Sourland Read online

  Through the girl’s torrent of words a crude melancholy narrative emerged like a wounded animal, limping—Adrienne saw clearly. She felt a stab of sympathy for the poor battered girl but her better judgment urged her caution. Take care! Don’t be foolish, Adrienne! Don’t get involved.

  Adrienne shivered. Her husband’s voice, close in her ear.

  Tracy was not one to get involved. Tracy was one for caution.

  “I wish that I could help you,” Adrienne said, “but I—I’m already late for—”

  “You got some paper, ma’am? Somethin to write with? All you’d need to hand him is some little thing—it could just say like Leisha has retracted—or, just L. has retracted. He’d know right-away what that meant.”

  “I—I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have time to—”

  “Ma’am, fuck that! Ma’am, sure you do.”

  So forcibly Leisha spoke, so glittery her tarry-black eyes, Adrienne found herself meekly providing the girl with a page torn from an address book, and a pen. Leisha scribbled a message onto the scrap of paper while Adrienne glanced anxiously about.

  The rear entrance to the courthouse was about twenty feet away. A steady stream of people were entering, mostly individuals. Some were uniformed law enforcement officers. No one took note of Adrienne and the girl in the faux-fur coat.

  “You can’t miss Edro Hodge, ma’am—left side of his face has this like Apache tattoo, and his hair in a rat-tail. And Edro has got these eyes, ma’am—you will know him when you see him when it’s like he sees you down to the roots of your shoes.”

  Roots of your shoes. These eyes. Adrienne wanted to laugh, this was so absurd. This was so ridiculous, reckless. Leisha pressed the folded note into Adrienne’s fingers and Adrienne was about to take it then drew back as if she’d touched a snake. No no don’t get involved. Not ever. Quickly she backed away from the staring girl saying she was sorry, very sorry, she couldn’t help her—“I’m late for Probate Court! Please understand.”

  Adrienne turned, fled. Adrienne walked quickly in her soft-leather boots, desperate not to slip on the icy pavement. At the courthouse entrance a uniformed police officer gestured to Adrienne, to step ahead of him. Maybe he was thinking she hadn’t enough strength to push the revolving door. Was she so ghastly-pale, did she carry herself so precariously? The girl was shouting after her, pleading—“Ma’am wait—ma’am damn you—ma’am!”

  “Ma’am? Step along, please.”

  Blindly Adrienne made her halting way through the security checkpoint. What a clamorous place this was, and unheated—overhead a high gray-tinctured ceiling, underfoot an aged and very dirty marble floor. Most of the others shuffling in the line were dark-skinned. Most wore work clothes, or were carelessly or poorly dressed, with sullen or expressionless faces. Adrienne stepped aside to allow a stout middle-aged black woman with an elderly mother to precede her but a security guard intervened speaking sharply: “Ma’am—put your things down here. Step along, ma’am.”

  Trying not to think Because I am white. I am the minority here.

  It was so: the only other Caucasian in view was a sheriff’s deputy stationed in the inner lobby.

  She was not a racist. Yet her hammering heart rebuked her—Now you are helpless, they have you.

  Her husband had been an academic, a historian. His field of specialization had been twentieth-century European history, after World War I. Like a time traveler he’d moved deftly from the present into the past—from the past into the present—though he had lived with horrors, he’d seemed to Adrienne curiously untouched by his discoveries, intellectually engaged rather more than emotionally engaged. A historian is a kind of scientist, he’d believed. A historian collects and analyzes data, he must take care not to impose his personal beliefs, his theories of history, upon this data. Adrienne had once entered Tracy’s study when he was assembling a book-length manuscript to send to his editor at Harvard University Press—chapters and loose pages were scattered across his desk and table and she’d had a fleeting glimpse of photographs he’d hidden from her—scenes of Nazi death-camps? Holocaust survivors?—she’d asked what these were and Tracy had said, “You don’t want to know, Adrienne.”

  Adrienne had protested, but not strongly. Essentially he’d been right—she had not wanted to know.

  How concerned for her Tracy would be, if he could see her here, alone. For why on earth was she here.

  Never had they spoken of death-duties. The subject had never arisen—for why should it have arisen? Tracy had not expected to die, not for a long time. He’d been a “fit” man—he exercised, he ate and drank sparingly, he was steeped in the sort of health-knowledge common to people of his education and class. Knowing is a form of immortality. Ignorance is the only weakness, and that can be prevented.

  So it had seemed to them. Now Adrienne had lost faith, she’d been staggered, stunned. Her husband’s knowledge had not saved him. No more than a house of ordinary dimensions could withstand a hurricane or an earthquake.

  “Ma’am—remove your coat, please. And your boots. Step along.”

