Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  A school teacher. In her last letter to him, she had referred to, “my middle-classness.”

  Showers’ father had come to Westchester County an extremely successful advertising executive, taking one of the nicer homes and thirty-five acres of land just outside Braddock Wells. By the time Showers was a sophomore in high school, his father was an unemployed advertising executive. By the time of Showers’ graduation, his father was bankrupt and ruined. A few weeks later, he deserted the family. Showers deserted it himself a short while after, unable to bear another hysterical binge on the part of his mother, a former actress. He felt no guilt in doing so. When his father had in desperation sold their last car, a Lincoln convertible, for grocery money, his mother had stormed about the house swearing and shrieking for days, then spent the money on new clothes.

  Showers had fled to New York City, putting his family out of his mind. He found a place to stay in the apartment of a friend and took a job in a Fifth Avenue bookstore, enrolling in night courses at the New School, waiting desperately and hungrily for opportunity to redress the myriad wrongs that had been visited upon him. An opportunity came, to his amazement, just two years later, in the form of a wealthy middle-aged woman who sat next to him in one of Rudolph Arnheim’s celebrated psychology courses. She took him home to meet her husband, a high-ranking member of the United States delegation to the United Nations. The next year, when the husband was posted to Bonn as ambassador, Showers went along, and was given a job. A congressionally approved waiver forgiving his lack of a college degree made him a foreign service officer five years later. Five years after that, the waiver was only an irrelevant footnote in his dossier.

  Showers and Felicity had drifted apart after high school graduation. Curiously, though his family’s fortunes were a shambles and he had little money to himself, Showers had quickly ascended from that margin between the classes, returning from the city to Westchester to live off wealthy friends on weekends and during summers, traveling with them to the Hamptons, Newport, Cape Cod, and the women’s college circuit of Massachusetts and Connecticut. He remembered triumphs, kissing Polly Winston at Nauset Beach, dancing with the extraordinary Jill Paisley at a lawn party in Bedford Village, sleeping with Wilhelmina von Letzendorf on the beach at Southampton.

  Felicity had merely prepared for life as a New York State high school French teacher, slipping downward from the margin. He had seen her briefly on a summer afternoon on the Braddock Wells village green. Her summer job that year was taking care of the children of the family that lived in the biggest house on the green. They had walked, for a very long time, and talked, and held each other. He neglected to kiss her. It was the last time he saw her. Once in Bonn, he had written her, and they then carried on a correspondence for many months, but the letters had stopped. He could not remember why. Her mother died. Perhaps it was because of that.

  He kept leafing through the yearbook. Here was a picture of the class “mother’s boy” who had gone to West Point and been killed in Vietnam. Here was Sandra Pope, the cheerleader who had been queen of the class, a girl with so many activities beneath her name in the yearbook that they looked like medals on a general. She had married a lawyer and moved to Scarsdale. Here was another cheerleader, a waif of a girl. He had been told by someone he had run into at an airport bar that she had been murdered. Why had he heard nothing of Felicity? Where was Felicity Stuart? He was going to become an ambassador. He was listed in Who’s Who in America. He was the success she had always told him he would be. What was the point if she didn’t know?

  He leaned back against the moist leather of his desk chair, chiding himself for the silliness of that thought. There should be nothing more irrelevant to an adult life—especially his adult life—than high school. But it wasn’t silly. His senior year in high school was the point at which his life had come utterly apart, and it had taken him years and years to put it back together again. The mending could never be complete unless he could somehow reach back to that time and find someone to declare it so. If not Felicity, who? Sandra Pope, the cheerleader now in Scarsdale?

  Showers closed the book and set it back upon the desk. There was another means of reaching into the past: the souvenir trunk he kept in the basement. He was sure there was at least one letter there. He always kept at least one letter from everyone.

  It took a long time to find it, stuck in a corner at the bottom beneath a shelf of his own youthful writings. He closed the lid of the trunk and sat upon it, drinking again as he unfolded the old, stiff paper. It was typewritten, like nearly all her letters, though she had a beautiful hand.

  “Dear Toby,” it began. All his life, Showers wanted to be called Toby, but no one ever did, not his parents or any friend; not his wife. Only Felicity. She called him Toby and nothing else and he never called her by her first name, Hope, which she despised. Except once, when they had had a fight.

  I must say it was a great surprise to hear from you, after all these weeks. I didn’t know if I would answer it. What’s the point? But, whotthehell, I can’t just let a silence pass between us cause you are not here …

  She went on, commencing to ramble, telling him that her grandparents had moved into a big new house on a hilltop in Connecticut, that the room she had there had a view of fifteen miles, that she was supposed to be studying for a French test, that she wanted to go to Europe, if not to graduate school, that she hadn’t seen any of her classmates and didn’t expect she ever would again, and that she still enjoyed the same pleasures in life, “namely drinking, men, smoking, Balzac, and any kind of hell-raising …”

  Felicity apparently had been drinking as she typed, indeed, may have been drinking for some time before she started. By the next page, the letter degenerated into something approximating Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitable.

