Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

My father died not in the summer but the late fall. My mother dated now and then but never came close to remarrying. She never spent a night outside our house unless it was with relatives downstate, and no man, at least none I saw, ever stayed in our place past supper. She was not happy when I left home for Detroit, and though she was proud of my success there, or at least told me she was, she was quietly relieved when my failures sent me back to Starvation. “You’re all the man I need in my house,” she would tell me, explaining that she was too busy for a man, too busy with her two-day-a-week job at Sally’s Dry Cleaning, too busy with her bowling and ceramics and euchre and church and Meals on Wheels.

But I think she clung to the memory of her Rudy, my father, because he’d already hurt her in the worst possible way, and she would never take a chance on being hurt that way again. Instead she put all of her heart into me and into her friends, the closest of them all women. While I could see that they made my mother happy, I knew there was a part of her that she had locked away forever in the deepest shadows of her heart, and it made me sad.

Today was not the anniversary of my father’s death. But I understood why Mom was playing Robert Goulet anyway. When I was in high school, I had come home from hockey one evening, hungry and tired, hoping Mom would have dinner on the table. But when I’d walked into the kitchen, the stove had been quiet, the table clear, and Robert Goulet was playing on the stereo. Although I had forgotten, that day was in fact the anniversary of my father’s death-and the same day of the month, by chance, the twenty-second, of Gracie’s father’s death-and Mom and Gracie, who was staying with us at the time, were in each other’s arms, dancing in the darkened living room between the sofa and the armchairs, a girl and a woman grieving the men they had lost.

I remembered this as I stood with Mom now, feeling her shoulders rock back and forth beneath my hands. The song ended. I walked over and turned the stereo off.

“Can you play it again, dear?”

I took Mom’s chair in both hands and swiveled it around to face me. I sat on an end table. She bunched the afghan around her.

“It’s all so sad,” she said.

“Yes. It’s very sad.”

“How is Darlene doing?”

“Devastated, I’m sure, but she’s been out working the case all night, so I suppose she’s distracted, for now at least.”

“Good. Will you give her my love?”

“Of course.”

Mom looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Those two,” she said. “They were nothing but trouble.”

Gracie was nothing but trouble. I pictured her on the night before she left town for college, having barely made it out of high school, a wisp in blue jeans, swaying to and fro on the roof of the Volkswagen bug she had painted orange to match her hair. Her nipples jutted against the T-shirt she’d torn short above her belly button. She waved around a bottle of Boone’s Farm as she sang off-key to “Joy to the World” blasting from the VW’s eight-track player.

Darlene danced and clapped and sipped from a Schlitz tallboy on the ground beneath Gracie. She shook her head shyly and laughed when Gracie motioned for her to climb up there too. Soon two boys and then a third climbed up there and little Gracie lowered herself to her knees and disappeared within the tangle of gyrating hips.

“Well,” I said, “Darlene knew when to stop.”

My mother nodded.

“How are you two doing?”

“OK.”

Mom held her look for a moment. She didn’t really believe me. I supposed how we were doing depended on how you defined “OK.” Darlene quietly worried that I would run back to Detroit; I wondered why she hadn’t finalized her divorce.

I’d asked her more than once when she was going to switch back to her maiden name. “I like how Esper sounds like whisper,” she told me. “Darlene Bontrager sounds like a fat person.”

“Were you with her last night?” Mom said.

“Yeah, until she got the call.”

“You let her go alone?”

“She was on duty, Mom. She couldn’t have me along.”

“But you went out there anyway, of course.”

“I have a job to do, too.”

Mom rocked back in her chair, pulled her hands out from under the afghan, and laced them together across her lap, bracing herself.

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She’s family, son. You have to get to the bottom of it.”

“Mother, forgive me, but get to the bottom of what? She hung herself. I’m sorry about that. But that’s the way it is.”

“Why did she hang herself? Why would she do that?”

Though I could not answer them, the questions themselves didn’t baffle me as much as why my mother was asking them. Did she really think there was something more to know other than that Gracie’s entire life seemed to point to an end like this one?

“I know you loved Gracie. But it’s not like this is shocking.”

“It may not be shocking, but it is a shock, at least to me.” She looked up at me. I saw fresh tears in her eyes, more angry than sad. “Gracie did not deserve this, Gus. She did not deserve this. She was starting to come around. She was starting to settle down.”

I thought, How could she not deserve what she chose? But I did not say anything. I dropped to a knee and put a hand on one of my mother’s. “Mom, she was sleeping with Soupy. She was drinking with Soupy. That isn’t quite settling down.”

“Soupy has a good heart.”

“Yes. And a hollow leg and the maturity of a ninth grader.”

Soupy Campbell was my oldest friend. We had played hockey together since we were kids. He was one of the boys who had climbed atop Gracie’s orange VW on that drunken high school night. I could still see him swaying his hips as he chugged from a quart bottle of beer.

Something about that memory bothered me.

“What is it you always say about your work?” Mom said. “‘You don’t know…’” Her voice trailed off. She was struggling to remember. She had been doing a lot of that lately.

I started to say, “You don’t know what the story-” but she cut me off: “Don’t.” She stared at my hand on her knee. “‘You don’t know what the story is… until it’s in the paper.’ ”

“Yes.”

She lifted her head. “You’re making assumptions here.” She hesitated. “I hate to say this, but I think you may be letting your emotions cloud your judgment.”

“What emotions?” I said.

“Please, Gus.”

My cell phone rang in my pocket. “Excuse me,” I said, pulling it out.

“Those things will be the death of civilization. Why couldn’t they, just leave them down in Detroit with the rest of the rat race?”

“Get with it, Mom,” I said as the phone rang again. “Media North is bringing us into the twenty-first century.”

“This one’s plenty hard enough. Put that down.”

I figured it was Darlene, and I wanted to talk with her, though not in front of Mom. I stopped the ring. “Sorry. Where were we?”

Mom hesitated, then said, “It’s not your fault that you were an only child, honey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“An only child gets used to having things his way. Then you suddenly had Gracie in your world.”

“She liked having things her way too.”

“And you didn’t appreciate it. You didn’t like Gracie.”

“That’s not true.”

It really wasn’t. I didn’t dislike Gracie any more than she disliked me. Our house just wasn’t big enough for both of us. Or maybe Mom wasn’t.

Over the years we had found a way to coexist, largely by avoiding each other, even after Gracie returned to Starvation the year before. When I saw her at the wheel of the Zamboni, I usually called out, “Hey, Gracie,” and she’d nod, if not smile. I sent her a drink or two when I saw her sitting on her stool at the back of Enright’s, her Kools and Bic lighter at the ready. Sometimes she acknowledged it, sometimes she didn’t.