THE FALL

Mr. Walker had never been one of my favorites amongst my parents’ friends, but he sank to the very bottom of the list after I heard a rumor that my mother had had an affair with him. Heard a rumor. I struggled with how to say that. Heard. Was told. Learned. I settled on "heard a rumor" because to this day I’m not sure exactly what happened between my mother and Mr. Walker. It may have been more of a flirtation or an indiscretion than what I would today call an affair, but hearing about it as a teenager changed the way I looked at my parents and their marriage, which up until then I had thought of as rock solid in the way that I guess most kids did at the time. 

We didn’t think a lot about divorce or infidelity then. Growing up in a Catholic neighborhood, those weren’t things that happened very often – at least divorce didn’t – and they seemed to me to be part of the world of movie stars rather than of the world my family lived in.

I know something happened, because of the way my mother reacted the one time I broached the subject with her, but she didn’t provide any details then, and I was – and remain, I guess – too embarrassed to pursue it any further. I never even asked my father about it, but there was one oblique comment he made a little while later that confirmed to me that there was some secret, or at least something that he and my mom had decided to put behind them. Now that they have been married for fifty years and Mr. Walker has been dead for nearly thirty, I guess they have successfully buried whatever it was.

The affair – if in fact that’s what it was -- had happened years before I heard about it, somewhere between the time I was born and my youngest sister Katherine came along. I found out about it not from either of my parents, or from Mr. Walker, but because of a nasty comment made by Jackie Reilly, who went to school with Katherine. Katherine was six years younger than I, and so she was still going to the Catholic primary school at our church when I was in my senior year at the public high school. Both schools were within walking distance of our house, and since the high school let out a half-hour earlier than the Catholic school, I sometimes – if I had hung out talking with friends at all – was walking home when Katherine and her friends emerged from their school’s front door. Our other sister, Elizabeth, who was between Katherine and me in age, would have been going to my high school except that she had been placed in a special "accelerated" program – they weren’t calling it "gifted" yet – and was bused to a school downtown where that program was housed. She didn’t arrive home on the bus until about four thirty. My older brother, Paul, was away at college by this time.

On this particular day – it was in the middle of the week, I know, because I had to go to school the next day, but I don’t remember whether it was a Tuesday, a Wednesday or a Thursday – I spotted Katherine as soon as she appeared in the doorway. She was moving at a pretty fast clip as she headed down the stairs. Then I saw her take a tumble. Kids around her squealed and I ran into the schoolyard to help. When I got to the stairs, Katherine was sprawled at the bottom, face down, screaming.

A couple of the nuns had come out to see what was happening, and one of them shooed the other students away while the other tended to Katherine. Although I told the nun doing crowd control that I was Katherine’s brother, she made me stay back with the students watching as the other nun helped Katherine to her feet. She wasn’t hurt badly, but both of her knees were bloody, and she had what looked to be bad scrapes on her nose and chin. Blood was dripping from her face; since it was still warm outside, she wasn’t wearing a coat or sweater or anything over her school uniform, a plaid jumper and white blouse. I saw a couple of red spots on the front of her blouse, and the tops of her white knee-highs were stained red from the blood running down off her knees.

As the nun dried Katherine’s tears with a handkerchief and led her back into the school building to clean up, I heard a girl’s voice behind me. "Serves her right. Her mother’s a whore."

As I’m sure you can imagine, the sound of those words hit me like a rock in the back of the head. I spun around, and when I did I saw Jackie Reilly standing with Mary Cattrall and two other girls I didn’t know.

"Who said that?"

I’m sure I glared at Jackie. I was pretty sure I had recognized her voice. Mary stuttered and was in general very meek, so I didn’t think it would have been her, and of course since I didn’t know the other girls I had no reason to suspect them. Jackie was a likely suspect at any rate, being the kind of girl who always seemed to be involved in personal intrigues with the other kids, the kind of girl who would try to tell my sister who to like and who to shun on any given day. Besides, she had what I took to be a nasty grin on her face and when she heard my question her eyes narrowed accusingly.

