The Storyteller (part two)
Jan. 1st, 2009 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beatrice_otterPart One
When Jenny Hill was twenty-eight, Edward Bloom came back to town. She didn’t recognize the name when it started going around; twenty years is a long time, and she’d mostly forgotten her first real childhood crush. He made quite a stir, especially among the ladies of the town, and was quite the topic of conversation. Jenny heard the whole story from Mary Beth Carter, who was Jenny’s second cousin, sister-in-law to Gertie Pyle Buford, but didn’t get along with her at all and so made a point of including Jenny in whatever she could. According to Mary Beth, Edward Bloom was a case of a local boy making good, because even if he wasn’t quite a local boy, he’d made an impression in Spectre the first time he was there, and Ashton was close enough to count.
People left Spectre all the time, looking for jobs, and wasn’t often they came back. Certainly not if they’d actually made it. Wasn’t much to come back to, in Spectre. One dusty street of stores, a church, and some houses surrounded by swamp and cotton fields. Even if you disbelieved some of the obvious exaggerations in Edward Bloom’s stories (Jenny did, especially hearing them second or third hand when the tall tales had gotten taller and the skill of the teller had shrunk considerably), well, he did have that flashy car so he must be doing something right.
Jenny mostly kept to herself, as always, and ignored the fuss. People in Spectre talked, and occasionally they even talked to her, but Jenny’d learned that life was much easier if she stayed on the fringes of the town’s activities. She gave piano lessons, she showed up to work at whatever the ladies of the church were doing, she went to church, she visited her Momma. She didn’t bother nobody, and nobody bothered her. And after a few days all the fuss died down, and things were pretty much back to normal. Edward Bloom had left again. That was the way of things, in Spectre.
Except he came back. Again. And it wasn’t because he sold so many of his gadgets—nobody in Spectre could afford them—so folks figured he must’ve come back because he liked the town. Which good taste, along with the further adventures of his life story that he showered on anyone who’d stay still long enough, was enough to firmly cement him in the town’s books as a son of Spectre, a conquering hero returned to prove that local boys really could make good.
By the time he came back the third time, and started buying up everything in sight, Jenny still hadn’t laid eyes on the man. Partly it was because she didn’t go into town much; partly it was because she’d taken care not to draw his attention. Jenny didn’t hold much with tale-telling and pie-in-the-sky stories. Charlie had cured her of that. And she couldn’t figure out his angle; wasn’t anything in the town as “historic” and “picturesque” as he seemed to think, and much as her hometown pride might wish to convince her otherwise, Jenny smelled a rat somewhere.
So it wasn’t until most of the town (including her Daddy’s virtually bankrupt store, to her mother’s disgust) belonged to one Edward Bloom and his “cultural trust” that she happened to make his acquaintance for the first time. Unlike all the other folks he’d bought out, Jenny was in no danger of losing her home. She’d inherited it outright, and as her needs were few and her wants simple she’d never had any reason to mortgage the place. She might starve, but she’d never be homeless. But it seemed that the great Mister Edward Bloom couldn’t stand to see a place as run-down as hers sitting even on the edges of the postcard-perfect city he was trying to turn Spectre into, so he stopped on by to see what arrangements could be made.
Jenny’d been playing the piano when he’d climbed her front porch and knocked on her door. She’d been working on that piece for a while; the piano was her main joy and comfort in life, and mastering a new piece was one of the highlights of her month, and she’d almost gotten this one down perfect. So she didn’t hear him, engrossed in music as she was. It wasn’t until he’d pushed open the screen door and cleared his throat she’d even realized someone was there.
“Yes?” she said, turning around, raising an eyebrow at the stranger before her. Only one person it could be, for there was only one person in town she hadn’t grown up with: Edward Bloom himself, the legend in the flesh, and every bit as handsome as the ladies of the town had said. Charlie had been handsome, too.
“Miz Hill, I’m Edward Bloom,” he said, with a smile as wide and cheery as could be without splitting his face completely in two. He used his hat to fan himself, and somehow he’d managed to keep his shirt free of sweat even in the beastly hot spell Spectre’d been having. Jenny herself was barefoot with no stockings to trap heat; after all, only her students would be seeing her. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me—I’ve taken on this town as a project.” He came in and sat on her couch without waiting for an invitation. “It’s the perfect Southern town, a piece of our heritage that could be lost if action isn’t taken to protect it. I’d surely hate for it to pass away, Ma’am, and that’s the truth. So I’m trying to ensure it’s survival as a model for all the surrounding area as to what the South should look like. And I was—”
Jenny cut him off. “You think a model of a Southern town is one that belongs to you?”
Bloom blinked. “Well, no, ma’am, but that’s why it sets up in a trust, so it’s not just mine, but it’s available to give people a helping hand when they need it, and—”
“I don’t need a helping hand,” Jenny said. “I do all right on my own. You’ve already got my parents’ place and store; don’t seem as if you need any more of my family’s property. So you just pretty up the rest of the town and leave me in peace, and we’ll all be happy.”
“Your parents?” Bloom said, a frown on his face.
“Mister and Mrs. Ernest Beamen,” Jenny said.
He blinked, and stared. “Jenny? Little Jenny Beamen?” A smile broke out over his face, even broader than the first one. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, that one. “Why, last time I saw you you were only ‘bout knee-high, always hangin’ round. You’ve sure grown into a pretty little thing, haven’t you? How’ve you been?”
“I get by,” Jenny said. “Which is why I don’t need or want your help. Thank you for your time.” She stood, forcing him to do the same.
“Jenny—Mrs. Hill, I mean—perhaps I could come back and discuss this with your husband, sometime.”
“I haven’t seen Mister Hill in almost ten years, for which I am thankful,” Jenny said, starting towards the door to show him out. “And even if he were here, the house has always been in my name, and that’s exactly where it’s going to stay. I wouldn’t bother coming back; my answer isn’t going to change.”
“Well, here’s my card if you should change your mind,” Bloom said in desperation, holding it out as he was herded to the door.
