said to Sister Evangeline as I helped her out of bed and into the wheelchair so I could take her out into the kitchen. "Mother was married to him before Dad. Actually, she's married to both of them, but Mr. Clinton doesn't seem to think that's such a big deal."

Sister Evangeline nodded and sighed. "A husband," she said. "I thought that's all it probably was. Poor Rose ran off just because she has two husbands. I wish she'd told me."

"Well, you're not supposed to have two, you know." Sister Evangeline never ceased to amaze me. This was big news, the biggest we'd ever seen at Saint Elizabeth's, which was a little hotbed of scandal in and of itself. "What would the church say about something like that?"

"The question is, what would God say, and that's between your mother and God. It's none of our business." I sighed and knelt down to slip her loafers onto her feet. "How's your father taking all this?" she said.

"It's hard for him, I can see that, the whole thing makes him nervous. But he's taking it okay. Mr. Clinton is a nice man. There's something about him, like he's just so harmless or something. I couldn't imagine getting mad at him."

"Do you like him?" Sister Evangeline asked me. I looked up and found her leaning over in her chair. Her face was so close to mine that I could see my reflection in her glasses.

"I like him fine," I said.

"I'd like to meet him," she said. "It would be like meeting part of Rose, before I even knew her."

I asked my father and he said it would be all right for us to have dinner in the kitchen of Saint Elizabeth's so that Sister Evangeline could eat with us. It would be a relief because in our house, with no one else, the three of us could drown trying to make conversation. At Saint Elizabeth's there would be Sister Evangeline and Lorraine. Even if we had nothing to say to each other, we'd at least have things to talk about. If we ate dinner late, at seven-thirty, the girls would be through eating and things would have quieted down some. I wrote a note telling Thomas Clinton what time I would pick him up, but I felt stupid when I got to the house. I remembered when I was little and I used to pick flowers and take them to my mother's door. I would leave them on the front step and knock and run. My hands would sweat like crazy, like for some reason they were sweating now. I leaned over and slipped the note under the door. I started to run away, I did, but then I thought that was just ridiculous.

What would my mother say if she saw us there, having dinner together and evoking her memory like it was all some sort of'séance? And yet she must have known this was how it would go. She knew both her husbands as men who would never be less than gracious in the face of social collapse. She knew, she must have, that we would all be peaceful and overly polite. That was the thing that made her run. If she could have counted on anyone to balk, to refuse, to blame, she might have found a way to get through it. But the thought of those painfully good manners must have filled her to the top with guilt. Because there would be no one there to punish her, she was left with the worse fate of having to punish herself.

I washed my hair and put on a dress for dinner. My father was at the kitchen sink, still working on getting the paint out from under his nails with a wire brush and Lava soap. He was wearing dark, pressed pants and a white shirt.

"You look nice," I said.

"Should I wear a tie, do you think?" He held up a dripping hand in front of his chest.