On that first night at the Farwells’, though, the men fell silent and uneasy one by one as Becky put down the tray, then pulled up a chair and sat down. They glanced at Hank, who acted as if it was nothing strange.
Becky regarded them all kindly, stirred her mug, and smiled politely. Then she said, “Thank you for coming. Ready to begin?”
2
Pierson, Illinois
1981
Pierson, Illinois, was a small Midwestern city about two hours southwest of Chicago, split by the Rock River. The town spanned the width of less than a mile, and its central feature was the low-head dam that stairstepped the water to a gushing froth before it flowed on west under Pierson’s two bridges, the Galena and the Sauk. Like most river towns in the area, it was named after an early European settler who mounted a ferry system and profited from nineteenth-century traders and travelers. And like most small towns in Illinois, Pierson claimed a vague but definite connection to Abraham Lincoln, who led a company in and around the area during the Black Hawk War. On the south river promenade a bronze statue of Lincoln surveyed the storefronts facing the water: a tanning salon, the Chamber of Commerce, Piccadillo’s Bar. The local history museum, in a building that used to be the old high school, hedged about Lincoln but went deep on the town’s one dramatic incident: the “Pierson Disaster.”
For Becky’s seventh-grade history report, she told the story of the Pierson Disaster—an 1806 riverbank crush accident that caused several drownings—from the point of view of a lame saloonkeeper who watched it all unfold, helplessly, from the banks. He hated how conspicuous he was, dry, with his cane, made unmanly by the surrounding furor of accident and heroics. But instead of acting, he observed. He saw it all, from that first innocuous shoving: how the men’s hands shot to their hats as they toppled backward; the horses and women screaming; the dark bodies dragged onto land.
Becky’s teacher, Mrs. Nagle, held her back after the bell. “Incomplete,” she’d written at the top of the front page.
“Who is this man?” she asked.
“I don’t know. No one.” Becky was annoyed; now she’d have to do it all over.
“Did you use the research sources?” By this Mrs. Nagle meant the endless flapping loops of microfilm in the dim projector room of the local library.
Becky admitted she had not.
Mrs. Nagle paged through her report, pointing here and there at poor Mr. Sam Smith’s reminiscences of that awful day. Then she took a pen and wrote two more words at the top of Becky’s paper: Fiction. Fact. “What you wrote was this.” She tapped one word. “And the assignment was this.” Tapped the other.
Becky redid the paper and never again did she stray outside the lines. In truth she was surprised that Mrs. Nagle had taken the time to challenge her. Most often Becky’s compositions received As and Bs with no more comments, no matter what she had written about. In a school where the graduation rate hovered around fifty percent and there was no funding to separate out advanced classes, being a high achiever just meant that you’d fly under the radar.
Only Ms. Marner, in senior year math, pushed Becky. She never let up, this tall and bony taskmaster whose first name was Diana and always insisted on “Ms.” (“Say it with me, class, ‘Mzzzzzzzz Marner.’ Not so hard now, is it?”).
Ms. Marner made Becky’s tests more difficult and wouldn’t listen to any complaints. She mimeographed pages of extra work and expected Becky to return them to her faculty mailbox within two days, no exception. She insisted that Becky join the Mathletes club (Becky was the only girl, and the only senior) and she brought her books from an out-of-state library, a videotape once even, that lurched ahead into the origin of numbers, the ideas behind the domains, vast overarching concepts.
Becky loved the mimeographs, the challenge and puzzle of each one, but she couldn’t understand why Ms. Marner was so into theory—it was dense, barely comprehensible. Becky was into math for the calculations. A mental arrangement of digits, the slotting in of value and function, seeing the total in her mind’s eye as clearly as it would then be printed on the page. She couldn’t explain to anyone, even Ms. Marner, what that inner game felt like: how the symbols click-click-clicked into brain-place, like the sound and feel of the colored wooden pegs in Chinese checkers.
One Saturday Ms. Marner drove Becky and two of the boys two hours each way to Peoria to compete in a round-robin state math tournament. She ran from corner to corner of the crowded gym to watch their various matches. When Becky won a prize there she heard a single hoot that rose above the rest of the polite applause. On the way home, Ms. Marner played show tunes on her tape deck, smoked Virginia Slims, and took them for burgers at a truck stop diner. Later, Becky realized that her teacher had most likely paid for all of it herself, the tournament registration, the gas, and the burgers.
One Thursday afternoon Ms. Marner waved the freshman boys out early and made Becky do what she couldn’t bear to do: talk about colleges. “IIT, is what I’m thinking. Obviously, U. Chicago is your moon shot. But I don’t know what the counselors have told you about aid . . .” She glanced up at Becky over her readers; when Becky didn’t respond she went on, “Anyway, IIT has a phenomenal department. I know the chair, slightly, from way back and I thought I could give him a call.”
Becky shrugged. “I mean, thanks, but . . . There’s a lot of stuff going on with my dad. It can’t happen.”
“So maybe you do a year or two closer to home. And then you transfer. Your options go exponential then.”
Becky bent to her backpack, fumbling with its zipper and straps. Talking about what you knew you could never have only made things worse. “I have to go.”
“If this is about money, there are all sorts of scholarships and loans. You’re not the first student to need—”
Becky hurried out of the classroom without saying goodbye. She couldn’t explain it to Ms. Marner. How much her father depended on her, how much the business did. Just breaking even took everything the two of them had. She couldn’t leave. When she got home, her father was sitting in his chair, TV on. Patient, happy to see her.
“Little late tonight,” he said.
“Yeah.” Becky went over to turn on the oven for their meal.
Sometime after that interaction, Becky stopped attending Mathletes. She avoided Ms. Marner’s gaze in class and when her teacher tried to talk to her after class, she muttered excuses about being busy. She was busy, caught up in a shipping snafu that ended up costing several thousand they didn’t have.
After graduation in June, Ms. Marner found her in the gym, where parents and purple-gowned seniors milled around and drank punch. “I hear you’re a working stiff now, like the rest of us.”
“It’s just an entry-level thing,” Becky said. “Mostly paperwork.” The truth was that her new job at Town Hall thrilled her. She’d applied on a whim after convincing her father that she could still do his books. What she didn’t tell him was how much they needed the paycheck.
“I have something for you.” Ms. Marner handed her a small gift-wrapped package. “I’ve missed our extra assignments. Come visit me sometime. Since you’ll be around.”