Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  I went for a walk to think over my problem with the Bureau of Child Welfare. The day was dense with rain that wouldn’t fall, the sky the color of ash, and Prospect Park was beautiful in that kind of weather, the brambles strung with beads of cold water, the branches of the oaks black against the sky at the edge of the Nethermead. At that time of day the park was haunted by solitary women in head scarves, walking rangy dogs—a category of women I thought of as The Widows. I took a path that looped back and forth across a long, motionless pond. The woods were quiet.

  In Argentina I had needed information about a group of students, and I had been given a brief to infiltrate, which meant, in that case, paying the international student fee at the university and making myself their friend. When you have little to go on, you have to just go where the action is and hang around until something happens.

  I still had a fake driver’s license that I had kept in my wallet during my first years in New York, when I was going out dancing and didn’t want the police to get my name if there was a raid. If you showed them identification, they might send you home; if you refused, they would make you sit for a day or two in the Tombs out of spite, and once they got your real name they would put it in the blotter. My fake said my name was Rose Davies. I remembered the man who’d sold it to me, a little guy from Flushing who hung around with speed freaks but wasn’t one. I wondered if he could supply social security cards as well. I was going to need one, because I was applying for a job.

  CHAPTER 4

  The jewel in the crown of Catholic Family Services was Saint Jerome’s School for Boys, a winding drive to a hidden campus of white buildings on a hill in the town of Oakwood, New York, site of a Revolutionary War defeat and an ancient ferry landing. I took the train from Grand Central to Westchester County. On a historical society plaque at the Oakwood station, I read that the town was also home to the ruins of a barn and meeting house that had belonged to a celibate utopian commune, which had eased into extinction for obvious reasons in 1882. They had raised sheep, sold wool, and fired bricks. I checked my hair in a mirror compact and used a tissue to edge away lipstick that had crept too far.

  I had called Mr. Ibarra a few days before to tell him that I suspected Félix had been picked up by Child Welfare, and suggested he make inquiries, since he was family. He tried, but got nowhere. There was no one listed anywhere under the name Félix Ibarra, and when he said the boy might be using another name, the officials on the other end became suspicious and evasive. He stuttered with frustration when he told me on the telephone.

  The campus was a mile and a half up a steep road. A vanload of boys passed and jeered at me while I climbed it, and I looked into half a dozen teenage faces for an instant; they were delighted and angry, and then gone. I was warm when I got to the top of the hill. A sign next to a guard’s booth at the school gate made the T in SAINT JEROME into a large cross, which split in half a line of praise for the generosity of the governor that ran across the bottom of the board. I explained my reason for visiting to the man in the booth, who tipped slowly off his stool and came out to open the gate. I walked up the drive to the administration building.

  At the front desk, just inside the foyer, a secretary was changing the ribbon on her typewriter.

  “I’m looking for work,” I said. It was less than a week to Christmas, and an artificial tree stood behind the secretary, the boughs frosted with artificial snow.

  “What kind of work?” she said.

  “I’ve been a caseworker and an aide.”

  “Have you seen the listings?” she said.

  “I haven’t.”

  “I’ve got them here.” She pulled a folder from a drawer. “You can sit there on the bench.”

  I took the listings to the bench. It was a sheaf of St. Jerome’s help-wanted ads, mimeographed from the pages of the Westchester papers. A dozen at least. Cooks, porters, caseworkers, social workers, clerks, guards.

  “There’s quite a lot,” I ventured.

  “People come and they go,” the secretary said.

  I fished my résumé out of my bag and chose the ad for the caseworker. A woman whose stockings were coming down blustered in, her hair wild. “Margaretta,” she said to the secretary. “Mother of God, those boys in Cottage 4.”

  “You’re not supposed to be in there without Chambers.”

  “Tell that to my supervisor.”

  “Ha. If I could find him,” said the secretary.

  “They blocked the door with a bunk bed. They want to keep me out, let them.”

  “You’re not going in there without Chambers.”

  “Your lips to God’s ear.”

  I was hovering, holding out the résumé and the ad. “Caseworker, please. I’d like to apply.”

  The women both turned to look at me, taking their time about it. I thought there might be a way for me to adopt their stance, to join their side. A few comments sprang to mind, things to say about the jobs that I was pretending to have had, the facilities and institutions listed on the fabricated résumé in my hand. But from the stillness of their faces when they looked at me, I could see that I shouldn’t try.

  The secretary took the papers and read them. The woman with her stockings bunched up in her shoes leaned against the wall and began to smooth her hair with her fingers.

  “I’ll give this to the residential director,” the secretary said. “But he’ll say yes. We’ve been very short. Be ready to come back after Christmas.”

  The triumph I felt about my success in this venture had begun to fade by the time the train pulled into Grand Central Terminal, and when I had the idea to go to the Bracken, I didn’t try all that hard to resist it. The weather had turned ugly by then, and though it was just five thirty, time for the office girls, the bar was quiet. The lights had not yet been dimmed for the evening. I could see the places in the floor where the nails stood out from boards that had been worn down by dancing. The row of Moroccan lanterns over the bar looked cheery. Max the bartender was smoking, leaning back against the cash register. She had a nice way of doing nothing without looking bored. She nodded when I came in, folding a fifty-cent umbrella I had just been forced by necessity to buy at the deli on the corner. My coat was spotted with rain.