Jenny didn’t take it, just stood there till he left. Then she went back to her piano. She had time for a few etudes before her next student arrived.
Bloom left town again, and Jenny half-hoped he’d given up. He hadn’t, worse luck for her. Instead, he was back three weeks later, with a set of tools and some paint and set about the house fixing all the things that were too big for Jenny to do herself. She let him, because if he was going to fix things without charging her for them or treating her to a disapproving silence she had no objection to letting him wear himself out with working. There were always too many projects in need of attention, as they tended to pile up and it took her time to save the money to pay for having a man come out and fix them for her. And all she had to do to keep the list of projects shrinking was let him patter away at her while he did it.
The first day, and the second, Bloom spent trying to convince her to buy in to his little scheme. Oh, he talked of other things, but always leading back to his vision of what Spectre should be. Unfortunately for him, Jenny was not impressed and always had a sharp retort for what he considered his strongest arguments. He kept shooting her perplexed looks, as if he wasn’t accustomed to people not falling in with his ideas. Well, if the way the citizens of Spectre related to him was at all typical, he probably wasn’t. It was probably good for him to get a taste of disappointment, Jenny decided, and her refusals took on a cheerful, good-natured tone that served to confuse him even further. She did so love helping people.
After those two days he spent working on her porch, replacing all the rotted boards, Bloom left town again to go back to work selling things. He was gone almost a month that time, conducting his business and keeping his schemes in motion via telephone and letter. When he came back, it was with the biggest man Jenny had ever seen, and the two of them set to work fixing places where the house had settled to make the floor level again.
It was something Jenny had never thought to add to the list of projects; there were many more immediate needs, and such major work to the house would have cost more than she could afford. Jenny was torn between a wish that he’d take care of things like the rotting porch that were on the list she’d given him, and awed that he’d take on such a major project for her. Bloom didn’t help any by keeping the conversation away from his plans for Spectre. Those, she could have defended herself against handily. Stories of the world outside Spectre, stories without agenda or barb, those she could not dismiss. The second day, for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, she wore makeup and did her hair on a day other than Sunday for the first time in a long time.
He came frequently after that, though never regularly, sometimes with Karl and sometimes alone, and slowly the old house began to look less ramshackle and more respectable. Slowly, too, Jenny began to look forward to his coming. To having someone to talk to. To not being alone.
“People are beginning to talk, you know,” Momma said one day over a glass of sweet tea. Jenny had come over to help with the spring cleaning; some of it was getting to be a bit beyond Momma’s capacity, these days. After a long morning of work they’d more than earned the break.
“People are always talking about something,” Jenny said, which was true if not necessarily to the point. She sipped her tea and looked around Momma’s kitchen, with its peeling paint, and reflected that with the nice pretty bright wallpaper Edward had just put up, and with the cabinets he’d fixed and the new appliances she’d made him let her help pay for, her kitchen was actually nicer than Momma’s. “What are they talking about now?”
There were only two types of women in Spectre. The members of the first type, which included (or was assumed to include) the majority of the female population, were good—prim and proper and never said or did anything as might spoil their reputation (though the reputations of others were fair game). Gertie Buford was the acknowledged queen of the younger ladies and darling of the older ones in that set.
The members of the second type were the fallen women, those who did not measure up to those exacting standards. As an abandoned wife, and one who hadn’t had the decency to move back in with her parents, and who didn’t go out of her way to court the good will of the arbiters of Spectre’s social life, and who had once said in public that she was better off without him, Jenny was firmly in the second category, if generally more pitied than censured. Being the butt of gossip was hardly new.
“You and Mister Bloom,” her Momma replied. “He’s been coming around to your place quite a lot, and both of you married to other people.”
“He’s still hoping to get me to sign over to him,” Jenny said. “Thinks he can wear me down. He won’t but he can’t give up and admit defeat, so he keeps coming over to try his luck, and he uses my list of projects as an excuse. Nothing’s happened.”
“That’s not the way the story’s told,” Momma said.
Jenny shrugged. “They’re just jealous he’s spending so much time with me and not them—you know how everyone loves his company. If they wanted to keep it longer, they should’ve tried playing hard to get.”
“Mmm.” Momma said. “Just be sure that you don’t end up gotten.” It wasn’t a reference to Edward’s plans for the town.
“I think I learned my lesson about that with Charlie,” Jenny said, and changed the subject.
Still, despite her previous terrible experience with men, and the knowledge that precarious as her reputation and circumstance were in town they could only get worse, Jenny longed for Edward’s company in a way that no married woman should. She began fixing things for him, cookies and pies and cakes to go with the meals she cooked him for working on her place. She’d sit close to him while he worked, or while he was eating, and bask in his presence. She began daydreaming, telling herself stories about what life would have been like if she’d married Edward instead of Charlie, and Edward came home to her instead of to a woman whose name she didn’t even know. Edward was all the things Charlie should have been, and wasn’t. His stories built people up, instead of tearing them down. He had ambitions, but he worked hard to achieve them. He left, but he came back.
And when one day he kissed her, well, it didn’t take any thought at all to fall into her fantasy and shut her eyes to the consequences.
Some six months later the house was just about unrecognizable as the dilapidated shack it’d been in all Jenny’s memory of the place, and Jenny’s story that Eddie only kept coming around to pester her about signing over to him was wearing mighty thin. She was pretty sure that the only reason the Buford girls were still her pupils was because there was no one else in town to teach piano, and even that might not be enough to keep them if the affair went on much longer. Even given the loss of income which she could ill afford, Jenny couldn’t bring herself to be too concerned; these six months with Eddie had been the best of her life.
He arrived one evening just as her last pupil of the day finished with his lesson, and young Billy Joe Weber stayed to hear a story while Jenny went into the kitchen to fix supper. The two were seated in what Aunt Bertha had called the parlor, except with decent furniture, the plaster fixed, and clean it was a far more inviting room.