"Patty Walker’s parents are getting divorced, and Patty told me it was because her father had lots of girlfriends and your mother was one of them. She said her mom was tired of her dad’s whores."

Patty Walker, the girl Jackie was talking about, didn’t go to Sacred Heart. Her family was Presbyterian, one of the few families on our block that didn’t belong to our parish. Besides the Walkers there were the Cohens, who of course were Jewish, and the Andersons, who like the Walkers went to Hunters Creek Presbyterian, a big, modern-looking church a few miles away that was known amongst my friends for the summer day camp that even some of the Catholic kids went to, although my siblings and I never did.

"You’re crazy," I shot back at Jackie. "I just saw the Walkers over at Brysons last Thursday and they were all together." This was true. Brysons was a department store where we bought most of our clothes. I had gone there with my mom and my sisters to get a new pair of shoes, and we had waved to the Walkers in the parking lot. I hadn’t noticed anything strange at their house over the weekend, but then I don’t think I had paid any attention to their house. It was on our side of the street so I would have had to walk down to see it, and I had had no reason to go that way in the past several days.

Jackie wasn’t finished.

"Yeah, well Mrs. Walker made Mr. Walker move out on Saturday, and now he’s living with Patty’s aunt and uncle. Patty came over to my house yesterday and she was crying. She said her parents had a big fight Friday night and it was awful. She says she hates her dad and all of his whore girlfriends. She said she’ll never talk to Katherine or Elizabeth again ‘cause of what your mom did."

All these years later, I can still feel the way the redness rushed over my face and a sharp pain slammed the pit of my stomach at the same time. There was something about Jackie’s accusation that rang true. At least, I could tell this was a story she had heard, not something she had made up. It had that quality of passed-on gossip – the details might not all be there, but the central charge was accurate.

My parents weren’t particularly close to the Walkers anymore – no more than to any of the other neighbors -- but I did remember that when I was little, there was a period of time when Mr. Walker came down to our house a lot. He was a fireman, so I guess he was off duty during the day sometimes. My dad always worked in an office, and was gone from breakfast until dinner – a nine-to-fiver, he would say – but Mr. Walker would stop over some mornings and visit with Mom. I remembered them sitting in the living room, talking and smoking. Worse, I remembered that what I didn’t like about Mr. Walker was that when he came over, Mom sometimes made me go play in the back yard, or if it was nasty out, down in the club room in the basement.

Still, I had to defend my mother.

"You need to watch what you say about people. I’m sure your parents wouldn’t want to know that you were spreading nasty rumors about people at school." Speaking the words calmed me down a little bit. I decided to finish the exchange by trying on a tone of adult condescension, figuring I could carry it off due to the six years between our ages. "And right in the shadow of Sacred Heart, no less. It’s just shameful."

I was trying for the sound of a disapproving father, but looking back I realize I probably came off more like a scolding mother. My dad would never have said something like "in the shadow of Sacred Heart." Nope. That was my mom talking. Still, the words evidently did the trick, because Jackie shot me one more dirty look, then turned and walked out of the schoolyard. The three girls who had been with her – who had looked down at the ground and shuffled uncomfortably during our entire exchange – followed Jackie out.

I hoped that not too many of the other kids had been paying attention. If they were, they had enough manners to make pretend they had not. Once the excitement of the fall and of Katherine’s crying had passed, the schoolyard had emptied out pretty quickly. Just a few of us were left.

A few seconds later, Katherine reappeared at the door of the school, hand in hand with the nun who had taken her inside to clean up. They walked carefully down the stairs and over to greet me. Katherine had stopped crying and was managing a weak smile. The nun placed Katherine’s hand in mine, then gently patted our joined hands in hers. "Nothing that won’t heal over before her wedding day," she said with a smile. And indeed, with the dirt cleaned off, my sister’s injuries looked much less serious. Just a scratch or two on her nose and her chin. The scabs should be gone in a few days. And her knees were covered with just large-sized Band Aids, which told me those scrapes weren’t as bad as they looked when freshly bloodied.

