Rafferty Street Read online

  “Why not just talk to Lorelei?”

  “I have, over and over through the years. Lorelei’s behavior isn’t controllable. She’ll remember how to act for months at a time and then—something like this. The only reasonable solution I can see is to remove you from the situation. Your good name is as much at stake as the Farm’s. I’d think you’d want to get out of this difficult position.”

  “I don’t believe this. Listen, Judy, I dropped out of a community college in Boston when I was a kid. Back then being gay was practically all-consuming. The hiding, trying to meet girls, finding places to go, drinking in the bars. I couldn’t juggle school, supporting myself and the gay life. I’ve been a cab driver, driving in circles, ever since. Then I took all those philosophy courses in New York to figure out my life, but talk about circles! I came to Morton River to change that. I didn’t know how exactly, but when I got this job I knew it was right.”

  Judy smiled, her expression full of regret.

  “Am I whistling into the wind here? For the first time I feel like I’m not drifting. Like I can make a difference. The workers—they’re important to me. I believe in what the Farm’s doing. I’ve been thinking of taking some night classes in September, starting on a degree in Special Ed. It’d be a long haul, but maybe I can use some old credits. I thought I finally knew where I was going. And now—I just don’t believe this. Everyone said you were so fair.”

  “I like to think I am. You’re able-bodied, smart and have some education. These people need my protection—you don’t.” Judy’s eyes were averted.

  “I visited a friend, my ex, in Oregon just before the election last fall. The look of exhaustion in Vicky’s eyes still haunts me. This is exactly the reason Vicky fought that anti-gay ballot measure out there, so a dyke didn’t have to walk away from her dreams without a whimper.” Hell if she would give up after seeing Vicky fight, Annie told herself.

  She stood so forcefully her chair rolled back and smashed against the wall. “This is not okay, Judy. I haven’t done a damn thing wrong and I am not interested in being a silent victim. I care about those folks. They’ve brought me some kind of sunshine I didn’t even know I was missing. Maybe this poses a sticky ethical problem for you, but I’m a person, not a dilemma.”

  Judy opened her mouth, extended a hand, then dropped it and shook her head. “I’m not firing you, Annie.”

  “No, you’re forcing me out, hoping I’ll slip through the door, tail between my legs, and take all this trouble with me.”

  “Only for the sake of our workers.”

  Annie bit her bottom lip. “Well, I’m out of here before I say too much. You have my number and I’ll be back at work the minute I hear from you.”

  “I can’t—” Judy faltered as Annie flung the door open and stalked down the hall, shoving her arms into her jacket sleeves.

  Outside, the New England spring seemed absurd, like a travel poster in a famished country. The reek of thriving herbs turned her stomach. She took the sourball from her pocket and threw it as hard as she could across the road.

  In her car, she gunned toward town, tires complaining as she leaned into curves where the road hugged the Morton River. She got stuck at the railroad crossing while a never-ending freight train rolled by. It was then that she felt the wetness on her cheeks, like Judy had held a leaky water pistol to her head—and this time she’d really been robbed. She pulled off to the side and abandoned the car to stalk through the weeds along the tracks.

  Between two factories, she could see the back of Dusty and Elly’s diner. Across the river from it were the narrow backyards of Rafferty Street. Tufts of grass clung tenuously to the river’s banks. No wonder this section had flooded so badly in years past, she thought, blotting her tears with a sleeve. Nothing was holding it together. The river could flush the diner, Gussie’s house—Annie’s home now—out to sea.

  Crap, moving to Morton River Valley was supposed to be a solution, not a catastrophe. She’d never been fired for any reason, much less being gay, yet four months in the Valley and here she was out on her ass.

  What would the workers think when she didn’t show up? This could be another trauma for Lorelei.

  She picked up a stone and pitched it far out into the river, rehearsing how she’d tell Gussie.

  Chapter Two

  “Uh-oh, you’ve caught me in the act!”

