Looking for Mr. Goodbar Read online

  (Here there is a lengthy silence. The other voice says something.) When I woke up . . . (He breaks off, again a silence and then the other voice.) I still don’t see what difference it . . . all right, all right. (But now there is a huge effort involved in his speaking, and his voice breaks frequently.) I was freezing. When I woke up I was freezing . . . I was . . . (voice) . . . I was in her . . . I was coming . . . I don’t know how . . . (voice) . . . Yeah. I knew. I was crying . . . I was . . . I think I was trying to warm her up. It was weird ’cause it was like . . . she was my friend. Then I, it hit me what a spot I was in. I had to get out fast. I got dressed and I went downstairs. The doorman wasn’t there. I walked. I had a couple of bucks George gave me but I was scared to get on a bus or anything where there was people. I figured something might show. So I walked but it was rough because my leg was killing me. I don’t know, I must’ve strained something. I couldn’t walk straight. I was limping. I still am. I don’t know what she did to me. When I got to George’s he let me in. There was no one else there. I told him. He gave me all the money he had in the house. He said if they tracked him down he’d tell them I was just some guy he met that day.

  I don’t know how I ended up in Cleveland. I meant to go to Miami.

  THERESA

  They didn’t look at her for almost two years and then it was too late. Besides, once they understood what had happened there was nothing but guilt in their eyes so that when she saw them looking at her she had to turn away in shame and confusion. If it hadn’t been for her brother’s death they might have realized sooner that she needed help. She was willing to forgive them but they couldn’t forgive themselves.

  When she was four her limbs had been briefly paralyzed by polio. She remembered none of it. Not the hospital, not the sisters who took care of her, not the respirator she’d needed to breathe. The illness was said to have altered her personality, and maybe that was why she couldn’t remember; she’d become another person. A quiet, withdrawn little girl with kinky red hair and pale green eyes and pale, pale skin beneath her freckles. Not the same child as the little girl who’d babbled incessantly in a near-language for months before she could slow herself down enough to attempt English. And let the water run over the rim of the tub into the hallway because she wanted to “make a ocean.” And showed up in the living room one night naked and covered with flour, saying, “I’m a cookie, eat me.”

  She began school two months late catching up quickly with the other children. She was one of the first to learn to read and preferred reading and solitary make-believe to playing with others. (Later, her first vivid memory, aside from one bright flash of being at the beach when she was little, would be of telling the priest at her first confession how she read with her father’s flashlight under the covers when she was supposed to be asleep. She could see herself at confession long after she’d lost the image of herself reading.)

  She grew overweight from inactivity so that her parents began urging her to go out and play with the other children (she was the only one who was urged; the others got orders) but she didn’t like the games they played, although she couldn’t tell this to her parents. Hide-and-seek frightened her—the part where you were It and everyone else went away. Games that demanded that you move fast were difficult too, because of her weight and because she got out of breath very easily. When that happened she got upset and then angry and had to run into the house before anyone could call her a bad sport.

  Brigid, who was only a year younger than Theresa, was exactly the opposite. Restless, athletic, totally uninterested in reading any more than she had to to escape punishment by the sisters, she spent almost as much time out of the house in the winter as she did when it was warm. She got along with everyone. There wasn’t a child in the neighborhood who wasn’t her friend or an adult who didn’t consider himself some sort of godparent of Brigid, who from the time of Theresa’s first illness, when she herself was three, seemed always ready to leave home and find herself a healthier family.

  Theresa didn’t like Brigid too much, not because of any one thing Brigid did but because she felt reproached in some way by Brigid’s existence. Her parents never asked her why she wasn’t like Brigid but the question somehow hovered in the air every time Brigid hit another home run or was invited someplace. Not that Theresa minded her sister’s popularity; if anything she minded those rare periods when Brigid spent a lot of time at home.

  Thomas and Katherine were something else. They were like a second set of parents to her and she adored them both, particularly Thomas, who never bossed her around. Thomas had been eleven and Katherine six when Theresa was born. (The Missus’ Second Thoughts, Mr. Dunn had once called Brigid and Theresa, and their mother had gotten very angry. Later, when the company was gone, she’d accused him of making it sound as though it happened that way on purpose. And then her father had said, “Indeed,” which no one understood except maybe their mother, who was the only one supposed to hear it, anyway.)

  Thomas was her mother’s favorite of them all and his death in a training-camp gun accident when he was eighteen dealt her the most staggering blow of her life. She turned gray almost overnight, a woman thirty-seven years old. She lost her famous temper but she lost her liveliness, too. At first she cried all the time. Then she stopped crying and there was a period when she just sat on a hard chair in the living room, staring at the rug. Which had no pattern.

  Her father grieved too but couldn’t match the length or depth of her mother’s mourning and became for a while like a ghost around the house. Hovering gray in the black shadow of her mother’s grief.

  Katherine doing the ironing and watching TV.

