She bounced in the chairs, opened the drawers in the night tables. “No Bible,” she said. “You think they put them away for the off-season?” She went into the bathroom but left the door open, and I heard running water. “It’s good and hot,” she said. “God, I feel filthy.”
“Are you hungry?” I called.
“Starving. Do you think the kitchen is open?”
“No, no.” It was one o’clock in the morning. “But maybe they have something.” The bathroom door closed and I heard water rush in the pipes. I called down to the lobby and was told they could send up two chicken sandwiches, the price of which made me blanch. But I was too hungry to sleep, so I reconciled myself to it. The sandwiches arrived a few minutes later in the hands of an aged bellboy, and I was relieved to find that I still had enough cash for the tip. I ate my sandwich standing up at the window, though with the lights on I couldn’t see the view that had delighted Max unless I cupped my hands around my eyes. A spread of unbroken woods and a bit of the end of the lake. Jane would have known all about this kind of place. Hadn’t she worked a few summers in a hotel in the Finger Lakes? Many of her teenage stories included the words summer people. She had saved a little boy from drowning once in Seneca Lake, the child of a Montreal family down for the season. I heard the bathroom door open behind me.
“I’m a new woman,” Max said happily.
I missed her; it was awful. I turned around, and Max was there, bent over the room service cart with its solitary sandwich, her hair loose and wet, her skin pink, wrapped in a white bathrobe with the hotel stitched in miniature over the left breast.
CHAPTER 8
Félix was sick of Paulie, who was supposed to split the tips with the busboys and the dishwashers but kept some back. Paulie thought nobody knew it because he did the counting at the concierge stand in front, but he didn’t notice that Félix could see him from his post cleaning the glass front doors.
The restaurant was an Italian place that cost a lot. Some days Félix worked from opening at eleven o’clock in the morning until after closing at ten o’clock at night, running plates and clearing tables. He was slower than some, because he checked over and over for steak knives and broken glass in the bins. He had tried to explain it once to a cook who was watching him unload dirty dishes, but he didn’t have the word for it in English, and when he tried to describe the problem, the cook looked at him like he was crazy. “Too much blood if I get cut,” he said several times, and then gave up. He had dim, awful memories of a week in the hospital and a blood transfusion when he was six, after he stepped on a nail in a field on the hacienda.
It was a hard job. The minute he sat down at the end of his shift and took off his shoes, his feet would begin to pulse with heat, and he sometimes felt static-shock crackles of pain in the joints of his toes. He wore tennis shoes. Dennis, the head cook, said those were the wrong kind of shoes for this kind of work, but they were all Félix had. Maybe he could buy different shoes next month. At least he had plenty to eat. Plates of fettuccine Alfredo with the cooks before the dinner service, and then shrimp scampi at end of shift if the moods were right. Sometimes he was allowed to bring cartons of noodles back to the house, if they were going to throw them away.
The house had a big turret and a little one and wooden shingles falling off the front, like a sea monster rotting away. A week and a half’s pay, every month, went to Ruth, the landlady, who came to collect it in person. Another boy at Saint Jerome had told Félix about the house, in what already felt like another life. The downstairs smelled like mildew and it was always cold. Most of the boys slept upstairs, in the three largest bedrooms. They had come from various places and most didn’t like to be asked about it. The older boys crowded into the bedroom in the back, where the windows were newer and fit tight in the frames, and the kerosene heater they kept could make some difference against the cold. The younger boys and more recent arrivals were left with the front rooms, where the wind whistled through the gaps around the frames, never letting you forget it. Félix hated the cold but there was one consolation. From those front rooms there were big views, clouded though they were by the dirt on the glass, of the town sloping down to the river. On bright days the river was sometimes dark; on dark days it could shine. Ships passed, dull black or red, separating the waters. The bridges were high to let them under. A river reminded you that every place connects to every other place. An idea that was sometimes too much to bear.