I kept hold of Katherine’s hand as we walked home, and she allowed it, although normally at ten she would have objected to being treated like a baby by her big brother. As soon as we were out of hearing of the nuns, I began a quiet interrogation.

"What happened there?"

"Somebody tripped me. I felt a foot stick out."

"Probably just an accident."

"I don’t think so. I think it was Jackie Reilly. She and some of her friends were being mean to me all day. They wouldn’t let me sit at their table at lunch." I could hear her voice start to tremble. She was tearing up again. "They were saying mean things about Mom. They said she and Mr. Walker had an affair. They said Patty’s parents are getting divorced because of Mom."

I figured this had probably been the case, but it bothered me to hear it from Katherine anyway. Some part of me had been hoping that Jackie had kept it inside until she got to me. I tried to reassure Katherine.

"Jackie’s a little twit. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Mom would never do anything like that."

"That’s what I said, but they just kept getting meaner and meaner. Jackie said Patty told her all about it."

"Mom’ll put a stop to it. She’ll call Jackie’s Mom. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to her." That seemed to calm Katherine down, and we strolled the rest of the way home peacefully.

When we got to our house, Mom was in the kitchen, but she poked her head around the doorway that led from the kitchen to the dining room. "You guys are late today. What took you so long?" Our house – my parents still live there -- was long and narrow, and the downstairs rooms came all in a row: the living room, where we had entered, separated by a wide archway from the dining room, and then finally the kitchen. From Mom’s vantagepoint, she could see all the way to the front door.

"What happened to your knees, Katherine?"

"She tripped on the stairs coming out of school," I volunteered. "The nuns cleaned her up. That’s why we took so long getting home."

"Oh well, I guess you’ll heal over before your wedding day," my mother said, echoing the nun at school. Strange that they would both be linking a childhood injury to a long-distant wedding day, but I guess that’s how some people thought about things. Or maybe they both just said it to get Katherine’s mind on something else. Mom was very matter-of-fact most of the time in dealing with us kids. We didn’t get a lot of fussing – she just didn’t work that way. So there was no surprise that she didn’t offer any more words of sympathy about Katherine’s injuries. "You kids had better get started on your homework. I’m making a pot roast for dinner tonight."

Katherine headed for the stairs, and I followed my mother back into the kitchen. I girded myself up, trying to summon the courage to tell Mom what had happened. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I did my best to sound adult and deadly serious, like Gregory Peck in "To Kill A Mockingbird," which I had just seen on TV the previous weekend.

"Mom, we need to talk."

"Sure honey, what’s on your mind?" Mom was at the kitchen sink, peeling vegetables for dinner, and her tone sounded somewhat disinterested.

"Mom, Katherine had some problems at school today. Jackie Reilly and some of the other girls were on her case. I guess Mr. and Mrs. Walker split up last weekend, and Jackie says that Patty told her that Mr. Walker and you –"

"What?" Suddenly interested, Mom came over and sat down at the table. She was obviously shaken up by what she suspected I was about to say.

"Oh, Jesus Christ. Muriel …" She didn’t finish the thought. Muriel was Mrs. Walker’s first name.

For a moment, Mom looked down silently at her hands, her fingers knitted together on the tabletop. When she looked up at me, she seemed to have collected herself. "Listen. You have no way of understanding this, not because you’re stupid but because you just don’t have any experience with these things. Your Dad is a good man. I love him and I’d never do anything to hurt him. When you were little and he worked for Merritt and was going to night school, he was away from the house a lot. He and Horace were really close then, and he asked Horace to look in on us, you and me and Paul and Elizabeth. Katherine wasn’t born yet. So he’d come over sometimes. You probably remember that, don’t you? Well, Muriel was always jealous – she didn’t trust Horace with me. And I’ve got to admit, with your dad gone so much, I probably relied on Horace more than I should have. But I’ve always loved your dad."