Edward’s story was one she’d heard a few times before, but it was as entertaining as ever the way Eddie told it. Young children sneaking through a swamp in the dead of night to see a witch with a glass eyeball. Quite a story. Jenny herself had never snuck out at night as a child to do any bit of mischief, but she had no trouble picturing Eddie as the sort who would. The glass eyeball itself reminded her of old Aunt Bertha, whom she hadn’t thought of in ages. Jenny smiled, as she got the chicken frying, and wondered what that old bat would think if she saw the house now. (She carefully did not, however, think about what Aunt Bertha’s reaction would be to some of the things her great-niece was doing in the house with the one who’d fixed it up so nicely.)
“Wow, Mister Bloom, what did you see?” Billy Joe asked excitedly.
“Well, now, I couldn’t possibly tell you,” Eddie said. “On account of its being a mystical message from the otherworld intended for my eyes alone.”
“Ooh,” Billy Joe said.
Jenny shook her head. Eddie was so good with children; for a second, she could imagine Billy Joe was their own, and the three of them were a family. Or perhaps a little girl ….
“Did you ever see the witch again?”
“Once. On the day I left Ashton, she was there. When I saw her, the crowd that had come to see me off parted like Moses and the Red Sea, and she beckoned me over with a gnarled hand. Not wishing to offend such a perilous creature, I hurried to her side for whatever words of wisdom she could impart to me.” Eddie’s voice dropped conspiratorially. “She leaned over to my ear and whispered these words: the biggest fish in the river gets that way by not being caught.”
Jenny almost dropped the skillet.
That was what Aunt Bertha had told her, long ago. But how had Eddie come to hear of it? He’d been in Spectre twenty years ago, and he’d mentioned talking with her then; she had only hazy memories of him, but it was possible she’d told him the story. And that glass eye—surely it was too much of a coincidence that the witch had her aunt’s house location (at the edge of a swamp), her glass eye, and her saying. Eddie must have taken those details and grafted them on to the personality of some old witch from Ashton, to make a better story out of it. There. Mystery solved.
Except … where was she, in the story? The witch was her aunt, Jenny was the one who’d spent time alone with her and impressed the other schoolchildren, Jenny was the one who’d looked into the eye, Jenny was the one who’d been warned not to let herself get hooked. And Jenny had been completely replaced by Eddie.
“What does that mean, Mister Bloom?”
“Well, Billy Joe, I don’t rightly know. But once I get that figured out, I’ll be sure and let you know.”
No, of course he hadn’t figured the words out, Jenny thought bitterly, they were never meant for him in the first place. And Billy Joe wasn’t her son, and Eddie wasn’t her husband, and you can’t live in a fantasy, at least not for long.
Later, over dinner, she asked him about it.
“What? Jenny, where did you get that idea?” Eddie asked. “Everything in my stories really has happened to me, one point or another. I don’t make it up.”
Jenny raised her eyebrows at him, dry as a bone.
Eddie ducked his head like a shame-faced little boy. “Well, I do embellish it some, but God’s honest truth it really all has happened to me, one time or another.”
“And the embellishments?” Jenny persisted. “Because my old Aunt Bertha had a glass eye just like that witch, and I looked in it as a young child of eight or ten, and spent a half-hour alone in her presence for which I got much respect for at school for the remainder of my time there. Shortly thereafter she told me about big fish getting that way by not being caught—and unlike you, I do understand what she meant. So I would appreciate it, if you tell stories involving me and my Aunt Bertha again, if you would properly attribute them.”
“Jenny, I’m telling you …” Eddie shook his head. “Is this because I haven’t been paying enough attention to you? I’m sorry I haven’t been around much, they’ve been expanding my territory and I’m spending more time on the road. I’ll try to do better, but I’m stretched real thin at the moment, and …”
Jenny sat back, listening to him drone on, and realized that for all the care and time he’d lavished on her, for all his hard work, she was just a bit player in his story. It really was all about Edward Bloom, in his mind—his larger-than-life stories, his job, his family back home, that perfect wife and son he only rarely mentioned in her presence. Even sitting right in front of her, he couldn’t hear her concerns over his own assumptions. Because of course, the only thing any woman could possibly want once their house was all pretty and fixed up was Edward Bloom’s attention.
That night, after Eddie was asleep and snoring gently next to her, Jenny stared at the ceiling. After a while, she got up quietly and started rummaging through his wallet. Didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for: pictures of Eddie and his wife Sandra and their son Will. They’d been nothing more than names in Eddie’s stories to her, until now. Not real people with faces and stories of their own. She wondered if that was the way Eddie saw them, or if they were just bits and pieces of his story to him, the necessary embellishments no Southern man could live without. Or if she was the embellishment and they the real people. She sat there for a long time.
“You’re awfully quiet this morning, Jenny,” Eddie said over breakfast.
“So, your wife Sandra,” Jenny said. “Chances of you ever leaving her and young Will are fairly slim, I imagine.” She didn’t look up at him as she said it. She wouldn’t want him to, anyway—the kind of man who’d do that to his wife and son was not the kind of man she wanted Eddie to be. She’d never wish her own pain on another woman, especially not one with a young son to raise.
“Of course not—Jenny, have I ever given you reason to think—I love Sandra and Will, you know that—”
“Your fooling around on her doesn’t do a very good job of proving it,” Jenny said dryly. “If you loved her so much, and if you were never going to be serious with me, why’d you do it? Why start something you never intended to finish properly?”
“She’s the kind … you’re a woman who … Jenny, you’re not being fair,” Eddie protested. “You know I care for you a great deal and I never meant to hurt or mislead you, it’s just—”
“She’s the kind of woman you marry, and I’m not, is that it?” She kept her voice down; didn’t think anyone would be passing by this time of the morning, but better safe than sorry and this was one conversation she didn’t want the whole town talking about.
“Now Jenny, you know I’d never say that to you,” Eddie said, and give him credit he was both perfectly sincere and telling the truth. He was too much of a gentleman for that.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Jenny said. His silence was answer enough. She scraped the eggs on her plate around, staring at them as she made pieces of abstract art like they had in magazines. “Eddie, when you leave this morning, I don’t believe you’d better come back.” She took a bite, never looking up at him.