When Félix was falling asleep, he sometimes had dreams that left him breathless, more exhausted than afraid. He was trying to build or locate something with cheap tools, bad directions, poor eyesight, the wrong language, ears stuffed with cotton. Mrs. Villanueva, who was his family but wasn’t his family, who was a friend of his mother who never appeared, was bending over him and speaking Spanish in her soft voice. There were his mother and father who had said they would send for him in a little while. It had been almost three years. When Mrs. Villanueva was alive, they had sent him letters without return addresses, letters that didn’t use his name. They never said when they were coming. He didn’t understand what they wanted him to do. How long he should wait.
This grinding mystery hovered close. He batted it away in the mornings; he ignored it as it pressed around him on his dark walks home. At Saint Jerome he had a textbook in which a few passages of a translated Don Quixote alternated with photographs of the original pages, dated 1605, and he was overcome by a sense of recognition and dread. This was the problem: his language mutilated, faded with age, missing parts of words, familiar orders inverted, blotted with x’s where other letters belonged, irretrievable.
“Washington,” Max said, sitting on her bed as I sat on mine. “So. What does your father do? Any brothers or sisters?”
“No brothers and no sisters.”
“And your father?”
“He died. My mother’s an editor at a magazine.” At the bars and parties where I went, when I could be bothered to go to bars and parties, we didn’t ask each other about our families. A rule that I had learned without noticing it before now. Too many of us had cut ties with them or disappeared, or were trying to disappear.
“I’m sorry,” Max said.
I nodded.
“What do you do, anyway?” Max said. “You’re a teacher?”
“I’m a caseworker at Saint Jerome,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “Those poor kids.”
“Yes,” I said, and then we ground into a silence. I got up and went to the bathroom, washed my face, and stood looking into the mirror, wishing I had a toothbrush. I had brought myself here, to this ridiculous pass, with this girl who was too pretty and who had come along thinking that I could make something exciting happen, or some vindication of our night, the chaos at the bar, and I couldn’t. I was disappointing her. My reflection came in and out of focus. I was tired. My hair was puffed up from the rain. I tried to smooth it with my hands, which didn’t work. Then Max was there in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Have I done something wrong?” she said coolly.
“You?”
“Yes, me. Have I done something wrong? Because you’re very quiet.” She uncrossed her arms, then crossed them again. “Maybe you have a girlfriend? You could have said.”
Had I not been talking enough? She had so much more to say than I did. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”
There was a little heat in her eyes. “What, then?”
I stared at her, speechless.
“There was no need to drive me around if you didn’t want,” she said, shrugging. “I’ll go home in the morning.”
“Max, no,” I said, reaching out with both hands, then not sure what to do with them. “You haven’t done anything. It’s my fault.”
“Why did you bring me up here?”
I dropped my hands. “Because I couldn’t leave you there,” I said. “Because I wanted to get away. Max. Look at you.” Her wet hair tendrilled across her neck, and her eyes were bright. Sh
e had washed off her workday makeup in the bath and I could see her freckles now. I took hold of the sash around her waist and pulled her closer. “Please forget everything,” I said. I kissed her; she leaned into me. Her hands were hot and damp through my dress.
It was tentative at the beginning, normal enough for a first time, and then for a while we could laugh in the dark and take our time. Finally, a rush and a shock. The room had grown stuffy and hot. I climbed out of bed, making some joke, and opened the window a few inches. The night was still and cold. I smoked a cigarette in the draft, and when I lay down again, she was already asleep. I lay awake for a while, thinking pleasant thoughts, and then less pleasant ones.
I woke at four thirty in the morning from a nightmare, with the sensation of having pulled myself bodily to consciousness from under deep water. I had been dreaming that a face was at the window. The curtains were open and the moon lit a corner of the rug. Max was breathing so quietly next to me that I leaned closer to hear her, as if she might have stopped. I felt alone and pursued, and fought the urge to wake her up. The room had gotten cold. I got out of bed and closed the window.
