When Phyllis began seeing the husband of her friend Lulu Classen, in late December of the previous year, the theme of their relationship—such relationships, like adult education courses, always have “themes”—was the mutual wish for a simplicity of life, a “paring back to the essentials.” Mickey felt most strongly, and Phyllis adamantly agreed, that the frantic nature of professional and social life in Queenston was depriving them of basic happiness—“What is money for, except to bring us peace of mind?” Mickey’s complaint, surprisingly bitter in one who had always seemed resigned to his lot, was that his wife cared more for her “activities” than for him; Phyllis’s complaint, which she knew to make wistful, not bitter, was that her husband cared more, far more, obsessively far more, for his work than for her. Mickey lent Phyllis an old, much-read hardback copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the Bible of his life, to read; Phyllis, after some flurried searching amid cartons of books stored in a corner of the basement, discovered an aged and seemingly much-read paperback copy of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which she lent Mickey to read—“The Bible of my life.”
A subtheme of Phyllis’s and Mickey’s relationship, which evolved by quick degrees into a genuine affair, was that their spouses, both from “more modest backgrounds” than their own, placed too much of a premium upon social position, social reputation: They “worried too much” about how others perceived them. Conversely, Lulu was often slipshod in the quality of household help she hired, and allowed her hair to grow to an unbecoming length; she was overly indulgent with the children, out of moral weakness. And Terence!—well, Terence was impossible.
Phyllis told Mickey, sighing, laughing, “I doubt that that man could dress himself, even choose a decent necktie, except for me.”
And, “He’s so weak with Aaron, I think he fears our son not liking him.”
It went discreetly unspoken between Phyllis Greene and Mickey Classen that each was extremely well-to-do. Divorce would not drain their resources in the slightest, and setting up a new household, in a “more rural” part of Queenston Township, would be an exhilaratingly exciting prospect. Phyllis had “always felt cramped, constrained” in the house at 7 Juniper Way, Mickey had “always wanted more acreage, real woods.” A clay tennis court, an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Separate guest quarters. A studio for Phyllis. A kiln for Mickey, who had longings to be a potter, in which to “fire” his pots. Their spouses—the nervously sweet-smiling Lulu, the earnest, unfailingly courteous Terence—were perceived as selfish, restraining presences, like jailers, or bloated spiders inhabiting houses long outgrown. How hard, suddenly, to breathe in their company!
Unknown to Mickey, as it would be unknown to Terence, was the fact that, yes, Phyllis had been “involved” with Matt Montgomery—but the affair had scarcely lasted six weeks, and had ended with such unfeeling abruptness on Montgomery’s part, Phyllis did not think it counted, really. She’d wept, a bit; she had been humiliated; yet, Matt Montgomery being the man he was, far and away the most sexually attractive of the Queenston men of his set, how could she resent him, for long? When now they met socially, Matt behaved as he’d always done; quite as if nothing had ever happened between them—no delirious kisses, no rapturous exchanges of pleasure. After her initial shock, Phyllis took her cue from Matt Montgomery, and learned to behave the same way.
In time, she didn’t doubt, she would forget, entirely—for she’d never loved any man as she loved Mickey Classen.
“Not Matt, but Mickey!—my God, I would never have guessed.”
Not once but several times, Terence Greene so exclaimed, staring at his wife as if he had never seen the woman before.
They wept in each other’s arms. Talked, and wept; wept, and talked. Not in Terence’s study but in the family room, in a farther wing of the house where it was less likely they would be overheard. Toward 2 A.M., Phyllis suggested they open a bottle of white wine—that good, expensive French wine the Classens themselves had brought over one evening last winter—to calm their nerves.
Then suddenly they were naked, naked as newlyweds, and weeping in each other’s arms, and a frantic need overcame them to make love—not as they had been doing for years, but in the way of their early passion, their youth. “I love you,” one whispered, and the other, “I love you.” Terence, with tightly shut eyes, tried to summon back the image of his sensuous and provocative fiancée, the rich minister’s daughter; Phyllis tried to summon back the image of her handsome, hungry young fiancé. Neither succeeded.