  Her mother sitting looking at the rug.

  Theresa on the floor in one corner of the room, curled up with Nancy Drew, looking up occasionally to catch the thread of the movie on the TV.

  Brigid out somewhere in the neighborhood.

  Her father comes in from work.

  Katherine puts down the iron and runs to kiss him. He hugs Katherine, fondles her long silky auburn hair. Her hair which is the way red hair is supposed to be when it doesn’t go wrong, like Theresa’s, and become fly-away kinky and orange. In this period Katherine is the only one who dares demand affection from their father. And she gets it. She’s his favorite, anyway. She knows it and Theresa knows it. If Brigid knows it she doesn’t care. Katherine goes back to her ironing. For a moment her father just stands there, uncertain whether he must come further into the room. Penetrate the shroud of its atmosphere.

  “Look at her,” Mrs. Dunn says. “Reading. Do you remember the way Thomas read to her all the time when she was sick?”

  Thomas spent more time in the hospital with her than anyone except her mother. Thomas read to her for hours at a time, holding up the books for her to see the pictures. Thomas brought her flowers from the lot on the corner. Thomas was a saint. Thomas had thought he might be a priest when he got out of the army but didn’t mention this to the recruiting officer. Theresa had loved Thomas very much but when her mother recited the Thomas litany Theresa wished that he had never lived so that this could never have happened.

  After the first year her father began keeping longer hours at work. Or wherever. Sometimes she heard her mother accuse him of being delayed by drink, not work. The accusations were dull and toneless, not as they’d been in the days before Thomas’s death. If they were made in Katherine’s presence Katherine would take her father’s side or try to mediate between them.

  Sometimes Theresa’s back hurt, particularly if she tried to sit straight and still for a long time. It wasn’t the kind of thing you bothered your parents with, even in normal times. It wasn’t bad enough. Besides, it might be something you were doing that was causing you the pain, and then to tell them would just bring anger and recriminations down on your head. At home she lay curled on her side whenever she could to accommodate the discomfort, but in class Sister Vera was always telling her to sit up straight. She began sitting on one foot or wedging
a book under her left buttock so that she would appear to be straight. Then one day she forgot to remove the book when Sister Vera came around checking homework, and Sister Vera saw it and sent her to the office. There, so frightened that she had to cross her legs for fear of wetting her pants, she haltingly explained to the Mother Superior, who, unlike Sister Vera, had known her since she began school, that she couldn’t actually sit the way Sister Vera wanted her to without doing that thing with the book.

  Her spine had curved.

  Years earlier the polio had weakened the muscles on the left side of her back more than those on the right so that they exerted less pull on the spine. Slowly since then the stronger muscles had pulled the lower part of her spine out of shape. The gray-haired specialist shook his head. If only they’d caught it earlier. Any time during the first year or two a plaster cast might have done the job but now . . .

  There were innumerable examinations and tests before she could enter the hospital for surgery. The first so bad that after that it almost didn’t matter—she felt little. Or she felt a great deal but dimly, as though it were happening to someone else. The doctor asking her in front of her father if she got her period yet. The doctor asking her father if anyone in the family had ever had a hunched back. (It was the only time her father got angry.) The doctor making her bend forward and try to touch the floor while he sat in back of her and put his hands on her waist and all over her, squeezing and poking and feeling. For years she had drifted into fantasy as she lay in bed at night or sat quietly looking at a book without reading it. Now her fantasies began to serve a more urgent purpose. It was much more bearable to be a princess getting tortured in a dungeon than a crooked little girl being tortured by doctors; after all, if you were a princess being tortured by bad guys, the good guys might rescue you at any moment.

  She was in the hospital for a year, her torso encased in a plaster cast both before and after the operation, which was in the third month. She never cried until the day they told her she was going home.

  Brigid was too young to be allowed in the hospital so they hadn’t seen each other for a year. That didn’t matter; they’d been strangers before and they were strangers now.

  “Hi,” Brigid said, “it’s nice you’re home,” and went off to play baseball. People were beginning to tease her about being a tomboy, now that she was eleven years old and still wrapped up in sports.

  Katherine, in the early months, had been to the hospital a great deal. Then something happened which at first no one would tell Theresa about. After a few weeks they told her Katherine was upset because she’d broken off her engagement with Young John. Young John, so called because he had the same name as her father, with whom he worked at the firehouse, had become very close to her father in the year following Thomas’s death. He’d spent a lot of time at their house and it had eventually become apparent to everyone that he was madly in love with Katherine. Katherine had finally agreed that she would marry him when she graduated from high school and now she’d changed her mind. At first that was all her mother would say.

  Not that Theresa cared all that much. The truth was that although Katherine was very nice to her most of the time, it was still sort of a relief not to have her around. There was something about Katherine that filled up a whole room. Not just that she was beautiful and everyone kept talking about how beautiful she was, it was the way Katherine was. She always sort of expected you to be looking at her and admiring her like all those dumb teenage boys who hung around the house and wanted to take her to the movies. Like her father. Theresa didn’t mind so much when it was going on, she’d gotten used to it, but there had been a feeling of not being in a hurry to get back to it, either.