After a few minutes she heard his chair scrape back, and he left the table. Her fork clattered to the plate and she buried her head in her hands. She’d thought she’d learned from Charlie not to get caught. Her shoulders shook with the effort of holding in tears. Eddie was rattling around in the bedroom, probably getting his stuff together and making sure that this time, unlike all previous visits, nothing got left behind. She’d given him a drawer a month or two back, and there were always odds and ends that didn’t quite make it back into the suitcase. Not this time.
She got up and scraped the remains of breakfast into the slops bucket. Neither of them had eaten much. Jenny, at least, wasn’t hungry. But at least, she reflected as she ran the water for the dishes, this time she’d learned to free herself from the hook.
“Jenny?”
She turned around slowly, knowing this was the last time she’d ever see him. He stood in the door, suitcase in hand, handsome as ever, and for a brief second she wanted to tell him to stay, let her live in the fantasy for just a few months longer. “Yes?” she said instead.
“If ever you get in trouble and need something—anything at all—you call me, y’hear?” he said. He stretched out his hand, and there was a business card in it.
Jenny looked at it for a few seconds; she’d never had his phone number. If he’d given it to her before, that sense of being part of his life might have averted last night’s painful revelation for at least a few months longer. She couldn’t say if she was glad or sad he was only offering it now. She didn’t reach out to take it.
“Jenny, please,” Eddie said. “I don’t want to have to worry about you, all by yourself out here.”
“All right,” Jenny said unsteadily. She took it delicately, thumb and forefinger, as if it might bite. “I’ll walk you to the door,” she said.
They walked in silence, not touching, and just inside the door Jenny gave him a peck on the cheek. He stood there, eyes closed, waiting for more, a muscle in his jaw clenching, and when nothing was forthcoming he took his hat from the peg he’d attached to the wall himself, stuck it on his head, and walked out. Jenny stood in the doorway and watched Edward Bloom drive away for the last time.
Then she walked in to her bedroom. It looked emptier, somehow, without Eddie’s coat slung over the back of a chair. She crossed the room and opened his drawer, to make sure he’d got everything she told herself. She stood there, staring down at it. He hadn’t taken everything, it seemed. That contract to sign over the house, just waiting for her signature, lay at the bottom. She didn’t know whether it was a message or just an oversight. She dropped the card in on top of it, closed the door, and did her best to forget about it.
***
When Jenny Hill was thirty-eight, her Daddy got cancer. Him being only sixty-two, and in generally good health otherwise, and the tumor being small and caught early, he’d probably survive and live a good long time if they could cut it out of him now before it had a chance to spread. Problem was, none of the family had the money to pay for it, and not having title to their home or store any more, couldn’t mortgage anything to get it. (Of course, if they still had title they’d probably have lost everything years ago, the way the economy was in Spectre, Momma was quick to point out when questions got asked.)
Jenny still had title to her own place, but ten years of no man around had again taken their toll and if it wasn’t as bad as it had been it still was no postcard. Nobody in town wanted to buy it, and Mister Buford down at the bank didn’t want to deal with her—fallout from her affair with Eddie. Well, that and his wife Gertie’s life-long dislike of Jenny. She hadn’t thought it was possible to be more ostracized than she had been since her husband left, and hadn’t thought she’d mind too much, but it was and she did, particularly now it might cost her Daddy his life.
In the bustle of tests, taking care of Daddy, and trying to raise the money for surgery, it took Jenny two weeks to remember Edward Bloom’s offer. She’d sworn she’d never call him for help, but this was Daddy’s life they were talking about; Jenny’d do a darn sight more degrading things than asking Edward to save her Daddy. She put it off for another week, debating with herself. What would Edward expect in return? This was more than a few hours’ work on the house—a lot more. That kind of money didn’t grown on trees and unless things had changed dramatically for Edward, he was comfortable but no more well-off than that.
But in the end, it didn’t matter; she called him anyway. He listened, he gave his condolences, he chatted for a while and caught up with current events in Spectre, he wired the money. He didn’t ask for anything, and he never stopped by Spectre to not-ask in person. Jenny hadn’t thought he’d demand a resumption of their arrangement in return for her Daddy’s life, he wasn’t that kind of a man; but she had wondered if he might use her contact as an excuse to drop on by and see if she had any interest in renewing their acquaintance. If he had, she wasn’t sure she’d have turned him down. She was awful lonely, these days; even the children gave her a wide berth. One or two of her students had let slip that some of the children who played ball on the field next to her house thought her a witch. She’d stopped going to church, not able to stand the whispering when she did, although with Daddy sick she’d been going again to pray.
The surgery was a success. Daddy recovered quickly, and further tests showed the cancer to be in remission. After he regained his strength and went back to work at the store, Jenny went into her bedroom, and opened a drawer for the second time in ten years. She signed the contract, and put it in the mail with a note saying Thank you for the money. I pay my debts. Jenny.
***
When Jenny Hill was forty-eight, she met Will Bloom for the first time. He had his father’s eyes, but his hair was much darker, which Jenny wondered at considering his mother had been a blonde in the one picture Jenny had seen of her. She showed him in to her living room. He sat down on an old couch covered in brown and yellow flowers that Jenny had picked out with his father, and handed her a file folder with an old document she recognized in it. Will came to her with the contract and the news that his father was dying, and wanted to know if she’d had an affair with his father. More than that, he wanted to know who his father had really been, the truth beneath the legend Eddie had built for himself.
And what should she tell him? Jenny had learned from Edward Bloom that in order to be the main character in a story, you had to tell it yourself; but Will wasn’t looking for Jenny, not really, he was looking for Eddie reflected in her, and for once Jenny was content to let that be. She thought of the stories Eddie’d told her during their time together, twenty years ago, thought of all the things she could say that would do nothing but hurt them both even at this late date. She thought of the way she remembered Eddie, and the way Eddie would want to be remembered, especially by his son and beloved wife. And if she was the one telling the story, and there were indeed only two types of women in the world and the role of perfect woman were already taken, well, she didn’t think Eddie’d begrudge her a few embellishments of her own.
