Mr. Jenkins didn’t approve of women walking the grounds alone at night, but neither did he want to waste another staff member by having me babysat, so he gave me a flashlight, irritated. It was a sharp, cold evening in late January. I had dressed warmly, in sturdy shoes. I went first through the dormitory, where the youngest, newest boys and the ones who needed the closest watch were assigned to sleep. Only a few doors were open: boys reading comics or magazines, arguing over a radio with a wisp of an antenna, lying still and looking at the ceiling. Those ones I stopped to question. “You feeling okay?”
“Yes, miss.”
I remembered evenings like that, although I had so few of them compared to the residents here. My term at the Maryland Youth Center had been outside of time—an eternal hum of lights, shifting inside a uniform that was too tight under the arms, other girls whispering through the walls: it had lasted forever, but for only a month. Some of these boys had been at St. Jerome’s for three years. I had written letters on my long evenings at MYC, then torn them up. There was no thought I had had while I was in juvenile detention that I could safely share with a living soul. I had filled dozens of pages and every last one had ended up in the bin outside my room, or down the incinerator chute set in the wall by the staff station. Each time I returned to my room I began again. This time I’ll get it, I thought. I’ll say it a different way. I wrote letters to my best friend Joanne that were too ardent. I lay for hours trying to imagine how to begin a letter to my mother, who had put me there. Something that said both You’re all I have and You’re nothing to me. She wrote me once, asking if I needed a warmer coat. I never answered. I did need a warmer coat.
The yellow silence of the dormitory was oppressive. I was relieved to step back outside into the brisk dark and begin the circuit that Mr. Jenkins had described for me. Around the perimeter of the campus, behind the cottages, looping once around the school, and making a lengthy dogleg to cover the playing fields, the baseball diamond, and abbreviated soccer pitch that edged into the woods on the north side. A fat moon was rising above the trees, whitening the frost on the grass. I saw a lit cigarette floating in the shadows behind a maintenance shed, but caught no one but the groundskeeper, whose name I hadn’t learned yet.
“What do they have you doing this for?” he said.
“They’re short-staffed. I don’t mind it.”
He shook his head sympathetically. “Ridiculous.”
I kept going, keeping away from the tree line. I had noticed paths at the edge of the woods in daylight, and wondered if the boys used them, and if they did, whether they had the nerve to do it at night. These were almost all boys from the city: they would be unsettled by the comprehensive darkness of this hill. I was a little unsettled by it myself, separated now by so many years from the old trees and private yards of Chevy Chase. I was used to Brooklyn, where the streetlights shone so brightly into my sitting room that I could have read the paper by them if I left the curtains open.
I had checked the logs. Michael and Cesar and three of the boys who followed them everywhere had signed out with the rest who had off-campus privileges to go to Oakwood after dinner. They were allotted two hours, and were expected back by 8:00 PM, but Michael and Cesar often came straggling in at 8:30 or 8:45, not quite late enough to raise an alarm but late enough to be docked points. The walk from the campus to Oakwood proper took fifteen minutes on the main road, which led in a long curve down the hill past the guard station and along a row of white- and gray-colonials whose residents wrote regular letters to the editor of the Oakwood Journal to complain about the Saint Jerome boys. They were accused of vandalism, theft of garden tools and supplies, casting menacing looks, making peculiar noises in the dark. On an investigative lunch break, I had learned that there was a faster way to travel: you could get from the delicatessen in Oakwood back to the center of St. Jerome’s campus in eight and a half minutes via a steep dirt path straight up the side of the hill. In daylight it was pleasantly secret and overgrown; at night, it would be a close tunnel of whipping branches, with the black woods pressing in all around.
As curfew approached, I headed toward the southwest side of the campus. I was beginning to feel the cold, although I had been walking fast. I smoked a cigarette and wished I had brought a thermos of tea. It was 7:50 by my watch. I hesitated near the garage where the school vans and the groundskeeper’s truck were parked, and switched my flashlight off. Behind me, from the road and the main gate, I heard young male voices. They carried clearly in cold, dry weather like this. It would be the main group, coming back from their off-campus jaunt, full of meatball sandwiches and doughnuts, buzzing with new intrigues. I walked in a circle, trying to keep my blood moving. After a few minutes, the portico of the main dormitory building, where check-in was done before the older boys could disperse to their cottages for the night, went quiet behind me. The stars had grown brighter.
A bubble of laughter in the woods, and then the sound of branches breaking underfoot. I moved into the shadow of an overgrown holly. A voice—Cesar? I held still. A shape appeared at the end of the path and I switched my flashlight on.
“Noo,” he said quietly. It was Michael, shading his eyes from the glare. Two other boys stopped abruptly behind him. “Shit,” someone said.
“My goodness,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s Miss Davies.”
“Who?”
“Where have you all been?” I said.
I saw a look cross Michael’s face—anger, which was gone almost as soon as it appeared, as if he couldn’t find a use for it. “We had passes, miss,” he said.
“You’re late.”
“We’re sorry, miss,” Cesar said, in a singsong so subtle in its irony that I couldn’t respond to it.