  Red-faced, forehead damp with sweat, overall bib flapping open and hands knotted around a mop handle, Augusta Brennan looked as rickety as the riverbank that held up her home.

  Annie scolded, “I thought we agreed I’d wash the floor tonight. You’re going to have one of your dizzy spells, fall and end up in the hospital.”

  “You’re mother-henning me again, Socrates. This is part of your birthday present. Besides, I have nothing to do but watch the flowers on the wallpaper fade. I used to like to come home and relax after a rough day juggling other people’s riches.”

  “No problem,” Annie said, flinging her cap onto the table and herself onto her chair. She was ashamed to meet Gussie’s eyes. “I’m not working.”

  Gussie straightened, carefully leaned the mop against the wall and sat across from Annie. Her eyes, under slackening lids, were grave. “What’s happened?”

  Annie took off her driving glasses and put them in their case. No more tears. She took a long quivering breath. “You haven’t known me very long, Gus. I can only swear to you, dyke’s honor, it isn’t true. Judy as much as accused me of molesting a worker.”

  Gussie’s face reddened.

  With a bitter smile, Annie said. “Happy birthday, Annie Heaphy.”

  Gussie sputtered, “You? That’s impossible!”

  “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Gussie said, laying a hand on Annie’s, “you thought I’d believe such a thing?”

  Annie shrugged, more relieved than she’d expected to be, then gave her details, getting angrier as she watched Gussie’s response.

  “These arrogant breeders!” growled Gussie.

  “I thought you liked straights.”

  “Please! No straight at a women’s softball game is going to go bananas over there being gay players. It’s common knowledge. Who made this complaint?”

  “Some woman named Norwood.”

  “It sounds familiar. Where do I know that name from?”

  Annie picked up her cap and twisted it around and around. “One minute I’m settling right in, the next I’m on the convicted sex offender list.”

  Toothpick, the stray kitten who had been a going away present from friends in New York, padded into the kitchen and stretched. Annie knelt to stroke her. Toothpick wouldn’t care if she were a child molester.

  Gussie used the kitchen table to push herself up, then moved stiffly to the sink and gazed out the window. Without her teeth in, Gussie’s face had a defeated look. She had retired to the Valley after a lifetime of crisscrossing the country as accountant at one factory, auditor at another, office manager in a sprawling food mill. Her last position had been with Rafferty Brass when the employees bought the company to try, unsuccessfully, to save it. Gussie had plenty of experience with crazy-ass complaints.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Annie said, tugging on her hat. “I don’t think Judy really believes this Norwood character, but Judy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. She says this is just temporary. What do I know about small towns? Do you think she’ll take me back?”

  “You shouldn’t even have to be worrying about this,” Gussie said, watching the sparrows peck at the window feeder. “I’ve been through it enough, we’ve all been through it enough.” She faced Annie. “It shouldn’t be so terrible today, but this is the consequence. We hid; you pay the piper.”

  “Gus, it’s not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it? What if I’d joined the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s? Told the officers at the war plant that I was a little funny? The suppliers and the workers would have gone without pay if
I’d been fired, some soldiers without equipment. Even so, back then being homosexual was such a terrible thing we didn’t dare say the word aloud.”

  “Hey, it’s not like you’re my mom. You don’t have to regret how you brought me up.”

  “Maybe I do, Annie. I never had children, never cared about future generations, but you, young Maddy, Paris, Peg, and poor Dusty and Elly with their troubles, you do such a good job sticking up for yourselves. I wish I could say you got your backbone from me.” She filled the tea kettle. “Maddy even calls me Gramma Gus. I should have my title revoked.”

  “The time wasn’t right for you back then.”

  “Does it feel right for you, now? You told me this job could lead to a career for you.”

  Annie wandered to the window too, her anger replaced by a regret. “Maybe I was moving too fast. But I finally felt like I’d started my real life. What can I do?”