“The first thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that your father never meant to end up here. Yet he did, twice. The first time he was early and the second time, he was late …”
When Jenny Hill was twenty-eight, Edward Bloom came back to town. She didn’t recognize the name when it started going around; twenty years is a long time, and she’d mostly forgotten her first real childhood crush. He made quite a stir, especially among the ladies of the town, and was quite the topic of conversation. Jenny heard the whole story from Mary Beth Carter, who was Jenny’s second cousin, sister-in-law to Gertie Pyle Buford, but didn’t get along with her at all and so made a point of including Jenny in whatever she could. According to Mary Beth, Edward Bloom was a case of a local boy making good, because even if he wasn’t quite a local boy, he’d made an impression in Spectre the first time he was there, and Ashton was close enough to count.
People left Spectre all the time, looking for jobs, and wasn’t often they came back. Certainly not if they’d actually made it. Wasn’t much to come back to, in Spectre. One dusty street of stores, a church, and some houses surrounded by swamp and cotton fields. Even if you disbelieved some of the obvious exaggerations in Edward Bloom’s stories (Jenny did, especially hearing them second or third hand when the tall tales had gotten taller and the skill of the teller had shrunk considerably), well, he did have that flashy car so he must be doing something right.
Jenny mostly kept to herself, as always, and ignored the fuss. People in Spectre talked, and occasionally they even talked to her, but Jenny’d learned that life was much easier if she stayed on the fringes of the town’s activities. She gave piano lessons, she showed up to work at whatever the ladies of the church were doing, she went to church, she visited her Momma. She didn’t bother nobody, and nobody bothered her. And after a few days all the fuss died down, and things were pretty much back to normal. Edward Bloom had left again. That was the way of things, in Spectre.
Except he came back. Again. And it wasn’t because he sold so many of his gadgets—nobody in Spectre could afford them—so folks figured he must’ve come back because he liked the town. Which good taste, along with the further adventures of his life story that he showered on anyone who’d stay still long enough, was enough to firmly cement him in the town’s books as a son of Spectre, a conquering hero returned to prove that local boys really could make good.
By the time he came back the third time, and started buying up everything in sight, Jenny still hadn’t laid eyes on the man. Partly it was because she didn’t go into town much; partly it was because she’d taken care not to draw his attention. Jenny didn’t hold much with tale-telling and pie-in-the-sky stories. Charlie had cured her of that. And she couldn’t figure out his angle; wasn’t anything in the town as “historic” and “picturesque” as he seemed to think, and much as her hometown pride might wish to convince her otherwise, Jenny smelled a rat somewhere.
So it wasn’t until most of the town (including her Daddy’s virtually bankrupt store, to her mother’s disgust) belonged to one Edward Bloom and his “cultural trust” that she happened to make his acquaintance for the first time. Unlike all the other folks he’d bought out, Jenny was in no danger of losing her home. She’d inherited it outright, and as her needs were few and her wants simple she’d never had any reason to mortgage the place. She might starve, but she’d never be homeless. But it seemed that the great Mister Edward Bloom couldn’t stand to see a place as run-down as hers sitting even on the edges of the postcard-perfect city he was trying to turn Spectre into, so he stopped on by to see what arrangements could be made.
Jenny’d been playing the piano when he’d climbed her front porch and knocked on her door. She’d been working on that piece for a while; the piano was her main joy and comfort in life, and mastering a new piece was one of the highlights of her month, and she’d almost gotten this one down perfect. So she didn’t hear him, engrossed in music as she was. It wasn’t until he’d pushed open the screen door and cleared his throat she’d even realized someone was there.
“Yes?” she said, turning around, raising an eyebrow at the stranger before her. Only one person it could be, for there was only one person in town she hadn’t grown up with: Edward Bloom himself, the legend in the flesh, and every bit as handsome as the ladies of the town had said. Charlie had been handsome, too.
“Miz Hill, I’m Edward Bloom,” he said, with a smile as wide and cheery as could be without splitting his face completely in two. He used his hat to fan himself, and somehow he’d managed to keep his shirt free of sweat even in the beastly hot spell Spectre’d been having. Jenny herself was barefoot with no stockings to trap heat; after all, only her students would be seeing her. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me—I’ve taken on this town as a project.” He came in and sat on her couch without waiting for an invitation. “It’s the perfect Southern town, a piece of our heritage that could be lost if action isn’t taken to protect it. I’d surely hate for it to pass away, Ma’am, and that’s the truth. So I’m trying to ensure it’s survival as a model for all the surrounding area as to what the South should look like. And I was—”
Jenny cut him off. “You think a model of a Southern town is one that belongs to you?”
Bloom blinked. “Well, no, ma’am, but that’s why it sets up in a trust, so it’s not just mine, but it’s available to give people a helping hand when they need it, and—”
“I don’t need a helping hand,” Jenny said. “I do all right on my own. You’ve already got my parents’ place and store; don’t seem as if you need any more of my family’s property. So you just pretty up the rest of the town and leave me in peace, and we’ll all be happy.”
“Your parents?” Bloom said, a frown on his face.
“Mister and Mrs. Ernest Beamen,” Jenny said.
He blinked, and stared. “Jenny? Little Jenny Beamen?” A smile broke out over his face, even broader than the first one. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, that one. “Why, last time I saw you you were only ‘bout knee-high, always hangin’ round. You’ve sure grown into a pretty little thing, haven’t you? How’ve you been?”
“I get by,” Jenny said. “Which is why I don’t need or want your help. Thank you for your time.” She stood, forcing him to do the same.
“Jenny—Mrs. Hill, I mean—perhaps I could come back and discuss this with your husband, sometime.”
“I haven’t seen Mister Hill in almost ten years, for which I am thankful,” Jenny said, starting towards the door to show him out. “And even if he were here, the house has always been in my name, and that’s exactly where it’s going to stay. I wouldn’t bother coming back; my answer isn’t going to change.”
“Well, here’s my card if you should change your mind,” Bloom said in desperation, holding it out as he was herded to the door.
Jenny didn’t take it, just stood there till he left. Then she went back to her piano. She had time for a few etudes before her next student arrived.