  You, my friend should be honored with this peice of verbage cause my letter writins very odd, that is I usually lose most of the people by my dwindling correspondence. They either come to the conclusion that I am dead and gone or married. At least I’ve escaped both of those so far and life is pretty good at times. I am not the same product of the old crowd as I am sure you aren’t either. I only now realize how much of what I do is related to my middle classness and deliberate “lack of tradition.” If you understand that you are pretty good. The trouble is we often don’t know where we belong …

  He finished his drink, staring into the empty glass a moment, then read on.

  Don’t be so damn ambitious, Toby my dear friend. Don’t let them maek you what you don’ want to be. Put that behind you it is over and doesn’t matter, not to you not to me. You have goodness in you Toby. noblesse and all of that. When you didn’t have your pretensions up you were the kindest person I ever knew. You write about what you want to do in th foreign service, all those important things. Do what you think should be done Toby Toby. Do the good thing. Don’t let them twist you Toby. I

  Can you tell, by the way I am not drunk whilecomposing this cause for one reason it is much to early in the day and I am sobered up from the night before I think.

  Cela n’importe peu. In case you cant’ recall your French that well write to me and I’ll oblige with a free translation.

  It’s been fun and allthat sort of rot. Alas the fleeting years float by. Well (such a bourgeoise type of farewell) here at last is the end to the trivialities and particulars.

  Love?!

  Hope Felicity Stuart.

  She had then written the name Felicity by hand. She had underscored the word “love.”

  Showers leaned forward, the letter dangling from his long fingers, feeling the damp of the cellar. The words seemed so immediate; Felicity, so very present. Yet it might as well have been a letter from a ghost, from the grave, from another century.

  He yawned. Still holding the letter, he came stumbling up the stairs into a kitchen that was filling with early-morning light. Though exceedingly unhappy, he smiled. He would make this egregious self-indulgence complete. He would have one more,
one last, martini. He would take it out onto the patio. He would sit and remember everything he possibly could about Felicity, and then he would stop this nonsense and put her forever from his mind. She would not call again. And if she did, it would not really matter. He was going to be a middle-aged man, and must concern himself with the things of middle age. Hope Facility Stuart belonged in his yearbook, the appropriate repository for first loves.

  He sipped and swallowed his gin with exquisite slowness, closing his eyes as he remembered a dark night once when he and Felicity had been in the back seat of a speeding car.

  The sun was shining. Showers had fallen asleep in a patio chair, and according to his watch it was nearly eight in the morning. Hearing someone nearby, he rubbed his eyes open and looked over the low hedge that divided his patio from that of the Restons next door. Alixe Reston, the daughter, was there, performing her morning exercises in shorts and a sweat shirt with “Georgetown University” on the front. She was a tall, big-boned young woman with a trim, long-legged athletic figure, a big girl, but at the same time very soft and feminine, with long, light brown hair and the most extraordinary large brown eyes. She was twenty-five. At times she seemed five years younger than that; other times, that much older.

  Alixe was staying alone in her parents’ house that summer, while they vacationed at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. She had just received her master’s degree from Georgetown, and, having at last exhausted the possibilities of higher learning, was using the summer to decide what to do next.

  Her father had asked Showers to “keep a neighborly eye on her.” He had been doing that for several years, indulging in such fantasies as taking her to the Delaware shore and walking with her, “the golden girl of the beach,” along the surf, savoring the envy. Another had her sharing his youth, twenty-five when he was twenty-five, the two of them meeting in some chance encounter, a party in New York. They were a harmless pursuit, these fantasies, improper but permissible, another sign of middle-age, certainly his only infidelities to his wife.

  The year he was twenty-five he had been in Germany. It was that year that he had last heard from Felicity Stuart.

  Alixe was touching her toes, her long hair falling almost to the ground with each graceful bend. Showers suddenly felt extremely embarrassed. Alixe’s father was a former cabinet officer and now senior partner of a major Washington law firm, a man of much consequence and respectability. And here sat Dennis Showers, a filthy unshaven mess wearing yesterday’s clothes and swilling gin at eight in the morning, just a few feet from the man’s daughter. “Neighborly eye” indeed.

  She paused, resting, her hands on her hips. “Good morning, Mr. Showers,” she said cheerily.

  “Good morning, Alixe,” he said, wondering if she had seen his martini glass. Of course she had. It sat in the center of the glass-topped patio table like a museum exhibit.

  She began another exercise, swiveling her hips from right to left.

  “You’re having an interesting morning, I see,” she said, smiling.

  “Well, yes I am.”

  “Is there anything I can help you with, Mr. Showers?”

  Sure. You can help me find a middle-aged ex-cheerleader I once knew in Westchester County, New York. I have a craving for pompons. “No, thank you, Alixe. My morning is interesting enough as it is.”

  She laughed, and finished her exercise. “Is Mrs. Showers home?”

  “Not yet.”

  Alixe smiled again, shaking her hair back from her face. “Bye,” she said. “Have an interesting day.”

  When she was gone, Showers shakily stood up, finished the drink, and hurried inside. At the very least, he would have to start with a long shower.

