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Again approaching the stone house from the gravel drive. And there was the crudely painted front door. And there, in the backyard of the house, the clothesline, and on the clothesline laundry stirring in the wind for it was a windy May afternoon, the sky overhead was splotched with swollen rain clouds. Towels, a sheet, his shirts. His underwear. So long as the laundry flapped on the line it was an ordinary washday, always there is something comical and reassuring about laundry, there could be no danger waiting inside the house. Even as a stranger’s voice came urgent and jarring Don’t go in there!-stop her! A woman’s voice, distracting. And yet already it was too late. For in history there are actions that no act of history can undo.
She was missing something! Always she was missing something, she’d failed to see sufficiently, or to hear. She must begin again.
Ru
Yet: Rebecca had missed something, again. God damn it all passed so fast, she could not see.
The crucifixion of Christ, that was a mystery.
The crucifixion of Christ, she came to detest.
Listening stony-hearted and unmoved as Reverend Deegan preached his Good Friday sermon. That Rebecca had heard before, and more than once. The man’s bulldog face and whiny, blustering voice. Betrayal of Judas, hypocrisy of the Jews. Pontius Pilate washing his hands of guilt with the excuse What is truth? And afterward at the house she’d wanted to escape yet could not for Miss Lutter must read aloud from the Book of St. John as if Rebecca were not capable of reading for herself. And Miss Lutter shook her head, sighing. Cruelly Rebecca thought It’s for yourself you feel sorry, not for Him. And Rebecca heard herself ask, with childlike logic, “Why did Jesus let them crucify Him, Miss Lutter? He didn’t have to, did He? If He was the Son of God?”
Warily Rose Lutter glanced up from her Bible, frowning at Rebecca through silver-rimmed bifocals as if, one more time, to Rose Lutter’s disgust, Rebecca had muttered a profanity under her breath.
“Well, why? I’m just asking, Miss Lutter.”
Hating the way the older woman was always looking so hurt, lately. When it wasn’t true hurt but anger she felt. A schoolteacher’s anger at her authority being challenged.
Rebecca persisted, “If Jesus really was God, He could do whatever He wanted. So if He didn’t, how could He be God?”
It was supreme adolescent logic. It was an unassailable logic, Rebecca thought.
Rose Lutter gave a moist, pained cry. With dignity the older woman rose, shut up her precious soft-leather Bible, and walked out of the room murmuring, for Rebecca to overhear, “Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she says.”
I do, though. I know exactly what I say.
That night Rebecca slept poorly, waking often. Smelling the damned potpourri on her bureau. At last, barefoot and stealthy, she carried it out of her room to hide in a hall closet, beneath the lowest shelf where, to her chagrin, Rose Lutter would discover it only after Rebecca was gone.
29
She was free! She would support herself, she would live in downtown Milburn after all. Not at Mrs. Schmidt’s disreputable rooming house but just around the corner on Ferry Street, in a ramshackle brownstone partitioned into a warren of rooms and small apartments. Here, Katy Greb and Katy’s older cousin LaVerne were living, and invited Rebecca to move in with them. Her share of the rent was only a few dollars a week-“Whatever you can afford, Rebecca.” For the first several weeks Rebecca slept on a pile of blankets on the floor, such exhausted sleep it scarcely mattered where she slept! She worked as a waitress, she worked as a merchandise clerk, finally she became a chambermaid at the General Washington Hotel.
It was Leora Greb, now Rebecca’s friend again, who helped to get her the job at the hotel. “Say you’re eighteen,” Leora advised. “Nobody will know.”
Rebecca was paid in cash, counted out into the palm of her hand. The hotel would not report her earnings to Internal Revenue, and so she would not be taxed. Nor would the hotel pay into her Social Security fund. “Off the books, eh? Makes things easier.” Amos Hrube, in charge of the cleaning and kitchen staff, winked at Rebecca as if there was a fond joke between them. Before Rebecca could draw back, Hrube pinched her cheek between the second and third fingers of his right hand.
“Don’t! That hurts.”
Hrube’s expression was pouting, playful. As an adult might pretend to sympathize with a child who has hurt herself in some silly inconsequential way.
“Well! Sor-ry.”
Hrube had an ugly flat face, a mashed-looking mouth. He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. On a wall behind his desk was a framed photo of a young man in a U.S. Army dress uniform, dark-haired, lean, yet bearing the unmistakable features of the elder Hrube. His office was a windowless cubbyhole at the rear of the hotel. Leora said not to mind Hrube for he tried such behavior with all the female help and some of them liked fooling around, and some did not. “He’s basically good-hearted. He’s done me some favors. He’ll respect you if that’s what you want and if you work hard. See,” Leora said, as if this was good news, “they can’t fire us all.”
Rebecca laughed. In fact this was good news. Her previous jobs had brought her into an unwanted proximity with men-who-hired. Always they’d been aware of her, eyeing and judging her. They had known who she was, too: the daughter of Jacob Schwart. At the General Washington there were many employees. Chambermaids were mostly invisible. And Leora had promised not to tell Hrube, or anyone, who she was, whose daughter. “Anyway that’s old news in Milburn. Like the war, people start to forget. Most people, anyway.”