Yet wasn’t there relief of a kind in this, their mutual failure? That their wine-soaked kisses were not after all enough to rekindle an old, outgrown passion? Not merely relief but forgiveness, even affection. Lying together a bit awkwardly on the nubby sofa in front of the cavernous, darkened fireplace, in each other’s arms, and naked. For the final time.
After some time Phyllis asked if Terence was awake, and Terence indicated yes, and Phyllis said, gently, almost shyly, “You don’t have to tell me, Terry, if you’d rather not. About your—” pausing, not knowing how tactfully to phrase it, your own friend? lover? secret life? until Terence helped her out by saying, “Phyllis, there is no one,” and Phyllis said, as if rebuffed, “No one?” and Terence said, flatly, “No one,” and Phyllis said, “But—wasn’t there? Wasn’t there someone?” and Terence said, “I really don’t know, dear. Maybe, in fact, no.”
Awkwardly drifting off to sleep as they did, neither slept well; toward morning, Phyllis quietly slipped away, to tiptoe upstairs to her own bed, and Terence, who had feigned sleep until Phyllis left, went away upstairs to his. There, groggy and faintly nauseated, he fell into sleep as into a deep lightless quarry.
I am a dead man, my life is over. My life is given me to begin.
And this was a coincidence of those turbulent hours: Terence woke abruptly from a dream of childhood in which both intense yearning and anxiety were commingled, to discover Phyllis, in a yellow terrycloth bathrobe, hair damp from the shower, calling his name. She smiled hesitantly, she was carrying a breakfast tray. Now there were no secrets between them, she said, she had something further to tell him. And, as she spoke, Terence realized that he’d been dreaming of his lost, dead mother Hettie Greene when Phyllis entered the room and wakened him.
Phyllis’s secret was, strictly speaking, the elder Winstons’—they had extracted from her the reluctant promise, nearly twenty-five years ago, never to tell Terence. But now she would tell him. How, when Phyllis had fallen unexpectedly in love with Terence and decided, yes, she would marry him (a graduate student already in debt from college loans, a rawboned young man seemingly without any family), the Winstons had, outrageously, and without Phyllis’s knowledge, hired a private detective to investigate their prospective son-in-law’s background—“I was furious with them, checking up on you in such a way. As if you, the wonderful young man you seemed to be, weren’t enough for Father and Mother!”
Terence Greene, the wonderful young man now middle aged, steeled himself to listen.
And so, within the space of a few minutes, on a warm July morning after the night in which his marriage dissolved, Terence Greene at last learned the rudiments of his lost life:
His mother had died “by her own hand”—hanged herself with a towel—in a jail cell in a county jail in upstate New York; she’d hanged herself two days into her trial for second-degree felony murder and as an accomplice to armed robbery.
Terence’s father, who had in fact committed the crimes, shooting to death a bartender in a country tavern during a robbery, had not lived to stand trial—he’d been shot by police trying to escape.
Terence’s mother’s name was Hetitia Greene, born in Tintern Falls, New York, daughter of a farming family; she’d been twenty-three years old when she died. Terence’s father’s name was “something very ordinary, like Mack Smith, Mike Smith,” and he too was from the Tintern Falls area, discharged from the Navy, served one or two prison sentences for car theft; he’d been in his mid-thirties when
he died of multiple bullet wounds.
Terence, his young mother’s only child, born “out of wedlock,” had been two years old when his mother committed suicide.
Terence’s father had died during a high-speed car chase. Hettie Greene and two-year-old Terence had been in the car with him.
When Smith was struck by police bullets his car had swerved off the road and overturned several times in a snowy field. Hettie Greene and her little boy, passengers in the rear seat, had been injured and hospitalized. Smith had died in the wreck.
It was Hettie Greene’s claim that she’d been an unwilling accomplice to the robbery, the murder. She told police, and would later testify at her trial, that Smith, with whom she’d been living for several years, had often beaten her, and threatened to kill both her and their son if she didn’t do everything he commanded.
