Unravished. Hester Kaplan
those selectmen and the so-called Shoreline Citizens, my husband and me. Someone had enlisted an expert from New York to talk about Tillman’s place in American art, and the man spoke deliberately, as if everyone—but especially Aug—was an idiot. When the lights were turned off, he showed slides of Tillman’s work. It was hard not to be moved, but who hadn’t seen those paintings of women a million times on calendars and kitchen towels and mouse pads? People anonymously dropped off books of the art on our doorstep, like turds in a brown paper bag. They sent us postcards of Tillman’s work. One, unsigned, read, “I was in the National Gallery, saw this and thought of you.” Tillman’s view, the one that would be disturbed by our house if it was built, was a national treasure, and if left unravished—that was the expert’s word that tried to untangle itself in my head—would continue to inspire others. Aug grunted and pulled at his last tuft of gray hair; inspire how, exactly? He didn’t deal in abstractions or potentials, just hard work and endurance and final decisions. The house, with its sight of the water from every room, was what he’d wanted since he was a kid tossing on a filthy mattress. It was his due now, and why not?
“Let people find their own fucking inspiration,” he said, loud enough for others to hear.
“Let’s be civil,” one of the selectmen said. The art expert adopted a vacant look.
When the lights went on, Diana, a former friend of ours, spoke about environmental concerns—the broom crowberry, the eastern spade-footed toad, the north harrier hawk, as if those things existed on Aug’s piece of land and no where else on earth. He yawned ostentatiously. Finally, the uneasy, middle-aged son of the dead painter’s dead friend spoke to the room. He owned the Tillman place—it had been left to him to see to its preservation—but he didn’t live there. No one had since Tillman himself. He had an uneasy manner and a sunburned nose he kept touching. A few times his ambivalent eye fell on me. He never said which side of the fight he was on, and it was this aftertaste of uncertainty he left when he sped away from the meeting that re-energized the crowd.
But this was only a hearing, there wouldn’t be a decision tonight, or likely for a long while, maybe a year or more, which meant our plans were on hold indefinitely. The room buzzed with victorious whispers, while Aug’s cool pose only further hardened people against him. The whole thing had begun to seem like a race of biblical concerns; which would come first, the kingdom or the king’s death?
Aug stayed to talk to one of the selectmen, while I went downstairs and outside to wait for him. Just beyond the town hall steps, a woman called my name and waved me over to her group.
“We’re wondering how you feel about all this, Alice,” she said. The others looked at me expectantly. “You’ve been notably quiet on the subject. You’re his wife, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have an opinion of your own.” The men laughed moronically.
These people had known August and me from the days when we were still invited to their parties, before all this grief about a house that didn’t even exist yet. Aug had watched their sacred sunsets dip behind the horizon and he’d swirled his drink covetously; he didn’t hide the fact that this was exactly what he wanted for himself. I suspected that they disliked him even then because they thought he was crude and avaricious. But to me, their faded clothes, old station wagons, frayed sneakers, damp summer houses, long, academic vacations—their hidden affluence in a world of desperation—was the crudest and falsest of all. They already had what they wanted.
“Yes, tell us how you feel about this,” another woman urged.
As a second, younger wife, I knew they’d always suspected me of marrying Aug for his money. I was blond, strong shouldered, a mystery they thought they understood, and they’d assumed that I could be their instrument of persuasion. These women, these almost but never friends of mine, these pursuers.
“How do I feel?” I asked, smiling and pressing a hand to my chest where my heart stomped with rage at them. “I’m really looking forward to our new house. It’s going to be beautiful, the sight of water from every window.”
Their heads tilted like dogs; was I fucking with them? I lifted the hair from my neck and let it fall again as though nothing bothered me except a little summer night’s heat. The men kicked at the dirt. I was not like their wives; I knew I was still beautiful. I turned to see Aug making his way down from the second floor, his hand grasping the railing. Maybe these Shoreline Citizens thought they would beat him down eventually, believed that no man could withstand public opinion that shunned him and called him a heartless, selfish prick, but they didn’t know Aug and didn’t understand that if you’re hated and you’re facing the end of your life, none of that mattered. Or that it only produced the opposite effect. He would fight forever.
His depth perception was newly shaky from the Aldactone, and his sneakered foot hovered over each riser. His reading glasses, perched on the top of his head, reflected the moonlight. Every step, compromised as it was, seemed to say screw you to the others, I’ll build my big house and outlive all of you. I was frozen with worry for him and the way his wide mouth was open as if a breath of health might blow in and cure him. Near the bottom, he gazed out and something like dread crossed his face and clouded his eyes. I like to think it was that he knew what was about to happen, and not about the way the people looked at him with such contempt. His legs folded, his head dropped in resignation, and he rolled over himself and down the last seven wooden stairs. His forehead hit the bottom granite stoop, his glasses went flying into the thick groundcover, and he curled into their tiny leaves, and then into himself.
There was a sickening inhale of the crowd as I rushed to Aug. No one else moved. He blinked like a baby while the two-inch gash on his forehead filled with blood, flooded his eyes and mixed with the pasty make-up. I tried to shield him and hold his twitching hands in mine. When he looked up at me, I knew he could see that I was alone with him, that behind me were not people to help, but just the white, indifferent clapboards of the town hall, and beyond that, the starless sky. I was a mourning bride without a train of concern. Aug began to shake and so did I. His head fell heavy in my hands. I was by myself, the ground soft under me, the cold heat of other bodies at a distance. Was this the end? Blood twined through his hair and my fingers.
“Will someone help me?” I yelled. “Please?”
Some of these Shoreline Citizens might be falling down stairs themselves soon, or clutching their heart on a benign summer evening, and now they were caught in their own dilemma of helping a man they’d sworn not to help. But they weren’t terrible people, and they finally began to stir and move towards us. Someone grabbed a blanket from a car, someone put a hand on my back. If they didn’t know Aug was sick before, they knew it now. But they were unsure of the outcome, like a group of kids that suspects it has gone too far.
Diana bent down and said something to me, but I blocked her self-righteous gawking. The EMTs came, and at the hospital, August’s head was scanned and stitched, and I explained his condition and medications so many times, I wondered if the doctors were trying to break me down like a criminal. I drove us home just as it was getting light out, and Aug kept his hand on my leg not only out of affection, I thought, but out of a need to hold on to something that wouldn’t escape his grasp. He was humiliated and silent. I told him he looked like a hero in a war photo, his face bruised and puffy and a startling white bandage around his head at a jaunty angle, but he didn’t react. I was ridiculously jocular and scared. I stopped at the town hall to dig around for Aug’s glasses, but couldn’t find them. My hands came up wet and empty. Back at the small house Aug had lived in for only one summer with his first wife and their daughter, and now me, he went up to bed. I pulled the shades down against the promised heat and unfolded a cool sheet over his legs. During that long day, I was captive in the house, surrounded by a forest of scrub pines brushing against each other and the watery feeling of having been spared something terrible.
Years before we were married, I had tutored Aug’s eight-year-old daughter, Molly, in reading. Her school might have given her the help she needed, but I saw that her father wanted to protect his only child from whatever label might be pinned on her—slow or dumb or worse. I wondered what had been pinned on him as a kid—Jew, shrimp, kike (all that and shit poor too, it turned out). Molly had eczema on the inside