Bloom left town again, and Jenny half-hoped he’d given up. He hadn’t, worse luck for her. Instead, he was back three weeks later, with a set of tools and some paint and set about the house fixing all the things that were too big for Jenny to do herself. She let him, because if he was going to fix things without charging her for them or treating her to a disapproving silence she had no objection to letting him wear himself out with working. There were always too many projects in need of attention, as they tended to pile up and it took her time to save the money to pay for having a man come out and fix them for her. And all she had to do to keep the list of projects shrinking was let him patter away at her while he did it.
The first day, and the second, Bloom spent trying to convince her to buy in to his little scheme. Oh, he talked of other things, but always leading back to his vision of what Spectre should be. Unfortunately for him, Jenny was not impressed and always had a sharp retort for what he considered his strongest arguments. He kept shooting her perplexed looks, as if he wasn’t accustomed to people not falling in with his ideas. Well, if the way the citizens of Spectre related to him was at all typical, he probably wasn’t. It was probably good for him to get a taste of disappointment, Jenny decided, and her refusals took on a cheerful, good-natured tone that served to confuse him even further. She did so love helping people.
After those two days he spent working on her porch, replacing all the rotted boards, Bloom left town again to go back to work selling things. He was gone almost a month that time, conducting his business and keeping his schemes in motion via telephone and letter. When he came back, it was with the biggest man Jenny had ever seen, and the two of them set to work fixing places where the house had settled to make the floor level again.
It was something Jenny had never thought to add to the list of projects; there were many more immediate needs, and such major work to the house would have cost more than she could afford. Jenny was torn between a wish that he’d take care of things like the rotting porch that were on the list she’d given him, and awed that he’d take on such a major project for her. Bloom didn’t help any by keeping the conversation away from his plans for Spectre. Those, she could have defended herself against handily. Stories of the world outside Spectre, stories without agenda or barb, those she could not dismiss. The second day, for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, she wore makeup and did her hair on a day other than Sunday for the first time in a long time.
He came frequently after that, though never regularly, sometimes with Karl and sometimes alone, and slowly the old house began to look less ramshackle and more respectable. Slowly, too, Jenny began to look forward to his coming. To having someone to talk to. To not being alone.
“People are beginning to talk, you know,” Momma said one day over a glass of sweet tea. Jenny had come over to help with the spring cleaning; some of it was getting to be a bit beyond Momma’s capacity, these days. After a long morning of work they’d more than earned the break.
“People are always talking about something,” Jenny said, which was true if not necessarily to the point. She sipped her tea and looked around Momma’s kitchen, with its peeling paint, and reflected that with the nice pretty bright wallpaper Edward had just put up, and with the cabinets he’d fixed and the new appliances she’d made him let her help pay for, her kitchen was actually nicer than Momma’s. “What are they talking about now?”
There were only two types of women in Spectre. The members of the first type, which included (or was assumed to include) the majority of the female population, were good—prim and proper and never said or did anything as might spoil their reputation (though the reputations of others were fair game). Gertie Buford was the acknowledged queen of the younger ladies and darling of the older ones in that set.
The members of the second type were the fallen women, those who did not measure up to those exacting standards. As an abandoned wife, and one who hadn’t had the decency to move back in with her parents, and who didn’t go out of her way to court the good will of the arbiters of Spectre’s social life, and who had once said in public that she was better off without him, Jenny was firmly in the second category, if generally more pitied than censured. Being the butt of gossip was hardly new.
“You and Mister Bloom,” her Momma replied. “He’s been coming around to your place quite a lot, and both of you married to other people.”
“He’s still hoping to get me to sign over to him,” Jenny said. “Thinks he can wear me down. He won’t but he can’t give up and admit defeat, so he keeps coming over to try his luck, and he uses my list of projects as an excuse. Nothing’s happened.”
“That’s not the way the story’s told,” Momma said.
Jenny shrugged. “They’re just jealous he’s spending so much time with me and not them—you know how everyone loves his company. If they wanted to keep it longer, they should’ve tried playing hard to get.”
“Mmm.” Momma said. “Just be sure that you don’t end up gotten.” It wasn’t a reference to Edward’s plans for the town.
“I think I learned my lesson about that with Charlie,” Jenny said, and changed the subject.
Still, despite her previous terrible experience with men, and the knowledge that precarious as her reputation and circumstance were in town they could only get worse, Jenny longed for Edward’s company in a way that no married woman should. She began fixing things for him, cookies and pies and cakes to go with the meals she cooked him for working on her place. She’d sit close to him while he worked, or while he was eating, and bask in his presence. She began daydreaming, telling herself stories about what life would have been like if she’d married Edward instead of Charlie, and Edward came home to her instead of to a woman whose name she didn’t even know. Edward was all the things Charlie should have been, and wasn’t. His stories built people up, instead of tearing them down. He had ambitions, but he worked hard to achieve them. He left, but he came back.
And when one day he kissed her, well, it didn’t take any thought at all to fall into her fantasy and shut her eyes to the consequences.
Some six months later the house was just about unrecognizable as the dilapidated shack it’d been in all Jenny’s memory of the place, and Jenny’s story that Eddie only kept coming around to pester her about signing over to him was wearing mighty thin. She was pretty sure that the only reason the Buford girls were still her pupils was because there was no one else in town to teach piano, and even that might not be enough to keep them if the affair went on much longer. Even given the loss of income which she could ill afford, Jenny couldn’t bring herself to be too concerned; these six months with Eddie had been the best of her life.
He arrived one evening just as her last pupil of the day finished with his lesson, and young Billy Joe Weber stayed to hear a story while Jenny went into the kitchen to fix supper. The two were seated in what Aunt Bertha had called the parlor, except with decent furniture, the plaster fixed, and clean it was a far more inviting room.