There had been other thefts, armed robberies, committed by Smith, and Hettie Greene had been an “unwilling accomplice” to these, too. And she had a juvenile record—“runaway child.” And there were “contradictions” in her various testimonies.
The tone of the trial—“I suppose the detective looked up newspaper accounts?”—was heavily against the defendant, when Hettie Greene took her life. Had she been convicted of both second-degree felony murder and as an accomplice to armed robbery, she might have been sentenced to as many as seventy years in prison.
After Hettie Greene’s death, her son Terence was taken in by a succession of relatives, scattered through New York State. There were no further incidents of a “public nature” in his life.
Terence Greene did well in all the schools he attended, and eventually won a scholarship to the State University of New York at Binghamton. There, he excelled, and—“Which brought us up to the present time, when ‘Terence Greene’ met ‘Phyllis Winston,’ and they became engaged.”
Phyllis, who had been speaking earnestly, yet a bit disjointedly, as if without having prepared beforehand much of what she intended to tell Terence, was clearly enjoying the drama, the pathos, of the moment. Terence’s silence and the utter stillness of his posture, the rapt expression in his eyes, provided her with the ideal mood in which this old, near-forgotten secret might be revealed. Had it not been for Terence’s hand shaking as he lifted his coffee cup, Phyllis might have supposed him unmoved; or, so fatally engaged by her words, he had no need to respond to them.
She said, with an air of girlish complaint, “Imagine—Father and Mother thought this report might make me reconsider marrying you! I remember Father, who in fact liked you, Terry, as a person, very much, taking me into his study and telling me in the gravest voice I’d ever heard, ‘The sins of the fathers are visited on the heads of the sons’—then going on to talk about heredity, genetics, that sort of thing.” Phyllis paused. Terence had now set down his coffee cup, was rubbing his eyes, was perhaps on the verge of tears; Phyllis alarmed herself that she might cry. “I told him, Terry, I remember I stood right up and banged my fist on his desk—that desk that’s yours now—and said, ‘Call yourself a minister of the Lord?—a Christian man? Saying such things about the man I love?’ I told him and Mother that I was going to marry you with or without their blessing, and that was that. I was damned stubborn in those days!”
How like a heroine Phyllis Greene was emerging, so unexpectedly in her own eyes: she who, the previous night, had revealed herself as an adulterous and unrepentant woman!
Terence said, quietly, “You were brave.”
He set down the coffee cup, and went to a window, to gaze out at the rear yard. Phyllis came quickly up behind him, and touched his shoulder. “Terry, are you all right? Should I have told you? Would you rather not have known?”
Terence did not reply; seemed not to have heard. Phyllis felt a clammy heat about his body. (He was in a cotton undershirt and shorts.) She went on, worriedly, “And such a shock, after last night.… You know, I’d always wondered, in a way, why you never made much of an effort to find out more about your past, as an adult. Going to court records, even hiring a private detective. If I’d been you, I would have wanted to know.”
Terence did not move away from Phyllis’s touch, but he did not seem to encourage it. He said, still looking out the window, at the massed evergreens and tall, leafy deciduous trees stretching to the rear of their property, “Maybe I already knew. I just didn’t want to remember.”
“We’ll never tell the children—of course. Or”—and here Phyllis hesitated, delicately—“Mickey. I promise.”
More briskly now, Terence said, “Well, we have many more practical things to discuss, than ancient history. I should move out, I suppose?—isn’t that what’s usually done? How soon do you want me gone?”
Phyllis shuddered. “Oh, Terry, that word ‘gone’—it sounds so—final.” She paused, tears welling in her eyes. In a gesture of wifely intimacy she pressed her forehead, and her damp eyes, against the back of Terence’s cotton undershirt. “Maybe—by next Monday?”
The Summons
Strange that it should have come to me by way of her, and not in memory, or a dream though now, as if a trigger had been sprung deep in his soul, Terence was dreaming far more frequently than ever before in his life, and so vividly! In the melancholy-echoing house at 7 Juniper Way in which he lived alone for most of August, and, later, in his single-bedroom “luxury” apartment off Queenston Square.