  “I was starting to think they’d dropped the bomb and nobody told me,” she said.

  “You’ve got customers,” I said. There were a couple of women in a booth.

  “They’re sculptures. They came with the place.”

  I laughed. “A gimlet, please.”

  “I’m going to promote you off the bottom shelf today, just because.” She uncapped a bottle of Tanqueray.

  “You’re much too kind.” I watched her work. The hem at her neckline had come unstitched on one side, and the fabric was creeping up. I wondered if she lived in a boardinghouse, like I used to. Some girls in the scene still lived at home with their mothers and fathers. But no, I thought. If she lived with her mother, her collar would be fixed.

  “I think I got a new job today,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? That’s terrific.” She took her own glass out from a low shelf. “Where?”

  “A reform school up in Westchester.”

  “That’s some commute.”

  “I suppose so. But beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “So they say. You’re a teacher?”

  “Something like that.”

  She looked at me as if expecting me to go on, but I didn’t.

  “Cheers to those who have the patience for it,” she said finally, and then went to the other end of the bar to attend to one of the women who had just surfaced from the booth.

  Something was wrong in the shadows in front of my house. I stepped back where I couldn’t be seen. The street was lined with leaning trees, and the shadows of the streetlights made things complicated, but someone was there. I crossed to number 117 and turned to look. A figure was huddled at the top of my stoop with arms around knees, smoking. It was Jane. She always sat like a kid, folded up. I
was pleased, then angry, then ashamed of having been pleased. I crossed the street again, making myself obvious now. She stood up. I needed to get the light over my front door fixed; I couldn’t have this dark space there for people to crouch in. It needed to be rewired—that was another bill. I stopped at the bottom of the stoop, as if she owned the place and I had come to sell her a vacuum cleaner. “Hello,” I said.

  “Vera,” she said. “I’m sorry to show up like this. I’ve been trying to call but I never seem to get you.”

  “You never do.” She was standing the way she did when she was nervous, with her knees together and her feet pigeon-toed. She was small and round, with hair almost as curly as mine, a blushing dynamo if she felt like dancing, unconvincing at contrition and apologies and everything else she was likely to do tonight.

  “I left some—I’m sorry. I want to apologize,” she said.

  “On the stoop?” I had withdrawn. I could feel it happening; it was almost physical.

  “Well, if you want. Or I could come in.”

  I went up and let her in. The house was cold; since I lost my job I had been turning down the boiler whenever I left. I wished I hadn’t today. I wished the house were warm and inviting and I could refuse to ask her to sit down, or maybe I wished that I could make her a pot roast and wrap her in a blanket. I dropped my keys on the hall table and walked into the kitchen. She could follow me if she wanted. She followed me.

  “I left my notes,” she said.

  “What notes?” Under the kitchen light I could see that she had dyed her hair again. It was red, and some of the curl had gone out of it. I had always thought she had the face of an English governess, milky and small featured, freckled but serious. When she had a meeting with the dean she always penciled her eyebrows in. She said she felt like she wasn’t quite there otherwise.

  “For the Comparative Review paper,” she said.

  “I would have mailed them to you.”

  She was wringing her hands. Her face was pink from the cold. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  She had no business looking so embarrassed when I was the humiliated one. I was the one who wasn’t enough. When would this scalding stop?

  “What did you want to say?” I said.

  “That I’m sorry. For the way I behaved. With—with Louise.”

  “That’s her name? Why are you coming over to my house and telling me her name?”

  She went on. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. I really never did. It happened bit by bit and then it was—happening. I’m so sorry.”

  “When did it start?”

  “When did it—well . . . I—”

  “When did you start to lie to me?”

  She looked alarmed. She dropped her gaze to her shoes. “In July, I guess it was.”

  We’d had a beautiful summer together. I had thought. My ribs felt like I was stuck in a girdle. “In July,” I repeated. “When we went to Montauk.”

  “It was just after that.” She looked pained. My eyes were wet. I turned around quickly, took a glass off a shelf, put it down.

  “It doesn’t matter now anyway,” she said. “It fell apart. It wasn’t much to start with. I’m so stupid, Vera. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, which didn’t make any sense.

  “It’s not all right. I’ve been a pig.” She was crying in earnest now, her shoulders shaking. “She borrowed money from me, Vera. God knows what she was doing with hers. I covered three months of her rent up front, and then she said she had to think things over and got on a train to Montreal. I even took an advance on my salary. I feel like the stupidest person in the world.” Her eyes were swollen and she looked light-headed, tentative. I pulled the kitchen chair out for her and brushed her hair out of her wet face. She rested her head against my waist and I let her. “Fools rush in,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s not a fool. Couldn’t be one if you tried.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “It’s true.”