She went silent again, then abruptly pushed back her chair and stood up. "This is ridiculous. I don’t have to explain myself," she snapped, then turned around and went back to the sink, where she busied herself peeling carrot, as if suddenly consumed with the seriousness of that task.

Not another word was ever said between my mother and me about what might have happened between her and Mr. Walker. The next day, Mom let Katherine stay home from school. "We’re going to go downtown and have a girls’ day out together," she told me at the breakfast table that morning. "Sometimes mothers and daughters just need to do that."

That afternoon I had cross-country tryouts. When I got home from school, around four thirty, I saw that the car was in the driveway. Mom and Katherine were back from their excursion. Climbing the three stairs to the front porch, I heard female laughter through the open living room window. As I entered the house, I was surprised to see Mom sitting on the living room couch with Mrs. Walker. Sitting in the big armchair, Dad’s chair, was Mrs. Reilly. They were laughing and talking happily, all three of them smoking cigarettes, and I could tell that they’d had a drink or two. Highball glasses with melting ice were sitting on the coffee table. The big glass ashtray at the center of the table was full of butts and ashes.

Katherine and Patty and Jackie were seated around the dining room table, playing Life.

My entry served as a cue for Mrs. Reilly. "Oh Jackie, look what time it is. We need to get on home. Grab your things and let’s go."

Jackie smiled at me as she walked toward the door. None of the rancor of yesterday’s encounter. To this day I don’t know what happened, but Mom had evidently worked some sort of magic on the neighbors and their girls. Mrs. Walker and Patty stayed for dinner that night.

Dad pecked Mrs. Walker on the cheek when he came in, and asked how they were doing.

"Pretty good, considering."

That was all that was said about the situation, at least in my presence. When the Walkers went home, Dad stood out on the sidewalk and watched until they reached their front door, which was visible from the sidewalk in front of our house, though not from our porch.

The next day Katherine went back to school and when I walked past that afternoon, she was chatting with Jackie. She waved me on. "I’m gonna walk home with Jackie. She’s gonna ask her mom if she can come over and do homework with me."

A few weeks later, Dad and I were out front on a Saturday morning, raking leaves before giving the lawn a final mow before winter set in. As sometimes happened, a car sped up the street on the side of our house. The brakes squealed as it came to the stop sign at the corner. It was a convertible, a Pontiac, and in the driver’s seat was Mr. Walker. A youngish woman, a brunette that I recognized as a salesgirl at Brysons, was with him. Mr. Walker looked over at us and waved with his right hand as he hit the accelerator. As he drove off – much too fast for our narrow street, I thought -- I saw that hand stroking the neck of the girl in the passenger seat.

"Jerk," I muttered under my breath. My dad was close enough to hear, but he didn’t react. He watched the car drive off, then went back to raking. That afternoon, while I was watching TV, I heard Dad talking to Mom. "Horace drove by this morning in a new convertible, with a new honey in the front seat. Guess he’s up to his old tricks."

"Well, I think Muriel’s well rid of him," Mom replied. "She seems to be doing just fine on her own. I heard she’s got a job at the public school – she’s making some money and she’s there with Patty. She’s making the best of it."

The week after I graduated from college, an appliance store in a shopping center on the east side of town caught fire. The blaze spread to the other stores in the center, and burned out of control for more than twelve hours. Four firefighters died, and one of them was Horace Walker.

I was at home, relaxing for a couple of weeks before starting my first full-time job, at a bank in Providence. I spotted Mr. Walker’s name in a newspaper article about the fire, and pointed it out to my parents, both of whom looked sincerely stricken by the death.

They went to the viewing at the funeral parlor. When they came home that night my mother was talking animatedly. "I had no idea Muriel had gotten remarried. I haven’t seen her in ages, since she moved back in with her mother. She just never kept in touch with any of us. She looked good, don’t you think? I hate to speak ill of the dead, but I think leaving Horace Walker was the smartest thing she ever did."