“Who’s here?” I pointed the flashlight at the other boys, who hung back. Two boys from Cottage 6, which was Gladys’s cottage, and one more I didn’t recognize. “You know something?” I said. “I have a feeling about you five. I’m not sure you do go to Oakwood.”
They shifted on their feet. Cesar was looking up curiously into the trees, as if trying to identify their species.
“No one ever seems to see you there,” I improvised.
“Miss, we were in Oakwood,” Michael said. “We went to the movies.”
“What did you see?”
“The Jungle Book.”
“You went to see a cartoon?”
“That’s all they’re showing, miss.”
“It was pretty good,” Cesar said pleasantly.
“You boys can go check in,” I said. “Michael, stay here.”
He sucked his teeth. As the other boys filed past, defeated, I caught a smell like the syrup in a jar of cherries.
Michael and I stood and watched them trudge away up the lawn.
“You weren’t in Oakwood,” I said. “You were up on the cliffs.”
I felt him tense up without looking at him. “No, miss.”
I said nothing. The silence was an advantage to me. I felt around in my pocket for another cigarette and lit it. They would have found some damp clearing to drink sweet liquor in. I had heard the milieu staff talk about walking up to the cliffs on night rounds to be sure there were no boys up there. The cliffs were just to the south of Oakwood; it was a short walk to a wild piece of land. It had once been part of the parcel that the utopians had settled. At the edge, Chambers had told me, there was a forty-foot drop straight down to the river. “It’s a cold night to be sitting in the woods,” I said.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark without the flashlight. Michael looked steadily at the grassy slope leading up to the school. He was trying to decide if it was worth denying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, miss,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be taking the younger boys out there. They look up to you.”
He kept his face turned away. He didn’t seem drunk. His feet were planted and he didn’t wobble, but there was sugar and liquor in t
he air. He was moderate, for a sixteen-year-old. I was sure I had come in late to Barrington in much worse condition more than once. Something came back to me down the years: the face of the night matron, looking at me furiously under the white light of the guard cottage while I stood there trying not to be sick. She had said awful things to me.
“I don’t take anybody anywhere,” he said.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “Every time I see trouble, you’re in the middle of it. What about that boy Candelario, who ran away? You were a friend of his.”
He was startled. “No, miss.”
“What happened to him?”
Michael squinted. “You work for the bureau, miss?”
I let him think it. “Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give me your best guess.”
He was chewing his lip.
“Do you worry about him?” I said. “Some people wouldn’t. But I think you do. Because he left and never came back. Most of them come back.”
“Not all of them.”
“I think Catholic Family Services is lucky the word didn’t get out.” I dropped my cigarette. “If you don’t have anything to say, that’s fine. I’ll go and find Mr. Chambers and let him know what you’ve been doing.”
An awful equilibrium between us, in the dark. He looked me full in the face and I saw myself changing before his eyes, from an ordinary intractable grownup to something less, a person willing to scheme and negotiate with a child. There was something in my throat.
He shook his head. “He was upset because somebody took his clock. He had brought it from home.”
“All right.”
“And then he was gone. He left.”
“So where did he go?”
“I already said I don’t know.”
“Where do boys go when they run away?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time here,” I said. “You know what goes on.”
He looked at me, a little of his self-possession coming back. “Yeah, I do.”
“All right. So where?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t have people.”
“Where do boys go, then, when they don’t have people?”
“They work.”
“Work where?”
He shrugged. “Somebody said a restaurant.”
“A restaurant?”
“After he left. Somebody said Bobby was talking about going to work in a restaurant.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, miss. That’s just what I heard somebody say.”
I could feel that I had reached the end of it, what he knew or what he would say. “All right,” I said. “You can go.”
CHAPTER 10
At home that night I made tea, turned on a lamp in the parlor, drifted around trying to think up an appetite. The house still needed furniture. I had been filling it slowly, piece by piece, but it had been a year already since I bought it and it still felt bare in places. I wondered where my grandmother’s furniture had gone. My family seemed so small sometimes, a scrap, my mother and me only tenuously connected to the aunts and uncles and cousins who had spread out across the sandy flats of the Gulf Coast, up through the Midwest, and into the mountainous silences of the Dakotas and Montana and Idaho. A family that had landed in this country from its various old-world disasters and had been maintaining its moody quiet ever since. New calamities were consigned to silence as quickly as they happened—lost homesteads of which no photographs survived, great-uncles who disappeared into western jails, a grandfather who killed himself during a hard winter somewhere in Montana, his own personal end of the world in a place I couldn’t have picked out on a map. Was there ever a family that was less interested in remembering itself? My father’s mother had been an exception, a small, talkative woman who kept her hair covered. She was Armenian, and she had fled the Adana massacres in 1909 to be a prairie bride. She died when I was seven and I had only a few memories of her. When she came to visit, my father would install her in the best chair and she would catch one of my hands in both of hers and talk to me endlessly in a trill of English blithely mixed with Armenian, her eyes kind and intent, apparently confident that I could understand her. I caught bits of what seemed to be fond and funny memories, churches and schoolyards and goats and chickens that floated, syntactically isolated, around our carpeted Chevy Chase front room. I think now that she was the only one who escaped her village, so she carried her memories alone and was engaged constantly in the project of impressing them on the minds of others. She was like the runner at ancient Marathon, exhausting her life in the effort to deliver a message. A little neighbor boy stealing eggs, a church decorated with flowers for a feast day. An orchard that belonged to the family. I don’t remember much. I was so young when I knew her, and my father is gone.
