Free Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone Page B

And Marcella will answer, “Well, thank you, hon. More nuts this time.” They are partners and Loll snips at some code. It’s code, all right. All of us have lived too long. Too long with boys. Too long without anything else. Room and board are free, remember. And the boys are always the same age. It keeps me young. The campus never changes. Most of the time we are the only women around. And the boys pretend to be gentlemen. I feel as I have always felt.
    Here is a story I always want to tell at those card parties. When I went to Washington, I visited the Capitol. In a room that has all these statues, there is a certain spot you can stand on and hear what’s being whispered on the other side of the room. Hear every word. My room is like that hall. That is how it is in my room in the house. The heating ducts and tunnels, the thin paneling and the laundry chutes must all crisscross above my bed. Nights, I hear the sounds the couples make in the rooms, and I know they are listening, too, to one another through the walls. This is what I want to tell the other housemothers. Listening as if I were on the bottom of some sea with all those noises swimming around my bed, I breathe out a kind of moan and listen to the middle of it being picked up and passed from one mouth to another, sinking back into the new wing where there are bunk beds, a couple above and a couple below, and back again. Each room adds its own layer and then it comes to me, a round dollop of sound, suspended above me. And me, the mother of pearl. No, I never interfere. That is not what a housemother is.
    Thursday nights in the cottage are for buttermints and the little stadium pillows Blanche brings for the folding chairs embroidered with “Sit on Depauw.” Autumn nights, we can hear the boys singing. One house might come by to serenade us, singing “Greensleeves” and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Or a wife of some faculty member will bring a covered dish and her Avon samples. But we don’t have much truck with the wives. We aren’t wives now, after all. Not mothers either, except to places, to houses. And because we keep houses, we are thought to be deaf and dumb. I probably am. We are for appearances only and our appearance—the same Butterick pattern in sixteen fabrics. “I thought that man would be the death of me,” Loll says. “Always after me.” Some nights we play hearts instead.
    Nor will I tell them about that fellow, Pound, the crazy poet, and how I was the one who made him leave this place. When it is my turn to deal, I deal. But it is true. I was the woman in his room that night. Because of me he went to Europe, and that’s where he got famous.
    I was with a circus that fall, and Crawfordsville was the last show before we wintered at Peru. I took tickets mostly, guessed weights and ages on the little midway we had. I read minds. I stayed in Crawfordsville after being paid off, hoping to go south. I spent the first night in the open with some flyers who next day left for parts unknown. That’s how I met Mr. Pound, near a mailbox on Grand Avenue. He was mailing a stack of letters—there must have been twenty. He was mailing them one at a time, reading each address before pushing each envelope in the slot. He wore a big white Panama, and he had a malacca cane. Not to mention a red beard.
    “You look cold,” he said.
    “I am cold,” I said.
    I was cold. Crawfordsville has never been friendly to a single woman. The college is all men. The town is used to men. At the circus, most of the crowd was made up of boys from the college in collarless shirts and crew-neck sweaters, hanging around an older man, a professor. What girls there were always carried an armful of dolls and teddy bears, those were just becoming popular, escorted by the boys who kept winning the prizes. I was waiting for a Monon passenger going south.
    “You must stay with me,” he said. “I need someone to talk to, and you’ll do very nicely.” He rapped his cane