I took a breath and headed down the hall.
My wife was sitting at the dining room table, an oval table. She had cleared the dinner dishes, Davy’s and hers, and was sitting at the oval’s head, sitting over an empty cup of coffee, rubbing the fingers of her left hand with her right.
I clumped to the table and sat down opposite her. I drummed my fingers on the wood. Badump-badump-badump. Sorry about the zoo? I thought. Sorry about the day? Sorry about our life together, such as it was? Badump-badump-badump went my fingertips on the oakwood. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Badump-badump-badump.
Barbara didn’t look at me. Her stately features were set and sad. She twisted her left hand back and forth on the fingers of her right. Slowly, that way, she worked her wedding ring over her knuckle and took it off.
She set the gold band on the tabletop—reached out to place it as far from her as she could, as close to me. Then she sat back. She raised the empty cup to her mouth so I wouldn’t see her lips trembling. Then she set it down unsteadily, making the saucer chatter.
She nodded at the ring. “If that were a bullet, you’d be dead,” she said. I believe it was the only spontaneous joke I ever heard her make.
I sat awhile, without a word, my eyes stinging. Watching the golden band go in and out of focus, watching the reflected light extend from it in rays and then subside. Is that all? I thought, my drumming fingers falling still. Is that what I was so afraid of all this livelong day? Merely losing her. Whom I didn’t love. And moving away from Davy, whom I rarely saw. Was that the whole impetus behind the Beachum fantasy? That long hallucinatory delaying tactic: had it all been in the service of avoiding merely this?
We both stared at the ring awhile, Barbara too. When I shifted my gaze to her, she was still staring at it. Her back straight, her head rearing, her features set in their haughtiest, most aristocratic expression. It was something she took very seriously, that ring, taking off that ring. But then, she took just about everything seriously. She always had.
“Right,” I said finally. My hand lay motionless on the edge of the table. “So I guess—what?—Bob called you?”
She snorted softly. “What’s the difference who called me?”
I shook my head.
“She called me, if you really want to know. Your Patricia.”
“Right,” I said. “Right, right, right.” Like Beachum’s confession, this made sense to me on the instant. It would be Patricia who called. She had wanted me to make her suffer, and now she was paying me back for doing what she asked. And I deserved it too, which was probably the strangest thing of all.
“She tried to reach your beeper,” Barbara said.
“Mm,” I said. I had forgotten to take it out of the glove compartment after I left the prison.
“She was crying. She wanted you to know that it was over. And that she was sorry Bob was going to force you out.”
I laughed. “Good of her to leave a message.”
She looked down on me from her moral height. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”
Well, yeah, actually, I’d thought I had her fooled completely. But I decided not to say so. “That crazy Patricia,” I murmured.
“I told her not to worry about it,” Barbara said then. “I told her this is just what you do. It’s just the thing you do.”
“Right. Sure.”
“Though, for the life of me, you don’t seem to get much pleasure out of it.”
I lifted one shoulder. Pleasure was a serious business to Barbara too.
After another moment of silence, I reached across the table and took up the ring. I held it between finger and thumb, turned it this way and that, watching the light from the small chandelier above us glint on it. There was an inscription on the inner curve. Just her name: Barbara Everett. It had been her new name at the time and seemed very romantic.
I closed my fist around the ring. “… hard on the kid,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Won’t this be kind of hard on the kid?”
Her eyebrows arched. “Good time to think of it, Ev.” I tried to answer her, but that stone, my heart—some laborer in the inner hell kept rolling it up into my throat and letting it sink down, bang, into my chest again. Poor Davy, I thought miserably. Poor little guy. With Barbara over him every moment, loving, grim and good. Who was going to teach him how to fool around? How to disobey? How to fart in silence and get everyone to blame the kid sitting next to him? Who would tell him that the best way to deal with a bully was to understand his insecurities and then bring your elbow real fast across the bridge of his ugly nose? Or how to nod at women when they told you what was right so you could get in their pants without too much palaver? How would he learn to shrug off the underdog sometimes and when to laugh up his sleeve at human suffering? The poor little nubbin. Barbara, with her great instincts for compassion and morality, with her big soul—Christ, without me, she would bury him in there.