In the dry-mouthed aftermath of our night, a hangover forming, self-consciousness returning, my anxieties crowded in. I remembered a story I’d read in the Times a few years before: in 1956 Trujillo had a man killed who was in exile in New York, a dissident named Galíndez who was getting a PhD at Columbia. Galíndez was kidnapped by Dominican agents in New York and flown back to the island and murdered for the offense of writing a thesis. A Dominican nurse who had also been on the flight was later found with all her bones broken in a burnt-out car at the bottom of a ravine, a detail from the article that had stayed with me, because the nurse’s friends said she couldn’t drive.
Balaguer had been Trujillo’s right hand and had succeeded him after he was assassinated. When I read through the Latin American pages in the paper on Sundays it was clear that Balaguer ran the island in much the same way Trujillo had. He enjoyed the support of the United States, in American dollars—just as Trujillo had, until shortly before the end. There were more Dominicans coming into New York now than there had been under Trujillo, because Balaguer’s violent repression had reached such a peak that no one was safe on the island. The prisons were still full. Farmers still found bodies in the cane fields. Balaguer held parades. He flew new American-made airplanes in formation across the skies of Santo Domingo.
I didn’t know what Balaguer’s people could want with this boy, but I couldn’t let them find him before I did. The boy was alone, and I was responsible for him in some way, now that I knew about him. That was something—I held onto it. The idea that someone depended on me, even if he didn’t know who I was.
The safest thing to do with the counterfeit Mr. Ibarra was to keep playing along. I needed the money anyway.
In the morning Max said, “Well.” Looking down at me, propped on her elbows. Smiling in a way that made her seem impossibly far away, but benevolent, like an empress.
We got up and I put on a bathrobe; she didn’t bother. She came out of the bathroom chatting, combing out her hair, which made me blush. She kept up her light talk until we were in the car, and then she said, “I have some old haunts to visit.”
I was about to turn the key in the ignition. “Oh?”
“Yes, I’m going to stay for a bit in Poughkeepsie and then take the train back. If you don’t mind dropping me in town.”
Once again the feeling washed over me that I had ruined everything, ruined a chance that I hadn’t taken seriously until it was directly in front of me. “Yes, of course.”’
We drove back down the wooded road, which was stripped of its mystery in the daytime: a leafless understory filled with brambles in a forest of insubstantial young trees. This ground had been cleared once. The day was neither cloudy nor fine. Max was quiet, not chattering like before.
“Do you miss California?” I said after a while.
“I do sometimes,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is.”
We entered Poughkeepsie proper and made our way through tidy streets. A troop of women in heels and netted hats spilled down the stairs of a domed church. Max sat with her fingers across her mouth. “You know what I miss?” she said. “I play the piano. I thought about going to a conservatory. I can’t have a piano here. But I play sometimes in a church.” She tapped the glass. “You can drop me here.”
I stopped at the curb and Max fixed her hair, checked to make sure nothing had spilled out of her bag onto the floor, straightened her jacket. Her hair was soft now, since she had washed it in the hotel, a light honey brown. She looked younger than she did in the bar. Just a girl, really. I felt ordinary, obtuse, a large machine poorly calibrated. I searched for something to say. Max turned and I blurted out that I would like her number.
“All right, but give me yours too,” she said.
She produced a notebook and a pen, and ripped a page in half. We exchanged numbers, and then she was abruptly out of the car and walking away down the sidewalk, settling the strap of her purse on her shoulder.
II
JANUARY 1968
NEW YORK
CHAPTER 9
Where did they go at night? I had been watching the logs, not only in my cottage but in the others, when I could find a reason to look at them, or when no one was around. The New Year had ticked past and we had settled into an icy January. The logs were brought each afternoon to the casework office to be reviewed by the supervisor, and I paged through them then. On Friday nights, and on Wednesday nights, a few late returns. I read back through a few months, looking for patterns. Michael and Cesar, always together, were late once every third week; they’d spend the following two weeks serving out their restrictions and be free again in time for the cycle to repeat itself. Some boys were AWOL for whole weekends, but usually those boys’ workers knew where they had been. “His grandma’s place,” they would say if I noticed the absence aloud. “He’s not allowed to go there because she won’t let me do a home inspection but he goes anyway.” Or: “With his girl, probably.” Or: “His brother just came back from upstate; I knew I wouldn’t see him until Monday.” The late returns didn’t have the same quick answers. During a quiet lunch hour, I cross-checked the cottages. There were six other boys that clustered on the late returns on the same nights as Michael and Cesar.