Edward’s story was one she’d heard a few times before, but it was as entertaining as ever the way Eddie told it. Young children sneaking through a swamp in the dead of night to see a witch with a glass eyeball. Quite a story. Jenny herself had never snuck out at night as a child to do any bit of mischief, but she had no trouble picturing Eddie as the sort who would. The glass eyeball itself reminded her of old Aunt Bertha, whom she hadn’t thought of in ages. Jenny smiled, as she got the chicken frying, and wondered what that old bat would think if she saw the house now. (She carefully did not, however, think about what Aunt Bertha’s reaction would be to some of the things her great-niece was doing in the house with the one who’d fixed it up so nicely.)
“Wow, Mister Bloom, what did you see?” Billy Joe asked excitedly.
“Well, now, I couldn’t possibly tell you,” Eddie said. “On account of its being a mystical message from the otherworld intended for my eyes alone.”
“Ooh,” Billy Joe said.
Jenny shook her head. Eddie was so good with children; for a second, she could imagine Billy Joe was their own, and the three of them were a family. Or perhaps a little girl ….
“Did you ever see the witch again?”
“Once. On the day I left Ashton, she was there. When I saw her, the crowd that had come to see me off parted like Moses and the Red Sea, and she beckoned me over with a gnarled hand. Not wishing to offend such a perilous creature, I hurried to her side for whatever words of wisdom she could impart to me.” Eddie’s voice dropped conspiratorially. “She leaned over to my ear and whispered these words: the biggest fish in the river gets that way by not being caught.”
Jenny almost dropped the skillet.
That was what Aunt Bertha had told her, long ago. But how had Eddie come to hear of it? He’d been in Spectre twenty years ago, and he’d mentioned talking with her then; she had only hazy memories of him, but it was possible she’d told him the story. And that glass eye—surely it was too much of a coincidence that the witch had her aunt’s house location (at the edge of a swamp), her glass eye, and her saying. Eddie must have taken those details and grafted them on to the personality of some old witch from Ashton, to make a better story out of it. There. Mystery solved.
Except … where was she, in the story? The witch was her aunt, Jenny was the one who’d spent time alone with her and impressed the other schoolchildren, Jenny was the one who’d looked into the eye, Jenny was the one who’d been warned not to let herself get hooked. And Jenny had been completely replaced by Eddie.
“What does that mean, Mister Bloom?”
“Well, Billy Joe, I don’t rightly know. But once I get that figured out, I’ll be sure and let you know.”
No, of course he hadn’t figured the words out, Jenny thought bitterly, they were never meant for him in the first place. And Billy Joe wasn’t her son, and Eddie wasn’t her husband, and you can’t live in a fantasy, at least not for long.
Later, over dinner, she asked him about it.
“What? Jenny, where did you get that idea?” Eddie asked. “Everything in my stories really has happened to me, one point or another. I don’t make it up.”
Jenny raised her eyebrows at him, dry as a bone.
Eddie ducked his head like a shame-faced little boy. “Well, I do embellish it some, but God’s honest truth it really all has happened to me, one time or another.”
“And the embellishments?” Jenny persisted. “Because my old Aunt Bertha had a glass eye just like that witch, and I looked in it as a young child of eight or ten, and spent a half-hour alone in her presence for which I got much respect for at school for the remainder of my time there. Shortly thereafter she told me about big fish getting that way by not being caught—and unlike you, I do understand what she meant. So I would appreciate it, if you tell stories involving me and my Aunt Bertha again, if you would properly attribute them.”
“Jenny, I’m telling you …” Eddie shook his head. “Is this because I haven’t been paying enough attention to you? I’m sorry I haven’t been around much, they’ve been expanding my territory and I’m spending more time on the road. I’ll try to do better, but I’m stretched real thin at the moment, and …”
Jenny sat back, listening to him drone on, and realized that for all the care and time he’d lavished on her, for all his hard work, she was just a bit player in his story. It really was all about Edward Bloom, in his mind—his larger-than-life stories, his job, his family back home, that perfect wife and son he only rarely mentioned in her presence. Even sitting right in front of her, he couldn’t hear her concerns over his own assumptions. Because of course, the only thing any woman could possibly want once their house was all pretty and fixed up was Edward Bloom’s attention.
That night, after Eddie was asleep and snoring gently next to her, Jenny stared at the ceiling. After a while, she got up quietly and started rummaging through his wallet. Didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for: pictures of Eddie and his wife Sandra and their son Will. They’d been nothing more than names in Eddie’s stories to her, until now. Not real people with faces and stories of their own. She wondered if that was the way Eddie saw them, or if they were just bits and pieces of his story to him, the necessary embellishments no Southern man could live without. Or if she was the embellishment and they the real people. She sat there for a long time.
“You’re awfully quiet this morning, Jenny,” Eddie said over breakfast.
“So, your wife Sandra,” Jenny said. “Chances of you ever leaving her and young Will are fairly slim, I imagine.” She didn’t look up at him as she said it. She wouldn’t want him to, anyway—the kind of man who’d do that to his wife and son was not the kind of man she wanted Eddie to be. She’d never wish her own pain on another woman, especially not one with a young son to raise.
“Of course not—Jenny, have I ever given you reason to think—I love Sandra and Will, you know that—”
“Your fooling around on her doesn’t do a very good job of proving it,” Jenny said dryly. “If you loved her so much, and if you were never going to be serious with me, why’d you do it? Why start something you never intended to finish properly?”
“She’s the kind … you’re a woman who … Jenny, you’re not being fair,” Eddie protested. “You know I care for you a great deal and I never meant to hurt or mislead you, it’s just—”
“She’s the kind of woman you marry, and I’m not, is that it?” She kept her voice down; didn’t think anyone would be passing by this time of the morning, but better safe than sorry and this was one conversation she didn’t want the whole town talking about.
“Now Jenny, you know I’d never say that to you,” Eddie said, and give him credit he was both perfectly sincere and telling the truth. He was too much of a gentleman for that.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Jenny said. His silence was answer enough. She scraped the eggs on her plate around, staring at them as she made pieces of abstract art like they had in magazines. “Eddie, when you leave this morning, I don’t believe you’d better come back.” She took a bite, never looking up at him.