  Out the window, Rafferty Street seemed cozy and familiar—as it had every weekday since she’d arrived just after Christmas. Traffic droned along Route 83; the butterscotch cat next door cleaned himself in a sunny window. In the vacant lot at the end of the street young men in T-shirts, jeans and boots slouched against cars. Inside, safe from their usual catcalls and guffaws, she was reminded of vultures circling in old westerns, telltale scavengers patiently awaiting the hero’s downfall.

  Annie felt sweaty. She took her napkin and patted her face dry. “It’s never felt real to me before. I always knew we were hated and feared by some people, but when have I had to feel it? Catcalls on the street? Avoiding certain places, not taking someone home for the holidays? It’s always been my choice, on the surface, whether to be out or to expose myself. But this—it’s funny.”

  “Funny as a piece of string.”

  “What happened today was just what I’ve been expecting all my life. I wonder if it’s why I never got serious about anything. I knew some ignorant stranger would come along and pull my covers because I’m gay.”

  “Annie—”

  “Look at Vicky’s ballot measure. Maddy’s idea about a gay group at the high school getting shot down. The fight’s not over by a long shot.”

  “It’s like what they say about child abuse, isn’t it?” said Gussie. “All it takes is one generation to end the cycle.”

  She looked outside again. “Look at the tough guys up the street. I’ve seen badder twelve-year-olds on Times Square. And they think they’re better than us. They think we’re so scared of being knocked down that we won’t stand up in the first place.”

  Gussie attempted a laugh. “Used to be I always left when people were getting too close. It was better to start new somewhere else than to have a Mrs. Norwood find out about me. But you’re not running, Socrates. You’re going to stand up to them because it’s not over ’til it’s over.”

  “I wish we’d won. I wish Gay Lib had already changed the world,” Annie said with a tired sigh. “I sure hope I don’t have to make trouble to get reinstated.”

  “Maybe there’s something we can do to make sure you don’t have to.” Gussie was pensively silent for a moment, then grinned. “Or at least don’t have to do it alone.”

  Annie looked with tenderness at the thoughtful face over the plentiful breasts and paunch. Gussie’s hair was a feathery cap of white which she’d mussed in agitation, leaving cowlicks at the crown. Round tinted glasses rested on her ruddy cheeks.

  “Judy’s a mouthpiece—she told me so. If she wants money for the Farm from big-buck johns, she has to follow their rules just like some hooker over by the docks. I didn’t let that stuff go on in my cab—why should I put up with it here?”

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “We?”

  “Don’t put me out to pasture yet, dear girl,” Gussie said.

  “Sorry, Gus. I was doing it again.”

  “Yes, you are. I still remember the first time you came in out of that blizzard like a lost soul who didn’t need an old woman like me in her life.”

  “Your tone wasn’t exactly friendly either,” she reminded Gussie.

  “I was about as anxious to take on someone new as you were.”

  “And I suspected you were enjoying being coddled.”

  “When the new girl in town should have been getting the attention?”

  “It didn’t take you long to thaw me out.”

  “And lure you into my den.”

  The first day they’d met, Annie had looked out the chilly kitchen window while Maddy and Gussie talked.

  Annie felt cold remembering that winter day. Beyond the railroad tracks, across the river, the diner had been a shadow with a pinkish glow around it. She had imagined the whispery sound of the snow as it hit the river, a split-second wet kiss as it became water and joined the rush to Long Island Sound. A train came inching past the back of the house, its one large bright eye spotlighting a horizontal column of snowflakes. It hooted over and over through the darkness, calling to her just like the trains of her childhood along the Chelsea River. She’d shivered then, too, missing what had once, happy or not, been home.

  It had been hard to swallow her excitement back when she’d first arrived in the Valley, but she’d come to a community in mourning. Nan Heimer, a woman who’d begun her first lesbian relationship at age seventy-seven, had died just before her ninth anniversary with Augusta Brennan, two years her junior. The funeral had been held the day Annie pulled into town. No one had had time for a newcomer.

  Only a few days after her arrival she’d been drawn into the care-taking circle that had sprung up around Gussie Brennan.

