Montrose Rashomon III: Caitlin Bryce

Third in a series of three short stories by Martin Marks

Note: This story reveals crucial plot details not available at the start of And the Geek Shall Inherit.

31st May, 1993...

I knew I would wind up with one of them. I don't know why it seemed inevitable almost from the start, nor why inevitability should suddenly be a problem for me. I've spent the last seven years putting the inevitable in its place.

Hope kept me going. I kept her going, too. Neither has any family left, except for the other. My parents were probably still alive, but my father had hit me and my mother had betrayed me. I got the hell out of Winchester when I was twelve: out of the frying pan, into the furnace of New York Avenue. I don't talk about what I did to stay alive the next two years. Not even to Hope.

The first time I met her was when she found me going through her mail one day, because I'd used her mailing address for something; a PO Box was a luxury I couldn't afford back then. I could have run away easily—she was seventy-two back then—but I didn't. I was just too tired of running.

"What in hell you doing, girl?" she said, in the impossible-to-reproduce sociolect of poor urban DC.

"I was expecting a letter, ma'am," I said.

"In my mailbox?"

"I put this address down," I said. "I don't have one."

She looked at me for a moment. "How old are you?"

"Fourteen, ma'am."

She shook her head. "You better come get something to eat. Bring the mail."

She made me canned soup while I read my letter... Dear Miss Bryce... pleased to inform you... national finalist... $500 savings bond... much luck in your future endeavors...

Five hundred dollars for a five page essay. It was the most I'd ever earned in my life, and I didn't feel violently ill from self-loathing afterwards. It was a bond, of course. When I realized that, the joy leaked away again. What was I supposed to do with a $500 T-bill? Put it in my safety deposit box? Hand it over to my broker to invest in a diverse portfolio of blue chips?

Hope brought me a bowl of steaming hot soup, and let me eat it before she started asking questions. That began what has become a lifelong love affair with canned tomato soup.

"What's your name?"

"Caitlin, ma'am. Caitlin Bryce."

"I'm Hope Lawrence. You live on the streets?"

"Yes," I said.

"It ain't right. Pretty young thing like you." She paused. "You a hard worker, Caitlin?"

"Yes, ma'am." It was true then, and it's true now.

"I need somebody to keep this place in shape so they don't haul this bony old black ass to a home," she said. "And you need a place to sleep and a few good meals. You promise on your soul not to murder me in my bed or steal what little I got to steal?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Okay, then. Welcome home."

She was the first person who was proud of me. She never read what I wrote—she said it was her eyes, but I honestly don't even know how well she could read—but she liked to sit and watch me write on the old typewriter I found in the attic. She liked to watch me draw, too, and put my sketches up on the refrigerator like I was in the first grade. She could barely keep herself alive on her pension check, so I worked two jobs. She didn't want to let me—said I should go to school instead—but we didn't have a choice. I went to the library a lot. She went to Salvation Army book giveaways and picked out books for me at random, which is how I wound up with a library composed of two copies of Martin Chuzzlewit, Elmer Davis's Friends of Mr Sweeney, James Herriot's All Things Bright and Beautiful, and the Handbook of Highway Engineering, among others. I learned a lot about being poor in Victorian England (it hasn't changed much), being well-off in the Roaring Twenties, the reproductive organs of sheep, and highways, highways, highways. I took the SAT, and only managed a 690 on the math section, but the 800 verbal was enough to convince the school board to give special dispensation for me to take the GED a year early. At fifteen, I became the equivalent of a high school graduate, though I hadn't been in a classroom since seventh grade. Hope was so proud of me; she'd never managed to get one herself.

And what does all this have to do with Nicola Tesla Buchenlieber and Eliot Paulsen? Only this: when I was sixteen years old, Montrose College went temporarily insane and accepted me, with a financial aid package that actually made it imaginable. Hope sold her home—over my protestations—and we moved to Annapolis's easily-ignored housing projects.

People said I was a cold fish my freshman year. I was always working, I never talked about my past, I never went to parties, and I didn't make many friends. I wouldn't have made any friends at all if the dining hall weren't so crowded one day in late November that I couldn't get a table to myself. I don't know why I chose Eliot and Nicola to sit with. Maybe (and I am ashamed to admit this) it was because Eliot was black, one of very few black students at Montrose, and I thought he would be more like me than everyone else. As it turned out, I came to detest him almost immediately. We were a pair of bad racial stereotypes flipped: while I grew up homeless white trash on the streets of Northeast D.C., he grew up rich (by my standards) in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. When he heard me speak, I remember, he said: "Oh, are you from the mountains?" in a voice like Noël Coward's. If it weren't for Nicola, I wouldn't have hung out with them at all.

Poor Nicola. I think he might still have a crush on me. I had one on him, for a while, because he was so physically unattractive: stout, maybe even doughy, and an inch or two shorter than me. It's a wonderful thing, when you've seen some of what I've seen, to find someone who you only like because he's smart and funny and always, always good to you. Nic was the sort of man a woman can look at and immediately say, "There is a man who will never hit me. There is a man who will never use me. There is a man who, when he looks at me, will look me directly in the eyes, and will see something worth seeing there."

