Kate Wilhelm: The Price Of Silence

Maria was five feet two inches tall, stocky, with lustrous black hair done up in intricate braids laced with red ribbons. She had come to help out when Johnny was born, a teenage girl fresh out of high school. Leone had called her “the little Indian girl.” He had left them all when Johnny was two, as if he had fulfilled his duty here and it was time to move on. Maria had stayed. A few years later, Maria had brought Thomas Bird in to introduce him, almost as if asking permission to marry him. He was not much taller than she was, and powerfully built. Ruth Ann had no illusions about who ran her household—they did. She had told them fifteen years earlier that she had named them in her will. They would get the house, Johnny would get the press. She had few if any secrets from Maria, and Maria, no doubt, shared everything she knew with Thomas Bird.

Sipping her drink while Maria prepared dinner, Ruth Ann told her about Todd and Barney. “Shaggy chestnut hair, big eyes like milk chocolate, and a brain. She’ll come back on Sunday and start on Monday and Barney will see to things in Portland and come along in a couple of weeks. He’s like a curly-haired boy, maybe a little younger than she is, or at least he looks younger. She’s twenty-eight. They loved the house, but it needs to be cleaned.”

Maria nodded; she would see to it.

“I reassured them,” Ruth Ann continued, “that the Tildens will likely be away for years.” Their daughter had been widowed by an accident that had left her partially paralyzed, and there were three young children. She knew the Tildens were not going to return to Brindle until the youngsters were grown. Ruth Ann sighed. One after another of her generation, leaving one way or another. Louise, whom she had gone to see in the nursing home, was eighty-eight, on her way out. She took another sip of her drink.

“Anyway, Louise insisted that I go over to the house and pick up that box. Deborah was supposed to bring it around weeks ago, but she’s been too busy and kept forgetting. If I’m going to write the history of Brindle I need that material, Louise said. Strange to be so lucid, and she is, and so weak. She’s entirely bedridden now.”

Maria tightened her lips. It didn’t pay to dwell on the natural order of things, she sometimes said, and didn’t repeat it now, but Ruth Ann got the message and did not continue. She would write Louise’s obit that weekend, have it ready. She would kill Lou Shinizer before she let him touch it.

From the kitchen table she could see that the sun had cleared the mountains, and shadows were forming out on the patio. She picked up her drink and walked to the door. “Can I do anything in here?” she asked. Maria said no, the way she always did. Ruth Ann went out to the patio and sat down again. The air had cooled rapidly as the sun moved on its westward track.

Seeing her old friend that day, knowing her end was so near, had stirred up too many memories, she mused. She had suddenly remembered with startling clarity the last time she had seen her father alive, sixty years ago. Stricken with pneumonia, he had struggled for breath under the oxygen tent they used in those days, only a few years before the penicillin that would have saved him. He had said something about the paper, or papers, save the paper…something. Today Louise had said almost the same thing: she had saved the papers.

After her father’s funeral, Ruth Ann had gone back to Eugene, to the women’s dorm to pack up her belongings and go home again, to take charge of the press, to save the paper. She had worked with her father from the time she was a child and knew exactly what had to be done, while her mother was totally ignorant of every aspect of it.

For years after that, she had lived with her mother in their little house on Spruce Street, two blocks from the Bolton Building that her father had built to house the newspaper. And then Leone had entered her life. She smiled faintly. She had been thirty-eight, in love for the first time, captivated by a pretty face and a charming accent. Leone had done two good things: fathered a child, and built the house Ruth Ann lived in now. A good house, he had said, a Mediterranean house, stucco, with a red tile roof, and wide overhangs to keep out the summer sun, let in the winter light, spacious rooms, this semi-enclosed patio. She took a longer drink. Leone had believed she was wealthy, she had come to realize, and when he learned that she wasn’t, he had pouted like a child. Johnny had his beautiful eyes and some of the same gestures, which she didn’t understand. He had no memory of his father, how could he have learned those gestures? One of those riddles jealously guarded by the genes. She finished her drink.

She brought her thoughts back to the question of papers. After her mother died, Ruth Ann had gone to Spruce Street to pack up the house, and she had found half a dozen boxes of papers that she had never known existed. Now she wondered if her father had told both of them to save the paper, or papers, and if her mother had done so without ever mentioning it. Ruth Ann had moved the boxes to one of the empty rooms and they were still there.

Wednesday night, Todd was dreaming. The presses were running, newspapers shooting out like disks from toy guns, flying out randomly, falling in heaps here, there, everywhere. When she tried to catch one, it eluded her, and she ran around a cavernous room pulling switches, jabbing buttons, trying to stop the press gone wild. An arctic wind stirred the papers, blew them around in a blizzard that blinded her, threatened to smother her.

Abruptly she woke up, shivering uncontrollably, struggling with the sheet and thin coverlet on her bed. The room was freezing. Groping for the light switch, she sat up amid the tangle of bedding. She had turned off the air conditioner earlier and opened a window; now she wrapped the coverlet around her shoulders and crossed the room to close the window. She didn’t even have a heavy robe, not in August, she thought in disgust. The air-conditioner control was set to Off; she turned it to Heat, but the cold was penetrating, unrelenting. She went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that her lips were pale, not quite blue, but close, and she couldn’t stop shaking. In the tub of hot water, gradually warming up, she decided she had to get out of this creepy hotel, go to the house that was to be her home for the next two years.

At first, she had been charmed by the hotel lobby, its vaulted ceiling, the intricate pattern of inlaid wood flooring, the marble counter at the registration desk, all turn-of-the-century elegance. But the suite she was in was not charming. Two small rooms that had seemed quaint, cozy and inviting had changed, become oppressive. Now this. Air-conditioning gone crazy, and no one to call at two-thirty in the morning.

She closed her eyes as the steam rose from the hot water. She wanted to be home with Barney, feel his warmth next to her, feel his arm over her, his legs pressing against hers. Realizing how close she was to tears, she shook her head angrily. Not her style. She missed him, and she was tired. That was all it amounted to, fatigue and loneliness.

Ruth Ann shivered and pulled the cover up higher, vaguely aware of Maria, who had entered her bedroom. Maria put an electric blanket over her and plugged it in, then sat in a nearby chair, wrapped in her own woolen blanket. Ruth Ann slid back into a dream-laden sleep. She was examining the newspaper with a screaming banner headline: Murder. She looked at the text, but it dissolved into a blank white space before she could focus on it. She turned the page; again the text melted into whiteness when she tried to read it. She could see pages of dense, crisp black text on white, but wherever she paused and tried to read, the text vanished. “I can’t see it, Dad,” she said plaintively.