“Look,” I said, my voice shaky. “Is it just the girls? Is it just the women you mind so much?”
She looked at me, wondering.
“I mean, look, we don’t have to have a marriage like other people. You could have guys sometimes,” I said. “I’d kill them, sure, but you could have them before that. I mean, what the hell, it’s two thousand years since Jesus died, we can make our own rules now.”
A fatuous proposition, made to her. “Maybe that’s your idea of marriage, Ev,” she said, as I might have guessed she would. “But it isn’t mine.”
“Why the hell not?” I answered desperately. “It’s not as if you loved me.”
That look of wonder was fixed on her face, but her eyes had gone glassy, her lips were trembling again.
“God, you’re stupid,” she said softly. “You don’t know anything about anybody else. You make people up in your head, and you decide what they’re thinking, and whatever they do, you just stuff it into the pattern of what you’ve decided about them. And you don’t know anything.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Now get out of here. Please.”
But I sat there all the same awhile longer. Unclasping my hand, bouncing the ring on my palm for a bit. I pressed my own lips together to keep them still.
Then finally I slipped the ring into my shirt pocket and stood up to go.
2
It was about twenty past nine, I guess, when I left my apartment. Later, Mark Donaldson told me that that was exactly when he had called. I figure the phone must have rung as I was clomping gloomily down the stairs, but I didn’t hear it, or if I did, I didn’t pay it any mind. Barbara didn’t answer it either.
Eventually, Donaldson hung up. He had already tried my beeper, but it was still in the glove compartment of my car. He sat back in his chair and sighed.
By then, he had put in a full day at the paper—and he still had a story to write up. The story was about an enraged wife who tried to set her husband’s comic book collection on fire and was killed in the blaze that followed. Donaldson was in a hurry to get the story done so he could get home for some sex with his own wife before she went to sleep. He was in no mood to chase me down, and he wondered, anyway, if it was even worth the trouble.
The reason he was calling was this: He had been sitting at his desk, hammering out the lead to the comic book story when a call was transferred to him from the city desk. Bob had already gone home and Anna Lee Daniels was there, the night city editor.
“Mark,” she sang, across the big room, “some drunken moron on three.”
“Thanks,” said Donaldson. He picked up.
A guttural voice belched out his name. “Zis Donaldson?”
“Yeah?”
“Zabout ti one of you azzoles got wise bout de nigger.”
Donaldson tucked the receiver comfortably between cheek and shoulder and returned to tapping out his story on the keyboard. He liked it when crazy people called him; it made for some funny stories.
“Well, thank you for sharing that thought with me,” he said. “What exactly are
we talking about?”
“Aren you de one culled Benny bout de—uuuuuhhhhh—Beachum caze?” said the guy on the phone.
Donaldson stopped typing. He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “So who are you?”
“Me? Me? I’m Arsley. Who de fug dya think?”
“Arsleywho?”
“Lieutenan Arsley. I uz in charge of de investi-thing. Ingation. I’m retired.” This last came out “ritahed,” and was followed by a seizure of phlegmy coughing.
“Ardsley,” Donaldson said. “In Florida?”
The man on the phone wheezed a few times and then said, “Sarasota, yeah. So you figured out it uz de nigger, huh. Too you bazzards long enough.”
Donaldson reached for his pad and pen. He was developing that heavy-lidded expression he got when he was annoyed. He didn’t think he was going to get much of a funny story out of this call. In which case, he was inclined to feel this nasty creep could more or less go to hell.
“We’re talking about the Beachum case,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, nigger punk, druggie peeza shit. Warn Ruzzel. Heezawon.”
“What?”
“Heezawon!” Ardsley shouted. “Whattayou deaf?”