  Except it turned out that Katherine wasn’t living at home, after all. It turned out that the way Katherine had broken her engagement to Young John was by running away with and marrying a cousin of Young John’s whom she met at a wedding she’d gone to with Young John. Katherine’s husband, Ronald, was a stockbroker, one of those terribly handsome superclean young businessmen who seemed almost as eager to please the rest of the family as to please his beautiful wife. Katherine seemed to run to the other end of the room whenever he came near her, but Theresa thought that might be her imagination.

  Six months later her mother told Theresa that Katherine was getting an annulment, which was not like a divorce. It meant the marriage had never existed. Theresa asked how that could be and her mother just said that it was the law. Meanwhile Katherine had gone to live with their Brooklyn cousins and was finishing high school there. Her mother said Katherine realized what a terrible mistake it had been to drop out of high school and she hoped Theresa would never do the same thing. Theresa said that she didn’t mean to, that, as a matter of fact, she was going to go to college and be a teacher. She’d become very fond of the young sister who’d come three times a week the whole year she was in the hospital and left her homework so she could keep up with her class. One of the essays she’d written had been about her determination to be like Sister Rosalie when she grew up, and Sister Rosalie had laughed and given her a kiss. Now her mother laughed because finishing high school was one thing and going to college another.

  Katherine finished high school and moved to Manhattan, where she lived with two other girls and was training to become a stewardess.

  Her mother and the doctor worried about Theresa’s weight; she was supposed to weigh fifteen pounds less than she did. She loved the diet the doctor put her on because it provided her with such a wealth of material for those times when her mother finally badgered her into going to confession.

  Bless me Father for I have sinned. It is four weeks since my last confession. I went off my diet for three weeks; I ate seven chocolate bars and drank Cokes. I yelled at my mother and I cursed twice.

  What difference did her weight make anyway? It was true that clothes were a problem, or would have been if she hadn’t worn a uniform to high school every day. Or if she’d cared. But she didn’t care. What difference did it make? What difference did it make if her red hair, pulled tightly into a rubber band before she left for school, was out of the band and flying all over by the end of the day? What difference did it make if the general effect was of sloppiness or, at best, of disorder controlled at great cost? In her fantasies she was beautiful, more perfect than Katherine, and in real life there was no Prince Charming who, if she lost fifteen pounds and turned beautiful, would swoop down and carry her off to his kingdom. Her best friend, Gail, was very small and skinny. People called them Mutt and Jeff and they both sort of got a kick out of that, the idea of making up a set that way. Gail didn’t care if she lost weight or not; Gail liked her the way she was. When she thought about graduating from high school and going off to college, the only thing that bothered her was that Gail wouldn’t be going with her. She tried to talk Gail into it but Gail just laughed, and it was true that she wasn’t nearly as good in school as Theresa was.

  The worst times were when Katherine came home to visit once a month, and an hour later the house was magically full of her discarded boyfriends, and the phone was ringing all the time, if not for Katherine, then for Brigid. Brigid stared at Katherine over the dinner table as though she were a movie star. Their mother said little but fairly reeked of contentment at having Katherine home. And their father, usually so silent (except in the stillness of his bedroom at night, when occasionally Theresa, passing the door on her way to the bathroom, would hear his low voice in a steady outpour of words), her father, discussing Katherine’s travels with her as though it were what she’d left home to do. Asking about the various cities as though he’d never expressed the opinion that people were best off taking the railroad if they really had to travel. Telling Katherine with a smile that yes, maybe he would take advantage of Eastern’s reduced fares for the families of their employees. Maybe he’d go to Washington, if John Kennedy were to get in next year. Or California. A couple of the men at the firehouse had been to California and said it was worth the
trip. Especially Disneyland. They weren’t to laugh, he said, his friends told him it was just as good for grownups as for kids.

  “For your thirtieth anniversary, Daddy,” Katherine said, “I’m going to give you and Mom a trip to California.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, now, Katherine,” her father said. But he was obviously pleased that she wanted to do it.

  Theresa went up to her room. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door and Katherine came in.

  “Tessie,” Katherine said, “is anything wrong?”

  Katherine didn’t know that she hated Tessie now, that she wanted to be called Terry. Tessie had been her name when she was a tiny child with reddish-blond curls.

  “No.”

  “You sure? Lately when I come home you hardly ever talk to me.”

  “Everyone else talks plenty,” Theresa pointed out.

  “You are mad at me.”

  Theresa was astounded to realize that Katherine was close to tears. In all the years that she could remember she’d never seen her sister cry. What was she supposed to say now? Maybe it wasn’t Katherine’s fault that she was a movie star and this house was her fan club.