Unravished. Hester Kaplan
too far past that. This isn’t kindergarten, for chrissake. I really don’t want those signs up.”
“Langstrom’s not perfect,” Sanford argued, “but this says we’re ready for something else. The reign of Dag is over.” Her husband’s enthusiasm had a hard edge to it. “You think all this deception and intimidation doesn’t ever reach down to where you are? Think again. You’re scared of it just like everyone else,” he told Francine, as though she were to blame, and the Mayor’s upcoming party was only more evidence of her corruptibility. “And that’s pretty fucking sad.”
A few nights later, she vandalized the signs which were already softened by the sprinkler that had gone on at midnight. They’d been too much like For Sale signs, she realized, suggesting flight. The next morning Sanford was distressed, but not really surprised, when he looked out at the pieces of paper which littered the lawn.
In the city’s last summer weeks, Lewis’s lilies bent under their own weight, and the kids got on the camp bus like prisoners. Sometimes in the slow hours in her office, in the days before the Mayor’s party, Francine sensed the Hunt-Paring House inching closer to death, not from inattention or dwindling funds, but from a lack of urgency. If it was change and progress that reaffirmed purpose, what was there left to do here? The rooster still sat on her desk—a defiant, tiny crime with a blue eye—as she fiddled with the final copy for the embroidery show. There was some beautiful, illuminating work, but the captivity of the women who made the pieces was overwhelming to her.
By mid-day of the Mayor’s party, an affable breeze had wrapped itself around the house, showing up like the caterers to set things in motion, and at just after seven, Francine watched from her office window as the Mayor stepped out of his Lincoln. For the second he stood directly below her, his head was a landing pad for a drop of rain or spit. The tanned skin of women in backless dresses punctuated a grove of dark suits. Beyond the party and down the hill, the city was beginning to light up while her office darkened. She felt the arrhythmic pulse of a car stereo down the block.
“So? Tell me everything that’s happened,” Sanford urged when she called later, but she had only a single detail to give him; she’d been the Mayor’s lover once.
“I don’t have anything to tell,” she said.
He hesitated. “Are you okay then?”
“I should go,” she said, risk fading fast in her.
There were people arguing in the bathroom down the hall when no one was supposed to be upstairs. Months ago, Francine had taken her first of many baths there on a late Sunday afternoon when the house was empty and she was lured by the prospect of a soak in these aristocratic waters. It was a luxurious basin with silken sides and such a rushing sound of water it was like standing by the cataract of a waterfall loud enough to drown out any sense that she shouldn’t be there. This too had become her private room, a strand of her pubic hair teasing at the drain, the ghost of her wet footprints on the floor.
As she stood outside the bathroom, she heard that it was the Mayor doing the belittling of whoever was in there with him. In a minute, the door opened, and a man fled down the stairs. When she looked in, Francine would have liked to see the Mayor gazing achingly from the window at the town he’d screwed, his shoulders falling in resignation that he’d made a mess of things. What the city wanted, what it really needed, she knew, was not just his apology, but his admission. But what she saw instead was the Mayor about to take a piss without lifting the toilet seat.
“Oh, no,” she said, alarmed, “you can’t do that here. You have to go downstairs.”
He laughed without looking at her and zipped up. “It’s been a while since anyone told me where I could take a leak.”
Get used to it, she was tempted to say. “This is not a public bathroom.”
He held his hands up in an exaggerated defense. “Okay, okay, I didn’t do it, I promise.” There was still an aggressive charm to his tone.
“These rooms are private, off-limits.”
“So I gather.” He straightened his tie and turned to stare down the faceless, dark space where she knew he couldn’t see her. “My mistake then, obviously. I thought these were public rooms. You know—for everyone.”
These were Francine’s words, spoken as though she were trespassing in the Mayor’s house again, instead of the other way around. How stupid she was, she told herself, hurrying towards her office, to think that he hadn’t recognized her that night, or that he might not have known where she’d always been during these years. Or that he was here now by chance.
“Why don’t you tell me about some of these pictures,” he said, pursuing her. “Looks like you keep the good stuff up here—you know, where the public’s not allowed. And why not, really—they wouldn’t appreciate it. Dopes. What’s this one?”
Francine turned to see the Mayor pointing at a canvas; he was still the guy who let the tip of his finger get too close.
“James Marsh Millicent,” she said. “And don’t touch, please.”
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