Bettyville by George Hodgman

When Bill and June left, I kept watch at the window. Mammy came over sometimes to stand behind me and try to make out what was going on. Gradually, the car disappeared into the dark. In the morning, Wray was gone.
    â€œIt’s just a sickness,” said Mammy of Wray’s affliction, “that’s all.” But it wasn’t. He was more than sick. He was loathed by many, it seemed. He was the kind of man whom our town seemed to hate, though he himself seemed to be the only one he had ever injured. Elsie Van Sickle talked about Wray’s “toots,” his trips to St. Louis on the train, and his stays at hotels downtown where, her voice implied, nothing good went on.
    Mammy called Wray every few days. Once he did not pick up the phone for a whole weekend and Mammy sent me to take him a skillet full of eggs and bacon. “Just open the door if it’s unlocked and leave it. Don’t go in unless it seems like he needs help. I can’t do it. He could be in there naked.”
    Miss Virginia, Mammy’s neighbor, drove me to Wray’s in the red Chevrolet that she acquired after she retired. Like Bertha Cox, she wore wigs and kept a row of them on Styrofoam heads on the top of the piano in her living room. Her favorite resembled a thatched roof in an African village. In emergency mode, she did not even put one on, but added a loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages to my deliveries. Upon arrival at Wray’s, I found myself more and more nervous. I balanced everything as I walked up the sidewalk to Wray’s new apartment in the Senior Housing Complex. Tentatively, I opened the aluminum screen door. It was unlocked, as was the main door with the little knocker.
    Wray was on the couch in a robe and nothing else, sick and queasy with eyes so glazed over that they could barely be distinguished from his gray face. The robe was untied and I tried not to glance below his pale chest with its swirls of hair. But I did; I could not stop myself. I left the food on a table near the door and picked up Wray’s glasses from the floor. As I had worn glasses for so long and was nearly blind without them, I was especially sympathetic. I had inherited the Bakers’ weak eyes.
    When Wray glanced at me, a flood of blood was set loose under the skin of his face. It spread. His hands were shaking too bad for him to eat.
    Back in the car, I told Miss Virginia what had happened as a small tear made its way down her rouged cheek.
    . . .
    As the years passed, I learned more about Wray, and whenever his name was mentioned, I got worried. The secrets around him were frightening to me. Often, Betty and I traveled to Moberly to visit her uncle Oscar at the Maple Lawn Lodge for elders. To Oscar we had delivered jelly rolls, prune juice, cottage cheese containers filled with ambrosia, and jars of ink in which he soaked his used typewriter ribbons. He kept a typewritten journal of his bowel movements (June 24: COMPLETE EVACUATION), which I pored over when Oscar and Betty left the room.
    After we left Oscar, while Betty shopped for groceries, I always went to the library, where it seemed there was something I felt driven to find hidden in the books. There were three floors, thousands of books. On a shelf, in a pile, in a newspaper or magazine: I had to be there somewhere. There had to be someone whose inside felt like mine. “What are you looking for?” a librarian asked me one day. “You always look like you are looking for something. Can I help you?”
    â€œI don’t know exactly. I don’t know.”
    Hiding back, far into the shelves, I read the
New York Times
Arts and Leisure section, books about movie stars, and occasionally, when there was nothing else to riffle through, stories about the war, where I hoped to find some mention of Saipan. I loved the name of that place where my father had been stationed, out there somewhere by the ocean:
Saipan, Saipan, Saipan
. Often in one of my