  Maddy Scala, a seventeen-year-old burly baby butch, backwards New York Mets cap squashed down over rowdy curls, had lofted snowballs into the river below as she led Annie over the bridge from the diner on Railroad Avenue to Rafferty Street. There, emerging from a curtain of snow, had been the strangest row of little houses Annie had ever seen. Some enterprising builder obviously had squeezed all he could onto a narrowing plot of land, a ridge leaning over the river and the railroad tracks. Annie, beguiled, could see that each house was smaller than the one before it.

  “This is one of the last streets in town that’s still all cobblestones,” Maddy had bragged.

  Along the silent cobbled street thick maples bore their burdens of snow with stoic dignity. Across the street was a row of brick duplexes, each with an open porch, built for factory workers. Christmas lights glowed in one front window two weeks after the holiday. Rafferty Street officially ended about a hundred yards along at the weed and refuse-filled lot where, Maddy told her, some of the worst troublemakers in Morton River hung out.

  Gussie Brennan’s side of the street had obviously been the pride of first generation home owners. Gussie’s was the next to last house, built of rough yellowed stone, and looked like an odd fanciful playhouse. The front windows were lined with bric-a-brac. On one sill, a luxurious Christmas cactus sported crimson blooms. This had been Nan Heimer’s home with her husband. Gussie had inherited it and lived there alone, much to the consternation of the lesbians who fussed over her.

  Then Maddy had led her through undisturbed snow around to the back, rapped on the door and they’d gone in from the storm to deliver a good meal to Augusta Brennan. Elly and Dusty might be having their problems, but they weren’t letting that get in the way of helping Gussie through her grieving.

  Gussie’s warm kitchen, with its familiar creature comforts—art deco era appliances and cabinets, a vague scent of burnt toast, the occasional drip from the faucet, even the oilcloth table covering—had felt exactly like home.

  Later, she’d asked to use the bathroom primarily to explore the allure of the little house. From outside the building had looked too small to turn around in, but the architect had kept walls to a minimum. The downstairs consisted of two large rooms, the kitchen and the narrower, knickknack-filled living room with laundry and bath at the wide end of the kitchen.

  It was a snug, quirkily attractive warehouse of sights and smells fr
om her childhood. She’d been surprised to feel such piercing nostalgia for her early years, filled as they had been with the icy silence of her parents, estranged in the home they shared. Annie had been one terrified little kid, afraid every hour of every day, that she’d do something to make them as angry at her as they were at each other.

  When Annie had come out of the bathroom Gussie had called tiredly, “Go on upstairs and look around, Annie. I’m not quite up to a nickel tour.”

  “Thanks!” she’d said into the warm kitchen doorway. “I love your place. This is just the sort of home I’d like someday.”

  Gussie had sighed. “The house feels terribly big just now. I have my friend Venita looking into the senior apartments on Bank Street where she is. This place may be on the market before long.”

  Annie dashed upstairs two steps at a time. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that she’d ever own a house again. The one she and Vicky had bought had been more of a rambling, falling apart beach shack than a house.

  The second story was divided just like the first. One bedroom was filled with mismatched furniture. The other had a four-poster bed smothered in quilts. A decorative pillow radiated the scent of pine. This was a variation on her parents’ three-decker house, but without the tension of unsaid angry words, without the atmosphere of impending doom.

  A lovely old armoire matched an ornate dresser with an oval mirror. On one side was a photograph of a tall, plain-faced young woman with a gentle look about her eyes and smile. Class of ’24 was scrawled in white pen across the bottom. On the other side Gussie, capped and gowned, laughed. There were more pictures, stories of two lives that had merged—Gussie and Nan together under the Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner sign—in another, arm in arm at the edge of a softball field, game in play behind them.

  Annie went back downstairs, running her hand lovingly along the banister. In the kitchen Gussie said, “I have a bad time with those stairs. I had a hip problem some years back and the climbing aggravates it. Still, I hate to leave our nest. All the grand memories I have here.”