  Adrienne did as she was told. She placed her things in trays on the conveyer belt to pass through the X-ray machine, as at an airport. Yet there was a harshness here, an air of suspicion on the part of the security staff, she had not experienced while traveling on either domestic or foreign flights. She was told to open her handbag for inspection, in addition to placing it in the tray; as she struggled to open her husband’s heavy leather briefcase, which contained several folders of legal documents, some of these documents fell to the floor. Awkwardly Adrienne stooped, her face warm with embarrassment, and reached for the papers. “Ma’am? You needin some help?” A male guard with skin the color of burnt cork stooped to help her retrieve the papers which had scattered on the damp, dirty floor amid the feet of strangers. How had this happened—these were precious documents! One was a notarized IRS form for the previous year, another was the death certificate issued for Tracy Emmet Myer on stiff gray-green paper resembling the paper used for U.S. currency and stamped with the New Jersey State seal. Somehow, there was Adrienne’s husband’s wallet being handed to her—and his wristwatch—which Adrienne had removed from the hospital room after his death and must have placed inside the briefcase without remembering she’d done so. The wallet was unnervingly light, flat—all the bills, credit cards and other items must have been taken from it—and the wristwatch had a broken face as if it had been stepped on. “This yours, too?”—the guard held out to Adrienne a scrap of paper upon which she saw scribbled handwriting—barely legible except for the oversized schoolgirl signature LEISHA.

  Leisha! The aggressive girl in the faux-fur jacket and corn-rowed hair had somehow succeeded in thrusting the note to her lover into Adrienne’s briefcase—how was this possible? Adrienne remembered clearly having refused it, and walking quickly away.

  Numbly she took the note from the guard, and the other items, and returned them to the briefcase. Her face throbbed with heat, she was aware of strangers staring at her. How quickly it had happened, Adrienne Myer had become that person, very often a woman, an older woman, who in public places draws the pitying or annoyed stares of others because she has dropped something, or has forgotten something, or has lost something, or has come to the wrong address and is holding up the line… She was fumbling now to put on her boots, and her coat. And where was her glove, had she dropped a glove…The deputy overseeing the checkpoint, a lieutenant, with a dim roughened skin that wasn’t nearly so Caucasian as Adrienne had imagined from a short distance, had come over to see what was wrong. Politely he said, “Ma’am? Where you headed—sur’gate?” When Adrienne stared blankly at him he said: “Office of the Sur’gate? Probate Court?” Bemusedly his eyes moved over her: the black cashmere coat that fell to midcalf, expensive but hastily misbuttoned, the expensive leather boots defaced by salt as by graffiti. “Probate is fifth floor, ma’am. Elevators through that doorway.”

  Is it so obvious, Adrienne wonde
red. Where I am headed, and why.

  She thanked the officer. She moved on. She was carrying her handbag and briefcase against her chest, like a refugee; trying not to think that she might have left something behind on the foyer floor—a crucial document—now scuffed and tattered underfoot—someone in the security line or one of the courthouse staff might have pilfered from her. She was not a racist, she was not a white racist yet she had to acknowledge that the color of her skin singled her out as one of the oppressors of the dark-skinned peoples of the world, that was a fact of history, and of fate; nowhere more evident than here in Trenton, the decaying and depopulated capital city of the State of New Jersey. The widow is one who comes swiftly to the knowledge Whatever harm comes to you, you deserve. For you are still alive.

  Not when he’d died—she had been too shocked, too stunned to comprehend that he had died, at that moment—but earlier—on the third or fourth day of his hospitalization—when she’d hurried to her husband’s room on the fifth floor of the hospital—“Telemetry”—and had seen an empty bed, a stripped mattress, no human figure in the bed, no surrounding machines—the thought struck her like a knife-blow He has died, they have taken him away—in that instant the floor had swung up toward her face, the floor had somehow come loose and swung up as she’d lost her footing, her balance, blood rushed out of her brain leaving her faint, helpless, utterly weak, broken and weeping—a nurse’s aide had prevented her from falling—“Mrs. Myer! Your husband has been moved just down the hall”—in an instant her life had ended, yet in the next instant her life had been restored to her; all that would happen to her from now on, she understood, would be random, wayward and capricious.

  Now it has begun, now there is nothing to stop it.

  The elevators were very slow-moving, crowded. Here too Adrienne was made to feel self-conscious, uneasy. After waiting for several minutes she decided to take the stairs. But what a surprise—these were not ordinary functional stairs but an old-fashioned staircase of carved mahogany, broad and sweeping, baronial; clearly the staircase belonged to an older part of the courthouse. Climbing the curving stairs, gripping the railing, Adrienne found herself staring into a shaft, like a deep pit; the courthouse appeared to be hollow at its core, as if receding in time. Adrienne paused to catch her breath, leaning against the railing, gazing down into the pit-like shaft. She thought This is a temptation for those who are not strong. Or for those who are strong. To end it now.

  How close she was, to losing her balance, falling…She’d begun to perspire with anxiety, inside her warm clothing.