Heezawon, Donaldson repeated to himself. “He’s the one?”
“Yeah, whydaya think I’m callin’ here? Fuckin health? Warn Russel.”
“Warn who?”
“Russel. Warn. Thuzis name. Nigger druggie shit.”
“You’re telling me that he’s the one who shot—what’s her name—that woman in the store?”
“Eah, yeah, yeah. Shot her. Sure, he shot her. Whodaya think? I knew the minneh he came in. But the CA, she already made a big fuss, see, cause she go’ thiz whi guy gotta show she doin juztiz. Too many niggers gettin the needle. Fuckin Supreme Court azzoles say so. Ga do juztiz now. Sh’already talked to the—uuuuuuhhhhh—papers. Press. Big speech at the courthouse. Dred Scott.” Ardsley favored Donaldson with his impression of a whining woman. “ ‘Gonna get de death penalty. I’m so tough. Gah get juztiz. Yah, yah, yah.’ Then iz Russel come in, I say, ‘Heeza gah! Heeza gah!’ She says, ‘Whattaya talkin?’ I say, ‘Heeza gah!’ She says, ‘Wherza proof?’ ‘Proof?’ I say. ‘Lookim! Nigger peeza shit. Druggie peeza shit.’ I mean, I’m no bigot or nothin he jus di it. Thazzall. She say, ‘Bushit.’ She say, ‘No place peep lak you on de fuckin force.’ Bitch. I say, ‘Fahn!’ I say, ‘Fuck you, bitch. Kill de wrong guy. S’your funeral.’ Pfffftt.” This noise was apparently a laugh of some sort and was followed by another round of gurgling coughs. Then, suddenly, the ex-cop’s tone of voice changed. He became more serious. In fact, he sounded worried. “I ga go.”
“What? Wait a minute.”
“Uh-oh. I ga go.”
“Hold …” But Donaldson heard the phone slam repeatedly as Ardsley tried to find its place in the cradle. Then there was a dial tone.
“Eyech,” said Donaldson. He dropped his own phone home and wiped his hand clean on his shirtfront. He tilted back in his chair. “Hey, Anna Lee?”
The night city editor lifted her chin to him. Ah, Anna Lee. She was an elegant piece of work, all right, long and slim in her fashionable suit, with short black hair and a pixie’s face. I had been trying to get her to sleep with me for months but she had some kind of prejudice against married men. She was spouse-ist.
“That Beachum guy on death row?” said Donaldson. “Didn’t he confess today or something?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Anna Lee. “Wait a minute.” Those long, lovable white-painted nails of hers tapped their way back through the wire stories on her terminal. “No, here, wait,” she said. “They retracted that. The governor’s office says they don’t know where the story came from but ‘they deny having any information to that effect.’ ”
“Great. The cop who headed the case just called up and said Beachum’s innocent.”
“Whoa!” Anna Lee perked up at that. “Did he sound reliable?”
Donaldson mimicked Ardsley’s drunken slur. “He say it muzza been some nigguh peeza shit.”
Anna Lee perked down again. “Terrific. Hold page one.”
“Yeah,” said Donaldson. “St. Loo’s finest.”
But he called me anyway. First the beeper, then the phone at home. When he got no answer, he sat back in his chair, watching his monitor, watching the cursor blink at the bottom of his burned-wife story.
Because he was not the sort to leave the matter there. He wanted to get home and get laid, sure. And he thought Lieutenant Ardsley was a vicious hamhock who couldn’t even tell a polluted version of the truth. But he knew there was a man’s life on the line, and he was thinking it might be wise to call Bob at home and run the story past him. He even vaguely considered following it up himself.
But that was when he heard Anna Lee start to cry.
He looked over at the city desk and saw her sitting with her hand on the telephone as if she had just hung up. Her normally composed, wry and elfin features were splotched and contorted. Her other hand shielded her eyes and the tears poured out from under it, making black tracks of mascara on her high cheeks.