After a few minutes she heard his chair scrape back, and he left the table. Her fork clattered to the plate and she buried her head in her hands. She’d thought she’d learned from Charlie not to get caught. Her shoulders shook with the effort of holding in tears. Eddie was rattling around in the bedroom, probably getting his stuff together and making sure that this time, unlike all previous visits, nothing got left behind. She’d given him a drawer a month or two back, and there were always odds and ends that didn’t quite make it back into the suitcase. Not this time.
She got up and scraped the remains of breakfast into the slops bucket. Neither of them had eaten much. Jenny, at least, wasn’t hungry. But at least, she reflected as she ran the water for the dishes, this time she’d learned to free herself from the hook.
“Jenny?”
She turned around slowly, knowing this was the last time she’d ever see him. He stood in the door, suitcase in hand, handsome as ever, and for a brief second she wanted to tell him to stay, let her live in the fantasy for just a few months longer. “Yes?” she said instead.
“If ever you get in trouble and need something—anything at all—you call me, y’hear?” he said. He stretched out his hand, and there was a business card in it.
Jenny looked at it for a few seconds; she’d never had his phone number. If he’d given it to her before, that sense of being part of his life might have averted last night’s painful revelation for at least a few months longer. She couldn’t say if she was glad or sad he was only offering it now. She didn’t reach out to take it.
“Jenny, please,” Eddie said. “I don’t want to have to worry about you, all by yourself out here.”
“All right,” Jenny said unsteadily. She took it delicately, thumb and forefinger, as if it might bite. “I’ll walk you to the door,” she said.
They walked in silence, not touching, and just inside the door Jenny gave him a peck on the cheek. He stood there, eyes closed, waiting for more, a muscle in his jaw clenching, and when nothing was forthcoming he took his hat from the peg he’d attached to the wall himself, stuck it on his head, and walked out. Jenny stood in the doorway and watched Edward Bloom drive away for the last time.
Then she walked in to her bedroom. It looked emptier, somehow, without Eddie’s coat slung over the back of a chair. She crossed the room and opened his drawer, to make sure he’d got everything she told herself. She stood there, staring down at it. He hadn’t taken everything, it seemed. That contract to sign over the house, just waiting for her signature, lay at the bottom. She didn’t know whether it was a message or just an oversight. She dropped the card in on top of it, closed the door, and did her best to forget about it.
***
When Jenny Hill was thirty-eight, her Daddy got cancer. Him being only sixty-two, and in generally good health otherwise, and the tumor being small and caught early, he’d probably survive and live a good long time if they could cut it out of him now before it had a chance to spread. Problem was, none of the family had the money to pay for it, and not having title to their home or store any more, couldn’t mortgage anything to get it. (Of course, if they still had title they’d probably have lost everything years ago, the way the economy was in Spectre, Momma was quick to point out when questions got asked.)
Jenny still had title to her own place, but ten years of no man around had again taken their toll and if it wasn’t as bad as it had been it still was no postcard. Nobody in town wanted to buy it, and Mister Buford down at the bank didn’t want to deal with her—fallout from her affair with Eddie. Well, that and his wife Gertie’s life-long dislike of Jenny. She hadn’t thought it was possible to be more ostracized than she had been since her husband left, and hadn’t thought she’d mind too much, but it was and she did, particularly now it might cost her Daddy his life.
In the bustle of tests, taking care of Daddy, and trying to raise the money for surgery, it took Jenny two weeks to remember Edward Bloom’s offer. She’d sworn she’d never call him for help, but this was Daddy’s life they were talking about; Jenny’d do a darn sight more degrading things than asking Edward to save her Daddy. She put it off for another week, debating with herself. What would Edward expect in return? This was more than a few hours’ work on the house—a lot more. That kind of money didn’t grown on trees and unless things had changed dramatically for Edward, he was comfortable but no more well-off than that.
But in the end, it didn’t matter; she called him anyway. He listened, he gave his condolences, he chatted for a while and caught up with current events in Spectre, he wired the money. He didn’t ask for anything, and he never stopped by Spectre to not-ask in person. Jenny hadn’t thought he’d demand a resumption of their arrangement in return for her Daddy’s life, he wasn’t that kind of a man; but she had wondered if he might use her contact as an excuse to drop on by and see if she had any interest in renewing their acquaintance. If he had, she wasn’t sure she’d have turned him down. She was awful lonely, these days; even the children gave her a wide berth. One or two of her students had let slip that some of the children who played ball on the field next to her house thought her a witch. She’d stopped going to church, not able to stand the whispering when she did, although with Daddy sick she’d been going again to pray.
The surgery was a success. Daddy recovered quickly, and further tests showed the cancer to be in remission. After he regained his strength and went back to work at the store, Jenny went into her bedroom, and opened a drawer for the second time in ten years. She signed the contract, and put it in the mail with a note saying Thank you for the money. I pay my debts. Jenny.
***
When Jenny Hill was forty-eight, she met Will Bloom for the first time. He had his father’s eyes, but his hair was much darker, which Jenny wondered at considering his mother had been a blonde in the one picture Jenny had seen of her. She showed him in to her living room. He sat down on an old couch covered in brown and yellow flowers that Jenny had picked out with his father, and handed her a file folder with an old document she recognized in it. Will came to her with the contract and the news that his father was dying, and wanted to know if she’d had an affair with his father. More than that, he wanted to know who his father had really been, the truth beneath the legend Eddie had built for himself.
And what should she tell him? Jenny had learned from Edward Bloom that in order to be the main character in a story, you had to tell it yourself; but Will wasn’t looking for Jenny, not really, he was looking for Eddie reflected in her, and for once Jenny was content to let that be. She thought of the stories Eddie’d told her during their time together, twenty years ago, thought of all the things she could say that would do nothing but hurt them both even at this late date. She thought of the way she remembered Eddie, and the way Eddie would want to be remembered, especially by his son and beloved wife. And if she was the one telling the story, and there were indeed only two types of women in the world and the role of perfect woman were already taken, well, she didn’t think Eddie’d begrudge her a few embellishments of her own.
“The first thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that your father never meant to end up here. Yet he did, twice. The first time he was early and the second time, he was late …”