The way to get a person to tell you something when he doesn’t want to is to know something about him, and offer not to tell. The Monday after Poughkeepsie, I told Mrs. Allen that I was going to need a few hours one morning for a doctor’s appointment, and volunteered, with profuse apologies, to cover an evening to make up for it, taking one of the many empty milieu spots. I asked for a Friday evening, a shift that no one wanted to work. Mrs. Allen readily agreed.
On Tuesday night I was exhausted. It had been a long day. I’d been ready to leave at five and had been surprised with an intake, a skinny boy just arrived from Staten Island, holding a grocery bag filled with clothes, an expression on his face that I recognized now—hostility that was a substitute for fear. He was fourteen and a half. He refused to answer my questions at first, and when I asked him what he’d had for lunch he couldn’t tell me. I walked with him to the cafeteria, let myself in with the staff key, and made him a bologna sandwich. We sat together in the dining room, which was lit only by the kitchen lights at the far end—Mr. Chambers liked us to be discreet when we used the kitchen after hours, because if we weren’t, it would bring the boys out of the common rooms and cottages, like moths to a flame. The boy ate the sandwich quickly and silently. I made him a second one and brought a chocolate milk from the bin in the refrigerator. He relaxed enough to look tired, and answered the questions I had left. It was six thirty before the boy was settled in Cottage 6 and I could clock out.
At home I switched on the television and the radio. I liked a little commotion in the evenings. I poured myself a whiskey and made a thick sandwich of my own out of the meatloaf I had ma
de on Sunday evening. The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. was on the television. An old man was supplying Stefanie Powers with a clip-on earring that could mist a room with knockout gas. She had the kind of hair I had desperately envied when I was seventeen: shining, auburn, mysteriously inflated from within.
I was afraid to call Max, but I also knew that I had to. It had been two days now since I left her in Poughkeepsie. I put the sandwich aside to stare into the molding around the edges of my parlor ceiling. I had hoped that she would call me and spare me this. But she had not.
I dialed the number she had given me and listened to it ring. At four rings I gave up hope, but relief and disappointment kept me on the line for another three. It was her room in the boardinghouse; of course she wouldn’t be at home at this time of the evening, she would be at work. I hung up and washed all the dishes in the kitchen, cleared the counter, swept the floor, considered mopping it, stopped myself. I found the number of the Bracken in the Manhattan telephone directory in the hall. There, too, the phone rang and rang. She had said it would take time for the owner to extricate his liquor license from the grip of the city. All that tension and effort, dissipated into nothing. I went back to the television. Now it was The Fugitive.
She had said she was staying in Poughkeepsie. Maybe she was still there.
For an instant I pictured her sitting in her boardinghouse room, watching the telephone ring, cutting eyes at her roommate.
Dr. Kimble escaping again from the wrecked train. Running through a desiccated California wood. The radio in the kitchen was switching to jazz. It seemed very difficult and complicated to get myself to bed.
St. Jerome’s was quiet on Friday evening, because all the boys in good standing who had family to visit had gone home. The boys who were left gathered in the common room or sat up playing cards in the cottages, or lingered in the cafeteria and dining room, which were kept open two extra hours. There was ice cream, and a television on a cart was wheeled into the common room: small compensations for the boys who had to stay. Milieu staff walked the hallways and grounds in shifts, running flashlights over the hurricane fences, stopping at the equipment sheds and garages to check and double-check the locks. A quiet, restless feeling prevailed. The boys were subdued, and would have picked fights with each other if there had been more opportunity to do so.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 7