  Since the first day of her husband’s hospitalization—now just nine days ago—she’d been subject to such flurries of anxiety, dread. She had brought her husband to the ER for he was suffering from an erratic heartbeat and a pronounced shortness of breath; his face was flushed, mottled; his eyes were unnaturally dilated. In the ER he’d been “stabilized”—he’d been kept overnight for cardiac tests—moved from the ER not into the general hospital population but to the seventh floor—“Telemetry”—which Adrienne had not wanted to see was adjacent to “Intensive Care” from that point onward her life became a sequence of linked yet seemingly disjointed episodes accelerated as in a slapstick silent film in which she might have been observed with pitying eyes, like a rat in a maze, compelled to repeat the same futile actions compulsively, unvaryingly, driving her car to the hospital and parking her car, hurriedly entering the hospital and crossing the wide lobby whose floor smelled of fresh disinfectant and taking one of the elevators to Telemetry, fifth floor, exiting the elevator and hurrying along the corridor to her husband’s room—steeling herself for what she might see, or not see, as she approached the doorway—as she approached the bed, and the white-clad figure reclining, or sitting up, in the bed—

  On the curving baronial stairs Adrienne became light-headed. A woman with toffee-colored skin clutched at her arm, deftly. “Ma’am? You havin some kind of faint?” Adrienne murmured no, no she was fine, though her lips had gone numb, blood had rushed out of her face. The woman gripped her arm and helped her on the stairs. She knows where I am headed Adrienne thought.

  On the next floor, Adrienne had to make her way through a long line of individuals filing into a vast assembly room. Here were far more light-skinned men and women than she’d seen in any other part of the courthouse, most of them well dressed and all of them wearing jurors’ badges; how plausible it would appear to a neutral observer, that Adrienne Myer had been summoned to the Mercer County Courthouse this morning for jury duty; she felt a stab of envy for these individuals, a powerful wish to be one of them, that her reason for being here was so impersonal, so banal and so easily resolved.

  On the next floor—was this the third, or the fourth?—Adrienne found herself in another crowded corridor—here was the Office of the Public Defender. On a long wooden bench against a wall festooned with warnings—NO SMOKING—NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE COURTROOM—DO NOT BRING CONTRABAND INTO THE COURTHOUSE—were seated a number of mostly young men, under the eye of several Mercer County sheriff’s deputies; all but two of the young men were dark-skinned, and all were wearing lurid-orange jumpsuits marked MERCER CO. MENS DETENTION. All were shackled at the wrists and ankles, like beasts.

  Adrienne tried not to stare seeing one of the white men close by, slouching on the bench; he had a sharp hawkish face disfigured by an aggressively ugly tattoo jagged like lightning bolts; his rat-colored hair was pulled back into a tail—a rat-tail? Was this—what was the name—Ezra, Edro?—Edro Hodge?—the person whom Leisha had been desperate to contact? Hodge’s eyes were heavy-lidded, drooping; he gave an impression of being oblivious of his surroundings, if not contemptuous. Adrienne slipped past not wanting to attract his attention.

  One floor up—two floors?—at last, Probate Court: the Office of the Surrogate.

  “Ma’am—here.”

  Before Adrienne was allowed into the waiting room of the Office of the Surrogate she was required to show a photo I.D—fumbling for her wallet which contained her driver’s license, but where was her wallet?—had someone taken her wallet, in the confusion downstairs?—in a panic locating her U.S. passport in the briefcase at which a woman deputy stared suspiciously—“This you, ma’am? Don’t look much like you.”

  The photo was several years old, Adrienne said. Though having to acknowledge that the woman in the photo, lightly smiling, with a smooth, unlined forehead and hopeful eyes, bore little resemblance to the woman she was now.

  “This is my name, though—‘Adrienne Myer.’ My husband’s name is—was—Myer.”

  How unconvincing this sounded! The very syllables—Adrienne Myer—had become nonsensical, mocking.

  For if once she’d been married to a man named Myer, the man named Myer no longer existed; where did that leave Adrienne Myer?

  Nonetheless, Adrienne was allowed to take a seat. The air in the waiting room was steam-heated, stale. Here was a vast space larger even than the jurors’ assembly room on the lower floor—a high-ceilinged room in sepia tones like an old daguerreotype, with high narrow windows that seemed to look out over nothing—unless the glass had become scummy and opaque with grime. Adrienne was nervously conscious of rows—rows!—of uncomfortable vinyl chairs crowded with people—their expressions ranged from melancholy to exhausted, anxious to resigned. At the rear of the waiting room the farther wall appeared to have dissolved into sepia shadow—the waiting room stretched on forever. Blindly Adrienne was seated clutching at her things—handbag, briefcase—she’d removed her black cashmere coat in this stifling heat—a glove had fallen to the floor, she retrieved with some effort—she’d been gripping her things so tightly, the bones of her hands ached. She was thinking All these people have died! So many of us.

  But this was wrong of course. Everyone in the waiting room was alive. She was alive.

  “I am—alive.”

  Alive. It was such a curious boastful word! It was such a tentative word, simply to utter it was to invite derision.
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