Though sedated with drink as he was most nights, how strange that Terence Greene was capable of dreaming at all, or remembering, upon waking, that he had.
A young woman who is my mother, her frightened eyes. Squeezing me against her breasts. No no don’t look! A man who is my father. His dark-stubbled jaws, blood-threaded angry eyes. Harsh hacking cough. And blood exploding out of his mouth as bullets tear into the back of his head.
Hettie Greene: only a girl, so young. Hanging herself in a county jail cell. The courtroom, the trial. The judge’s high bench. The American flag behind the bench. The odors of wet wool, wet rubber boots. The sheriff’s deputies, their impassive faces, eyes. Their holstered pistols. Everyone in the courtroom staring at the frightened young woman giving testimony. Condemning her beforehand—guilty as charged.
These sights, which I never saw. I was too young to have seen. I would not have been allowed to have seen. Yet—“So vivid, the nightmare, I must have been there.”
Terence moved out of his house forever on August 29, well in advance of his family’s return on September 7. (Labor Day came late this year.) Leaving the house with few possessions, yes with a backward glance of regret and, unexpectedly, a sharp pang of loss recalling the evening he’d carried poor Tuffi wrapped in an old beach towel for a winding sheet and buried him amid the evergreens, the soft earth fragrant with their needles.
That punk! that animal! with the gold ring through his nose had fallen there too, but Terence had not buried him there. Terence had not taken the trouble to bury him, at all.
Dreaming more frequently, and more luridly, now. Sprawled in his sweaty underwear across his bed. Maggots I said, and maggots I mean. You men! He woke, startled, to the sound of female laughter.
These were lengthy heat-stuporous days as summer waned, and even longer nights. Never that woman. Treacherous woman. Again. Even when sober and upright returning from the depot, attaché case in hand, walking to his apartment because it was only a matter of two blocks now, even then he seemed never to remember which doorway was his, that it was that doorway he must turn into, The Queenston Square Arms, a few steps from Qwik-Copy (photocopying, faxing services) to the right and Yogurt Delite to the left.
(Young teenagers patronized Yogurt Delite and hung about on the sidewalk. Terence Greene averted his eyes, not wanting to see his children, and be seen by them. But, of course, they were away—his daughters in Nantucket, his son in the West. Spared of being embarrassed by Daddy.)
Yes, he’d cooperated. He would instruct his lawyer to cooperate with Phyllis’s lawyer. He’d moved out of 7 Juniper Way well in advance of Ph
yllis’s deadline, and surrendered all his keys. Terence Greene was a gentleman and would remain a gentleman until the unspeakable end.
And how considerate of Phyllis, after all: She’d changed her mind about kicking him out so abruptly, decided it would be a better idea if she, Kim, and Cindy went up early to Nantucket, to stay with her mother I regret I didn’t kill when I had the opportunity for the rest of the summer. (Mickey had taken a house on Nantucket, too. An arrangement made months ago, without Lulu’s knowledge.) This way, Phyllis said, Terence could remain at home to make his plans for the future under less pressure.
After the first flush of excitement, and personal triumph—how much the center of things Phyllis Greene had become!—Phyllis had taken on the less gratifying role of mediator, organizer. She professed an “agonizing concern” that the children not be “traumatized.” She seemed to worry that Terence, in his very docility, or indifference, was making a bad impression.
Saying, in mild reprimand over the telephone, “This is damned hard on all of us, Terry. Not just you.”
I want to confess to several crimes. I am uncertain how to go about it. One murder occurred in Trenton, last September: The victim’s name was (is?) Eldrick Gill. A second murder occurred in Manhattan, in April of this year: The victim was the well-known poet Quincy Ryder, whose death in a ninth-floor fall was ruled “accidental.” A third murder occurred in Queenston, New Jersey, in July: The victim was a young man named Studs Schrieber (Edward Schrieber, Jr.) whom police believe to be “missing.” His body will be found, by now in a state of advanced putrefaction, in a rolled-up carpet in a ravine/landfill off Route 22 in rural Hunterdon County.
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