  As he walked through the living room he glanced at the white French telephone. Felicity Stuart had said she was in trouble.

  3

  There was a radio playing in the dark, dank basement apartment near the Old City section of Montreal. The music was a French Canadian folk song, played on a violin, piano, and guitar. Some of those working at the table in the rear room sang along with the tune, a happy lark of a melody. They were making bombs, gelignite bombs, small enough to fit into a briefcase or lunchbox. Four had been completed, and, with unconnected leads hanging, set in a wooden box packed with wadding. There was explosive enough left for another three bombs. After that, there was no more explosive, which made Leon Macoutes very angry. The plan called for a dozen and Macoutes wanted at least another fifteen. He wanted the Ottawa Parliament left in rubble. He wanted every Anglais in Canada dead, if possible. It wasn’t, so he would settle for the Parliament; Macoutes was nothing if not reasonable.

  His “friends” had promised him more gelignite but none had been forthcoming, and the calendar was fast advancing. If he did not hear from them soon, he would have to ignore their agreement and seek explosive elsewhere. He had other “friends.”

  At twenty-seven, Leon Macoutes was one of the most dangerous men in Canada. Yet, small, thin, with a face still troubled by acne, he looked more a minor street-gang leader than anything else. He had grown his beard, which was of a reddish color that disagreed with his long, dark brown hair, in part as a disguise, in part to mask his prominent teeth and receding chin. He thought, wrongly, that it made him resemble Ché Guevara.

  Papineau Fils was a Quebec separatist terrorist organization named for Joseph Papineau, leader of the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838, an abortive insurrection that was doomed to catastrophic and pathetic failure. So much of Canada had by then been settled by Tory refugees from the American revolution and their descendants, and the American president to whom Papineau had turned, Martin Van Buren, was the weakest, most indecisive American leader in history up until Jimmy Carter. For this, and for so many other reasons, the Papineau Fils hated Americans almost as much as they did the Canadian British.

  The PFs, as the American Central Intelligence Agency referred to them, had come to be to the old Front de Libération du Québec what the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army was to the old Officials. Numbering nearly one hundred, a considerable strength for a terrorist group, they had originally been organized by Georges Falaise, an aging, bitter intellectual who had parted with the FLQ after Rene Levecque had won the premiership of Quebec and rendered the terrorist movement moribund with his mainstream political victories. Falaise’s chief lieutenant was Pierre Hillion, a charismatic professional criminal who had converted to PF radical politics while in prison—or at least liked the idea of committing crimes for a cause. Falaise was now dead, and Hillion was back again in prison, serving a long sentence for assault and robbery. Until he could contrive an escape, functional command of the PF had devolved upon Macoutes, the Montreal area group leader.

  The PF’s longstanding plans had not been altered or interrupted by the shift. The FLQ had wanted to separate Quebec from the rest of Canada. The PF wanted to destroy the Canadian federation so that Quebec might be free.

  It was fortunate for them that they had so many allies in this cause. Macoutes had nothing of Falaise’s intelligence or Hillion’s natural qualities of leadership. He was, however, mean. To prove himself to the rest of Papineau Fils after he had been made its acting leader, he had killed a policeman, machine-gunning the man to death from a car in the English-speaking section of Montreal near Mont Royal.

  Macoutes now slouched in an old, cracked, wooden rocker, reading the evening newspaper, pleased by a story about the growing strength of the independence movement in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but by little else. The lack of explosive gnawed at him, a crack in his self-image as a leader.

  “Leon,” said Paulette. “C’est l’heure. Nous serons en retard.”

  Paulette Arlon was Macoutes’ mistress, and master. Four years his junior, she had an anger in her much worthier of an older and more aggrieved woman. Macoutes was the son of a Montreal dentist who had disowned him. In his three years at the university, the only prominence Macoutes had achieved was as student radical leader. He ha
d dropped out of classes, becoming a campus drifter, solely to maintain that status. Paulette was the daughter of an extremely wealthy lumber company president, whom she had vowed to murder. She was as short as Macoutes, but plump, her round body swathed in wide skirts and, despite the summer, thick turtleneck sweaters. She wore her black hair thick and full, with bangs that came down over her eyebrows. She somewhat resembled a turtle.

  Macoutes let his newspaper drop to the floor and glanced at the happy bomb-makers at the table. “Oui,” he said, rising. “It’s time.”

  They walked quickly but casually down the narrow, dirty street, Paulette carrying a shopping bag. After several turns, they came to a filling station, with a row of three public telephones. Macoutes, looking at his watch, went to the rearmost open booth, picking up the receiver and dropping in a coin, but keeping his finger on the disconnect bar. In a moment or two, there came a ring, cut off by Macoutes as he lifted his finger and pulled his hand away.

  “Leon ici,” he said.

  “Leon,” said the distant voice. “C’est fini. The whole show. All as planned.”

  Macoutes beamed. “They have been found, Alain? Identified?”

  “No, not yet. But it must happen soon. The identification is there. The hotel key and matches, other things. All there.”

  “Bon. You are in Vancouver?”

  “Oui. Leaving soon. Maurice wants to talk to someone.”