T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

At first, when she awoke in the hospital and the nurse brought her daughter into the room, Beverly thought there must be some mistake, so convinced was she that her child would be a boy, Till’s son, his reified image come from out of the void to stand in for him — Till Jr., who would grow into a man with both his arms pliable and intact. She hadn’t thought of any girls’ names. But when her mother, still in her uniform, came straight to her from work and took the baby up in her arms with a look of ecstasy, a new name darted into her head — Matilda, she would call her Matilda, Tillie for short — and she said it aloud, pronounced it for her mother in the echoing room while the woman in the bed beside her looked on with her twin boys and a placid smile. “Tillie, what do you think of Tillie?”

Her mother, staring into the baby’s face as if the baby were an embodied message from an unknowable place, clucked her tongue. “Do you really want to live with that for the rest of your life?” she said, without looking up.

“Live with what?”

“If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you. But think about it. Just think.”

She fought the notion through the hushed course of that first day, through the changings and the feedings and the trip in the taxi that came for her next morning, stubborn, seeing Till as he was before the war, Till in his uniform, Till without it, in bed, pressing his urgent body to hers. For the first two weeks, right up to the eve of the christening, the baby was just the baby , but finally, sitting there in the rocker by the window of the only house she’d ever known until her husband came along, her daughter sucking placidly at the rubber nipple of the just-warmed bottle and her mother, tired on her feet, shuffling into the room to offer her a cup of tea, she came to herself — she had a daughter, not a son, and Till was a spirit now. In that moment the baby had her name — she would call her Katherine, after the gentle woman with the suffering face and sweet compressed smile who balanced the teacup on its saucer as if it were a feat of legerdemain and never took her eyes from her all the while.

Men came round, men cut from the same mold as Warren, but Beverly never gave them the slightest encouragement, and eventually they stopped coming. There was no question of remarrying, even for the sake of her daughter, because she was a one-man woman, then and always, and she was prepared to die alone at the end of her life to keep herself for Till when they met in heaven. If Katherine (or Kat, as they began calling her because she wouldn’t part with her stuffed tabby except in the bathtub, and then only reluctantly) grew up without a father, she wasn’t the only one, what with the divorce rate and the toll the war had taken, and she never seemed any the worse for it, at least not while she was in school. Of course, Beverly had no choice but to go back to work within a month after her daughter was born, reversing roles with her mother, who quit the grocery to stay home full-time.

Did her mother spoil the child? Yes, absolutely. There were endless afternoons at the beach with a red plastic bucket and shovel, the seashell collections and the dried starfish, trips to feed the ducks in the canals, cones and sundaes at the ice cream parlor, a parade of toys and dresses and shoes. Children were meant to be spoiled, that was her mother’s attitude. And if Kat wanted a story right in the middle of dinner, well, she got it. And another at bedtime and then at breakfast too. In the beginning there were the nursery rhymes Beverly had received from her mother’s lips when she herself was a girl, “Goosey, Goosey Gander,” “Little Jack Horner” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” in the very same worn volumes she’d kept on a special shelf in her room till she was old enough to be embarrassed by them and banished them to the garage, and then the narratives stretched out and the three little pigs came to the table along with the three bears, and after dinner each night, before she switched on the radio — and in later years, the TV — she and her mother traded off from book to book and still Kat demanded more. After the nursery rhymes it was “Dick and Jane” and “Winnie the Pooh” and on up the ladder till Kat was already beginning to read on her own by the time she started kindergarten.

School illuminated her. She was an eager student, utterly absorbed in the task at hand, no matter how repetitive or frustrating it might have seemed to her classmates. Her report cards were glowing. And when the achievement tests came round in sixth grade and then again in seventh, she consistently ranked in the highest percentile. She was a happy child. She bloomed. She grew. And then came adolescence, which hit with the sudden impact of a meteor — one day Kat was a little girl with a Minnie Mouse barrette in her hair and the next she was filled out and there were boys mooning round every day after school, junior versions of the men who’d come to the house before them — but Kat never seemed to fall under the spell of one or the other of them and never, even for a day, even for prom, let her schoolwork flag. Beverly began to hope for college, a scholarship even, because she really felt there were no limits to what her daughter could do.

To that end, she put aside money each week from her paycheck. She hadn’t had the opportunity of college herself, graduating from high school in the midst of the Depression and then going right to work in a defense plant during the war, but she’d taken a secretarial course and it had paid off. She’d begun working as a secretary in the main offices of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District when Kat entered first grade, and the work was steady and guaranteed, and since she lived with her mother and her mother owned the house free and clear, what would have gone to rent went into a special savings account. And this was no dollar-a-week Christmas club, this was the real thing. A college fund. For Kat. Kat was her hope. Kat, whose mother was a secretary and whose father was dead and drowned in the roiling waters of the Anacapa Passage, was going to be the first of her family to go on to college and thus have access to all the professions a college degree would open up for her — law, medicine, education, science.

When she was accepted at UCLA on a state scholarship that paid tuition and a modest living allowance, they celebrated — all three of them, though Beverly’s mother was by then having difficulty walking and hadn’t left the house in months — with a lobster dinner at a hotel on Ocean Boulevard overlooking the sea. The first year Kat lived at home, then went into student housing as a sophomore, so that they saw her only on weekends. After a while she began skipping a weekend now and again, then two in a row, pleading her workload. Sometimes a whole month would go by before she’d come home, and when she did come she brought a duffel of dirty laundry with her, which Beverly was only too glad to wash and fold and stack neatly for her, all the while trying to keep from worrying, from nagging. Because Kat was too thin and she wore her hair long and parted in the middle, like the hippies they read about in the paper and saw on TV, and like the hippies she wore flared hip-huggers with stars and flowers stitched into them and blouses that showed off her midriff, which anybody — not just her mother — would have considered provocative. And what about drugs? Marijuana? Did she use marijuana?

Kat never said a word about it. She never mentioned her grades either, though when the reports came at the end of the semester, Beverly — who would never dream of opening her daughter’s mail — couldn’t help quizzing her about them. Was everything all right? Yes , Kat assured her, everything’s fine . And added, in a tone Beverly didn’t like, Stop harassing me . In her senior year, she started dating seriously. She was in love, that was what she told her mother over the phone and on the odd weekends when she came home, but who was the boy? What was his name? What was his family like? What was he majoring in? He was a student, wasn’t he? He doesn’t smoke marijuana or anything, does he? What does his father do? Where are they from? This went on for a whole weekend, from dinner Friday night till Sunday morning at breakfast, the washer churning on the enclosed porch and a pale tired sun smeared like grease over everything in the kitchen. “You can’t even tell me his name?” Beverly said, setting a plate of waffles and two poached eggs down before her. “Your own mother? I mean, what’s the secret? Is he a dwarf or something”—she let out a laugh—“or a Communist? Or is it us. Your nana and me. You’re ashamed of us, is that it?”