  “Come on,” I said. It was a sad idea, to never come unstuck from yourself. Her tears were leaking through my dress. “Look, I think you should have some tea and whiskey.”

  “All right,” she said.

  I wondered if she had eaten. She sometimes forgot. While the kettle was coming to a boil, I went to the living room and turned the thermostat up from where I had left it all day. In the depths of the house the radiators kicked on, whistling.

  Once she had had her hot toddy and a sandwich, she pulled herself together. I went and got her papers for her. It felt strange, retrieving them from the second bedroom, which she had used as an office during the long weekends she spent at my place. They were just where she had left them, shuffled together and held down with a dictionary on the desk in the corner. I had left them there because it hurt to move them, and it was as if, by coming back, she had kindly offered an end to the spell that bound me from entering this room. I looked at the first page. I couldn’t make much sense of it. I hadn’t been to school the way Jane had. I wondered if I had been successful in hiding from her the way she intimidated me, with her mountains of books and chummy arguments about style. She came from the college livid sometimes; she had published more than anyone in her tier and was still only a lecturer. All the tenured places went to men. We had fought about it once. I had called her naive.

  When I came down with the papers, Jane was washing her mug and plate in the sink.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. I had gotten very tired on the trip back down the stairs. She didn’t answer. I watched her set the dishes aside and dry her hands.

  “Can I use your telephone?” she said. “I think I’ll be extravagant and call a cab.”

  “Of course.” I pointed to it, although she knew where it was.

  I waited with her on the stoop. “You know, I lost my job,” I said, after thinking about it for a long time.

  “No!” I could see her trying to make out my expression in the dark. “What happened?”

  I started to clear my throat but only made a humming noise. “Kepler heard me on the phone with you.”

  She said nothing at first and I regretted having spoken. She would think I wanted her to feel bad about it. I didn’t. It was my own fault, or Kepler’s. Mr. Anderson’s, for being such a coward. It would be hard to replace me. I shifted, not wanting to catch her eye, and then remembered the cigarette I had put behind my ear and lit it. She put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder.

  “That’s hideous,” she said.

  “Yes, well,” I said. Her cab arrived, and her hand slipped away. I watched her go down the steps and cross the sidewalk, light on her feet, like a bird.

  As predicted, the residential director at Saint Jerome called on Thursday and asked if I could start on Tuesday, which was the day after Christmas. I agreed. I was pleased and eager to begin, and it wasn’t all because of the case. Distractions were welcome. After the call, I went back to the business of the week, which was finding a way to survive the holiday, once again.

  In the end, I fell back on an old Christmas strategy: matinees all afternoon at a movie theater on Houston Street—Doctor Dolittle, then Fitzwilly, then The Graduate, and then, why not, I waited in my seat until they played The Graduate again. Afterward I went to a place in the Lower East Side that served beef burgundy, which I ordered and then ate with two glasses of beer. The waiter winked when he brought the drinks, as if to say that he was letting me get away with something untoward.

  I slept poorly that night, as I always did before the first day at a new job. I kept having twitchy nightmares about trains I couldn’t catch. I gave up and got out of bed at five thirty, choosing a sober outfit: a wool skirt, blocky shoes. I got the paper off the stoop and read it for a while in the kitchen. All bad news. ALLIED CEASEFIRE ENDS IN VIETNAM – BOMBING RESUMES. It was a relief when the time came to walk to the B train.

  It was a drizzling gray morning in Oakwood,
New York. I was checked in by the same secretary I had seen before, and directed to a hot, narrow office with a stack of forms to fill out, then shown to a large, tiled room filled with desks. The windows were open, letting in the damp air and letting out the smell of bleach from still-wet floors.

  “This is the casework office,” said the secretary. “The girls do their own typing. You can type?”

  “I can type.” Through the cantilevered windows I could see the school building. White columns across the front affected to hold up a pediment depicting St. Jerome in concrete relief, engaged in some nonspecific act of charity with a group of children. Behind the school, a lawn shocked brown by the winter ended in a tangle of bare trees and undergrowth. In the distance, the silver of the Hudson River, soft with fog this morning.

  “Take an empty desk,” the secretary said. “But make sure it is empty.”

  My supervisor was Mrs. Allen. Mrs. Allen would be in at ten o’clock. I chose a desk and put my pen and pad in the top drawer. The building was quiet. I could hear footsteps from time to time, and female voices raised in joking or complaining tones, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. I hadn’t expected it to be quiet. The Maryland Youth Center had filled my head as soon as I walked in the gate that morning, and that had been a noisy place, even when the matrons managed to hector and punish us into silence. Our shoes echoed and squeaked, we elbowed and thumped each other, we were always just contained. The breakfast trays were deafening as they came through the dishwasher’s window in the dining room, the staff telephone was always ringing to no effect, the immense soup pots in the kitchen went off like gongs. Finally I remembered that it was the day after Christmas and the boys who weren’t home on leave were probably sleeping late, off school for the week.

  Mrs. Allen swept in, wearing a belted raincoat and galoshes, at 9:55 AM.

  “You’re the new one?” she said. “Miss Davies?”