If I'd been ready for a relationship as a freshman, or a sophomore, or even last semester, it would have been Nicola I picked. He was a native speaker of English, two varieties of German, and Serbian, which is a combination not many people can claim. When Eliot tried to call me "Cait", Nicola called me "Tlin", and it was Tlin that stuck. For every clever thing Eliot said—and he said quite a lot—Nic would say two. He learned to anticipate my moods in a way Eliot never did, and knew as soon as he saw me whether to greet me with a joke, a philosophical quandary, or just a comment on the weather. And he was always willing to talk about highways.

But Nicola never asked for more. And if there was one thing I wanted from him, it was to be asked.

Eliot, meanwhile, I slowly learned to appreciate. For one, he could write good poetry, which I had always thought became impossible somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, and good prose as well, when he didn't try too hard. I learned a lot from him as a writer. Plus, he's tall, and rougishly good-looking, and masculine in a way I tried for years not to find appealing. And he's the sort of man who asks for what he wants.

(Sometimes I would see his shadow on the wall, and for a split second I'd see my father, or my stepfather, and I'd wince, and he would see, but he never asked why. I never told either him or Nicola my deepest fear, which was that I was secretly like my mother, that, deep inside, I was a doormat who'd let what happened to me happen to my own daughter, all for the blind love of an unloveable man. It didn't matter that Eliot had never shown any sign of a cruel streak, at least not physically speaking, that he wasn't a drug addict like my father or a twisted pervert like my stepfather: he was an admitted scoundrel, he was more powerful than me, and I liked that he was, and for a long time that scared me more than if he'd ever laid a hand on me.)

Eliot was, of course, a bastard. I suppose he still is, and I've gotten more used to it. He had a three-stage philosophy towards women he thought I didn't notice: to first annoy them, then impress them, then dump them when he got what he wanted. He never tried it on me, of course—not overtly, anyway—but for most of the time he chased after me (until this year, in fact), he never stopped scratching his itch. I can't say I blamed him, since it wasn't like I ever gave him much hope, but it didn't exactly improve my opinion of him.

The reason Eliot won, in the end, is that he tried. For my entire junior year, his senior year, he's been leading up to what happened in April: flirting, hinting, wooing me at every opportunity. I tried desperately to hint to Nicola that he needed to make his move; he didn't. And so, we come to shortly after midnight on the second day of April, in Eliot's Hunt-Slate single room, where the two of us had spent the evening ostensibly discussing Hegel.

"I need to get home," I said. "I've got to be at work by six."

"You need a vacation," he said. "Call in sick."

"Good night, Eliot."

"At least let me walk you home."

I hesitated. Neither Eliot nor Nicola had ever seen my home. "It's far away, I've told you."

"All the more reason for you not to go alone this time of night," he reasoned.

"I don't want you to, Eliot."

"Why not?" he said.

"Because I don't want you to," I replied. "Good night, Eliot."

I was heading out the door when he called to me. "Tlin—wait."

I turned back to him. "What?"

"I need to ask you something."

"Make it quick," I said.

He hesitated for a moment, then leaned in and kissed me.

"That... was the question," he said when he broke the kiss.

"Eliot, I... Jesus, can't you just use words?"

I was furious at him, and furious at myself for not being furious enough at him. He kissed me without even asking my permission. I should have slapped him. But I didn't. Work was forgotten; I felt a strange new sense of life rush through me, like when I tasted Hope's tomato soup for the first time. In hindsight, I realized that Eliot's kiss was the first time in my life someone had done something to me that was simultaneously sexual and tender. It would not be the last time in my life. In fact, to be quite honest, it wasn't even the last time that night.

The next morning I called in sick for the first time ever.

It's been more than a month since that night. I made Eliot swear not to tell anyone about us. More than anything, I don't want it getting back to Nicola. I still find it hard to get over the sense that I'm cheating on a man who never even asked me out... though I do, admittedly, get over it. Eliot has just graduated, and is heading back to Pittsburgh for law school. I can't go with him, even for the summer; Hope needs me here. But he's waited for me for three years; now that he has me, I'm sure he'll wait one more.

Neither Eliot nor Nic knows anything about my past, other than that I was born in the Shenandoah, and not into money. I haven't even told them about Hope, who I still go home to every night, though I have told Hope about both of them. (She prefers Eliot.) I don't plan to tell them, either. For one thing, I think they both enjoy the mystery. More importantly, though, to tell one would be a betrayal of the other, and to tell them both at the same time would be hypocritical if I didn't also tell Nic about me and Eliot, which I'd really rather not do. It's bad enough Eliot's seen my real eyes. Perhaps someday, when Eliot and I are safely engaged or something, I will sit them both down and tell them the whole story. And the first thing I'll do is take out my contacts, and tell them about my father.