By the time Donaldson was out of his chair, there were two other night side reporters moving toward her, as well as the assistant night city editor and a movie reviewer from across the room. Nobody didn’t like Anna Lee.
The staff gathered around the city desk and stared as their editor wept. Except for Harriet McConnel from county side, they were all men, and they stood there silent and abashed for long moments, watching Anna’s lean body shake with sobs.
Finally, Donaldson, irked, looked up at Harriet.
“For Christ’s sake, Harry, ask her what’s wrong,” he said.
“What’s wrong, Anna Lee?” asked Harriet McConnel.
It was another few seconds before the night city editor could swallow her tears and lower her hand—and blow the Beachum story completely out of Donaldson’s mind by saying simply: “Michelle is dead.”
3
Five years earlier, a minor functionary of the state’s Democratic party had approached the Reverend Harlan Flowers in the south city church where the reverend was making his name as a young firebrand. The functionary was a small, bald, pink-faced man who had a damp red smile and a dry, mirthless chuckle which Flowers found peculiarly unattractive. The functionary explained in fairly plain terms that he wanted to contribute a substantial sum of money to Flowers’s discretionary funds. In return for this donation, Flowers would be expected to ensure that the members of his congregation were registered as Democratic voters, transported to the polls come election day and encouraged to vote their party’s ticket from the governor’s office right on down the line. The functionary—rapidly swiping at his smile with a handkerchief—pointed out that Flowers would thus be serving his people—black people—twice over: once by receiving funds which could be used for the betterment of the neighborhood (or not, as Flowers saw fit) and again by pushing them to vote for that party which had “historically been in the forefront of your people’s struggle.” Despite this dual inducement, Flowers refused the donation. To be fair to both the reverend and the Democrats, a Republican functionary turned up only three days later offering substantial sums to ensure that Flower’s congregation did not go to the polls at all—and he was refused as well. Finally, a number of Flowers’s fellow churchmen showed up, expressing the opinion that Flowers was being naive about the political process and otherwise getting in the way of a pretty good thing. When Flowers explained that it seemed immoral to him to sell his vote let alone the votes of his parishioners, the other ministers trooped from the room wearing very serious expressions indeed.
About six weeks after the election, one of these same ministers took to his pulpit to announce in tones of thunderous regret that he had come into possession of disheartening news. Charges had been made, he said, that a certain neighborhood servant of God had strayed from the path of righteousness so far as to misappropriate church funds for his own uses,
patronize various local establishments of sin and abuse the trust of at least one young girl who had come to him for spiritual guidance. The young girl was produced, the press was alerted and investigators from both the city and the state were dispatched with what some might have felt was remarkable alacrity. The Reverend Harlan Flowers was in deep, deep trouble.
The scandal that followed was not the less painful and debilitating to Flowers for the fact that he was guiltless. The sight of his name in the newspapers linked to financial boondoggles he hadn’t the nature to devise and sexual improprieties he hadn’t even the inclination to commit, was like a stone gargoyle perched atop his heart devouring the inner substance of it day after miserable day. There were nights during that period when Flowers fell on his knees and begged his God to kill him as a mercy. There were mornings when he awoke made almost faithless by the fact that his prayers had gone unheeded and his consciousness had been allowed to return.
He was saved the disaster of an indictment finally by our froggy friend Cecilia Nussbaum. The circuit attorney soon got wise to the real nature of the charges and not only called off the local dogs but journeyed to Jefferson City where many a political buttock was made to resemble a football field after a particularly rainy Sunday. As for the reporters, after about the fifth time Flowers told them that he had been rigorously faithful to his wife for all seventeen years of their marriage, it finally occurred to them that this was a pretty original defense for a public figure. In fact, they began to feel it was so preposterous it might just be true. And the moment the sex charges evaporated, the financial peccadilloes that had been discovered in the church books appeared miraculously to be exactly what they were: the result of Flowers’s sloppy and indifferent accounting procedures. With a few self-examining editorials to cover their retreat, the media withdrew.
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