These thoughts pursued me upstairs, into the dark second-floor hallway. I stopped in the doorway of the second bedroom that I had turned into an office, which Jane had appropriated for a few weekends of work when the construction in the lot behind her own apartment had been too much for her to bear. She had left behind a bed jacket that she liked to write in; it was hung over the back of the chair. I recoiled from the sight of it and went back downstairs.
Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I dialed Max’s number again. She picked up on the second ring and I carefully tipped myself over a cliff.
“Hello, it’s Vera,” I said. “I’d like to see you tomorrow.”
There was the briefest pause and then she said, “Well hello, stranger.”
“I tried you earlier in the week . . .”
“Oh, I was still—”
“Upstate?”
“Yes.”
Now we were nowhere in particular. I tried to decide whether I should repeat my invitation.
“Tomorrow I’m afraid I’m busy,” she said.
“Oh, yes, sorry, I know it’s very late to make—I know it’s—I just thought that I would. That I would say hello—”
“Sunday morning I’m playing piano at Greenwich Church on Eleventh Street,” she said. “Would you like to come?”
“To church?”
“Yes, to church. For musical reasons only. It’s a beautiful church, with a little green lawn.”
“Well, all right. Yes. I would.”
“Wonderful. It’s the ten o’clock service.”
“I’ll see you there.”
Sunday morning was sunny and cold, with one of those high blue skies that looked like it might crack, and faint cirrus streaks at the foot of Sixth Avenue. I had come with a hat pinned over my hair and my thickest scarf. I was at risk of looking foolish. I had worried overnight that this was a test that I was failing—that any self-respecting bar pickup would refuse to appear on a Sunday morning for a chaste hour of Brahms and choral music. That this might be the date she fobbed off on the girls she kept in some second tier. I felt anxious and unkind. It was her impulsive goodbye in Poughkeepsie that still stung. I paused in the back of the nave, conducting an inventory: my shoes were clean, my hat straight, my hair reasonable. My mother had taken me to a Methodist church in Arlington on a handful of Sundays a thousand years ago. I remembered cutting shepherds and sheep out of colored paper in a basement room, and my mother’s brisk reemergence after the service, looking as if some part of her architecture had been braced while she was gone. She never spoke about her religion, and some time after my father died, she went back to spending Sundays on the sunporch, reading alone. I found a gold cross in her jewelry box once and she said only that it had been her mother’s.
The church was beautiful: the sun lit a Tiffany angel bestriding a blue earth in a window above the altar. The wooden beams overhead were painted red; the plaster of the sanctuary ceiling was blue. The pews at the front were full. I chose a place at the back and looked up into the brass light fixtures.
Max appeared a few minutes before ten, stepping out of the rectory in he
els and a dark skirt, and took her seat at the piano. I watched her pause, her wrists cocked, eyes down, before she began to play. The chatter in the pews fell away. I didn’t recognize the piece. It was bright and sweet, and she was smiling to herself. I watched her shift and reach, bringing her attention down lightly and firmly on each figure. It was so intricate; she moved so quickly. The pastor had entered, unnoticed, and stood in the pulpit. Max came to the end of the piece and let her hands drop into her lap.
The sermon was about the erosion of the family. Lately there was always a low chatter of disapproval in the city, in newspapers and magazines, in gatherings of adults. Its subject was the hippies: loose-haired teenagers clustered under trees in Tompkins Square Park in the rain, issuing plumes of smoke into the branches, and girls in beads sunning themselves for stupefied hours in the Sheep Meadow. The summer before, this anxious hum had reached a pitch that put it on the evening news, and cameras panned across Golden Gate Park and down the sidewalks of San Francisco. I had seen some of it, the sunlit faces just vague white spots on the screen of my struggling television. Some girls danced slowly alone, revolving in circles, and bare-chested young men with beards loomed suddenly into the camera’s eye, beaming and offering handfuls of something—bread? It had happened so fast, an alien civilization that sprang from the earth. They all seemed to know what they were doing, as if following a script. Life magazine said that young people from good families were abandoning their homes and streaming westward. It was the phrase good families that made me realize that many of the hippies were from places like I was, from Chevy Chase and Bethesda and Grosse Pointe and Westchester and Lake Forest. I tried to imagine this countercultural wave crashing on the shore of B-CC, my old high school. We still hadn’t dared to wear blue jeans when I was a student. Our stockings were subjected to tests of transparency. The pastor was speaking on the prodigal son, the way that parents should welcome back their wayward children when they returned. This was not a fire-and-brimstone kind of church, and he was restraining himself from the commentary on brassieres and similar topics that usually dominated.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 8